Good luck getting the government to try to fix this - they're the ones which made it possible. Visa/Mastercard lobbied for and got laws passed which made it illegal for merchants to add a surcharge if you pay with a credit card, to help them recoup the credit card processing fee. (That's why you see some places advertising a cash discount - it's a loophole in the law.)
There would've been a lot more downward pressure on the 2% processing fee if merchants had been allowed to directly pass the fee on to customers. People would've preferred to pay with cash until credit card companies were able to lower the cost to something more reasonable, like a half or quarter percent. Card networks which had higher fees (e.g. Amex) would've had a tougher time than card networks with lower fees (e.g. Discover). But thanks to (corrupt) government regulation, competition to lower processing prices was eliminated, and we're all saddled with what's effectively a 2% sales tax to a private company. Even if you're paying with cash, you're paying the tax as the cash purchases basically subsidize the merchants fees for credit card purchases (since you pay the same amount for cash or credit in most stores).
And no the fee is not for protection against fraud. The merchant pays for fraud, not the credit card company. When you spot an unauthorized charge on you bill and request a chargeback, the card processing company issues a notice to the merchant asking for proof the purchase was valid. Usually this is the signature on the credit card receipt, but for online or automated transactions this can be things like the billing address or phone number (that's why gas station pumps ask you for your zip code). If the signature or other information the merchant submits doesn't match, the transaction is determined to be fraudulent, and the processing company simply deducts the amount of the charge from the merchant's payment. The merchant is out the money and the merchandise. The only expenses the card companies have to pay for are infrastructure, equipment, and staff. With the modern Internet and computers, this is probably on the order of pennies per transaction.
The paper defines the period as 1900-2015. TFA lists the causes as "habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption." Attributing it to climate change denial exclusively is a gross mischaracterization.
To me, those are glorified tic-tac-toe programs. They're not "thinking" about how to win at the game, they are simply exhaustively searching the solution space to find moves whose branches give them the best chance of winning. Tic-tac-toe always ends up a tie with semi-competent players because its within the capability of humans to see the entire solution space and avoid moves which result in a loss. Computers are simply able to search a much larger solution space in the same amount of time as a human.
Humans don't play chess and go like that. The solution space in those games is too massive for them to thoroughly search, so they have to resort to a different strategy. They learn patterns and trends from repeatedly playing the game. Then they develop algorithms and heuristics based on those patterns. When they play a new game, they try to determine which pattern the current game board best approximates, and apply the appropriate algorithm to decide what their next move would be. Program a computer to learn how to play like that - without searching the solution space - then I will be impressed. e.g. What's the best chess program you can write while limiting it to, say, a thousand iterative loops for each move?
It depends on what you're learning. For most things, forcing yourself to write it down as you're listening to it reinforces what you've just heard. Your brain has to parse the sentence, rephrase it as shorthand, then repeat that shorthand phrase to itself as it guides your hand into writing it down. That instant triplicate review of the lecture material is much better for remembering and learning than just listening. On more complex abstract topics though, the act of taking notes can distract you from concentrating on and understanding what the lecturer is saying. Likewise, on really simple topics (stuff where everything said in the lecture is "obvious" immediately after it's said), having pre-printed notes can save you from boredom. Though in that case I usually skipped the lecture, read through the notes in 1/3 to 1/4 the time I would've spent at the lecture, and did fine on the tests.
This is why I always preferred professors who wrote and drew with chalk as they lectured - it forces them to pace themselves giving you time to either write notes, or think about and understand what they were saying. In lectures by professors who used Powerpoint slides, sometimes they'd skim over something so quickly you'd miss it and be forced to stop the lecture to ask it be repeated, or make a note to review it again after. You'd spend the rest of the class trying to remember what follows without really understanding it, so you could attempt to put the pieces together into a comprehensive whole when you reviewed your notes and the slides in your room after class (and good luck if it was the first lecture in a day packed with classes).
1. Installing fiber to these rural areas would be stupidly expensive.
2. There's no need to rely on those companies to prevent telecos from screwing us over - we already have that power. Telecos and cable companies don't have a natural monopoly. They have a government-granted monopoly. Your local municipal government entered into a contract with a teleco/cable company which gave them a monopoly. To get rid of it, all you need to do is convince your local government to change the deal and allow competition. If only there were a way for citizens to influence what their government does...
By your reasoning, the trick Enron did (where they repeatedly "sold" an item back and forth between a subsidiary to pad their revenue) was legitimate.
The important thing isn't the money spent. It's the value obtained from spending that money. I spend $5 on a hammer and use it to fix something that would've cost me $20 if I hired someone, then I gained $20 of productivity for the $5 purchase, for a net gain of $15. My economic productivity increased by $15. It's the productivity increase which is important, which is why the Enron trick doesn't work (no productivity was increased since they were just passing it back and forth).
In the case of failed businesses, $x was spent but less than $x of productivity was generated. The true loss is the difference between these two, so is less than $x. But it's still a loss.
Put slightly differently, $1.48 billion is an amount. Economic activity is a rate. Yes that $1.48 billion is still out there in different hands. But the potential for $1.48 billion of economic activity every 6 months from these businesses is now gone. (Not that this should concern anyone. $1.48 billion is less than 0.01% of U.S. GDP. Some losses are necessary when exploring the solution space of viable business activity, and 0.01% is vanishingly tiny. Bad ideas fold. The money gets re-spent on new ideas, most of which hopefully turn out to be good ideas.)
They sell bird nets for keeping birds out (or in) to cover things like fish farms to prevent birds from eating all the fish. They're relatively inexpensive and I'm sure you could get them in a finer mesh if you wanted (so drones can't drop stabbing implements, though I suspect prisoners can already make a shiv with stuff they find in the prison).
Just because it's a high-tech problem doesn't mean it needs a high-tech solution. Although prison guards might get a sense of satisfaction actively watching for drones, then commanding a Phalanx to take it out, it's unnecessary and profligate.
Landfill tends to not be compacted as well as regular soil. Consequently it tends to liquefy more easily during earthquakes, leading to uneven settling and destruction of homes built on top. Nearly all the homes which collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake were in the Marina district which was built on landfill (albeit mostly from dredging the harbor). (They were also 3-4 stories, which happens to have a resonance frequency matching that of most earthquakes.)
Smell is not an issue. The landfill is typically covered with several layers of barrier several feet thick, including watertight plastic sheeting.. Drainage holes are left along the sides to capture and treat excess water which manages to seep in when it rains, while methane recapture piping extracts gases which build up due to biological decomposition for resale. A friend's house is built on landfill and he never would've known it if I hadn't remembered the location as being a landfill from back when I was in high school.
You can build on it, but the buildings have to be built much more sturdily than if built on regular soil, and you're still screwed if the ground settles unevenly causing the home's foundation to break. Usually the land is used for non-structural purposes, like a park.
The system will cost between $20,000 and $25,000, compared to conventional systems priced as high as $60,000.
Note they're comparing to conventional systems "priced as high as $60,000." In other words it's a useless marketing comparison designed to trick you into thinking the alternative is expensive by comparing an average price to the highest price you'll ever see.
So to heat/cool a German-sized home would require about 65% the size system, which translates into $13k-$16k. Which at the current exchange rate is about 11.5k-14k Euros. Nearly identical to the prices you've quoted. The heat pump in your link for earth systems is cheaper than for air or water. Typically, the earth systems are most expensive because of the additional digging which is needed to bury the water loops. Air systems simply vent to the air (a backwards air conditioner), while in water systems you just drop the loops into the bottom of a pond or lake. I suspect the prices you're quoting don't include installation, which is a huge part of the cost.
The point of airport security isn't really to thwart terrorists. It's to convince people that flying is safe, so that they'll fly instead of drive to their destination. You see, cars are much more dangerous than planes, and car accidents kill far more people than terrorists do. So a terrorist incident aboard an airliner kills more Americans by convincing them to drive instead of fly on their next trip, than it directly kills aboard the airliner. (9/11 was the exception, since the planes were used to attack another target. But as UA93 demonstrated, that's not going to happen again.)
So the point of airport security is to convince people that the government is doing something about terrorists, and that it's safe to fly. Hence the term "security theater". Actually doing something about terrorists is less important than convincing people that something is being done and assuaging their fears about flying. Because the public's fear about flying and terrorists is irrational and completely out of proportion to the actual risk, a well-meaning lie ends up being better for society than the truth.
Unfortunately, a lot of the people in the TSA don't get this. They take their jobs way too seriously, making air travel a hassle. This convinces people to drive instead of fly, and a good number of them end up dying in car accidents. Basically, if there are too many intrusive TSA procedures and rules, the TSA can wind up indirectly killing more people than terrorists.
If a member site detects their bandwidth is being throttled by an ISP, they send out a notice and all members of the consortium throttle their bandwidth to the ISP until the notice is revoked.
Targeted throttling by an ISP works because the customer only sees one site being slow, and incorrectly blames the site, instead of their ISP. But if they see a bunch of sites (including Google and Facebook) are also slow, they will properly blame the ISP as the cause of the problem.
Tit for tat is surprisingly effective at fostering cooperation in otherwise competitive environments.
Problem is there's no law saying "Police must allow the public to photograph/video them, under penalty of..." If a police officer wrongfully arrests you for recording, he can later simply say "oops, I didn't know," drop the charges, and not face any penalties. Very different from when you're caught speeding and you say "but I didn't see that speed limit sign." The law says you're subject to a fine for violating it, so you still have to pay the fine even if you didn't know.
It's like what Rambus did when they joined JEDEC (a standard-setting consortium of memory manufacturers). The JEDEC rules said members couldn't patent any ideas being discussed between them. Rambus patented SDRAM and DDR anyway, then sued the memory manufacturers for violating "their" patents. The trials found that Rambus had acted in bad faith and violated the JEDEC rules. Unfortunately those rules didn't include penalties for when a member was in violation - mainly financial penalties and being forced to give up patents obtained in violation of the rules. Consequently, the only thing JEDEC could do was kick Rambus out. The patents were still valid (the USPTO was operating under first to file back then, not first to invent). And Rambus was successfully able to extort licensing fees from all the memory manufacturers for something they themselves had invented and that Rambus had stolen.
I'm not even sure establishing a Constitutional right to photograph/video police helps, unless you can establish a pattern of violation. Otherwise, all it's good for is forcing them to drop charges.
Fitbit didn't do it with Pebble. Pebble's management spun it that way to try to shift blame away from themselves - making it sound like Fitbit was the one eliminating Pebble's jobs. Fitbit simply bought Pebble's IP, nothing more.
The drop in oil prices has everything to do with the current political mess in Venezuela. When oil prices went up over $100/bbl, they used the extra revenue to increase social services. When oil prices went back down to $40/bbl, they refused to cut back on those social services. Instead, the government started printing more money to pay for those services (effectively stealing from its citizens' savings). That started a massive inflationary spiral which destroyed any semblance of stability in their economy.
The government's attempt to fix it by freezing the exchange rate of the Bolivar (because they don't believe in market forces - that's why you see the exchange rate graph decrease in a stair-step) just led to more economic chaos as Venezuelan companies doing import/export were no longer able to get anyone to take their laughably mis-priced money. Thus their non-oil foreign trade mostly dried up as well. The bickering about the best way to solve this situation (hint: cut back on outlays for social services to match actual government revenue) is what's led to the current political mess.
This is the playbook of what's going to happen to Middle Eastern countries which built most of their wealth on oil. Most of them are using their oil revenue to fund social services to keep the masses content while the ruling class (usually a family) does whatever the hell they want. When their oil revenue dries up, they're going to be forced to make a difficult choice between continuing those social services and suffering Venezuela's fate, or cutting them to preserve economic stability but then having to face the full wrath of the rioting masses for the first time in decades. (Note that some Middle Eastern countries have little to no oil revenue - e.g. Jordan.)
Read up on a little history. The chaos in the modern Middle East stems from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the first World War. The European victors carved up its territory into colonies along the modern borders we see today, with little to no regard for the cultural, religious, and socio-political boundaries of the indigenous people. Culturally, it would've made more sense to divide it into Turkey, Kurdistan, and Arabia, and maybe a few other countries to reflect local Sunni/Shia enclaves.
That's why you have Iraq trying to get Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Arabs trying to stay in the same room long enough without killing each other to form something resembling a "national" government. There is no socio-political reason for "Iraq" to exist as a country - it's borders are an artificial construct created by some ignorant Europeans drawing lines on a map for land whose people they knew next to nothing about. The U.S. and Soviet Union may have played off this chaos, but they didn't cause it. Europe did.
The NHTSA tests were made by a bunch of people sitting in an office thinking up what might be a good way to simulate vehicle crashes to test their safety.
The IIHS tests are made by the folks who have to pay out money for insurance claims, and are designed to weed out failure modes they are seeing in actual crashes which led them to pay out more than they were expecting. They made the driver's side overlap tests specifically because they saw it as a weakness with the NHTSA tests. The NHTSA test only covers impacts directly from the front and the side. Yet they were seeing a lot of claims from impacts where cars didn't hit head-on and the intrusion thus bypassed most or all the crash-resistance designed to satisfy the NHTSA test.
Driver drifts slightly over the double yellow line and hits a car in the oncoming lane.
Driver veers off the road and hits something (concrete, building, etc) at an angle driver's side first.
Those are the scenarios that the IIHS test is trying to replicate. Passing the "small" version of the overlap test successfully is important because if the car can't, it may actually be better for the driver to let a greater portion of the car's front hit the oncoming vehicle/obstacle, rather than to try to avoid it and only receive a glancing blow. As the size of the impact area shrinks, the stresses on the section receiving the impact increases because there's less material absorbing the same crash energy. So the crash-resistance should be concentrated mostly along the sides, tapering off as you move inwards (perhaps increasing again towards the center). That is what this test is encouraging car designers to do. A car could be designed to let its left or right side completely shear off in a collision which misses the center of the front bumper, and still be completely NHTSA-compliant.
The vast majority of people I know only use Word, with a large segment using Word + Excel. Yet the smallest version of Office you can get bundles (i.e. forces you to pay for) Powerpoint and OneNote to get those two.
Companies release their products as bundles all the time. If Google had been leveraging their search dominance to Android dominance, I could sorta understand this. But they're not - they're doing it the other way around. If you want the Play Store, you have to install the Google suite of Android apps which includes the Google search bar. Anyone who is already a user of Google search can continue to use it in a Google-free version of Android like Cyanogenmod in a browser, just like they do on the desktop. Google's version of Android is basically AOSP + their bundle.
The second charge doesn't even make sense. The EU is pretty much telling Google "you would have been better off if you hadn't released Android as open source." Way to destroy any incentive for any company to ever use or release anything as open source again. In the future companies will only release the absolute minimum source code as required by licensing, preferably not a fully functioning product (like AOSP) so no regulatory agency can ever blame them for a derivative product's failure.
The third charge has merit if true. No kickbacks putting a finger on the scales of the market's behavior.
simply don't get a choice and have to pay whatever the local government-granted monopoly wants
FTFY.
The solution is already within our power - get your local government to stop granting these stupid monopolies. For whatever reason, that is the choice we made - instead of letting the market sort this out with competition, we decided it would be better to let elected government officials do it through regulation. And they chose/were bribed to create monopolies via regulation which are causing all these problems. We can
Pressure our elected officials to change the regulations,
or vote the bastards out and replace them with new politicians who won't grant monopolies,
or decide that regulating this was a bad idea in the first place because there's no accounting for the stupidity of politicians, and restore the free market and let competition fix it.
Why are anti-semitic remarks bad? Because it makes Jews fearful for their safety or even their lives.
If you fight fire with fire and try to coerce anti-semites into stopping by making them fearful, you're essentially validating their methodology of putting fear into the hearts of Jews.
Remember, the goal here isn't a world without Jews fearful of anti-semites. It's a world where nobody has to be fearful regardless of their race, gender, preferences, or beliefs (political, religious, operating system, etc). Shaming anti-semites (or people who are anti-anything) into compliance doesn't get you to that goal. It just pushes the fear onto a different group (anti-semites), who then sees your choice to make them fearful as moral vindication that it's ok for them to make others (e.g. Jews) fearful. And the problem comes full circle. Only now instead of just one side using fear tactics, both sides are. Congratulations - you've increased the amount of fear in the world, not decreased it.
The reason it's called the moral high ground is because it's easy to fall off it. And that's what CNN did - fell off.
My fear is that the move towards mild hybrids will de-emphasize the importance of good traffic management in cities (e.g. synchronized lights to reduce the number of red lights you'll hit). Most of the fuel savings for hybrids comes in city driving, where they can recoup about 1/3 of the kinetic energy whenever the car brakes. So they decrease the fuel wasted from poor traffic management.
The problem with focusing solely on improving MPG is that it ignores other external losses. Adopting hybrids but ignoring traffic management means the cars will save fuel, but people's time will still be wasted needlessly at pointless red lights. Near my house there's a trio of lights which for some baffling reason are timed so if you get caught by the first red light, the next two lights are guaranteed to be red when you reach them. It can take well over 3 minutes to travel approximately 1000 feet, and the entire area is a parking lot during rush hour even though there's no backup leading to or away from it. In another spot, a light gives a 20 second green to the exit from a small shopping center parking lot every single cycle (light is red in the other three directions). I've driven past it every day for 2 years, and I've only seen someone exiting that shopping center three times, yet everyone has to wait 20 seconds every cycle as if there were cars exiting it all the time. Its green light badly needs to be regulated by a vehicle sensor.
It's also bad manners to just hit reply without actually reading the email you were just sent. Pretty much every email I've received from noreply@ includes in the body of the email a different email address you should reply to if you need to contact customer service. noreply@ is companies' version of brown M&Ms - it filters out people who just hit reply without actually reading to see if the answer to their question is in the email they're replying to.
I used to help at an English school in Korea, which also put together travel packages for the teachers and students to visit the U.S. This was back in the days before the automatic 90-day travel visa for holders of S. Korean passports.
The children, males, and older (married) Korean women had no problem getting travel visas. But we had a high percentage of rejections for young females. Our theory was that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service thinks young, unmarried women want to visit the U.S. in hopes of finding a husband, and obtaining U.S. citizenship that way. So it gives them a higher bar to hurdle if they apply for a tourist visa.
Motorcycles and scooters often lack or have less emissions controls than cars and trucks. And in a place like Vietnam, I suspect many of them use two-stroke engines instead of four-stroke. Two-strokes generate more power per engine weight, but they mix incoming fuel and exhaust gases thus generating more pollution.
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Good luck getting the government to try to fix this - they're the ones which made it possible. Visa/Mastercard lobbied for and got laws passed which made it illegal for merchants to add a surcharge if you pay with a credit card, to help them recoup the credit card processing fee. (That's why you see some places advertising a cash discount - it's a loophole in the law.)
There would've been a lot more downward pressure on the 2% processing fee if merchants had been allowed to directly pass the fee on to customers. People would've preferred to pay with cash until credit card companies were able to lower the cost to something more reasonable, like a half or quarter percent. Card networks which had higher fees (e.g. Amex) would've had a tougher time than card networks with lower fees (e.g. Discover). But thanks to (corrupt) government regulation, competition to lower processing prices was eliminated, and we're all saddled with what's effectively a 2% sales tax to a private company. Even if you're paying with cash, you're paying the tax as the cash purchases basically subsidize the merchants fees for credit card purchases (since you pay the same amount for cash or credit in most stores).
And no the fee is not for protection against fraud. The merchant pays for fraud, not the credit card company. When you spot an unauthorized charge on you bill and request a chargeback, the card processing company issues a notice to the merchant asking for proof the purchase was valid. Usually this is the signature on the credit card receipt, but for online or automated transactions this can be things like the billing address or phone number (that's why gas station pumps ask you for your zip code). If the signature or other information the merchant submits doesn't match, the transaction is determined to be fraudulent, and the processing company simply deducts the amount of the charge from the merchant's payment. The merchant is out the money and the merchandise. The only expenses the card companies have to pay for are infrastructure, equipment, and staff. With the modern Internet and computers, this is probably on the order of pennies per transaction.
The paper defines the period as 1900-2015. TFA lists the causes as "habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently climate disruption." Attributing it to climate change denial exclusively is a gross mischaracterization.
To me, those are glorified tic-tac-toe programs. They're not "thinking" about how to win at the game, they are simply exhaustively searching the solution space to find moves whose branches give them the best chance of winning. Tic-tac-toe always ends up a tie with semi-competent players because its within the capability of humans to see the entire solution space and avoid moves which result in a loss. Computers are simply able to search a much larger solution space in the same amount of time as a human.
Humans don't play chess and go like that. The solution space in those games is too massive for them to thoroughly search, so they have to resort to a different strategy. They learn patterns and trends from repeatedly playing the game. Then they develop algorithms and heuristics based on those patterns. When they play a new game, they try to determine which pattern the current game board best approximates, and apply the appropriate algorithm to decide what their next move would be. Program a computer to learn how to play like that - without searching the solution space - then I will be impressed. e.g. What's the best chess program you can write while limiting it to, say, a thousand iterative loops for each move?
It depends on what you're learning. For most things, forcing yourself to write it down as you're listening to it reinforces what you've just heard. Your brain has to parse the sentence, rephrase it as shorthand, then repeat that shorthand phrase to itself as it guides your hand into writing it down. That instant triplicate review of the lecture material is much better for remembering and learning than just listening. On more complex abstract topics though, the act of taking notes can distract you from concentrating on and understanding what the lecturer is saying. Likewise, on really simple topics (stuff where everything said in the lecture is "obvious" immediately after it's said), having pre-printed notes can save you from boredom. Though in that case I usually skipped the lecture, read through the notes in 1/3 to 1/4 the time I would've spent at the lecture, and did fine on the tests.
This is why I always preferred professors who wrote and drew with chalk as they lectured - it forces them to pace themselves giving you time to either write notes, or think about and understand what they were saying. In lectures by professors who used Powerpoint slides, sometimes they'd skim over something so quickly you'd miss it and be forced to stop the lecture to ask it be repeated, or make a note to review it again after. You'd spend the rest of the class trying to remember what follows without really understanding it, so you could attempt to put the pieces together into a comprehensive whole when you reviewed your notes and the slides in your room after class (and good luck if it was the first lecture in a day packed with classes).
1. Installing fiber to these rural areas would be stupidly expensive.
2. There's no need to rely on those companies to prevent telecos from screwing us over - we already have that power. Telecos and cable companies don't have a natural monopoly. They have a government-granted monopoly. Your local municipal government entered into a contract with a teleco/cable company which gave them a monopoly. To get rid of it, all you need to do is convince your local government to change the deal and allow competition. If only there were a way for citizens to influence what their government does...
Maybe they're making typos in the artists' names.
By your reasoning, the trick Enron did (where they repeatedly "sold" an item back and forth between a subsidiary to pad their revenue) was legitimate.
The important thing isn't the money spent. It's the value obtained from spending that money. I spend $5 on a hammer and use it to fix something that would've cost me $20 if I hired someone, then I gained $20 of productivity for the $5 purchase, for a net gain of $15. My economic productivity increased by $15. It's the productivity increase which is important, which is why the Enron trick doesn't work (no productivity was increased since they were just passing it back and forth).
In the case of failed businesses, $x was spent but less than $x of productivity was generated. The true loss is the difference between these two, so is less than $x. But it's still a loss.
Put slightly differently, $1.48 billion is an amount. Economic activity is a rate. Yes that $1.48 billion is still out there in different hands. But the potential for $1.48 billion of economic activity every 6 months from these businesses is now gone. (Not that this should concern anyone. $1.48 billion is less than 0.01% of U.S. GDP. Some losses are necessary when exploring the solution space of viable business activity, and 0.01% is vanishingly tiny. Bad ideas fold. The money gets re-spent on new ideas, most of which hopefully turn out to be good ideas.)
They sell bird nets for keeping birds out (or in) to cover things like fish farms to prevent birds from eating all the fish. They're relatively inexpensive and I'm sure you could get them in a finer mesh if you wanted (so drones can't drop stabbing implements, though I suspect prisoners can already make a shiv with stuff they find in the prison).
Just because it's a high-tech problem doesn't mean it needs a high-tech solution. Although prison guards might get a sense of satisfaction actively watching for drones, then commanding a Phalanx to take it out, it's unnecessary and profligate.
Landfill tends to not be compacted as well as regular soil. Consequently it tends to liquefy more easily during earthquakes, leading to uneven settling and destruction of homes built on top. Nearly all the homes which collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake were in the Marina district which was built on landfill (albeit mostly from dredging the harbor). (They were also 3-4 stories, which happens to have a resonance frequency matching that of most earthquakes.)
Smell is not an issue. The landfill is typically covered with several layers of barrier several feet thick, including watertight plastic sheeting.. Drainage holes are left along the sides to capture and treat excess water which manages to seep in when it rains, while methane recapture piping extracts gases which build up due to biological decomposition for resale. A friend's house is built on landfill and he never would've known it if I hadn't remembered the location as being a landfill from back when I was in high school.
You can build on it, but the buildings have to be built much more sturdily than if built on regular soil, and you're still screwed if the ground settles unevenly causing the home's foundation to break. Usually the land is used for non-structural purposes, like a park.
Note they're comparing to conventional systems "priced as high as $60,000." In other words it's a useless marketing comparison designed to trick you into thinking the alternative is expensive by comparing an average price to the highest price you'll ever see.
The $20k-$25k is for a typical U.S. home which is nearly 2700 square feet (250 m^2). Average home size in Germany is about 160 square meters (~1700 square feet).
So to heat/cool a German-sized home would require about 65% the size system, which translates into $13k-$16k. Which at the current exchange rate is about 11.5k-14k Euros. Nearly identical to the prices you've quoted. The heat pump in your link for earth systems is cheaper than for air or water. Typically, the earth systems are most expensive because of the additional digging which is needed to bury the water loops. Air systems simply vent to the air (a backwards air conditioner), while in water systems you just drop the loops into the bottom of a pond or lake. I suspect the prices you're quoting don't include installation, which is a huge part of the cost.
The point of airport security isn't really to thwart terrorists. It's to convince people that flying is safe, so that they'll fly instead of drive to their destination. You see, cars are much more dangerous than planes, and car accidents kill far more people than terrorists do. So a terrorist incident aboard an airliner kills more Americans by convincing them to drive instead of fly on their next trip, than it directly kills aboard the airliner. (9/11 was the exception, since the planes were used to attack another target. But as UA93 demonstrated, that's not going to happen again.)
So the point of airport security is to convince people that the government is doing something about terrorists, and that it's safe to fly. Hence the term "security theater". Actually doing something about terrorists is less important than convincing people that something is being done and assuaging their fears about flying. Because the public's fear about flying and terrorists is irrational and completely out of proportion to the actual risk, a well-meaning lie ends up being better for society than the truth.
Unfortunately, a lot of the people in the TSA don't get this. They take their jobs way too seriously, making air travel a hassle. This convinces people to drive instead of fly, and a good number of them end up dying in car accidents. Basically, if there are too many intrusive TSA procedures and rules, the TSA can wind up indirectly killing more people than terrorists.
If a member site detects their bandwidth is being throttled by an ISP, they send out a notice and all members of the consortium throttle their bandwidth to the ISP until the notice is revoked.
Targeted throttling by an ISP works because the customer only sees one site being slow, and incorrectly blames the site, instead of their ISP. But if they see a bunch of sites (including Google and Facebook) are also slow, they will properly blame the ISP as the cause of the problem.
Tit for tat is surprisingly effective at fostering cooperation in otherwise competitive environments.
Problem is there's no law saying "Police must allow the public to photograph/video them, under penalty of..." If a police officer wrongfully arrests you for recording, he can later simply say "oops, I didn't know," drop the charges, and not face any penalties. Very different from when you're caught speeding and you say "but I didn't see that speed limit sign." The law says you're subject to a fine for violating it, so you still have to pay the fine even if you didn't know.
It's like what Rambus did when they joined JEDEC (a standard-setting consortium of memory manufacturers). The JEDEC rules said members couldn't patent any ideas being discussed between them. Rambus patented SDRAM and DDR anyway, then sued the memory manufacturers for violating "their" patents. The trials found that Rambus had acted in bad faith and violated the JEDEC rules. Unfortunately those rules didn't include penalties for when a member was in violation - mainly financial penalties and being forced to give up patents obtained in violation of the rules. Consequently, the only thing JEDEC could do was kick Rambus out. The patents were still valid (the USPTO was operating under first to file back then, not first to invent). And Rambus was successfully able to extort licensing fees from all the memory manufacturers for something they themselves had invented and that Rambus had stolen.
I'm not even sure establishing a Constitutional right to photograph/video police helps, unless you can establish a pattern of violation. Otherwise, all it's good for is forcing them to drop charges.
Fitbit didn't do it with Pebble. Pebble's management spun it that way to try to shift blame away from themselves - making it sound like Fitbit was the one eliminating Pebble's jobs. Fitbit simply bought Pebble's IP, nothing more.
The drop in oil prices has everything to do with the current political mess in Venezuela. When oil prices went up over $100/bbl, they used the extra revenue to increase social services. When oil prices went back down to $40/bbl, they refused to cut back on those social services. Instead, the government started printing more money to pay for those services (effectively stealing from its citizens' savings). That started a massive inflationary spiral which destroyed any semblance of stability in their economy.
The government's attempt to fix it by freezing the exchange rate of the Bolivar (because they don't believe in market forces - that's why you see the exchange rate graph decrease in a stair-step) just led to more economic chaos as Venezuelan companies doing import/export were no longer able to get anyone to take their laughably mis-priced money. Thus their non-oil foreign trade mostly dried up as well. The bickering about the best way to solve this situation (hint: cut back on outlays for social services to match actual government revenue) is what's led to the current political mess.
This is the playbook of what's going to happen to Middle Eastern countries which built most of their wealth on oil. Most of them are using their oil revenue to fund social services to keep the masses content while the ruling class (usually a family) does whatever the hell they want. When their oil revenue dries up, they're going to be forced to make a difficult choice between continuing those social services and suffering Venezuela's fate, or cutting them to preserve economic stability but then having to face the full wrath of the rioting masses for the first time in decades. (Note that some Middle Eastern countries have little to no oil revenue - e.g. Jordan.)
Corrected link to an ethnic map of the Middle East.
Read up on a little history. The chaos in the modern Middle East stems from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the first World War. The European victors carved up its territory into colonies along the modern borders we see today, with little to no regard for the cultural, religious, and socio-political boundaries of the indigenous people. Culturally, it would've made more sense to divide it into Turkey, Kurdistan, and Arabia, and maybe a few other countries to reflect local Sunni/Shia enclaves.
That's why you have Iraq trying to get Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Arabs trying to stay in the same room long enough without killing each other to form something resembling a "national" government. There is no socio-political reason for "Iraq" to exist as a country - it's borders are an artificial construct created by some ignorant Europeans drawing lines on a map for land whose people they knew next to nothing about. The U.S. and Soviet Union may have played off this chaos, but they didn't cause it. Europe did.
The IIHS tests are made by the folks who have to pay out money for insurance claims, and are designed to weed out failure modes they are seeing in actual crashes which led them to pay out more than they were expecting. They made the driver's side overlap tests specifically because they saw it as a weakness with the NHTSA tests. The NHTSA test only covers impacts directly from the front and the side. Yet they were seeing a lot of claims from impacts where cars didn't hit head-on and the intrusion thus bypassed most or all the crash-resistance designed to satisfy the NHTSA test.
Those are the scenarios that the IIHS test is trying to replicate. Passing the "small" version of the overlap test successfully is important because if the car can't, it may actually be better for the driver to let a greater portion of the car's front hit the oncoming vehicle/obstacle, rather than to try to avoid it and only receive a glancing blow. As the size of the impact area shrinks, the stresses on the section receiving the impact increases because there's less material absorbing the same crash energy. So the crash-resistance should be concentrated mostly along the sides, tapering off as you move inwards (perhaps increasing again towards the center). That is what this test is encouraging car designers to do. A car could be designed to let its left or right side completely shear off in a collision which misses the center of the front bumper, and still be completely NHTSA-compliant.
The vast majority of people I know only use Word, with a large segment using Word + Excel. Yet the smallest version of Office you can get bundles (i.e. forces you to pay for) Powerpoint and OneNote to get those two.
Companies release their products as bundles all the time. If Google had been leveraging their search dominance to Android dominance, I could sorta understand this. But they're not - they're doing it the other way around. If you want the Play Store, you have to install the Google suite of Android apps which includes the Google search bar. Anyone who is already a user of Google search can continue to use it in a Google-free version of Android like Cyanogenmod in a browser, just like they do on the desktop. Google's version of Android is basically AOSP + their bundle.
The second charge doesn't even make sense. The EU is pretty much telling Google "you would have been better off if you hadn't released Android as open source." Way to destroy any incentive for any company to ever use or release anything as open source again. In the future companies will only release the absolute minimum source code as required by licensing, preferably not a fully functioning product (like AOSP) so no regulatory agency can ever blame them for a derivative product's failure.
The third charge has merit if true. No kickbacks putting a finger on the scales of the market's behavior.
FTFY.
The solution is already within our power - get your local government to stop granting these stupid monopolies. For whatever reason, that is the choice we made - instead of letting the market sort this out with competition, we decided it would be better to let elected government officials do it through regulation. And they chose/were bribed to create monopolies via regulation which are causing all these problems. We can
Why are anti-semitic remarks bad? Because it makes Jews fearful for their safety or even their lives.
If you fight fire with fire and try to coerce anti-semites into stopping by making them fearful, you're essentially validating their methodology of putting fear into the hearts of Jews.
Remember, the goal here isn't a world without Jews fearful of anti-semites. It's a world where nobody has to be fearful regardless of their race, gender, preferences, or beliefs (political, religious, operating system, etc). Shaming anti-semites (or people who are anti-anything) into compliance doesn't get you to that goal. It just pushes the fear onto a different group (anti-semites), who then sees your choice to make them fearful as moral vindication that it's ok for them to make others (e.g. Jews) fearful. And the problem comes full circle. Only now instead of just one side using fear tactics, both sides are. Congratulations - you've increased the amount of fear in the world, not decreased it.
The reason it's called the moral high ground is because it's easy to fall off it. And that's what CNN did - fell off.
My fear is that the move towards mild hybrids will de-emphasize the importance of good traffic management in cities (e.g. synchronized lights to reduce the number of red lights you'll hit). Most of the fuel savings for hybrids comes in city driving, where they can recoup about 1/3 of the kinetic energy whenever the car brakes. So they decrease the fuel wasted from poor traffic management.
The problem with focusing solely on improving MPG is that it ignores other external losses. Adopting hybrids but ignoring traffic management means the cars will save fuel, but people's time will still be wasted needlessly at pointless red lights. Near my house there's a trio of lights which for some baffling reason are timed so if you get caught by the first red light, the next two lights are guaranteed to be red when you reach them. It can take well over 3 minutes to travel approximately 1000 feet, and the entire area is a parking lot during rush hour even though there's no backup leading to or away from it. In another spot, a light gives a 20 second green to the exit from a small shopping center parking lot every single cycle (light is red in the other three directions). I've driven past it every day for 2 years, and I've only seen someone exiting that shopping center three times, yet everyone has to wait 20 seconds every cycle as if there were cars exiting it all the time. Its green light badly needs to be regulated by a vehicle sensor.
It's also bad manners to just hit reply without actually reading the email you were just sent. Pretty much every email I've received from noreply@ includes in the body of the email a different email address you should reply to if you need to contact customer service. noreply@ is companies' version of brown M&Ms - it filters out people who just hit reply without actually reading to see if the answer to their question is in the email they're replying to.
I used to help at an English school in Korea, which also put together travel packages for the teachers and students to visit the U.S. This was back in the days before the automatic 90-day travel visa for holders of S. Korean passports.
The children, males, and older (married) Korean women had no problem getting travel visas. But we had a high percentage of rejections for young females. Our theory was that the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service thinks young, unmarried women want to visit the U.S. in hopes of finding a husband, and obtaining U.S. citizenship that way. So it gives them a higher bar to hurdle if they apply for a tourist visa.
Motorcycles and scooters often lack or have less emissions controls than cars and trucks. And in a place like Vietnam, I suspect many of them use two-stroke engines instead of four-stroke. Two-strokes generate more power per engine weight, but they mix incoming fuel and exhaust gases thus generating more pollution.