...13 years ago.

13 years I had one choice, DSL, and it was $79/month for 768k/256k asymmetric on the ISP side and then another $20 a month on the telco side. 1 static IP.

Now I pay $72 per month and get 15/5 Mbit and get 5 static IPs. It was $69/month for the last 3 years but crept up $2/month in the last month (no explanation on the bill, just a bigger number).

It sounds like in absolute dollar terms I'm paying about the same price, but I'm getting more than 10 times the download speed and static IPs aren't getting easier to obtain, plus the numbers above aren't corrected for inflation.

I'm really surprised Comcast hasn't jacked the price up horribly -- the ONLY competition they have is CenturyLink who have done pretty much nothing to boost speeds/lay fiber/etc and the municipal wifi network which I think is likely to be not much better if not worse than LTE. Hell, half the time I stay in a hotel I end up ditching the low-rent wifi they offer for the personal hotspot off my LTE smartphone.

Plus, Comcast MUST be facing constant pressure on their network. I hear people in densely populated hipster neighborhoods gripe about slow throughput but I can never tell what that might be.

It's misleading the way the story reads, but I have read of shortages of propofol and other drugs due to limited manufacturing facilities -- demand outstrips supply, a fuckup in manufacturing requiring the output to be slowed or stopped, etc.

I also have read that there were a whole bunch of drugs from the late 1960s or 1970s that never went through a "modern" FDA approval process. They were all out of patent and widely made as cheap generics. The FDA decided these needed re-approval (despite decades of widespread generally safe use) and forced them off the market, granting whoever would do the approval for them monopoly status.

The drugs then became impossible to find and when they returned to market, the supply was constrained and suddenly they were priced like new, brand-name drugs to boot.

I'm not sure of popofol was one of these re-eval drugs or not.

The purpose of having several shooters is that you only supply live ammunition to a couple of them, the rest are firing blanks, so that the men firing the gun don't know if they are firing the killing shot.

No, in this case, the side streets are probably in as good or better shape than the main street and of no different topology than the main "through" street.

If a cyclist can't maintain the posted road speed and get passed safely by cars, they shouldn't be on the road as they are a creating a road hazard to themselves and others.

Making Bryant a bike boulevard was beyond stupid. Bryant is a relatively busy through street (IIRC, it is a former streetcar line and is a current bus route), and yes it is a common car alternative to Lyndale.

And yes, I understand the "utility" argument of riding on Lyndale or some other busy street because that's where the $widget_store is, but it makes less sense if the trip to the Lyndale business is more than 2-3 blocks. If it's 8-10 blocks, cutting a block east or west to a much less traveled, safer street makes so much more sense.

I work as a SMB consultant and we run into a fair number of small business owners really intent on managing their employees "behavior" (web browsing, emailing, occasionally down to installing and running commercial spyware).

I get why some situations (harassment of other employees, strong suspicions of financial crimes, corporate espionage, etc) may warrant this, but so often it seems like they're trying to manage behavior instead of managing the results of their employees work.

If you have an employee who is supposed to produce a given work product, wouldn't it be more effective to actually focus on the work product (quality, quantity, etc) and not on whether or not they buy stuff from Amazon during work hours?

If your employee can't produce the desired work product then you have a business-rational reason for firing them. If their work product meets the stated goals, then why do you care what else they may be doing provided it is not a detriment to the rest of the business?

At the end of the day it seems like a kind of paternalism that is focused on controlling people, not managing their work.

Cycling seems fairly safe to me if you wear a helmet and you choose your routes to avoid cars.

Here in Minneapolis I notice what I would call a lot of "aggressive" cyclists -- people who run traffic control devices (stop signs, lights, etc) and get dangerously close to traffic that might otherwise change speeds/lanes/turn/etc very quickly. From the cyclists I talk to, it almost seems like cycling is taking on a political component, too, which seems to contribute to aggressive cycling or at least an aggressive attitude.

The other thing that kind of amazes me are the people who INSIST on cycling on a busy through street (like Lyndale through South Minneapolis) instead of moving over just a block on either side and riding on a nearly empty residential street, like Garfield or Aldrich. Or the bike racing gear wearers who insist on riding on the parkway instead of the bike path 25 feet away, in spite of the fact that the parkway is a single lane and the parking cutouts along the parkway are pretty narrow -- if cars are parked in the cutouts there's precious little room to pass a cyclist.

As long as people insist on riding in traffic and people kind of a jerk about it, it doesn't surprise me that there are conflicts a cyclist will lose simply based on mass.

I had a 42" Sony LCD rear projection TV until about a year ago and there was no way that was "big enough" at 3m viewing distance. With letterboxed content (most movies), the shrinkage in vertical size was enough to make it even smaller.

I replaced it with a 70" Sharp and for about the first couple of days I was like "this may be too big.." but I'm now completely used to it and I don't think it would be a problem to go even larger in this space.

...Or worse, with bifocals?

When something like this becomes available, it'd be awesome even if it was only used for watching a movie on an airplane, but I worry it would be worthless for people who have an eyeglasses prescription.

Or are you saying that the fault lies with US citizens for not taking below-minimum wage jobs payed under the table?

It kind of boils down to "Why won't blacks work?"

Racism is a canard -- I can't believe that someone who is "racist" would reject an English-speaking, native-born African American for a low/unskilled job yet be perfectly willing to hire (at some risk), an illegal immigrant who can't speak English.

What's really damning is that people may be rejecting blacks specifically because they make poor employees based on actual experience.

From a macoeconomic standpoint, there clearly is a demand for low-skilled labor, otherwise millions of illegals wouldn't be here working. While some employers may be engaging in mere economic discrimination (wanting to pay less for labor), in aggregate if there was a demand for N units of work for W units of wages, there still should be employers wanting to accept some lower level of additional employment for the same amount of wages (ie, hiring some differentially lower number of native workers for the same amount of pay, just getting a lower total amount of increased production from the reduced number of hires.

I do think that blacks are mostly rejecting work because of low pay, but the problem is they are competing with people from the third world with drastically reduced expectations ("Wow! Food and water that won't give me dysentery!"), which is one of the big reasons to reject "open migration" -- nobody, including the middle class, can compete with people willing to live lifestyles only marginally better than third world.

But there is also a sense that they won't work.

Urination has a public health and sanitation objection tied to it, as well as exposing the genetalia in public.

Breastfeeding is the feeding of a child and it does not expose any genetalia; you're more likely to see a nipple at the Oscar awards than you are when a woman breastfeeds in public.

It's a good thing we're not at war against the Swedish Navy.

It's always a sign of the weakness of a left-wing political argument when advocates for a position overtly or more subtly make opposition to their positions a symptom of or an overt act of "racism".

The debate surrounding immigration is a great example of this. If you are opposed to illegal immigration (that is, bypassing border controls, overstaying a visa, working without work permission, etc) you are increasingly labeled racist, presumably because you aren't really opposed to migrant labor, you're opposed to Latinos.

This is too bad, because I think there are a lot of ways in which easier migration from outside our borders (Latino, or otherwise) has a lot of negative consequences.

One obvious example that seldom gets mentioned is the unemployment rate among African Americans. This figure is often quite high -- 15-20% or more depending on the measure. The jobs taken by illegal immigrants are almost always low-skill, entry-level jobs, the same jobs that young, unskilled African Americans could take.

If you're concerned about African American unemployment, you should naturally be concerned about wage depression and competition for these jobs by illegal immigrants. Isn't supporting a lenient immigration policy which keeps African Americans unemployed the real racist policy?

And then there's affordable housing, health care, schools, and so on, all of which are pressured by large numbers of low-skilled immigrants.

Sure, we're all upset by the crooks in the system (although I would argue that Madoff, Stewart and Abramoff are all distractions, not the real problem), but the rich and the power structure gain by wage depression and keeping the working classes on edge through unlimited low-skilled job competition. High wages and a "seller's market" for labor actually keep pressure on the corporate elite.

You would hope that an articulated train would be modular enough that segments/cars could be decoupled to perform maintenance or swap segments/cars as needed.

It's probably more work than just switching cars in the yard, though, and the segments are probably more specialized so you can't substitute a middle segment for an end/rear car, although I don't know if all existing cars have this interchangeability although visually it looks that way.

...already articulated, they just don't have a flexible enclosure built around the articulation point.

I don't think that having the coupling area enclosed will make the entire train any less articulated than it is now.