You must not understand where your IRAs are, because they're in these companies.

Does that mean every mutual fund must pass this punishment on to its customers? There's no way, because that might be a breach of confidence.

You (as the investor) have no way of knowing exactly what gets done because the information doesn't come out until it's too late for you to make an informed decision.

Are you a senator or congress critter? Upper management of a US automaker?

Are you sure that isn't dependent upon which state you call home? In my state, no political registration is necessary.

That's right, North Dakota doesn't force you to take sides until you actually vote. What a concept!

If civil engineers designed traffic lights like this, it would _ruin_ automobile transportation. Have you ever driven a car/truck/bicycle in America?

It seems like you're encouraging a race to see who can approach the light at the slowest possible pace to ensure they can stop before it turns red for fear of being punished? That is the wrong paradigm.

I'm not joking. The trick seems to be finding a way to improve your odds in the numbers game of marketing. Usually, it's by finding a way to get mentioned at the water cooler. It doesn't matter that if product you sell is indistinguishable from any of the competitors, what matters is that they remember yours.

Look what Jobs did with the Macbook line, even just the "Think different." tagline. Dodge seemed to have a winner with the "Hi." campaign. AFLAC's duck is a great way to help remember them. Volkswagen's "Das Auto" was pretty great. Wendy's "Where's the beef?" lady will probably never be forgotten.

John Deere has a variety of satellite-guided systems that can be implemented, and there are a few methods to monitor and program firmware over a wireless connection (I don't know the exact communications medium, it's not my field). Suggesting that there is 500+GB isn't unlikely, because I use CAN to interact with the hardware that we test, and a few seconds of reading a few variables can easily be 1MB.

Here's my quick number-crunching output:
500GB / 5 hours (estimate average flight including prep) = 100GB / hour
100GB / 60min / 60sec = .0278GB / sec of data being recorded
If it's anything like the CAN system here, they'll probably have 16 byte messages, depending on how it's subdivided. A lot of things report at 1000ms intervals, but more critical ones report at 100ms or faster. .0278GB/s = 28.4MB/s = 29127KB/s = 29826162 bytes / second
29826162 byte / 24 byte / 10 ms =
Assuming they use 16 byte messages with 8 character message IDs logged to .asc or .blf, etc, that breaks down to roughly 124000 things reporting every 100ms. My guess is that there are probably messages transmitted to the ground every minute or thirty seconds, or about 3MB per data burst.

I probably should have added a couple of notes about how the best people don't waste their time with certifications, because their previous experience exceeds the crap these certifications imply.

Make no mistake, I think this garbage is as useless to the IT world as used toilet paper is to a hungry man, but there are still short-sighted management units and HR drones that will only believe you know anything about magical black boxes if you have a piece of paper from someone else who says that you do.

In a nutshell, a certification is like a piece of paper that says "I can speak this language fluently.".

If you didn't know how to speak Hindi, but needed to do business in a remote part of India where Hindi is the dominant language, wouldn't it be nice if you could hire someone (local to you) with proof of their fluency?

The problem is that far too many HR departments and managers don't understand that demanding roughly half of these certifications from anyone who has spent even a year in IT would be akin to demanding a native English speaker have some kind of ESL training/certification.

Clearly, one of us has been able to decide that seeking income isn't our first goal when trying to find a job. Until this year, I've been unable to find employment that (consistently) pays even $10/hour, and I'm 30. Since I finished my first degree, the first thing I look at when seeking a better job is how much it will pay. To date, the best money I've made is delivering pizza, and it's not because I lack ability, intelligence, or willingness to work.

I have met many people in the last few years who went into consulting, and they all tout that it's great to finally get paid what their skills are worth. The hidden thing they never mention: people skills. Most of the engineers I know don't have people skills, at least, not with people outside their immediate work/social-sphere.

If you are competent, have people skills, _and_ you can sell (all of which are usually required for most consulting work), you're wasting your time in consulting, because you'll double your income (or better) in insurance. I don't see that field getting saturated with capable people for a long time.

I would argue that food scarcity isn't increasing, but our current situation comes from a variety of problems:
1- horrible resource management
2- no incentive to produce (US farm subsidies)
2a- edible food units converted (at a net loss) into non-edible fuels
2b- edible food units wasted to keep prices artificially high
2c- arable soils not used for production or even intentionally spoiled.

Why? Capitalism has resulted in atrocious abuses by short-sighted goons. I think we have seen a derivation of corporatism that will enrich a few at the expense of the many.

We need more entities that enact intelligent, long-term practices focused on the maximum profit over the company lifetime, not the maximum profit in the shortest time for the smallest number.

We can't assume a company will be good just because it's non-profit. If access is "limited", how much will it cost to become unlimited? If it's limited, someone is limiting it, and everyone has a price. Don't kid yourself.

Governments are supposed to be non-profit, and look what has happened throughout world history.

When it comes to governments, or any institution that has unrestricted access to all of the information about a population, no amount of suspicion is too much.

I really don't understand why the legal system needs to be bothered to deal with this. My tax dollars have better things to do than get wasted deciding "It's acceptable to display multiple products in one place."

If the argument is from $company that "They searched for my expensive product, but bought a cheaper alternative instead! We demand that they not see other items!", then it seems obvious that these people have never shopped anywhere, ever. Generic acetaminophen is sitting right next to Tylenol, but how often does Tylenol lobby to make that illegal?

If anything, the more expensive product company marketing goons need to realize that places like Amazon are doing them a favor because the opposite happens too. A cheap coffee-maker has two stars, but something 50% more expensive has 4.5, so people look to see why it's reviewed so much higher. I know I do.

Peer-reviews have helped many people avoid buying garbage unwittingly, and steered many people to something better suited to their needs.

Add my tears to the river.

Before seeing incomes rise, I would really like to see taxes (on everything except international goods) go down, but that won't happen because this country is being destroyed by government and business collusion. I don't want to insist that a profit ceiling be instituted or a high minimum wage get forced (because I have an idea about how badly that would be abused), but I can't think of any other way to prevent 90+% of the country drowning in poverty.

If there is only .01% of the US population at any given time with defects that could have been fixed through some wacky procedure that is reasonably sound, isn't it worth putting some effort into preventing 30k people from suffering? What's is being ignored is that this procedure wouldn't even be mandatory, so what is there to lose? To put an economic spin on it: As a fully-functioning US citizen, I am willing to spend some of my tax dollars in an effort to potentially save $5 million each year in direct subsidies alone.

A simple cost/benefit analysis will tell you that removing a bunch of broken people from society is a great burden being released.
30 years at $500/month? That's $180k! I'm pretty darn sure there are many cases that involve significantly more or less, but I saw a generalized study a couple of years ago that tossed out those estimates.

Allow me to introduce you to my little friend, a stovetop espresso maker.

https://www.google.com/shopping/product/5487614631804297073?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&biw=1072&bih=736&q=bialetti%20espresso%20maker&oq=bial&gs_l=serp.3.1.0l10.65030.66973.0.68379.6.6.0.0.0.0.140.509.4j2.6.0...0.0...1c.1.3.serp.gbqjNNjbWrI&sa=X&ei=oTAdUZXzEuyFyQGin4GADA&ved=0CHcQ8wIwAg

I started with drip coffee, then moved to a percolator, a French press when that didn't do it, and now I'm on espresso. Sometimes I step down to something weaker, but that's usually because someone else is making the coffee.