I'm not surprised at all. To play in most Middle East countries requires a local company and a physical office. This can be hard to set up for foreigners due to local law. Certain countries basically require kickbacks and bribes to get anything done. Legitimate companies often get around both of these issues by partnering with a "facilitator" company.
The Facilitator company will sometimes act as the agent (sales representative) for the legitimate company, collecting a commission on goods and services sold. The commission may be deliberately higher than normal in order to have the cash to pay whoever needs to be paid. This can be discovered by examining the commission amount/percentage and comparing it to other parts of the world for similar services. The foreign company can be held responsible if it knew, or should have known, that something fishy was going on.
Another way to do the same thing is to retain such a company for consulting services. Looking at contract deliverables and the contract amount usually gives an indication if the consulting services are legitimate or a cover for something else. Again, the foreign company can be held responsible if they knew, or should have known that something was up.
Yet another way to do the same thing is to subcontract to one of these facilitating companies. The facilitating company then marks up the price to whatever they need in order to pay their sales staff, pay bribes, or negotiate legal hurdles. The customer's contract is between the customer and the facilitating company, and the foreign company never sees it. Done right, the foreign company has no idea what the final customer price is, or if it was reasonable, etc. This is the best way to protect a foreign company since any improper or illegal actions that the facilitating company takes fall solely on the facilitating company. The facilitating company can also accept contract provisions that a foreign company could not legally accept (Israeli goods boycott, as an example). The foreign company never has the information required to see that something was amiss, so proving that they "knew or should have known" is substantially harder.
One last thing to keep in mind is that certain types of payments are actually legal. Generally, you can pay someone to "hurry up" and complete something that is included in their official duties, and which they would have done for you anyway without the payment. If the payment is just to expedite something that would have happened anyway, it is not considered a bribe, even if it is paid directly to an individual. The prime example of this is paying a customs officer to release cargo which has all the correct paperwork. The officer would have done this anyway, eventually. The payment is just to expedite the legal and inevitable action.
Because large precision devices are expensive, take a long time to build, so there's no economies of scale. The mirror onboard the Hubble is a highly precise piece of glass (it's precisely incorrect, but precise non the less), and building large telescope mirrors is tough.
No, there absolutely are economies of scale. The tooling you buy/build to make that megahuge mirror probably was custom designed and built. If you can build 2 mirrors, the tooling and tooling design cost drops to 50% on a per-unit basis.
The procedures, qualification, and documentation benefit also. You need procedures for your technicians to work to, which someone has to write, then someone has to review, and someone has to approve it. You often need to make small qualification parts to prove that certain processes can be repeated with the desired quality, and you need to document the qualification of the procedure. Then you need to qualify your technicians to those procedures. Designing the part and creating all the drawings takes a while. Drawings need to be reviewed for correctness, and inevitably things are found which are corrected. Finding vendors who can provide what you need, qualifying them, and getting them to fully understand exactly what you want them to do is a big effort also. All these tasks cost a substantial amount of money, BUT after you have done them once, you can make 1, 2, or 100 parts and not have to pay those costs again.
Direct labor and material do cost money too, but they are often a small portion of projects like this.
Reminds me of Netscape in 2001 which was a 25MB+ download. Which didn't compare particularly favorably to Opera 5 @ 2MB, especially considering that Netscape had less features, a larger memory footprint, no tabs and crashed far more often.
Transmission: 25MB - considered a small footprint/? uTorrent is what 1 or 2MBs? And is ad-free if you support it.
uTorrent has not been what I would say a "trusted" piece of software for at least a couple years now. It got bloated up and the company lost the morals at some point after version 2. Sure, you can run 2.2.1, the installer is still available, and at the time it was one of the best torrent clients available, but there are probably big security problems with using it in 2016. Not to mention I had some stability problems the last time I tried to use that version.
They're not conflating old with obsolete; they're suggesting that a bespoke, cutting-edge system that didn't turn into a template has left BART on a tree branch all by itself, and thus has engendered its obsolescence.
History is littered with rail projects that did their own thing despite other, more popular, standards or pseudo-standards being on the market already. Sometimes the road more frequently traveled is, in fact, the better road.
10 years is not very old for a TV set. Back in 2009 when the digital switchover and HD forced the issue, many of the TVs scrapped were from the 80s and 90s. There are no major changes to broadcast TV coming down the pike (3D is dead in the water, 4K gets a big meh from your average household) so no reason to buy a new set unless the old one craps out. I'm sure shitty capacitors will do in a number of those sets, but a good many of them will still be in use in 2019.
Incremental improvements have a way of stacking up. If the glass vendor improves their coatings and can cut glare by 5% a year, the panel vendor improves contrast ratio by 5% a year, the processor vendor improves power consumption by 5% per year, these are all small improvements but after 10 years you have a product that is substantially better in many measurable ways. I replaced an older 27" 1920x1600 panel a while back and the new monitor is a huge improvement as far as picture quality goes. I gained a bit of desk space, and it cost substantially less both in real dollars and inflation-corrected dollars. The old one was "fine" but technology moves on. I have yet to look at any TV/Monitor and be completely, 100% satisfied that it could not be improved further. I think we have many years ahead of us before monitors are a fully mature technology and the only improvements to be made are related to cost reduction.
"carve out $21.55 million for pilot projects such as modernizing the electric distribution grid."
What a concept, a utility company "carving" out money to maintain the system they have a monopoly on. People wonder how our national infrastructure got into the horrible shape it is now...
There are a lot of ways that could go down. Maybe external parties want to implement systems that the utility doesn't think are important. Just as an example, smart meters that can control AC units in the event of a power shortage. In some parts of the country, there is a solid case to be made for installing such equipment. In other areas, it might be completely frivolous.
The article uses the term "modernizing", not "maintaining". You're reading your own bias into it. Without knowing all the details that is just speculation.
This actually increases the cost of doing business. When the quality of almost every product can not be assumed, the burden of quality shifts almost entirely to the purchaser. It takes a lot of manpower to write detailed Requests for Proposal, compare bids to those RFPs, evaluate them, and do additional QC checking since the vendor can't be trusted to do that. There are enough stories of companies with solid reputations throwing it all away in pursuit of slightly lower costs that you can't even trust "reliable" vendors anymore. Yesterday they were fine, today they might be fine, but tommorow? It all hangs on the whim of an upper level manager who may be solely incentivized to cut costs.
Maybe men are better at negotiating salary. Negotiating makes a huge difference. When I was promoted at my last job, I did not negotiating because I was afraid I wouldn't be given the job. The person (a lady) who was promoted next did negotiate and started about 5 thousand more than me.
I'd be interested to see what the starting offer was for men and woman and what disparity was there.
A strong negotiator needs a high degree of self-confidence. The ablity to maintaining high self-confidence in situations where that confidence is questioned is often correlated with sales ability. This issue is always framed as a gender issue, but I am not sure it is. There are plenty of men with no self confidence who negotiate like overcooked spagetti, and many women who are very strong negotiators. My theory is that the testosterone/estrogen balance is more important than simply gender in this situation. Obviously that relates to gender but this is not a black and white issue.
In any case, a 5.4% difference in pay is an indication that small continuous-improvement adjustments are needed, not the sweeping social changes that are often proposed. We need to be very careful with any change that tilts the bar since women have outnumbered men in college graduation for some time now and the long-term ramifications of that may not have shown up in salary data yet. We may find in 10 years that significant action is needed to balancing the playing field back towards men.
The worst part is that shit like this is no longer surprising or noteworthy.
There was a time when a revelation like this would have been major news, all the papers and news stations would have had a field day with it, and heads would have rolled. Now there's barely the merest hint of interest, and not a shred of outrage.
The public has been thoroughly desensitized to what should be seen as egregious and illegal behavior by the government, yet for most people it's basically a snoozefest.
The most popular news companies don't devote any time to long-term stories, or do any investigative journalism anymore. The focus is on being first and being entertaining. Most are bought and paid for on certain issues.
There are many outfits that still do news the old-fashioned way, but they are usually small, niche, and don't have the funding that the major networks have. They also have different focuses and strengths. News today is about figuring out who has an agenda on a topic-by-topic basis. Vice News is usually very fair and unbiased with stories about Russia and North Korea, but their environmental and weed stories are obviously biased. Russia Today (RT) is a decent source of news for topics that don't involve the interests of Russia (such as their coverage of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake). BBC has been covering the European refugee crisis very well, but a lot of their news isn't relevent to US citizen. It shouldn't be required to figure out which news organizations may have an agenda on a certain topic, and avoid those organizations on those topics, but that's the way it is now.
I don't understand people's obsession throwing money at an expensive adjustable desk. Just get a drafting table and a tall chair. Problem solved.
I don't understand people's obsession with car seats that can be adjusted forwards and backwards. Just strap a couple of bricks to the pedals and put some extra cushions on the seat back. Problem solved.
Watching the first 'digital native' generation trying to deal with real world problems is kind of cute, isn't it?
I think this issue is more of inexperience, rather than generational differences, as the parent implied when they speculated that the GP was in university. When labor is basically free or labor cost are not important (as in many University or research settings), the solutions gravitate towards customized hardware operated by a relatively highly skilled person. Data collection in the real world gravitates towards commercial off-the-shelf solution operated by person of a lower skill level. It just doesn't make sense to have an electrical engineer running around checking grounds using a complicated in-house built tool when you can send an electrical technician at 1/2 the hourly rate and have them use a 3rd-party calibrated tool.
I really doubt there's a way to build enough bus routes to take people from arbitrary point to arbitrary point in an efficient manner. Public transportation works pretty well at major transportation hubs, when you can move huge concentrations of people to and from specific, highly popular destinations (like to extremely dense city centers). But it doesn't work nearly as well when you're trying to move between two arbitrary points in, say, a large semi-densely suburban region dotted with small to medium-sized cities in which the journey an individual is likely to take is not nearly so predictable.
The problem is that without hub and spokes, you're trying to solve a N x N hard problem (with N being the number of possible destinations in a given region) in the worst case scenario. Each additional hub you add drastically reduces the number of routes needed, but at the cost of increased travel time and inconvenience.
I think we are at the point where we can flip the bus problem table over and do something new. If passengers could input their location and destination into a computer system, the technology exists to rearrange lesser-used bus routes in real time. We really don't need a bus to pass by 10 empty bus stops if nobody is there and a bus stop 2 blocks off the route has people waiting. Heavily used routes would probably remain scheduled-service as they are now. You could even run simulations and calculate figures such as "80% of passengers would complete their trips at an average speed (including wait times) of 20mph or more". There is a potential to improve service AND reduce costs at the same time.
For data input, there could be a smartphone app or website. Electronic ticket kiosks could be installed at bus stops. They could print a ticket that has specific instructions, in plain english, regarding transfers. A single 45W solar panel would supply more than enough power and avoid the need for underground utility installation. If electronic kiosks are economically viable for multiple parking meters on each block, they must be somewhat economically viable for bus stops. Bonus- passengers pay for the bus ticket beforehand. The time busses spend sitting at a bus stop waiting for passengers to pay would be shortened greatly.
This is a classic routing problem. Computers are really good at these types of problems, can solve them in realtime, and can predict into the future based on historical data. The only thing holding us back is the historical desire to have regular, preplanned service at a specific time and place. I would argue that we don't need that anymore.
The impression I had was that Big Dog was their big product. Google bought them and killed the program cause they don't do defense work. I thought the Army saying Big Dog didn't meet noise requirements was something that allowed everyone to save face.
Maybe Google shouldn't have bought a robotics company that was primarily defense funded...
I read somewhere that soldiers hated Big Dog because of the noise and limited use cases, and that soldiers preferred wheeled vehicles that they could ride in. You could probably ride on Big Dog and similar legged robots, but it wouldn't be very comfortable.
Just something I read on the internet but it makes sense. Getting rid of the group seems a bit odd though. Maybe Google is thinking that when humanoid robots are finally "ready" as a consumer product, they can just buy a company and get back in the game. Or maybe they feel that Boston Dynamics costs too much and can't compete in the free market. Their robots did lose the Darpa Robot Challenge to research universities, after all.
I've looked at NUCs a few times now for various situations and every time I've been turned off by the requirement for 19V PSU. Not 12V not 24V, but 19V. Nice and non-standard, and exceptionally non-standard in situations where you may need a tiny computer (i.e. not somewhere where a wall socket is available).
19V / 19.5V seems to be a very common input voltage for laptops. It is related to the Li-Ion chemistry and also how the voltage converters and regulators are set up in most laptops. I suspect they are leveraging this technology and didn't bother improving it for NUC applications. Laptop power bricks are common enough and NUC type devices are niche products, even if they are very useful in certain applications.
As someone who spent a career in the Army handling and actively working to protect classified information (MOS 97B then 35L Counterintelligence Agent) I assure you it is most certainly NOT a molehill. She not only mishandled the emails, but on at least one occasion directed a subordinate to strip the markings from a document before emailing it to her. In other words she knew it was wrong and still wanted to get around it.
You also don't realize how intertwined the intel communications systems are these days. Bradley Manning included thousands of State Dept reports in the stockpile he gave to WikiLeaks, Snowden has revealed several State Dept reports as well. And as Secretary of State She had access to the highest levels of intelligence. Yes she did have access, she did not protect it. She willfully ordered subordinates to illegally strip markings to try to slip around the rules. Any lesser person would have been indicted long ago. The fact that she still has not despite what has been revealed (and much cannot be revealed due to the classification of the emails) indicates the Justice Dept. is sitting on the case, hoping it can make it go away.
Actually, both parties have an interest in delaying the investigation now. Clinton supporters (and the Democratic party, since they have supported Clinton over Sanders from the beginning) obviously don't want the investigation to be completed, ever.
The Republican Party would probably prefer that Clinton get the Democratic nomination, and a bombshell be dropped at a critical point in the election. Election day is November 8, so November 6 around noon would be the perfect time. It would make the Sunday evening news and voters would have all day Monday to talk about it at the water cooler before voting on Tuesday
Remember that the IT specialist who set up the server was given immunity by the Justice Department less than 2 weeks ago. It takes time to get all the information out of that individual, follow up on leads, question additional persons of interest, gather additional evidence, bring it all together, and make a decision of what to do next. This story isn't over yet.
Common sense is that you ban new housing, make it attractive to move somewhere higher - won't happen.
In principle, there is no need to ban such housing, we just need to stop subsidizing it. Right now, it's subsidized both through government-financed flood insurance programs, as well as through the provision emergency services. That encourages people not only to build in risky places, but also to pay for flood-proofing their homes. If people had to pay for the full cost of insurance and emergency services out of their own pockets, many people who currently build in flood zones would consider it too expensive and build somewhere else, and others would flood proof their homes instead of getting a fresh home every few decades courtesy of the tax payer. Attempts to reform the system have been repeatedly undermined. (I think the reform act was probably too heavy handed. A better and simpler choice might be to limit payouts from government subsidized flood insurance to a one time payment, both per site and per property owner.)
We need better flood maps and risk analysis systems too. Some places have gotten a "100 year flood" several times in the past decade. That indicates to me the risk calculations could use some work. Another problem is new development. New development paves over the earth with nonpermeable concrete and then disposal of rainwater becomes a significant problem. Areas which were once had swampy land to soak up the rain can quickly become areas that generate large volumes of runoff/drain water.
Some places have adequate retention pond regulations, and some places allow developers pass the costs, problems, and risks to the general public. The regulations for flood control are at a local or regional level. There is only so much the federal government can do, even if they were empowered to do something. Flood control in the USA is a very large problem and anyone proposing simple or easy solutions doesn't understand the problem.
Were you asleep for the last two months when the rapid drop in oil prices was threatening to drive us back into another recession?
That was all horseshit. Low oil prices never created a threat of recession. Except maybe a recession in the trading accounts of oil speculators and energy companies.
For everyone else, it was stimulative to the economy to have oil prices low.
To a point. Several of my friends working in oil and gas lost their jobs. The salaried employees were laid off, and the contract ones typically ran out a contract and could not find a new contract. I saw several posts on Facebook that families were cancelling Christmas (gifts) since they didn't have a job and didn't know when they would have one. Some are in danger of losing their houses, or are already in the process. Even if they had emergency savings, there's only so long that can last.
Low oil prices are great up until the point where large numbers of jobs are cut. It isn't a crisis for the USA, but a lot of people in the industry, and related industries, have endured hardship over the last year. This has a ripple effect on the communities the workers live in. When you don't know when your next paycheck will be, you don't buy any product or service that isn't absolutely necessary. Even it was a necessary correction, the effect on a lot of working families is not good. That's not something I take lightly.
Rapid changes in price (upwards or downwards) in a critical and necessary commodity are not good for anyone. I don't hear anyone calling for a discussion on how to dampen or smooth out the boom and bust cycle that oil and gas follows. Now would be a good time to do something, while the pain is on everyone's mind.
And thus how Aircraft bathrooms get in the state they do - everyone tries to use them without touching anything.
The first users, when the bathroom is clean, probably don't do that. It's when a bathroom starts getting untidy that a self-reinforcing feedback loop takes over. The dirtier the bathroom gets, the more successive users make it exponentially worse.
Some airlines, particularly Japanese and Korean ones, have the flight attendants put on rubber gloves and clean up the bathroom periodically mid-flight. It's a bizarre concept, I know, but it seems to be a good solution.
Algebra 1 is sufficient for formal logic, though. He isn't saying to eliminate all algebra. Frankly, stats would not be my choice as a follow-up, but rather a combination of critical thinking courses and civics. Society would likely benefit greatly from more people being involved and more capable of separating their emotions from their important decisions.
It is truly shocking to me the number of people I encounter who don't understand how tax brackets work. I've had people who hold masters degrees in engineering who complained that if they were paid more, they would actually have less take-home pay because of being "bumped up to a higher tax bracket". That's not how tax brackets work in the USA.
Whenever there is confusion, there is room for manipulation. And there are a lot of politicians who know that.
The rusted out body of a Model A for 18K+ when you can buy a beautiful fully restored working Model As for as little 16,000
If you don't shop around expect to be taken advantage of.
In defense of that guy, a lot of people don't know what something is worth, or understand that they need to price their products at market level. If you get angry at overpriced Ebay listings, don't go shopping on Craigslist for anything with a steep depreciation curve. Sometimes the prices are laughable.
Another "messaging" app that somehow messages differently than regular text messages? Somehow, I doubt that their target market of dim-witted 10 year old kids is going to decide which phone OS's continue into the future.
In a lot of markets (EG South America) WhatsApp is used by the majority of mobile users due to the pricing of text messages vs pure data because most people in the world don't have unlimited text messages in their plans. So I think you need to revise your opinion of the WhatsApp target market to reflect that other people face situations different than your own and as such have different motivations to use things like WhatsApp.
It is also great in locations where there is wifi but no or spotty cell service. I rode around on a mexican-flagged ship for a couple weeks in the Gulf of Mexico. Whatsapp was extremely popular with the crew. The wifi was unreliable and slow, but text and voice messages on WhatsApp went through fine most of the time. It fills a need, so therefore people use it.
Many of these services are somewhat regional. As another example, Line is very popular in Asia and some other regions, but almost unheard of in the US.
Chicago public schools have a graduation rate of below 70%. They'd be better off making sure their students had a grasp of fundamental skills than adding additional CS requirements to graduation.
It sounds like they really need to ask some questions about WHY their graduation rate is so low, and then decide if changing the curriculum would help. My gut reaction is that there are a lot of factors that have nothing to do with what the school is doing at all.
We got enough railroads. What don't have is new boxcars to replace old boxcars at the end of their 50-year lifecycle.
The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decades long shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.
I'm a bit baffled why this is a problem. Who uses boxcars nowadays? Everybody has shifted to 20ft and 40ft shipping containers. There's plenty of rail cars to handle these. They can even be double stacked in many parts of the country. A shipping container has the added advantage of being able to be loaded before the train comes, then simply lifted onto the car. If you load by forklift or pallet jack, it is a lot easier to fill up the container since the door on all standard containers is at the end, not the middle. You don't have to make a hard 90 degree turn after entering the container and deal with the loading difficulties that imposes. Containers also eliminate a lot of the problems of intermodal transport. You can lift the container right off the train and put it on a truck, or a ship. No need to unload the boxcar manually and repack it.
The only advantage that a boxcar seems to have is that a single car has a higher weight capacity than a single 40ft container. 1 boxcar has a weight capacity of roughly 2 40ft containers, if you're packing it full of paper at an average density of 0.9g/cm^3 (as the complainers in the linked article are). The many advantages of containers mitigate this disadvantage, in my opinion.
it's someone from UL trying to instill fear and drum up business for their private, for profit company.
I was going to drum up that UL is a not-for-profit, but it turns out that you're right and I'm behind the times. UL went 'for-profit' back in 2012. Though it seems that the for profit branch is still owned by the non-profit parent company. So I wonder how the hell that works out.
I mean, I like businesses. I like companies doing their best to make a profit. Part of the whole libertarian thing. But also as part of the libertarian thing, I'm extremely supportive of non and not-for profits like the UL used to be, cooperatives, and employee-owned companies. My ideal utility company, for example, is a cooperative not-for profit.
UL discarding their 'not-for-profit' status makes me uncomfortable. Before, while I wouldn't term them perfect, I could at least say that the company's primary concern was safety above all else. Sure, they'd charge money - but they needed to keep the lights on. Not needing to turn a profit, they would be mostly immune to the corruption of having to satisfy their customers by passing goods that might not actually be as safe as they could be.
I used to work for a nonprofit which had a for-profit consulting company associated with them. I was on the nonprofit side. The for-profit side had better pay and benefits, for the exact same experience level and job function. The workers on the nonprofit side envied the for-profit side.
There are some disadvantages to being a nonprofit. Legitimate ones. Like the allowable retirement plans under IRS guidelines are different than the ones for normal companies and may not be as favorable to workers. Pay has to be justified and approved in different ways than a for-profit. Sometimes these quirks of tax law make it harder to hire staff, especially in highly technical jobs such as the UL might have need for. Maybe that isn't the case with UL labs at all, and it was done for sleazy reasons. But there are legitimate reasons to go for-profit.
Check out "Benefit Corporations" (NOT 'B-corps, that is totally different). They are a very new idea and we haven't yet seen how they will impact society and capitalism. I am sure that they will be very popular once someone tells the millennials.
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I'm not surprised at all. To play in most Middle East countries requires a local company and a physical office. This can be hard to set up for foreigners due to local law. Certain countries basically require kickbacks and bribes to get anything done. Legitimate companies often get around both of these issues by partnering with a "facilitator" company.
The Facilitator company will sometimes act as the agent (sales representative) for the legitimate company, collecting a commission on goods and services sold. The commission may be deliberately higher than normal in order to have the cash to pay whoever needs to be paid. This can be discovered by examining the commission amount/percentage and comparing it to other parts of the world for similar services. The foreign company can be held responsible if it knew, or should have known, that something fishy was going on.
Another way to do the same thing is to retain such a company for consulting services. Looking at contract deliverables and the contract amount usually gives an indication if the consulting services are legitimate or a cover for something else. Again, the foreign company can be held responsible if they knew, or should have known that something was up.
Yet another way to do the same thing is to subcontract to one of these facilitating companies. The facilitating company then marks up the price to whatever they need in order to pay their sales staff, pay bribes, or negotiate legal hurdles. The customer's contract is between the customer and the facilitating company, and the foreign company never sees it. Done right, the foreign company has no idea what the final customer price is, or if it was reasonable, etc. This is the best way to protect a foreign company since any improper or illegal actions that the facilitating company takes fall solely on the facilitating company. The facilitating company can also accept contract provisions that a foreign company could not legally accept (Israeli goods boycott, as an example). The foreign company never has the information required to see that something was amiss, so proving that they "knew or should have known" is substantially harder.
One last thing to keep in mind is that certain types of payments are actually legal. Generally, you can pay someone to "hurry up" and complete something that is included in their official duties, and which they would have done for you anyway without the payment. If the payment is just to expedite something that would have happened anyway, it is not considered a bribe, even if it is paid directly to an individual. The prime example of this is paying a customs officer to release cargo which has all the correct paperwork. The officer would have done this anyway, eventually. The payment is just to expedite the legal and inevitable action.
Because large precision devices are expensive, take a long time to build, so there's no economies of scale. The mirror onboard the Hubble is a highly precise piece of glass (it's precisely incorrect, but precise non the less), and building large telescope mirrors is tough.
No, there absolutely are economies of scale. The tooling you buy/build to make that megahuge mirror probably was custom designed and built. If you can build 2 mirrors, the tooling and tooling design cost drops to 50% on a per-unit basis.
The procedures, qualification, and documentation benefit also. You need procedures for your technicians to work to, which someone has to write, then someone has to review, and someone has to approve it. You often need to make small qualification parts to prove that certain processes can be repeated with the desired quality, and you need to document the qualification of the procedure. Then you need to qualify your technicians to those procedures. Designing the part and creating all the drawings takes a while. Drawings need to be reviewed for correctness, and inevitably things are found which are corrected. Finding vendors who can provide what you need, qualifying them, and getting them to fully understand exactly what you want them to do is a big effort also. All these tasks cost a substantial amount of money, BUT after you have done them once, you can make 1, 2, or 100 parts and not have to pay those costs again.
Direct labor and material do cost money too, but they are often a small portion of projects like this.
Reminds me of Netscape in 2001 which was a 25MB+ download. Which didn't compare particularly favorably to Opera 5 @ 2MB, especially considering that Netscape had less features, a larger memory footprint, no tabs and crashed far more often. Transmission: 25MB - considered a small footprint/? uTorrent is what 1 or 2MBs? And is ad-free if you support it.
uTorrent has not been what I would say a "trusted" piece of software for at least a couple years now. It got bloated up and the company lost the morals at some point after version 2. Sure, you can run 2.2.1, the installer is still available, and at the time it was one of the best torrent clients available, but there are probably big security problems with using it in 2016. Not to mention I had some stability problems the last time I tried to use that version.
They're not conflating old with obsolete; they're suggesting that a bespoke, cutting-edge system that didn't turn into a template has left BART on a tree branch all by itself, and thus has engendered its obsolescence.
History is littered with rail projects that did their own thing despite other, more popular, standards or pseudo-standards being on the market already. Sometimes the road more frequently traveled is, in fact, the better road.
10 years is not very old for a TV set. Back in 2009 when the digital switchover and HD forced the issue, many of the TVs scrapped were from the 80s and 90s. There are no major changes to broadcast TV coming down the pike (3D is dead in the water, 4K gets a big meh from your average household) so no reason to buy a new set unless the old one craps out. I'm sure shitty capacitors will do in a number of those sets, but a good many of them will still be in use in 2019.
Incremental improvements have a way of stacking up. If the glass vendor improves their coatings and can cut glare by 5% a year, the panel vendor improves contrast ratio by 5% a year, the processor vendor improves power consumption by 5% per year, these are all small improvements but after 10 years you have a product that is substantially better in many measurable ways. I replaced an older 27" 1920x1600 panel a while back and the new monitor is a huge improvement as far as picture quality goes. I gained a bit of desk space, and it cost substantially less both in real dollars and inflation-corrected dollars. The old one was "fine" but technology moves on. I have yet to look at any TV/Monitor and be completely, 100% satisfied that it could not be improved further. I think we have many years ahead of us before monitors are a fully mature technology and the only improvements to be made are related to cost reduction.
"carve out $21.55 million for pilot projects such as modernizing the electric distribution grid."
What a concept, a utility company "carving" out money to maintain the system they have a monopoly on. People wonder how our national infrastructure got into the horrible shape it is now...
There are a lot of ways that could go down. Maybe external parties want to implement systems that the utility doesn't think are important. Just as an example, smart meters that can control AC units in the event of a power shortage. In some parts of the country, there is a solid case to be made for installing such equipment. In other areas, it might be completely frivolous.
The article uses the term "modernizing", not "maintaining". You're reading your own bias into it. Without knowing all the details that is just speculation.
when you outsource everything -I'm just sayin'
This actually increases the cost of doing business. When the quality of almost every product can not be assumed, the burden of quality shifts almost entirely to the purchaser. It takes a lot of manpower to write detailed Requests for Proposal, compare bids to those RFPs, evaluate them, and do additional QC checking since the vendor can't be trusted to do that. There are enough stories of companies with solid reputations throwing it all away in pursuit of slightly lower costs that you can't even trust "reliable" vendors anymore. Yesterday they were fine, today they might be fine, but tommorow? It all hangs on the whim of an upper level manager who may be solely incentivized to cut costs.
Maybe men are better at negotiating salary. Negotiating makes a huge difference. When I was promoted at my last job, I did not negotiating because I was afraid I wouldn't be given the job. The person (a lady) who was promoted next did negotiate and started about 5 thousand more than me.
I'd be interested to see what the starting offer was for men and woman and what disparity was there.
A strong negotiator needs a high degree of self-confidence. The ablity to maintaining high self-confidence in situations where that confidence is questioned is often correlated with sales ability. This issue is always framed as a gender issue, but I am not sure it is. There are plenty of men with no self confidence who negotiate like overcooked spagetti, and many women who are very strong negotiators. My theory is that the testosterone/estrogen balance is more important than simply gender in this situation. Obviously that relates to gender but this is not a black and white issue.
In any case, a 5.4% difference in pay is an indication that small continuous-improvement adjustments are needed, not the sweeping social changes that are often proposed. We need to be very careful with any change that tilts the bar since women have outnumbered men in college graduation for some time now and the long-term ramifications of that may not have shown up in salary data yet. We may find in 10 years that significant action is needed to balancing the playing field back towards men.
The worst part is that shit like this is no longer surprising or noteworthy.
There was a time when a revelation like this would have been major news, all the papers and news stations would have had a field day with it, and heads would have rolled. Now there's barely the merest hint of interest, and not a shred of outrage.
The public has been thoroughly desensitized to what should be seen as egregious and illegal behavior by the government, yet for most people it's basically a snoozefest.
The most popular news companies don't devote any time to long-term stories, or do any investigative journalism anymore. The focus is on being first and being entertaining. Most are bought and paid for on certain issues.
There are many outfits that still do news the old-fashioned way, but they are usually small, niche, and don't have the funding that the major networks have. They also have different focuses and strengths. News today is about figuring out who has an agenda on a topic-by-topic basis. Vice News is usually very fair and unbiased with stories about Russia and North Korea, but their environmental and weed stories are obviously biased. Russia Today (RT) is a decent source of news for topics that don't involve the interests of Russia (such as their coverage of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake). BBC has been covering the European refugee crisis very well, but a lot of their news isn't relevent to US citizen. It shouldn't be required to figure out which news organizations may have an agenda on a certain topic, and avoid those organizations on those topics, but that's the way it is now.
I don't understand people's obsession throwing money at an expensive adjustable desk. Just get a drafting table and a tall chair. Problem solved.
I don't understand people's obsession with car seats that can be adjusted forwards and backwards. Just strap a couple of bricks to the pedals and put some extra cushions on the seat back. Problem solved.
Watching the first 'digital native' generation trying to deal with real world problems is kind of cute, isn't it?
I think this issue is more of inexperience, rather than generational differences, as the parent implied when they speculated that the GP was in university. When labor is basically free or labor cost are not important (as in many University or research settings), the solutions gravitate towards customized hardware operated by a relatively highly skilled person. Data collection in the real world gravitates towards commercial off-the-shelf solution operated by person of a lower skill level. It just doesn't make sense to have an electrical engineer running around checking grounds using a complicated in-house built tool when you can send an electrical technician at 1/2 the hourly rate and have them use a 3rd-party calibrated tool.
I really doubt there's a way to build enough bus routes to take people from arbitrary point to arbitrary point in an efficient manner. Public transportation works pretty well at major transportation hubs, when you can move huge concentrations of people to and from specific, highly popular destinations (like to extremely dense city centers). But it doesn't work nearly as well when you're trying to move between two arbitrary points in, say, a large semi-densely suburban region dotted with small to medium-sized cities in which the journey an individual is likely to take is not nearly so predictable.
The problem is that without hub and spokes, you're trying to solve a N x N hard problem (with N being the number of possible destinations in a given region) in the worst case scenario. Each additional hub you add drastically reduces the number of routes needed, but at the cost of increased travel time and inconvenience.
I think we are at the point where we can flip the bus problem table over and do something new. If passengers could input their location and destination into a computer system, the technology exists to rearrange lesser-used bus routes in real time. We really don't need a bus to pass by 10 empty bus stops if nobody is there and a bus stop 2 blocks off the route has people waiting. Heavily used routes would probably remain scheduled-service as they are now. You could even run simulations and calculate figures such as "80% of passengers would complete their trips at an average speed (including wait times) of 20mph or more". There is a potential to improve service AND reduce costs at the same time.
For data input, there could be a smartphone app or website. Electronic ticket kiosks could be installed at bus stops. They could print a ticket that has specific instructions, in plain english, regarding transfers. A single 45W solar panel would supply more than enough power and avoid the need for underground utility installation. If electronic kiosks are economically viable for multiple parking meters on each block, they must be somewhat economically viable for bus stops. Bonus- passengers pay for the bus ticket beforehand. The time busses spend sitting at a bus stop waiting for passengers to pay would be shortened greatly.
This is a classic routing problem. Computers are really good at these types of problems, can solve them in realtime, and can predict into the future based on historical data. The only thing holding us back is the historical desire to have regular, preplanned service at a specific time and place. I would argue that we don't need that anymore.
The impression I had was that Big Dog was their big product. Google bought them and killed the program cause they don't do defense work. I thought the Army saying Big Dog didn't meet noise requirements was something that allowed everyone to save face.
Maybe Google shouldn't have bought a robotics company that was primarily defense funded...
I read somewhere that soldiers hated Big Dog because of the noise and limited use cases, and that soldiers preferred wheeled vehicles that they could ride in. You could probably ride on Big Dog and similar legged robots, but it wouldn't be very comfortable.
Just something I read on the internet but it makes sense. Getting rid of the group seems a bit odd though. Maybe Google is thinking that when humanoid robots are finally "ready" as a consumer product, they can just buy a company and get back in the game. Or maybe they feel that Boston Dynamics costs too much and can't compete in the free market. Their robots did lose the Darpa Robot Challenge to research universities, after all.
I've looked at NUCs a few times now for various situations and every time I've been turned off by the requirement for 19V PSU. Not 12V not 24V, but 19V. Nice and non-standard, and exceptionally non-standard in situations where you may need a tiny computer (i.e. not somewhere where a wall socket is available).
19V / 19.5V seems to be a very common input voltage for laptops. It is related to the Li-Ion chemistry and also how the voltage converters and regulators are set up in most laptops. I suspect they are leveraging this technology and didn't bother improving it for NUC applications. Laptop power bricks are common enough and NUC type devices are niche products, even if they are very useful in certain applications.
As someone who spent a career in the Army handling and actively working to protect classified information (MOS 97B then 35L Counterintelligence Agent) I assure you it is most certainly NOT a molehill. She not only mishandled the emails, but on at least one occasion directed a subordinate to strip the markings from a document before emailing it to her. In other words she knew it was wrong and still wanted to get around it. You also don't realize how intertwined the intel communications systems are these days. Bradley Manning included thousands of State Dept reports in the stockpile he gave to WikiLeaks, Snowden has revealed several State Dept reports as well. And as Secretary of State She had access to the highest levels of intelligence. Yes she did have access, she did not protect it. She willfully ordered subordinates to illegally strip markings to try to slip around the rules. Any lesser person would have been indicted long ago. The fact that she still has not despite what has been revealed (and much cannot be revealed due to the classification of the emails) indicates the Justice Dept. is sitting on the case, hoping it can make it go away.
Actually, both parties have an interest in delaying the investigation now. Clinton supporters (and the Democratic party, since they have supported Clinton over Sanders from the beginning) obviously don't want the investigation to be completed, ever.
The Republican Party would probably prefer that Clinton get the Democratic nomination, and a bombshell be dropped at a critical point in the election. Election day is November 8, so November 6 around noon would be the perfect time. It would make the Sunday evening news and voters would have all day Monday to talk about it at the water cooler before voting on Tuesday
Remember that the IT specialist who set up the server was given immunity by the Justice Department less than 2 weeks ago. It takes time to get all the information out of that individual, follow up on leads, question additional persons of interest, gather additional evidence, bring it all together, and make a decision of what to do next. This story isn't over yet.
In principle, there is no need to ban such housing, we just need to stop subsidizing it. Right now, it's subsidized both through government-financed flood insurance programs, as well as through the provision emergency services. That encourages people not only to build in risky places, but also to pay for flood-proofing their homes. If people had to pay for the full cost of insurance and emergency services out of their own pockets, many people who currently build in flood zones would consider it too expensive and build somewhere else, and others would flood proof their homes instead of getting a fresh home every few decades courtesy of the tax payer. Attempts to reform the system have been repeatedly undermined. (I think the reform act was probably too heavy handed. A better and simpler choice might be to limit payouts from government subsidized flood insurance to a one time payment, both per site and per property owner.)
We need better flood maps and risk analysis systems too. Some places have gotten a "100 year flood" several times in the past decade. That indicates to me the risk calculations could use some work. Another problem is new development. New development paves over the earth with nonpermeable concrete and then disposal of rainwater becomes a significant problem. Areas which were once had swampy land to soak up the rain can quickly become areas that generate large volumes of runoff/drain water.
Some places have adequate retention pond regulations, and some places allow developers pass the costs, problems, and risks to the general public. The regulations for flood control are at a local or regional level. There is only so much the federal government can do, even if they were empowered to do something. Flood control in the USA is a very large problem and anyone proposing simple or easy solutions doesn't understand the problem.
That was all horseshit. Low oil prices never created a threat of recession. Except maybe a recession in the trading accounts of oil speculators and energy companies.
For everyone else, it was stimulative to the economy to have oil prices low.
To a point. Several of my friends working in oil and gas lost their jobs. The salaried employees were laid off, and the contract ones typically ran out a contract and could not find a new contract. I saw several posts on Facebook that families were cancelling Christmas (gifts) since they didn't have a job and didn't know when they would have one. Some are in danger of losing their houses, or are already in the process. Even if they had emergency savings, there's only so long that can last.
Low oil prices are great up until the point where large numbers of jobs are cut. It isn't a crisis for the USA, but a lot of people in the industry, and related industries, have endured hardship over the last year. This has a ripple effect on the communities the workers live in. When you don't know when your next paycheck will be, you don't buy any product or service that isn't absolutely necessary. Even it was a necessary correction, the effect on a lot of working families is not good. That's not something I take lightly.
Rapid changes in price (upwards or downwards) in a critical and necessary commodity are not good for anyone. I don't hear anyone calling for a discussion on how to dampen or smooth out the boom and bust cycle that oil and gas follows. Now would be a good time to do something, while the pain is on everyone's mind.
And thus how Aircraft bathrooms get in the state they do - everyone tries to use them without touching anything.
The first users, when the bathroom is clean, probably don't do that. It's when a bathroom starts getting untidy that a self-reinforcing feedback loop takes over. The dirtier the bathroom gets, the more successive users make it exponentially worse.
Some airlines, particularly Japanese and Korean ones, have the flight attendants put on rubber gloves and clean up the bathroom periodically mid-flight. It's a bizarre concept, I know, but it seems to be a good solution.
Using that logic, any company that wanted to design and build an airplane after 1913 was a complete fool and was wasting their time and money.
Algebra 1 is sufficient for formal logic, though. He isn't saying to eliminate all algebra. Frankly, stats would not be my choice as a follow-up, but rather a combination of critical thinking courses and civics. Society would likely benefit greatly from more people being involved and more capable of separating their emotions from their important decisions.
It is truly shocking to me the number of people I encounter who don't understand how tax brackets work. I've had people who hold masters degrees in engineering who complained that if they were paid more, they would actually have less take-home pay because of being "bumped up to a higher tax bracket". That's not how tax brackets work in the USA.
Whenever there is confusion, there is room for manipulation. And there are a lot of politicians who know that.
Sure the guy is a scumbag, but anyone buying from him deserves to be taken advantage of.
People list things for far more than what they are worth all the time.
I was looking to buy a Model A and look what I came across this
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Ford-M...
The rusted out body of a Model A for 18K+ when you can buy a beautiful fully restored working Model As for as little 16,000
If you don't shop around expect to be taken advantage of.
In defense of that guy, a lot of people don't know what something is worth, or understand that they need to price their products at market level. If you get angry at overpriced Ebay listings, don't go shopping on Craigslist for anything with a steep depreciation curve. Sometimes the prices are laughable.
Another "messaging" app that somehow messages differently than regular text messages? Somehow, I doubt that their target market of dim-witted 10 year old kids is going to decide which phone OS's continue into the future.
In a lot of markets (EG South America) WhatsApp is used by the majority of mobile users due to the pricing of text messages vs pure data because most people in the world don't have unlimited text messages in their plans. So I think you need to revise your opinion of the WhatsApp target market to reflect that other people face situations different than your own and as such have different motivations to use things like WhatsApp.
It is also great in locations where there is wifi but no or spotty cell service. I rode around on a mexican-flagged ship for a couple weeks in the Gulf of Mexico. Whatsapp was extremely popular with the crew. The wifi was unreliable and slow, but text and voice messages on WhatsApp went through fine most of the time. It fills a need, so therefore people use it.
Many of these services are somewhat regional. As another example, Line is very popular in Asia and some other regions, but almost unheard of in the US.
Chicago public schools have a graduation rate of below 70%. They'd be better off making sure their students had a grasp of fundamental skills than adding additional CS requirements to graduation.
It sounds like they really need to ask some questions about WHY their graduation rate is so low, and then decide if changing the curriculum would help. My gut reaction is that there are a lot of factors that have nothing to do with what the school is doing at all.
We got enough railroads. What don't have is new boxcars to replace old boxcars at the end of their 50-year lifecycle.
The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decades long shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21
I'm a bit baffled why this is a problem. Who uses boxcars nowadays? Everybody has shifted to 20ft and 40ft shipping containers. There's plenty of rail cars to handle these. They can even be double stacked in many parts of the country. A shipping container has the added advantage of being able to be loaded before the train comes, then simply lifted onto the car. If you load by forklift or pallet jack, it is a lot easier to fill up the container since the door on all standard containers is at the end, not the middle. You don't have to make a hard 90 degree turn after entering the container and deal with the loading difficulties that imposes. Containers also eliminate a lot of the problems of intermodal transport. You can lift the container right off the train and put it on a truck, or a ship. No need to unload the boxcar manually and repack it.
The only advantage that a boxcar seems to have is that a single car has a higher weight capacity than a single 40ft container. 1 boxcar has a weight capacity of roughly 2 40ft containers, if you're packing it full of paper at an average density of 0.9g/cm^3 (as the complainers in the linked article are). The many advantages of containers mitigate this disadvantage, in my opinion.
it's someone from UL trying to instill fear and drum up business for their private, for profit company.
I was going to drum up that UL is a not-for-profit, but it turns out that you're right and I'm behind the times. UL went 'for-profit' back in 2012. Though it seems that the for profit branch is still owned by the non-profit parent company. So I wonder how the hell that works out.
I mean, I like businesses. I like companies doing their best to make a profit. Part of the whole libertarian thing. But also as part of the libertarian thing, I'm extremely supportive of non and not-for profits like the UL used to be, cooperatives, and employee-owned companies. My ideal utility company, for example, is a cooperative not-for profit.
UL discarding their 'not-for-profit' status makes me uncomfortable. Before, while I wouldn't term them perfect, I could at least say that the company's primary concern was safety above all else. Sure, they'd charge money - but they needed to keep the lights on. Not needing to turn a profit, they would be mostly immune to the corruption of having to satisfy their customers by passing goods that might not actually be as safe as they could be.
I used to work for a nonprofit which had a for-profit consulting company associated with them. I was on the nonprofit side. The for-profit side had better pay and benefits, for the exact same experience level and job function. The workers on the nonprofit side envied the for-profit side.
There are some disadvantages to being a nonprofit. Legitimate ones. Like the allowable retirement plans under IRS guidelines are different than the ones for normal companies and may not be as favorable to workers. Pay has to be justified and approved in different ways than a for-profit. Sometimes these quirks of tax law make it harder to hire staff, especially in highly technical jobs such as the UL might have need for. Maybe that isn't the case with UL labs at all, and it was done for sleazy reasons. But there are legitimate reasons to go for-profit.
Check out "Benefit Corporations" (NOT 'B-corps, that is totally different). They are a very new idea and we haven't yet seen how they will impact society and capitalism. I am sure that they will be very popular once someone tells the millennials.