Mergers are always good for CEOs and shareholders and always bad for everyone else. It's a rule. This is not sarcasm.
Consider the whole reason Verizon and AT&T dominate the market: Verizon happened when Bell Atlantic absorbed MCI and GTE; AT&T absorbed Cingular and a few others. Smaller players still exist, but competition is hard; without mergers very small players would drop off until a healthy culture formed, but with mergers one or two parasites become huge and dominating and make it harder for smaller players to gain traction.
The smaller players can merge, gaining a stronger hand to compete but increasing the distance between them and the other small players, which then makes it hard for those small players to compete--and then they either die off or get absorbed in mergers. Eventually small players can't exist, and as they die off the larger players come to scavenge the carcasses.
Each round of mergers brings a lot of similar services under one hand, where they become redundant or excessive. Having 14 non-redundant niche services is a money sink, and so 10 of them go away and the consumer has 4 to pick from which aren't always as well-matched to the individual consumer's needs as the services discontinued. Lay-offs occur, although we can typically bring that into a cost-savings and increase in efficiency, which is less economic waste and should be good--because it SHOULD cause a decrease in operational costs, leading to a decrease in pricing of services to consumers, leaving more free money in the economy to fund new ventures that can tap the newly freed labor pool. Unfortunately, what often happens is the price stays high and margins increase, so the economy gets additional labor that it doesn't have anything to do with and we have a bunch more people unemployed.
To be fair, it's Texas-Mexican border food, not Mexican proper, so you really can't claim it's faux-Mexican. You can make claims on how well it emulates food culture close to but north of the big river.
Also, to be fair, most 'Mexican' food here is shitty because it's not greasy. Look at a jar of salsa one day, do you see lard? How much lard do you think went into your Mission tortillas? Guess what? Mexicans use a lot of lard. That's pork, in case you didn't know.
We need more lard in our pseudo-Mexican food so we can have authentic pseudo-Mexican food.
Nah it seems to be a culture shift from my vantage. Girls are abandoning iPhones, while a bunch of hipster and (oddly) black dudes are buying iPhones to show off.
Local culture seems to be that modern black guys buy whatever girls think is cool to impress girls, while modern white guys wear gold chains and blast rap music and wear backwards hats trying to impress people by being black. Hilariously, girls are now bored with iPhones, and white guys all look like dorks 'cause they're imitating last decade's black dudes.
I'm not worried so much about slipping as I am about bumps. I hit a bump at 15mph, bump bump bump. I hit 5 more bumps. I try to pedal, but my foot leaves the pedal (i.e. goes upwards) and I get the edge of the pedal, then come off, hit my heel on the ground and break my ankle. Also I pull up on my pedals when going clipless and looking for power (i.e. hills).
Nein, Ich bin in der Stadt. Der United Stadt. Disen ist Scheiss, aber das sowas von sovas komt.
Parts are stock but bike was $400 USD so ja probably not the most well-tuned setup.
What do you mean? I couldn't do that on my Motorola Cliq with Android 1.4, but I found out recently that my Galaxy Nexus will continue downloading from Wifi or 4G LTE while taking a cell phone call.
Compare T-Mobile value plans and buy your phone directly instead of through the provider. Saves a chunk of change ($20/mo * 24mo per phone, really). Unlimited data on T-Mobile is $30/mo, but profile your actual data use. For my single line use, I get $10/mo 2GB plan (overflows into unlimited free low-speed Edge data) and don't use nearly that; I also noticed the Facebook app eats bandwidth (it eats battery faster than the charger supplies it, too), so I use the Facebook Messenger app but not the full Facebook app.
It may be worth the switch, but it also may be doable to switch away from unlimited data and into something cheaper. Currently I've used 103MB this cycle (since Sep 21), 64.26MB of that is Mint.com (which is heavy), 15MB is Web browser (Facebook, including uploads), 13MB is Google Play Store (app updates), 5.56MB is Gmail, 1.12MB is news and weather.
Notably, when I am home I'm connected to Wifi, so I don't use data between 9pm and 7am. In total roughly 50% of my bandwidth is through Wifi, more if you bulk-load Kindle or bring down from Amazon Cloud Player to the device itself when around Wifi (apparently Amazon MP3 now stores in Cloud Player but lets you copy from Cloud Player to the current device without DRM, instead of being an either-or solution). I'll bring an album or a single book down on 4G LTE, but if I'm syncing my library or several albums of music I'll do that at home ahead of time.
Are you people nuts? I pay $10/mo for 2GB unlimited from T-Mobile. After 2GB over 4G LTE, it drops me to Edge slow shit but I don't pay any more. If I want to get LTE forever I pay $30/mo, but honestly I use a couple hundred megs a month. I'd have the $5 200MB plan, but that one charges after you overrun.
I haven't experienced the microphone cutting problem or the random reboots, although random reboots started happening when I started running the experimental branch of Cyanogenmod (which also annoys me for not having built-in permissions management like CM7! May as well run stock).
Battery life... I have wifi and GPS on ALL THE TIME (even without wifi connected to anything) and I've started to eschew using the charger at work. I leave and it's at 79%. I use the damn thing as a Kindle reader and an MP3 player at the same time while riding the train. I'm having a hard time getting the battery run down in a day even being a ridiculous twat to my phone.
Oh, maybe you were running the Facebook for Android app when you measured battery life? I had the phone 100% charged and plugged in and it started to lose battery life pretty quick (dropped by 2% in 1 hour), and ran up a metric shitload of 4G bandwidth use besides. Removed that. Seriously the Facebook app is terrible.
Don't need proof. We're charging him with a crime, for which he now has to attend court and defend himself. Evidence of his conduct will be presented to support the charge.
Meanwhile I got a Google Galaxy Nexus, and a friend (who is a graphics designer and a HOT girl) got the Galaxy SIII and sold her iPhone 4, and she's ecstatic about how much better it is than her iPhone. Of course she hit a wall when she hooked it up and got MTP, and had to step five feet to the right and get around it with the Android file transfer program for MacsOSX, but beyond that it's been smooth.
Ubuntu is Debian with a more regular 6 month release cycle, so it theoretically allows you to get more up-to-date without as big a stability sacrifice as going to Debian testing/sid. RHEL is Fedora minus 95% of available packages on a 5-10 year release cycle (how old is RHEL6?). I can recommend Ubuntu, though I'd immediately ditch Unity; they do some goofy shit, though.
A lot of modern touring bikes are taking up the front friction/rear index-friction selectable setting, where the rear has a switch to put it into friction mode and the front is just friction.
I aligned my rear derailleur a few times as the cable settled into the housing. It worked decently, most of the time: the space between the gears is small, so it doesn't have to be quite perfect. My front derailleur was worse by far, and I found that it would go in and out of adjustment based on a 10 degree shift in temperature. I adjusted it in the spring and literally for a month if it was 50 degrees out the FDR worked great, 60 and the FDR couldn't shift worth a damn, 40 and the FDR kind of worked.
The other issue has to do with cross chaining, by which your gear range is limited because you use indexing. My 8 speed rubs if I'm using the big chain ring with any but the top 3. I can adjust it so that it can use the top 4 or even the top 5, but it tends to not shift into the big chain ring good at all then. Also it won't rub on the big ring if I'm in the 3rd to last, but then if I go up to the higher 2 gears it starts grinding the FDR against the chain. So I keep my big ring set up so it doesn't rub and only uses the top 3 gears, which means the 20-22mph range involves a lot of shifting between chain rings and jumping a couple gears, which is ridiculous since if I try to do these at the same time my chain falls off the crank entirely.
With friction, I just adjust the FDR to move the chain where it belongs and not rub, and tick the RDR where I want it. Thus I can utilize my big chain ring more. My 8 speed, with friction up front, can take the 18mph+ range on the big chain ring, which allows me to shift into the big chain ring if I'm on relatively flat or slightly downward sloping ground. As it stands, I spend 95% of my time on the middle ring, and go to the small ring to climb hills. Cruising around 20 is awkward, because my cadence is too low when I lose 1-2mph and then it's too high when I want to pick up 2-3mph.
Clipless pedals and friction is the way to go. Platforms and toe clips suck.
I've seen it done on Konica Minolta, supposedly all copiers are supposed to detect and error. Internet claims just 'colour copiers', whatever 'colour' is.
Shake out your hands by flicking your fingers about 12 times. Take one paper towel, fold it in half, and it will get your hands completely dry. Seriously, there was a TED talk on this.
A fine toothed comb basically squeegees the water out of your hair. It takes 20-30 paper towels to get my hair as dry as 2 paper towels after a few seconds of combing; a LOT of water comes out. Similarly, I have a 400W 3200RPM spin dryer at home that I drop clothes in for 3 minutes, and then put them in the 3kW tumble dryer for 5 minutes and they're over-dried. Removing the excess water before attempting to dry something is usually helpful.
Why not? Do you wash your hands at work or do you just come type on everybody's keyboard but it's ok because you didn't pee on your hands? It's the same amount of effort really.
Shower before bike ride, removes most of the bacteria that ferment the sweat. Swap out the bike clothes to remove most of the sweat, cotton undershirt shirt draws up any remaining moisture and allows it to dry so that fermentation is halted. Hang the wicking clothes to dry. Wool won't allow microbial growth, so the same shirt can be worn for an entire week in the cold months anyway..
The algorithm looks for a specific pattern of 5 points. For example, Photoshop catches it; screenshotting a photocopier that doesn't work at the moment is harder to do.
Still wrong. Plenty of people come off bicycles all the time without sustaining head injury. Your statistic is also carefully skewed to ignore the total incidence--that is, if 99% of incidents result in fatal head injury 100% prevented by helmet, and 99.99999999999999999% of bicycle trips enjoy zero incidents, then roughly 0.000000000000000001% of bicycle trips will end non-fatally with a helmet and fatally without a helmet. That means if everyone of 7 billion people on this planet makes 2 bicycle trips every single day, every 136,986,301 years there will be 1 fatality preventable by helmet.
People who ride bikes don't fall or hit things all that often, though it's more often than 1 in a few gazillion trips. When they do fall, they don't get hurt all that often--I've never taken a head impact except when I intentionally forced my front wheel to stop (when I was like 12) by jamming my foot in it at 30mph, causing an endo (I was leaning forward off the seat). That's why kids should wear helmets: they do stupid shit like jump ramps with no hands. Adults BMX jumping cars should also wear helmets. Adults who aren't experienced and fall off bicycles a lot should wear helmets until they learn to ride. Adults who have learned to ride, however, have such a ridiculously low rate of incidence and a high rate of recovery (i.e. they ditch the bike and protect themselves from injury in a fall) that wearing a helmet is merely a good idea, but not critical.
Cycle tracks are considered less safe as well because they further declimatize cars to cyclists, and so incident where the track crosses the road increases more than enough to compensate the physical barrier separation. To boot, they have higher physical space requirements and higher costs, and do even more to teach cyclists that the rules of the road don't apply to them while teaching motorists that the road is theirs and cyclists are just in the way.
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Because we're better off judging a man by how he handles blackjack and hookers.
Mergers are always good for CEOs and shareholders and always bad for everyone else. It's a rule. This is not sarcasm.
Consider the whole reason Verizon and AT&T dominate the market: Verizon happened when Bell Atlantic absorbed MCI and GTE; AT&T absorbed Cingular and a few others. Smaller players still exist, but competition is hard; without mergers very small players would drop off until a healthy culture formed, but with mergers one or two parasites become huge and dominating and make it harder for smaller players to gain traction.
The smaller players can merge, gaining a stronger hand to compete but increasing the distance between them and the other small players, which then makes it hard for those small players to compete--and then they either die off or get absorbed in mergers. Eventually small players can't exist, and as they die off the larger players come to scavenge the carcasses.
Each round of mergers brings a lot of similar services under one hand, where they become redundant or excessive. Having 14 non-redundant niche services is a money sink, and so 10 of them go away and the consumer has 4 to pick from which aren't always as well-matched to the individual consumer's needs as the services discontinued. Lay-offs occur, although we can typically bring that into a cost-savings and increase in efficiency, which is less economic waste and should be good--because it SHOULD cause a decrease in operational costs, leading to a decrease in pricing of services to consumers, leaving more free money in the economy to fund new ventures that can tap the newly freed labor pool. Unfortunately, what often happens is the price stays high and margins increase, so the economy gets additional labor that it doesn't have anything to do with and we have a bunch more people unemployed.
To be fair, it's Texas-Mexican border food, not Mexican proper, so you really can't claim it's faux-Mexican. You can make claims on how well it emulates food culture close to but north of the big river.
Also, to be fair, most 'Mexican' food here is shitty because it's not greasy. Look at a jar of salsa one day, do you see lard? How much lard do you think went into your Mission tortillas? Guess what? Mexicans use a lot of lard. That's pork, in case you didn't know.
We need more lard in our pseudo-Mexican food so we can have authentic pseudo-Mexican food.
Nah it seems to be a culture shift from my vantage. Girls are abandoning iPhones, while a bunch of hipster and (oddly) black dudes are buying iPhones to show off.
Local culture seems to be that modern black guys buy whatever girls think is cool to impress girls, while modern white guys wear gold chains and blast rap music and wear backwards hats trying to impress people by being black. Hilariously, girls are now bored with iPhones, and white guys all look like dorks 'cause they're imitating last decade's black dudes.
Isn't it like that in all US big cities?
Google Galaxy Nexus and Samsung Galaxy S3 are the top tier phones in the world right now. I get 450min for my $60/mo but I don't use nearly that much.
I'm not worried so much about slipping as I am about bumps. I hit a bump at 15mph, bump bump bump. I hit 5 more bumps. I try to pedal, but my foot leaves the pedal (i.e. goes upwards) and I get the edge of the pedal, then come off, hit my heel on the ground and break my ankle. Also I pull up on my pedals when going clipless and looking for power (i.e. hills).
Nein, Ich bin in der Stadt. Der United Stadt. Disen ist Scheiss, aber das sowas von sovas komt.
Parts are stock but bike was $400 USD so ja probably not the most well-tuned setup.
What do you mean? I couldn't do that on my Motorola Cliq with Android 1.4, but I found out recently that my Galaxy Nexus will continue downloading from Wifi or 4G LTE while taking a cell phone call.
Compare T-Mobile value plans and buy your phone directly instead of through the provider. Saves a chunk of change ($20/mo * 24mo per phone, really). Unlimited data on T-Mobile is $30/mo, but profile your actual data use. For my single line use, I get $10/mo 2GB plan (overflows into unlimited free low-speed Edge data) and don't use nearly that; I also noticed the Facebook app eats bandwidth (it eats battery faster than the charger supplies it, too), so I use the Facebook Messenger app but not the full Facebook app.
It may be worth the switch, but it also may be doable to switch away from unlimited data and into something cheaper. Currently I've used 103MB this cycle (since Sep 21), 64.26MB of that is Mint.com (which is heavy), 15MB is Web browser (Facebook, including uploads), 13MB is Google Play Store (app updates), 5.56MB is Gmail, 1.12MB is news and weather.
Notably, when I am home I'm connected to Wifi, so I don't use data between 9pm and 7am. In total roughly 50% of my bandwidth is through Wifi, more if you bulk-load Kindle or bring down from Amazon Cloud Player to the device itself when around Wifi (apparently Amazon MP3 now stores in Cloud Player but lets you copy from Cloud Player to the current device without DRM, instead of being an either-or solution). I'll bring an album or a single book down on 4G LTE, but if I'm syncing my library or several albums of music I'll do that at home ahead of time.
Chipotle is crappy compared to Qdoba, but better than Taco Bell.
Are you people nuts? I pay $10/mo for 2GB unlimited from T-Mobile. After 2GB over 4G LTE, it drops me to Edge slow shit but I don't pay any more. If I want to get LTE forever I pay $30/mo, but honestly I use a couple hundred megs a month. I'd have the $5 200MB plan, but that one charges after you overrun.
I haven't experienced the microphone cutting problem or the random reboots, although random reboots started happening when I started running the experimental branch of Cyanogenmod (which also annoys me for not having built-in permissions management like CM7! May as well run stock).
Battery life... I have wifi and GPS on ALL THE TIME (even without wifi connected to anything) and I've started to eschew using the charger at work. I leave and it's at 79%. I use the damn thing as a Kindle reader and an MP3 player at the same time while riding the train. I'm having a hard time getting the battery run down in a day even being a ridiculous twat to my phone.
Oh, maybe you were running the Facebook for Android app when you measured battery life? I had the phone 100% charged and plugged in and it started to lose battery life pretty quick (dropped by 2% in 1 hour), and ran up a metric shitload of 4G bandwidth use besides. Removed that. Seriously the Facebook app is terrible.
Don't need proof. We're charging him with a crime, for which he now has to attend court and defend himself. Evidence of his conduct will be presented to support the charge.
Meanwhile I got a Google Galaxy Nexus, and a friend (who is a graphics designer and a HOT girl) got the Galaxy SIII and sold her iPhone 4, and she's ecstatic about how much better it is than her iPhone. Of course she hit a wall when she hooked it up and got MTP, and had to step five feet to the right and get around it with the Android file transfer program for MacsOSX, but beyond that it's been smooth.
Girls are abandoning the iPhone. Dump stock now.
Is this why there's a bump where the camera is on the Galaxy Nexus, and the lens itself is recessed in a mm?
Ubuntu is Debian with a more regular 6 month release cycle, so it theoretically allows you to get more up-to-date without as big a stability sacrifice as going to Debian testing/sid. RHEL is Fedora minus 95% of available packages on a 5-10 year release cycle (how old is RHEL6?). I can recommend Ubuntu, though I'd immediately ditch Unity; they do some goofy shit, though.
A lot of modern touring bikes are taking up the front friction/rear index-friction selectable setting, where the rear has a switch to put it into friction mode and the front is just friction.
I aligned my rear derailleur a few times as the cable settled into the housing. It worked decently, most of the time: the space between the gears is small, so it doesn't have to be quite perfect. My front derailleur was worse by far, and I found that it would go in and out of adjustment based on a 10 degree shift in temperature. I adjusted it in the spring and literally for a month if it was 50 degrees out the FDR worked great, 60 and the FDR couldn't shift worth a damn, 40 and the FDR kind of worked.
The other issue has to do with cross chaining, by which your gear range is limited because you use indexing. My 8 speed rubs if I'm using the big chain ring with any but the top 3. I can adjust it so that it can use the top 4 or even the top 5, but it tends to not shift into the big chain ring good at all then. Also it won't rub on the big ring if I'm in the 3rd to last, but then if I go up to the higher 2 gears it starts grinding the FDR against the chain. So I keep my big ring set up so it doesn't rub and only uses the top 3 gears, which means the 20-22mph range involves a lot of shifting between chain rings and jumping a couple gears, which is ridiculous since if I try to do these at the same time my chain falls off the crank entirely.
With friction, I just adjust the FDR to move the chain where it belongs and not rub, and tick the RDR where I want it. Thus I can utilize my big chain ring more. My 8 speed, with friction up front, can take the 18mph+ range on the big chain ring, which allows me to shift into the big chain ring if I'm on relatively flat or slightly downward sloping ground. As it stands, I spend 95% of my time on the middle ring, and go to the small ring to climb hills. Cruising around 20 is awkward, because my cadence is too low when I lose 1-2mph and then it's too high when I want to pick up 2-3mph.
Clipless pedals and friction is the way to go. Platforms and toe clips suck.
I've seen it done on Konica Minolta, supposedly all copiers are supposed to detect and error. Internet claims just 'colour copiers', whatever 'colour' is.
Actually in Japan it's a lot of bicycles too. Also brits who come to America are immediately shocked at the visible racial tension we have here.
Shake out your hands by flicking your fingers about 12 times. Take one paper towel, fold it in half, and it will get your hands completely dry. Seriously, there was a TED talk on this.
A fine toothed comb basically squeegees the water out of your hair. It takes 20-30 paper towels to get my hair as dry as 2 paper towels after a few seconds of combing; a LOT of water comes out. Similarly, I have a 400W 3200RPM spin dryer at home that I drop clothes in for 3 minutes, and then put them in the 3kW tumble dryer for 5 minutes and they're over-dried. Removing the excess water before attempting to dry something is usually helpful.
Why not? Do you wash your hands at work or do you just come type on everybody's keyboard but it's ok because you didn't pee on your hands? It's the same amount of effort really.
Shower before bike ride, removes most of the bacteria that ferment the sweat. Swap out the bike clothes to remove most of the sweat, cotton undershirt shirt draws up any remaining moisture and allows it to dry so that fermentation is halted. Hang the wicking clothes to dry. Wool won't allow microbial growth, so the same shirt can be worn for an entire week in the cold months anyway..
Yes they might not be as nice to hostile invaders of their country as they are to each other.
The algorithm looks for a specific pattern of 5 points. For example, Photoshop catches it; screenshotting a photocopier that doesn't work at the moment is harder to do.
Still wrong. Plenty of people come off bicycles all the time without sustaining head injury. Your statistic is also carefully skewed to ignore the total incidence--that is, if 99% of incidents result in fatal head injury 100% prevented by helmet, and 99.99999999999999999% of bicycle trips enjoy zero incidents, then roughly 0.000000000000000001% of bicycle trips will end non-fatally with a helmet and fatally without a helmet. That means if everyone of 7 billion people on this planet makes 2 bicycle trips every single day, every 136,986,301 years there will be 1 fatality preventable by helmet.
People who ride bikes don't fall or hit things all that often, though it's more often than 1 in a few gazillion trips. When they do fall, they don't get hurt all that often--I've never taken a head impact except when I intentionally forced my front wheel to stop (when I was like 12) by jamming my foot in it at 30mph, causing an endo (I was leaning forward off the seat). That's why kids should wear helmets: they do stupid shit like jump ramps with no hands. Adults BMX jumping cars should also wear helmets. Adults who aren't experienced and fall off bicycles a lot should wear helmets until they learn to ride. Adults who have learned to ride, however, have such a ridiculously low rate of incidence and a high rate of recovery (i.e. they ditch the bike and protect themselves from injury in a fall) that wearing a helmet is merely a good idea, but not critical.
Cycle tracks are considered less safe as well because they further declimatize cars to cyclists, and so incident where the track crosses the road increases more than enough to compensate the physical barrier separation. To boot, they have higher physical space requirements and higher costs, and do even more to teach cyclists that the rules of the road don't apply to them while teaching motorists that the road is theirs and cyclists are just in the way.