Cut the military back to nuclear deterrent, coast guard, and small standing army for border protection, and allow the return of the merchant marine to keep trade routes safe, and you have a cut closer to 90%. We'd be better liked abroad as well, allowing us to reap the benefits of increased trade.
What are you talking about? The US "Merchant marine" is just a fancy way of saying "the commercial ships flying a USA flag". It's true that in wartime, we have historically armed these ships. But that is somewhat tricky to do nowadays because of international law. The only ships that can get away with this easilly are MSC ships, and those ships are directly supporting the military or other government operations. Commercial ships sometimes bring on private security contractors when traveling through dangerous areas, but that is completely different from what you are implying.
"allow the return of the merchant marine to keep trade routes safe," is a nonscensical statement.
Yep. I moved from Australia to the US a couple of years ago. I am a very frequent flier (140+ segments per year).
In Australia it was never a problem getting overhead space because:
(a) The carry on bag size limits were enforced
(b) Most airlines (including the major two - Qantas and Virgin) allow one checked bag as part of the ticket price (I won't say 'free', but it's not charged as an extra fee)
(c) Less of those godforsaken small regional jets (EMB 120s, 175s and CRJ 200s and 700s in particular) that have tiny overhead bins. The proportion of flights in the US (and Canada) that these aircraft amazes me. You get them even between major (4M+ population) cities. You'd never get anything smaller than a 737 or A320 in Australia between major city pairs.
Having said that, addressing (a) and/or (b) alone would probably be enough to solve the issue in North America.
The airline market in the US is much more competitive with many more players. Most don't compete on flying experience, they compete on all the things leading up to a purchase decision. So they compete on price and choice. If an airline offer 6 flights a day from Milwaukee but a competitor offers only 2, the one offering 6 is probably going to do more business. Their flights fit better into people's schedules and it opens up more opportunities for reasonable connections. They would be stupid not to offer as many flights as they can while still being profitable and competitive on each one.
Maybe in Australia there is less competition, or more airport congestion, or regulations preventing this outcome. But in a highly competitive market I think this is the natural outcome.
You realize that your entire justification for using your existing units is because you are used to them right? Believe me when I tell you that metric units seem completely reasonable for the kinds of everyday things that people encounter when you are used to using them. We even have weather maps, beers, and shoes!
At least try to internalize the fact that you aren't being remotely objective.
Terrible examples. I have drank "pints" (not liters) of beers all over the world. That's how they were sold.
Shoe sizes have at least 6 different standards, not including the US or counting women's sizing standards.
I've had the very same problem for years now. I get exclusively results that other people got, who searched something vaguely similar.
First, you have to enclose every fucking word between quotes or you get only Taylor Swift and Kardashian search results.
Second, even _if_ you do that, it ignores all the punctuations I enter. I _really_ want only the results where there are exactly the period or comma on exactly the place where I put it, how hard can that be?
If I search for carbuncles, I don't need to see cars of somebody's uncle.
And don't even mention if you use a VPN, then you'll get Estonian or Russian results even when you enter only English words.
Google has become useless other than for clueless teens.
Why can't they just have a checkbox that you can select:
Check this box if you can spell and really mean what you type.
Not to mention that if you type in google.com you may be redirected to a local country site. If someone wanted google.de, they would have typed google.de in the address bar to begin with!
I wonder if the Russian media does the same sort of thing, i.e. portrays Limbaugh as some kind of spokesman for Obama?
About a decade ago a British newspaper called The Sun ran a story about how Japanese women were being tricked into buying sheep that had been sheared to look like poodles. There were confused as to why they didn't bark or eat dog food. Of course it was nonsense, eventually traced back to a joke someone told. Anyway, other retarded newspapers around the world picked it up, and then the Japanese media noticed. Ever since there have been monthly stories about how stupid and gullible British people are, often featuring obviously false stories published in the Sun or Daily Mail. Of course some of it is actually true, like the pictures of drunk people having sex in the street or looting in London, but still...
So the standard angle is now that British people are kind of stupid. Similar to how there is a stereotype about Russian people, and the media likes to find idiots that exemplify it and publicise them.
But stereotypes about Russian people are all true! They are all scary and depressed psychopaths! That's why nobody is their friend!
It certainly isn't the case that they are reclusive because they have a hard time making friends due to the stereotypes. That would be ridiculous.
EVERYBODY who's worked at Disney invariably refers to it as Mauschwitz (or Mouseswitz). The only other internal company name I've come across that's more universal is ex G.E. employees referring to it as "Generous Electric".
In my industry (steam and gas turbines), GE stands for "Good Enough".
Trust, it takes a long time to build and just a few seconds to destroy
Well, that's giving Disney too much credit I think. This was a long time in the works with several different departments and at least a dozen people involved. You have to have meetings with the outside contractor, draft a contract, get approvals, arrange payment methods, etc etc. You need to have meetings with HR, and they have to get all the preparations in place to fire the American workers. Somebody has to coordinate employee orientations and reassign assets from all the terminated employees to the replacement workers.
This was a carefully planned operation with many people involved. It was deliberately done, step by step, over the course of months or even years. The only mistake is that people found out about it.
I really wish the "normal" moderation was in between 'good' moderations and 'bad' moderations. I have reached for Insightful and accidentally hit Redundant way too many times.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I will have to try your experiment, but I am curious if you would like Olive Oil as much as the fat. Vegetable Oil tastes awful, so it is no surprise there.
You can't (or at least you shouldn't) fry anything in Olive oil. It will smoke and degrade into potentially unhealthy chemicals.
Don't call the police, call the bank and let the bank call the police.
It's not worth their time. They either wrote off the loss or their insurance company paid or they backcharged the merchants. Spending any additional time on nailing the criminal wouldn't benefit them in any way. It would be purely for vengeance.
Sorry, but no. People are definitely not able to operate machinery after using what is essentially a very powerful tranquilizer. They're not drunk, but being "stoned" sure isn't advantageous for your attention.
I'm all for legal use of whatever substance you want to subject your body to, but the line is drawn where it affects others directly.
Weed is not a tranquilizer. I don't think you've ever tried it. I am more careful when driving stoned than when I drive clearheaded. The larger the dose, the more paranoid I get that something bad is going to happen if I don't dedicate 100% of my attention to the act. High drivers drive slower and are more relaxed (and possibly paranoid of rearending someone) so they don't generally tailgate. This is such a common reaction that it is a stereotype.
The article is rather vague, but a business making $1.5millions in revenue, especially in the grey-drug market, should not be bringing much profit...
If its all marijuana, and revenue, that's about 130kg of weed using a weed price of $11.5/gram (Priceofweed.com, Texas, High Quality, based on 9568 samples). Thats a lot of weed shipments- roughly 175 grams per business day.
While there might be a problem with fraud in Uber use in China, is it any worse than in any other country? There is an implicit racism in all these stories that hit the media decrying 'Chinese Fraud and Duplicity'. I am sure there is plenty, as totalitarian governments have been shown to increase dishonesty in their populations, but is it really worse than any other developing country or country lacking a government?
Granted, the story will 'sell more papers' than a similar story about Uber being defrauded by teenage stoners from Kansas. China is a competing economic power with the US and EU, and as a result it seems to being demonized because Chinese people didn't have the common sense to be born with white skin. This constant barrage of stories about 'Chinese' dishonesty paints an image of them as being inscrutable and untrustworthy as a race.
Chinese people may not be universally unscrupulous, but it is definitely a lot more common than in other countries. When is the last time a German or Australian was at a trade show and wasted a competitor's time, asking questions that are obviously related to copying their business, taking detailed notes, and photos of everything? I have never seen it happen or witness such a thing. But without fail, at every trade show I go to, there are several Chinese delegations who go around doing this to every booth in the show. It's a cultural etiquette mismatch. Chinese people (despite, or because of, their totalitarian government?) also seem to have a difficult time following any kind of rule.
Thing is. Apple doesn't care. This service can loose money and as long as it makes the iPhone more attractive to potential buyers it is worth it to them. Same with the new news app. I'm honestly shocked they didn't make the streaming service cheaper.
Why would they make it cheaper? They can sell expensive razor blade handles AND expensive razor blades.
For some odd reason there is a huge glut of six core Xeon boxes on ebay. Look for anything with the X5650 cpu. Earlier in the year I picked up a X5650 box with 24gb of ram for $350. Hard to beat that price for a complete system. Way quicker than my old Q6600 box.
Wow you weren't kidding. There is a ridiculous number of listings on ebay. If I were younger and had more time, I might be tempted. A more recent chip would still give a better $/performance though. Especially if you factor in power costs.
and the person can put a hold on the bill so it can't come to the floor for a vote and they can do it anonymously
Wait what? Can someone explain this to an outsider? Snide comments aside this sounds like the exact opposite of a democracy. I thought only the President had, what it sounds like, something akin to veto powers over bills.
There are two different bills that the GP referenced, the Grid Act and the SHIELD Act.
The GRID act gives special emergency powers to The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to order utilities to do something. This was widely rejected by the industry because some of the powers could force the utility to keep their plants online, even if their machines were being damaged. That's not reasonable. If a grid problem gets to the point where it is damaging generators and other grid infrastructure, we should shut it down. Intentionally damaging a bunch of generators isn't going to keep the grid online if things get to that point.
The SHIELD act was about electromagnetic interference. FERC asked NERC last month to look into this some more. I would rather a government agency with some knowledge and experience on the matter write the rules, rather than a bunch of politicians who are pushing a bill that a lobbyist wrote.
A powerful EMP affecting the entire power grid is inevitable. There has been a lot of discussion about this.
Which is probably one of the reasons that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (The federal agency "FERC") asked the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (FERC's rulemaking organization "NERC") to investigate this. Less than a month ago. And their documents look like a common-sense plan.
The quote from Executive Director of the EMP Task Force Dr Peter Pry "Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country.... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid."
is just ridiculous in that context. FERC is the government agency responsible and they have asked their rulemaking body to make or revise some rules on the subject. And NERC is not a lobbying group. They make rules. The reporting requirements for some of their rules are onerous for the utilities (although they are generally common-sense and reasonable). I have a hard time believing they are in anybody's pocket.
The causes of an EMP are nuclear blast or solar flare, I think in case of the former you would have far larger problems than the grid to worry about.
That's why I find this quite sinister. It looks like they are just blatantly misleading the public to get more funding.
Yep, this guy is full of crap. The telling statement is:
"Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country.... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid."
That's very misleading. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is a government agency that has powers to make rules regarding the grid. They decided that this is a highly technical industry, so they basically created the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to investigate potential issues, draft rules, and get the industry on board with them. FERC tells NERC which kind of rule they want, NERC drafts it. Then FERC decides if the draft rules should be made law. NERC doesn't have any legal powers to protect the grid, they are just a rulemaking organization. So the statement "no part of the U.S. government that has legal powers to order them to protect the grid" is very misleading since NERC doesn't have the power to protect the grid anyway. That's FERC's job.
Unless you set it for jumbo fonts, or have super vision, for many tasks it seems like that would be too small to add much benefit -- at least to me.
That's a side effect of operating systems which don't scale properly. Windows doesn't do it properly and most other operating systems screw it up in various ways too.
I, for one, appreciate that it takes money to protect my freedom from terrorists. I have nothing to hide
And innocent people have nothing to fear.
Hey, guess what. YOU don't get to determine what's "innocent".
Back in the 1800s, Heroin was a commercial product, cocaine was legal and you could stockpile weed without ending up in prison. These days, buying fertilizer can get you in trouble. For decades, alcohol was illegal There is virtually nothing so innocuous that some group cannot get all worked up about and make illegal and suddenly all your records about your little hobby can be used to put you away. Not just the obvious vices, but things like photography, home vegetables, choir practice and more.
We are one major (not a joker or protester) incident away from having crippling regulations put on radio control aircraft.
Re:24/7 Live Global Radio
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I thought they made a really compelling argument for Apple Radio. They are pushing on the idea of a distinction between radio and algorithmically-driven playlists. Of the role of a djay in curating music and placing it in a cultural context. On the very notion of pop music not as a pejorative term but as a dimension of our shared experience.
Ok sure, I'll bite, at least for the trial period. $10/mo sounds expensive, tho.
$10/mo is cheap compared to SiriusXM. SiriusXM is a terrible company, their customer service is awful and their marketing machine makes the people selling fake viagra blush. Advertisements on some channels (Comedy in particular) are some of the sleaziest late-night ads I have ever heard. But I have struggled to find something better. The barrier to entry into online services is a bit high- every online service there is requires some tweaking, customizing, or "learning your tastes" period, whereas I can just turn on Sirius and go to a genre channel and get exactly what the channel says it is.
I'm guessing shorter chains make it more likely for the donors involved to agree, as it's less "anonymous".
Also; why make these chains any longer than necessary.
At the end of the day though, these chains should be as long as necessary, and I'm thoroughly impressed by the organisational skills involved here and the willingness of the donors to go through with it.
I think it has more to due with what happens when a kidney is rejected. With a single swap, if things go bad, that is tragic but the two matches probably got to know each other a little bit. With a long chain, the chances of at least one of the kidneys being rejected increases, and the politics may get more complicated when that happens.
When you factor it out, what you're left with is advantage of their divisible by ten units versus the more varied divisions in imperial.
One thing to realize is that Imperial measurements are often simpler to work with, they're in more handy increments than metric.
Unless you're doing scientific stuff you don't often compare inches of something with miles of something else.
I remember reading that chefs and cooks over in Europe are 'rebelling' against metric because it's a pain in the ass when cooking. Imperial - tablespoons, cups, and such are actually more convenient once you've learned it. You can triple or quadruple a recipe, cut it in half or thirds, pretty easily in your head. Not so easily for metric.
Same deal with inches, feet, and yards when constructing a building.
I completely agree with cooking in metric being a pain. I've tried to make some Japanese and eastern European recipes, and it generally involves a LOT of weighing. Weighing is probably more accurate, but it becomes a huge chore. Especially when you get to the point in the recipe when you have to weigh out precise amounts of egg whites.
Really, with all the important issues that should occupy a president's attention, if this is even on your radar, you're not qualified for the job.
Converting to metric is not just a fun science nerd issue no one cares about.
Really it's an economic issue, and I'm surprised it hasn't been made more of a big deal. When we follow international standards, we can better share ideas and better trade goods. If the US used metric, we'd be in a much better position to sell our goods worldwide, as we wouldn't need to re-tool or re-calculate all the time.
Great example: our US engineers are mostly trained in the English system. My wife used to work in an industry that is now heavily developing and building things overseas. The American engineers had to build everything to metric standards, since they were building in India and what not, and really had trouble with it, as they weren't properly trained to do metric calculations and the equipment they wanted to buy from American companies didn't always come in a metric size. Instead, the engineers would have to half-ass some crazy scheme (like buying parts and then cutting them -- makes sense until you realize you'd have to pay field guys to do this 10,000 times) to get it to work. The quality suffers, and since there's all these problems, I get the sense that many international companies would rather just hire Germans or whatever to do it.
This is an anecdote of one industry, sure, but if our engineers were trained in metric, and our businesses made the jump to make metric products in the first place, we'd probably be a lot more competitive in the world market. We wouldn't need to spend all this extra time and money on customization, we could just do it. I imagine all this effort has long ago exceeded the cost of buying new tools once; we should have just switched then and told businessmen to shut up about costs.
All of that absolutely doesn't matter. The US doesn't export cheap manufactured goods. We just don't do it. We're too high on the standard of living pyramid to make it work economically.
For expensive precision goods, I have yet to find a machinist who can hit a dimension of 4.000" +/- 0.001" but can't machine the same part to 3.937" (100mm). The machines all have toggle switches, but to reduce errors it is better to just have the engineer do all the conversions to inches right on the drawing or in the CAM program.
Even in Metric countries like Canada, many people still use imperial units for a lot of things. Go to the lumber store and you can get a 2x4, and they are sold in 6, 8, 10, and 12 foot lengths. Plywood is sold in 4x4 foot sheets. Just about everybody I know refers to their weight in pounds and their height in feet and inches. Almost nobody can tell you the metric equivalent without a calculator. We order a pint of beer at the pub, and most people still refer to a block of butter as a "pound of butter". . British people still use "stone" to express their body weight, and they are supposed to be metric as well.
You can standardize all you want, and print whatever you want on the packaging, but people are still going to use whatever they are used to. You could have the US go metric tomorrow, but people will still use Imperial measurements for another century
And Pizza diameters. I've been all over the world and have found Pizza sizes advertised in inches in some very strongly metric countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Cut the military back to nuclear deterrent, coast guard, and small standing army for border protection, and allow the return of the merchant marine to keep trade routes safe, and you have a cut closer to 90%. We'd be better liked abroad as well, allowing us to reap the benefits of increased trade.
What are you talking about? The US "Merchant marine" is just a fancy way of saying "the commercial ships flying a USA flag". It's true that in wartime, we have historically armed these ships. But that is somewhat tricky to do nowadays because of international law. The only ships that can get away with this easilly are MSC ships, and those ships are directly supporting the military or other government operations. Commercial ships sometimes bring on private security contractors when traveling through dangerous areas, but that is completely different from what you are implying.
"allow the return of the merchant marine to keep trade routes safe," is a nonscensical statement.
Yep. I moved from Australia to the US a couple of years ago. I am a very frequent flier (140+ segments per year).
In Australia it was never a problem getting overhead space because:
(a) The carry on bag size limits were enforced
(b) Most airlines (including the major two - Qantas and Virgin) allow one checked bag as part of the ticket price (I won't say 'free', but it's not charged as an extra fee)
(c) Less of those godforsaken small regional jets (EMB 120s, 175s and CRJ 200s and 700s in particular) that have tiny overhead bins. The proportion of flights in the US (and Canada) that these aircraft amazes me. You get them even between major (4M+ population) cities. You'd never get anything smaller than a 737 or A320 in Australia between major city pairs.
Having said that, addressing (a) and/or (b) alone would probably be enough to solve the issue in North America.
The airline market in the US is much more competitive with many more players. Most don't compete on flying experience, they compete on all the things leading up to a purchase decision. So they compete on price and choice. If an airline offer 6 flights a day from Milwaukee but a competitor offers only 2, the one offering 6 is probably going to do more business. Their flights fit better into people's schedules and it opens up more opportunities for reasonable connections. They would be stupid not to offer as many flights as they can while still being profitable and competitive on each one.
Maybe in Australia there is less competition, or more airport congestion, or regulations preventing this outcome. But in a highly competitive market I think this is the natural outcome.
You realize that your entire justification for using your existing units is because you are used to them right? Believe me when I tell you that metric units seem completely reasonable for the kinds of everyday things that people encounter when you are used to using them. We even have weather maps, beers, and shoes!
At least try to internalize the fact that you aren't being remotely objective.
Terrible examples. I have drank "pints" (not liters) of beers all over the world. That's how they were sold.
Shoe sizes have at least 6 different standards, not including the US or counting women's sizing standards.
I've had the very same problem for years now. I get exclusively results that other people got, who searched something vaguely similar.
First, you have to enclose every fucking word between quotes or you get only Taylor Swift and Kardashian search results.
Second, even _if_ you do that, it ignores all the punctuations I enter. I _really_ want only the results where there are exactly the period or comma on exactly the place where I put it, how hard can that be?
If I search for carbuncles, I don't need to see cars of somebody's uncle.
And don't even mention if you use a VPN, then you'll get Estonian or Russian results even when you enter only English words.
Google has become useless other than for clueless teens.
Why can't they just have a checkbox that you can select:
Check this box if you can spell and really mean what you type.
Not to mention that if you type in google.com you may be redirected to a local country site. If someone wanted google.de, they would have typed google.de in the address bar to begin with!
I wonder if the Russian media does the same sort of thing, i.e. portrays Limbaugh as some kind of spokesman for Obama?
About a decade ago a British newspaper called The Sun ran a story about how Japanese women were being tricked into buying sheep that had been sheared to look like poodles. There were confused as to why they didn't bark or eat dog food. Of course it was nonsense, eventually traced back to a joke someone told. Anyway, other retarded newspapers around the world picked it up, and then the Japanese media noticed. Ever since there have been monthly stories about how stupid and gullible British people are, often featuring obviously false stories published in the Sun or Daily Mail. Of course some of it is actually true, like the pictures of drunk people having sex in the street or looting in London, but still...
So the standard angle is now that British people are kind of stupid. Similar to how there is a stereotype about Russian people, and the media likes to find idiots that exemplify it and publicise them.
But stereotypes about Russian people are all true! They are all scary and depressed psychopaths! That's why nobody is their friend!
It certainly isn't the case that they are reclusive because they have a hard time making friends due to the stereotypes. That would be ridiculous.
EVERYBODY who's worked at Disney invariably refers to it as Mauschwitz (or Mouseswitz). The only other internal company name I've come across that's more universal is ex G.E. employees referring to it as "Generous Electric".
In my industry (steam and gas turbines), GE stands for "Good Enough".
Trust, it takes a long time to build and just a few seconds to destroy
Well, that's giving Disney too much credit I think. This was a long time in the works with several different departments and at least a dozen people involved. You have to have meetings with the outside contractor, draft a contract, get approvals, arrange payment methods, etc etc. You need to have meetings with HR, and they have to get all the preparations in place to fire the American workers. Somebody has to coordinate employee orientations and reassign assets from all the terminated employees to the replacement workers.
This was a carefully planned operation with many people involved. It was deliberately done, step by step, over the course of months or even years. The only mistake is that people found out about it.
I really wish the "normal" moderation was in between 'good' moderations and 'bad' moderations. I have reached for Insightful and accidentally hit Redundant way too many times.
I will have to try your experiment, but I am curious if you would like Olive Oil as much as the fat. Vegetable Oil tastes awful, so it is no surprise there.
You can't (or at least you shouldn't) fry anything in Olive oil. It will smoke and degrade into potentially unhealthy chemicals.
Don't call the police, call the bank and let the bank call the police.
It's not worth their time. They either wrote off the loss or their insurance company paid or they backcharged the merchants. Spending any additional time on nailing the criminal wouldn't benefit them in any way. It would be purely for vengeance.
Sorry, but no. People are definitely not able to operate machinery after using what is essentially a very powerful tranquilizer. They're not drunk, but being "stoned" sure isn't advantageous for your attention.
I'm all for legal use of whatever substance you want to subject your body to, but the line is drawn where it affects others directly.
Weed is not a tranquilizer. I don't think you've ever tried it. I am more careful when driving stoned than when I drive clearheaded. The larger the dose, the more paranoid I get that something bad is going to happen if I don't dedicate 100% of my attention to the act. High drivers drive slower and are more relaxed (and possibly paranoid of rearending someone) so they don't generally tailgate. This is such a common reaction that it is a stereotype.
The article is rather vague, but a business making $1.5millions in revenue, especially in the grey-drug market, should not be bringing much profit...
If its all marijuana, and revenue, that's about 130kg of weed using a weed price of $11.5/gram (Priceofweed.com, Texas, High Quality, based on 9568 samples). Thats a lot of weed shipments- roughly 175 grams per business day.
While there might be a problem with fraud in Uber use in China, is it any worse than in any other country? There is an implicit racism in all these stories that hit the media decrying 'Chinese Fraud and Duplicity'. I am sure there is plenty, as totalitarian governments have been shown to increase dishonesty in their populations, but is it really worse than any other developing country or country lacking a government? Granted, the story will 'sell more papers' than a similar story about Uber being defrauded by teenage stoners from Kansas. China is a competing economic power with the US and EU, and as a result it seems to being demonized because Chinese people didn't have the common sense to be born with white skin. This constant barrage of stories about 'Chinese' dishonesty paints an image of them as being inscrutable and untrustworthy as a race.
Chinese people may not be universally unscrupulous, but it is definitely a lot more common than in other countries. When is the last time a German or Australian was at a trade show and wasted a competitor's time, asking questions that are obviously related to copying their business, taking detailed notes, and photos of everything? I have never seen it happen or witness such a thing. But without fail, at every trade show I go to, there are several Chinese delegations who go around doing this to every booth in the show. It's a cultural etiquette mismatch. Chinese people (despite, or because of, their totalitarian government?) also seem to have a difficult time following any kind of rule.
Thing is. Apple doesn't care. This service can loose money and as long as it makes the iPhone more attractive to potential buyers it is worth it to them. Same with the new news app. I'm honestly shocked they didn't make the streaming service cheaper.
Why would they make it cheaper? They can sell expensive razor blade handles AND expensive razor blades.
For some odd reason there is a huge glut of six core Xeon boxes on ebay. Look for anything with the X5650 cpu. Earlier in the year I picked up a X5650 box with 24gb of ram for $350. Hard to beat that price for a complete system. Way quicker than my old Q6600 box.
Wow you weren't kidding. There is a ridiculous number of listings on ebay. If I were younger and had more time, I might be tempted. A more recent chip would still give a better $/performance though. Especially if you factor in power costs.
and the person can put a hold on the bill so it can't come to the floor for a vote and they can do it anonymously
Wait what? Can someone explain this to an outsider? Snide comments aside this sounds like the exact opposite of a democracy. I thought only the President had, what it sounds like, something akin to veto powers over bills.
There are two different bills that the GP referenced, the Grid Act and the SHIELD Act.
The GRID act gives special emergency powers to The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to order utilities to do something. This was widely rejected by the industry because some of the powers could force the utility to keep their plants online, even if their machines were being damaged. That's not reasonable. If a grid problem gets to the point where it is damaging generators and other grid infrastructure, we should shut it down. Intentionally damaging a bunch of generators isn't going to keep the grid online if things get to that point.
The SHIELD act was about electromagnetic interference. FERC asked NERC last month to look into this some more. I would rather a government agency with some knowledge and experience on the matter write the rules, rather than a bunch of politicians who are pushing a bill that a lobbyist wrote.
> Further since an EMP is extremely unlikely to happen
What?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A powerful EMP affecting the entire power grid is inevitable. There has been a lot of discussion about this.
Which is probably one of the reasons that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (The federal agency "FERC") asked the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (FERC's rulemaking organization "NERC") to investigate this. Less than a month ago. And their documents look like a common-sense plan.
... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid."
The quote from Executive Director of the EMP Task Force Dr Peter Pry
"Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country.
is just ridiculous in that context. FERC is the government agency responsible and they have asked their rulemaking body to make or revise some rules on the subject. And NERC is not a lobbying group. They make rules. The reporting requirements for some of their rules are onerous for the utilities (although they are generally common-sense and reasonable). I have a hard time believing they are in anybody's pocket.
The causes of an EMP are nuclear blast or solar flare, I think in case of the former you would have far larger problems than the grid to worry about.
That's why I find this quite sinister. It looks like they are just blatantly misleading the public to get more funding.
Yep, this guy is full of crap. The telling statement is: ... There is no part of the U.S. government that has the legal powers to order them to protect the grid."
"Well, the short answer to [why we aren't defending against EMPs] is called the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. They used to be a trade association or a lobby for the 3,000 electric utilities that exist in this country.
That's very misleading. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is a government agency that has powers to make rules regarding the grid. They decided that this is a highly technical industry, so they basically created the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) to investigate potential issues, draft rules, and get the industry on board with them. FERC tells NERC which kind of rule they want, NERC drafts it. Then FERC decides if the draft rules should be made law. NERC doesn't have any legal powers to protect the grid, they are just a rulemaking organization. So the statement "no part of the U.S. government that has legal powers to order them to protect the grid" is very misleading since NERC doesn't have the power to protect the grid anyway. That's FERC's job.
If NERC is in the industry's pocket, they aren't in it very deep. They have made rules regarding cybersecurity and IT systems that have cost utilities hundreds of thousands (small utilities) to millions (large utilities). Just look at some of their recent filings (proposed rules.) Especially this one - The North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s Report on the Potential Impacts of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Proposed Clean Power Plan—Chapter 7 Reliability Assurance Mechanism. If NERC was in the industry's pocket, this would be some drivel about how the EPA's clean power plan was rubbish. It isn't. It basically just says "hey this EPA plan might affect grid reliability, we better develop a metric to measure grid reliability". It's very reasonable and obviously written by an engineer, not a lobbyist.
Unless you set it for jumbo fonts, or have super vision, for many tasks it seems like that would be too small to add much benefit -- at least to me.
That's a side effect of operating systems which don't scale properly. Windows doesn't do it properly and most other operating systems screw it up in various ways too.
I, for one, appreciate that it takes money to protect my freedom from terrorists. I have nothing to hide
And innocent people have nothing to fear.
Hey, guess what. YOU don't get to determine what's "innocent".
Back in the 1800s, Heroin was a commercial product, cocaine was legal and you could stockpile weed without ending up in prison. These days, buying fertilizer can get you in trouble. For decades, alcohol was illegal There is virtually nothing so innocuous that some group cannot get all worked up about and make illegal and suddenly all your records about your little hobby can be used to put you away. Not just the obvious vices, but things like photography, home vegetables, choir practice and more.
We are one major (not a joker or protester) incident away from having crippling regulations put on radio control aircraft.
I thought they made a really compelling argument for Apple Radio. They are pushing on the idea of a distinction between radio and algorithmically-driven playlists. Of the role of a djay in curating music and placing it in a cultural context. On the very notion of pop music not as a pejorative term but as a dimension of our shared experience.
Ok sure, I'll bite, at least for the trial period. $10/mo sounds expensive, tho.
$10/mo is cheap compared to SiriusXM. SiriusXM is a terrible company, their customer service is awful and their marketing machine makes the people selling fake viagra blush. Advertisements on some channels (Comedy in particular) are some of the sleaziest late-night ads I have ever heard. But I have struggled to find something better. The barrier to entry into online services is a bit high- every online service there is requires some tweaking, customizing, or "learning your tastes" period, whereas I can just turn on Sirius and go to a genre channel and get exactly what the channel says it is.
I'm guessing shorter chains make it more likely for the donors involved to agree, as it's less "anonymous". Also; why make these chains any longer than necessary. At the end of the day though, these chains should be as long as necessary, and I'm thoroughly impressed by the organisational skills involved here and the willingness of the donors to go through with it.
I think it has more to due with what happens when a kidney is rejected. With a single swap, if things go bad, that is tragic but the two matches probably got to know each other a little bit. With a long chain, the chances of at least one of the kidneys being rejected increases, and the politics may get more complicated when that happens.
When you factor it out, what you're left with is advantage of their divisible by ten units versus the more varied divisions in imperial.
One thing to realize is that Imperial measurements are often simpler to work with, they're in more handy increments than metric.
Unless you're doing scientific stuff you don't often compare inches of something with miles of something else.
I remember reading that chefs and cooks over in Europe are 'rebelling' against metric because it's a pain in the ass when cooking. Imperial - tablespoons, cups, and such are actually more convenient once you've learned it. You can triple or quadruple a recipe, cut it in half or thirds, pretty easily in your head. Not so easily for metric.
Same deal with inches, feet, and yards when constructing a building.
I completely agree with cooking in metric being a pain. I've tried to make some Japanese and eastern European recipes, and it generally involves a LOT of weighing. Weighing is probably more accurate, but it becomes a huge chore. Especially when you get to the point in the recipe when you have to weigh out precise amounts of egg whites.
Really, with all the important issues that should occupy a president's attention, if this is even on your radar, you're not qualified for the job.
Converting to metric is not just a fun science nerd issue no one cares about.
Really it's an economic issue, and I'm surprised it hasn't been made more of a big deal. When we follow international standards, we can better share ideas and better trade goods. If the US used metric, we'd be in a much better position to sell our goods worldwide, as we wouldn't need to re-tool or re-calculate all the time.
Great example: our US engineers are mostly trained in the English system. My wife used to work in an industry that is now heavily developing and building things overseas. The American engineers had to build everything to metric standards, since they were building in India and what not, and really had trouble with it, as they weren't properly trained to do metric calculations and the equipment they wanted to buy from American companies didn't always come in a metric size. Instead, the engineers would have to half-ass some crazy scheme (like buying parts and then cutting them -- makes sense until you realize you'd have to pay field guys to do this 10,000 times) to get it to work. The quality suffers, and since there's all these problems, I get the sense that many international companies would rather just hire Germans or whatever to do it.
This is an anecdote of one industry, sure, but if our engineers were trained in metric, and our businesses made the jump to make metric products in the first place, we'd probably be a lot more competitive in the world market. We wouldn't need to spend all this extra time and money on customization, we could just do it. I imagine all this effort has long ago exceeded the cost of buying new tools once; we should have just switched then and told businessmen to shut up about costs.
All of that absolutely doesn't matter. The US doesn't export cheap manufactured goods. We just don't do it. We're too high on the standard of living pyramid to make it work economically.
For expensive precision goods, I have yet to find a machinist who can hit a dimension of 4.000" +/- 0.001" but can't machine the same part to 3.937" (100mm). The machines all have toggle switches, but to reduce errors it is better to just have the engineer do all the conversions to inches right on the drawing or in the CAM program.
Even in Metric countries like Canada, many people still use imperial units for a lot of things. Go to the lumber store and you can get a 2x4, and they are sold in 6, 8, 10, and 12 foot lengths. Plywood is sold in 4x4 foot sheets. Just about everybody I know refers to their weight in pounds and their height in feet and inches. Almost nobody can tell you the metric equivalent without a calculator. We order a pint of beer at the pub, and most people still refer to a block of butter as a "pound of butter". . British people still use "stone" to express their body weight, and they are supposed to be metric as well.
You can standardize all you want, and print whatever you want on the packaging, but people are still going to use whatever they are used to. You could have the US go metric tomorrow, but people will still use Imperial measurements for another century
And Pizza diameters. I've been all over the world and have found Pizza sizes advertised in inches in some very strongly metric countries.