There is no political reason. The U.S. would be involved whether or not they activated the sirens. The U.S. is obligated by treaties wrapping up the loose ends of WWII to provide for Japan's defense against foreign attack. The treaties and Japanese Constitution limit Japan's military to operating domestically to repel an invasion. The JSDF is not allowed to operate outside Japan, though that clause has been stretched recently to allow Japan to participate in UN peacekeeping missions. Since that leaves Japan extremely vulnerable to foreign attack, the treaties make defending Japan from outside Japan's borders the responsibility of the U.S.
So in this particular case (foreign missile overflying Japan), not only is a U.S. response warranted, it's required.
The key here is lack of competing services (lack of landline phones for the cell phone case). Delivering something by drone is attractive when the alternative is in the backpack of someone hiking down a footpath. Not so attractive when a UPS or USPS truck will be driving by there every day anyway.
You know, if you push this idea to its logical conclusion, you end up with a train. And we already have those. Plus, since friction of metal wheels on metal rails is a lot less than friction of rubber pneumatic tires on asphalt, the train is even more energy efficient.
I can understand the desire to reduce loading/unloading times by transporting goods by trucks which can all split up to different delivery addresses when they reach their destination city. But you have to remember that a long convoy of trucks imposes an externalized cost onto other cars on the highway. They have to wait for the convoy to pass before they can get into that lane so they can exit, or incur additional risk of injury or death by speeding up to try to get in front of the convoy. If you really have enough stuff going to the same city that you need multiple trucks to carry everything, just put it onto a train and transfer it to trucks at the destination city.
People don't say that because you can't get shots - modern cameras have fast enough shutter speeds that you can. You're not supposed to do it because if you hold the camera still while pointed at the sun too long (like on a tripod), you'll burn a hole in the shutter or (for shutterless cameras) burn a hole in the CCD/CMOS sensor.
You know how as a kid you used to burn ants with a magnifying glass? That's exactly what the lens of your camera is doing to the shutter and sensor.
It's less of a concern with higher-end DSLRs which use metal shutter blades (for a faster max shutter speed). You only have to worry about heat damage on those. But lower-end DSLRs still use a shutter curtain made of black fabric. The focused sunlight will burn right through that.
Actually, going on the backroads was what slowed our return trip down. Apparently Google Maps doesn't track traffic levels on certain small roads, but still considers them as an alternate route. When the main road began to get bogged down, it sent us down an alternate road that it considered "better" because there was no traffic info for it. We we ended up taking nearly 2 hours to travel 1.5 miles because of a two-way stop sign. Basically each car on our road had to wait 15-30 seconds at the stop sign for a gap in the cross traffic (which didn't have a stop sign).
Use Maps to find alternate routes, but avoid the ones which show no traffic data.
I don't watch boxing, but I can understand its attraction. It's the same reason sports are popular (and in particular why judged sports like figure skating are often criticized). Theories, talk, arguments about which team or boxer is better don't count for anything. You're conclusively resolving the debate with a pure head-to-head confrontation. Any theory about whose strategy will be more successful is immediately and with finality validated, or is shot down.
It differs from terrorism and criminal violence in that the participants are willing. Same difference between sex and rape, between trade and theft.
Every crowd-funded project I've seen has a blurb at the end saying that it may fail and you may lose your money.
But I agree with you that crowdfunding (in its current state) is just a half-assed version of venture capitalism where the project owner retains 100% ownership and control, instead of having to share it with the people putting up the money. I've only "contributed" to two projects - one was an art project, and the other was for a device which I always wondered why it didn't exist and the project already had a working prototype.
I look at crowdfunding and I start to understand why a minimum wage is important. The problem isn't that employers are greedy. It's that a subset of job-seekers are stupid and will agree to work for a lot less than their labor is worth, consequently driving down the prevailing wage for everyone. As long as this subset willingly contributes to crowdfunded projects for nothing more than a promise for the completed product (which might not even happen), crowdfunding is going to continue in this sorry state. As an initial investor, you should get partial ownership of the resulting company (even if a minority share so the owner retains full operational control). That way if the owner eventually sells for $2 billion, the initial investors share in that windfall instead of the owner pocketing everything.
Unlike a conventional telephone or internet cable, which can be tapped without the sender or recipient being aware, a QKD network alerts both users to any tampering with the system as soon as it occurs.
The bitrate for quantum encryption is too slow to actually use it to encrypt the data you're transmitting. Instead, you use it to encrypt a key which you transmit to the recipient. The data is then encrypted via standard cryptography using that key - basically a one-time pad. That's why it's called Quantum Key Distribution. SSH and I believe OpenVPN do the same thing.
So someone evesdropping in on the key distribution would be detected. But there's nothing to stop someone from capturing the encrypted data stream, then getting a copy of the distributed key after the QKD happens (e.g. if the recipient computer has been altered to transmit the key back to the attacker). At that point they can use the key to decrypt the data stream after the fact. In other words, the key distribution is secure, but protecting that key after it's been distributed still has the same vulnerabilities.
While oil was the world's most valuable resource, it has been surpassed by data, as evidenced by the five most valuable companies in the world today -- Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Google's parent company Alphabet.
Why base it on market capitalization? As the dot-com bubble showed, that's an extremely variable and unreliable way to measure a company's success.
Based on annual revenue - you know, how much these companies actually sell, which seems like a more relevant measure if you're talking about how valuable their product is - the listed companies rank:
#9 Apple
#26 Amazon
#65 Alphabet
#69 Microsoft
#393 Facebook
The top ten companies based on revenue are:
#1 Walmart (retail)
#2 State Grid (Chinese electricity utility)
#3 Sinopec Group (oil)
#4 China National Petroleum (oil)
#5 Toyota Motor (auto)
#6 Volkswagen (auto)
#7 Royal Dutch Shell (oil)
#8 Berkshire Hathaway (finance)
#9 Apple (tech)
#10 Exxon Mobil (oil)
So based on value of sales, the world's most valuable commodity remains oil.
#1 Apple (tech)
#2 JP Morgan Chase (finance)
#3 Berkshire Hathaway (finance)
#4 Wells Fargo (finance)
#5 Gilead Sciences (pharmaceuticals)
#6 Verizon (telecom)
#7 Citigroup (finance)
#8 Alphabet (tech)
#9 Exxon Mobil (oil)
#10 Bank of America (finance)
So based on profit, the world's most valuable commodity is financial services.
Revenue = how much you actually sell
Profit = how strong your sales are (delta between supply and demand)
Market cap = investors (including clueless ones) placing bets
Because solar and wind are very disperse, dilute energy sources, and collecting them itself takes a lot of energy, materials, and effort. Fossil fuels (and geothermal where available) and especially nuclear are very concentrated energy sources, and thus much easier and more efficient ways to generate large quantities of energy on-demand.
Just because the environmental movement chooses to pretend this aspect of energy generation doesn't exist doesn't mean it isn't a factor. It's like when I discovered the house I was renting had blackberry bushes outside. "Great!" I thought, "Free blackberries!" And when the blackberries ripened I went outside to pick them. An hour later I had a small bowl of blackberries, but I still had to wash them and my fingers were sore from numerous thorn pricks. The next day I just went to the store and bought a box of blackberries for a couple dollars. It was a much more efficient use of my time and resources to get the same end product.
Sounds like they're pinning the validity of their service on the first sale doctrine, which says that once a content creator sells a license to a copyrighted work, the buyer can choose to then re-sell it to someone else essentially transferring their license to the new owner.
The only question then will be if a DVD (or I assume Blu-ray) license also confers streaming rights. I hope they win. If you already paid for the license to a copyrighted work, it shouldn't matter to the content creator how you get it. The distinction between getting the bits that make up the movie via a physical medium like a DVD or by streaming is completely artificial. More importantly, if they win it should clear the way for you to stream movies from (say) Amazon Video if you've already bought them from (say) Google Play, as well as stream the movie from any service if you've already bought the Blu-ray (HD) or DVD (SD).
Which IMHO makes a lot more sense than a system where your TV getting the bits via reading an optical disc is somehow different than it getting the bits over the Internet. I've been using a variant of that - buying movies on Blu-ray (I don't own a Blu-ray player), then downloading it from a pirate site to add to my Plex server's library. The end result is the same, it just saves me the work of ripping the Blu-ray myself.
Sites on which you disable sound will remain that way until you turn them back on.
No, do it the other way. Let me disable sound on all sites unless I opt to enable it for a specific site. That way I'm not playing whack-a-mole with a million random websites I might one day click. Instead I only get sound on the few dozen websites I frequent which need sound, and the occasional random site I visit where I want sound I can temporarily turn it on.
A few years ago, my father eventually did meet his biological father, along with two uncles and an aunt, when they sought him out during a trip back to Ohio for his mother's funeral. None of them use Facebook.
You see that little 'f' logo in the upper right of slashdot's page? That's not a simple icon graphic with a link to Facebook. It's a complex script which drops a cookie or figures out some other way to track your computer, and reports which web page you viewed that icon on. So even if you don't have a Facebook account, Facebook is still tracking you. Not as you, but as user #92183656156.
Every time you visit a web page with that 'f' icon (most major sites), you are being tracked. And all it takes is one time when you enter an email address into a web page, and they're able to deduce that user #92183656156 that they've been tracking is in fact your_name@gmail.com, from which point they can cross-reference to deduce your phone number, home address, where you work, how much money you make, who your relatives are, etc. even though you don't have a Facebook account.
Copyright exists because copyrightable works are different from other types of works (material, monetary). If I take your retirement principal, you no longer have it. If I take your copyrighted work, you still have it.
The analogous situation with retirement savings can't really happen because money doesn't work that way. But if it did, it would be: I take your $200,000 retirement principle, and I have $200,000 and you still have $200,000.
So the way to maximize the value of a copyrighted work to society is for everyone to get a copy. But if everyone gets a copy for free, then there's no incentive for people to create new works. So we set up a system where for a short time creators have exclusive rights to distribute their works in exchange for money. Once that time expires, it falls into the public domain, and the entire public gets the benefit of the formerly copyrighted work.
Unfortunately, copyright holders have managed to get this time extended to a ridiculously long duration. Currently about 120 years (average remaining lifespan at time of creation + 70 years). Can you even name a dozen copyrighted works which were created 100-120 years ago? The duration is so ridiculously long that by the time copyrighted works fall into the public domain, they have next to zero value to society remaining, thus defeating the whole purpose of copyright. I'm not sure what the correct duration should be. 8 years seems too short. But it sure as hell isn't 120 years.
The problem is that the benefits are not linear. You can easily see that by going to the limits of the policy - when all manufacturing is done in China and all workers are out of a job, for instance.
That's not what happens. The only way U.S. companies could move all manufacturing to China is if they're able to import and sell all those manufactured goods back here in the U.S. So in that scenario, the U.S. has no more manufacturing jobs, but has sufficient design, service, and other jobs to sustain the consumption of all those manufactured goods.
For the "all workers are out of a job" scenario you outline to be true, there would also have to be no manufacturing for U.S. companies to move to China. If that were to actually happen, we'd have a reversal - lots of idle potential workers in the U.S. means manufacturing wages here would drop below that of China. And manufacturing jobs would move from China back to the U.S. So the "all workers are out of a job" scenario can't really happen. Unless of course you implement a minimum wage high enough to guarantee that it's always cheaper to manufacture in China.
The economy isn't trying to "punish" U.S. workers. All it sees is a geographic wage disparity (lower wages in China than in the U.S.). It tries to correct this by moving jobs from the high-wage region to the low-wage region. This results in wages in the low-wage region increasing as the people's productivity there increases. The end-state is both China and the U.S. having high wages. Whether wages in the U.S. end up higher or lower depends on whether earlier wages were based on actual productivity (end-state wages are higher because of stronger trade partners), or based on the U.S. exploiting foreign countries (end-state wages are lower because the U.S. can no longer exploit foreign countries).
My argument against offshoring wouldn't be that it's bad. It's actually good (I don't believe the U.S. is primarily exploitative, so I think the end-state for the U.S. is an improvement over the current state). My argument against it would be that it's happening too quickly. Offshoring is fine, but it needs to be done slowly enough to give laid-off workers time to retrain and find non-manufacturing jobs. That would allow the economy to keep humming along despite the loss of manufacturing jobs. Not too slowly though, or you end up with what happened between the 1980s and 1990s - unions thwarted factory automation in order to preserve manual labor manufacturing jobs. So when cheap Chinese labor became available, the manufacturing jobs and factories moved to China. If U.S. factories had been allowed to automate in the 1980s, perhaps the overall cost of manufacturing in automated factories in the U.S. would've remained lower than manufacturing with manual labor in China, and at least we'd still have factories employing Americans overseeing the robots.
It's not a linear function
Correct.
If you go to one extreme (no minimum wage), you end up with widespread worker exploitation. (Based on historical evidence.) And overall productivity suffers. (Evidenced by Ford's business booming when he set his wages much higher than the prevailing wage. Indicative that low wages were hurting overall economic productivity, and raising them increased productivity.)
If you go to the other extreme (minimum wage higher than the average wage), you break the economy. (Based on Greece. Actually the economy will just devalue your currency until your fixed minimum wage equals the actual productivity of the people at that wage. So this can't really happen unless people keep trying to increase the minimum wage. Or in Greece's case, because their currency's value was fixed based on other countries' economies. OTOH if you try to fix prices to prevent this, then the economy grinds to a halt - nobody is going to sell stuff for less than what it cost them
The hypothesis Damore argued against is that all gender-differences in workplace representation are due to discrimination. You only need a single counter-example to disprove this hypothesis, and Damore provided several. The Economist article doesn't even try to tackle these (in fact it seems to avoid acknowledging them except implicitly).
Instead, the Economist brings up counter-points to Damore's memo. e.g. That there are statistical differences between men and women which favor women, to counter his point that there are statistical differences which favor men. In other words, it is written as if the hypothesis in dispute was "there is no gender-based discrimination." Which AFAIK nobody is arguing except those using it as a straw man to try to justify draconian anti-discrimination measures.
Basically, the SJW crowd argued "all wood floats." Damore pointed out "hey these types of wood sink." And the Economist in response argues "well these types of wood float." Well that's nice, but it doesn't really support the original argument nor counter Damore's point.
This whole debate boils down to using gender ratio in the workplace as a measure of discrimination. All Damore is arguing is that there are other reasons than discrimination which cuase the ratio not to be 50/50. The SJW crowd doesn't want to give up this disproven hypothesis because it makes it easy to justify their anti-discrimination measures. Anyone who's published any real paper using statistics knows it's never this easy - that is why statisticians have jobs. There are always caveats and other factors you have to try your best to control for.
Or as I like to put it, it's easy to uphold a principle when doing so defends the rights of those you like and agree with. The true test of how strongly you believe in a principle comes when upholding it will defend someone you dislike and disagree with.
The question here is how much leeway businesses have in refusing service. The left has already established that they believe a business may not discriminate at all, and must treat everyone equally in terms of business transactions. That's why they believe a Christian owner of a cake shop must produce a cake for a gay wedding even if it personally offends the owner to produce decorations for a gay wedding.
Well, now we have a case which flips the left/right spectrum. If you are running a business offering a service to the public, can you deny that service to white supremacist customers because you personally disagree with white supremacy?
Now, I personally believe the cake shop owner has the right to refuse to make a cake decorated for a gay wedding (but not to refuse to sell a generic cake which the buyer may decorate as they wish). So I have no problem with GoFundMe, Godaddy, etc. denying these Nazis services since it requires "their" equipment to propagate white supremacist materials. But I'm curious though how those on the left justify denying business owners the right to refuse a customer in one case, but having no problem with it in this one.
Yeah. My prediction is he's going to get off the murder charges for reason of insanity. He'll still be locked up (in a mental hospital), but I suspect those hoping this will set a precedent against acts of violence against protesters are going to be disappointed by the outcome.
have secret discussions about things which are supposed to leave an auditable paper trail because they affect policy,
delete messages which are subpoenaed because they could be relevant to a criminal investigation,
send or receive classified materials over an unclassified network,
he can use a private service as much as he wants. Since the way Twitter works is to make anything he posts public, the first two can't happen. He can only get in trouble with it if he uses it to illegally reveal classified materials.
Some references change over time. Some don't. I bought a on 3D programming in the late 1990s. The algorithms in the book don't change with time, so the author and publisher had the presence of mind to include the sample code both via a website, and on a CD included with the book.
There's a saying from the early 1900s which I saw quoted frequently during the 1970s-1990s, but whose principle seems to have been discarded the last couple decades:
Merely stating an opinion should never be a hate crime. The benefits that come to society from freedom of expression far, far exceed the benefits that come from insulating people against being offended.
Sure, but there's more than one reason to fear what a man might say. You might fear the truth, if you have done wrong; but you might also fear a lie, if it's a good enough one that it makes stupid people do bad things.
Countering lies by suppressing them has three major problems:
Who determines what's a lie? The binary true/false classification works in computers, but most things in the real world (including math) fall into a trinary true/false/unknown or can't be determined. That unknown category is enormous in some areas, and there's a very strong tendency for people to project their preconceived biases to shift things in the unknown category into the true or false category.
Triggers the anti-authoritarian reflex in people. If someone wants to suppress it, we immediately suspect their intentions are nefarious.
Establishes a mechanism which in the future could be hijacked by those in power to suppress the truth.
Lies need to be countered with the truth. Saying lies need to be suppressed to protect ourselves from stupid people just demonstrates that you lack faith in people. If that's what you believe, then how can you advocate democracy? The entire premise behind democracy is that on average (and given enough time) The People will make the right decision. Yes there are stupid people and yes some of them will make the wrong decision. But the goal here isn't 100% agreement among the populace. It's giving people the freedom to decide for themselves because you believe that a majority of them will correctly sort out the truth from lies.
IMHO, suppressing Nazi propaganda is tantamount to admitting that they're right. You don't trust democracy and freedom of expression to take care of the problem (dismiss bankrupt philosophies like National Socialism). So you resort to authoritarianism to squelch the free transfer of ideas. Just like the Nazis and Communists did, just like ISIS and the Taliban do. Either you believe in free expression or you don't. If you say you want free expression but only for the ideas you believe in, the only difference between you and the Nazis/Communists/ISIS/Taliban is which ideas you think should be allowed to be freely exchanged.
OTOH, Godaddy and Google are private companies. If they disagree with and don't want to be part of the dissemination of Nazi propaganda, then I think it's their right to kick these guys off of their service. But it should be their decision and theirs alone. They shouldn't be pressured into doing it by outside parties. Otherwise we're legitimizing the nasty policies where the U.S. tried to extend its Cuba blockade by refusing to do business with companies who did business with Cuba, or the Arab countries trying to do the same with companies who did business with Israel. I make decisions for myself, you make decisions for yourself. The moment you try to pressure me into changing my decision that I arrived at of my own free will, that's coercion.
It's because we as a society have decided that money is less important than people. On the one hand this means that a company owner isn't justified in putting workers' lives at risk just to make more money. On the other hand, it means the punishment for a financial crime is less than the punishment for physical crime. e.g. The majority of the punishment for bank robbery isn't because you stole money, it's because you threatened people with violence during the act of stealing money.
You can't have it both ways. If you want the punishment for financial crimes to be equivalent to the punishment for physical crimes, then you are saying money is as important as people's lives and physical well-being.
They can be legal if you previously signed an agreement agreeing to them. e.g. Credit card company changes its terms. Sends you a letter describing the changes and says by continuing to use the card you agree to the new terms. And if you don't agree to the changes, stop using the card and call them to tell them you're cancelling the card.
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There is no political reason. The U.S. would be involved whether or not they activated the sirens. The U.S. is obligated by treaties wrapping up the loose ends of WWII to provide for Japan's defense against foreign attack. The treaties and Japanese Constitution limit Japan's military to operating domestically to repel an invasion. The JSDF is not allowed to operate outside Japan, though that clause has been stretched recently to allow Japan to participate in UN peacekeeping missions. Since that leaves Japan extremely vulnerable to foreign attack, the treaties make defending Japan from outside Japan's borders the responsibility of the U.S.
So in this particular case (foreign missile overflying Japan), not only is a U.S. response warranted, it's required.
The key here is lack of competing services (lack of landline phones for the cell phone case). Delivering something by drone is attractive when the alternative is in the backpack of someone hiking down a footpath. Not so attractive when a UPS or USPS truck will be driving by there every day anyway.
You know, if you push this idea to its logical conclusion, you end up with a train. And we already have those. Plus, since friction of metal wheels on metal rails is a lot less than friction of rubber pneumatic tires on asphalt, the train is even more energy efficient.
I can understand the desire to reduce loading/unloading times by transporting goods by trucks which can all split up to different delivery addresses when they reach their destination city. But you have to remember that a long convoy of trucks imposes an externalized cost onto other cars on the highway. They have to wait for the convoy to pass before they can get into that lane so they can exit, or incur additional risk of injury or death by speeding up to try to get in front of the convoy. If you really have enough stuff going to the same city that you need multiple trucks to carry everything, just put it onto a train and transfer it to trucks at the destination city.
People don't say that because you can't get shots - modern cameras have fast enough shutter speeds that you can. You're not supposed to do it because if you hold the camera still while pointed at the sun too long (like on a tripod), you'll burn a hole in the shutter or (for shutterless cameras) burn a hole in the CCD/CMOS sensor.
You know how as a kid you used to burn ants with a magnifying glass? That's exactly what the lens of your camera is doing to the shutter and sensor.
It's less of a concern with higher-end DSLRs which use metal shutter blades (for a faster max shutter speed). You only have to worry about heat damage on those. But lower-end DSLRs still use a shutter curtain made of black fabric. The focused sunlight will burn right through that.
Actually, going on the backroads was what slowed our return trip down. Apparently Google Maps doesn't track traffic levels on certain small roads, but still considers them as an alternate route. When the main road began to get bogged down, it sent us down an alternate road that it considered "better" because there was no traffic info for it. We we ended up taking nearly 2 hours to travel 1.5 miles because of a two-way stop sign. Basically each car on our road had to wait 15-30 seconds at the stop sign for a gap in the cross traffic (which didn't have a stop sign).
Use Maps to find alternate routes, but avoid the ones which show no traffic data.
I don't watch boxing, but I can understand its attraction. It's the same reason sports are popular (and in particular why judged sports like figure skating are often criticized). Theories, talk, arguments about which team or boxer is better don't count for anything. You're conclusively resolving the debate with a pure head-to-head confrontation. Any theory about whose strategy will be more successful is immediately and with finality validated, or is shot down.
It differs from terrorism and criminal violence in that the participants are willing. Same difference between sex and rape, between trade and theft.
Every crowd-funded project I've seen has a blurb at the end saying that it may fail and you may lose your money.
But I agree with you that crowdfunding (in its current state) is just a half-assed version of venture capitalism where the project owner retains 100% ownership and control, instead of having to share it with the people putting up the money. I've only "contributed" to two projects - one was an art project, and the other was for a device which I always wondered why it didn't exist and the project already had a working prototype.
I look at crowdfunding and I start to understand why a minimum wage is important. The problem isn't that employers are greedy. It's that a subset of job-seekers are stupid and will agree to work for a lot less than their labor is worth, consequently driving down the prevailing wage for everyone. As long as this subset willingly contributes to crowdfunded projects for nothing more than a promise for the completed product (which might not even happen), crowdfunding is going to continue in this sorry state. As an initial investor, you should get partial ownership of the resulting company (even if a minority share so the owner retains full operational control). That way if the owner eventually sells for $2 billion, the initial investors share in that windfall instead of the owner pocketing everything.
The bitrate for quantum encryption is too slow to actually use it to encrypt the data you're transmitting. Instead, you use it to encrypt a key which you transmit to the recipient. The data is then encrypted via standard cryptography using that key - basically a one-time pad. That's why it's called Quantum Key Distribution. SSH and I believe OpenVPN do the same thing.
So someone evesdropping in on the key distribution would be detected. But there's nothing to stop someone from capturing the encrypted data stream, then getting a copy of the distributed key after the QKD happens (e.g. if the recipient computer has been altered to transmit the key back to the attacker). At that point they can use the key to decrypt the data stream after the fact. In other words, the key distribution is secure, but protecting that key after it's been distributed still has the same vulnerabilities.
Why base it on market capitalization? As the dot-com bubble showed, that's an extremely variable and unreliable way to measure a company's success.
Based on annual revenue - you know, how much these companies actually sell, which seems like a more relevant measure if you're talking about how valuable their product is - the listed companies rank:
#9 Apple
#26 Amazon
#65 Alphabet
#69 Microsoft
#393 Facebook
The top ten companies based on revenue are:
#1 Walmart (retail)
#2 State Grid (Chinese electricity utility)
#3 Sinopec Group (oil)
#4 China National Petroleum (oil)
#5 Toyota Motor (auto)
#6 Volkswagen (auto)
#7 Royal Dutch Shell (oil)
#8 Berkshire Hathaway (finance)
#9 Apple (tech)
#10 Exxon Mobil (oil)
So based on value of sales, the world's most valuable commodity remains oil.
The top ten companies based on profit are:
#1 Apple (tech)
#2 JP Morgan Chase (finance)
#3 Berkshire Hathaway (finance)
#4 Wells Fargo (finance)
#5 Gilead Sciences (pharmaceuticals)
#6 Verizon (telecom)
#7 Citigroup (finance)
#8 Alphabet (tech)
#9 Exxon Mobil (oil)
#10 Bank of America (finance)
So based on profit, the world's most valuable commodity is financial services.
Revenue = how much you actually sell
Profit = how strong your sales are (delta between supply and demand)
Market cap = investors (including clueless ones) placing bets
Because solar and wind are very disperse, dilute energy sources, and collecting them itself takes a lot of energy, materials, and effort. Fossil fuels (and geothermal where available) and especially nuclear are very concentrated energy sources, and thus much easier and more efficient ways to generate large quantities of energy on-demand.
Just because the environmental movement chooses to pretend this aspect of energy generation doesn't exist doesn't mean it isn't a factor. It's like when I discovered the house I was renting had blackberry bushes outside. "Great!" I thought, "Free blackberries!" And when the blackberries ripened I went outside to pick them. An hour later I had a small bowl of blackberries, but I still had to wash them and my fingers were sore from numerous thorn pricks. The next day I just went to the store and bought a box of blackberries for a couple dollars. It was a much more efficient use of my time and resources to get the same end product.
Sounds like they're pinning the validity of their service on the first sale doctrine, which says that once a content creator sells a license to a copyrighted work, the buyer can choose to then re-sell it to someone else essentially transferring their license to the new owner.
The only question then will be if a DVD (or I assume Blu-ray) license also confers streaming rights. I hope they win. If you already paid for the license to a copyrighted work, it shouldn't matter to the content creator how you get it. The distinction between getting the bits that make up the movie via a physical medium like a DVD or by streaming is completely artificial. More importantly, if they win it should clear the way for you to stream movies from (say) Amazon Video if you've already bought them from (say) Google Play, as well as stream the movie from any service if you've already bought the Blu-ray (HD) or DVD (SD).
Which IMHO makes a lot more sense than a system where your TV getting the bits via reading an optical disc is somehow different than it getting the bits over the Internet. I've been using a variant of that - buying movies on Blu-ray (I don't own a Blu-ray player), then downloading it from a pirate site to add to my Plex server's library. The end result is the same, it just saves me the work of ripping the Blu-ray myself.
No, do it the other way. Let me disable sound on all sites unless I opt to enable it for a specific site. That way I'm not playing whack-a-mole with a million random websites I might one day click. Instead I only get sound on the few dozen websites I frequent which need sound, and the occasional random site I visit where I want sound I can temporarily turn it on.
You see that little 'f' logo in the upper right of slashdot's page? That's not a simple icon graphic with a link to Facebook. It's a complex script which drops a cookie or figures out some other way to track your computer, and reports which web page you viewed that icon on. So even if you don't have a Facebook account, Facebook is still tracking you. Not as you, but as user #92183656156.
Every time you visit a web page with that 'f' icon (most major sites), you are being tracked. And all it takes is one time when you enter an email address into a web page, and they're able to deduce that user #92183656156 that they've been tracking is in fact your_name@gmail.com, from which point they can cross-reference to deduce your phone number, home address, where you work, how much money you make, who your relatives are, etc. even though you don't have a Facebook account.
Copyright exists because copyrightable works are different from other types of works (material, monetary). If I take your retirement principal, you no longer have it. If I take your copyrighted work, you still have it.
The analogous situation with retirement savings can't really happen because money doesn't work that way. But if it did, it would be: I take your $200,000 retirement principle, and I have $200,000 and you still have $200,000.
So the way to maximize the value of a copyrighted work to society is for everyone to get a copy. But if everyone gets a copy for free, then there's no incentive for people to create new works. So we set up a system where for a short time creators have exclusive rights to distribute their works in exchange for money. Once that time expires, it falls into the public domain, and the entire public gets the benefit of the formerly copyrighted work.
Unfortunately, copyright holders have managed to get this time extended to a ridiculously long duration. Currently about 120 years (average remaining lifespan at time of creation + 70 years). Can you even name a dozen copyrighted works which were created 100-120 years ago? The duration is so ridiculously long that by the time copyrighted works fall into the public domain, they have next to zero value to society remaining, thus defeating the whole purpose of copyright. I'm not sure what the correct duration should be. 8 years seems too short. But it sure as hell isn't 120 years.
That's not what happens. The only way U.S. companies could move all manufacturing to China is if they're able to import and sell all those manufactured goods back here in the U.S. So in that scenario, the U.S. has no more manufacturing jobs, but has sufficient design, service, and other jobs to sustain the consumption of all those manufactured goods.
For the "all workers are out of a job" scenario you outline to be true, there would also have to be no manufacturing for U.S. companies to move to China. If that were to actually happen, we'd have a reversal - lots of idle potential workers in the U.S. means manufacturing wages here would drop below that of China. And manufacturing jobs would move from China back to the U.S. So the "all workers are out of a job" scenario can't really happen. Unless of course you implement a minimum wage high enough to guarantee that it's always cheaper to manufacture in China.
The economy isn't trying to "punish" U.S. workers. All it sees is a geographic wage disparity (lower wages in China than in the U.S.). It tries to correct this by moving jobs from the high-wage region to the low-wage region. This results in wages in the low-wage region increasing as the people's productivity there increases. The end-state is both China and the U.S. having high wages. Whether wages in the U.S. end up higher or lower depends on whether earlier wages were based on actual productivity (end-state wages are higher because of stronger trade partners), or based on the U.S. exploiting foreign countries (end-state wages are lower because the U.S. can no longer exploit foreign countries).
My argument against offshoring wouldn't be that it's bad. It's actually good (I don't believe the U.S. is primarily exploitative, so I think the end-state for the U.S. is an improvement over the current state). My argument against it would be that it's happening too quickly. Offshoring is fine, but it needs to be done slowly enough to give laid-off workers time to retrain and find non-manufacturing jobs. That would allow the economy to keep humming along despite the loss of manufacturing jobs. Not too slowly though, or you end up with what happened between the 1980s and 1990s - unions thwarted factory automation in order to preserve manual labor manufacturing jobs. So when cheap Chinese labor became available, the manufacturing jobs and factories moved to China. If U.S. factories had been allowed to automate in the 1980s, perhaps the overall cost of manufacturing in automated factories in the U.S. would've remained lower than manufacturing with manual labor in China, and at least we'd still have factories employing Americans overseeing the robots.
Correct.
The hypothesis Damore argued against is that all gender-differences in workplace representation are due to discrimination. You only need a single counter-example to disprove this hypothesis, and Damore provided several. The Economist article doesn't even try to tackle these (in fact it seems to avoid acknowledging them except implicitly).
Instead, the Economist brings up counter-points to Damore's memo. e.g. That there are statistical differences between men and women which favor women, to counter his point that there are statistical differences which favor men. In other words, it is written as if the hypothesis in dispute was "there is no gender-based discrimination." Which AFAIK nobody is arguing except those using it as a straw man to try to justify draconian anti-discrimination measures.
Basically, the SJW crowd argued "all wood floats." Damore pointed out "hey these types of wood sink." And the Economist in response argues "well these types of wood float." Well that's nice, but it doesn't really support the original argument nor counter Damore's point.
This whole debate boils down to using gender ratio in the workplace as a measure of discrimination. All Damore is arguing is that there are other reasons than discrimination which cuase the ratio not to be 50/50. The SJW crowd doesn't want to give up this disproven hypothesis because it makes it easy to justify their anti-discrimination measures. Anyone who's published any real paper using statistics knows it's never this easy - that is why statisticians have jobs. There are always caveats and other factors you have to try your best to control for.
Or as I like to put it, it's easy to uphold a principle when doing so defends the rights of those you like and agree with. The true test of how strongly you believe in a principle comes when upholding it will defend someone you dislike and disagree with.
The question here is how much leeway businesses have in refusing service. The left has already established that they believe a business may not discriminate at all, and must treat everyone equally in terms of business transactions. That's why they believe a Christian owner of a cake shop must produce a cake for a gay wedding even if it personally offends the owner to produce decorations for a gay wedding.
Well, now we have a case which flips the left/right spectrum. If you are running a business offering a service to the public, can you deny that service to white supremacist customers because you personally disagree with white supremacy?
Now, I personally believe the cake shop owner has the right to refuse to make a cake decorated for a gay wedding (but not to refuse to sell a generic cake which the buyer may decorate as they wish). So I have no problem with GoFundMe, Godaddy, etc. denying these Nazis services since it requires "their" equipment to propagate white supremacist materials. But I'm curious though how those on the left justify denying business owners the right to refuse a customer in one case, but having no problem with it in this one.
Yeah. My prediction is he's going to get off the murder charges for reason of insanity. He'll still be locked up (in a mental hospital), but I suspect those hoping this will set a precedent against acts of violence against protesters are going to be disappointed by the outcome.
he can use a private service as much as he wants. Since the way Twitter works is to make anything he posts public, the first two can't happen. He can only get in trouble with it if he uses it to illegally reveal classified materials.
Some references change over time. Some don't. I bought a on 3D programming in the late 1990s. The algorithms in the book don't change with time, so the author and publisher had the presence of mind to include the sample code both via a website, and on a CD included with the book.
There's a saying from the early 1900s which I saw quoted frequently during the 1970s-1990s, but whose principle seems to have been discarded the last couple decades:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Merely stating an opinion should never be a hate crime. The benefits that come to society from freedom of expression far, far exceed the benefits that come from insulating people against being offended.
Countering lies by suppressing them has three major problems:
Lies need to be countered with the truth. Saying lies need to be suppressed to protect ourselves from stupid people just demonstrates that you lack faith in people. If that's what you believe, then how can you advocate democracy? The entire premise behind democracy is that on average (and given enough time) The People will make the right decision. Yes there are stupid people and yes some of them will make the wrong decision. But the goal here isn't 100% agreement among the populace. It's giving people the freedom to decide for themselves because you believe that a majority of them will correctly sort out the truth from lies.
IMHO, suppressing Nazi propaganda is tantamount to admitting that they're right. You don't trust democracy and freedom of expression to take care of the problem (dismiss bankrupt philosophies like National Socialism). So you resort to authoritarianism to squelch the free transfer of ideas. Just like the Nazis and Communists did, just like ISIS and the Taliban do. Either you believe in free expression or you don't. If you say you want free expression but only for the ideas you believe in, the only difference between you and the Nazis/Communists/ISIS/Taliban is which ideas you think should be allowed to be freely exchanged.
OTOH, Godaddy and Google are private companies. If they disagree with and don't want to be part of the dissemination of Nazi propaganda, then I think it's their right to kick these guys off of their service. But it should be their decision and theirs alone. They shouldn't be pressured into doing it by outside parties. Otherwise we're legitimizing the nasty policies where the U.S. tried to extend its Cuba blockade by refusing to do business with companies who did business with Cuba, or the Arab countries trying to do the same with companies who did business with Israel. I make decisions for myself, you make decisions for yourself. The moment you try to pressure me into changing my decision that I arrived at of my own free will, that's coercion.
It's because we as a society have decided that money is less important than people. On the one hand this means that a company owner isn't justified in putting workers' lives at risk just to make more money. On the other hand, it means the punishment for a financial crime is less than the punishment for physical crime. e.g. The majority of the punishment for bank robbery isn't because you stole money, it's because you threatened people with violence during the act of stealing money.
You can't have it both ways. If you want the punishment for financial crimes to be equivalent to the punishment for physical crimes, then you are saying money is as important as people's lives and physical well-being.
They can be legal if you previously signed an agreement agreeing to them. e.g. Credit card company changes its terms. Sends you a letter describing the changes and says by continuing to use the card you agree to the new terms. And if you don't agree to the changes, stop using the card and call them to tell them you're cancelling the card.