1kW at idle is a lot. You could cut that down by shutting down Pis in banks as they went unused, and firing them up again as needed. It wouldn't require very much more hardware, just some microrelay boards which can be driven by some of the Pis themselves.
Electricity in New Mexico is $0.11 to $0.12 per kwh. So at maximum they would save $0.12 per hour. You would spend far more in labor/coding/hardware than you would ever save in power costs. Plus you may introduce bugs or other issues that would take even more time to fix or delay useful work.
The people who would ponder a smart gadget to save money, probably are smart enough to embrace the myriad of cheaper heating/cooling/whatever strategies that save more. I mean, does a smart thermostat dial that learns your routine, an extremely simple algorithm, really deserve to be a couple hundred bucks compared to a $20 one that can be programmed? All it has going for it is being pretty and slightly more convenient but the few times it's better is not going to make up the difference to most people. It's not like its designers had to design something complex like a new 3d engine for the latest batch of video games.
On top of that, switches are plain reliable. I've been in houses where 115 year old light switches (and wires) were still operating. Basic switchs cost around $1 or something today. I've had ceiling fans still work after 40 years, still on a basic switch, with a dangling yank cables operating the light and fan speed operation. Otoh, I've seen fans where $30 smart switches, controlling all operations from the light switch box, are broken after a measley 5 years and often unavailable since the model is updated or manufacturer just gone. Replacing an entire ceiling fan (or 2 or 3) is hours of aggravating physical work with ladders no smart switch is worth, no matter the few second conveniences it provides.
I've been experimenting with both smart and semi-smart (occupancy/vacancy sensor) switches. I have one Zwave 120V switch, a Zwave 240V switch on the waterfall pump, and probably a dozen occupancy/vacancy sensors that are independent of each other. The 240V switch developed an internal short on the 35th day (outside of Amazon warranty) and was a nightmare to get replaced under warranty. The 120V Zwave switch works, but is more expensive, more of a pain to set up, and more of a pain to maintain than occupancy switches. I have found timer/sunset based programming to not always be what I want, and additional functionality (motion, light sensor, etc) to be expensive and a pain to maintain.
I am very satisfied with the occupancy switches. The timers are variable from 1 to 30 minutes, they can be programmed auto on/auto off, manual on/auto off. They can even be set to manual on/manual off if the next owner doesn't like them. I have relay-based ones in closets and dimmers in living spaces (to avoid audible clicks). They aren't on any network, they are independent of each other, they can't be hacked, and if I want to change the programming I just push a few buttons right on the switch. The motion detection is excellent, and it is easy to put white electrical tape over zones which I do not want the sensor to trigger. They have performed exactly as expected with never a delay in triggering. It wouldn't seem like saving 2 seconds whenever you enter or leave a room would be worthwhile, but it is very, very nice. I am the kind of person who is compelled to turn off lights when I leave a room, and it was constantly interrupting my thought process of wherever I was going and what I planned to do once I got there.
I will not be deploying Zwave devices further. If the 240V pool waterfall device fails, it will get replaced with an intermatic mechanical timer. I don't use the smartphone to turn it on/off as much as I thought, and the only other benefit (running the waterfall for 2 minutes twice a day to flush out leaves/bugs) I can replicate with a different, cheaper switch.
My iPhone 5 is still going strong. I have a 5S at home waiting to be formatted and put into service, but meh, the 5 still works.
I bought a 5s myself just a couple months ago. It's all the phone I really need.
Smartphones are following the same path as PCs in the 90's. Back then you needed to spend $1000+ (~$1600 in today's money) to get a usable machine, and it was obsolete in 2-3 years. As smartphones mature further (perhaps we are already or nearly there), we will get to point where we are at with laptops and desktops now- the machine is fine for 5 years or more.
By declaring yourself a country you recognize the legitimacy of a ruling class.
The real solution of our problems can come when we can get people to give up on the belief in statism.
Which has no moral validity. Nor does it solve any problem.
It's sad that even people who woke up from the fairy tale of religion still believe in the fairy tale of governments.
A legitimate purpose of government in my opinion is to solve problems caused by the tragedy of the commons. The free market or individuals cannot solve such problems easily. A good example is lighthouses.
Most people would recognizes that lighthouses are needed, but if governments did not build them, who would? Anyone can make use of a lighthouse, so if a shipping company built them, they would be at a competitive disadvantage compared to other companies who did not incur the expense. You could argue that companies or individuals might form co-ops or boating associations who build lighthouses, but what incentive would there be to join such organizations and pay fees? Society as a whole loses when ships run aground- packages or shipments may be lost, oil may be spilled, etc. which costs society in the form of environmental cleanups and higher costs of goods.
This is a clear problem of the tragedy of the commons and a problem that is easily solved by making everyone share the cost. And for that you need an organization that collects money from everyone and administers how it is distributed to solve such problems. Government may overreach in many areas but there will always be functions that only an organization that acts like a government can provide.
fingerprint scanning increases the cost of the phone. Face recognition does not require any additional hardware.
Not true. There is both a structured light transmitter and receiver which are additional hardware compared to previous iphones. There may also be a separate processor for data processing of these modules.
On the weekends, Costco usually has 10 lanes of cash registers with 10 people in line each, with baskets loaded to the top, followed by long long lines to pass by receipt checkers to exit the building...The downfall of "retail" isn't all about Amazon.com and online clicks, it also includes the rise of these warehouse stores that sell superior quality produce and products (except for their accidentally unauthorized jewelry and slightly obsolete electronics) as well as buying basic household goods in bulk to reduce cost in a country that has had depressed wages for twenty years. Because of the lower overhead, warehouse stores can be a much cheaper way to buy things than ordering online from Amazon and still offer some of the seasonal and local customizations that Department stores once did.
The problem with Costco is that they actively provide an inferior shopping experience-
Aisles are not labeled and products move around frequently
Aisles are logjammed at my location. First it was just on weekends, now it is basically any time.
Lines are very long as you mentioned
If you find a commodity product you really like, Costco may stop carrying it at any time (They have infuriated me with their yogurt brand/ swapouts)
You can't park your cart next to the bathrooms unless you are already checked out. (Big inconvenience if you have small children)
3rd party companies hassling me about Direct TV, cell phones, etc. have become more common
Prices are not especially cheap compared to other stores on many products
I still shop there but we are strongly considering dropping membership.
That solution is simple. Fire them. Promote good workers, fire bad; same as it's always been.
From my experience, management very rarely knows which workers are good and which are bad.
At what level? I know exactly who is useless among my immediate coworkers. My direct supervisor knows this as well. Maybe 3 levels up, they have no idea, but those levels shouldn't be responsible for termination decisions anyway.
It takes time to build a case for poor performance so that you don't get sued. And then if you fire someone, you have to spend time and money looking for someone, possibly traveling them to your location, interviewing, etc. And then you may be taking a gamble on the new hire. It sometimes takes a really bad worker to make all that effort worthwhile.
Every single one of our surface systems have issues. Most of the problems orbit around really crappy drivers from microsoft related to power management and switching between tablet/laptop modes. The remaining seem to be caused by crappy patches for windows 10 that need to go through more debugging before release. Surfaces are not reliable, and most of our users are looking to get rid of the ones we have deployed.
The one good area is hardware reliability. The hardware itself seems to be rock solid. It's their legendary programmers that are letting the team down. For the price, it's quite disappointing.
That is the case with almost all Microsoft hardware. Even the Zune was a great device physically. It was the awful software needed to load music on it that was the problem. Questionable marketing didn't help either.
The only problem with giving the Democrats the roto rooter treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., is Americans expect everything now, it must happen yesterday and cleaning out the Democrats much like cleaning out the Republicans will take at least 6 years. Two minor elections and one full election. Not that it wont be chaotic fun to do so but too many Americans expect it served up a platter for them, someone else to clean up their mess.
I don't get, look how much fun it has been screwing over the establishment and making them look as stupid and clumsy as clowns in a clown car. This is the best time to enjoy politics, sure the outcomes at the moment aren't all that flash but you can see them literally falling apart in a blind panic, collapsing in the pile of bullshit the have crafted out of US politics.
Being a reformist is always way meaner than being a revolutionary. Revolutions tend to lead to one thing only, another revolution. The Reformists use the power of the state to clean the state and once started becomes pretty much impossible to stop. We are not fighting the authorities but backing those with honour and integrity and allowing them to do the job they want to do and providing them with the support and information to do that job. The best way to fight crime of any sort is for the authorities and the public to work together and that takes patience, cooperation and clear thought, the willingness to do the hard yards to get the touch down.
Maybe it was time for a little chaos in US politics, the established parties are too complacent and too beholden to large donations from small groups at the fringes of mainstream.
On the other hand, we definitely need to stop outside influences from pouring gasoline on the fire. Ineffective government isn't a good thing, despite what some people may say. A company where the CEO, board of directors, and all the VPs can't manage effectively quickly runs into trouble, and a government is not that different.
Just a slight quibble with the language that's commonly used when it comes to discussing weed resistance to herbicides. Weeds don't "develop" resistance to chemicals. Rather there are certain individuals in the plant population which, due to genetic variations, have natural resistance to herbicides (any specific herbicide, even ones not invented yet). As herbicides kill non-resistant weeds, the ones left behind are the ones that can tolerate and metabolize the chemical. And those are the plants that put down seeds into the soil. The non-resistant plants never put down any seed. So it's chemical use that selects for these plants and seeds for future generation. It's not like the plants are smart, or are being mutated by chemicals, nor are they being genetically modified, like the corn and soybeans are.
That's the basic definition of natural selection. Bacterium evolve to tolerate various substances and conditions by the same mechanisms, and we say they "develop resistance". Why would plants use a different term?
Where reddit falls apart is in attracting advertisers to pay for it's hosting cost.
Why is that? Lack of imagination? Advertisers love targeted marketing, especially if you can reach the target at the moment they may be open to making a purchase. Reddit is a place where people self-segregate themselves into targetable groups. You don't need to rely on Facebook or Google's guess of what their users are interested in. Each reddit has fairly obvious indicators. Domino's Pizza should be all over r/whoarude. Canon and Nikon could be advertising on the various photo-related reddits. GoPro and Red Bull on r/holdmybeer.
They are destroying retail. Perhaps it is inevitable, but it is terrible: retail was the last way that an average person could have their own business - by opening a "shop". Now all the "shops" are going under because everyone buys online. No more shops - just Amazon employees, all working for "the man".
For most of history, the rich had enormous power and wealth compared to the peasants. The 18th-20th centuries were sort of an anomaly in the way ordinary citizens gained wealth and power. The world is headed back towards extreme inequality.
I always wondered if it achieved anything truly productive. 5% is a big enough number that it would seem to have a pretty negative effect on the company -- termination processing, new hires, training, and the general chaos on teams/departments when there's a bunch of change.
I can even see side effects, where people who do well in a job get management positions, become "low performers" and get canned. Sure, they've cut a low performer but they also lost someone good at their original job because, basically, they fired the original manager. Now they need two employees.
I would also think it created a pretty toxic atmosphere and a lot of just people trying to meet goals versus actual productivity.
Not only a toxic atmosphere for current employees, but one in which it is difficult to attract talent. GE is the 800 lb gorilla in my field of work, but they are infamous for layoffs. Recently in my field of work, they laid off a whole division, created a new subsidiary, and gave the laid off employees offers for about 1/2 of what they used to be making. I would have to be either desperate or given a very good offer to even consider working for them.
Families with young children are now more likely to have a subscription video service such as Netflix or Hulu (72%) than they are to have cable TV (65%).
That's because cable TV is shit value for the money. It's (generally) tied to a physical location, requires special hardware to record and view at a time convenient to you (which they charge extra for), has a huge amount of really crappy programming, they refuse to make ala-carte channel selection an option, their streaming options (generally) suck, and it's very expensive. $40/month gets you a very basic selection of channels with not a lot of interesting programming and no archive of content to watch.
In short:
Hard to time shift
Hard to location shift
Expensive
Crappy assortment of programming
Wall to wall advertisements
No archive of content to watch
Is it really any wonder people are dropping cable?
Most of the big cable companies have phone apps now. Xfinity has been pushing advertisements for this on me for a while. They also seem to be working on the time shifting.
That said, most cable channels are terrible value for money.
Free market capitalism isn't always pretty or nice. But these are things that needed to happen and in the end it will produce the most efficient supply chain and lowest prices. It's no different than a cheetah bringing down a gazelle on the African savanna. These are things that need to happen for the good of us all..
Did it need to happen? I am a former Toshiba employee, and my take on this is that their troubles stem from a couple major issues:
1. Toshiba invested approximately $1B or more in Nuclear technology prior to the Fukushima disaster. They were not alone- Alstom and other companies expected a Nuclear Renaissance to provide clean base load power to support future growth of non-dispatchable renewable power. The value of this R&D, staffing, and facility buildup is now approximately $0.
2. Toshiba sold 4 new reactors in the US which were under construction or about to begin construction at the time of Fukushima. These projects were sold and managed by a somewhat recently acquired subsidiary (Westinghouse Nuclear). It turns out that Westinghouse had no idea what they were doing, anyone with a clue had either retired or left. The contract didn't account for all the costs and cost overruns were rampant, as can be expected from poorly run projects. Now some or all of these project may be cancelled, and the escape clauses are not particularly favorable to Toshiba. Toshiba (HQ) financially guaranteed the project for the US subsidiary, which exposed them to financial risk. I am sure the customers insisted on this, but normally, the Japanese parent company is financially insulated from overseas subsidiaries to some extent - the subsidiary is a separate financial entity and normally goes bankrupt without pinching the parent company too hard.
3. Toshiba couldn't absorb both of the above hits. Their banking partners downgraded their credit, their stock took a dive, and they have had to scramble to put their financial house back in order.
I wouldn't say it is "for the good of us all" that the final nail has been hammered into nuclear power. In the US, aging coal plants are being replaced with natural gas. In Japan, they are operating coal plants that had been slated for retirement, and installing new natural gas plants. Perhaps this is more financially efficient, but many people would argue that it is a massive blow to the effort to improve the worldwide carbon footprint. And it wasn't inevitable, just the consequence of poor project management and natural disaster chance.
How is it "unrealistic" to expect a steel company to correctly produce steel and accurately describe its properties? Other steel companies seem to manage this without issue.
But as another responder stated, if you are a company you basically cannot trust ANYTHING outsourced these days, and must constantly monitor it for quality. Which begs the question, why outsource then if you must also incur the added cost of verification and riding herd on QA...
I am not knowledgeable about auto part forgings, but for large steel rotor forgings (20-100 tons), there are about 3-5 reputable companies in the world. The equipment to manufacture such forgings costs millions, the knowledge to make such forgings is highly specialized, the cost of making a mistake and remaking the part is huge, and the volume is in the dozens or perhaps 100s of pieces per year (worldwide). It doesn't make sense for any manufacturing company to make such forgings themselves. Not even GE, Mitsubishi, or Toshiba can justify the capital and labor overhead to make such parts in house.
Obviously smaller parts are a different story, but outsourcing does make sense for most raw material forming such as casting and forging.
Essentially, an enormous, empty, upside-down âoebucketâ is placed on the seafloor, and air is sucked out of the bucket, which forces the bucket downward, further into the seafloor sediment.
If there's a lot of air in that bucket, you're going to have a hard time getting it to the bottom. I'd guess they actually just open the suction hole and let the air flow out and fill it with water as they're lowering it, then once it's on the bottom they suck water out. The flow of water over the bottom edge seems like it would loosen the sand and make it easier for the bucket to sink, at the same time that the water pressure on top of the bucket (due to the pressure differential from the suction) would force it downward.
Secondly, and I don't know if this is a good or bad measure, but households in the UK use more electricity per household than in many other European countries. Of course the number is much lower than in the USA, which is profligate in its domestic electricity use.
Note that many people use electricity for heating. They use storage heaters, which store heat when electricity is cheap (at night) and release it during the day.
The US has a quite a few cities where the average high is 85F or more for 1/3 to 1/2 of the year. The US also has very low electricity prices, Google tells me that UK electricity costs around 15.5 pence (~$0.20)per KW/hr, which is nearly double my rate.
I live in the southern part of the US, and my electricity cost peaks at ~$200 per month in the summer. The biggest energy saving measure I could take (aside from removing my pool) would be to install double pane windows. The cost for that ranges from $18k to $45k (I have many large windows). If doing that saved $50/month in AC costs , it would pay for itself in 30 years. The US is generally fairly efficient as far as electricity goes. Despite population increases, especially in the southern US, our electricity use has remained flat or decreased over the past 15 years. I would argue we are as efficient as the current economics dictate.
You are mistaking the ULA Cost+ system (milk the system for everything you can making as much profit as possible and hire retiring generals/Astronauts as lobbyists to keep the gravy train running) for the Space-X system (plough profits back into developing the technologies needed in order to be able to send rockets to mars and colonise it). It's true that Space-X now has lobbyists in D.C., but no ex-generals there either to my knowledge.
No ex-generals, yet. Musk is a modern-day Howard Hughes. And that includes building strong ties to government agencies and taking their money. The only difference between SpaceX and ULA is that SpaceX has to hustle harder because they were the underdog. They don't seem to be making money, at least as of 2015. Once they have a solid business, we'll see if they too sit on their laurels like ULA, or if that the cash still goes into R&D. The investors will expect some decent returns at some point, and R&D is usually one of the first items to get cut.
The different address/data width standards on each of those busses.
(E)ISA 8/16/32 bit, PIO/DMA
VLB/MCA (Bet you forgot about those!) 25/33/50mhz VLB. Not sure about MCA.
PCI(-X) 32/64 bit, 33-133mhz 3.3/5V Variety of PCI latencies. Different max PCI memory apertures. Some cards may/may not work on different PCI chipsets as a result.
AGP: dedicated PCI channel with a fast one way DMA aperture from main memory to card. 3.3V/1.8V/1.5V signalling, Chipsets generally supported either AGP2x/4x or AGP4x/8x, or only one of those standards at only 1 or 2 signal voltages. Some early pentium era hardware may be AGP2x only at AGP 1x speed.
PCIe: At least 3 major standards. PCIe 1.1/2.0 weren't very different, 3/4 added 64 bit BAR and a variety of other features that may cause breakage of newer devices on older PCIe busses, similiar to
Some of this may be inaccurate, but is damn close given it is all off the top of my head.
This only covers *desktop PC* standards too. It gets even messier if you start looking at Laptop busses or Mac/SGI/Sun/HP/DEC/etc busses as well. Go look at how many MXM (lack of) standards there are. And try to find a GPU upgrade for your laptop. If it is pre-Intel ME, you have maybe 3 options(all Vulkan compatibility, and maybe 1 with basic OpenCL/Cuda support), assuming you had one of the standards compliant notebooks. Similiar problem for anything newer, although the cards got a bit better standardized, but good luck disassembling your laptop and getting your new card under the heatsink, thermally contacting, and actually wattage/heat compatible with your system.
I did not forget about MCA. I had a IBM PS/2 model 80 back when they had fallen to around $75 but before they became collectors items. I didn't end up using it for anything, but it was worth the $75 just to open it up and admire the build quality.
Scheduled cullings are a well-known way to kill your company in its tracks. Not only do people game the metrics, as you say, but good workers will get out as fast as they can find another job. As a result you just end up with a bunch of workers trying to game the metrics and not much else who have essentially no interest in the company's well-being because they are being treated like cattle.
GE is a prime example. They are the 800lb gorilla in my industry but I would never work for them. They just had their 2nd of 3 planned major layoffs just in the 2nd half of this year. I have a friend who works there as a manager, and the number of people he has had to personally let go is staggering.
You forgot the other trick- unique safety standards.
There are reasonable rationales for having different safety standards for each country (Germans always wear their seatbelts, so the airbag can be smaller), but there is a cost to having unique standards. At a minimum, the development costs aren't spread out on a larger volume. At worst, consumers are forced to spend more for features that they may not want. Reversing cameras are a neat feature but the cost/benefit of having one on my compact car with excellent visibility isn't very good.
For Intel's sake, this had better rock, or else it's DOA.
I'm guessing you'd need to purchase a specialized motherboard with accompanying chipset to use one of these. Whereas GPUs can just plug into slots that most motherboards have already.
GPUs, like cassette tapes, may be with us for awhile before something else comes along that competes well enough with them in cost and utility to make switching a no-brainer.
Slots come and go. Just in my (young) lifetime I have seen 4 different slot standards for graphics cards (ISA,PCI,AGP, and PCI-E) just for the consumer market. Plus a bunch of other ones of varying popularity for the server market. If something better comes along and doesn't get mired in a patent fight, the slot will change again.
Finally, there is a ton of upper-end cheating. Many of the top notch players use private servers online that they pay to use. So when they are put against a new apponent's base layout, they go to the private server, make the base, then practice against it.
I would consider that to be "practicing", not cheating. You even used the word "practice" yourself.
Having a neural network do the "practicing" to find the best strategy might be cheating, but probably indistinguishable from a skilled player who did the practicing themselves.
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1kW at idle is a lot. You could cut that down by shutting down Pis in banks as they went unused, and firing them up again as needed. It wouldn't require very much more hardware, just some microrelay boards which can be driven by some of the Pis themselves.
Electricity in New Mexico is $0.11 to $0.12 per kwh. So at maximum they would save $0.12 per hour. You would spend far more in labor/coding/hardware than you would ever save in power costs. Plus you may introduce bugs or other issues that would take even more time to fix or delay useful work.
Do you work in academia?
The people who would ponder a smart gadget to save money, probably are smart enough to embrace the myriad of cheaper heating/cooling/whatever strategies that save more. I mean, does a smart thermostat dial that learns your routine, an extremely simple algorithm, really deserve to be a couple hundred bucks compared to a $20 one that can be programmed? All it has going for it is being pretty and slightly more convenient but the few times it's better is not going to make up the difference to most people. It's not like its designers had to design something complex like a new 3d engine for the latest batch of video games.
On top of that, switches are plain reliable. I've been in houses where 115 year old light switches (and wires) were still operating. Basic switchs cost around $1 or something today. I've had ceiling fans still work after 40 years, still on a basic switch, with a dangling yank cables operating the light and fan speed operation. Otoh, I've seen fans where $30 smart switches, controlling all operations from the light switch box, are broken after a measley 5 years and often unavailable since the model is updated or manufacturer just gone. Replacing an entire ceiling fan (or 2 or 3) is hours of aggravating physical work with ladders no smart switch is worth, no matter the few second conveniences it provides.
I've been experimenting with both smart and semi-smart (occupancy/vacancy sensor) switches. I have one Zwave 120V switch, a Zwave 240V switch on the waterfall pump, and probably a dozen occupancy/vacancy sensors that are independent of each other. The 240V switch developed an internal short on the 35th day (outside of Amazon warranty) and was a nightmare to get replaced under warranty. The 120V Zwave switch works, but is more expensive, more of a pain to set up, and more of a pain to maintain than occupancy switches. I have found timer/sunset based programming to not always be what I want, and additional functionality (motion, light sensor, etc) to be expensive and a pain to maintain.
I am very satisfied with the occupancy switches. The timers are variable from 1 to 30 minutes, they can be programmed auto on/auto off, manual on/auto off. They can even be set to manual on/manual off if the next owner doesn't like them. I have relay-based ones in closets and dimmers in living spaces (to avoid audible clicks). They aren't on any network, they are independent of each other, they can't be hacked, and if I want to change the programming I just push a few buttons right on the switch. The motion detection is excellent, and it is easy to put white electrical tape over zones which I do not want the sensor to trigger. They have performed exactly as expected with never a delay in triggering. It wouldn't seem like saving 2 seconds whenever you enter or leave a room would be worthwhile, but it is very, very nice. I am the kind of person who is compelled to turn off lights when I leave a room, and it was constantly interrupting my thought process of wherever I was going and what I planned to do once I got there.
I will not be deploying Zwave devices further. If the 240V pool waterfall device fails, it will get replaced with an intermatic mechanical timer. I don't use the smartphone to turn it on/off as much as I thought, and the only other benefit (running the waterfall for 2 minutes twice a day to flush out leaves/bugs) I can replicate with a different, cheaper switch.
My iPhone 5 is still going strong. I have a 5S at home waiting to be formatted and put into service, but meh, the 5 still works.
I bought a 5s myself just a couple months ago. It's all the phone I really need.
Smartphones are following the same path as PCs in the 90's. Back then you needed to spend $1000+ (~$1600 in today's money) to get a usable machine, and it was obsolete in 2-3 years. As smartphones mature further (perhaps we are already or nearly there), we will get to point where we are at with laptops and desktops now- the machine is fine for 5 years or more.
By declaring yourself a country you recognize the legitimacy of a ruling class. The real solution of our problems can come when we can get people to give up on the belief in statism. Which has no moral validity. Nor does it solve any problem. It's sad that even people who woke up from the fairy tale of religion still believe in the fairy tale of governments.
A legitimate purpose of government in my opinion is to solve problems caused by the tragedy of the commons. The free market or individuals cannot solve such problems easily. A good example is lighthouses.
Most people would recognizes that lighthouses are needed, but if governments did not build them, who would? Anyone can make use of a lighthouse, so if a shipping company built them, they would be at a competitive disadvantage compared to other companies who did not incur the expense. You could argue that companies or individuals might form co-ops or boating associations who build lighthouses, but what incentive would there be to join such organizations and pay fees? Society as a whole loses when ships run aground- packages or shipments may be lost, oil may be spilled, etc. which costs society in the form of environmental cleanups and higher costs of goods.
This is a clear problem of the tragedy of the commons and a problem that is easily solved by making everyone share the cost. And for that you need an organization that collects money from everyone and administers how it is distributed to solve such problems. Government may overreach in many areas but there will always be functions that only an organization that acts like a government can provide.
fingerprint scanning increases the cost of the phone. Face recognition does not require any additional hardware.
Not true. There is both a structured light transmitter and receiver which are additional hardware compared to previous iphones. There may also be a separate processor for data processing of these modules.
On the weekends, Costco usually has 10 lanes of cash registers with 10 people in line each, with baskets loaded to the top, followed by long long lines to pass by receipt checkers to exit the building...The downfall of "retail" isn't all about Amazon.com and online clicks, it also includes the rise of these warehouse stores that sell superior quality produce and products (except for their accidentally unauthorized jewelry and slightly obsolete electronics) as well as buying basic household goods in bulk to reduce cost in a country that has had depressed wages for twenty years. Because of the lower overhead, warehouse stores can be a much cheaper way to buy things than ordering online from Amazon and still offer some of the seasonal and local customizations that Department stores once did.
The problem with Costco is that they actively provide an inferior shopping experience-
Aisles are not labeled and products move around frequently
Aisles are logjammed at my location. First it was just on weekends, now it is basically any time.
Lines are very long as you mentioned
If you find a commodity product you really like, Costco may stop carrying it at any time (They have infuriated me with their yogurt brand/ swapouts)
You can't park your cart next to the bathrooms unless you are already checked out. (Big inconvenience if you have small children)
3rd party companies hassling me about Direct TV, cell phones, etc. have become more common
Prices are not especially cheap compared to other stores on many products
I still shop there but we are strongly considering dropping membership.
That solution is simple. Fire them. Promote good workers, fire bad; same as it's always been.
From my experience, management very rarely knows which workers are good and which are bad.
At what level? I know exactly who is useless among my immediate coworkers. My direct supervisor knows this as well. Maybe 3 levels up, they have no idea, but those levels shouldn't be responsible for termination decisions anyway.
It takes time to build a case for poor performance so that you don't get sued. And then if you fire someone, you have to spend time and money looking for someone, possibly traveling them to your location, interviewing, etc. And then you may be taking a gamble on the new hire. It sometimes takes a really bad worker to make all that effort worthwhile.
Every single one of our surface systems have issues. Most of the problems orbit around really crappy drivers from microsoft related to power management and switching between tablet/laptop modes. The remaining seem to be caused by crappy patches for windows 10 that need to go through more debugging before release. Surfaces are not reliable, and most of our users are looking to get rid of the ones we have deployed.
The one good area is hardware reliability. The hardware itself seems to be rock solid. It's their legendary programmers that are letting the team down. For the price, it's quite disappointing.
That is the case with almost all Microsoft hardware. Even the Zune was a great device physically. It was the awful software needed to load music on it that was the problem. Questionable marketing didn't help either.
The only problem with giving the Democrats the roto rooter treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., is Americans expect everything now, it must happen yesterday and cleaning out the Democrats much like cleaning out the Republicans will take at least 6 years. Two minor elections and one full election. Not that it wont be chaotic fun to do so but too many Americans expect it served up a platter for them, someone else to clean up their mess.
I don't get, look how much fun it has been screwing over the establishment and making them look as stupid and clumsy as clowns in a clown car. This is the best time to enjoy politics, sure the outcomes at the moment aren't all that flash but you can see them literally falling apart in a blind panic, collapsing in the pile of bullshit the have crafted out of US politics.
Being a reformist is always way meaner than being a revolutionary. Revolutions tend to lead to one thing only, another revolution. The Reformists use the power of the state to clean the state and once started becomes pretty much impossible to stop. We are not fighting the authorities but backing those with honour and integrity and allowing them to do the job they want to do and providing them with the support and information to do that job. The best way to fight crime of any sort is for the authorities and the public to work together and that takes patience, cooperation and clear thought, the willingness to do the hard yards to get the touch down.
Maybe it was time for a little chaos in US politics, the established parties are too complacent and too beholden to large donations from small groups at the fringes of mainstream.
On the other hand, we definitely need to stop outside influences from pouring gasoline on the fire. Ineffective government isn't a good thing, despite what some people may say. A company where the CEO, board of directors, and all the VPs can't manage effectively quickly runs into trouble, and a government is not that different.
Just a slight quibble with the language that's commonly used when it comes to discussing weed resistance to herbicides. Weeds don't "develop" resistance to chemicals. Rather there are certain individuals in the plant population which, due to genetic variations, have natural resistance to herbicides (any specific herbicide, even ones not invented yet). As herbicides kill non-resistant weeds, the ones left behind are the ones that can tolerate and metabolize the chemical. And those are the plants that put down seeds into the soil. The non-resistant plants never put down any seed. So it's chemical use that selects for these plants and seeds for future generation. It's not like the plants are smart, or are being mutated by chemicals, nor are they being genetically modified, like the corn and soybeans are.
That's the basic definition of natural selection. Bacterium evolve to tolerate various substances and conditions by the same mechanisms, and we say they "develop resistance". Why would plants use a different term?
Where reddit falls apart is in attracting advertisers to pay for it's hosting cost.
Why is that? Lack of imagination? Advertisers love targeted marketing, especially if you can reach the target at the moment they may be open to making a purchase. Reddit is a place where people self-segregate themselves into targetable groups. You don't need to rely on Facebook or Google's guess of what their users are interested in. Each reddit has fairly obvious indicators. Domino's Pizza should be all over r/whoarude. Canon and Nikon could be advertising on the various photo-related reddits. GoPro and Red Bull on r/holdmybeer.
They are destroying retail. Perhaps it is inevitable, but it is terrible: retail was the last way that an average person could have their own business - by opening a "shop". Now all the "shops" are going under because everyone buys online. No more shops - just Amazon employees, all working for "the man".
For most of history, the rich had enormous power and wealth compared to the peasants. The 18th-20th centuries were sort of an anomaly in the way ordinary citizens gained wealth and power. The world is headed back towards extreme inequality.
All the taxi drivers in Delhi are named Kevin.
Wasn't GE famous (or infamous) for doing this?
I always wondered if it achieved anything truly productive. 5% is a big enough number that it would seem to have a pretty negative effect on the company -- termination processing, new hires, training, and the general chaos on teams/departments when there's a bunch of change.
I can even see side effects, where people who do well in a job get management positions, become "low performers" and get canned. Sure, they've cut a low performer but they also lost someone good at their original job because, basically, they fired the original manager. Now they need two employees.
I would also think it created a pretty toxic atmosphere and a lot of just people trying to meet goals versus actual productivity.
Not only a toxic atmosphere for current employees, but one in which it is difficult to attract talent. GE is the 800 lb gorilla in my field of work, but they are infamous for layoffs. Recently in my field of work, they laid off a whole division, created a new subsidiary, and gave the laid off employees offers for about 1/2 of what they used to be making. I would have to be either desperate or given a very good offer to even consider working for them.
Families with young children are now more likely to have a subscription video service such as Netflix or Hulu (72%) than they are to have cable TV (65%).
That's because cable TV is shit value for the money. It's (generally) tied to a physical location, requires special hardware to record and view at a time convenient to you (which they charge extra for), has a huge amount of really crappy programming, they refuse to make ala-carte channel selection an option, their streaming options (generally) suck, and it's very expensive. $40/month gets you a very basic selection of channels with not a lot of interesting programming and no archive of content to watch.
In short: Hard to time shift Hard to location shift Expensive Crappy assortment of programming Wall to wall advertisements No archive of content to watch
Is it really any wonder people are dropping cable?
Most of the big cable companies have phone apps now. Xfinity has been pushing advertisements for this on me for a while. They also seem to be working on the time shifting.
That said, most cable channels are terrible value for money.
Free market capitalism isn't always pretty or nice. But these are things that needed to happen and in the end it will produce the most efficient supply chain and lowest prices. It's no different than a cheetah bringing down a gazelle on the African savanna. These are things that need to happen for the good of us all..
Did it need to happen? I am a former Toshiba employee, and my take on this is that their troubles stem from a couple major issues:
1. Toshiba invested approximately $1B or more in Nuclear technology prior to the Fukushima disaster. They were not alone- Alstom and other companies expected a Nuclear Renaissance to provide clean base load power to support future growth of non-dispatchable renewable power. The value of this R&D, staffing, and facility buildup is now approximately $0.
2. Toshiba sold 4 new reactors in the US which were under construction or about to begin construction at the time of Fukushima. These projects were sold and managed by a somewhat recently acquired subsidiary (Westinghouse Nuclear). It turns out that Westinghouse had no idea what they were doing, anyone with a clue had either retired or left. The contract didn't account for all the costs and cost overruns were rampant, as can be expected from poorly run projects. Now some or all of these project may be cancelled, and the escape clauses are not particularly favorable to Toshiba. Toshiba (HQ) financially guaranteed the project for the US subsidiary, which exposed them to financial risk. I am sure the customers insisted on this, but normally, the Japanese parent company is financially insulated from overseas subsidiaries to some extent - the subsidiary is a separate financial entity and normally goes bankrupt without pinching the parent company too hard.
3. Toshiba couldn't absorb both of the above hits. Their banking partners downgraded their credit, their stock took a dive, and they have had to scramble to put their financial house back in order.
I wouldn't say it is "for the good of us all" that the final nail has been hammered into nuclear power. In the US, aging coal plants are being replaced with natural gas. In Japan, they are operating coal plants that had been slated for retirement, and installing new natural gas plants. Perhaps this is more financially efficient, but many people would argue that it is a massive blow to the effort to improve the worldwide carbon footprint. And it wasn't inevitable, just the consequence of poor project management and natural disaster chance.
How is it "unrealistic" to expect a steel company to correctly produce steel and accurately describe its properties? Other steel companies seem to manage this without issue.
But as another responder stated, if you are a company you basically cannot trust ANYTHING outsourced these days, and must constantly monitor it for quality. Which begs the question, why outsource then if you must also incur the added cost of verification and riding herd on QA...
I am not knowledgeable about auto part forgings, but for large steel rotor forgings (20-100 tons), there are about 3-5 reputable companies in the world. The equipment to manufacture such forgings costs millions, the knowledge to make such forgings is highly specialized, the cost of making a mistake and remaking the part is huge, and the volume is in the dozens or perhaps 100s of pieces per year (worldwide). It doesn't make sense for any manufacturing company to make such forgings themselves. Not even GE, Mitsubishi, or Toshiba can justify the capital and labor overhead to make such parts in house.
Obviously smaller parts are a different story, but outsourcing does make sense for most raw material forming such as casting and forging.
Essentially, an enormous, empty, upside-down âoebucketâ is placed on the seafloor, and air is sucked out of the bucket, which forces the bucket downward, further into the seafloor sediment.
If there's a lot of air in that bucket, you're going to have a hard time getting it to the bottom. I'd guess they actually just open the suction hole and let the air flow out and fill it with water as they're lowering it, then once it's on the bottom they suck water out. The flow of water over the bottom edge seems like it would loosen the sand and make it easier for the bucket to sink, at the same time that the water pressure on top of the bucket (due to the pressure differential from the suction) would force it downward.
That is a generally accurate description.
Secondly, and I don't know if this is a good or bad measure, but households in the UK use more electricity per household than in many other European countries. Of course the number is much lower than in the USA, which is profligate in its domestic electricity use.
Note that many people use electricity for heating. They use storage heaters, which store heat when electricity is cheap (at night) and release it during the day.
The US has a quite a few cities where the average high is 85F or more for 1/3 to 1/2 of the year. The US also has very low electricity prices, Google tells me that UK electricity costs around 15.5 pence (~$0.20)per KW/hr, which is nearly double my rate.
I live in the southern part of the US, and my electricity cost peaks at ~$200 per month in the summer. The biggest energy saving measure I could take (aside from removing my pool) would be to install double pane windows. The cost for that ranges from $18k to $45k (I have many large windows). If doing that saved $50/month in AC costs , it would pay for itself in 30 years. The US is generally fairly efficient as far as electricity goes. Despite population increases, especially in the southern US, our electricity use has remained flat or decreased over the past 15 years. I would argue we are as efficient as the current economics dictate.
You are mistaking the ULA Cost+ system (milk the system for everything you can making as much profit as possible and hire retiring generals/Astronauts as lobbyists to keep the gravy train running) for the Space-X system (plough profits back into developing the technologies needed in order to be able to send rockets to mars and colonise it). It's true that Space-X now has lobbyists in D.C., but no ex-generals there either to my knowledge.
No ex-generals, yet. Musk is a modern-day Howard Hughes. And that includes building strong ties to government agencies and taking their money. The only difference between SpaceX and ULA is that SpaceX has to hustle harder because they were the underdog. They don't seem to be making money, at least as of 2015. Once they have a solid business, we'll see if they too sit on their laurels like ULA, or if that the cash still goes into R&D. The investors will expect some decent returns at some point, and R&D is usually one of the first items to get cut.
The different address/data width standards on each of those busses.
(E)ISA 8/16/32 bit, PIO/DMA VLB/MCA (Bet you forgot about those!) 25/33/50mhz VLB. Not sure about MCA. PCI(-X) 32/64 bit, 33-133mhz 3.3/5V Variety of PCI latencies. Different max PCI memory apertures. Some cards may/may not work on different PCI chipsets as a result. AGP: dedicated PCI channel with a fast one way DMA aperture from main memory to card. 3.3V/1.8V/1.5V signalling, Chipsets generally supported either AGP2x/4x or AGP4x/8x, or only one of those standards at only 1 or 2 signal voltages. Some early pentium era hardware may be AGP2x only at AGP 1x speed. PCIe: At least 3 major standards. PCIe 1.1/2.0 weren't very different, 3/4 added 64 bit BAR and a variety of other features that may cause breakage of newer devices on older PCIe busses, similiar to
Some of this may be inaccurate, but is damn close given it is all off the top of my head.
This only covers *desktop PC* standards too. It gets even messier if you start looking at Laptop busses or Mac/SGI/Sun/HP/DEC/etc busses as well. Go look at how many MXM (lack of) standards there are. And try to find a GPU upgrade for your laptop. If it is pre-Intel ME, you have maybe 3 options(all Vulkan compatibility, and maybe 1 with basic OpenCL/Cuda support), assuming you had one of the standards compliant notebooks. Similiar problem for anything newer, although the cards got a bit better standardized, but good luck disassembling your laptop and getting your new card under the heatsink, thermally contacting, and actually wattage/heat compatible with your system.
I did not forget about MCA. I had a IBM PS/2 model 80 back when they had fallen to around $75 but before they became collectors items. I didn't end up using it for anything, but it was worth the $75 just to open it up and admire the build quality.
Scheduled cullings are a well-known way to kill your company in its tracks. Not only do people game the metrics, as you say, but good workers will get out as fast as they can find another job. As a result you just end up with a bunch of workers trying to game the metrics and not much else who have essentially no interest in the company's well-being because they are being treated like cattle.
GE is a prime example. They are the 800lb gorilla in my industry but I would never work for them. They just had their 2nd of 3 planned major layoffs just in the 2nd half of this year. I have a friend who works there as a manager, and the number of people he has had to personally let go is staggering.
You forgot the other trick- unique safety standards.
There are reasonable rationales for having different safety standards for each country (Germans always wear their seatbelts, so the airbag can be smaller), but there is a cost to having unique standards. At a minimum, the development costs aren't spread out on a larger volume. At worst, consumers are forced to spend more for features that they may not want. Reversing cameras are a neat feature but the cost/benefit of having one on my compact car with excellent visibility isn't very good.
For Intel's sake, this had better rock, or else it's DOA.
I'm guessing you'd need to purchase a specialized motherboard with accompanying chipset to use one of these. Whereas GPUs can just plug into slots that most motherboards have already.
GPUs, like cassette tapes, may be with us for awhile before something else comes along that competes well enough with them in cost and utility to make switching a no-brainer.
Slots come and go. Just in my (young) lifetime I have seen 4 different slot standards for graphics cards (ISA,PCI,AGP, and PCI-E) just for the consumer market. Plus a bunch of other ones of varying popularity for the server market. If something better comes along and doesn't get mired in a patent fight, the slot will change again.
Finally, there is a ton of upper-end cheating. Many of the top notch players use private servers online that they pay to use. So when they are put against a new apponent's base layout, they go to the private server, make the base, then practice against it.
I would consider that to be "practicing", not cheating. You even used the word "practice" yourself.
Having a neural network do the "practicing" to find the best strategy might be cheating, but probably indistinguishable from a skilled player who did the practicing themselves.