I'm not so sure. As I got older and had a kid, I don't really have the stomach for exploitation any more.
It's why I don't watch porn or college football like I used to. I can't really chalk it up to growth, because I'm still the same jerk I ever was, but I can't enjoy seeing people get used and hurt.
Having said that, if the Blackhawks lose game 7 tonight against the Kings, I may have to turn to pornhub to assuage my existential pain.
Are we talking about the big brain or the little brain?
Problem is that there's nothing else for Windows. BitLocker can't be trusted, FreeOTFE is dead too... All we can do is hope that the last good version of TrueCrypt remains secure for a long time yet, or that someone forks it.
Replying to myself, lame...
Having speculated all that, the fact that U.S. was changed to United States is a pretty big hint. I just hope whoever did it isn't rotting in Guantanamo now, because I doubt that the NSA took kindly to that.
To be fair it might not be the NSA, it could be GCHQ or any number of other government agencies. Some people seem to think that the Truecrypt authors are from eastern Europe. Maybe some eastern European government knocked on their door.
The only thing that is really certain is that this appears to be a case of duress.
Well, whether the situation fits the various definitions is a judgment call. It depends on whether you perceive what the property company is doing as productive, or exploiting their middleman position to extort fees they've done nothing to earn -- an activity which would fit all the definitions I listed. I'll leave that up to other readers, since we clearly differ on issues of substance as well as terminology.
a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner
There is nothing "frivolous" about being clear when making economic and political statements,
Says the person who draws a distinction between "rent seeking" and "business decisions", as if one were not an instance of the other.
I see irony is not one of your strong suits.
Please give me some sort of source to your claim.
According to this page the average number of bus passengers in the UK is 9, and buses get about 6 MPG. So that is 54 passenger-miles per gallon, which is about as good as one person in an electric car, or two people in a gasoline powered car. But even that overstates the case for buses, since they drive a fixed non-optimal route, where a car goes directly to the passenger's destination, so the "miles" are not equivalent.
I'm back at my computer so here you go:
"Rent seeking is the socially costly pursuit of wealth transfers" -- The Encyclopedia of Public Choice, Rowley, Charles, Schneider, Friedrich (Eds.), Springer-Verlag 2003.
"Definition of 'Rent-Seeking' When a company, organization or individual uses their resources to obtain an economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits back to society through wealth creation." -- Investopedia, http://www.investopedia.com/te..., Accessed June 1 2014.
"The idea that resources are unproductively used in rent-seeking contests has much broader application than the original rent-seeking papers suggested[emphasis mine] The rent-seeking logic has been applied to issues in history, sociology, anthropology, biology and philosophy. The core has also been formalized and analyzed more rigorously, using the tools of modern game theory. The modern rent-seeking literature describes the rational decision to invest in contesting pre-existing wealth or income, rather than undertaking productive activity. [emphasis mine]" -- Congleton, Roger D., Arye L. Hillman, and Kai A. Konrad. "Forty years of research on rent seeking: an overview." The Theory of Rent Seeking: Forty Years of Research 1 (2008).
In other words while rent-seeking in the sense of Anne Krueger's 1974 paper still continues to be an active area of research, the term is used differently in wider areas of economic research.
Oh, yes, and one more citation for you:
"prig (n.): a person who displays or demands of others pointlessly precise conformity, fussiness about trivialities, or exaggerated propriety, especially in a self-righteous or irritating manner." -- "prig." Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 01 Jun. 2014. http://dictionary.reference.co...>.
are you kidding, California is nearly bankrupt.
Even a state teetering on bankruptcy can fund boondoggles by issuing bonds payable in the far future. California is in the process of building a bullet train from SF to LA, that is budgeted at nearly $100 BILLION, and take 30 years to complete. On average, these big ticket projects run over budget by a factor of three, so it they will likely burn through $300 billion or more before it is completed, or cancelled. That will be about $10 million per seat. The projected cost of a ticket on the train is far higher than the cost of driving a car or taking a plane, so it will likely serve rich people with more money than time.
For popular journeys, mass transit is going to be considerably more efficient.
Not true. Most public transit is not particularly efficient. Trains and buses are very efficient when they are full, but they often run partly empty. On average, they are about as efficient as two people in an average car. An efficient self-driving on-demand electric car is probably better, both economically and environmentally, and they will be more widely used because they are more convenient. Eventually, self-driving taxis will kill public transit. There will no longer be enough demand.
Why wouldn't an autonomous car be able to avoid potholes?
They should be much better at it. For starters, they can use a combination of lidar and vision to detect the pothole better than a human would. Then, they could record the exact location (within a cm) of the pothole, so it can be avoided again in the future, and lastly, they could share the pothole data with other autonomous cars, so they can also avoid it.
I did.
Rent-seeking
Cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger. Trying to make more money without producing more for customers. Classic examples of rent-seeking, a phrase coined by an economist, Gordon Tullock, include:
a protection racket, in which the gang takes a cut from the shopkeeper's PROFIT;
a CARTEL of FIRMS agreeing to raise PRICES;
a UNION demanding higher WAGES without offering any increase in PRODUCTIVITY;
lobbying the GOVERNMENT for tax, spending or regulatory policies that benefit the lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers or consumers or some other rivals.
Whether legal or illegal, as they do not create any value, rent-seeking activities can impose large costs on an economy.
Source The Economist Magazine Dictionary of Economic Terms. I can cite many other sources, but I'm posting this from a phone so you can Google them yourself.
The Wikipedia article is about the rent seeking as described in Anne Kreuger's well-known 1974 paper. However that is only one example of how investors attempt to seek higher than normal profits without creating any utility, which is the more general sense of the word.
What's a realistic time frame for that? 20 or 30 years?
I read a study that if just 10% of cars were autonomous, and programmed to behave optimally, most traffic jams could be prevented. Basically, they would set the pace for other drivers, and could smooth out the accordion effect that prolongs congestion.
There'll always be a need to be human driven cars and trucks.
Why?
You mean stop disagreeing with Wikipedia.
According to all the latest reports, there was no truth in any of the earlier reports.
