Domain: thoughtco.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to thoughtco.com.
Comments · 42
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Sails through Democrats but STOPPED
It's going to be stopped by the Senate because Mitch McConnell has never denied being bribed by the telco/ISP industry. He has been bribed by the Coal industry - he's the one who started the lie about the "War on Coal" and then backtracked.
I haven't seen anything that Mitch has done for the people of Kentucky. Nothing. Plenty for the moneyed interests that back him - but nothing for the average Kentuckian.
What does that tell you?
Mitch sure loves his private jet - how do you afford that on a Senate Majority Leader's pay?
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Re:Why a bus?
buy a new $800,000 bus to save $30,000 a year paying a driver?
A few points:
1) Buses have a limited lifespan, so they'll need to be replaced eventually anyway. As long as they're only buying the new buses as part of their regular fleet replacement, you need to look at the difference in cost between an autonomous bus and a conventional bus. Since even a diesel bus can cost over $500,000, paying $800,000 for a driverless bus is much less of a stretch.
2) The amount you're suggesting for driver pay would only cover a single driver working a conventional workweek. Most bus routes run way more than 8 hours a day 5 days a week. You'd need at least 2 full time drivers to cover a route that's 12 hours a day 7 days a week, and more like 3 drivers if it's 18 hours a day.
3) Drivers need more than just their hourly wage. You'll also need to pay for benefits, a manager to oversee them, HR overhead, etc. That's going to add considerably to the cost of hiring them.
Add it all up, and an autonomous bus can pay for itself pretty quickly in reduced driving costs.
And that's also assuming they're intending to maintain existing service levels. As it is, a metro system needs to buy enough buses to serve its peak service levels, but it takes many of those buses out of service during off-peak periods to save on driver costs. If they eliminate the need to pay for more drivers, they can improve their off-peak service levels cheaply, which makes the service more attractive.
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Re:Crybaby Putinite.
The same person or small cabal has been in charge for 4-5 terms. That's not healthy even if they do fake a vote,
It seems to be "healthy" in the US for the Congress, which has a re-election rate above 90%...
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Re:What's "broken"?
If the AI isn't doing anything, then what's broken is the courts spending good money for something that does nothing
You seem to insist on things being either perfect or unusable — an obvious case of a well-known fallacy.
that racial bias in sentencing
The "racial bias in sentencing" — if any such exist — is irrelevant, because the AI is not doing the sentencing.
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never before
Never before have I seen the federal government tempt fate in national parks the way we are today," says Diane Regas
She's been an activist in this area for a long time, so it is surprising that she did not notice the previous long shutdowns. Jimmy Carter shut it down three times (11, 12, and 18 days). Bill Clinton shut it down for 21 days (also 5 days), and Barack Obama shut it down for 16 days, So far, Trump's shutdown is tied with Obama, but Clinton's was the longest.
There have been many, here's a list:
https://www.thoughtco.com/gove... -
subsidies
We can continue to provide government subsidies, charge high import tariff on farm products to make sure the farm industry can replace workers with robots, while blaming China for the lost jobs.
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Re:Bullshit
Cars are more expensive because fewer and fewer people can afford them. That means fewer used cars. That means higher used car prices, which the car manufacturers see as cue to raise prices.
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfr... sure doesn't look like a graph of fewer and fewer people being able to afford new cars to me.
Used car sales appear flat but not plummeting as well: https://www.thoughtco.com/used...
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The main driver
The standard complaints about drugs, antibiotics, and surfactants will certainly be suspect, but I wonder whether migration patterns might be affected by roads. It certainly must at least be putting some evolutionary pressure on the beasties what with the slabs of hot, dangerous pavement blocking things off every which way.
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This is a lie
Not Registering to vote does not prevent you from being called to Jury duty. In some states (notably Red ones) it does increase the likelihood you will be called. This is on purpose. It is another form of voter suppression.
To be clear I don't think you're the one lying, but rather you're the one being lied to.
The benefits from eliminating voter suppression outweigh the occasional ill informed voter. the ruling class will mobilize ill informed voters. I remember a commercial against net metering (the practice where if your solar rig puts power back in the grid the power company pays you for it). The power co didn't want to pay for it, so they got a law on the ballots by tricking folks into signing a dubious petition. That done they had to get it passed, but people overwhelmingly supported Net Metering. What to do?
So they ran these ads. There was a bunch of old people sitting around and talking about something _scary_. Not once did anyone say what the scary thing was. At the end there was an impassioned plea to vote yes on prop such and such. They ran it in an off election when the only old folks were voting. It passed in a land slide.
Those are the kinds of voters we get when we pick and choose who votes. You get voters that the ruling class has picked. They're not informed, they're what most call "useful idiots"... -
Re:Whats the point?
Googling turned up a better article:
https://www.thoughtco.com/bus-..."Of the above costs, a majority is the cost of employee wages and benefits - about 70%."
Thanks for the citation. The ratio of wages to other costs is lower for trains and trams, since they usually carry more people per driver. But lower wage cost is often the rationale for deploying them instead of buses, since other costs per passenger-mile are higher. Once buses are driverless, that rationale is no longer valid, and railed public-transit makes much less sense.
In fact, once you go driverless, even full sized buses make little sense. It would make more sense to use smaller vans that can run more often and on more flexible routes. This will appeal to many people that currently drive.
Driverless tech will revolutionize mass transit, and mostly in a good way.
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Re:Whats the point?
Googling turned up a better article:
https://www.thoughtco.com/bus-..."Of the above costs, a majority is the cost of employee wages and benefits - about 70%."
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Loser talk
I always love these "we lost to a complete moron" comments. If he's a moron, how much lower does that make losers like you?
Anyhow, he has around 500 business and I can only find 6 bankruptcies. That implies a failure rate of ~1%. Most people agree that around 80-90% of startups fail and other types of businesses fail at least 20x more often, in general. But please, do tell us more about your business knowledge. Since running a casino is just easy money, why haven't you built one? Surely you can convince the bank's business loan department that it's free money if they're so easy to make a profit on. I mean, the games are literally rigged in the house's favor, how could you lose? The hell are you doing on Slashdot when you could get free money and be set for life?
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Re:Sounds like a good way...
Fact check: There are over 340,000 licensed guns in California, and gods alone know how many unlicensed ones. Source.
The defenselessness of Californians is greatly overstated.
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Re:Yeah, right
Atari has been notified about your use of the word ATARI in your channel, we'll see how that goes
Atari is Japanese, asshole.
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Re:Seize the means of productionHitler was a committed Catholic, and not only not a socialist, but a determined Capitalist.
and LOATHED SocialismRichard Evans, in his magisterial three volume history of Nazi Germany, is quite clear on whether Hitler was a socialist: “it would be wrong to see Nazism as a form of, or an outgrowth of, socialism.” (The Coming of the Third Reich, Evans, p. 173). Not only was Hitler not a socialist himself, nor a communist, but he actually hated these ideologies and did his utmost to eradicate them.
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Re:I think you need to learn to read
Who pays for the year over year losses totaling in the tens of billions?
https://www.thoughtco.com/post...
Someone is paying for those losses.
https://about.usps.com/news/na...
When businesses operate at losses such as these, they go out of business (ToyRUs)
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Re:Jaywalking
According to this list, the civil service. Though, the one you were thinking of, law, seems to be the #2 professional background. According to this article the percentage of lawyers in Congress is actually shrinking, it used to 80% in the 19th century and had fallen to 40% as of 2016. For reference, according to Dr Dutton's list, civil service is 10th on the list of top 10 jobs with the highest rates of psycopathy.
Maybe congress needs more healthcare aide workers? That's the job with the lowest rate of psycopathy.
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Re:There were only muzzle loading gun at that time
The framer could not have foreseen that a single person could mow people down,
18th Century Timeline: 1700 - 1799
You suppose Ben Franklin couldn't make the intellectual leap from the power loom to the Gatling gun?
You're almost certainly wrong.
The actual problem is not predicting the future, but figuring out which of many thousands of plausible developments are worth talking about, before they've yet come to fruition.
For Franklin, s/plausible/obvious/g.
For Jefferson, s/plausible/obvious/50%FFS, before there was a Library of Congress, there was Thomas Jefferson's personal reading room. I only rated him 50% because he couldn't possibly have read even half of the esoteric books he owned.
Both of them foresaw enough to know that future generations would need to achieve the right balance between tradition with common sense.
Hamilton was no dummy, either.
Next stop: Ken Thompson and Rob Pike didn't foresee the rise of distributed computing, because, you know, the jump from concurrency to distributed algorithms is vastly greater than the jump from the power loom to the Gatling gun.
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Re:How was this question graded?
"intuitive" tricks that we build up in our heads are not actually true.
That is nonsense. But it is interesting that you have in america a liege of school teachers and text book companies that are trying to ban books with such "intuitive tricks".https://www.thoughtco.com/math...
There are thousands of those "tricks"
... and people that build processors e.g. know lots of them.You obviously don't and are scared about people who know more "intuitively" than you
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Re: First shutdown ever for a majority administra
I get it. You're a fucking idiot. You don't know what you're talking about, and refuse to learn about it. You are making stupid people embarrassed because they're now associated with you. It's been explained to you why you are wrong. If you continue to intentionally be wrong and lie about it, then you are no long simply wrong.. you're a lying sack of shit. That's probably an upgrade from what you normally are, but you should still strive to be better.
https://www.factcheck.org/2008...
https://www.thebalance.com/us-...
https://www.thoughtco.com/hist...
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10...
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/... -
Re:This is why we don't trust your "experts"
ah, little Troller Boy is still upset in defense of, again, the perennial martyr of the Right, the Great Sarah Palin, the least contributory of all of the losing VP-candidates throughout history, the one who all you have to say about is over the mean liberals and leftists who say such harsh words.
How Sad that that's ALL you can offer about her. Or her drones.
It's ok, we know you have nothing. No leadership. No integrity. It's trolling all the way down for Dumb-Ass-Troll.
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Ancients used sound to levitate large boulders
Of course all the patents are now hidden under "National Security", inventors murdered.
The Ancient Secrets of Levitation
Cultures From the Past May Have Had Ancient Secrets to Build Their Monuments
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-...Ancient Mysteries of Sound Levitation
http://www.trinfinity8.com/anc...Acoustic Levitation Of Stone
https://www.bibliotecapleyades...Tibetan Sound Levitation Of Large Stones Witnessed By Scientist
http://www.thelivingmoon.com/4... -
Re: Morons
You are a troll. We can all see that you are a troll.
https://www.thoughtco.com/cali...
1970 - 19,953,134
1990 - 29,760,021
2000 - 33,871,648
2009 - 38,292,687
2015 - 38,715,000
The business website Kiplinger.com forecast California would rank 10th in the nation among states for fastest job growth in 2016.
Do your own research. YMMV. -
Re:Yes
And you will be consumed by bacteria, which are now egging you on through your gut to eat more so you die soon and they can feast.
Unless there's some truth that we, and all animals, live symbiotically as a host for these microorganisms.
In a mutualistic relationship, both the bacteria and the host benefit. For example, there are several kinds of bacteria that live on the skin and inside the mouth, nose, throat, and intestines of humans and animals. These bacteria receive a place to live and feed while keeping other harmful microbes from taking up residence. Bacteria in the digestive system assist in nutrient metabolism, vitamin production, and waste processing. They also aid in the host's immune system response to pathogenic bacteria.
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Re:Idiotic
Did a search and I found free ones and very cheap ons (like 5USD per year) that will be good enough for that. https://www.thoughtco.com/chea...
Not looked to far into it yet. -
Re:I propose a simple experiment..
Forgot a relevant link:
https://www.thoughtco.com/effe... -
Re:"Cx"? Uh...
How exactly is it pronounced? Cause I can already see other language designers claiming "Our language is better than Cx!"
If it's making the reference I think it is, it would be "C double sharp".
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Re:Tradeoffs
It would be pretty bad, but not "fucked".
https://geneticliteracyproject...
1) 60% of US crops grow fine without bees. "...Wheat, corn and rice are wind-pollinated. Lettuce, beans and tomatoes are self-pollinated. The 12 crops that worldwide furnish nearly 90 percent of the worldâ(TM)s food â" rice, wheat, maize (corn), sorghums, millets, rye, and barley, and potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassavas or maniocs, bananas and coconuts â" are wind pollinated, self-pollinated or are propagated asexually or develop without the need for fertilization (parthenocarpically)...."
2) of that remaining 40%, not all of the plants require insect pollination; some are merely benefited by it in better yields but can do without.
3) LOTS of insects pollinate that remaining 40%.
https://www.thoughtco.com/inse... -
Re:"the country"?
A large part of the challenges that Peurto Rico faces is that it is not in fact a country, but rather it is an "unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeast Caribbean Sea".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.thoughtco.com/puer...
Peraps if Peurto Rico was a country (or a "state" within the United States), they might have been better able to respond to the types of problems that this storm has caused.
WIth a population of a bit more than 3.4 million, the territory seems to have more people than twenty-two other US states:
http://worldpopulationreview.c...
It's a fucking island. Logistics are the challenge here, not labels. If Hawaii were to get wiped out tomorrow by a volcano, it would be just as challenging for them to rebuild too.
Also, the label argument is lost in a sea of irony when our government HQ sits in the "District of Columbia"...
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"the country"?
A large part of the challenges that Peurto Rico faces is that it is not in fact a country, but rather it is an "unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeast Caribbean Sea".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.thoughtco.com/puer...
Peraps if Peurto Rico was a country (or a "state" within the United States), they might have been better able to respond to the types of problems that this storm has caused.
WIth a population of a bit more than 3.4 million, the territory seems to have more people than twenty-two other US states:
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Re:Is anyone surprised?
Using accelerometers to detect motion (actually changes in motion) is blindingly obvious because that's what they're designed to do.
But if you want to be a stickler about where they're used and for what purpose, crash test dummies have been using accelerometers for this purpose in human body analogues since at least 1997, pre-dating and invalidating this patent. -
Re:How insecure is a divine king?
Erm, yes the current king is Rama X, hence I explicitly wrote Rama IX
... no idea what the misunderstanding is.A good overview about gods in Buddhism you can find here: https://www.thoughtco.com/gods...
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Re:Fry speech
You are very wrong.
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Re:What Unions Did For You
I see a lot of apathy for Unions. Very sad. They gave you: Weekends off, eight hour work day, Holidays off. And a safer workplace. People died in the fight to start unions for you. If you like working 60 hours a week on a regular basis; keep on disliking unions.. Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/1886...
You are right, but most if not all of these things are today covered by labor laws. Unions had their place and time. Today, they simply have outlived their usefulness, and on more than few occasions are actually causing more damage than good.
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What Unions Did For You
I see a lot of apathy for Unions. Very sad. They gave you: Weekends off, eight hour work day, Holidays off. And a safer workplace. People died in the fight to start unions for you. If you like working 60 hours a week on a regular basis; keep on disliking unions.. Source: https://www.thoughtco.com/1886...
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Re: Not 'hung"
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Re:No mail delivery...
The owner of a bank sent all 80,000 bricks to town by parcel post. After this the post office limited shipments to 200 lbs per day per shipper.
The postal service used to deliver babies as well.
https://www.thoughtco.com/when-it-was-legal-mail-babies-3321266
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Re:Current congestion? Yes. But this invites more
Yup, self-driving cars will be a game changer for traffic. Since the majority of traffic in most places is local day-to-day traffic, like getting to/from work, stores, restaurants, etc. I don't think the increased car utilization will come close to outweighing the improved traffic efficiency.
You have me pretty excited about road trips though. I hadn't really thought about it, but clearly cars will be designed more for passenger comfort. It'll be like first class or better travel, with privacy, at your convenience, with complete control over making stops and route changes. If efficiency improves enough, we can have fewer lanes that are wider so cars can have more interior room.
On the other hand, self-driving buses are also going to be a game changer. According to this article operating expenses for buses are huge, and about 70% are for employees. Self-driving buses will mean we can have twice as many buses, or maybe 10 times as many cheaper buses with lower capacity. If the bus came every 5 minutes instead of every 30 minutes, and went to more places, a lot of people are going to stop owning a car.
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Re: Free Speech
Of course this may be written to fit the leftard agenda:
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/...http://www.bruceonpolitics.com...
http://www.bruceonpolitics.com...Both sound socialist.
http://media.factmyth.com/2016...
https://www.thoughtco.com/g00/...
"Thereâ(TM)s no way anyone can, or ever should, defend Hitler, and so things like health-care reform are equated with something terrible, a Nazi regime which sought to conquer an empire and commit several genocides. The problem is, this is a distortion of history."
Of course wishing to preserve your people, nation and culture shouldn't be viewed as imperialism, genocide and slavery either. But that's what they claim it result in. With borders and no immigrants the risks would had been close to none. Then again even in the case of civil war and deportations genocide is some way off.Reading those texts seem about as dumb as wasting too much time on the subject and calling people diagnoses.
In the end what title you throw at it may not explain all and all which use the same title may not be the same, because people and in this case politics may be more complex than just one single trait. -
Re:In other news
In other news Barack Obama will be paid $400K for one speech.
So Obama is making less than Bill Clinton but more than George W. So what?
https://www.thoughtco.com/former-presidents-speaking-fees-3368127
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Re:probably = guess again
Canadian bills are printed in Australia, that's where the plastic bills were invented. https://www.thoughtco.com/cana...
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Not everybody, just you. [Re:odd thing...]
So everybody on this forum who was actually educated about maps being distorted and globes being very common in school is wrong?
No. Not everybody. Just you. Youstate with utter confidence that you know the contents of the classroom and the curriculum of the teaching in every single school in America
... and you can even tell me confidently how things were taught in "middle school" even before you were born. The idea that different schools might have different curricula is apparently beyond your conceptual horizon.The fact that flat maps are distorted was and is common instruction, EVERYBODY does it, using a globe as the primary instruction tool. It's a way of crossing between history/geography/math, which teachers love.
"Everybody." Really. How in the world do you know that? Everybody where you went to school, perhaps. But unless you have visited every school in America, your confidence is misplaced.
I think that much of your belief about what is taught is probably just a matter of decade. In 1973 Arno Peters had a press conference, and instigated a big flap about map projections, leading to a lot of visibility, even making it to debate in the United Nations-- the "Peters projection controversy." https://www.thoughtco.com/pete... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...–Peters_projection
Before 1973, the choice of map projection was a technical detail that really hardly anybody knew or cared about, except for cartographers and perhaps mathematicians. After that it became high profile, and it seems reasonable that it might even have made it the middle school curriculum. At least, wherever you live it apparently did.