So inside a retail store are thousands and thousands of tiny little cost centers? Does that mean that the retail store is also thousands and thousands of tiny little profit centers?

Or would a rational person perhaps look at the store as a profit center because it makes money, despite having overhead costs like ... the screws that hold the front door to its hinges? Or is each of those screws a cost center, in your view?

How about the display cases that hold the jewelry in the store?

How about the cash registers?

How about the front door?

Is every last bit of overhead inside a profit center a tiny, microscopic cost center?

For comparison, 3 minutes is about how long it takes to fill a tank of gas (including stuff like removing the gas cap, inserting the hose, swiping your credit card, and putting the hose back on the hook). It's a good time to reference against.

My take on this is if they put up wind or solar arrays, it would work better than trying to charge people's cars live off it.

Have you ever calculated how big a solar array it would take to charge a Tesla battery?

Solar constant on the ground at U.S. latitudes is about 750 Watts/m^2.
High-efficiency panels are about 22% efficient. Commercially, 18% is more realistic, but let's go with 22%.
Solar capacity factor for the desert Southwest U.S. is about 0.18. Multiply by 2 to account for night.
The big Tesla S battery has a 85 kWh.

750 Watts/m^2 * 22% efficiency = 165 W/m^2
times 0.36 capacity factor (average for the day) = 59.4 W/m^2 average generation during the 12 hours of daylight

Assume 90% charging efficiency. Real-life measurements put it at about 85%, but solar would charge it a lot slower so let's be generous and say 90%. At 90% charging efficiency, you need 94.4 kWh to fill the 85 kWh battery.

To charge the battery in 12 hours would thus take:
94,400 Wh / (12 hours * 59.4 W/m^2) = 132.5 m^2 of solar panels

A car parking space is about 9' x 18', or about 15 square meters. So you'd need roughly 9 car parking spaces worth of solar panels to charge one big Tesla S battery per day in the desert Southwest U.S.

Costs of implementing a PV Solar generation system are about $3.30/Watt in the U.S. on a utility-level scale. Technically this is commercial scale, but let's go with best case. 1 m^2 of these panels would be rated at 165 Watts peak capacity. At a price of $3.30/Watt, this would be $544.50/m^2 * 132.5 m^2 = $72,146.25 worth of PV to be able to charge 1 Tesla battery per day.

The amount of electricity used by a busy Tesla battery charging station would put it into the industrial category. The average U.S. electricity price for industrial customers was $0.07/kWh for 2014. At $0.07/kWh, the panels would essentially be charging the battery with $6.61 worth of electricity per day. It would take 10,913 days, or 29.9 years for the PV system to pay for themselves.

I won't go through the math in detail, but if you use more realistic figures of 18% efficient panels, 0.145 capacity factor (average for the U.S. overall), 85% charging efficiency, and the $4.50/Watt cost of commercial PV installations, the numbers end up 213 m^2 (14.2 parking spaces) of panels to charge one battery per day, and 61.9 years before the panels pay for themselves.

The costs are coming down, and we will eventually get to the point where it's cost-effective. But please do a reality check on the notion that you'll be able to prop up a few square meters of solar panels and charge your car for free.

Sure, and if anyone disagrees with you, it must be because of some character flaw on their part? Fucking stupid hypocritical fuckards.

Bro, I backed up my position. You backed your end up with "I'm an expert"...

Do better.

As to where the cables feed into some sort of switch or router, then have the cables on that portion of the system owned by the house or by the city and identified as belonging to the house. Then you can have multiple providers all in the same larger gray box etc. And then switching from one provider to another would mean going to the gray box and unplugging a wire from provider "A" and plugging it into the box for provider "B".

this is not insurmountable. You're trying to prove me wrong instead of trying to understand the issue. It isn't helpful.

So, a company's money-making, walk-up retail storefront isn't a profit center?

So, all VPNs are "the internet?"

You're asking for a solution that logically cannot exist.

Your CA system is flawed and compromised routinely because it is flawed. It can't be secured because you're assuming the CA certs are only issued to trusted entities and they're not trustworthy. They don't take their position in the system seriously and even if they did you're still basing the security of the whole system on your trust in them. If you can't see how hopeless that is then I can't help you.

I appreciate the value of defense and law and order. The problem is that most of the budget and focus of the government goes to anything but these things.

There is a modern attempt to justify government using welfare for example rather then defense and law and order.

I don't feel comfortable with that. I'd like them to do their jobs rather then come up with new ones.

The actual expense of the government if we just focus on law and order and defense is relatively tiny. Especially law and order. That constitutes almost nothing.

And in places like Los Angeles where I live, you're running into a situation where the government is cutting court services and shutting down court houses despite higher demand for courts. Why? Lack of money. But they have lots of money. They're just spending it on other things.

Look, the issue with government is that you do need some of it to maintain a civil society. However, the amount you need is radically less then what we have today. Raising taxes to pay for yet more stuff that we do not need is to the common ill.

Empires have collapsed for not heeding this warning.

Okay, to what extent and for what purpose?

For example, I'd be happy to lease the polls out to a third party. Say a local business or construction firm that was willing to maintain them etc.

You could put the contracts up for bid every so often. The poles and conduits would be owned by the city but I don't see why we'd need actual city workers to do it. Just lease the space out to the lowest bidder in a public bid and then put clauses in the lease that say they pay a fine and lose the contract if they don't do a good job.

My primary issue here is that the city workers are often a problem in construction projects. I'd prefer a more flexible and controllable situation where people could be fired for being bad a their jobs. City workers are in practical terms impossible to fire. They're also a lot more expensive.

The problem with most claims of racism is that they're non-falsifiable. You're not saying anything that can be argued against or proven wrong. It isn't an argument that can be logically challenged.

Except being inheritable. Which was his whole point, such as it was.

> Apart from the fact that you're mixing UPDATE syntax with INSERT syntax

Works in MySQL and MS SQL, ymmv for any other RDMS.

In regards to both escape_string() and htmlspecialchars(), two words: character sets.

They are not fundamentally any better than addslashes(). They just have a bit more duct tape.

It wasn't "out there." It was "in there." They had the compromised credentials for a top-level system admin, and spent months on the internal network collecting goodies before laying waste to the system.