It's also possible that they're price-sorting. That is, people staying at expensive hotels have more money (duh). They're willing to pay more for luxuries, many of them hard to observe (more staff, more frequent replacement of linens [and more in the rotation], more expensive furnishings, etc.) The people who pay for such things have more money and you can use that to try to up-sell them.

If they're paying $200 a night for four-star deluxe room, they've got $10 to kick in for wi-fi and not even really notice it. And you know that they didn't pick the $69 EconoLodge down the street. They'll assume that they're getting more bits, and that the service is better maintained; they're likely not to check. They do know that they're perceiving an overall experience that they like better, and they're willing to pay a substantial premium for it. That's not right or wrong, if they're getting what they want, but it does expose their pricing preference. That tips their hand and makes them pay more than they might otherwise.

I think it's similar to Starbucks. Even if you like it better, is it really "four times better" than the 7-11? It doesn't matter. They know that you're willing to pay 300% more for the coffee and will price everything else to match, because you're there, regardless of what it costs them.

Many places include utilities, so it would be in their interest to lower costs.

Even for those who don't, lower utility prices are potentially a selling point. If a renter has to chose between two identical apartments, one of which gets its electricity for $.10 and the other for $.23, it's an easy decision.

That's not going to mean instant conversion of every single apartment; friction is high even when the cost-benefit tradeoff is obvious, and it often isn't. But I don't think that having a distinction between occupant and owner is necessarily a bar to upgrades. It introduces delays, but the costs are being paid by somebody, and they'll seek to minimize them.

I suspect that a better argument against getting solar electric into apartments is the ratio of roof to occupants. It's not a renter-owner distinction, since not all apartments are big buildings and not all big buildings are rented, but it does mean that there's a chunk of the population whose abodes don't have enough access to the sun to support the economics of solar panels. The solar panels will get put on anyway since that is now rooftop space that's being wasted in a populated area, but the economics of who pays to own/lease that space, and who is willing to make the up-front investment, is less clear.

And I don't think it's a coincidence that Elon Musk is a big player in that domain as well.

That is stuff Tolkien actually talked about at more length in the LotR appendices and in material published after his death. It seems reasonable to include it, since this is really intended as an LotR prequel rather than just The Hobbit on its own. I'm not entirely crazy about the way they wrote it, but it's not something they invented out of whole cloth.

I'd have liked to have seen more of Saruman, in fact, but that was limited by Christopher Lee's health. It ties in to the continuation of the Gandalf plot line from the second film.

I really don't know much about that; can you amplify a bit? I mean, economics said that it should happen some day, as all that money washing into China should eventually translate into demands for higher pay, but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers. And there were a LOT of potential workers.

So what finally caused the labor rate to rise enough? I gather that the goal was to establish dominance in some kinds of manufacturing so that we'd have to re-establish the industry from scratch, raising the threshold for bringing manufacturing projects back here. Did the achieve that, or what?

One pathway for electron/positron collision can produce a neutral Z and a Higgs. In fact, they already tried that at the Large Electron Positron collider, the predecessor to the LHC. It came very close, at 115 GeV. There were hints of the Higgs, and so it came as no real surprise to find it just 10% higher.

This is actually a more efficient way of producing Higgs particles, at lower energies. The LHC produces the Higgs with two quarks, but there are six quarks involved in the proton/proton collision, so a lot of the energy you put in doesn't produce Higgs bosons. (In very rare instances you'll get two Higgs bosons, but most of the time the other quarks just produce other stuff.)

Sorry, I think this is the point I'm not getting. Is that a tax thing or benefits thing or some other law? Does it incur some sort of penalty, like making them pay some kind of retroactive tax?

Yeah, as usual, the summary is terrible. ALL collisions at the LHC are proton-proton collisions, not just the W-W ones.

What they're measuring is one of the higher-order corrections implied by the Higgs mechanism. Without the Higgs field, W bosons wouldn't have mass. Measuring how the Ws interact with each helps verify that the Higgs mechanism for explaining W boson mass is correct. Unfortunately, it's kinda hard to produce a W boson, much less two at once, much less getting them to interact with each other. You have to produce a lot of high-energy collisions to see it happen.

They did, and they got the answer they expected from the Higgs mechanism. Yay, Peter Higgs gets to keep his Nobel prize.

It was sponsored by over 200 people on both sides. It passed by a "voice vote" which means they didn't track exactly who voted for it or against it, but it was overwhelmingly positive. I gather that a few Democrats voted against it, mostly on the grounds that some states tax it and need it as a revenue source (it's a Republican thing to believe that collecting less taxes somehow magically decreases deficits rather than increasing them), but mostly, it's hard to vote against a tax cut in an election year.

Because of that there's a good chance that it will flounder and die in the Senate. The House is 100% up in November, but the Senators are a bit more responsible about forbidding states from raising revenues, and the Senators from Texas (which lose their exemption under the current moratorium) may ask Reid to spike it.

So arguably, this is more about ending the moratorium than extending it: by voting up a permanent ban they've diminished the chances of extending the temporary one. I don't know all of the inside-baseball on this one and there's more that I'm not seeing, so I can't give a confident prediction.

If so, perhaps they their script from when I quit Comcast. I quit because they couldn't or wouldn't fix a very unreliable connection; don't get me wrong, the service sucked. But canceling it took a few minutes; they asked me why, and I told them, and that was it. They didn't try really hard to retain me.

Perhaps the frequent complaints I'd made popped up a box saying "Customer is a pain in the butt, let them go" or "Customer is at the end of a long last mile with outdated equipment, and it would cost more to fix their problem than we'd make in payments, so give it up." Or maybe it was just my very definite answer about why I was canceling. But it didn't take me very long and I got no real pushback on it.

I find that in effect my password-keeper for sites with onerous restrictions, but used only rarely, is my email. I end up using the password-recovery feature which usually ends up as "we'll email you a link; if you have access to the original email address you signed in with, we'll treat that as proof that you are who you say you are."

Losing access to my email account would be pretty disastrous. That can happen not just by forgetting the password, but with any kind of administrative failure, or even simply being out of range (though fortunately, trying to access a web site usually implies access to my email.)

It's very much an eggs-in-one-basket situation, though fortunately those rarely-used web sites are usually of limited importance to me.

What I find particularly perplexing is that if there was a real significant movement, and the request were possible, the White House would already be doing it. It's hard for me to imagine a President saying, "Gosh, 134,000+ people, you're right. This is a really important issue and I had no idea that people cared about it. Thanks, I'll get right on it."

So I'm confused as to what they hope to accomplish with the site. Maybe, maybe they'd end up going to Congress and saying, "Look, we've got ten million virtual signatures here, and that means I've got a campaign issue next time around. So go do something." But shy of that I don't see it giving anybody anything except a place to vent, followed by a quick civics lesson on the separation of powers.

Oh. Duh. That makes perfect sense, visualized that way. Thanks.

I learned to camp during the 80s, when we were transitioning from the "huge swaths of canvas with wooden poles" era to the "flimsy nylon with folding aluminum tubes" phase. It was so, so much better.

Is it that significant of an improvement over the previous blackest thing? I would have expected that solar thermal panels would be limited primarily by the difficulty of generating usable power from the heat differential. I know that there already existed previous really-really-black coatings, though I actually would have thought that compared to the other problems, ordinary black paint would suffice. Is this enough of an improvement to make a difference in that vein?