This is like saying I spent $30,000 last year, so my finances took a big hit. I actually had income, so you know... my debts were paid down, savings were built, and I spent $30,000.
The U.S. Technology Industry surpassed 6.5 million employees in 2014, and 6.7 million in 2015. TFA and TFS say there were 79,000 tech jobs cut in 2015, but there were 200,000 more jobs at the end of 2015 than there were at the end of 2014. Now TFA and TFS say there were 96,000 tech jobs cut in 2016, so I guess we're looking at a job growth of 243,000 in the sector?
If the law says these people are included, the President does not have the legal authority to exclude them. As the Executive, his job is to execute the law. Executive orders to exclude execution of the law in specific cases is legislating from the Executive, which is a breach of Presidential power.
On the other hand, if the law currently specifies US Citizens and Permanent Residents and does not specifically exclude others, the Executive is within his discretion to incorporate all lawful visitors to the US in the protections put forth. That is up for debate; however, in the absence of circumstances activating any law requiring the specific action, the Executive can order those protections extended by reasoning that nothing has provided the Executive branch the power or responsibility to carry out those specific actions against which the law protects. The Judiciary has the final say, and typically gives standing to those who are targets of action or loss by lack of action.
Mintsim's standard price for 5GB and unlimited voice/text is $299/year (+3% regulatory fees) or about $25/month. For four lines, that's 20GB. Their 2GB offering is $199 or $16.58/month per line, versus about 2.5GB per line to match that 10GB.
There is an argument to be made here, but you need to make it. Instead you try to say something clever that on inspection is either wrong or very wrong.
The argument is that we're not sitting right on the edge of deployable technology that requires less human labor to accomplish all the things humans do today and will want to do with the new technology. We're refining existing technology (which is itself producing new technology--better $OLD_THING is $NEW_THING) and making it cheaper to use it, reducing jobs required to produce the outputs of that technology; and that means people can more-easily afford luxuries like fast food (instead of cooking your own food, you pay servants) or Tesla cars.
The pattern thus far has been that the greater availability of goods leads to more purchasing. How many things would you be able to buy with infinite money? You could get yourself a really, really high-end car, right? Well, the car you drive today could be produced in 1970, roughly, aside from some of the silicon (although transistor radios existed); and it would cost you the equivalent of millions of today's dollars instead of just $20k. The same is true of continuously-shrinking labor costs in providing high-speed Internet, gas, oil, solar panels, and the like.
For us to enter a post-scarcity economy, the cities have to plan themselves; the power grid has to plan itself; the factories have to build themselves; the robots have to be built by other robots; the vegetables have to pick themselves; the cars have to maintain themselves--and design themselves, for that matter. If it's just human operators and human engineers making and using this stuff to produce with 1/30 as much labor, then you just have the difference between 1790 and 1990.
Don't think so?
In 1790, 90% of the American workforce were farmers. In 1990, 2.6% of the American workforce were farmers--and we export over half our agricultural outputs now.
More-fundamentally, the technology you need in the end is essentially human-level intelligence--which will probably demand civil rights.
Notice this doesn't address consumption, which might go up significantly, or the tax impact of not having to subsidize these low skill workers with government benefits. It's a complex issue with many possible metrics for success or failure.
WAGES ARE PAID FROM REVENUES.
In the fast food industry, management calls in additional workers and sends workers on break or home for the day to keep point-of-sale labor costs at 14% of revenue--that means for every $1,000 brought in per hour, the franchise pay a total of $140 of wages, on average. They actually fail at that: the real fast food cost of wages in the U.S. is 25.4%.
The fast food industry brought in $198.9 billion in 2014, with a total wage load of $47.02 billion.
So let's say you bumped the minimum wage fro $7.25/hr to $8.25/hr. Imagine the average customer pays $8, and the wage cost is 25.4%. At $7.25/hr, that's $2.03 in wages; at $8.25/hr, it's $2.31. You're looking at that $8 meal becoming $8.28. No big deal, right? 28 cents.
What we're looking at is $47.02 billion being bumped to $48.67 billion--an extra $1.65 billion to buy the same amount of food. In terms of $7.25/hr wages, that's 113,793 jobs.
So here's the thing: if Americans spend $198.9 billion on fast food, they'll be able to purchase 3.38% less food at the $8.25/hr wage. That means you go from 3,242,758 million jobs to 3,133,154 jobs--109,604 fewer jobs. If Americans instead spend $200.55 billion on fast food, they spend $1.65 million less elsewhere because they simply don't have it.
So you keep saying, "Hey, consumption might go up, because the fast food workers have more money." The other side of this is there will be fewer workers, either fewer in fast food or fewer doing something else. The total wages paid in the United States in that given span of time--the year 2014, t
I've seen plenty of city buses drive back to the depot flashing "NOT IN SERVICE". Bus routes tend to be loops, as well; the final stop tends to be the closest stop to the depot on that particular route.
City buses also spend a lot of time on the side of the road with the engine compartment open to allow them to cool off. Sometimes they go out of service for 40 minutes due to overheating.
Are users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk also Amazon employees? They can't set prices, but they can take work. In this case, the Uber Mechanical Turk allows clients to offer work (seek ride) and to provide that work (provide ride); the difference is that the client offering work (ride seeker) sets the price on Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Neither of these lets the contractor set the price.
The way I see it, Uber isn't a taxi company. Uber provides a platform as a service allowing service providers (ride share drivers) to find customers (passengers). The service providers might count as independent taxi drivers and thus be taxi companies themselves.
If Uber drivers are Uber employees, then Uber is providing the taxiing service, and is a taxi company. That's a lot different.
In other words: Uber is basically a phone book and telephone rolled into one, with a listing of cabbies and their rates circulated periodically--although in this case the cabbies have agreed to take current market rates and pay a share of revenues to Uber for publishing their contact information in the circular, and the circular goes out pretty much continuously, every second. If Uber employs the cabbies, then Uber is the cab service provider.
If you were looking for independence, you want Uber. If you were looking for employment, you want Yellow Cab Company.
Pretty much. People have an over-inflated sense of self-importance (IT says not being able to effectively do their job costs company millions more than C-level executives think it will) and want everything to be someone else's fault. QED.
I can tell people what risk I can and can't handle given a budget. I'm not in that position; I'm just tech labor. I'm fully-capable of performing proper organizational risk assessment, planning risk controls, and assembling the necessary tools and procedures to control risks. It's not about "sub-optimal mitigation of attacks"; it's about negotiating what you want to bid for and how much you want to pay.
Buses and other large vehicles use most of their fuel accelerating. Electric buses and freight trucks actually can coast for a hell of a long time on barely any fuel, but have to stop and then accelerate frequently. Regenerative braking diminishes this cost, extending service life on a battery charge.
Buses are complex and require motor and drive train maintenance. Drive trains in electric vehicles are vastly-simpler--no gearbox--and hub motors provide an option amounting to wiring and an electrical control box. Far less maintenance, far less wear, longer service lives.
It would make sense to swap out entire buses rather than batteries. Bus drivers need a food break every 4-5 hours; rotating them back to the depot and putting them back on power would allow substantial recharging. Some of these buses can recharge 100% in under an hour; and for buses going into service to meet peak demand, you'll end up with them coming in and out at different times during the day, allowing you to keep a turn-over reserve: a bus comes in, plugs into charging, and an hour later the driver takes a bus that hasn't gone out yet; two hours later, the guy who came in for lunch break when that new bus departed takes the bus he left behind, which has had two hours to charge. This reserve fleet also allows deployment of a new bus if one suffers mechanical breakdown, which is generally standard; meanwhile the amount of miles driven in total is spread among more buses, giving them a larger service life.
while other manufacturers will come in and sell something similar with slightly less features for vastly lower costs
There are two forces there. One is the general luxury effect--a luxury item has a smaller audience, and lower demand means bigger margins and higher prices (fewer potential consumers at cost means higher risk and higher barriers to entry, constricting competition). Apple manages to hold this one all on its own by being the only iOS supplier, whereas anyone can make an Android phone; other makers are facing a high barrier to entry using a non-Android OS because they have to compete in a Smart Phone market which is dominated by iOS and Android, and they don't have anything to show for it due to all the apps being for iOS or Android (see: Windows Phone 7--hence why Microsoft wants the apps to be cross-platform with Windows 10 and Windows Phone 10, as they have the desktop market and can build a phone OS app store base to try to pry their way in).
The other is just leading-edge technology and its cost. When you get into newer technology, you hit something like scarcity. I typically describe scarcity as a matter of scaling: if you can ramp up production by 10% for a 10% increase in cost (i.e. labor), you're not seeing scarcity; whereas if ramping up by 10% means expending 12% more cost, you've crossed into scarcity territory. Leading-edge technology can either be completely-different and high-labor or it can be an incremental advance that exceeds proportional cost. Squeezing more storage onto NAND, for example, requires a 14nm process instead of 22nm, whereas the 22nm process is stable (98% yield) and the 14nm process isn't (25% yields)--thus you need 400% more labor per viable chip, yet those chips store about 57% more, so cost more per unit storage. As the 14nm process exceeds 70% yield or so, it'll become cheaper per unit storage than 22nm. QED.
Your top-tier tech generally has those leading-edge technologies, or something appreciably close. They boast brand-new 8+8 homogeneous-architecture SOCs with huge amounts of on-die RAM, 3D NAND, the latest screens, and the latest high-end camera sensors. They push the cost way up and talk about all the features they have--all stuff that's going to be standard in the next generation 6 months from now, when those components are cheaper; but we can let people call Samsung and LG "Apple Immitators" for "cloning the iPhone" months after iPhone did it first.
Your low-cost, $300 phones generally have current-gen tech, which is pretty impressive. Cheap phones can have lagging tech because they're trying to squeeze costs out, but then you get a way-out-of-date $200 phone because a 90%-efficient process isn't that much more expensive than a 98%-efficient process.
The nice thing about making a $300 phone is not everyone can afford an $800 phone; you have a big market to work with. That also means you face competition, whereas Apple and Samsung are competing for fewer voting dollars at the top-tier range and don't have to worry about every cheap Chinese manufactory releasing a top-quality phone comparable to their flagships. Instead we see the OnePlus Three--competitive, but it's not a brand-new iPhone or Galaxy and is more a problem for the mid-tier market. That mid-tier market has lower margins, and also has stability in that it has many players and isn't going to sharply-divert to a new one unless they found a way to make the same tech 20% cheaper; whereas the upper-tier market has stability in that any new competitor is trying to divert fewer people from a high-end luxury device which is essentially purchasing identity, and so has a slim chance of making a stable profit largely contingent on convincing people to identify with someone other than Apple or Samsung.
Honestly, imagine GM releasing a Tesla competitor. It's $85,000. It's about on-par with an $85,000 Tesla Model S. What sets you apart from your friends? How do you feel about driving a Chevrolet--an el
Depending on the work crew to have the same repeater that you need is what is ludicrous
Each repeater unit works with Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and several other carriers. They generally work across the entire GM spectrum with all carriers simultaneously. You don't get a repeater that works with one of the carriers and not all of them; they generally don't exist, except that some don't cover a portion of Sprint's GSM band and so some Sprint phones will get voice but not data in some areas if trying to use those repeaters.
I've never been asked to hang a repeater and I suspect it is not a very common practice.
In 1920, using wooden shipping pallets wasn't common practice. What's your point? If you're at a job site and your boss expects your cell phone to work when he calls you and it doesn't, then you have a problem.
Your real problem is you have an uncertainty, and so you're scared. "This is new and wah wah I'm scared I'm scared!" So you take another uncertainty (Verizon phone might not work in the basement--it doesn't work in the office I work in unless you go upstairs a floor) because it's a more-familiar uncertainty.
That is, it's more-familiar unless you live in one of those locations where Verizon is spotty and frequently loses coverage for mile-long stretches of road and in some residences and offices. Then maybe you need Sprint or AT&T or T-Mobile--except when you're in a building that shields part of the signal and causes your phone to drop. Then you need a repeater, and we're back to square 1.
He's not supplying his crews with phones and he's sure as hell not giving them all $300+ repeaters just to save $30/month on a phone bill. Payback period of 30 months or so is not very cost-effective.
Actually, compared to $80/month Verizon, $16/month Mintsim is saving me $768/year. Compared to $69 T-Mobile, it's saving me $648/year. Repeaters last years, although when you're dealing with large numbers of crews you're multiplying the cost yeah.
I never said his crews had communications, and if they do it's because they have Verizon or are stepping outside to make calls.
Which doesn't help for incoming calls. Verizon doesn't work in this basement in the heart of Baltimore--12 feet of dirt and 4 feet of concrete and steel with 2 feet of steel overhead, good fucking luck.
He needs to be continuously reachable, not them.
I didn't understand this part of the problem. I guess if you learn of a change in the job you don't have to send that message reliably to your work crew. One-way communication seems strange to me, but fair enough.
You also still haven't addressed how repeaters would solve his rural/industrial coverage problem when he's on the road or between sites.
They won't. On the other hand, if you're running Verizon and you expect coverage... lol, hahahahahahahhahhahahahaha, I hope you're in a New England state... coverage on the roads with Verizon, that's rich. Once you get West of Ohio, it's Sprint, AT&T, or T-mobile, depending on where you are; T-Mobile is a little less reliable than Verizon in New England.
Then again, even Verizon drops on the light rail and metro here, as well as the tunnels (well, we knew that was going to happen). I don't spend much time outside the city; my parents have a house in PA, and they bring a back-up phone on Sprint's network when they go there because Verizon doesn't fucking work despite having a visible tower right fucking there on top the next mountain. OTOH Verizon has a tower near their HOA in Delaware and T-Mobile doesn't.
It's been spotty even here in the heart of Verizon's best coverage area. They can't even make a repeater work for VZ in PA; there's simply no available signal at their house. Works for T-Mobile in Delaware, although there's 2-3 bars of VZ signal t
You're doing a lot of "why you can't," and I do a lot of "how do we get around that?"
As I said: for those areas where you actually have coverage, the basement thing is easily-resolved by a repeater. When Bob pops in to see his work crews, there will be a repeater if they've set up a repeater, so proposing that they could do that but then that he won't have signal when he gets there is ludicrous.
Further, work crews working in areas without electricity use air or electrical tools powered by a portable generator. There's always electricity; and repeaters use watts of power. They're not multi-amp devices and they can be driven for a couple hours off a small, consumer-grade UPS; if you need comm, you can add comm without adding to the load of the system. If there's no comm there because you're in the middle of nowhere, then your phone's not going to have signal anyway; but I assume you mean the house is unplugged from the grid or whatnot, not that they're off in the desert 100 miles from civilization and cell phone service.
You're so focused on why it can't be done that you made an internally-inconsistent scenario (work crews have comm, but Bob doesn't have comm when he visits work crews).
The stated problem was that the contractor goes into a basement and signal goes away, whereas Verizon has frequencies that penetrate better. That problem is actually understated: modern building practices for new and retrofit construction are using up to 8 inches of insulation cladding, often foil-faced, along with radiant barriers in the roof; these can be effectively opaque to cell phone signals, and so the problem will likely increase in the future.
If you live in an area where T-Mobile doesn't have dead spots, then this is a viable consideration. If you end up in a building where you have a 3/8 inch bubble wrap roof component reflecting Verizon signal, this is also a consideration.
As for "comfortable", it's gear. A contractor came into my house and plugged some giant tank in on one floor, then ran a hose up to the other floor. They didn't explain what it was; it's equipment.
All roommates are terrible because having to interact with anyone continuously for an extended period is terrible. Dogs are the best roommates; cats if you have to leave it alone all day.
That's true, although it's kind of moot when you have a $150k salary, spend most of it on cost-of-living, and have the remains of a normal salary to spend on a car. Cars are a bad model, though, because most car sales are used cars, and used cars are purchased as a financial strategy: a lot of people don't want to pay the depreciation premium.
Someone earlier was complaining that Americans making $80,000 couldn't afford a $30,000 car; I'm making $77,000 and I can afford a $30,000 car from zero starting with 6 months of savings for a down payment on a 2-year loan.
There are a lot of problems, like somehow assuming there will be more jobs available if those jobs have higher salaries (i.e. you can afford fewer employees), while also acknowledging that lower wages lead to lower prices (meaning consumers can afford more of a thing, leading to more production, thus more jobs).
Perhaps they meant that 13% of programmer jobs would go away--the Indian jobs--and be replaced with 11% more non-H1-B programmer jobs. Fewer in total, but more that aren't outsourced.
I've frequently suggested people buy a GSM repeater for about $250 if they have that issue, largely because it's happened to me in situations where I can sometimes flicker Edge on and off and catch LTE+ for 1 bar in the right spot. Paying $200/year versus $800/year kind of makes that economical.
You would think HOAs would want to add on-pole towers for major carriers so as to maximize cell phone signal, but mostly they just all buy Verizon or AT&T or whatever already works there. Weird because the carriers will often pay a substantial fee to maintain a tower (as high as $800/month in some areas, depending on how much coverage they can get out of the tower) and that can offset HOA fees. Thus you get things like flat areas of DE being Verizon territory even though you can drop in a $250 repeater and boost the (barely-usable) signal in your house, or any of the 40 HOAs in the area can get $3,600-$9,600 out of T-Mobile and Sprint to host their towers.
If I were a contractor able to get "barely-any" service in basements on job sites, I'd bring a GSM repeater and plug it in on the floor immediately above--or run the antenna up there and have the transmitter in the basement. Think about it. $15/month versus $80/month. That thing's paying for itself in 4 months.
I've seen those repeaters as high as $3,000, but you really can get them for pretty cheap. Looks like the price has gone up a tad, though.
I keep hearing that, but I also keep seeing healthy job sectors and people who have student loans and are well on their way to paying them off. I avoided student loan debt, so I can't much comment; besides, my fiscal position is far-superior to my peers. Last year, I put $18,000 into my 401(k); and I paid my mortgage down 50% in the first 4 years. I intend to finish it in 2018 or 2019; it was going to be a 3-year mortgage, but I changed my financial priorities ($18k into 401(k) plus $3,500 in HSA in one year, and $15k into accounts before that... there's enough money shoved into savings at this point that I could pay off my mortgage).
I make $77k now. Just got a pay increase, 1.99%.
I'm starting to wonder how many things are giving voice to a minority, how many are manipulations of statistics (student loan debt will grow with inflation and population, even if the loans are regularly getting paid off), and how many are things we just repeat again and again until we forget they're not true. I know the middle-class and lower-class income arguments are that last category (although minimum wage does constantly lose buying power--inflation does that, but inflation can only happen if working-class incomes increase faster than inflation).
I'm 31 and I have no friends; I don't want to move because moving is a pain in the ass.
Seriously, roommates. The first thing I identified before moving out of my parents's house was that roommates are a terrible, terrible idea. You had to learn that the hard way, huh? Unfortunately I didn't identify that my parents would constantly complain I don't visit, or I would have moved farther away; maybe they won't bother asking why I didn't come by this week if I live 5,000 miles away.
So? You're in NYC; you're not a real human being. Real human beings live in places where $150,000 income isn't "poor".
Honestly, what's with people? "It's too expensive in expensive areas! I moved here for the $200,000 salary but a 450sqft apartment costs $170,000/year!" Well, move to somewhere where you get a $75k/year salary and rent for a $650sqft 1br costs $600/month.
I declined to buy a house when I could because renting was cheaper. In that time, I spent way less on rent than I would have on a mortgage--$725/month versus $1,400. Then I saw a house for $50,000 with 3x the space and bought it, moved 3 miles.
As per my mortgage, I paid roughly 53% of the principle the first year in interest. That is: I paid $4,026 in P+I; of that, the balance on my mortgage reduced by $2,616, and the bank collected $1,410 in interest.
Would that I made the regular payments, I would pay $11,402 in 15 years at 2.875% interest rate for a $49,092 loan on a $50,000 house. That's 18% of its purchase price, and doesn't count MPI or any of the things included in rent--maintenance and taxes, mainly, along with homeowner's insurance being $880/year instead of $125.
If I were to move in 4 years, $5,033 would be paid to interest, with a balance reduction of $11,150. That makes P+I 16,183, and interest around 31%.
It's hard not to take a loss in those conditions. My house, purchased for $50,000 in 2012 after arguing the sale price down, is now estimated at just under $53,000. It has gained a theoretical $2,764 on paper, while my interest costs have consumed over $4,000. The house is actually halfway paid off, too.
I've also put nearly $9,000 of work into the house in insulation and remodeling thus far, and will add another $11,000 to that. This hasn't bumped the potential sale price much, and primarily serves to stabilize my finances by cutting my utility bill by 2/3. I can likely run the entire house from heat pump only (no gas furnace), which requires a $5,000+ addition of a heat pump and replacement of the furnace with an air handler; replacing the (1982) furnace with an actual furnace bumps that to nearly $11,000. In the end, I may be able to retail the house for as much as $65,000.
I've always expected to take a loss, so it's no matter.
Homeownership hasn't been the ticket to riches and savings over the tyranny of rent; I've sunk literally $60,000 so far into buying financial freedom, and have $50,000 more to go. Even then, I need to keep up with maintenance; and I can do that by paying an electrician $2,000 to rewire my panel for 200A and a plumber $1,800 to install a water heater, or I can run the high-voltage main line and gas piping myself for $500 and $600. Those electricians, plumbers, and professional contractors are incorporated in your rent, and spread among units--cheap insurance.
On the other hand, renters tend to have perpetual bills (rent) but actually expend less money over time in total. The ROI being a long-term renter is great in the short- and long-term; whereas sinking a high amount of your cash flow into eliminating your mortgage in 5 years allows you to rapidly build up enough cash thereafter to coast for years without a job. Emergency funds grow quickly when you don't have any expenses--caveat, if you suddenly have $5,000 of damage, you need to make an insurance claim, outlay your deductible (which may be $5,000 anyway), and watch 10 months of savings vanish in an eye blink while your month-to-month insurance costs suddenly tick up to recuperate the damages.
I made a decision between two options with their advantages. I made both decisions, depending on the opportunity presented. Homeownership is a better deal generally in high-interest-rate markets, but a home that costs less than your annual income when you have more than half of that income free to divert to debt management is an option. In low-interest-rate markets, homeownership is a trap.
So let's talk a little bit about psychiatric care.
I don't see a lot of TV ads, but I do read a lot of stuff online and try to probe my doctors and psychiatrists for information. They can tell me what's dangerous; I tend to target things I can use chronically and overdose on without harming myself as a matter of risk control, and otherwise have to be very clear on the proper protocol of handling e.g. amphetamine, Welbutrin, or Ambien because that shit's actually dangerous. For comparison: Amphetamine will fuck you up bad, and Ambien with alcohol will kill you; while 50x the standard dose of Modafinil will give you a bad day but not cause harm, and the 120mg off-label maximum dose of Atomoxitine is a lot lower than the 1,080mg doses given to volunteers who also showed no medical problems but didn't particularly enjoy the experience. "Safe" has a... relative definition.
I wanted to avoid amphetamine, so asked my doctor for Modafinil. Turns out Modafinil works fucking fantastic; but I'm also an insomniac and didn't sufficiently understand sleep actigraphy, so thought I was getting 6 hours each night when really I get about two. Tip: don't use Modafinil to stay awake for 4 weeks straight. Considering I hadn't slept in like a year, using Modafinil for ADHD had... undeclared side-effects. It caused suicide-grade depression, which I found enlightening--also I'm 100% compensated for depression, I respond to stress by dissociating (yeah I'm not in one piece up here), and any kind of strain (especially emotional strain) causes me to sleep better and so I slept pretty god damned solid for the next 6 days.
After that I was interested in Atomoxitine. We tried amphetamine instead. Psychiatrist's reasoning was sound: I have an anhedonia problem--one I'm aware of largely because I avoid any negative stimulus even to full sacrifice of positive rewards (no reinforcing behavior), which swiftly reverses if I take a low dose of phenylpiracetam (that kind of disturbs me--behavioral change, alters judgment), and turns into mild euphoria and a very different experience of life (anything that's supposed to be "pleasurable" is... did you know there's an actual feeling associated with things that make you laugh or smile, instead of just a reflex? I didn't; I thought I was just really, really high). The logic was that I need more dopamine, and amphetamine is a dopamine releasing agent; too bad it actually made me depressed.
It took another month for me to realize I was lying awake in bed at night for several hours during which my Fitbit read me as asleep. I adjusted it to use the Sensitive setting and it correctly measured my time. I read some research papers on sleep actigraphy and it turns out actigraphy can come within 93% of a polysomnograph (which includes EEG) if it's less-sensitive to activity on nights where the user sleeps better and more-sensitive when the user sleeps poorly. I had it set to be less-sensitive while sleeping poorly, so it was all fucked up and claiming a lot more sleep than I was getting.
The psychiatrist recommended Belsomra (Suvorexant). This was actually luck; I had asked him to avoid GABA drugs because I don't like the risk of night-driving and other crazy Ambien shit. Suvorexant generally doesn't fucking work unless you take high doses--Merck asked the FDA to approve 20mg, 40mg, and 80mg, and was told 10mg, 15mg, 20mg; and 20mg is significantly-likely to cause you to be too groggy to drive. Turns out the stuff has no side-effects when I use it, and it cuts my sleep latency from 2-3 hours down to 15-20 minutes. Sleep is readily-identified as following the normal sleep cycle, but not as good, as if the chart's raised a bit so I don't get quite as far into deep sleep and raise to awake instead of REM; I sleep well for the first half of the night and poorly in the second half.
That drug costs $300/month, and insurance doesn't like it.
Detergents aren't all more-or-less the same. Powdered detergents clean better than liquid; liquids have more fragrance, but less color-safe bleaching agent and brightening agents. Gain's powdered detergents significantly out-perform every other well-known detergent on the market, and Tide holds a place above Arm and Hammer and other cheap generics. The new pod-style detergents are high-performers, with Tide frequently leading that particular market: they can incorporate powder and liquid in one pre-metered unit, allowing for complex and unstable combinations and thus getting clothes cleaner and fresher by bringing fragrant liquids along with liquid enzymes that would affect the shelf-life of a liquid detergent, and capping it all off with dry color-safe bleaches and brightening agents.
That doesn't even get into specialized detergents like Woolite Black, which contain fewer brightening agents and help protect the color-fastness of dark clothes (Woolite doesn't clean nearly as well as Tide or Gain). Then you have the fabric softener industry, which is a huge clusterfuck of variability.
Then you have things like water hardness. Dropping any generic water softener in-line with your washing machine immensely boosts the performance of your detergent, cutting back on how much you need to use for an equivalent cleaning. That's generic: salt is salt, and the only question is how much impurity is in the salt (which, for most tablet salt or sun-dried salt, is under 0.01%), if it has iron binders (may wear your softener faster, but do remove iron), and whether it's sodium or potassium. Performance is otherwise identical for a dissolved amount of salt (meaning tablets vs crushed vs blocks matters, and otherwise just use the cheapest stuff you can find).
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This is like saying I spent $30,000 last year, so my finances took a big hit. I actually had income, so you know... my debts were paid down, savings were built, and I spent $30,000.
The U.S. Technology Industry surpassed 6.5 million employees in 2014, and 6.7 million in 2015. TFA and TFS say there were 79,000 tech jobs cut in 2015, but there were 200,000 more jobs at the end of 2015 than there were at the end of 2014. Now TFA and TFS say there were 96,000 tech jobs cut in 2016, so I guess we're looking at a job growth of 243,000 in the sector?
If the law says these people are included, the President does not have the legal authority to exclude them. As the Executive, his job is to execute the law. Executive orders to exclude execution of the law in specific cases is legislating from the Executive, which is a breach of Presidential power.
On the other hand, if the law currently specifies US Citizens and Permanent Residents and does not specifically exclude others, the Executive is within his discretion to incorporate all lawful visitors to the US in the protections put forth. That is up for debate; however, in the absence of circumstances activating any law requiring the specific action, the Executive can order those protections extended by reasoning that nothing has provided the Executive branch the power or responsibility to carry out those specific actions against which the law protects. The Judiciary has the final say, and typically gives standing to those who are targets of action or loss by lack of action.
Mintsim's standard price for 5GB and unlimited voice/text is $299/year (+3% regulatory fees) or about $25/month. For four lines, that's 20GB. Their 2GB offering is $199 or $16.58/month per line, versus about 2.5GB per line to match that 10GB.
You can do better than $22.50 per line.
There is an argument to be made here, but you need to make it. Instead you try to say something clever that on inspection is either wrong or very wrong.
The argument is that we're not sitting right on the edge of deployable technology that requires less human labor to accomplish all the things humans do today and will want to do with the new technology. We're refining existing technology (which is itself producing new technology--better $OLD_THING is $NEW_THING) and making it cheaper to use it, reducing jobs required to produce the outputs of that technology; and that means people can more-easily afford luxuries like fast food (instead of cooking your own food, you pay servants) or Tesla cars.
The pattern thus far has been that the greater availability of goods leads to more purchasing. How many things would you be able to buy with infinite money? You could get yourself a really, really high-end car, right? Well, the car you drive today could be produced in 1970, roughly, aside from some of the silicon (although transistor radios existed); and it would cost you the equivalent of millions of today's dollars instead of just $20k. The same is true of continuously-shrinking labor costs in providing high-speed Internet, gas, oil, solar panels, and the like.
For us to enter a post-scarcity economy, the cities have to plan themselves; the power grid has to plan itself; the factories have to build themselves; the robots have to be built by other robots; the vegetables have to pick themselves; the cars have to maintain themselves--and design themselves, for that matter. If it's just human operators and human engineers making and using this stuff to produce with 1/30 as much labor, then you just have the difference between 1790 and 1990.
Don't think so?
In 1790, 90% of the American workforce were farmers. In 1990, 2.6% of the American workforce were farmers--and we export over half our agricultural outputs now.
More-fundamentally, the technology you need in the end is essentially human-level intelligence--which will probably demand civil rights.
Notice this doesn't address consumption, which might go up significantly, or the tax impact of not having to subsidize these low skill workers with government benefits. It's a complex issue with many possible metrics for success or failure.
WAGES ARE PAID FROM REVENUES.
In the fast food industry, management calls in additional workers and sends workers on break or home for the day to keep point-of-sale labor costs at 14% of revenue--that means for every $1,000 brought in per hour, the franchise pay a total of $140 of wages, on average. They actually fail at that: the real fast food cost of wages in the U.S. is 25.4%.
The fast food industry brought in $198.9 billion in 2014, with a total wage load of $47.02 billion.
So let's say you bumped the minimum wage fro $7.25/hr to $8.25/hr. Imagine the average customer pays $8, and the wage cost is 25.4%. At $7.25/hr, that's $2.03 in wages; at $8.25/hr, it's $2.31. You're looking at that $8 meal becoming $8.28. No big deal, right? 28 cents.
What we're looking at is $47.02 billion being bumped to $48.67 billion--an extra $1.65 billion to buy the same amount of food. In terms of $7.25/hr wages, that's 113,793 jobs.
So here's the thing: if Americans spend $198.9 billion on fast food, they'll be able to purchase 3.38% less food at the $8.25/hr wage. That means you go from 3,242,758 million jobs to 3,133,154 jobs--109,604 fewer jobs. If Americans instead spend $200.55 billion on fast food, they spend $1.65 million less elsewhere because they simply don't have it.
So you keep saying, "Hey, consumption might go up, because the fast food workers have more money." The other side of this is there will be fewer workers, either fewer in fast food or fewer doing something else. The total wages paid in the United States in that given span of time--the year 2014, t
I've seen plenty of city buses drive back to the depot flashing "NOT IN SERVICE". Bus routes tend to be loops, as well; the final stop tends to be the closest stop to the depot on that particular route.
City buses also spend a lot of time on the side of the road with the engine compartment open to allow them to cool off. Sometimes they go out of service for 40 minutes due to overheating.
Are users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk also Amazon employees? They can't set prices, but they can take work. In this case, the Uber Mechanical Turk allows clients to offer work (seek ride) and to provide that work (provide ride); the difference is that the client offering work (ride seeker) sets the price on Amazon's Mechanical Turk.
Neither of these lets the contractor set the price.
The way I see it, Uber isn't a taxi company. Uber provides a platform as a service allowing service providers (ride share drivers) to find customers (passengers). The service providers might count as independent taxi drivers and thus be taxi companies themselves.
If Uber drivers are Uber employees, then Uber is providing the taxiing service, and is a taxi company. That's a lot different.
In other words: Uber is basically a phone book and telephone rolled into one, with a listing of cabbies and their rates circulated periodically--although in this case the cabbies have agreed to take current market rates and pay a share of revenues to Uber for publishing their contact information in the circular, and the circular goes out pretty much continuously, every second. If Uber employs the cabbies, then Uber is the cab service provider.
If you were looking for independence, you want Uber. If you were looking for employment, you want Yellow Cab Company.
Pretty much. People have an over-inflated sense of self-importance (IT says not being able to effectively do their job costs company millions more than C-level executives think it will) and want everything to be someone else's fault. QED.
I can tell people what risk I can and can't handle given a budget. I'm not in that position; I'm just tech labor. I'm fully-capable of performing proper organizational risk assessment, planning risk controls, and assembling the necessary tools and procedures to control risks. It's not about "sub-optimal mitigation of attacks"; it's about negotiating what you want to bid for and how much you want to pay.
Buses and other large vehicles use most of their fuel accelerating. Electric buses and freight trucks actually can coast for a hell of a long time on barely any fuel, but have to stop and then accelerate frequently. Regenerative braking diminishes this cost, extending service life on a battery charge.
Buses are complex and require motor and drive train maintenance. Drive trains in electric vehicles are vastly-simpler--no gearbox--and hub motors provide an option amounting to wiring and an electrical control box. Far less maintenance, far less wear, longer service lives.
It would make sense to swap out entire buses rather than batteries. Bus drivers need a food break every 4-5 hours; rotating them back to the depot and putting them back on power would allow substantial recharging. Some of these buses can recharge 100% in under an hour; and for buses going into service to meet peak demand, you'll end up with them coming in and out at different times during the day, allowing you to keep a turn-over reserve: a bus comes in, plugs into charging, and an hour later the driver takes a bus that hasn't gone out yet; two hours later, the guy who came in for lunch break when that new bus departed takes the bus he left behind, which has had two hours to charge. This reserve fleet also allows deployment of a new bus if one suffers mechanical breakdown, which is generally standard; meanwhile the amount of miles driven in total is spread among more buses, giving them a larger service life.
The logistics aren't that ridiculous.
while other manufacturers will come in and sell something similar with slightly less features for vastly lower costs
There are two forces there. One is the general luxury effect--a luxury item has a smaller audience, and lower demand means bigger margins and higher prices (fewer potential consumers at cost means higher risk and higher barriers to entry, constricting competition). Apple manages to hold this one all on its own by being the only iOS supplier, whereas anyone can make an Android phone; other makers are facing a high barrier to entry using a non-Android OS because they have to compete in a Smart Phone market which is dominated by iOS and Android, and they don't have anything to show for it due to all the apps being for iOS or Android (see: Windows Phone 7--hence why Microsoft wants the apps to be cross-platform with Windows 10 and Windows Phone 10, as they have the desktop market and can build a phone OS app store base to try to pry their way in).
The other is just leading-edge technology and its cost. When you get into newer technology, you hit something like scarcity. I typically describe scarcity as a matter of scaling: if you can ramp up production by 10% for a 10% increase in cost (i.e. labor), you're not seeing scarcity; whereas if ramping up by 10% means expending 12% more cost, you've crossed into scarcity territory. Leading-edge technology can either be completely-different and high-labor or it can be an incremental advance that exceeds proportional cost. Squeezing more storage onto NAND, for example, requires a 14nm process instead of 22nm, whereas the 22nm process is stable (98% yield) and the 14nm process isn't (25% yields)--thus you need 400% more labor per viable chip, yet those chips store about 57% more, so cost more per unit storage. As the 14nm process exceeds 70% yield or so, it'll become cheaper per unit storage than 22nm. QED.
Your top-tier tech generally has those leading-edge technologies, or something appreciably close. They boast brand-new 8+8 homogeneous-architecture SOCs with huge amounts of on-die RAM, 3D NAND, the latest screens, and the latest high-end camera sensors. They push the cost way up and talk about all the features they have--all stuff that's going to be standard in the next generation 6 months from now, when those components are cheaper; but we can let people call Samsung and LG "Apple Immitators" for "cloning the iPhone" months after iPhone did it first.
Your low-cost, $300 phones generally have current-gen tech, which is pretty impressive. Cheap phones can have lagging tech because they're trying to squeeze costs out, but then you get a way-out-of-date $200 phone because a 90%-efficient process isn't that much more expensive than a 98%-efficient process.
The nice thing about making a $300 phone is not everyone can afford an $800 phone; you have a big market to work with. That also means you face competition, whereas Apple and Samsung are competing for fewer voting dollars at the top-tier range and don't have to worry about every cheap Chinese manufactory releasing a top-quality phone comparable to their flagships. Instead we see the OnePlus Three--competitive, but it's not a brand-new iPhone or Galaxy and is more a problem for the mid-tier market. That mid-tier market has lower margins, and also has stability in that it has many players and isn't going to sharply-divert to a new one unless they found a way to make the same tech 20% cheaper; whereas the upper-tier market has stability in that any new competitor is trying to divert fewer people from a high-end luxury device which is essentially purchasing identity, and so has a slim chance of making a stable profit largely contingent on convincing people to identify with someone other than Apple or Samsung.
Honestly, imagine GM releasing a Tesla competitor. It's $85,000. It's about on-par with an $85,000 Tesla Model S. What sets you apart from your friends? How do you feel about driving a Chevrolet--an el
Depending on the work crew to have the same repeater that you need is what is ludicrous
Each repeater unit works with Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, and several other carriers. They generally work across the entire GM spectrum with all carriers simultaneously. You don't get a repeater that works with one of the carriers and not all of them; they generally don't exist, except that some don't cover a portion of Sprint's GSM band and so some Sprint phones will get voice but not data in some areas if trying to use those repeaters.
I've never been asked to hang a repeater and I suspect it is not a very common practice.
In 1920, using wooden shipping pallets wasn't common practice. What's your point? If you're at a job site and your boss expects your cell phone to work when he calls you and it doesn't, then you have a problem.
Your real problem is you have an uncertainty, and so you're scared. "This is new and wah wah I'm scared I'm scared!" So you take another uncertainty (Verizon phone might not work in the basement--it doesn't work in the office I work in unless you go upstairs a floor) because it's a more-familiar uncertainty.
That is, it's more-familiar unless you live in one of those locations where Verizon is spotty and frequently loses coverage for mile-long stretches of road and in some residences and offices. Then maybe you need Sprint or AT&T or T-Mobile--except when you're in a building that shields part of the signal and causes your phone to drop. Then you need a repeater, and we're back to square 1.
He's not supplying his crews with phones and he's sure as hell not giving them all $300+ repeaters just to save $30/month on a phone bill. Payback period of 30 months or so is not very cost-effective.
Actually, compared to $80/month Verizon, $16/month Mintsim is saving me $768/year. Compared to $69 T-Mobile, it's saving me $648/year. Repeaters last years, although when you're dealing with large numbers of crews you're multiplying the cost yeah.
I never said his crews had communications, and if they do it's because they have Verizon or are stepping outside to make calls.
Which doesn't help for incoming calls. Verizon doesn't work in this basement in the heart of Baltimore--12 feet of dirt and 4 feet of concrete and steel with 2 feet of steel overhead, good fucking luck.
He needs to be continuously reachable, not them.
I didn't understand this part of the problem. I guess if you learn of a change in the job you don't have to send that message reliably to your work crew. One-way communication seems strange to me, but fair enough.
You also still haven't addressed how repeaters would solve his rural/industrial coverage problem when he's on the road or between sites.
They won't. On the other hand, if you're running Verizon and you expect coverage... lol, hahahahahahahhahhahahahaha, I hope you're in a New England state... coverage on the roads with Verizon, that's rich. Once you get West of Ohio, it's Sprint, AT&T, or T-mobile, depending on where you are; T-Mobile is a little less reliable than Verizon in New England.
Then again, even Verizon drops on the light rail and metro here, as well as the tunnels (well, we knew that was going to happen). I don't spend much time outside the city; my parents have a house in PA, and they bring a back-up phone on Sprint's network when they go there because Verizon doesn't fucking work despite having a visible tower right fucking there on top the next mountain. OTOH Verizon has a tower near their HOA in Delaware and T-Mobile doesn't.
It's been spotty even here in the heart of Verizon's best coverage area. They can't even make a repeater work for VZ in PA; there's simply no available signal at their house. Works for T-Mobile in Delaware, although there's 2-3 bars of VZ signal t
You're doing a lot of "why you can't," and I do a lot of "how do we get around that?"
As I said: for those areas where you actually have coverage, the basement thing is easily-resolved by a repeater. When Bob pops in to see his work crews, there will be a repeater if they've set up a repeater, so proposing that they could do that but then that he won't have signal when he gets there is ludicrous.
Further, work crews working in areas without electricity use air or electrical tools powered by a portable generator. There's always electricity; and repeaters use watts of power. They're not multi-amp devices and they can be driven for a couple hours off a small, consumer-grade UPS; if you need comm, you can add comm without adding to the load of the system. If there's no comm there because you're in the middle of nowhere, then your phone's not going to have signal anyway; but I assume you mean the house is unplugged from the grid or whatnot, not that they're off in the desert 100 miles from civilization and cell phone service.
You're so focused on why it can't be done that you made an internally-inconsistent scenario (work crews have comm, but Bob doesn't have comm when he visits work crews).
There are no possible jokes that can be made about the Holocaust.
I thought we were finally over this nonsense.
umadbro?
The stated problem was that the contractor goes into a basement and signal goes away, whereas Verizon has frequencies that penetrate better. That problem is actually understated: modern building practices for new and retrofit construction are using up to 8 inches of insulation cladding, often foil-faced, along with radiant barriers in the roof; these can be effectively opaque to cell phone signals, and so the problem will likely increase in the future.
If you live in an area where T-Mobile doesn't have dead spots, then this is a viable consideration. If you end up in a building where you have a 3/8 inch bubble wrap roof component reflecting Verizon signal, this is also a consideration.
As for "comfortable", it's gear. A contractor came into my house and plugged some giant tank in on one floor, then ran a hose up to the other floor. They didn't explain what it was; it's equipment.
"Writing it off" means you pay 70%. You tell the IRS that's not income, and they don't tax you on it.
Contractors show up with shitloads of equipment, and they want to plug it in all over the house. What's one more piece of equipment?
All roommates are terrible because having to interact with anyone continuously for an extended period is terrible. Dogs are the best roommates; cats if you have to leave it alone all day.
That's true, although it's kind of moot when you have a $150k salary, spend most of it on cost-of-living, and have the remains of a normal salary to spend on a car. Cars are a bad model, though, because most car sales are used cars, and used cars are purchased as a financial strategy: a lot of people don't want to pay the depreciation premium.
Someone earlier was complaining that Americans making $80,000 couldn't afford a $30,000 car; I'm making $77,000 and I can afford a $30,000 car from zero starting with 6 months of savings for a down payment on a 2-year loan.
There are a lot of problems, like somehow assuming there will be more jobs available if those jobs have higher salaries (i.e. you can afford fewer employees), while also acknowledging that lower wages lead to lower prices (meaning consumers can afford more of a thing, leading to more production, thus more jobs).
Perhaps they meant that 13% of programmer jobs would go away--the Indian jobs--and be replaced with 11% more non-H1-B programmer jobs. Fewer in total, but more that aren't outsourced.
I've frequently suggested people buy a GSM repeater for about $250 if they have that issue, largely because it's happened to me in situations where I can sometimes flicker Edge on and off and catch LTE+ for 1 bar in the right spot. Paying $200/year versus $800/year kind of makes that economical.
You would think HOAs would want to add on-pole towers for major carriers so as to maximize cell phone signal, but mostly they just all buy Verizon or AT&T or whatever already works there. Weird because the carriers will often pay a substantial fee to maintain a tower (as high as $800/month in some areas, depending on how much coverage they can get out of the tower) and that can offset HOA fees. Thus you get things like flat areas of DE being Verizon territory even though you can drop in a $250 repeater and boost the (barely-usable) signal in your house, or any of the 40 HOAs in the area can get $3,600-$9,600 out of T-Mobile and Sprint to host their towers.
If I were a contractor able to get "barely-any" service in basements on job sites, I'd bring a GSM repeater and plug it in on the floor immediately above--or run the antenna up there and have the transmitter in the basement. Think about it. $15/month versus $80/month. That thing's paying for itself in 4 months.
I've seen those repeaters as high as $3,000, but you really can get them for pretty cheap. Looks like the price has gone up a tad, though.
I keep hearing that, but I also keep seeing healthy job sectors and people who have student loans and are well on their way to paying them off. I avoided student loan debt, so I can't much comment; besides, my fiscal position is far-superior to my peers. Last year, I put $18,000 into my 401(k); and I paid my mortgage down 50% in the first 4 years. I intend to finish it in 2018 or 2019; it was going to be a 3-year mortgage, but I changed my financial priorities ($18k into 401(k) plus $3,500 in HSA in one year, and $15k into accounts before that... there's enough money shoved into savings at this point that I could pay off my mortgage).
I make $77k now. Just got a pay increase, 1.99%.
I'm starting to wonder how many things are giving voice to a minority, how many are manipulations of statistics (student loan debt will grow with inflation and population, even if the loans are regularly getting paid off), and how many are things we just repeat again and again until we forget they're not true. I know the middle-class and lower-class income arguments are that last category (although minimum wage does constantly lose buying power--inflation does that, but inflation can only happen if working-class incomes increase faster than inflation).
I'm 31 and I have no friends; I don't want to move because moving is a pain in the ass.
Seriously, roommates. The first thing I identified before moving out of my parents's house was that roommates are a terrible, terrible idea. You had to learn that the hard way, huh? Unfortunately I didn't identify that my parents would constantly complain I don't visit, or I would have moved farther away; maybe they won't bother asking why I didn't come by this week if I live 5,000 miles away.
So? You're in NYC; you're not a real human being. Real human beings live in places where $150,000 income isn't "poor".
Honestly, what's with people? "It's too expensive in expensive areas! I moved here for the $200,000 salary but a 450sqft apartment costs $170,000/year!" Well, move to somewhere where you get a $75k/year salary and rent for a $650sqft 1br costs $600/month.
I declined to buy a house when I could because renting was cheaper. In that time, I spent way less on rent than I would have on a mortgage--$725/month versus $1,400. Then I saw a house for $50,000 with 3x the space and bought it, moved 3 miles.
As per my mortgage, I paid roughly 53% of the principle the first year in interest. That is: I paid $4,026 in P+I; of that, the balance on my mortgage reduced by $2,616, and the bank collected $1,410 in interest.
Would that I made the regular payments, I would pay $11,402 in 15 years at 2.875% interest rate for a $49,092 loan on a $50,000 house. That's 18% of its purchase price, and doesn't count MPI or any of the things included in rent--maintenance and taxes, mainly, along with homeowner's insurance being $880/year instead of $125.
If I were to move in 4 years, $5,033 would be paid to interest, with a balance reduction of $11,150. That makes P+I 16,183, and interest around 31%.
It's hard not to take a loss in those conditions. My house, purchased for $50,000 in 2012 after arguing the sale price down, is now estimated at just under $53,000. It has gained a theoretical $2,764 on paper, while my interest costs have consumed over $4,000. The house is actually halfway paid off, too.
I've also put nearly $9,000 of work into the house in insulation and remodeling thus far, and will add another $11,000 to that. This hasn't bumped the potential sale price much, and primarily serves to stabilize my finances by cutting my utility bill by 2/3. I can likely run the entire house from heat pump only (no gas furnace), which requires a $5,000+ addition of a heat pump and replacement of the furnace with an air handler; replacing the (1982) furnace with an actual furnace bumps that to nearly $11,000. In the end, I may be able to retail the house for as much as $65,000.
I've always expected to take a loss, so it's no matter.
Homeownership hasn't been the ticket to riches and savings over the tyranny of rent; I've sunk literally $60,000 so far into buying financial freedom, and have $50,000 more to go. Even then, I need to keep up with maintenance; and I can do that by paying an electrician $2,000 to rewire my panel for 200A and a plumber $1,800 to install a water heater, or I can run the high-voltage main line and gas piping myself for $500 and $600. Those electricians, plumbers, and professional contractors are incorporated in your rent, and spread among units--cheap insurance.
On the other hand, renters tend to have perpetual bills (rent) but actually expend less money over time in total. The ROI being a long-term renter is great in the short- and long-term; whereas sinking a high amount of your cash flow into eliminating your mortgage in 5 years allows you to rapidly build up enough cash thereafter to coast for years without a job. Emergency funds grow quickly when you don't have any expenses--caveat, if you suddenly have $5,000 of damage, you need to make an insurance claim, outlay your deductible (which may be $5,000 anyway), and watch 10 months of savings vanish in an eye blink while your month-to-month insurance costs suddenly tick up to recuperate the damages.
I made a decision between two options with their advantages. I made both decisions, depending on the opportunity presented. Homeownership is a better deal generally in high-interest-rate markets, but a home that costs less than your annual income when you have more than half of that income free to divert to debt management is an option. In low-interest-rate markets, homeownership is a trap.
So let's talk a little bit about psychiatric care.
I don't see a lot of TV ads, but I do read a lot of stuff online and try to probe my doctors and psychiatrists for information. They can tell me what's dangerous; I tend to target things I can use chronically and overdose on without harming myself as a matter of risk control, and otherwise have to be very clear on the proper protocol of handling e.g. amphetamine, Welbutrin, or Ambien because that shit's actually dangerous. For comparison: Amphetamine will fuck you up bad, and Ambien with alcohol will kill you; while 50x the standard dose of Modafinil will give you a bad day but not cause harm, and the 120mg off-label maximum dose of Atomoxitine is a lot lower than the 1,080mg doses given to volunteers who also showed no medical problems but didn't particularly enjoy the experience. "Safe" has a ... relative definition.
I wanted to avoid amphetamine, so asked my doctor for Modafinil. Turns out Modafinil works fucking fantastic; but I'm also an insomniac and didn't sufficiently understand sleep actigraphy, so thought I was getting 6 hours each night when really I get about two. Tip: don't use Modafinil to stay awake for 4 weeks straight. Considering I hadn't slept in like a year, using Modafinil for ADHD had ... undeclared side-effects. It caused suicide-grade depression, which I found enlightening--also I'm 100% compensated for depression, I respond to stress by dissociating (yeah I'm not in one piece up here), and any kind of strain (especially emotional strain) causes me to sleep better and so I slept pretty god damned solid for the next 6 days.
After that I was interested in Atomoxitine. We tried amphetamine instead. Psychiatrist's reasoning was sound: I have an anhedonia problem--one I'm aware of largely because I avoid any negative stimulus even to full sacrifice of positive rewards (no reinforcing behavior), which swiftly reverses if I take a low dose of phenylpiracetam (that kind of disturbs me--behavioral change, alters judgment), and turns into mild euphoria and a very different experience of life (anything that's supposed to be "pleasurable" is ... did you know there's an actual feeling associated with things that make you laugh or smile, instead of just a reflex? I didn't; I thought I was just really, really high). The logic was that I need more dopamine, and amphetamine is a dopamine releasing agent; too bad it actually made me depressed.
It took another month for me to realize I was lying awake in bed at night for several hours during which my Fitbit read me as asleep. I adjusted it to use the Sensitive setting and it correctly measured my time. I read some research papers on sleep actigraphy and it turns out actigraphy can come within 93% of a polysomnograph (which includes EEG) if it's less-sensitive to activity on nights where the user sleeps better and more-sensitive when the user sleeps poorly. I had it set to be less-sensitive while sleeping poorly, so it was all fucked up and claiming a lot more sleep than I was getting.
The psychiatrist recommended Belsomra (Suvorexant). This was actually luck; I had asked him to avoid GABA drugs because I don't like the risk of night-driving and other crazy Ambien shit. Suvorexant generally doesn't fucking work unless you take high doses--Merck asked the FDA to approve 20mg, 40mg, and 80mg, and was told 10mg, 15mg, 20mg; and 20mg is significantly-likely to cause you to be too groggy to drive. Turns out the stuff has no side-effects when I use it, and it cuts my sleep latency from 2-3 hours down to 15-20 minutes. Sleep is readily-identified as following the normal sleep cycle, but not as good, as if the chart's raised a bit so I don't get quite as far into deep sleep and raise to awake instead of REM; I sleep well for the first half of the night and poorly in the second half.
That drug costs $300/month, and insurance doesn't like it.
At my request to
Detergents aren't all more-or-less the same. Powdered detergents clean better than liquid; liquids have more fragrance, but less color-safe bleaching agent and brightening agents. Gain's powdered detergents significantly out-perform every other well-known detergent on the market, and Tide holds a place above Arm and Hammer and other cheap generics. The new pod-style detergents are high-performers, with Tide frequently leading that particular market: they can incorporate powder and liquid in one pre-metered unit, allowing for complex and unstable combinations and thus getting clothes cleaner and fresher by bringing fragrant liquids along with liquid enzymes that would affect the shelf-life of a liquid detergent, and capping it all off with dry color-safe bleaches and brightening agents.
That doesn't even get into specialized detergents like Woolite Black, which contain fewer brightening agents and help protect the color-fastness of dark clothes (Woolite doesn't clean nearly as well as Tide or Gain). Then you have the fabric softener industry, which is a huge clusterfuck of variability.
Then you have things like water hardness. Dropping any generic water softener in-line with your washing machine immensely boosts the performance of your detergent, cutting back on how much you need to use for an equivalent cleaning. That's generic: salt is salt, and the only question is how much impurity is in the salt (which, for most tablet salt or sun-dried salt, is under 0.01%), if it has iron binders (may wear your softener faster, but do remove iron), and whether it's sodium or potassium. Performance is otherwise identical for a dissolved amount of salt (meaning tablets vs crushed vs blocks matters, and otherwise just use the cheapest stuff you can find).