China has plenty of regulations to clean up their air. They have a rule of law problem, however, in enforcing any of them. What the wind up doing is blanket crackdowns that are unsustainable and so peter out after a week or two.
Some parts on a washing machine are definitely designed to break. For example, the couplings [1] on a washing machine are usually made of a plastic material. They are designed to break when introduced to various amounts of stress. Breaking under stress protects the motor from damage (which is a lot more expensive to replace). It's definitely frustrating when the washer breaks down for this reason, but the repair is extremely cheap (< $5 for the actual part, more for labor) if you do it yourself.
In my old washer this coupling will routinely break almost each year. After ten years I have mastered the replacement process (removing the case, turning machine upside down, and detaching the motor) in under 15 minutes.
Pro tip: if you decide to DIY, order half a dozen of these [1] couplings in advance.
In Chicago, I'm currently living in a high rise where the fastest plan I can get is 24 Mbps for around $80/mo. My high rise has an exclusivity contract with AT&T U-Verse. I've spoken with AT&T reps and they can't offer any higher speeds. I also talked to property management and they said there's nothing they can do for me. They are locked into an exclusivity contract with AT&T for the wires in the building.
Does anyone have experience dealing with properties who claim to have exclusivity contracts? I talked to people at Webpass, and they've stated it is available in my area. They'd come in and set everything up free of charge. I don't see the downside for my building to allow Webpass to come in.
I'm in a high rise in Boston, similar situation but with Comcast. I also spoke with Webpass a few days ago, they say that my building has a revenue sharing exclusive agreement with Comcast and that Webass does not participate in revenue sharing agreements. This feels like it should be illegal but my sister, an attorney, did not see anything obviously wrong under current law.
in a MDU, the owner owns the common spaces. that includes risers and inside wiring. they're free to sell, lease, or restrict the rights to whomever they please.
just like wifi ratings for hotels have become a "thing", so must exclusivity agreements and broadband providers when it comes to apartment/housing hunting.
it would be extremely difficult bordering on impossible, in my opinion, for a law in the US to prohibit property owner rights in a fashion that prevents these kind of agreements. only a "market" solution would work here. and of course, that's very difficult on its own.
Typically the exclusivity agreement is a marketing exclusivity only. It's also true that AT&T may have maintained ownership of the lines, especially if it is fiber direct to the unit. If that's the case, any new provider would need to install new lines, which is costly once the building is complete. The ROI likely won't pencil for the new provider.
This is exciting news! In Chicago, I'm currently living in a high rise where the fastest plan I can get is 24 Mbps for around $80/mo. My high rise has an exclusivity contract with AT&T U-Verse. I've spoken with AT&T reps and they can't offer any higher speeds. I also talked to property management and they said there's nothing they can do for me. They are locked into an exclusivity contract with AT&T for the wires in the building.
Does anyone have experience dealing with properties who claim to have exclusivity contracts? I talked to people at Webpass, and they've stated it is available in my area. They'd come in and set everything up free of charge. I don't see the downside for my building to allow Webpass to come in. I do know the FCC has regulations about exclusivity contracts with video providers, but I couldn't find any documents on things like internet. It seems like my only option is to find a place that does not have exclusivity contracts with providers.
Your property management company is likely receiving a significant sum of money from ATT to keep it this way. Unless you have access to their contract with ATT, you're SoL.
There is a potential flaw I spot in this piece. The author likens the self-liquidation strategy to what the big tobacco companies did. The problem I see with this is that tobacco is a luxury item. For many, oil is an every day necessity.
This leads into the liquidation issue. If companies such as BP were to liquidate, what would happen? The author mentions that non-oil countries should focus on providing resources and knowledge on oil extraction, but would that be enough to prevent price gouging? If there are no competitors selling oil, I could see the prices skyrocketing once the competition has liquidated all of their reserves. Would our knowledge, tools and "know how" be enough to prevent a monopoly on oil? Our only fallback would be to charge more on the services the author suggested we offer instead of oil.
I think the issue that this and a few other comments have is that by "self-liquidation strategy" the author doesn't literally mean sell every company asset as quickly as possible. It means recognize that the market for petroleum is going to decline and mostly go away before the OPEC states have all depleted their reserves. Therefore, BP et al should not invest in finding more reserves, and instead just focus on extracting all the money they can from what they have.
Note I'm not taking a stance on whether or not the author is right, but I think that if he is, there are enough players to prevent price gouging, and if anything we'd see prices fall due to no one wanting to be left with stranded assets.
If I were to stereotype smokers I wouldn't call the a group of luxury item buyers. I know tobacco isn't a necessity but the anacedata point from me would be that poverty and tobacco use are closely correlated.
Luxury traditionally means "optional" in this context. People can generally live and work without tobacco. Industrialized countries currently require oil, although this is changing.
Industrialized countries will require oil for a long time yet but it does seem that it is in the process of losing its special status as a lynchpin commodity and turning into "just another commodity" like aluminum or iron ore.
They didn't just leave the site, they came and complained here. To turn an adolescent meme around: the OP's broken sense of entitlement isn't the business model's problem.
Yeah, this is rad, as I imagine there's some overhead to running the transpiled babel ES6 code compared to running the native ES6 features. At least some things may be faster - I remember lexical block scoping (let and fat arrow) causing perf issues in traceur.
Now I just need to be able to rely on these features being present in the browser so I can just write native ES6 everywhere and skip that build step entirely.
We've been using a concept of a "esnextguardian" to be what our package.json main points to, it then tries and loads the es6+ version and if that fails, fallbacks to the compiled es5 version. It's been working quite well for all our different Bevry projects. More info: https://github.com/bevry/base#esnextguardian
The problem with this is that unless you're doing deep packet inspection, they can patch the system to route every call through the same frontend IP -- including services you actually want to use. It'll work for the short term, but probably not long term -- doubly so if they just route everything over HTTP.
When writing raw SQL, I tend to test my queries against the database first with sample queries, then carry them into code once all the logic has been figured out.
