Even nobel prize winners are trying to make a quick buck from publishing their books, instead of spreading their ideas to a bigger audience free of charge. Definition of irony?
Obama won a Nobel prize for peace, then went on to spend the most money on the military in the history of the USA, on top of vastly expanding NSA spying programs and establishing a formal kill list.
Think I'm kidding?
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
It's a difficult job to be president. The alternative to your narrative is that there are very bad people in the world who wish to kill lots of innocent people. The decision to eliminate such people is one that should not be taken lightly. Escalating this decision to the top executive shows that these decisions are taken very seriously.
Giving Obama the Nobel Peace prize was a huge mistake in both timing (too early) and merit (undeserved). But the President should be involved directly in drone strike targets. Otherwise these decisions would be made by unelected military officials, and that sounds very troubling to me.
Visa, Master and Swift have been abused so badly in pursuit of political goals in US Primaries that people all over the world have lost faith. Case in point - Sanctions against Iran a country which does not promote Wahabbism whil allowing full trae with Saudi. People have realized that depending on American and Western money networks opens you up to financial blackmail whenever American politicians want to do some dog whistling.
Russia has created its own payment network and making it difficult for Visa and Master to operate there in order to drive adoption. China most transactions are moving to Baidu's network. India is now using PayTM. As more and more major economies start moving away from western payment systems the West's power to use sanctions as a policy tool will go away. Since money still needs to move between the competing monetary systems cryptocurrencies will become the interface currency
Dodging government to government pressure is probably only a small reason for countries to move away from Visa and Mastercard. A much bigger reason taking 1-2.5% of every consumer transaction. That's a huge incentive for any bank or financial company to build a competing system.
Government sanctions as a policy tool are deeply flawed, but one of the few options to pressure countries without dropping bombs. The reason sanctions are somewhat effective is not because of the power of one country, but only when lots of countries adopt them. It's basically a government-level boycott.
Government sanctions are a flawed method of applying pressure, but cryptocurrencies are not a great workaround. Suppose North Korea gets their hands on a huge pile of bitcoin. Then what? They can't exactly make bitcoin an official currency, that would wreck their internal monetary policy of having artificially inflated exchange rates. It is difficult to cash out in other countries and use legitimate banks to transfer money, because they are sanctioned. The only reliable option left is to cash out in Russia (closed) or China (closed) and launder the money the old fashioned way (for overseas use), or carry it across the border (for internal use). Cryptocurrencies are just one of many difficult and not-foolproof options to try to get around sanctions. They are not a magic sanction-killing bullet.
I live on a street full of old people. They watch everything and report anything even slightly suspicious. Sure, that means the Amazon guy sometimes get followed by the police, but overall it is one of the safest neighborhoods I have ever lived in. Maybe the systems where informers were a problem were the problem, not the informers.
The alternative is sensors and cameras automatically finding persons of interest and uniformed officers grabbing people without notice.
Having at least one citizen in the loop may make the police more trustworthy, if the system is set up only for serious crimes.
China's ruling political party has no competition, so they never felt the need to directly contradict progressive ideas. They have admitted the existence of global warming (sorry GOP, I will not use the term you invented "climate change") and are actively fighting against it.
The USA's ruling party is currently the GOP, it holds the Presidency and a majority in Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.
But the GOP got there in part by fighting against the Democrat party, which had put itself on the side of Progress. That includes the progressive idea of global warming.
So the GOP denied global warming and put pro pollution people in charge. They refuse to put funding into clean energy and that explains it.
I would make a totally different case-
China's ruling party's biggest goal is stability and keeping unrest to a minimum. All the pollution was starting to get a lot of attention. When I was there 3 years ago, I couldn't see the building across the street due to the Beijing smog. Cleaning up their pollution problem fits into the climate change narrative, but I would argue it is not their main goal.
The calculation between Europe, Russia, and the US is totally different. Russia's economy is strongly driven by oil and natural gas exports, and Russia is the country with the most to gain from global warming. So naturally Russia would benefit spreading from anti climate change ideology.
The US economy benefits from very cheap energy, and our natural gas prices are 1/3 of what Europe pays. We seem to be in a new Cold War, so promoting clean energy while at the same time ramping up fossil fuel production (and exporting it) are actually complementary strategies. Both actions have the effect of hurting Russia financially.
Somehow, I can't imagine heroin addicts buying their next fix over the internet. It seems more likely that they would need it to be delivered WAY FASTER, and they would eventually end up selling their PC/laptop/smartphone just to get money for their next fix anyway.
Plus, a local news story about the rising overdoses from Heroin mentions that the Heroin was TOO POWERFUL, because it was mixed with oxycodone.
You would be surprised. Buying over the internet completely eliminates the risk of getting physically harmed during the transaction. The risk of being robbed is probably about the same. The risk of getting caught by law enforcement is probably less (for reasonably small quantities).
Desperate people living day to day probably aren't using the dark web, but such people probably aren't using Amazon Prime either. There are plenty of affluent drug users, if Hollywood is any indication.
There's no real money in legitimate Oxy sales, it went generic a LONG time ago.
Where I'm sure they don't mind if their wholesalers do, Big Pharma dare not openly engage in illicit production and sales. Regulators would find out quickly if they did and poof, no profits...
Oxycontin may be a generic now, but there's plenty of money in "Oxy" sales. It has just moved on into newer drugs that have "anti-abuse" additives (which don't work very well), more powerful versions for "intractable pain" (which gets prescribed for not-so-intractable pain), long-release versions, etc.
Musk may be pushing for some very interesting deadlines and pretty outlandish sounding concepts...
However his cars, even with all the weaknesses they have, are viable and his space company also successfully delivers.
I'd say that should at least be impressive.
You could say the exact same thing about Howard Hughes. Wildly ambitious, had trouble with deadlines, decent reliance on government contracts and grants for significant parts of his business, similar mental eccentricities.
If both men didn't spend so much time cultivating his personal and company brands, the facts would probably turn the population against them.
That's a bit of a problem. Not only was Puerto Rico broke and effectively in bankruptcy before Hurricane Maria, probably the brokest entity in the destitute island is the Puerto Rico power authority (prepa). It was $9B in debt BEFORE the power grid got ripped up.
PREPA owes my company about $200k for some work 2 years ago on one of their generators. It is likely that we were the winning bidder only because our competition wasn't foolish enough to bid the work. Our competition had already been burned prior to that.
Needless to say, we won't be repairing any generators on Puerto Rico until they pay us for last time. And I doubt our competition will either. I feel bad for the people but we won't stay in business long if we do work for free.
Musk seems to be taking advantage of a public relations opportunity. He must know there is no money to actually build out what he is trying to sell.
We've had it here for a while. My apartment complex has notified us twice that they Amazon service not only refuses to deliver to the door like FedEx and UPS but the delivery person just dumps packages in the office without notifying anyone or getting a signature. When I first saw the white vans with the Amazon logo I couldn't help but noticed the "Enterprise" sticker on the back. I guess they rent locally instead of owning a fleet? Maybe that was just a trial. Absolutely crazy logistics.
In our neighhood, the Amazon delivery guy drives an early '90s Crown Victoria. It sticks out so much in our neighborhood that sometimes our local constable will follow him around.
That's actually an interesting idea. I wonder if the Chinese encouraged anti-climate change sentiment in the US? It certainly looks like it's going to work out to their advantage.
Russia is the bigger winner and has a bigger motive to promote anti-climate-change ideas. Large parts of uninhabitable land become habitable, the warmer parts become temperate and near-tropical, AND a large part of their government's revenue is based on exporting fossil fuels. Russia would be stupid not to promote anti-climate-change ideology.
"To say that this volume is surprising is an understatement,"
Yeah bollocks, it's standard practice to try and swamp the opposition with huge volumes of paperwork in the hope that they will miss something important in amongst the irrelevant crap they pushed your way.
And then its also standard practice to complain about this, try and delay proceeding and maximize the billable hours that eventually gets put onto the end consumer as a price increase.
In my experience (technical/commercial disputes relating to large projects, but not yet a lawsuit), examining the pile of documents for what should have been included, but wasn't, is usually the real golden nugget. There may be more of a compulsion to not forget the key document in actual legal cases.
Most of my life, I've received 20 to 30 years of service out of appliance-class products such as televisions, refrigerators, stoves, microwaves, washing machines, and dryers. I have noticed a steep downtrend in those lifecycles, particularly in televisions, washing machines and dryers. But that reduction has been due to engineering choices in the machinery.
Now I'm interpreting this as an indication that devices with Android are targeting a six-year lifecycle!!! No way.
Android is in all of the above device types today and even in our cars. Android needs to be thinking in terms of how to at least maintain security updates for 30 years. Perhaps that may have to involve some standard pluggable module so that the hardware can be upgraded too, but it has to happen. The ever falling device lifetimes are soaking up both the piddling economic growth of the middle class and our resources.
That's capitalism and the free market for you. The people want the new shiny. Anything capable of lasting and being maintainable for 30 years generally looks dated, usually costs significantly more, and is therefore slowly being choked out of the mass market.
The linked article includes a comment by someone who apparently has a sub-dermal NFC tag implanted. Either he's one of the nerdiest people around, or he's just revealed that he's actually a dog. (Actually, though, are those commonly used by the disabled to make unlocks easier?)
A large amount of cutting-edge technological innovation today helps the disabled. Self driving cars, AI virtual assistants, humanoid robots, snuggies, etc. I may have read somewhere that many products meant for the disabled are pitched to the mass market as a way to defray the cost of development.
80%+ of "As-seen-on-TV" products seem to fall into this category. "Has this ever happened to you"? is normally a "No, never" for most people, but it might happen multiple times a day for people with certain disabilities.
Agree about the need for GPS. Why carry two devices when one does the trick. Ever gotten lost driving a car without a GPS or its software is out of date? A phone with Google Maps saves the day. One of our cars has a GPS system, but is out of date. The update software costs ~$180, and we don't know how up to date it is. Once we went looking for an address but when we got there the car's GPS map showed we were in the middle of nowhere with no roads. My wife as navigator with her phone and google maps got us there.
My boss takes his standalone GPS everywhere. He says it is very helpful to have a separate device to navigate with when is on conference calls. He travels a lot and also has to be on conference calls. For me and you and most other people, a separate car isn't worth the weight and space, but there are always edge cases.
Modern ones use the latent heat of condensation to warm incoming air, saving on electricity. They are about twice as efficient in power terms as a 'normal' dryer, although they do take longer to dry clothes.
Which means the clothes tumble longer, which increases wear. It's easy to calculate kW-hr saved per year. Evaluating the cost of clothes wearing out slightly faster is a more difficult problem that most people won't be considering. Maybe it is worth it, maybe not.
It is entirely possible that the Russians attempted (and perhaps succeeded) in influencing the election, but no collusion occurred.
It is even plausible that if the Russians did try to influence the election, a logical further action would be to make it seems as though collusion DID take place.
Until the full investigation is complete, taking a position on either side is just playing into the Russian goal of undermining faith in our democracy, or partisan tribal politics. Mueller is generally agreed to be a tenacious investigator, but fair and honest. That is why we should still have faith in our democracy (even if parts of it are indeed corrupt). I reserve my judgement until the investigation is completed.
The left refuses to even acknowledged he won and is an impediment to progress at every turn.
Don't exaggerate. Virtually everybody on the left acknowledges that he won, we're just unhappy about it.
And of course we are asking our representatives in Congress to do everything that they can to block his agenda... the President is not a king and cannot rule like a dictator.
Has he tried to be one?
I disagree with many of Trump's policies, but instead of passing something easy in the first 100 days, the Republican party focused on delivering the promise they have been harking on for the past 7 years- repealing Obamacare. When it became abundantly clear that the public didn't want that, they turned their attention to tax reforms benefitting the wealthy. Trump doesn't have much to do with either of those agendas, those are longstanding Republican party platforms.
What Trump does seem to be very good at is bringing attention to an issue and forcing a resolution of it. How many times did Obama stand in front of a podium and denounce violent acts? Dozens if not hundreds of times. The issue was out of the news cycle by the next day and nothing changed. By not giving the news media the sound bite they expect, Trump has the power to keep the public's attention on an issue. The statues probably would have come down sooner or later, but because Trump kept the story going, that will probably happen sooner now.
Similarly, by amping up the rhetoric on North Korea and keeping the media focused on his strong language, they eventually backed down. It was the eventual conclusion (Kim Jong Un isn't stupid), but Trump's actions almost certainly expedited the result.
I'm not saying Trump is a good president by any means, but he does have the media's attention and makes good use of it. Good Cop / Bad Cop is a very effective negotiating tactic, and it is one that Trump seems to use frequently. Some very effective bosses I have worked under were equally comfortable playing good cop OR bad cop. Most politicians play good cop to their base. Very few politicians play bad cop intentionally, and most try to be as appealing as possible to everyone. When Trump issues statements directly contrary to Secretary of State Tillerson, is that really an administration in "disarray", or a negotiating tactic? Probably a decent amount of both. Tillerson is the carrot and Trump is the stick. If you want to force a decision, you have to show both at the same time.
The problem with Florida, was Algore, or his "group" wanted to hand pick counties to recount. Instead of recounting the entire state, he wanted to pick only areas they knew would be heavily democratic.
Plus, had Ralph Nader not run, Al Gore more than likely would have been elected, just as Bush 41 would have been elected, had Ross Perot not run in 92.
Personally, I'd like to see ALL electronic voting of any kind, done away with. Every ballot should be paper, with an X or similar to denote who you pick. Plus, I'd like to see everyone that votes, have their index finger dipped in that hard to remove purple ink you see in a lot of 3rd world countries, along with everyone that votes, should present a government issued photo ID. (for those that have a hardship, the ID should be given at no cost).
Sometimes, I think the corruption in elections is a backhanded way to make people think "what difference does it make" to the point they don't bother voting, so our soft tyranny we have now, can be transformed into a hard tyranny, or dictatorship.
If you look at it now, we already have 2 classes of people. The politicians and the surfs (citizens). How many laws are on the books now, that WE as citizens must obey, but, those elected, do not. Obamacare, Social Security, insider trading and what not.
They make laws for us, but then exempt themselves from those same laws.
You're focusing on the wrong problem. By the time the election comes, the 2 major parties have long since locked in their candidates, who were chosen by the most vocal and committed people in the party. Both parties are currently being led from the fringes, since those people yell the loudest and are more likely to show up during primary election activities. The recent election is a prime example- many of the most electable candidates on the republican side lost to those with strong backing from vocal minorities. On the democrat side, Bernie quickly became the "Not Hillary" candidate but was too far left to go very far.
If we had a viable third party, that might help, but that is a bit of a pipe dream. What really needs to happen is that moderates in both parties need to get more involved in the primary and pre-primary processes. The majority of Americans are reasonably moderate but this is not represented in our elected officials.
The plan was to stop supporting and _eventually_ drop it.
This is in line with the alarming industry trend of dropping something very stable and unchangeable (ergo, does not bring any money) in favor of something experimental and unstable that you will be able to sell to clueless buyers.
Similar to impossibility of having practically eternal products, stable software products of private industry are impossible as well.
Have you been to the grocery chains recently? Remember the hype of LED lamps? It was hard to find a good incadescent in my grocery store at one point, majority of the shelf space was covered by LEDs. Now the situation is back to the beginning: majority are incadescents, LEDs are in minority.
Welcome to the late stage capitalism
Who buys light bulbs at the grocery store? They are generally marked up between 150-300% of the cost at a big-box retailer.
I would guess at those prices, turnover is low. I have seen lots of home goods at the grocery store that are laughably out of date. Especially electronics. Your grocery store might have decided that stocking incandescents is better than stocking LEDs since LEDs are still getting cheaper (depreciating) while incandescents are more stable in price.
Although it is an annual rent which is going to turn off a lot of people I now consider it a regular business related sense such as dry cleaning or a commute-capable car or for that matter taxes on income. If you want to be a grown up there are things you have to pay for.
It is precisely THAT kind of thinking that is going to possibly eventually *doom* us all to perpetual, rental of software, rather than ownership (perpetual license if you're picky)...and that is NOT a good thing for consumers.
Once the companies have you trapped in rental..they really have no incentive to improve and innovate now do they?
We've seen it with Adobe's Creative Cloud rental system....you haven't seen any truly breakthrough improvements to date. Yes, they roll out some nice things here and there, but nothing that is earthshaking. I've certainly not found I miss anything by still using my CS6 apps I bought.
And we've seen problems with Adobe CC...they will roll stuff out that breaks on peoples systems, and well....you're SOL till they can get an online fix out, meanwhile, you lose business.
There are also people who've lost out by having their registration get lost in the system or broken, and again...they are SOL till customer service can help, and well, I think with most of these places we know the terms "customer service" and "help" are mutually exclusive terms.
I can see it going this way with ANY software rental.
The best way to avoid this is to pay with your wallet.
I'm fairly certain that Adobe software today would be utter crap regardless of it was a one-time purchase or as a recurring payment. They have been on that path for years, if not decades.
Most modern steel mills use electrical arcs to smelt instead of coke derived from coal
You still need a large quantity of either CO or H2 to reduce iron ore into iron. Coal gasification and natural gas reforming are convenient and economical ways to produce these gasses. They are not the only ways, but they may well be the only economically competitive ways at the current time.
Slashdot Mirror
Even nobel prize winners are trying to make a quick buck from publishing their books, instead of spreading their ideas to a bigger audience free of charge. Definition of irony?
Obama won a Nobel prize for peace, then went on to spend the most money on the military in the history of the USA, on top of vastly expanding NSA spying programs and establishing a formal kill list.
Think I'm kidding?
Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05... ^ yes, NY times, not breitbart or fox news
It's more hypocrisy than irony, though.
It's a difficult job to be president. The alternative to your narrative is that there are very bad people in the world who wish to kill lots of innocent people. The decision to eliminate such people is one that should not be taken lightly. Escalating this decision to the top executive shows that these decisions are taken very seriously.
Giving Obama the Nobel Peace prize was a huge mistake in both timing (too early) and merit (undeserved). But the President should be involved directly in drone strike targets. Otherwise these decisions would be made by unelected military officials, and that sounds very troubling to me.
Visa, Master and Swift have been abused so badly in pursuit of political goals in US Primaries that people all over the world have lost faith. Case in point - Sanctions against Iran a country which does not promote Wahabbism whil allowing full trae with Saudi. People have realized that depending on American and Western money networks opens you up to financial blackmail whenever American politicians want to do some dog whistling. Russia has created its own payment network and making it difficult for Visa and Master to operate there in order to drive adoption. China most transactions are moving to Baidu's network. India is now using PayTM. As more and more major economies start moving away from western payment systems the West's power to use sanctions as a policy tool will go away. Since money still needs to move between the competing monetary systems cryptocurrencies will become the interface currency
Dodging government to government pressure is probably only a small reason for countries to move away from Visa and Mastercard. A much bigger reason taking 1-2.5% of every consumer transaction. That's a huge incentive for any bank or financial company to build a competing system.
Government sanctions as a policy tool are deeply flawed, but one of the few options to pressure countries without dropping bombs. The reason sanctions are somewhat effective is not because of the power of one country, but only when lots of countries adopt them. It's basically a government-level boycott.
Government sanctions are a flawed method of applying pressure, but cryptocurrencies are not a great workaround. Suppose North Korea gets their hands on a huge pile of bitcoin. Then what? They can't exactly make bitcoin an official currency, that would wreck their internal monetary policy of having artificially inflated exchange rates. It is difficult to cash out in other countries and use legitimate banks to transfer money, because they are sanctioned. The only reliable option left is to cash out in Russia (closed) or China (closed) and launder the money the old fashioned way (for overseas use), or carry it across the border (for internal use). Cryptocurrencies are just one of many difficult and not-foolproof options to try to get around sanctions. They are not a magic sanction-killing bullet.
I live on a street full of old people. They watch everything and report anything even slightly suspicious. Sure, that means the Amazon guy sometimes get followed by the police, but overall it is one of the safest neighborhoods I have ever lived in. Maybe the systems where informers were a problem were the problem, not the informers.
The alternative is sensors and cameras automatically finding persons of interest and uniformed officers grabbing people without notice. Having at least one citizen in the loop may make the police more trustworthy, if the system is set up only for serious crimes.
China's ruling political party has no competition, so they never felt the need to directly contradict progressive ideas. They have admitted the existence of global warming (sorry GOP, I will not use the term you invented "climate change") and are actively fighting against it.
The USA's ruling party is currently the GOP, it holds the Presidency and a majority in Supreme Court, the House of Representatives, and the Senate.
But the GOP got there in part by fighting against the Democrat party, which had put itself on the side of Progress. That includes the progressive idea of global warming.
So the GOP denied global warming and put pro pollution people in charge. They refuse to put funding into clean energy and that explains it.
I would make a totally different case-
China's ruling party's biggest goal is stability and keeping unrest to a minimum. All the pollution was starting to get a lot of attention. When I was there 3 years ago, I couldn't see the building across the street due to the Beijing smog. Cleaning up their pollution problem fits into the climate change narrative, but I would argue it is not their main goal.
The calculation between Europe, Russia, and the US is totally different. Russia's economy is strongly driven by oil and natural gas exports, and Russia is the country with the most to gain from global warming. So naturally Russia would benefit spreading from anti climate change ideology.
The US economy benefits from very cheap energy, and our natural gas prices are 1/3 of what Europe pays. We seem to be in a new Cold War, so promoting clean energy while at the same time ramping up fossil fuel production (and exporting it) are actually complementary strategies. Both actions have the effect of hurting Russia financially.
Somehow, I can't imagine heroin addicts buying their next fix over the internet. It seems more likely that they would need it to be delivered WAY FASTER, and they would eventually end up selling their PC/laptop/smartphone just to get money for their next fix anyway. Plus, a local news story about the rising overdoses from Heroin mentions that the Heroin was TOO POWERFUL, because it was mixed with oxycodone.
You would be surprised. Buying over the internet completely eliminates the risk of getting physically harmed during the transaction. The risk of being robbed is probably about the same. The risk of getting caught by law enforcement is probably less (for reasonably small quantities).
Desperate people living day to day probably aren't using the dark web, but such people probably aren't using Amazon Prime either. There are plenty of affluent drug users, if Hollywood is any indication.
There's no real money in legitimate Oxy sales, it went generic a LONG time ago.
Where I'm sure they don't mind if their wholesalers do, Big Pharma dare not openly engage in illicit production and sales. Regulators would find out quickly if they did and poof, no profits...
Oxycontin may be a generic now, but there's plenty of money in "Oxy" sales. It has just moved on into newer drugs that have "anti-abuse" additives (which don't work very well), more powerful versions for "intractable pain" (which gets prescribed for not-so-intractable pain), long-release versions, etc.
Musk may be pushing for some very interesting deadlines and pretty outlandish sounding concepts...
However his cars, even with all the weaknesses they have, are viable and his space company also successfully delivers.
I'd say that should at least be impressive.
You could say the exact same thing about Howard Hughes. Wildly ambitious, had trouble with deadlines, decent reliance on government contracts and grants for significant parts of his business, similar mental eccentricities.
If both men didn't spend so much time cultivating his personal and company brands, the facts would probably turn the population against them.
It's fairly obvious. The Goa'uld are coming.
"... If enough money can be found"
That's a bit of a problem. Not only was Puerto Rico broke and effectively in bankruptcy before Hurricane Maria, probably the brokest entity in the destitute island is the Puerto Rico power authority (prepa). It was $9B in debt BEFORE the power grid got ripped up.
PREPA owes my company about $200k for some work 2 years ago on one of their generators. It is likely that we were the winning bidder only because our competition wasn't foolish enough to bid the work. Our competition had already been burned prior to that.
Needless to say, we won't be repairing any generators on Puerto Rico until they pay us for last time. And I doubt our competition will either. I feel bad for the people but we won't stay in business long if we do work for free.
Musk seems to be taking advantage of a public relations opportunity. He must know there is no money to actually build out what he is trying to sell.
We've had it here for a while. My apartment complex has notified us twice that they Amazon service not only refuses to deliver to the door like FedEx and UPS but the delivery person just dumps packages in the office without notifying anyone or getting a signature. When I first saw the white vans with the Amazon logo I couldn't help but noticed the "Enterprise" sticker on the back. I guess they rent locally instead of owning a fleet? Maybe that was just a trial. Absolutely crazy logistics.
In our neighhood, the Amazon delivery guy drives an early '90s Crown Victoria. It sticks out so much in our neighborhood that sometimes our local constable will follow him around.
That's actually an interesting idea. I wonder if the Chinese encouraged anti-climate change sentiment in the US? It certainly looks like it's going to work out to their advantage.
Russia is the bigger winner and has a bigger motive to promote anti-climate-change ideas. Large parts of uninhabitable land become habitable, the warmer parts become temperate and near-tropical, AND a large part of their government's revenue is based on exporting fossil fuels. Russia would be stupid not to promote anti-climate-change ideology.
"To say that this volume is surprising is an understatement," Yeah bollocks, it's standard practice to try and swamp the opposition with huge volumes of paperwork in the hope that they will miss something important in amongst the irrelevant crap they pushed your way. And then its also standard practice to complain about this, try and delay proceeding and maximize the billable hours that eventually gets put onto the end consumer as a price increase.
In my experience (technical/commercial disputes relating to large projects, but not yet a lawsuit), examining the pile of documents for what should have been included, but wasn't, is usually the real golden nugget. There may be more of a compulsion to not forget the key document in actual legal cases.
Most of my life, I've received 20 to 30 years of service out of appliance-class products such as televisions, refrigerators, stoves, microwaves, washing machines, and dryers. I have noticed a steep downtrend in those lifecycles, particularly in televisions, washing machines and dryers. But that reduction has been due to engineering choices in the machinery.
Now I'm interpreting this as an indication that devices with Android are targeting a six-year lifecycle!!! No way.
Android is in all of the above device types today and even in our cars. Android needs to be thinking in terms of how to at least maintain security updates for 30 years. Perhaps that may have to involve some standard pluggable module so that the hardware can be upgraded too, but it has to happen. The ever falling device lifetimes are soaking up both the piddling economic growth of the middle class and our resources.
That's capitalism and the free market for you. The people want the new shiny. Anything capable of lasting and being maintainable for 30 years generally looks dated, usually costs significantly more, and is therefore slowly being choked out of the mass market.
The linked article includes a comment by someone who apparently has a sub-dermal NFC tag implanted. Either he's one of the nerdiest people around, or he's just revealed that he's actually a dog. (Actually, though, are those commonly used by the disabled to make unlocks easier?)
A large amount of cutting-edge technological innovation today helps the disabled. Self driving cars, AI virtual assistants, humanoid robots, snuggies, etc. I may have read somewhere that many products meant for the disabled are pitched to the mass market as a way to defray the cost of development.
80%+ of "As-seen-on-TV" products seem to fall into this category. "Has this ever happened to you"? is normally a "No, never" for most people, but it might happen multiple times a day for people with certain disabilities.
Agree about the need for GPS. Why carry two devices when one does the trick. Ever gotten lost driving a car without a GPS or its software is out of date? A phone with Google Maps saves the day. One of our cars has a GPS system, but is out of date. The update software costs ~$180, and we don't know how up to date it is. Once we went looking for an address but when we got there the car's GPS map showed we were in the middle of nowhere with no roads. My wife as navigator with her phone and google maps got us there.
My boss takes his standalone GPS everywhere. He says it is very helpful to have a separate device to navigate with when is on conference calls. He travels a lot and also has to be on conference calls. For me and you and most other people, a separate car isn't worth the weight and space, but there are always edge cases.
what about stuff by law can't be self checkout like beer and smokes? also WIC and food stamps?
I am sure age-restricted items could be managed with a photo ID scanner and a video link to a call center in India.
Modern ones use the latent heat of condensation to warm incoming air, saving on electricity. They are about twice as efficient in power terms as a 'normal' dryer, although they do take longer to dry clothes.
Which means the clothes tumble longer, which increases wear. It's easy to calculate kW-hr saved per year. Evaluating the cost of clothes wearing out slightly faster is a more difficult problem that most people won't be considering. Maybe it is worth it, maybe not.
It is entirely possible that the Russians attempted (and perhaps succeeded) in influencing the election, but no collusion occurred. It is even plausible that if the Russians did try to influence the election, a logical further action would be to make it seems as though collusion DID take place. Until the full investigation is complete, taking a position on either side is just playing into the Russian goal of undermining faith in our democracy, or partisan tribal politics. Mueller is generally agreed to be a tenacious investigator, but fair and honest. That is why we should still have faith in our democracy (even if parts of it are indeed corrupt). I reserve my judgement until the investigation is completed.
Don't exaggerate. Virtually everybody on the left acknowledges that he won, we're just unhappy about it.
And of course we are asking our representatives in Congress to do everything that they can to block his agenda... the President is not a king and cannot rule like a dictator.
Has he tried to be one?
I disagree with many of Trump's policies, but instead of passing something easy in the first 100 days, the Republican party focused on delivering the promise they have been harking on for the past 7 years- repealing Obamacare. When it became abundantly clear that the public didn't want that, they turned their attention to tax reforms benefitting the wealthy. Trump doesn't have much to do with either of those agendas, those are longstanding Republican party platforms.
What Trump does seem to be very good at is bringing attention to an issue and forcing a resolution of it. How many times did Obama stand in front of a podium and denounce violent acts? Dozens if not hundreds of times. The issue was out of the news cycle by the next day and nothing changed. By not giving the news media the sound bite they expect, Trump has the power to keep the public's attention on an issue. The statues probably would have come down sooner or later, but because Trump kept the story going, that will probably happen sooner now.
Similarly, by amping up the rhetoric on North Korea and keeping the media focused on his strong language, they eventually backed down. It was the eventual conclusion (Kim Jong Un isn't stupid), but Trump's actions almost certainly expedited the result.
I'm not saying Trump is a good president by any means, but he does have the media's attention and makes good use of it. Good Cop / Bad Cop is a very effective negotiating tactic, and it is one that Trump seems to use frequently. Some very effective bosses I have worked under were equally comfortable playing good cop OR bad cop. Most politicians play good cop to their base. Very few politicians play bad cop intentionally, and most try to be as appealing as possible to everyone. When Trump issues statements directly contrary to Secretary of State Tillerson, is that really an administration in "disarray", or a negotiating tactic? Probably a decent amount of both. Tillerson is the carrot and Trump is the stick. If you want to force a decision, you have to show both at the same time.
The problem with Florida, was Algore, or his "group" wanted to hand pick counties to recount. Instead of recounting the entire state, he wanted to pick only areas they knew would be heavily democratic. Plus, had Ralph Nader not run, Al Gore more than likely would have been elected, just as Bush 41 would have been elected, had Ross Perot not run in 92. Personally, I'd like to see ALL electronic voting of any kind, done away with. Every ballot should be paper, with an X or similar to denote who you pick. Plus, I'd like to see everyone that votes, have their index finger dipped in that hard to remove purple ink you see in a lot of 3rd world countries, along with everyone that votes, should present a government issued photo ID. (for those that have a hardship, the ID should be given at no cost). Sometimes, I think the corruption in elections is a backhanded way to make people think "what difference does it make" to the point they don't bother voting, so our soft tyranny we have now, can be transformed into a hard tyranny, or dictatorship. If you look at it now, we already have 2 classes of people. The politicians and the surfs (citizens). How many laws are on the books now, that WE as citizens must obey, but, those elected, do not. Obamacare, Social Security, insider trading and what not. They make laws for us, but then exempt themselves from those same laws.
You're focusing on the wrong problem. By the time the election comes, the 2 major parties have long since locked in their candidates, who were chosen by the most vocal and committed people in the party. Both parties are currently being led from the fringes, since those people yell the loudest and are more likely to show up during primary election activities. The recent election is a prime example- many of the most electable candidates on the republican side lost to those with strong backing from vocal minorities. On the democrat side, Bernie quickly became the "Not Hillary" candidate but was too far left to go very far.
If we had a viable third party, that might help, but that is a bit of a pipe dream. What really needs to happen is that moderates in both parties need to get more involved in the primary and pre-primary processes. The majority of Americans are reasonably moderate but this is not represented in our elected officials.
That must be some dedicated pranking.
Or drug/people smugglers trying to distract or divert the Coast Guard.
The plan was to stop supporting and _eventually_ drop it.
This is in line with the alarming industry trend of dropping something very stable and unchangeable (ergo, does not bring any money) in favor of something experimental and unstable that you will be able to sell to clueless buyers.
Similar to impossibility of having practically eternal products, stable software products of private industry are impossible as well.
Have you been to the grocery chains recently? Remember the hype of LED lamps? It was hard to find a good incadescent in my grocery store at one point, majority of the shelf space was covered by LEDs. Now the situation is back to the beginning: majority are incadescents, LEDs are in minority.
Welcome to the late stage capitalism
Who buys light bulbs at the grocery store? They are generally marked up between 150-300% of the cost at a big-box retailer.
I would guess at those prices, turnover is low. I have seen lots of home goods at the grocery store that are laughably out of date. Especially electronics. Your grocery store might have decided that stocking incandescents is better than stocking LEDs since LEDs are still getting cheaper (depreciating) while incandescents are more stable in price.
It is precisely THAT kind of thinking that is going to possibly eventually *doom* us all to perpetual, rental of software, rather than ownership (perpetual license if you're picky)...and that is NOT a good thing for consumers.
Once the companies have you trapped in rental..they really have no incentive to improve and innovate now do they?
We've seen it with Adobe's Creative Cloud rental system....you haven't seen any truly breakthrough improvements to date. Yes, they roll out some nice things here and there, but nothing that is earthshaking. I've certainly not found I miss anything by still using my CS6 apps I bought.
And we've seen problems with Adobe CC...they will roll stuff out that breaks on peoples systems, and well....you're SOL till they can get an online fix out, meanwhile, you lose business.
There are also people who've lost out by having their registration get lost in the system or broken, and again...they are SOL till customer service can help, and well, I think with most of these places we know the terms "customer service" and "help" are mutually exclusive terms.
I can see it going this way with ANY software rental.
The best way to avoid this is to pay with your wallet.
I'm fairly certain that Adobe software today would be utter crap regardless of it was a one-time purchase or as a recurring payment. They have been on that path for years, if not decades.
Most modern steel mills use electrical arcs to smelt instead of coke derived from coal
You still need a large quantity of either CO or H2 to reduce iron ore into iron. Coal gasification and natural gas reforming are convenient and economical ways to produce these gasses. They are not the only ways, but they may well be the only economically competitive ways at the current time.