Unless the opposing ship blasts them with infected USB drives that is unlikely to happen.
Though that wouldn't stop some dummy on shore leave picking up a brothel USB, and plugging it in somewhere he shouldn't... That said, some simple physical limitations (i.e. no USB ports etc...) would pretty much prevent that from happening (which is likely the case, or if there are USB connects they are in a physically protected place with limited access).
Agreed, I'd guess that warship systems are pretty isolated, and what links they do have would be highly protected.
Also I have to think if another warship had to get within Wifi range to launch a "cyber attack", they would probably be in a world of hurt from say a normal attack.
That said, while I don't think it would be all that effective or reasonable, I suppose a sub could sneak right under the warship and perhaps be close enough to hack systems. Though I don't know how Wifi really behaves through water (that would be a neat piece of trivia), and anyway if they were that close they could do far worse likely with a conventional attack anyway so why bother with the cyber attack. It would make for a great prank in peace time naval exercises, where the sub does exactly that, and launches a virus that populates all the monitors with a smiley face and a "Got You!" message. Would make for a good movie scene at least.
One vulnerability would be if they had a saboteur on board that could physically access VIA panel or USB or something. Probably only reasonable in movies.
I think they took a page from STTNG and DS9 in that the best parts of both those shows were "War with the Borg", and "War with the Dominion", so they were basically like, "Ok, or show isn't doing so well, lets make up an alien race and have a war with them, that should solve everything!":)
As for the whole temporal war thing, I agree it was a bit silly, though it did give them the dramatic device to travel back in time to fight Nazi's etc... Which is really also taking a page out of the original series and STTNG, as that was a troup they used quite a bit that is pretty well established. Of course there have been plenty of time travel excuses without a temporal war thingy.
I will say they did have a couple of episodes I really liked. One was where Tucker and Malcolm get stuck in a pod together. It was more like a two person play, and also they got drunk which was amusing. The other was I believe another time travel episode, where they do back to the same time period as the original series, with the same uniforms, big blinky buttons and sound effects, and tribbles, I thought it a nice hommage. Finally they did one like Voyager (though I think a bit better), where they are in a parallel universe and they are all evil bastards. It was just kinda fun and you could tell that they don't take themselves so seriously. It also seemed like they really enjoyed doing that for a change and I think it showed.
Also though it got horrible reviews, I liked Pandorum quite a bit, where it mixes up the whole "I woke up too early" with "I can't remember anything" which was pretty great. There are a couple books out there like that as well, and there are plenty of room to grow/material to draw upon. It kind of makes it a science fiction mystery which I think is a good combo. I guess I really hoped that Passengers might be a little more like that, but with better production values etc...
I kind of liked The Arrival, if only for the idea. I agree about Interstellar, though I did like the blackhole part.
I agree with Passengers. I was pretty excited about that one, and thought it had a great premise and lots of promise. But it was basically a romance movie wrapped in a thin science fiction shell. Though I think you could argue the plausibility of his actions. He *was* a mechanic, a machinist, and a tech and he couldn't do anything. All the people that could help him were behind the locked door which he couldn't access (bit of a dramatic device there). So his only driver was loneliness and hopelessness which prompts him to awake a writer. It wasn't until the ship got hit and stuff starts breaking that the Officer awakes who was actually able to help, and would have maybe been able to help more had he not died so quick. Anyway I wasn't so critical of the plot, other than it existed, when it could have been something else so much better.
While very short lived, Firefly as you know is up there as well. While BSG was very good, the later seasons got a bit ridiculous. Where I could watch every episode of Firefly ad nauseum. DSN other than the war also had a lot of weak episodes. Though recently watched some Enterprise, and though I like everyone else made fun of it when it came out, watched it anyway, find it better as it ages a bit.
The Expanse is currently the best in show right now so to speak I think (insofar as ship-based).
Even more modern bad science fiction. Saw an ad for the new season of Killjoys... Looks horrible. I'll probably still watch it however. I even managed to slog my way though The Chronicles Shannara, and I'll probably do it again when the new season comes out. While Dark Matter isn't terrible, it isn't exactly top shelf either and I watch that also. The Expanse is probably the only really good science fiction television out there (although there are some Netflix series out there that look promising that I haven't watched yet). I think part of it is just like movies (though lately that has changed a bit) there is usually not a whole lot to really pick from, so if you really enjoy science fiction you watch all of it anyway if only because there are not a lot of options out there anyway (other than re-runs of old shows).
Anyway I'm looking forward to the new Star Trek, though I guess you could also say, any new Star Trek...
Oh forgot about Westworld, which was also very good and I look forward to more. Also all the Walking Dead stuff and Gotham, but then you start stretching the definitions of "science fiction" a bit. Give me some good old space ship type science fiction any day. Oh there was also the short lived show about the generational ship that left in the 50's, I also liked that, though I can't remember what it was called off hand or if it was ever coming back (probably not)...
Obviously the pregnant teens were causing all the violent crime... A pregnant teen with a gun is dangerous indeed! Target them for gun control, and boom, problem solved!
Though seriously, there could be a link economically where many pregnant teens lack support, and probably poor desperate people might be more inclined to turn to violence when they perceive they have no other alternatives...
True. However there have been many instances abroad where people go nuts (terrorists and otherwise) using knives. Do you think this was because they like to use knives, or was it because they couldn't easily get their hands on a gun in that particular country due to gun control laws? Now do you think if those afore mentioned crazies were able to get their hands on guns, would the carnage be more, or less?
There has been a couple recent cases of this in England. Did their stricter laws prevent more incidents from happening? Who knows, maybe not. However it is pretty hard to argue that the severity of the incident wasn't lower as a result.
At one point I was losing my mind because of this. IT Security changed the policy one year. Except everything was every 30 days, requires it to be long, include upper, lower, special, not include similar previous passwords, etc... Which if I had one desktop password would not be a big deal. However I probably had about 6 for normal corporate reasons and about double that for the various other systems I needed to manage and support/maintain. Try keeping track of that... It was ridiculous.
Since then, a lot of the individual passwords have been consolidated, however I still have a lot to manage, and they are still subject to the above requirements.
As a funny aside I had a rather embarrassing talk with IT at one point when I forgot for the life of me one of my passwords, which happened to be a rather large expletive towards IT about the whole password situation. Oddly enough the help desk staff didn't even blink. I suspect I wasn't the only one with such passwords.
I've seen this a lot where I work. A lot of the valuations that IT does might be called inflationary if I was being kind. That said I understand at least some of the reasoning for why that is, most of which are legit. However at certain times I think there are internal power struggles going on behind the scenes where a particular department is trying to assert more power, and grow their staff, budget, etc... for no other reason that to self perpetuate itself, in that the bigger they get the more power they can wield, the more control and influence they have, etc... Some of it with negative repercussions, like using the number of IT tickets solved as an indicator of required resources, the end result being tickets for ever minor ridiculous thing, unsolved tickets being closed requiring to open new ones, etc... spending more time creating "tickets" to be "solved" than actually doing any real work (by both IT and the staff trying to play within the rules).
That said, I also see even more in the way of 1:1 type chargebacks, where the amount is exactly the same, so good from a certain standpoint, but is done really only for the purposes of process, accounting, etc... where there is zero net benefit. The difficulty is that there is a massive amount of this, and the administration overhead to manage all of these "transactions" are where a lot of money is lost. Where the left hand is paying the right hand, who is paying the left hand, who is paying the left foot, and the right foot, who are all paying the head. It is all the same body. Just call it even. It gets into budget breakdowns etc... and who is allocated what. Anyway there have been a few situations where I have been involved *trying* to design a system to take into account bizarre business practices and procedures involving large amounts of money moving around for seemingly little reason, groups getting changed, then charged back, etc... A good general analogy would be government taxing itself, or changing fees for service... It is all just a shell game with the same amount of money, only the guy doing the shuffling needs to get paid to manage the "game"...
It is pretty simple, that is the primary reason why. I have to support one legacy application that only runs on 32bit machines, and that we can't reasonably update to work on a 64bit machine. I know of a handful of other legacy application in our organization in the same boat. We figure we have until 2020 to design and replace said applications (as corporately we only support Windows 10 64bit, and Windows 7 32/64bit). It is quite irritating really. Anyway at one point we did a bit of analysis and found it was basically *a lot* cheaper at least in the short term to simply buy users 32bit machines to use than it was to design and replace systems right away. We know it is only a temporary fix, but it gives us the time to replace the legacy apps. I'm sure there are other reasons like hardware, but given how long 64bit cpus have been around and ubik I doubt anything but really ancient machines are limited by this so it is probably a pretty minor issue. It is all about all those legacy apps hanging around that just haven't been replaced yet.
Not only exactly what you said, but the fact that they have no backups (or they were not working) is also pretty scathing. I've worked with some experienced developers that know our systems for 15 years, and they never ever have any access to production! Never mind they should have DEV and TEST instances as well, probably logging depending on what they are using...
Makes me wonder if their IT was that inept, or if there was some serious financial or other more fundamental technical issues that they needed to go away, and this guy is simply the scapegoat... LIke the CTO was embezzling from the system and needed a reason for all evidence to disappear. Or someone senior with real access screwed up very badly, and again this guy is getting the blame. Seems pretty unreasonable and unrealistic that something like this could even happen. Anyway it all sounds very fishy to me, I'd bet there is something else going on.
Not sure if this is a contributing factor, but Home Depot is their only real competition. The Home Depot website and app are some of the worst I have ever seen for a large commercial enterprise. Half the time neither do not work at all, and if they do, they are full of problems with almost every aspect of the experience. On top of that Home Depot has started a policy awhile ago not to honor any giftcards or store credit online. Dealing with their technical support in an attempt to buying something online was a nightmare, though the options that are given to them to deal with customers isn't probably great. The last time I tried to by something, I ended up giving up in frustration in attempting to give them money, and in went and bought the same product someplace else (BestBuy of all places) where it was more expensive, but at least I could finish my damn transaction.
Given that this is Lowes only "competition", perhaps they feel relatively save off shoring their IT staff and the possible degradation that may ensue, as it can't be any worse than what Home Depot does now. Perhaps they do the same, no idea. The only time I use Home Depot, now is if I need some lumber or widget that I am reasonably sure they will have in stock and go to the physical store. They are essentially a brick and mortar only store to me, seeming to regress into the past.
I think that is probably a pretty common issue. I know it is similar where I am. At one point they were part of my union, which was silly because every time there was a strike vote (no matter what it was) they would vote 99.9% to go on strike. They knew that they would all be for the most part classified as essential workers and not be allowed to strike anyway. Meaning all the rest of us would have to go out to win them them benefits. They are still in a related union, but at least don't vote with us anymore. There was a recent vote like a year or so ago, and management was going to start installing management types from other business areas as prison guards (or that was the threat). I can only imagine how disastrous that would have been (though I think some of us were secretly hoping some of our management might have to do it and see what "happens"). At any rate, of course that didn't happen and they got what they want, which is what they always do. Which is why it is so expensive and why they all have such high salaries. That isn't to say they don't have some legitimate grievances (like safety, and numbers, and facilities, etc...), but salary isn't really one of them. Don't get me wrong, not an easy or fun job, with danger and stress, they should be compensated fairly... that said the pendulum swings. I've always been a bit critical of industries that have "unions" but who more less legally can't strike, seems a bit silly (Prison guards, Police, Fire, Nurses, doctors, teachers to a certain extent politically as parents can deal with children)... It is kind of a slap in the face to other unions struggling to get that 0.5, 1 or 2% inflationary increase when some of these other are getting unsustainable 6 and 8% increases year over year. At any rate it is mostly political cowardice, most would pass the buck to the next guy and them blame them for not being able to balance the budget.
My work started doing this recently. Not all that happy about it. To make matters worse, the implemented it retroactively 2 years before the program actually existed, so I'm already half way through the program. They call it "Non-disciplinary", however if you advance into the program too far you can be let go, which sounds pretty disciplinary to me. I believe I effectively do not have any sick days anymore, I'll just go to work sick from now on, unless I get hit by a bus or something, at which point work will probably be the least of my worries.
I expect it is a bargaining ploy to the Union. i.e. "You wanna get rid of it? How about those pensions?" Though Walmart doesn't even have that I suppose.
The US should have signed the agreement and then totally failed to live up it and miss all their targets without any repercussions like the rest of us!
I don't disagree with you, however the UK is probably better positioned than just about anyone for renewables as it is surrounded by water which is where all the best windpower is located. Though you have to get past all the NIMBY's and real estate barons first. A better example might be some small landlocked European country.
From what I've read it is pretty much the opposite of what you just said. The reason nuclear costs are so high is due to the construction cost and the length that it takes (and how those costs change over time). Fuel is nothing for nuclear in the grand scheme of things. On the other side, the second most reason is the decommission costs, which are usually built into the construction funding (which also inflates the cost, and again when you are talking about 60 years later, those costs change... upwards).
As far as waste goes it is a bit of a weird one. Currently without re-processing (which is what happens in the US), much of the fuel is left, meaning the halflife is quite long, meaning it really isn't all that radioactive, nor is the material that it has come in contact with. However that also means storage is much longer. Should they re-process to use most of the fuel, the halflife is much shorter, meaning much more radioactive, meaning much less to store for way less time, though more dangerous to handle. Damned if you do damned if you don't so to speak. Though I don't think either decision has anything to do with storage and more to do with how facilities were made with the making of weapons in mind. Anyway, all of this is probably a bit of a oversimplification, but more less the gist of it.
I agree 100% with your baseload comment however. Until the magic storage problem is somehow resolved this issue doesn't ever go away. I could see something like distributed battery solution a la Elon Musk (particularly when combined with distributed renewable generation, smart guy he may rule the world in a few decades), however producing billions of batteries isn't exactly all that environmentally friendly either...
I think the sad part is that most of the technical challenges with nuclear seem to be because all the facilities are old using old technology. Because new ones are not being built not only are newer safer better designs not being built, but also stagnating the progress in advancing those technology due to the limited market for them. I know Canada somewhat recently partially sold it's nuclear program, and another company (Westinghouse?) recently had the division that did their nuclear program go bankrupt. Only China seems to be building anymore, but post Japan they've cut back their plans by like half (though still a lot). However they have a bigger coal problem than anyone, and the alternative is gas and being politically beholden to Russia which probably isn't a real option either.
Sounds just like my ex-wife's soul! Ba dump dump spish!
Anyway just laughing a bit of the creative description... How is it any more of "pit of infinitely deep darkness" than one black hole. Infinity x 2 bitches! Sounds like something you say as a kid to one up your friend who just said shotgun times infinity to get the front seat....
Case in point Alaska already has UBI to a limited extent, in that everyone gets 1000$ or whatever just for existing in Alaska, and that is only from oil, nothing else (and not even equal to values, just a taste).
Not really a fair comparison. You're assuming that personal income is where all the money comes from. Government in run using multiple sources of funding, and while Income Tax isn't a trivial amount, it isn't the only thing that pays for everything. Corporate tax is another big example, services, fees, permits, licences, trade, markets, sales, royalties, etc... Your own example is a huge strawman, not sure if you were intentionally trying to be ironic or not.
Well I don't think you need to be a critic to know what you're getting with "XXX: The Return of Xander Cage"...
That said, I recall seeing the trailers for King Arthur and thinking wow this is going to be bad... It looked to have as much to do with the King Arthur mythos as the Easter Bunny. From what I could see there was a guy with a sword and that was about where the story ends...
Critics many times don't get it. Back in the day there were a ton of great movies that got panned, that turned into cult classics. Spaceballs, Super Troopers, Officespace, Event Horizon, Starship Troopers, etc... I think all of these got one star from critics as terrible movies, yet they are all some of my favorites...
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Unless the opposing ship blasts them with infected USB drives that is unlikely to happen.
Though that wouldn't stop some dummy on shore leave picking up a brothel USB, and plugging it in somewhere he shouldn't... That said, some simple physical limitations (i.e. no USB ports etc...) would pretty much prevent that from happening (which is likely the case, or if there are USB connects they are in a physically protected place with limited access).
Agreed, I'd guess that warship systems are pretty isolated, and what links they do have would be highly protected.
Also I have to think if another warship had to get within Wifi range to launch a "cyber attack", they would probably be in a world of hurt from say a normal attack.
That said, while I don't think it would be all that effective or reasonable, I suppose a sub could sneak right under the warship and perhaps be close enough to hack systems. Though I don't know how Wifi really behaves through water (that would be a neat piece of trivia), and anyway if they were that close they could do far worse likely with a conventional attack anyway so why bother with the cyber attack. It would make for a great prank in peace time naval exercises, where the sub does exactly that, and launches a virus that populates all the monitors with a smiley face and a "Got You!" message. Would make for a good movie scene at least.
One vulnerability would be if they had a saboteur on board that could physically access VIA panel or USB or something. Probably only reasonable in movies.
I think they took a page from STTNG and DS9 in that the best parts of both those shows were "War with the Borg", and "War with the Dominion", so they were basically like, "Ok, or show isn't doing so well, lets make up an alien race and have a war with them, that should solve everything!" :)
As for the whole temporal war thing, I agree it was a bit silly, though it did give them the dramatic device to travel back in time to fight Nazi's etc... Which is really also taking a page out of the original series and STTNG, as that was a troup they used quite a bit that is pretty well established. Of course there have been plenty of time travel excuses without a temporal war thingy.
I will say they did have a couple of episodes I really liked. One was where Tucker and Malcolm get stuck in a pod together. It was more like a two person play, and also they got drunk which was amusing. The other was I believe another time travel episode, where they do back to the same time period as the original series, with the same uniforms, big blinky buttons and sound effects, and tribbles, I thought it a nice hommage. Finally they did one like Voyager (though I think a bit better), where they are in a parallel universe and they are all evil bastards. It was just kinda fun and you could tell that they don't take themselves so seriously. It also seemed like they really enjoyed doing that for a change and I think it showed.
Also though it got horrible reviews, I liked Pandorum quite a bit, where it mixes up the whole "I woke up too early" with "I can't remember anything" which was pretty great. There are a couple books out there like that as well, and there are plenty of room to grow/material to draw upon. It kind of makes it a science fiction mystery which I think is a good combo. I guess I really hoped that Passengers might be a little more like that, but with better production values etc...
I kind of liked The Arrival, if only for the idea. I agree about Interstellar, though I did like the blackhole part.
I agree with Passengers. I was pretty excited about that one, and thought it had a great premise and lots of promise. But it was basically a romance movie wrapped in a thin science fiction shell. Though I think you could argue the plausibility of his actions. He *was* a mechanic, a machinist, and a tech and he couldn't do anything. All the people that could help him were behind the locked door which he couldn't access (bit of a dramatic device there). So his only driver was loneliness and hopelessness which prompts him to awake a writer. It wasn't until the ship got hit and stuff starts breaking that the Officer awakes who was actually able to help, and would have maybe been able to help more had he not died so quick. Anyway I wasn't so critical of the plot, other than it existed, when it could have been something else so much better.
While very short lived, Firefly as you know is up there as well. While BSG was very good, the later seasons got a bit ridiculous. Where I could watch every episode of Firefly ad nauseum. DSN other than the war also had a lot of weak episodes. Though recently watched some Enterprise, and though I like everyone else made fun of it when it came out, watched it anyway, find it better as it ages a bit.
The Expanse is currently the best in show right now so to speak I think (insofar as ship-based).
Even more modern bad science fiction. Saw an ad for the new season of Killjoys... Looks horrible. I'll probably still watch it however. I even managed to slog my way though The Chronicles Shannara, and I'll probably do it again when the new season comes out. While Dark Matter isn't terrible, it isn't exactly top shelf either and I watch that also. The Expanse is probably the only really good science fiction television out there (although there are some Netflix series out there that look promising that I haven't watched yet). I think part of it is just like movies (though lately that has changed a bit) there is usually not a whole lot to really pick from, so if you really enjoy science fiction you watch all of it anyway if only because there are not a lot of options out there anyway (other than re-runs of old shows).
Anyway I'm looking forward to the new Star Trek, though I guess you could also say, any new Star Trek...
Oh forgot about Westworld, which was also very good and I look forward to more. Also all the Walking Dead stuff and Gotham, but then you start stretching the definitions of "science fiction" a bit. Give me some good old space ship type science fiction any day. Oh there was also the short lived show about the generational ship that left in the 50's, I also liked that, though I can't remember what it was called off hand or if it was ever coming back (probably not)...
Obviously the pregnant teens were causing all the violent crime... A pregnant teen with a gun is dangerous indeed! Target them for gun control, and boom, problem solved!
Though seriously, there could be a link economically where many pregnant teens lack support, and probably poor desperate people might be more inclined to turn to violence when they perceive they have no other alternatives...
True. However there have been many instances abroad where people go nuts (terrorists and otherwise) using knives. Do you think this was because they like to use knives, or was it because they couldn't easily get their hands on a gun in that particular country due to gun control laws? Now do you think if those afore mentioned crazies were able to get their hands on guns, would the carnage be more, or less?
There has been a couple recent cases of this in England. Did their stricter laws prevent more incidents from happening? Who knows, maybe not. However it is pretty hard to argue that the severity of the incident wasn't lower as a result.
At one point I was losing my mind because of this. IT Security changed the policy one year. Except everything was every 30 days, requires it to be long, include upper, lower, special, not include similar previous passwords, etc... Which if I had one desktop password would not be a big deal. However I probably had about 6 for normal corporate reasons and about double that for the various other systems I needed to manage and support/maintain. Try keeping track of that... It was ridiculous.
Since then, a lot of the individual passwords have been consolidated, however I still have a lot to manage, and they are still subject to the above requirements.
As a funny aside I had a rather embarrassing talk with IT at one point when I forgot for the life of me one of my passwords, which happened to be a rather large expletive towards IT about the whole password situation. Oddly enough the help desk staff didn't even blink. I suspect I wasn't the only one with such passwords.
I've seen this a lot where I work. A lot of the valuations that IT does might be called inflationary if I was being kind. That said I understand at least some of the reasoning for why that is, most of which are legit. However at certain times I think there are internal power struggles going on behind the scenes where a particular department is trying to assert more power, and grow their staff, budget, etc... for no other reason that to self perpetuate itself, in that the bigger they get the more power they can wield, the more control and influence they have, etc... Some of it with negative repercussions, like using the number of IT tickets solved as an indicator of required resources, the end result being tickets for ever minor ridiculous thing, unsolved tickets being closed requiring to open new ones, etc... spending more time creating "tickets" to be "solved" than actually doing any real work (by both IT and the staff trying to play within the rules).
That said, I also see even more in the way of 1:1 type chargebacks, where the amount is exactly the same, so good from a certain standpoint, but is done really only for the purposes of process, accounting, etc... where there is zero net benefit. The difficulty is that there is a massive amount of this, and the administration overhead to manage all of these "transactions" are where a lot of money is lost. Where the left hand is paying the right hand, who is paying the left hand, who is paying the left foot, and the right foot, who are all paying the head. It is all the same body. Just call it even. It gets into budget breakdowns etc... and who is allocated what. Anyway there have been a few situations where I have been involved *trying* to design a system to take into account bizarre business practices and procedures involving large amounts of money moving around for seemingly little reason, groups getting changed, then charged back, etc... A good general analogy would be government taxing itself, or changing fees for service... It is all just a shell game with the same amount of money, only the guy doing the shuffling needs to get paid to manage the "game"...
It is pretty simple, that is the primary reason why. I have to support one legacy application that only runs on 32bit machines, and that we can't reasonably update to work on a 64bit machine. I know of a handful of other legacy application in our organization in the same boat. We figure we have until 2020 to design and replace said applications (as corporately we only support Windows 10 64bit, and Windows 7 32/64bit). It is quite irritating really. Anyway at one point we did a bit of analysis and found it was basically *a lot* cheaper at least in the short term to simply buy users 32bit machines to use than it was to design and replace systems right away. We know it is only a temporary fix, but it gives us the time to replace the legacy apps. I'm sure there are other reasons like hardware, but given how long 64bit cpus have been around and ubik I doubt anything but really ancient machines are limited by this so it is probably a pretty minor issue. It is all about all those legacy apps hanging around that just haven't been replaced yet.
Not only exactly what you said, but the fact that they have no backups (or they were not working) is also pretty scathing. I've worked with some experienced developers that know our systems for 15 years, and they never ever have any access to production! Never mind they should have DEV and TEST instances as well, probably logging depending on what they are using...
Makes me wonder if their IT was that inept, or if there was some serious financial or other more fundamental technical issues that they needed to go away, and this guy is simply the scapegoat... LIke the CTO was embezzling from the system and needed a reason for all evidence to disappear. Or someone senior with real access screwed up very badly, and again this guy is getting the blame. Seems pretty unreasonable and unrealistic that something like this could even happen. Anyway it all sounds very fishy to me, I'd bet there is something else going on.
Not sure if this is a contributing factor, but Home Depot is their only real competition. The Home Depot website and app are some of the worst I have ever seen for a large commercial enterprise. Half the time neither do not work at all, and if they do, they are full of problems with almost every aspect of the experience. On top of that Home Depot has started a policy awhile ago not to honor any giftcards or store credit online. Dealing with their technical support in an attempt to buying something online was a nightmare, though the options that are given to them to deal with customers isn't probably great. The last time I tried to by something, I ended up giving up in frustration in attempting to give them money, and in went and bought the same product someplace else (BestBuy of all places) where it was more expensive, but at least I could finish my damn transaction.
Given that this is Lowes only "competition", perhaps they feel relatively save off shoring their IT staff and the possible degradation that may ensue, as it can't be any worse than what Home Depot does now. Perhaps they do the same, no idea. The only time I use Home Depot, now is if I need some lumber or widget that I am reasonably sure they will have in stock and go to the physical store. They are essentially a brick and mortar only store to me, seeming to regress into the past.
I think that is probably a pretty common issue. I know it is similar where I am. At one point they were part of my union, which was silly because every time there was a strike vote (no matter what it was) they would vote 99.9% to go on strike. They knew that they would all be for the most part classified as essential workers and not be allowed to strike anyway. Meaning all the rest of us would have to go out to win them them benefits. They are still in a related union, but at least don't vote with us anymore. There was a recent vote like a year or so ago, and management was going to start installing management types from other business areas as prison guards (or that was the threat). I can only imagine how disastrous that would have been (though I think some of us were secretly hoping some of our management might have to do it and see what "happens"). At any rate, of course that didn't happen and they got what they want, which is what they always do. Which is why it is so expensive and why they all have such high salaries. That isn't to say they don't have some legitimate grievances (like safety, and numbers, and facilities, etc...), but salary isn't really one of them. Don't get me wrong, not an easy or fun job, with danger and stress, they should be compensated fairly... that said the pendulum swings. I've always been a bit critical of industries that have "unions" but who more less legally can't strike, seems a bit silly (Prison guards, Police, Fire, Nurses, doctors, teachers to a certain extent politically as parents can deal with children)... It is kind of a slap in the face to other unions struggling to get that 0.5, 1 or 2% inflationary increase when some of these other are getting unsustainable 6 and 8% increases year over year. At any rate it is mostly political cowardice, most would pass the buck to the next guy and them blame them for not being able to balance the budget.
Sounds like they drank too much to me...
My work started doing this recently. Not all that happy about it. To make matters worse, the implemented it retroactively 2 years before the program actually existed, so I'm already half way through the program. They call it "Non-disciplinary", however if you advance into the program too far you can be let go, which sounds pretty disciplinary to me. I believe I effectively do not have any sick days anymore, I'll just go to work sick from now on, unless I get hit by a bus or something, at which point work will probably be the least of my worries.
I expect it is a bargaining ploy to the Union. i.e. "You wanna get rid of it? How about those pensions?"
Though Walmart doesn't even have that I suppose.
The US should have signed the agreement and then totally failed to live up it and miss all their targets without any repercussions like the rest of us!
I don't disagree with you, however the UK is probably better positioned than just about anyone for renewables as it is surrounded by water which is where all the best windpower is located. Though you have to get past all the NIMBY's and real estate barons first. A better example might be some small landlocked European country.
From what I've read it is pretty much the opposite of what you just said. The reason nuclear costs are so high is due to the construction cost and the length that it takes (and how those costs change over time). Fuel is nothing for nuclear in the grand scheme of things. On the other side, the second most reason is the decommission costs, which are usually built into the construction funding (which also inflates the cost, and again when you are talking about 60 years later, those costs change... upwards).
As far as waste goes it is a bit of a weird one. Currently without re-processing (which is what happens in the US), much of the fuel is left, meaning the halflife is quite long, meaning it really isn't all that radioactive, nor is the material that it has come in contact with. However that also means storage is much longer. Should they re-process to use most of the fuel, the halflife is much shorter, meaning much more radioactive, meaning much less to store for way less time, though more dangerous to handle. Damned if you do damned if you don't so to speak. Though I don't think either decision has anything to do with storage and more to do with how facilities were made with the making of weapons in mind. Anyway, all of this is probably a bit of a oversimplification, but more less the gist of it.
I agree 100% with your baseload comment however. Until the magic storage problem is somehow resolved this issue doesn't ever go away. I could see something like distributed battery solution a la Elon Musk (particularly when combined with distributed renewable generation, smart guy he may rule the world in a few decades), however producing billions of batteries isn't exactly all that environmentally friendly either...
I think the sad part is that most of the technical challenges with nuclear seem to be because all the facilities are old using old technology. Because new ones are not being built not only are newer safer better designs not being built, but also stagnating the progress in advancing those technology due to the limited market for them. I know Canada somewhat recently partially sold it's nuclear program, and another company (Westinghouse?) recently had the division that did their nuclear program go bankrupt. Only China seems to be building anymore, but post Japan they've cut back their plans by like half (though still a lot). However they have a bigger coal problem than anyone, and the alternative is gas and being politically beholden to Russia which probably isn't a real option either.
Sounds just like my ex-wife's soul! Ba dump dump spish!
Anyway just laughing a bit of the creative description... How is it any more of "pit of infinitely deep darkness" than one black hole. Infinity x 2 bitches! Sounds like something you say as a kid to one up your friend who just said shotgun times infinity to get the front seat....
Case in point Alaska already has UBI to a limited extent, in that everyone gets 1000$ or whatever just for existing in Alaska, and that is only from oil, nothing else (and not even equal to values, just a taste).
Not really a fair comparison. You're assuming that personal income is where all the money comes from. Government in run using multiple sources of funding, and while Income Tax isn't a trivial amount, it isn't the only thing that pays for everything. Corporate tax is another big example, services, fees, permits, licences, trade, markets, sales, royalties, etc... Your own example is a huge strawman, not sure if you were intentionally trying to be ironic or not.
Well I don't think you need to be a critic to know what you're getting with "XXX: The Return of Xander Cage"...
That said, I recall seeing the trailers for King Arthur and thinking wow this is going to be bad... It looked to have as much to do with the King Arthur mythos as the Easter Bunny. From what I could see there was a guy with a sword and that was about where the story ends...
Critics many times don't get it. Back in the day there were a ton of great movies that got panned, that turned into cult classics. Spaceballs, Super Troopers, Officespace, Event Horizon, Starship Troopers, etc... I think all of these got one star from critics as terrible movies, yet they are all some of my favorites...