Oh I'm sure that Russia is meddling in the elections here. Just like every non-American with Internet access and an opinion on Trump/Clinton chipped in their 2 cents. Just like the U.S. meddles in elections elsewhere. People talk to each other, it's a fact of life. And in the Internet age that means they'll talk across national boundaries, even about stuff that they're technically not supposed to be talking about.
If the reports of Russian meddling I've seen are accurate, the scale of it was so small (tens of thousands of dollars of ads in an election where Trump and Clinton spent over $1.8 billion, or nearly $14 per vote) that random people in other countries posting their opinion about the U.S. election on public forums, Facebook, etc. probably had a greater cumulative influence. The media keeps hyping the Russia angle because they feel they need to discredit the 2016 election. I mean if the media were right and a few dozen Russians spending on the order of six figures really swung the election, then every politician would be tripping over themselves to hire these guys to help them run their future ad campaigns.
Average profit margin (net income) for the grocery industry is just 2.85% of sales [nyu.edu].
Whole Foods was making a relatively stellar 3.2% profit.
If half the workers got a $5/hr wage increase, that would've dropped to 1.7%.
If 3/4 of the workers got a $5/hr increase, that would've dropped to 0.98%.
Realistically, they only could've afforded a little less than a $1/hr wage increase (that would've put them at the industry average 2.85% profit margin).
Don't they make enough profit corporately that the increased wages make little impact on the overall profits, or are they too money-grubbing to really care?
I'm betting on the latter, personally.
Whole Foods has 91,000 employees. In their last year of independent operation, they had $15.7 billion in gross sales, $507 million net income (aka profit). That's $827 million before taxes, with $320 million in corporate income taxes, or 38.7%.
If you figure just half those 91,000 employees are wage slaves who used to work 30 hours a week, 50 hours/year, then increasing their pay from $10/hr to $15/hr would've resulted in (45,500 employees)*(1500 hours/yr)*($5/hr) = $341.25 million in additional wages. Payroll costs would have increased by an additional 7.65% (employer's fraction of Social Security and Medicare). Workers comp insurance for people involved in manual labor (warehousing and stocking) is typically around 5% of their wages. Assume the low-end employees didn't get any benefits.
So total cost of the $5 hourly wage increase would've been $384 million. That would've reduced income before taxes to $432 million, and net income after taxes to $271 million. Or 54% what it was before the wage increase.
If 3/4 of the employees were wage slaves earning the minimum, then these figures increase to $576 million in increased costs, reducing net income to $154 million, or just 30% what it was before the wage increase.
So you lose your bet. it would've made a huge impact on overall profits.
Average profit margin (net income) for the grocery industry is just 2.85% of sales.
Whole Foods was making a relatively stellar 3.2% profit.
If half the workers got a $5/hr wage increase, that would've dropped to 1.7%.
If 3/4 of the workers got a $5/hr increase, that would've dropped to 0.98%.
but they should be highlighted as being inappropriate with the message being that like a Stark, "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword."
The doctor wasn't the one who gave him the disease. I'm having trouble finding out what this "chronic lung disease" was - it seems to be omitted in all the news reports (the quality of journalism has fallen markedly in the last few decades). If it was smoking-related, the guy did it to himself.
The appropriate catchphrase here is "shooting the messenger." I get that the family and the guy were upset to find out he'd be dying so soon, but there's no reason to take it out on the doctor. The doctor was only the messenger.
Put another way, would they rather have found out via video conference and had 48 hours to spend together and prepare for the end? Or would they have preferred to lose 10%-20% of that remaining time waiting until a doctor could deliver the news in person? Given the short timeframe of the diagnosis, I think informing them ASAP by any means possible should've been the priority.
I was around the last time the USA got rid of daylight-savings time, in 1973-1975. It was total hell. Children went to school in pitch darkness and bitter cold, and people drove to work in the dark.
The correct way to fix that is to change what time school and work starts. Not to change everyone's clocks. 7am or 8am may have been pitch darkness where you were. Other places it was fine. The places which are affected by longer night (higher latitudes, further west in the time zone) can simply change the start times for school and business in winter. If you insist on changing the clocks, everyone is affected - even people in areas where the time change offers no benefit and is tremendously inconvenient.
Tokens are trivial to bypass. I do it all the time at hotels (so my family doesn't have to re-validate a half dozen devices every 24 hours when the token expires). You just set up a WiFi router in client mode (so it acts like a wireless adapter). Have it spoof your laptop's MAC address if necessary. You then connect your laptop to the router, and login to the hotel WiFi via the router's WiFi. The hotel WiFi reads the MAC address off the router, the token is validated via the laptop (which since it's going through the router makes it look like the token was validated by the router), and from that point on anything connected to the router can use the hotel's WiFi. To the hotel it looks like all that traffic is coming from the laptop.
I then plug in a second WiFi router into the client router. That lets me broadcast my own private wireless network for my family's devices to connect to. And after 24 hours when they require me to revalidate devices, I just do it once with my laptop.
It's a continuous scale, from truly awful customer service, to bad customer service, to neutral customer service, to good customer service, to stellar customer service.
Profit = (sales) * (profit margin)
so is a function of two variables.
If your customer service drops too low, customers stop buying from you. The drop in sales leads to a decrease in profits.
If your customer service becomes too good, the cost to address customer complaints eats into your profit margin, or even turns it negative (you lose money per sale on average). And your overall profit decreases.
At some point along that scale, profit is maximized The company is happy because it's making lots of profit. The customers are happy because they're getting stuff for cheaper because the company isn't wasting money on excessive customer service.
If you're a naive businessman who thinks you should make sure 100% of your customers are satisfied*, then yes having worse customer service will increase your profits Likewise, if you're a naive businessman who thinks cutting customer service expenses will always increase profit, then no, at some point having worse customer service results in decreased profits. Pretty much everyone who has run a business understands this. These professors would too if they'd spent some time running a business instead of only theorizing about them.
* (The phrase, "the customer is always right," doesn't mean you should give the customer whatever they demand. It means you're better off selling the customer what they want, rather than what you think they should get. In other words, what the customer thinks they want is always right. The phrase has unfortunately been appropriated by abusive customers trying to justify their excessive demands for service from businesses.)
All it does is force other consumers to move away from using green energy (switch to fossil fuels), because you are now using the green energy they used to use. e.g. Everyone used to use 20% green energy, 80% fossil fuels. Some company decides to buy up all 20% green energy for its own use so it can claim its energy consumption is 100% green. That forces everyone else to use 100% fossil fuel energy. And the net result is... 20% green energy, 80% fossil fuels - exactly the same as before this pointless gesture.
To truly increase the fraction of energy derived from green sources, you have to change the supply end of power generation. That means adding new green power sources, and shutting down fossil fuel plants.
Most of the sports which have implemented automatic or instant replay review have made it part of a challenge system. The umpire or referee makes calls as before, but if the player or coach feels the call was wrong they can challenge it. Only then does it it get reviewed. Each side has a certain number of challenges they're allowed per game. If their challenge overturns the umpire's call, they get the challenge back. If it confirms the umpire's call, they lose the challenge (have one fewer for the rest of the game).
The system used in tennis is probably the closest analogue to how it might work in baseball. It's quick, so doesn't delay the game much. It adds drama to the game as everyone (players, refs, fans) gets to watch the replay together (not like the terrible system in football where only one guy in a hidden room somewhere watches it, and radios his decision to the field). And the result has been accepted by players and refs as definitive, so it actually cuts down on the amount of time wasted arguing over calls.
It also provides objective evidence if there's a ref or ump who's clearly doing a bad job. Which baseball badly needs since there are some umpires who have a reputation for calling a small strike zone, some for calling a large strike zone.
The amount of money a government can create "out of thin air" is limited by the productivity of the country. That's why the U.S, Germany, UK, etc. have been able to go into heavy deficit spending without serious economic consequences - they're still keeping government spending to a relatively small percentage of total GDP. But once the government starts creating more money than the country's productivity, the economy responds by devaluing the currency (basically lowering the value of the currency to keep spending equal to or less than productivity). That's what's crippled Venezuela's Bolivar - the socialist government there keeps trying to hand out more value in services than their economy is producing, resulting in massive inflation.
North Korea is in a situation similar to Venezuela. They have very little domestic productivity (and the largest chunk of it is put into the military). The only realistic way they can make more money (aside from ditching their system of government, which is unlikely to happen), is to steal it.
If guests won't tip a robot, doesn't that mean they'll have more cash on hand, and will be more likely to tip the human casino industry workers? The fact that converting some of the jobs to robots means fewer human employees, would seem to actually work to the advantage of the remaining human workers when it comes to tips.
Motorcycles have tires about the same diameter as car tires, but have a fatality rate that's nearly 28x worse. The lack of a safety cage protecting the passenger compartment is the primary factor. In a car accident, the car absorbs most of the impact energy. In a motorcycle or scooter or bike accident, you get to absorb most of the impact energy.
There's also the mass imbalance when a car and scooter collide (basically, the lighter vehicle bounces backwards off the heavier vehicle, resulting in occupants of the lighter vehicle experiencing nearly 2x the acceleration forces). But that can easily be eliminated from the comparison by looking only at single vehicle accidents.
A dedicated spy group could probably do really well by selling cheap external enclosures that modified common drives inserted with this hack, then had a cellular data feed built in to transmit real-time audio to whoever on demand.
If you're making the enclosures, why bother hacking the firmware? Let me introduce you to The Thing. A marvelous piece of KGB engineering which was a half century ahead of its time. (If you don't want to read the link, you can make the enclosure a passive microphone which re-transmits sounds into the RF band when "illuminated" by an external RF energy source. Basically an RFID tag hooked up to a microphone.)
Services like Facebook and printing services need to make copies of your photo to provide their service. As such, you have to grant them a limited license under copyright to make those copies. They have to "own" those copies to be able to process / compress / move / store the photos.
The thing you have to watch out for is services which try to slip in language granting themselves an unrestricted, unlimited license to reproduce and relicense your work. A new free photo hosting service came up recently, and when I read the terms and conditions it said exactly that. Granting them such a license would allow them to sell your photos without your permission nor giving you any royalties. Most services like Google Photos make clear they're not doing this, by including the phrase "for the purpose of operating this service" somewhere. That intentionally limits their right to make copies of your photo to only what's necessary to provide their service.
You can be compelled by the court to testify in a case unrelated to you (other than you being a witness). Refusal to do so is contempt of court, and can result in jail time (not prison). Your desire to protect someone does not override the court's responsibility to get at the truth.
This seems like an odd reason to refuse to comply with the court. Grand jury hearings (they determine if there's sufficient evidence for a case to go to a real trial) act as a shield against government harassing innocents by constantly sending them to trial on frivolous charges. They are frequently held in secret so as not to prejudice potential future jurors, and not to prejudice the public in case there's a determination that there's insufficient evidence (people have this bad habit of assuming that being accused = guilty).
The only other notable case I can think of where someone refused to testify was a reporter who was ordered by a court to give up the name of his anonymous source, and was jailed (for years) under contempt of court. But in that case, the principle of freedom of the press was at stake - people wishing to inform the press anonymously would no longer do so if their anonymity could be stripped by a simple court order.
You don't really need to kill the business model. Just need to make it clear and up-front what the user is giving up in exchange for using the service without payment. Actually, I've felt this needs to be a part of every contract and thus EULA (i.e. a change in contract law). At the top of every contract should be a bullet-point list summarizing what each side is giving up in the contract. e.g.
Facebook agrees to allow you to:
Access the service.
Store data (text, images, video) to share with other users.
You agree to allow Facebook to:
Show you ads targeted at you based on your demographics, your interests, websites you've visited, things you've purchased, people you associate with, things you say in your posts.
Keep a copy of data you store on Facebook forever (even if deleted from the active service)
Collect data on who views your content.
Collect data on whose content you view.
Collect data on the websites you visit outside of Facebook by matching your browser used to access Facebook with the browser used to access these other sites.
Infer relationships by cross-referencing the above data with data available from other companies, the government, and otherwise freely available.
Sell the information on you obtained via the above to others.
If someone really wants to agree to all that, it's not your or my place to stop them. My beef is only that it isn't made clear to people exactly what they're giving up when they sign up for a "free" Facebook account. The biggest culprit being lawyers burying the important details in a 50 page EULA of dense, obscure, and difficult to understand language. If the business model dies when you shine a light onto its inner secret workings, then it never deserved to operate in the first place. OTOH if people willingly choose to use the business after its inner workings are completely exposed, then it's not the government's place to stop the people from using it.
The stupid thing is the telecos aren't even natural monopolies. They're government-granted monopolies. So breaking them up doesn't even need to be an anti-trust action. Congress just needs to pass a national law prohibiting state and local governments from granting monopoly contracts for services going to people's homes. No selling out the people for the local government's gain.
Although Sony has yet to announce a broader Android version of the service, the existence of an Android version of the app that's exclusive to Sony Xperia phones suggests there aren't any technical barriers.
There are no technical barriers. Basically the way these remote play apps (like Steam In Home Streaming) work is that the machine playing the game converts the video into an h.264 video stream in real-time using the h.264 encoder built into every modern GPU. The device where you view the game then just receives the stream, decodes it, and displays it, just as if it were playing a YouTube video. The only difference is the device can send control inputs back to the machine playing the game. If you can program the control input part, pretty much any device capable of playing streamed h.264 videos can act as the receiving device - even a Raspberry Pi. (That's basically what the discontinued Steam Link was - a cheap Linux box that supported h.264 hardware decode and so could act as the receiver for Steam In Home Streaming.)
The only thing stopping this technology from coming to all gaming platforms and all devices capable of receiving streamed video is the (un)willingness of developers to code it. Going forward, expect the codec to eventually be updated to h.265, VP9, or AV1. (Probably not for a while though - those currently take substantially longer to encode than h.264. But it was only 30 years ago that a 1024x768 JPEG photo took several minutes to encode, and nearly a minute to decode on a then-modern PC.)
If you believe in gender equality, your goal should not be making hiring rates for both genders equal. Your goal should be making it so gender doesn't matter when it comes to hiring. The difference is subtle but important. If you're trying to make hiring rates for both genders equal, you're assuming unequal rates indicates discrimination. If you're trying to make it so gender doesn't matter, then unequal rates may or may not indicate discrimination.
The problem with the former approach becomes more apparent in the long-term. As your anti-discrimination campaign succeeds, fewer people discriminate. However, just by random chance alone, sometimes you'll have statistical blips of inequality. If you assume inequality is due to discrimination, you end up wrongly condemning innocent people associated with those random blips. Recent examples include the weatherman who said coon instead of king (I didn't even know "coon" was a racial slur until that story broke), and the sports writer who wrote "chink in the armor" not realizing an alternate meaning was a racial slur.
Likewise, I'm an immigrant so didn't know watermelon and friend chicken were considered racial stereotypes against blacks, until a black friend pointed them out to me. (I'm still unclear why these are considered derogatory, but I avoid them so as not to stir up a hornet's nest.) The important thing being that I didn't know they were stereotypes because the anti-discrimination campaign had succeeded. But ironically that very success leaves me, an innocent, more vulnerable to wrong-headed accusations of discrimination if I had happened to cluelessly mention one of them.
As your anti-discrimination campaign succeeds, the number of true discrimination incidents decreases. But this causes the percentage of incorrect discrimination accusations against innocents to increase. This slandering of innocents causes people to come to resent your anti-discrimination campaign. Do you seriously think the man you turned down for a job or promotion in favor of a woman is going to take it all in stride if he learns he had better credentials but lost the job/promotion because of his gender? Eventually there are enough of these people to start a counter-campaign. And public will ends up swinging the other way.
So over the long-term, trying to make the genders equal results in an oscillation between discrimination against women, to discrimination against men, back to discrimination against women, etc. OTOH, trying to make it so gender doesn't matter results in a trend always converging on gender not mattering.
Card transactions were slower than cash most of the time and it still seems that way, especially with the newer chipped cards.
Most people don't seem to realize you can swipe/insert the card while the cashier is scanning your purchases. Then when the cashier completes the transaction, the charge is processed almost immediately. From what I've seen, bagging is what slows the process down the most (that and price checks on items which don't ring up correctly).
I can't tell you how many times I've seen people claim they paid with a twenty instead of a ten.
That isn't always the customer conning the cashier. Numerous times, the cashier has claimed I only gave a ten when I gave a twenty (in one case I was playing in line with my friend, folding two tens together in creative ways, and the cashier claimed I only handed him one ten when I gave him both).
The guy in charge of collecting cash and distributing change throughout the day for the booths at a festival was a friend of mine. During pre-festival prep, I noticed him working on the price display boards. He was setting the prices to all end in 99 cents. I pulled him aside and asked him, "Do you *really* want to run around all day collecting and distributing pennies?" The light bulb went off in his head and he changed them all to end in 95 cents. After the first day, he changed the prices again, so they all ended in multiples of 25 cents, with most of them ending in round dollars.
Lesson: Make sure the guy setting the prices is also the one who has to deal with the hassle of dealing with change.
That only disproves play time as a third factor which increases both.. It could be that players who found themselves to be naturally better at playing these games have invested more heavily in gaming rigs.
In fact, one of their graphs seems to show exactly this. If you look at the zero axis of the kill/death ratio increase vs hours played graph for different GPU owners, you see that all four do not converge to zero at zero hours played. Those with higher-end hardware have a better K/D ratio even with minimal time played, indicating that they're naturally better players.
The problem with the "better hardware makes you a better player" hypothesis is that the gaming hardware is actually a comparatively small component of the lag you experience. I used to work at a company making networked simulators for the military, and had to quantify this a couple decades ago to decide how important it was to optimize our code.
Internet lag averages about 30 ms. Might be lower for newer games. (I've seen as low as 8 ms if you're lucky and have a good ISP and live near the server).
Game and protocol processing lag (time for the game to decode the network packet, decode the protocol simulating your opponent's movement on your computer) is usually on the order of 100 ms (the other player's movement has to be encoded by their computer, shoved into a network packet, transmitted to the server, transmitted to you, removed from the network packet, then decoded by your computer for display on your screen).
Human comprehension time is about 250 ms for visual stimuli. That is, your brain takes about a quarter second to see something, process it, and comprehend exactly what it's seeing. It's actually faster at processing audio (about 170 ms) - the runners in the 100m dash are beginning with the crack of the starting pistol, not the flash of the gun firing. It's important enough that they wire the gun to speakers placed in each runner's starting blocks, so that nobody is advantaged by the slow speed of sound causing the gun crack to reach their ears faster.
Nerve impulse speed is around 120 m/s. So when you command your hand to move your mouse, it takes about 5 ms for the signal to travel from your brain to your muscles.
So your hand isn't moving/clicking your mouse until 100 + 250 + 5 + 25 = 380 ms after the other player pops his head out from behind the wall. Your brain is basically constantly predicting what'll happen more than a third of a second in the future, and pre-emtively sending movement signals to your muscles to respond to what it thinks will happen in the future. That's why motor reflex actions like those associated with walking happen in your spinal chord. It avoids the lengthy trip all the way to your brain and back, plus processing time in your brain.
Meanwhile, going from a 60 Hz monitor to 120 Hz gains you 8.3 ms. Going from 120 Hz to 144 Hz gains you 1.4 ms. And going from 144 Hz to 240 Hz gains you only 2.8 ms. Even if you say your brain needs to see 3 frames to pick up and predict motion, that becomes 33 ms for 60 Hz (time interval between 3 frames is 2 refresh cycles), 17 ms for 120 Hz, 14ms for 144 Hz, and 8.3 ms for 240 Hz. It's still dwarfed by the time it takes your brain to parse what it's seeing, meaning the biggest factor is how much talent you naturally have or are trained to have. That's why the military trains so relentlessly rather than buying night vision scopes with a better than 60 Hz refresh rate - decreasing the time your brain needs to process what it's seeing makes a bigger difference in reaction time.
The problem is that people want the time to be synchronized so that sunrise (or sunset) happens around the same time year-round. Unfortunately, that's an astronomical impossibility because the sunrise and sunset times vary both with time of year and with your latitude. Noon (and midnight) do not have this problem. The sun is directly overhead (and directly below) at the exact same time every day in every location.
The "proper" time standard is thus the one which puts noon as close as possible to when the sun is directly overhead. You can't argue that you'd like to have the sun up before 9:30 because that phenomenon is specific to your latitude (and to a lesser extent, how far east/west you are in your time zone). It's silly to require the rest of the world to adopt a time standard which works best for your latitude.
The "correct" solution is not to change the clocks, but for different locations to change their business hours throughout the year.
Businesses near the equator (where days are noon +/- 6 hours year-round) can keep business hours the same year-round. So say, start 2 hours after sunrise at 8am, end at 4pm.
At 30 degrees latitude, the days last noon +/- 7 hours in summer, +/- 6 hours in spring/fall, and +/- 5 hours in winter. Businesses there can shift their operating hours one hour ahead in summer (say, 7am to 3pm), keep it at 8-4 during spring and fall, shift it to 9-5 during winter.
At 50 degrees latitude, the days last noon +/- 8 hours in summer, +/- 6 hours in spring/fall, and +/-4 hours in winter. Businesses there can shift their operating hours two hours ahead in summer (say 6am to 2pm), keep it at 8-4 during spring and fall, shift it to 10-6 during winter.
That keeps sunrise a couple hours before the start of business hours year-round, regardless of your latitude or time of year. Each latitude can tweak this forward or back depending on their preference (higher latitudes will probably prefer start of business to be right around sunrise in winter instead of 2 hours after, to maximize use of the short day). And each business can tweak this forward or back depending on their needs (e.g. businesses delivering food to restaurants will probably want to start a couple hours before sunrise instead of a couple hours after).
Trying to do this by adjusting everyone's clock by the same amount regardless of their latitude is insane.
What right is being taken away here? The right to be wrong? The right to believe any bullshit no matter how insane? The right to be an utter moron that's easily convinced because he's too stupid to tell when he's being bullshitted?
The right of self determination - the right to decide for yourself what you do with your body and your life. In other words, the fundamental right that is the basis for democracy. The entire premise of democracy is that people will on average make the right decision. So if you let them freely choose what they want to do, most of the time it turns out right. Concede that right, and you're basically admitting that the fascists are sometimes right.
That's why the correct solution to this problem is education. Teach people how to think critically and make rational decisions. Then the problem solves itself - people view stuff they read on Facebook with a skeptical eye, research both sides, and decide for themselves that the anti-vaxxers are full of $#!t. As a bonus, it doesn't just fix the anti-vaxx problem, it fixes a host of other problems.
Unfortunately, educating people is a lot harder than banning speech, or making vaccinations mandatory, or otherwise infringing people's rights. So people who want a quick and dirty solution but don't really think about the long-term consequences of their decisions, tend to favor these right-infringing methods. (The people who want to be fascists and dictators also favor them, though they try to keep their true motivations secret.) Think about it - making vaccination mandatory is basically giving the state the power to inject the entire population with whatever substance it deems necessary. Just about every dystopian sci-fi story ever written has warned us against exactly that. But sugar-coat it with public health and put idiot anti-vaxxers on the opposing side, and suddenly people are tripping over themselves to give the state exactly that power. To me, that's a bigger travesty than the anti-vaxxer movement.
The report is an analysis of data that power companies were required to publish in March 2018.
EPA in 2015 finalized the first federal regulation for the disposal of coal ash â" often called the âoeCoal Ash Rule.â Among other things, the Coal Ash Rule established groundwater monitoring requirements for coal ash dumps, and it required power companies to make the data available to the public starting in March 2018.
The nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), in collaboration with Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, Prairie Rivers Network, and other organizations, obtained and analyzed all of the groundwater monitoring data that power companies posted on their websites in 2018.
Unless your claim is that the entirety of this contamination happened in just the 13 months from Feb 2017 to Mar 2018, Trump's EPA appointments and policies have nothing to do with this. Coal ash has always been toxic sludge, and containing it safely has always been a problem.
IMHO, the real culprit here is the environmental movement. They opposed transitioning from coal to nuclear power in the late 20th century, instead trying to use coal's terrible nature as leverage for switching to renewables. Nuclear provided an alternative to coal, so needed to be vilified to preserve the narrative. In 2016 we burned about 728 million tons of coal per year and generated about 130 million tons of coal ash. (The rest of the mass gets discharged into the air, where lucky you and me get to breathe it.) Coal ash has a density of about 1.6 kg/liter, so this is enough coal ash generated every year to fill roughly 230 oil tankers (at 320,000 m^3).
The nuclear reactors in the U.S. generate about 2200 tons of spent fuel each year, or about 104 cubic meters. Nuclear generates about 20% of our electricity vs about 30% for coal, so replacing coal with nuclear would've generated about 156 cubic meters of spent fuel. That's about enough to fill two tractor trailers (though you don't want to pack it that closely or it would start fissioning again).
230 oil tankers of coal ash vs 2 tractor trailers of spent nuclear fuel per year. That's the choice we had, and the environmental movement made us pick the 230 oil tankers of coal ash by forcing nuclear off the table.
The sum total of nuclear waste the U.S. has produced in 60 years of nuclear power is only about 80,000 tons. About one and a half olympic-sized swimming pools by volume. That's why the nuclear power industry isn't panicking over the lack of a long-term waste storage site. There's so little waste that they're just storing decades worth of it in pools at the plants themselves. And this waste still has most of its energy in it. The U.S. banned reprocessing in the 1970s (one of the byproducts is weapons grade plutonium). As a consequence, our "spent fuel" still has about 97% of uranium's energy still in it. That's why it stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Reprocessing can get that energy utilization from 3% to over 60%, resulting in spent fuel which only stays dangerous for centuries. We just have to figure a way to safely control or dispose of the weapons grade plutonium.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I'm sure that Russia is meddling in the elections here. Just like every non-American with Internet access and an opinion on Trump/Clinton chipped in their 2 cents. Just like the U.S. meddles in elections elsewhere. People talk to each other, it's a fact of life. And in the Internet age that means they'll talk across national boundaries, even about stuff that they're technically not supposed to be talking about.
If the reports of Russian meddling I've seen are accurate, the scale of it was so small (tens of thousands of dollars of ads in an election where Trump and Clinton spent over $1.8 billion, or nearly $14 per vote) that random people in other countries posting their opinion about the U.S. election on public forums, Facebook, etc. probably had a greater cumulative influence. The media keeps hyping the Russia angle because they feel they need to discredit the 2016 election. I mean if the media were right and a few dozen Russians spending on the order of six figures really swung the election, then every politician would be tripping over themselves to hire these guys to help them run their future ad campaigns.
Realistically, they only could've afforded a little less than a $1/hr wage increase (that would've put them at the industry average 2.85% profit margin).
Whole Foods has 91,000 employees. In their last year of independent operation, they had $15.7 billion in gross sales, $507 million net income (aka profit). That's $827 million before taxes, with $320 million in corporate income taxes, or 38.7%.
If you figure just half those 91,000 employees are wage slaves who used to work 30 hours a week, 50 hours/year, then increasing their pay from $10/hr to $15/hr would've resulted in (45,500 employees)*(1500 hours/yr)*($5/hr) = $341.25 million in additional wages. Payroll costs would have increased by an additional 7.65% (employer's fraction of Social Security and Medicare). Workers comp insurance for people involved in manual labor (warehousing and stocking) is typically around 5% of their wages. Assume the low-end employees didn't get any benefits.
So total cost of the $5 hourly wage increase would've been $384 million. That would've reduced income before taxes to $432 million, and net income after taxes to $271 million. Or 54% what it was before the wage increase.
If 3/4 of the employees were wage slaves earning the minimum, then these figures increase to $576 million in increased costs, reducing net income to $154 million, or just 30% what it was before the wage increase.
So you lose your bet. it would've made a huge impact on overall profits.
The doctor wasn't the one who gave him the disease. I'm having trouble finding out what this "chronic lung disease" was - it seems to be omitted in all the news reports (the quality of journalism has fallen markedly in the last few decades). If it was smoking-related, the guy did it to himself.
The appropriate catchphrase here is "shooting the messenger." I get that the family and the guy were upset to find out he'd be dying so soon, but there's no reason to take it out on the doctor. The doctor was only the messenger.
Put another way, would they rather have found out via video conference and had 48 hours to spend together and prepare for the end? Or would they have preferred to lose 10%-20% of that remaining time waiting until a doctor could deliver the news in person? Given the short timeframe of the diagnosis, I think informing them ASAP by any means possible should've been the priority.
The correct way to fix that is to change what time school and work starts. Not to change everyone's clocks. 7am or 8am may have been pitch darkness where you were. Other places it was fine. The places which are affected by longer night (higher latitudes, further west in the time zone) can simply change the start times for school and business in winter. If you insist on changing the clocks, everyone is affected - even people in areas where the time change offers no benefit and is tremendously inconvenient.
Tokens are trivial to bypass. I do it all the time at hotels (so my family doesn't have to re-validate a half dozen devices every 24 hours when the token expires). You just set up a WiFi router in client mode (so it acts like a wireless adapter). Have it spoof your laptop's MAC address if necessary. You then connect your laptop to the router, and login to the hotel WiFi via the router's WiFi. The hotel WiFi reads the MAC address off the router, the token is validated via the laptop (which since it's going through the router makes it look like the token was validated by the router), and from that point on anything connected to the router can use the hotel's WiFi. To the hotel it looks like all that traffic is coming from the laptop.
I then plug in a second WiFi router into the client router. That lets me broadcast my own private wireless network for my family's devices to connect to. And after 24 hours when they require me to revalidate devices, I just do it once with my laptop.
Profit = (sales) * (profit margin)
so is a function of two variables.
At some point along that scale, profit is maximized The company is happy because it's making lots of profit. The customers are happy because they're getting stuff for cheaper because the company isn't wasting money on excessive customer service.
If you're a naive businessman who thinks you should make sure 100% of your customers are satisfied*, then yes having worse customer service will increase your profits Likewise, if you're a naive businessman who thinks cutting customer service expenses will always increase profit, then no, at some point having worse customer service results in decreased profits. Pretty much everyone who has run a business understands this. These professors would too if they'd spent some time running a business instead of only theorizing about them.
* (The phrase, "the customer is always right," doesn't mean you should give the customer whatever they demand. It means you're better off selling the customer what they want, rather than what you think they should get. In other words, what the customer thinks they want is always right. The phrase has unfortunately been appropriated by abusive customers trying to justify their excessive demands for service from businesses.)
All it does is force other consumers to move away from using green energy (switch to fossil fuels), because you are now using the green energy they used to use. e.g. Everyone used to use 20% green energy, 80% fossil fuels. Some company decides to buy up all 20% green energy for its own use so it can claim its energy consumption is 100% green. That forces everyone else to use 100% fossil fuel energy. And the net result is... 20% green energy, 80% fossil fuels - exactly the same as before this pointless gesture.
To truly increase the fraction of energy derived from green sources, you have to change the supply end of power generation. That means adding new green power sources, and shutting down fossil fuel plants.
Most of the sports which have implemented automatic or instant replay review have made it part of a challenge system. The umpire or referee makes calls as before, but if the player or coach feels the call was wrong they can challenge it. Only then does it it get reviewed. Each side has a certain number of challenges they're allowed per game. If their challenge overturns the umpire's call, they get the challenge back. If it confirms the umpire's call, they lose the challenge (have one fewer for the rest of the game).
The system used in tennis is probably the closest analogue to how it might work in baseball. It's quick, so doesn't delay the game much. It adds drama to the game as everyone (players, refs, fans) gets to watch the replay together (not like the terrible system in football where only one guy in a hidden room somewhere watches it, and radios his decision to the field). And the result has been accepted by players and refs as definitive, so it actually cuts down on the amount of time wasted arguing over calls.
It also provides objective evidence if there's a ref or ump who's clearly doing a bad job. Which baseball badly needs since there are some umpires who have a reputation for calling a small strike zone, some for calling a large strike zone.
The amount of money a government can create "out of thin air" is limited by the productivity of the country. That's why the U.S, Germany, UK, etc. have been able to go into heavy deficit spending without serious economic consequences - they're still keeping government spending to a relatively small percentage of total GDP. But once the government starts creating more money than the country's productivity, the economy responds by devaluing the currency (basically lowering the value of the currency to keep spending equal to or less than productivity). That's what's crippled Venezuela's Bolivar - the socialist government there keeps trying to hand out more value in services than their economy is producing, resulting in massive inflation.
North Korea is in a situation similar to Venezuela. They have very little domestic productivity (and the largest chunk of it is put into the military). The only realistic way they can make more money (aside from ditching their system of government, which is unlikely to happen), is to steal it.
If guests won't tip a robot, doesn't that mean they'll have more cash on hand, and will be more likely to tip the human casino industry workers? The fact that converting some of the jobs to robots means fewer human employees, would seem to actually work to the advantage of the remaining human workers when it comes to tips.
Motorcycles have tires about the same diameter as car tires, but have a fatality rate that's nearly 28x worse. The lack of a safety cage protecting the passenger compartment is the primary factor. In a car accident, the car absorbs most of the impact energy. In a motorcycle or scooter or bike accident, you get to absorb most of the impact energy.
There's also the mass imbalance when a car and scooter collide (basically, the lighter vehicle bounces backwards off the heavier vehicle, resulting in occupants of the lighter vehicle experiencing nearly 2x the acceleration forces). But that can easily be eliminated from the comparison by looking only at single vehicle accidents.
If you're making the enclosures, why bother hacking the firmware? Let me introduce you to The Thing. A marvelous piece of KGB engineering which was a half century ahead of its time. (If you don't want to read the link, you can make the enclosure a passive microphone which re-transmits sounds into the RF band when "illuminated" by an external RF energy source. Basically an RFID tag hooked up to a microphone.)
Services like Facebook and printing services need to make copies of your photo to provide their service. As such, you have to grant them a limited license under copyright to make those copies. They have to "own" those copies to be able to process / compress / move / store the photos.
The thing you have to watch out for is services which try to slip in language granting themselves an unrestricted, unlimited license to reproduce and relicense your work. A new free photo hosting service came up recently, and when I read the terms and conditions it said exactly that. Granting them such a license would allow them to sell your photos without your permission nor giving you any royalties. Most services like Google Photos make clear they're not doing this, by including the phrase "for the purpose of operating this service" somewhere. That intentionally limits their right to make copies of your photo to only what's necessary to provide their service.
You can be compelled by the court to testify in a case unrelated to you (other than you being a witness). Refusal to do so is contempt of court, and can result in jail time (not prison). Your desire to protect someone does not override the court's responsibility to get at the truth.
This seems like an odd reason to refuse to comply with the court. Grand jury hearings (they determine if there's sufficient evidence for a case to go to a real trial) act as a shield against government harassing innocents by constantly sending them to trial on frivolous charges. They are frequently held in secret so as not to prejudice potential future jurors, and not to prejudice the public in case there's a determination that there's insufficient evidence (people have this bad habit of assuming that being accused = guilty).
The only other notable case I can think of where someone refused to testify was a reporter who was ordered by a court to give up the name of his anonymous source, and was jailed (for years) under contempt of court. But in that case, the principle of freedom of the press was at stake - people wishing to inform the press anonymously would no longer do so if their anonymity could be stripped by a simple court order.
Facebook agrees to allow you to:
You agree to allow Facebook to:
If someone really wants to agree to all that, it's not your or my place to stop them. My beef is only that it isn't made clear to people exactly what they're giving up when they sign up for a "free" Facebook account. The biggest culprit being lawyers burying the important details in a 50 page EULA of dense, obscure, and difficult to understand language. If the business model dies when you shine a light onto its inner secret workings, then it never deserved to operate in the first place. OTOH if people willingly choose to use the business after its inner workings are completely exposed, then it's not the government's place to stop the people from using it.
The stupid thing is the telecos aren't even natural monopolies. They're government-granted monopolies. So breaking them up doesn't even need to be an anti-trust action. Congress just needs to pass a national law prohibiting state and local governments from granting monopoly contracts for services going to people's homes. No selling out the people for the local government's gain.
There are no technical barriers. Basically the way these remote play apps (like Steam In Home Streaming) work is that the machine playing the game converts the video into an h.264 video stream in real-time using the h.264 encoder built into every modern GPU. The device where you view the game then just receives the stream, decodes it, and displays it, just as if it were playing a YouTube video. The only difference is the device can send control inputs back to the machine playing the game. If you can program the control input part, pretty much any device capable of playing streamed h.264 videos can act as the receiving device - even a Raspberry Pi. (That's basically what the discontinued Steam Link was - a cheap Linux box that supported h.264 hardware decode and so could act as the receiver for Steam In Home Streaming.)
The only thing stopping this technology from coming to all gaming platforms and all devices capable of receiving streamed video is the (un)willingness of developers to code it. Going forward, expect the codec to eventually be updated to h.265, VP9, or AV1. (Probably not for a while though - those currently take substantially longer to encode than h.264. But it was only 30 years ago that a 1024x768 JPEG photo took several minutes to encode, and nearly a minute to decode on a then-modern PC.)
If you believe in gender equality, your goal should not be making hiring rates for both genders equal. Your goal should be making it so gender doesn't matter when it comes to hiring. The difference is subtle but important. If you're trying to make hiring rates for both genders equal, you're assuming unequal rates indicates discrimination. If you're trying to make it so gender doesn't matter, then unequal rates may or may not indicate discrimination.
The problem with the former approach becomes more apparent in the long-term. As your anti-discrimination campaign succeeds, fewer people discriminate. However, just by random chance alone, sometimes you'll have statistical blips of inequality. If you assume inequality is due to discrimination, you end up wrongly condemning innocent people associated with those random blips. Recent examples include the weatherman who said coon instead of king (I didn't even know "coon" was a racial slur until that story broke), and the sports writer who wrote "chink in the armor" not realizing an alternate meaning was a racial slur.
Likewise, I'm an immigrant so didn't know watermelon and friend chicken were considered racial stereotypes against blacks, until a black friend pointed them out to me. (I'm still unclear why these are considered derogatory, but I avoid them so as not to stir up a hornet's nest.) The important thing being that I didn't know they were stereotypes because the anti-discrimination campaign had succeeded. But ironically that very success leaves me, an innocent, more vulnerable to wrong-headed accusations of discrimination if I had happened to cluelessly mention one of them.
As your anti-discrimination campaign succeeds, the number of true discrimination incidents decreases. But this causes the percentage of incorrect discrimination accusations against innocents to increase. This slandering of innocents causes people to come to resent your anti-discrimination campaign. Do you seriously think the man you turned down for a job or promotion in favor of a woman is going to take it all in stride if he learns he had better credentials but lost the job/promotion because of his gender? Eventually there are enough of these people to start a counter-campaign. And public will ends up swinging the other way.
So over the long-term, trying to make the genders equal results in an oscillation between discrimination against women, to discrimination against men, back to discrimination against women, etc. OTOH, trying to make it so gender doesn't matter results in a trend always converging on gender not mattering.
Most people don't seem to realize you can swipe/insert the card while the cashier is scanning your purchases. Then when the cashier completes the transaction, the charge is processed almost immediately. From what I've seen, bagging is what slows the process down the most (that and price checks on items which don't ring up correctly).
That isn't always the customer conning the cashier. Numerous times, the cashier has claimed I only gave a ten when I gave a twenty (in one case I was playing in line with my friend, folding two tens together in creative ways, and the cashier claimed I only handed him one ten when I gave him both).
People make mistakes. It's not always malevolent.
The guy in charge of collecting cash and distributing change throughout the day for the booths at a festival was a friend of mine. During pre-festival prep, I noticed him working on the price display boards. He was setting the prices to all end in 99 cents. I pulled him aside and asked him, "Do you *really* want to run around all day collecting and distributing pennies?" The light bulb went off in his head and he changed them all to end in 95 cents. After the first day, he changed the prices again, so they all ended in multiples of 25 cents, with most of them ending in round dollars.
Lesson: Make sure the guy setting the prices is also the one who has to deal with the hassle of dealing with change.
In fact, one of their graphs seems to show exactly this. If you look at the zero axis of the kill/death ratio increase vs hours played graph for different GPU owners, you see that all four do not converge to zero at zero hours played. Those with higher-end hardware have a better K/D ratio even with minimal time played, indicating that they're naturally better players.
The problem with the "better hardware makes you a better player" hypothesis is that the gaming hardware is actually a comparatively small component of the lag you experience. I used to work at a company making networked simulators for the military, and had to quantify this a couple decades ago to decide how important it was to optimize our code.
So your hand isn't moving/clicking your mouse until 100 + 250 + 5 + 25 = 380 ms after the other player pops his head out from behind the wall. Your brain is basically constantly predicting what'll happen more than a third of a second in the future, and pre-emtively sending movement signals to your muscles to respond to what it thinks will happen in the future. That's why motor reflex actions like those associated with walking happen in your spinal chord. It avoids the lengthy trip all the way to your brain and back, plus processing time in your brain.
Meanwhile, going from a 60 Hz monitor to 120 Hz gains you 8.3 ms. Going from 120 Hz to 144 Hz gains you 1.4 ms. And going from 144 Hz to 240 Hz gains you only 2.8 ms. Even if you say your brain needs to see 3 frames to pick up and predict motion, that becomes 33 ms for 60 Hz (time interval between 3 frames is 2 refresh cycles), 17 ms for 120 Hz, 14ms for 144 Hz, and 8.3 ms for 240 Hz. It's still dwarfed by the time it takes your brain to parse what it's seeing, meaning the biggest factor is how much talent you naturally have or are trained to have. That's why the military trains so relentlessly rather than buying night vision scopes with a better than 60 Hz refresh rate - decreasing the time your brain needs to process what it's seeing makes a bigger difference in reaction time.
The "proper" time standard is thus the one which puts noon as close as possible to when the sun is directly overhead. You can't argue that you'd like to have the sun up before 9:30 because that phenomenon is specific to your latitude (and to a lesser extent, how far east/west you are in your time zone). It's silly to require the rest of the world to adopt a time standard which works best for your latitude.
The "correct" solution is not to change the clocks, but for different locations to change their business hours throughout the year.
That keeps sunrise a couple hours before the start of business hours year-round, regardless of your latitude or time of year. Each latitude can tweak this forward or back depending on their preference (higher latitudes will probably prefer start of business to be right around sunrise in winter instead of 2 hours after, to maximize use of the short day). And each business can tweak this forward or back depending on their needs (e.g. businesses delivering food to restaurants will probably want to start a couple hours before sunrise instead of a couple hours after).
Trying to do this by adjusting everyone's clock by the same amount regardless of their latitude is insane.
The right of self determination - the right to decide for yourself what you do with your body and your life. In other words, the fundamental right that is the basis for democracy. The entire premise of democracy is that people will on average make the right decision. So if you let them freely choose what they want to do, most of the time it turns out right. Concede that right, and you're basically admitting that the fascists are sometimes right.
That's why the correct solution to this problem is education. Teach people how to think critically and make rational decisions. Then the problem solves itself - people view stuff they read on Facebook with a skeptical eye, research both sides, and decide for themselves that the anti-vaxxers are full of $#!t. As a bonus, it doesn't just fix the anti-vaxx problem, it fixes a host of other problems.
Unfortunately, educating people is a lot harder than banning speech, or making vaccinations mandatory, or otherwise infringing people's rights. So people who want a quick and dirty solution but don't really think about the long-term consequences of their decisions, tend to favor these right-infringing methods. (The people who want to be fascists and dictators also favor them, though they try to keep their true motivations secret.) Think about it - making vaccination mandatory is basically giving the state the power to inject the entire population with whatever substance it deems necessary. Just about every dystopian sci-fi story ever written has warned us against exactly that. But sugar-coat it with public health and put idiot anti-vaxxers on the opposing side, and suddenly people are tripping over themselves to give the state exactly that power. To me, that's a bigger travesty than the anti-vaxxer movement.
Unless your claim is that the entirety of this contamination happened in just the 13 months from Feb 2017 to Mar 2018, Trump's EPA appointments and policies have nothing to do with this. Coal ash has always been toxic sludge, and containing it safely has always been a problem.
IMHO, the real culprit here is the environmental movement. They opposed transitioning from coal to nuclear power in the late 20th century, instead trying to use coal's terrible nature as leverage for switching to renewables. Nuclear provided an alternative to coal, so needed to be vilified to preserve the narrative. In 2016 we burned about 728 million tons of coal per year and generated about 130 million tons of coal ash. (The rest of the mass gets discharged into the air, where lucky you and me get to breathe it.) Coal ash has a density of about 1.6 kg/liter, so this is enough coal ash generated every year to fill roughly 230 oil tankers (at 320,000 m^3).
The nuclear reactors in the U.S. generate about 2200 tons of spent fuel each year, or about 104 cubic meters. Nuclear generates about 20% of our electricity vs about 30% for coal, so replacing coal with nuclear would've generated about 156 cubic meters of spent fuel. That's about enough to fill two tractor trailers (though you don't want to pack it that closely or it would start fissioning again).
230 oil tankers of coal ash vs 2 tractor trailers of spent nuclear fuel per year. That's the choice we had, and the environmental movement made us pick the 230 oil tankers of coal ash by forcing nuclear off the table.
The sum total of nuclear waste the U.S. has produced in 60 years of nuclear power is only about 80,000 tons. About one and a half olympic-sized swimming pools by volume. That's why the nuclear power industry isn't panicking over the lack of a long-term waste storage site. There's so little waste that they're just storing decades worth of it in pools at the plants themselves. And this waste still has most of its energy in it. The U.S. banned reprocessing in the 1970s (one of the byproducts is weapons grade plutonium). As a consequence, our "spent fuel" still has about 97% of uranium's energy still in it. That's why it stays dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Reprocessing can get that energy utilization from 3% to over 60%, resulting in spent fuel which only stays dangerous for centuries. We just have to figure a way to safely control or dispose of the weapons grade plutonium.