At the corporate level, there is no genuinely competitive market place.
More likely, AT&T & Comcast will carve out neighborhoods or areas that they "own". While it may be competitive for awhile, once they get a certain degree of penetration, they will stop, and rates will start to increase again.
Hmm... what are the stats... 80% of the mutual funds don't beat index funds? Hmm... yet they continue in business, and people continue to throw money into them.
So, by that measure, are they "criminally" underperforming? No.
That would be all fine and dandy, but it seem to presume that laws fall from the sky or we find them hidden around town as if left by the easter bunny.
People create laws, in response to other people's demands or needs. Laws do not simply come into existence as if from divine intervention.
As such, people also have the right to demand the government change the enforcement of laws, or enact new laws to better fit the reality of things. And, the enforcers (who are again, people) have some inherent latitude over the various factors on enforcing the laws on its citizens, etc.
But, take away the people, and you could then create your perfect Republic. You know, like in Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
They last about 10x as long as asphalt roads, yes. They get ground down and resurfaced with asphalt anyways.
If people use chains or studded snow tires on their cars, and it doesn't snow enough, they don't really last all that long. They make for a good base for asphalt, though.
Well, it's become less direct than it was. Now all that research money is funneled through Monsanto ('cept they don't call it research). Monsanto's investments in politicians and ties to bureaucrats have paid off well.
So, all those 4' long regular fluorescent tubes each have as much mercury in them to poison..oh...Lake Michigan?
The vapor is bad, yes. Water over time reacting with mercury to make methyl mercury is bad. There are more 4' and 8' traditional fluorescent tubes trashed every day without special handling as part of construction debris...
And, how many TONS of mercury are released in coal fly ash per day?
the modern treatment of "illegal enemy combatant" by the US has been immoral. But, it allows for the summary execution of saboteurs, spies, etc. during times of war.
In my mind, that means sending in the spooks or SpecFor guys and capping them, rather than black-bagging them and torturing the crap [literally & figuratively] out of them. Save that for their hardware.
But, we couldn't really find the Timothy McVeighs almost 20 years ago, and probably couldn't now, either, despite the PATRIOTACT, NSA spying, etc.
Look what a couple of disgruntled kooks from Salem, OR, did a few months ago to a bank in Woodburn, OR. I'm sure their purchase of pre-paid cell phones showed up somewhere (they sure identified them through purchase records fast enough), but not enough to tie that in with whatever else they bought along the way to preempt their plans...
You sure have a strange definition of hell. Maybe stop using IE, HotMail/Yahoo mail, etc.?
I'll keep my comfortable air-conditioned, running water & effective sewage treatment, food distribution, job, etc., even if I have to deal with the occaisional spam e-mail (hey, GMail is pretty effective at filtering out that crap) intruding into my personal life when I can choose to use my computer, or not, and still have an enjoyable life, versus living in some intolerant Taliban-controlled backhole, a refugee camp in , any prison, etc., where day-to-day existance is very fragile, indeed.
Methinks the concerns about mercury in Compact FLs really is just noise generated by various groups of trolls... It's not an insignificant risk, but it's really no more different than the risk presented by conventional fluorescent tubes that have been used for quite some time with very little noise about their mercury risk if they break.
Sorry, calling a Hazmat team if a fluorescent bulb breaks is a hysterical overreaction. The rolling beads of mercury isn't a huge risk in the grand scheme of things. Anyone living in the fallout zone of a coal-powered plant is at a higher chronic risk of mercury exposure, yet no one seems to care about that or the mercury exposed to the environment in the ash from those power plants.
Maybe. But, it can be a major pain in the ass to be interrupted in person for some. And most voice mail systems completely blow chunks, so that leaves out telephonic conversations. E-mail, it can be easy to lose messages due to inbox noise. IM? Well, I was a bit skeptical, but it works for some things far better than e-mail.
I'm an old-school Luddite in some ways (oh, the days of burning out actually on Bitnet relay/chat, talk and write)...
You can show the world you, as can I. Show me the "Microsoft" or any other corporation, and your arguments will hold water. No, BillG or SteveB don't count, nor do the things a corporation might actually produce, nor do the employees that work for the corporation, or any assets that are owned by the corporation. The Microsoft Campus is not "Microsoft", nor is the shipping center they had in the Canyon Park Business Center, or any other place like that. A corporation is a virtual entity. Ownership of a corporation is abstracted out, even a sole proprietorship is an abstraction. Stocks, partnership percentages, are all abstractions, much like money is an abstraction (of value).
Think about it: how do you throw a corporation in jail for its misdeeds? You can't. You can certainly punish it financially or the people working on behalf of the corporation, but you can't really do much TO a corporation except dissolve it. You can't throw all of Microsoft's stocks in jail.
fuel consumption scales roughly with weight of vehicle, number of tires contacting the road. While one semi-truck does as much damage to the roads as 9600 cars, on a given US urban or suburban highway, there are WAY more vehicle miles driven per day per mile of highway than trucks. In areas with low car traffic, the trucks wear grooves/ruts into the road surface, but since they generally stay to the outside lanes, that's where most of the wear they cause is at. On urban highways, the grooves get worn into all lanes of the highway just because every lane has about the same number of cars per hour driving on it. (My personal data points: Pacific NW, San Diego/LA, Chicagoland highways. I also worked for the Washington Transportation Research Center in college...).
So yes, on one hand, a loaded semi-truck does as much damage on a given piece of road as 9600 car trips. But in a given day, WAY more than 9600 cars/truck will have driven on the same piece of road.
You obviously don't live in a state that has one or two large urban population centers that dominates the state political agenda (New York, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, et al) and allocation of government resources.
In Illinois, the political resentment against Chicago is obvious. It brought about fine things like the toll roads in the Chicago metro area, because "downstaters" didn't want their tax money paying for roads they'd "never" drive on (but, given how people who live even in border counties, like Will, feel about going up to Chicago, which is a major mental ordeal, it's understandable, I suppose). In Washington, Seattle, King County, then Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle-friendly policies drive the state's agenda, much to everyone's chagrin in eastern Washington. The King County elections basically decide the governor's race each go-round. Similar in Oregon (although it's more a Willamette Valley vs rest-of-state thing...for now). Also, Oregon, now has two urban-based state senators, unfortunately (at least one though has played more than lip service to rural concerns).
The urban-rural parochialism is a powerful source of political friction in these states.
...but not if you lived in the bumfucks of Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho...
For example, I have family that lives outside of Lance Creek, WY. Well, from their house it's 17 miles to the nearest paved road (US87). The telco CO is either in Lance Creek proper or Lusk, WY. DSL over copper is NOT an option. No one is going to be clamoring for the contract to add fiber in Niobrara County, WY, either, as it is one of the least densly populated counties in the US. The various rural telephone co-ops and companies will need something akin to the Rural Electrification Act to make it happen. And, the terrain in Niobrara County is much like the Palouse region of eastern Washington, houses are at the bottoms of draws and valleys, so wireless broadband is probably a non-starter as well. Cell phone service exists, as long as you can go up to the top of a hill that has good view of the surrounding terrain. And the weather is pretty tough on equipment - they deal with thunderstorms far more than the Pacific NW does.
Let's just leave DirectWay out of the equation...
And we haven't even gotten to the tough areas, like most of the Rocky Mts...
well, if I still had my Nuclear Physics book (which ever book Prof "twistor" Cramer used when he taught it at Univ of Washington, PHYS 327), it's got a nice table of some critical masses in it.
The tricky parts of the Fat Man bomb were getting the shapes of the explosive blocks precise enough, getting the right intermediary material to "hold" the impulse long enough for the plutonium to go critical and stay critical long enough before it blew itself apart, and the timing of all the detonators and initiators worked out.
Slashdot Mirror
At the corporate level, there is no genuinely competitive market place.
More likely, AT&T & Comcast will carve out neighborhoods or areas that they "own". While it may be competitive for awhile, once they get a certain degree of penetration, they will stop, and rates will start to increase again.
Hmm... what are the stats... 80% of the mutual funds don't beat index funds? Hmm... yet they continue in business, and people continue to throw money into them.
So, by that measure, are they "criminally" underperforming? No.
That would be all fine and dandy, but it seem to presume that laws fall from the sky or we find them hidden around town as if left by the easter bunny.
People create laws, in response to other people's demands or needs. Laws do not simply come into existence as if from divine intervention.
As such, people also have the right to demand the government change the enforcement of laws, or enact new laws to better fit the reality of things. And, the enforcers (who are again, people) have some inherent latitude over the various factors on enforcing the laws on its citizens, etc.
But, take away the people, and you could then create your perfect Republic. You know, like in Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba, etc.
...but it's a good thing if Rupert Murdoch has say over the channels carried on DirecTV?
They last about 10x as long as asphalt roads, yes. They get ground down and resurfaced with asphalt anyways.
If people use chains or studded snow tires on their cars, and it doesn't snow enough, they don't really last all that long. They make for a good base for asphalt, though.
For that part of the country, though, probably not, when you factor in pot hole repairs (or not) in pavement, which is a big deal in Michigan.
Well, it's become less direct than it was. Now all that research money is funneled through Monsanto ('cept they don't call it research). Monsanto's investments in politicians and ties to bureaucrats have paid off well.
Someone on Craigslist probably has some used Hot Grits(TM) to go with it...
So, all those 4' long regular fluorescent tubes each have as much mercury in them to poison..oh...Lake Michigan?
The vapor is bad, yes. Water over time reacting with mercury to make methyl mercury is bad. There are more 4' and 8' traditional fluorescent tubes trashed every day without special handling as part of construction debris...
And, how many TONS of mercury are released in coal fly ash per day?
Hmm... get some perspective.
"We're all niggers in the eye of The Man"
the modern treatment of "illegal enemy combatant" by the US has been immoral. But, it allows for the summary execution of saboteurs, spies, etc. during times of war.
In my mind, that means sending in the spooks or SpecFor guys and capping them, rather than black-bagging them and torturing the crap [literally & figuratively] out of them. Save that for their hardware.
But, we couldn't really find the Timothy McVeighs almost 20 years ago, and probably couldn't now, either, despite the PATRIOTACT, NSA spying, etc.
Look what a couple of disgruntled kooks from Salem, OR, did a few months ago to a bank in Woodburn, OR. I'm sure their purchase of pre-paid cell phones showed up somewhere (they sure identified them through purchase records fast enough), but not enough to tie that in with whatever else they bought along the way to preempt their plans...
You sure have a strange definition of hell. Maybe stop using IE, HotMail/Yahoo mail, etc.?
I'll keep my comfortable air-conditioned, running water & effective sewage treatment, food distribution, job, etc., even if I have to deal with the occaisional spam e-mail (hey, GMail is pretty effective at filtering out that crap) intruding into my personal life when I can choose to use my computer, or not, and still have an enjoyable life, versus living in some intolerant Taliban-controlled backhole, a refugee camp in , any prison, etc., where day-to-day existance is very fragile, indeed.
Methinks the concerns about mercury in Compact FLs really is just noise generated by various groups of trolls... It's not an insignificant risk, but it's really no more different than the risk presented by conventional fluorescent tubes that have been used for quite some time with very little noise about their mercury risk if they break.
Sorry, calling a Hazmat team if a fluorescent bulb breaks is a hysterical overreaction. The rolling beads of mercury isn't a huge risk in the grand scheme of things. Anyone living in the fallout zone of a coal-powered plant is at a higher chronic risk of mercury exposure, yet no one seems to care about that or the mercury exposed to the environment in the ash from those power plants.
Maybe. But, it can be a major pain in the ass to be interrupted in person for some. And most voice mail systems completely blow chunks, so that leaves out telephonic conversations. E-mail, it can be easy to lose messages due to inbox noise. IM? Well, I was a bit skeptical, but it works for some things far better than e-mail.
I'm an old-school Luddite in some ways (oh, the days of burning out actually on Bitnet relay/chat, talk and write)...
but what if it was your son, and those conducting the search were females?
no...
with pedobears...
You can show the world you, as can I. Show me the "Microsoft" or any other corporation, and your arguments will hold water. No, BillG or SteveB don't count, nor do the things a corporation might actually produce, nor do the employees that work for the corporation, or any assets that are owned by the corporation. The Microsoft Campus is not "Microsoft", nor is the shipping center they had in the Canyon Park Business Center, or any other place like that. A corporation is a virtual entity. Ownership of a corporation is abstracted out, even a sole proprietorship is an abstraction. Stocks, partnership percentages, are all abstractions, much like money is an abstraction (of value).
Think about it: how do you throw a corporation in jail for its misdeeds? You can't. You can certainly punish it financially or the people working on behalf of the corporation, but you can't really do much TO a corporation except dissolve it. You can't throw all of Microsoft's stocks in jail.
...and I got one from a Barrister in Great Britain...
At least they're grammar and structure is get better. [sic]
fuel consumption scales roughly with weight of vehicle, number of tires contacting the road. While one semi-truck does as much damage to the roads as 9600 cars, on a given US urban or suburban highway, there are WAY more vehicle miles driven per day per mile of highway than trucks. In areas with low car traffic, the trucks wear grooves/ruts into the road surface, but since they generally stay to the outside lanes, that's where most of the wear they cause is at. On urban highways, the grooves get worn into all lanes of the highway just because every lane has about the same number of cars per hour driving on it. (My personal data points: Pacific NW, San Diego/LA, Chicagoland highways. I also worked for the Washington Transportation Research Center in college...).
So yes, on one hand, a loaded semi-truck does as much damage on a given piece of road as 9600 car trips. But in a given day, WAY more than 9600 cars/truck will have driven on the same piece of road.
Hurray for Trolls!
You paint with a pretty broad brush...
Now go back to doing your "superiority dance".
You obviously don't live in a state that has one or two large urban population centers that dominates the state political agenda (New York, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, et al) and allocation of government resources.
In Illinois, the political resentment against Chicago is obvious. It brought about fine things like the toll roads in the Chicago metro area, because "downstaters" didn't want their tax money paying for roads they'd "never" drive on (but, given how people who live even in border counties, like Will, feel about going up to Chicago, which is a major mental ordeal, it's understandable, I suppose). In Washington, Seattle, King County, then Olympia-Tacoma-Seattle-friendly policies drive the state's agenda, much to everyone's chagrin in eastern Washington. The King County elections basically decide the governor's race each go-round. Similar in Oregon (although it's more a Willamette Valley vs rest-of-state thing...for now). Also, Oregon, now has two urban-based state senators, unfortunately (at least one though has played more than lip service to rural concerns).
The urban-rural parochialism is a powerful source of political friction in these states.
...but not if you lived in the bumfucks of Wyoming, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho...
For example, I have family that lives outside of Lance Creek, WY. Well, from their house it's 17 miles to the nearest paved road (US87). The telco CO is either in Lance Creek proper or Lusk, WY. DSL over copper is NOT an option. No one is going to be clamoring for the contract to add fiber in Niobrara County, WY, either, as it is one of the least densly populated counties in the US. The various rural telephone co-ops and companies will need something akin to the Rural Electrification Act to make it happen. And, the terrain in Niobrara County is much like the Palouse region of eastern Washington, houses are at the bottoms of draws and valleys, so wireless broadband is probably a non-starter as well. Cell phone service exists, as long as you can go up to the top of a hill that has good view of the surrounding terrain. And the weather is pretty tough on equipment - they deal with thunderstorms far more than the Pacific NW does.
Let's just leave DirectWay out of the equation...
And we haven't even gotten to the tough areas, like most of the Rocky Mts...
maybe the OP was a former financial executive, where "poverty" == $500K/yr...
No, but you can plant others' DNA.
well, if I still had my Nuclear Physics book (which ever book Prof "twistor" Cramer used when he taught it at Univ of Washington, PHYS 327), it's got a nice table of some critical masses in it.
The tricky parts of the Fat Man bomb were getting the shapes of the explosive blocks precise enough, getting the right intermediary material to "hold" the impulse long enough for the plutonium to go critical and stay critical long enough before it blew itself apart, and the timing of all the detonators and initiators worked out.