I'm a manager at Microsoft and I can clear this up a bit, because it sounds totally random.

Your performance review determines your 'rewards', which is your 'merit increase' (salary), bonus, and stock award. Let's say you make $200k a year, and your maximum bonus range is up to 20%. Your target/expected bonus is half of that, so 10%. If you get a "100", this is really "100%" of your expected bonus, so you get 10% of $200k, or $20k bonus. If you have a great performance year and your boss gives you a 140, then you get 140% of your expected bonus range. This means that your top bonus percentage is "200%" of your expected bonus, aka your max bonus. I think this is purely for psychological reasons - people hear that they got a 100% and think that's awesome, vs hearing they got a 50% and being disappointed.

The other thing is that you can't give someone a bonus of 107 or something. It's only in 20-point increments and there are certain ones that (at least in my experience) aren't available, so the options are: 0 [you're being managed out], 60 [you're being given a stern warning], 80 [slightly underperforming, but not a big deal], 100 [expected - this is probably 50% of all employees], 120 [overperformed], 140 [wowowow], 160, 180, 200. The higher numbers are reserved for exceptional circumstances OR lower level employees who are early in career, so giving them a 40% larger bonus isn't that expensive for the company.

There's also quite a lot of wiggle room on the final merit/bonus/stock calculation, where your manager might give you a 120 - but then the overall studio or group or org or the whole company get slightly adjusted along the way. If you're in Azure, you might get a larger bonus all other things being equal over someone working on HoloLens or Xbox.

If it's good enough for Penn State, it should be good enough for me...

I've got 4 acres. Let's do some math and compare this against solar.

I did a rough calculation and found that, if I wanted to, I could install about 1MW worth of solar panels on my property. Scaling up to 10MW would take my nearest 10 neighbors, but lets roll with it. Cost would likely be in the range of $2/watt installed. (DIY I'm looking at $1) So call it $10m. In my area I pay $0.0981 per kWh, and I generate about 1400kWhr/year with a 1kW solar install. Or, to look at it another way, the sun shines 1400 hours per year here. 10MW worth of solar panels will generate ~14MWhrs per year and would return $1.37M in electrical energy, giving a payback period of about 7.3 years.

Assuming the nuclear is running 24/7 without any down time, always running at full efficiency - they'll generate 87.6MWhrs and have a return of $8.6M/year. Given the "under $100 million" price tag, they're looking at a payback period of around 11.6 years.. HOWEVER. Nuclear has ongoing costs and fueling, which I haven't included. And solar certainly has some maintenance and repair, but I really doubt it's going to be higher than nuclear.

This price seems, to me, to be completely reasonable and worth the expense. Even if its more expensive than solar, it's baseline power available 24/7, without the need for batteries. The 'using less land' bit is worthless to me, but a small reactor like this could power my entire town. A random business could install them somewhere ~50 miles out from a metropolitan area and it would be a fantastic investment. Imagine doing it in Southern California where they pay $0.35/kWh - payback period would be like 4 years!!

There is a standard - it's CCS. Tesla wanted their own proprietary thing, so they did that roughly 10 years ago - and now that CCS is everywhere, Tesla wants people to stop using the standard and to adopt their proprietary connector.

If Tesla had done this 5 years ago, we'd be in a much different situation. Also... what good is a Tesla Supercharging station if only Tesla vehicles are allowed to charge at them?

We agreed to 3 year contracts on all 5 houses on our street, with not major upfront install costs.

I really do think we need better protection laws for home buyers in these situations.

I purchased a house ~18 months ago, and prior to putting in an offer I called our cable company (Spectrum) and they assured me that I could get 1gig cable service. So we bought the house, and on closing day I called to set it up... They said they couldn't, because there was no line installed. They eventually quoted me $80k to install it.

It took me 18 months and lots of work to finally get a different company to lay 1/4 mile of fiber optic line (in a conduit that already existed) so that our neighborhood could all have fiber.

If someone had claimed that the house could get water, and then it couldn't - I could sue. Or if it wasn't wired for electricity or something. But not internet access - and that shouldn't be the case.

Liquid mirrors don't work in zero gravity...

Building it on the Moon buys us physics that makes it so when you spin the liquid, it creates a paraboloid rather than spinning it and creating a 'donut' or 'tube' of the liquid.

While the article doesn't mention the tobacco lobby being behind it, it would be incredibly easy to see.

After all, the companies that are being hit primarily make non-brand pods for Juul. Of course Altria (for example) would want to shut that down.

the tobacco lobby has been VERY active over recent years at a national level trying to get the FDA to crack down on vaping, so that only things like Juul and other "buy at the convenience store disposable" brands are available... the market which is pretty much completely dominated by the big four companies.

They would love to to get rid of off brands and local mom and pop shops.

We're nowhere near Artificial Intelligence. Machine Learning is interesting, but extremely limited technology that's not yet ready to be trusted for anything important.

The main reason Internet access lags in the US is that municipalities sell "franchises" to cablecos and telcos - one of each pays the municipality in exchange for exclusive rights to "service" the customers in the area. This means that for roughly 2/3 or Americans, we have no meaningful competition in these areas, just a government-mandated duopoly. And of course these megacorporations behave poorly - if you don't like it, tough shit. Your government sold you out (and cheaply at that - check the numbers), and then regulates things with the attention span and intelligence of a brain-damaged squirrel. The AOC- and Bernie-bots then get all cranky about corporations being corporationy. Of course they are. They need competition to make them behave. Unfortunately, your "saviors" made this impossible

I love the concept, but as has been mentioned SMS is a pretty crappy communication medium. My thinking is that there should be three modes, from most-secure to least-secure.

1) LAN / WiFi / Bluetooth-range control. This can be extended via VPN for those geeky enough, although user-friendly private VPNs are becoming more of a thing.

2) P2P encryption-based comms via a cloud-based relay server. Standard PKI libraries should allow for reasonably-secure communication.

3) Extend control via Apple HomeKit. I wouldn't trust Google or Amazon any further than I can throw their corporate headquarters, but so far Apple has been pretty well-behaved and they are really, really good with crypto (look at the innards of iPhone filesystem design, for example). Yes, this implementation would defeat the intended purpose, but it would also make the product far more commercially viable. All we need is an *option* for better control over remote access. Rich people tend to use Apple products, and will search for products with keyword "HomeKit." Go ahead and take their money. The geek market along is probably not enough to sustain a product line, so you're going to have to compromise somewhere. This is probably the least noxious way to do so.

To begin with, this doesn't mean that Luxottica isn't doing bad things. It's just this bullshit line of reasoning makes me a bit crazy.

Cost to produce something and get it into the hands of consumers does not equal the Bill Of Materials (BOM) cost. There are a lot of other people involved in the supply chain that - shockingly enough - don't want to work for free. This includes:

1) The designers and engineers that create the product.
2) The manufacturers that pay everyone from the people actually making the product, their managers, administrative support, etc.
3) The distributors and their overhead (this reduces the exposure of retailers to carrying excess inventory)
4) The salespeople that help you select the frames, fit them, take measurements for where your eyes are relative to the frames (critical for making the lenses focus properly on your retinas), their management, administrative support, etc.
5) The capital involved in all of this - machines to make the eyewear and lenses, buildings people work in, retail space leased, their computers, furniture, etc., etc., etc.

In most cases, BOM is maybe 10%-15% of the price you pay because everything else costs money too. I don't see of this isn't fucking obvious, but apparently the world needs constant reminders because ZOMG CONSPIRACY!!!

I see a million of these articles, none of which even mention the obscene amount of unnecessary overhead in many of these systems. The politicians bullshit about there not being enough taxes or fees, but they (and their media lapdogs) ignore the egregious amount of waste involved. A starter....

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fny.curbed.com%2F2017%2F12%2F...

Silicon Valley has this Janus-like political stance where they behave like caricatures of the most amoral greedy sociopathic businesspeople while ostentatiously parroting progressive dogma as if it somehow balances the whole thing out anywhere outside of their twisted little minds. The left happily and hypocritically ate it up while the negative aspects of their behavior were carefully hidden away, but now that the curtain has been pulled back the infighting has begun and now it's funny to watch.

This isn't a blanket condemnation of business or progressives (there are plenty of outstanding people and organizations in both areas), but representative politics has a horrible way of bending the path of humanity towards kakistocracy (government by the worst possible people).

Strictly speaking - not defending this practice, just explaining it - merchants should decline to take your card if you've done this, per their agreement with the card issuers. The signature is there as a promise to pay, not as a means of identification. Yes, this is stupid. A better practice is the banks that allow you to put your picture on the card.

Wish I had points to mod you up - you're exactly right. And it's not all US airlines. American Airlines is among the worst at these seat games and other nickel-and-dime bullshit. So guess what? I no longer fly with them, even though they have some routes that are very convenient for me. Southwest and Alaska are both fairly reasonable for seat quality and pricing, and so I use them more.