One hour show in the 1950's, 52 minutes of content, 8 minutes of ads. One hour show today, 39 to 41 minutes of content, 19 to 21 minutes of ads.
Web sites at the start- a few relevant ads which were low bandwidth, didn't flash, weren't animated, and didn't interfere with your mouse and put invisible overlays over the screen to steal your mouseclick and shoot you off to some random site, combined with massive numbers of privacy invading cookies (i've stopped trying to load pages after the cookie and ad count passed 25 and the page still wasn't loading.
Web sites today- often the advertising content consumes 10x to over 500x the bandwidth of the content. Intrusive, and everything bad up above PLUS occasionally injects PUP's and virii into my computer. Dangerous and obnoxious. Often the ads have nothing to do with me OR they are creepily over relevant (having cookied me on some other site unrelated to the current one).
I wouldn't go to heroic efforts to block low bandwidth, relevant polite ads.
Now, it's reached a point, I simply don't load certain pages. If I can't get them to load within 30 seconds, I move on to some other less convoluted, less intrusive site.
This ignores the growing reality that today's farmers produce 100x the output that they did less than a century ago. Similar productivity gains elsewhere.
Once robots become ubiquitous we either have a mass dieoff or mass socialism.
Logic is not independent of emotion. Some people with damaged amygdalas can reason but can't weight any fact as more important than another.
Dale Carnegie taught that if you had a relationship with people, you would be better at reasoning in ways that benefited them and they would also reason in your favor.
Given the same facts, we still weight the importance of those facts from unimportant to highly important. It's possible that the legislators were corrupt and passed laws they knew to be unconstitutional and more likely that they had desire to pass the laws so they weighted the likelihood the laws were unconstitutional as low.
However, as a Twain said, it's hard to reason with someone when their salary is on the line. Major farming states means lots of farmers means votes, power, and future donations flow from pleasing farmers. The legislators are unduly influenced by these facts and make obviously unwise, dumb, unconstitutional decisions.
Facebook couldn't disable your tablet if you pissed them off.
I use google+ but I was was concerned about reports of banning people from google+ resulting in loss of access to other services. So I firewalled them and had multiple id's.
Capitalism works no better. There are MANY limits to capitalism on normal human behavior which are required for it to work well. And from 1980 to 2000 many of those limitations were removed because the concentration of wealth and power grew great enough to capture the government.
We are now in an oligarchy and the fed is trying desperately to avoid a crash worse than the great depression.
I think capitalism needs *less* ivory tower idealism but everything gets corrupted over time until it finally is collapsed and replaced with something different and our current iteration of capitalism is massively corrupted from "free" capitalism. If we had free capitalism, workers in the 1st world would benefit from being able to buy prices at market price instead of artificial regional prices. So sure, your wages would be under pressure, but you could buy blood pressure medicine for 10 cents a day like they do in india, and first run hollywood movies for an eighth the price like they do in china.
And the government wouldn't be setting interest rate at zero to prevent deflation. Deflation should have been occuring in the u.s. for the last 16 years.
While I agree with parts of your argument, land lines are expensive more because they have millions of miles of physical wires to maintain. Cell towers do not have this burden.
Also, Cell phone service for any smart phone is MUCH more expensive than landlines now if you are single. It's sort of like "$100 for 4" or "$100 for 1".
That said, I use smartjack (flawlessly) over my internet. $19 a year. It's mainly a backup to find my cell phone and for extremely long gaming calls (can't get one player to use skype). I think the network effect for land lines is collapsing. Pretty soon it will be smarter to have a "land line" format phone that actually connects to a local cell tower (no lines to maintain, install, etc.).
But it occurs to me that as long as they have DSL cable service, the lines will be there anyway. So maybe the network effect won't be lost. not sure. I haven't been a landline customer for 3 years.
Also, Fukushima is only rendering about 500sq miles uninhabitable for (currently optimistically estimated) 25 years while Chernobyl is about 900sq miles for over 25 years so far. It won't return to average radiation levels for over 20,000 years. You can live there now... if you don't want to have children and accept a higher risk of cancer. About 600 elderly live there now. The animals in the area have mutations, stillbirths, etc. But, those that survive handle the radiation better as time goes on and thrive from the lack of human predation and habitat destruction.
The Chernobyl radiation area 's sort of butterfly shaped tho and due to wind pattern there is a second 'wing' / exclusion area which is also uninhabitable of similar size- so about 1800sq miles total.
China, and the chinese, have a massive superiority complex laid over a very deep inferiority complex stemming from the 1800s all the way to the 1940s.
Until that gets resolved, they are more dangerous than average. They have a chip on their shoulder and have something to "prove" combined with a sense of manifest destiny.
Their military spending is much less BUT their labor costs are much less so their spending is much higher than it looks like given the raw numbers. Effectively its 3 to 4 times as large.
Hopefully they transition to a truly confident nation and resolve their issues. Then there is still "average" danger. Any group of people can go apeshit on other groups of people when they think they are more powerful. It's happened over and over.
Autonomous rates will be $400 cheaper when you first get it. And after a few years it will be the same price unless you change companies.
I'm changing back to allstate from 21st century this year. Allstate wanted to charge me $1200 a year-- 21st century was $700. Now 21st century is closing on $1000 and allstate has offered me $1000, $900, $800,and now $700 to switch back over the last 4 years.
Rents have risen by 400% in Texas (and similar top states) in the last 15 years.
Housing has risen by 500% during the same period. But... if you owned your house, your value rose but your payments increased only by the tax increase. My house payment before i paid the house off in 2012, was $700 a month. Total- including taxes. Now, it's $330 a month.
Once your house is paid off, property taxes, insurance, and repairs are approximately 1/3 of rental costs or new home costs.
I totally agree- it's right for you right now. But it's a terrible option for anyone who ever hopes to retire unless they are earning in the top 10% of all citizens.
Still, you want a paid for house by the time you reach retirement. Rent goes up much faster than property taxes and repair costs (esp with a home warranty).
I use a home warranty service. As long as you don't try to sign up and then get a repair higher than your annual premium right away they are pretty reasonable. And their repair people are REPAIR people which is nice. A feeling of comfort knowing my max bill will be $65 too. No phony recommendations "well this is so old, better we replace it for several thousand dollars!
And homes are tremendously overpriced due to low interest rates. Even when rates just return to 2% (and home loans to 6%), you could see homes lose 16% (or more) of their value.
On the flip side of this, there are many stations which have no conveniences and which have no operator 8 to 12 hours per day. I expect these are much more profitable than traditional stations.
They have controls in place that require executive approval of all changes. Any unapproved changes are a firing expense. So the little tuning changes we always used to do for "free" can't be done. Likewise, the changes won't be approved since by management point of view, there is no value to the activity since it is not a feature (this is true at small companies too- had a developer bend my ear on this issue literally today a few hours ago).
Be a man, in response to revealing our massively illegal behavior which you had no legal way to address and protecting most the citizens of this country (slightly) from our invasinos, we'll put him in a solitary cell for the rest of his life.
Just to make sure no one else ever makes the mistake of trying to protect the country from our illegal behavior.
There is no such thing as an idiot proof flat tax.
Businesses by their nature have very complicated taxes. We'll let them write off a $45,000 truck to deliver product but not a $45,000 mercedes (unless you are in the limo business in which case, you might be able to after all).
Wealthy people, by their nature, have very complicated taxes. Is this a business trip or a holiday? Is this a business lunch or a personal lunch?
We can reduce the loopholes (temporarily) but corporate bought representatives will put them right back in. The flat tax by it's nature is either regressive OR has a massive deduction for everyone which means many of the poorest won't be paying taxes (just like now).
Each share of the national spending last year was $10,000 for every baby, child, senior, and working person. It's about $20,000 if you restrict it to adults who have earnings. That means- unless people can earn well over $20,000 there is not point in working under a totally flat tax. Which means it must be progressive (you have to take money from those who have money to pay).
AND it ignores state and local taxes which are currently higher on the poor than the middle class and higher on the middle class than on the wealthy in every single state. In some states, it's 12.9% for the poorest but under 1% for the wealthiest.
It's pretty simple. Do you want to vote for corporate sock puppet #1 or #2?
But the republican sock puppets are very much against my self interest. The party has drifted a long way from when I voted for three republican presidents in a row.
While the right calls Obama a socialist, he's really a capitalist corporate servant.
To be fair, the system has been so rigged at this point, that unless you are an independently wealthy socialist, you are going to have to sell out to capitalistic corporate interests to be elected.
And that's why we vote. To come to a democratic, collective decision.
And each of us tolerates the decisions we were in the minority on.
I don't like subsidizing sports stadiums but they got 51% of the vote.
I voted republican for Reagan and Bush Sr. and then the republicans went bat shit crazy (measurably so on 528.com) with reagan republicans having a '32" conservative ranking while Ted Cruz has a over 60 ( I think it's "68"). Democrats have stayed about the same in the 20's.
So now, I vote democratic. I don't like all they stand for but no way I'm voting for the extreme right wing conservative party the republicans have become. But... if 51% of the country elects a republican candidate then I'll tolerate it for 4 years because that's the collective decision of our democratic republic.
Aye, and if you count the two trillion dollars we spent to protect oil fields, the subsidies are much higher than people realize for oil.
Imagine... if we didn't do that. And oil went to $300 a barrel. We would have automatically gone to less expensive cars, solar would have surged into demand along with other alternative energies. We might have even worked on smaller, safer self contained- no human intervention nuclear power.
But since we engage in massive subsidies for sports stadiums, oil companies, banking companies-- I think the benefit (much lower cost solar panels) of subsidizing the early expensive iterations of solar panels will be a good bang for the buck. And reduce our need to spend two trillion dollars again in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
One hour show in the 1950's, 52 minutes of content, 8 minutes of ads.
One hour show today, 39 to 41 minutes of content, 19 to 21 minutes of ads.
Web sites at the start- a few relevant ads which were low bandwidth, didn't flash, weren't animated, and didn't interfere with your mouse and put invisible overlays over the screen to steal your mouseclick and shoot you off to some random site, combined with massive numbers of privacy invading cookies (i've stopped trying to load pages after the cookie and ad count passed 25 and the page still wasn't loading.
Web sites today- often the advertising content consumes 10x to over 500x the bandwidth of the content. Intrusive, and everything bad up above PLUS occasionally injects PUP's and virii into my computer. Dangerous and obnoxious. Often the ads have nothing to do with me OR they are creepily over relevant (having cookied me on some other site unrelated to the current one).
I wouldn't go to heroic efforts to block low bandwidth, relevant polite ads.
Now, it's reached a point, I simply don't load certain pages. If I can't get them to load within 30 seconds, I move on to some other less convoluted, less intrusive site.
This ignores the growing reality that today's farmers produce 100x the output that they did less than a century ago.
Similar productivity gains elsewhere.
Once robots become ubiquitous we either have a mass dieoff or mass socialism.
I simply choose not to watch them "now".
For example, I can skip a year and then watch everything I missed with the included on demand services.
Or buy them on DVD-- cheaper than paying for cable in many cases.
Logic is not independent of emotion. Some people with damaged amygdalas can reason but can't weight any fact as more important than another.
Dale Carnegie taught that if you had a relationship with people, you would be better at reasoning in ways that benefited them and they would also reason in your favor.
Given the same facts, we still weight the importance of those facts from unimportant to highly important. It's possible that the legislators were corrupt and passed laws they knew to be unconstitutional and more likely that they had desire to pass the laws so they weighted the likelihood the laws were unconstitutional as low.
However, as a Twain said, it's hard to reason with someone when their salary is on the line. Major farming states means lots of farmers means votes, power, and future donations flow from pleasing farmers. The legislators are unduly influenced by these facts and make obviously unwise, dumb, unconstitutional decisions.
Might not be bad as a kids film.
That entire series had recurring villains too so you have a little bit to work with.
I just can't see anything compelling for adults.
If Marvel does it, it will be done well. Otherwise, it's going to be crap.
I've played since Greyhawk was in 3rd edition (1977ish). It's a great game, but it has a lot of artificiality to it because of the Vance material.
They need good characters. It would be better to tell the story of Drizzt or some other character with a lot of storyline than to make a "dnd" movie.
Speaking as a DND fan who still runs for 12 players in the level 20 range.
Facebook couldn't disable your tablet if you pissed them off.
I use google+ but I was was concerned about reports of banning people from google+ resulting in loss of access to other services. So I firewalled them and had multiple id's.
Capitalism works no better. There are MANY limits to capitalism on normal human behavior which are required for it to work well. And from 1980 to 2000 many of those limitations were removed because the concentration of wealth and power grew great enough to capture the government.
We are now in an oligarchy and the fed is trying desperately to avoid a crash worse than the great depression.
I think capitalism needs *less* ivory tower idealism but everything gets corrupted over time until it finally is collapsed and replaced with something different and our current iteration of capitalism is massively corrupted from "free" capitalism. If we had free capitalism, workers in the 1st world would benefit from being able to buy prices at market price instead of artificial regional prices. So sure, your wages would be under pressure, but you could buy blood pressure medicine for 10 cents a day like they do in india, and first run hollywood movies for an eighth the price like they do in china.
And the government wouldn't be setting interest rate at zero to prevent deflation. Deflation should have been occuring in the u.s. for the last 16 years.
While I agree with parts of your argument, land lines are expensive more because they have millions of miles of physical wires to maintain. Cell towers do not have this burden.
Also, Cell phone service for any smart phone is MUCH more expensive than landlines now if you are single. It's sort of like "$100 for 4" or "$100 for 1".
That said, I use smartjack (flawlessly) over my internet. $19 a year. It's mainly a backup to find my cell phone and for extremely long gaming calls (can't get one player to use skype). I think the network effect for land lines is collapsing.
Pretty soon it will be smarter to have a "land line" format phone that actually connects to a local cell tower (no lines to maintain, install, etc.).
But it occurs to me that as long as they have DSL cable service, the lines will be there anyway. So maybe the network effect won't be lost. not sure. I haven't been a landline customer for 3 years.
Also, Fukushima is only rendering about 500sq miles uninhabitable for (currently optimistically estimated) 25 years while Chernobyl is about 900sq miles for over 25 years so far. It won't return to average radiation levels for over 20,000 years. You can live there now... if you don't want to have children and accept a higher risk of cancer. About 600 elderly live there now. The animals in the area have mutations, stillbirths, etc. But, those that survive handle the radiation better as time goes on and thrive from the lack of human predation and habitat destruction.
The Chernobyl radiation area 's sort of butterfly shaped tho and due to wind pattern there is a second 'wing' / exclusion area which is also uninhabitable of similar size- so about 1800sq miles total.
http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/...
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
China, and the chinese, have a massive superiority complex laid over a very deep inferiority complex stemming from the 1800s all the way to the 1940s.
Until that gets resolved, they are more dangerous than average. They have a chip on their shoulder and have something to "prove" combined with a sense of manifest destiny.
Their military spending is much less BUT their labor costs are much less so their spending is much higher than it looks like given the raw numbers. Effectively its 3 to 4 times as large.
Hopefully they transition to a truly confident nation and resolve their issues. Then there is still "average" danger. Any group of people can go apeshit on other groups of people when they think they are more powerful. It's happened over and over.
Good to know!
Autonomous rates will be $400 cheaper when you first get it. And after a few years it will be the same price unless you change companies.
I'm changing back to allstate from 21st century this year. Allstate wanted to charge me $1200 a year-- 21st century was $700. Now 21st century is closing on $1000 and allstate has offered me $1000, $900, $800,and now $700 to switch back over the last 4 years.
Rents have risen by 400% in Texas (and similar top states) in the last 15 years.
Housing has risen by 500% during the same period. But... if you owned your house, your value rose but your payments increased only by the tax increase. My house payment before i paid the house off in 2012, was $700 a month. Total- including taxes. Now, it's $330 a month.
Once your house is paid off, property taxes, insurance, and repairs are approximately 1/3 of rental costs or new home costs.
I totally agree- it's right for you right now. But it's a terrible option for anyone who ever hopes to retire unless they are earning in the top 10% of all citizens.
Still, you want a paid for house by the time you reach retirement. Rent goes up much faster than property taxes and repair costs (esp with a home warranty).
The key is when you retire.
Rent goes up faster than retirement income.
I use a home warranty service. As long as you don't try to sign up and then get a repair higher than your annual premium right away they are pretty reasonable. And their repair people are REPAIR people which is nice. A feeling of comfort knowing my max bill will be $65 too. No phony recommendations "well this is so old, better we replace it for several thousand dollars!
And predictable costs which is good when retired.
And homes are tremendously overpriced due to low interest rates. Even when rates just return to 2% (and home loans to 6%), you could see homes lose 16% (or more) of their value.
On the flip side of this, there are many stations which have no conveniences and which have no operator 8 to 12 hours per day. I expect these are much more profitable than traditional stations.
They have controls in place that require executive approval of all changes. Any unapproved changes are a firing expense. So the little tuning changes we always used to do for "free" can't be done. Likewise, the changes won't be approved since by management point of view, there is no value to the activity since it is not a feature (this is true at small companies too- had a developer bend my ear on this issue literally today a few hours ago).
Be a man, in response to revealing our massively illegal behavior which you had no legal way to address and protecting most the citizens of this country (slightly) from our invasinos, we'll put him in a solitary cell for the rest of his life.
Just to make sure no one else ever makes the mistake of trying to protect the country from our illegal behavior.
There is no such thing as an idiot proof flat tax.
Businesses by their nature have very complicated taxes. We'll let them write off a $45,000 truck to deliver product but not a $45,000 mercedes (unless you are in the limo business in which case, you might be able to after all).
Wealthy people, by their nature, have very complicated taxes. Is this a business trip or a holiday? Is this a business lunch or a personal lunch?
We can reduce the loopholes (temporarily) but corporate bought representatives will put them right back in. The flat tax by it's nature is either regressive OR has a massive deduction for everyone which means many of the poorest won't be paying taxes (just like now).
Each share of the national spending last year was $10,000 for every baby, child, senior, and working person. It's about $20,000 if you restrict it to adults who have earnings. That means- unless people can earn well over $20,000 there is not point in working under a totally flat tax. Which means it must be progressive (you have to take money from those who have money to pay).
AND it ignores state and local taxes which are currently higher on the poor than the middle class and higher on the middle class than on the wealthy in every single state. In some states, it's 12.9% for the poorest but under 1% for the wealthiest.
It's pretty simple. Do you want to vote for corporate sock puppet #1 or #2?
But the republican sock puppets are very much against my self interest. The party has drifted a long way from when I voted for three republican presidents in a row.
While the right calls Obama a socialist, he's really a capitalist corporate servant.
To be fair, the system has been so rigged at this point, that unless you are an independently wealthy socialist, you are going to have to sell out to capitalistic corporate interests to be elected.
And that's why we vote. To come to a democratic, collective decision.
And each of us tolerates the decisions we were in the minority on.
I don't like subsidizing sports stadiums but they got 51% of the vote.
I voted republican for Reagan and Bush Sr. and then the republicans went bat shit crazy (measurably so on 528.com) with reagan republicans having a '32" conservative ranking while Ted Cruz has a over 60 ( I think it's "68"). Democrats have stayed about the same in the 20's.
So now, I vote democratic. I don't like all they stand for but no way I'm voting for the extreme right wing conservative party the republicans have become. But... if 51% of the country elects a republican candidate then I'll tolerate it for 4 years because that's the collective decision of our democratic republic.
Aye, and if you count the two trillion dollars we spent to protect oil fields, the subsidies are much higher than people realize for oil.
Imagine ... if we didn't do that. And oil went to $300 a barrel. We would have automatically gone to less expensive cars, solar would have surged into demand along with other alternative energies. We might have even worked on smaller, safer self contained- no human intervention nuclear power.
But since we engage in massive subsidies for sports stadiums, oil companies, banking companies-- I think the benefit (much lower cost solar panels) of subsidizing the early expensive iterations of solar panels will be a good bang for the buck. And reduce our need to spend two trillion dollars again in the future.