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Comment Re:Growing body of evidence of damage to humans (Score 1) 13

> Isn't capitalism great?

Capitalism doesn't let you buy laws, that's Corporatism, a subset of Fascism, which is in turn a subset of Socialism.

A proper Capitalist systems speaks to economics, not poltiics.

Reconstruction US, Post-Mao China, Post-Soviet Russia all embraced capitalist economics to lift the vast majority of their population out of abject poverty.

Societies which did the opposite mostly killed their middle class ans then half the population starved to death.

Comment Aspects (Score 1) 19

Having lived through the Dot-Bomb it's basically the same.

You're not going to get a valuation bubble without a hype bubble. And nobody is buying companies for that much who have zero infrastructure. And the stock price is what they use to buy the infrastructure.

These are inextricably linked, not separate phenomena.

This is what Austrian Economists call the 'malinvestment' part of the business cycle. It's caused by artificially cheap money (not set by a market) and will unavoidably be cleared.

Our Orwell is so strong the eggheads artificially setting the price of money call themselves "The Open Market Committee". Because an open market in lending rates is de facto prohibited.

Comment Pentagon Papers (Score 0, Troll) 207

They don't have to do this but most "journalists" are hacks that engage in Access Journalism (which is a type of bribery).

They aren't hard-driving gumshoe drunks like the legendary journalists of yore who sought to speak truth to power. They're mostly stenographers for the rich and powerful now (yay, journalism school!)

It will be interesting to see if any leave out of principle. I doubt more than 10% will. You can pretty much distrust any stories from the ones who stay.

Comment Re: This should stop the abuse of H1-B (Score 1) 222

fill a 100k job with an h1-b worker and only pay them 50k, it's still back to profit after 2 years

That one is actually illegal. The minimum on a H-1B salary is $60,000. But there is an additional requirement that the salary has to be at or higher than the prevailing wage for the job in question.

Government: So I see that your H-1B jobs are all for "Computer Programmer (I)" and your U.S. hires are all for "Software Engineer (III)" or "(IV)".
Company: Yes. We haven't had much luck in hiring level one programmers here in the U.S. We put the jobs out there, but nobody is applying.

Prevailing wage for the job doesn't mean what you think it does. A bunch of sleazy outsourcing firms made sure of that.

Comment Re:Misleading headline (Score 1) 111

Ten tiny companies, ten meters.

So instead of paying higher prices for power they'll spend tons of money maintaining an incredibly inefficient system?

Surprisingly little money. As soon as the extra cost exceeds the cost of hiring one person to maintain workarounds, it is cheaper to do the workarounds. Tricks like that might ostensibly work for individuals, but they fail badly every time when you're talking about big corporations.

Comment Re:Misleading headline (Score 1) 111

If the gov't (yeah, i know) mandated a sliding cost scale, with highest prices for the biggest users, things would change rather quickly

I've said this before. That won't work. Business, unlike homeowners, have the ability to create shell companies. The effort required to avoid rules like that is negligible for businesses. All that does is massively increase the billing hassle for the power companies.

Comment Re:Wrong Model (Score 1) 111

If it's the same as here, then there is simply no market incentive for localized storage even though there is a massive need. For market to drive distributed storage, you need extremely local pricing.

In California, they have messed with the cost structure enough that solar without storage is usually not worth doing beyond your peak usage, because your excess power production won't net you nearly as much as you pay to buy that power back later in the afternoon.

Comment Re:20% as much CO2 (Score 1) 80

and trains can be very comfortable and safe

They can be, but not when they're over crowded. Then they are extremely uncomfortable, and become ideal spreading grounds for infectious diseases as well as pickpockets. The conditions commuters endure at peak times would be illegal for transporting farm animals in many countries.
Pushing more people into over crowded trains is not the answer, reducing congestion should be the goal.

Only it's not, the focus is always on forcing more people onto public transport which just increases congestion and worsens conditions.

Work remote if you can, if your job can't be done remotely have the workplace in a location that enables people to live nearby and walk to work. Having workplaces bunched together in an area with no housing is harmful.

Comment Re:20% as much CO2 (Score 1) 80

80% less than cars is a lot less, but I'm kind of surprised it's that much. It actually makes me wonder how a Prius would fare compared to a klunky old half-full (per load factor statistics) Amtrak train.

Part of the problem is that trains are really, really heavy. A double-decker passenger train car might weigh 180,000 pounds and carry only 100 people, for a total weight of 1,800 pounds per car plus the person. So you're carrying half the weight of that Prius. The trains are still vastly more efficient because you have one powertrain accelerating all of those people in Priuses (Prii?) instead of hundreds, they accelerate and decelerate slowly (and rarely), they have low rolling resistance, etc.

Imagine how much more efficient they would be if train cars were improved with modern technology to bring the weight down.

Comment Re:"Strenghten the value" (Score 4, Informative) 241

Crossed them off the list.

Wow. Their refrigerators reportedly have among the worst reliability stats out of all the major brands, but ads are the reason you're rejecting them? I'm kind of assuming the ads are to recover the unexpectedly high cost of warranty repairs and food loss claims. :-)

Having used a lot of their Blu-Ray players and TVs over the years, Samsung reached peak ensh*ttification a long time ago, IMO. What remains is the long-tail death spiral.

Comment Re:We are so screwed (Score 1) 205

Remember - the Federation reserved the Death Penalty for making AI Androids.

Noonian Soong had to exile himself to a remote planet outside Federation control to work on Data and Lore (and his sexbot...).

They needed people to be able to have jobs *that* badly.

Which ... stop sending redshirts outside the ship with magnetic boots in a radiation storm, OK? They could have at least had some astromech droids. Sheesh!

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