Long-standing court precedent is that the Constitution only applies to U.S. soil. That's why Bush put a prison in Guantanamo Bay - it's not U.S. soil, it's Cuban soil. He was hoping to avoid that little complication of prisoners from Iraq and Afghanistan being shielded by the Constitution because they'd been brought to the U.S. That's also why INS can search your baggage and computer at the border - until you're admitted to the U.S. you're not considered to be on U.S. soil.
So while it's disappointing that the SCotUS didn't take this case, it's not surprising. From their perspective, these other countries willingly handed the U.S. Federal government Kim Dotcom's assets and money. It has nothing to do with the U.S. court system. He is not a U.S. citizen, he doesn't live in the U.S., and the seizures and forfeitures did not happen on U.S. soil.
OP is incorrect that the Constitution only applies to U.S. citizens. The moment a non-citizen crosses onto U.S. soil, even if they do so illegally, they are protected by the Constitution. In fact, due to the bad aftertaste of the three-fifths compromise, non-citizens (legal and illegal) are counted as part of a state's population when determining how many Representatives in the House that state gets. That's right - each 750,000 extra illegal aliens = 1 more Representative in the House (they're distributed pretty evenly across blue and red states at the moment so it doesn't skew politics too badly).
Let the red states have choice-free oligopolies that overlord their content and privacy; the fools deserve it.
They're not oligopolies - that would imply they somehow came to dominate the market on their own. They're government-granted monopolies. Net neutrality is a government solution to a government-created problem. Basically the government whose initial regulation of cable and phone companies created this screwed up monopoly ISP system in the first place, now claim the solution to their first screwup is even more regulation.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't enforce net neutrality, but has no problem for one simple reason - they have competing ISPs. If an ISP decides to throttle content from a Netflix as a ploy to try to make the website pay them, all that happens is their customers cancel their service and sign up with a competing ISP which doesn't throttle Netflix. Any ISP arbitrarily throttling content would be cutting their own throat.
What's different in the U.S. is that government has granted certain anointed ISPs monopoly status. The only reason Verizon, Comcast, et al can try to pull off their "fast lane" scam is because they know their customers can't switch to a different ISP - thanks to the government prohibiting any competing ISPs. The whole problem started because government decided to over-regulate in the first place. And now net neutrality advocates are arguing the solution is even more government regulation? What's that saying about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? You'll forgive me for being skeptical that net neutrality won't have unforeseen negative consequences of its own.
There are two possible solutions here. Net neutrality is only needed if you allow the government-granted monopolies to remain in place. The other solution is to rescind all the government-granted monopolies, and allow competition in the ISP marketplace. If you want to prevent multiple service lines from cluttering up the telephone poles, then grant a monopoly to a wire maintenance company which installs and maintains cable. But prohibit them from selling service. Then any company is allowed to sell Internet, TV, phone service over those lines for a fixed fee (established by the PUC - pretty much how gas and electricity service is done in most of the country).
1 in 95 - Suicide
1 in 96 - Poisoning / overdoes (this is the new big one, courtesy of the opioid epidemic, but the press has mostly ignored it).*
1 in 114 - Motor vehicle crash
1 in 127 - Fall
1 in 370 - Assault by firearm
1 in 645 - Car occupant
1 in 647 - Pedestrian incident (mostly hit by cars)
1 in 948 - Motorcycle rider incident
Do note that these are overall odds of dying for the country as a whole. Not everyone participates in all of these activities so your individual risk may be higher. For example, the motorcyclist death rate for the country as a whole is 1 in 948. But there are approximately 30x as many cars as motorcycles, suggesting only about 1 in 30 people rides a motorcycle. So the fatality rate for an individual motorcyclist is probably closer to 1 in 32. (Yes, about 1 in every 100 people you know who rides in a car is fated to die in a car accident. About 1 in every 30 people you know who rides a motorcycle is fated to die in a motorcycle accident.)
* You remember that shooting at UCLA last year which resulted in 2 dead (murder/suicide)? That made national headlines with all the major networks carrying live coverage, because the press loves stories about gun violence. The exact same day a drug overdose incident at a concert in Florida killed 2 and hospitalized 57. But that story barely made it out of local news.
And just for completeness, there were 225 people killed by terrorists from 2001 (post-9/11) to 2016, or 15 per year. With a population of 323 million and an average lifespan of 79 years, that works out to a chance of dying of:
1 in 161,856 - Lightning strike
1 in 272,574 - Terrorism
For example, in my own nation (Norway) we have a high rate of gun ownership, but "for protection" is simply not a valid reason to buy a firearm.
The pattern I've noticed in the U.S. is that densely populated areas with relatively fast police response times (a few minutes) generally favor gun control. Sparsely populated areas with slow police response times (15+ minutes) generally favor individual gun ownership. The "you don't own a gun so you call someone with a gun (police) to protect you" argument has very different connotations depending on which type of area you live in.
I'm not sure what sort of solution this suggests, if any. Increased police presence in rural areas (to maintain the same number of cops per square mile and thus the same response time) is probably unfeasible. Just pointing out the pattern I've noticed and why some of the pro/anti gun control arguments which ring true in one location may sound like total nonsense in another.
After the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, one of the surprising findings was that adding more inspectors could actually make things less safe. Each inspector figured if they skipped inspecting a part, the other inspector(s) would catch it. So they felt it was not that big a deal to be lazy at their job and skip a few of the harder inspections here and there. But when all the inspectors think this way, the chances of a bad part passing "inspection" increased compared to if there was only one inspector.
In the same way, if you know there's a computer system which tracks your ship's location and the location of all other ships, and automatically sounds an alarm if it detects a collision course, then you're more likely to slack at your job and start reading slashdot or the latest J.K. Rowling book. OTOH if there is no computer system, and you and ONLY YOU are personally responsible for tracking your and that other ship's position and course to make sure you don't collide, then you're going to have 100% of your attention devoted to that task. Double or multiple redundancy works for equipment, but not always for people.
He had a helluva lot more options than truck and gun. I won't mention the myriad of other options so as not to give people ideas. But some of them could've easily killed hundreds if not thousands at a concert/gathering like this.
If the only options you can think of are trucks and guns, then you're still stuck in the good guy obedient citizen mentality. Before 9/11, the Philippines police cracked a terrorist cell which included papers and computer documents about a plot to hijack airliners and fly them into buildings. When I heard that on the news, I dismissed it as the Philippines police grandstanding and trying to exaggerate their bust. I had a good guy obedient citizen mentality back then, and the concept of someone willfully flying an airliner full of people into a building full of people was simply unthinkable to me at the time. "Unthinkable" was a word I didn't truly understand until 9/11, and I realized the Philippines police had been right all along. And I had stupidly refused to see the obvious truth because my good guy obedient citizen blinders made it unthinkable.
Stop trying to blame the objects. Blame the person for once. Understand that people doing things like this aren't good people who were tempted by the allure of evil objects into committing these heinous acts. They are evil or mentally unstable people, whose sole goal, whose sole driving purpose before committing these acts was to kill as many people as possible. The objects were merely a tool, a means to fulfill that intent. Once you understand that, then you can start thinking like they do about ways to carry out their schemes. And you'll realize that there are a hopelessly endless number of ways for them to carry out their intentions for us to successfully fight them by playing whack-a-mole and simply banning potentially deadly object with legitimate alternate uses.
Even at $10.5 billion, Apple is still at the bottom of the top 20 when it comes to R&D spending as a percent of revenue (basically normalizing for the size of the company), and around half the top 20's average.
To match the top 20's average, Apple would need to spend $20.1 billion on R&D. To match the top tech company (Intel) they'd have to spend $50.7 billion.
OP is correct that birds are immune to capsaicin (the chemical in hot peppers which makes them "hot"). Speculation is that pepper plants use the chemical as a way to discourage land mammals from eating their fruits, thus guaranteeing their seeds would be dispersed more widely by birds. Pepper spray isn't going to do squat.
Yeah, I monitor AIS to help decide where to take my boat fishing (track where the charter sportfishing boats are going). It's fairly common to see glitches in AIS tracks. Ships traveling at warp speed are pretty frequent too. My guess is AIS glitches and reports the same GPS position for a while (as if the ship is stationary). Then all of a sudden it reports the correct location and it looks like the ship has traveled at high speed to the new location.
Iâ(TM)m not super interested in hearing poorly-curated music played out of a small speaker.
I don't have an Echo. But I do have a Logitech Harmony Hub which I hear can be controlled by an Echo or Google Home. I can program the Harmony to turn on my AV system and tune it to a specific radio station. Have it turn on the TV, AV system, and Blu-ray player and start playing the loaded BD movie. Supposedly you can have it control Plex to play stuff on your home media server if you get some sort of USB dongle that acts as a remove control receiver (the Harmony Hub controls devices by issuing remote control signals). Smart lights and wall sockets are also controllable.
Amazon's idea is pretty much the same as Logitech's Harmony Hub - consolidate all your remote controls and physical switches (for smart devices) and make them all available through a single interface (voice for Amazon, a handheld remove for Logitech). The big difference I can see is that my Harmony Hub still works if my Internet connection goes down. Alexa is useless without an Internet connection. If they can make Alexa's voice recognition to work locally instead of over the Internet, then I think they'll have a winner. But I suspect Alexa phoning home to tell Amazon what devices you have and what you do with them is the whole point of Alexa from Amazon's perspective.
lazy practice of private for-profit prisons. Fifteen bucks for a two-minute phone call? That's just fucking outrageous!
Ah, you weren't around before the breakup of Bell Telephone, were you? A five minute call between New York and Los Angeles used to cost $2.16 in 1975 (page 280). More than $10 in 2017 dollars. Those were the days... not.
The problem isn't for-profit prisons, nor capitalism, nor a host of other things being mentioned. The problem is simply that the prison phone system is a monopoly - there is no competition for providing phone calls to prisoners. Since it's a monopoly, the prison can charge whatever they want. It would be no different for a state-run prison - the cable and local phone / Internet monopolies we currently live under are all courtesy of the government. They are monopolies granted by the local government.
Cell phones allow prisoners to bypass that monopoly.
There's a tendency among Europeans to tribute the problems they see in the U.S. to structural problem with the U.S.
Most European states are very homogeneous in their racial makeup. The U.S. has an extremely large immigrant population, making it very ethnically diverse for a developed nation (I believe only Canada is more diverse). If you compare to a map of homicide rates, with the notable exceptions of Canada and Russia, you'll see a very strong correlation. More ethnically diverse countries tend to have more homicides.
We as a species are still very tribal. When the population is homogeneous and fewer tribes are in conflict, there tends to be less violent crime. When the population is diverse and more tribes are in conflict, there tends to be more violent crime. That's probably all you're seeing. The Canadians I've met are genuinely nice and friendly towards outsiders (almost to a fault - they have problems standing up for themselves when they're being taken advantage of). Americans tend to be more of the type who won't take crap for others. The high U.S. prison population is probably a consequence of maintaining low developed world crime rates within an ethnically diverse population. (I haven't visited Russia nor met many Russians so I can't speak for why their correlation is the opposite of most of the world.)
Drop a few million people from all around the world into any EU country, and I suspect you'd either see their crime rate or their prison population skyrocket.
Usually these renewable reports are grossly exaggerated to make it seem like renewable is more capable than it really is. But this one is actually fairly accurate.
So their "homes powered" metric is fairly close to accurate (2150 homes would be exact). We'll go with the exact 450 Watts per home figure.
To put this in perspective, the proposed Hinkley C nuclear plant would have a 3.2 GW capacity. Using the 90% capacity factor for newer nuclear reactors, this would give an actual generation of 2.88 GW, or enough to power 6.4 million homes.
At a construction cost of 24.5 billion GBP (the UK has some of the most expensive nuclear in the world), this works out to 3828 GBP per home powered.
Unfortunately none of the news reports on this new solar farm that I was able to find mention its cost. This site estimates a utility-scale solar installation in the UK costs about 1.1 GBP per Watt. That works out to 11 million GBP / 2150 homes = 5116 GBP per home powered. But it doesn't include the cost of the 6 MW battery.
Perhaps a better question would be, why does open source suck at making a desktop/mobile platform, while a company which uses the same open source managed to make a platform which displaced Windows as the #1 OS in use. IMHO it's user friendliness. The programmers who make open source projects are notorious for prioritizing their own needs above their users', and demand some sort of worship from users (don't ever piss off a programmer in an open source support forum if you ever want a particular bug fixed). This results in an obtuse user interface with poor documentation, and a steep learning curve. That may work for the 5% of the population who are geeks, programmers, and tinkerers who love to spend time figuring stuff out, but it doesn't work for the remaining 95%. Google just took that obtuse open source, found a bunch of skilled programmers who could grok that obtuseness, and paid them to make it friendly to use for the 95% (money in lieu of worship). And it took over the world.
The point stands though that this is incredibly wasteful
Not necessarily. Unfortunately a lot of people advocating environmentalism don't have a clue about opportunity cost. It's incorrect to compare this to a zero base state - if the travel didn't happen at all. The correct comparison is to what would happen if this rocket travel weren't available. i.e. what happens right now? People fly between these locations. So the correct comparison is the monetary and pollution cost of a plane vs. rocket.
I haven't done the math, but I can see where Musk is going with this. The vast majority of the energy used by a plane on these long flights is overcoming friction with the air. A rocket eliminates that frictional energy loss by traveling above the air. In other words, the energy cost to fly on long flights is pretty close to proportional to the distance flown. While the energy cost to achieve a sub-orbital trajectory is very close to fixed (a fraction of escape velocity, with a slight increase in velocity translating into a very large change in distance traveled). So there's a certain distance beyond which the rocket will require less energy than a plane. If you can get the price of the technology down enough, a rocket between destinations greater than that distance will be both cheaper and less polluting than flying. The trip being quicker is just gravy.
Wealth is just the accumulation of income (minus expenses). In other words, income minus expenses is the first derivative of wealth.
Or to put it more intuitively:
Your income is quickly your faucet fills a bucket.
Your expenses are how quickly the water drains out of a hole at the bottom of the bucket.
Your wealth is how much water is in the bucket.
Add to that:
Income taxes are water diverted straight from the faucet (reduces the flowrate of water into the bucket).
Sales taxes are a slight enlarging of a hole at the bottom, increasing the flowrate of water out of the bucket by a small percentage.
The key point here is the income taxes. They're subtracted as the water enters the bucket, before it's turned into wealth. In other words, wealth has already been taxed. If you want to tax rich people, you can accomplish the exact same thing just by raising the income tax rate on rich people (because they control the government).
On top of this, the amount of water in the bucket depends on three factors - income flowrate, expenses flowrate, and how much time this bucket has been there. A wealth tax based on the amount of wealth is a conflation of all three of these factors, and thus cannot distinguish between them. People who've been alive longer would unfairly have to pay more wealth tax. People who've reduced their expenses because they believe in saving up a nest egg would unfairly have to pay more wealth tax. The wealth tax would be lowest (as a percentage) on people who live paycheck-to-paycheck not because they have to, but because they blow their entire paycheck every month on toys, entertainment, and frivolities. I'll repeat - two people with identical incomes can owe very different wealth taxes - the one who saves will owe more wealth tax than the one who spends their entire paycheck every month.
A wealth tax basically says if you act financially responsibly and save up money for a rainy day, you will be punished by owing more taxes. It's an unfair and fiscally irresponsible tax, favored only by people who either don't know better, or deliberately wish to increase society's dependence on government safety nets so they can gain more power.
(Excise taxes, like property taxes, are technically a wealth tax. But they serve as an incentive for people to act fiscally responsibly, not a disincentive. Say someone owns a farm and the surrounding area has become developed into an area of higher economic activity. The increase in his property tax encourages him to find a more economically efficient use of the land than farming, or to sell it to someone else who will. Unless the people have passed a law preventing the property tax from appreciating to reflect increasing value of land. Then the farmer can stick around for decades, using now-valuable land for an economically inefficient activity, driving up costs for all his neighbors.)
"We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody's civil rights to say whatever he pleases." - Adolf Hitler
The issue here is something recent anti-white supremacist protesters need to take to heart. The principle of free speech is agnostic. You cannot claim to uphold free speech while simultaneously attempting to deny it to those you disagree with. Either you believe in free speech, even when that speech offends you. Or you believe in suppression of certain viewpoints and their expression. The latter puts you in the same category as China, Russia, and Nazi Germany - the only difference is which ideas you've decided to suppress.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The idea behind free speech is that you can't counter a negative with a negative. If you consider it to be justified to impose negative policies against ideas you consider to be negative, you are by definition justifying negative policies towards your ideas by those people if the tables are ever turned. After all, from their perspective, you have negative ideas and thus they are justified in imposing negative policies against you And all of society devolves into a self-perpetuating cycle of negativity.
Free speech attempts to break this cycle by saying everyone is allowed to have their say. And instead of actively fighting against the expression of ideas we don't like, we'll simply rely on rational people (who hopefully make up the overwhelming majority of the population) to judge and dismiss those ideas as ridiculous. The proper response to white supremacist propaganda is citing historical examples of where their beliefs have led the world in the past - innocents living (or hiding) in fear, mob lynchings of innocents, genocide, world war. Convince rational people that we don't want to go down that direction again.
The free market argument works if there's competition. If the customers want net neutrality, they will ditch ISPs which accept payments for fast lanes, and switch to ISPs which honor net neutrality. If customers want services who pay for fast lanes, they will ditch neutral ISPs for ISPs which charge for fast lanes. This is pretty much how Internet service works in most of the world. If your ISP's policies piss you off, you cancel and get Internet using a different ISP.
Unfortunately, this isn't the case in the U.S. The vast majority of Internet providers have a government-granted monopoly, whether it be DSL (local phone service monopoly) or cable (cable TV/Internet monopoly). Without competition, there is no alternate ISP for customers to switch to if they're unhappy with their ISP's policies.
Hopefully the Supreme Court realizes this, and rules that local governments granting ISP monopolies is unconstitutional - state or local regulation of interstate commerce (the Internet crosses state and national borders). That way, everyone wins. The ISPs opposing net neutrality can charge for fast lanes. The ISPs for net neutrality can provide neutral service. And customers can choose whichever ISP they prefer. (For bonus points, websites which don't like ISPs who charge for fast lanes and artificially throttle their service to those companies as a way to "encourage" their customers to switch to a different ISP. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.)
I expect that small and mid-sized sedans would be all-electric first.
The problem is these are not the vehicles producing the emissions. The whole thing stems from MPG being the inverse of fuel consumption. People see the big MPG number from a fuel-efficient vehicle and think they're making a big difference in fuel consumption. It's actually the opposite - the bigger the MPG of a vehicle, the smaller the impact it has on overall consumption and emissions. Switching from a 25 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG Prius results in less fuel savings (and thus less emissions reduction) than someone switching from a 15 MPG full-size SUV to a 25 MPG large sedan. Yes, that 10 MPG improvement results in more fuel savings and more emissions reduction than the Prius' 25 MPG improvement.
15 MPG = 6.67 gallons to drive 100 miles
25 MPG = 4 gallons to drive 100 miles, a 2.67 gallon improvement
50 MPG = 2 gallons to drive 100 miles, only a 2 gallon improvement
Because MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, it's 1/MPG which is the important value. And the bigger MPG values mean less incremental fuel savings. The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. For some reason it's backwards in the U.S., and marketing has abused it to make people feel good about buying a Prius when it's about the smallest difference you can make in terms of driving.
You know how environmentalists scoffed at hybrid SUVs? That was actually the best place to put a hybrid engine. The 6 MPG improvement the Highlander Hybrid gets from 22 to 28 MPG results in a fuel savings of nearly 1 gallon per 100 miles. That's about the same savings as switching from a 33 MPG econobox to a 50 MPG Prius. If you can improve a tractor trailer's 6 MPG to just 6,4 MPG, that also saves about the same amount of fuel per mile. It's the big vehicles which consume a lot of fuel whose efficiency you want to improve first in order to produce the biggest reduction in fuel consumption and emissions. The Priuses, econoboxes, and small sedans are roundoff error.
Give Musk credit. He actually understands this, which is why his next project is an electric tractor trailer.
Use the charging port. Apple is always saying how they can't comply with the EU's microUSB charger mandate because the Lightning charging port they use is so much more capable than USB. So it should be trivial for them to connect an FM antenna lead to it.
That's what I tell my friends and customers. I have a 12 TB NAS for daily backups (among other things), but I also back that up monthly to a RAID enclosure which gets stored elsewhere.
You want at least one backup offline so it doesn't get screwed up by malware. And you want it off-site so you'll still have it in case your house burns down. Tape or WORM (write once, read many) optical media is better than HDDs because you can't modify the data after it's written (at least on tape drives with a read-only switch - something I've long complained that HDDs should have). I've accidentally copied a bad file over its backup, instead of vice versa while trying to restore a non-corrupt version.
If the concern is foreign actors meddling with the U.S. election, shouldn't Facebook be turning over to Congress all political ads purchased on Facebook by foreigners for viewing in the U.S.?
By turning over only the Russian ads, they've basically already confirmed Trump's accusation of bias. If you only look for roaches in the kitchen, you'll only find roaches in the kitchen. Doesn't mean there aren't roaches in the rest of your house. And for all you know the kitchen may actually have the fewest roaches.
When I trade with any company, those transactions are confidential between myself and that company. If I *choose* to perform that transaction with a debit or credit card in order to make the transaction easier or more convenient, that is my choice.
Credit and debit card info is already protected by law in the U.S. A merchant cannot give or sell it to someone else. They can't even keep a copy of it legally.
Unless you agree to let them. That little checkbox that says "save my credit card info for future purchases"? That's not just for your convenience. That's what grants the merchant permission to store you credit card info in their database.
Where I *do* have a problem is in the use, sale and profit from my personal information, in a manner that is not compatible with the purpose for which I originally agreed to disclose that information, without my knowledge and/or consent.
This right here is the problem with your approach. The info the credit bureaus collect wasn't disclosed by you. It was disclosed to them by the other party in the transaction - the people and companies you did business with. If you paid a bill late, the person (e.g. landlord) or company (e.g. the power utility) reported that to one or more credit bureaus. Likewise if your credit card has a $10k credit limit and use $2k of it on average and you pay it off on time each month, the credit card company reports that to the credit bureaus. So while the info is about you, it's not provided by you. It's provided by others that you interact with financially. Your credit report is basically a collation of Yelp ratings on you by everyone you've interacted with financially.
So why not pass a law prohibiting others from reporting your financial behavior to the credit bureaus? We could, but it won't have the effect most people seem to think it will. There's so much hatred for the credit bureaus, that most people don't understand that the only thing the credit bureaus can do is help you. If you have no credit, that's the same thing as having bad credit. Lenders have to assume the worst case scenario to protect their finances. (The exception is when you're in college - then it's known that you're just starting out and have a good reason for having no credit history, so the eventual credit for college students is slightly better than the average adult.) How willing are you to try out a restaurant with no Yelp reviews? You probably wouldn't risk taking a first date there or holding a family reunion there - you'd minimize the risk by trying it out first alone or with a few friends. Likewise, if a lender knows nothing about you, they're going to assume the worst - that you're highly unlikely to pay back any money they lend you, and charge you a high interest rate accordingly.
Unless a credit bureau vouches for you and reports that you're good about paying your bills, and are low risk. When a lender sees that, they're more willing to lend you money and will charge you a lower interest rate for it because they are confident you are low risk. In other words, the normal state isn't easy loans and the credit bureaus making your life hell when you have poor credit. That hell state is the normal state, and the credit bureaus make your life easier when they say you have good credit.
Prohibiting people and businesses from reporting this info about you to the credit bureaus will make it on average harder and more expensive for you to borrow money, not easier. Which gets us back to that little checkbox for storing your credit card info. Every loan you take out, every credit card you own, every lease you sign, every service you sign up for with a monthly bill will have a similar checkbox requesting you give them permission to report your financial behavior to the credit bureaus. Fail to check that box and you'll just consign yourself to the worst possible credit rating,
We're quite happy to have the government step in. Private companies have seen Australia have the worst internet infrastructure and outrageous bank fees.
Australia has the worst internet infrastructure because it's one of the most geographically isolated countries. Getting Internet to the continent is more expensive, which raises the price floor, resulting in an overall lower level of service for a given population density at a given price.
Bank fees are outrageous because the country's economy is small (its population and GDP are less than Texas), so there are fewer transactions to/from the AUD resulting in higher exchange costs. And the currency has been relatively unstable the last 20 years, fluctuating in value by more than 100% against the Euro and USD relative to its low in 2001. This volatility represents a lot of risk for multi-national banks and companies doing currency exchanges to/from AUD, and that risk is reflected as higher bank fees "just in case" the currency's value plummets.
Canada has a similar problem with bank fees (its population and GDP are only about 50% bigger than Australia). This is one of the reasons the EU wanted so desperately to create a single currency for all its member countries. (You'll also notice that Canada ranks much higher than Australia in Internet speeds, despite similar population, population density, and population distribution. The difference being Canada doesn't need trans-oceanic cables for Internet.)
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Long-standing court precedent is that the Constitution only applies to U.S. soil. That's why Bush put a prison in Guantanamo Bay - it's not U.S. soil, it's Cuban soil. He was hoping to avoid that little complication of prisoners from Iraq and Afghanistan being shielded by the Constitution because they'd been brought to the U.S. That's also why INS can search your baggage and computer at the border - until you're admitted to the U.S. you're not considered to be on U.S. soil.
So while it's disappointing that the SCotUS didn't take this case, it's not surprising. From their perspective, these other countries willingly handed the U.S. Federal government Kim Dotcom's assets and money. It has nothing to do with the U.S. court system. He is not a U.S. citizen, he doesn't live in the U.S., and the seizures and forfeitures did not happen on U.S. soil.
OP is incorrect that the Constitution only applies to U.S. citizens. The moment a non-citizen crosses onto U.S. soil, even if they do so illegally, they are protected by the Constitution. In fact, due to the bad aftertaste of the three-fifths compromise, non-citizens (legal and illegal) are counted as part of a state's population when determining how many Representatives in the House that state gets. That's right - each 750,000 extra illegal aliens = 1 more Representative in the House (they're distributed pretty evenly across blue and red states at the moment so it doesn't skew politics too badly).
They're not oligopolies - that would imply they somehow came to dominate the market on their own. They're government-granted monopolies. Net neutrality is a government solution to a government-created problem. Basically the government whose initial regulation of cable and phone companies created this screwed up monopoly ISP system in the first place, now claim the solution to their first screwup is even more regulation.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't enforce net neutrality, but has no problem for one simple reason - they have competing ISPs. If an ISP decides to throttle content from a Netflix as a ploy to try to make the website pay them, all that happens is their customers cancel their service and sign up with a competing ISP which doesn't throttle Netflix. Any ISP arbitrarily throttling content would be cutting their own throat.
What's different in the U.S. is that government has granted certain anointed ISPs monopoly status. The only reason Verizon, Comcast, et al can try to pull off their "fast lane" scam is because they know their customers can't switch to a different ISP - thanks to the government prohibiting any competing ISPs. The whole problem started because government decided to over-regulate in the first place. And now net neutrality advocates are arguing the solution is even more government regulation? What's that saying about the definition of insanity being doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? You'll forgive me for being skeptical that net neutrality won't have unforeseen negative consequences of its own.
There are two possible solutions here. Net neutrality is only needed if you allow the government-granted monopolies to remain in place. The other solution is to rescind all the government-granted monopolies, and allow competition in the ISP marketplace. If you want to prevent multiple service lines from cluttering up the telephone poles, then grant a monopoly to a wire maintenance company which installs and maintains cable. But prohibit them from selling service. Then any company is allowed to sell Internet, TV, phone service over those lines for a fixed fee (established by the PUC - pretty much how gas and electricity service is done in most of the country).
Chart of odds of dying to back this up (2017 publication).
1 in 95 - Suicide
1 in 96 - Poisoning / overdoes (this is the new big one, courtesy of the opioid epidemic, but the press has mostly ignored it).*
1 in 114 - Motor vehicle crash
1 in 127 - Fall
1 in 370 - Assault by firearm
1 in 645 - Car occupant
1 in 647 - Pedestrian incident (mostly hit by cars)
1 in 948 - Motorcycle rider incident
Do note that these are overall odds of dying for the country as a whole. Not everyone participates in all of these activities so your individual risk may be higher. For example, the motorcyclist death rate for the country as a whole is 1 in 948. But there are approximately 30x as many cars as motorcycles, suggesting only about 1 in 30 people rides a motorcycle. So the fatality rate for an individual motorcyclist is probably closer to 1 in 32. (Yes, about 1 in every 100 people you know who rides in a car is fated to die in a car accident. About 1 in every 30 people you know who rides a motorcycle is fated to die in a motorcycle accident.)
* You remember that shooting at UCLA last year which resulted in 2 dead (murder/suicide)? That made national headlines with all the major networks carrying live coverage, because the press loves stories about gun violence. The exact same day a drug overdose incident at a concert in Florida killed 2 and hospitalized 57. But that story barely made it out of local news.
And just for completeness, there were 225 people killed by terrorists from 2001 (post-9/11) to 2016, or 15 per year. With a population of 323 million and an average lifespan of 79 years, that works out to a chance of dying of:
1 in 161,856 - Lightning strike
1 in 272,574 - Terrorism
The pattern I've noticed in the U.S. is that densely populated areas with relatively fast police response times (a few minutes) generally favor gun control. Sparsely populated areas with slow police response times (15+ minutes) generally favor individual gun ownership. The "you don't own a gun so you call someone with a gun (police) to protect you" argument has very different connotations depending on which type of area you live in.
I'm not sure what sort of solution this suggests, if any. Increased police presence in rural areas (to maintain the same number of cops per square mile and thus the same response time) is probably unfeasible. Just pointing out the pattern I've noticed and why some of the pro/anti gun control arguments which ring true in one location may sound like total nonsense in another.
After the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, one of the surprising findings was that adding more inspectors could actually make things less safe. Each inspector figured if they skipped inspecting a part, the other inspector(s) would catch it. So they felt it was not that big a deal to be lazy at their job and skip a few of the harder inspections here and there. But when all the inspectors think this way, the chances of a bad part passing "inspection" increased compared to if there was only one inspector.
In the same way, if you know there's a computer system which tracks your ship's location and the location of all other ships, and automatically sounds an alarm if it detects a collision course, then you're more likely to slack at your job and start reading slashdot or the latest J.K. Rowling book. OTOH if there is no computer system, and you and ONLY YOU are personally responsible for tracking your and that other ship's position and course to make sure you don't collide, then you're going to have 100% of your attention devoted to that task. Double or multiple redundancy works for equipment, but not always for people.
He had a helluva lot more options than truck and gun. I won't mention the myriad of other options so as not to give people ideas. But some of them could've easily killed hundreds if not thousands at a concert/gathering like this.
If the only options you can think of are trucks and guns, then you're still stuck in the good guy obedient citizen mentality. Before 9/11, the Philippines police cracked a terrorist cell which included papers and computer documents about a plot to hijack airliners and fly them into buildings. When I heard that on the news, I dismissed it as the Philippines police grandstanding and trying to exaggerate their bust. I had a good guy obedient citizen mentality back then, and the concept of someone willfully flying an airliner full of people into a building full of people was simply unthinkable to me at the time. "Unthinkable" was a word I didn't truly understand until 9/11, and I realized the Philippines police had been right all along. And I had stupidly refused to see the obvious truth because my good guy obedient citizen blinders made it unthinkable.
Stop trying to blame the objects. Blame the person for once. Understand that people doing things like this aren't good people who were tempted by the allure of evil objects into committing these heinous acts. They are evil or mentally unstable people, whose sole goal, whose sole driving purpose before committing these acts was to kill as many people as possible. The objects were merely a tool, a means to fulfill that intent. Once you understand that, then you can start thinking like they do about ways to carry out their schemes. And you'll realize that there are a hopelessly endless number of ways for them to carry out their intentions for us to successfully fight them by playing whack-a-mole and simply banning potentially deadly object with legitimate alternate uses.
Even at $10.5 billion, Apple is still at the bottom of the top 20 when it comes to R&D spending as a percent of revenue (basically normalizing for the size of the company), and around half the top 20's average.
35.7% - Bristol-Myers Squibb - $5.9b
24.3% - AstroZeneca - $6.0
21.9% - Intel - $12.1b
19.9% - Roche Holding - $10.0b
17.0% - Merk - $6.7b
19.2% - Novartis - $9.5b
15.7% - Pfizer - $7.7b
15.6% - Oracle - $5.8b
14.4% - Alphabet - $12.3b
12.9% - Microsoft - $12.0b
12.9% - Johnson & Johnson - $9.0b
12.6% - Cisco - $6.2b
11.7% - Amazon - $12.5b
7.2% - Samsung - $12.7b
5.6% - Volkswagen - $13.2b
4.9% - General Motors - $7.5b
4.5% - Ford - $6.7b
4.5% - Apple, revised - $10.5b
4.0% - Daimler - $6.6b
3.7% - Toyota - $8.8b
3.5% - Apple - $8.1b
8.7% - Total - $179.4b
To match the top 20's average, Apple would need to spend $20.1 billion on R&D. To match the top tech company (Intel) they'd have to spend $50.7 billion.
OP is correct that birds are immune to capsaicin (the chemical in hot peppers which makes them "hot"). Speculation is that pepper plants use the chemical as a way to discourage land mammals from eating their fruits, thus guaranteeing their seeds would be dispersed more widely by birds. Pepper spray isn't going to do squat.
Yeah, I monitor AIS to help decide where to take my boat fishing (track where the charter sportfishing boats are going). It's fairly common to see glitches in AIS tracks. Ships traveling at warp speed are pretty frequent too. My guess is AIS glitches and reports the same GPS position for a while (as if the ship is stationary). Then all of a sudden it reports the correct location and it looks like the ship has traveled at high speed to the new location.
I don't have an Echo. But I do have a Logitech Harmony Hub which I hear can be controlled by an Echo or Google Home. I can program the Harmony to turn on my AV system and tune it to a specific radio station. Have it turn on the TV, AV system, and Blu-ray player and start playing the loaded BD movie. Supposedly you can have it control Plex to play stuff on your home media server if you get some sort of USB dongle that acts as a remove control receiver (the Harmony Hub controls devices by issuing remote control signals). Smart lights and wall sockets are also controllable.
Amazon's idea is pretty much the same as Logitech's Harmony Hub - consolidate all your remote controls and physical switches (for smart devices) and make them all available through a single interface (voice for Amazon, a handheld remove for Logitech). The big difference I can see is that my Harmony Hub still works if my Internet connection goes down. Alexa is useless without an Internet connection. If they can make Alexa's voice recognition to work locally instead of over the Internet, then I think they'll have a winner. But I suspect Alexa phoning home to tell Amazon what devices you have and what you do with them is the whole point of Alexa from Amazon's perspective.
Ah, you weren't around before the breakup of Bell Telephone, were you? A five minute call between New York and Los Angeles used to cost $2.16 in 1975 (page 280). More than $10 in 2017 dollars. Those were the days... not.
The problem isn't for-profit prisons, nor capitalism, nor a host of other things being mentioned. The problem is simply that the prison phone system is a monopoly - there is no competition for providing phone calls to prisoners. Since it's a monopoly, the prison can charge whatever they want. It would be no different for a state-run prison - the cable and local phone / Internet monopolies we currently live under are all courtesy of the government. They are monopolies granted by the local government.
Cell phones allow prisoners to bypass that monopoly.
There's a tendency among Europeans to tribute the problems they see in the U.S. to structural problem with the U.S.
Most European states are very homogeneous in their racial makeup. The U.S. has an extremely large immigrant population, making it very ethnically diverse for a developed nation (I believe only Canada is more diverse). If you compare to a map of homicide rates, with the notable exceptions of Canada and Russia, you'll see a very strong correlation. More ethnically diverse countries tend to have more homicides.
We as a species are still very tribal. When the population is homogeneous and fewer tribes are in conflict, there tends to be less violent crime. When the population is diverse and more tribes are in conflict, there tends to be more violent crime. That's probably all you're seeing. The Canadians I've met are genuinely nice and friendly towards outsiders (almost to a fault - they have problems standing up for themselves when they're being taken advantage of). Americans tend to be more of the type who won't take crap for others. The high U.S. prison population is probably a consequence of maintaining low developed world crime rates within an ethnically diverse population. (I haven't visited Russia nor met many Russians so I can't speak for why their correlation is the opposite of most of the world.)
Drop a few million people from all around the world into any EU country, and I suspect you'd either see their crime rate or their prison population skyrocket.
Usually these renewable reports are grossly exaggerated to make it seem like renewable is more capable than it really is. But this one is actually fairly accurate.
10 MW * 0.097 capacity factor = 970 kW
970 kW / 2500 homes = 388 Watts per home
Average UK home annual consumption is 3940 kWh
3940 kWh / 1 year = 450 Watts average consumption.
So their "homes powered" metric is fairly close to accurate (2150 homes would be exact). We'll go with the exact 450 Watts per home figure.
To put this in perspective, the proposed Hinkley C nuclear plant would have a 3.2 GW capacity. Using the 90% capacity factor for newer nuclear reactors, this would give an actual generation of 2.88 GW, or enough to power 6.4 million homes.
At a construction cost of 24.5 billion GBP (the UK has some of the most expensive nuclear in the world), this works out to 3828 GBP per home powered.
If you run the same calculation using the 70% capacity factor for the UK's older nuclear plants over the last 5 years, it works out to 2.24 GW. Enough to power 5 million homes at 4900 GBP per home powered.
Unfortunately none of the news reports on this new solar farm that I was able to find mention its cost. This site estimates a utility-scale solar installation in the UK costs about 1.1 GBP per Watt. That works out to 11 million GBP / 2150 homes = 5116 GBP per home powered. But it doesn't include the cost of the 6 MW battery.
Android is based on the Linux kernel. If you want, you can use it via a Unix command line. Add the missing command line tools if you want the full experience.
Perhaps a better question would be, why does open source suck at making a desktop/mobile platform, while a company which uses the same open source managed to make a platform which displaced Windows as the #1 OS in use. IMHO it's user friendliness. The programmers who make open source projects are notorious for prioritizing their own needs above their users', and demand some sort of worship from users (don't ever piss off a programmer in an open source support forum if you ever want a particular bug fixed). This results in an obtuse user interface with poor documentation, and a steep learning curve. That may work for the 5% of the population who are geeks, programmers, and tinkerers who love to spend time figuring stuff out, but it doesn't work for the remaining 95%. Google just took that obtuse open source, found a bunch of skilled programmers who could grok that obtuseness, and paid them to make it friendly to use for the 95% (money in lieu of worship). And it took over the world.
Not necessarily. Unfortunately a lot of people advocating environmentalism don't have a clue about opportunity cost. It's incorrect to compare this to a zero base state - if the travel didn't happen at all. The correct comparison is to what would happen if this rocket travel weren't available. i.e. what happens right now? People fly between these locations. So the correct comparison is the monetary and pollution cost of a plane vs. rocket.
I haven't done the math, but I can see where Musk is going with this. The vast majority of the energy used by a plane on these long flights is overcoming friction with the air. A rocket eliminates that frictional energy loss by traveling above the air. In other words, the energy cost to fly on long flights is pretty close to proportional to the distance flown. While the energy cost to achieve a sub-orbital trajectory is very close to fixed (a fraction of escape velocity, with a slight increase in velocity translating into a very large change in distance traveled). So there's a certain distance beyond which the rocket will require less energy than a plane. If you can get the price of the technology down enough, a rocket between destinations greater than that distance will be both cheaper and less polluting than flying. The trip being quicker is just gravy.
Or to put it more intuitively:
Add to that:
The key point here is the income taxes. They're subtracted as the water enters the bucket, before it's turned into wealth. In other words, wealth has already been taxed. If you want to tax rich people, you can accomplish the exact same thing just by raising the income tax rate on rich people (because they control the government).
On top of this, the amount of water in the bucket depends on three factors - income flowrate, expenses flowrate, and how much time this bucket has been there. A wealth tax based on the amount of wealth is a conflation of all three of these factors, and thus cannot distinguish between them. People who've been alive longer would unfairly have to pay more wealth tax. People who've reduced their expenses because they believe in saving up a nest egg would unfairly have to pay more wealth tax. The wealth tax would be lowest (as a percentage) on people who live paycheck-to-paycheck not because they have to, but because they blow their entire paycheck every month on toys, entertainment, and frivolities. I'll repeat - two people with identical incomes can owe very different wealth taxes - the one who saves will owe more wealth tax than the one who spends their entire paycheck every month.
A wealth tax basically says if you act financially responsibly and save up money for a rainy day, you will be punished by owing more taxes. It's an unfair and fiscally irresponsible tax, favored only by people who either don't know better, or deliberately wish to increase society's dependence on government safety nets so they can gain more power.
(Excise taxes, like property taxes, are technically a wealth tax. But they serve as an incentive for people to act fiscally responsibly, not a disincentive. Say someone owns a farm and the surrounding area has become developed into an area of higher economic activity. The increase in his property tax encourages him to find a more economically efficient use of the land than farming, or to sell it to someone else who will. Unless the people have passed a law preventing the property tax from appreciating to reflect increasing value of land. Then the farmer can stick around for decades, using now-valuable land for an economically inefficient activity, driving up costs for all his neighbors.)
"We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody's civil rights to say whatever he pleases." - Adolf Hitler
The issue here is something recent anti-white supremacist protesters need to take to heart. The principle of free speech is agnostic. You cannot claim to uphold free speech while simultaneously attempting to deny it to those you disagree with. Either you believe in free speech, even when that speech offends you. Or you believe in suppression of certain viewpoints and their expression. The latter puts you in the same category as China, Russia, and Nazi Germany - the only difference is which ideas you've decided to suppress.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" - Evelyn Beatrice Hall
The idea behind free speech is that you can't counter a negative with a negative. If you consider it to be justified to impose negative policies against ideas you consider to be negative, you are by definition justifying negative policies towards your ideas by those people if the tables are ever turned. After all, from their perspective, you have negative ideas and thus they are justified in imposing negative policies against you And all of society devolves into a self-perpetuating cycle of negativity.
Free speech attempts to break this cycle by saying everyone is allowed to have their say. And instead of actively fighting against the expression of ideas we don't like, we'll simply rely on rational people (who hopefully make up the overwhelming majority of the population) to judge and dismiss those ideas as ridiculous. The proper response to white supremacist propaganda is citing historical examples of where their beliefs have led the world in the past - innocents living (or hiding) in fear, mob lynchings of innocents, genocide, world war. Convince rational people that we don't want to go down that direction again.
The free market argument works if there's competition. If the customers want net neutrality, they will ditch ISPs which accept payments for fast lanes, and switch to ISPs which honor net neutrality. If customers want services who pay for fast lanes, they will ditch neutral ISPs for ISPs which charge for fast lanes. This is pretty much how Internet service works in most of the world. If your ISP's policies piss you off, you cancel and get Internet using a different ISP.
Unfortunately, this isn't the case in the U.S. The vast majority of Internet providers have a government-granted monopoly, whether it be DSL (local phone service monopoly) or cable (cable TV/Internet monopoly). Without competition, there is no alternate ISP for customers to switch to if they're unhappy with their ISP's policies.
Hopefully the Supreme Court realizes this, and rules that local governments granting ISP monopolies is unconstitutional - state or local regulation of interstate commerce (the Internet crosses state and national borders). That way, everyone wins. The ISPs opposing net neutrality can charge for fast lanes. The ISPs for net neutrality can provide neutral service. And customers can choose whichever ISP they prefer. (For bonus points, websites which don't like ISPs who charge for fast lanes and artificially throttle their service to those companies as a way to "encourage" their customers to switch to a different ISP. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.)
by duct tape.
The problem is these are not the vehicles producing the emissions. The whole thing stems from MPG being the inverse of fuel consumption. People see the big MPG number from a fuel-efficient vehicle and think they're making a big difference in fuel consumption. It's actually the opposite - the bigger the MPG of a vehicle, the smaller the impact it has on overall consumption and emissions. Switching from a 25 MPG sedan to a 50 MPG Prius results in less fuel savings (and thus less emissions reduction) than someone switching from a 15 MPG full-size SUV to a 25 MPG large sedan. Yes, that 10 MPG improvement results in more fuel savings and more emissions reduction than the Prius' 25 MPG improvement.
15 MPG = 6.67 gallons to drive 100 miles
25 MPG = 4 gallons to drive 100 miles, a 2.67 gallon improvement
50 MPG = 2 gallons to drive 100 miles, only a 2 gallon improvement
Because MPG is the inverse of fuel consumption, it's 1/MPG which is the important value. And the bigger MPG values mean less incremental fuel savings. The rest of the world uses liters per 100 km to avoid this problem. For some reason it's backwards in the U.S., and marketing has abused it to make people feel good about buying a Prius when it's about the smallest difference you can make in terms of driving.
You know how environmentalists scoffed at hybrid SUVs? That was actually the best place to put a hybrid engine. The 6 MPG improvement the Highlander Hybrid gets from 22 to 28 MPG results in a fuel savings of nearly 1 gallon per 100 miles. That's about the same savings as switching from a 33 MPG econobox to a 50 MPG Prius. If you can improve a tractor trailer's 6 MPG to just 6,4 MPG, that also saves about the same amount of fuel per mile. It's the big vehicles which consume a lot of fuel whose efficiency you want to improve first in order to produce the biggest reduction in fuel consumption and emissions. The Priuses, econoboxes, and small sedans are roundoff error.
Give Musk credit. He actually understands this, which is why his next project is an electric tractor trailer.
Use the charging port. Apple is always saying how they can't comply with the EU's microUSB charger mandate because the Lightning charging port they use is so much more capable than USB. So it should be trivial for them to connect an FM antenna lead to it.
That's what I tell my friends and customers. I have a 12 TB NAS for daily backups (among other things), but I also back that up monthly to a RAID enclosure which gets stored elsewhere.
You want at least one backup offline so it doesn't get screwed up by malware. And you want it off-site so you'll still have it in case your house burns down. Tape or WORM (write once, read many) optical media is better than HDDs because you can't modify the data after it's written (at least on tape drives with a read-only switch - something I've long complained that HDDs should have). I've accidentally copied a bad file over its backup, instead of vice versa while trying to restore a non-corrupt version.
If the concern is foreign actors meddling with the U.S. election, shouldn't Facebook be turning over to Congress all political ads purchased on Facebook by foreigners for viewing in the U.S.?
By turning over only the Russian ads, they've basically already confirmed Trump's accusation of bias. If you only look for roaches in the kitchen, you'll only find roaches in the kitchen. Doesn't mean there aren't roaches in the rest of your house. And for all you know the kitchen may actually have the fewest roaches.
Credit and debit card info is already protected by law in the U.S. A merchant cannot give or sell it to someone else. They can't even keep a copy of it legally.
Unless you agree to let them. That little checkbox that says "save my credit card info for future purchases"? That's not just for your convenience. That's what grants the merchant permission to store you credit card info in their database.
This right here is the problem with your approach. The info the credit bureaus collect wasn't disclosed by you. It was disclosed to them by the other party in the transaction - the people and companies you did business with. If you paid a bill late, the person (e.g. landlord) or company (e.g. the power utility) reported that to one or more credit bureaus. Likewise if your credit card has a $10k credit limit and use $2k of it on average and you pay it off on time each month, the credit card company reports that to the credit bureaus. So while the info is about you, it's not provided by you. It's provided by others that you interact with financially. Your credit report is basically a collation of Yelp ratings on you by everyone you've interacted with financially.
So why not pass a law prohibiting others from reporting your financial behavior to the credit bureaus? We could, but it won't have the effect most people seem to think it will. There's so much hatred for the credit bureaus, that most people don't understand that the only thing the credit bureaus can do is help you. If you have no credit, that's the same thing as having bad credit. Lenders have to assume the worst case scenario to protect their finances. (The exception is when you're in college - then it's known that you're just starting out and have a good reason for having no credit history, so the eventual credit for college students is slightly better than the average adult.) How willing are you to try out a restaurant with no Yelp reviews? You probably wouldn't risk taking a first date there or holding a family reunion there - you'd minimize the risk by trying it out first alone or with a few friends. Likewise, if a lender knows nothing about you, they're going to assume the worst - that you're highly unlikely to pay back any money they lend you, and charge you a high interest rate accordingly.
Unless a credit bureau vouches for you and reports that you're good about paying your bills, and are low risk. When a lender sees that, they're more willing to lend you money and will charge you a lower interest rate for it because they are confident you are low risk. In other words, the normal state isn't easy loans and the credit bureaus making your life hell when you have poor credit. That hell state is the normal state, and the credit bureaus make your life easier when they say you have good credit.
Prohibiting people and businesses from reporting this info about you to the credit bureaus will make it on average harder and more expensive for you to borrow money, not easier. Which gets us back to that little checkbox for storing your credit card info. Every loan you take out, every credit card you own, every lease you sign, every service you sign up for with a monthly bill will have a similar checkbox requesting you give them permission to report your financial behavior to the credit bureaus. Fail to check that box and you'll just consign yourself to the worst possible credit rating,
Australia has the worst internet infrastructure because it's one of the most geographically isolated countries. Getting Internet to the continent is more expensive, which raises the price floor, resulting in an overall lower level of service for a given population density at a given price.
Bank fees are outrageous because the country's economy is small (its population and GDP are less than Texas), so there are fewer transactions to/from the AUD resulting in higher exchange costs. And the currency has been relatively unstable the last 20 years, fluctuating in value by more than 100% against the Euro and USD relative to its low in 2001. This volatility represents a lot of risk for multi-national banks and companies doing currency exchanges to/from AUD, and that risk is reflected as higher bank fees "just in case" the currency's value plummets.
Canada has a similar problem with bank fees (its population and GDP are only about 50% bigger than Australia). This is one of the reasons the EU wanted so desperately to create a single currency for all its member countries. (You'll also notice that Canada ranks much higher than Australia in Internet speeds, despite similar population, population density, and population distribution. The difference being Canada doesn't need trans-oceanic cables for Internet.)