They have 'actived' posted on their web site (I'm like to see how someone passively does that.) an opinion to explain why they don't get involved in such cases.
I'm sure you'd complain just as much if they hadn't posted a mention of the 2nd amendment. You'd say, "Look, they're trying to trick people into thinking they support all civil liberties.".
Or if they posted a terse 'We don't do second amendment stuff' without an explanation, you'd say, "Look, they can't even give a good reason they don't do it!"
So instead they post the explanation, and you...condemn them for 'actively posting' it, whatever the hell that means.
And, there you go. I knew eventually someone would whine about their fucking name.
Wake me when the National Rifle Association stops defending handgun ownership. (Handguns are not rifles.)
Hell, I wish another organization would step up and defend 1st amendment rights, and another step up and defend 14th amendment rights and equality in general, allowing the ACLU to stick with the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th.
It's no use arguing with these morons. Everyone's explained time and time again that different organizations do different things, and yet they think it's the topper of all arguments to argue that the ACLU doesn't care about the second amendment. Game over, they win.
No one's every bothered to explain why they should care about the 2nd amendment, because they clearly, repeatly, explicitly, say they don't take a position on that. I mean, you can hardly call them misleading.
The only logic there is that their name says 'civil liberties', and that the second is such a liberty. So I guess they're guilty of being a horrible horrible organization because their name is slightly wrong or something.
Hey, someone remind what what the National Rifle Association is doing talking about handguns and shotguns and all those other non-rifled weapons? And shouldn't the Sierra Club be sticking to the Sierra Nevada mountains, or at least that general area?
The number of 'misnamed' political activism groups far outnumber the ones labeled in any sane manner.
It stop generational cultures of violence. Obviously you're going to move some criminals with them, but there's a difference in criminals operating in places rules by law, and places controlled by crime that the police have given up on.
And, as was pointed out, this happened with very little planning and no support for the relocated people. And there is a poverty threshold, as the article talks about, which no one had even noticed before. This is, in fact, what I trying to get people past. Obviously my idea doesn't work if you just move people enmass to somewhere else, and it apparently doesn't work if you move them to somewhere were 25% are from the projects, either. There's some level we have to stay below per-area.
And, frankly, you'll notice something very important missing from the article. You read about a lot of people confused as to where the crime is coming from, but not a single statistics about whether or not total crime has gone down. I suspect what happened is that the crime, being distributed among people in general instead of being concentrated among people with no economic or political power, just become less ignorable, not 'more crime'. (In a ghetto, a good deal of crime isn't even reported, like almost all vandalism.)
Of course, total crime only matters if you think that all people have the right to be free of crime, or just non-poor people.
No kidding. Instead of parks, how about some damn mass transit? Have wider streets, run a 'tolley line' though it. (Or, rather, a tolley-like bus with a permanent lane that people can step on and off very quickly.)
Or, more to the point, how about a city built correctly, with shops on the ground floor and apartments above them, so that people can get 95% of their shopping done in their own neighborhood? (And this time they'd have damn elevators.)
Which also helps reduce crime as apartments can no longer be broken into on ground-level. Obviously, businesses can be, but they always can, businesses have to be accessible to the public.
Tthis is what cities should have been doing for quite some time. And not just when the population declined.
That's how you fix neighborhoods. You just offer to move everyone else somewhere else. Honest people, who are too poor to live anywhere but hate the violence and crime, will leap at the chance.
Likewise, petty criminals will go along with it, and end up somewhere where they will find the police do respond. Very quickly. And they'll end up in jail. (Or, alternately, they might decide to go straight.)
And tear down or at least seal up (And I mean actually seal up, with sensors, and actually arrest trespassers) all empty buildings.
And then, once the population of the street gets below a certain amount, close off one end of it. Stop it from being a through street. That stops all the drive-by drug purchases that provide income for the remaining scum. (So now they can't afford their rent, and they get kicked out.)
And when it's all done, the government will have an empty street, which it will then repair up to actual livable standards and sell off.
Seriously, the only way to fix some neighborhoods is to depopulate them and then repopulate them back later. They've gotten such a culture of crime that absolutely nothing can be done except massive levels of police crackdowns, which we don't have the political will to do. But, instead, we can simply offer the sane people trapped there the chance to leave, and then starve the people who stay behind to death.
Heck, we could probably just do the first part of this, let people out, and then do the massive police crackdown. Without 90% of the innocent bystanders, it might work a good deal better.
Strangely enough, we've done this before for much less noble purposes. We tried to break Native American culture in sorta this way, and it mostly worked. Obviously, that was a rather immoral act, but I wouldn't have the least problem in breaking up gang culture neighborhoods.
That's what I always thought they should use. Have an anti-elevator on a slight slope. The back end aligned with the road, but the front end is two inches or so in the air. Drive on it, push the front down, drive off.
If it's on a downward slope anyway, you haven't used any gas. In fact, you can use it on a flat street, where in theory it would use more energy, but if you put it at a stop sign, everyone's stopping anyway. You've even slightly saved on brake usage.
It's not much to power a store, but it's probably enough to power a traffic light.
Of course, the ultimate idea would be to build downward-only elevators in parking decks, which could easily generate enough power to run the lights in them, and would save large amounts of gas. Stick a spring-loaded platform on each floor with a door so only one car can get on at once, they go downward, taking all the lower platforms with them in a stack. Car drives off, latch releases, the platforms springs back to wait for another car.
You could, instead of trying to 'stack' platforms on the way down, have a call button and the sole platform stay at the bottom until called, at which point it springs up to the right floor...but then what if they don't get on? You'd need a real electric motor to operate the thing, although, obviously, it could be powered by the downward motion of cars too.
They're legal tender, and it's illegal to melt them down. I'm not sure if they could be considered gold bullion for this reason.
You actually had to turn gold coins in and get cash for them.
You could actually continue to own gold bullion, you just couldn't buy it. You had to sell it to the government if you sold it. And, really, the same with gold coins...you could own them (Although technically illegally), you just couldn't use them. If you wanted to use them, you'd have to trade them in. (Presumably stating you'd 'just found them' or something if it was past the time you were supposed to trade them in.)
All this was to hide the fact that the actual cost of gold and cash had been disconnected, even while the government continued to state, I think, $35 an ounce as the value of money. (Which is what they'd give you for gold.)
Of course, a lot of people just continued to hold on to all their gold during this time, which paid off when all this ended and gold was worth ten times more.
They were hired as contractors. The amount you pay your contractors is based on the contracted price, and I'm pretty sure minimum wage laws don't apply.
I'm not certain why you think minimum wage laws wouldn't apply to contractors, but they do.
I'd expect that he'd write them off as a business expense.
If he wrote them off as a business expense, than he had to actually write the value he paid for them as a loss. A loss when he sent them to employees.
In other words, for his idea to work, they need to transferred out at the company at face value. As 'cash'. Not as 'benefits' or whatever else you might pay people, they need to exit, on the books, as 'ten dollars of salary, paid in cash', so the person receiving them can record them that way. They have to leave the company as though they were normal cash, paid to employees, that just happened to be worth quite a lot of money to collectors.
If they don't exit that way, it's pretty obvious it was some tax evasion scheme. The company can't assert it paid the worker in a thousand dollars worth of goods, and have the worker report that income as ten dollars.
However, if they do it as ten dollar each way, then you've got a different problem of valuable coins that they actually purchased at full value disappearing within the company.
IF the government doesn't like it they need to change the law and outlaw the gold coins that they mint as legal tender.
Actually, they needed to not change the law. For a while, this would, indeed, be illegal, as private ownership of gold bullion was illegal. They not only changed the law, they started making gold coins again.
And, indeed. I don't care what the IRS says. If the government prints $10 on a coin, and issues it, WRT the government it's worth ten dollars, period. If the government doesn't like that, it can stop issuing such coins.
Incidentally, before anyone tries to lump me it with 'the government should not issue paper money' people, I think those people are crazy. However, there's a valid point that if the government is issuing something as money, it has to treat it as money.
Incidentally, this guy probably committed a bunch of crimes. Not only is he in violation of min wage laws, but I bet his bookkeeping would be interesting, too. It's either lying and showing people were paid in full, or it's showing min wage violations. And it's showing some purchase by the company of expensive gold coins that just vanished.
You know, it's easy to demonstrate you're a moron. California stats since last census:
Total people gained from international migration: 1,825,697
Total people lost to domestic migration: 1,378,706
Just counting people moving in and out of California, California has population growth. And that's not counting the fact that 2,549,081 more people who were born than people who died died.
What lead to the downfall of the auto industry is the health insurance industry and the inability of the auto industry to maintain the health insurance they'd promised.
Why would we tax parents? I've never understood that logic.
It's the children who benefit, let's tax them. Of course, we'd have to wait until they're adults.
That seems perfectly fair to everyone. (Except adults who immigrate to this country and have to pay taxes for a school they didn't go to, but whatever.)
I'm sure there are places, but doing the math in Marietta blew my mind.
The real joke is, for $0.25 cheaper, in Atlanta, you can buy a ticket on a bus, ride it into the subway station, ride the subway, and then get off and get on another bus. You could essentially keep swapping transports for free until you had to step outside the system.
In Marietta, OTOH, you got exactly one transfer. And a higher ticket price, and buses that ran every 30 minutes instead of 10-15, and no subway.
Mass transit systems tend to suffer from exactly the same issue I'm having to convince the theatre I volunteer at: The people running them don't realize that empty seats cost money, and full seats have no cost. If you're running the bus anyway, run it with people in it.
And, perhaps more importantly, don't price yourself higher than alternate, more convenient, things.
Empty seats on a bus makes it worse than an SUV, so stop riding the bus and get an SUV, right? Empty seats on a light rail makes it almost as bad as a plane, so go take a plane to work, right?
Bingo.
The trick isn't to switch, the trick is to optimize. Whenever large groups of people need to get from one place to another, they should be together, on the most efficient method.
Anyone looking at one aspect of this is just being silly or, as in this case, deliberately misleading.
Likewise, no one's ever sure how much traffic is 'movable' to some other time or place or method.
For example, rush hour traffic...we are fairly sure that's not movable in time or space, but we could have them use another method. (If they could do that trip at some other time, they almost certainly would have already.)
OTOH, a pickup truck with a chest of drawers in the back of it can't be done any other method or space, but could possible change the time it happens at. (Although people are smart enough to do that already.)
But you can sit and watch 10 cars drive by a certain point, and you never know exactly who would have been willing to take a bus, and who would be willing to take a 'tolley-like bus', and who would be willing to take a subway, and whatnot. And you can look at the number of plane tickets and never know how many people would have been willing to spend an extra 50% longer on the train. Statistics won't tell us that.
Hell, people won't tell us that, cause they don't know. An important part of leaving your car behind is the assurance you won't need it, and you won't feel you won't need it until the system has reached a certain size and reliability, a very large Catch-22 if fools are trying to make the mass transit system 'fund itself'.
This is why New York, for example, is continually expanding mass transit. It reached that tipping point such a long time back that personal cars are unimaginable. (And New York demonstrates, I think, that the first step to having mass transit is, ironically, taxis. Plenty of cheap taxis let people have a 'safety net' and actually get to where they're going, quickly, when the mass transit system fails them.)
So the consumption is 0.022l of Kerosene per (km*passenger) (liters per kilometer per passenger). That's better than many cars, if you drive alone, which most people, sadly, do. So if you look at it from this angle, the 777-200 is more fuel-efficient.
Not better than mine. My car uses no kerosene per kilometer at all. Zero. Not a negligible amount, but literally 0.00000000. It's easy to buy such cars, if you know where to look. For example, any new or used car lot will be entirely full of such cars.
And, while you're shopping, don't forget to ask how often you have to change the uranium. It's easy to find a car where you never have to do that, if you look.
More to the point, I wish people would stop comparing dissimilar fuels 'per gallon' or 'per liter' like that makes any sense at all.
And you're assuming the fucking bus actually saves money.
I lived in Marietta for a while, at SPSU, in a dorm. Without a car for an entire year. And no internet in the dorms for the first six months. Luckily, there was a bus station literally 150 yards away from my dorm, at the front of the school.
It came every 30 minutes, and was usually roughly on time, so I never had trouble catching it. It went right to the Cobb Galleria Center where there was a large mall, nice bookstores and movie theaters in walking distance, etc. 25 minutes away. 5 miles. I must have done this trip 10 times a month, for eight months. The route was perfect, except the last bus was at 10:30 and most of the stores were open until 11, but I could live with that.
Then I got a car. ~28 MPG. And I looked at the two $1.50 tickets I had to buy to ride the bus, and I looked at $1.25 a gallon gas, and I did the math. Even in the stop and go traffic, the trip cost me a third as much in my car. Oh, and I could stay until 11, or even see a movie later, and I could go by the grocery store on the way back, etc. Oh, and it took half the time.
I didn't ride the bus ever again.
The only people who road mass transit in that town were people without cars. Anyone who had to have a car, for whatever reason, would not be using the buses. Hell, at their prices, it might have been cheaper to buy a car regardless.
I am not convinced that market forces would not have addressed pollution issues in a way that was as good or better than the one we chose.
It is not my job to convince you of things that are fairly obvious.
There is no plausible means by which companies would have stopped polluting by themselves. If public opinion had turned against them, they would have simply polluted in secret, like I said. Or they simply would have purchased land far away from their workers and market and dumped there, safe from anyone voting with their wallet. Or even done that secretly.
Your worship of the market is silly. The market operates to make companies the most money, which, once we remove the ability for companies to commit certain types of fraud and collusion, results in them creating the cheapest products via competition, via the most efficient means.
'the efficient solution', however, does not mean 'the superior solution' for society at large. See, for example, Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' for the most efficient meatpacking industry.
TFA also talks about building trains into major population centers to eliminate the need for infrastructure for cars to _get_ to the train.
That's something that's very important when comparing the costs. You can have train stations deposit people in major cities. You can have them literally step out the door into downtown, with no transfer or anything. If you can run a subway, you can run a rail line.
You can't do that for airports.
You can't even transfer people to subways easily from an airport in most places, thanks to really goofy baggage handling and security. For example, in Atlanta, you have to go all the way to one of the end terminals to get on the subway. Ironically, you usually ride a subway to get there. A different one, inside airport security. (When I say it that way, it really sounds weird.)
They really should move security to inside each terminal, but then they'd have problem making people run all over the airport when their flights moved, as they inexplicably always do.
They can't even let people enter security at the main gate, but, if they want, exit from security in the terminals and get on the subway, because their luggage is not there. And they can't give people their luggage in the terminal, as that's inside airport security.
I guess, in theory, they could ask how you're exiting the airport, and make sure your luggage was there, outside security however you exited, but, seriously. It's a huge mess, and means you have to travel the entire damn length of the airport, via a subway, to get on the actual subway. (And, annoyingly, you have to go upstairs and then back down, which they could fix. Yeah, you have to go up to get your baggage, but if you don't have baggage you should just be able to walk over to the subway station.)
Whereas with a train, even if they didn't want to build tracks in the city and you did have to transfer to subway, they could build parallel tracks and let you walk out the door of your train with your luggage (As you normally carry that yourself on the train) and straight across onto a subway train.
Trucks do not cause 200x the damage of cars. Each axle (in the EU) is limited to 8 tonnes, which means 4 tonnes per wheel so roughly 8x the weight of a cars wheel.
Your math is just stupid there. Trucks may only cause '8x' the damage of a car per tire, but, um, they have more tires, too.
Although asserting that trucks cause 200x the damage as cars is clearly wrong, the costs do not scale the way you think they do.
For one thing, bridges, especially the smaller ones. Without trucks crossing them, they're a lot cheaper to build and maintain. It is much simpler to build a two-carlength bridge that can support ten tons (Roughly five cars.) than one can support the 30 tons that two trucks going over them can apply. Likewise, on larger bridges, the bridge as a whole can clearly already support the weight, but that doesn't mean each part can...if you pile all cars currently on a bridge on top of each other, and stuck that pile in the middle, it'd break through.
Same with cement. You can't just apply slightly more, and eight 1000 pound wheels going over a road is not equivalent, stresswise, to one 8000 pound wheel. 8000 pound wheels will crack things you could drop, from five feet up, a car with four 1000 pound wheels on.
You can't just swap out weights for time and quantity and assume that it all evens out. If you don't believe me...how many hours a week do you lay on your bed? 56? Your car weighs about 20-25 times more than you...do you think your bed could support it for two hours? Two minutes?
If you build bed that can hold a car, but it's normally used to hold one people, with the car on it for two minutes a week, the car driver doesn't get to claim 'My car uses, proportionally, less bed than others'. That may be true, but, cost wise, the 'car support' in the bed is the major cost.
Likewise, with trucks, they have to seriously overbuild the roads. Probably not costing 200 times as much, I don't know where that number comes from, but it is non-negligible, and it is not covered by the added gasoline that truck drivers use, because the problem does not scale like that. (Not to mention that trucks are more fuel-efficient, per pound, to start with, so end up paying less per pound in gas tax.)
Subdivisions provide the perfect place for a bus pickup at the front. I always thought, in addition to that, they should have golf carts on every street, and people could just grab one and ride back and forth to their house. (With some sort of ignition disabling GPS that keeps it from being driven out of the subdivision.)
To compare, let's look at Marietta, Georgia, a city with twenty times the people, also ran busses every half-hour...on some routes, and sometimes they space them out to an hour, and they all shut down at about 10.
The real joke is that there's no problem with them stopping at smaller towns...if they'd just cut their trains in third and run more of them. Let some of them stop at small towns, let some of them be express.
The problem with Amtrak is that shipping gets priority over them, believe it or not.
Another problem is that they've started the security that planes have, which makes no sense. You cannot hijack a train, either to fly to Cuba in or to fly into a building. (You can't even hit another train in any predictable way, trains are not in charge of what tracks they are on. They could probably move other trains out of the way fast enough and send you down some dead-end.) If you were going to blow up a train, meanwhile, you'd hit it with a car bomb at a crossing, not try to smuggle one on. I think it demonstrates how little 'security' has to do with actual threat assessment when we're doing it on trains. Trains require no security whatsoever.
And, yes, it is flatly absurd that more cities aren't connected by rail. It's crazy that, for example, people here in the south drive to Walt Disney World. Because it's apparently easier to drive for 20 hours than to take a train. I don't blame them...they're right!
I have to disagree with you. While most American cities are ill-suited to public transportation, subways were invented for exactly that niche...putting mass transit into places when it didn't fit.
Obviously, not every 'green' measure is a good idea, but it's entirely possible you live in a city where there's sane behavior. Let me tell you a story:
I live in Georgia. North Georgia. About an hour and a half north of Atlanta. There are three roads going north from Atlanta. I-75, I-85, and SR-400. These roads are packed, every single day. I an up SR-400.
Atlanta has a pretty good subway system. A lot of people use it. Unfortunately, it stops, basically, at Atlanta. On SR-400, they've even built a northmost station that is an 'exit', only accepting incoming cars from the north and dumping them back out northward. (I.e., the train only goes south from there, the roads only go north when you leave the station.) The station is packed every day.
Sadly, this train station is about an hour south of me, almost in Atlanta. Why?
Because of idiotic politics, that's why. It could be another 60 miles up the road and still be packed. They could build another one 60 miles up the road and they would both be packed. Cars are bumper to bumper for another thirty miles past this train station.
I get a little tired of people who live in 'green' cities talking about how we don't need more mass transit. Maybe you folks don't...but some cities really do.
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They have 'actived' posted on their web site (I'm like to see how someone passively does that.) an opinion to explain why they don't get involved in such cases.
I'm sure you'd complain just as much if they hadn't posted a mention of the 2nd amendment. You'd say, "Look, they're trying to trick people into thinking they support all civil liberties.".
Or if they posted a terse 'We don't do second amendment stuff' without an explanation, you'd say, "Look, they can't even give a good reason they don't do it!"
So instead they post the explanation, and you...condemn them for 'actively posting' it, whatever the hell that means.
And, there you go. I knew eventually someone would whine about their fucking name.
Wake me when the National Rifle Association stops defending handgun ownership. (Handguns are not rifles.)
Hell, I wish another organization would step up and defend 1st amendment rights, and another step up and defend 14th amendment rights and equality in general, allowing the ACLU to stick with the 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th.
How can a "National Rifle Association" care about handguns?
It's no use arguing with these morons. Everyone's explained time and time again that different organizations do different things, and yet they think it's the topper of all arguments to argue that the ACLU doesn't care about the second amendment. Game over, they win.
No one's every bothered to explain why they should care about the 2nd amendment, because they clearly, repeatly, explicitly, say they don't take a position on that. I mean, you can hardly call them misleading.
The only logic there is that their name says 'civil liberties', and that the second is such a liberty. So I guess they're guilty of being a horrible horrible organization because their name is slightly wrong or something.
Hey, someone remind what what the National Rifle Association is doing talking about handguns and shotguns and all those other non-rifled weapons? And shouldn't the Sierra Club be sticking to the Sierra Nevada mountains, or at least that general area?
The number of 'misnamed' political activism groups far outnumber the ones labeled in any sane manner.
No, it doesn't work immediately.
It stop generational cultures of violence. Obviously you're going to move some criminals with them, but there's a difference in criminals operating in places rules by law, and places controlled by crime that the police have given up on.
And, as was pointed out, this happened with very little planning and no support for the relocated people. And there is a poverty threshold, as the article talks about, which no one had even noticed before. This is, in fact, what I trying to get people past. Obviously my idea doesn't work if you just move people enmass to somewhere else, and it apparently doesn't work if you move them to somewhere were 25% are from the projects, either. There's some level we have to stay below per-area.
And, frankly, you'll notice something very important missing from the article. You read about a lot of people confused as to where the crime is coming from, but not a single statistics about whether or not total crime has gone down. I suspect what happened is that the crime, being distributed among people in general instead of being concentrated among people with no economic or political power, just become less ignorable, not 'more crime'. (In a ghetto, a good deal of crime isn't even reported, like almost all vandalism.)
Of course, total crime only matters if you think that all people have the right to be free of crime, or just non-poor people.
No kidding. Instead of parks, how about some damn mass transit? Have wider streets, run a 'tolley line' though it. (Or, rather, a tolley-like bus with a permanent lane that people can step on and off very quickly.)
Or, more to the point, how about a city built correctly, with shops on the ground floor and apartments above them, so that people can get 95% of their shopping done in their own neighborhood? (And this time they'd have damn elevators.)
Which also helps reduce crime as apartments can no longer be broken into on ground-level. Obviously, businesses can be, but they always can, businesses have to be accessible to the public.
Tthis is what cities should have been doing for quite some time. And not just when the population declined.
That's how you fix neighborhoods. You just offer to move everyone else somewhere else. Honest people, who are too poor to live anywhere but hate the violence and crime, will leap at the chance.
Likewise, petty criminals will go along with it, and end up somewhere where they will find the police do respond. Very quickly. And they'll end up in jail. (Or, alternately, they might decide to go straight.)
And tear down or at least seal up (And I mean actually seal up, with sensors, and actually arrest trespassers) all empty buildings.
And then, once the population of the street gets below a certain amount, close off one end of it. Stop it from being a through street. That stops all the drive-by drug purchases that provide income for the remaining scum. (So now they can't afford their rent, and they get kicked out.)
And when it's all done, the government will have an empty street, which it will then repair up to actual livable standards and sell off.
Seriously, the only way to fix some neighborhoods is to depopulate them and then repopulate them back later. They've gotten such a culture of crime that absolutely nothing can be done except massive levels of police crackdowns, which we don't have the political will to do. But, instead, we can simply offer the sane people trapped there the chance to leave, and then starve the people who stay behind to death.
Heck, we could probably just do the first part of this, let people out, and then do the massive police crackdown. Without 90% of the innocent bystanders, it might work a good deal better.
Strangely enough, we've done this before for much less noble purposes. We tried to break Native American culture in sorta this way, and it mostly worked. Obviously, that was a rather immoral act, but I wouldn't have the least problem in breaking up gang culture neighborhoods.
That's what I always thought they should use. Have an anti-elevator on a slight slope. The back end aligned with the road, but the front end is two inches or so in the air. Drive on it, push the front down, drive off.
If it's on a downward slope anyway, you haven't used any gas. In fact, you can use it on a flat street, where in theory it would use more energy, but if you put it at a stop sign, everyone's stopping anyway. You've even slightly saved on brake usage.
It's not much to power a store, but it's probably enough to power a traffic light.
Of course, the ultimate idea would be to build downward-only elevators in parking decks, which could easily generate enough power to run the lights in them, and would save large amounts of gas. Stick a spring-loaded platform on each floor with a door so only one car can get on at once, they go downward, taking all the lower platforms with them in a stack. Car drives off, latch releases, the platforms springs back to wait for another car.
You could, instead of trying to 'stack' platforms on the way down, have a call button and the sole platform stay at the bottom until called, at which point it springs up to the right floor...but then what if they don't get on? You'd need a real electric motor to operate the thing, although, obviously, it could be powered by the downward motion of cars too.
They're legal tender, and it's illegal to melt them down. I'm not sure if they could be considered gold bullion for this reason.
You actually had to turn gold coins in and get cash for them.
You could actually continue to own gold bullion, you just couldn't buy it. You had to sell it to the government if you sold it. And, really, the same with gold coins...you could own them (Although technically illegally), you just couldn't use them. If you wanted to use them, you'd have to trade them in. (Presumably stating you'd 'just found them' or something if it was past the time you were supposed to trade them in.)
All this was to hide the fact that the actual cost of gold and cash had been disconnected, even while the government continued to state, I think, $35 an ounce as the value of money. (Which is what they'd give you for gold.)
Of course, a lot of people just continued to hold on to all their gold during this time, which paid off when all this ended and gold was worth ten times more.
They were hired as contractors. The amount you pay your contractors is based on the contracted price, and I'm pretty sure minimum wage laws don't apply.
I'm not certain why you think minimum wage laws wouldn't apply to contractors, but they do.
I'd expect that he'd write them off as a business expense.
If he wrote them off as a business expense, than he had to actually write the value he paid for them as a loss. A loss when he sent them to employees.
In other words, for his idea to work, they need to transferred out at the company at face value. As 'cash'. Not as 'benefits' or whatever else you might pay people, they need to exit, on the books, as 'ten dollars of salary, paid in cash', so the person receiving them can record them that way. They have to leave the company as though they were normal cash, paid to employees, that just happened to be worth quite a lot of money to collectors.
If they don't exit that way, it's pretty obvious it was some tax evasion scheme. The company can't assert it paid the worker in a thousand dollars worth of goods, and have the worker report that income as ten dollars.
However, if they do it as ten dollar each way, then you've got a different problem of valuable coins that they actually purchased at full value disappearing within the company.
IF the government doesn't like it they need to change the law and outlaw the gold coins that they mint as legal tender.
Actually, they needed to not change the law. For a while, this would, indeed, be illegal, as private ownership of gold bullion was illegal. They not only changed the law, they started making gold coins again.
And, indeed. I don't care what the IRS says. If the government prints $10 on a coin, and issues it, WRT the government it's worth ten dollars, period. If the government doesn't like that, it can stop issuing such coins.
Incidentally, before anyone tries to lump me it with 'the government should not issue paper money' people, I think those people are crazy. However, there's a valid point that if the government is issuing something as money, it has to treat it as money.
Incidentally, this guy probably committed a bunch of crimes. Not only is he in violation of min wage laws, but I bet his bookkeeping would be interesting, too. It's either lying and showing people were paid in full, or it's showing min wage violations. And it's showing some purchase by the company of expensive gold coins that just vanished.
You know, it's easy to demonstrate you're a moron. California stats since last census:
Total people gained from international migration: 1,825,697
Total people lost to domestic migration: 1,378,706
Just counting people moving in and out of California, California has population growth. And that's not counting the fact that 2,549,081 more people who were born than people who died died.
What lead to the downfall of the auto industry is the health insurance industry and the inability of the auto industry to maintain the health insurance they'd promised.
Why would we tax parents? I've never understood that logic.
It's the children who benefit, let's tax them. Of course, we'd have to wait until they're adults.
That seems perfectly fair to everyone. (Except adults who immigrate to this country and have to pay taxes for a school they didn't go to, but whatever.)
Yes, people who use schools should be taxed.
Of course, kids don't have any money, so we'll probably have to tax them once they grown up.
So we should tax everyone but immigrants for their use of the schools. And politically that's silly, so we'd probably end up taxing everyone.
I'm sure there are places, but doing the math in Marietta blew my mind.
The real joke is, for $0.25 cheaper, in Atlanta, you can buy a ticket on a bus, ride it into the subway station, ride the subway, and then get off and get on another bus. You could essentially keep swapping transports for free until you had to step outside the system.
In Marietta, OTOH, you got exactly one transfer. And a higher ticket price, and buses that ran every 30 minutes instead of 10-15, and no subway.
Mass transit systems tend to suffer from exactly the same issue I'm having to convince the theatre I volunteer at: The people running them don't realize that empty seats cost money, and full seats have no cost. If you're running the bus anyway, run it with people in it.
And, perhaps more importantly, don't price yourself higher than alternate, more convenient, things.
Empty seats on a bus makes it worse than an SUV, so stop riding the bus and get an SUV, right? Empty seats on a light rail makes it almost as bad as a plane, so go take a plane to work, right?
Bingo.
The trick isn't to switch, the trick is to optimize. Whenever large groups of people need to get from one place to another, they should be together, on the most efficient method.
Anyone looking at one aspect of this is just being silly or, as in this case, deliberately misleading.
Likewise, no one's ever sure how much traffic is 'movable' to some other time or place or method.
For example, rush hour traffic...we are fairly sure that's not movable in time or space, but we could have them use another method. (If they could do that trip at some other time, they almost certainly would have already.)
OTOH, a pickup truck with a chest of drawers in the back of it can't be done any other method or space, but could possible change the time it happens at. (Although people are smart enough to do that already.)
But you can sit and watch 10 cars drive by a certain point, and you never know exactly who would have been willing to take a bus, and who would be willing to take a 'tolley-like bus', and who would be willing to take a subway, and whatnot. And you can look at the number of plane tickets and never know how many people would have been willing to spend an extra 50% longer on the train. Statistics won't tell us that.
Hell, people won't tell us that, cause they don't know. An important part of leaving your car behind is the assurance you won't need it, and you won't feel you won't need it until the system has reached a certain size and reliability, a very large Catch-22 if fools are trying to make the mass transit system 'fund itself'.
This is why New York, for example, is continually expanding mass transit. It reached that tipping point such a long time back that personal cars are unimaginable. (And New York demonstrates, I think, that the first step to having mass transit is, ironically, taxis. Plenty of cheap taxis let people have a 'safety net' and actually get to where they're going, quickly, when the mass transit system fails them.)
So the consumption is 0.022l of Kerosene per (km*passenger) (liters per kilometer per passenger). That's better than many cars, if you drive alone, which most people, sadly, do. So if you look at it from this angle, the 777-200 is more fuel-efficient.
Not better than mine. My car uses no kerosene per kilometer at all. Zero. Not a negligible amount, but literally 0.00000000. It's easy to buy such cars, if you know where to look. For example, any new or used car lot will be entirely full of such cars.
And, while you're shopping, don't forget to ask how often you have to change the uranium. It's easy to find a car where you never have to do that, if you look.
More to the point, I wish people would stop comparing dissimilar fuels 'per gallon' or 'per liter' like that makes any sense at all.
And you're assuming the fucking bus actually saves money.
I lived in Marietta for a while, at SPSU, in a dorm. Without a car for an entire year. And no internet in the dorms for the first six months. Luckily, there was a bus station literally 150 yards away from my dorm, at the front of the school.
It came every 30 minutes, and was usually roughly on time, so I never had trouble catching it. It went right to the Cobb Galleria Center where there was a large mall, nice bookstores and movie theaters in walking distance, etc. 25 minutes away. 5 miles. I must have done this trip 10 times a month, for eight months. The route was perfect, except the last bus was at 10:30 and most of the stores were open until 11, but I could live with that.
Then I got a car. ~28 MPG. And I looked at the two $1.50 tickets I had to buy to ride the bus, and I looked at $1.25 a gallon gas, and I did the math. Even in the stop and go traffic, the trip cost me a third as much in my car. Oh, and I could stay until 11, or even see a movie later, and I could go by the grocery store on the way back, etc. Oh, and it took half the time.
I didn't ride the bus ever again.
The only people who road mass transit in that town were people without cars. Anyone who had to have a car, for whatever reason, would not be using the buses. Hell, at their prices, it might have been cheaper to buy a car regardless.
I am not convinced that market forces would not have addressed pollution issues in a way that was as good or better than the one we chose.
It is not my job to convince you of things that are fairly obvious.
There is no plausible means by which companies would have stopped polluting by themselves. If public opinion had turned against them, they would have simply polluted in secret, like I said. Or they simply would have purchased land far away from their workers and market and dumped there, safe from anyone voting with their wallet. Or even done that secretly.
Your worship of the market is silly. The market operates to make companies the most money, which, once we remove the ability for companies to commit certain types of fraud and collusion, results in them creating the cheapest products via competition, via the most efficient means.
'the efficient solution', however, does not mean 'the superior solution' for society at large. See, for example, Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle' for the most efficient meatpacking industry.
TFA also talks about building trains into major population centers to eliminate the need for infrastructure for cars to _get_ to the train.
That's something that's very important when comparing the costs. You can have train stations deposit people in major cities. You can have them literally step out the door into downtown, with no transfer or anything. If you can run a subway, you can run a rail line.
You can't do that for airports.
You can't even transfer people to subways easily from an airport in most places, thanks to really goofy baggage handling and security. For example, in Atlanta, you have to go all the way to one of the end terminals to get on the subway. Ironically, you usually ride a subway to get there. A different one, inside airport security. (When I say it that way, it really sounds weird.)
They really should move security to inside each terminal, but then they'd have problem making people run all over the airport when their flights moved, as they inexplicably always do.
They can't even let people enter security at the main gate, but, if they want, exit from security in the terminals and get on the subway, because their luggage is not there. And they can't give people their luggage in the terminal, as that's inside airport security.
I guess, in theory, they could ask how you're exiting the airport, and make sure your luggage was there, outside security however you exited, but, seriously. It's a huge mess, and means you have to travel the entire damn length of the airport, via a subway, to get on the actual subway. (And, annoyingly, you have to go upstairs and then back down, which they could fix. Yeah, you have to go up to get your baggage, but if you don't have baggage you should just be able to walk over to the subway station.)
Whereas with a train, even if they didn't want to build tracks in the city and you did have to transfer to subway, they could build parallel tracks and let you walk out the door of your train with your luggage (As you normally carry that yourself on the train) and straight across onto a subway train.
Trucks do not cause 200x the damage of cars. Each axle (in the EU) is limited to 8 tonnes, which means 4 tonnes per wheel so roughly 8x the weight of a cars wheel.
Your math is just stupid there. Trucks may only cause '8x' the damage of a car per tire, but, um, they have more tires, too.
Although asserting that trucks cause 200x the damage as cars is clearly wrong, the costs do not scale the way you think they do.
For one thing, bridges, especially the smaller ones. Without trucks crossing them, they're a lot cheaper to build and maintain. It is much simpler to build a two-carlength bridge that can support ten tons (Roughly five cars.) than one can support the 30 tons that two trucks going over them can apply. Likewise, on larger bridges, the bridge as a whole can clearly already support the weight, but that doesn't mean each part can...if you pile all cars currently on a bridge on top of each other, and stuck that pile in the middle, it'd break through.
Same with cement. You can't just apply slightly more, and eight 1000 pound wheels going over a road is not equivalent, stresswise, to one 8000 pound wheel. 8000 pound wheels will crack things you could drop, from five feet up, a car with four 1000 pound wheels on.
You can't just swap out weights for time and quantity and assume that it all evens out. If you don't believe me...how many hours a week do you lay on your bed? 56? Your car weighs about 20-25 times more than you...do you think your bed could support it for two hours? Two minutes?
If you build bed that can hold a car, but it's normally used to hold one people, with the car on it for two minutes a week, the car driver doesn't get to claim 'My car uses, proportionally, less bed than others'. That may be true, but, cost wise, the 'car support' in the bed is the major cost.
Likewise, with trucks, they have to seriously overbuild the roads. Probably not costing 200 times as much, I don't know where that number comes from, but it is non-negligible, and it is not covered by the added gasoline that truck drivers use, because the problem does not scale like that. (Not to mention that trucks are more fuel-efficient, per pound, to start with, so end up paying less per pound in gas tax.)
Subdivisions provide the perfect place for a bus pickup at the front. I always thought, in addition to that, they should have golf carts on every street, and people could just grab one and ride back and forth to their house. (With some sort of ignition disabling GPS that keeps it from being driven out of the subdivision.)
To compare, let's look at Marietta, Georgia, a city with twenty times the people, also ran busses every half-hour...on some routes, and sometimes they space them out to an hour, and they all shut down at about 10.
The real joke is that there's no problem with them stopping at smaller towns...if they'd just cut their trains in third and run more of them. Let some of them stop at small towns, let some of them be express.
The problem with Amtrak is that shipping gets priority over them, believe it or not.
Another problem is that they've started the security that planes have, which makes no sense. You cannot hijack a train, either to fly to Cuba in or to fly into a building. (You can't even hit another train in any predictable way, trains are not in charge of what tracks they are on. They could probably move other trains out of the way fast enough and send you down some dead-end.) If you were going to blow up a train, meanwhile, you'd hit it with a car bomb at a crossing, not try to smuggle one on. I think it demonstrates how little 'security' has to do with actual threat assessment when we're doing it on trains. Trains require no security whatsoever.
And, yes, it is flatly absurd that more cities aren't connected by rail. It's crazy that, for example, people here in the south drive to Walt Disney World. Because it's apparently easier to drive for 20 hours than to take a train. I don't blame them...they're right!
I have to disagree with you. While most American cities are ill-suited to public transportation, subways were invented for exactly that niche...putting mass transit into places when it didn't fit.
Obviously, not every 'green' measure is a good idea, but it's entirely possible you live in a city where there's sane behavior. Let me tell you a story:
I live in Georgia. North Georgia. About an hour and a half north of Atlanta. There are three roads going north from Atlanta. I-75, I-85, and SR-400. These roads are packed, every single day. I an up SR-400.
Atlanta has a pretty good subway system. A lot of people use it. Unfortunately, it stops, basically, at Atlanta. On SR-400, they've even built a northmost station that is an 'exit', only accepting incoming cars from the north and dumping them back out northward. (I.e., the train only goes south from there, the roads only go north when you leave the station.) The station is packed every day.
Sadly, this train station is about an hour south of me, almost in Atlanta. Why?
Because of idiotic politics, that's why. It could be another 60 miles up the road and still be packed. They could build another one 60 miles up the road and they would both be packed. Cars are bumper to bumper for another thirty miles past this train station.
I get a little tired of people who live in 'green' cities talking about how we don't need more mass transit. Maybe you folks don't...but some cities really do.