I'm guessing they're getting FAR less than even dismal mp3 quality music ripping off of streaming services, that aren't putting out very high quality music at all....
I would guess this wouldn't sound very good even on a portable player or in a car, much less even a modestly decent home sound system....
Or, do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
I can only speak for YouTube as I don't use Spotify, etc., but YouTube vides have MPA audio at 128 kbps at the lower resolutions and 192 kbps at 720p and up. It's arguable, but 128 kbps should be roughly equivalent to 192 kbps MP3. So it's not as bad as you think. But honestly, no, no young people care at all about sound quality. If it's not terrible, it's good enough for them. One thing my conversations with young people has made clear is that they are simply not ever going to buy music in a physical format, like CDs, ever. They'd rather not have music than do that. And streaming meets their needs because they prefer to listen to pretty random selections of songs rather than being fans of specific artists.
It's not just you motorcycle riders who have problems. I had a blue Nissan Leaf that I leased and was using to drive to work. My distance from home to work is just under 22 miles each way and I had an older, gasoline powered car that was not doing well in the stop and go traffic and was not getting good gas mileage either, so I got the Leaf. I liked the Leaf but what I didn't like was having a large number of close calls driving it because people seemed to be unable to see it and would start getting over right into where my car was or would turn right in front of me from the opposite side of the road like I wasn't even there. I talked to a few other Leaf drivers and have heard similar stories. The Leaf is not unusually small, the design isn't strange, and there was nothing about the blue color mine had that was different from blues used by other car manufacturers, but I had a lot of incidents where people seemed completely unable to see the car. I don't have the Leaf any more and while I liked driving it, I admit to feeling a bit safer without it.
People are just pretty bad drivers in general. I am always seeing people make very risky left turns right in front of oncoming traffic rather than wait for a break in traffic where it's safer. In my state improper left turns seem to be the cause of the majority of accidents. By our state law, left turn has to yield to oncoming traffic, but you would really be surprised at how many people seem to think that oncoming traffic has to yield to all left turns.
Don't forget there's also the Russian opposition party early retirement plan: get shot on the footsteps of the Kremlin.
In all seriousness, the fact that they didn't just have some underlings "get rid of him" and are pretending to obey rule of law suggests that he's not guilty at all of what they claim and he's being sent up for something else (ie. political activities they don't like) or they've got someone in prison waiting to "take care of the problem".
I know lots of people say Trump is doing this because he's so egotistical that he can't believe he actually lost the popular vote. I actually think that's unlikely and 2 other reasons are a lot more likely.
1) It's simply red meat for his supporters and nothing more. If you have friends on Facebook who are pro-Trump and pro-Republican, you have probably been appalled at some of the crazy things they think are true. I'd love to see someone take a poll to verify this, but I suspect that Trump's supporters believe as much as 50% of the USA population is on welfare (actual number is about 8%) and that 20% or greater of the people in the USA are here illegally (it's actually about 4%).
2) Trump loves to distract his detractors with things they shouldn't even pay attention to, like tweets. Trump may actually know full well he lost the popular vote but this committee is meant to serve as a distraction from something else (health care failure maybe).
Keep in mind that some of the wing nuts on the left have already played into Trump's hand by publicly asserting that zero fraudulent voters occurred in the 2016 elections. All Trump has to do is find one anywhere and they're proven wrong. This could be simply about showing up his detractors who said there weren't any fraudulent votes and discrediting them for the future.
My concern over the technology is that it also can cause a non-deterministic behavior for the platform making it hard to capture elusive bugs..
Or they could just simply not fix the bugs to take care of that. True story here. I work for a Fortune 500 company in their IT department and I joined them when my previously employer, a startup, was bought out by my current employer. A guy in my management chain was a huge OpenBSD fan, so he made us run some servers using it. Nothing in production used it, but we had some test systems that did. I know I know. Running something in test that isn't like production.... So anyway, he loved OpenBSD with a passion and we couldn't get rid of it while he was there, even though it wasn't used in production at all. We ended up finding a gigantic bug that made OpenBSD's kernel panic and we could make it panic at will. It was caused by a specific piece of hardware in our servers that ran OpenBSD. We and others told Theo and he admitted it was a real problem, but he said he wasn't going to fix it because too few people had this specific hardware. So manager dude finally admitted we couldn't go on like this because not only could we crash the servers at will, they crashed a lot on their own if we did nothing because of the bug. So we replaced all our OpenBSD installations with RedHat and never went back to OpenBSD.
The real point is not "Don't trust other companies", "The cloud isn"t what you think it is" and so on. The real point is this - Man chooses stupid, ill advised, misleading email name at a domain he doesn't control and then gets upset when domain owners take away his name. Honestly, I don't know why he hasn't been getting crap from people for 20 years on the use of "noreply" in his email. Some of us do actually pay attention to that.
As a point of interest, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Fogerty (leader of Credence Clearwater Revival) wrote a song back in the 1980s about Saul Zaentz himself. Called "Zanz Kant Danz", it had lyrics like "Zanz can't dance, but he'll steal your money. Watch him or he'll rob you blind." Zaentz sued and a settlement forced Fogerty to rename the song "Vanz Kant Danz". Zaentz was pretty infamous in his day for his treatment of Credence. In an industry known for abusing its artists their record deal was infamously bad, called by some the worst deal in the entire industry for a major band. To be somewhat fair to Zaentz, Fogerty agreed to this deal and his agreement with his bandmates gave him the authority to do so. Fogerty has a real problem, in my opinion, of refusing to accept any responsibility himself for bad decisions he made, such as allowing Zaentz to siphon off band royalties into an off shore trust that didn't seem to accomplish anything but transfer their wealth to him. Zaentz was not a good guy at all and I can't say I'm surprised that approximately 3 years after his death he somehow is part of a lawsuit alleging infringement and a contract breach. If there was anybody who could cause legal problems from the grave, he'd be the guy.
People here are giving pretty reasonable posts, like you'd have to secure passengers, and so on, but I seem to recall that either Easyjet or Ryanair had some crazy CEO a few years ago who suggested this kind of thing and he was definitely not interested at all in securing passengers.
After writing that, I just checked. Viva Colombia is owned by Ryanair. It all makes sense now. The idea got nowhere in Europe for safety reasons. Let's just say that Latin America in general has a much more, uh, "relaxed" attitude towards aviation safety than would work in the USA, Canada and the EU. I said in general so I'm not saying all Latin American airlines are like that.
Unless that guy has the most Jewish and Western European sounding name ever for a citizen of Iran, Iraq and the other countries on the ban, it's not related. Citizens of about 40 countries, including the vast majority of European countries, are allowed visa free travel to the USA. Apparently we now make citizens of those countries apply for an ESTA which basically is advance approval that they'll be allowed into the US. This system should avoid the problem of having people fly into the US and being denied entry at the airport. Nobody wants that. Stenberg's ESTA was denied but for privacy reasons nobody can comment on why. It could be a mistake. It could be that he did something that raised the ire of the US government (maybe he has a lot of friends in a country the USA doesn't like). Maybe he's very anti-US on social media. Don't know. I wish his lawyers luck. Yeah. Having a lawyer fight this is totally going to be successful (sarcasm there). Eventually it will come out what his problem is. Don't be surprised if, for example, he's been a complete jerk on social media towards the USA or somebody in the government and it came back to haunt him.
It doesn't thrill me to say this, but I still think it's going to be true. I'll set that alarm clock to wake you in January 2025 when Trump's successor gets sworn in. By the way, Trump's base is arguing for him that because "everybody" is against him that he hasn't had time do anything yet and it's not his fault. And yes, even if he destroys health care and his tax cuts ruin the US economy, he'll still get re-elected.
People are vegan for different reasons. Some are vegan for health reasons, Some are vegan for the environment, but most are vegan because they are against killing animals that feel pain.
Actually I think you mean this: ... but most are vegan because they are crazy.
I've known vegetarians who fit your reasons, but vegans are basically vegetarians' crazy cousins who nobody wants to talk about. People rarely become vegan because they are against killing animals. They'd be vegetarians in that case. They become vegans because they've gone off the deep end of the non-meat eaters segment of people.
I do have some sympathy for you, but your situation is unusual. You're pretty much at the poverty line with your yearly income due to disability and that does mean that you don't have a lot of choices for health insurance. And I hate to break it to you, but your premiums were still going up without Obamacare. Premiums went up constantly before it. They've gone up with it. They'll go up when AHCA gets passed. There's nothing in AHCA that's going to be of benefit to you.
I'm not accepting your numbers for US single payer insurance costs, which were no doubt pulled out of some biased right wing article you found. I also hate to break this to you, but single payer insurance is inevitable. It's the only thing that can ever bring costs down other than providing catastrophic only coverage that pays for nothing else, which would be a big problem for you. And even providing catastrophic only coverage is likely to see premiums go through the roof because the insurance companies will get less money that way in premiums, so they'll make it up by raising costs.
Your argument about the government paying pension plans is bogus because the US government back in the 1980s moved away from a pension plan system for federal employees and for over 30 years now all federal employees have had to have 401K plans. They have no choice.
So a pirated music file is worth tens of thousands of dollars, but a persons confidential medical history is worth $1.43
The major reason this is true is that a small number of cases with delusional defendants and incompetent lawyers lost big time. I'm too lazy to look up her name, but there is some lady who lost 3 times in court and every loss ended up being worse than the one before. She basically admitted in court that she shared the files in question and the last time she went she had law school students (no joke) as her lawyers. The students talked smack before the trial about how it was going to be a slam dunk to win it and they got her her worst loss ever. The cases I've known where defendants won was when they had good lawyers and they denied personally sharing the files in question. One case involved a guy who ran a home for senior citizens and his lawyers showed that the wifi there wasn't secured and the plaintiffs couldn't explicitly prove that he and only he could be responsible for the files being shared. Ever major loss I've ever read about involved defendants who admitted that they shared the files, refused to settle the case outside of court for a fraction of what they ended up paying with a loss in court, and basically seemed to think they would win in court simply because... magic.
Yet when these things are talked about in the US, it seems like they are job killing ideas coming from the devil himself.
I'm an American and I've traveled extensively around the world. Trust me. When we get those, they will indeed be job killers that come from the devil. America isn't like anywhere else, including Canada. You should see the stuff in my Facebook feed from my Republican friends. They are convinced that huge numbers of people, like maybe half the USA, is on welfare and/or food stamps and refuses to work. And they're cheering as the Republicans are currently trying to destroy health care because they think it might lower their costs a little (it won't) and they truly believe that the 20+ million people that will lose health insurance overnight will have no effect on the economy and they'll never go to the ER (where the taxpayer picks up the tab) and apparently will just die and get out of the way. The lack of compassion in America these days from Republican supporters is off the charts. George W Bush tried compassionate conservatism and he's widely ridiculed within the party now. McDonalds in the USA won't put those in to improve service. They'll put them in to get rid of employees. Just watch.
Did actually watch the segment? First of all, the woman does not health insurance so she has to pay the full amount of whatever she is going to be charged. One of the benefits of having health insurance is that the insurance company negotiated rates for you already. Some costs without insurance are ridiculous. Second, $8,000 is what the woman was quoted to her. She said that's her cost in an interview reported by Al Jazeera. How did Oliver lie? Or are you being disingenuous?
One of the tactics of the American right (ie. Republicans) is to insist that everybody in the country now has much costlier insurance with less coverage and different doctors "thanks to Obamacare". My insurance costs were going up before Obamacare and they've gone up after, but I've seen no proof that they weren't going up anyway without it. And I've had no coverage changes or been forced to change doctors at all. One of my best friends (small businessman) admitted that he and his family have saved a lot of money on insurance (for themselves) since Obamacare yet he hates Obama with a passion and insists he was the world president ever. People believe what they want to believe.
If it's "Far from autonomous", they shouldn't be calling it autopilot.
Seems like an appropriate name, actually. A plane on autopilot also just keeps course and altitude, but doesn't fly around storms, or start an automatic landing procedure when fuel is running low.
If you'd like to try an experiment and you work in a reasonably large office, pick 10 of your co-workers at random and ask them to explain to you what autopilot on a plane does. I bet that at least 7 out of 10 will claim that autopilot can land the plane and possibly other things that it doesn't really do. Given how the average person probably doesn't actually understand the name correctly, it wasn't a good choice.
Doubts that it's going to save $1 trillion. Trump lies constantly and he won't stick to anything he says, so this could even be true in that he'll actually try but as soon as the plan hits any minor bumps he'll give up on it, move on to something else, and blame the Democrats for it. Right now the only "promise" he seems inclined to keep is to try to deport just about every illegal immigrant DHS can get its hands on.
The story is that the directors had problems with Kathleen Kennedy, who runs LucasFilms and is their boss, from day one. Basically they couldn't get along with the CEO and she fired them. Kennedy has a pretty good track record in the industry and picking a fight with her was not a great plan. Plus, remember news leaked out that Rogue One had re-shoots and lots of people concluded that the only possible outcome was a disastrous movie that would fail spectacularly. Rogue One made half a billion at the box office. I thought it was pretty good. These guys' claim to fame is they made 3 comedy movies that turned a profit. Losing them with most of the shooting done is not a tragedy and the final result may still be pretty good and probably more in line with what the bosses expect than what they were planning on doing themselves.
The feline brain is very similar in structure to the human brain, only obviously a lot smaller.
And a lot stupider. Insert obligatory joke about _______ voter here. But seriously, I used to work with a guy who was one of those "crazy cat people". I think he has had as many as 8 cats at a time living with him. Calling him a fan of cats is really an understatement. And I remember him saying that while he loved cats, they were in general pretty stupid and dogs, of which he had zero, were a lot more intelligent.
I got back from a trip to Asia and bought an unlocked Nokia N-80 I had seen advertised there, which at the time was pretty cutting edge. Within something like 2 months of purchasing of the Nokia, the iPhone came out and Nokia got left in the dust - permanently. They never really recovered. Nokia made a lot of half-hearted attempts to compete with Apple but the whole "touch screen thing" seemed to be something they never really grasped and Nokia would, at best, hold onto the "garbage phone" market for a while in the 3rd world where their cheapish "I want a phone that's only phone" low featured models would continue to sell in decent numbers for a while.
There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars). But most things we think will take 100 years will probably take less than 20.
I get that you said "most". One exception sadly seems to be space exploration. I'm pretty sure if we could go back in to, let's say, 1965 and get President Johnson and the very top NASA and private industry space experts in a room and told them the following:
"I've got good news and bad. The good news is that we're going to get men on the moon in 1969 and bring them safely back multiple times. (Sounds of cheers from the room)
The bad news is that the last time we'll go will be 1972 and we won't try again and the next 45 years after that will mostly be spent dealing with one space station (much less impressive in reality then you're likely to expect it to be) and we will be decades, at absolute best, from ever going back to the moon, let along putting someone on Mars."
It's hard for me to imagine any one of those people would believe the bad news part of that, yet here we are.
I used to work for the Federal government some years ago. In no way does this surprise me. A lot of Federal requirements take on a life of their own and keep going long after they've lost relevance. The Federal excise tax on telephones was started to fund the Spanish-American War in 1898 and we still have it. Spain has been a NATO ally longer than most people here have been alive and we still have a tax that began to pay for fighting them.
But chess games? Two BILLION of them? I'd have thought that would be plenty. Color me very pleasantly surprised.
I am not a user of that site, so I'm just speculating here, but I wonder if the games total is so large because a significant number of them are not actually people playing but people using bots to play for analysis purposes. I used to play in official tournaments some years ago and I long ago gave up on chess once computers started getting used for analysis. If you're not a player you might be surprised how much play gets subjected to computer analysis to try to find better outcomes from losses, for example. I know it's had some impact in a few specific cases where a line of play was considered unwinnable for a long time for one color against a good opponent (I'm talking deep into a game like after 15 moves) and computer analysis found ways to revive the line for the color that previously was considered unable to win at it.
There are conservatives who mirror the Kremlin's message, but these buildings filled with thousands of paid trolls are the originals and the instigators. This is not a game, read the Times story above and you will see the real world consequences; Russia can create fake hysteria in America, made up disasters, and form political causes out of the ether which sway American policy in the direction they like.
Some sources are saying that the whole current hubbub about Qatar is based on a false story that came from these groups. For whatever reason Trump certainly seems convinced that Qatar is ground zero for terrorist funding and I'm just not sure that's really true. I do know that Russia likes to sow discord among US allies and having Qatar end up so angry that they close down the US base there would certainly be an endgame Russia would like to see. Russia is also a master at creating problems and then inserting themselves into the middle of them as a mediator and insisting that only they can resolve them.
To be fair, Clinton did have an unsecured Exchange server hanging on the public Internet, and her lieutenant John Podesta fell for the world's dumbest phishing scam... I mean, c'mon.
To be fair, Podesta didn't fall for the phishing scam. He thought the email was suspicious so he asked a millennial on his staff who was supposedly his email expert about it. The young guy went into an immediate panic and insisted that the email was completely legit and Podesta needed to click on the link immediately. So he did. Nobody will name the staffer or say what happened to him. The guy who fell for the phishing scam was Podesta's trusted staffer who was supposed to know how to detect this kind of thing.
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I'm guessing they're getting FAR less than even dismal mp3 quality music ripping off of streaming services, that aren't putting out very high quality music at all....
I would guess this wouldn't sound very good even on a portable player or in a car, much less even a modestly decent home sound system....
Or, do people just not care (or even know about) sound fidelity anymore...?
I can only speak for YouTube as I don't use Spotify, etc., but YouTube vides have MPA audio at 128 kbps at the lower resolutions and 192 kbps at 720p and up. It's arguable, but 128 kbps should be roughly equivalent to 192 kbps MP3. So it's not as bad as you think. But honestly, no, no young people care at all about sound quality. If it's not terrible, it's good enough for them. One thing my conversations with young people has made clear is that they are simply not ever going to buy music in a physical format, like CDs, ever. They'd rather not have music than do that. And streaming meets their needs because they prefer to listen to pretty random selections of songs rather than being fans of specific artists.
It's not just you motorcycle riders who have problems. I had a blue Nissan Leaf that I leased and was using to drive to work. My distance from home to work is just under 22 miles each way and I had an older, gasoline powered car that was not doing well in the stop and go traffic and was not getting good gas mileage either, so I got the Leaf. I liked the Leaf but what I didn't like was having a large number of close calls driving it because people seemed to be unable to see it and would start getting over right into where my car was or would turn right in front of me from the opposite side of the road like I wasn't even there. I talked to a few other Leaf drivers and have heard similar stories. The Leaf is not unusually small, the design isn't strange, and there was nothing about the blue color mine had that was different from blues used by other car manufacturers, but I had a lot of incidents where people seemed completely unable to see the car. I don't have the Leaf any more and while I liked driving it, I admit to feeling a bit safer without it.
People are just pretty bad drivers in general. I am always seeing people make very risky left turns right in front of oncoming traffic rather than wait for a break in traffic where it's safer. In my state improper left turns seem to be the cause of the majority of accidents. By our state law, left turn has to yield to oncoming traffic, but you would really be surprised at how many people seem to think that oncoming traffic has to yield to all left turns.
Don't forget there's also the Russian opposition party early retirement plan: get shot on the footsteps of the Kremlin.
In all seriousness, the fact that they didn't just have some underlings "get rid of him" and are pretending to obey rule of law suggests that he's not guilty at all of what they claim and he's being sent up for something else (ie. political activities they don't like) or they've got someone in prison waiting to "take care of the problem".
I know lots of people say Trump is doing this because he's so egotistical that he can't believe he actually lost the popular vote. I actually think that's unlikely and 2 other reasons are a lot more likely.
1) It's simply red meat for his supporters and nothing more. If you have friends on Facebook who are pro-Trump and pro-Republican, you have probably been appalled at some of the crazy things they think are true. I'd love to see someone take a poll to verify this, but I suspect that Trump's supporters believe as much as 50% of the USA population is on welfare (actual number is about 8%) and that 20% or greater of the people in the USA are here illegally (it's actually about 4%).
2) Trump loves to distract his detractors with things they shouldn't even pay attention to, like tweets. Trump may actually know full well he lost the popular vote but this committee is meant to serve as a distraction from something else (health care failure maybe).
Keep in mind that some of the wing nuts on the left have already played into Trump's hand by publicly asserting that zero fraudulent voters occurred in the 2016 elections. All Trump has to do is find one anywhere and they're proven wrong. This could be simply about showing up his detractors who said there weren't any fraudulent votes and discrediting them for the future.
My concern over the technology is that it also can cause a non-deterministic behavior for the platform making it hard to capture elusive bugs. .
Or they could just simply not fix the bugs to take care of that. True story here. I work for a Fortune 500 company in their IT department and I joined them when my previously employer, a startup, was bought out by my current employer. A guy in my management chain was a huge OpenBSD fan, so he made us run some servers using it. Nothing in production used it, but we had some test systems that did. I know I know. Running something in test that isn't like production.... So anyway, he loved OpenBSD with a passion and we couldn't get rid of it while he was there, even though it wasn't used in production at all. We ended up finding a gigantic bug that made OpenBSD's kernel panic and we could make it panic at will. It was caused by a specific piece of hardware in our servers that ran OpenBSD. We and others told Theo and he admitted it was a real problem, but he said he wasn't going to fix it because too few people had this specific hardware. So manager dude finally admitted we couldn't go on like this because not only could we crash the servers at will, they crashed a lot on their own if we did nothing because of the bug. So we replaced all our OpenBSD installations with RedHat and never went back to OpenBSD.
The real point is not "Don't trust other companies", "The cloud isn"t what you think it is" and so on. The real point is this - Man chooses stupid, ill advised, misleading email name at a domain he doesn't control and then gets upset when domain owners take away his name. Honestly, I don't know why he hasn't been getting crap from people for 20 years on the use of "noreply" in his email. Some of us do actually pay attention to that.
As a point of interest, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer John Fogerty (leader of Credence Clearwater Revival) wrote a song back in the 1980s about Saul Zaentz himself. Called "Zanz Kant Danz", it had lyrics like "Zanz can't dance, but he'll steal your money. Watch him or he'll rob you blind." Zaentz sued and a settlement forced Fogerty to rename the song "Vanz Kant Danz". Zaentz was pretty infamous in his day for his treatment of Credence. In an industry known for abusing its artists their record deal was infamously bad, called by some the worst deal in the entire industry for a major band. To be somewhat fair to Zaentz, Fogerty agreed to this deal and his agreement with his bandmates gave him the authority to do so. Fogerty has a real problem, in my opinion, of refusing to accept any responsibility himself for bad decisions he made, such as allowing Zaentz to siphon off band royalties into an off shore trust that didn't seem to accomplish anything but transfer their wealth to him. Zaentz was not a good guy at all and I can't say I'm surprised that approximately 3 years after his death he somehow is part of a lawsuit alleging infringement and a contract breach. If there was anybody who could cause legal problems from the grave, he'd be the guy.
People here are giving pretty reasonable posts, like you'd have to secure passengers, and so on, but I seem to recall that either Easyjet or Ryanair had some crazy CEO a few years ago who suggested this kind of thing and he was definitely not interested at all in securing passengers.
After writing that, I just checked. Viva Colombia is owned by Ryanair. It all makes sense now. The idea got nowhere in Europe for safety reasons. Let's just say that Latin America in general has a much more, uh, "relaxed" attitude towards aviation safety than would work in the USA, Canada and the EU. I said in general so I'm not saying all Latin American airlines are like that.
Unless that guy has the most Jewish and Western European sounding name ever for a citizen of Iran, Iraq and the other countries on the ban, it's not related. Citizens of about 40 countries, including the vast majority of European countries, are allowed visa free travel to the USA. Apparently we now make citizens of those countries apply for an ESTA which basically is advance approval that they'll be allowed into the US. This system should avoid the problem of having people fly into the US and being denied entry at the airport. Nobody wants that. Stenberg's ESTA was denied but for privacy reasons nobody can comment on why. It could be a mistake. It could be that he did something that raised the ire of the US government (maybe he has a lot of friends in a country the USA doesn't like). Maybe he's very anti-US on social media. Don't know. I wish his lawyers luck. Yeah. Having a lawyer fight this is totally going to be successful (sarcasm there). Eventually it will come out what his problem is. Don't be surprised if, for example, he's been a complete jerk on social media towards the USA or somebody in the government and it came back to haunt him.
Wake me when he DOES something.
It doesn't thrill me to say this, but I still think it's going to be true. I'll set that alarm clock to wake you in January 2025 when Trump's successor gets sworn in. By the way, Trump's base is arguing for him that because "everybody" is against him that he hasn't had time do anything yet and it's not his fault. And yes, even if he destroys health care and his tax cuts ruin the US economy, he'll still get re-elected.
People are vegan for different reasons. Some are vegan for health reasons, Some are vegan for the environment, but most are vegan because they are against killing animals that feel pain.
Actually I think you mean this:
... but most are vegan because they are crazy.
I've known vegetarians who fit your reasons, but vegans are basically vegetarians' crazy cousins who nobody wants to talk about. People rarely become vegan because they are against killing animals. They'd be vegetarians in that case. They become vegans because they've gone off the deep end of the non-meat eaters segment of people.
I do have some sympathy for you, but your situation is unusual. You're pretty much at the poverty line with your yearly income due to disability and that does mean that you don't have a lot of choices for health insurance. And I hate to break it to you, but your premiums were still going up without Obamacare. Premiums went up constantly before it. They've gone up with it. They'll go up when AHCA gets passed. There's nothing in AHCA that's going to be of benefit to you.
I'm not accepting your numbers for US single payer insurance costs, which were no doubt pulled out of some biased right wing article you found. I also hate to break this to you, but single payer insurance is inevitable. It's the only thing that can ever bring costs down other than providing catastrophic only coverage that pays for nothing else, which would be a big problem for you. And even providing catastrophic only coverage is likely to see premiums go through the roof because the insurance companies will get less money that way in premiums, so they'll make it up by raising costs.
Your argument about the government paying pension plans is bogus because the US government back in the 1980s moved away from a pension plan system for federal employees and for over 30 years now all federal employees have had to have 401K plans. They have no choice.
So a pirated music file is worth tens of thousands of dollars, but a persons confidential medical history is worth $1.43
The major reason this is true is that a small number of cases with delusional defendants and incompetent lawyers lost big time. I'm too lazy to look up her name, but there is some lady who lost 3 times in court and every loss ended up being worse than the one before. She basically admitted in court that she shared the files in question and the last time she went she had law school students (no joke) as her lawyers. The students talked smack before the trial about how it was going to be a slam dunk to win it and they got her her worst loss ever. The cases I've known where defendants won was when they had good lawyers and they denied personally sharing the files in question. One case involved a guy who ran a home for senior citizens and his lawyers showed that the wifi there wasn't secured and the plaintiffs couldn't explicitly prove that he and only he could be responsible for the files being shared. Ever major loss I've ever read about involved defendants who admitted that they shared the files, refused to settle the case outside of court for a fraction of what they ended up paying with a loss in court, and basically seemed to think they would win in court simply because ... magic.
Yet when these things are talked about in the US, it seems like they are job killing ideas coming from the devil himself.
I'm an American and I've traveled extensively around the world. Trust me. When we get those, they will indeed be job killers that come from the devil. America isn't like anywhere else, including Canada. You should see the stuff in my Facebook feed from my Republican friends. They are convinced that huge numbers of people, like maybe half the USA, is on welfare and/or food stamps and refuses to work. And they're cheering as the Republicans are currently trying to destroy health care because they think it might lower their costs a little (it won't) and they truly believe that the 20+ million people that will lose health insurance overnight will have no effect on the economy and they'll never go to the ER (where the taxpayer picks up the tab) and apparently will just die and get out of the way. The lack of compassion in America these days from Republican supporters is off the charts. George W Bush tried compassionate conservatism and he's widely ridiculed within the party now. McDonalds in the USA won't put those in to improve service. They'll put them in to get rid of employees. Just watch.
Did actually watch the segment? First of all, the woman does not health insurance so she has to pay the full amount of whatever she is going to be charged. One of the benefits of having health insurance is that the insurance company negotiated rates for you already. Some costs without insurance are ridiculous. Second, $8,000 is what the woman was quoted to her. She said that's her cost in an interview reported by Al Jazeera. How did Oliver lie? Or are you being disingenuous?
One of the tactics of the American right (ie. Republicans) is to insist that everybody in the country now has much costlier insurance with less coverage and different doctors "thanks to Obamacare". My insurance costs were going up before Obamacare and they've gone up after, but I've seen no proof that they weren't going up anyway without it. And I've had no coverage changes or been forced to change doctors at all. One of my best friends (small businessman) admitted that he and his family have saved a lot of money on insurance (for themselves) since Obamacare yet he hates Obama with a passion and insists he was the world president ever. People believe what they want to believe.
If it's "Far from autonomous", they shouldn't be calling it autopilot.
Seems like an appropriate name, actually. A plane on autopilot also just keeps course and altitude, but doesn't fly around storms, or start an automatic landing procedure when fuel is running low.
If you'd like to try an experiment and you work in a reasonably large office, pick 10 of your co-workers at random and ask them to explain to you what autopilot on a plane does. I bet that at least 7 out of 10 will claim that autopilot can land the plane and possibly other things that it doesn't really do. Given how the average person probably doesn't actually understand the name correctly, it wasn't a good choice.
Doubts that it's going to save $1 trillion. Trump lies constantly and he won't stick to anything he says, so this could even be true in that he'll actually try but as soon as the plan hits any minor bumps he'll give up on it, move on to something else, and blame the Democrats for it. Right now the only "promise" he seems inclined to keep is to try to deport just about every illegal immigrant DHS can get its hands on.
The story is that the directors had problems with Kathleen Kennedy, who runs LucasFilms and is their boss, from day one. Basically they couldn't get along with the CEO and she fired them. Kennedy has a pretty good track record in the industry and picking a fight with her was not a great plan. Plus, remember news leaked out that Rogue One had re-shoots and lots of people concluded that the only possible outcome was a disastrous movie that would fail spectacularly. Rogue One made half a billion at the box office. I thought it was pretty good. These guys' claim to fame is they made 3 comedy movies that turned a profit. Losing them with most of the shooting done is not a tragedy and the final result may still be pretty good and probably more in line with what the bosses expect than what they were planning on doing themselves.
The feline brain is very similar in structure to the human brain, only obviously a lot smaller.
And a lot stupider. Insert obligatory joke about _______ voter here. But seriously, I used to work with a guy who was one of those "crazy cat people". I think he has had as many as 8 cats at a time living with him. Calling him a fan of cats is really an understatement. And I remember him saying that while he loved cats, they were in general pretty stupid and dogs, of which he had zero, were a lot more intelligent.
I got back from a trip to Asia and bought an unlocked Nokia N-80 I had seen advertised there, which at the time was pretty cutting edge. Within something like 2 months of purchasing of the Nokia, the iPhone came out and Nokia got left in the dust - permanently. They never really recovered. Nokia made a lot of half-hearted attempts to compete with Apple but the whole "touch screen thing" seemed to be something they never really grasped and Nokia would, at best, hold onto the "garbage phone" market for a while in the 3rd world where their cheapish "I want a phone that's only phone" low featured models would continue to sell in decent numbers for a while.
There will probably be some things we assume are easy which will still elude us in 50 years (like flying cars). But most things we think will take 100 years will probably take less than 20.
I get that you said "most". One exception sadly seems to be space exploration. I'm pretty sure if we could go back in to, let's say, 1965 and get President Johnson and the very top NASA and private industry space experts in a room and told them the following:
"I've got good news and bad. The good news is that we're going to get men on the moon in 1969 and bring them safely back multiple times. (Sounds of cheers from the room)
The bad news is that the last time we'll go will be 1972 and we won't try again and the next 45 years after that will mostly be spent dealing with one space station (much less impressive in reality then you're likely to expect it to be) and we will be decades, at absolute best, from ever going back to the moon, let along putting someone on Mars."
It's hard for me to imagine any one of those people would believe the bad news part of that, yet here we are.
I used to work for the Federal government some years ago. In no way does this surprise me. A lot of Federal requirements take on a life of their own and keep going long after they've lost relevance. The Federal excise tax on telephones was started to fund the Spanish-American War in 1898 and we still have it. Spain has been a NATO ally longer than most people here have been alive and we still have a tax that began to pay for fighting them.
But chess games? Two BILLION of them? I'd have thought that would be plenty. Color me very pleasantly surprised.
I am not a user of that site, so I'm just speculating here, but I wonder if the games total is so large because a significant number of them are not actually people playing but people using bots to play for analysis purposes. I used to play in official tournaments some years ago and I long ago gave up on chess once computers started getting used for analysis. If you're not a player you might be surprised how much play gets subjected to computer analysis to try to find better outcomes from losses, for example. I know it's had some impact in a few specific cases where a line of play was considered unwinnable for a long time for one color against a good opponent (I'm talking deep into a game like after 15 moves) and computer analysis found ways to revive the line for the color that previously was considered unable to win at it.
There are conservatives who mirror the Kremlin's message, but these buildings filled with thousands of paid trolls are the originals and the instigators. This is not a game, read the Times story above and you will see the real world consequences; Russia can create fake hysteria in America, made up disasters, and form political causes out of the ether which sway American policy in the direction they like.
Some sources are saying that the whole current hubbub about Qatar is based on a false story that came from these groups. For whatever reason Trump certainly seems convinced that Qatar is ground zero for terrorist funding and I'm just not sure that's really true. I do know that Russia likes to sow discord among US allies and having Qatar end up so angry that they close down the US base there would certainly be an endgame Russia would like to see. Russia is also a master at creating problems and then inserting themselves into the middle of them as a mediator and insisting that only they can resolve them.
To be fair, Clinton did have an unsecured Exchange server hanging on the public Internet, and her lieutenant John Podesta fell for the world's dumbest phishing scam... I mean, c'mon.
To be fair, Podesta didn't fall for the phishing scam. He thought the email was suspicious so he asked a millennial on his staff who was supposedly his email expert about it. The young guy went into an immediate panic and insisted that the email was completely legit and Podesta needed to click on the link immediately. So he did. Nobody will name the staffer or say what happened to him. The guy who fell for the phishing scam was Podesta's trusted staffer who was supposed to know how to detect this kind of thing.