Corporations said they would always act in the best interest because they're held accountable by stockholders and consumers? Is he saying that unregulated corporations are doing things which may be harming the population in general because of a short-term profit motive? Say it isn't so!
You've never seen manufactured housing (aka mobile homes)? That do that all the time, and delivery it right to your site ready to be hooked into the power grid and water/sewer.
Don't like mobile homes? Try a modular home. Built in a factory with all the bits complete but in shipable-size pieces, assembled on site.
Still too much? there are a dozen different panelization technologies that will send you prefabricated parts you just screw or connect together.
Lots of people pay outrageous prices for stuff. People with lots of disposable income. If you were pulling in solid 7 figures (or higher), the cost of Google glass would be insignificant, less than the cost of a lunch out to someone with an average salary. Buying a private jet vs flying international first class seems like not that much of an upgrade, considering you get to the same place either way, and you get a comfortable ride regardless, but jet ownership and usage is increasing, even through you'll probably never buy one.
That's just it. Nearly 200,000 people die every. single. day. Doctors have patients die all the time because some things can't be fixed, or can't be fixed within the constraints of "regular" medicine. One of those constraints is money. I didn't see where he took her to a clinic and offered the best surgeon in the world $10,000,000 to attempt the surgery. (And, remember, all medical procedures are just probabilities of repair not guarantees.) Because he probably would have gotten a different answer.
And, yes, it's intensely frustrating. In fact, I'm often glad that I'm not a doctor. I've run into cases where someone's home will cost more to fix than the home is worth. Often, for those people, it costs more than their life savings. It's the death sentence for the structure, and a pretty dire condition for the owner. Imaging that your only shelter is falling apart around you, and may collapse, but not only don't you have the money to fix it but if you found the money and did fix it, it would still be worth less than the money you spent.
As for the misdiagnosis, doctors are still humans and they still make mistakes.
Every fiat currency in the world is backed by the guns and ammo the country can bring to bear in the event of war, because might implies stability.
Fiat currencies are backed by nothing more tangable that that which underlies bitcoin. It's all a matter of confidence. The biggest problem with bitcoin is psychological. Humans, on the whole, have been duped into believing that inflation is good, and that more money means more value (ignore the fallacy there, most people will never understand it). Bitcoin is a (nominally) fixed supply, which means that it's value related to other fixed supply goods, in a perfect market, will never change. To someone who has used fiat currency all their lives, that's a bad thing.
In fact, as bit coin value goes up relative to fiat currencies, the payments in bitcoins (how much you "make" on a transaction) goes DOWN, which is the worst thing you can show any average Joe. The flip side doesn't help - if the value of bitcoin goes down, then the public sees it as a commodity which has lost value and is therefore a bad investment.
IMHO bitcoin can't win.
Oh, they do. Mine has a little section with breadboards and wire and arduinos and shields. And they're about 2x-3x what Amazon will deliver to me for free in 2 days (yes, I have prime), and 3x-10x what the parts go for on the open/global market. So, yes, I'll spend $20 on that SD shield if I absolutely need it today, but if I don't I can guarantee I'm going to order it for $10 at Amazon or for $4 the next time I order from DX.
Being local means something, and I prefer to buy locally, but not when I get raped at the checkout. I understand the 1000% markup on a pack of 5 resistors or a single LED I need that might cost $2 - there's a minimum cost to package, stock, and sell something. But the bigger stuff really needs to be more in line with what other vendors are selling it for on line. That means better/more efficient distribution and smarter inventorying, and clearly they're not interested. Lowes seems to be able to stock copper parts at $0.15-0.40 a piece, and you can buy a whole range of bolts, screws, and nuts for as little as $0.05 a piece. If they offered me a hammer for $40 that I can buy online for $15-20, I can pretty much guarantee they wouldn't be making many in-store sales, which is why they sell a hammer for $17-22, because for $2 extra I'll happily get it right now, but for $20 extra I can buy two on line and always have a spare.
There should be a law against doing this that applies to anyone not in law enforcement. Or government. Or corporations. Those are the minds which will be affected, and they won't stop until something is made illegal.
Those people are just collateral damage in the war to maximum revenue. They say you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and you can't make yacht-buying CxO salaries without breaking a few laws. So a few people get bad wifi. They should just be richer so they can buy better service.
With the resurgence in the maker movement, RS might have been in the right position to take advantage of it, but instead had tacked towards a mobile phone mall storefront with some overpriced toys, horrifically overpriced, low end consumer electronics, and batteries.
Sadly, there's probably not enough volume in the maker niche to keep all of the stores afloat at competitive pricing (i.e., not $35 for an Uno board that can be had from Amazon for $18 and from foreign shippers at $12), but it would be awfully cool to have racks of parts and components in at least one store in every town.
To add to the "bad example" text of a sibling post, it's also Buzz Aldrin. Famous, good looking, tall, white, and well spoken - those are all unwritten and unspoken mitigating factors in American law. It would have been the same for any high profile CEO or member of nearly any state or federal legislature.
FWIW, a punch is actually a battery charge. Assault is the threat of bodily harm (and that may also be used as a mitigating factor if you are accused of battery following an assault).
It's less creepy than having this damned fish in my ear all the time.
Not at all. A technically minded person who's entire career is solving problems throws several hundred hours at solving a problem vs a doctor who is allotted 2-6 hours to solve the same problem and has a hundred other patients who are clamoring for his time. Which do you think would solve a complex problem?
I encounter it every day as a professional engineer who designs buildings. I get $600 (about 4 hours of time) to solve the entire wind and seismic resisting system on a small building and if you decide the entire first floor will be all glass I'll tell you you can't do it. If you're an engineer (but not necessarily a structural one) and decide to design a system yourself and you spend 400 hours on it there's a good chance you'll come up with a solution. For $40,000 in your time, you've solved problem worth $600 on the open market.
And, FWIW, I can solve that kind of problem in under 40 hours - maybe $6000 - but if you offer me $600 to solve the problem, I'm going to tell you that it can't be done [for that money].
Space flight happens because we want to study things from space. NASA is the "host" for principal investigators who often work outside of NASA. In fact, a major NOAA installation was constructed right across the street from NASA - Goddard (in Greenbelt, MD) to allow closer interaction between the two because their missions are so closely aligned.
The aeronautical and aerospace research NASA does isn't in a vacuum; it's meant to ultimately serve a useful cause, and that includes studying the planet. It does do wind tunnel research; it does explore other planets; it does advance optics, and thermal management, and fluid flow, and all the myriad pieces which go into spaceflight and airborne hardware requirements. And much of it happens to flow down to terrestrial uses.
And this is more about Ted Cruz, who doesn't believe that they do anything useful, in charge of their mission. Imagine if they put Aunt Jemima in charge of the Canadian strategic maple syrup reserve. Yeah, it's that crazy.
To the average American, NASA is just a huge portion of the budget (Billions! of dollars) spent to put some clown in orbit a couple of times a year. This is, in fact, exactly what they want based on their knowledge of what NASA does. All the technology gained by what NASA has learned over the decades by doing the hard and impossible things is entirely lost on Joe Sixpack. And, unfortunately, government / private interaction is not an efficient (in the economic sense) sense, so that the effects of cuts won't be felt where the average person lives for 20 years. It's our own damned fault for living in a country filled with morons.
I'm just as jazzed at the possibility of a nuclear-powered car, or solar or wind for that matter.
That's the "efficient" part of electrics - they run on whatever the current source of power generation is, which means that in 10 years (if every
Software production is assumed to be a line function, but it is run like a staff function. -- Paul Licker
