At $200M for 224 homes it sounds like he is building an upper middle class housing development. This does not sound like habitat for humanity-like helping the poor.
Yeah $900,000 per unit is pretty steep nationally, but it's average for the area.
This sounds like a honeypot to me..
Especially when selling 0-days isn't actually illegal in most circumstances, only rather shady. Researchers do deals all the time. Total anonymity on one or both sides doesn't really help anyone. Hell, it's so commonplace they have discussed it on NPR: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
If anything this is just a new way to scam people out of money or to ferret out security researchers for further recruitment/waterboarding by the CIA.
After all, if you destroy DC, you destroy the people that are authorized to pay you in the first place.
That, and you completely destabilize/devalue the very thing you are demanding. Your $100B USD won't go far if the US government collapses. Better ask for Gold or Bitcoins.
And $30B will get you 30 desal plants like Carlsbad's, which cost $1B, and which will provide 7% of what San Diego area residents need.
But the $30B won't get you the power it takes to run them (new power plants?) Or the energy required to power the power plants.
Also, CA's agriculture depends upon cheap water, not expensive desalinated water.
That said, would a $30B pipeline bring in the same amount of water as desal plants? Or more? Operating expenses are sure to be lower, but there'd need to be a detailed economic and engineering case made for one solution over the other.
--PM
Desalinated water is ready to drink, so you would effectively be taking all the normal purification plants offline and freeing up all the water that went through them for agri use. That being said, SoCal could solve the "water crisis" today if they stopped watering all their fucking lawns.
...so the poorer people will move out. Nice plan. How about putting water meters on farm consumption, most have no meters at all. Most ag water users pay zero, or close to that. How about letting the market decide where almonds and lettuce should be grown, instead of giving CA farmers a massive subsidy while cities go dry?
The market decides by way of water rights on certain parcels (that drives up/down land value). The landowners then get to decide which crops (i.e. ones that are the most valuable per gallon) to grow with their water. If water were truly scarce the farmers would be just bottling the water and selling it (some already are, but most are just growing almonds like always). The market is working nicely, thanks. And if poor people can't afford to live in SoCal? (its already really really hard unless you are OK being a homeless bum) Let them move to a cheaper place to live and maybe they will enjoy their minimum wage a little. Then, prices on everything in SoCal will go up (even more) and the market will kick in and force some of the rich people to move out too. This is Adam Smith's plan at work, why disrupt it?
"Just fucking take it all"
Or how about
"What taxes? I'm MC Hammer"
Of course, all they need to do is not get caught. Same thing happens with slot machines and other random chance electronic games... it's easier than lobbying:
1) Casino boss invites high ranking government official.
2) Boss says, "We know you'll have fun, but I think you'll have more fun on machine number 57 if you grant consideration to improving legal conditions surrounding our fine establishment."
3) Official wins jackpot
4) Boss wins jackpot (figuratively)
You're a fool if you don't think this happens. This is why I'm against electronic gambling. Not because of some moral "gambling is of the devil" thing... but because it would be trivial to rig these machines and then erase all evidence that anything fraudulent happened. Politicians can literally transform your hopes and dreams into money lining their wallet.
There (should be) a paper trail of payouts to any winner from any casino, for tax purposes. The distinction that a mechanical vs electronic device was "rigged" is totally secondary to that fact. If this was skirted, then several other laws were also broken that day.
I'm actually surprised there haven't been more cases of insiders rigging lotteries.
I should think knowing all of those zillions of dollars are just sitting there would cause more people to decide to see if they could get away with it.
How would you know if there were, and they were getting away with it?
It might be useful to inform an admin to look at suspicious postings, especially if they can get the accuracy higher. BUT I hope no one uses such algorithms to automatically stop suspected trolls. This can only lead to unforeseen consequences and stifling of free speech (unless of course stifling is not an unforeseen consequence, but an intended one).
Moderation at a privately owned/operated site can be freely used to filter anything they don't want their users to see, even if it creates a slant. However, the odds that they will start filtering specifically subversive content is pretty low, since it's those kind of posts that generate hundreds of follow-ups of disagreement, bolstering even more traffic. More likely, they will filter the truly atrocious (bland death threats, etc) that add little in terms of desirable content.
Me american, me play joke
me take bit at end of double float and set it randomly whenever you divide
good luck trying to figure out of your nukes will go off!
It rhymes better in Mandarin, I swear
If no one paid for a
"(payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre)"
It's difficult to take someone's opinions about net neturality seriously when they don't understand the difference between broadcast media and on-demand media.
If you think there's a huge difference in record companies wanting to control content despite consumer's interests, and ISPs wanting to control content despite consumer's interests, then I think we're done here. Close it up, we had a good run. The Internet is now over.
I don't want ANYONE buying promotions into my IP stream! I want my ISP to do their freaking job and shift packets from the source to me, without molestation and without interest or undue visibility into the contents.
Sadly, this is impossible. The problem is that there isn't one big pool of "internet" and a bunch of ISPs out there finding ways to sell it to you. Instead, a massive and intricate network of peering agreements exist just to make the internet function at the basic level, and THEN they figure out how to get it to your house. So, it's impossible for the FCC to say "hey verizon treat netflix with the same respect you would any other peer" because peering agreements work both ways, cost both companies money, and either verizon OR netflix can abuse the relationship.
You seem obsessed with robots but also seem to have no actual experience with any of those industries.
Having watched *millions* of jobs in the US and even more globally disappear at the hands of automation in the past 30 years, it is pretty laughable to insist that somehow the trend will stop and/or reverse itself any time soon. You are right that there will always be a need for a certain number of humans in any given physical operation, but that number is constantly going down and it will not stop going down until it's at 1. Keep on thinking that "most of the jobs are safe" and sure, they might be safe in your lifetime, but they are not safe for very long in the bigger picture of urban planning, which is the crux of this article.
Why do we *need* to travel at all? Autonomous transportation in many cases is simply very inefficient teleconferencing. At least this is true in business.
Because sometimes there's real value in being there. Sure, most of the information you get from a conference or meeting could be found online, or you could watch a seminar remotely, but you don't necessarily get the same experience and make the same contacts that you would from a face-to-face meeting. Often times, you end up learning things at a conference that you didn't even know you were looking for.
Sometimes? Yes. But the question of commuting is about *all* the times.
"Just think, with VLSI we can have 100 ENIACS on a chip!" -- Alan Perlis
