Mitt Romney is one of the smartest presidential candidates this nation has ever seen, as well as a fundamentally decent human being. People tore him to bits over offhand comments and talked endlessly about his unforgivable sin of having - 30 years prior - taken his dog on vacation. (One New York Times columnist published no less than 86 columns talking about that incident, which seems like obsessive enough behavior to qualify for institutionalization.)
Donald Trump is one of the least intelligent presidential candidates this nation has ever seen. Blatant lies, boasts about sexual assault, and so on only served to feed his campaign. At least a third of the country is still really excited about having this "stable genius" lead them even though he clearly struggles to understand any of the issues a President faces.
Look at Churchill's speeches or FDR's fireside chats. Now look at Donald Trump's twitter stream (MY EYES! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!). This is the evolution of civil discourse in just one lifetime.
I get that sometimes someone who speaks blunt falsehoods rather than complex truths can be seen as a "man of the people." I don't think this has to be so. I don't think this has been true in all cultures and at all times through human history. I don't know how we can overcome the anti-intellectual pressures that have been building in this country for 70 years, the politicization of journalism and education, the degeneration of political discourse at all levels into dick jokes and cursing, and so on. But if we don't find some way to overcome it our civilization will collapse.
Every "take the device away after X time" will be a new battle of wills and of wits and a new opportunity for the child to take umbrage if the parent succeeds.
If the boundaries are clearly set before the device is given, and if as many of those boundaries as possible can be enforced consistently without the parent's repeated intervention, it reduces household friction and allows family interactions to focus on more positive things.
Plus, helicopter parenting is harmful, and there ought to be plenty of times when the parents aren't hovering over the child ready to take away the device after precisely X time elapses.
For most things - including almost everything invented before the Internet except, perhaps, deadly weapons - you should be able to trust that unsupervised kids, if they've been taught well, will uphold reasonable boundaries most of the time in their parents' absence, and that when they violate those boundaries they will usually learn valuable but not-too-damaging lessons about why the boundaries were there in the first place.
But the variety of damaging things and deranged people kids can encounter over the Internet is too broad and deep to leave it at that. Also, the ways that social media and app designers have focused on "slot machine psychology" etc to retain eyeballs for ads &c by fostering addiction are too much to expect kids to avoid on their own. Even just the "source of endless novelty without creativity or effort" aspect is dangerous for kids to have continual access to. So there are good reasons to have boundaries set when the parent isn't there to enforce them.
Gee, why not go on quadruple savings time then? You can have the sun out until 1AM!!
Or you could simply admit that DST is just a silly attempt at self-deception to get ourselves to do things earlier. If we want to do things in the sun after work, we need to go to work early and get out of work early. Lying to ourselves about the time is one of the most ridiculous ways imaginable to try to do this.
12 noon should be left as close as possible to true solar noon.
In future years, the idea that the government mandated that people lie to themselves about the time will seem as bizarre as the strangest medieval legal customs seem to us today.
Star Trek Into Plot Holes was not a good movie by any definition. It was miserable. Utter trash. No, it was not enjoyable.
On the other hand, saying "well this may be a Good Movie by the standards of the non-trekkie unwashed masses, but it just doesn't live up to the high standards and tradition of excellence that is Star Trek" is rather strange. General consensus is that at least half of the pre-Abrams Star Trek movies are dreadful too. I don't know that any of them were quite as bad as Into Plot Holes, but then again, there are several of the old movies which thanks to sound advice I've avoided seeing.
Unions helped somewhat with shifting employment in those directions, but increasing competition between firms for workers and increasing worker mobility played a large role in making those changes too -- and these, not unions, are the reason the benefits persisted.
From the early Industrial Revolution until the New Deal, labor monopsonies (only one purchaser of labor) were common. Barriers to changing employers were high in the day of "company towns," horse and buggy travel, limited access to education, etc. Because these companies had market power as monopsonies, it sometimes made sense to form a labor monopoly - a union - to counter that market power and achieve better outcomes for workers.
But at the same time, antitrust law, new entrants into markets, the spread of cars, better access to education and mass communication, and many other factors led to the demise of the "company town" and the advent of a time when workers had more realistic options. Employers had to compete for workers via wages and benefits. Unions became less important.
These days, there are few situations where an employer has sufficient labor market power to worry about, and in most of those situations, antitrust rather than unions should be the measure to turn to. (Exceptions include certain kinds of government workers; we don't want to have ten competing police agencies in a town.)
Most places in the US the gas tax, registration fees, etc cover only something like half the cost of road construction and maintenance. So someone who does not own a car already pays almost half as much for the road as an average driver, through unrelated taxes such as sales or income.
Studies show that road wear is roughly proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, which would mean ten thousand cyclists cause less road wear than one car and a hundred million cyclists cause less road wear than one semi. Cyclists contribute less to congestion and roadblock (the social cost of which is huge), pose much less risk to those around them than do cars, and emit none of the pollutants that damage local air quality. So a cyclist's fair share of road costs would be vastly lower than what they're actually paying.
Considering how much more money is spent on roads than on bike paths (at least 100x), bike path costs don't change that equation.
So the cyclists are already unfairly subsidizing the drivers, not the other way around. Perhaps instead of punishing a socially useful behavior while asking them to subsidize others' driving, Oregon should be raising gas taxes by about $2/gallon to pay for the roads - as experts from Greg Mankiw on the right to Steven Chu on the left have said the whole country should do - and instituting a $15 credit on bicycle purchases.
"Space is a crummy place to live. Really awful. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly inhospitable it is. I mean, you may think things are pretty bad in Detroit, but that's just peanuts to space."
People keep talking about how we need a backup plan for Earth because we're going to mess it up. I think they're failing to realize that nuclear winter, Chicxulub-like asteroid impacts, ice ages, runaway desertification, a thousand other unlikely extreme scenarios, or just about any physically possible conjunction of any of these would all leave Earth a more resource-rich and hospitable environment than any other mass in the Solar System.
With improvements in rover and probe technology I don't think there's any rational justification for sending meat into space until we have vastly improved materials science, propulsion, and launch systems - the kind we might have, say, five hundred years down the road. If somebody wants a huge engineering challenge just to send people where nobody's been, try creating undersea colonies or something instead.
I don't think people emphasize enough the extent to which net neutrality is largely an antitrust measure.
When broadband is a 2 or 3 player oligopoly there are plenty of incentives for deals that aren't in the interests of consumers or web innovation. These are much like the exclusive dealing agreements which were one of the classic motivations for antitrust law in the first place.
If the market were competitive -- if customers had access to more than a dozen different decent service providers, as many did in the dial-up era of shared infrastructure-- then net neutrality would rarely be a concern. If a service provider tried throttling traffic and making back room deals with content providers to unthrottle them, content providers wouldn't listen to them and customers would migrate away.
We haven't taken antitrust law seriously enough as a nation for the last 30 years. We need to be more aware of the problems of noncompetitive markets and the times when, despite its limitations, government antitrust intervention can improve matters.
It often seems that denigrating mild hybrids is one of the few things fans of EVs and PHEVs and their detractors agree on. All the drawbacks and none of the benefits, fanboys on both sides often claim. But the facts simply don't back them up.
If we can actually modernize vehicle electrical systems and move beyond legacy cruft, an automaker would be nuts not to use mild hybrid tech throughout its fleet. It really is a lot simpler than a full parallel hybrid, and a lot less of a total overhaul of the automotive world than depending on a series hybrid or range extender and huge batteries. Getting sizeable benefits in everyone's hands will do more for the environment than getting EVs in the hands of a select few.
While it's true that most trips driven in the US could easily fit in any EV's range, it's also true that ~85% of trips are taken with only one occupant, yet single-seat cars haven't taken off. People will continue to buy cars for the uses they think they might have, not just their primary everyday use, and plenty of people will think of backcountry or cross-country trips they might take. It will take revolutionary changes before those kinds of trips are as easy in an EV as with gas.
The 40nm process the Pi is fabbed on is now nine years old.
The Pi 3 is very thermally limited. Overheating and power supply related problems are very common. It's also only a ~30% improvement over the Pi2 while the Pi 2 was more like a 700% improvement over the original Pi. All of this would be very different if the Pi 3 had been fabbed at 28nm.
Yes, it doesn't make sense to try to push the Pi onto a leading edge process like 10nm, where per-transistor costs are going up rather than down and FinFET design gets more complicated. But a move to e.g. 20nm planar would make a huge difference and be enough to keep performance close to other ARM competitors for many years.
The trouble is that Broadcom has largely moved on and it's going to be difficult to get a die shrink (or any improvements to VideoCore) to happen. The Pi 4 will be a long time in coming.
If machine learning led to moderation systems accepting even the most offensive ideas when expressed in civil language while rejecting even mainstream ideas expressed in uncivil ways, it would be worth celebrating.
It's possible to have worthwhile dialogue with people whose ideas and morals are tremendously repugnant to us - people who think slavery is justified, people who advocate the violent and bloody overthrow of democracies and the installation of communist dictators, etc. It's also possible, and increasingly common in today's society, for people to get to where they can't have any dialogue with people whose ideas differ from theirs, even if they only differ in ways outsiders would, like Swift among the big-endian and little-endian Lilliputians, see as trivial.
People on the left shout profanities and death threats at their opponents and then stick their fingers in their ears when their opponents speak because hearing a contrary idea will "trigger" them. It's distressing to find that Congresscritters like Gillibrand are more interested in throwing f-bombs around, like undersized eleven-year-olds desperately trying to show off how tough they are, than they are in attempting to do the work of governing; this, rather than maturity and reason, are what we expect from representatives these days. The same problems are manifest on the right, in different forms. Last year I went to a Republican Party event where the (very popular among the general public) Republican governor could hardly speak over the insults, epithets, and boos far-right party delegates were hurling at him from the audience. This is not what free speech looks like; this is what the death of the exchange of ideas looks like.
Having open fora and a marketplace of ideas are important. These can only really perform their function if every idea, no matter how repugnant, can find some expression. They can only avoid devolving into endless rivers of excrement if every person in the forum, no matter how large a majority agree with their viewpoint, has restrictions on the form their expressions will take. Maybe there's some utility in letting those who want to wade through endless rivers of excrement have the freedom to do so somewhere, but that's not what free speech is about.
People often see norms of civility and the restraint of obscenity as diametrically opposed to the freedom of speech. But ultimately, meaningful freedom of speech really depends on the existence of settings that have such norms.
If this only works for bare FLAC, then this is still kinda nice.
But if it works for Ogg FLAC, then this is a watershed moment, because Apple has been dragging their feet on everything related to the Ogg container etc ever since iTunes and the iPod appeared, and even though Microsoft is adding VP9 etc support they too are still dragging their feet on Ogg.
Support for the Ogg container could signal willingness to start supporting other open formats. If Safari added Opus support it would be a real boon.
If consumer preferences for separation really are strong enough that those people really won't freely eat at an establishment that admits the minority, regardless of price, then yes, market forces aren't going to force them to eat together.
But the question isn't one of a single food source in any remotely realistic scenario. Rather, it's a question of the competitive environment. Other things being equal, businesses will be most profitable by choosing to cater to whichever of the two separate groups is otherwise underserved. If two of three restaurants cater only to the majority, a fourth will admit the minority. With no barriers to market entry, the proportion of sellers admitting the minority would always perfectly match the proportion of people willing to eat with the minority. Realistic entry costs will lead to an approximate match.
If consumer preferences for separation really are so strong - if people really do get that much utility out of being separate - one needs an argument other than just "segregation is always bad" to justify overriding them. I am personally willing to pay extra to eat in restaurants that don't admit people who are smoking, and some restaurants cater to that preference. There's nothing morally wrong with that.
In response to another of your comments, one certainly doesn't need to be an anarchist or even a libertarian to believe we should allow people more freedom of association. I think there are clearly cases where the government should be involved in providing public goods, dealing with externalities, and protecting common resources. But an unbounded and nationally concentrated power to override decisions of private association leads to tyranny.
What we think is a moral imperative is reducing discrimination on a systematic level.
Again, there's no argument presented for why this is even at all moral, much less morally required. As you admit, the method tried for "reducing it on a systematic level" in the relevant sense (the private sphere) comes down, eventually, to forcing individuals to jail at gunpoint for exercising their freedom of association.
When the barber declines to give me a haircut based on my eye color he has done me no favor but he has done me no wrong. That's true even if I live in a place where he's the only barber within a thousand miles. My desire to have "an opportunity for a good haircut" does not give me a right to force him to cut my hair or to force him out of business.
Your simplistic "history tells us and psychology supports" comes with no history and no psychological support. I'm not expecting a dissertation here, but systems like Jim Crow and apartheid or even medieval segregation of Jews had to be propped up by huge intrusive legal frameworks and constant enforcement of those laws to avoid natural erosion. When people have declined to associate with one another despite being free to do so and despite the natural incentives to do so, it's difficult to see why their value judgments should be overridden at gunpoint.
I happen to be of the opinions that Donald Trump is a sorry excuse for a human being, that Hispanic immigrants both legal and illegal have on the whole done vastly more good than harm, that the Muslim ban is both unconstitutional and entirely counterproductive, etc. But none of that has to do with private individuals' rights of association. Promoting interracial and intercultural understanding may be a just cause, but in the long run, a just cause is not served by unjust means. Attempts to repress objectionable opinions by trampling the rights of those who hold them tends to perpetuate those opinions.
The "mighty businessman" is an individual deciding what to do with his or her own time and labor. I have absolutely no right to force the barber to cut my hair contrary to his will. I have no right to have him jailed for declining to cut my hair. It's not that he's "more important," it's that it's his time and his effort. It doesn't matter whether any other barber feels differently. It doesn't matter if he's the only barber on the continent. I don't have any right to demand his services any more than I have a right to enslave him.
Totalitarian restrictions on buyers' freedom of association are possible, they just haven't come up as much. If I'm selling bananas and the barber makes a point of only buying bananas from people with blue eyes, I have no right to confiscate his money and give my bananas as compensation.
You've completely missed the point about governmentally instutionalized discrimination versus private choices. I have a right, as a brown-eyed citizen, to equal protection under the law - e.g. to have my vote count just as much as someone with blue eyes rather than 3/5 as much. That doesn't mean I have the right to demand that private individuals never act differently because of my eye color.
Why do people think that overriding people's preferential associations is somehow an intrinsic moral good, enough so that it's sufficient justification for using the threat of imprisonment to force submission?
In the absence of discrimination law, suppose one person wanted to open a hair salon which only does black women's hair and another person wants to open a barbershop only open to men with blue eyes. I think the former would be more likely to survive long term than the latter - a possibly useful specialization that could find a niche versus pointlessly restricting one's customer base and refusing good money- but I see no moral issue with either of them. I have brown eyes; if the barber declines to cut my hair, I fail to see how I have a right to demand his services. Even more so, I can't see why I should be able to have him forced out of his business or taken to jail at gunpoint for his refusal to stop cutting blue-eyed mens' hair. To give me such a power to bludgeon people with would be patently unjust.
Consider the famous homosexuality anti-discrimination cases, such as wedding photographers or bakers who didn't want to do expressive creative work explicitly endorsing something they objected to and thought was not really a marriage. In these cases, it seems obvious to me that anti-discrimination laws aren't rectifying an existing injustice, they're creating one. The customers in question could have easily found others willing to take their money and give them the same services; instead, they were able to use the law as a weapon to bludgeon others for their convictions and deprive them of their livelihoods.
Unless some other factor changes valuations, economic discrimination is an unstable situation - the demand curve your business sees is higher if you are open to all customers, so businesses have an incentive not to discriminate, and if they ignore those incentives, they'll likely face competitors that don't. So if it has no value it generally only persists if propped up by law. If people judge it to be of value, why should that judgment be overridden at gunpoint?
Discrimination in the 20th century South wasn't primarily a matter of individual choice. It was a matter of discriminatory public institutions and Jim Crow laws that mandated discrimination in the private sector. Suppose those were effectively eradicated (and e.g. education and law enforcement were totally nondiscriminatory) but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hadn't imposed anything on private businesses (or if Heart of Atlanta Motel had won its court case). Without unjust laws propping it up, I think most private business racial discrimination would have naturally faded away over the course of a couple decades. I also think some kind of more drastic short term action to hasten the process and start to make up for Jim Crow was desirable, but I am worried that the way we did it set us up for a permanent end to the freedom of association in the Western world.
A shocking new study from Rutgers shows that people are somewhat more likely to befriend or marry people of the same racial, regional, and socioeconomic background. "It's completely unacceptable to have this kind of discrimination in the 21st century," the highly paid academics said in a joint statement. "We urge Congress and the courts to end this now by creating an office of Equal Relationship Opportunity and imposing prohibitive fines for those whose friendships and significant romantic relationships do not meet today's standards of diversity. Individuals who are concerned about whether their existing friendships are diverse enough should discontinue those friendships and apply to the ERO for a government-approved, acceptably diverse list of friends."
Trying to have one body of law for people's work interactions and another for their private interactions may have worked in the 1960s but it won't work in the future.
Anti-discrimination laws have gotten out of hand; rather than rectifying injustices like those of the Jim Crow era pro-discrimination laws, they are now, like Jim Crow laws, expanding the unjust deprivation of individuals' freedom of association.
Not true. Gasoline expenditure as percent of total spending is remarkably constant across income levels.
Rich people may be more likely to drive a Prius than the poor, but they're also more likely to drive SUVs, sporty cars, etc. And the total impact on fuel economy of common maintenance problems that leave a car legal to drive (passes safety and emissions) will practically always be less than 10%, and the majority of that is tire inflation (free to fix) or alignment. (Many of the maintenance problems mechanics commonly tell you reduce your mileage are shown in studies to have very little real world impact.) Even in California, the actual fuel efficiency of cars driven by people below the poverty level was 89% as high as that of people earning six figures (p. 8).
Even if it were true that the costs of a gas tax fell disproportionately on the poor, many of the externalities associated with high fuel use (e.g. inner-city pollution and related health issues) do as well, ergo so do the benefits of the fuel tax. There are vastly more effective ways to help the poor than by encouraging everyone in the country to drive inefficient vehicles.
As for who is subsidizing who regarding road costs: road wear is roughly proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, and weight is very well correlated with fuel use, so drivers of efficient lightweight vehicles are already unfairly subsidizing heavy vehicles and would be doing so even more under a miles driven tax.
If only there were some option other than "make it illegal" or "do nothing"...
Some people get a large amount of utility out of vehicles that use a lot of fuel (e.g. people who need high towing capacity). An omniscient social planner would want to allow these people to pay for the environmental cost of their driving while discouraging others from using inefficient vehicles (and discourage unnecessary driving too). Is there anything that could accomplish these without mind control? Hmm, let's think about it.
Lo and behold, higher fuel taxes accomplish all of the above while still letting people make their own choices. Amazing!
Serious economists generally agree that our gas taxes are too low by $2 per gallon or more. (A prominent example is Greg Mankiw, Harvard prof and economic adviser to GWB and Romney, though, like all economic advisers, too often ignored.) We aren't making drivers pay the cost of building and maintaining the roads, much less the social costs of gridlock and pollution. The road construction subsidies given to private transportation, on top of the externalities involved, distort people's incentives tremendously. Those perverse incentives affect a lot of other choices people make (e.g. employment and housing markets). We could fix this at a stroke, and even do it in a revenue-neutral way by reducing taxes on productive behavior like payroll and income.
Most other first world countries have had this figured out for a long time now. UK fuel tax is something like $3/gal. German fuel taxes are over $6/gallon, and other than problems due to some dude named Assad, they've been doing just fine. Unfortunately, here in the States it's a political third rail, so even though people on both the right and left will admit it makes sense in private, either will lambast the other to oblivion if they ever propose it in public.
You sound like you're implying that these two opinions are equally "out of the mainstream":
- being biologically and genetically female determines whether or not you are a woman
- there's nothing wrong with raping or sexually abusing men or boys
The fact that anyone might think these two opinions are at all comparable shows something seriously sick about how far off the rails our society has gone in the past fifteen years.
The issue isn't hardware incompatibility or development time. The "Moto G Play" is practically a rebrand of the same hardware, re-released a year later; it got the Nougat update. The issue is that they want to entice people to ditch their still-new hardware to buy the new shiny.
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Mitt Romney is one of the smartest presidential candidates this nation has ever seen, as well as a fundamentally decent human being. People tore him to bits over offhand comments and talked endlessly about his unforgivable sin of having - 30 years prior - taken his dog on vacation. (One New York Times columnist published no less than 86 columns talking about that incident, which seems like obsessive enough behavior to qualify for institutionalization.)
Donald Trump is one of the least intelligent presidential candidates this nation has ever seen. Blatant lies, boasts about sexual assault, and so on only served to feed his campaign. At least a third of the country is still really excited about having this "stable genius" lead them even though he clearly struggles to understand any of the issues a President faces.
Look at Churchill's speeches or FDR's fireside chats. Now look at Donald Trump's twitter stream (MY EYES! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!). This is the evolution of civil discourse in just one lifetime.
I get that sometimes someone who speaks blunt falsehoods rather than complex truths can be seen as a "man of the people." I don't think this has to be so. I don't think this has been true in all cultures and at all times through human history. I don't know how we can overcome the anti-intellectual pressures that have been building in this country for 70 years, the politicization of journalism and education, the degeneration of political discourse at all levels into dick jokes and cursing, and so on. But if we don't find some way to overcome it our civilization will collapse.
Every "take the device away after X time" will be a new battle of wills and of wits and a new opportunity for the child to take umbrage if the parent succeeds.
If the boundaries are clearly set before the device is given, and if as many of those boundaries as possible can be enforced consistently without the parent's repeated intervention, it reduces household friction and allows family interactions to focus on more positive things.
Plus, helicopter parenting is harmful, and there ought to be plenty of times when the parents aren't hovering over the child ready to take away the device after precisely X time elapses.
For most things - including almost everything invented before the Internet except, perhaps, deadly weapons - you should be able to trust that unsupervised kids, if they've been taught well, will uphold reasonable boundaries most of the time in their parents' absence, and that when they violate those boundaries they will usually learn valuable but not-too-damaging lessons about why the boundaries were there in the first place.
But the variety of damaging things and deranged people kids can encounter over the Internet is too broad and deep to leave it at that. Also, the ways that social media and app designers have focused on "slot machine psychology" etc to retain eyeballs for ads &c by fostering addiction are too much to expect kids to avoid on their own. Even just the "source of endless novelty without creativity or effort" aspect is dangerous for kids to have continual access to. So there are good reasons to have boundaries set when the parent isn't there to enforce them.
Gee, why not go on quadruple savings time then? You can have the sun out until 1AM!!
Or you could simply admit that DST is just a silly attempt at self-deception to get ourselves to do things earlier. If we want to do things in the sun after work, we need to go to work early and get out of work early. Lying to ourselves about the time is one of the most ridiculous ways imaginable to try to do this.
12 noon should be left as close as possible to true solar noon.
In future years, the idea that the government mandated that people lie to themselves about the time will seem as bizarre as the strangest medieval legal customs seem to us today.
the Central Committee of the CCP
wait, I mean Baidu Cloud
Star Trek Into Plot Holes was not a good movie by any definition. It was miserable. Utter trash. No, it was not enjoyable.
On the other hand, saying "well this may be a Good Movie by the standards of the non-trekkie unwashed masses, but it just doesn't live up to the high standards and tradition of excellence that is Star Trek" is rather strange. General consensus is that at least half of the pre-Abrams Star Trek movies are dreadful too. I don't know that any of them were quite as bad as Into Plot Holes, but then again, there are several of the old movies which thanks to sound advice I've avoided seeing.
Unions helped somewhat with shifting employment in those directions, but increasing competition between firms for workers and increasing worker mobility played a large role in making those changes too -- and these, not unions, are the reason the benefits persisted.
From the early Industrial Revolution until the New Deal, labor monopsonies (only one purchaser of labor) were common. Barriers to changing employers were high in the day of "company towns," horse and buggy travel, limited access to education, etc. Because these companies had market power as monopsonies, it sometimes made sense to form a labor monopoly - a union - to counter that market power and achieve better outcomes for workers.
But at the same time, antitrust law, new entrants into markets, the spread of cars, better access to education and mass communication, and many other factors led to the demise of the "company town" and the advent of a time when workers had more realistic options. Employers had to compete for workers via wages and benefits. Unions became less important.
These days, there are few situations where an employer has sufficient labor market power to worry about, and in most of those situations, antitrust rather than unions should be the measure to turn to. (Exceptions include certain kinds of government workers; we don't want to have ten competing police agencies in a town.)
Most places in the US the gas tax, registration fees, etc cover only something like half the cost of road construction and maintenance. So someone who does not own a car already pays almost half as much for the road as an average driver, through unrelated taxes such as sales or income.
Studies show that road wear is roughly proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, which would mean ten thousand cyclists cause less road wear than one car and a hundred million cyclists cause less road wear than one semi. Cyclists contribute less to congestion and roadblock (the social cost of which is huge), pose much less risk to those around them than do cars, and emit none of the pollutants that damage local air quality. So a cyclist's fair share of road costs would be vastly lower than what they're actually paying.
Considering how much more money is spent on roads than on bike paths (at least 100x), bike path costs don't change that equation.
So the cyclists are already unfairly subsidizing the drivers, not the other way around. Perhaps instead of punishing a socially useful behavior while asking them to subsidize others' driving, Oregon should be raising gas taxes by about $2/gallon to pay for the roads - as experts from Greg Mankiw on the right to Steven Chu on the left have said the whole country should do - and instituting a $15 credit on bicycle purchases.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams:
"Space is a crummy place to live. Really awful. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly inhospitable it is. I mean, you may think things are pretty bad in Detroit, but that's just peanuts to space."
People keep talking about how we need a backup plan for Earth because we're going to mess it up. I think they're failing to realize that nuclear winter, Chicxulub-like asteroid impacts, ice ages, runaway desertification, a thousand other unlikely extreme scenarios, or just about any physically possible conjunction of any of these would all leave Earth a more resource-rich and hospitable environment than any other mass in the Solar System.
With improvements in rover and probe technology I don't think there's any rational justification for sending meat into space until we have vastly improved materials science, propulsion, and launch systems - the kind we might have, say, five hundred years down the road. If somebody wants a huge engineering challenge just to send people where nobody's been, try creating undersea colonies or something instead.
I don't think people emphasize enough the extent to which net neutrality is largely an antitrust measure.
When broadband is a 2 or 3 player oligopoly there are plenty of incentives for deals that aren't in the interests of consumers or web innovation. These are much like the exclusive dealing agreements which were one of the classic motivations for antitrust law in the first place.
If the market were competitive -- if customers had access to more than a dozen different decent service providers, as many did in the dial-up era of shared infrastructure-- then net neutrality would rarely be a concern. If a service provider tried throttling traffic and making back room deals with content providers to unthrottle them, content providers wouldn't listen to them and customers would migrate away.
We haven't taken antitrust law seriously enough as a nation for the last 30 years. We need to be more aware of the problems of noncompetitive markets and the times when, despite its limitations, government antitrust intervention can improve matters.
It often seems that denigrating mild hybrids is one of the few things fans of EVs and PHEVs and their detractors agree on. All the drawbacks and none of the benefits, fanboys on both sides often claim. But the facts simply don't back them up.
If we can actually modernize vehicle electrical systems and move beyond legacy cruft, an automaker would be nuts not to use mild hybrid tech throughout its fleet. It really is a lot simpler than a full parallel hybrid, and a lot less of a total overhaul of the automotive world than depending on a series hybrid or range extender and huge batteries. Getting sizeable benefits in everyone's hands will do more for the environment than getting EVs in the hands of a select few.
While it's true that most trips driven in the US could easily fit in any EV's range, it's also true that ~85% of trips are taken with only one occupant, yet single-seat cars haven't taken off. People will continue to buy cars for the uses they think they might have, not just their primary everyday use, and plenty of people will think of backcountry or cross-country trips they might take. It will take revolutionary changes before those kinds of trips are as easy in an EV as with gas.
The 40nm process the Pi is fabbed on is now nine years old.
The Pi 3 is very thermally limited. Overheating and power supply related problems are very common. It's also only a ~30% improvement over the Pi2 while the Pi 2 was more like a 700% improvement over the original Pi. All of this would be very different if the Pi 3 had been fabbed at 28nm.
Yes, it doesn't make sense to try to push the Pi onto a leading edge process like 10nm, where per-transistor costs are going up rather than down and FinFET design gets more complicated. But a move to e.g. 20nm planar would make a huge difference and be enough to keep performance close to other ARM competitors for many years.
The trouble is that Broadcom has largely moved on and it's going to be difficult to get a die shrink (or any improvements to VideoCore) to happen. The Pi 4 will be a long time in coming.
The ffmpeg files do have Mozilla copyright information in the headers so I wonder whether there's some derivation. Maybe not though.
And from what I understand the still-in-progress ffmpeg native opus encoder is an independent implementation.
If machine learning led to moderation systems accepting even the most offensive ideas when expressed in civil language while rejecting even mainstream ideas expressed in uncivil ways, it would be worth celebrating.
It's possible to have worthwhile dialogue with people whose ideas and morals are tremendously repugnant to us - people who think slavery is justified, people who advocate the violent and bloody overthrow of democracies and the installation of communist dictators, etc. It's also possible, and increasingly common in today's society, for people to get to where they can't have any dialogue with people whose ideas differ from theirs, even if they only differ in ways outsiders would, like Swift among the big-endian and little-endian Lilliputians, see as trivial.
People on the left shout profanities and death threats at their opponents and then stick their fingers in their ears when their opponents speak because hearing a contrary idea will "trigger" them. It's distressing to find that Congresscritters like Gillibrand are more interested in throwing f-bombs around, like undersized eleven-year-olds desperately trying to show off how tough they are, than they are in attempting to do the work of governing; this, rather than maturity and reason, are what we expect from representatives these days. The same problems are manifest on the right, in different forms. Last year I went to a Republican Party event where the (very popular among the general public) Republican governor could hardly speak over the insults, epithets, and boos far-right party delegates were hurling at him from the audience. This is not what free speech looks like; this is what the death of the exchange of ideas looks like.
Having open fora and a marketplace of ideas are important. These can only really perform their function if every idea, no matter how repugnant, can find some expression. They can only avoid devolving into endless rivers of excrement if every person in the forum, no matter how large a majority agree with their viewpoint, has restrictions on the form their expressions will take. Maybe there's some utility in letting those who want to wade through endless rivers of excrement have the freedom to do so somewhere, but that's not what free speech is about.
People often see norms of civility and the restraint of obscenity as diametrically opposed to the freedom of speech. But ultimately, meaningful freedom of speech really depends on the existence of settings that have such norms.
Holy heart failure!
51 year time bomb.
If this only works for bare FLAC, then this is still kinda nice.
But if it works for Ogg FLAC, then this is a watershed moment, because Apple has been dragging their feet on everything related to the Ogg container etc ever since iTunes and the iPod appeared, and even though Microsoft is adding VP9 etc support they too are still dragging their feet on Ogg.
Support for the Ogg container could signal willingness to start supporting other open formats. If Safari added Opus support it would be a real boon.
If consumer preferences for separation really are strong enough that those people really won't freely eat at an establishment that admits the minority, regardless of price, then yes, market forces aren't going to force them to eat together.
But the question isn't one of a single food source in any remotely realistic scenario. Rather, it's a question of the competitive environment. Other things being equal, businesses will be most profitable by choosing to cater to whichever of the two separate groups is otherwise underserved. If two of three restaurants cater only to the majority, a fourth will admit the minority. With no barriers to market entry, the proportion of sellers admitting the minority would always perfectly match the proportion of people willing to eat with the minority. Realistic entry costs will lead to an approximate match.
If consumer preferences for separation really are so strong - if people really do get that much utility out of being separate - one needs an argument other than just "segregation is always bad" to justify overriding them. I am personally willing to pay extra to eat in restaurants that don't admit people who are smoking, and some restaurants cater to that preference. There's nothing morally wrong with that.
In response to another of your comments, one certainly doesn't need to be an anarchist or even a libertarian to believe we should allow people more freedom of association. I think there are clearly cases where the government should be involved in providing public goods, dealing with externalities, and protecting common resources. But an unbounded and nationally concentrated power to override decisions of private association leads to tyranny.
What we think is a moral imperative is reducing discrimination on a systematic level.
Again, there's no argument presented for why this is even at all moral, much less morally required. As you admit, the method tried for "reducing it on a systematic level" in the relevant sense (the private sphere) comes down, eventually, to forcing individuals to jail at gunpoint for exercising their freedom of association.
When the barber declines to give me a haircut based on my eye color he has done me no favor but he has done me no wrong. That's true even if I live in a place where he's the only barber within a thousand miles. My desire to have "an opportunity for a good haircut" does not give me a right to force him to cut my hair or to force him out of business.
Your simplistic "history tells us and psychology supports" comes with no history and no psychological support. I'm not expecting a dissertation here, but systems like Jim Crow and apartheid or even medieval segregation of Jews had to be propped up by huge intrusive legal frameworks and constant enforcement of those laws to avoid natural erosion. When people have declined to associate with one another despite being free to do so and despite the natural incentives to do so, it's difficult to see why their value judgments should be overridden at gunpoint.
I happen to be of the opinions that Donald Trump is a sorry excuse for a human being, that Hispanic immigrants both legal and illegal have on the whole done vastly more good than harm, that the Muslim ban is both unconstitutional and entirely counterproductive, etc. But none of that has to do with private individuals' rights of association. Promoting interracial and intercultural understanding may be a just cause, but in the long run, a just cause is not served by unjust means. Attempts to repress objectionable opinions by trampling the rights of those who hold them tends to perpetuate those opinions.
The "mighty businessman" is an individual deciding what to do with his or her own time and labor. I have absolutely no right to force the barber to cut my hair contrary to his will. I have no right to have him jailed for declining to cut my hair. It's not that he's "more important," it's that it's his time and his effort. It doesn't matter whether any other barber feels differently. It doesn't matter if he's the only barber on the continent. I don't have any right to demand his services any more than I have a right to enslave him.
Totalitarian restrictions on buyers' freedom of association are possible, they just haven't come up as much. If I'm selling bananas and the barber makes a point of only buying bananas from people with blue eyes, I have no right to confiscate his money and give my bananas as compensation.
You've completely missed the point about governmentally instutionalized discrimination versus private choices. I have a right, as a brown-eyed citizen, to equal protection under the law - e.g. to have my vote count just as much as someone with blue eyes rather than 3/5 as much. That doesn't mean I have the right to demand that private individuals never act differently because of my eye color.
So what?
Why do people think that overriding people's preferential associations is somehow an intrinsic moral good, enough so that it's sufficient justification for using the threat of imprisonment to force submission?
In the absence of discrimination law, suppose one person wanted to open a hair salon which only does black women's hair and another person wants to open a barbershop only open to men with blue eyes. I think the former would be more likely to survive long term than the latter - a possibly useful specialization that could find a niche versus pointlessly restricting one's customer base and refusing good money- but I see no moral issue with either of them. I have brown eyes; if the barber declines to cut my hair, I fail to see how I have a right to demand his services. Even more so, I can't see why I should be able to have him forced out of his business or taken to jail at gunpoint for his refusal to stop cutting blue-eyed mens' hair. To give me such a power to bludgeon people with would be patently unjust.
Consider the famous homosexuality anti-discrimination cases, such as wedding photographers or bakers who didn't want to do expressive creative work explicitly endorsing something they objected to and thought was not really a marriage. In these cases, it seems obvious to me that anti-discrimination laws aren't rectifying an existing injustice, they're creating one. The customers in question could have easily found others willing to take their money and give them the same services; instead, they were able to use the law as a weapon to bludgeon others for their convictions and deprive them of their livelihoods.
Unless some other factor changes valuations, economic discrimination is an unstable situation - the demand curve your business sees is higher if you are open to all customers, so businesses have an incentive not to discriminate, and if they ignore those incentives, they'll likely face competitors that don't. So if it has no value it generally only persists if propped up by law. If people judge it to be of value, why should that judgment be overridden at gunpoint?
Discrimination in the 20th century South wasn't primarily a matter of individual choice. It was a matter of discriminatory public institutions and Jim Crow laws that mandated discrimination in the private sector. Suppose those were effectively eradicated (and e.g. education and law enforcement were totally nondiscriminatory) but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hadn't imposed anything on private businesses (or if Heart of Atlanta Motel had won its court case). Without unjust laws propping it up, I think most private business racial discrimination would have naturally faded away over the course of a couple decades. I also think some kind of more drastic short term action to hasten the process and start to make up for Jim Crow was desirable, but I am worried that the way we did it set us up for a permanent end to the freedom of association in the Western world.
A shocking new study from Rutgers shows that people are somewhat more likely to befriend or marry people of the same racial, regional, and socioeconomic background. "It's completely unacceptable to have this kind of discrimination in the 21st century," the highly paid academics said in a joint statement. "We urge Congress and the courts to end this now by creating an office of Equal Relationship Opportunity and imposing prohibitive fines for those whose friendships and significant romantic relationships do not meet today's standards of diversity. Individuals who are concerned about whether their existing friendships are diverse enough should discontinue those friendships and apply to the ERO for a government-approved, acceptably diverse list of friends."
Trying to have one body of law for people's work interactions and another for their private interactions may have worked in the 1960s but it won't work in the future.
Anti-discrimination laws have gotten out of hand; rather than rectifying injustices like those of the Jim Crow era pro-discrimination laws, they are now, like Jim Crow laws, expanding the unjust deprivation of individuals' freedom of association.
Not true. Gasoline expenditure as percent of total spending is remarkably constant across income levels.
Rich people may be more likely to drive a Prius than the poor, but they're also more likely to drive SUVs, sporty cars, etc. And the total impact on fuel economy of common maintenance problems that leave a car legal to drive (passes safety and emissions) will practically always be less than 10%, and the majority of that is tire inflation (free to fix) or alignment. (Many of the maintenance problems mechanics commonly tell you reduce your mileage are shown in studies to have very little real world impact.) Even in California, the actual fuel efficiency of cars driven by people below the poverty level was 89% as high as that of people earning six figures (p. 8).
Even if it were true that the costs of a gas tax fell disproportionately on the poor, many of the externalities associated with high fuel use (e.g. inner-city pollution and related health issues) do as well, ergo so do the benefits of the fuel tax. There are vastly more effective ways to help the poor than by encouraging everyone in the country to drive inefficient vehicles.
As for who is subsidizing who regarding road costs: road wear is roughly proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, and weight is very well correlated with fuel use, so drivers of efficient lightweight vehicles are already unfairly subsidizing heavy vehicles and would be doing so even more under a miles driven tax.
If only there were some option other than "make it illegal" or "do nothing"...
Some people get a large amount of utility out of vehicles that use a lot of fuel (e.g. people who need high towing capacity). An omniscient social planner would want to allow these people to pay for the environmental cost of their driving while discouraging others from using inefficient vehicles (and discourage unnecessary driving too). Is there anything that could accomplish these without mind control? Hmm, let's think about it.
Lo and behold, higher fuel taxes accomplish all of the above while still letting people make their own choices. Amazing!
Serious economists generally agree that our gas taxes are too low by $2 per gallon or more. (A prominent example is Greg Mankiw, Harvard prof and economic adviser to GWB and Romney, though, like all economic advisers, too often ignored.) We aren't making drivers pay the cost of building and maintaining the roads, much less the social costs of gridlock and pollution. The road construction subsidies given to private transportation, on top of the externalities involved, distort people's incentives tremendously. Those perverse incentives affect a lot of other choices people make (e.g. employment and housing markets). We could fix this at a stroke, and even do it in a revenue-neutral way by reducing taxes on productive behavior like payroll and income.
Most other first world countries have had this figured out for a long time now. UK fuel tax is something like $3/gal. German fuel taxes are over $6/gallon, and other than problems due to some dude named Assad, they've been doing just fine. Unfortunately, here in the States it's a political third rail, so even though people on both the right and left will admit it makes sense in private, either will lambast the other to oblivion if they ever propose it in public.
Those horses bolted 20 years ago.
This decision should have been made with the introduction of NPAPI back in the heady days of Netscape 2.0.
You sound like you're implying that these two opinions are equally "out of the mainstream":
- being biologically and genetically female determines whether or not you are a woman
- there's nothing wrong with raping or sexually abusing men or boys
The fact that anyone might think these two opinions are at all comparable shows something seriously sick about how far off the rails our society has gone in the past fifteen years.
Sure, it's cheap. The thing is, they're counting on making you buy a new phone with every single Android update.
I have a 2015 Moto G. I got it partially because I thought Motorola, having touted an 18-month support + update policy, would be better about updates than most of their competitors. But they refused to issue a Nougat update, even though Nougat was released less than 14 months later.
The issue isn't hardware incompatibility or development time. The "Moto G Play" is practically a rebrand of the same hardware, re-released a year later; it got the Nougat update. The issue is that they want to entice people to ditch their still-new hardware to buy the new shiny.