Actually, local polls tend to be very vigilant. While we make all the fuss about national candidates, the same elections usually also concern everyone down to dogcatcher and ordinances about how many chickens you can own.

It would be hard for someone in Beijing to accurately fake such voting to provide a complete ballot while skewing national figures. While we make a big deal of where the polls went wrong, when the polls go straight into the Twilight Zone, people start hand-counting. Checks and balances also run up and down the tree when localities suspect that regional counts are off. We have both official agencies and news agencies at multiple levels forming a web to protect and defend our country's most precious resource. And don't go on about "Fake News". News agencies on all/b? sides watch this stuff, so even if one group closed their eyes, others would scream the louder for it. As it is, most of the screaming is coming from politicians who can't stand that maybe not as many people love them as they want to believe.

Election fraud is real, but estimates are that it's barely a blip overall. It tends to get caught, and usually invalidated. Some would even argue that more fraud is committed but preventing authorized people from voting than from dead people or illegal immigrants voting.

The real fraud, alas, is what the people we elect do once in office.

This isn't paranoia - it's Big Business since maybe 1950 or earlier. Companies grow. Companies merge. Layoffs ensue, Bonuses are paid. Companies divest. Rinse, repeat.

There's no Dark Conspiracy here, at least unless you're a rabid Communist. It's not productive, but the people who get paid to facilitate M&A and divestiture get a nice chunk of change every time companies go through this cycle and that's all that really matters to them.

Some would say it's not True Capitalism when the buying and selling of corporations is more important than using capital as a means of producing and selling actual products, but there are plenty who'll say that whatever makes you money is Capitalism. Just as the stock market was originally developed for the simple transfer of capital assets, but has since developed a significant side in abstract instruments. Some of which - like mortgage-backed securities - have enough clout to bring about a Great Recession.

Amazon is neither more nor less likely to play the game than any other company. After all, "Don't be Evil" isn't their motto.

Correction. Not 15 minutes. 45 minutes. 15 minutes would be a respectable chapter. 45 is more like a small book.

You mean that mega-companies don't like to merge to form even larger companies? Because if there isn't at least one pending mega-merger being worked on in the airline, telecom, or consumables industries right now, we're in an unusual state of affairs.

Or did you mean that merger announcements don't usually boost stock prices or trigger layoffs due to consolidation?

Or maybe it's that the top-level execs don't get big rewards, because after all, it's what they're paid to do just like the guy on the assembly line producing the widgets that the newly-merged company sells. Assuming it's not in one of the now-redundant plants that will be closing.

Or maybe you mean that Main Street hasn't been devastated by the big chain stores who can actually dictate prices to many of their suppliers?

Because none of that is imaginary unless history is imaginary.

I can read much faster than I can talk. I still can't read that speech in 30 minutes or less. In fact, I did something I'd never done before, which is skipped over it after about 15 minutes or so.

In addition to being overly long-winded, like I said, you'd have to be a drooling idiot not to have gotten the point by that point in the book. She actually moved her credibility backwards by hammering it so hard.

At least I kept reading, though. I imagine that a lot of people threw the book against the wall and gave up.

Three meetings a day would make me worry, if I managed you. For developers, my experience is rarely more than one intra-departmental meeting a week. The only weekly meeting I regularly attended was the one where we reviewed what would be acceptable to go live that week. Nor was it uncommon for people to phone into that one.

Meetings are infamously a waste of time and they are one area where quality is infinitely preferable to quantity.

I exchanged information and ideas with people on 3 different continents today. No one's complaining. They're all repeat customers, in fact.

I wonder how much "push the needle" means appearing busier than you are. I've worked for people like that. They'd literally sit around pushing icons on their desktop when they couldn't grab someone else's phone or hover over a worker. It not only annoyed the workers, customers would beg to be left alone as well in one of the worst cases. The person in question was universally acknowledged an expert in the field, but disliked for being incredibly intrusive. A literal busybody.

Unless you are interacting with some massive piece of machinery that's unsuitable for home installation, there's precious little that actually needs you to be in a certain place at a certain time. Yes, maybe staring people down or displaying your bone-crushing handshake appeals to you, but an effective manager doesn't really need that - having control over subordinates' remuneration and job future is generally more than enough to keep most minions toiling.

Of course, you could be one of those fortunate "managers" who have all the responsibility but none of the power, but that rarely lasts. Or you could be the kind of person who annoys your staff so much that the only time they'll do anything is when you're directly wielding the whip. Or, I suppose that you could be so lacking in motivation yourself that the only way you can make yourself work is to see fellow-sufferers allegedly working.

But for most other people these days, geography is secondary.

Well, in the present-day USA, you're expected to swear personal loyalty and curtsey to someone who just happens to have the right blood in his veins.

Two companies that size are just as likely to announce a merger, followed by share price increases and layoffs. And massive bonuses in the C-suite.

In the mean time, ask all those mom-and-pop businesses on Main Street how healthy competion is - when the competitor is a 900-lb gorilla and has the leverage to negotiate extra-favorable bulk pricing from its suppliers.

"One share, one vote. The CEO has 50,000 shares and the board has a grant of another 20,000 that's virtually guaranteed even if he trashes the company. You have 100 and a bill for a kidney transplant. What could be more democratic than that?"

There was quite a fight over who invented the telephone. When you get to television, it gets even murkier. And then again, surely you've seen those old films about all the different people trying to invent the airplane.

Rand's real failing (other than that she wrote a "30-minute" speech that can't even be read in 30 minutes and insulted the reader by assuming that he/she was too dim to have gotten the point by then) was the assumption that all creative people are conservative-types, when so many in real life are outspoken liberals.

But I enjoy the irony that the these ultra-capitalists ultimately win by essentially unionizing and going on strike.

Income is "property"? I thought it was the state next door that had legal cannabis.

Sounds like there's a whole slew of existing laws that counter this new one, but equating a cash flow with static assets makes the "corporations are people" concept seem downright pedestrian. At least corporations do some of the same things that people do, even if the State of Texas has yet to administer lethal injections to one.

Why doubt when you can google? https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

I like this quote. It indicates that concentrating the Sun's energy on an industrial scale is hardly a new idea:

I suspect that any "repulsing" that was done - if any - was more like Romans turning away from hot blinding light, but the fact that a mere 60 sailors could ignite even a rigged dummy without any accelerants beyond those naturally found in a wooden ship is an indication of real power. Imagine if there had been 300 of them.

In the modern day, as the rest of the article indicates, quite a lot is being done and the associated math is provided.

Solar Smelters International has their own Facebook page. And, as I said, you can build your own: http://www.instructables.com/i...

All the rest is simply a matter of scale. Commercial factories often have thousands of square feet of roof space. A typical location in the USA can receive about 5KWh/meter/day power. That's PER day, meaning yes, rain, clouds and night-time included. And because we're talking direct heat-to-heat concentration, the efficiency is a lot higher than photovoltaics,.

So the question is: how skeptical are you?

Go to YouTube and look for the video where the guy smelts quarters using nothing but the sun, a support frame, and the Fresnel lens pulled from an old TV.

Now think about what would happen if you had a factory-sized array of solar concentrators. Large concentrator arrays are already being used today.

I'd bet that it's not so much explicit theft, but go to someone's house and you may find a closet full of unreturned umbrellas.

A bicycle is something that's easier to leave at the rack when you get to your destination. An umbrella is something you'll typically take all the way to the door. And you might expect to take with you when you leave, but oh, you forgot - it's stopped raining. Kind of like with ball-point pens, only more cumbersome.

Possibly the best solution is to simply make disposable umbrellas. Although Redbox had a good idea on DVD's. Fees accumulate up to a fixed point and after that, no need to return the DVD - it's yours now.