Banking is hardly a free market. And separating yourself from a bank isn't as simple as it once was.
In the last year I've had several disappointing experiences with big businesses. All of them have been difficult, but the more competitive the market the easier it has been:
I own an Audi A3 TDI. My iPad Pro bricked after an iOS update. And (although I wasn't directly affected) Wells Fargo cheated a bunch of customers.
Although it has been a hassle, I was able to buy a new vehicle, one that isn't an Audi, just by visiting a dealer in town and picking one out. Sorting out selling back the vehicle to VW looks to be fairly straight forward and I never have to think about Audi again.
Apple screwed me out of several days of use and I had to complain a lot, but they replaced my dead iPad. If they didn't I would have likely sold all my Apple hardware and gone back to Microsoft and Android devices.
I'm considering moving my accounts from Wells Fargo. This will mean contacting a dozen or so different entities to change payments, deposits, and a bunch of other semi-automatic transactions, having to get new credit cards, and a very high likelihood of someone losing a payment. The first bank that offers a concierge-like service for getting all that sorted out will get my business. But I won't hold my breath.
Which is why people should be vetted and subject to background checks prior to working for a company. I'm sure everyone has a price, and a few people with a past do reform, but you're an example of someone who could have done some real damage but chose not to. I don't know what motivated you to not pilfer the data, but I'll bet the fear of the consequences wasn't necessary at the top of the list.
When the goal is to deliver 4KHz worth of audio that hasn't changed at all over the last 100 years, It's pretty easy to get to 99.99% up time. Note that 99.999% uptime was only for SONET level circuits. When the product is narrowly defined by you, you get the ability to define what reliable service is. Helps to have the ability to raise rates every few years even when your operating costs drop. Also helps to control the central office upgrade cycle. That way you can make damn sure that switch's software is mostly bug-free.
Once you start running advanced networks it gets a little more hairy. And now that flat-rate pricing, instead of per-minute billing, is the norm, people are using the network much more than they used to. Because the upgrade cycle is less than 10 years, it makes sense to centralize as much as possible, especially for CPE provisioning and services. Years ago, switching for local calls was handled entirely within the local CO. These days there's going to be a virtual switch that could be located in another state, or maybe even just one or two for the entire country. If the local CO's link fails, or there's a badly managed maintenance order, what would have been isolated to a single town can now affect whole regions or even be national. But it helps keep the margins high and maybe keeps the competitors at bay.
Not saying it's right, just saying that current network management practices encourage centralization. And maybe there's something to that. Fixing one (hot backed up) thing that can restore service to millions in a few minutes might be cheaper and better than single point of failure devices all through the network. Certainly easier to patch and maintain a few redundant servers than thousands of individual units.
Somewhere in the bowels of 1 Infinite Loop I'll bet there's a mockup of a MacBook with an A10 processor. Or multiple A10 processors. Running a crude port of macOS. But because that would mean another round of porting legacy software over to the new chips it won't happen until they can get a good emulator experience. Seems to me that's where things should be headed, just basing on what's come up over the last few years.
Interesting how out of tune many of the notes sound. I wonder if that's due to not having fine enough control over the oscillator or because the programmer didn't understand tempering?
I live at 5000 feet ASL. If my house floods because of sea level rise, I think we're all pretty much doomed. Indiana will be under water long before Colorado.
Many people are building "panic rooms" into their homes. They are multi-purpose, and the guys who know how to build the good ones hide them in plain sight.
"While many wealthy people worked hard or smart for their wealth. And many poor are there due to slacking off and bad life decisions."
You are referring to decent people who made a fortune legitimately - which is wonderful.
Unfortunately most of the wealthy elite did not get there by working hard - they got there by profiting from the misery and misfortune of others and engaging in criminal activities.
Most poor people aren't poor due to bad decisions. They are poor because they are exploited by the wealthy and live in a system where the average person - absent some stroke of luck - can at best have a moderate income if he/she works hard their entire life.
How many millionaires do you know that made their fortune by working 40+ hours a week and saving every penny? Probably none.
Certainly not the Bush's, Clinton's, Desmaris', Bronfman's, Johnson's, Buffets, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, etc.
Poor people are meant to stay poor; rich are meant to stay rich.
That is the will of our overlords - not the average joe.
How is it that someone working in a sweatshop is exploiting them? Sure, the factory owner could pay them western wages, but why? The minute they do someone else will build a factory and undercut their prices by lowering wages. If the wage or working conditions are too bad, people won't work there. The reason they work there isn't because someone is forcing them, it's because they chose to work in the sweatshop because it was better than not working in the sweatshop.
Same is true of child labor. The choice isn't school or sweatshop. If the sweatshop didn't exist, the children will have to turn to prostitution or worse. If parents had it as an option of course they'd chose the send their kids to school over sending them to the factory.
It's a hard concept to understand, having been born into a world of high productivity and plenty, but once you realize that the peasants of the world have to make very hard choices, all of which are distasteful for you or me, you start to see the world a little differently.
The power of the raspberry pi isn't that it is cheap. There are $9 Arm systems these days. It is the fact that there's a large established community of people who are around to answer questions and blog about what they're up to. None of the Pi Killers have anything close to the momentum.
Engineers are good at making useful things out of worthless land and discarded raw materials. Edison looked at a small village in the California desert and thought it would be a great place to produce his new moving pictures. I'm sure plenty of people thought he was nuts, but look how that turned out.
Are you able to discern a 1 MPG difference in your milage from day to day? What about over the life of a vehicle. Will that loss be enough to keep people in their VW diesels when you can get a Skyactiv gasser that performs just as well?
Not usually the same 10% either. People move in and out of the job market all the time, especially women (because of the whole reproduction thing). Lately there have been a lot of people close enough to retirement age to check out early too.
You can't say that for certain. Running machines requires skilled labor to maintain and program them. Pulling trays out of an oven all day doesn't. Programming and maintenance skills have a higher value, not to mention that the employee generates more revenue per hour than the manual laborer.
Watch the old ST:TNG episodes. See how the LCARS tablets are used. Even as a simple prop it's pretty revealing. They replace paper. PCs replaced typewriters, but not notebooks and printouts. Tablets take care of that. Many of the comments here elude to that fact without actually stating it. The use cases are for viewing photos, reading documents, etc. In a pinch you can create media with them, but just as writing with a typewriter was faster and more efficient than hand writing, using a tablet for composition isn't as good as using a PC running a basic word processing program. Notepad apps are still evolving but I find having a synchronized notebook to be very handy and the use case is very much like the old paper day planners and spiral notebooks, but much easier to edit and organize later on the PC. I can't tell you when I last used a printer, other than to get large photos printed out at Costco.
Not to mention the low end 7" tablets aren't very good at those functions because the screen isn't large enough, and usually the display doesn't have the necessary color correction or resolution to be effective (including the iPad mini). Earlier this year I picked up a 9.7" iPad pro. The display is fantastic. It makes reading a pleasure. The keyboard is a disappointment, the pencil is just OK, but the display's color gamut and the light temperature sensor are worth it -although most buyers aren't going to notice it until they get it home and use it for a few days, so that's a very hard sell with Apple's markup.
I'm a "producer" of the No Agenda Show. Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak often talk about the corrupting influence advertising has on modern media and so therefore can't really run ads and have any integrity. It's not always a great show, but it is good enough most of the time to get me through my long commute. They also actively engage listeners and have created a community around the show. They use custom artwork, contributed by listeners for every show. A lot of it is quite good, very professional looking artwork. They encourage you to share the program, and seed Bit torrent with it. The server space is contributed, as is maintenance/moderation of the IRC chat room and live stream. If you donate enough you get recognition during the episode if you like, and there are various rewards that you receive in return for supporting the show. And they occasionally have meet-ups (put together by listeners, not by Curry or Dvorak) where fellow "producers" get together. Other podcasts do some of the same things but for the most part they seem to just recreate the same old talk radio format, just with a cheaper distribution channel. And of course they are beholden to the sponsors, who can destroy a podcast with one phone call.
The traditional way of producing audio and video, along with expecting to pay for it through ad revenue, is dead except for sports and big blockbuster films. The expense of paying for board operators and production people backing up talent (and in the case of NPR and other traditional media outlets producers, editors and copywriters), isn't going to be sustainable when your download rates are measured in the hundreds of thousands and ad responses are under single digit percentages. Direct payment and community building around your production are what will drive media in the future. Sure, Curry's skill as a DJ and audio engineer comes in handy when producing since he can act as a board op and talent, but as audio production tools improve opportunities for novice podcasters will follow. What's really going to be difficult is video podcasting because we're still not able to produce a convincing virtual set, but with all that retail space opening up in the post-amazon retail world, maybe someone will figure that out too.
Well sure. Someone releases a report showing that the agency lets 95% of the bad stuff through. "OK" says management, "You want effective screening? You got it!" Word goes down from the boss to scrutinize everything that comes down the conveyor belt with a fine tooth comb. Wait times skyrocket.
Meanwhile, the next head of DHS is having lunch with a lobbyist who's representing a company with yet another high tech sensor system that will cost millions but still not work, or cause skin rashes in 50% of the people tested, but is guaranteed to keep the lines moving.
The problem with working nights is you get out of sync with the rest of the world. I updated the phone on Tuesday, no problems, so I figured I'd just do the update on the iPad and move on. Now I get to restore my shiny new iPad Pro to factory defaults. Looks like one issue with restoring is that the iPad isn't waiting for the 1.94GB download to complete, so it restarts, causing iTunes to stop downloading until you go through the whole EULA again. Fingers crossed it will complete the load before bedtime.
I'd love to see the RCA on this one, especially since it only affects the 9.7" iPad pro.
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Banking is hardly a free market. And separating yourself from a bank isn't as simple as it once was.
In the last year I've had several disappointing experiences with big businesses. All of them have been difficult, but the more competitive the market the easier it has been:
I own an Audi A3 TDI. My iPad Pro bricked after an iOS update. And (although I wasn't directly affected) Wells Fargo cheated a bunch of customers.
Although it has been a hassle, I was able to buy a new vehicle, one that isn't an Audi, just by visiting a dealer in town and picking one out. Sorting out selling back the vehicle to VW looks to be fairly straight forward and I never have to think about Audi again.
Apple screwed me out of several days of use and I had to complain a lot, but they replaced my dead iPad. If they didn't I would have likely sold all my Apple hardware and gone back to Microsoft and Android devices.
I'm considering moving my accounts from Wells Fargo. This will mean contacting a dozen or so different entities to change payments, deposits, and a bunch of other semi-automatic transactions, having to get new credit cards, and a very high likelihood of someone losing a payment. The first bank that offers a concierge-like service for getting all that sorted out will get my business. But I won't hold my breath.
Which is why people should be vetted and subject to background checks prior to working for a company. I'm sure everyone has a price, and a few people with a past do reform, but you're an example of someone who could have done some real damage but chose not to. I don't know what motivated you to not pilfer the data, but I'll bet the fear of the consequences wasn't necessary at the top of the list.
When the goal is to deliver 4KHz worth of audio that hasn't changed at all over the last 100 years, It's pretty easy to get to 99.99% up time. Note that 99.999% uptime was only for SONET level circuits. When the product is narrowly defined by you, you get the ability to define what reliable service is. Helps to have the ability to raise rates every few years even when your operating costs drop. Also helps to control the central office upgrade cycle. That way you can make damn sure that switch's software is mostly bug-free.
Once you start running advanced networks it gets a little more hairy. And now that flat-rate pricing, instead of per-minute billing, is the norm, people are using the network much more than they used to. Because the upgrade cycle is less than 10 years, it makes sense to centralize as much as possible, especially for CPE provisioning and services. Years ago, switching for local calls was handled entirely within the local CO. These days there's going to be a virtual switch that could be located in another state, or maybe even just one or two for the entire country. If the local CO's link fails, or there's a badly managed maintenance order, what would have been isolated to a single town can now affect whole regions or even be national. But it helps keep the margins high and maybe keeps the competitors at bay.
Not saying it's right, just saying that current network management practices encourage centralization. And maybe there's something to that. Fixing one (hot backed up) thing that can restore service to millions in a few minutes might be cheaper and better than single point of failure devices all through the network. Certainly easier to patch and maintain a few redundant servers than thousands of individual units.
Somewhere in the bowels of 1 Infinite Loop I'll bet there's a mockup of a MacBook with an A10 processor. Or multiple A10 processors. Running a crude port of macOS. But because that would mean another round of porting legacy software over to the new chips it won't happen until they can get a good emulator experience. Seems to me that's where things should be headed, just basing on what's come up over the last few years.
http://www.noagendashow.com
Well, the Earth's orbit was a little more fluid back then.
Interesting how out of tune many of the notes sound. I wonder if that's due to not having fine enough control over the oscillator or because the programmer didn't understand tempering?
No. Most of them weren't prostitutes. Most of them starved to death.
I live at 5000 feet ASL. If my house floods because of sea level rise, I think we're all pretty much doomed. Indiana will be under water long before Colorado.
Many people are building "panic rooms" into their homes. They are multi-purpose, and the guys who know how to build the good ones hide them in plain sight.
"While many wealthy people worked hard or smart for their wealth. And many poor are there due to slacking off and bad life decisions."
You are referring to decent people who made a fortune legitimately - which is wonderful.
Unfortunately most of the wealthy elite did not get there by working hard - they got there by profiting from the misery and misfortune of others and engaging in criminal activities.
Most poor people aren't poor due to bad decisions. They are poor because they are exploited by the wealthy and live in a system where the average person - absent some stroke of luck - can at best have a moderate income if he/she works hard their entire life.
How many millionaires do you know that made their fortune by working 40+ hours a week and saving every penny? Probably none.
Certainly not the Bush's, Clinton's, Desmaris', Bronfman's, Johnson's, Buffets, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, etc.
Poor people are meant to stay poor; rich are meant to stay rich.
That is the will of our overlords - not the average joe.
How is it that someone working in a sweatshop is exploiting them? Sure, the factory owner could pay them western wages, but why? The minute they do someone else will build a factory and undercut their prices by lowering wages. If the wage or working conditions are too bad, people won't work there. The reason they work there isn't because someone is forcing them, it's because they chose to work in the sweatshop because it was better than not working in the sweatshop.
Same is true of child labor. The choice isn't school or sweatshop. If the sweatshop didn't exist, the children will have to turn to prostitution or worse. If parents had it as an option of course they'd chose the send their kids to school over sending them to the factory.
It's a hard concept to understand, having been born into a world of high productivity and plenty, but once you realize that the peasants of the world have to make very hard choices, all of which are distasteful for you or me, you start to see the world a little differently.
The power of the raspberry pi isn't that it is cheap. There are $9 Arm systems these days. It is the fact that there's a large established community of people who are around to answer questions and blog about what they're up to. None of the Pi Killers have anything close to the momentum.
Fred Astaire came back from beyond the grave to sell a vacuum cleaner.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"They won't learn and downplay all the exploits until someone famous dies or gets injured from it." -FTFY.
Engineers are good at making useful things out of worthless land and discarded raw materials. Edison looked at a small village in the California desert and thought it would be a great place to produce his new moving pictures. I'm sure plenty of people thought he was nuts, but look how that turned out.
"Discernible"
Are you able to discern a 1 MPG difference in your milage from day to day? What about over the life of a vehicle. Will that loss be enough to keep people in their VW diesels when you can get a Skyactiv gasser that performs just as well?
These weren't minimum wage jobs.
Not usually the same 10% either. People move in and out of the job market all the time, especially women (because of the whole reproduction thing). Lately there have been a lot of people close enough to retirement age to check out early too.
You can't say that for certain. Running machines requires skilled labor to maintain and program them. Pulling trays out of an oven all day doesn't. Programming and maintenance skills have a higher value, not to mention that the employee generates more revenue per hour than the manual laborer.
So don't buy the product. No one is force feeding you Twinkies.
Watch the old ST:TNG episodes. See how the LCARS tablets are used. Even as a simple prop it's pretty revealing. They replace paper. PCs replaced typewriters, but not notebooks and printouts. Tablets take care of that. Many of the comments here elude to that fact without actually stating it. The use cases are for viewing photos, reading documents, etc. In a pinch you can create media with them, but just as writing with a typewriter was faster and more efficient than hand writing, using a tablet for composition isn't as good as using a PC running a basic word processing program. Notepad apps are still evolving but I find having a synchronized notebook to be very handy and the use case is very much like the old paper day planners and spiral notebooks, but much easier to edit and organize later on the PC. I can't tell you when I last used a printer, other than to get large photos printed out at Costco.
Not to mention the low end 7" tablets aren't very good at those functions because the screen isn't large enough, and usually the display doesn't have the necessary color correction or resolution to be effective (including the iPad mini). Earlier this year I picked up a 9.7" iPad pro. The display is fantastic. It makes reading a pleasure. The keyboard is a disappointment, the pencil is just OK, but the display's color gamut and the light temperature sensor are worth it -although most buyers aren't going to notice it until they get it home and use it for a few days, so that's a very hard sell with Apple's markup.
I'm a "producer" of the No Agenda Show. Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak often talk about the corrupting influence advertising has on modern media and so therefore can't really run ads and have any integrity. It's not always a great show, but it is good enough most of the time to get me through my long commute. They also actively engage listeners and have created a community around the show. They use custom artwork, contributed by listeners for every show. A lot of it is quite good, very professional looking artwork. They encourage you to share the program, and seed Bit torrent with it. The server space is contributed, as is maintenance/moderation of the IRC chat room and live stream. If you donate enough you get recognition during the episode if you like, and there are various rewards that you receive in return for supporting the show. And they occasionally have meet-ups (put together by listeners, not by Curry or Dvorak) where fellow "producers" get together. Other podcasts do some of the same things but for the most part they seem to just recreate the same old talk radio format, just with a cheaper distribution channel. And of course they are beholden to the sponsors, who can destroy a podcast with one phone call.
The traditional way of producing audio and video, along with expecting to pay for it through ad revenue, is dead except for sports and big blockbuster films. The expense of paying for board operators and production people backing up talent (and in the case of NPR and other traditional media outlets producers, editors and copywriters), isn't going to be sustainable when your download rates are measured in the hundreds of thousands and ad responses are under single digit percentages. Direct payment and community building around your production are what will drive media in the future. Sure, Curry's skill as a DJ and audio engineer comes in handy when producing since he can act as a board op and talent, but as audio production tools improve opportunities for novice podcasters will follow. What's really going to be difficult is video podcasting because we're still not able to produce a convincing virtual set, but with all that retail space opening up in the post-amazon retail world, maybe someone will figure that out too.
If wind is so cheap why do we continue to subsidize it?
Well sure. Someone releases a report showing that the agency lets 95% of the bad stuff through. "OK" says management, "You want effective screening? You got it!" Word goes down from the boss to scrutinize everything that comes down the conveyor belt with a fine tooth comb. Wait times skyrocket.
Meanwhile, the next head of DHS is having lunch with a lobbyist who's representing a company with yet another high tech sensor system that will cost millions but still not work, or cause skin rashes in 50% of the people tested, but is guaranteed to keep the lines moving.
MORE MONEY MORE MONEY MORE MONEY!
The problem with working nights is you get out of sync with the rest of the world. I updated the phone on Tuesday, no problems, so I figured I'd just do the update on the iPad and move on. Now I get to restore my shiny new iPad Pro to factory defaults. Looks like one issue with restoring is that the iPad isn't waiting for the 1.94GB download to complete, so it restarts, causing iTunes to stop downloading until you go through the whole EULA again. Fingers crossed it will complete the load before bedtime.
I'd love to see the RCA on this one, especially since it only affects the 9.7" iPad pro.