If you think about it, all of these airplanes have "emergency exits" in parts of the plane other than near the cockpit in front. So you could utilize at least one of those near the rear of the plane during boarding -- if you redesigned the boarding platforms at the terminal gates to work with them.
Then you could simultaneously have people board on both sides of the plane, filling in the rows in the middle first and working towards either end.
But THAT would require a lot more expense -- so I doubt you'll ever see such a thing.
It's not really any surprise that their CEO is trying to spin Apple as the perfect business, who really only cares about taking the time to make best in class products that make everyone's life better....
Once you strip away the hype? I think what you have is a company that's been VERY successful because it stuck it out, competing head to head with Microsoft when nobody else would. (Sure, Linux and BSD were always there but they're free products.... not strictly commercial ones developed only by a specific group of paid developers.) Off of decades of name recognition and respect for the brand (many teachers, artists, publishers and others who considered Apple computers the superior tool for their crafts for a long time)... the company was able to expand into new areas, like selling watches, set top TV boxes, and a whole online media store for subscription streaming and purchased music and video content.
These days? Yes, I think they make a lot of design decisions intended solely to boost profit margins. All the dongle adapters for things are a great example. But those who are invested in the Apple ecosystem will grit their teeth and pay up, because it beats redoing the whole environment (now including home control via HomeKit!) to use Windows and/or Android based alternatives.
Personally, I use a mix of Mac and Windows and some Linux here and there. I'm relatively platform agnostic. The "cloud" makes that increasingly easy to do, these days. But I still don't regret my decision to pay out big $'s every 3-5 years or so, to keep one of the higher end configurations of both a desktop Mac and a notebook portable Mac. The resale value to get rid of them when I'm ready to upgrade far exceeds what I get for the Windows PC stuff, so that helps.
I'm really not much of a book buyer or reader, so I guess you could say I'm not the B&N target market anyway. Except I've had occasion to go in there for various things, including buying childrens' books as gifts for an employee's baby shower and a search, a while back, for what I thought was a real simple item; a loop to stick on a surface to act as a pen-holder.
That pen-holder search was a huge fiasco.... Found the product I wanted on the B&N web site and it indicated my local store had it in stock. So I walked down there on my lunch break. Couldn't find it anyplace in the store, since small "odds and ends" like that were just randomly scattered throughout the store, positioned here and there between rows of books on shelves. I asked for assistance, and was first told they didn't have the item in stock at all. I pulled out my phone and showed them their own web page that said they did. Then I was told to come back in a couple hours, because they'd need some time to locate it for me.
At this point, I started regretting not just ordering one off Amazon to ship to me.... But I did go back hours later, to find they simply said they "had one someplace, but couldn't find it for me". I wound up getting one at an Office Depot store that weekend.
That's generally been my B&N experience. Stores are set up so they're enjoyable to browse around at random, but terrible if you go there on a mission to buy something specific (unless it's a book they're featuring prominently at that point in time).
Shows how much the thing meant to me.... As far as I'm concerned, Twitter is based on such a simple premise, it's the last thing I want to install a whole application to do. It's bad enough I keep getting spam emails from them to "remind me" about other content people tweeted that I might want to sign in and read.
I, too, refused to ever provide FB with my phone number - even though it prompts regularly to add it.
I'm finding that increasingly, "free" services online that ask for your cell number DO use the info for marketing purposes.
For example? I know many people who noticed that right after they started playing that HQ Trivia game on their phones, they started receiving a lot of scam and solicitation calls on their number. I definitely did.
Lazy would be someone who never bothers to try to make their own hot breakfast with pancakes and eggs! This guy says he cooks "most of his own meals".
Personally, I never cook things like that.... Maybe you can call me lazy, but I'm just not a fan of breakfast OR a morning person. If my alternate is sleeping in a bit later, I'll pick that any time over getting up extra early to make breakfast. I grew up eating cold cereal and toast with some juice for breakfast -- and I'm still ok with that if I actually want to eat that early in the morning. I rather like saving hot breakfast as something for special occasions like vacation trips.
On the other hand, I was out until 11:30PM or so fixing circuit issues at one of our offices, at work.... so again, no so sure you can label me "lazy".
And I'd agree with you, except on the metro, I see it littered with newspapers every time I ride it. The catch? They're not the "big name" city newspapers. What you see more of in print are the small, regional papers that get handed out free and survive on advertising dollars.
That's really where I see print media having more staying power. If you're a local publication that just wants to inform people about what local bands are playing where, covering some news items of local/regional interest that will never be found on the AP wire newsfeeds, and featuring underground cartoonists in your comics? You do best printing physical papers and distributing them to readers at no charge. When one person is done reading it, they tend to leave it on a bench or seat where the next person picks it up and peruses it, just because it's sitting there. You'd spend more than it would be worth trying to convince enough people to do online subscriptions and to actually download the latest edition every time it comes out.
I think you're missing my argument here. (I can't speak for those who push for Communism from their public education. I'm certainly not advocating for that.)
We have 3 kids in the public school system right now, and what I've seen wrong includes:
1. Systemic issues with spending FAR too much taxpayer money on administrative staff. When I was in public high school, it was a pretty good-sized school and yet you only had one person with the title of principal. Today, smaller schools than the one I attended will regularly have 3 principals, plus a number of assistant principals. What changed to require 3x or more work from that job title since the late 1980's or early 1990's??
2. Far too much focus on standardized testing, to the point where our high schools don't even have a formalized program in place for reading skills. In one area school (not even in a poor neighborhood, like some would guess), about 70% of the kids coming in as Freshmen can't read at a high school level. The high schools respond by teaching to the proficiency tests they're required by law to give - rather than ensuring the kids are actually capable of reading at the proper grade level. The teachers all claim they "don't have enough time in the class day" to do anything else. And really, this problem seems to stem from further back in the middle and grade schools, where many of them no longer teach grammar, phonics or even "sight words".
3. The Bill and Melinda Gates' vision for "IEPs for all!" revolves around having the ability to custom tailor computer teaching/testing software to each student's needs, so they can sit down in front of screens for more of a class day and let the machines do the teaching and testing. IMO, it's the LAST thing we need more of in our public schools -- and it's somewhat telling that Gates sent his OWN kids to a private school where technology was essentially off limits.
4. It's not really been my experience that parents are "pushing mediocre students into advanced programs". Rather, the standard classrooms have become such a "zoo" or "free for all", the kids who care at all about learning are frustrated by all the noise and distraction - so THEY push to be put into honors classes, even if their academic proficiency doesn't really justify it.
I remember many years ago, when the antitrust litigation was just winding down against Microsoft... one of my best friends said to me, "Have you noticed how it seems like the government really got to Bill Gates? The comments he's making suddenly all sound like exactly what they told him to say. I wonder if this was part of the settlement with them?"
At the time, I thought that was somewhat insightful -- but perhaps a bit too "tin foil hat". As time has gone on though, I'm thinking he was right on the money.
If you look at the statements Bill made before and after the Justice Dept. got ahold of him, it's a night and day difference. And ever since then, he's continued to be pretty much a mouthpiece for Federal government agendas. The latest I've seen him advocating for (after pushing "Common Core" teaching in schools) is "IEPs for all students". Honestly, that would be a horrible idea, considering the current IEP is difficult enough to get teachers and faculty up to speed on and cooperating with, when you have a student with real disabilities or behavioral problems affecting their learning. If everybody had an individualized list of requirements and details on accommodations that would "best suit them", you'd probably double or triple the cost of running public schools. You'd need far more faculty to actually go through all of the IEPs and to implement them for everyone, plus more expense providing all the things they'd ask for like quiet places to take exams by themselves.) It's madness.
IMO, the problem with that claim is, it doesn't adequately explain why only the younger crowd is leaving it in big numbers? Are you REALLY going to tell me that it's the 12 to 18 year olds who are the only ones who have a good grasp on the downsides of Facebook monetizing the info you post, etc. etc.??
I think the obvious answer is that the older generation has pretty much "owned" Facebook. If you sign in and look at any random "news feed", you're going to see mainly material of interest to a crowd much older than pre-teens. As long as these teens and pre-teens "friend" their own family and relatives, that's going to continue to be true -- since it's their older brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and older cousins or nephews sharing the memes asking you to recall objects from the 1970's like rotary dial phones and LP record players, classic movie quotes from the 80's, etc. etc.
Seriously.. I don't think Trump's administration can do a thing without getting attacked for it. But this strikes me as a great idea. I mean, who cares if no private industry ends up wanting to buy the ISS? At least you can offer it up for sale and see what happens? If you just de-orbit the thing, you make absolutely NO money from it at the end and just add some pollution to the air.
As far as who would actually want to buy an orbiting research lab? Off-hand, I'm thinking big pharmaceutical firms might have some use for one? Maybe some government contractor would like it? I don't think anyone is thinking "Space hotel!" here... but plenty of industries invest heavily in R&D and might have a use for an ability to run experiments in space.
The issue of other countries owning part of it? Well -- that may or may not make a sale unworkable? But people find ways to sell off items all the time that have multiple party ownership. Again, these other nations will get zero if the thing is just de-orbited.
I've been primarily a "Mac user" since around 2000-2001, when I got really tired of the Windows world and discovered the new Mac OS X operating system and all the new hardware Apple was suddenly creating under Steve Jobs' take-back of his company.
Apple really had a good run between 2000 and Jobs' death. Under Tim Cook? I feel like the company hasn't been nearly as pleasing to support and follow along with. The thing is though? Like a lot of Mac users I know, we're all pretty heavily invested in the ecosystem, and it doesn't make any sense to try to bail out on it wholesale. The Apple bashers/haters have been saying essentially the same things since as far back as I can remember. The thing is, I've been into computers and I.T. since the late 1980's and I *also* bashed Apple back in the days of "Classic" MacOS. That's when Apple was at their low point, selling crappy Performa towers that couldn't even multitask well enough to format a floppy disk at the same time you did anything else with the machine.
The re-invented Apple of the Jobs era is probably what kept me interested in computers, when I saw so many of my peers get burnt out on it and change careers and focus.
The "Mac haters" I run across today tend to fall into two camps; The ones who always refused to use a Mac and insist they're substandard, overpriced junk based on an idea nothing changed since 1990 in the business.... and the younger ones who just hate how successful the company is, and/or the fact they can't afford to buy them.
These days, I get paid to support a mix of both Windows PCs and Macs, and I've gone back and forth between using Android phones and iPhones. I typically own some products on both sides of that fence and believe in using the best tool for the job, no matter who manufactures it. All this Apple hate is the same baseless garbage it always was. But that doesn't change the fact that a lot of us who DO still buy Apple's products are feeling a decline in the quality and value for the dollar. There have been a lot of software bugs in OS X and iOS that feel like Apple is slipping on quality control. Product launches such as for the Apple Watch were botched, trying to position it like a piece of high end jewelry or a fashion statement, instead of a piece of tech complimenting an iPhone for the masses. (I think they got that pretty much corrected with "Series 3" of the watch and sales are better than ever on it now.) The HomeKit home automation support was another botched launch, really. Just now, you finally have companies like Belkin selling reasonably priced "gateways" so WeMo devices can work with HomeKit properly -- and until iOS 11, Apple didn't have the HomeKit UI in what I'd call a finished state, either.
My point is? I have a LOT to thank Apple for and have gotten a whole lot of use out of their products. I have enough invested in them that I'm not going to be quick to migrate away from them either. BUT, I'm not going to make apologies for Apple's mis-steps either. I just find the blanket "Apple hate" to be utterly nonproductive and uninformed. If you love products from Apple's competition, you should be thankful every day that Apple survived. Many things you use are better BECAUSE they were challenged by Apple.
I'm just as grumpy as the next guy about finding out about yet another product you can't easily open up and do repairs on. But this thing is just a speaker with some wireless network connectivity, essentially.
I've got some pretty nice Bluetooth wireless speakers over here (a pair of Harmon Kardon Onyx mini's, and my wife has a pair of UE Boom 2's), and these even have rechargeable batteries inside them. Yet they don't look too repairable either. MAYBE the Onyx can be disassembled. I see some "how to" stuff on a Google search that refers to a larger model of the speaker, at least? But I'm pretty sure with most of these -- people just trash them when their batteries finally stop holding a charge.
Typically, speakers last for many years. You used to blow traditional speakers because they weren't mated up optimally to the amplifier they were attached to. If the amp couldn't put out enough wattage for the volume level you wanted to listen at, you got "clipping" -- damaging distortion that tore up the speakers. With these "all in one" units, that shouldn't really be much of a problem anymore. They should handle the maximum volume level they allow you to turn it up to.
I'm pretty confident if I purchased these HomePod speakers, they'd be trouble free for as long as I'd care to use them. Eventually, the built-in amps in these things tend to fail, but I'm talking 10 years or so. I have several nice 3 piece amplified sets of PC speakers that all lasted about that long before the amps failed. (Probably capacitors drying out and failing on the circuit boards -- but I never cared to even try to repair one before.)
The way this is worded, it makes it sound like an unprecedented disaster for all of crypto-currency. It's all going to crash to ZERO!
If you think about it though, what he's really describing is exactly what all the alt-coin permutations have done since all of this got started. People keep spinning off new alt-coins from code used to create a previous one. Occasionally, one comes along with an entirely new methodology behind it, but it's all the same for the people doing the buying and selling.
After initial surges in value and popularity, many of them decline to zero value and fade away. Heck, many are created specifically FOR this purpose, because somebody's trying to do a big "pump and dump" scheme with them.
But most people who are really "into" trading crypto-coins are well aware that all of this happens. Part of the whole investment strategy involves selling off one and buying into a different one, as you think it's time to get out of a dying one and into a rising one.
I wanted to mod your comment up, but my recent experience on here tells me people will slowly mod you back down to "Troll" status anyway, within a day or two.
They couldn't handle the truth when I pointed out the way some of these home solar PPA and "no money down loan" arrangements REALLY work. (Essentially, the companies selling them are only heavily discounting the power they sell you via Federal subsidies and tax breaks they're gathering up. The panels they're "lending" you and putting on your roof don't generate nearly enough electricity to explain the cost difference they're pretending they're giving you on your power usage. I suspect some of them could maintain their current business model quite profitably if they only put up fake solar panels that never really generated ANY electricity -- as long as they could keep up the ruse.)
I'll all for "clean energy" initiatives that make real financial sense. But it's ridiculous people keep framing these projects as "advocates vs. Trump and Big Oil". The truth is, we need all the energy production we can get. These big, experimental new projects with wind farms and large scale solar generating stations and the like are mostly not even ready to go online in a "production" sense for another 20+ years. Meanwhile, all of the construction work on them and the R&D by designers and engineers working on the projects is getting done by people driving their gasoline powered vehicles to and from their offices or the job sites!
People are still keeping themselves alive and able not to freeze to death in the winter months by burning heating oil. And most technology we use seems to be partially made of plastics, which require oil to produce too.
I think you blew right past my point about bank tellers, for starters. Of COURSE you'd rather use the ATM because it's faster. But you're not going to have that option when you need to go in to discuss taking out a loan, or a second mortgage on your house... or maybe when you find fraud on your account and have to get it sorted out. I don't see AI automating away almost ANY of that except in some future sci-fi Star Wars type universe.
What I'm basically saying is, we've hired a lot of people to do really simple, relatively "brain dead" jobs, just because "somebody's gotta do 'em". Before the cotton gin, we just used people to inefficiently run around in fields all day and pick it by hand, too. But technology is freeing us from the ability to settle for doing that kind of monotonous, mechanical work and challenging us to actually think and do more complex things instead. I can see the job of the garbage collector disappearing -- yet I don't think society will view that as a backwards move, in the tomes of history. Trash collection has NEVER been a glorious job and it has very real health risks involved too. It's honestly a better idea to do with robots.
AI really isn't ready to do almost anything that involves negotiations with other people. Has any business on Earth actually automated their "retentions" department? I mean, we have AI tech to do speech synthesis and to understand voice commands over the phone.... yet it's nowhere NEAR intelligent enough to know how to soothe an irate customer and then to offer him or her suitable arrangements to retain their business but offer them a better value on alternative packages or plans for whatever they're paying for.
I'm not even convinced the driverless car is REALLY achievable until you get ALL of them on the road automated and communicating in some kind of network amongst themselves. Wired had a good article recently on why the current self-driving cars can't distinguish between a moving vehicle in front of them and a stopped one in the road that it suddenly comes up on if the other one dodges it at the last minute....
In 2018, I don't know how people are defending a gimped CPU like this in any "premium" notebook?
The fact it's "excellent for mobile tasks that don't require much computing power" means you're lumping it in with the ARM processors in Apple's iPads, among other things. They're great for watching videos and web surfing, or running basic Office apps too.
From what I've seen, Windows can bog down a CPU pretty seriously just doing its OWN software updates! I feel the sluggishness on any Core i3 laptop as opposed to bumping a similarly spec'd one up to a Core i5 processor. So the Core m is a step below that, essentially.
I saw the hype about these new, lower MS Surface prices on C-Net news this morning, and thought that was a good thing until I saw they just used the Core m CPU as the way to achieve it. That's nothing special. Just offering a lower tier than ever before for the machine.
There's so much FUD surrounding automation and AI these days.... But I look around at almost every established business, today, and I see a whole bunch of employees doing work that could have been automated away long ago, yet wasn't. Just because technology ALLOWS you to do a thing doesn't mean you WILL.
Humans are still the buyers of all of the products and services these companies offer, and humans like interaction with other humans. We've already done a lot of automation in cases where you value a quick transaction more than you do the human factor. (Bank ATMs are a great example. If you're dealing with a bank just to get some cash out of your account, or to make a deposit, or even just to check your balance - it's a waste of everybody's time having you go inside a building and wait in line to then work with a human teller to do it. The ATM was a no-brainer, even if it allowed banks to reduce their head-count of tellers or even remove a few bank branches.) You see the same thing with the self checkout lanes. Big stores always have a few of them, but they still keep live humans as cashiers in other lanes. They didn't just go to full-on automation. Why not? I mean, they could have and it would have probably saved them more money than just putting in a few. The answer, I think, is that people still prefer interacting with other people, especially in cases where they think the other person will make the transaction more pleasant than the machine will. Automated checkout is usually picked by people in a hurry or people who only have a relative few items to ring up, If you have a lot of fresh foods that can't just be swiped through with a bar code to ring them up? You see those people gravitating toward the human cashiers.
There's no accountability with a robot or machine either. You need humans to negotiate return or exchange processes, for example. You can't argue with the machine if it dispensed the wrong item after you paid.
I see automation taking a lot of jobs away in specific industries, as it gets good enough to do it. Self-driving vehicles being the big one here. But again, the humans working as truck drivers or as cabbies can surely do other things for an income. Knowing how to operate a large motor vehicle is a pretty specific skillset when you think about it. It's crazy to claim that's ALL you could ever really do to be productive in a society.
Umm.... I'm essentially in Western MD myself (Frederick County).
It's great that wherever you're at, nobody is getting high electric bills like that. But are you also in one of those areas where people commonly heat with propane or oil burning furnaces? The area I'm in is full of 100+ year old two story homes that have been retrofitted to only using electric heat pumps for heating and cooling.
Sure, most of these homes could use better insulation. But I've been there and done that with a previous split-level I owned, and even after spraying the recommended amount of insulation into the whole attic and so forth, never found it put that much of a dent in my utility bills. (What I mean is, it might have knocked $20-40 off of a bill in the winter or middle of the summer -- but wasn't a solution to a big, $700 type electric bill, for sure.)
I already swapped out every light in this place with efficient LED lighting, too. So it's not like I've done nothing to curb power usage.
As for the rest of what I said? No, I'll never be convinced that it's generally a wise policy to take large amounts of money from wage earners and hand it over to government, so a relative few "elites" in power get to decide how they can best spend it. What I do know is that private business is always strongly motivated to keep innovating, whenever they've got a product people are buying. And people only buy products they actually like and find useful. I'd love to see a lot of these government subsidies to "big oil" going away, too... I'm not singling out solar or "clean energy" here. I just universally believe we're going to be better off letting people keep more of what they work to earn. They'll turn around and vote with their wallets for the best options. It's an imperfect world and this method won't ALWAYS produce the optimal solution. But so what? Neither does asking imperfect and biased politicians and government committees to spend your money for you.
I was never really a "Trump supporter" (voted for Gary Johnson in the election, in fact) -- but I'm fine with these fiscally conservative changes.
Every time I turn around, someone is shoving "environmentally clean/sound/Green" this, that or the other thing my direction -- and usually without much logic to their position. As long as it makes them feel good that they're "saving our planet", to hell with common sense and logic, right?
I mean, look.... It's gotten so ridiculous, we have the state of California trying to fine restaurant workers $2,000 if they hand out a plastic drinking straw without a customer asking for one first!
When it comes to tax dollars spent on "renewable energy research", I seriously doubt there's much of any real benefit that can be shown for the money they've poured into it recently? Almost all of the incremental improvements I've seen with solar panel technology have come from private industry doing their own in-house R&D so their specific brand of panel can outperform the competition in some way. It wasn't a matter of the U.S. government doing all that R&D and then sharing it with industries so we could have better panels for all. A whole lot of the solar industry is just a big sham anyway, IMO. Basically, you've got all these installers out there hawking panels to people under low/no money down "power purchase agreements" and solar leases, when the math doesn't even add up that the panels these people bought are generating enough electricity to cover the discounted kilowatt hour rates the customers receive in the agreements.
I just saw this illustrated last month, with the super cold weather we had out here in Maryland. People pretty commonly received electric bills of as much as $750 for the month, because we're all using electric heat pumps or baseboard heating. A few people with Vivint and other solar PPA arrangements bragged that their bill was only about $50 or $60. But fact check! With the amount of energy it takes to heat a home with all electric heat plus all the other power used (electric stoves, water heaters, clothes washers/dryers, etc.), there's no WAY those panels generated anywhere NEAR what it would take to offset the bill down to $50.
So how can this be a workable business model for Vivint and others? Clearly they're banking on all sorts of clean energy subsidies they're collecting for increasing the solar footprint, regardless of any real economic sense it's making.
I happen to have SunPower solar panels myself (a 7.64Kw system) that I purchased straight out. And I can assure you that the month of December is one of the lowest power generating months of the year. My panels don't put more than maybe a 25% dent in my electric bill in winter months. They probably account for a maximum of maybe 65% of my usage in the peak months where they get the most sunshine. Granted, our house is 2,200 sq. feet and over 100 years old, drafty, and we have a family of 6 living here and using a lot of electricity. But I can more clearly see exactly what the solar panels contribute than the people on these lease arrangements that obfuscate the facts. And as much as these cost to install? They won't even break even on that until they're over 2/3rds. of the way through their usable life.
Why keep paying government to advocate this stuff?
Nope.... That concern isn't that valid, IMO. We know from our history that we tend to congregate together in densely packed groups. Half of the U.S. population exists in something like a dozen big cities.
The people who really get into "the great outdoors" tend to be the ones motivated to sacrifice a lot of conveniences and even better job prospects to live in more rural areas. But they're also the ones more likely to take care of the place they're moving to!
I disagree, at least to an extent. Sure, there are always free activities out there people can attend. But quite frankly, a vast majority of them I see on a regular basis don't interest me much or at all. The small city I live in tries to do a number of events each year to promote some tourism and stimulate the local economy, and I participate whenever it's appealing. (For example, they do a big Veterans's Day parade each year. As a Jeep owner, I always volunteer to be part of the parade along with a whole group of other Jeeps - throwing candy to the kids on the street as we go through the town. Costs me maybe $40 or so in candy plus the gas, but a good time and a chance to show some appreciation for our Vets.)
But most of the time, free events are things like some band performing live in a park, and often not even performing a style of music I care for. I'm not into drawing or painting so all the "paint nights" and the like are out for me too. (And heck, those are rarely free either. Usually they ask at least $25 a person for those things.)
I was never into sports, so you wouldn't have found me at the local basketball or tennis court -- and I'm in my 40's now. Can't blame social media for my choices....
The people really spending a lot of time "getting out and about" DO tend to be retirees. They're the ones who not only qualify for senior discounts on all the restaurants and lodging and sometimes on the travel itself, but have the free time to do it without it causing problems.
When I was younger, I went to a lot of movies with my friends, or we went bowling, shooting pool or to the arcades at the mall. These days, the arcades are pretty much dead, bowling alleys are struggling and count more on serious league players than teens and 20-something occasional bowlers, and I'm not sure many pool halls are left that don't focus more on drinking for the 21+ crowd? The movies have gone up in price as the quality of the films has dropped too. So who can blame people for staying home and doing Netflix instead?
Especially with Google charging money for YouTube "Red" subscriptions, the smart move would be to allow the videos to be watched on as many devices as possible!
This feud with Amazon makes no sense, IMO, because there's no way it's more profitable selling people a few more Chromecast boxes, vs. having greater reach for viewers of the service itself.
Some of the Slashdot commenters seem to take the stance that this is a bad thing; a result of a workplace environment that's gotten so bad, you'd rather just risk going it on your own as a freelancer.
I'm not so sure?
For example, I work for a company that employs maybe 100 full-time people, but also keeps about 200 additional freelancers on a list of people they use on a contract basis for projects. Some of these folks were former employees who decided on their own to go freelance.
Having worked with a number of them over the years, I think it's a mixed bag. You've got the people who happily gave up a "stable job" with a regular salary and benefits for the contract work, because they're really good at what they do. They weren't worried about having enough work to make ends meet. In fact, they make a lot more money as a freelancer and can pick and choose what they'd prefer to do instead of have a project dictated to them as their sole job.
On the other hand? I've also spoken to a number of these freelancers who I'm really unimpressed with. They don't seem to know their way around the technologies they're supposed to be getting paid to work with, and some of them just have bad attitudes in general. I'm sure in at least some of those cases, they couldn't keep a full-time job for too long. Maybe they're good at a few specific things and that's why our company keeps them on their list of folks they use? But they're probably not a good idea to hire full-time.
I agree that "job security" isn't as much of a thing as it used to be, but that's been the case since I first entered the job market, decades ago! It's been clear to me that my parents had a level of job security that just doesn't exist for my generation, or for any of them that have come after me. Businesses today are just trying to be as efficient as possible, and technology helps automate away some of the job positions people once held where they really didn't contribute a whole lot. These days, you can't expect good pay and benefits unless you've got the knowledge and skills to warrant it -- and even then? If you work for a place that has a product or service that's not DIRECTLY tied to what you do for them, you're always at risk of losing your job through no fault of your own. (You might be amazing at database administration, but if the widget maker you work for has salespeople who slack off and don't get a decent number of widgets sold? You don't have a lot of job security there.)
When you look at the big auto makers like Chevy, they're cutting deals to partner up with ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft. That should tell you what their long-term goals are. They want to be the ones who own or exclusively sell fleets of driverless vehicles used in a future where people no longer own their own personal cars -- but simply call for one as needed, on a trip by trip basis.
Tesla, on the other hand, is still more firmly entrenched in the idea of making a desirable electric car with as much cool gadgetry on it as possible, so you'll WANT to proudly own one for yourself as a personal vehicle.
That means Tesla would be less interested in achieving fully self-driving vehicles. (Right now, that would probably constitute a bigger drain on their finances than it's worth - since their near-term customers are pretty ok with a car they can still drive when they want to, and which just uses automated features as kind of an "auto pilot" mode that expects the driver to cancel and intervene whenever necessary.)
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If you think about it, all of these airplanes have "emergency exits" in parts of the plane other than near the cockpit in front. So you could utilize at least one of those near the rear of the plane during boarding -- if you redesigned the boarding platforms at the terminal gates to work with them.
Then you could simultaneously have people board on both sides of the plane, filling in the rows in the middle first and working towards either end.
But THAT would require a lot more expense -- so I doubt you'll ever see such a thing.
It's not really any surprise that their CEO is trying to spin Apple as the perfect business, who really only cares about taking the time to make best in class products that make everyone's life better....
Once you strip away the hype? I think what you have is a company that's been VERY successful because it stuck it out, competing head to head with Microsoft when nobody else would. (Sure, Linux and BSD were always there but they're free products .... not strictly commercial ones developed only by a specific group of paid developers.) Off of decades of name recognition and respect for the brand (many teachers, artists, publishers and others who considered Apple computers the superior tool for their crafts for a long time) ... the company was able to expand into new areas, like selling watches, set top TV boxes, and a whole online media store for subscription streaming and purchased music and video content.
These days? Yes, I think they make a lot of design decisions intended solely to boost profit margins. All the dongle adapters for things are a great example. But those who are invested in the Apple ecosystem will grit their teeth and pay up, because it beats redoing the whole environment (now including home control via HomeKit!) to use Windows and/or Android based alternatives.
Personally, I use a mix of Mac and Windows and some Linux here and there. I'm relatively platform agnostic. The "cloud" makes that increasingly easy to do, these days. But I still don't regret my decision to pay out big $'s every 3-5 years or so, to keep one of the higher end configurations of both a desktop Mac and a notebook portable Mac. The resale value to get rid of them when I'm ready to upgrade far exceeds what I get for the Windows PC stuff, so that helps.
I'm really not much of a book buyer or reader, so I guess you could say I'm not the B&N target market anyway. Except I've had occasion to go in there for various things, including buying childrens' books as gifts for an employee's baby shower and a search, a while back, for what I thought was a real simple item; a loop to stick on a surface to act as a pen-holder.
That pen-holder search was a huge fiasco.... Found the product I wanted on the B&N web site and it indicated my local store had it in stock. So I walked down there on my lunch break. Couldn't find it anyplace in the store, since small "odds and ends" like that were just randomly scattered throughout the store, positioned here and there between rows of books on shelves. I asked for assistance, and was first told they didn't have the item in stock at all. I pulled out my phone and showed them their own web page that said they did. Then I was told to come back in a couple hours, because they'd need some time to locate it for me.
At this point, I started regretting not just ordering one off Amazon to ship to me .... But I did go back hours later, to find they simply said they "had one someplace, but couldn't find it for me". I wound up getting one at an Office Depot store that weekend.
That's generally been my B&N experience. Stores are set up so they're enjoyable to browse around at random, but terrible if you go there on a mission to buy something specific (unless it's a book they're featuring prominently at that point in time).
Shows how much the thing meant to me.... As far as I'm concerned, Twitter is based on such a simple premise, it's the last thing I want to install a whole application to do. It's bad enough I keep getting spam emails from them to "remind me" about other content people tweeted that I might want to sign in and read.
I, too, refused to ever provide FB with my phone number - even though it prompts regularly to add it.
I'm finding that increasingly, "free" services online that ask for your cell number DO use the info for marketing purposes.
For example? I know many people who noticed that right after they started playing that HQ Trivia game on their phones, they started receiving a lot of scam and solicitation calls on their number. I definitely did.
Lazy would be someone who never bothers to try to make their own hot breakfast with pancakes and eggs! This guy says he cooks "most of his own meals".
Personally, I never cook things like that.... Maybe you can call me lazy, but I'm just not a fan of breakfast OR a morning person. If my alternate is sleeping in a bit later, I'll pick that any time over getting up extra early to make breakfast. I grew up eating cold cereal and toast with some juice for breakfast -- and I'm still ok with that if I actually want to eat that early in the morning. I rather like saving hot breakfast as something for special occasions like vacation trips.
On the other hand, I was out until 11:30PM or so fixing circuit issues at one of our offices, at work .... so again, no so sure you can label me "lazy".
And I'd agree with you, except on the metro, I see it littered with newspapers every time I ride it. The catch? They're not the "big name" city newspapers. What you see more of in print are the small, regional papers that get handed out free and survive on advertising dollars.
That's really where I see print media having more staying power. If you're a local publication that just wants to inform people about what local bands are playing where, covering some news items of local/regional interest that will never be found on the AP wire newsfeeds, and featuring underground cartoonists in your comics? You do best printing physical papers and distributing them to readers at no charge. When one person is done reading it, they tend to leave it on a bench or seat where the next person picks it up and peruses it, just because it's sitting there. You'd spend more than it would be worth trying to convince enough people to do online subscriptions and to actually download the latest edition every time it comes out.
I think you're missing my argument here. (I can't speak for those who push for Communism from their public education. I'm certainly not advocating for that.)
We have 3 kids in the public school system right now, and what I've seen wrong includes:
1. Systemic issues with spending FAR too much taxpayer money on administrative staff. When I was in public high school, it was a pretty good-sized school and yet you only had one person with the title of principal. Today, smaller schools than the one I attended will regularly have 3 principals, plus a number of assistant principals. What changed to require 3x or more work from that job title since the late 1980's or early 1990's??
2. Far too much focus on standardized testing, to the point where our high schools don't even have a formalized program in place for reading skills. In one area school (not even in a poor neighborhood, like some would guess), about 70% of the kids coming in as Freshmen can't read at a high school level. The high schools respond by teaching to the proficiency tests they're required by law to give - rather than ensuring the kids are actually capable of reading at the proper grade level. The teachers all claim they "don't have enough time in the class day" to do anything else. And really, this problem seems to stem from further back in the middle and grade schools, where many of them no longer teach grammar, phonics or even "sight words".
3. The Bill and Melinda Gates' vision for "IEPs for all!" revolves around having the ability to custom tailor computer teaching/testing software to each student's needs, so they can sit down in front of screens for more of a class day and let the machines do the teaching and testing. IMO, it's the LAST thing we need more of in our public schools -- and it's somewhat telling that Gates sent his OWN kids to a private school where technology was essentially off limits.
4. It's not really been my experience that parents are "pushing mediocre students into advanced programs". Rather, the standard classrooms have become such a "zoo" or "free for all", the kids who care at all about learning are frustrated by all the noise and distraction - so THEY push to be put into honors classes, even if their academic proficiency doesn't really justify it.
I remember many years ago, when the antitrust litigation was just winding down against Microsoft ... one of my best friends said to me, "Have you noticed how it seems like the government really got to Bill Gates? The comments he's making suddenly all sound like exactly what they told him to say. I wonder if this was part of the settlement with them?"
At the time, I thought that was somewhat insightful -- but perhaps a bit too "tin foil hat". As time has gone on though, I'm thinking he was right on the money.
If you look at the statements Bill made before and after the Justice Dept. got ahold of him, it's a night and day difference. And ever since then, he's continued to be pretty much a mouthpiece for Federal government agendas. The latest I've seen him advocating for (after pushing "Common Core" teaching in schools) is "IEPs for all students". Honestly, that would be a horrible idea, considering the current IEP is difficult enough to get teachers and faculty up to speed on and cooperating with, when you have a student with real disabilities or behavioral problems affecting their learning. If everybody had an individualized list of requirements and details on accommodations that would "best suit them", you'd probably double or triple the cost of running public schools. You'd need far more faculty to actually go through all of the IEPs and to implement them for everyone, plus more expense providing all the things they'd ask for like quiet places to take exams by themselves.) It's madness.
IMO, the problem with that claim is, it doesn't adequately explain why only the younger crowd is leaving it in big numbers? Are you REALLY going to tell me that it's the 12 to 18 year olds who are the only ones who have a good grasp on the downsides of Facebook monetizing the info you post, etc. etc.??
I think the obvious answer is that the older generation has pretty much "owned" Facebook. If you sign in and look at any random "news feed", you're going to see mainly material of interest to a crowd much older than pre-teens. As long as these teens and pre-teens "friend" their own family and relatives, that's going to continue to be true -- since it's their older brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and older cousins or nephews sharing the memes asking you to recall objects from the 1970's like rotary dial phones and LP record players, classic movie quotes from the 80's, etc. etc.
Seriously .. I don't think Trump's administration can do a thing without getting attacked for it. But this strikes me as a great idea. I mean, who cares if no private industry ends up wanting to buy the ISS? At least you can offer it up for sale and see what happens? If you just de-orbit the thing, you make absolutely NO money from it at the end and just add some pollution to the air.
As far as who would actually want to buy an orbiting research lab? Off-hand, I'm thinking big pharmaceutical firms might have some use for one? Maybe some government contractor would like it? I don't think anyone is thinking "Space hotel!" here ... but plenty of industries invest heavily in R&D and might have a use for an ability to run experiments in space.
The issue of other countries owning part of it? Well -- that may or may not make a sale unworkable? But people find ways to sell off items all the time that have multiple party ownership. Again, these other nations will get zero if the thing is just de-orbited.
I've been primarily a "Mac user" since around 2000-2001, when I got really tired of the Windows world and discovered the new Mac OS X operating system and all the new hardware Apple was suddenly creating under Steve Jobs' take-back of his company.
Apple really had a good run between 2000 and Jobs' death. Under Tim Cook? I feel like the company hasn't been nearly as pleasing to support and follow along with. The thing is though? Like a lot of Mac users I know, we're all pretty heavily invested in the ecosystem, and it doesn't make any sense to try to bail out on it wholesale. The Apple bashers/haters have been saying essentially the same things since as far back as I can remember. The thing is, I've been into computers and I.T. since the late 1980's and I *also* bashed Apple back in the days of "Classic" MacOS. That's when Apple was at their low point, selling crappy Performa towers that couldn't even multitask well enough to format a floppy disk at the same time you did anything else with the machine.
The re-invented Apple of the Jobs era is probably what kept me interested in computers, when I saw so many of my peers get burnt out on it and change careers and focus.
The "Mac haters" I run across today tend to fall into two camps; The ones who always refused to use a Mac and insist they're substandard, overpriced junk based on an idea nothing changed since 1990 in the business .... and the younger ones who just hate how successful the company is, and/or the fact they can't afford to buy them.
These days, I get paid to support a mix of both Windows PCs and Macs, and I've gone back and forth between using Android phones and iPhones. I typically own some products on both sides of that fence and believe in using the best tool for the job, no matter who manufactures it. All this Apple hate is the same baseless garbage it always was. But that doesn't change the fact that a lot of us who DO still buy Apple's products are feeling a decline in the quality and value for the dollar. There have been a lot of software bugs in OS X and iOS that feel like Apple is slipping on quality control. Product launches such as for the Apple Watch were botched, trying to position it like a piece of high end jewelry or a fashion statement, instead of a piece of tech complimenting an iPhone for the masses. (I think they got that pretty much corrected with "Series 3" of the watch and sales are better than ever on it now.) The HomeKit home automation support was another botched launch, really. Just now, you finally have companies like Belkin selling reasonably priced "gateways" so WeMo devices can work with HomeKit properly -- and until iOS 11, Apple didn't have the HomeKit UI in what I'd call a finished state, either.
My point is? I have a LOT to thank Apple for and have gotten a whole lot of use out of their products. I have enough invested in them that I'm not going to be quick to migrate away from them either. BUT, I'm not going to make apologies for Apple's mis-steps either. I just find the blanket "Apple hate" to be utterly nonproductive and uninformed. If you love products from Apple's competition, you should be thankful every day that Apple survived. Many things you use are better BECAUSE they were challenged by Apple.
I'm just as grumpy as the next guy about finding out about yet another product you can't easily open up and do repairs on. But this thing is just a speaker with some wireless network connectivity, essentially.
I've got some pretty nice Bluetooth wireless speakers over here (a pair of Harmon Kardon Onyx mini's, and my wife has a pair of UE Boom 2's), and these even have rechargeable batteries inside them. Yet they don't look too repairable either. MAYBE the Onyx can be disassembled. I see some "how to" stuff on a Google search that refers to a larger model of the speaker, at least? But I'm pretty sure with most of these -- people just trash them when their batteries finally stop holding a charge.
Typically, speakers last for many years. You used to blow traditional speakers because they weren't mated up optimally to the amplifier they were attached to. If the amp couldn't put out enough wattage for the volume level you wanted to listen at, you got "clipping" -- damaging distortion that tore up the speakers. With these "all in one" units, that shouldn't really be much of a problem anymore. They should handle the maximum volume level they allow you to turn it up to.
I'm pretty confident if I purchased these HomePod speakers, they'd be trouble free for as long as I'd care to use them. Eventually, the built-in amps in these things tend to fail, but I'm talking 10 years or so. I have several nice 3 piece amplified sets of PC speakers that all lasted about that long before the amps failed. (Probably capacitors drying out and failing on the circuit boards -- but I never cared to even try to repair one before.)
The way this is worded, it makes it sound like an unprecedented disaster for all of crypto-currency. It's all going to crash to ZERO!
If you think about it though, what he's really describing is exactly what all the alt-coin permutations have done since all of this got started. People keep spinning off new alt-coins from code used to create a previous one. Occasionally, one comes along with an entirely new methodology behind it, but it's all the same for the people doing the buying and selling.
After initial surges in value and popularity, many of them decline to zero value and fade away. Heck, many are created specifically FOR this purpose, because somebody's trying to do a big "pump and dump" scheme with them.
But most people who are really "into" trading crypto-coins are well aware that all of this happens. Part of the whole investment strategy involves selling off one and buying into a different one, as you think it's time to get out of a dying one and into a rising one.
I wanted to mod your comment up, but my recent experience on here tells me people will slowly mod you back down to "Troll" status anyway, within a day or two.
They couldn't handle the truth when I pointed out the way some of these home solar PPA and "no money down loan" arrangements REALLY work. (Essentially, the companies selling them are only heavily discounting the power they sell you via Federal subsidies and tax breaks they're gathering up. The panels they're "lending" you and putting on your roof don't generate nearly enough electricity to explain the cost difference they're pretending they're giving you on your power usage. I suspect some of them could maintain their current business model quite profitably if they only put up fake solar panels that never really generated ANY electricity -- as long as they could keep up the ruse.)
I'll all for "clean energy" initiatives that make real financial sense. But it's ridiculous people keep framing these projects as "advocates vs. Trump and Big Oil". The truth is, we need all the energy production we can get. These big, experimental new projects with wind farms and large scale solar generating stations and the like are mostly not even ready to go online in a "production" sense for another 20+ years. Meanwhile, all of the construction work on them and the R&D by designers and engineers working on the projects is getting done by people driving their gasoline powered vehicles to and from their offices or the job sites!
People are still keeping themselves alive and able not to freeze to death in the winter months by burning heating oil. And most technology we use seems to be partially made of plastics, which require oil to produce too.
I think you blew right past my point about bank tellers, for starters. Of COURSE you'd rather use the ATM because it's faster. But you're not going to have that option when you need to go in to discuss taking out a loan, or a second mortgage on your house ... or maybe when you find fraud on your account and have to get it sorted out. I don't see AI automating away almost ANY of that except in some future sci-fi Star Wars type universe.
What I'm basically saying is, we've hired a lot of people to do really simple, relatively "brain dead" jobs, just because "somebody's gotta do 'em". Before the cotton gin, we just used people to inefficiently run around in fields all day and pick it by hand, too. But technology is freeing us from the ability to settle for doing that kind of monotonous, mechanical work and challenging us to actually think and do more complex things instead. I can see the job of the garbage collector disappearing -- yet I don't think society will view that as a backwards move, in the tomes of history. Trash collection has NEVER been a glorious job and it has very real health risks involved too. It's honestly a better idea to do with robots.
AI really isn't ready to do almost anything that involves negotiations with other people. Has any business on Earth actually automated their "retentions" department? I mean, we have AI tech to do speech synthesis and to understand voice commands over the phone .... yet it's nowhere NEAR intelligent enough to know how to soothe an irate customer and then to offer him or her suitable arrangements to retain their business but offer them a better value on alternative packages or plans for whatever they're paying for.
I'm not even convinced the driverless car is REALLY achievable until you get ALL of them on the road automated and communicating in some kind of network amongst themselves. Wired had a good article recently on why the current self-driving cars can't distinguish between a moving vehicle in front of them and a stopped one in the road that it suddenly comes up on if the other one dodges it at the last minute....
In 2018, I don't know how people are defending a gimped CPU like this in any "premium" notebook?
The fact it's "excellent for mobile tasks that don't require much computing power" means you're lumping it in with the ARM processors in Apple's iPads, among other things. They're great for watching videos and web surfing, or running basic Office apps too.
From what I've seen, Windows can bog down a CPU pretty seriously just doing its OWN software updates! I feel the sluggishness on any Core i3 laptop as opposed to bumping a similarly spec'd one up to a Core i5 processor. So the Core m is a step below that, essentially.
I saw the hype about these new, lower MS Surface prices on C-Net news this morning, and thought that was a good thing until I saw they just used the Core m CPU as the way to achieve it. That's nothing special. Just offering a lower tier than ever before for the machine.
There's so much FUD surrounding automation and AI these days.... But I look around at almost every established business, today, and I see a whole bunch of employees doing work that could have been automated away long ago, yet wasn't. Just because technology ALLOWS you to do a thing doesn't mean you WILL.
Humans are still the buyers of all of the products and services these companies offer, and humans like interaction with other humans. We've already done a lot of automation in cases where you value a quick transaction more than you do the human factor. (Bank ATMs are a great example. If you're dealing with a bank just to get some cash out of your account, or to make a deposit, or even just to check your balance - it's a waste of everybody's time having you go inside a building and wait in line to then work with a human teller to do it. The ATM was a no-brainer, even if it allowed banks to reduce their head-count of tellers or even remove a few bank branches.) You see the same thing with the self checkout lanes. Big stores always have a few of them, but they still keep live humans as cashiers in other lanes. They didn't just go to full-on automation. Why not? I mean, they could have and it would have probably saved them more money than just putting in a few. The answer, I think, is that people still prefer interacting with other people, especially in cases where they think the other person will make the transaction more pleasant than the machine will. Automated checkout is usually picked by people in a hurry or people who only have a relative few items to ring up, If you have a lot of fresh foods that can't just be swiped through with a bar code to ring them up? You see those people gravitating toward the human cashiers.
There's no accountability with a robot or machine either. You need humans to negotiate return or exchange processes, for example. You can't argue with the machine if it dispensed the wrong item after you paid.
I see automation taking a lot of jobs away in specific industries, as it gets good enough to do it. Self-driving vehicles being the big one here. But again, the humans working as truck drivers or as cabbies can surely do other things for an income. Knowing how to operate a large motor vehicle is a pretty specific skillset when you think about it. It's crazy to claim that's ALL you could ever really do to be productive in a society.
Umm.... I'm essentially in Western MD myself (Frederick County).
It's great that wherever you're at, nobody is getting high electric bills like that. But are you also in one of those areas where people commonly heat with propane or oil burning furnaces? The area I'm in is full of 100+ year old two story homes that have been retrofitted to only using electric heat pumps for heating and cooling.
Sure, most of these homes could use better insulation. But I've been there and done that with a previous split-level I owned, and even after spraying the recommended amount of insulation into the whole attic and so forth, never found it put that much of a dent in my utility bills. (What I mean is, it might have knocked $20-40 off of a bill in the winter or middle of the summer -- but wasn't a solution to a big, $700 type electric bill, for sure.)
I already swapped out every light in this place with efficient LED lighting, too. So it's not like I've done nothing to curb power usage.
As for the rest of what I said? No, I'll never be convinced that it's generally a wise policy to take large amounts of money from wage earners and hand it over to government, so a relative few "elites" in power get to decide how they can best spend it. What I do know is that private business is always strongly motivated to keep innovating, whenever they've got a product people are buying. And people only buy products they actually like and find useful. I'd love to see a lot of these government subsidies to "big oil" going away, too ... I'm not singling out solar or "clean energy" here. I just universally believe we're going to be better off letting people keep more of what they work to earn. They'll turn around and vote with their wallets for the best options. It's an imperfect world and this method won't ALWAYS produce the optimal solution. But so what? Neither does asking imperfect and biased politicians and government committees to spend your money for you.
I was never really a "Trump supporter" (voted for Gary Johnson in the election, in fact) -- but I'm fine with these fiscally conservative changes.
Every time I turn around, someone is shoving "environmentally clean/sound/Green" this, that or the other thing my direction -- and usually without much logic to their position. As long as it makes them feel good that they're "saving our planet", to hell with common sense and logic, right?
I mean, look.... It's gotten so ridiculous, we have the state of California trying to fine restaurant workers $2,000 if they hand out a plastic drinking straw without a customer asking for one first!
When it comes to tax dollars spent on "renewable energy research", I seriously doubt there's much of any real benefit that can be shown for the money they've poured into it recently? Almost all of the incremental improvements I've seen with solar panel technology have come from private industry doing their own in-house R&D so their specific brand of panel can outperform the competition in some way. It wasn't a matter of the U.S. government doing all that R&D and then sharing it with industries so we could have better panels for all. A whole lot of the solar industry is just a big sham anyway, IMO. Basically, you've got all these installers out there hawking panels to people under low/no money down "power purchase agreements" and solar leases, when the math doesn't even add up that the panels these people bought are generating enough electricity to cover the discounted kilowatt hour rates the customers receive in the agreements.
I just saw this illustrated last month, with the super cold weather we had out here in Maryland. People pretty commonly received electric bills of as much as $750 for the month, because we're all using electric heat pumps or baseboard heating. A few people with Vivint and other solar PPA arrangements bragged that their bill was only about $50 or $60. But fact check! With the amount of energy it takes to heat a home with all electric heat plus all the other power used (electric stoves, water heaters, clothes washers/dryers, etc.), there's no WAY those panels generated anywhere NEAR what it would take to offset the bill down to $50.
So how can this be a workable business model for Vivint and others? Clearly they're banking on all sorts of clean energy subsidies they're collecting for increasing the solar footprint, regardless of any real economic sense it's making.
I happen to have SunPower solar panels myself (a 7.64Kw system) that I purchased straight out. And I can assure you that the month of December is one of the lowest power generating months of the year. My panels don't put more than maybe a 25% dent in my electric bill in winter months. They probably account for a maximum of maybe 65% of my usage in the peak months where they get the most sunshine. Granted, our house is 2,200 sq. feet and over 100 years old, drafty, and we have a family of 6 living here and using a lot of electricity. But I can more clearly see exactly what the solar panels contribute than the people on these lease arrangements that obfuscate the facts. And as much as these cost to install? They won't even break even on that until they're over 2/3rds. of the way through their usable life.
Why keep paying government to advocate this stuff?
Nope.... That concern isn't that valid, IMO. We know from our history that we tend to congregate together in densely packed groups. Half of the U.S. population exists in something like a dozen big cities.
The people who really get into "the great outdoors" tend to be the ones motivated to sacrifice a lot of conveniences and even better job prospects to live in more rural areas. But they're also the ones more likely to take care of the place they're moving to!
I disagree, at least to an extent. Sure, there are always free activities out there people can attend. But quite frankly, a vast majority of them I see on a regular basis don't interest me much or at all. The small city I live in tries to do a number of events each year to promote some tourism and stimulate the local economy, and I participate whenever it's appealing. (For example, they do a big Veterans's Day parade each year. As a Jeep owner, I always volunteer to be part of the parade along with a whole group of other Jeeps - throwing candy to the kids on the street as we go through the town. Costs me maybe $40 or so in candy plus the gas, but a good time and a chance to show some appreciation for our Vets.)
But most of the time, free events are things like some band performing live in a park, and often not even performing a style of music I care for. I'm not into drawing or painting so all the "paint nights" and the like are out for me too. (And heck, those are rarely free either. Usually they ask at least $25 a person for those things.)
I was never into sports, so you wouldn't have found me at the local basketball or tennis court -- and I'm in my 40's now. Can't blame social media for my choices....
The people really spending a lot of time "getting out and about" DO tend to be retirees. They're the ones who not only qualify for senior discounts on all the restaurants and lodging and sometimes on the travel itself, but have the free time to do it without it causing problems.
When I was younger, I went to a lot of movies with my friends, or we went bowling, shooting pool or to the arcades at the mall. These days, the arcades are pretty much dead, bowling alleys are struggling and count more on serious league players than teens and 20-something occasional bowlers, and I'm not sure many pool halls are left that don't focus more on drinking for the 21+ crowd? The movies have gone up in price as the quality of the films has dropped too. So who can blame people for staying home and doing Netflix instead?
Especially with Google charging money for YouTube "Red" subscriptions, the smart move would be to allow the videos to be watched on as many devices as possible!
This feud with Amazon makes no sense, IMO, because there's no way it's more profitable selling people a few more Chromecast boxes, vs. having greater reach for viewers of the service itself.
Some of the Slashdot commenters seem to take the stance that this is a bad thing; a result of a workplace environment that's gotten so bad, you'd rather just risk going it on your own as a freelancer.
I'm not so sure?
For example, I work for a company that employs maybe 100 full-time people, but also keeps about 200 additional freelancers on a list of people they use on a contract basis for projects. Some of these folks were former employees who decided on their own to go freelance.
Having worked with a number of them over the years, I think it's a mixed bag. You've got the people who happily gave up a "stable job" with a regular salary and benefits for the contract work, because they're really good at what they do. They weren't worried about having enough work to make ends meet. In fact, they make a lot more money as a freelancer and can pick and choose what they'd prefer to do instead of have a project dictated to them as their sole job.
On the other hand? I've also spoken to a number of these freelancers who I'm really unimpressed with. They don't seem to know their way around the technologies they're supposed to be getting paid to work with, and some of them just have bad attitudes in general. I'm sure in at least some of those cases, they couldn't keep a full-time job for too long. Maybe they're good at a few specific things and that's why our company keeps them on their list of folks they use? But they're probably not a good idea to hire full-time.
I agree that "job security" isn't as much of a thing as it used to be, but that's been the case since I first entered the job market, decades ago! It's been clear to me that my parents had a level of job security that just doesn't exist for my generation, or for any of them that have come after me. Businesses today are just trying to be as efficient as possible, and technology helps automate away some of the job positions people once held where they really didn't contribute a whole lot. These days, you can't expect good pay and benefits unless you've got the knowledge and skills to warrant it -- and even then? If you work for a place that has a product or service that's not DIRECTLY tied to what you do for them, you're always at risk of losing your job through no fault of your own. (You might be amazing at database administration, but if the widget maker you work for has salespeople who slack off and don't get a decent number of widgets sold? You don't have a lot of job security there.)
When you look at the big auto makers like Chevy, they're cutting deals to partner up with ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft. That should tell you what their long-term goals are. They want to be the ones who own or exclusively sell fleets of driverless vehicles used in a future where people no longer own their own personal cars -- but simply call for one as needed, on a trip by trip basis.
Tesla, on the other hand, is still more firmly entrenched in the idea of making a desirable electric car with as much cool gadgetry on it as possible, so you'll WANT to proudly own one for yourself as a personal vehicle.
That means Tesla would be less interested in achieving fully self-driving vehicles. (Right now, that would probably constitute a bigger drain on their finances than it's worth - since their near-term customers are pretty ok with a car they can still drive when they want to, and which just uses automated features as kind of an "auto pilot" mode that expects the driver to cancel and intervene whenever necessary.)