And they have a fair return on investment as well. That $5.4 billion (actually $9 billion now) increases its number of passengers per year from roughly 90 million per year to 120 million per year. It is already the highest volume airport by passengers per year. Looking at their annual budget [atlanta-airport.com] from 2010, it looks like they turned a profit of roughly $100 million in 2010 and $200 million in 2009.
...I don't understand why you think that's a fair return on investment at all. One terminal costs 9 billion dollars, which they can make up in...60 years? Of course, by then, they will have had another three giant construction projects to pay off.
Now, Hartsfield is a good investment, simply because the city makes a hell of a lot of money from visitors, hopefully more than it spends. But presumably, such a thing would also exist with HSR. (Not in these specific circumstances, because the traffic at Hartsfield is very international so HSR can't replace it, but we're not debating if Atlanta should remove their airport and replace it with HSR, which is clearly a stupid idea.)
Rails also need rails between those cheap train stations. That rail and the cost of the land, especially for high speed systems, is where their costs truly lie. For example, I wager for the cost bandied about for the California high speed rail ($68 billion at last check), they could have built half a dozen or more huge airports. And the ridership is expected to be around 120 million a year, which incidentally is what it is for the Hartsfield-Jackson airport (the Atlanta airport you mentioned).
Except the airport expansion only handled, as you pointed out, 30 million more people. For $9 billion. A new airport for handling 120 million people would have been, even under the most _ideal_ estimations, $27 billion.
That's still less than half the cost of HSR...except that's half for _one airport_ and _no airplanes_ compared to the entire California HSR system, with multiple stations(1), and presumably the cost of actually buying trains included in the HSR estimate, whereas the airport expansion did not buy any new planes.
California is thinking about spending $68 billion on an _entire system of transportation_. How much do you think it would cost to build as many airports as they wish to build stations, and then buy enough airplanes to handle the same capacity? They could barely build _two_ airports and enough airplanes to shuttle 120 million people a year back and forth for $68 billion. (They both might be handling '120 million', but that 120 million will be traveling through (at least) two rail stations in California, assuming people can't just teleport on and off trains, whereas the Hartfield expansion is just dealing with that many at one airport.)
Yes, yes, we're talking about government subsidies, which airplanes are not...but the problem is, the cost of airplanes, and company profits, are causing rather large overheads that eat into 'paying back the subsidies'. Seriously, Hartsfeld is make one dollar a person to pay back government subsidies.
Like I said, for some reason we've all just decided to _ignore_ the amount of money we're pouring into airports. Whereas pouring basically the same, or even less, into any sort of rail is a horrible idea...Amtrak has gotten approximately one billion dollars worth of subsidies in the entire 40 years it has existed. Republicans in Congress apparently thinks this is way too much.
1) This is unfair, because it's including the cost overruns on the actual airport construction, but not any cost overruns on not-started HSR...but, OTOH, we're not including the fact Hartsfield was actually designed to be expanded and there are parts of Hartsfield that were not touched at all, and stuff that just had be expanded for much less cost than starting from scratch like the transport and baggage system and parking, and it was constructed on already-owned lands, etc, etc. The actual average construction cost of the airport almost certainly is higher than an average cost of $3 billion every 10 million people, in today's dollar.(And, let's not forget, Hartsfield has an economies of scale that almost no other airport does.)
A lot of the regulations around government services seem to be insisted on by the _right_. The way this actually seems to works:
The left demands government services in some manner.
The right demands that it be regulated because, I dunno, they've come to the imaginary idea that people on welfare spend all their money on drugs. So people on welfare must be drug tested!
The left, being cowards, agree.
The right then turns around and points at this regulation as government interference and demands 'less government'.
Almost every single government regulation I can think of attached to a government service is there because the right (By 'the right' also include 'conservative Democrat') started bitching and moaning about abuse of that service, most 'abuses' being totally imaginary.
And that's not to start on the stuff that _isn't_ a government service but the right wants to regulate anyway, like abortion.
Or to put it another way: If the left is regulating behavior, it appears to doing so in an honest attempt to help. Minimum wage, smoking bans, etc. And, perhaps tellingly, they regulates _everyone_.
Whereas when the right attempts to regulate behavior, it often appears to be doing so out of spite, because it doesn't like the entire idea of the government being useful, so adds regulation to that somewhere to make it harder to use. Also, these regulations are often aimed only at specific groups of people they dislike, and the Republican base would never be impacted by them at all. (re: papers please, abortion outlawing, etc.)
That, I think, are the two important test of government regulation: Are they aimed at _everyone_, or are they just aimed at people who don't vote for the people who passed them? And is there any actual _harm_ caused by the lack of these regulations, or the harm either imaginary or just some trivial government cost?
Regulations the right demands very often fail one, or even both, of those tests. Regulations the left want usually pass both those tests.
Please note I'm talking about regulations...the left is perfectly happy in _taxing_ people who don't vote for them, just to make the government some money. (Which is obviously the entire point of taxes.) 'Taxes' and 'regulations' aren't the same thing. The left isn't running around making bankers piss in a cup. (Although, frankly, we'd end up with a much higher percentage of drug users there than testing welfare users.)
Why the _hell_ are you comparing a 5 mile trip to a 2500 mile trip? Of course the five mile trip costs more per mile. You know what's even worse?! A 5 miles airplane ride. Damn, is that expensive or what?
And I should also point out that 5 miles airplane trip takes three hours, whereas a 5 mile train trip takes 30 minutes. So under your crazy-land rules, I can conclude airplanes are actually 6 times slower than trains.
Or, you know, we can conclude that it is completely idiotic to compare costs and times of trips that are difference distances.
Go to amtrak.com and check out prices for a trip between, say, LA and Seattle.
$106
Now compare to economy airline tickets.
$231
Amtrak is almost certainly far more expensive
If by more you mean less.
I just bought airline tickets from Phoenix to Boston on Southwest, and it was about $130 per ticket, and that's probably 2500 miles I'm guessing.
Most people with right-wing politics claim to support a smaller government, but believe the authority figures...and support their local police. This contrasts interestingly with the people with left-wing politics who claim to support a larger government, but don't trust authority figures, and don't trust their local police.
That is only interesting if you make an automatic association between 'more government' and 'more _laws_'.
What the left usually actually wants is more government _services_, not 'more things to arrest people for'.
I've tried to point this out before, but no one ever listens: It's possible to have a completely fascist and utterly _microscopic_ government. All you need is a secret police and no laws stopping them from doing whatever.
Likewise, it's possible to have a humongous government that has almost law enforcement at all. The government, could, for example, hire half the population to stand on street corners giving out candy.
Every one of the high speed rails in practice is highly subsidized.
I'm thinking you aren't aware of how much air travel is subsidized. And I'm not just talking about airline bailouts.
I live in Georgia. The City of Atlanta just spent $5.4 billion on expanding the airport.
Airports are pretty damn expensive. Running ATC is pretty damn expensive.
Yes, rail needs the equivalent of both of those, but they are a _lot_ cheaper.
This is due to a lot of little cost differences, like the fact there's no incredibly complicated baggage moving system (People carry their own baggage), and no need for security. And the fact you can build them in a spur pattern so you don't need giant fifty-acre parking lots to keep cars. And rail 'air traffic control' is like one guy who doesn't have to constantly deal with complicated stuff. (You can actually make that entirely failsafe, where in a worse case scenerio all that happens is the trains all end up parked somewhere.)
And you don't have to have _passenger accessible_ space to park trains while they are checked and refueled. Planes have to spend an hour between flights at airports to get ready to go, so you have to overbuild everything. (Or, alternately, they could land the plane, let everyone out, leave the gate and go fix up the plane, and then come back to load passengers...but no airport does that. So they have to waste a gate on every plane.) Trains need five minutes to refuel and swap personnel, and that's it, so in actuality they can leave as soon as they load and unload. A train station that handled exactly the same number of trains as an airport a day needs like a fifth the space.
And that is assuming that the amount of trains would be the same...in reality, trains hold more people, so there's less of them needed. Also, trains drop people off along the way, so there are less 'destinations' to deal with.
And you can build train stations a lot shittier because, frankly, people aren't spending hours trapped inside them.
So, to compare the cost differences...they both have expensive maintenance to keep from accidents...with trains the rails have to be maintained, and with planes the planes themselves do. But _everything else_ is cheaper for trains.
And that's not even getting into the fact that even if the costs were same...rail is still cheaper. Why? Because it can be put _closer_ to people, cutting travel expense to and from it. (Which means less government subsidies of the roads.)
So, basically, the parent post started talking about income inequality, and _you_ linked to a page that said...'Wait, it's not income inequality that's the issue...it's _wealth_ inequality. That's the actual problem, and it's worse than income inequality!'.
That is probably a valid point, or at least a reasonable argument, but it has fuck-all to do with 'Federal employees' taking all the money, you idiot.
The real problem here is, people, the one I don't see anyone addressing, is that this tmosley can probably _vote_.
Why are you assuming that they are card matching games? Or even games at all. 'Memory' is part of a iPhone, after all.
Memory, as a foreign word, is a perfectly reasonable trademark for a German board game.
The problem is, as an _English_ word that actually describes part of a computer, it's really insane to run around claiming that computer programs cannot use it in their name.
It's sorta like 'Ford' is a entirely reasonable trademark for cars...but then Ford enters a new market that makes devices to help cars float across rivers...no, they can't bring that trademark along and sue people who sell a 'fording device'.
The trademark makes sense in the context of German board games, it does not make sense in the context of international computer programs.
Oddly enough, 'faster' is not the only attribute people look for in transport.
'Not being crushed into tiny seats' could be one of them. 'Being able to carry luggage' could be one of them. 'Not randomly delayed all the time for no logical reason' could be one of them. 'Not having to drive hours to start my trip' could be one of them. 'Arriving in town instead of an hour outside it' could be one of them.
And like I said, 'Being a third the price of an airplane ticket' is a pretty damn good one by just itself.
So you have this iffy middle case with mediocre ridership numbers.
No, in the US the numbers for rail are mediocre, because we've built a completely shitty system. (In fact, the number of riders far outstrip the quality of the system, which ought to tell you something about what would be going on if we didn't have a shitty system.)
In places with actual working high speed rail, or any working rail at all, the ridership numbers are quite good.
Indeed. I've long suspected that the reason airlines are in such trouble is, frankly, that it is actually too expensive to haul people around that way.
Yes, the TSA isn't helping, but the simply fact is, people often drive long distances simply because it's cheaper.
Air travel is really something that should be almost the last resort, based on cost, but because we've completely fucked up rail in the US, it become the first choice.
The fun thing about rail is that space stops being so important. Sure, adding space per passenger eventually means another car, which means more weight, so more cost, but that cost goes up much more slowly than a plane. (Cargo rail regularly hauls around half-empty _giant metal boxes_ without the slightest concern.) And airplanes, of course, cannot have passenger space added on the fly.
Trains do not care about luggage weight. Trains have almost no incentive to remove another three inches of space so they can add another row of seats. Trains are much cheaper to operate, even including tracks and whatnot. (And if you include track cost you really have to include airport cost.)
Trains are, in theory, slower, but that theory becomes somewhat dubious when you have to wait at the airport for two hours before your flight, which is then delayed another two hours because of some mechanical issue, and then delayed landing another hour because of a thunderstorm. As opposed to just walking onto a train.(1)
Trains are, frankly, more appropriate than planes for almost every circumstances that we use planes for. Obviously, we need planes for overseas trips, and they might even make sense on trips over about 1200 miles, as that would require sleeping on a train. (OTOH, plenty of people would rather take a nice comfortable 20 hour train ride than a 2 hour airport + 8 hour cramped plane ride. Bring back compartment cars!)
1) Yes, I know some idiots have started screening train passengers, which is so actually stupid I'm astonished those people have not been lynched. You cannot drive trains into buildings, and if you want to crash a train you do not stupidly bring a bomb onto a train, you put a bomb on the _tracks_.
I think you misunderstood my post if you think I have an issue with what you said.
Journalists should pay to get seats. All of them. Every single fucking one. (Please note the person getting paid to do play-by-play is not a journalist in any sense.)
Following the rules of people you are reporting on, in return for them providing you with perks, is not 'journalism'.
Actual journalists do not follow people around like puppy dogs, promising they'll be good if they just be graced with an interview or 'access' or whatever. They say 'I am writing a story about this thing. You can either give me what _you_ want out there, and hope I include it in the story, or you can choose _not_ to try to give me anything, in which case I will simply continue without your input.'
Now, I don't actually _care_ what they do in sports, because sports are not actually important. But this entire thing has infest journalism from top to bottom.
No, the pro sports leagues were _not_ successful in arguing that. They were successful in _threatening lawsuits_ and forcing the sites to shut down.
It's been pretty clearly determined that, under the law, individual facts are not copyright-able. The fact that a specific team scored a touchdown is an individual fact. In fact, it's not even _that_. Those cases are about people taking _written_ facts and replicating them, which could, _in theory_, have copyright, except they are too small and not creative enough.
But events _themselves_ are not copyrighted. Copyrights only apply to thing in fixed mediums. If I am sitting in person and watching a football game, that game is not copyrighted.(1) In fact, it is entirely legal for me to record it and I would own the copyright on that recording. Yes, really. (Go ask wedding photographers if you don't believe me.)
What teams have attempted to do, somewhat successfully with personal video recording, and less successfully with twitter, is to assert _contract law_ over ticket holders. They claim the ticket is a contractual agreement that specifically bars filming, and thus they were damaged by break of contract. This was always stupid logic because, uh, not everyone who attends the game 'purchased' the ticket, and having one person hand you a ticket with a bunch of legalese on it, and then handing that to someone else, does not bind you to a contract! (Suddenly we're being governed by Harry Potter logic for some reason, where you can agree to a binding contract not to film the Quidditch World Cup by accidentally handing Dobby a sock!)
But they mostly got away with that with tickets, helped by the fact they could just throw people out for filming anyway. Events can always throw people out for breaking posted rules, without any 'contracts' or 'copyright law' or anything. _Suing_ was always dodgy, but whatever.
But this is nonsensical with twitter. The problem is that either a) Ticket holders are legally under a gag order and can't talk about the game at all, which even our incredibly pro-business courts are not willing to go with, or b) They can indeed tell other people what's going on, at which point...there are no damages anyway, because those _other_ people aren't bound by any contract at all.
So the pro sports leagues have been forced to not even try. Yes, they were able to go after some people in the early days of the internet by bluffing about their court case being better than it was, but it's not something that they'd actually win.
You'll notice that what we're talking about here is them _revoking credentials_ to a reporter, not suing them.
1) Oddly enough, as pre-created football plays are written down, there might be the really surreal argument that a football game is the 'public performance' of those plays, just like a play is a public performance of a _script_. And hence it's copyrighted. I don't recall any NFL team ever trying to argue this, especially as it would create the uncomfortable universe where NFL games are copyrighted by _coaches_ and the NFL does not appear to have any specific permission to record and broadcast them.
Indeed. The government does not have the right to revoke credentials based the content of someone's speech, even if those are _ privileges_, not rights.
I mean, think how it would work otherwise. 'You write things critical of the government, so we're not going to let you have a driver's license.'
And I don't see how that logic wouldn't extend to other things. 'You're a member of this religion, so you can't visit this national park.' 'You're black, so you can't use this water fountain that the government has provided...water fountains are just a privilege the government provides, not a right.'.
Some people are just really stupid, and think the government can just take things away just because they're 'privileges'. In the actual _real world_, the government isn't allowed to do _anything_ to people for exercising their constitutional rights, regardless of whether the government is 'punishing' people or 'just taking away a privilege' that the government didn't have to provide. Once the government decided to provide something, it has to do it equally, within the rules it has laid out...and the first amendment explicitly forbids from making rules WRT speech.
That said, an argument can, in theory, be made this is _not_ a content-based restriction.
OTOH, 'content' isn't the only only thing here...the government has held that restricting _timing_ of speech can be disallowed in certain circumstance. (And it can be allowed in others. It's confusing.)
But there's is enough confusion that it's entirely possible that someone essentially _giving their article out early_, piecemeal, via twitter, instead of waiting and publishing an article after the game, is not an allowable reason to revoke credentials.
Who the hell cares if it's a 'public event' or not? Is there some magical law making it illegal to report what someone is seeing at a _private_ event?
Once again, we have the blow-job giving media scared to death of the people they are actually supposed to be reporting on. At least here it's about pointless sports instead of politics, but it's still completely idiotic.
Here is something that everyone in the goddamn universe needs drilled into their head: YOU DO NOT GET TO DECIDE HOW THE MEDIA REPORTS ON YOU.
The media, en mass, needs to stand up and say 'You can try to set whatever fucking rules you want. We will continue to do whatever we want. You want to revoke our experiential, go ahead, we'll buy tickets. You want to bar us from the stadium, go ahead, we'll send secret observers to rely information to us.'
Not this idiotic nonsense where reporters apparently have to do whatever the university says.
It's especially fucking surreal in this situation, where sports writers are usually some of sports _biggest promoters_. Hell, newspapers could simply say 'If you will not let our reporters do whatever they want, we will REFUSE TO REPORT ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR FOOTBALL PROGRAM.'
I've actually got no problem with weekly stock trades (As in my example.), or even daily stock trades.
What I do find unacceptable is buying and selling the same symbol within seconds.
Indeed. At the very least there should be a 'heartbeat' that all trades actually happen on. I can't see any reason to make this less than one hour. (1)
That provides as much liquidity as any human being could possibly need, (and a hell of a lot more liquidity than most other investments), while stopping absurd 'I learned this news five second before everyone else' races. Half those races are some sort of illegal insider trading, but even the ones that aren't, it's hard to figure how that informational disparity provides _any_ net benefit to the market as a whole.(2)
There's a difference between smart investments, and a person tuned to financial news who learns something seconds before everyone else, buys the stock immediately, and sells it two minutes later as the spike happens. That's fine for _him_, but helps the actual market, or anyone else, not the slightest bit, and I fail to see why we should have a system to enable that at all.
Much less placing fake quotes.
I'm flatly astonished this is allowed. Yeah, I know, 'machines might screw up'...except the fact is that trades complete in fractions of seconds anyway, much too fast for anyone to fix.
At this point, _all_ cancelled quotes are _made with the intent of canceling_.
1) Trades might or might not happen, so in practice saying you get to try 'once an hour' might actually mean it takes up to several hours for the bid to actually match something. Which is a major issue with my 'weekly' thing, and would require some revamping to actually make that idea work. Hourly, though, would work fine.
2) This, really, is the problem. The market rules are not designed to provide benefit to the market as a whole. They're designed to provide a benefit to the brokers, who _claim_ to be able to help with trades due to their vast knowledge, but in actuality make money by gaming the system.
If you look at the investment career of the plutocratic candidate Romney you can see how far this transformation has already gone. A lot of his $250 Billion (or more) was acquired (i.e. stolen) from Bane investors. The deals were always structured so that Bain insiders would come out ahead, no matter what the outcome: win, loose or draw.
This is what always gets me about Bain. Not the whole 'firing workers, dismantling companies' stuff, which a case can _arguably_ be made that it is what the economy requires. It sounds bad, but there it is.
But that's not the scam. Here is the scam, for people who haven't managed to piece it together. (The media is really bad at this.) I will reduce the amounts to make them easy to follow.
1) Bain ends up buys a company with $100 worth of debt for $50. (Remember, it's the previous owner(s) that got the $50, not the company.)
Starting: Bain money= -$50, corporate money=-$100
2) Bain hires _itself_ to run the company, for, let's say, $25 a year. Bain money +25, corporate money -25
3) Thanks to Bain management, aka, ripping the company to shreds and laying off workers, manages to makes $10 that year, instead of the -$10 of last year. Corporate money +10.
4) Bain gets other people to invest the company, let's say $50. Corporate money +50, investor money -50
End of year 1: Bain money= -$25, corporate money=-$65, other investors money=-$50
5) As the company is clearly turning around (It made $20 more sells this year!), more investors show up, with another $50. Corporate money +50, investor money -50
6) Bain pays itself another $25 to run the company. Bain money +25, corporate money -25
7) The company, running out of things to sell, breaks even. corporate money +0
End of year 2: Bain money=$0, corporate money =-$40, other investors money=-$100
8) Confused, investors back off.
9) Bain, yet again, pays itself $25 a year. Bain money +25, corporate money -25
10) Without actually having any manufactoring, sells plummet, corporate money -25
End of year 3: Bain money=$25, corporate money =-$90, other investors money=-$100
End of year 4: Company collapses, declares bankruptcy, and, here's the really funny part of bankruptcy law: salaries are first, so Bain collects yet another $25 salary before creditors. Also note that Bain is the majority shareholder, so after Bain gets paid for its crappy 'management', it gets BACK IN LINE to get the remaining assets as they are divided up, if any are left.
Bain is an absurd scam, a complete abuse of the law. We actually have laws stopping this from being done by human beings in publicly traded companies. No, the chairman of the board cannot hire himself at a huge salary. But we let privately traded companies do that...which is fine if the chairman of the board is only investor. It's not so fine when he's not. (And it's really not fine when the other investors came in _though_ the chairman, entrusting their investments to him, and _he_ invested in the company 'for them'. That's literally outright theft.)
The entire damn premise of the stock market is _supposed_ to be 'I would like to own a piece of this company because I think this company will turn a profit and pay me a dividend'. People should buy or sell stock based on how that. This means that stock prices should be how much people believe it's quarterly reports, combined obvious market changers like a plant fire or a new CEO or a competitor coming out with a better product or something, which might rationally cause you to reevaluate that.
There is absolutely no reason for anyone to buy stock and sell it in less than a month.
Instead, we have a goddamn casino. A _literal_ casino that has no bearing at all on how well companies actually do, because something like half the investors aren't there to try to get profit from companies, but to get profit from the reselling the stocks!
If I could magically restructure the way this works, I would set it up where all trades get executed at 12:01 Sunday morning. And dividends go out immediately after that for the previous week's owners. (Not that there will always be dividends, but if they exist, they should be evenly divided between weeks instead of them being saved up for each month or quarter or whatever.)
That's it. A weekly cycle. Buy it Sunday morning, wait a week, check Saturday evening what the dividends will be (Technically you only have six and a half days information, but that should be enough.), decide to keep it or not, decide who else you think will make money, and repeat. The question should be 'Do I think this company will make money next week?'.
Yes, obviously stock prices will change also, but that should not be the goal of anyone to really make money that way. And handing out profits as dividends instead of holding on to them will stop the constant inflation of stock prices.
Stock needs to return to meaning 'owning part of a corporation'.
Yes, because the inverse is automagically true despite circumstances and the history surrounding the situation. The republicans lost the black vote well before either of the two major civil rights legislation was passed. The only thing invented is your mental processing in order to construe what you want instead of what was real.
The reason that the Republicans lost the black votes in 1964 is that Goldwater was seen as racist. Although Goldwater, while only getting 6% of black votes, only got 36% of anyone's votes, so just how much this was attributed to preceieved racism and how much of it was attributed to the complete clusterfuck implosion his candidacy became is anyone's guess.
Other Republicans, running for the House and Senate, continued to be elected by black people.
I hope you can realize that 1968 is quite a few years down the road from 1960 right? Or do you think 1968 all the sudden invented this grand racism strategy you want to persist.
Who mentioned 1960? Oh, I see what this is about. You have a delusion that in 1960, Kennedy suddenly ended up with some sort of massive percentage of the black vote for this prison reason.
That's a interesting theory, except in 1960 Democrats got 68% of the black vote...and in 1956, they got 60%. Well, it's at least a 8% increase...except not. Because, you see, in 1960, the election was essentially tied...and in 1956, the Democrat lost by 8%.
So, doing the math, in 1960, this great hypothetical defection of black voters from Republicans...8% of all voters moved from Republican to Democratic. And in the same election, 8% of black voters moved from Republican to Democratic.
Your theory is possibly the stupidest political conspiracy theory I've ever seen. You are attempting to make a 0% change in the votes of black voters into some massive change in their voting patterns. The _population at large_ decided to vote for Kennedy in 1960, not black voters.
Black voters actually diverged from the presidential norm in 1964 (By almost 25% of black voters changing what party they voted for!), and there is a perfectly good reason that happened. It's called Barry Goldwater and his 'states should be doing voting rights, not the federal government', aka his 'the states have the right to continue to discriminate against blacks if they so choose' accidental political platform. (States rights later became a code word for racism, but not at the time. I actually believe that Goldwater was fairly honest and just somewhat clueless about what would actually happen.)
Here is a clue, The democrat who blocked black students from entering the school which caused the national guard to be employed, never left the democrat party until he attempted to destroy it. George Wallace created this racism connected to everything monkey you want to keep feeding bananas to.
He never left the Democratic party...until he left the Democratic party? What the hell are you trying to say here?
George Wallace left the Democratic party in 1968 to run on a racist ticket. I present this fact not actually understanding what your premise is.
So what is your point? Mine was that a larger percent of the party voted in support of the acts. Are you trying to say that 80-85 percent of republicans seated in congress were racists except for when it came to signing onto legislation to promote and protect the civil rights of minorities? You must think it is some master rouge with the republicans pretending not to be racist when laws are being passed and all- but you how it really is, behind the scenes- not because the facts say anything about it, but because you believe it.
Uh, no. In fact, I have never called the Republicans in congress in the 1960s racist. They were not, as a rule. And, in fact, they were often elected with the support of black voters. (Basically, the only racists in Congress at the time were southern congressmen...and those were of both par
And when did 50 MPG become some sort of incredible technological triumph in the first place?
It's actually pretty easy to make a vehicle from the 1980s get 50 MPG via modifications. Machine the engine to incredibly tight tolerances, use super high quality oil, implement some stuff that modern cars already do via computerized fuel injection, strip out the emission controls, preheat gasoline (which is what appears to be done here)...50 MPG is impressive, but not some sort of impossible thing.
In fact, a lot of the patents in that list appear to be carburetor tricks for creating air-fuel mixes. Anyone who thinks they are even slightly useful does not quite understand that a) we've moved past carburetors, and b) the fuel-injection systems we replaced them with already do many of those 'tricks', or don't need them. Fuel injectors are constantly adjusting based on engine temp and all sorts of things, and do not operate by by the crazy method of 'mixing air and gas by hitting a moving metal flap with gasoline' which required all sorts of odd tricks to make things work right.
In short: The guy was right. By correctly varying the air-fuel mixture, much higher MPGs can be reached. It's how we went from 20 MPG in the 80s to 40 MPGs now. The problem is, while _he_ was working on stupid carburetor tricks, other people were inventing fuel injection operated by computers that do all this stuff magically.
And the problem with the _rest_ of the changes, tightening tolerances and whatnot, is now you've made the car 10 times as expensive, as all that has to be done by hand...and the damn engine will blow up at the slightest piece of dirt that gets in, or when the oil pressure drops by 10%, or just rip itself apart when you run out of gas. And oil costs about fifty times what it should.
Any idiot can get rid of a dozen 'inefficiencies' of an automobile engine that actually exist because the thing is designed to operate, and be maintained, and parts replaced, in real world conditions, not a damn clean room. Car companies do not sell cars like that, as they would not make it out of the two-year warranty.
Uh, no. Water companies do not do restrictions like that.
Governments do restrictions like that.
How the hell would a water company even punish you for breaking the rules? They can't give you a fine, and they're required by law to provide service to everyone who pays their bills.
I remember when cable companies used to charge you per TV. And people would illegally run splitters and cable and have to disconnect it before calling the cable company.
And then, suddenly, bam, the cable company wasn't allowed to do that anymore, by law.
The sky did not fall.
And did the sky fall after jailbreaking was legalized?
And remember when the phone company only allowed you to connect _their_ phones to the line?
There is no reason that the programs or devices using a telephone's data connection should be the slightest concern of the telephone company, any more than it's their business what sort of headphones you have hooked up to it or anything.
In fact, it's not actually their business what sort of phone you're using, or what the hell a 'phone' is. If I take my SIM out of my unlimited data phone and stick it in a cellular modem, that should be entirely fine. As long as my SIM is paid for and all the frequency and encoding stuff is correct, they should be required to provide me service. (And it's not actually their concern if the encoding is wrong...that's the FCC's problem.)
Corporate America has demonstrated over and over that they will put infinite amounts of restrictions on the services they sell us, claiming all sorts of bullshit reasons that such things must exist...and then laws stop that, and nothing bad happens. Everyone lives happily ever after.
We really need to that to happen with cell phones.
In fact, an argument can be made that it should happen with data vs. voice. You should have to pay for 'tower bandwidth' usage, and then maybe some sort of microscopic 'megabyte transferred to the internet' or 'minutes of phone call onto the public phone network', but the majority of the cost for the phone company is 'talking to the tower' (Or, rather, maintaining enough tower for everyone who wants to talk to them to use.) and _that_ is what the majority of the cost should be for.
And SMS are fucking free, you asshats. That is goddamn cellular overhead. You can't charge us for a variant of something that every single powered-on cell phone does every minute.
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And they have a fair return on investment as well. That $5.4 billion (actually $9 billion now) increases its number of passengers per year from roughly 90 million per year to 120 million per year. It is already the highest volume airport by passengers per year. Looking at their annual budget [atlanta-airport.com] from 2010, it looks like they turned a profit of roughly $100 million in 2010 and $200 million in 2009.
Now, Hartsfield is a good investment, simply because the city makes a hell of a lot of money from visitors, hopefully more than it spends. But presumably, such a thing would also exist with HSR. (Not in these specific circumstances, because the traffic at Hartsfield is very international so HSR can't replace it, but we're not debating if Atlanta should remove their airport and replace it with HSR, which is clearly a stupid idea.)
Rails also need rails between those cheap train stations. That rail and the cost of the land, especially for high speed systems, is where their costs truly lie. For example, I wager for the cost bandied about for the California high speed rail ($68 billion at last check), they could have built half a dozen or more huge airports. And the ridership is expected to be around 120 million a year, which incidentally is what it is for the Hartsfield-Jackson airport (the Atlanta airport you mentioned).
Except the airport expansion only handled, as you pointed out, 30 million more people. For $9 billion. A new airport for handling 120 million people would have been, even under the most _ideal_ estimations, $27 billion.
That's still less than half the cost of HSR...except that's half for _one airport_ and _no airplanes_ compared to the entire California HSR system, with multiple stations(1), and presumably the cost of actually buying trains included in the HSR estimate, whereas the airport expansion did not buy any new planes.
California is thinking about spending $68 billion on an _entire system of transportation_. How much do you think it would cost to build as many airports as they wish to build stations, and then buy enough airplanes to handle the same capacity? They could barely build _two_ airports and enough airplanes to shuttle 120 million people a year back and forth for $68 billion. (They both might be handling '120 million', but that 120 million will be traveling through (at least) two rail stations in California, assuming people can't just teleport on and off trains, whereas the Hartfield expansion is just dealing with that many at one airport.)
Yes, yes, we're talking about government subsidies, which airplanes are not...but the problem is, the cost of airplanes, and company profits, are causing rather large overheads that eat into 'paying back the subsidies'. Seriously, Hartsfeld is make one dollar a person to pay back government subsidies.
Like I said, for some reason we've all just decided to _ignore_ the amount of money we're pouring into airports. Whereas pouring basically the same, or even less, into any sort of rail is a horrible idea...Amtrak has gotten approximately one billion dollars worth of subsidies in the entire 40 years it has existed. Republicans in Congress apparently thinks this is way too much.
1) This is unfair, because it's including the cost overruns on the actual airport construction, but not any cost overruns on not-started HSR...but, OTOH, we're not including the fact Hartsfield was actually designed to be expanded and there are parts of Hartsfield that were not touched at all, and stuff that just had be expanded for much less cost than starting from scratch like the transport and baggage system and parking, and it was constructed on already-owned lands, etc, etc. The actual average construction cost of the airport almost certainly is higher than an average cost of $3 billion every 10 million people, in today's dollar.(And, let's not forget, Hartsfield has an economies of scale that almost no other airport does.)
A lot of the regulations around government services seem to be insisted on by the _right_. The way this actually seems to works:
The left demands government services in some manner.
The right demands that it be regulated because, I dunno, they've come to the imaginary idea that people on welfare spend all their money on drugs. So people on welfare must be drug tested!
The left, being cowards, agree.
The right then turns around and points at this regulation as government interference and demands 'less government'.
Almost every single government regulation I can think of attached to a government service is there because the right (By 'the right' also include 'conservative Democrat') started bitching and moaning about abuse of that service, most 'abuses' being totally imaginary.
And that's not to start on the stuff that _isn't_ a government service but the right wants to regulate anyway, like abortion.
Or to put it another way: If the left is regulating behavior, it appears to doing so in an honest attempt to help. Minimum wage, smoking bans, etc. And, perhaps tellingly, they regulates _everyone_.
Whereas when the right attempts to regulate behavior, it often appears to be doing so out of spite, because it doesn't like the entire idea of the government being useful, so adds regulation to that somewhere to make it harder to use. Also, these regulations are often aimed only at specific groups of people they dislike, and the Republican base would never be impacted by them at all. (re: papers please, abortion outlawing, etc.)
That, I think, are the two important test of government regulation: Are they aimed at _everyone_, or are they just aimed at people who don't vote for the people who passed them? And is there any actual _harm_ caused by the lack of these regulations, or the harm either imaginary or just some trivial government cost?
Regulations the right demands very often fail one, or even both, of those tests. Regulations the left want usually pass both those tests.
Please note I'm talking about regulations...the left is perfectly happy in _taxing_ people who don't vote for them, just to make the government some money. (Which is obviously the entire point of taxes.) 'Taxes' and 'regulations' aren't the same thing. The left isn't running around making bankers piss in a cup. (Although, frankly, we'd end up with a much higher percentage of drug users there than testing welfare users.)
The TSA needs be beaten with a baseball bat. With rail, the TSA can't even use the _imaginary_ reasons that they have for air travel.
Why the _hell_ are you comparing a 5 mile trip to a 2500 mile trip? Of course the five mile trip costs more per mile. You know what's even worse?! A 5 miles airplane ride. Damn, is that expensive or what?
And I should also point out that 5 miles airplane trip takes three hours, whereas a 5 mile train trip takes 30 minutes. So under your crazy-land rules, I can conclude airplanes are actually 6 times slower than trains.
Or, you know, we can conclude that it is completely idiotic to compare costs and times of trips that are difference distances.
Go to amtrak.com and check out prices for a trip between, say, LA and Seattle.
$106
Now compare to economy airline tickets.
$231
Amtrak is almost certainly far more expensive
If by more you mean less.
I just bought airline tickets from Phoenix to Boston on Southwest, and it was about $130 per ticket, and that's probably 2500 miles I'm guessing.
Wrong. A trip from Phoenix to Boston actually costs about double what you said, about $250:
https://www.google.com/search?output=search&q=airline+ticket+Phoenix+to+Boston
Meanwhile, Amtrak tells me that such a trip is $230.
In my experience, rail travel is very, very expensive in the US, compared to air travel.
In my experience, you say dumb things here and have no idea how to compare the price of things. (The _smaller_ dollar amount is _cheaper_.)
I suspect in actuality you're used to cheaper airline fares because of something...which I have to point out _exist on rail also_.
Most people with right-wing politics claim to support a smaller government, but believe the authority figures...and support their local police. This contrasts interestingly with the people with left-wing politics who claim to support a larger government, but don't trust authority figures, and don't trust their local police.
That is only interesting if you make an automatic association between 'more government' and 'more _laws_'.
What the left usually actually wants is more government _services_, not 'more things to arrest people for'.
I've tried to point this out before, but no one ever listens: It's possible to have a completely fascist and utterly _microscopic_ government. All you need is a secret police and no laws stopping them from doing whatever.
Likewise, it's possible to have a humongous government that has almost law enforcement at all. The government, could, for example, hire half the population to stand on street corners giving out candy.
Every one of the high speed rails in practice is highly subsidized.
I'm thinking you aren't aware of how much air travel is subsidized. And I'm not just talking about airline bailouts.
I live in Georgia. The City of Atlanta just spent $5.4 billion on expanding the airport.
Airports are pretty damn expensive. Running ATC is pretty damn expensive.
Yes, rail needs the equivalent of both of those, but they are a _lot_ cheaper.
This is due to a lot of little cost differences, like the fact there's no incredibly complicated baggage moving system (People carry their own baggage), and no need for security. And the fact you can build them in a spur pattern so you don't need giant fifty-acre parking lots to keep cars. And rail 'air traffic control' is like one guy who doesn't have to constantly deal with complicated stuff. (You can actually make that entirely failsafe, where in a worse case scenerio all that happens is the trains all end up parked somewhere.)
And you don't have to have _passenger accessible_ space to park trains while they are checked and refueled. Planes have to spend an hour between flights at airports to get ready to go, so you have to overbuild everything. (Or, alternately, they could land the plane, let everyone out, leave the gate and go fix up the plane, and then come back to load passengers...but no airport does that. So they have to waste a gate on every plane.) Trains need five minutes to refuel and swap personnel, and that's it, so in actuality they can leave as soon as they load and unload. A train station that handled exactly the same number of trains as an airport a day needs like a fifth the space.
And that is assuming that the amount of trains would be the same...in reality, trains hold more people, so there's less of them needed. Also, trains drop people off along the way, so there are less 'destinations' to deal with.
And you can build train stations a lot shittier because, frankly, people aren't spending hours trapped inside them.
So, to compare the cost differences...they both have expensive maintenance to keep from accidents...with trains the rails have to be maintained, and with planes the planes themselves do. But _everything else_ is cheaper for trains.
And that's not even getting into the fact that even if the costs were same...rail is still cheaper. Why? Because it can be put _closer_ to people, cutting travel expense to and from it. (Which means less government subsidies of the roads.)
So, basically, the parent post started talking about income inequality, and _you_ linked to a page that said...'Wait, it's not income inequality that's the issue...it's _wealth_ inequality. That's the actual problem, and it's worse than income inequality!'.
That is probably a valid point, or at least a reasonable argument, but it has fuck-all to do with 'Federal employees' taking all the money, you idiot.
The real problem here is, people, the one I don't see anyone addressing, is that this tmosley can probably _vote_.
Why are you assuming that they are card matching games? Or even games at all. 'Memory' is part of a iPhone, after all.
Memory, as a foreign word, is a perfectly reasonable trademark for a German board game.
The problem is, as an _English_ word that actually describes part of a computer, it's really insane to run around claiming that computer programs cannot use it in their name.
It's sorta like 'Ford' is a entirely reasonable trademark for cars...but then Ford enters a new market that makes devices to help cars float across rivers...no, they can't bring that trademark along and sue people who sell a 'fording device'.
The trademark makes sense in the context of German board games, it does not make sense in the context of international computer programs.
What's the business case for high speed rail?
That it's a fuckton cheaper than flying?
Airplanes are faster for long distances
Oddly enough, 'faster' is not the only attribute people look for in transport.
'Not being crushed into tiny seats' could be one of them. 'Being able to carry luggage' could be one of them. 'Not randomly delayed all the time for no logical reason' could be one of them. 'Not having to drive hours to start my trip' could be one of them. 'Arriving in town instead of an hour outside it' could be one of them.
And like I said, 'Being a third the price of an airplane ticket' is a pretty damn good one by just itself.
So you have this iffy middle case with mediocre ridership numbers.
No, in the US the numbers for rail are mediocre, because we've built a completely shitty system. (In fact, the number of riders far outstrip the quality of the system, which ought to tell you something about what would be going on if we didn't have a shitty system.)
In places with actual working high speed rail, or any working rail at all, the ridership numbers are quite good.
Indeed. I've long suspected that the reason airlines are in such trouble is, frankly, that it is actually too expensive to haul people around that way.
Yes, the TSA isn't helping, but the simply fact is, people often drive long distances simply because it's cheaper.
Air travel is really something that should be almost the last resort, based on cost, but because we've completely fucked up rail in the US, it become the first choice.
The fun thing about rail is that space stops being so important. Sure, adding space per passenger eventually means another car, which means more weight, so more cost, but that cost goes up much more slowly than a plane. (Cargo rail regularly hauls around half-empty _giant metal boxes_ without the slightest concern.) And airplanes, of course, cannot have passenger space added on the fly.
Trains do not care about luggage weight. Trains have almost no incentive to remove another three inches of space so they can add another row of seats. Trains are much cheaper to operate, even including tracks and whatnot. (And if you include track cost you really have to include airport cost.)
Trains are, in theory, slower, but that theory becomes somewhat dubious when you have to wait at the airport for two hours before your flight, which is then delayed another two hours because of some mechanical issue, and then delayed landing another hour because of a thunderstorm. As opposed to just walking onto a train.(1)
Trains are, frankly, more appropriate than planes for almost every circumstances that we use planes for. Obviously, we need planes for overseas trips, and they might even make sense on trips over about 1200 miles, as that would require sleeping on a train. (OTOH, plenty of people would rather take a nice comfortable 20 hour train ride than a 2 hour airport + 8 hour cramped plane ride. Bring back compartment cars!)
1) Yes, I know some idiots have started screening train passengers, which is so actually stupid I'm astonished those people have not been lynched. You cannot drive trains into buildings, and if you want to crash a train you do not stupidly bring a bomb onto a train, you put a bomb on the _tracks_.
I think you misunderstood my post if you think I have an issue with what you said.
Journalists should pay to get seats. All of them. Every single fucking one. (Please note the person getting paid to do play-by-play is not a journalist in any sense.)
Following the rules of people you are reporting on, in return for them providing you with perks, is not 'journalism'.
Actual journalists do not follow people around like puppy dogs, promising they'll be good if they just be graced with an interview or 'access' or whatever. They say 'I am writing a story about this thing. You can either give me what _you_ want out there, and hope I include it in the story, or you can choose _not_ to try to give me anything, in which case I will simply continue without your input.'
Now, I don't actually _care_ what they do in sports, because sports are not actually important. But this entire thing has infest journalism from top to bottom.
No, the pro sports leagues were _not_ successful in arguing that. They were successful in _threatening lawsuits_ and forcing the sites to shut down.
It's been pretty clearly determined that, under the law, individual facts are not copyright-able. The fact that a specific team scored a touchdown is an individual fact. In fact, it's not even _that_. Those cases are about people taking _written_ facts and replicating them, which could, _in theory_, have copyright, except they are too small and not creative enough.
But events _themselves_ are not copyrighted. Copyrights only apply to thing in fixed mediums. If I am sitting in person and watching a football game, that game is not copyrighted.(1) In fact, it is entirely legal for me to record it and I would own the copyright on that recording. Yes, really. (Go ask wedding photographers if you don't believe me.)
What teams have attempted to do, somewhat successfully with personal video recording, and less successfully with twitter, is to assert _contract law_ over ticket holders. They claim the ticket is a contractual agreement that specifically bars filming, and thus they were damaged by break of contract. This was always stupid logic because, uh, not everyone who attends the game 'purchased' the ticket, and having one person hand you a ticket with a bunch of legalese on it, and then handing that to someone else, does not bind you to a contract! (Suddenly we're being governed by Harry Potter logic for some reason, where you can agree to a binding contract not to film the Quidditch World Cup by accidentally handing Dobby a sock!)
But they mostly got away with that with tickets, helped by the fact they could just throw people out for filming anyway. Events can always throw people out for breaking posted rules, without any 'contracts' or 'copyright law' or anything. _Suing_ was always dodgy, but whatever.
But this is nonsensical with twitter. The problem is that either a) Ticket holders are legally under a gag order and can't talk about the game at all, which even our incredibly pro-business courts are not willing to go with, or b) They can indeed tell other people what's going on, at which point...there are no damages anyway, because those _other_ people aren't bound by any contract at all.
So the pro sports leagues have been forced to not even try. Yes, they were able to go after some people in the early days of the internet by bluffing about their court case being better than it was, but it's not something that they'd actually win.
You'll notice that what we're talking about here is them _revoking credentials_ to a reporter, not suing them.
1) Oddly enough, as pre-created football plays are written down, there might be the really surreal argument that a football game is the 'public performance' of those plays, just like a play is a public performance of a _script_. And hence it's copyrighted. I don't recall any NFL team ever trying to argue this, especially as it would create the uncomfortable universe where NFL games are copyrighted by _coaches_ and the NFL does not appear to have any specific permission to record and broadcast them.
Indeed. The government does not have the right to revoke credentials based the content of someone's speech, even if those are _ privileges_, not rights.
I mean, think how it would work otherwise. 'You write things critical of the government, so we're not going to let you have a driver's license.'
And I don't see how that logic wouldn't extend to other things. 'You're a member of this religion, so you can't visit this national park.' 'You're black, so you can't use this water fountain that the government has provided...water fountains are just a privilege the government provides, not a right.'.
Some people are just really stupid, and think the government can just take things away just because they're 'privileges'. In the actual _real world_, the government isn't allowed to do _anything_ to people for exercising their constitutional rights, regardless of whether the government is 'punishing' people or 'just taking away a privilege' that the government didn't have to provide. Once the government decided to provide something, it has to do it equally, within the rules it has laid out...and the first amendment explicitly forbids from making rules WRT speech.
That said, an argument can, in theory, be made this is _not_ a content-based restriction.
OTOH, 'content' isn't the only only thing here...the government has held that restricting _timing_ of speech can be disallowed in certain circumstance. (And it can be allowed in others. It's confusing.)
But there's is enough confusion that it's entirely possible that someone essentially _giving their article out early_, piecemeal, via twitter, instead of waiting and publishing an article after the game, is not an allowable reason to revoke credentials.
Who the hell cares if it's a 'public event' or not? Is there some magical law making it illegal to report what someone is seeing at a _private_ event?
Once again, we have the blow-job giving media scared to death of the people they are actually supposed to be reporting on. At least here it's about pointless sports instead of politics, but it's still completely idiotic.
Here is something that everyone in the goddamn universe needs drilled into their head: YOU DO NOT GET TO DECIDE HOW THE MEDIA REPORTS ON YOU.
The media, en mass, needs to stand up and say 'You can try to set whatever fucking rules you want. We will continue to do whatever we want. You want to revoke our experiential, go ahead, we'll buy tickets. You want to bar us from the stadium, go ahead, we'll send secret observers to rely information to us.'
Not this idiotic nonsense where reporters apparently have to do whatever the university says.
It's especially fucking surreal in this situation, where sports writers are usually some of sports _biggest promoters_. Hell, newspapers could simply say 'If you will not let our reporters do whatever they want, we will REFUSE TO REPORT ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR FOOTBALL PROGRAM.'
I've actually got no problem with weekly stock trades (As in my example.), or even daily stock trades.
What I do find unacceptable is buying and selling the same symbol within seconds.
Indeed. At the very least there should be a 'heartbeat' that all trades actually happen on. I can't see any reason to make this less than one hour. (1)
That provides as much liquidity as any human being could possibly need, (and a hell of a lot more liquidity than most other investments), while stopping absurd 'I learned this news five second before everyone else' races. Half those races are some sort of illegal insider trading, but even the ones that aren't, it's hard to figure how that informational disparity provides _any_ net benefit to the market as a whole.(2)
There's a difference between smart investments, and a person tuned to financial news who learns something seconds before everyone else, buys the stock immediately, and sells it two minutes later as the spike happens. That's fine for _him_, but helps the actual market, or anyone else, not the slightest bit, and I fail to see why we should have a system to enable that at all.
Much less placing fake quotes.
I'm flatly astonished this is allowed. Yeah, I know, 'machines might screw up'...except the fact is that trades complete in fractions of seconds anyway, much too fast for anyone to fix.
At this point, _all_ cancelled quotes are _made with the intent of canceling_.
1) Trades might or might not happen, so in practice saying you get to try 'once an hour' might actually mean it takes up to several hours for the bid to actually match something. Which is a major issue with my 'weekly' thing, and would require some revamping to actually make that idea work. Hourly, though, would work fine.
2) This, really, is the problem. The market rules are not designed to provide benefit to the market as a whole. They're designed to provide a benefit to the brokers, who _claim_ to be able to help with trades due to their vast knowledge, but in actuality make money by gaming the system.
If you look at the investment career of the plutocratic candidate Romney you can see how far this transformation has already gone. A lot of his $250 Billion (or more) was acquired (i.e. stolen) from Bane investors. The deals were always structured so that Bain insiders would come out ahead, no matter what the outcome: win, loose or draw.
This is what always gets me about Bain. Not the whole 'firing workers, dismantling companies' stuff, which a case can _arguably_ be made that it is what the economy requires. It sounds bad, but there it is.
But that's not the scam. Here is the scam, for people who haven't managed to piece it together. (The media is really bad at this.) I will reduce the amounts to make them easy to follow.
1) Bain ends up buys a company with $100 worth of debt for $50. (Remember, it's the previous owner(s) that got the $50, not the company.)
Starting: Bain money= -$50, corporate money=-$100
2) Bain hires _itself_ to run the company, for, let's say, $25 a year. Bain money +25, corporate money -25
3) Thanks to Bain management, aka, ripping the company to shreds and laying off workers, manages to makes $10 that year, instead of the -$10 of last year. Corporate money +10.
4) Bain gets other people to invest the company, let's say $50. Corporate money +50, investor money -50
End of year 1: Bain money= -$25, corporate money=-$65, other investors money=-$50
5) As the company is clearly turning around (It made $20 more sells this year!), more investors show up, with another $50. Corporate money +50, investor money -50
6) Bain pays itself another $25 to run the company. Bain money +25, corporate money -25
7) The company, running out of things to sell, breaks even. corporate money +0
End of year 2: Bain money=$0, corporate money =-$40, other investors money=-$100
8) Confused, investors back off.
9) Bain, yet again, pays itself $25 a year. Bain money +25, corporate money -25
10) Without actually having any manufactoring, sells plummet, corporate money -25
End of year 3: Bain money=$25, corporate money =-$90, other investors money=-$100
End of year 4: Company collapses, declares bankruptcy, and, here's the really funny part of bankruptcy law: salaries are first, so Bain collects yet another $25 salary before creditors. Also note that Bain is the majority shareholder, so after Bain gets paid for its crappy 'management', it gets BACK IN LINE to get the remaining assets as they are divided up, if any are left.
Bain is an absurd scam, a complete abuse of the law. We actually have laws stopping this from being done by human beings in publicly traded companies. No, the chairman of the board cannot hire himself at a huge salary. But we let privately traded companies do that...which is fine if the chairman of the board is only investor. It's not so fine when he's not. (And it's really not fine when the other investors came in _though_ the chairman, entrusting their investments to him, and _he_ invested in the company 'for them'. That's literally outright theft.)
Indeed.
STOCK PRICES SHOULD NOT CHANGE FROM DAY TO DAY.
The entire damn premise of the stock market is _supposed_ to be 'I would like to own a piece of this company because I think this company will turn a profit and pay me a dividend'. People should buy or sell stock based on how that. This means that stock prices should be how much people believe it's quarterly reports, combined obvious market changers like a plant fire or a new CEO or a competitor coming out with a better product or something, which might rationally cause you to reevaluate that.
There is absolutely no reason for anyone to buy stock and sell it in less than a month.
Instead, we have a goddamn casino. A _literal_ casino that has no bearing at all on how well companies actually do, because something like half the investors aren't there to try to get profit from companies, but to get profit from the reselling the stocks!
If I could magically restructure the way this works, I would set it up where all trades get executed at 12:01 Sunday morning. And dividends go out immediately after that for the previous week's owners. (Not that there will always be dividends, but if they exist, they should be evenly divided between weeks instead of them being saved up for each month or quarter or whatever.)
That's it. A weekly cycle. Buy it Sunday morning, wait a week, check Saturday evening what the dividends will be (Technically you only have six and a half days information, but that should be enough.), decide to keep it or not, decide who else you think will make money, and repeat. The question should be 'Do I think this company will make money next week?'.
Yes, obviously stock prices will change also, but that should not be the goal of anyone to really make money that way. And handing out profits as dividends instead of holding on to them will stop the constant inflation of stock prices.
Stock needs to return to meaning 'owning part of a corporation'.
Yes, because the inverse is automagically true despite circumstances and the history surrounding the situation. The republicans lost the black vote well before either of the two major civil rights legislation was passed. The only thing invented is your mental processing in order to construe what you want instead of what was real.
The reason that the Republicans lost the black votes in 1964 is that Goldwater was seen as racist. Although Goldwater, while only getting 6% of black votes, only got 36% of anyone's votes, so just how much this was attributed to preceieved racism and how much of it was attributed to the complete clusterfuck implosion his candidacy became is anyone's guess.
Other Republicans, running for the House and Senate, continued to be elected by black people.
I hope you can realize that 1968 is quite a few years down the road from 1960 right? Or do you think 1968 all the sudden invented this grand racism strategy you want to persist.
Who mentioned 1960? Oh, I see what this is about. You have a delusion that in 1960, Kennedy suddenly ended up with some sort of massive percentage of the black vote for this prison reason.
That's a interesting theory, except in 1960 Democrats got 68% of the black vote...and in 1956, they got 60%. Well, it's at least a 8% increase...except not. Because, you see, in 1960, the election was essentially tied...and in 1956, the Democrat lost by 8%.
So, doing the math, in 1960, this great hypothetical defection of black voters from Republicans...8% of all voters moved from Republican to Democratic. And in the same election, 8% of black voters moved from Republican to Democratic.
Your theory is possibly the stupidest political conspiracy theory I've ever seen. You are attempting to make a 0% change in the votes of black voters into some massive change in their voting patterns. The _population at large_ decided to vote for Kennedy in 1960, not black voters.
Black voters actually diverged from the presidential norm in 1964 (By almost 25% of black voters changing what party they voted for!), and there is a perfectly good reason that happened. It's called Barry Goldwater and his 'states should be doing voting rights, not the federal government', aka his 'the states have the right to continue to discriminate against blacks if they so choose' accidental political platform. (States rights later became a code word for racism, but not at the time. I actually believe that Goldwater was fairly honest and just somewhat clueless about what would actually happen.)
Here is a clue, The democrat who blocked black students from entering the school which caused the national guard to be employed, never left the democrat party until he attempted to destroy it. George Wallace created this racism connected to everything monkey you want to keep feeding bananas to.
He never left the Democratic party...until he left the Democratic party? What the hell are you trying to say here?
George Wallace left the Democratic party in 1968 to run on a racist ticket. I present this fact not actually understanding what your premise is.
So what is your point? Mine was that a larger percent of the party voted in support of the acts. Are you trying to say that 80-85 percent of republicans seated in congress were racists except for when it came to signing onto legislation to promote and protect the civil rights of minorities? You must think it is some master rouge with the republicans pretending not to be racist when laws are being passed and all- but you how it really is, behind the scenes- not because the facts say anything about it, but because you believe it.
Uh, no. In fact, I have never called the Republicans in congress in the 1960s racist. They were not, as a rule. And, in fact, they were often elected with the support of black voters. (Basically, the only racists in Congress at the time were southern congressmen...and those were of both par
Yeah, cable companies have managed to basically undo that law.
Luckily, cable companies are dying a slow painful death anyway.
And when did 50 MPG become some sort of incredible technological triumph in the first place?
It's actually pretty easy to make a vehicle from the 1980s get 50 MPG via modifications. Machine the engine to incredibly tight tolerances, use super high quality oil, implement some stuff that modern cars already do via computerized fuel injection, strip out the emission controls, preheat gasoline (which is what appears to be done here)...50 MPG is impressive, but not some sort of impossible thing.
In fact, a lot of the patents in that list appear to be carburetor tricks for creating air-fuel mixes. Anyone who thinks they are even slightly useful does not quite understand that a) we've moved past carburetors, and b) the fuel-injection systems we replaced them with already do many of those 'tricks', or don't need them. Fuel injectors are constantly adjusting based on engine temp and all sorts of things, and do not operate by by the crazy method of 'mixing air and gas by hitting a moving metal flap with gasoline' which required all sorts of odd tricks to make things work right.
In short: The guy was right. By correctly varying the air-fuel mixture, much higher MPGs can be reached. It's how we went from 20 MPG in the 80s to 40 MPGs now. The problem is, while _he_ was working on stupid carburetor tricks, other people were inventing fuel injection operated by computers that do all this stuff magically.
And the problem with the _rest_ of the changes, tightening tolerances and whatnot, is now you've made the car 10 times as expensive, as all that has to be done by hand...and the damn engine will blow up at the slightest piece of dirt that gets in, or when the oil pressure drops by 10%, or just rip itself apart when you run out of gas. And oil costs about fifty times what it should.
Any idiot can get rid of a dozen 'inefficiencies' of an automobile engine that actually exist because the thing is designed to operate, and be maintained, and parts replaced, in real world conditions, not a damn clean room. Car companies do not sell cars like that, as they would not make it out of the two-year warranty.
You're probably better off stealing power from the phone company.
Of course, the people who want to take away your right to vote have no problem misusing the mod system when people point out what they're doing.
Uh, no. Water companies do not do restrictions like that.
Governments do restrictions like that.
How the hell would a water company even punish you for breaking the rules? They can't give you a fine, and they're required by law to provide service to everyone who pays their bills.
No shit.
I remember when cable companies used to charge you per TV. And people would illegally run splitters and cable and have to disconnect it before calling the cable company.
And then, suddenly, bam, the cable company wasn't allowed to do that anymore, by law.
The sky did not fall.
And did the sky fall after jailbreaking was legalized?
And remember when the phone company only allowed you to connect _their_ phones to the line?
There is no reason that the programs or devices using a telephone's data connection should be the slightest concern of the telephone company, any more than it's their business what sort of headphones you have hooked up to it or anything.
In fact, it's not actually their business what sort of phone you're using, or what the hell a 'phone' is. If I take my SIM out of my unlimited data phone and stick it in a cellular modem, that should be entirely fine. As long as my SIM is paid for and all the frequency and encoding stuff is correct, they should be required to provide me service. (And it's not actually their concern if the encoding is wrong...that's the FCC's problem.)
Corporate America has demonstrated over and over that they will put infinite amounts of restrictions on the services they sell us, claiming all sorts of bullshit reasons that such things must exist...and then laws stop that, and nothing bad happens. Everyone lives happily ever after.
We really need to that to happen with cell phones.
In fact, an argument can be made that it should happen with data vs. voice. You should have to pay for 'tower bandwidth' usage, and then maybe some sort of microscopic 'megabyte transferred to the internet' or 'minutes of phone call onto the public phone network', but the majority of the cost for the phone company is 'talking to the tower' (Or, rather, maintaining enough tower for everyone who wants to talk to them to use.) and _that_ is what the majority of the cost should be for.
And SMS are fucking free, you asshats. That is goddamn cellular overhead. You can't charge us for a variant of something that every single powered-on cell phone does every minute.
Because. Other. People. Are. Trying. To. Make. Phone. Calls. You. Fucktard.