Are you off the odd opinion that the savings would be passed on to the consumer? If so, why? Have you not been paying attention for the last half-century? All a lower price from the public sector would do is reduce the municipality's operating budget and improve the mega-corp's profit level.
Enron's market manipulations were enabled by separating production from transmission. If they had been required to sell for Generation Cost + X% (the old rule) there wouldn't have been the rolling blackouts and grotesque pricing.
Twenty five or thirty years ago exclusive grants were commonly given to a single company, since that was the only way to ensure that companies would build out the physical plant. A lot of people still think that's the rule, especially the Libertardians for some reason.
So cities should have to give the mega-corps lower prices than the power companies do? Almost everywhere they charge the same as whatever local utilities charge, why should municipalities have to subsidize multinational corporations? Of course the charge is more than it actually costs the city to maintain that pole, so what? If they were out of town the price charged by PG&E or Puget Sound Energy or Detroit Edison is going to be more than it actually costs them to maintain the pole as well. I personally think that the whole idea that municipalities should be happy to give away everything that's not nailed down to the mega-corps is utterly absurd.
My own observation is that the nice guys end up with the more stable relationships, which tend to produce fewer but higher-achieving offspring. Speaking as someone who just celebrated our silver anniversary.
Several years ago my wife and I were at a secondhand store and I saw a complete set of VHS tapes of Cosmos. That's what I got for my birthday, one of the best presents I've ever had. I've been re-watching it recently and am surprised at how accurate Sagan's predictions generally were.
It wasn't only in astronomy, medicine didn't really become a science until Pasteur and a few others dragged it into the modern age. The anatomical drawings of Galen and others of his time were still being used at the time of the American Revolutionary War, and differences between the drawings and what was actually observed were considered to be a problem with the cadaver (really) rather than possibly an error in the original documentation or the copying process.
That's workable if you have a single network that you can control and maintain in some rational manner, but each retail store is a separate entity linked back to the regional/district hub, which link back to the headquarters. Within each retail store network pretty much everything can talk to everything else because of the nightmare of trying to maintain several thousand separate switch configurations around the country/world. It's generally a collection of small flat networks firewalled at the links, because that's the only way they can make it work consistently.
I've worked in the physical security field (cameras, key cards, alarm systems, etc.) for the past eight years, and can tell you that Target's HVAC vendor is in no way unusual. I know of a large security vendor that uses the same username/password combination on every every customer that they ever touch, nationwide, and at most of them they are administrators on the security server. At a lot of them they have remote access.
No, Sagan wasn't looking at oxygen as a product of life, he was looking at molecular atmospheric oxygen as something that was inherently unstable, especially in the presence of methane, and very especially in the concentrations that we breathe. That meant something unusual was happening. An atmosphere rich in helium and xenon would attract attention as well, and prompt investigation. The default hypothesis would be complex radioactive processes, just like the default hypothesis for atmospheric O2 would be complex chemical processes. The discovery of artificially concentrated radioactive elements (for example) would be analogous to artificial light sources on Earth. We don't have to know what kind of things life produces, we just need to have a handle on what typical planetary evolution produces and look for variances from this norm. We'll probably end up with situations where investigators ask, "Is that life, or just an obscenely complex self-maintaining chemical process?"
Carl Sagan took a look at what an alien spacecraft could sense as it approached our Solar System, to see at what distance life could be deduced. His conclusion was that as soon as the spacecraft could detect molecular oxygen and methane in the same atmosphere (an inherently unstable and unmaintainable combination) it would know that something unusual was happening on the third planet out from the Sun. Detecting light on what should be the dark side of the planet would be the confirmation.
The Toyota (aka Lexus) was designed to last for half a million miles or more. The Chrysler was designed to fall apart after a hundred thousand. Literally. My great uncle retired from the Chrysler Proving Grounds, one of their jobs was to visit wrecking yards, find Chrysler products with >100,000 miles, and examine all the parts. If (for example) the starter and steering linkage were still in fine shape while everything else was uniformly worn management would go after the manufacturers of those parts and squeeze them on price until the quality dropped.
Always has been. Every year they announce the Darwin Awards, for example. And look at how much attention Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have gotten over the years. Then more recently there's the McAffee foolishness.
It's really sad that consumers here have been convinced by retailers that price is everything, Much of the rest of the world still remembers that it is often worth more over the long run to pay more for a better product, but here a blender that is two bucks cheaper will far outsell the more solidly-built one next to it on the shelf.
Haven't had to work with many CCNAnythings then, I take it. There is no piece of paper that will improve a moron's financial position and status faster than a Cisco cert, and if you can memorize a Brain Dump site you can get one.
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Frelling free market religious fanatics annoy the crap out of me. Where the hell do mega-corps actually compete?
Are you off the odd opinion that the savings would be passed on to the consumer? If so, why? Have you not been paying attention for the last half-century? All a lower price from the public sector would do is reduce the municipality's operating budget and improve the mega-corp's profit level.
Didn't mean Enron's financial foolishness, just the market manipulation that they did to fuck over California.
Enron's market manipulations were enabled by separating production from transmission. If they had been required to sell for Generation Cost + X% (the old rule) there wouldn't have been the rolling blackouts and grotesque pricing.
You can get service from World Of Warcraft? I'd take that.
Twenty five or thirty years ago exclusive grants were commonly given to a single company, since that was the only way to ensure that companies would build out the physical plant. A lot of people still think that's the rule, especially the Libertardians for some reason.
So cities should have to give the mega-corps lower prices than the power companies do? Almost everywhere they charge the same as whatever local utilities charge, why should municipalities have to subsidize multinational corporations? Of course the charge is more than it actually costs the city to maintain that pole, so what? If they were out of town the price charged by PG&E or Puget Sound Energy or Detroit Edison is going to be more than it actually costs them to maintain the pole as well. I personally think that the whole idea that municipalities should be happy to give away everything that's not nailed down to the mega-corps is utterly absurd.
Because that worked so well with Enron.
My own observation is that the nice guys end up with the more stable relationships, which tend to produce fewer but higher-achieving offspring. Speaking as someone who just celebrated our silver anniversary.
Then the Cro-Magnons win.
This should seriously piss off the Libertardian Social Darwinists.
If you request it NASA will put you on a mailing list for times when the ISS is supposed to fly over. You can sign up here.
Several years ago my wife and I were at a secondhand store and I saw a complete set of VHS tapes of Cosmos. That's what I got for my birthday, one of the best presents I've ever had. I've been re-watching it recently and am surprised at how accurate Sagan's predictions generally were.
It wasn't only in astronomy, medicine didn't really become a science until Pasteur and a few others dragged it into the modern age. The anatomical drawings of Galen and others of his time were still being used at the time of the American Revolutionary War, and differences between the drawings and what was actually observed were considered to be a problem with the cadaver (really) rather than possibly an error in the original documentation or the copying process.
That's workable if you have a single network that you can control and maintain in some rational manner, but each retail store is a separate entity linked back to the regional/district hub, which link back to the headquarters. Within each retail store network pretty much everything can talk to everything else because of the nightmare of trying to maintain several thousand separate switch configurations around the country/world. It's generally a collection of small flat networks firewalled at the links, because that's the only way they can make it work consistently.
I've worked in the physical security field (cameras, key cards, alarm systems, etc.) for the past eight years, and can tell you that Target's HVAC vendor is in no way unusual. I know of a large security vendor that uses the same username/password combination on every every customer that they ever touch, nationwide, and at most of them they are administrators on the security server. At a lot of them they have remote access.
No, Sagan wasn't looking at oxygen as a product of life, he was looking at molecular atmospheric oxygen as something that was inherently unstable, especially in the presence of methane, and very especially in the concentrations that we breathe. That meant something unusual was happening. An atmosphere rich in helium and xenon would attract attention as well, and prompt investigation. The default hypothesis would be complex radioactive processes, just like the default hypothesis for atmospheric O2 would be complex chemical processes. The discovery of artificially concentrated radioactive elements (for example) would be analogous to artificial light sources on Earth. We don't have to know what kind of things life produces, we just need to have a handle on what typical planetary evolution produces and look for variances from this norm. We'll probably end up with situations where investigators ask, "Is that life, or just an obscenely complex self-maintaining chemical process?"
Carl Sagan took a look at what an alien spacecraft could sense as it approached our Solar System, to see at what distance life could be deduced. His conclusion was that as soon as the spacecraft could detect molecular oxygen and methane in the same atmosphere (an inherently unstable and unmaintainable combination) it would know that something unusual was happening on the third planet out from the Sun. Detecting light on what should be the dark side of the planet would be the confirmation.
The Toyota (aka Lexus) was designed to last for half a million miles or more. The Chrysler was designed to fall apart after a hundred thousand. Literally. My great uncle retired from the Chrysler Proving Grounds, one of their jobs was to visit wrecking yards, find Chrysler products with >100,000 miles, and examine all the parts. If (for example) the starter and steering linkage were still in fine shape while everything else was uniformly worn management would go after the manufacturers of those parts and squeeze them on price until the quality dropped.
Always has been. Every year they announce the Darwin Awards, for example. And look at how much attention Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have gotten over the years. Then more recently there's the McAffee foolishness.
Only if you forgot Valentines Day . . .
It's really sad that consumers here have been convinced by retailers that price is everything, Much of the rest of the world still remembers that it is often worth more over the long run to pay more for a better product, but here a blender that is two bucks cheaper will far outsell the more solidly-built one next to it on the shelf.
Haven't had to work with many CCNAnythings then, I take it. There is no piece of paper that will improve a moron's financial position and status faster than a Cisco cert, and if you can memorize a Brain Dump site you can get one.
I'd say a $60,000 conference table was a serious sign of incompetence on the part of the executive and facilities staff . . .
Rural road = open highway