U.S. military spending as a percent of GDP is actually only about 1.5x the world average. If you sort that list by percentage, the U.S. just barely makes the top 20 (it's #20).
If you factor in Japan's GDP (the U.S. is obligated to provide for Japan's defense per the terms of the peace treaties ending WWII), U.S. military spending is only 1.15x the world average.
The U.S. military budget is huge mainly because the U.S. economy is huge.
I live in a European country. I pay 25% sales tax, a 40% income tax and a monthly charge for my pension plan but that's not a tax to my mind, it's an investment. Additionally I pay tons of all kinds of fees every time I want to use a public service, my car is subject to fuel taxes and road taxes but I expect this 'taxing by a thousand tiny cuts' phenomenon also exists in the states so let's stick with the big taxes.
If you think about it, you'll realize how stupid this whole thing is. Regardless of the form of taxation, the net result is the same - money diverted from the productivity generator (employee, company) to the government. So why do we need so many taxes?
This would all be a whole lot simpler for everyone if we abolished all taxes except one, and diverted the same amount of money to the government via that single tax (if you want a progressive tax system, the income tax is the obvious one to keep). You could shrink the entire tax code down to a small booklet you could actually read and understand in a single evening. The tax collecting agency could be reduced to about 1/20th its size. You wouldn't need as many accountants to keep track of sales taxes or VATs throughout the manufacturing and retail chain. And we wouldn't be sitting here wondering exactly how much we pay in taxes because of having to add up all the nickle and diming (thousand cuts in places which don't have nickles and dimes).
The only additional taxes outside the main One Tax should be behavior-modifying taxes. e.g. Fuel taxes to encourage fuel conservation, property taxes to encourage effective use of land, sin taxes to discourage smoking, etc.
Just disable the Windows Update service. You'll have to re-enable it eventually to get security updates, but at least this way you can control when the updates occur. I've had to do that since Win 10 keeps installing "updated" video drivers which don't work on my laptop. Every month I enable updates long enough to get the newest security updates (along with everything else Microsoft forces on you), then disable it again and reinstall the "older" working video drivers.
FWIW, they did let you put off the Oct 2016 major update for as long as you wanted. It was treated much like the upgrade to Win 10 (in fact it used the same procedure - moving the previous system into Windows.old for 10 days* and allowing you to roll it back). Meaning you could end up with it automatically (and unwillingly) installed, but for the most part the customer was in control of it.
* Yes they reduced the roll-back period from 30 days to 10 days. Was a major PITA since some of my clients experiencing problems with it didn't realize they'd been forcibly upgraded, and by the time they notified me of problems it was past the 10 day window and we had to restore from a backup to revert the system.
Do you fully understand how biological intelligence works? No? Then by your own logic, you don't have faith in your own intellect. And the line of reasoning your brain just conjectured is not produced by "a robust system" and thus cannot be trusted.
This is the big mismatch I've noticed between how scientists and engineers think. Scientists refuse to believe something works unless they can understand it. Engineers just accept (take it on faith if you will) that there are things out there which work even if they don't understand why or how.
As for who's right, I'll just point out that classical mechanics and quantum physics still disagree on (among other things) the mass of an electron, and we still don't know for sure if the Laws of Thermodynamics are actual laws or if they can be violated. Hasn't stopped us from getting plenty of mileage out of them.
Read the fine print on your airline ticket purchase some time. It gives the airline the right to forcibly bump you from an overbooked flight (with compensation). I agree what United did was terrible from a PR standpoint. But it was the guy refusing to get off the plane who was in violation of the ticket contract between him and United. If he sues for being bumped, he's gonna lose. (If he sues for being injured, he might win, but my bet is he'll still lose since he was injured in the process of refusing to comply with a contract he agreed to.)
The market drives price optimization above anything else because that's what customers prioritize above anything else. If people didn't care about saving a few bucks on a plane seat ($5 * 130 pax = cost of an extra seat), airlines wouldn't need to overbook. But because they will buy from a different airline if the fare is $5 cheaper, airlines have to play the overbooking game to reduce the fare a tiny bit more.
Markets are like computers. They do exactly what people want. The problem you're citing comes about because of a mismatch between what people say they want, and their actual behavior. Not because of a problem with the market. Everyone says they want bigger seats, shorter lines, "free" checked bags, better food, no bumping, but their purchasing behavior clearly indicates they'd rather save a few more bucks than have those things. The media listens to what people say, not what they do. The market doesn't care what people say, only what they do.
Security theater is mandated (and run by) the government, not the airlines. Outrageous fees were another cost-cutting move - to reduce the fares for customers who didn't need to check in a bag, or didn't want the in-flight meal service. Cramped seats are yet another way to reduce fares for people who don't want to pay a little extra for larger seats (Economy+). Inadequate cleaning is also a consequence of reduced fares - by reducing the turn-around time to the absolute minimum, the airline can get more miles out of its equipment each day, reducing operating expenses thus allowing lower fares. It all boils down to customers prioritizing ticket prices above all else (and a disproportionate fear of terrorism fed by the media which runs terrorism stories because they catch more eyeballs thus leading to more advertising revenue).
The proper metaphor would be stealing a stolen credit card - most people honestly wouldn't care if a credit card thief had his stolen credit cards stolen in turn. Amazingly, the press has turned the Russian hacking thing into a story about the hacking, and have pretty much ignored what the hack revealed (e.g. Hillary being emailed debate questions in advance, making the televised debates a sham).
If a stowaway hiding the bowels of a ship points out the ship is sinking, do you fret over punishing the stowaway for being aboard illegally, or how he brought it to the attention of the first mate in order to try to make the captain look bad? Or do you prioritize fixing the sinking ship? That's the test of character those on the left are facing because of the hacking, and they're failing at it pretty miserably. When someone points out wrongdoing, you take steps to correct the wrong. You don't devote all your energy to punishing the person who pointed it out. That's what they tell us about whistleblowers anyway. I guess it doesn't apply when the shoe is on the other foot?
The only reason these "code cowboys" are of note is because nobody new wants to bother learning what they've learned. The only barrier to entry preventing some millenial from learning COBOL is the lack of consistent jobs maintaining COBOL code. If these cowboys die of old age, the demand for people who can fix/modify COBOL code would lead to a few young people learning it and being paid $100/hr. This isn't the Middle Ages, where craftsmen kept trade secrets which they passed on to their heirs only in whispers on their death bed. Pretty much everything about COBOL is publicized and public - you just have to be willing to learn it.
There's another factor you're failing to consider. While it'd be nice if we could spend years researching every topic before making a decision, frequently (and arguably the majority of the time) that is simply not an option. There's value in how quickly a decision can be made. Often, a mediocre quick decision can yield a better outcome than a well-researched, well thought-out decision which takes months or years to arrive at. This is why militaries organize themselves into ranks and chains of command - because in combat, the situation changes so quickly that if you spend hours or sometimes even minutes trying to completely understand the it, your conclusions will be obsolete by the time you reach them. You have to make a decision quickly based on the incomplete and imperfect information you have at that moment.
That's why people are attracted to charismatic and confident leaders - because their ability to make quick decisions frequently has value. And once a decision has been made you can only compare to a hypothetical (what if a different decision had been made?). And confidence is great at swaying people away from thinking the hypothetical is better than the reality.
You're actually using a classic coping mechanism for those not on the winning side of a decision - denigrating the decision maker by claiming this quick-decision process does not scale up at all. It scales up just fine. It's just that as you scale up, the number of decisions which need to be made increases. So even though the percentage of decisions which are better served by well thought-out research remains the same, the number of them also increases.
If we really want to progress as a species, we have to avoid falling for either extreme of this argument. Certain decisions are better made quickly, even if there's incomplete or imperfect information. Other decisions can wait and are better if made after careful and thorough research. Both methods have merit. The test of our intelligence is whether we recognize them and treat them appropriately. Or whether we'll blithely apply a one-size-fits-all decision-making strategy just because we happen to like or dislike charismatic people.
You wanna know why GM abandoned the EV1? They developed the EV1 because the California Air Resources Board (CARB) mandated that by 2000, a certain percentage of each auto manufacturer's sales had to be zero-emissions. If an automaker couldn't meet that requirement, either they'd have to buy credits from another automaker, or they'd be locked out of the lucrative California market.
GM built the EV1 (using a lead-acid battery). Ford and Chrysler bet on hydrogen fuel cells, which didn't pan out (still haven't). The Japanese automakers tinkered with EVs, but decided the technology was unfeasible at the time and focused instead on hybrids.
1999 came around and GM was the only company with a car which would meet CARB's emissions-free requirement the next year. GM had invested over a billion dollars developing the EV1, but they stood to make many times that in licensing fees from 2000 and on. Everything was looking rosy for them.
Then the whole thing collapsed. The other automakers convinced CARB that the zero-emissions requirement was technologically unfeasible with year 2000 technology. And that the best they could do at the time were hybrids, which used a battery to improve efficiency, but still got all their energy from the ICE. CARB agreed and rescinded the zero-emissions requirement, instead using a less-stringent low emissions vehicle and ultra-low emissions vehicle requirement (LEV and ULEV).
Basically, CARB pulled the rug out from under GM. They'd coerced GM into investing over a billion dollars in the technology, then on the eve of GM hitting paydirt, CARB changed the rules making it impossible for them to recoup their investment. This is why companies hate government regulations - because unlike real-world physics which remains constant, regulations change based on politicians' whims. You spend a billion dollars trying to comply with an upcoming regulation, then they suddenly change the regulation making all the money you spent irrelevant. CARB even had the unmitigated gall to ask GM to continue selling the EV1 after pulling this double-cross.
Do you understand now why GM recalled all the EV1s and had them destroyed? CARB was trying to get the benefits of the technology developed for the EV1, while denying GM the promised financial payout for developing the technology in the first place. GM wasn't playing that game. If they were going to take a billion dollar bath on the project, there was no way in hell they were going to let CARB derive any benefit from the whole shenanigan.
Tesla is no different. The only reason they made a profit for two quarters, and aren't even further in the red in the other quarters is because they're able to sell carbon credits to automakers who don't meet CARB's zero-emissions requirements. In other words, Tesla's "success" is an artificial regulatory construct. The only difference between Tesla and GM is that CARB stuck with the ZEV requirement this time. If they'd abandoned it at the last minute like they did with GM, you can bet the Musk would've given CARB the middle finger as well and abandoned Tesla.
Although I hadn't used it in years, the desktop environment was efficient and enjoyable to use. It wasn't like GNOME 3, where I can't figure out how the hell to do even simple tasks a lot of the time. The OS/2 UI was very intuitive and easy to work with.
OS/2 is based on IBM's Common User Access guidelines, which laid out standardized keyboard and mouse user interface inputs for various operations. It was developed based on years of research and human trials to figure out what did/didn't work. Unlike GNOME 3 which is seemingly based on whatever the programmer thought was cool and neat. Windows is based on CUA as well, although Microsoft has begun taking some liberties with it (or abandoning it almost entirely for their Metro stuff).
When it costs $2.5 billion to get FDA approval for a drug, and your potential market is a few thousand or tens of thousands of people, you have to price it that high just to recoup your costs.
The real problem is that we have buyers (insurance and government) who will pay that price regardless of whether the drug actually provides that much value to the patients. It's a noble sentiment to believe that every life is worth saving. But practically, when you try to do that you just end up burdening society with costs which give you a negative return on investment (you're throwing away money - people's productivity that they've sent in good faith to government and to insurance companies).
You don't have to dumb it down and say "virtual telescope". Call it what it is - an interferometer and make it a link so people who don't know the term can read about it and educate themselves.
It's only been 28 years since Tim Berners-Lee proposed a method of information storage and retrieval for exactly this purpose. His work was done in the wake of the Fleischmann-Pons Cold Fusion announcement in 1989, which saw scientists sending faxes of faxes of faxes of the draft journal paper to each other so they could try to replicate their experiment. He figured there had to be a better way. His proposal grew into the World Wide Web, as seemingly everyone adopted and embraced it except scientists publishing papers - the very people Berners-Lee had in mind when he created it. In the intervening 28 years, we've even seen a new company whose sole purpose is to provide people with real-time spot-rankings of citation links created under that proposal, grow into one of the most powerful in the world - Google.
I'm sure last week it was the destabilization of Iraq that was the cause of ISIS.
While the second Iraq war provided the opportunity for ISIS/ISIL to form, they didn't become big players until two main events. The Arab Spring in 2011 caused unrest in the region; notably in Syria, which devolved into civil war giving them a window of opportunity to spread their influence (both by persuasion and by force). And the capture of massive amounts of U.S. military weapons that had been given to Iraqi troops. The Iraqis fled from ISIL's advance leaving the weapons, rather than stood to fight because U.S. troops had been withdrawn from Iraq to keep Obama's campaign promise. I think most would agree now that that withdrawal was premature, and the Iraqis could've used several more years of training and support before being left to fend for themselves.
There's plenty of blame to go around. Yeah Bush dropped the cake on the floor. But Obama tried to shove it under the carpet to meet a self-imposed deadline, instead of truly cleaning up the mess. Of course the ants were going to find it. And the situation with Syria being caught in a tug-of-war between the U.S. and Russia dates back to the Cold War, and arguably all the way back to the end of WWII and the formation of Israel.
If you really dig down into the root cause of instability in this portion of the Middle East, I'd blame the Europeans for carving up the region after they defeated the Ottoman Empire in the first World War. They drew those borders with little to no consideration for the indigenous cultural, lingual, and political boundaries. As a result, you have disparate peoples forced together into the same "country" trying to form a unified government. And (in the most extreme case) the Kurds - 28 million people spread across as minorities in four countries without a country to call their own.
Managers rise to the level of their incompetence. That is, people are promoted for performing well, up until they attain a position at which they are no longer competent. At which point they stop being promoted, and persist in that position doing their jobs incompetently in perpetuity.
What you're willfully ignoring here is that the efficiency is not all that matters. A plane has a certain payload capacity, and the fuel/battery load counts against that. Your 10x greater efficiency (actually it's closer to 2x) does no good if the energy density of batteries is so low that you now have zero remaining payload for passengers and cargo. And you get most of the 2x worse efficiency back by the fuel being burned (and thus no longer having to carry its weight) throughout the flight.
Anyhow, TFA describes hybrid electric jets. All the energy the electric motors use will come from burning fuel. So the overall system-wide efficiency of the electric motor will by definition always be worse than using the fuel for thrust. At least under nominal conditions. That's the catch which makes hybrid-electric jet engines viable - you can't always operate the engines at nominal (highest efficiency) thrust. If you tune the engines for optimal efficiency at cruise, they end up being inefficient at low thrust. So the idea is to run the engines at cruise power a bit longer to charge some batteries, then you turn the engines off and use an electric motor powered by the batteries to provide the minimal thrust needed during descent.
TFA openly admits the technology is not yet there to make a fully electric jet viable. Which was AC's point.
Actually that really is the problem. The only solution that Democrats see is more regulation.
All that needs to happen is to eliminate the government-granted monopolies in cable and DSL Internet service. Either allow multiple cable and phone companies to install lines in government-controlled easements; or award the line installation and maintenance to a single company and allow multiple cable/phone companies to run their service over the single line (this will probably be the optimal solution going forward as fiber can supplant copper). Once you have competition, you don't need net neutrality anymore. Any ISP who intentionally degrades Netflix to try to make their own video streaming service seem better will simply lose all their Netflix-using customers. Preferential network prioritization only works because customers have no alternate ISP to flee to, and that's only the case because of government meddling in the market (government-granted monopolies).
Democrats like the current monopoly arrangement because it means multiple companies have to bid (bribe) to win the monopoly, and afterwards they only have to deal with a single point of contact if they wish to alter the deal. Ideally, we'd get rid of both net neutrality and government-granted monopolies. There should be a single set of wires to every home in the country, and every homeowner could pick whether they wanted Internet service from Comcast, Verizon, Spectrum, Cox, AT&T, or dozens of other smaller carriers.
Norway has an overabundance of hydroelectric power. Hydro is by far the cheapest renewable (cheaper than coal). And, provided you have enough of it to meet or exceed your consumption, it's available on-demand, unlike wind or solar. That is, it can cover both base load and peaking load.
Unfortunately, most countries don't have such an abundance of the almost perfect renewable energy source. So they'd end up burning coal or natural gas to provide base load electricity at 40%-50% efficiency, transmitted to the ports at 98% efficiency, to charge batteries at the port at 85% efficiency, to charge batteries on the ship at 85% efficiency, for an overall cycle efficiency of 32%. At that efficiency, you might as well just keep burning diesel. Or they'd use wind at 2-3x the cost, or solar at 4-5x the cost, and it wouldn't be financially viable for ferry companies to switch from diesel to electric. (Electric trains work because they don't have to carry the electricity source with them. Ships and planes don't have that luxury.)
The whole point of making them undischargable via bankruptcy is so that lenders don't deny student loans to a student from a poor family with no or bad credit. Yes making them dischageable will force lenders to re-introduce risk analysis. And when they do that, those who the loans are intended to help the most (the poor) will be disproportionately denied loans.
The problem is the entire concept of "helping" students get a college education via loans. The colleges and universities simply raise the price of tuition in response to the greater amount of money the loans make available. Just like when we moved from single-income households to two-income households, it didn't double our standard of living. The cost of purchases whose price was demand-driven (primarily a house) simply increased to suck up the extra money.
Likewise, loans are a demand-driven subsidy. They shift the demand curve up by increasing the number of people who can afford to buy the product (in this case, education). This works in markets with commodity or near-commoditized products - the supply increases in response to meet the increased demand, leading to more availability at the same or only slightly higher price (and sometimes the improved efficiency from more competition leads to lower prices). But education doesn't work like that - certain schools have far more applicants than spots for students. So the loans simply allow them to crank up their tuition to cull down the number of applicants.
What's needed here is a supply-driven subsidy. Take the money that would've gone into loans, grants, and scholarships, and put it directly into funding state universities with capped tuitions. That increases the supply of education, shifting the supply curve to the right. Prices will drop and more students will be able to afford college. Yes this won't help poorer students wishing to attend an expensive private school. But we have to choose between equality for all but blowing the price of tuition through the roof, vs. some inequality but keeping tuitions affordable.
No. Historically, the Constitution does not apply outside U.S. territory. That's why Bush put a prison on Guantanamo Bay - it wasn't U.S. soil, it was Cuban soil being leased to the U.S. (though eventually Boumediene v Bush found that due to the U.S. having complete control of the area, the U.S. had de facto soverignty as if it were U.S. soil). So when you're at a U.S. border checkpoint awaiting entry into the U.S., the Constitution does not apply, at least not to non-citzens.
While it has generally been understood that the Constitution travels with American citizens whenever they are abroad, their right to sue to enforce those rights depends upon whether Congress or the courts have created a specific legal right to file a lawsuit.
The point of this bill is to create that right for U.S. citizens to sue for unconstitutional search and seizure at border entry points.
Ford. Price to Earnings ratio of 9.95, Earnings per share of 1.15. Revenue of $151.8 billion in 2016.
Tesla. Price to Earnings ratio of -63.79 (they lost money). Earnings per share of -4.68 (Tesla lost 4x more per share than Ford made). Revenue of $7 billion in 2016.
Basically, for Tesla to be priced where it is (assuming a "reasonable" P/E ratio of 10), you're betting that its earnings are going to reach $16 billion/yr. If you go by the average 5% profit margin for major automakers, this means you expect Tesla to become a $320 billion/yr revenue company. Or the third biggest company in the world after Walmart and China's national power company.
Good luck with that bet. The Chevy Bolt has set a really high bar for the Tesla Model 3 to meet. If you're one of those people expecting the Model 3 to give you Model S quality and features at a Bolt price, you're going to be in for a major disappointment.
If this design turns out to be superior to what you can get from NVIDIA and ATI
This is almost certainly aimed at improving improving the GPU in their iOS devices. Desktop (and laptop) GPUs are still an order of magnitude faster than GPUs in mobile devices (and consume an order of magnitude more power). I seriously doubt Apple would be able to leapfrog Nvidia and AMD in GPUs. (Except maybe power efficiency - problem being almost everyone else already beats them at power efficiency. That's why you rarely see Nvidia Terga SoCs in mobile devices outside of dedicated gaming handhelds like the Nvidia Shield and Nintendo Switch.)
This isn't like the A6 SoC Apple designed - where everyone else was licensing and using the same ARM v7 design for their SoCs, and all Apple had to do was tweak it to make the A6 perform better than other ARM SoCs. There's no standard modern GPU hardware architecture for them to license - they'd have to start from scratch.
Also, they've been neglecting their Mac line for years now. Many Macs aren't getting serious refreshes for 2-3 years, while competitors refresh every year. When I bought my current laptop with an Nvidia 970m, the top-end Macbook Pro still only had a Nvidia 750m as an option (and was still priced $500 higher for it). The Macbooks are temperature constrained because their designer-centric "form over function" mentality prevents them from cutting ventilation holes into the bottom of the chassis, severely limiting the power of the GPU they can put in.
Contrary to what those on the left want to believe, Republicans actually have more diversity and difference of opinion than the Democrats. If you browse through the historical voting record of the House and Senate and sort by "votes with party", you'll find it's the Democrats who vote more as a bloc, and Republicans who are more likely to cross the aisle. As we saw with the failure of the Republicans to repeal/replace Obamacare, having the House, Senate, and Presidency controlled by Republicans doesn't mean they'll be able to pass whatever they want as easily as when Democrats are controlling those three branches.
Anyhow, while immigration law is made by Congress, immigration enforcement is controlled by the President. People can apply for as many H1-Bs as they want. If Trump signs an executive order instructing INS not to grant any H1-Bs, none of those people will get H1-Bs. So it remains to be seen what Trump will do about H1-Bs. That is how the balance of power works between those two branches. The Legislative can pass whatever laws they want, but the Executive gets to choose how to enforce (or not enforce) those laws.
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U.S. military spending as a percent of GDP is actually only about 1.5x the world average. If you sort that list by percentage, the U.S. just barely makes the top 20 (it's #20).
If you factor in Japan's GDP (the U.S. is obligated to provide for Japan's defense per the terms of the peace treaties ending WWII), U.S. military spending is only 1.15x the world average.
The U.S. military budget is huge mainly because the U.S. economy is huge.
If you think about it, you'll realize how stupid this whole thing is. Regardless of the form of taxation, the net result is the same - money diverted from the productivity generator (employee, company) to the government. So why do we need so many taxes?
This would all be a whole lot simpler for everyone if we abolished all taxes except one, and diverted the same amount of money to the government via that single tax (if you want a progressive tax system, the income tax is the obvious one to keep). You could shrink the entire tax code down to a small booklet you could actually read and understand in a single evening. The tax collecting agency could be reduced to about 1/20th its size. You wouldn't need as many accountants to keep track of sales taxes or VATs throughout the manufacturing and retail chain. And we wouldn't be sitting here wondering exactly how much we pay in taxes because of having to add up all the nickle and diming (thousand cuts in places which don't have nickles and dimes).
The only additional taxes outside the main One Tax should be behavior-modifying taxes. e.g. Fuel taxes to encourage fuel conservation, property taxes to encourage effective use of land, sin taxes to discourage smoking, etc.
Just disable the Windows Update service. You'll have to re-enable it eventually to get security updates, but at least this way you can control when the updates occur. I've had to do that since Win 10 keeps installing "updated" video drivers which don't work on my laptop. Every month I enable updates long enough to get the newest security updates (along with everything else Microsoft forces on you), then disable it again and reinstall the "older" working video drivers.
FWIW, they did let you put off the Oct 2016 major update for as long as you wanted. It was treated much like the upgrade to Win 10 (in fact it used the same procedure - moving the previous system into Windows.old for 10 days* and allowing you to roll it back). Meaning you could end up with it automatically (and unwillingly) installed, but for the most part the customer was in control of it.
* Yes they reduced the roll-back period from 30 days to 10 days. Was a major PITA since some of my clients experiencing problems with it didn't realize they'd been forcibly upgraded, and by the time they notified me of problems it was past the 10 day window and we had to restore from a backup to revert the system.
Do you fully understand how biological intelligence works? No? Then by your own logic, you don't have faith in your own intellect. And the line of reasoning your brain just conjectured is not produced by "a robust system" and thus cannot be trusted.
This is the big mismatch I've noticed between how scientists and engineers think. Scientists refuse to believe something works unless they can understand it. Engineers just accept (take it on faith if you will) that there are things out there which work even if they don't understand why or how.
As for who's right, I'll just point out that classical mechanics and quantum physics still disagree on (among other things) the mass of an electron, and we still don't know for sure if the Laws of Thermodynamics are actual laws or if they can be violated. Hasn't stopped us from getting plenty of mileage out of them.
Read the fine print on your airline ticket purchase some time. It gives the airline the right to forcibly bump you from an overbooked flight (with compensation). I agree what United did was terrible from a PR standpoint. But it was the guy refusing to get off the plane who was in violation of the ticket contract between him and United. If he sues for being bumped, he's gonna lose. (If he sues for being injured, he might win, but my bet is he'll still lose since he was injured in the process of refusing to comply with a contract he agreed to.)
The market drives price optimization above anything else because that's what customers prioritize above anything else. If people didn't care about saving a few bucks on a plane seat ($5 * 130 pax = cost of an extra seat), airlines wouldn't need to overbook. But because they will buy from a different airline if the fare is $5 cheaper, airlines have to play the overbooking game to reduce the fare a tiny bit more.
Markets are like computers. They do exactly what people want. The problem you're citing comes about because of a mismatch between what people say they want, and their actual behavior. Not because of a problem with the market. Everyone says they want bigger seats, shorter lines, "free" checked bags, better food, no bumping, but their purchasing behavior clearly indicates they'd rather save a few more bucks than have those things. The media listens to what people say, not what they do. The market doesn't care what people say, only what they do.
Security theater is mandated (and run by) the government, not the airlines. Outrageous fees were another cost-cutting move - to reduce the fares for customers who didn't need to check in a bag, or didn't want the in-flight meal service. Cramped seats are yet another way to reduce fares for people who don't want to pay a little extra for larger seats (Economy+). Inadequate cleaning is also a consequence of reduced fares - by reducing the turn-around time to the absolute minimum, the airline can get more miles out of its equipment each day, reducing operating expenses thus allowing lower fares. It all boils down to customers prioritizing ticket prices above all else (and a disproportionate fear of terrorism fed by the media which runs terrorism stories because they catch more eyeballs thus leading to more advertising revenue).
The proper metaphor would be stealing a stolen credit card - most people honestly wouldn't care if a credit card thief had his stolen credit cards stolen in turn. Amazingly, the press has turned the Russian hacking thing into a story about the hacking, and have pretty much ignored what the hack revealed (e.g. Hillary being emailed debate questions in advance, making the televised debates a sham).
If a stowaway hiding the bowels of a ship points out the ship is sinking, do you fret over punishing the stowaway for being aboard illegally, or how he brought it to the attention of the first mate in order to try to make the captain look bad? Or do you prioritize fixing the sinking ship? That's the test of character those on the left are facing because of the hacking, and they're failing at it pretty miserably. When someone points out wrongdoing, you take steps to correct the wrong. You don't devote all your energy to punishing the person who pointed it out. That's what they tell us about whistleblowers anyway. I guess it doesn't apply when the shoe is on the other foot?
The only reason these "code cowboys" are of note is because nobody new wants to bother learning what they've learned. The only barrier to entry preventing some millenial from learning COBOL is the lack of consistent jobs maintaining COBOL code. If these cowboys die of old age, the demand for people who can fix/modify COBOL code would lead to a few young people learning it and being paid $100/hr. This isn't the Middle Ages, where craftsmen kept trade secrets which they passed on to their heirs only in whispers on their death bed. Pretty much everything about COBOL is publicized and public - you just have to be willing to learn it.
There's another factor you're failing to consider. While it'd be nice if we could spend years researching every topic before making a decision, frequently (and arguably the majority of the time) that is simply not an option. There's value in how quickly a decision can be made. Often, a mediocre quick decision can yield a better outcome than a well-researched, well thought-out decision which takes months or years to arrive at. This is why militaries organize themselves into ranks and chains of command - because in combat, the situation changes so quickly that if you spend hours or sometimes even minutes trying to completely understand the it, your conclusions will be obsolete by the time you reach them. You have to make a decision quickly based on the incomplete and imperfect information you have at that moment.
That's why people are attracted to charismatic and confident leaders - because their ability to make quick decisions frequently has value. And once a decision has been made you can only compare to a hypothetical (what if a different decision had been made?). And confidence is great at swaying people away from thinking the hypothetical is better than the reality.
You're actually using a classic coping mechanism for those not on the winning side of a decision - denigrating the decision maker by claiming this quick-decision process does not scale up at all. It scales up just fine. It's just that as you scale up, the number of decisions which need to be made increases. So even though the percentage of decisions which are better served by well thought-out research remains the same, the number of them also increases.
If we really want to progress as a species, we have to avoid falling for either extreme of this argument. Certain decisions are better made quickly, even if there's incomplete or imperfect information. Other decisions can wait and are better if made after careful and thorough research. Both methods have merit. The test of our intelligence is whether we recognize them and treat them appropriately. Or whether we'll blithely apply a one-size-fits-all decision-making strategy just because we happen to like or dislike charismatic people.
That's my experience too. But Windows Enterprise customers can turn off the stupid forced updates.
You wanna know why GM abandoned the EV1? They developed the EV1 because the California Air Resources Board (CARB) mandated that by 2000, a certain percentage of each auto manufacturer's sales had to be zero-emissions. If an automaker couldn't meet that requirement, either they'd have to buy credits from another automaker, or they'd be locked out of the lucrative California market.
GM built the EV1 (using a lead-acid battery). Ford and Chrysler bet on hydrogen fuel cells, which didn't pan out (still haven't). The Japanese automakers tinkered with EVs, but decided the technology was unfeasible at the time and focused instead on hybrids.
1999 came around and GM was the only company with a car which would meet CARB's emissions-free requirement the next year. GM had invested over a billion dollars developing the EV1, but they stood to make many times that in licensing fees from 2000 and on. Everything was looking rosy for them.
Then the whole thing collapsed. The other automakers convinced CARB that the zero-emissions requirement was technologically unfeasible with year 2000 technology. And that the best they could do at the time were hybrids, which used a battery to improve efficiency, but still got all their energy from the ICE. CARB agreed and rescinded the zero-emissions requirement, instead using a less-stringent low emissions vehicle and ultra-low emissions vehicle requirement (LEV and ULEV).
Basically, CARB pulled the rug out from under GM. They'd coerced GM into investing over a billion dollars in the technology, then on the eve of GM hitting paydirt, CARB changed the rules making it impossible for them to recoup their investment. This is why companies hate government regulations - because unlike real-world physics which remains constant, regulations change based on politicians' whims. You spend a billion dollars trying to comply with an upcoming regulation, then they suddenly change the regulation making all the money you spent irrelevant. CARB even had the unmitigated gall to ask GM to continue selling the EV1 after pulling this double-cross.
Do you understand now why GM recalled all the EV1s and had them destroyed? CARB was trying to get the benefits of the technology developed for the EV1, while denying GM the promised financial payout for developing the technology in the first place. GM wasn't playing that game. If they were going to take a billion dollar bath on the project, there was no way in hell they were going to let CARB derive any benefit from the whole shenanigan.
Tesla is no different. The only reason they made a profit for two quarters, and aren't even further in the red in the other quarters is because they're able to sell carbon credits to automakers who don't meet CARB's zero-emissions requirements. In other words, Tesla's "success" is an artificial regulatory construct. The only difference between Tesla and GM is that CARB stuck with the ZEV requirement this time. If they'd abandoned it at the last minute like they did with GM, you can bet the Musk would've given CARB the middle finger as well and abandoned Tesla.
OS/2 is based on IBM's Common User Access guidelines, which laid out standardized keyboard and mouse user interface inputs for various operations. It was developed based on years of research and human trials to figure out what did/didn't work. Unlike GNOME 3 which is seemingly based on whatever the programmer thought was cool and neat. Windows is based on CUA as well, although Microsoft has begun taking some liberties with it (or abandoning it almost entirely for their Metro stuff).
When it costs $2.5 billion to get FDA approval for a drug, and your potential market is a few thousand or tens of thousands of people, you have to price it that high just to recoup your costs.
The real problem is that we have buyers (insurance and government) who will pay that price regardless of whether the drug actually provides that much value to the patients. It's a noble sentiment to believe that every life is worth saving. But practically, when you try to do that you just end up burdening society with costs which give you a negative return on investment (you're throwing away money - people's productivity that they've sent in good faith to government and to insurance companies).
You don't have to dumb it down and say "virtual telescope". Call it what it is - an interferometer and make it a link so people who don't know the term can read about it and educate themselves.
It's only been 28 years since Tim Berners-Lee proposed a method of information storage and retrieval for exactly this purpose. His work was done in the wake of the Fleischmann-Pons Cold Fusion announcement in 1989, which saw scientists sending faxes of faxes of faxes of the draft journal paper to each other so they could try to replicate their experiment. He figured there had to be a better way. His proposal grew into the World Wide Web, as seemingly everyone adopted and embraced it except scientists publishing papers - the very people Berners-Lee had in mind when he created it. In the intervening 28 years, we've even seen a new company whose sole purpose is to provide people with real-time spot-rankings of citation links created under that proposal, grow into one of the most powerful in the world - Google.
While the second Iraq war provided the opportunity for ISIS/ISIL to form, they didn't become big players until two main events. The Arab Spring in 2011 caused unrest in the region; notably in Syria, which devolved into civil war giving them a window of opportunity to spread their influence (both by persuasion and by force). And the capture of massive amounts of U.S. military weapons that had been given to Iraqi troops. The Iraqis fled from ISIL's advance leaving the weapons, rather than stood to fight because U.S. troops had been withdrawn from Iraq to keep Obama's campaign promise. I think most would agree now that that withdrawal was premature, and the Iraqis could've used several more years of training and support before being left to fend for themselves.
There's plenty of blame to go around. Yeah Bush dropped the cake on the floor. But Obama tried to shove it under the carpet to meet a self-imposed deadline, instead of truly cleaning up the mess. Of course the ants were going to find it. And the situation with Syria being caught in a tug-of-war between the U.S. and Russia dates back to the Cold War, and arguably all the way back to the end of WWII and the formation of Israel.
If you really dig down into the root cause of instability in this portion of the Middle East, I'd blame the Europeans for carving up the region after they defeated the Ottoman Empire in the first World War. They drew those borders with little to no consideration for the indigenous cultural, lingual, and political boundaries. As a result, you have disparate peoples forced together into the same "country" trying to form a unified government. And (in the most extreme case) the Kurds - 28 million people spread across as minorities in four countries without a country to call their own.
Managers rise to the level of their incompetence. That is, people are promoted for performing well, up until they attain a position at which they are no longer competent. At which point they stop being promoted, and persist in that position doing their jobs incompetently in perpetuity.
What you're willfully ignoring here is that the efficiency is not all that matters. A plane has a certain payload capacity, and the fuel/battery load counts against that. Your 10x greater efficiency (actually it's closer to 2x) does no good if the energy density of batteries is so low that you now have zero remaining payload for passengers and cargo. And you get most of the 2x worse efficiency back by the fuel being burned (and thus no longer having to carry its weight) throughout the flight.
Anyhow, TFA describes hybrid electric jets. All the energy the electric motors use will come from burning fuel. So the overall system-wide efficiency of the electric motor will by definition always be worse than using the fuel for thrust. At least under nominal conditions. That's the catch which makes hybrid-electric jet engines viable - you can't always operate the engines at nominal (highest efficiency) thrust. If you tune the engines for optimal efficiency at cruise, they end up being inefficient at low thrust. So the idea is to run the engines at cruise power a bit longer to charge some batteries, then you turn the engines off and use an electric motor powered by the batteries to provide the minimal thrust needed during descent.
TFA openly admits the technology is not yet there to make a fully electric jet viable. Which was AC's point.
Actually that really is the problem. The only solution that Democrats see is more regulation.
All that needs to happen is to eliminate the government-granted monopolies in cable and DSL Internet service. Either allow multiple cable and phone companies to install lines in government-controlled easements; or award the line installation and maintenance to a single company and allow multiple cable/phone companies to run their service over the single line (this will probably be the optimal solution going forward as fiber can supplant copper). Once you have competition, you don't need net neutrality anymore. Any ISP who intentionally degrades Netflix to try to make their own video streaming service seem better will simply lose all their Netflix-using customers. Preferential network prioritization only works because customers have no alternate ISP to flee to, and that's only the case because of government meddling in the market (government-granted monopolies).
Democrats like the current monopoly arrangement because it means multiple companies have to bid (bribe) to win the monopoly, and afterwards they only have to deal with a single point of contact if they wish to alter the deal. Ideally, we'd get rid of both net neutrality and government-granted monopolies. There should be a single set of wires to every home in the country, and every homeowner could pick whether they wanted Internet service from Comcast, Verizon, Spectrum, Cox, AT&T, or dozens of other smaller carriers.
Norway has an overabundance of hydroelectric power. Hydro is by far the cheapest renewable (cheaper than coal). And, provided you have enough of it to meet or exceed your consumption, it's available on-demand, unlike wind or solar. That is, it can cover both base load and peaking load.
Unfortunately, most countries don't have such an abundance of the almost perfect renewable energy source. So they'd end up burning coal or natural gas to provide base load electricity at 40%-50% efficiency, transmitted to the ports at 98% efficiency, to charge batteries at the port at 85% efficiency, to charge batteries on the ship at 85% efficiency, for an overall cycle efficiency of 32%. At that efficiency, you might as well just keep burning diesel. Or they'd use wind at 2-3x the cost, or solar at 4-5x the cost, and it wouldn't be financially viable for ferry companies to switch from diesel to electric. (Electric trains work because they don't have to carry the electricity source with them. Ships and planes don't have that luxury.)
The whole point of making them undischargable via bankruptcy is so that lenders don't deny student loans to a student from a poor family with no or bad credit. Yes making them dischageable will force lenders to re-introduce risk analysis. And when they do that, those who the loans are intended to help the most (the poor) will be disproportionately denied loans.
The problem is the entire concept of "helping" students get a college education via loans. The colleges and universities simply raise the price of tuition in response to the greater amount of money the loans make available. Just like when we moved from single-income households to two-income households, it didn't double our standard of living. The cost of purchases whose price was demand-driven (primarily a house) simply increased to suck up the extra money.
Likewise, loans are a demand-driven subsidy. They shift the demand curve up by increasing the number of people who can afford to buy the product (in this case, education). This works in markets with commodity or near-commoditized products - the supply increases in response to meet the increased demand, leading to more availability at the same or only slightly higher price (and sometimes the improved efficiency from more competition leads to lower prices). But education doesn't work like that - certain schools have far more applicants than spots for students. So the loans simply allow them to crank up their tuition to cull down the number of applicants.
What's needed here is a supply-driven subsidy. Take the money that would've gone into loans, grants, and scholarships, and put it directly into funding state universities with capped tuitions. That increases the supply of education, shifting the supply curve to the right. Prices will drop and more students will be able to afford college. Yes this won't help poorer students wishing to attend an expensive private school. But we have to choose between equality for all but blowing the price of tuition through the roof, vs. some inequality but keeping tuitions affordable.
The point of this bill is to create that right for U.S. citizens to sue for unconstitutional search and seizure at border entry points.
Ford. Price to Earnings ratio of 9.95, Earnings per share of 1.15. Revenue of $151.8 billion in 2016.
Tesla. Price to Earnings ratio of -63.79 (they lost money). Earnings per share of -4.68 (Tesla lost 4x more per share than Ford made). Revenue of $7 billion in 2016.
Basically, for Tesla to be priced where it is (assuming a "reasonable" P/E ratio of 10), you're betting that its earnings are going to reach $16 billion/yr. If you go by the average 5% profit margin for major automakers, this means you expect Tesla to become a $320 billion/yr revenue company. Or the third biggest company in the world after Walmart and China's national power company.
Good luck with that bet. The Chevy Bolt has set a really high bar for the Tesla Model 3 to meet. If you're one of those people expecting the Model 3 to give you Model S quality and features at a Bolt price, you're going to be in for a major disappointment.
This is almost certainly aimed at improving improving the GPU in their iOS devices. Desktop (and laptop) GPUs are still an order of magnitude faster than GPUs in mobile devices (and consume an order of magnitude more power). I seriously doubt Apple would be able to leapfrog Nvidia and AMD in GPUs. (Except maybe power efficiency - problem being almost everyone else already beats them at power efficiency. That's why you rarely see Nvidia Terga SoCs in mobile devices outside of dedicated gaming handhelds like the Nvidia Shield and Nintendo Switch.)
This isn't like the A6 SoC Apple designed - where everyone else was licensing and using the same ARM v7 design for their SoCs, and all Apple had to do was tweak it to make the A6 perform better than other ARM SoCs. There's no standard modern GPU hardware architecture for them to license - they'd have to start from scratch.
Also, they've been neglecting their Mac line for years now. Many Macs aren't getting serious refreshes for 2-3 years, while competitors refresh every year. When I bought my current laptop with an Nvidia 970m, the top-end Macbook Pro still only had a Nvidia 750m as an option (and was still priced $500 higher for it). The Macbooks are temperature constrained because their designer-centric "form over function" mentality prevents them from cutting ventilation holes into the bottom of the chassis, severely limiting the power of the GPU they can put in.
Contrary to what those on the left want to believe, Republicans actually have more diversity and difference of opinion than the Democrats. If you browse through the historical voting record of the House and Senate and sort by "votes with party", you'll find it's the Democrats who vote more as a bloc, and Republicans who are more likely to cross the aisle. As we saw with the failure of the Republicans to repeal/replace Obamacare, having the House, Senate, and Presidency controlled by Republicans doesn't mean they'll be able to pass whatever they want as easily as when Democrats are controlling those three branches.
Anyhow, while immigration law is made by Congress, immigration enforcement is controlled by the President. People can apply for as many H1-Bs as they want. If Trump signs an executive order instructing INS not to grant any H1-Bs, none of those people will get H1-Bs. So it remains to be seen what Trump will do about H1-Bs. That is how the balance of power works between those two branches. The Legislative can pass whatever laws they want, but the Executive gets to choose how to enforce (or not enforce) those laws.