As has been noted by several other posters, western countries have exported their recyclable trash to China for years. That has pretty much come to a halt, and I don't think it will be long before countries like the US realize just what a mess they have on their hands. Getting rid of single-use plastic now is the best thing we can do.
I know Elon loves cars (and rockets), but what about selling batteries for other things? BMW sells its batteries for electric vessels (boats). It would be great (for the world at large) if Tesla did the same.
This is the real "sharing economy"! The planet is not going to be survivable for humans and many other species if we don't start cooperating. If that means one has to give up enforcing their own patents in order to take advantage of these from Toyota, then so be it.
We love Star Trek, where the "...economics of the future are somewhat different..." where "...we work to better ourselves, and the rest of humanity..." So maybe this is the actual true beginning of cooperation that will make our collective future possible...
Exactly! And it also does not stop Netflix from playing by the MPAA's rules, which have requirements for showing the film in a theatre for a given period of time. Newcomers love to throw out the "rules" (or outright knowingly facilitate the breaking of laws) that have been in place for generations, which have made industries possible and to thrive (like, in this case, the relationship between the studios, distributors, and theatre operators). Yes, times have changed, but the MPAA allowing Netflix to bypass the rules will do the same thing to movie theaters that Uber and Lyft have done to cab companies.
The Academy Awards are for "movies" that are to be projected onto a screen in a movie theatre. Netflix has chosen to not play by the rules that govern that way of distributing a film. There is no antitrust in this case. Now, if the MPAA made agreements with theatre operators to prevent Netflix from showing its movies in any movie theatre (which would then disqualify Netflix from being eligible for an Oscar), then that would be antitrust.
NYC streets are worse because of 250,000+ (obviously, not all at the same time) Uber/Lyft/Via/etc. vehicles being on the streets. I don’t care if there is demand, they have made congestion worse, period. I think all municipalities should treat all “private”, “shared”, whatever you want to call them, car services just like taxis, and require them to be painted a special color. You know not to travel too closely behind a taxi because they could stop or swerve at any moment. Unless you look at the very fine print on the license plate (and this is only in cities that require these cars to register), you do you know it is a car for hire, and to not follow too closely, unless you want to be blocked while they pick up a fare. How is it that these upstarts can “disrupt” an entire industry, and have a significantly lower barrier to entry than the incumbent? I say, require them all to be painted pink!
The cars parked across the sidewalk are individuals parking their car at home. Bird scooters littering the sidewalks is a business model. How do you not understand the difference?
I love how Hollywood gives us futuristic UIs from movies like Iron Man, the Matrix, etc. And then you have Google. They predict a future that looks like...to use another Hollywood reference, The Truman Show.
If someone were to directly buy a distressed property in one of these zones using money from capital gains, and fix it up (and even live there for 5-10 years), would they realize the same tax benefit as investing in a "fund"?
I think both the US and Australia (and probably other countries), should just do away with the $50 and $100 bills. It becomes a lot more inconvenient if you have to carry around 5 times as many briefcases of cash for illegal transactions.
Even the super strong HDPE bags at "luxury" grocery stores like Citarella, Grace's Market, Agata and Valentina, etc., get double bagged for absolutely no reason other than this is what the people who shop at these places have come to expect. It is long, long past time for NYC to impose a charge on plastic bags. My wife and I are honestly the only people who bring their own bags to Citarella.
I bought a Performa 6360 (the lowest-end Mac that could run the BeOS at the time) so I could run the BeOS. Even the installer blew me away (you could move the dialog around while it was installing, and it was updating live on the screen). I was like, "You can do that with this hardware?!" This was 1997. I really loved that OS.
Not sure what city you live in, but the ad on the top of the cab is not "the light". I can't imagine a fare system that is not hooked directly to the actual "driver is available for a fare" light, i.e., once the fare is underway, the light switches off. Also, there are apps now in several cities to hail cabs, and some cab companies have their own apps (kind of like Uber, i.e., you can't hail a Lyft or Via via Uber, so why should there be a universal app to hail any cab -- but that would depend on your city and how cabs operate).
Don't forget about using collection agencies to collect local government fines. Like, how a $30 parking ticket eventually turns into $1000 and ruined credit.
Before the tax info was public, they still fined people based on their income; they just expected people to tell the truth. They have even gone back and re-fined rich people who they found to have lied (back before officers could look up the info in real-time).
Every single state employee’s salary in the state of California is public. Look it up yourself: sacbee.com/statepay (warning, horrible search mechanism).
The UC system alone has 250,000 people. Student salary data is the only data anonymized.
Making salary data public is the only way to go. Anything else is a poor half measure that will probably not solve the problem they are trying to address.
Salaries are public in Finland. Fines are based on your salary, which is how it should be. Making a lot of money affords you many things. Getting out of feeling the pain of wrongdoing should not be one of them. Just one of the many benefits of public salary data.
All salaries for everyone should be public. Come up with whatever excuse you want, and it can be countered. And I am a socialist, not a libertarian. The more data that comes to light, the more we will have equality for equal work.
There is a simple solution to the salary problem... Make salaries public. “You can’t make private firms publish salary data,” you may say. True, but local, state, and the federal government can say that any business that does business with them must publish all salaries. The only way to make wages fair is to expose them to the light of day.
You have to wonder, how many of them would be doing this (or any other "crazy" thing) if there were no cameras, no YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram Live, etc.?
A friend of mine used to be in the Navy nuclear power program, and worked at LLNL for a bit, too, and he talked about how they would throw nuclear material in the back of a van and drive it around. And this was in "Nuclear Free Zones" in the Bay Area. It is so sad to see people protesting and blocking trains carying low level nuclear waste (like the suits workers would wear at nuclear power facilities) through their towns, when this kind of far more dangerous shit is going on and know one knows about it.
I was friends with many foreign students in college (a large school in the midwest), and it was because all of them wanted to meet people unlike them. One friend, from Zimbabwe (who was originally from Sri Lanka), once said to me, "I can never understand why all of the foreign students hang out with only people from their own country." She was pretty exceptional, but it's true in general. A lot of Americans do the same thing when they go overseas. It kind of makes no sense to go all of that way, and then just hang out with people just like you.
I thought the current application determined what is displayed in that area? How do we know the Terminal won't cause the escape and FN keys to appear? Same for TextMate, Atom, etc.? Yes, Apple owns the default Terminal app so there is no controlling what happens with it (or is there, i.e., can you, via preferences define what you want to show up regardless of what the app chooses...). But the makers of TextMate, Atom, and IDEs can decide to make the function keys show up, no?
Just look at the Amish and Mennonites, and you will see people who are happy, subsist, and even prosper, by leading a life that requires little to no modern ameneties.