It is amazing to me that Pakistan has a lower population density than a lot of countries like Germany. It is much higher density than the US as you surmised.
It is amazing how close any busy place is to utter dysfunction, even without mass panic making things even worse. I can only imagine what a real disaster would be like.
The population of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen total about the same as the USA. There are literally hundreds of thousands of internet cafes. I'm sure the CIA is trying, and they did find Osama, but it is a huge difficult task.
My father grew up in a small mining town in Utah. His family was not Mormon, and it made life much harder than it needed to be. My grandpa, uncle, and father were passed over for promotion, harassed, excluded, refused service at businesses, charged extortionate prices for services such as funerals, contractors, automobile repair, etc.
They were pressured to join the Mormon church. The relatives I have who stayed there all caved in and now toe the line. They gripe and mock in private, but they go to meetings and tithe.
It is better in SLC (or as I've seen it humorously abbreviated SL,UT) - it is easy for tourists or short term visitors to forget they are in the beehive state. Things take a darker turn if you are perceived as wanting to become a permanent resident.
We could send up a crew of young people to have wacky adventures and fixate on each other. In their spare time they could clean up junk manually. I like the manga/anime that deals with this, Planetes
Google uses sophisticated dedupe technology all over the place. It comes in handy when storing similar emails, photos, etc. It is sad how many people have the same data stored.
I stopped reading USENET regularly when the spam got to be too horrible. My killfile was enormous and I would add hundreds if not thousands of entries to it daily, but the spammers were more patient than I was. This was sometime in the late 90s IIRC.
That makes sense, thank you for explaining the problem. I think these problems tend to occur gradually, making assumptions and compromises that were reasonable at the time unworkable as more road, traffic, trains are added over the years. I've seen heavy rail areas with underground or elevated pedestrian crossings which would address part of the problem.
I don't know the political situation in the bay area, but in most of the US there is an irrational hatred of rail that results in strong opposition to any investment in improvements.
You make some good points. I don't understand your impatience with Caltrain grade level crossings, though. Where I live there are freight trains that take up to 10 minutes to pass (multi hundred car coal loads) and these are a big inconvenience. Light rail crossings are usually less than one minute, about the same as a pretty quick traffic light.
I would guess that my address is in my car usually, if not on my insurance/registration/tire receipt/etc. then on some stray mail. I expect that is the case for most people. Barring that, a thief could look up the owner by their VIN or plate, then check property records to determine what house(s) they own.
That's actually a good idea if any thieves are reading this. Go to a theater or sporting event and pick out a nice looking car as it arrives. Look up the owner by plate number or VIN, check property records to see if you can figure out their primary residence. You know they won't be around for a while, so go rob their house.
I don't think avoiding programming your GPS gives you any extra security. It does make your GPS more annoying to use every time, with 100% certainty. Anyone who worries about being burgled should buy good insurance and try to relax.
I think the fear is someone stealing your vehicle or GPS while you are away from home and immediately going to your house. While you are dealing with the police they are robbing your house, confident that you aren't going to come home soon.
It seems to me most people think about crime more than is warranted. In my city, I am approximately 5x more likely to be in a car wreck than to be victim of a theft. I don't worry needlessly about car crashes, so theft is even further from my thoughts.
I guess I should call them. I hesitate to allow them to open a new card for me because I know part of the credit score formula is average age of accounts and a new card would hit that with a double whammy. I already took a big credit score hit when Chase closed my 10 year old credit card without notice for inactivity. That alone dropped my score 16 points.
Interest rates on credit cards are weird. I have excellent credit, always pay everything on time, have zero revolving balance, own a house I can easily make the payments on.
All of my credit cards have raised my rates to 24.99%. I don't know why, and if it mattered I could probably call them and have it changed. Perhaps they are angry that I never give them finance charges, just the usurious merchant fees minus their cash back.
Depends on the car. I like the Toyota Echo (cheap, >35mpg, surprisingly good headroom) and it was always worth roughly the same new and used. I had one get totaled by a texting driver and was shocked at the market for new vs. used. I ended up with a used one because I couldn't find a new one with the features I wanted/didn't want.
The Yaris, (replacement for the Echo) seemed to have a similar situation when I last checked.
I have bought lots of huge heavy items at the self-checkout at both Lowe's and Home Depot in the past several months and I figured out a system that makes it easier. I scan and bag any light items, then walk over to the human station. Usually the person is standing there ready, sometimes if they are on the ball they are already headed over to help me. Either way, I say I have some heavy items and they scan them with a wireless barcode scanner, mark them as skipped for bagging, and I can pay. I've bought hundreds of heavy and bulky items and my most impressive purchase was 2 flatbed wagons stacked 5' high. I had a friend helping that time, but checkout was a breeze.
GMC had those irritating ads for "Professional Grade" trucks. They would load the trucks as if they were a dump truck or have them tow an unreasonable load. All of the ads were probable warranty-voiding abuses. I found some amusement in them because I knew that most buyers would rather die than let their $50k truck actually do some work.
Why do you assume the merger falls apart? As far as I can tell, it has already happened It affects me, and I am sad about it. Mergers are never done to improve things for the customer.
I stopped using inkjet about 10 years ago because I don't print very often. The couple times a month I would print seemed to piss off my printer. It would go through one or more cleaning cycles, then grudgingly print a bad-looking page that would run if it got the slightest bit damp. It seemed that I was buying new cartridges more often than my page count would justify, so I kept careful track. I gave up after realizing that I got less than 30 pages from a cartridge that should have given me several hundred pages.
Has that improved in your opinion? I am curious what model has $2 ink available, btw.
There is no such thing as a solvent that can dissolve anything. That isn't what is meant by the term. Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. That is all that is meant by the term Universal Solvent. Any intro to Chemistry course should mention this.
There are a few major reasons the highway system is deteriorating: The federal highway tax hasn't been raised in nearly 20 years and is a fixed amount per gallon. Gasoline has tripled in price but the tax is the same.
Raw materials such as concrete, steel, asphalt, fuel, and labor have increased several hundred percent. There is a lack of accountability from contractors. Partly corruption, partly incompetence, partly bureaucratic inertia, it results in shoddy overbudget work in too many cases.
These are tough problems to solve. Localities are oddly protective of their dysfunctional transportation infrastructure industry, opposition to tax increase, even to keep pace with the cost of materials, is fierce, and much of the interstate system is reaching the end of its design life at the same time.
I don't see any easy answers. Perhaps high profile disasters will spur investment, but the sad truth is we all pay every day for the poor state of our roads in increased maintenance cost, accidents, impaired fuel economy, higher cost to transport goods, etc.
My friends in the refining business attribute the changing relative price of diesel and gasoline in the US to several factors:
Refineries are hard to build or reconfigure for various reasons.
Crude feedstock is whatever it is, and gives a certain ratio of fuels most efficiently.
Demand for heavy fuels has increased remarkably due in large part to increased global trade.
Changes in diesel purity standards have made diesel more costly to refine.
Lots of people in the refining industry are trying to increase capacity and decrease costs of diesel refining. It is difficult and expensive to increase supply and many refiners are wary of huge investments given the price volatility of refined petroleum products.
Slashdot Mirror
You made me curious and I found a list
It is amazing to me that Pakistan has a lower population density than a lot of countries like Germany. It is much higher density than the US as you surmised.
It is amazing how close any busy place is to utter dysfunction, even without mass panic making things even worse. I can only imagine what a real disaster would be like.
The population of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen total about the same as the USA. There are literally hundreds of thousands of internet cafes. I'm sure the CIA is trying, and they did find Osama, but it is a huge difficult task.
500 points!
My father grew up in a small mining town in Utah. His family was not Mormon, and it made life much harder than it needed to be. My grandpa, uncle, and father were passed over for promotion, harassed, excluded, refused service at businesses, charged extortionate prices for services such as funerals, contractors, automobile repair, etc.
They were pressured to join the Mormon church. The relatives I have who stayed there all caved in and now toe the line. They gripe and mock in private, but they go to meetings and tithe.
It is better in SLC (or as I've seen it humorously abbreviated SL,UT) - it is easy for tourists or short term visitors to forget they are in the beehive state. Things take a darker turn if you are perceived as wanting to become a permanent resident.
We could send up a crew of young people to have wacky adventures and fixate on each other. In their spare time they could clean up junk manually. I like the manga/anime that deals with this, Planetes
Google uses sophisticated dedupe technology all over the place. It comes in handy when storing similar emails, photos, etc. It is sad how many people have the same data stored.
I stopped reading USENET regularly when the spam got to be too horrible. My killfile was enormous and I would add hundreds if not thousands of entries to it daily, but the spammers were more patient than I was. This was sometime in the late 90s IIRC.
That makes sense, thank you for explaining the problem. I think these problems tend to occur gradually, making assumptions and compromises that were reasonable at the time unworkable as more road, traffic, trains are added over the years. I've seen heavy rail areas with underground or elevated pedestrian crossings which would address part of the problem.
I don't know the political situation in the bay area, but in most of the US there is an irrational hatred of rail that results in strong opposition to any investment in improvements.
You make some good points. I don't understand your impatience with Caltrain grade level crossings, though. Where I live there are freight trains that take up to 10 minutes to pass (multi hundred car coal loads) and these are a big inconvenience. Light rail crossings are usually less than one minute, about the same as a pretty quick traffic light.
I would guess that my address is in my car usually, if not on my insurance/registration/tire receipt/etc. then on some stray mail. I expect that is the case for most people. Barring that, a thief could look up the owner by their VIN or plate, then check property records to determine what house(s) they own.
That's actually a good idea if any thieves are reading this. Go to a theater or sporting event and pick out a nice looking car as it arrives. Look up the owner by plate number or VIN, check property records to see if you can figure out their primary residence. You know they won't be around for a while, so go rob their house.
I don't think avoiding programming your GPS gives you any extra security. It does make your GPS more annoying to use every time, with 100% certainty. Anyone who worries about being burgled should buy good insurance and try to relax.
I think the fear is someone stealing your vehicle or GPS while you are away from home and immediately going to your house. While you are dealing with the police they are robbing your house, confident that you aren't going to come home soon.
It seems to me most people think about crime more than is warranted. In my city, I am approximately 5x more likely to be in a car wreck than to be victim of a theft. I don't worry needlessly about car crashes, so theft is even further from my thoughts.
I guess I should call them. I hesitate to allow them to open a new card for me because I know part of the credit score formula is average age of accounts and a new card would hit that with a double whammy. I already took a big credit score hit when Chase closed my 10 year old credit card without notice for inactivity. That alone dropped my score 16 points.
Interest rates on credit cards are weird. I have excellent credit, always pay everything on time, have zero revolving balance, own a house I can easily make the payments on.
All of my credit cards have raised my rates to 24.99%. I don't know why, and if it mattered I could probably call them and have it changed. Perhaps they are angry that I never give them finance charges, just the usurious merchant fees minus their cash back.
Depends on the car. I like the Toyota Echo (cheap, >35mpg, surprisingly good headroom) and it was always worth roughly the same new and used. I had one get totaled by a texting driver and was shocked at the market for new vs. used. I ended up with a used one because I couldn't find a new one with the features I wanted/didn't want.
The Yaris, (replacement for the Echo) seemed to have a similar situation when I last checked.
I have bought lots of huge heavy items at the self-checkout at both Lowe's and Home Depot in the past several months and I figured out a system that makes it easier. I scan and bag any light items, then walk over to the human station. Usually the person is standing there ready, sometimes if they are on the ball they are already headed over to help me. Either way, I say I have some heavy items and they scan them with a wireless barcode scanner, mark them as skipped for bagging, and I can pay. I've bought hundreds of heavy and bulky items and my most impressive purchase was 2 flatbed wagons stacked 5' high. I had a friend helping that time, but checkout was a breeze.
Maybe they use a land line. I've noticed my friends who use land lines (small sample size) have high accuracy rates relative to average.
GMC had those irritating ads for "Professional Grade" trucks. They would load the trucks as if they were a dump truck or have them tow an unreasonable load. All of the ads were probable warranty-voiding abuses. I found some amusement in them because I knew that most buyers would rather die than let their $50k truck actually do some work.
Leprosy is easily cured. AIDS is not.
Why do you assume the merger falls apart? As far as I can tell, it has already happened
It affects me, and I am sad about it. Mergers are never done to improve things for the customer.
I stopped using inkjet about 10 years ago because I don't print very often. The couple times a month I would print seemed to piss off my printer. It would go through one or more cleaning cycles, then grudgingly print a bad-looking page that would run if it got the slightest bit damp. It seemed that I was buying new cartridges more often than my page count would justify, so I kept careful track. I gave up after realizing that I got less than 30 pages from a cartridge that should have given me several hundred pages.
Has that improved in your opinion? I am curious what model has $2 ink available, btw.
There is no such thing as a solvent that can dissolve anything. That isn't what is meant by the term. Water dissolves more substances than any other liquid. That is all that is meant by the term Universal Solvent. Any intro to Chemistry course should mention this.
Thank you for not editing the page, btw.
I love the icon. Traffic cone indicating permanent state of "under construction."
There are a few major reasons the highway system is deteriorating:
The federal highway tax hasn't been raised in nearly 20 years and is a fixed amount per gallon. Gasoline has tripled in price but the tax is the same.
Raw materials such as concrete, steel, asphalt, fuel, and labor have increased several hundred percent.
There is a lack of accountability from contractors. Partly corruption, partly incompetence, partly bureaucratic inertia, it results in shoddy overbudget work in too many cases.
These are tough problems to solve. Localities are oddly protective of their dysfunctional transportation infrastructure industry, opposition to tax increase, even to keep pace with the cost of materials, is fierce, and much of the interstate system is reaching the end of its design life at the same time.
I don't see any easy answers. Perhaps high profile disasters will spur investment, but the sad truth is we all pay every day for the poor state of our roads in increased maintenance cost, accidents, impaired fuel economy, higher cost to transport goods, etc.
My friends in the refining business attribute the changing relative price of diesel and gasoline in the US to several factors:
Refineries are hard to build or reconfigure for various reasons.
Crude feedstock is whatever it is, and gives a certain ratio of fuels most efficiently.
Demand for heavy fuels has increased remarkably due in large part to increased global trade.
Changes in diesel purity standards have made diesel more costly to refine.
Lots of people in the refining industry are trying to increase capacity and decrease costs of diesel refining. It is difficult and expensive to increase supply and many refiners are wary of huge investments given the price volatility of refined petroleum products.
It wasn't just the Soviets that put nuclear reactors in orbit, check out the US effort
It malfunctioned and later fell apart.