It does however raise the question of precisely where the line in gambling is. If I overcharge you for an item and give every hundredth customer thirty of them, is that gambling? Obviously it is, but is it legally?
The line is pretty clear. If the average rate of return for the customer is less than what they on average paid, then it's gambling. If the average return is higher than what they paid, then it's investing.
That's the key thing to understand here. Positive economic activity comes from productivity being increased by each transaction (on average). This increased productivity translates into a larger monetary return than what was originally invested. The refinery buys $1 worth of ore and turns it into $2 worth of steel. The tool company buys $2 worth of steel and turns it into a $4 hammer. The hardware store buys the $4 hammer and sells it at retail for $8. The carpenter buys the $8 hammer and uses it to increase his carpentry business productivity by $16. The customer buys a dresser from the carpenter because its organizational value to him (time saved not having to find stuff in a big pile) is more than the purchase price. In each case, despite the previous buyer increasing the price, because of value added by that person (ore to steel, steel to tool, tool in a warehouse in Wisconsin to one on the shelf at your local store, pile of wood to dresser), the increased price is worth it to the buyer because they're getting more value out of their purchase than what they paid. They're not gambling that they can sell what they buy for more. They're investing because they're adding value and thus confident they can sell for more than they bought it.
Any activity which on average results in less return than the original investment is a bad economic transaction at best (i.e. a waste of money), or a scam/fraud at worst (subprime mortgages repackaged as collateralized debt obligations). Gambling on average results in less return than the original investment.
The only time gambling works is if the average return exactly equals the investment. If two people decide to bet on a football game, then the transaction is zero sum. One person gains exactly what the other person loses. But the moment you add a bookie or a casino to the mix (i.e. try to turn it into a business), it becomes negative sum because the bookie or casino is skimming a little off the top of each transaction.
In baseball, the reason is a bit simpler if you actually play the game. A pitcher's arm doesn't make a perfectly vertical arc. It's tilted a bit (for most pitchers), swinging out to the side at the top compared to the release point. This results in a fastball (underspin) or curve (topspin) not spinning perfectly vertical. For a right-handed pitcher, their fastball will tend to rise (compared to just gravity) and drift slightly to the left (batter's point of view). Their curve will tend to fall and drift slightly to the right.
For the batter, they're not looking straight at the oncoming pitch. Their head is offset a bit from the center of the plate and where the bat will contact the ball. For the right-handed batter, this means a ball which is moving perfectly straight towards the middle of the strike zone will appear to drift slightly to the right (batter's point of view) due to perspective as it moves from the pitcher to the plate.
For the right-handed batter facing a right-handed pitcher:
The fastball (easiest pitch to hit) drifts slightly to the left. This tends to cancel out the apparent drift to the right due to perspective, making it easier for the batter to lock onto the pitch (it appears to have less relative motion in the horizontal axis).
The curveball drifts slightly to the right, accentuating its apparent drift due to perspective (to the right for a perfectly straight pitch). You would think more motion would make it harder to hit, but a curveball is slower. The drop in height plus the greater apparent motion to the right makes it appear to move more, making it easier for the batter to pick up that this is a curve and not a fastball. That gives him a little more time to adjust his swing's timing and location appropriately. i.e. A right-hand pitcher's fastball and curve look a lot more different to a right-handed batter.
For the right-handed batter facing a left-handed pitcher:
The fastball drifts slightly to the right, adding to the rightward drift due to perspective. The ball moves more horizontally, making it harder for the batter to determine exactly where in the horizontal axis he needs to aim to contact it.
The curveball drifts slightly to the left, partly canceling out the apparent horizontal motion due to perspective. It looks like a fastball for slightly longer, making it harder to adjust the swing's timing and location when he eventually figures out it's a curve. i.e. A left-handed pitcher's fastball and curve look similar to a right-handed batter for longer.
Left-handed batters don't have as much problem facing right-handed pitchers because they've been facing more of them all their lives. Yes left-handed pitchers are very common at the pro level. But when playing as kids, in schools, and in the early minor leagues, right-handed pitchers are much more common. I suspect that's the same reason left-handed fencers are more successful. They may be split 50/50 at the pro level. But if you tallied up the lifetime matches including when they were learning, they've mostly been facing right-handers.
Seriously, most businesses don't need to be "administered". Administrating is for the conglomerates,
As a self-taught "administrator" who's run two small businesses, I'd have to disagree. There is in fact quite a bit to learn about running a business - accounting, legal (especially labor and tax codes), organizational, employee management, etc.
However, I'd say about 80% of this would be better suited taught in a high-school level course. The accounting is virtually identical to running your personal finances, just a lot more formal. Everyone has to pay taxes and occasionally deal with a legal infraction or subpeona. Organizational skills and how to accept and/or delegate responsibility is something that everyone should learn. And managing people (working with, encouraging, watching out for, detecting problems, reprimanding) is important at a family and relationship level too.
The remaining stuff specific to running a business, I'd say you could pick up from a few night courses at your local adult community college. Or in my case, by asking an accountant friend and a lawyer friend a lot of questions, and listening to advice from someone who'd actually taken employee management courses. There are lots of little facts and tidbits (e.g. what percentage of your budget should be going to payroll or marketing? How do you calculate and deduct payroll taxes? What documentation do I need to collect and submit when I hire an employee?) which have very specific answers but aren't all located in a single easy-to-find place. One thing you learn pretty quickly running your own business is that time is your most valuable resource. And if you can get a neatly organized reference which answers most of these questions for a few thousand dollars, it's well worth paying for it just because it saves you the time of stumbling around the web trying to find it all yourself.
What matters isn't population or even GDP. It's GDP per capita - how much productivity each citizen is producing on average. This represents how much useful economic work each citizen can produce in a year. It mostly depends on their country's regulatory and living environment. Countries with better protection laws (to protect laborers) and business-friendly laws (to encourage business development) tend to have very high GDP per capita. Repressive societies tend to have very low GDP per capita. (Countries with disproportionately high natural resources like oil also tend to be high, since each citizen can accomplish more economic work with less effort acquiring and selling said resource.)
The U.S. is currently up around $57k per year per capita. Most of Europe is around $40k-$50k per year per capita, indicating that while Europe's socialist laws create a fairer society, they come at the cost of slightly lower overall productivity. China isn't even close at $8k per year per capita. Even Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are stuck at about $30k-$38k, probably because their rigid cultural social structure inhibits the fluid movement of workers to jobs they're better suited for and would like to do. An unhappy worker is a less productive worker.
First, putting 93% of their stores in majority-white zip codes is meaningless without also knowing what percentage of zip codes are majority-white. Pulling some demographics out of a zip code database gives 17,409 zip codes which are more than 50% white. 2591 zip codes where whites are 50.0% or fewer. So white-majority zip codes comprise (17409)/(17409+2591) = 87.0% of all zip codes.
That is, if Apple located the stores randomly based on zip code, you would expect 87% of them to be in white-majority zip codes. On top of that, there's a margin of error. 99% of the time, you'd expect these stores to fall within a range of (2.576)*sqrt((0.87)*(1-0.87)/(270)) = 0.0527, or +/- 5.3%. That is, 99% of the time you sprinkled the stores randomly in a table of zip codes, you'd end up between 81.7% to 92.3% of stores in white-majority zip codes. 93% falls just outside this range, so we're talking about just barely being 99% confident that this is a real deviation, not a random occurrence.
Second, these are zip codes, not areas of equal population or population. Zip codes vary in population by about a 7:1 ratio. It's much more advantageous for a business to put a store into a zip code with a high population. So if there's any correlation between zip code population and racial diversity, it could be enough to offset the margin statistical significance we found above. I don't have time to research this, but my hunch would be that the low population zip codes tend to be skewed towards white-minority (e.g. remote areas like Indian reservations, sections of Alaska with large Inuit population, etc) compared to white-majority zip codes. Since a business is unlikely to put a store in an area of low population, that would erase a good chunk of the discrepancy between 87% and 93%.
Third, related to the second, is that high population density zip codes tend to be smaller and near other high population density zip codes. So whereas a store in a medium population density zip code may be meant to stand on its own, a store in a high population density zip code may be meant to draw customers from nearby zip codes. That is, people in neighboring zip codes are expected to travel the short distance to the single store servicing all those zip codes. I also suspect that high population density zip codes tend to be more white-minority (e.g. the Bronx). If so, this would also skew the number of stores in minority zip codes down. Not because there are fewer stores within a x mile radius, but because there are more zip codes within an x mile radius.
tl;dr - This looks more like just a straight random distribution, with some biasing due to how minorities tend to distribute themselves geographically compared to whites. Not some form of discrimination on Apple's part.
It's government which allows ISPs to abuse the people in the first place. Net neutrality is only "needed" because most Americans only have one realistic choice of ISP. And they only have one choice because their local government has granted that ISP a monopoly.
If the local governments weren't granting service monopolies, then there would be competition between ISPs. Any ISP which degraded Netflix's speeds as part of a ploy to extort money from Netflix would be shooting itself in the foot. Its customers would notice Netflix was streaming badly, hear from their neighbor that Netflix worked fine on their ISP, and they'd simply cancel and switch their service to their neighbor's ISP. No net neutrality needed. They're prevented from doing this only because their local government has sold them out and granted their ISP a monopoly. Net neutrality is trying to fix a problem created by government regulation, with more government regulation.
If Ajit Pai and Trump truly believe in the free market, then they'll roll back net neutrality, then follow it up by prohibiting local governments from granting local service monopolies.
Only the maximum and minimum moments of inertia are stable in rotation. If you try to spin an object around any other axis, it will tumble - the axis of rotation varies relative to the body. Every spacecraft or satellite that's launched had some poor slob whose job was to get the exact mass, location, and inertia tensor of every single component put into the spacecraft, and put it into a huge spreadsheet. Then he uses that to calculate the minimum and maximum moments of inertia of the spacecraft. If the desired spin axis doesn't line up with either of these moments, then he has to change the location of some of the components of the spacecraft until it does (like positioning weights on a tire when you balance it)..
With round or nearly round objects, the min/max moment of inertia isn't very different from from the inertia around other axes, so this oscillation tends to be very slow and not noticeable. But it's much more likely to be pronounced with an elongated and flattened body.
It's called a plant. Takes a while to complete the conversion process though.
See, pure hydrogen is a bitch to deal with. It's gaseous at STP and extremely low density so you need high pressures to get any reasonable energy density, and it's a tiny molecule so seeps through hoses and valves which are watertight and airtight. So taking sunlight and storing its energy in hydrogen presents huge engineering challengesl.
Plants ran into the exact same problem about a half billion years ago. Their solution was to attach the hydrogen molecules to carbon, producing a hydrocarbon chain. This turns it into a high density solid (sugar, carbohydrates, cellulose) that still retains most of the energy of pure hydrogen, but is much easier to handle and store. When these hydrocarbons are further cooked by time and pressure, you get our traditional fossil fuels - gas, oil, and coal.
That's the holy grail of biofuels - accelerate this process. Break down cellulose into shorter chains (sugars). Have bacteria partially digest the sugars to produce alcohol or even oil. Burn the alcohol as fuel and releasing the waste products into the atmosphere. Then new plants pull the waste products out of the atmosphere to make new cellulose, thus completing the cycle.
I don't mind that they're doing this to encourage people to stay in a healthy range as they collect new data. I just wish there was a way the could do it without redefining what certain words mean.
Bitcoin is a bubble/scam. Its very design (limited to 21 million bitcoins) means it doesn't have a future.
But like I've been telling everyone who asks me about bitcoin, that it's a bubble doesn't automatically mean it's a bad short-term investment. A lot of people made a ton of money off the tech bubble and the housing bubble. If you want to make a speculative investment in bitcoin, by all means do so. Just be aware that due to its flawed design, eventually it will collapse. Take care to make sure you're not the one left holding the bag when that happens. Basically my standard investing/gambling advice - don't put more money into it than you can stand to lose.
The nuclear parts of the plant itself survived both the earthquake and tsunami just fine even though both events were well beyond the plant's design specifications.
The failure was loss of power to run the plant's cooling systems. Basically, the tsunami swamped the backup power generators and contaminated the diesel fuel reserves for the generators. The destruction of the surrounding roads prevented new generators and fuel from being brought in in a timely manner. And when they eventually did arrive, workers discovered the power couplings for the trucks were different from the ones the plant used, and they had to gerry-rig a connector. All of this took critical time which could've mitigated the severity of the accident. This wasn't an explosion like Chernobyl, it was a gradual event as the cooling water slowly evaporated allowing the fuel rods to melt.
A single diesel generator situated on higher ground with an independent fuel source could've prevented the entire accident. Instead, in stereotypical Japanese fashion, they placed all the generators in a neat row right next to each other in the basement, where the tsunami swamped all of them simultaneously. See, the thing about redundant backup systems (e.g. multiple generators in case some do not function) is that they have to be different to be redundant. If they're the same model, in the same location, using the same fuel source, then any single event which affects one generator will affect all the generators, defeating their redundancy. In fact the two newer reactors at Fukushima on higher ground were just fine because their generators and fuel supply worked as intended. They just didn't have a really long extension cord to reach from those generators to the problem reactors. Basically the failure at Fukushima was the same as when you store your backup drive next to your computer (although the consequences were much more severe). If your house burns down or you're burglarized, both your computer's main drive and your backup drive will be lost. Because you're storing both in the same location, the redundancy of a second copy is defeated by any event which affects that entire location.
Fukushima wasn't a failure of nuclear power. It was a failure of backup (non)redundancy which had nuclear consequences. Basically, because of unwarranted paranoia about nuclear power, everyone concentrated on going over the nuclear parts of the plant with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it was safe. As a result, the non-nuclear backup systems didn't get enough scrutiny, and that's what failed.
It's like airliner safety. Air travel is already far safer than other modes of transport. But because any airplane crash gets disproportionate news coverage, we spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the couple hundred airliner deaths per year even further. Meanwhile the tens of thousands of people dying each year in car accidents gets very little attention. Even including the estimated future cancer deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is still the safest power source we've invented (yes, safer than wind and solar based on both on deaths and lost man-days per unit of electricity generated).
As someone similar to Damore (borderline autistic), his comments on how we see the world are spot on. I had to spend decades learning seemingly inane social rules just to be able to function "properly" in society instead of logically, and I still sometimes screw things up.
e.g. I once got a present from my sister which I didn't really need nor want, and I told her so and tried to give it back thinking she could get a refund and save her money (I didn't need a present to know she loves me and cares about me). She taught me that when you receive a gift, you just accept it and thank the person, even if you don't want it. Apparently the important thing is the gesture the other person is making, not whether you really need the gift. i.e. The process of gift giving is as much for the giver's benefit as it is for the recipient's, and rejecting it can create the impression that you don't appreciate the time and effort the giver put into getting the gift for you.
About a decade later, a co-worker gave me a gift, so I politely accepted it and thanked her. I didn't really need it so I stuck it in the trunk of my car. A few months later she happened to see it in my trunk, unopened. My boss called me in later (we were all good friends). Apparently my co-worker had come to her almost in tears about seeing her gift in my trunk. I had no idea what was going on. When my boss asked why I accepted the gift, I explained the incident with my sister. She gave a big sigh and said that was right, but that there's another case with its own (contradictory) rule. She then carefully explained the social custom where if someone likes you romantically, they can give you a gift. And if you reciprocate you accept the gift, but if you do not you reject the gift.
In the context of the Google memo, I can see why you think this is dangerous - as you say it implies the memo was aberrant because of a mental illness. But what he's describing is actually a larger issue with how society functions. It's full of illogical, contradictory, and seemingly pointless social rules. Most of you seem to learn it subconsciously just from observing others, which is probably what leads to some of this illogical PC stuff being enshrined as the "right" way to behave. People like Damore and me struggle with trying to make sense of all this, unraveling these rules and trying to place them properly inside a framework built with different rules (usually logic). Sometimes it's like trying to put a square peg into a round hole, or having to put two pegs into a single hole. You just know it doesn't make sense, but everyone else seems to accept that that's the way it's supposed to be and behave as if it's correct, so I just add it to the huge list of pointless rules I should follow because normal people do.
To give you "normal" people some idea of what it's like, here's an example of arbitrary social rules that I get the sense most of you view similarly to how I perceive social rules (based on how often it's spoofed in movies). You look at all those place settings for formal dining, and you think. "What's the point? Why bother when you can just use any fork or spoon which is convenient?" Yet if you're in a formal dining setting and you break one of those arbitrary rules, you can be denounced, ridiculed, and even ostracized by others at the formal dinner. Or if you're one of the servers, you can be fired for putting a setting in the wrong order. Well, for some of us like Damore, every social interaction is one great big formal dinner setting, full of arbitrary and pointless rules which can get you denounced, ridiculed, ostracized, or fired if you break them. Even though there is nothing about the situation which logically warrants such a harsh penalty. Society just thinks adherence to those rules is important.
So in the limited scope of his memo, what Damore is saying about autism appears to weaken his argument. B
There's a huge amount of inertia within the military (or government for that matter), which makes it really slow to adapt to and take advantage of changes. Technological progress is the very epitome of change, so the two make very poor bedfellows. It works much better if they simply hire someone to handle the technological part for them.
In the mid-1990s my company was doing some ship model testing. We rented the tow tank at the U.S. Navy's David Taylor Research Center (now David Taylor Model Basin). One morning I arrived at the center and saw a bunch of what looked like washing machines piled up at the tow tank entrance. I asked our Navy guide what they were.
"Hard drives"
"Whoa. How old are they?"
"I dunno, early '70s I think."
"Wow. What's their capacity?
"About 10 MB."
"So they've been sitting in your warehouse all this time, and you finally decided to throw them out?"
"Oh no, we were using them up til yesterday. Our requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."
Not exactly the kind of organization you want building cutting-edge data storage solutions for themselves.
Tuitions have skyrocketed because of the wide availability of government-backed loans (i.e. the government promises to repay the loan if the student defaults on it). This has caused lenders to loan money to students like candy because there is no risk to them. The students are then flush full of money, so the schools simply take advantage of it to raise their tuition and sop up the extra money. This extra money has mostly gone into paying for unnecessary administrators.
Government directly backing universities does not cause this problem. The money goes straight to the school, so there is no incentive for them to raise prices for students. Quite the opposite in fact, since they're now getting additional money from another source and thus can lower tuition.
Supply-side government incentives and demand-side government incentives have these different effects on the market. Politicians should really think about these effects (or in many cases learn about them since they seem completely ignorant) before implementing government subsidies.
Giving students easier access to money to pay for school is a demand-side incentive. What should happen is the increased demand causes more universities to be built, and the increased competition lowers prices (tuitions). But schools are not commodities. Schools with good reputations are in higher demand, so increasing the availability of money just makes more students apply to these schools. Demand goes up, supply stays constant, price goes up.
Giving money to universities is a supply-side incentive. The government can even add conditions to receiving that money, like requiring tuitions not exceed a certain % of the median family income.
The U.S. college and university economics are so screwed up right now because of these student loans, grants, and scholarships, that the only solution I can see now is to aggressively shift money away from those programs and into public universities (with the stipulation that the public university keep tuitions reasonable). If you're poor, you'll still be able to go to college, but it'll be a public university, not a private ivy league college. Then wait for that additional funding to increase the reputation and competitiveness of public universities. That increased competition plus funds drying up for private colleges will force them to go on a diet, shedding those unnecessary administrators and reducing other costs, so they can lower tuition.
I'm also pretty close to decided that loans for students are a really bad idea. Loans basically allow you to time-shift money from your future into the present. Since students have their entire future earnings potential ahead of them, this is a massive amount of money that loans allow schools to tap into. Without any loans (or at least publicly funded or supported loans), students will only be able to pay what they can currently afford, and tuitions will fall to match their ability to pay out of pocket.
Fun story about this. Back in the early 2000s, American Express ran a Christmas giveaway with a BMW M5 as the grand prize. The winner was delighted to receive the car, not so delighted when the IRS sent him a bill for income taxes on the retail value of the car. He complained about it online, saying Amex's "prize" had saddled him with a tax bill for tens of thousands of dollars.
To their credit, American Express stepped up and sent him a check for the amount of the taxes. The winner was once again delighted to receive the check, not so delighted when the IRS sent him a bill for income taxes on the amount of the check.
Once again, American Express stepped up. This time they calculated how much they needed to send him to fully pay off the taxes on the car, plus all the taxes on all the money they were giving him to pay for taxes. And sent him a check for that amount (minus what they'd paid him in the previous check).
This is why you frequently hear that the winner of something like a house in a sweepstakes had no choice but to sell the house. Unlike Amex, most contests only awarded the prize, leaving the winner responsible for the taxes (read the fine print - it'll say the winner is responsible for all taxes). Since very few people have enough savings to pay the income taxes on half a million dollars in one lump sum, they have no choice but to sell the house (and get charged income taxes again on the sale price if they don't re-invest it into another house).
So yeah, the proper solution to this is for the university to pay their RAs and TAs enough for their stipend, plus whatever taxes they'll owe due to the tuition waivers (plus taxes they'll owe due to their higher overall pay rate). Alternatively, the university could simply lower their tuition. But I suspect it'll be a cold day in hell before that happens. I'm curious how universities even got this exception in the first place.
It's not required until 2019, but most of the EVs (and hybrids operating in electric-only mode) already have it. That electric whine with a high pitched overtone you hear from them at low speeds? It's not from the motor. It's just sound played through a speaker.
The noise is added so blind and inattentive pedestrians are aware that there's a moving car nearby. NHTSA noticed an uptick in low-speed accidents between hybrids/EVs and pedestrians, so jumped on a way to stop it before it became epidemic.
I have a VW Touareg TDI subject to the recall. I'm extremely sensitive to the diesel stench. When I'm on the freeway, I can usually tell when there's an old diesel Mercedes a quarter mile ahead simply by the smell. And I cannot ride on most diesel boats because the smell gives me a headache. I have never gotten that smell from the Touareg. In fact except for the 'D' in TDI, almost nobody has even noticed that it's a diesel.
I bought it for towing, and was surprised at how fuel efficient it is. This is a 5000 lb vehicle rated to tow 7700 lbs, and I benchmarked it at 36.6 MPG on the freeway with cruise control set at 65 MPH over a circular route. I changed fuel additives recently to one with more lubrication (modern ultra-low sulfur formulations are very low in lubrication), and now I'm getting about 38 MPG on the freeway with occasional forays into 40+ MPG territory. I'm afraid that in their zeal to get stereotypical "dirty" cars off the road, environmentalists are going to wind up increasing fuel consumption and air pollution by eliminating some incredibly fuel-efficient vehicles.
Understand that the reason the NOx emissions are high on diesels is because the engines are so efficient. The more efficiently the engine burns, the higher the temperature and the less carbon (from the fuel) there is for atmospheric oxygen to bind to, so some of the oxygen ends up binding to atmospheric nitrogen instead. Diesel straddles the limit for acceptable NOx emissions (which contribute to smog). But if you artificially set the NOx limits lower than they really need to be for clean air, you'll trade off engine efficiency and wind up increasing fuel consumption and therefore pollution.
But one thing I did see was that this hunk of shit takes about 7.2 MegaWatt hours per-charge. That's an INSANE amount of power just to keep one of these rigs running. [...] No one needs faster trucks, we need more efficient trucks.
That is in fact why this truck exists. See, the U.S. is weird in that it measures fuel efficiency in MPG. That's actually the inverse of fuel efficiency (which would be GPM, or how many gallons does it take to drive 100 miles). Because MPG is the inverse, it leads to a numerical inversion which tricks a lot of people into thinking what's small is big. (The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem.) Say you needed to drive 100 miles. How many gallons of gas do you need?
6.125 MPG tractor trailer = 16 gallons
12.5 MPG large SUV = 8 gallons (8 gallons saved over tractor trailer)
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons (4 gallons saved over SUV)
50 MPG Prius = 2 gallons (2 gallons saved over sedan)
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the amount of fuel saved is only half that of the previous doubling? In other words, the majority of the fuel savings comes at smaller MPG. The +25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons. While the +12.5 MPG jump from a SUV to a sedan saves you 4 gallons. Even though the 12.5 MPG delta seems smaller than the 25 MPG delta, it saves twice as much fuel. How? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. Bigger is smaller, smaller is bigger.
So econoboxes like the Prius are actually the worst possible place to put a hybrid or electric motor. The car is already very fuel efficient. You're adding a lot of complexity and cost for very little fuel savings. The best place to put these technologies is in the gas guzzlers - SUVs and tractor trailers. Raising that 6.125 MPG tractor trailer's MPG to 6.67 MPG (a 9% increase in MPG) yields just as much fuel savings per mile as doubling a Prius' MPG to 100 MPG (a 100% increase in MPG).
This whole obsession with high MPG vehicles like the Prius is misguided at best, a terrible waste of money and resources at worst. Musk has done the math and knows this, and knows that the best way to really cut the country's fuel consumption is by improving the efficiency of gas guzzling vehicles like tractor trailers. Which is why he made this electric truck.
Also as a second real serious complaint... who the FUCK said that ANYONE wants a semi truck that can accelerate that fast? You in no way want a semi truck that accelerates like that, you want something that can have an enormous amount of TORQUE, so you can pull heavy loads.
HP = constant * Torque * RPM. That's right, the HP and torque curves for an engine are one and the same, just both axes are scaled differently. (The value of the constant depends on what units you're using.)
Also, an electric motor deals much better with the huge range of power output that a truck needs. From low power at cruise speed, to high power during acceleration. Electric motors are so much better at this than transmissions that pretty much every modern train locomotive is electric. Even if the train still uses fossil fuels, it's energy isn't sent directly to the wheels via a mechanical linkage. It's converted into electricity, which then powers an electric motor which drives the wheels. AKA the diesel-electric locomotive.
my biggest complaint about In-N-Out Burger is that they never have enough parking spaces and their drive through line is so long that it also blocks parking spaces.
That's just an indication that demand is outstripping supply, and that more In-N-Out Burger restaurants are needed to meet demand. The "problem" stems from the chain being privately owned, and the family who owns it refusing to franchise. So they personally have to locate, finance, purchase/lease the land, and construct every new In-N-Out Burger restaurant that's made. And apparently the family members they've assigned to this task aren't able to do it fast enough to keep pace with the growing population of diners.
It also lets them incorporate the solar awnings (not the majority of the power delivered, but still useful).
The solar awnings are mostly for show. If you do the math, they provide an almost insignificant amount of the electricity needed to charge the cars.
Figure 5x2.5 meter awning per car stall. By your account, there's 20 charging stalls per station. That's 20*5m*2.5m = 250 m^2 of panels. Figure they're using 160 W/m^2 commercial panels. Assume they're tilted facing south angled at the station's latitude. Multiply by the average capacity factor for the U.S. of 0.145, and a battery charging efficiency of 80%, and you get (250 m^2)*(160 W/M^2)*(0.145)*(24 hours)*(0.8) = 111.4 kWh. Or enough to give about 2.8 cars a half-charge (assuming 80 kWh batteries). Do note that the supercharger efficiency is probably even lower, as generally the faster you charge the battery the lower the efficiency (some of the energy goes into heating up the battery).
If you figure the station runs at half capacity for 12 hours out of the day at 30 min per charge, that's (0.5 capacity)*(20 stalls)*(12 hours/day)/(0.5 hours/charge) = 240 charges per day. So the solar panels provide only (2.8)/(240) = 0.0146 = 1.2% of the electricity needed to charge the cars. Even less if their electricity is going into a storage battery instead of directly to a car (that incurs another battery charging/discharging efficiency loss).
Solar's biggest drawback is that the energy is extremely diffuse. To do it right on a utility or car charging station scale, you need a big field covered with solar panels. Unless you're constrained by the available land area (which definitely isn't the case for a rest area by a highway), putting the panels on awnings above parking spaces or on top of buildings needlessly increases cost. Unless of course your primary goal is publicity - showing off the panels to people passing through.
Yeah. The only smart-home gadget I'd buy is one that will still work after I modify my router's security settings to prevent it from accessing anything outside my home network, and I can access it remotely by VPNing into my home network.
To be fair, any politician from any country could stand in the middle of Fifth Ave. and shoot someone, and they would still have some people vote for them. A small subset of voters are just weird like that.
Trump is just irreverent and unconcerned about his image enough to state that fact, while most politicians wouldn't touch it for fear of it costing them votes. I mean I share your low opinion of him. But if you consider how politicians over the last couple decades have degenerated into not having any real fundamental ideology, instead basing their positions on whatever polls best, I can see why a lot of people would vote for Trump. The man is unlike any other politician - he forms his own opinions and isn't afraid to state them no matter how unpopular it might make him. That is one of the traits of a leader, and I can see how some people are attracted to that.
Many of these people will be on a grant. So, yes, it has nothing to do with education cost.
I was curious how much truth there was to this. Here's what some quick Googling turned up:
Financial Aid: FAQs
In 2014-15, about two-thirds of full-time students paid for college with the help of financial aid in the form of grants and scholarships. Approximately 57 percent of financial aid dollars awarded to undergraduates was in the form of grants, and 34 percent took the form of federal loans.
International Students at U.S. Colleges
Some, but not all, U.S. schools offer international students financial aid. In 2016-2017, of the 1,293 schools that provided data on this topic to U.S. News, 425 said they awarded aid to international students - that's around 1 out of every 3. Each of these 425 schools gave financial aid to, on average, about 40 percent of the international students they enrolled.
So the overall rate at which students receive grants is (2/3)*57% = 38% (or 44% if you assume the missing 9% is scholarships)
The rate at which international students receive fanancial assistance is (425/1293)*40% = 13%
This article sums it up. OP is correct that the cost of U.S. colleges is a huge factor for foreign students.
How international students are subsidizing U.S. universities
A growing number of international students are finding that their dreams of studying in the U.S. comes with a nearly impossible price tag. Many schools have limited funds for student aid, and the lion's share of that money is reserved for U.S. students. And most foreign citizens are not eligible for federal student aid from the U.S. Department of Education.
That means that being a foreign student in the U.S. usually means paying full tuition
The real question is, when will the phone companies let me block them?
My problems began about a year ago when I started getting a bunch of wrong number calls from people asking (in Spanish) for Manuel. My guess is someone didn't memorize their new phone number correctly and was giving out my number instead. I managed to get most of those sorted out eventually. Although one little old lady (I picked out "abuela" in what she was saying) kept hanging up and calling again, thinking she was continuously dialing the number wrong.
But then the robocalls began. Most of them in Spanish, but a few English. Mind you, I've had this number for almost 20 years with only a handful of spam calls each year. But my guess is the person also used my number when signing up for things, because I started getting 5-10 robocalls a day. The phone company was absolutely useless at helping me block them. The only way I survived was because Google's phone app tells you if a number is a suspected spam caller, and I just let it go to voicemail (they always leave a 5 second empty voicemail).
Does anyone know of an app which generates the "number has been disconnected" tones in response to an incoming phone call? I'm reluctant to change my voicemail to that because I do occasionally get real voicemails.
Slashdot Mirror
The line is pretty clear. If the average rate of return for the customer is less than what they on average paid, then it's gambling. If the average return is higher than what they paid, then it's investing.
That's the key thing to understand here. Positive economic activity comes from productivity being increased by each transaction (on average). This increased productivity translates into a larger monetary return than what was originally invested. The refinery buys $1 worth of ore and turns it into $2 worth of steel. The tool company buys $2 worth of steel and turns it into a $4 hammer. The hardware store buys the $4 hammer and sells it at retail for $8. The carpenter buys the $8 hammer and uses it to increase his carpentry business productivity by $16. The customer buys a dresser from the carpenter because its organizational value to him (time saved not having to find stuff in a big pile) is more than the purchase price. In each case, despite the previous buyer increasing the price, because of value added by that person (ore to steel, steel to tool, tool in a warehouse in Wisconsin to one on the shelf at your local store, pile of wood to dresser), the increased price is worth it to the buyer because they're getting more value out of their purchase than what they paid. They're not gambling that they can sell what they buy for more. They're investing because they're adding value and thus confident they can sell for more than they bought it.
Any activity which on average results in less return than the original investment is a bad economic transaction at best (i.e. a waste of money), or a scam/fraud at worst (subprime mortgages repackaged as collateralized debt obligations). Gambling on average results in less return than the original investment.
The only time gambling works is if the average return exactly equals the investment. If two people decide to bet on a football game, then the transaction is zero sum. One person gains exactly what the other person loses. But the moment you add a bookie or a casino to the mix (i.e. try to turn it into a business), it becomes negative sum because the bookie or casino is skimming a little off the top of each transaction.
For the batter, they're not looking straight at the oncoming pitch. Their head is offset a bit from the center of the plate and where the bat will contact the ball. For the right-handed batter, this means a ball which is moving perfectly straight towards the middle of the strike zone will appear to drift slightly to the right (batter's point of view) due to perspective as it moves from the pitcher to the plate.
For the right-handed batter facing a right-handed pitcher:
For the right-handed batter facing a left-handed pitcher:
Left-handed batters don't have as much problem facing right-handed pitchers because they've been facing more of them all their lives. Yes left-handed pitchers are very common at the pro level. But when playing as kids, in schools, and in the early minor leagues, right-handed pitchers are much more common. I suspect that's the same reason left-handed fencers are more successful. They may be split 50/50 at the pro level. But if you tallied up the lifetime matches including when they were learning, they've mostly been facing right-handers.
As a self-taught "administrator" who's run two small businesses, I'd have to disagree. There is in fact quite a bit to learn about running a business - accounting, legal (especially labor and tax codes), organizational, employee management, etc.
However, I'd say about 80% of this would be better suited taught in a high-school level course. The accounting is virtually identical to running your personal finances, just a lot more formal. Everyone has to pay taxes and occasionally deal with a legal infraction or subpeona. Organizational skills and how to accept and/or delegate responsibility is something that everyone should learn. And managing people (working with, encouraging, watching out for, detecting problems, reprimanding) is important at a family and relationship level too.
The remaining stuff specific to running a business, I'd say you could pick up from a few night courses at your local adult community college. Or in my case, by asking an accountant friend and a lawyer friend a lot of questions, and listening to advice from someone who'd actually taken employee management courses. There are lots of little facts and tidbits (e.g. what percentage of your budget should be going to payroll or marketing? How do you calculate and deduct payroll taxes? What documentation do I need to collect and submit when I hire an employee?) which have very specific answers but aren't all located in a single easy-to-find place. One thing you learn pretty quickly running your own business is that time is your most valuable resource. And if you can get a neatly organized reference which answers most of these questions for a few thousand dollars, it's well worth paying for it just because it saves you the time of stumbling around the web trying to find it all yourself.
What matters isn't population or even GDP. It's GDP per capita - how much productivity each citizen is producing on average. This represents how much useful economic work each citizen can produce in a year. It mostly depends on their country's regulatory and living environment. Countries with better protection laws (to protect laborers) and business-friendly laws (to encourage business development) tend to have very high GDP per capita. Repressive societies tend to have very low GDP per capita. (Countries with disproportionately high natural resources like oil also tend to be high, since each citizen can accomplish more economic work with less effort acquiring and selling said resource.)
The U.S. is currently up around $57k per year per capita. Most of Europe is around $40k-$50k per year per capita, indicating that while Europe's socialist laws create a fairer society, they come at the cost of slightly lower overall productivity. China isn't even close at $8k per year per capita. Even Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are stuck at about $30k-$38k, probably because their rigid cultural social structure inhibits the fluid movement of workers to jobs they're better suited for and would like to do. An unhappy worker is a less productive worker.
First, putting 93% of their stores in majority-white zip codes is meaningless without also knowing what percentage of zip codes are majority-white. Pulling some demographics out of a zip code database gives 17,409 zip codes which are more than 50% white. 2591 zip codes where whites are 50.0% or fewer. So white-majority zip codes comprise (17409)/(17409+2591) = 87.0% of all zip codes.
That is, if Apple located the stores randomly based on zip code, you would expect 87% of them to be in white-majority zip codes. On top of that, there's a margin of error. 99% of the time, you'd expect these stores to fall within a range of (2.576)*sqrt((0.87)*(1-0.87)/(270)) = 0.0527, or +/- 5.3%. That is, 99% of the time you sprinkled the stores randomly in a table of zip codes, you'd end up between 81.7% to 92.3% of stores in white-majority zip codes. 93% falls just outside this range, so we're talking about just barely being 99% confident that this is a real deviation, not a random occurrence.
Second, these are zip codes, not areas of equal population or population. Zip codes vary in population by about a 7:1 ratio. It's much more advantageous for a business to put a store into a zip code with a high population. So if there's any correlation between zip code population and racial diversity, it could be enough to offset the margin statistical significance we found above. I don't have time to research this, but my hunch would be that the low population zip codes tend to be skewed towards white-minority (e.g. remote areas like Indian reservations, sections of Alaska with large Inuit population, etc) compared to white-majority zip codes. Since a business is unlikely to put a store in an area of low population, that would erase a good chunk of the discrepancy between 87% and 93%.
Third, related to the second, is that high population density zip codes tend to be smaller and near other high population density zip codes. So whereas a store in a medium population density zip code may be meant to stand on its own, a store in a high population density zip code may be meant to draw customers from nearby zip codes. That is, people in neighboring zip codes are expected to travel the short distance to the single store servicing all those zip codes. I also suspect that high population density zip codes tend to be more white-minority (e.g. the Bronx). If so, this would also skew the number of stores in minority zip codes down. Not because there are fewer stores within a x mile radius, but because there are more zip codes within an x mile radius.
tl;dr - This looks more like just a straight random distribution, with some biasing due to how minorities tend to distribute themselves geographically compared to whites. Not some form of discrimination on Apple's part.
It's government which allows ISPs to abuse the people in the first place. Net neutrality is only "needed" because most Americans only have one realistic choice of ISP. And they only have one choice because their local government has granted that ISP a monopoly.
If the local governments weren't granting service monopolies, then there would be competition between ISPs. Any ISP which degraded Netflix's speeds as part of a ploy to extort money from Netflix would be shooting itself in the foot. Its customers would notice Netflix was streaming badly, hear from their neighbor that Netflix worked fine on their ISP, and they'd simply cancel and switch their service to their neighbor's ISP. No net neutrality needed. They're prevented from doing this only because their local government has sold them out and granted their ISP a monopoly. Net neutrality is trying to fix a problem created by government regulation, with more government regulation.
If Ajit Pai and Trump truly believe in the free market, then they'll roll back net neutrality, then follow it up by prohibiting local governments from granting local service monopolies.
Only the maximum and minimum moments of inertia are stable in rotation. If you try to spin an object around any other axis, it will tumble - the axis of rotation varies relative to the body. Every spacecraft or satellite that's launched had some poor slob whose job was to get the exact mass, location, and inertia tensor of every single component put into the spacecraft, and put it into a huge spreadsheet. Then he uses that to calculate the minimum and maximum moments of inertia of the spacecraft. If the desired spin axis doesn't line up with either of these moments, then he has to change the location of some of the components of the spacecraft until it does (like positioning weights on a tire when you balance it)..
With round or nearly round objects, the min/max moment of inertia isn't very different from from the inertia around other axes, so this oscillation tends to be very slow and not noticeable. But it's much more likely to be pronounced with an elongated and flattened body.
It's a spaceship!
It's called a plant. Takes a while to complete the conversion process though.
See, pure hydrogen is a bitch to deal with. It's gaseous at STP and extremely low density so you need high pressures to get any reasonable energy density, and it's a tiny molecule so seeps through hoses and valves which are watertight and airtight. So taking sunlight and storing its energy in hydrogen presents huge engineering challengesl.
Plants ran into the exact same problem about a half billion years ago. Their solution was to attach the hydrogen molecules to carbon, producing a hydrocarbon chain. This turns it into a high density solid (sugar, carbohydrates, cellulose) that still retains most of the energy of pure hydrogen, but is much easier to handle and store. When these hydrocarbons are further cooked by time and pressure, you get our traditional fossil fuels - gas, oil, and coal.
That's the holy grail of biofuels - accelerate this process. Break down cellulose into shorter chains (sugars). Have bacteria partially digest the sugars to produce alcohol or even oil. Burn the alcohol as fuel and releasing the waste products into the atmosphere. Then new plants pull the waste products out of the atmosphere to make new cellulose, thus completing the cycle.
They adjusted down the range of BMI which qualified you as overweight or obese.
I don't mind that they're doing this to encourage people to stay in a healthy range as they collect new data. I just wish there was a way the could do it without redefining what certain words mean.
Bitcoin is a bubble/scam. Its very design (limited to 21 million bitcoins) means it doesn't have a future.
But like I've been telling everyone who asks me about bitcoin, that it's a bubble doesn't automatically mean it's a bad short-term investment. A lot of people made a ton of money off the tech bubble and the housing bubble. If you want to make a speculative investment in bitcoin, by all means do so. Just be aware that due to its flawed design, eventually it will collapse. Take care to make sure you're not the one left holding the bag when that happens. Basically my standard investing/gambling advice - don't put more money into it than you can stand to lose.
The nuclear parts of the plant itself survived both the earthquake and tsunami just fine even though both events were well beyond the plant's design specifications.
The failure was loss of power to run the plant's cooling systems. Basically, the tsunami swamped the backup power generators and contaminated the diesel fuel reserves for the generators. The destruction of the surrounding roads prevented new generators and fuel from being brought in in a timely manner. And when they eventually did arrive, workers discovered the power couplings for the trucks were different from the ones the plant used, and they had to gerry-rig a connector. All of this took critical time which could've mitigated the severity of the accident. This wasn't an explosion like Chernobyl, it was a gradual event as the cooling water slowly evaporated allowing the fuel rods to melt.
A single diesel generator situated on higher ground with an independent fuel source could've prevented the entire accident. Instead, in stereotypical Japanese fashion, they placed all the generators in a neat row right next to each other in the basement, where the tsunami swamped all of them simultaneously. See, the thing about redundant backup systems (e.g. multiple generators in case some do not function) is that they have to be different to be redundant. If they're the same model, in the same location, using the same fuel source, then any single event which affects one generator will affect all the generators, defeating their redundancy. In fact the two newer reactors at Fukushima on higher ground were just fine because their generators and fuel supply worked as intended. They just didn't have a really long extension cord to reach from those generators to the problem reactors. Basically the failure at Fukushima was the same as when you store your backup drive next to your computer (although the consequences were much more severe). If your house burns down or you're burglarized, both your computer's main drive and your backup drive will be lost. Because you're storing both in the same location, the redundancy of a second copy is defeated by any event which affects that entire location.
Fukushima wasn't a failure of nuclear power. It was a failure of backup (non)redundancy which had nuclear consequences. Basically, because of unwarranted paranoia about nuclear power, everyone concentrated on going over the nuclear parts of the plant with a fine-toothed comb to make sure it was safe. As a result, the non-nuclear backup systems didn't get enough scrutiny, and that's what failed.
It's like airliner safety. Air travel is already far safer than other modes of transport. But because any airplane crash gets disproportionate news coverage, we spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the couple hundred airliner deaths per year even further. Meanwhile the tens of thousands of people dying each year in car accidents gets very little attention. Even including the estimated future cancer deaths from Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power is still the safest power source we've invented (yes, safer than wind and solar based on both on deaths and lost man-days per unit of electricity generated).
As someone similar to Damore (borderline autistic), his comments on how we see the world are spot on. I had to spend decades learning seemingly inane social rules just to be able to function "properly" in society instead of logically, and I still sometimes screw things up.
e.g. I once got a present from my sister which I didn't really need nor want, and I told her so and tried to give it back thinking she could get a refund and save her money (I didn't need a present to know she loves me and cares about me). She taught me that when you receive a gift, you just accept it and thank the person, even if you don't want it. Apparently the important thing is the gesture the other person is making, not whether you really need the gift. i.e. The process of gift giving is as much for the giver's benefit as it is for the recipient's, and rejecting it can create the impression that you don't appreciate the time and effort the giver put into getting the gift for you.
About a decade later, a co-worker gave me a gift, so I politely accepted it and thanked her. I didn't really need it so I stuck it in the trunk of my car. A few months later she happened to see it in my trunk, unopened. My boss called me in later (we were all good friends). Apparently my co-worker had come to her almost in tears about seeing her gift in my trunk. I had no idea what was going on. When my boss asked why I accepted the gift, I explained the incident with my sister. She gave a big sigh and said that was right, but that there's another case with its own (contradictory) rule. She then carefully explained the social custom where if someone likes you romantically, they can give you a gift. And if you reciprocate you accept the gift, but if you do not you reject the gift.
In the context of the Google memo, I can see why you think this is dangerous - as you say it implies the memo was aberrant because of a mental illness. But what he's describing is actually a larger issue with how society functions. It's full of illogical, contradictory, and seemingly pointless social rules. Most of you seem to learn it subconsciously just from observing others, which is probably what leads to some of this illogical PC stuff being enshrined as the "right" way to behave. People like Damore and me struggle with trying to make sense of all this, unraveling these rules and trying to place them properly inside a framework built with different rules (usually logic). Sometimes it's like trying to put a square peg into a round hole, or having to put two pegs into a single hole. You just know it doesn't make sense, but everyone else seems to accept that that's the way it's supposed to be and behave as if it's correct, so I just add it to the huge list of pointless rules I should follow because normal people do.
To give you "normal" people some idea of what it's like, here's an example of arbitrary social rules that I get the sense most of you view similarly to how I perceive social rules (based on how often it's spoofed in movies). You look at all those place settings for formal dining, and you think. "What's the point? Why bother when you can just use any fork or spoon which is convenient?" Yet if you're in a formal dining setting and you break one of those arbitrary rules, you can be denounced, ridiculed, and even ostracized by others at the formal dinner. Or if you're one of the servers, you can be fired for putting a setting in the wrong order. Well, for some of us like Damore, every social interaction is one great big formal dinner setting, full of arbitrary and pointless rules which can get you denounced, ridiculed, ostracized, or fired if you break them. Even though there is nothing about the situation which logically warrants such a harsh penalty. Society just thinks adherence to those rules is important.
So in the limited scope of his memo, what Damore is saying about autism appears to weaken his argument. B
There's a huge amount of inertia within the military (or government for that matter), which makes it really slow to adapt to and take advantage of changes. Technological progress is the very epitome of change, so the two make very poor bedfellows. It works much better if they simply hire someone to handle the technological part for them.
In the mid-1990s my company was doing some ship model testing. We rented the tow tank at the U.S. Navy's David Taylor Research Center (now David Taylor Model Basin). One morning I arrived at the center and saw a bunch of what looked like washing machines piled up at the tow tank entrance. I asked our Navy guide what they were.
"Hard drives"
"Whoa. How old are they?"
"I dunno, early '70s I think."
"Wow. What's their capacity?
"About 10 MB."
"So they've been sitting in your warehouse all this time, and you finally decided to throw them out?"
"Oh no, we were using them up til yesterday. Our requisition for new hard drives finally came through."
"..."
Not exactly the kind of organization you want building cutting-edge data storage solutions for themselves.
Government directly backing universities does not cause this problem. The money goes straight to the school, so there is no incentive for them to raise prices for students. Quite the opposite in fact, since they're now getting additional money from another source and thus can lower tuition.
Supply-side government incentives and demand-side government incentives have these different effects on the market. Politicians should really think about these effects (or in many cases learn about them since they seem completely ignorant) before implementing government subsidies.
The U.S. college and university economics are so screwed up right now because of these student loans, grants, and scholarships, that the only solution I can see now is to aggressively shift money away from those programs and into public universities (with the stipulation that the public university keep tuitions reasonable). If you're poor, you'll still be able to go to college, but it'll be a public university, not a private ivy league college. Then wait for that additional funding to increase the reputation and competitiveness of public universities. That increased competition plus funds drying up for private colleges will force them to go on a diet, shedding those unnecessary administrators and reducing other costs, so they can lower tuition.
I'm also pretty close to decided that loans for students are a really bad idea. Loans basically allow you to time-shift money from your future into the present. Since students have their entire future earnings potential ahead of them, this is a massive amount of money that loans allow schools to tap into. Without any loans (or at least publicly funded or supported loans), students will only be able to pay what they can currently afford, and tuitions will fall to match their ability to pay out of pocket.
Fun story about this. Back in the early 2000s, American Express ran a Christmas giveaway with a BMW M5 as the grand prize. The winner was delighted to receive the car, not so delighted when the IRS sent him a bill for income taxes on the retail value of the car. He complained about it online, saying Amex's "prize" had saddled him with a tax bill for tens of thousands of dollars.
To their credit, American Express stepped up and sent him a check for the amount of the taxes. The winner was once again delighted to receive the check, not so delighted when the IRS sent him a bill for income taxes on the amount of the check.
Once again, American Express stepped up. This time they calculated how much they needed to send him to fully pay off the taxes on the car, plus all the taxes on all the money they were giving him to pay for taxes. And sent him a check for that amount (minus what they'd paid him in the previous check).
This is why you frequently hear that the winner of something like a house in a sweepstakes had no choice but to sell the house. Unlike Amex, most contests only awarded the prize, leaving the winner responsible for the taxes (read the fine print - it'll say the winner is responsible for all taxes). Since very few people have enough savings to pay the income taxes on half a million dollars in one lump sum, they have no choice but to sell the house (and get charged income taxes again on the sale price if they don't re-invest it into another house).
So yeah, the proper solution to this is for the university to pay their RAs and TAs enough for their stipend, plus whatever taxes they'll owe due to the tuition waivers (plus taxes they'll owe due to their higher overall pay rate). Alternatively, the university could simply lower their tuition. But I suspect it'll be a cold day in hell before that happens. I'm curious how universities even got this exception in the first place.
It's not required until 2019, but most of the EVs (and hybrids operating in electric-only mode) already have it. That electric whine with a high pitched overtone you hear from them at low speeds? It's not from the motor. It's just sound played through a speaker.
The noise is added so blind and inattentive pedestrians are aware that there's a moving car nearby. NHTSA noticed an uptick in low-speed accidents between hybrids/EVs and pedestrians, so jumped on a way to stop it before it became epidemic.
I have a VW Touareg TDI subject to the recall. I'm extremely sensitive to the diesel stench. When I'm on the freeway, I can usually tell when there's an old diesel Mercedes a quarter mile ahead simply by the smell. And I cannot ride on most diesel boats because the smell gives me a headache. I have never gotten that smell from the Touareg. In fact except for the 'D' in TDI, almost nobody has even noticed that it's a diesel.
I bought it for towing, and was surprised at how fuel efficient it is. This is a 5000 lb vehicle rated to tow 7700 lbs, and I benchmarked it at 36.6 MPG on the freeway with cruise control set at 65 MPH over a circular route. I changed fuel additives recently to one with more lubrication (modern ultra-low sulfur formulations are very low in lubrication), and now I'm getting about 38 MPG on the freeway with occasional forays into 40+ MPG territory. I'm afraid that in their zeal to get stereotypical "dirty" cars off the road, environmentalists are going to wind up increasing fuel consumption and air pollution by eliminating some incredibly fuel-efficient vehicles.
Understand that the reason the NOx emissions are high on diesels is because the engines are so efficient. The more efficiently the engine burns, the higher the temperature and the less carbon (from the fuel) there is for atmospheric oxygen to bind to, so some of the oxygen ends up binding to atmospheric nitrogen instead. Diesel straddles the limit for acceptable NOx emissions (which contribute to smog). But if you artificially set the NOx limits lower than they really need to be for clean air, you'll trade off engine efficiency and wind up increasing fuel consumption and therefore pollution.
That is in fact why this truck exists. See, the U.S. is weird in that it measures fuel efficiency in MPG. That's actually the inverse of fuel efficiency (which would be GPM, or how many gallons does it take to drive 100 miles). Because MPG is the inverse, it leads to a numerical inversion which tricks a lot of people into thinking what's small is big. (The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem.) Say you needed to drive 100 miles. How many gallons of gas do you need?
Notice how every time MPG doubles, the amount of fuel saved is only half that of the previous doubling? In other words, the majority of the fuel savings comes at smaller MPG. The +25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons. While the +12.5 MPG jump from a SUV to a sedan saves you 4 gallons. Even though the 12.5 MPG delta seems smaller than the 25 MPG delta, it saves twice as much fuel. How? Because MPG is the inverse of fuel efficiency. Bigger is smaller, smaller is bigger.
So econoboxes like the Prius are actually the worst possible place to put a hybrid or electric motor. The car is already very fuel efficient. You're adding a lot of complexity and cost for very little fuel savings. The best place to put these technologies is in the gas guzzlers - SUVs and tractor trailers. Raising that 6.125 MPG tractor trailer's MPG to 6.67 MPG (a 9% increase in MPG) yields just as much fuel savings per mile as doubling a Prius' MPG to 100 MPG (a 100% increase in MPG).
This whole obsession with high MPG vehicles like the Prius is misguided at best, a terrible waste of money and resources at worst. Musk has done the math and knows this, and knows that the best way to really cut the country's fuel consumption is by improving the efficiency of gas guzzling vehicles like tractor trailers. Which is why he made this electric truck.
HP = constant * Torque * RPM. That's right, the HP and torque curves for an engine are one and the same, just both axes are scaled differently. (The value of the constant depends on what units you're using.)
Also, an electric motor deals much better with the huge range of power output that a truck needs. From low power at cruise speed, to high power during acceleration. Electric motors are so much better at this than transmissions that pretty much every modern train locomotive is electric. Even if the train still uses fossil fuels, it's energy isn't sent directly to the wheels via a mechanical linkage. It's converted into electricity, which then powers an electric motor which drives the wheels. AKA the diesel-electric locomotive.
That's just an indication that demand is outstripping supply, and that more In-N-Out Burger restaurants are needed to meet demand. The "problem" stems from the chain being privately owned, and the family who owns it refusing to franchise. So they personally have to locate, finance, purchase/lease the land, and construct every new In-N-Out Burger restaurant that's made. And apparently the family members they've assigned to this task aren't able to do it fast enough to keep pace with the growing population of diners.
The solar awnings are mostly for show. If you do the math, they provide an almost insignificant amount of the electricity needed to charge the cars.
Figure 5x2.5 meter awning per car stall. By your account, there's 20 charging stalls per station. That's 20*5m*2.5m = 250 m^2 of panels. Figure they're using 160 W/m^2 commercial panels. Assume they're tilted facing south angled at the station's latitude. Multiply by the average capacity factor for the U.S. of 0.145, and a battery charging efficiency of 80%, and you get (250 m^2)*(160 W/M^2)*(0.145)*(24 hours)*(0.8) = 111.4 kWh. Or enough to give about 2.8 cars a half-charge (assuming 80 kWh batteries). Do note that the supercharger efficiency is probably even lower, as generally the faster you charge the battery the lower the efficiency (some of the energy goes into heating up the battery).
If you figure the station runs at half capacity for 12 hours out of the day at 30 min per charge, that's (0.5 capacity)*(20 stalls)*(12 hours/day)/(0.5 hours/charge) = 240 charges per day. So the solar panels provide only (2.8)/(240) = 0.0146 = 1.2% of the electricity needed to charge the cars. Even less if their electricity is going into a storage battery instead of directly to a car (that incurs another battery charging/discharging efficiency loss).
Solar's biggest drawback is that the energy is extremely diffuse. To do it right on a utility or car charging station scale, you need a big field covered with solar panels. Unless you're constrained by the available land area (which definitely isn't the case for a rest area by a highway), putting the panels on awnings above parking spaces or on top of buildings needlessly increases cost. Unless of course your primary goal is publicity - showing off the panels to people passing through.
Yeah. The only smart-home gadget I'd buy is one that will still work after I modify my router's security settings to prevent it from accessing anything outside my home network, and I can access it remotely by VPNing into my home network.
To be fair, any politician from any country could stand in the middle of Fifth Ave. and shoot someone, and they would still have some people vote for them. A small subset of voters are just weird like that.
Trump is just irreverent and unconcerned about his image enough to state that fact, while most politicians wouldn't touch it for fear of it costing them votes. I mean I share your low opinion of him. But if you consider how politicians over the last couple decades have degenerated into not having any real fundamental ideology, instead basing their positions on whatever polls best, I can see why a lot of people would vote for Trump. The man is unlike any other politician - he forms his own opinions and isn't afraid to state them no matter how unpopular it might make him. That is one of the traits of a leader, and I can see how some people are attracted to that.
I was curious how much truth there was to this. Here's what some quick Googling turned up:
So the overall rate at which students receive grants is (2/3)*57% = 38% (or 44% if you assume the missing 9% is scholarships)
The rate at which international students receive fanancial assistance is (425/1293)*40% = 13%
This article sums it up. OP is correct that the cost of U.S. colleges is a huge factor for foreign students.
The real question is, when will the phone companies let me block them?
My problems began about a year ago when I started getting a bunch of wrong number calls from people asking (in Spanish) for Manuel. My guess is someone didn't memorize their new phone number correctly and was giving out my number instead. I managed to get most of those sorted out eventually. Although one little old lady (I picked out "abuela" in what she was saying) kept hanging up and calling again, thinking she was continuously dialing the number wrong.
But then the robocalls began. Most of them in Spanish, but a few English. Mind you, I've had this number for almost 20 years with only a handful of spam calls each year. But my guess is the person also used my number when signing up for things, because I started getting 5-10 robocalls a day. The phone company was absolutely useless at helping me block them. The only way I survived was because Google's phone app tells you if a number is a suspected spam caller, and I just let it go to voicemail (they always leave a 5 second empty voicemail).
Does anyone know of an app which generates the "number has been disconnected" tones in response to an incoming phone call? I'm reluctant to change my voicemail to that because I do occasionally get real voicemails.