I've posted this elsewhere in more detail, but Blockbuster, due to the spinoff from Viacom, was saddled with about a billion in debt. That debt didn't exactly help when Icahn ended up ousting Antioco, who was trying to modernize the brand, and replaced him with Keyes, who was trying to be the brick and mortar shop of the past. That's just two examples of times Blockbuster the brand got completely fucked by outside interests. There's plenty of others in the chain's history, like Bill Fields being fired.

What's weird to me is that insurance companies aren't at all incentivized to reduce costs. In fact, they're blatantly incentivized towards raising costs. It really doesn't matter whether they're capped at 20% profit - their profit scales with larger overall numbers, so they're incentivized to keep costs high and push them higher in all situations. If healthcare costs rise 10%, they can push their insurance prices up 10%, and have a 10% increase in profit, even under the same percentage cap. Doctors like it too, since they'd make an extra 10% on the same procedure. Even the patients, in most cases, care far more about quality care than about the cost of care.

Auto insurance and repair has plain old economics going for it - as spare parts become more available later in a car's production run, the costs drop. Home/flood insurance seems like it would be subject to the same upward incentive in home prices as health insurance, with the caveat that housing prices usually remain relatively stagnant outside of a bubble and there's not much the insurance companies can do to affect pricing anyway.

Healthcare, though, becomes a problematic outlier relative to other types of insurance - how do you lower costs when almost all the players have a tangible incentive to help costs rise and the ability to do so, and even the consumer has an ambivalence to cost as long as quality is maintained/improved and the cost burden doesn't reach a certain (unknown) untenable threshold for a large enough percentage?

That's the problem the US is attempting to deal with in healthcare, at its' core. It's probably the most complicated economic and policy problem possible - how do you regulate a market that has almost nothing providing natural balancing factors? Supply and demand are effectively nonexistent, healthcare isn't optional (and never really was, even before the ACA), and all the players are rewarded for pushing on the same side of the scale.

Seems like a regulatory problem, more than a problem with chip-and-pin. You can always just legislate away credit card issuers' responsibility, regardless as to whether they use chip-and-pin or not.

Card not present transactions are already the primary target, as far as I can tell. I've never replaced a card for an in-person fraud, but I've had at least one replacement, if not more, for each of my cards (including ones never used online) on online orders.

If everyone uses a strategy that counters battleships, and nobody uses them, then the design and concept of the battleship is, by definition, obsolete.

You do realize that the vast majority of battleships worldwide were decommissioned in the 50's and 60's, and no navy has had a battleship in service since the 90's, right? The first Iraq war was the last time one was used.

About the Seoul City thing, I looked it up, because I was curious as well. It seems that Seoul's full name is "Seoul Special City", and the area around Seoul is the "Seoul Capital Area". I'm guessing he said "Seoul City" to make clear the service would be offered in the city proper, and would normally be translated with the "city" dropped from his statement.

Not really. ABP needs to certify the company's advertising practices to at least a moderate degree. They need to do extra work to allow only ads that are unobtrusive. They make no attempt to hide that they get paid by large companies, and give every user the opportunity to opt out. That's not terrible ethics, that's transparency in action.

It's extraordinarily well known that they accept unobtrusive ads - go to their web page, and it's literally bullet point #2 under their heading, sandwiched between "Blocks banners, pop-ups and video ads - even on Facebook and YouTube" and "It's free", with a link to a page describing *why* they do it and instructions on how to turn it off if you so choose. Many of the people who use Adblock Plus, myself included, use it specifically to block intrusive or broken ads, rather than all ads. As an example, on Twitch, there's ads that play in certain spots of the stream determined by the streamer - that could be fine, except for the fact that Twitch ads are broken. They don't adhere to volume settings, and frequently crash the player - a giant pain when you just happen to have a stream on while doing something else, especially since they always run a "preroll" ad when you load or reload a stream, which itself can crash the player. That's outright unacceptable. Google ads, OTOH, are about as unobtrusive as they get, and don't outright break the sites they're on, so I don't have a problem with that.

Why do you think that being for expansion in one area means you're for expansion in all areas? Clearly, government needs to do more to promote competition in the ISP business, and just as clearly, government is overreaching with the TSA and spy agencies, which need to be more limited. It's no so simple to say "fuck big government" or "let's expand government", either of which is such an extraordinary simplification of the fact that it blows me away that people take either side seriously.

BTW, people will hate the IRS regardless as to whether they grow, shrink, or just stay the same size, so they're pretty much irrelevant to whether you hate the size of government as long as it exists. Don't; forget, the early history of the US was rife with infighting over taxes.

It really is due to municipalities and states in the US. South Korea is so far ahead because there's a bunch of choices - 4 major ISPs, plus 2 of their major cell operators are both rolling out LTE-A at 300mbps, which is entirely a viable option instead of the land-based ISPs. In the US, the federal government hasn't rectified the problem that states and local governments are causing with their exclusivity deals and blocks against municipal broadband, but it's not entering into those agreements for the locals either. The federal government is allowing the problem to persist, at least to some degree - I don't know how well they'd be able to argue for striking down local laws like this, even if there was a will to do it. Net neutrality is much easier for the federal government to get involved in than how states deploy the infrastructure.

Yeah, about a 12 foot wingspan prop plane.....it'll get shot down long before it gets near a target like the WH. I think the guy from Ohio actually had the best concept for trying this type of attack - small amount of explosives on a jet-style RC that would be fast moving (I've seen them go up past 400mph) and hard to hit, and is more likely to actually make it inside of the building since you could aim for the glass.

On the WH specifically, I doubt you'd be able to have even a few pounds of C4 do significant damage to the building from the outside - it's not exactly a soft target built like a standard house, where 4 pounds of C4 might completely demolish it from the outside. The entire building is at a minimum bulletproof, and the walls are likely backed by blast panels. That was one of the most troubling things about the guy who ran inside, IMO. If the threat is outside of the WH, there's not much to worry about unless they're carrying a small nuke or flying a jetliner into it. If the threat is inside the WH, though, they can cause a massive amount of damage with just a gun, or a small quantity of relatively easy to access explosives.

I'm thinking you overestimate the payload capacity of drones, at least for quadcopters (as opposed to plane-styles, which I know nearly nothing about, but would likely be terrifying without any explosive payload if it went full speed into the capital dome). One of the most popular large models for carrying heavier payloads, the DJI Phantom 2, can carry about 320g reliably. That is, it won't be sluggish and unable to compensate for wind gusts at that kind of payload. The thing is, this drone is *big*. I doubt the drone in the story was larger than a Syma X11 or similar toy, which you'd be hard-pressed to even see coming, tops out at about 15g of payload, can't compensate for more than about 10mph wind gusts, and won't hear outdoors in a city unless it gets within 5 feet or so. A Phantom, OTOH, is large enough to see and hear at a distance, and slow enough to shoot down. There's also a huge price difference, as a Phantom is over $1000, while one of those toy drones is in the $50 ballpark. In other words, this is only really a major threat when explosives advance to the point where you can fit that C4 block's charge into a 15g, 2" x 2" package.

This is really aimed at irresponsible behavior by large companies. Large companies are undoubtedly going to leave a massive trail of emails and tons of other proof in the wake of the discovery as they try to rectify the problem, and subpoenas will get that proof into the court system. Small companies aren't going to be worth bringing to court, since there's a decent chance that there's no real proof.

I'm glad the common standards for safety make it safe to do 65 on the Turnpike both in mid summer at 90 degrees and in light snow sub-32.

You can espouse the benefits of common safety standards all you want, but the Turnpike, along with most other interstates, was designed for near 100mph speeds (if not exceeding that) when no traffic is present in good weather with a capable car, and using "common safety standards" as your excuse for the government screwing you is a farce unless they're actually changing the speed limit based on the actual conditions present on the road. It's funny too, because they do change the speed limit of the Turnpike occasionally - downwards, in bad conditions. Specifically, for the government's benefit, not ours. Masquerading as safety, when the truth is that safety would be the reason only if it moved in both directions.

Have you ever talked to a cop about speed limits? Do you know what the majority I've met have said about them? "We can't pull over everyone going this speed, so we look for people who are actually dangerous, whether they're swerving or going so far over that it's unsafe. You're not going to get pulled over going 5 above it." Gops completely understand what's safe to drive on a given road at a given time - they're trained more extensively than your average driver, both in recognizing dangerous behaviors in others and how to drive themselves. Have you ever seen a cop observing the speed limit with open road in front of them outside of a residential area? Speed limits, as a hard limit for safety regardless as to the actual conditions present, are bullshit, and cops tacitly recognize that fact and use their near-immunity to get away with what you're defending so vehemently. Case closed.