Metallic mercury and inorganic mercury is pretty safe. You can hold a ball of mercury in your hand without any real consequences. But organic mercury compounds can be much more dangerous. It took just a drop of dimethyl mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury on the outside of a glove to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn. Of course, no one is going to directly die from this, but an increase in atmospheric and oceanic mercury levels could have a real negative impact on both the ecosystems and general human health.
Wikipedia dry humor
Karen Wetterhahn
Known for Work on toxic metal exposure, dying of toxic metal exposure
Decommissioning costs are always multiples of estimates and we still have no viable plan for dealing with nuclear waste.
Decommissioning costs depend entirely on the organization and project management during decommissioning. Many projects overrun the schedule (and therefore the budget), but some plants have completed their goals ahead of schedule and under budget.
And we DO have a viable plan for dealing with nuclear waste. It is stored onsite at the plant in containers designed to last a very long time. This has worked perfectly well so far. It doesn't mean that no plan exists just because a plan to consolidate all that waste in a central location fizzled.
Wind and solar are getting cheaper than oil and gas, oil extraction costs are only increasing, the cost of wind and solar is still on a downwards trend and will stay there for a while.
Oil extraction costs are not increasing greatly. Hydraulic fracturing has increased US production significantly as less productive fields are now profitable. In 2018 the US broke the previous record for domestic oil production, which was set in 1970.
The cost of wind and solar followed an exponential decay curve for a while, but have basically leveled out. There is a limit to how cheap you can pour a foundation or build an offshore platform, and we are nearing that limit. Solarcity and Sunrun are losing money hand over fist. Most of the big OEMs have spun off their wind divisions into separate subsidiaries or sold them altogether. That is not to say that wind and solar will not continue to grow, as customer demand is now influencing decision making. But costs will not be going down, especially if battery storage is necessary for large-scale non dispatchable deployments.
Lowe's -- the second-largest U.S. home-improvement chain, after Home Depot -- has also been in discussions with Tesla about selling its solar products, said people familiar with the situation. At some point, Home Depot may also offer Tesla's much-anticipated solar roof, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. [The products] will be highlighted in high-profile displays, which are 12 feet tall and 7 feet wide. Some locations will be fitted with visual demonstrations that show how the products work.
Totally not a press release. The marketing department at Tesla is truly top-tier.
from 1933 to 1975, when they got the US off the gold standard and onto fiat currency. Whether cryptocurrencies are viable long-term, I couldn't tell you, but governments HATE not having a monopoly on stores of value.
The old habit of buying gold chains as a way to hold gold was still possible.
I have used nothing but HGST drives for all the machines I have built, including NAS's, for as long as I can remember. This is an awesome study and I am sure it probably has some peeps at seagate steaming right about now.
Why? Backblaze is still buying palletfuls of Seagate drives based on their drive counts of the 12TB and 10TB drives. I believe it was explained last year that the amortized $/operating year was lower that other brands, even with the increased failure rate.
Making that kind of decision depends on how tolerant of failure the purchaser is, the cost of replacement, and how many drives they are purchasing. Some large storage companies don't even bother replacing failed drives, they just disable them.
I think you underestimate the power of Mario as a brand. It is one of the few longstanding brands that is well-received by people from 4 years old to adulthood.
Plus, there is an awful lot of content in Mario Odyssey. We average an hour a day since release and are not even close to collecting all the moons. Nintendo seems to be releasing more content for the game as time goes on as well. We are already well below the $/hr cost of pretty much any other non-free entertainment, even considering the cost of the console.
Well, short of making them illegal, there'll always be a market for piston-engined/internal combustion-engined vehicles. They're so much fun to drive.
Spoken like someone who has not sat behind the wheel of a P95D. Try that, then tell me how much fun ICE cars are to drive.
And a $10 casio digital watch keeps better time than a mechanical watch. Many people prefer to read a digital readout than an analog one. But the mechanical watch market still exists and will likely continue to exist.
Being mostly out of the Apple ecosystem, I was surprised the other day when I was driven by a friend. She was answering calls without using the hands-free Bluetooth car connection, and I asked her why. She told me that she had forgotten the charging cable at home, and that keeping the bluetooth on would drain the battery faster, and battery didn't last very long, as, you know, she added apologetically, "my phone it's an Apple".
I'd put my friend as a typical Apple user: well-off and absolutely not technically oriented, She will probably keep buying iPhones, as her computers are all from Apple, and learning new things is a hassle. But anyway I found it curious to find a typical Apple user apologizing for her choice of smartphone. That's not how Apple got to the top, and, even if it's just anecdotal evidence, has a sound of bells tolling in the distance.
So I'd suppose that Apple has to take that into account and improve it's battery-consumption act.
The battery issues are just one problem among many. IOS 11 broke bluetooth compatability with my car, and there are other people with the same problem. I can't for the life of me figure out how they could break something so fundamental to a modern phone. The issue still hasn't been fixed, and Apple seems to be pointing the finger at the car companies to update the vehicle firmware. As if that is a viable solution.
Keeping adequate spinning reserve is both cheaper and a better practice. Having to resort to battery power at those prices tells me that something is very, very wrong with the Australian grid. Perhaps Enron-style criminally wrong.
$1000/MW-hr only happens during emergency conditions. Itâ(TM)s $1/Kw-hr. Thatâ(TM)s a hugely expensive price no matter where you live. If thatâ(TM)s Teslaâ(TM)s shining example of price competitiveness, I am not convinced this makes any sense. It makes a lot more sense just to build out appropriate non-storage capacity at $0.10 to $0.15 per Kw-hr.
I think that their problem is that they continually wanted to protest some action and kept pushing the clock closer, only now they've run out of room and look damned foolish because all of these little political statements have add up to what we see now. As you point out when you look at it in a historical context, it makes you roll your eyes quite a bit.
They clearly need to walk the clock back quite a bit and do so periodically when whatever new thing they're worried about fails to come to pass or lead to new cause for concern.
It's even more foolish now. The Koreans are talking to each other, the US has postponed their military exercises in Korea until after the Olympics, and the proxy wars in the Middle East are not as hot as they were a year ago. Ukraine and Crimea have "calmed down" in the sense that nobody in the USA cares anymore.
If anything, they should be setting the clock backwards.
Other places use paper of a slightly different arbitrary size.
Other places use paper that makes sense. One sheet of A0 is 1 square meter with an aspect ratio of sqrt(2). Keep cutting it in half to get A1, A2, A3, and so on, all with the same aspect ratio. A4 is close to 8.5x11, and is used for the same things. Metric paper really shines when you want to shrink/enlarge to the next paper size, thanks to the common aspect ratio.
I agree it is a decent system but there are two factors working against it in the US-
1. Familiarity with the 8.5x11 / 11x17 / etc. system, & sunk costs
2. It arguably is a barrier to foreign firms supplying the US market. Changing how the paper is cut, at a minimum, is a little more work for foreign firms accustomed to metric paper. They need to design double the amount of packaging, make adjustments to paper size (probably not that hard depending on the machine) and if their process is optimized to get 20 sheets of A4 from a width of paper roll, they may have slightly more waste. It may be a very light "tarriff" but it has the advantage of not being counted as one.
That said, don't conflate blockchain and bitcoin. Blockchain technology is likely to be part of our future. Bitcoin is just one user of blockchain technology, it may or may not be part of our future. "Not" is a serious possibility given that bitcoin has deviated from its design and its assumptions about its blockchain security are no longer valid. Its security required a global distributed community of miners who are regular individuals using their own computers and this has not been true for years. Bitcoin is plausibly vulnerable to mining cartels and government intervention due to the current state of affairs where we have a relatively small number of miners using expensive specialized ASIC hardware that is geographically located in a single country and reliant upon inexpensive government supplied electricity. Are cartels or the government likely to subvert the bitcoin blockchain? Probably not, but it remains plausible, and bitcoin security is based on the assumption that such things are not even remotely plausible.
Bitcoin is entirely replaceable by a another coin with better security, new features and/or better performance. Before anyone makes a "network effect" argument, keep in mind that a network effect needs high switching costs to be effective. There is little to no switching cost to move from bitcoin to a different coin.
Why will blockchain be a part of the future? The future is very difficult to predict with regards to technology. Blockchain is essentially a football stadium filled with accountants keeping ledger books. Someone goes up to a microphone and announces a transaction, everyone records the transaction in the ledger (if the transaction checks out). And everyone's ledger book essentially must hold all the transactions which have ever happened.
This is far too much redundancy for most applications, and the data starts to get unmanageable after a relatively short number of transactions (compared to current systems). It's as if everyone had a Usenet server and stored all the posts back to the start of Usenet. For a distributed system where nobody trusts each other, maybe it is a useful (but inefficient) solution. But we live in a world where companies and financial institutions have credit ratings & escrow accounts. Normal databases are very good at tracking packages, money, inventory, and other things that need to be tracked. Blockchain doesn't seem to bring any value to most systems already in place.
If you pivot the 14,500ft runway from 1 corner, a 1 degree rotation would move the other end by 253 ft in case anyone was wondering. You could halve that by rotating in the middle, but it would still probably interfere with taxiways, not to mention all the runway and taxiway signage.
Once a currency becomes unusable as a payment method, it becomes a useless currency, and that is left is pure speculation... when people realize that, its market value is going to drop to zero.
I'm not sure the world has seen a crash where the # of transactions/second is limited and the transaction fee is basically a bidding process. It should be much more interesting than typical crashes.
Trump didn't drain the swamp, he pumped an extra million gallons into it giving industry direct control over the government. Hell he proposed fuel requirements for power plants as a way to make all rate payer pay more to support coal which is no longer the cheapest source of power (that's wind, and solar is right behind wind with both cheaper than coal by a significant percentage) these days even with all the subsidies coal gets. Rolling back regulations that advantage small businesses would be the next step in corporate control over government and the head of the FCC that Trump put in position is just the man to do it.
1. Wind and Solar get a lot of subsidies too.
2. Natural gas is putting coal out of business, not renewables. Natural gas is dispatchable, Wind and Solar are "if it is available you can have it (or must take it)".
3. Natural gas in the USA is currently cheaper than it has ever been. This may persist for years, perhaps decades. But what happens when gas prices return to what they were in the 1990s?
4. Some parts of the US, particularly the northeast, have problems with natural gas supply when it gets very cold. The gas power plants have to compete with residential and commercial heating, and pipeline capacity is a big concern in cold weather.
If things keep going the way they are, the free market will effectively eliminate coal and nuclear power plants. These plants are unique in being able to keep a stockpile of fuel, regardless of weather conditions or competition for fuel. That's a capability that could really come in handy in case of a natural disaster or other calamity. That is why the regulations aimed to subsidize plants that can store 60 days of fuel onsite. You can't store that much natural gas at the point of use, and batteries of that capacity will never be economical. Pumped storage is great but also can't store that much energy. Energy diversity is a good thing. You may disagree with keeping these power stations around, but there are many valid reasons to try to keep them aside from keeping coal miners in a job.
No driving from city to city and changing to smaller more expensive networks.
No fees to access another small network in the USA simply for enjoying the freedom to move around the USA.
Stay with your existing plan all over the USA as your brand will finally be able to get access to all of the USA.
No more very local monopolies that gathered up all the local spectrum keeping out other brands from all over the USA.
Enjoy your bands support, pricing and quality of service all over the USA. No more unexpected payments demanded from local monopolies to connect in their state, city.
Wireless spectrum was to allow innovative communications services all over the USA. Not to be small local monopolies that demand connection payments as they got granted the ability to be the only network in that part of the USA.
Enjoy the freedom to travel all over the USA with your own trusted telco plan. No more strange costs just for making a call in California or New Jersey because someone local got all the spectrum and kept it so they could get extra payments for people trying to make a call.
Soon your trusted telco brand will be available all over the USA at the same easy to understand rates. Enjoy making calls and using data all over the USA without local monopolies adding their extra data costs.
Surely there is enough spectrum to have it both ways? The big national telcos have enough spectrum to offer more speed than anyone needs in a portable device. US LTE speeds aren't the fastest in the world, but they are plenty fast when you have a good signal. You can easily watch 1080P video with a good LTE signal, and speeds are almost high enough for 4K.
The 3550-3700 MHz band is high enough in frequency that signals do not propagate through structures or walls well. That's a big problem for portable devices, not so much for fixed installations where you can put a LOS antenna on your roof. This regional spectrum tends to get used for things like locally-owned wireless internet in rural areas where the big ISPs don't want to compete, and/or where houses are so far apart that wired/fiber infrastructure costs are prohibitive. Letting the big telecoms grab up this spectrum is very bad for rural wireless internet.
A 25% increase in pay would bankrupt the restaurant. Food prices are *set* by the corporate office, not the franchisee. This is the reason why here in Ontario when the min. wage jumped to $14/hr businesses started laying off employees and cutting back on previously "good will gestures" such as bonus pay. The restaurant industry is cut-throat and operates on a profitability margin of 3-6%. That's far more then even a small gas bar, which has a profitability margin of 1-3%, they don't make their money from selling gas(which is also sold at a preset price, most stations make 0.02%-0.038% profit on fuel). They make their money on drinks/food/snacks/etc.
Why didn't all of the affected businesses raise prices?
If gas stations (even those immediately next to one another) are able to raise prices anytime their costs go up, any other business should be able to do so also.
Earlier in the day I saw an a US ad for Huawei. It was the first time I've ever seen such a thing. It was also very strange. I am going to walk out on a limb and sound racist. Slashdot can make of it what it will. It was a very American ad in terms of dramatizing how super cool their tech is and the general way it was scripted and shot. It was also presented as a "here we come" kind of commercial. It was also very Asian as all the actors had were Chinese (or looked kinda like it) had heavy Asian accents, and was obviously shot in China, yet they were acting like Americans. It was about the Mate 10 being the end all be all. I think perhaps I saw it on YouTube which is strange as I only saw it the one time. I wish I had a link. Did anyone else see it?
Dissect this as you wish. I could have given a better commentary but I've been drinking. It was rather striking and unusual though.
Foreign companies sometimes have to walk a fine line that can be difficult to follow. Many American chains in Japan have failed. Some didn't offer enough "Japanized" menu options (Wendy's). Others went in the other direction and failed because they catered 100% to Japanese tastes, and didn't offer any American menu items for customers who were seeking American-style food (Krispy Kreme).
Marketing and branding are also very important. The foreign company has to find some niche or market that domestic companies fail to deliver on. As example, KFC has somehow convinced many Japanese people that Christmas = Fried Chicken. This was probably helped by the fact that Christmas in Japan is not the huge tradition it is in the USA, and turkey is very uncommon in Japan. KFC manufactured a tradition where none existed.
A business owner, outside of a few essential things (like housing) should have the god damn right to choose to take on a client. It's a fucking bakery for Christ's sake, in western Oregon you'd have to *try* very hard to find a religious, conservative baker.
This was simply a case of someone who got butt-hurt over the business owner having the temerity to stand up for their beliefs, and decided to try to make an example out of the bakery. Essentially the outcome was that they lost their business, and have to pay around $100k in fines because they didn't want to bake a cake.
A sane, rational person would cowboy up, and find another bakery that would be happy to take your money. But nope, gotta make a court case out of it!
Fuck the plaintiffs. Seriously. Fuck Them.
Allow me to offer an analogy... Rather than a cake baker, say you owned a lunch counter. A lunch counter in a Woolworth's Department Store. And then one day, some uppity negroes come in and ask to eat lunch, despite your very clear "whites only" sign.
You're a private businessman, and you should have the god damn right to choose whom you serve, right? You should be able to restrict service only to your Aryan friends, and if they're butt-hurt about it, fuck them. Seriously. Fuck Them.
Would you agree with all that? It's the same situation, but lunch rather than a cake, and a battle 50 years ago instead of today. But you're on the side of discrimination, yes? I just want to be clear whether you're consistent or not.
How about going to a halal butcher with a pig and demand that they butcher it for you, religious beliefs be damned?
Halal butchers don't butcher pigs at all, for anyone. Cake bakers do bake cakes. The couple here didn't go to a cake baker and ask for a roast rack of lamb - they asked for a cake, selected out of a catalog of cakes that the baker provides. This would be the same as going to a halal butcher, pointing to something on the menu, and saying "I'll take number 3." And, in such a situation, if the butcher said, "my religious beliefs don't let me serve you number 3- hold on one second. Mr. Smith, your number 3 is ready! Sorry about that- I was saying that my religious beliefs don't let me serve a number 3 to you specifically," you'd probably be more than a little upset, and justifiably so.
There's a small wrinkle in the cake case that makes the "lunch counter" example not 100% comparable, in my mind.
The cake shop offered to sell any off-the-shelf (standard) cake. They only refused to make a customized gay cake, as they claimed that a customized cake is an artistic expression and covered under the first amendment.
Is that really different from a lunch counter refusing to allow certain condiments, substitutions, or other off-menu items? Gay cakes apparently weren't on the menu at that cake shop. Should all cake bakers be required to offer gluten-free cakes too?
A business owner, outside of a few essential things (like housing) should have the god damn right to choose to take on a client. It's a fucking bakery for Christ's sake, in western Oregon you'd have to *try* very hard to find a religious, conservative baker.
This was simply a case of someone who got butt-hurt over the business owner having the temerity to stand up for their beliefs, and decided to try to make an example out of the bakery. Essentially the outcome was that they lost their business, and have to pay around $100k in fines because they didn't want to bake a cake.
A sane, rational person would cowboy up, and find another bakery that would be happy to take your money. But nope, gotta make a court case out of it!
Fuck the plaintiffs. Seriously. Fuck Them.
How about going to a halal butcher with a pig and demand that they butcher it for you, religious beliefs be damned?
This case was the worst example to pick up. The bakery offered to sell the plaintiffs any off-the-shelf cake, they only declined to make a customized cake. It was argued in court by the defendants that a customized cake is an artistic expression and should be protected under the first amendment. I think that is a reasonable legal line to draw, but some legal experts may disagree - an artistic expression may be difficult to define.
Yes, they are. It is illegal in the US to discriminate based on age, race, national origin, religion, gender, etc etc.
All the mental gymnastics in the world will not be able to rationalize how those rules should ONLY apply to women, gays, and minorities.
And yet the US government itself does this. My industry is dominated by male workers. There are many 1-man and very small (less than 10 employees) companies that put the wife as a majority owner. If the wife is a minority, even better. It increases the chances of being awarded a contract by both the US government and many large companies. It is an extremely common practice and if I ever go independant, I will do it as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Metallic mercury and inorganic mercury is pretty safe. You can hold a ball of mercury in your hand without any real consequences. But organic mercury compounds can be much more dangerous. It took just a drop of dimethyl mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury on the outside of a glove to kill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn. Of course, no one is going to directly die from this, but an increase in atmospheric and oceanic mercury levels could have a real negative impact on both the ecosystems and general human health.
Wikipedia dry humor
Karen Wetterhahn
Known for Work on toxic metal exposure, dying of toxic metal exposure
Decommissioning costs are always multiples of estimates and we still have no viable plan for dealing with nuclear waste.
Decommissioning costs depend entirely on the organization and project management during decommissioning. Many projects overrun the schedule (and therefore the budget), but some plants have completed their goals ahead of schedule and under budget.
And we DO have a viable plan for dealing with nuclear waste. It is stored onsite at the plant in containers designed to last a very long time. This has worked perfectly well so far. It doesn't mean that no plan exists just because a plan to consolidate all that waste in a central location fizzled.
Wind and solar are getting cheaper than oil and gas, oil extraction costs are only increasing, the cost of wind and solar is still on a downwards trend and will stay there for a while.
Oil extraction costs are not increasing greatly. Hydraulic fracturing has increased US production significantly as less productive fields are now profitable. In 2018 the US broke the previous record for domestic oil production, which was set in 1970.
The cost of wind and solar followed an exponential decay curve for a while, but have basically leveled out. There is a limit to how cheap you can pour a foundation or build an offshore platform, and we are nearing that limit. Solarcity and Sunrun are losing money hand over fist. Most of the big OEMs have spun off their wind divisions into separate subsidiaries or sold them altogether. That is not to say that wind and solar will not continue to grow, as customer demand is now influencing decision making. But costs will not be going down, especially if battery storage is necessary for large-scale non dispatchable deployments.
Lowe's -- the second-largest U.S. home-improvement chain, after Home Depot -- has also been in discussions with Tesla about selling its solar products, said people familiar with the situation. At some point, Home Depot may also offer Tesla's much-anticipated solar roof, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private. [The products] will be highlighted in high-profile displays, which are 12 feet tall and 7 feet wide. Some locations will be fitted with visual demonstrations that show how the products work.
Totally not a press release. The marketing department at Tesla is truly top-tier.
from 1933 to 1975, when they got the US off the gold standard and onto fiat currency. Whether cryptocurrencies are viable long-term, I couldn't tell you, but governments HATE not having a monopoly on stores of value.
The old habit of buying gold chains as a way to hold gold was still possible.
Not only possible, but stylish
I have used nothing but HGST drives for all the machines I have built, including NAS's, for as long as I can remember. This is an awesome study and I am sure it probably has some peeps at seagate steaming right about now.
Why? Backblaze is still buying palletfuls of Seagate drives based on their drive counts of the 12TB and 10TB drives. I believe it was explained last year that the amortized $/operating year was lower that other brands, even with the increased failure rate.
Making that kind of decision depends on how tolerant of failure the purchaser is, the cost of replacement, and how many drives they are purchasing. Some large storage companies don't even bother replacing failed drives, they just disable them.
I think you underestimate the power of Mario as a brand. It is one of the few longstanding brands that is well-received by people from 4 years old to adulthood.
Plus, there is an awful lot of content in Mario Odyssey. We average an hour a day since release and are not even close to collecting all the moons. Nintendo seems to be releasing more content for the game as time goes on as well. We are already well below the $/hr cost of pretty much any other non-free entertainment, even considering the cost of the console.
Well, short of making them illegal, there'll always be a market for piston-engined/internal combustion-engined vehicles. They're so much fun to drive.
Spoken like someone who has not sat behind the wheel of a P95D. Try that, then tell me how much fun ICE cars are to drive.
And a $10 casio digital watch keeps better time than a mechanical watch. Many people prefer to read a digital readout than an analog one. But the mechanical watch market still exists and will likely continue to exist.
Being mostly out of the Apple ecosystem, I was surprised the other day when I was driven by a friend. She was answering calls without using the hands-free Bluetooth car connection, and I asked her why. She told me that she had forgotten the charging cable at home, and that keeping the bluetooth on would drain the battery faster, and battery didn't last very long, as, you know, she added apologetically, "my phone it's an Apple".
I'd put my friend as a typical Apple user: well-off and absolutely not technically oriented, She will probably keep buying iPhones, as her computers are all from Apple, and learning new things is a hassle. But anyway I found it curious to find a typical Apple user apologizing for her choice of smartphone. That's not how Apple got to the top, and, even if it's just anecdotal evidence, has a sound of bells tolling in the distance.
So I'd suppose that Apple has to take that into account and improve it's battery-consumption act.
The battery issues are just one problem among many. IOS 11 broke bluetooth compatability with my car, and there are other people with the same problem. I can't for the life of me figure out how they could break something so fundamental to a modern phone. The issue still hasn't been fixed, and Apple seems to be pointing the finger at the car companies to update the vehicle firmware. As if that is a viable solution.
Keeping adequate spinning reserve is both cheaper and a better practice. Having to resort to battery power at those prices tells me that something is very, very wrong with the Australian grid. Perhaps Enron-style criminally wrong.
$1000/MW-hr only happens during emergency conditions. Itâ(TM)s $1/Kw-hr. Thatâ(TM)s a hugely expensive price no matter where you live. If thatâ(TM)s Teslaâ(TM)s shining example of price competitiveness, I am not convinced this makes any sense. It makes a lot more sense just to build out appropriate non-storage capacity at $0.10 to $0.15 per Kw-hr.
I think that their problem is that they continually wanted to protest some action and kept pushing the clock closer, only now they've run out of room and look damned foolish because all of these little political statements have add up to what we see now. As you point out when you look at it in a historical context, it makes you roll your eyes quite a bit. They clearly need to walk the clock back quite a bit and do so periodically when whatever new thing they're worried about fails to come to pass or lead to new cause for concern.
It's even more foolish now. The Koreans are talking to each other, the US has postponed their military exercises in Korea until after the Olympics, and the proxy wars in the Middle East are not as hot as they were a year ago. Ukraine and Crimea have "calmed down" in the sense that nobody in the USA cares anymore.
If anything, they should be setting the clock backwards.
Other places use paper that makes sense. One sheet of A0 is 1 square meter with an aspect ratio of sqrt(2). Keep cutting it in half to get A1, A2, A3, and so on, all with the same aspect ratio. A4 is close to 8.5x11, and is used for the same things. Metric paper really shines when you want to shrink/enlarge to the next paper size, thanks to the common aspect ratio.
I agree it is a decent system but there are two factors working against it in the US-
1. Familiarity with the 8.5x11 / 11x17 / etc. system, & sunk costs
2. It arguably is a barrier to foreign firms supplying the US market. Changing how the paper is cut, at a minimum, is a little more work for foreign firms accustomed to metric paper. They need to design double the amount of packaging, make adjustments to paper size (probably not that hard depending on the machine) and if their process is optimized to get 20 sheets of A4 from a width of paper roll, they may have slightly more waste. It may be a very light "tarriff" but it has the advantage of not being counted as one.
That said, don't conflate blockchain and bitcoin. Blockchain technology is likely to be part of our future. Bitcoin is just one user of blockchain technology, it may or may not be part of our future. "Not" is a serious possibility given that bitcoin has deviated from its design and its assumptions about its blockchain security are no longer valid. Its security required a global distributed community of miners who are regular individuals using their own computers and this has not been true for years. Bitcoin is plausibly vulnerable to mining cartels and government intervention due to the current state of affairs where we have a relatively small number of miners using expensive specialized ASIC hardware that is geographically located in a single country and reliant upon inexpensive government supplied electricity. Are cartels or the government likely to subvert the bitcoin blockchain? Probably not, but it remains plausible, and bitcoin security is based on the assumption that such things are not even remotely plausible. Bitcoin is entirely replaceable by a another coin with better security, new features and/or better performance. Before anyone makes a "network effect" argument, keep in mind that a network effect needs high switching costs to be effective. There is little to no switching cost to move from bitcoin to a different coin.
Why will blockchain be a part of the future? The future is very difficult to predict with regards to technology. Blockchain is essentially a football stadium filled with accountants keeping ledger books. Someone goes up to a microphone and announces a transaction, everyone records the transaction in the ledger (if the transaction checks out). And everyone's ledger book essentially must hold all the transactions which have ever happened.
This is far too much redundancy for most applications, and the data starts to get unmanageable after a relatively short number of transactions (compared to current systems). It's as if everyone had a Usenet server and stored all the posts back to the start of Usenet. For a distributed system where nobody trusts each other, maybe it is a useful (but inefficient) solution. But we live in a world where companies and financial institutions have credit ratings & escrow accounts. Normal databases are very good at tracking packages, money, inventory, and other things that need to be tracked. Blockchain doesn't seem to bring any value to most systems already in place.
The newest Sony phone, has a waterproof 3.5 mm jack.
There have been waterproof 3.5mm jacks for years. I had a Casio Gzone roughly 10 years ago that had one.
If you pivot the 14,500ft runway from 1 corner, a 1 degree rotation would move the other end by 253 ft in case anyone was wondering. You could halve that by rotating in the middle, but it would still probably interfere with taxiways, not to mention all the runway and taxiway signage.
Once a currency becomes unusable as a payment method, it becomes a useless currency, and that is left is pure speculation... when people realize that, its market value is going to drop to zero.
I'm not sure the world has seen a crash where the # of transactions/second is limited and the transaction fee is basically a bidding process. It should be much more interesting than typical crashes.
Trump didn't drain the swamp, he pumped an extra million gallons into it giving industry direct control over the government. Hell he proposed fuel requirements for power plants as a way to make all rate payer pay more to support coal which is no longer the cheapest source of power (that's wind, and solar is right behind wind with both cheaper than coal by a significant percentage) these days even with all the subsidies coal gets. Rolling back regulations that advantage small businesses would be the next step in corporate control over government and the head of the FCC that Trump put in position is just the man to do it.
1. Wind and Solar get a lot of subsidies too.
2. Natural gas is putting coal out of business, not renewables. Natural gas is dispatchable, Wind and Solar are "if it is available you can have it (or must take it)".
3. Natural gas in the USA is currently cheaper than it has ever been. This may persist for years, perhaps decades. But what happens when gas prices return to what they were in the 1990s?
4. Some parts of the US, particularly the northeast, have problems with natural gas supply when it gets very cold. The gas power plants have to compete with residential and commercial heating, and pipeline capacity is a big concern in cold weather.
If things keep going the way they are, the free market will effectively eliminate coal and nuclear power plants. These plants are unique in being able to keep a stockpile of fuel, regardless of weather conditions or competition for fuel. That's a capability that could really come in handy in case of a natural disaster or other calamity. That is why the regulations aimed to subsidize plants that can store 60 days of fuel onsite. You can't store that much natural gas at the point of use, and batteries of that capacity will never be economical. Pumped storage is great but also can't store that much energy. Energy diversity is a good thing. You may disagree with keeping these power stations around, but there are many valid reasons to try to keep them aside from keeping coal miners in a job.
No driving from city to city and changing to smaller more expensive networks. No fees to access another small network in the USA simply for enjoying the freedom to move around the USA. Stay with your existing plan all over the USA as your brand will finally be able to get access to all of the USA. No more very local monopolies that gathered up all the local spectrum keeping out other brands from all over the USA. Enjoy your bands support, pricing and quality of service all over the USA. No more unexpected payments demanded from local monopolies to connect in their state, city. Wireless spectrum was to allow innovative communications services all over the USA. Not to be small local monopolies that demand connection payments as they got granted the ability to be the only network in that part of the USA. Enjoy the freedom to travel all over the USA with your own trusted telco plan. No more strange costs just for making a call in California or New Jersey because someone local got all the spectrum and kept it so they could get extra payments for people trying to make a call. Soon your trusted telco brand will be available all over the USA at the same easy to understand rates. Enjoy making calls and using data all over the USA without local monopolies adding their extra data costs.
Surely there is enough spectrum to have it both ways? The big national telcos have enough spectrum to offer more speed than anyone needs in a portable device. US LTE speeds aren't the fastest in the world, but they are plenty fast when you have a good signal. You can easily watch 1080P video with a good LTE signal, and speeds are almost high enough for 4K.
The 3550-3700 MHz band is high enough in frequency that signals do not propagate through structures or walls well. That's a big problem for portable devices, not so much for fixed installations where you can put a LOS antenna on your roof. This regional spectrum tends to get used for things like locally-owned wireless internet in rural areas where the big ISPs don't want to compete, and/or where houses are so far apart that wired/fiber infrastructure costs are prohibitive. Letting the big telecoms grab up this spectrum is very bad for rural wireless internet.
A 25% increase in pay would bankrupt the restaurant. Food prices are *set* by the corporate office, not the franchisee. This is the reason why here in Ontario when the min. wage jumped to $14/hr businesses started laying off employees and cutting back on previously "good will gestures" such as bonus pay. The restaurant industry is cut-throat and operates on a profitability margin of 3-6%. That's far more then even a small gas bar, which has a profitability margin of 1-3%, they don't make their money from selling gas(which is also sold at a preset price, most stations make 0.02%-0.038% profit on fuel). They make their money on drinks/food/snacks/etc.
Why didn't all of the affected businesses raise prices?
If gas stations (even those immediately next to one another) are able to raise prices anytime their costs go up, any other business should be able to do so also.
The "artist’s impression of a flash from FRB 121102" photo in the article is both hilarious and scary that this is how science is reported.
Earlier in the day I saw an a US ad for Huawei. It was the first time I've ever seen such a thing. It was also very strange. I am going to walk out on a limb and sound racist. Slashdot can make of it what it will. It was a very American ad in terms of dramatizing how super cool their tech is and the general way it was scripted and shot. It was also presented as a "here we come" kind of commercial. It was also very Asian as all the actors had were Chinese (or looked kinda like it) had heavy Asian accents, and was obviously shot in China, yet they were acting like Americans. It was about the Mate 10 being the end all be all. I think perhaps I saw it on YouTube which is strange as I only saw it the one time. I wish I had a link. Did anyone else see it? Dissect this as you wish. I could have given a better commentary but I've been drinking. It was rather striking and unusual though.
Foreign companies sometimes have to walk a fine line that can be difficult to follow. Many American chains in Japan have failed. Some didn't offer enough "Japanized" menu options (Wendy's). Others went in the other direction and failed because they catered 100% to Japanese tastes, and didn't offer any American menu items for customers who were seeking American-style food (Krispy Kreme).
Marketing and branding are also very important. The foreign company has to find some niche or market that domestic companies fail to deliver on. As example, KFC has somehow convinced many Japanese people that Christmas = Fried Chicken. This was probably helped by the fact that Christmas in Japan is not the huge tradition it is in the USA, and turkey is very uncommon in Japan. KFC manufactured a tradition where none existed.
As an Oregonian, that case really pissed me off.
A business owner, outside of a few essential things (like housing) should have the god damn right to choose to take on a client. It's a fucking bakery for Christ's sake, in western Oregon you'd have to *try* very hard to find a religious, conservative baker.
This was simply a case of someone who got butt-hurt over the business owner having the temerity to stand up for their beliefs, and decided to try to make an example out of the bakery. Essentially the outcome was that they lost their business, and have to pay around $100k in fines because they didn't want to bake a cake.
A sane, rational person would cowboy up, and find another bakery that would be happy to take your money. But nope, gotta make a court case out of it!
Fuck the plaintiffs. Seriously. Fuck Them.
Allow me to offer an analogy... Rather than a cake baker, say you owned a lunch counter. A lunch counter in a Woolworth's Department Store. And then one day, some uppity negroes come in and ask to eat lunch, despite your very clear "whites only" sign.
You're a private businessman, and you should have the god damn right to choose whom you serve, right? You should be able to restrict service only to your Aryan friends, and if they're butt-hurt about it, fuck them. Seriously. Fuck Them.
Would you agree with all that? It's the same situation, but lunch rather than a cake, and a battle 50 years ago instead of today. But you're on the side of discrimination, yes? I just want to be clear whether you're consistent or not.
How about going to a halal butcher with a pig and demand that they butcher it for you, religious beliefs be damned?
Halal butchers don't butcher pigs at all, for anyone. Cake bakers do bake cakes. The couple here didn't go to a cake baker and ask for a roast rack of lamb - they asked for a cake, selected out of a catalog of cakes that the baker provides. This would be the same as going to a halal butcher, pointing to something on the menu, and saying "I'll take number 3." And, in such a situation, if the butcher said, "my religious beliefs don't let me serve you number 3- hold on one second. Mr. Smith, your number 3 is ready! Sorry about that- I was saying that my religious beliefs don't let me serve a number 3 to you specifically," you'd probably be more than a little upset, and justifiably so.
There's a small wrinkle in the cake case that makes the "lunch counter" example not 100% comparable, in my mind.
The cake shop offered to sell any off-the-shelf (standard) cake. They only refused to make a customized gay cake, as they claimed that a customized cake is an artistic expression and covered under the first amendment.
Is that really different from a lunch counter refusing to allow certain condiments, substitutions, or other off-menu items? Gay cakes apparently weren't on the menu at that cake shop. Should all cake bakers be required to offer gluten-free cakes too?
As an Oregonian, that case really pissed me off.
A business owner, outside of a few essential things (like housing) should have the god damn right to choose to take on a client. It's a fucking bakery for Christ's sake, in western Oregon you'd have to *try* very hard to find a religious, conservative baker.
This was simply a case of someone who got butt-hurt over the business owner having the temerity to stand up for their beliefs, and decided to try to make an example out of the bakery. Essentially the outcome was that they lost their business, and have to pay around $100k in fines because they didn't want to bake a cake.
A sane, rational person would cowboy up, and find another bakery that would be happy to take your money. But nope, gotta make a court case out of it!
Fuck the plaintiffs. Seriously. Fuck Them.
How about going to a halal butcher with a pig and demand that they butcher it for you, religious beliefs be damned?
This case was the worst example to pick up. The bakery offered to sell the plaintiffs any off-the-shelf cake, they only declined to make a customized cake. It was argued in court by the defendants that a customized cake is an artistic expression and should be protected under the first amendment. I think that is a reasonable legal line to draw, but some legal experts may disagree - an artistic expression may be difficult to define.
Yes, they are. It is illegal in the US to discriminate based on age, race, national origin, religion, gender, etc etc.
All the mental gymnastics in the world will not be able to rationalize how those rules should ONLY apply to women, gays, and minorities.
And yet the US government itself does this. My industry is dominated by male workers. There are many 1-man and very small (less than 10 employees) companies that put the wife as a majority owner. If the wife is a minority, even better. It increases the chances of being awarded a contract by both the US government and many large companies. It is an extremely common practice and if I ever go independant, I will do it as well.