The oil and tires are variable costs because you pay them per mile. If you call your insurance you can make your insurance a variable cost in a variety of ways. Even the car itself is a variable cost because you're causing it to depreciate (and increases the frequency of other breakdown) by adding the miles.

The notion that it's just gas is a fiction caused by bad budgeting.

Since the median age of a car in the U.S. is 9, really it's the miles that kill cars now, not the age. For the Hondas I drive it seems like they are priced as if they might make it to 200k, so you're talking about 0.002 of the life of the car. If it's a $20k car, that's another $40 (averaged over the life of the car).

the first two are entirely encapsulated systems and really can't be the problem.

Medicare is paid for by a 2.9 percent tax on income. Fixing it's budget problem of changes in demographics can't be that hard.

Similarly, social security is basically a pay as you go system that is dealing with a demographic shift. You just change to change the tax or benefit replacement rate (fraction of tax paid out per year) and it's fixed.

Defense on the other hand is a problem. I think that if the US spent less on defense our allies would be forced to spend more and we'd also become more competitive for exports. When the U.S. attacked Libya, we had wars going in two theaters and were still able to provide overwhelming force. Meanwhile, several European countries contributions were assets like 2 F-15s 3 weeks into the conflict. This is because that's what their defense plan calls for, for them to have 2 F-15s ready for combat within a month.

Basically, the U.S. is sponsoring all the European socialism via our defense spending because these countries simply don't have to spend money on defense.

What's absorbing in the x-ray region? Certainly not hydrogen, taking a 1s to free would not absorb that much energy.

Android Apps don't ask for permissions, they list demands. Once you've installed the App, you're just forced to just live with all their demands, uninstall, or root your phone. iPhones, on the other hand, allow you to grant and revoke permissions on the fly.

I realize that here on slashdot, rooting your phone may not seem like a big deal, but it's a pain and violates my agreement with my carrier--not something I'm willing to do.

The point was it's not like a 7.7 Mohs and transparent material is unheard of. It's the price that is interesting.

I scratched it. There are construction materials with inclusions that have hardness above sapphire.

I wouldn't be so sure. I managed to scratch the sapphire crystal on a watch when i nicked a wall I walked too close too. Expensive mistake.

Yeah, imagine if we could get transparent sapphire (9 Mohs) or even diamond (10 Mohs).

If these executives didn't have to do anything to deserve this money, why aren't you one of them?

No. You're confusing digits with precision. Accuracy is a ex ante property of a statistical estimator, not ex post. Your examples are all ex post.

You weight to avoid this. So if a station has a 10% chance of getting into the sample, you multiply it's results by 10. If a station has a 100% chance (say some huge NYC station) you multiply it's results by 1. This is how estimation via sampling works. Survey methodology is a real field and it's not occupied by idiots as you seem so willing to believe.

No arguing there, and that's probably how they are paid. When the firm decides if it should make an additional album (so, this would be a low level star group, they always make as many huge star songs as they can get from them), they have to think about how much it will cost and how much money they will make. If they think it will make more money than it will cost, they probably make the album / song.

It's not really a quick buck. The music industry is contracting because there isn't enough revenue. They need more bucks or there will be less music (likely just huge stars and less midlevel groups, which is most of what I love).

The summary said it would be $500 if you make less than $1M in revenue. Doesn't seem like a ton of money.

If the huge corporate stations without jockeys fold I'm not so sure I care.