If you have a government-granted monopoly in cable service, then the government has the right to regulate you via a public utilities commission. What the government giveth, the government can take away.
If you don't want a public utilities commission overseeing your operations, then you must give up the government-granted monopoly. Even if it weren't government-granted (i.e. a natural monopoly), you'd still fall under anti-trust regulations.
In the former case, the market desires of the people are conveyed to the business via The People -> government -> PUC -> business. In the case of the latter, the market desires of the people are conveyed to the business directly via competition, and the people switching their spending to companies who better offer what they want.
plus the entire medical industry, including especially the pharmaceautical industry, be mandated as not-for-profit? Take greed out of the equation for everything that is classified as a necessity, and you come closer to the Star Trek vision of a post-scarcity, utopian society.
As long as there are medical treatments whose cost to implement exceeds the average lifetime productivity of the individual being treated, this can't happen. Unlike economics, productivity is a zero-sum game - everything that's consumed has to be produced. And if your society is consuming more than it produces, it won't last long. Something has to give; usually the currency devalues (prices go up) to try to make the sum total cost of things consumed equal total productivity (since wages tend to change slower than prices).
That's the role greed plays in the economy - discouraging people from giving stuff away for less than it costs to produce. You can still do it (e.g. charity), but when done by individuals the amount you can give away is limited by the resources you have available to you (which is capped at close to how much you yourself produce). Socialism can work, as long as you are mindful to keep it within these bounds. But if you exceed it (give away more stuff than is produced), you end up with Venezuela. That's what makes socialism risky - it disassociates this tight coupling between productivity and consumption at the individual level (can't buy more than you earn), by shifting some of the consumption costs to society overall (via the government). But since the government has the ability to raise taxes indefinitely (doesn't have a hard budget limit), it can promise more consumption than the country is actually producing, going into massive debt (what happened to Greece).
So while unfettered greed is bad for society, so is eliminating it altogether.
All spacecraft are spun or use spinning reaction wheels for stability. Heck, I've had to do weight and inertia calculations to insure the major or minor inertia axis of a spacecraft aligns with its designed rotational axis. If they don't line up, it will tumble. Rotation is a very well-understood problem which has been and is already tackled and used aboard every satellite, space problem, and launch vehicle we send up into space.
The practical problem isn't one of designing or building a centrifugal module. It's of building a spacecraft large enough that the occupants could use a centrifugal module without throwing up. If the radius is too small, you get disorienting Coriolis effects when someone jogs around the interior circumference (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey). The head traces a smaller circle than the feet, resulting in a centrifugal force differential, causing the body to lean from "vertical" in order to remain upright while moving. Basically, we haven't yet needed to build a spacecraft large enough that a centrifugal module wouldn't suffer from these effects.
Rather than a rotating wheel, the more interesting design is a living quarters capsule connected by a long tether to a counterweight (or if you want, a second living quarters capsule). This is considerably smaller (and cheaper), but could be used to generate artificial gravity in the living quarters. The problem here is one of maneuverability - since it's a tether instead of a rigid structure, you can't make course corrections. You'd have to first slow down the rotation, reel in the counterweight, make the course correction, then play out the counterweight, and start both ends rotating again.
You're presuming that truth = good, falsehood = bad.
Telling the truth can be bad. Lying can be good. Say you're at a mini-mart and an upset woman runs up to you saying her husband is trying to kill her, then runs into the bathroom. Then an angry man runs in holding a knife screaming, "where is that bitch, I'm gonna kill her." Do you tell him the truth? Or do you deliberately mislead him by lying, and say she ran out the back door?
Speaking the truth or lying does not necessarily correlate to good/bad. Your intent in saying what you say does - whether you're trying to help or harm. Unfortunately, intent is something internal to your mind. You can guess what another person's intent probably is, and in rare cases you can eliminate any other possibility and infer their true intent. But most of the time you can't be sure. And basing legality or punishment on something that most of the time you can't be sure of is just setting up your system for all kinds of trouble.
Take the anti-vaccination movement for example. It's based on statistical error (emphasizing single anecdotes over overall trends) or logical error (believing the testimony of a famous celebrity unskilled in the field over the testimony of a non-famous expert in the field). I would dearly love to ban it from the Internet. But if we set that precedent, what if some time in the future the conspiracy theory becomes true and the government is pacifying the population with mind-altering drugs under the guise of vaccination? Your well-intentioned ban in favor of the truth has then set a precedent allowing a misleading falsehood to be presented as the truth, and the actual truth suppressed.
The more I think about it, the more strongly I feel that banning is not the answer. Educating the populace is, so most of them will not make the aforementioned errors. Yeah we're never going to convince 100% of the people that vaccines are good. But 99% should be good enough for most purposes. And I really don't think the tradeoff in future potential abuse is worth it just to get that final 1% to comply.
The fundamental premise behind Democracy is that The People are on average smart enough to usually make the right decision. If you feel we need policies which deprive The People of the right to make those decisions, then you're basically admitting The People aren't smart enough to make the right decision, and thus Democracy doesn't work. (I can actually seen an argument for a benevolent oligarchy being better than democracy. But if you're going to argue for that, then don't even bother with the pretense of pretending to support freedom of speech.)
This hurricane season is notable mainly because a hurricane hadn't made landfall on the U.S. since 2005 (which ironically after Katrina and Wilma, is when people were saying that due to climate change, multiple major hurricanes hitting the U.S. each year was going to be the new norm). That's pretty incredible when you consider that the historical average for the U.S. over 164 years has been 1.73 hurricanes per year making landfall. We basically missed out on being hit by 21 hurricanes in a row.
The average North Atlantic hurricane season sees 10.1 named storms, 5.9 becoming hurricanes, and 2.5 becoming major hurricanes (category 3+). These things tend to be cyclical though, with a few decades with below average storms, followed by a few decades of above average storms, repeat. The prediction for the season was 11-17 named storms, 5-9 hurricanes, and 2-4 major hurricanes. We're almost to the end of the season and currently at 14 named storms, 9 hurricanes, and 5 major hurricanes. Just slightly above predicted.
In terms of number of global cyclones (it is after all called global warming), the North Atlantic is the only basin which has seen an uptick in hurricanes the last couple decades. The East Pacific is flat. Typhoons in West Pacific are mostly flat with a slight downward trend. The South Pacific is down. As are cyclones inthe Indian Ocean.
If we can go an unprecedented 12 years without a hurricane making landfall in the U.S., can you just for a tiny moment consider the possibility that what happened this year was random before jumping to the conclusion that it was due to climate change? (FWIW, I'm of the opinion that climate change adds more energy to the system, increasing not just maximum intensity but also variability. The recent 12 years without a hurricane can mostly be attributed to a very strong El Nino which had the side-effect of reducing the probability of Atlantic hurricanes reaching the higher latitudes like the U.S. However, this being a hypothesis, the burden of proof is upon me. The null hypothesis - the theory that one assumes is true absent statistically significant evidence for an alternative - has to be that there has bee no change in number or intensity of hurricanes. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble if you go hog wild on every theory which has a tiny bit of correlative (but not statistically significant) empirical support. Of such things, conspiracy theories are made.)
Because of inertia and reluctance to leave older, established technologies, it's not often that you get a chance to try out a widescale deployment of a theoretical new technology in a developed nation. Implementing it in some place like Africa wouldn't stress it as much as a developed nation would, so the results and conclusions aren't always applicable to a different market. This is actually a great opportunity for them to do a real-world test of whether this balloon cellular idea works as well as it does on paper in a first world nation.
Google is probably as anxious to get some real-world data from a widescale implementation, as Puerto Rico is to restore cellular service. And then they can know if this is something worth pursuing in the future, or if there's some unforeseen fly in the ointment which will lead them to shelve the project.
I've got a Samsung Galaxy S with AMOLED screen from 2010 (first year they used it) sitting on the desk next to me (I was prepping it so I could give it to one of the kids as a service-less phone for games). I used it for 4 years before upgrading to a Nexus 5. Opening the white Email app on both phones, the AMOLED screen on the Galaxy S is actually slightly bluer than the IPS screen on the Nexus 5.
I'm not saying the OLEDs don't wear out. But given how much I used it over 4 years and how well it's held up, IMHO the reports of the screens yellowing are greatly exaggerated. Probably based on a few outlier examples of people who used the devices unusually heavily. They seem to hold up just fine under "normal" or my "more than normal" use.
It's not a simple matter of can or can't do. The problem is there's no standard threshold of success which needs to be met for a system to be considered a "marketable" autonomous car. If your car can handle 95% of situations, is it suitable for use on the road and for sale to the public? 99%? 99.999%? Or maybe the proper metric isn't situations, maybe it should be average time in operation before it encounters a situation which stumps it. Should that standard be 1000 hours (6 weeks)? 10,000 hours (a bit over a year)? A million hours (over 100 years)?
Without some sort of standard, you can put a brick on the accelerator and a bungee cord on the steering wheel, and call it an autonomous car. Because it is, for about 20 seconds before it drifts into the next lane. It sounds like GM is working to a much more stringent internal standard for autonomy than Tesla, and the GM exec is frustrated that the press is constantly comparing them as if they were equals. Whether or not the car can drive autonomously isn't as important nor relevant as how often it fails to drive autonomously.
All you people who love government regulation should be all over this, instead of giving Tesla a free pass just because they're Tesla. It's why we have nutrition labels, Energy Star labels, NHTSA crash safety tests, EPA mileage ratings, standardized health plans under the ACA, etc. So buyers can easily compare products on a like-for-like basis
Nextel used iDEN which was a technological dead end. Like GSM, it used TDMA - each phone is assigned a timeslice and they all take turns talking with the tower. This was fine for low-bandwidth applications like voice, but was disastrous for data. If you send data using TDMA, the total bandwidth gets split across all phones equally. Each phone gets its full communications timeslice even if it doesn't need all (or any) of it. And some bandwidth is lost for padding to avoid timeslice overlap due to the finite speed of light.
In contrast, CDMA allows all phones to transmit simultaneously. Each phone is assigned an orthogonal code which allows the tower to tell their transmissions apart - kinda like writing vertically and horizontally on the same sheet of paper. The letters overlap, but the shape of the letters is distinct enough (orthogonal) that you can tell which ones are vertical or horizontal, and you can clearly read both overlapping messages. In CDMA, each phone sees the transmissions of the other phones as noise. And the bandwidth each phone gets is the signal to noise ratio. So bandwidth is instantly allocated automatically between all transmitting phones. If a bunch of phones stop transmitting, the noise floor drops, and the phones which are still transmitting get the bandwidth released by the non-transmitting phones.
GSM threw in the towel within a year and amended the GSM spec to add UMTS for 3G data. UMTS used wideband CDMA for data. Yes that's right. CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. This was why CDMA got 3G data about a year before GSM. And why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time (they had a TDMA radio for voice and a CDMA radio for data, whereas CDMA phones only had a single radio which couldn't do both at once). If Sprint hadn't acquired and subsumed Nextel, Nextel would've run into the same problem as GSM and been forced to either adopt CDMA (same as if they'd merged with Sprint), or hemorrhaged customers due to lack of 3G data until they went bankrupt.
The money doesn't leave the economy unless somebody sinks it into gold, art, or real estate.
Money spent on gold, art, and real estate stays in the economy. The guy you paid for the gold, art, or real estate now has a bunch of money he can spend on things.
What matters is the overall productivity gain from what the money was spent on. That's why Enron's scam of selling the same equipment back and forth multiple times between two of its divisions didn't actually generate money. It inflated the accounting books, but because there was no productivity gain per transaction, it did nothing to help the company. For an economic transaction to be beneficial to the individual/company and the overall economy, it has to have a net productivity gain. The store which sells a hammer has to sell it for more than they paid for it (and to stock it). The carpenter who buys the hammer has to be able to use it to increase his carpentry business sales by more than he paid for the hammer.
Gold is pretty bad in that respect because it doesn't do anything (unless you're using it to plate electronics for corrosion resistance). And in fact buying it for decoration can be a net negative on the economy since it drives up the price for gold used for productive purposes (like anti-corrosion plating). Art can be good if exhibiting it generates additional economic activity (people wanting to make/buy more art, people traveling to view it). Real estate can be good if you build something on it that generates more economic activity, or preserve it to allow something to continue to exist which generates or protects economic activity (e.g. land for anti-flood dikes).
If just 10% of the energy people spent on blaming others with different political affiliation was instead spent on work, growing a business, or starting a new business, most of the problems we complain about would disappear on their own.
The entire reason we developed representative government with elected officials is so we would only need to take a few days out of our lives every couple years to worry about politics. Instead of having to learn the minutiae of every political issue every day so we can make an informed decision about all of them, we choose a few people to do it for us. That frees us up to do our regular productive jobs the rest of the time. But instead of using that free time to get more work done or for recreational activities, for some odd reason we use huge portions of it to follow what our elected officials do and argue with each other about the rightness or wrongness of it. That's not our job. That's the job of the politicians we elected. We made those elected offices so everyone wouldn't have to waste time dealing with all that stuff.
Do your research before the elections and vote your conscience. Follow up on it just enough to make sure the people you voted for are doing what you expected them to do, and so you're prepared for the next election. Otherwise, get on with your life. That's how the system was designed to work. If you feel strongly enough about politics that you must follow it every day, then you should probably be running for office. And if the electorate decides you aren't suitable for office, go back to your regular job.
Do you want to know the best way to heal the political divisiveness currently afflicting the country? Get to know some people with different political opinions. Go on vacation together, go hiking with them, play some sports with them, go to a concert together, take your kids to the park together, go fishing together. Discuss anything but politics. You'll find that you're both regular people, and you have a lot more in common with each other than differences. And when a divisive political issue comes up, your imagination won't be working with a vacuum so it can run wild and cast the other guy as evil incarnate so it's OK to punch him, throw things at him, shoot him, or even think it's OK that he's been shot.. He'll be the neighbor you hang out with - a real person with a life just like you who has his own personal reasons for disagreeing with you, just like you have your own personal reasons for disagreeing with him. And maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to sit down and have a civilized conversation about how best to resolve or live with our differences, instead of calling each other stupid/crazy/evil and doing everything we can to impede each other.
Broken window fallacy. If there hadn't been any storms, the money those places will now have to spend on repairs would've been spent on other business instead. So that construction boom comes at the cost of other business jobs. i.e. There's no net increase in number of jobs, it's just that money has been siphoned away from other jobs to pay for construction jobs.
Also see opportunity cost. Like most people, you are incorrectly calculating opportunity cost by comparing to a vacuum (construction repair jobs vs nothing). A correct analysis compares the benefits of construction vs what was given up to pay for that construction.
Tesla is able to get only 5% decrease in capacity over 1200 cycles
You can get figures like that if you use very shallow depth of discharge. Say, 10%. The drawback of course is you then need to buy a battery whose capacity is 10x greater than the max charge you plan to regularly use, thus driving up cost 10x. Which is pretty substantial when the battery is already the most expensive part of your system.
Because Hollywood managed to pull the wool over regulators' eyes, and convince them that digital bits comprising a movie transmitted over a wire are somehow different from digital bits stored on a disc and transmitted via the postal service.
If you buy a license to view a digital movie, the means by which you get that digital copy should be irrelevant - streaming, disc, OTA TV broadcast, etc. Likewise if a rental company has rights to rent those digital bits to people, the means by which they deliver it (streaming or disc) should be irrelevant.
Netflix introduced the unlimited streaming plan at $7.99 in July 2011. (Their current $7.99 plan doesn't stream in HD, so the $9.99 soon to be $10.99 plan corresponds to their original $7.99 plan.)
So bumping it up to $10.99 means it's increased by 1.27x the rate of inflation. Or an average annual increase of 5.5% vs the actual annual CPI inflation rate of 1.4% over the last 6 years.
With all the concern over cloud services collecting information for advertising purposes, I'm surprised someone hasn't come out with a server-type device which operates only on your home LAN, and can handle things like voice recognition, pattern recognition, and search queries (consolidated so the search engine can't tell which device/user is making the request). The need to do voice recognition over the cloud made sense when it was new, rapidly improving, and required hefty hardware to process the audio sample in real-time. But I think by now it could be accomplished locally.
because the wage stagnation that started in the 80s and's been going strong since decimated their wages
It actually started in the 1970s with the Arab Oil Embargo. But people wanting to blame it all on Reagan like to pretend it started in the 1980s.
That's why Reagan is generally considered a pretty good President (among those who lived through the 1970s and 1980s). Yes growth was stagnant. But compared to what was happening before under Ford and Carter, it was a marked improvement. It's a little amusing to hear people complain about how terrible things are today. It's damn rosy compared to stagflation and the interest rates approaching 20% which eventually got us out of it.
Amazon saved some tax, but that saving allowed it to under-cut its rivals, some of who have been put out of business
If the tax saving allowed Amazon to undercut its competitor's prices, then the money is still in Luxembourg or the EU. Their customers still have it (or they spent it, in which case the money helped other businesses). If, as insinuated, Amazon took all the 250m Euro it saved to the bank rubbing their hands in glee, then there was no price savings for the customers, and thus no negative consequences for Amazon's competitors. (A combination of both is also possible, with a diminished magnitude for both types of effect.)
It's important to understand that you can't simply analyze this as Amazon depriving the EU of tax revenue. EU citizens with a certain amount of money spending it at a variety of stores including Amazon, with a percentage of those expenditures being converted into tax revenue for the EU. Unless the EU citizens have kept some of the money they saved from Amazon in their savings account, or Amazon has transferred more money out of its EU operations than if they had had to pay those taxes, then the total tax revenue by the EU shouldn't be much different. The difference will be that EU citizens were able to purchase more goods per Euro paid in taxes (either directly as VAT/sales tax or indirectly as corporate taxes).
Or to put it more succinctly:
(money the EU lost in tax revenue) = (money EU citizens got to keep and spend on other things) + (additional money Amazon got to keep for operations or as profit)
Whether this has a negative or positive overall effect on tax revenue depends on whether the EU government would've spent that money more productively than the EU citizens (minus whatever Amazon kept and didn't spend on more EU operations).
Because the ratio of nameplate capacity to actual power generation is not the same for all power sources. If you replace a 1 GW nuclear plant with 1 GW of solar panels, you're going to have a huge, huge power shortfall. To get actual power generation, you have to multiply nameplate capacity by capacity factor. Typical capacity factors are about:
90% for nuclear
60% for coal
40% for gas and hydro (these could be higher, but they're typically used for peaking load since they can be throttled very quickly)
30%-40% for offshore wind (yes I know they hit over 60% off Scotland; unfortunately the rest of the world is not so fortunate to have such consistent winds)
20%-25% for onshore wind
14.5% for PV solar in the continental U.S. About 19% in the desert southwest, 10% in the northern latitudes (including northern Europe). This accounts for angle of the sun, night, weather, as well as some downtime for maintenance.
165 gigawatts of renewables were completed last year, which was two-thirds of the net expansion in electricity supply.
So assuming the non-renewable expansions averaged a 50% capacity factor, we get:
165 GW or renewables (mostly wind and solar) @ 20% capacity factor = 33 GW actual production.
82.5 GW of non-renewables @ 50% capacity factor = 41.25 GW actual production.
The lipid hypothesis is dead. The notion that fat clogs up the arteries like a drain clogged with lard, is dead.
When I was in grade school in the 1970s, our parents came to our class one by one over about a month so we could get a sense of what types of careers there were. My friend's father was a bioresearcher. He brought in samples of rabbit aortas. They'd been experimenting by feeding rabbits diets with different amounts of fat in their food. (Yes, herbivores can eat and process meat.) After a few years (however long rabbits live), they dissected the rabbits, and sliced and unrolled the aorta to measure how much arterial plaque had built up on the walls.
The display board he brought in had 4 or 5 aorta sections, arranged from no-fat diet to increasing fat diet. There was a visually obvious correlation between amount of fat in the diet and amount of plaque built up on the artery walls.
I'm sure the mechanism is much more complicated than simply "consumed fat turns into plaque on artery walls." There's probably a threshold below which consumed fat doesn't clog your arteries. And I'm sure other types of food could be converted by your body into lipids which turn into plaques. But there most assuredly is a positive causal correlation between fat consumption and arteriosclerosis.
Who the hell would be against net neutrality except a few straggling brainwashed fools who would have a different opinion if they only knew what was real?
There are actually two possible solutions here, only one of which is net neutrality.
No net neutrality. But also no government-granted monopolies. If people actually had a choice of ISPs, any ISP trying to charge websites for access would be shooting themselves in the foot. Their customers would notice Netflix was slow, hear that Netfix was fine on their friend's ISP, and switch their service to the other ISP.
Keep the government-granted monopolies. Use net neutrality to keep them in check. Basically more government regulation to fix a problem created in the first pace by government regulation. ISPs can succeed in making websites pay them for "fast lanes" only because they know their customers are their captives. Instead of the customers being able to access the website via a different ISP, the website has no choice but to pay the ISP if it wants those customers to have access.
FWIW, most of the rest of the world uses the first one.
Make the companies who lost people's identity data in hacks pay for it. All of it. They're the ones who broke SSNs. They should be the ones who pay to fix it.
If cancer starts off small and benign, and only after some years turns larger and malignant (fatal), then the death rate will be skewed towards women with more developed forms of breast cancer. The inclusion of less developed forms of breast cancer via earlier detection will skew the death rates down not because the women are dying less often, but because you're including more women in your stats who have early breast cancer and thus don't have an elevated death rate (yet).
You can see the same thing in the mortality rate for the general population by age. If you look at only the 75-84 yo age group (analogous to women with late form breast cancer, the only kind detectable in the 1970s-1980s), the death rate is 5000 per 100,000 per year. If you look at the previous 65-74 year age group (analogous to women with early form breast caner), the death rate is 2000 per 100,000 per year. If you then combine these two groups together (analogous to modern early detection), their combined death rate will be a combination of the two - somewhere around 3000 per.
So the death rate has "decreased" 5000 to 3000 even though nothing has changed (it's the exact same data set), just because your statistics now include younger people / women with earlier forms of breast cancer.
This is akin to Russia buying 1000-foot-tall billboards above every voting place in battleground states
The two locations which have thus far been revealed to have been targeted by the ads (Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD) are hardly battleground states. Clinton won Maryland by a 2:1 margin (26%). Trump won Missouri by a 3:2 margin (19%).
I could see this as being part of some concerted (but underfunded - a nation state can drop a few $million without blinking) effort to sow chaos and discord in the U.S. population. But to claim that it was targeting the election is a real stretch. All the evidence I've seen thus far (location, apolitical nature, and timeframe of the ads) point to it having nothing to do with attempting to influence the election. What kind of idiot trying to influence an election wastes the majority of his money on ads after the election?
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In the former case, the market desires of the people are conveyed to the business via The People -> government -> PUC -> business. In the case of the latter, the market desires of the people are conveyed to the business directly via competition, and the people switching their spending to companies who better offer what they want.
As long as there are medical treatments whose cost to implement exceeds the average lifetime productivity of the individual being treated, this can't happen. Unlike economics, productivity is a zero-sum game - everything that's consumed has to be produced. And if your society is consuming more than it produces, it won't last long. Something has to give; usually the currency devalues (prices go up) to try to make the sum total cost of things consumed equal total productivity (since wages tend to change slower than prices).
That's the role greed plays in the economy - discouraging people from giving stuff away for less than it costs to produce. You can still do it (e.g. charity), but when done by individuals the amount you can give away is limited by the resources you have available to you (which is capped at close to how much you yourself produce). Socialism can work, as long as you are mindful to keep it within these bounds. But if you exceed it (give away more stuff than is produced), you end up with Venezuela. That's what makes socialism risky - it disassociates this tight coupling between productivity and consumption at the individual level (can't buy more than you earn), by shifting some of the consumption costs to society overall (via the government). But since the government has the ability to raise taxes indefinitely (doesn't have a hard budget limit), it can promise more consumption than the country is actually producing, going into massive debt (what happened to Greece).
So while unfettered greed is bad for society, so is eliminating it altogether.
All spacecraft are spun or use spinning reaction wheels for stability. Heck, I've had to do weight and inertia calculations to insure the major or minor inertia axis of a spacecraft aligns with its designed rotational axis. If they don't line up, it will tumble. Rotation is a very well-understood problem which has been and is already tackled and used aboard every satellite, space problem, and launch vehicle we send up into space.
The practical problem isn't one of designing or building a centrifugal module. It's of building a spacecraft large enough that the occupants could use a centrifugal module without throwing up. If the radius is too small, you get disorienting Coriolis effects when someone jogs around the interior circumference (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey). The head traces a smaller circle than the feet, resulting in a centrifugal force differential, causing the body to lean from "vertical" in order to remain upright while moving. Basically, we haven't yet needed to build a spacecraft large enough that a centrifugal module wouldn't suffer from these effects.
Rather than a rotating wheel, the more interesting design is a living quarters capsule connected by a long tether to a counterweight (or if you want, a second living quarters capsule). This is considerably smaller (and cheaper), but could be used to generate artificial gravity in the living quarters. The problem here is one of maneuverability - since it's a tether instead of a rigid structure, you can't make course corrections. You'd have to first slow down the rotation, reel in the counterweight, make the course correction, then play out the counterweight, and start both ends rotating again.
You're presuming that truth = good, falsehood = bad.
Telling the truth can be bad. Lying can be good. Say you're at a mini-mart and an upset woman runs up to you saying her husband is trying to kill her, then runs into the bathroom. Then an angry man runs in holding a knife screaming, "where is that bitch, I'm gonna kill her." Do you tell him the truth? Or do you deliberately mislead him by lying, and say she ran out the back door?
Speaking the truth or lying does not necessarily correlate to good/bad. Your intent in saying what you say does - whether you're trying to help or harm. Unfortunately, intent is something internal to your mind. You can guess what another person's intent probably is, and in rare cases you can eliminate any other possibility and infer their true intent. But most of the time you can't be sure. And basing legality or punishment on something that most of the time you can't be sure of is just setting up your system for all kinds of trouble.
Take the anti-vaccination movement for example. It's based on statistical error (emphasizing single anecdotes over overall trends) or logical error (believing the testimony of a famous celebrity unskilled in the field over the testimony of a non-famous expert in the field). I would dearly love to ban it from the Internet. But if we set that precedent, what if some time in the future the conspiracy theory becomes true and the government is pacifying the population with mind-altering drugs under the guise of vaccination? Your well-intentioned ban in favor of the truth has then set a precedent allowing a misleading falsehood to be presented as the truth, and the actual truth suppressed.
The more I think about it, the more strongly I feel that banning is not the answer. Educating the populace is, so most of them will not make the aforementioned errors. Yeah we're never going to convince 100% of the people that vaccines are good. But 99% should be good enough for most purposes. And I really don't think the tradeoff in future potential abuse is worth it just to get that final 1% to comply.
The fundamental premise behind Democracy is that The People are on average smart enough to usually make the right decision. If you feel we need policies which deprive The People of the right to make those decisions, then you're basically admitting The People aren't smart enough to make the right decision, and thus Democracy doesn't work. (I can actually seen an argument for a benevolent oligarchy being better than democracy. But if you're going to argue for that, then don't even bother with the pretense of pretending to support freedom of speech.)
This hurricane season is notable mainly because a hurricane hadn't made landfall on the U.S. since 2005 (which ironically after Katrina and Wilma, is when people were saying that due to climate change, multiple major hurricanes hitting the U.S. each year was going to be the new norm). That's pretty incredible when you consider that the historical average for the U.S. over 164 years has been 1.73 hurricanes per year making landfall. We basically missed out on being hit by 21 hurricanes in a row.
The average North Atlantic hurricane season sees 10.1 named storms, 5.9 becoming hurricanes, and 2.5 becoming major hurricanes (category 3+). These things tend to be cyclical though, with a few decades with below average storms, followed by a few decades of above average storms, repeat. The prediction for the season was 11-17 named storms, 5-9 hurricanes, and 2-4 major hurricanes. We're almost to the end of the season and currently at 14 named storms, 9 hurricanes, and 5 major hurricanes. Just slightly above predicted.
In terms of number of global cyclones (it is after all called global warming), the North Atlantic is the only basin which has seen an uptick in hurricanes the last couple decades. The East Pacific is flat. Typhoons in West Pacific are mostly flat with a slight downward trend. The South Pacific is down. As are cyclones inthe Indian Ocean.
If we can go an unprecedented 12 years without a hurricane making landfall in the U.S., can you just for a tiny moment consider the possibility that what happened this year was random before jumping to the conclusion that it was due to climate change? (FWIW, I'm of the opinion that climate change adds more energy to the system, increasing not just maximum intensity but also variability. The recent 12 years without a hurricane can mostly be attributed to a very strong El Nino which had the side-effect of reducing the probability of Atlantic hurricanes reaching the higher latitudes like the U.S. However, this being a hypothesis, the burden of proof is upon me. The null hypothesis - the theory that one assumes is true absent statistically significant evidence for an alternative - has to be that there has bee no change in number or intensity of hurricanes. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble if you go hog wild on every theory which has a tiny bit of correlative (but not statistically significant) empirical support. Of such things, conspiracy theories are made.)
Because of inertia and reluctance to leave older, established technologies, it's not often that you get a chance to try out a widescale deployment of a theoretical new technology in a developed nation. Implementing it in some place like Africa wouldn't stress it as much as a developed nation would, so the results and conclusions aren't always applicable to a different market. This is actually a great opportunity for them to do a real-world test of whether this balloon cellular idea works as well as it does on paper in a first world nation.
Google is probably as anxious to get some real-world data from a widescale implementation, as Puerto Rico is to restore cellular service. And then they can know if this is something worth pursuing in the future, or if there's some unforeseen fly in the ointment which will lead them to shelve the project.
I've got a Samsung Galaxy S with AMOLED screen from 2010 (first year they used it) sitting on the desk next to me (I was prepping it so I could give it to one of the kids as a service-less phone for games). I used it for 4 years before upgrading to a Nexus 5. Opening the white Email app on both phones, the AMOLED screen on the Galaxy S is actually slightly bluer than the IPS screen on the Nexus 5.
I'm not saying the OLEDs don't wear out. But given how much I used it over 4 years and how well it's held up, IMHO the reports of the screens yellowing are greatly exaggerated. Probably based on a few outlier examples of people who used the devices unusually heavily. They seem to hold up just fine under "normal" or my "more than normal" use.
It's not a simple matter of can or can't do. The problem is there's no standard threshold of success which needs to be met for a system to be considered a "marketable" autonomous car. If your car can handle 95% of situations, is it suitable for use on the road and for sale to the public? 99%? 99.999%? Or maybe the proper metric isn't situations, maybe it should be average time in operation before it encounters a situation which stumps it. Should that standard be 1000 hours (6 weeks)? 10,000 hours (a bit over a year)? A million hours (over 100 years)?
Without some sort of standard, you can put a brick on the accelerator and a bungee cord on the steering wheel, and call it an autonomous car. Because it is, for about 20 seconds before it drifts into the next lane. It sounds like GM is working to a much more stringent internal standard for autonomy than Tesla, and the GM exec is frustrated that the press is constantly comparing them as if they were equals. Whether or not the car can drive autonomously isn't as important nor relevant as how often it fails to drive autonomously.
All you people who love government regulation should be all over this, instead of giving Tesla a free pass just because they're Tesla. It's why we have nutrition labels, Energy Star labels, NHTSA crash safety tests, EPA mileage ratings, standardized health plans under the ACA, etc. So buyers can easily compare products on a like-for-like basis
Nextel used iDEN which was a technological dead end. Like GSM, it used TDMA - each phone is assigned a timeslice and they all take turns talking with the tower. This was fine for low-bandwidth applications like voice, but was disastrous for data. If you send data using TDMA, the total bandwidth gets split across all phones equally. Each phone gets its full communications timeslice even if it doesn't need all (or any) of it. And some bandwidth is lost for padding to avoid timeslice overlap due to the finite speed of light.
In contrast, CDMA allows all phones to transmit simultaneously. Each phone is assigned an orthogonal code which allows the tower to tell their transmissions apart - kinda like writing vertically and horizontally on the same sheet of paper. The letters overlap, but the shape of the letters is distinct enough (orthogonal) that you can tell which ones are vertical or horizontal, and you can clearly read both overlapping messages. In CDMA, each phone sees the transmissions of the other phones as noise. And the bandwidth each phone gets is the signal to noise ratio. So bandwidth is instantly allocated automatically between all transmitting phones. If a bunch of phones stop transmitting, the noise floor drops, and the phones which are still transmitting get the bandwidth released by the non-transmitting phones.
GSM threw in the towel within a year and amended the GSM spec to add UMTS for 3G data. UMTS used wideband CDMA for data. Yes that's right. CDMA won the GSM vs CDMA war. This was why CDMA got 3G data about a year before GSM. And why GSM phones could talk and use data at the same time (they had a TDMA radio for voice and a CDMA radio for data, whereas CDMA phones only had a single radio which couldn't do both at once). If Sprint hadn't acquired and subsumed Nextel, Nextel would've run into the same problem as GSM and been forced to either adopt CDMA (same as if they'd merged with Sprint), or hemorrhaged customers due to lack of 3G data until they went bankrupt.
Money spent on gold, art, and real estate stays in the economy. The guy you paid for the gold, art, or real estate now has a bunch of money he can spend on things.
What matters is the overall productivity gain from what the money was spent on. That's why Enron's scam of selling the same equipment back and forth multiple times between two of its divisions didn't actually generate money. It inflated the accounting books, but because there was no productivity gain per transaction, it did nothing to help the company. For an economic transaction to be beneficial to the individual/company and the overall economy, it has to have a net productivity gain. The store which sells a hammer has to sell it for more than they paid for it (and to stock it). The carpenter who buys the hammer has to be able to use it to increase his carpentry business sales by more than he paid for the hammer.
Gold is pretty bad in that respect because it doesn't do anything (unless you're using it to plate electronics for corrosion resistance). And in fact buying it for decoration can be a net negative on the economy since it drives up the price for gold used for productive purposes (like anti-corrosion plating). Art can be good if exhibiting it generates additional economic activity (people wanting to make/buy more art, people traveling to view it). Real estate can be good if you build something on it that generates more economic activity, or preserve it to allow something to continue to exist which generates or protects economic activity (e.g. land for anti-flood dikes).
If just 10% of the energy people spent on blaming others with different political affiliation was instead spent on work, growing a business, or starting a new business, most of the problems we complain about would disappear on their own.
The entire reason we developed representative government with elected officials is so we would only need to take a few days out of our lives every couple years to worry about politics. Instead of having to learn the minutiae of every political issue every day so we can make an informed decision about all of them, we choose a few people to do it for us. That frees us up to do our regular productive jobs the rest of the time. But instead of using that free time to get more work done or for recreational activities, for some odd reason we use huge portions of it to follow what our elected officials do and argue with each other about the rightness or wrongness of it. That's not our job. That's the job of the politicians we elected. We made those elected offices so everyone wouldn't have to waste time dealing with all that stuff.
Do your research before the elections and vote your conscience. Follow up on it just enough to make sure the people you voted for are doing what you expected them to do, and so you're prepared for the next election. Otherwise, get on with your life. That's how the system was designed to work. If you feel strongly enough about politics that you must follow it every day, then you should probably be running for office. And if the electorate decides you aren't suitable for office, go back to your regular job.
Do you want to know the best way to heal the political divisiveness currently afflicting the country? Get to know some people with different political opinions. Go on vacation together, go hiking with them, play some sports with them, go to a concert together, take your kids to the park together, go fishing together. Discuss anything but politics. You'll find that you're both regular people, and you have a lot more in common with each other than differences. And when a divisive political issue comes up, your imagination won't be working with a vacuum so it can run wild and cast the other guy as evil incarnate so it's OK to punch him, throw things at him, shoot him, or even think it's OK that he's been shot.. He'll be the neighbor you hang out with - a real person with a life just like you who has his own personal reasons for disagreeing with you, just like you have your own personal reasons for disagreeing with him. And maybe, just maybe, we'll be able to sit down and have a civilized conversation about how best to resolve or live with our differences, instead of calling each other stupid/crazy/evil and doing everything we can to impede each other.
Broken window fallacy. If there hadn't been any storms, the money those places will now have to spend on repairs would've been spent on other business instead. So that construction boom comes at the cost of other business jobs. i.e. There's no net increase in number of jobs, it's just that money has been siphoned away from other jobs to pay for construction jobs.
Also see opportunity cost. Like most people, you are incorrectly calculating opportunity cost by comparing to a vacuum (construction repair jobs vs nothing). A correct analysis compares the benefits of construction vs what was given up to pay for that construction.
Why is it the pest insects are always the ones to develop resistance to pesticides? Why can't the good bugs develop pesticide resistance for once?
You can get figures like that if you use very shallow depth of discharge. Say, 10%. The drawback of course is you then need to buy a battery whose capacity is 10x greater than the max charge you plan to regularly use, thus driving up cost 10x. Which is pretty substantial when the battery is already the most expensive part of your system.
The problem is due to the physical distortion of the battery as it's charged. The greater the cycle depth, the greater the distortion, and the more quickly it wears out.
Because Hollywood managed to pull the wool over regulators' eyes, and convince them that digital bits comprising a movie transmitted over a wire are somehow different from digital bits stored on a disc and transmitted via the postal service.
If you buy a license to view a digital movie, the means by which you get that digital copy should be irrelevant - streaming, disc, OTA TV broadcast, etc. Likewise if a rental company has rights to rent those digital bits to people, the means by which they deliver it (streaming or disc) should be irrelevant.
Netflix introduced the unlimited streaming plan at $7.99 in July 2011. (Their current $7.99 plan doesn't stream in HD, so the $9.99 soon to be $10.99 plan corresponds to their original $7.99 plan.)
$7.99 in July 2011 is equivalent to $8.68 today.
So bumping it up to $10.99 means it's increased by 1.27x the rate of inflation. Or an average annual increase of 5.5% vs the actual annual CPI inflation rate of 1.4% over the last 6 years.
With all the concern over cloud services collecting information for advertising purposes, I'm surprised someone hasn't come out with a server-type device which operates only on your home LAN, and can handle things like voice recognition, pattern recognition, and search queries (consolidated so the search engine can't tell which device/user is making the request). The need to do voice recognition over the cloud made sense when it was new, rapidly improving, and required hefty hardware to process the audio sample in real-time. But I think by now it could be accomplished locally.
It actually started in the 1970s with the Arab Oil Embargo. But people wanting to blame it all on Reagan like to pretend it started in the 1980s.
That's why Reagan is generally considered a pretty good President (among those who lived through the 1970s and 1980s). Yes growth was stagnant. But compared to what was happening before under Ford and Carter, it was a marked improvement. It's a little amusing to hear people complain about how terrible things are today. It's damn rosy compared to stagflation and the interest rates approaching 20% which eventually got us out of it.
If the tax saving allowed Amazon to undercut its competitor's prices, then the money is still in Luxembourg or the EU. Their customers still have it (or they spent it, in which case the money helped other businesses). If, as insinuated, Amazon took all the 250m Euro it saved to the bank rubbing their hands in glee, then there was no price savings for the customers, and thus no negative consequences for Amazon's competitors. (A combination of both is also possible, with a diminished magnitude for both types of effect.)
It's important to understand that you can't simply analyze this as Amazon depriving the EU of tax revenue. EU citizens with a certain amount of money spending it at a variety of stores including Amazon, with a percentage of those expenditures being converted into tax revenue for the EU. Unless the EU citizens have kept some of the money they saved from Amazon in their savings account, or Amazon has transferred more money out of its EU operations than if they had had to pay those taxes, then the total tax revenue by the EU shouldn't be much different. The difference will be that EU citizens were able to purchase more goods per Euro paid in taxes (either directly as VAT/sales tax or indirectly as corporate taxes).
Or to put it more succinctly:
(money the EU lost in tax revenue) = (money EU citizens got to keep and spend on other things) + (additional money Amazon got to keep for operations or as profit)
Whether this has a negative or positive overall effect on tax revenue depends on whether the EU government would've spent that money more productively than the EU citizens (minus whatever Amazon kept and didn't spend on more EU operations).
So assuming the non-renewable expansions averaged a 50% capacity factor, we get:
When I was in grade school in the 1970s, our parents came to our class one by one over about a month so we could get a sense of what types of careers there were. My friend's father was a bioresearcher. He brought in samples of rabbit aortas. They'd been experimenting by feeding rabbits diets with different amounts of fat in their food. (Yes, herbivores can eat and process meat.) After a few years (however long rabbits live), they dissected the rabbits, and sliced and unrolled the aorta to measure how much arterial plaque had built up on the walls.
The display board he brought in had 4 or 5 aorta sections, arranged from no-fat diet to increasing fat diet. There was a visually obvious correlation between amount of fat in the diet and amount of plaque built up on the artery walls.
I'm sure the mechanism is much more complicated than simply "consumed fat turns into plaque on artery walls." There's probably a threshold below which consumed fat doesn't clog your arteries. And I'm sure other types of food could be converted by your body into lipids which turn into plaques. But there most assuredly is a positive causal correlation between fat consumption and arteriosclerosis.
There are actually two possible solutions here, only one of which is net neutrality.
FWIW, most of the rest of the world uses the first one.
Make the companies who lost people's identity data in hacks pay for it. All of it. They're the ones who broke SSNs. They should be the ones who pay to fix it.
If cancer starts off small and benign, and only after some years turns larger and malignant (fatal), then the death rate will be skewed towards women with more developed forms of breast cancer. The inclusion of less developed forms of breast cancer via earlier detection will skew the death rates down not because the women are dying less often, but because you're including more women in your stats who have early breast cancer and thus don't have an elevated death rate (yet).
You can see the same thing in the mortality rate for the general population by age. If you look at only the 75-84 yo age group (analogous to women with late form breast cancer, the only kind detectable in the 1970s-1980s), the death rate is 5000 per 100,000 per year. If you look at the previous 65-74 year age group (analogous to women with early form breast caner), the death rate is 2000 per 100,000 per year. If you then combine these two groups together (analogous to modern early detection), their combined death rate will be a combination of the two - somewhere around 3000 per.
So the death rate has "decreased" 5000 to 3000 even though nothing has changed (it's the exact same data set), just because your statistics now include younger people / women with earlier forms of breast cancer.
The two locations which have thus far been revealed to have been targeted by the ads (Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, MD) are hardly battleground states. Clinton won Maryland by a 2:1 margin (26%). Trump won Missouri by a 3:2 margin (19%).
I could see this as being part of some concerted (but underfunded - a nation state can drop a few $million without blinking) effort to sow chaos and discord in the U.S. population. But to claim that it was targeting the election is a real stretch. All the evidence I've seen thus far (location, apolitical nature, and timeframe of the ads) point to it having nothing to do with attempting to influence the election. What kind of idiot trying to influence an election wastes the majority of his money on ads after the election?