I wondered if that's what he was proposing, that all defense of property be funded by property taxes. Property tax isn't really a tax on property rights, though. And in any case property tax does end up being a tax on economic activity also, or at least on economic value, which is determined by economic activity. So I don't see the point.

While I agree with parts of your argument, land lines are expensive more because they have millions of miles of physical wires to maintain. Cell towers do not have this burden.

Also, Cell phone service for any smart phone is MUCH more expensive than landlines now if you are single. It's sort of like "$100 for 4" or "$100 for 1".

That said, I use smartjack (flawlessly) over my internet. $19 a year. It's mainly a backup to find my cell phone and for extremely long gaming calls (can't get one player to use skype). I think the network effect for land lines is collapsing.
Pretty soon it will be smarter to have a "land line" format phone that actually connects to a local cell tower (no lines to maintain, install, etc.).

But it occurs to me that as long as they have DSL cable service, the lines will be there anyway. So maybe the network effect won't be lost. not sure. I haven't been a landline customer for 3 years.

How do you tax property rights?

The guys I know working on the Google cars disagree. Oh, they have plenty to do, but it's mostly because they've set an extraordinarily high bar for themselves.

Also, Fukushima is only rendering about 500sq miles uninhabitable for (currently optimistically estimated) 25 years while Chernobyl is about 900sq miles for over 25 years so far. It won't return to average radiation levels for over 20,000 years. You can live there now... if you don't want to have children and accept a higher risk of cancer. About 600 elderly live there now. The animals in the area have mutations, stillbirths, etc. But, those that survive handle the radiation better as time goes on and thrive from the lack of human predation and habitat destruction.

The Chernobyl radiation area 's sort of butterfly shaped tho and due to wind pattern there is a second 'wing' / exclusion area which is also uninhabitable of similar size- so about 1800sq miles total.

http://www.subbrit.org.uk/rsg/...

http://www.theguardian.com/wor...

China, and the chinese, have a massive superiority complex laid over a very deep inferiority complex stemming from the 1800s all the way to the 1940s.

Until that gets resolved, they are more dangerous than average. They have a chip on their shoulder and have something to "prove" combined with a sense of manifest destiny.

Their military spending is much less BUT their labor costs are much less so their spending is much higher than it looks like given the raw numbers. Effectively its 3 to 4 times as large.

Hopefully they transition to a truly confident nation and resolve their issues. Then there is still "average" danger. Any group of people can go apeshit on other groups of people when they think they are more powerful. It's happened over and over.

That just means they haven't gotten to that yet, not that they expect it to be very hard.

Good to know!

Autonomous rates will be $400 cheaper when you first get it. And after a few years it will be the same price unless you change companies.

I'm changing back to allstate from 21st century this year. Allstate wanted to charge me $1200 a year-- 21st century was $700. Now 21st century is closing on $1000 and allstate has offered me $1000, $900, $800,and now $700 to switch back over the last 4 years.

Mozilla is whining anyway; when they switched search providers from Google to Yahoo I had to go through and specify it on EVERY INSTANCE of Firefox I have. Since I use --no-remote and segment my web browsing this was actually a royal pain in the ass. Granted, Google was the old "default," so I had never changed it, but it was still an undesired change in behavior. If they're going to whine about Microsoft doing the same thing then they ought to look at their own behavior.

Firefox is still my browser of choice for personal use but for others I've started to recommend Chrome. It's just less hassle to support it for your luser friends. The future of Firefox and Mozilla is not an encouraging one, which is a pity.

Of course it's cheaper than DRAM; DRAM is expensive. TFA says it will be more expensive than NAND and cheaper than DRAM. So, it just adds another point on the continuum... the more speed and write cycles you need, the more it costs. Seems reasonable. And TFA says nothing about availability; not sure where you got that from.

There's no reason to conclude it's magic. There's also no reason to start designing new architectures around it until we see it in the real world.

For that matter, it would be a pretty good cache for NAND SSDs. I could do with most of my writes being 1000X faster.

Rents have risen by 400% in Texas (and similar top states) in the last 15 years.

Housing has risen by 500% during the same period. But... if you owned your house, your value rose but your payments increased only by the tax increase. My house payment before i paid the house off in 2012, was $700 a month. Total- including taxes. Now, it's $330 a month.

Once your house is paid off, property taxes, insurance, and repairs are approximately 1/3 of rental costs or new home costs.

I totally agree- it's right for you right now. But it's a terrible option for anyone who ever hopes to retire unless they are earning in the top 10% of all citizens.

My SSD is 1 TB. The other one is 256 GB. SSDs today are a lot larger than you seem to realize.

Where I live, it's a one. Check my photos out.