Except for some strange reason, Americans in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire are less likely to kill people -- not just less likely than other Americans, but even less likely than the average Canadian, or even many Europeans.
No -- Webster and Bloomberg are very much into restricting anybody's access to guns. Unless you subscribe to the theory that by making all firearms expensive and difficult to obtain or own (unless you are rich or politically connected) is worthwhile because it also happens to deny access for "crazies", then that is not Daniel Webster's goal.
For example, under Giuliani/Bloomberg very few people obtained handgun carry permits in New York City, primarily the rich and famous. Favored people included Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, but few if any of the "little people" who might actually need to protect themselves. Like his billionaire patron Michael R. Bloomberg, Daniel Webster is a strong proponent of "permit to purchase" and may issue carry laws, both of which have a disparate impact on minorities and serve more to ensure that only the "right people" (the rich, famous, and other political contributors) are able to exercise their rights.
Going back to the original story, Bindu Kalesan herself has stated "the laws would result in fewer guns",the study wasn't designed to distinguish how policy contributions to suicide or homicide deaths. She also says her study does not account for how restricting firearms possession by the law-abiding changes the rate of assault, rape, or other violent crimes by the non-law-abiding, only looks at the impact of changes to state gun laws on overall firearms deaths.
There is almost no funding for gun violence research because the gun lobby knows it will produce more papers like this one.
Hopefully that will change, but i think the U.S. will switch to the metric system first.
So the $16 Million in research funding by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the Joyce and MacArthur Foundations is almost no funding? Prior to the Dickey Amendment, only about 3 percent of papers on gun control received US government funding. There is still plenty of "funding for gun violence research", all that changed is that CDC usage of tax money was restricted after the CDC spent millions on gun control propaganda "studies" with preordained outcomes to support a political push for more gun control laws. This was never a ban on research or statistics collection.
Mark Rosenberg, Director the CDC National Center of Injury Prevention branch stated on record that he “envisions a long term campaign, similar to tobacco use and auto safety, to convince Americans that guns are, first and foremost, a public health menace.” (Rolling Stone, 1993), and also “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol — cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly — and banned.” (Washington Post,10/19/1994). Does this sound like unbiased scientific research, or like a politician?
If anything, the publication and funding of actual "gun violence research" has increased since the Dickey Amendment, it's just that the CDC is no longer allowed to hand out taxpayer money to their friends to help push a political agenda.
Gosh, I'd love to find the link and read the whole context of your Daniel Webster quote. I tried to googled it, and my meager search skills were unable to locate the source.
And, given the stuff Webster has written elsewhere about the public health approach, see http://annals.org/article.aspx... this quote doesn't really sound like Webster...
As you've noted, Mr. Webster runs the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research; his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research, so when Daniel Webster comes out and says a pro-gun-control study is flawed you know it has got to have some serious problems!
Looks like the majority of the Daniel Webster quotes indicting Bindu Kalesan's study are from an email exchange with the Washington Post.
If you don't want to root your device and don't want to tunnel all your traffic to a VPN server (adds latency) , you can use one of the Android "NoRoot" firewalls that routes app traffic through a local VPN for inspection and filtering. This uses more CPU and battery, but all protection is done within your mobile device. It takes a lot of manual effort to build a policy that blocks undesirable traffic and still lets apps work.
You can tunnel your traffic to a commercial VPN provider, but now you are trusting them to maintain performance and not invade your privacy, and they won't have any visibility to the contents of traffic that is inside SSL/TLS encryption, for better or for worse (e.g. cannot inspect Android apps downloaded as APKs from SSL websites).
Better yet, you can root the device and add your own Certificate Authority and firewall settings. Now you can use your own VPN to ensure all traffic from all applications goes to a remote VPN headend for inspection/modification, even traffic the device thinks is encrypted with SSL. If you have many users going through the same VPN, you can do things with packets and headers to make it difficult for CDNs and ad networks to identify individual users who are all behind the same gateway.
If you have more time than money, you can build up a VPN headend with open source tools (e.g. Squid+SSLbump)., and write policy to block traffic that doesn't meet your security policy, and to log what your device tries to send. You can use header modification to strip out identifying information and cookies.
If you are a business or otherwise have more money than time, the expensive approach is to use a commercial firewall appliance that has a client VPN and URL filtering service (e.g. Checkpoint, Palo Alto, Juniper, F5, etc). You set up the VPN to send all your mobile device traffic through the firewall, and use firewall policy to decrypt SSL, inspect APKs, and block ads. This solution is very effective at blocking ads and undesirable network traffic, and can often detect or block malicious APKs and other attacks.
Three people, working independently, made errors in programming and website updates which nearly bankrupted United Airlines when the errors came together on September 8, 2008. "Shares fell to about $3 from more than $12 in less than an hour, wiping more than $1 billion in value before trading was halted.".
When the market first opened that Monday, United Airlines was trading at over $12 a share. The public summary of the events state that Chicago Tribune re-indexed their archives, resulting in a six-year-old story about United Airlines bankruptcy to be re-posted on the Web site of The South Florida Sun-Sentinel without a date. Google picked up the "new" article, saw the missing date, and inserted the current date of 9/8/2008. That article was picked up by a research firm, Income Securities Advisers, which then posted a link to it on a page on Bloomberg News, which sent a news alert based on the old article. The news alert triggered automated trading systems to issue sell orders. Nasdaq finally ordered a halt in trading the stock at 11:08 a.m, but the damage had been done, United Airlines Stock had lost 75% of it's value.
I was hired as a firewall admin at an online trading company, then quickly discovered the director of IT was insane, but kept management happy because he made his numbers by keeping his team constantly understaffed; I was told to work on not just servers, but installing Sun servers in racks, running cable, and fixing just about anything plugged into the network.
I made the mistake of showing competence in networking, so was asked to "expand my role" (new title, same salary), and start working on the switches themselves, including executing an "upgrade" to stacked HP ProCurve switches with VLANs (replacing a hodge-podge of random manufacturer switches). The actual upgrade went fine, basic testing (ping) showed everything stable, but as soon as trading opened the next day, everything went to hell, performance dropped through the floor and customers started calling in about trades timing out. Long story short, turned out that Solaris HME cards were unable to negotiate properly with ProCurve switches, half the machines were dropping packets due to duplex mismatches. There's a reason people call the Sun interface cards "Happy Meal Ethernet"
Cost the company approximately $180,000 in direct and customer exodus losses, and was likely a factor in their eventual collapse. I wasn't fired, but management never trusted me again so I saw the writing on the wall, and quit to do consulting work at a (also doomed) dot-com online supermarket.
On the upside, I was able to make thousands in consulting income from installing those same "lock speed to 100 and duplex to full" Solaris scripts on servers for various customers who also had performance issues plugging in Sun servers to cheap switches.
Yes, but aren't the steam generators closed loop? If you keep blowing out steam, you need to replenish water. That water must be stored on board or extracted from the sea water. I doubt that it is a good idea to use sea water in the generator; higher corrosion and all that jazz. The advantage of an electric system, is no consumables wasted, save fuel for the initial generation, which you would have used anyway.
It's right in the summary, "...algorithm known as the De Bruijn sequence", named after the Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn, The algorithm is interesting and actually has a number of other practical applications beyond breaking weak codes.
I think you're missing the "tedious, repetitive, and unenjoyable" factors in most definitions of "grinding". Not every game is grinding, not every game makes you repeat a boring task just to gain enough in-game currency/status/whuffie to proceed to something interesting.
I suspect that the "drone delivery zone" will be similar to the "same day" delivery zone, which means neither my home nor my office will ever be within operating range. So no, I am not excited about this.
How will Amazon handle the theft problem? Why just steal a package of unknown value when you can stuff the drone into a steel box and get a pile of expensive parts along with whatever bonus you find in the package being delivered.
Will Amazon be forced to redline neighborhoods that have a high attrition rate?
I just read the entire article and the author forgot one other solution: the British solution Instead of putting the burden on app developers to include backdoors, or on Google to block apps that don't, put the burden on end users to turn over their keys to police when asked. I'm not saying I like this solution, but it is a solution the author of the article didn't consider. If you make the sentence for non-cooperation long enough, it doesn't really matter if the police find what they're looking for: they can just lock you up for not handing over the keys.
Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacations than most others in the developed world.
We shoot each other more often as well.
With the possible exception of Postal workers (sorry, stereotyping) people who work 60-hour weeks and take no vacations are unlikely to be the ones doing the shooting -- they are doing the work of two people, and that other guy, the guy whose job the over-achiever has eliminated, is more likely to one with time to spare to go out murdering.
As productivity increases, companies can get more done with fewer workers. Good for profit margins, not so good for unemployment rates.
This seems like an odd bug to have happen, how bad were the effects? Just 'weaker' randomness, or without randomdev_init_reader do the random routines just return the same series of pseudorandom digits every time?
There is only one way you can EVER be compelled to testify and actually ANSWER their questions (you aren't allowed to lie, but you can refuse to answer, the "right to remain silent" applies to your TRIAL as well which is why defendants can't be compelled to testify) and that is you have to be given IMMUNITY. If the prosecution gives your testimony immunity you cannot be prosecuted for what you say (unless you commit perjury and lie).
One undecided facet is whether compelling somebody to "testify" by providing their encryption key or by requiring them to unlock an encrypted device, also gives them immunity for the evidence revealed in the contents.
One legal theory is that a person may be compelled to decrypt (e.g. by sitting them in front of a laptop with a copy of their PGP disk volume and saying "unlock this or go to jail"), and the only immunity required is immunity for prosecution due to the fact that they knew the key (e.g. a conspiracy charge), without granting immunity for evidence found in the cleartext of data in encrypted storage. I disagree, but can see that approach passing constitutional muster
I know you're trying to be funny, but for the last couple of years both organizations have gotten together to oppose the NSA, and domestic spying in general. They have other mutual enemies, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
And on gun rights, the NRA and state-level ACLU organizations are often both on the same side of an issue, it's primarily the national ACLU that has taken a strong stance against individual firearms rights.
The ISY (upgrade to the 994i if you haven't already) has a very nice and fully documented REST interface, included in the base license. There is an optional module enabling it to make calls out to remote network resources and also host web pages internally on the microSD storage card.
You don't need to use their proprietary programming interface. The same PLC or "PLM" (PowerLinc Modem) that the ISY uses can be accessed directly as a serial device if you want to work with Insteon devices at a low level from your own hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi.
The worst part about Insteon devices is that they have x10 support which can't be disabled. It results in devices switching on and off randomly.
This may have been true when Insteon was first introduced in 2005, but has not been the case for at least the past 5 years. No new Insteon devices come with X10 addresses programmed in by default, and Insteon is almost entirely immune to accidentally responding to noise on the power line by switching on and off randomly.
Insteon support site now states "Please note that most new Insteon devices no longer support X10 communication.".
In general, Insteon is not a particularly secure protocol, and is vulnerable to sniffing and replay attacks. If you need devices with stronger security, consider more recent home automation protocols such as Z-Wave.
I'm in New England, and like many US states, we have a 25c/gallon tax on '#2 Road Diesel' (tax paid, no dye added), this is always Ultra-Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD). Generally fuel sold for use in cars is only about 10-15% more expensive than fuel sold for use in a furnace, and most of that is highway tax, not extra distillation at the source.
For Delivery, you can can specify either 'Home Heating Oil" or "Off-Road Diesel". Both are #2 Diesel and contain dye (indicating no road tax was paid), and in most US states, both are at least Low Sulfur, but several states now mandate ULSD for heating oil. There is more margin for variation in the grade of oil sold as heating oil than for off-road diesel, but usually they come out of the same tank & truck. Off-Road Diesel is used for construction equipment, generators, etc. In the winter, when delivering off-road diesel, they might add kerosene and/or additional anti-gel treatment, only because home heating oil is usually stored underground or in a basement while construction equipment and storage tanks are more exposed to the elements.
These strange antics and anomalous test results make fraud the obvious explanation.
Average electricity consumption per capita in the USA is 1683W. For the EU, it's 688W, which makes 2kW ample for a small household. If my electricity consumption went to 1.5MWh/month, I'd start to seriously worry - my electricity bill would be about three or four times what it currently is. According to Wikipedia, electricity in the USA costs 8-17 cents per kWh. That works out at $120 to $255 for 1.5MWh. Do people seriously spend that much money on power each month?
Yes. My monthly usage ranges from 800KWh to 1800KWh (peaks being due to HVAC)
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and who paid for this study exactly?
That is an interesting question.
According to Forbes Bindu Kalesan says the the Boston University study was "self funded".
Guns don't kill people, Americans do.
Except for some strange reason, Americans in Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire are less likely to kill people -- not just less likely than other Americans, but even less likely than the average Canadian, or even many Europeans.
No -- Webster and Bloomberg are very much into restricting anybody's access to guns. Unless you subscribe to the theory that by making all firearms expensive and difficult to obtain or own (unless you are rich or politically connected) is worthwhile because it also happens to deny access for "crazies", then that is not Daniel Webster's goal.
For example, under Giuliani/Bloomberg very few people obtained handgun carry permits in New York City, primarily the rich and famous. Favored people included Donald Trump and Bill Cosby, but few if any of the "little people" who might actually need to protect themselves. Like his billionaire patron Michael R. Bloomberg, Daniel Webster is a strong proponent of "permit to purchase" and may issue carry laws, both of which have a disparate impact on minorities and serve more to ensure that only the "right people" (the rich, famous, and other political contributors) are able to exercise their rights.
Going back to the original story, Bindu Kalesan herself has stated "the laws would result in fewer guns",the study wasn't designed to distinguish how policy contributions to suicide or homicide deaths. She also says her study does not account for how restricting firearms possession by the law-abiding changes the rate of assault, rape, or other violent crimes by the non-law-abiding, only looks at the impact of changes to state gun laws on overall firearms deaths.
There is almost no funding for gun violence research because the gun lobby knows it will produce more papers like this one.
Hopefully that will change, but i think the U.S. will switch to the metric system first.
So the $16 Million in research funding by George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and the Joyce and MacArthur Foundations is almost no funding? Prior to the Dickey Amendment, only about 3 percent of papers on gun control received US government funding. There is still plenty of "funding for gun violence research", all that changed is that CDC usage of tax money was restricted after the CDC spent millions on gun control propaganda "studies" with preordained outcomes to support a political push for more gun control laws. This was never a ban on research or statistics collection.
Mark Rosenberg, Director the CDC National Center of Injury Prevention branch stated on record that he “envisions a long term campaign, similar to tobacco use and auto safety, to convince Americans that guns are, first and foremost, a public health menace.” (Rolling Stone, 1993), and also “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol — cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly — and banned.” (Washington Post,10/19/1994). Does this sound like unbiased scientific research, or like a politician?
If anything, the publication and funding of actual "gun violence research" has increased since the Dickey Amendment, it's just that the CDC is no longer allowed to hand out taxpayer money to their friends to help push a political agenda.
Gosh, I'd love to find the link and read the whole context of your Daniel Webster quote. I tried to googled it, and my meager search skills were unable to locate the source.
And, given the stuff Webster has written elsewhere about the public health approach, see http://annals.org/article.aspx... this quote doesn't really sound like Webster...
As you've noted, Mr. Webster runs the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s Center for Gun Policy and Research; his job is basically to fund and promote anti-gun research, so when Daniel Webster comes out and says a pro-gun-control study is flawed you know it has got to have some serious problems! Looks like the majority of the Daniel Webster quotes indicting Bindu Kalesan's study are from an email exchange with the Washington Post.
If you don't want to root your device and don't want to tunnel all your traffic to a VPN server (adds latency) , you can use one of the Android "NoRoot" firewalls that routes app traffic through a local VPN for inspection and filtering. This uses more CPU and battery, but all protection is done within your mobile device. It takes a lot of manual effort to build a policy that blocks undesirable traffic and still lets apps work.
You can tunnel your traffic to a commercial VPN provider, but now you are trusting them to maintain performance and not invade your privacy, and they won't have any visibility to the contents of traffic that is inside SSL/TLS encryption, for better or for worse (e.g. cannot inspect Android apps downloaded as APKs from SSL websites).
Better yet, you can root the device and add your own Certificate Authority and firewall settings. Now you can use your own VPN to ensure all traffic from all applications goes to a remote VPN headend for inspection/modification, even traffic the device thinks is encrypted with SSL. If you have many users going through the same VPN, you can do things with packets and headers to make it difficult for CDNs and ad networks to identify individual users who are all behind the same gateway.
If you have more time than money, you can build up a VPN headend with open source tools (e.g. Squid+SSLbump)., and write policy to block traffic that doesn't meet your security policy, and to log what your device tries to send. You can use header modification to strip out identifying information and cookies.
If you are a business or otherwise have more money than time, the expensive approach is to use a commercial firewall appliance that has a client VPN and URL filtering service (e.g. Checkpoint, Palo Alto, Juniper, F5, etc). You set up the VPN to send all your mobile device traffic through the firewall, and use firewall policy to decrypt SSL, inspect APKs, and block ads. This solution is very effective at blocking ads and undesirable network traffic, and can often detect or block malicious APKs and other attacks.
Otherwise, lots of books on tape. And whatever sort of setup they use when teaching braille, might as well come out with a new skill.
In the end, a slightly less impressive variation on "Machine with Concrete."'?
Three people, working independently, made errors in programming and website updates which nearly bankrupted United Airlines when the errors came together on September 8, 2008. "Shares fell to about $3 from more than $12 in less than an hour, wiping more than $1 billion in value before trading was halted.".
When the market first opened that Monday, United Airlines was trading at over $12 a share. The public summary of the events state that Chicago Tribune re-indexed their archives, resulting in a six-year-old story about United Airlines bankruptcy to be re-posted on the Web site of The South Florida Sun-Sentinel without a date. Google picked up the "new" article, saw the missing date, and inserted the current date of 9/8/2008. That article was picked up by a research firm, Income Securities Advisers, which then posted a link to it on a page on Bloomberg News, which sent a news alert based on the old article. The news alert triggered automated trading systems to issue sell orders. Nasdaq finally ordered a halt in trading the stock at 11:08 a.m, but the damage had been done, United Airlines Stock had lost 75% of it's value.
I was hired as a firewall admin at an online trading company, then quickly discovered the director of IT was insane, but kept management happy because he made his numbers by keeping his team constantly understaffed; I was told to work on not just servers, but installing Sun servers in racks, running cable, and fixing just about anything plugged into the network.
I made the mistake of showing competence in networking, so was asked to "expand my role" (new title, same salary), and start working on the switches themselves, including executing an "upgrade" to stacked HP ProCurve switches with VLANs (replacing a hodge-podge of random manufacturer switches). The actual upgrade went fine, basic testing (ping) showed everything stable, but as soon as trading opened the next day, everything went to hell, performance dropped through the floor and customers started calling in about trades timing out. Long story short, turned out that Solaris HME cards were unable to negotiate properly with ProCurve switches, half the machines were dropping packets due to duplex mismatches. There's a reason people call the Sun interface cards "Happy Meal Ethernet"
Cost the company approximately $180,000 in direct and customer exodus losses, and was likely a factor in their eventual collapse. I wasn't fired, but management never trusted me again so I saw the writing on the wall, and quit to do consulting work at a (also doomed) dot-com online supermarket.
On the upside, I was able to make thousands in consulting income from installing those same "lock speed to 100 and duplex to full" Solaris scripts on servers for various customers who also had performance issues plugging in Sun servers to cheap switches.
Yes, but aren't the steam generators closed loop? If you keep blowing out steam, you need to replenish water. That water must be stored on board or extracted from the sea water. I doubt that it is a good idea to use sea water in the generator; higher corrosion and all that jazz. The advantage of an electric system, is no consumables wasted, save fuel for the initial generation, which you would have used anyway.
Nuclear aircraft carriers have large scale desalination (distillation, aka "flash evaporator") plants, some capable of producing 400K gallons of distilled water each day, in excess of shipboard daily water needs.
It's right in the summary, "...algorithm known as the De Bruijn sequence", named after the Dutch mathematician Nicolaas Govert de Bruijn, The algorithm is interesting and actually has a number of other practical applications beyond breaking weak codes.
I think you're missing the "tedious, repetitive, and unenjoyable" factors in most definitions of "grinding". Not every game is grinding, not every game makes you repeat a boring task just to gain enough in-game currency/status/whuffie to proceed to something interesting.
I suspect that the "drone delivery zone" will be similar to the "same day" delivery zone, which means neither my home nor my office will ever be within operating range. So no, I am not excited about this.
How will Amazon handle the theft problem? Why just steal a package of unknown value when you can stuff the drone into a steel box and get a pile of expensive parts along with whatever bonus you find in the package being delivered.
Will Amazon be forced to redline neighborhoods that have a high attrition rate?
I just read the entire article and the author forgot one other solution: the British solution Instead of putting the burden on app developers to include backdoors, or on Google to block apps that don't, put the burden on end users to turn over their keys to police when asked. I'm not saying I like this solution, but it is a solution the author of the article didn't consider. If you make the sentence for non-cooperation long enough, it doesn't really matter if the police find what they're looking for: they can just lock you up for not handing over the keys.
In the USA, this would likely require a constitutional amendment, it is widely held that the Fifth Amendment "Right Against Self-Incrimination" protects the right not to divulge an encryption key.
Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacations than most others in the developed world.
We shoot each other more often as well.
With the possible exception of Postal workers (sorry, stereotyping) people who work 60-hour weeks and take no vacations are unlikely to be the ones doing the shooting -- they are doing the work of two people, and that other guy, the guy whose job the over-achiever has eliminated, is more likely to one with time to spare to go out murdering.
As productivity increases, companies can get more done with fewer workers. Good for profit margins, not so good for unemployment rates.
This seems like an odd bug to have happen, how bad were the effects? Just 'weaker' randomness, or without randomdev_init_reader do the random routines just return the same series of pseudorandom digits every time?
Also, obligatory Dilbert reference
One undecided facet is whether compelling somebody to "testify" by providing their encryption key or by requiring them to unlock an encrypted device, also gives them immunity for the evidence revealed in the contents.
One legal theory is that a person may be compelled to decrypt (e.g. by sitting them in front of a laptop with a copy of their PGP disk volume and saying "unlock this or go to jail"), and the only immunity required is immunity for prosecution due to the fact that they knew the key (e.g. a conspiracy charge), without granting immunity for evidence found in the cleartext of data in encrypted storage. I disagree, but can see that approach passing constitutional muster
I know you're trying to be funny, but for the last couple of years both organizations have gotten together to oppose the NSA, and domestic spying in general. They have other mutual enemies, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And on gun rights, the NRA and state-level ACLU organizations are often both on the same side of an issue, it's primarily the national ACLU that has taken a strong stance against individual firearms rights.
The ISY (upgrade to the 994i if you haven't already) has a very nice and fully documented REST interface, included in the base license. There is an optional module enabling it to make calls out to remote network resources and also host web pages internally on the microSD storage card.
You don't need to use their proprietary programming interface. The same PLC or "PLM" (PowerLinc Modem) that the ISY uses can be accessed directly as a serial device if you want to work with Insteon devices at a low level from your own hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi.
The worst part about Insteon devices is that they have x10 support which can't be disabled. It results in devices switching on and off randomly.
This may have been true when Insteon was first introduced in 2005, but has not been the case for at least the past 5 years. No new Insteon devices come with X10 addresses programmed in by default, and Insteon is almost entirely immune to accidentally responding to noise on the power line by switching on and off randomly.
Insteon support site now states "Please note that most new Insteon devices no longer support X10 communication.".
In general, Insteon is not a particularly secure protocol, and is vulnerable to sniffing and replay attacks. If you need devices with stronger security, consider more recent home automation protocols such as Z-Wave.
Yeah, that's good. That way any bank employee reviewing the contents of your box can take your coins and you will never know for years.
Where do you live that "bank employees" can "review" the contents of your safe deposit box?
Are there more impurities in home heating oil?
I'm in New England, and like many US states, we have a 25c/gallon tax on '#2 Road Diesel' (tax paid, no dye added), this is always Ultra-Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD). Generally fuel sold for use in cars is only about 10-15% more expensive than fuel sold for use in a furnace, and most of that is highway tax, not extra distillation at the source.
For Delivery, you can can specify either 'Home Heating Oil" or "Off-Road Diesel". Both are #2 Diesel and contain dye (indicating no road tax was paid), and in most US states, both are at least Low Sulfur, but several states now mandate ULSD for heating oil. There is more margin for variation in the grade of oil sold as heating oil than for off-road diesel, but usually they come out of the same tank & truck. Off-Road Diesel is used for construction equipment, generators, etc. In the winter, when delivering off-road diesel, they might add kerosene and/or additional anti-gel treatment, only because home heating oil is usually stored underground or in a basement while construction equipment and storage tanks are more exposed to the elements.
Average electricity consumption per capita in the USA is 1683W. For the EU, it's 688W, which makes 2kW ample for a small household. If my electricity consumption went to 1.5MWh/month, I'd start to seriously worry - my electricity bill would be about three or four times what it currently is. According to Wikipedia, electricity in the USA costs 8-17 cents per kWh. That works out at $120 to $255 for 1.5MWh. Do people seriously spend that much money on power each month?
Yes. My monthly usage ranges from 800KWh to 1800KWh (peaks being due to HVAC)