So instead of revealing the actual leverage ratios of these banks - and keep in mind, this would not CHANGE the ratios but simply reveal what they are - we are happy to coddle the financial industry, to let banks continue to take risks and overextend themselves, ensuring that the NEXT collapse will be bigger, perhaps too big for another government bailout to fix. Does that sound ugly?
Two points:
Your "not a bailout" arguments seem to center around the fact that the Fed did nothing to avoid the destruction of Bear Stearns as an entity and the fact that a lot of their employees lost their jobs in the transition... that doesn't change the fact that the government stepped in and provided a huge pile of cash to finance a private deal, which pretty much sounds like a bailout to me.
Also, perhaps things would have been touch and go for a while if the government let Bear Stearns collapse ungracefully instead of gracefully, if the government wasn't pumping huge sums of cash into the industry that it may never see again. So? All the government is teaching the financial industry is "feel free to take risky positions, we'll come bail you out by taking on your riskiest investments and lending you money at killer rates". In the long run, it is far more important that banks learn to only take positions that they have properly evaluated and that they can survive. If a dumb bank has to collapse every now and then, so be it.
That's true - but we need mechanisms in place to encourage consumption of electricity during those off-peak times. If there is a huge pipeline that requires a lot of electricity to power, the most economical way to equip a pumping station would be with small enough capacity that running it 24/7 is just enough (with safety capacity, of course). But then it will be consuming lots of peak electricity instead of just that delicious ecological off-peak-hours wind electricity. Until electricity is sold at different rates at different times, there's not a lot of incentive to differ from the normal usage patterns.
Transporting that power is not going to solve the problem either - I'll grant that it may help a bit, but transmission efficiency is a MAJOR problem, upgrading the lines and building new ones is a huge expense that adds to the price of the energy, and long transmission corridors have an environmental impact. Everybody likes to throw around the random statistic that a 90 x 90 mile solar plant in the southwest could power the whole nation, but the transmission obstacles make it a rather moot point.
It becomes more difficult to predict power availability, requiring greater excess capacity on peaking plants. This is a standard operations management principle: the greater the variability in in supply (or demand) the (exponentially) more excess capacity is required to achieve a given service level.
In addition to the random fluctuations, the timing of these things may not be exactly what the grid needs. I know that in a lot of locations in California, the wind turbines supply their peak generation in the mornings and evenings, whereas peak consumption occurs in the early afternoon. Adding generation capacity in non-peak hours just doesn't make sense; you're taking load off of baseline generation that can handle all of the load at practically zero marginal cost. Utilities are building these wind plants in CA purely to abide by state rules requiring a certain percentage of electricity to come from renewable source... and, in the process, requiring construction of redundant plants to cover the inevitable shortfall in peaking capacity.
On the other hand, how many people are buying this as a full time alternative to a full sized laptop? I can't speak as to how many customers use other laptops as well, but at 1 million units so far and the rest of the industry racing to catch up, I think the Eee is well past the point of a curiosity. It turns out that people actually like to buy light, cheap laptops!
You're right, the battery life is an issue that will have to be resolved, but keep in mind that a lot of the highly mobile people I see using these (students, like myself) are hardly ever far from an outlet. Hopefully when they make the switch to Atom that will help the battery life.
Whats amusing is that the author took the time to blur out the SSN's but left the names, and addresses of the "offenders" in the picture. How much do you want to bet some overzealous reader of that article is going to be sending something fun to one of those addresses? The names and addresses were already available by design to the public through the website. The problem was that the SQL injection vulnerability also revealed *additional* restricted data.
And... is there a problem with that? Farmers have been breeding plants for a really long time, plants that regularly exchange genetic material with other plants. Just because Monsanto can't control its 'property' doesn't mean farmers should stop using tried and true tactics.
Even assuming the obvious financial incentives aren't in play, actually increasing people's safety is more complicated than is being represented.
Sure, increasing the length of the yellow light and the pause while all lights are red will unarguably reduce the number of accidents... TODAY. Humans are learning creatures, and in particular they use their learning abilities to engage in "risk homeostasis". They will tend to expose themselves to the same level of risk of running a red light (or more precisely, the possible consequences thereof in terms of tickets/accidents/insurance hikes) over time, and as the system gives them more leeway they will take up the slack.
What is needed is to make intersections PREDICTABLE. The more predictable intersections are, the fewer driving errors will be made. Yellow lights should be of a consistent length (and based on the expected speed/attention of the drivers on that particular stretch of road at that particular time of day). If there are red light cameras, put up big honking signs letting people know! Cameras are put at specific intersections because they have been labeled as "high risk" or "congested", and the goal is to reduce risk of accidents and congestion from people left inside during the change. The more people are aware of the presence of the cameras, the greater the effect.
They go out of their way to encourage the growth of an ecosystem in which their products can compete. Not too long ago I hadn't heard of any PC/laptop processors besides AMD/Intel, but thanks to VIA's encouragement of the Ultra-mobile PC market (or 'netbooks' as Intel likes to call them) they have suddenly become a player.
VIA created the nanobook reference design for mini-laptops that use their low-cost, low-power chips. Already the CloudBook has come out based on that design, and in other countries various similar laptops have been released from different distributors. Now they're stimulating essential linux development, which will continue to increase the value of their low-cost platform. This has "win" written all over it; we're all going to come out ahead thanks to their strategy.
In P2P situations, the idea is that the person has shared each song with lots of people who would otherwise have bought it.
To an extent yes, but you're missing the point. Large penalties apply for certain kinds of acts based on the assumption that only an infinitesimal portion of those acts will be discovered. The marginal cost to society of each instance of speeding by 15 miles per hour is almost negligible, yet enormous (to those of us in the middle or lower classes) fines apply. When the probability of punishment is lower, a more severe punishment is required to have the same effect (or so the reasoning goes).
I can tell you only barely skimmed the first page - the article is actually saying that Apple succeeds by flouting the conventional wisdom, and praises Jobs for his brilliance.
As recently at 2006, a US nuclear plant was still using WordPerfect for its procedures because they had invested huge amounts of time and money into advanced macros that were specific to the needs of procedure writers managing tens of thousands of pages of active documents. All of their procedure writers were current or ex reactor operators, and when your workforce is largely over 40 and very difficult to hire off the street, it's very hard to change software. I asked a few of them why they never changed, and the response was an impassioned defense of the superiority of the product.
By all indications, they're probably still using WP today (but I wouldn't be surprised if they're the only ones). The procedures are managed internally, the NRC is the only "customer" and they of course require it in hardcopy. In that little island, WP managed to hold its own against the incursion of Office.
I've seen a lot of comments arguing that anything that saves the lives of our soldiers is worth it. That's a hard thing to argue against; certainly I don't wish death on any of my countrymen. And from a strategic standpoint, you'd want to have all of your options available.
But from the standpoint of what's good for the world, I don't think this is. We see the same thing over and over again as we reduce the lethality of certain acts. Now that tasers are widespread, police are using them on people that just happen to piss them off, because nobody will die and the officer won't go to prison (or at least his buddies on the force and in the DA office don't have to do anything questionable to prevent it). When anti-lock brakes were introduced, fatalities remained steady, because people with ABS in their car drive demonstrably more recklessly than people who don't.
Now we're reducing the human cost of waging war, but we're reducing it asymmetrically. With robots and cruise missiles we hardly have to risk an American life to GO to war now. When you're destroying the American economy with a war, that will annoy some people. But when you're bringing back coffins by the tankerload, you have people marching on Washington DC. Big difference. Now the US finds it much easier to justify going to war and maintaining a warlike presence, so we're going to do it more often. And people just like the innocent Iraqi civilians are going to pay, and the US is going to pay from stirring up more terrorism and anti-American sentiment, and the world is going to pay for the destruction of productive economies and vast diversion of resources from productive ends.
Wow, sensitive much? (I speak as an avid OpenOffice user who refers new people to it on a regular basis.) The fact is, this project was done in Excel and will run in Excel. Do you think that the post about this project should be "Using [A Spreadsheet Program] As A 3D Graphics Engine"?
The links you post do not refer to similar projects created in OpenOffice or StarOffice, as far as I can see.
Your point about the dominance of MS Office is aging - with OOo able to open just about every Office file type (with the exception of 2007, which most people have been trained not to use) the cost of switching is much lower than it once was. Microsoft has recognized that its grip on the lucrative office software market has become more slippery lately, which is why Office 2007 is the first genuinely innovative release they've had in years (once again, with the exception of the idiotic file format). I am not interested in leveling the playing field, I am interested in having quality software available to us at a reasonable price, or in other words I am interested in having a competitive market. As long as Microsoft, OOo, Google, et. al. are all fighting for their chunk of the market by producing new innovations, I'm happy.
The problem is certainly not localized to business method patents - but it is definitely a problem. The original intent of the patent system was to award a limited monopoly in exchange for a complete description of how to duplicate a specific implementation of an idea, so after the monopoly expired just about anybody could make use of that description. However, today, just about every patent filing is buried in legalese and is described in vague terms that intentionally cover as much litigatable ground as possible, while failing to provide enough information to effectively duplicated the implementation.
Microsoft's obligations to hardware manufacturers are arguably much more important than its obligations to customers. Reasons: they sell most of their software to OEMs, and one of the main advantages of Windows (over Apple) is that it works with a very wide array of hardware. As such, Microsoft has to fill certain obligations to manufacturers in order to protect that relationship. RAM manufacturers began planning, researching, and designing their productions lines years in advanced to accommodate the increased RAM requirements for Vista - suppose Microsoft decided to delay for another year? Millions or billions of dollars worth of inventory would have gone obsolete and would probably have been destroyed to keep from tanking the market price of memory.
When you subtract out government subsidies (interest free loans and bailouts) yes, Southwest is just about the only profitable US airline. OK, probably some other airlines have managed to make more than they spent, but certainly not as much as they would have wanted to make, and certainly not as much as their investors would have expected to make in other industries. Not enough to call them "profitable". Southwest on the other hand has been in the black every year for 35 years.
Also, what difference would this truly make? Airports already maximize the number of takeoffs from multiple gates. The plane has no choice but to take off at time X, regardless of how annoying the boarding process is. Any successful implementation of speeding up this process means that everybody waits on the plane longer versus in the seating area at the gate.
What difference? Profits. Southwest is the only profitable US airline and has been for decades. One of the key differences is that Southwest optimizes the hell out of their turnaround procedures, and although they suck on many of the airline industry's traditional metrics (average used capacity per flight, for example) their planes spend a lot longer in the air because they spend a lot LESS time on the ground. Planes are not making money while they're on the ground waiting for people to be seated.
Why should you care if the airlines are making a profit? The more lucrative the industry, the more companies enter the field, the more competition, and the better prices and service we get. Maybe not right away, but in the long run we do like the companies that provide services to us to minimize their costs.
This is not the type of keyboard you compose a novel on. The whole point of this keyboard is that it allows rapid, flexible input adapted to a wide variety of applications. Somebody using this keyboard with photoshop might switch briefly over to the standard keyboard view to type in some text, name a layer, something like that, but will not be typing on it for long. There are multiple market segments out there, and this targets a specific one.
Not sure how long until the google cache refreshes, but if you check it out you do see the cache lists the price at $31. So one part of the story is corroborated, at least.
I am not too familiar with how it varies from state to state - but I do know that there is booming business in helping make public records more accessible. After all, in this day and age it seems counterintuitive that public records should be kept on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard". You can find more information about state FOI laws here.
Hm, well you're right in principle but it's hard to apply those principles sometimes! I think the idea is that the insurance company is turning a profit, and they rely on these police reports, which are expensive to produce and really only apply to one-ish citizen and this for-profit company. When you have a gap in the budget it's easy to get people to agree to fill it with a source like this. Everybody loves to hate an insurance company. Plus, this could also be "congestion pricing" in a manner of speaking... it means that the insurance companies will not use up valuable city resources unless the actual value to the insurance company is more than the cost of the report.
29B-1-3. Inspection and copying. (1) Every person has a right to inspect or copy any public record of a public body in this state, except as otherwise expressly provided by section four of this article... (3) The custodian of any public records, unless otherwise expressly provided by statute, shall furnish proper and reasonable opportunities for inspection and examination of the records in his or her office and reasonable facilities for making memoranda or abstracts therefrom, during the usual business hours, to all persons having occasion to make examination of them. The custodian of the records may make reasonable rules and regulations necessary for the protection of the records and to prevent interference with the regular discharge of his or her duties. If the records requested exist in magnetic, electronic or computer form, the custodian of the records shall make such copies available on magnetic or electronic media, if so requested.
I don't believe the assessor can reasonably claim financial damage... generally copying fees are limited to nominal processing costs, or a close approximation thereof, and only in a few cases around the country have I ever heard of a government treating copying fees as a profit center... and those were only for specialized documents such as police reports being furnished to an insurance company.
This is such a backwards way of thinking. I work for a software company that is involved in document management, and everywhere we look, cities, counties, and states are looking to pass the savings on to their citizens, not trying to nickel and dime their way into mediocrity. The tax assessor's office's budget can always be fixed if they truly are relying on those $20 fees. Even those organizations that do make some money off supplying documents are constantly trying to improve access and let people access documents online and so on.
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Actually, I found a statistic where they estimate only 30% of ultraportable purchasers are replacing an existing (large) laptop. see it here
So instead of revealing the actual leverage ratios of these banks - and keep in mind, this would not CHANGE the ratios but simply reveal what they are - we are happy to coddle the financial industry, to let banks continue to take risks and overextend themselves, ensuring that the NEXT collapse will be bigger, perhaps too big for another government bailout to fix. Does that sound ugly?
Two points: Your "not a bailout" arguments seem to center around the fact that the Fed did nothing to avoid the destruction of Bear Stearns as an entity and the fact that a lot of their employees lost their jobs in the transition... that doesn't change the fact that the government stepped in and provided a huge pile of cash to finance a private deal, which pretty much sounds like a bailout to me.
Also, perhaps things would have been touch and go for a while if the government let Bear Stearns collapse ungracefully instead of gracefully, if the government wasn't pumping huge sums of cash into the industry that it may never see again. So? All the government is teaching the financial industry is "feel free to take risky positions, we'll come bail you out by taking on your riskiest investments and lending you money at killer rates". In the long run, it is far more important that banks learn to only take positions that they have properly evaluated and that they can survive. If a dumb bank has to collapse every now and then, so be it.
That's true - but we need mechanisms in place to encourage consumption of electricity during those off-peak times. If there is a huge pipeline that requires a lot of electricity to power, the most economical way to equip a pumping station would be with small enough capacity that running it 24/7 is just enough (with safety capacity, of course). But then it will be consuming lots of peak electricity instead of just that delicious ecological off-peak-hours wind electricity. Until electricity is sold at different rates at different times, there's not a lot of incentive to differ from the normal usage patterns.
Transporting that power is not going to solve the problem either - I'll grant that it may help a bit, but transmission efficiency is a MAJOR problem, upgrading the lines and building new ones is a huge expense that adds to the price of the energy, and long transmission corridors have an environmental impact. Everybody likes to throw around the random statistic that a 90 x 90 mile solar plant in the southwest could power the whole nation, but the transmission obstacles make it a rather moot point.
It becomes more difficult to predict power availability, requiring greater excess capacity on peaking plants. This is a standard operations management principle: the greater the variability in in supply (or demand) the (exponentially) more excess capacity is required to achieve a given service level.
In addition to the random fluctuations, the timing of these things may not be exactly what the grid needs. I know that in a lot of locations in California, the wind turbines supply their peak generation in the mornings and evenings, whereas peak consumption occurs in the early afternoon. Adding generation capacity in non-peak hours just doesn't make sense; you're taking load off of baseline generation that can handle all of the load at practically zero marginal cost. Utilities are building these wind plants in CA purely to abide by state rules requiring a certain percentage of electricity to come from renewable source... and, in the process, requiring construction of redundant plants to cover the inevitable shortfall in peaking capacity.
And... is there a problem with that? Farmers have been breeding plants for a really long time, plants that regularly exchange genetic material with other plants. Just because Monsanto can't control its 'property' doesn't mean farmers should stop using tried and true tactics.
Even assuming the obvious financial incentives aren't in play, actually increasing people's safety is more complicated than is being represented.
Sure, increasing the length of the yellow light and the pause while all lights are red will unarguably reduce the number of accidents... TODAY. Humans are learning creatures, and in particular they use their learning abilities to engage in "risk homeostasis". They will tend to expose themselves to the same level of risk of running a red light (or more precisely, the possible consequences thereof in terms of tickets/accidents/insurance hikes) over time, and as the system gives them more leeway they will take up the slack.
What is needed is to make intersections PREDICTABLE. The more predictable intersections are, the fewer driving errors will be made. Yellow lights should be of a consistent length (and based on the expected speed/attention of the drivers on that particular stretch of road at that particular time of day). If there are red light cameras, put up big honking signs letting people know! Cameras are put at specific intersections because they have been labeled as "high risk" or "congested", and the goal is to reduce risk of accidents and congestion from people left inside during the change. The more people are aware of the presence of the cameras, the greater the effect.
They go out of their way to encourage the growth of an ecosystem in which their products can compete. Not too long ago I hadn't heard of any PC/laptop processors besides AMD/Intel, but thanks to VIA's encouragement of the Ultra-mobile PC market (or 'netbooks' as Intel likes to call them) they have suddenly become a player.
VIA created the nanobook reference design for mini-laptops that use their low-cost, low-power chips. Already the CloudBook has come out based on that design, and in other countries various similar laptops have been released from different distributors. Now they're stimulating essential linux development, which will continue to increase the value of their low-cost platform. This has "win" written all over it; we're all going to come out ahead thanks to their strategy.
To an extent yes, but you're missing the point. Large penalties apply for certain kinds of acts based on the assumption that only an infinitesimal portion of those acts will be discovered. The marginal cost to society of each instance of speeding by 15 miles per hour is almost negligible, yet enormous (to those of us in the middle or lower classes) fines apply. When the probability of punishment is lower, a more severe punishment is required to have the same effect (or so the reasoning goes).
I can tell you only barely skimmed the first page - the article is actually saying that Apple succeeds by flouting the conventional wisdom, and praises Jobs for his brilliance.
As recently at 2006, a US nuclear plant was still using WordPerfect for its procedures because they had invested huge amounts of time and money into advanced macros that were specific to the needs of procedure writers managing tens of thousands of pages of active documents. All of their procedure writers were current or ex reactor operators, and when your workforce is largely over 40 and very difficult to hire off the street, it's very hard to change software. I asked a few of them why they never changed, and the response was an impassioned defense of the superiority of the product. By all indications, they're probably still using WP today (but I wouldn't be surprised if they're the only ones). The procedures are managed internally, the NRC is the only "customer" and they of course require it in hardcopy. In that little island, WP managed to hold its own against the incursion of Office.
I've seen a lot of comments arguing that anything that saves the lives of our soldiers is worth it. That's a hard thing to argue against; certainly I don't wish death on any of my countrymen. And from a strategic standpoint, you'd want to have all of your options available.
But from the standpoint of what's good for the world, I don't think this is. We see the same thing over and over again as we reduce the lethality of certain acts. Now that tasers are widespread, police are using them on people that just happen to piss them off, because nobody will die and the officer won't go to prison (or at least his buddies on the force and in the DA office don't have to do anything questionable to prevent it). When anti-lock brakes were introduced, fatalities remained steady, because people with ABS in their car drive demonstrably more recklessly than people who don't.
Now we're reducing the human cost of waging war, but we're reducing it asymmetrically. With robots and cruise missiles we hardly have to risk an American life to GO to war now. When you're destroying the American economy with a war, that will annoy some people. But when you're bringing back coffins by the tankerload, you have people marching on Washington DC. Big difference. Now the US finds it much easier to justify going to war and maintaining a warlike presence, so we're going to do it more often. And people just like the innocent Iraqi civilians are going to pay, and the US is going to pay from stirring up more terrorism and anti-American sentiment, and the world is going to pay for the destruction of productive economies and vast diversion of resources from productive ends.
Wow, sensitive much? (I speak as an avid OpenOffice user who refers new people to it on a regular basis.) The fact is, this project was done in Excel and will run in Excel. Do you think that the post about this project should be "Using [A Spreadsheet Program] As A 3D Graphics Engine"? The links you post do not refer to similar projects created in OpenOffice or StarOffice, as far as I can see. Your point about the dominance of MS Office is aging - with OOo able to open just about every Office file type (with the exception of 2007, which most people have been trained not to use) the cost of switching is much lower than it once was. Microsoft has recognized that its grip on the lucrative office software market has become more slippery lately, which is why Office 2007 is the first genuinely innovative release they've had in years (once again, with the exception of the idiotic file format). I am not interested in leveling the playing field, I am interested in having quality software available to us at a reasonable price, or in other words I am interested in having a competitive market. As long as Microsoft, OOo, Google, et. al. are all fighting for their chunk of the market by producing new innovations, I'm happy.
Microsoft's obligations to hardware manufacturers are arguably much more important than its obligations to customers. Reasons: they sell most of their software to OEMs, and one of the main advantages of Windows (over Apple) is that it works with a very wide array of hardware. As such, Microsoft has to fill certain obligations to manufacturers in order to protect that relationship. RAM manufacturers began planning, researching, and designing their productions lines years in advanced to accommodate the increased RAM requirements for Vista - suppose Microsoft decided to delay for another year? Millions or billions of dollars worth of inventory would have gone obsolete and would probably have been destroyed to keep from tanking the market price of memory.
When you subtract out government subsidies (interest free loans and bailouts) yes, Southwest is just about the only profitable US airline. OK, probably some other airlines have managed to make more than they spent, but certainly not as much as they would have wanted to make, and certainly not as much as their investors would have expected to make in other industries. Not enough to call them "profitable". Southwest on the other hand has been in the black every year for 35 years.
What difference? Profits. Southwest is the only profitable US airline and has been for decades. One of the key differences is that Southwest optimizes the hell out of their turnaround procedures, and although they suck on many of the airline industry's traditional metrics (average used capacity per flight, for example) their planes spend a lot longer in the air because they spend a lot LESS time on the ground. Planes are not making money while they're on the ground waiting for people to be seated.
Why should you care if the airlines are making a profit? The more lucrative the industry, the more companies enter the field, the more competition, and the better prices and service we get. Maybe not right away, but in the long run we do like the companies that provide services to us to minimize their costs.
This is not the type of keyboard you compose a novel on. The whole point of this keyboard is that it allows rapid, flexible input adapted to a wide variety of applications. Somebody using this keyboard with photoshop might switch briefly over to the standard keyboard view to type in some text, name a layer, something like that, but will not be typing on it for long. There are multiple market segments out there, and this targets a specific one.
Hopefully no time soon... otherwise judges like this will make it even harder to circumvent their ridiculous orders.
Not sure how long until the google cache refreshes, but if you check it out you do see the cache lists the price at $31. So one part of the story is corroborated, at least.
I am not too familiar with how it varies from state to state - but I do know that there is booming business in helping make public records more accessible. After all, in this day and age it seems counterintuitive that public records should be kept on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of The Leopard". You can find more information about state FOI laws here.
Hm, well you're right in principle but it's hard to apply those principles sometimes! I think the idea is that the insurance company is turning a profit, and they rely on these police reports, which are expensive to produce and really only apply to one-ish citizen and this for-profit company. When you have a gap in the budget it's easy to get people to agree to fill it with a source like this. Everybody loves to hate an insurance company. Plus, this could also be "congestion pricing" in a manner of speaking... it means that the insurance companies will not use up valuable city resources unless the actual value to the insurance company is more than the cost of the report.
29B-1-3. Inspection and copying. ..
(1) Every person has a right to inspect or copy any public record of a public body in this state, except as otherwise expressly provided by section four of this article.
(3) The custodian of any public records, unless otherwise expressly provided by statute, shall furnish proper and reasonable opportunities for inspection and examination of the records in his or her office and reasonable facilities for making memoranda or abstracts therefrom, during the usual business hours, to all persons having occasion to make examination of them. The custodian of the records may make reasonable rules and regulations necessary for the protection of the records and to prevent interference with the regular discharge of his or her duties. If the records requested exist in magnetic, electronic or computer form, the custodian of the records shall make such copies available on magnetic or electronic media, if so requested.
http://www.legis.state.wv.us/WVCODE/29B/masterfrmFrm.htm
I don't believe the assessor can reasonably claim financial damage... generally copying fees are limited to nominal processing costs, or a close approximation thereof, and only in a few cases around the country have I ever heard of a government treating copying fees as a profit center... and those were only for specialized documents such as police reports being furnished to an insurance company.
This is such a backwards way of thinking. I work for a software company that is involved in document management, and everywhere we look, cities, counties, and states are looking to pass the savings on to their citizens, not trying to nickel and dime their way into mediocrity. The tax assessor's office's budget can always be fixed if they truly are relying on those $20 fees. Even those organizations that do make some money off supplying documents are constantly trying to improve access and let people access documents online and so on.