As even in average, society roughly 40% of people will steal if they feel they can get away with it, and 30% will steal no matter what. This is your basic material covered in your crim101 courses.
I have also seen studies showing that most people return a found wallet in a public place, with interesting differences depending on the city and location where the wallet is found, and studies showing levels of cheating on tests is fairly constant regardless of the likelyhood of being caught. Under what conditions are the 30 and 40% present under? Are we talking about a gum drop, a candy bar or a car?
Twice I've had my car searched by police. They asked permission, I said no. They said by me saying no that they had probable cause. I don't do drugs, there was nothing illegal in the car. It was a waste of their time bringing out the dogs and all the other cop cars that have to stop to gawk.
Say no does no good.
Well, if everyone said "no", they might be more selective on who they wasted their time on bringing out the dogs, etc.
I also doubt very much if refusal for permission to search is actually considered "probable cause" in most cases. If so, it would result in completely removing any protections against unreasonable search by the mere application of the magic words "May I search that?" There are many legitimate reasons for not wanting a search to be performed beyond not wanting the police to find incriminating evidence.
My undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser University (BC Canada) back in the 1990s had fairly few non-major based requirements. Most science programs had a couple hours of arts required. My particular program (combined Honours Math and Physics) had a few hours of "non-science" credits required. I ended up fulfiling those with a few "logic" classes taught in the philosophy department. I think that the "non-science" designation was poor wording from before the time when the institution only offered two classifications of courses (science and arts) - by the 1990s they had other designations including "applied science" courses in the engineering and computer science departments - I think I might have been able to get away with not even taking the philosophy courses.
One of my physics profs said he fulfilled his "language" requirements in the 1950s at Berkley (or "Cal" as he called it) by taking one of the newly minted Fortran courses.
That over-engineering might result in increased efficiency. When supplying 130 watts, waste heat from inefficiencies are more important than when supplying 30 watts, so a 130W supply might be designed to only have 5% inefficiencies, compared to the 30W supply that may be acceptable with a 10% inefficiency. Thus using the 130W supply for a device drawing only 20W may result in only 0.1W of wast compared to 2W of wast if using the 20W supply.
But what do I know? Maybe power supplies waste a set amount of energy rather than a fraction of their draw.
In any case standardizing on a voltage and a plug/socket combo and just specifying the current drain of the device would go a long way to making the world a better place even if some "universal" power supply was created.
I don't really see other countries with universal care as "developed" in contrast to the US. Sure, they provide care to more people, and in the short term, things look great. But the reality is that none of these nations handle the real issue that is straight in the face of the US, rising healthcare costs. Universal care in other countries doesn't fix this. They just make someone else pay for it. In Japan, over 50% of the hospitals operate in the red. In Germany, doctors are forced to take substantially lower wages than in comparative countries, which has led to a number of protests consisting of tens of thousands of doctors and contributed to Germany's immigration deficit.
The US system sucks, but it's a lot easier to fix than in these other nations.
I don't agree. The types of problems that places like the EU countries and Canada are experiencing for example in their health care systems are ones of supply issues (wait times for example), payment formulas (hospital and physician payments for example), and coverage policy debates (what should be covered? IVF, sex changes, experimental, etc.) While these are significant issues, fundamentally the systems are working to provide reasonable care to the majority of the population without undue hardship on the individual or the society as a whole. Additionally, the potential changes to the existing systems to address current and future shortcomings are not mired in political difficulties in the way the politicization of healthcare in the US has made it virtually impossible to craft any significant reforms. In contrast to pretty much the rest of the "developed" world, the US is spending huge amounts on a per-capita basis, with large fractions of the population getting inadequate care at a very high cost to the individual and a very high cost to the economy. It is a very real challenge for a US company to provide health coverage to its workforce while still being competitive with a non-US company operating in a country with a more workable health-care system.
Not that I disagree with all of redemtionboy's points. Greater competition, removal of conflicts of interest, better consumer knowledge, and all sorts of other tweaks could result in huge increases in efficiencies to the whole health care system. Fundamentally however I feel that healthcare is probably not something I want to be completely "market-driven" - particularly since I find it hard to believe that the market will inevitably be manipulated to the determent of the patient/customer.
I don't know that much effort has really been put into "extorting people out of burning fossil-fuels" - both Canada and the US still give significant tax incentives to the oil and gas industries. I suspect that this is also common in other countries since generally they are such a large sector of the economy and fairly well connected politically.
For a service oriented businesses the increased traffic could make up for the decreased margin.
I read a story a few weeks ago about a British portrait photographer who miscalculated (again on bad advice from a Groupon sales rep) and ended up owing people about 4 months worth of portraits and prints at such a huge discount she'd be making about $3 an hour for the first 1/3 of the year.
As I recall, that was a third party wondering how the photographer could make money off of it - not the actual photographer complaining. Some might argue that $3/hour is better than zero if they were not able to fill their schedule on their own. In terms of photography, I have received numerous offers for *free* sittings, even more of a loss leader than the steep Groupon discounts. They can make their money on the up-sell - bigger prints, more copies, extra poses, etc.
But of course, you are correct that the real problem is the business owner not knowing what they are getting into, and not limiting the negative impact by way of limited numbers and/or tighter control over the timing of the coupons. Having sales reps work to make sure the program is advantageous to both the consumer and the business would seem to be worthwhile - hopefully Groupon's reps will wise up and change their approach before they completely ruin the very businesses they are trying to profit from.
That's a pretty steep discount for a bit of advertising, and I can't see Groupon continuing to find that many suckers, er businesses at that margin...
In comparison however, running a regular advertising campaign can cost many thousands of bucks is straight cash payments - so potentially using that budgeted money for this type of offer might make sense. For a service oriented businesses the increased traffic could make up for the decreased margin. For example if your hair stylists are sitting around with empty chairs, putting a person into one at any price is a net gain since your overhead is a constant.
It does seem however that these types of offers are not very good at creating repeat business without the the discount, so traditional advertisement might be more useful.
I suspect that any well thought out no-reply address systems do in fact pay attention to proper bounce messages (those sent by the SMTP server). If a "pseudo-bounce" message generated by a email program has similar impact, I do not know, but for the occasional piece of misdirected email, it probably is worth a try.
For Apple's Mail.app there is a "bounce message" which returns something pretty much like a "no such address" type of response. There are probably plug-ins for Thunderbird that do the same, but where I looked for them I mostly found plugins that "redirect" mail to addresses of your choice keeping the headers intact - so there may be an issue with terminology that might complicate your search for a solution.
Or you can ask just about anyone for a real orange. Everyone has a citrus tree or three in their yard down there. You dont even have to ask, getting rid of citrus is difficult in FL. Just find the working class side of town, wait till dark and creep into the backyard. Pick all the fruit you want and sneak back to your car.
What is strange is that in places where there is fruit literally falling off the trees and being swept into the street for rubbish collection, the groceries are still successfully selling *the same type of fruit* for real money. I recently spent six months in central California and we collected a whole bunch of oranges and grapefruits from grateful neighbours who were just dumping it out with their grass clippings for compost. I am surprised that someone couldn't make some money collecting this in a more formal manner, or that groups like high schools or scouting troops do not collect and sell it as a fund-raiser. Surely that would be more efficient that selling cookies which have to be paid for at some point.
The title made me think it would be about a way of getting rid of unwanted nanodevices in the environment - maybe some sort of vacuum combined with a filter. Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" has the problems of unwanted nano-machines as one of its themes.
Actually I was talking about Petrol. Eng, but you've got the idea already.
From a societal point of view, we should be trying to encourage more of these types into working in the skilled trades - such a driven individual would soon have a similar income after starting a contracting, plumbing, machining, etc business while relieving a huge under supply across the "developed" world. As a society we have been pushing the "degree for success" model a bit much, and giving the trades a bad (undeserved) stereotype in the process. In many technical areas there is a glut of phds and a shortage of technicians.
What we _can learn from the data is that if you want a major that will bring in a steady, terrific income, Petroleum Engineering and other specialty majors are pretty awesome. The Study makes it pretty clear that people with "hard" majors make about twice as much as people with "soft" majors, so if money is your thing, pick a hard major. Put another way, if what you love to do is a soft major, prepare yourself for a life where you will never be tempted by the siren call of enormous wealth.
Actually you cannot learn that such a major will bring in such an income, but rather that the people in the study who have that major had that income. The study does not show that a particular choice results in a particular outcome, but rather than certain choices are correlated with certain outcomes. The reason they are correlated is not obviously clear. Would those people who chose PEng have had similar outcomes in a different career due to their own personalities/drives/interests?
Generally speaking however, either the radiation ionizes the absorbing atom (which RF does not do, even at high densities) or it causes heating (which as you say COULD have lots of unknown effects, but there is no particular reason to think any of them are likely). Absent any plausible mechanism for problems, there is little reason for being particularly cautious in deployment. Of course, we could be completely off in all of our understanding on the interaction between radiation and biology - but then epidemiological studies would show some linkage between RF exposure and particular problems. However a huge number of such trials do not show such a link to their limits of ability to measure it. Any such link is thus very small, and not a reason to make significant policy decisions.
Isn't Google's offering an instance of Jabber? I have certainly used Mac OS's iChat to lot into my gmail account via its Jabber support (not that I have actually USED it for anything, so no information about if it actually works, or how well).
If he is trustworthy enough to care for your pets - is there not a risk that he might be considered worthy enough to get taken himself? Similarly for all of his employees. If he is one of the unsaved - can you trust him with the care of your precious babies?
In 1998, Apple introduced the iMac. This came with USB and FireWire, but with no legacy ports. If you wanted to sell a peripheral to iMac users, it had to be USB or FireWire (mostly USB, since it was cheaper for device manufacturers).
The first few versions of the iMac did not have FireWire, just USB. The iMac first got FireWire in October 1999 with some versions of the "slot-loading" iMac G3:
Thus, those early adopters REALLY needed USB peripheral, and as you said, for a while it seemed as though the only colours available for USB devices matched the iMac colours.
So there is no place other than a private transaction where I can make such a trade. Thus there is a significant barrier to such transactions - even for those confident (in either direction) of future movement in price. Before everyone met under the apple tree near that street by the city wall, it was possible to invest in fractional ownership of a variety of enterprises, but the advantages of a proper stock market and investment firms on Wall Street did not really come into play until trading became simple, reliable, and relatively efficient.
The constant refrain of "then short it", thus has much less validity as a response to those who feel bitcoins are likely undergoing a bubble.
Even without that, just because people are unwilling to "put their money where their mouth is" does not automatically make their viewpoints valueless. Rational people can feel that the market is going to move in a certain direction without necessarily having the resources (in time, capital, and skillset) or desire to actually invest in that belief.
I'm not saying that banking is impossible with gold (it's how it has originated), or that fractional reserve banking and thus bank runs are not possible. Since there's no central bank to enforce or even verify minimal reserves, there's nothing to stop an infinite expansion. It's however plausible that, assuming a completely unregulated market, that consumers will demand 3rd party auditing for the private banks, and a mutual insurance scheme equivalent to FDIC. This will thus force the banks to maintain minimal reserves and require sound collateral, which will clearly curb the infinite credit expansion.
Oh is that how things worked before the FDIC in America? Oh wait, that isn't how it worked. What happened is that banks in fact did lend out money they didn't have, all without insurance, and people took those loans and made those deposits and got screwed for their own shortsightedness. It wasn't until we protected ourselves from our own stupidity that we institutionalized these sorts of banking protections. Why do you suppose people will be more rational with this monetary system without regulatory oversight?
RF radiation is is up to 300 GHz = 3x10^11 Hz according to wikipedia ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Radio_frequency ). Ionizing radiation is about 100 billion billion Hertz = 10^20 Hz (according to http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/ionize_nonionize.html ), so to get multiple RF photos to have ionizing energies, you only need about 10^8 of them to join together. If the cross section decreases just by a factor of two for each additional photon absorption (which I figure is a huge underestimate) the cross section for a 10^8 photon absorption would be decreased by a factor of 2^(10^8).
That's like a really big tiny number you know.
It does not happen.
Oh - you were probably being a bit sarcastic. There is a way to calculate it.
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As even in average, society roughly 40% of people will steal if they feel they can get away with it, and 30% will steal no matter what. This is your basic material covered in your crim101 courses.
I have also seen studies showing that most people return a found wallet in a public place, with interesting differences depending on the city and location where the wallet is found, and studies showing levels of cheating on tests is fairly constant regardless of the likelyhood of being caught. Under what conditions are the 30 and 40% present under? Are we talking about a gum drop, a candy bar or a car?
Twice I've had my car searched by police. They asked permission, I said no. They said by me saying no that they had probable cause. I don't do drugs, there was nothing illegal in the car. It was a waste of their time bringing out the dogs and all the other cop cars that have to stop to gawk.
Say no does no good.
Well, if everyone said "no", they might be more selective on who they wasted their time on bringing out the dogs, etc.
I also doubt very much if refusal for permission to search is actually considered "probable cause" in most cases. If so, it would result in completely removing any protections against unreasonable search by the mere application of the magic words "May I search that?" There are many legitimate reasons for not wanting a search to be performed beyond not wanting the police to find incriminating evidence.
My undergraduate degree at Simon Fraser University (BC Canada) back in the 1990s had fairly few non-major based requirements. Most science programs had a couple hours of arts required. My particular program (combined Honours Math and Physics) had a few hours of "non-science" credits required. I ended up fulfiling those with a few "logic" classes taught in the philosophy department. I think that the "non-science" designation was poor wording from before the time when the institution only offered two classifications of courses (science and arts) - by the 1990s they had other designations including "applied science" courses in the engineering and computer science departments - I think I might have been able to get away with not even taking the philosophy courses.
One of my physics profs said he fulfilled his "language" requirements in the 1950s at Berkley (or "Cal" as he called it) by taking one of the newly minted Fortran courses.
That over-engineering might result in increased efficiency. When supplying 130 watts, waste heat from inefficiencies are more important than when supplying 30 watts, so a 130W supply might be designed to only have 5% inefficiencies, compared to the 30W supply that may be acceptable with a 10% inefficiency. Thus using the 130W supply for a device drawing only 20W may result in only 0.1W of wast compared to 2W of wast if using the 20W supply.
But what do I know? Maybe power supplies waste a set amount of energy rather than a fraction of their draw.
In any case standardizing on a voltage and a plug/socket combo and just specifying the current drain of the device would go a long way to making the world a better place even if some "universal" power supply was created.
I don't really see other countries with universal care as "developed" in contrast to the US. Sure, they provide care to more people, and in the short term, things look great. But the reality is that none of these nations handle the real issue that is straight in the face of the US, rising healthcare costs. Universal care in other countries doesn't fix this. They just make someone else pay for it. In Japan, over 50% of the hospitals operate in the red. In Germany, doctors are forced to take substantially lower wages than in comparative countries, which has led to a number of protests consisting of tens of thousands of doctors and contributed to Germany's immigration deficit.
The US system sucks, but it's a lot easier to fix than in these other nations.
I don't agree. The types of problems that places like the EU countries and Canada are experiencing for example in their health care systems are ones of supply issues (wait times for example), payment formulas (hospital and physician payments for example), and coverage policy debates (what should be covered? IVF, sex changes, experimental, etc.) While these are significant issues, fundamentally the systems are working to provide reasonable care to the majority of the population without undue hardship on the individual or the society as a whole. Additionally, the potential changes to the existing systems to address current and future shortcomings are not mired in political difficulties in the way the politicization of healthcare in the US has made it virtually impossible to craft any significant reforms. In contrast to pretty much the rest of the "developed" world, the US is spending huge amounts on a per-capita basis, with large fractions of the population getting inadequate care at a very high cost to the individual and a very high cost to the economy. It is a very real challenge for a US company to provide health coverage to its workforce while still being competitive with a non-US company operating in a country with a more workable health-care system.
Not that I disagree with all of redemtionboy's points. Greater competition, removal of conflicts of interest, better consumer knowledge, and all sorts of other tweaks could result in huge increases in efficiencies to the whole health care system. Fundamentally however I feel that healthcare is probably not something I want to be completely "market-driven" - particularly since I find it hard to believe that the market will inevitably be manipulated to the determent of the patient/customer.
I don't know that much effort has really been put into "extorting people out of burning fossil-fuels" - both Canada and the US still give significant tax incentives to the oil and gas industries. I suspect that this is also common in other countries since generally they are such a large sector of the economy and fairly well connected politically.
For a service oriented businesses the increased traffic could make up for the decreased margin.
I read a story a few weeks ago about a British portrait photographer who miscalculated (again on bad advice from a Groupon sales rep) and ended up owing people about 4 months worth of portraits and prints at such a huge discount she'd be making about $3 an hour for the first 1/3 of the year.
As I recall, that was a third party wondering how the photographer could make money off of it - not the actual photographer complaining. Some might argue that $3/hour is better than zero if they were not able to fill their schedule on their own. In terms of photography, I have received numerous offers for *free* sittings, even more of a loss leader than the steep Groupon discounts. They can make their money on the up-sell - bigger prints, more copies, extra poses, etc.
But of course, you are correct that the real problem is the business owner not knowing what they are getting into, and not limiting the negative impact by way of limited numbers and/or tighter control over the timing of the coupons. Having sales reps work to make sure the program is advantageous to both the consumer and the business would seem to be worthwhile - hopefully Groupon's reps will wise up and change their approach before they completely ruin the very businesses they are trying to profit from.
That's a pretty steep discount for a bit of advertising, and I can't see Groupon continuing to find that many suckers, er businesses at that margin...
In comparison however, running a regular advertising campaign can cost many thousands of bucks is straight cash payments - so potentially using that budgeted money for this type of offer might make sense. For a service oriented businesses the increased traffic could make up for the decreased margin. For example if your hair stylists are sitting around with empty chairs, putting a person into one at any price is a net gain since your overhead is a constant.
It does seem however that these types of offers are not very good at creating repeat business without the the discount, so traditional advertisement might be more useful.
Or I'll throw you into the garbage cans again!
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/They_Live
I suspect that any well thought out no-reply address systems do in fact pay attention to proper bounce messages (those sent by the SMTP server). If a "pseudo-bounce" message generated by a email program has similar impact, I do not know, but for the occasional piece of misdirected email, it probably is worth a try.
For Apple's Mail.app there is a "bounce message" which returns something pretty much like a "no such address" type of response. There are probably plug-ins for Thunderbird that do the same, but where I looked for them I mostly found plugins that "redirect" mail to addresses of your choice keeping the headers intact - so there may be an issue with terminology that might complicate your search for a solution.
A number of places (some or most of California perhaps? and Ontario as well) do have time-of-day pricing for residential customers.
from 2009:
http://www.davis.ca/en/blog/Climate-Change-Law-Practice-Group/2009/05/14/Ontario-launches-time-of-day-electricity-pricing-initiative
http://local.smart-homeowner.com/Time_of_Use_Pricing_for_Electricity_San_Diego_CA-r1196840-San_Diego_CA.html
they wont be happy until everyone is back to living in caves
Then the radon will get you!
Or you can ask just about anyone for a real orange. Everyone has a citrus tree or three in their yard down there. You dont even have to ask, getting rid of citrus is difficult in FL. Just find the working class side of town, wait till dark and creep into the backyard. Pick all the fruit you want and sneak back to your car.
What is strange is that in places where there is fruit literally falling off the trees and being swept into the street for rubbish collection, the groceries are still successfully selling *the same type of fruit* for real money. I recently spent six months in central California and we collected a whole bunch of oranges and grapefruits from grateful neighbours who were just dumping it out with their grass clippings for compost. I am surprised that someone couldn't make some money collecting this in a more formal manner, or that groups like high schools or scouting troops do not collect and sell it as a fund-raiser. Surely that would be more efficient that selling cookies which have to be paid for at some point.
The title made me think it would be about a way of getting rid of unwanted nanodevices in the environment - maybe some sort of vacuum combined with a filter. Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" has the problems of unwanted nano-machines as one of its themes.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Neal_Stephenson
Actually I was talking about Petrol. Eng, but you've got the idea already.
From a societal point of view, we should be trying to encourage more of these types into working in the skilled trades - such a driven individual would soon have a similar income after starting a contracting, plumbing, machining, etc business while relieving a huge under supply across the "developed" world. As a society we have been pushing the "degree for success" model a bit much, and giving the trades a bad (undeserved) stereotype in the process. In many technical areas there is a glut of phds and a shortage of technicians.
What we _can learn from the data is that if you want a major that will bring in a steady, terrific income, Petroleum Engineering and other specialty majors are pretty awesome. The Study makes it pretty clear that people with "hard" majors make about twice as much as people with "soft" majors, so if money is your thing, pick a hard major. Put another way, if what you love to do is a soft major, prepare yourself for a life where you will never be tempted by the siren call of enormous wealth.
Actually you cannot learn that such a major will bring in such an income, but rather that the people in the study who have that major had that income. The study does not show that a particular choice results in a particular outcome, but rather than certain choices are correlated with certain outcomes. The reason they are correlated is not obviously clear. Would those people who chose PEng have had similar outcomes in a different career due to their own personalities/drives/interests?
Generally speaking however, either the radiation ionizes the absorbing atom (which RF does not do, even at high densities) or it causes heating (which as you say COULD have lots of unknown effects, but there is no particular reason to think any of them are likely). Absent any plausible mechanism for problems, there is little reason for being particularly cautious in deployment. Of course, we could be completely off in all of our understanding on the interaction between radiation and biology - but then epidemiological studies would show some linkage between RF exposure and particular problems. However a huge number of such trials do not show such a link to their limits of ability to measure it. Any such link is thus very small, and not a reason to make significant policy decisions.
Except for banning green jelly beans of course - http://xkcd.com/882/
Isn't Google's offering an instance of Jabber? I have certainly used Mac OS's iChat to lot into my gmail account via its Jabber support (not that I have actually USED it for anything, so no information about if it actually works, or how well).
If he is trustworthy enough to care for your pets - is there not a risk that he might be considered worthy enough to get taken himself? Similarly for all of his employees. If he is one of the unsaved - can you trust him with the care of your precious babies?
In 1998, Apple introduced the iMac. This came with USB and FireWire, but with no legacy ports. If you wanted to sell a peripheral to iMac users, it had to be USB or FireWire (mostly USB, since it was cheaper for device manufacturers).
The first few versions of the iMac did not have FireWire, just USB. The iMac first got FireWire in October 1999 with some versions of the "slot-loading" iMac G3:
http://lowendmac.com/imacs/imac-g3-1999.html
Thus, those early adopters REALLY needed USB peripheral, and as you said, for a while it seemed as though the only colours available for USB devices matched the iMac colours.
So there is no place other than a private transaction where I can make such a trade. Thus there is a significant barrier to such transactions - even for those confident (in either direction) of future movement in price. Before everyone met under the apple tree near that street by the city wall, it was possible to invest in fractional ownership of a variety of enterprises, but the advantages of a proper stock market and investment firms on Wall Street did not really come into play until trading became simple, reliable, and relatively efficient.
The constant refrain of "then short it", thus has much less validity as a response to those who feel bitcoins are likely undergoing a bubble.
Even without that, just because people are unwilling to "put their money where their mouth is" does not automatically make their viewpoints valueless. Rational people can feel that the market is going to move in a certain direction without necessarily having the resources (in time, capital, and skillset) or desire to actually invest in that belief.
So where is a market where I can short BitCoins?
I'm not saying that banking is impossible with gold (it's how it has originated), or that fractional reserve banking and thus bank runs are not possible. Since there's no central bank to enforce or even verify minimal reserves, there's nothing to stop an infinite expansion. It's however plausible that, assuming a completely unregulated market, that consumers will demand 3rd party auditing for the private banks, and a mutual insurance scheme equivalent to FDIC. This will thus force the banks to maintain minimal reserves and require sound collateral, which will clearly curb the infinite credit expansion.
Oh is that how things worked before the FDIC in America? Oh wait, that isn't how it worked. What happened is that banks in fact did lend out money they didn't have, all without insurance, and people took those loans and made those deposits and got screwed for their own shortsightedness. It wasn't until we protected ourselves from our own stupidity that we institutionalized these sorts of banking protections. Why do you suppose people will be more rational with this monetary system without regulatory oversight?
RF radiation is is up to 300 GHz = 3x10^11 Hz according to wikipedia ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Radio_frequency ). Ionizing radiation is about 100 billion billion Hertz = 10^20 Hz (according to http://www.epa.gov/radiation/understand/ionize_nonionize.html ), so to get multiple RF photos to have ionizing energies, you only need about 10^8 of them to join together. If the cross section decreases just by a factor of two for each additional photon absorption (which I figure is a huge underestimate) the cross section for a 10^8 photon absorption would be decreased by a factor of 2^(10^8).
That's like a really big tiny number you know.
It does not happen.
Oh - you were probably being a bit sarcastic. There is a way to calculate it.