Well, yeah, in this case. But Amazon doesn't generally make it a point to edit books for people. The assumption is that the Kindle MOBI file isn't the original source content, so if Amazon were to monkey with the MOBI data, their changes would just get stomped on the next time the author fixes anything. For Amazon to fix this in a way that would have any permanence, they'd have to add that script as part of kindlegen, and then it would break millions of other books. Better for them to ask the author to fix his or her source content and rebuild the derived MOBI.
Auto-hyphenation is built into WebKit, so unless they took steps to deliberately break it, it should work in all readers based on WebKit. To my knowledge:
iBooks supports it (in iOS 6 and later, and all versions of OS X)
Kindle previewer supports it in all the KF8 modes which should mean newer Kindle readers support it unless somebody at Amazon screwed up pretty carelessly (e.g. by failing to copy the hyphenation dictionaries into the right places while building the firmware images).
I was not aware of Nook supporting it. That's surprising, given that they're based on RMSDK. Hmm. Upon digging further, RMSDK egregiously violates the CSS specification by using "adobe" as a vendor prefix, then proceeds to also use the wrong CSS property name, resulting in the property "adobe-hyphenate" instead of "-adobe-hyphens" as it should be, with values of "none", "explicit", and "auto" instead of "none", "manual", and "auto". Nice, job, Adobe.... [redacted swearing at what feels like the hundredth instance of Adobe flagrantly violating the CSS specification that I've run into personally]
I think you have that backwards. If you have fewer than 6 holes, it didn't originate in California. If you have fewer than 10, it didn't originate in NYC. If you have fewer than a hundred or if the hubcaps are still intact, it didn't originate in East St. Louis.
Why don't eBook publishers use a typesetting system based on TeX or LaTeX?
Let me count the reasons.
Books in electronic form must be reflowable, to accommodate variations in device size, and to accommodate rotation. What this means is that page numbers can change continuously. If I rotate a reader from portrait to landscape mode, then flip to the next page, then rotate it back into portrait orientation, there's no guarantee that the page boundaries are the same as they were in portrait orientation previously. So imagine having to run LaTeX on your entire document more than once per second, with a page offset, rendering only a subset of the content.
Books in electronic form require the ability to reliably link between documents. Good luck with that in LaTeX, much less in a hypothetical reflowing LaTeX.
LaTeX's font handling and Unicode glyph handling are dreadfully subpar even in XeLaTeX. Line breaks around em dashes and en dashes are as broken as they were in OS 9, requiring use of \hspace{0.001pt} after them if you want LaTeX to wrap correctly.
LaTeX is, IMO, terrible for anything that involves even basic custom formatting. I've used it for fiction book publishing. I have over 2,400 lines of custom LaTeX macros to prove it. By contrast, even when working around the quirks of multiple EPUB readers, I have only about 1,000 lines of simple CSS that gives almost exactly the same results as those 2,400 lines of seriously complex macro code in LaTeX. To be fair, there's a bit of Perl content translation code that replaces a little bit of macro code, so the difference isn't quite as extreme as it sounds, but it's a lot easier to do math computation in Perl than in LaTeX macro code, and a good chunk of that math was only required because LaTeX lacks some fairly basic formatting functionality, such as an equivalent for the CSS min-width property. LaTeX is positively primitive when compared with HTML and CSS, IMO.
LaTeX is a write-only language. Like Tom Christenson said about Perl, nothing can parse LaTeX other than LaTeX. It is basically impossible to properly translate LaTeX into any other form, which makes it a terrible source language. Most people writing content want to write once and reuse in different formats, so you're better off starting in a proper semantic markup language like XML. And if you're starting from XML, it's easy to spit out HTML. It is butt ugly to spit out LaTeX. Been there, done that. I have almost 800 lines of custom XSL on top of the existing DocBook2XML code to prove it.
There are probably many more reasons I could think of if I took the time, but that's just what comes to mind off the top of my head. Knowing what I know now, if I had to do my latest project over again, I would have written a custom typesetter in JavaScript that runs in a custom WebKit-based app. It would have been faster, and I would have had more control. I can't even imagine trying to use LaTeX in an eBook reader. It would be like printing a book using a million Chinese workers with quill pens.
What math and CS book publishers should be doing is formatting formulas using LaTeX and converting the PDFs to SVG images. That should give you nicely formatted formulas whose text is still searchable. The rest of the content should be HTML, just like any other eBook. It isn't rocket science; the publishers you've dealt with just don't care about those books enough to do the job correctly.:-)
It's your printer and publisher --- and both have always had a say in grammar, style and formatting.
Uh, no. Amazon isn't a printer or publisher in any meaningful sense of the word. Many eBooks distributed by Amazon have an actual publisher associated with them, and for their print editions, have an actual printer, too. Amazon is more properly described as a distributor and a bookseller. Traditionally, neither has had any say in grammar, style, or formatting; their sole recourse is to refuse to carry a title that they feel is of insufficient quality, which is what Amazon does.
The real problem with Amazon is that they also exercise monopolistic control over what can be read by Kindle readers, by not publishing the details of their file format and by disallowing the use of their publishing tools to create content for sale through any means other than their own online store. It is the electronic equivalent of the only bookstore chain in an entire country requiring you to use a nonstandard set of book dimensions and requiring that you exclusively sell any books with those dimensions through their store (in perpetuity). It is simply beyond insane, and the net effect is that Amazon can't simply tell people to distribute their junk books elsewhere, because people aren't allowed to do so. So instead of a nice curated collection, you end up with a steaming pile of crap.
The Kindle can load its ebooks from anywhere. Sure, it's perhaps easier/faster to get them straight from Amazon, but there are no technical barriers whatever to loading any file you want onto your Kindle.
Actually, there are technical barriers, and steep ones. Amazon does not use a standard eBook format, but rather uses its own custom binary blob. Because Amazon does not publish information about that format, there is exactly one tool that is known to generate this format in a guaranteed forward-compatible way. That tool, kindlegen, was written by Amazon, and the licensing terms from 2.0 onwards (the first version to support nontrivial formatting) do not allow you to use it for creating content that is sold outside Amazon's store. So in order to distribute content elsewhere, you have to either:
give it away for free,
violate Amazon's license,
use an unauthorized tool that produces content based on reverse engineering, which may or may not be even remotely correct, or
sell an EPUB book and require your readers to convert it to Kindle format themselves.
None of these choices is viable, IMO. As such, I consider Kindle to be by far the single most locked-down eBook reader on the market today. At least when Apple puts licensing terms like that into their book generation software, they have the decency to document the format so that you aren't forced to use their toolchain....
Ah. What's news then, is that Amazon can't deploy a simple perl script to fix common typography errors such as these.
Please don't encourage Amazon to do that. Deciding whether a particular editorial choice is correct or not programmatically is a lot more complex than deciding whether video is likely to be unstable, and programmatically fixing those mistakes correctly in a pile of inconsistent, semi-random text and markup is dramatically harder than applying an IS algorithm to video.
In my experience, whenever Amazon attempts to "fix" content, it just causes more work for the 90% of content creators who know what we're doing, as we have to find ways to work around Amazon's ingestion scripts' brain damage. For example, if Amazon deployed a Perl script to "fix" this, then odds are good that mathematics texts would also get "fixed", and by "fixed", I of course mean broken.
The best way for Amazon to handle this is to do almost exactly what they did: wait for someone to report a problem, examine the content to make sure the report isn't bogus, contact the content creator, and ask for a corrected edition. If the content creator responds by saying, "No, that's really what I meant," then let it go through. Anything else just gets in the way of everyone in a misguided attempt to help a small percentage of content submitters. And the number of people who are even capable of submitting a file with Unicode minus sign characters in place of hyphens is vanishingly small.
With that said, Amazon should have looked at the content more carefully and pointed out the Unicode minus signs, rather than saying "too many hyphens", which is just absurd; the hyphen count described here seems low to me by a factor of three or four, not high.
There is a unicode character known as a soft hyphen. The soft hyphen indicates where to break a word if it doesn't all fit on a line. This character should be used instead of a hard hyphen most of the time.
Too bad eBook readers are very inconsistent in their support for that. Some readers display an icon indicating an unknown glyph, many fail to insert the hyphen....
IMO, the best you can do is trust the reader's automatic hyphenation and hope for the best. To do so, in your stylesheet, add:
This. If I had my way, I would ban all touchscreen control systems in cars. They're fundamentally unsafe by design as long as there are humans behind the wheel. If it is unsafe for me to look down at my cell phone and read a text message, it's a hundred times as unsafe for me to look down at my radio, see what channel it is on, scroll through a list of channels, and choose the right one. It is almost as though someone at every auto company simultaneously thought to themselves, "We've been improving the road safety of our cars for three or four decades, and the lower accident rate has meant fewer replacement vehicles. What can we do to cause more car wrecks?"
I don't know about your country, in mine it's easy: You rear end someone, you're guilty. Period. There is no good explanation you could possibly give why you couldn't keep enough distance that you had enough time to react and stop your vehicle before slamming into another one.
Actually, there's one exception. If a driver slams on his or her brakes right after making a sudden lane change into your lane, then the accident is almost always the fault of the driver in front. However, without a dashboard camera, you're unlikely to be able to prove that the driver in front did this unless the driver admits fault, which is why this is a very common form of insurance fraud.
Why multiple jobs? Because they're only getting so many hours each job, because if they'd work more they'd be elegible for benefits.
This is why we need to just have a government-provided baseline health insurance system, with the ability for folks to buy insurance to supplement it, if desired.
With that said, you could go a long way towards fixing the problem by making proportional health insurance coverage mandatory for all employees regardless of hours. Working 10 hours per week? The employer has to pay 25% of your health insurance costs, as a separate line item, above and beyond your wages. The entire notion of benefits being available only if you fall above some arbitrary threshold is just plain silly, and is practically designed for abuse.
Lawrence: Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.
This describes completely what most people would do if they had the option.
The problem is, there are two magic lines. The first magic line is the point where you no longer need money to survive. Above that point, you can goof off and not do anything, and because most people are only self-motivating in groups, unless you happen to know a bunch of other people, you're unlikely to do much. Yes, you'll work on projects, and you'll make some progress on some of them, but you'll also end up goofing off a lot. The second magic line is the point where you have enough money to ensure that a dozen other people also don't have to work to survive. When you pass that point, suddenly you're able to form groups of people to work on interesting projects. Those groups tend to be self-motivating, so you start to accomplish things.
As a result, you're right that most people would do nothing, but that's mainly because so very few people have the option of not working. Once you get a critical mass—once you have enough unemployed people in a single area who aren't panicking trying to find jobs so they can eat and have a roof over their heads, things just start happening in ways that are wildly unpredictable, and often quite useful and interesting.
If you need proof of that, just look at all the cool things people create at a typical college. That's a perfect microcosm showing what a world would be like if everyone could survive without working. In college, the majority of people either don't work or do minimal work-study jobs related to their field of study to get extra spending money. Sure, some people spend their free time partying, but others create really cool things like independent films, small businesses, Facebook....
Second people who don't actually own any property -- Renters of all kinds, the cost of property taxes on the occupied property are passed on.
Yes, and that's why taxes on businesses don't work, either. They end up getting passed on as a glorified sales tax, and the people at the bottom pay all of it, while the people who own the business don't pay any of it.
The retired -- never mind retired folks that still live at home probably consume the least in terms of local public resources they stuck paying the taxes even without the income to support it.
Most sane property tax laws have limitations on valuation that kick in when you hit 65, precisely to ensure that seniors don't lose their homes.
No property taxes are pretty much bullshit. The only fair taxes are consumption based taxes.
See, that's where you lost me. Most participation in our economy is not in the form of sales, but rather the exchange of services for work, stock and bond exchanges, etc. And yes, I see that you plan to treat stocks as sales. The problem is, taxing sales regardless of whether you make or lose money causes people to hold securities longer and decreases speculation, which results in stocks having less liquidity, and basically breaks the market.
IMO, we should instead treat capital gains as ordinary income, with a small exemption sufficient to cover saving money for retirement. Because you only take the hit when you actually gain money, such a scheme is much less likely to significantly depress the stock market. Also, by making the taxation be proportional to your gains, you have the advantage of making the people who have the most money pay the most in taxes. By contrast, your scheme will lead to exactly the same sorts of abuse that we've seen with California's prop 13—businesses buy property and hold it forever, leasing it rather than selling it, to ensure that they never pay any taxes. The people with the most money end up paying the least in taxes, and the people at the bottom end up paying the most.
If you only need some small percentage of the actual human labor, you could simply reduce any one individuals work in order to allow for more people to share the burden. For example, if we drop the work week to 30 hours, suddenly you can employ 33% more people in order to accomplish the same amount of work. This of course assumes that there are others capable of doing that work and that's questionable to some degree.
For jobs where humans are cogs in a machine, that works. For jobs that require interaction and higher-order brain skills, the communication burden is likely to increase with the square of the number of people involved, so you rapidly hit a point of diminishing returns, where your choices are either A. come up with unnecessary work to keep everyone occupied, or B. pay people to not work. Certainly choice A is simpler, but choice B has the potential to create a new renaissance of artistic work that is currently stymied by lack of free time, so there's something to be said about that approach—making work something you do to be able to afford nice things without scrimping and saving, rather than something you do to stay alive.
We might also greatly increase the number of educators.
If we assume that everyone is good at teaching, that would be a great idea. Classes work a lot better with smaller class sizes. IMO, you really can't usefully learn anything in a class of 200 people. You might as well tell the students, "Read the book and we'll take a quiz on it" or hand them a DVD to watch for all the good those classes do. They're basically a complete waste of educators' time that could better be spent actually working with the students. Unfortunately, the state isn't willing to pay the cost of hiring enough teachers to actually teach them correctly, with sane class sizes, and to fix that, we'd actually have to fund our public universities, which is something that the general public seems to like doing even less than funding social programs, for some bizarre reason.
In short, it's a great idea, but I'm going to grow two more arms and become the king of soldering before that happens.
This. If there weren't a drought, they'd have to come up with some other means of artificially forcing ascetic behavior on everyone. That's what environmentalists do these days—keep the public's attention on them by taking things away from everyone. See also light bulbs, plastic bags, electricity conservation, etc., most of which don't actually have the results they're hoping for.
For example, any power conservation (including bulb bans) results first and foremost in a reduction of the most expensive power—baseline nuclear and/or spending towards future renewable power—not the cheapest, dirtiest power. If anything, the best way to get cleaner power is to use a lot more power to force them to build more clean power plants, then cut back usage to earlier levels and demand that they shut down coal plants through legislation. Cutting consumption first provides little to no benefit.
The term "end-to-end crypto" says nothing about who else might have the crypto key. Just blindly assuming that no one in the middle has it, it is a real shortcoming.
If anyone else has the key, then the system is pretty much useless. Cell networks already use encryption between your handset and the towers (which gets stronger periodically as folks crack the existing protocols), and the wires are only tappable by the government, realistically, which means Verizon's end-to-end encryption offers you exactly zero advantage over the encryption that you would otherwise be using without paying for it.
If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.
—Cardinal Richelieu (allegedly)
I think the problem is just misconceptualized. Think of read-only memory, like say DVDs. They're not *100* read-only. Data is written to them once in an irreversible manner before their operational life begins using an alternative write mechanism, and then during their design life they're read-only. If you apply the same paradigm to write-only memory, it's perfectly reasonable for, say, a datalogger: data is written during the operation of the device, then when the device has completed its task, the memory is retrieved and read in an irreversible manner.
The First Ecumenical Council was not about uniting the RCC. It was about reducing divisions between the Apostolic Sees—Rome (the RCC), Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Except for the Roman Catholic Church, the others on that list are Orthodox churches, which are autocephalous, and thus have their own popes that are separate and distinct from the Catholic pope. More to the point, although they were part of the Roman Empire at the time, they were not part of the Roman Catholic Church, and to the best of my knowledge, with the exception of one branch of the Church of Alexandria that joined the RCC in 1442 (a thousand years after Constantine), none of those other churches have joined with the RCC in the nearly two thousand years since.
More to the point, out of the two or three hundred bishops at that council, as I understand it, only about five were from the Latin rite (Roman Catholic) Church. That council had a far more significant impact on the Orthodox churches than the RCC. Its main achievement was disavowing the teachings of Arius (from the Alexandria Church, not the RCC).
Further, even if you were correct, the first Roman Catholic Pope was still the pope of the Roman Catholic Church hundreds of years before Constantine was even born, which means it clearly was, in fact, founded long before Constantine. Certainly, Constantine strengthened the Roman Catholic Church—particularly by recognizing it as a legal religion—but he most certainly did not found it, and any suggestion to the contrary is utterly absurd.
To put it another way, saying that Constantine founded the RCC is roughly like saying that FDR, by uniting the country with other nations against a common enemy, founded the United States of America.
Are you referring to Catholicism, which was founded by Constantine?
Constantine did not found the RCC. He just changed Roman law so that it would be legal. The RCC predates Constantine, and was solidly entrenched in Roman society by the time Constantine made it a legal religion. Constantine's change in Roman law wasn't proactive; it was reactive.
im surprised theres so much hate for H2. its true that most hydrogen today is from NG. but you realize that if you run your EV in many parts of the east coast you're basically running on coal? that's much worse.
Of course, I think most EVs are sold on the west coast, so that's probably a moot point. Besides, with EVs, you at least have the option of using clean energy (and even the ability to provide that energy yourself). With hydrogen, a truly green option doesn't even exist unless you use a grossly inefficient means of producing hydrogen, such as electrolysis of water, which is just horribly impractical.
also, aside from the $90k tesla, all EVs have horrible performance and range.
That's the fault of the shortsighted engineers who chose to put hitting a price point ahead of usability. It isn't inherent to EVs, just EVs made by people who either don't understand the market or are deliberately trying to kill that market out of fears over high reliability of EVs leading to fewer car sales in the long term—it's hard to say which.
All H2 vehicles are full purpose cars, like gasoline cars.
As long as you're within driving range of one of ten stations. By contrast, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand EV charging stations in California, and in a pinch, any electrical outlet can do the job, albeit more slowly. For that matter, a U-Haul trailer with a generator on it can probably keep you going indefinitely.:-D
"Whee! We're releasing the CO2 somewhere else instead of from your tailpipe, so now our car is green!"
What a load of crap.
IMO, the only subsidies and tax breaks should be for true electric vehicles, because they are the only ones that can realistically be powered from non-CO2-emitting power sources. Everything else is just a workaround—a step in the wrong direction, purely in the name of expediency, solely because doing it right is expensive and challenging, and fuel cells are (relatively) cheap and easy.
The difference is that there are people who can eat what they want and stay thin. Leavings things to evolution is often the safer bet.
There are people who can have sex all they want and never get pregant, too, but evolution doesn't select for them, at least in subsequent generations.:-)
Too bad there isn't a rule that says you lose your citizenship if you sponsor a bill that is declared unconstitutional. Wiping your @$$ with the highest law in the nation should come with a very high price. If it does not, then there's no real incentive to not keep whittling away at it until it becomes a worthless piece of paper... just as our Congress is doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yeah, in this case. But Amazon doesn't generally make it a point to edit books for people. The assumption is that the Kindle MOBI file isn't the original source content, so if Amazon were to monkey with the MOBI data, their changes would just get stomped on the next time the author fixes anything. For Amazon to fix this in a way that would have any permanence, they'd have to add that script as part of kindlegen, and then it would break millions of other books. Better for them to ask the author to fix his or her source content and rebuild the derived MOBI.
Auto-hyphenation is built into WebKit, so unless they took steps to deliberately break it, it should work in all readers based on WebKit. To my knowledge:
I was not aware of Nook supporting it. That's surprising, given that they're based on RMSDK. Hmm. Upon digging further, RMSDK egregiously violates the CSS specification by using "adobe" as a vendor prefix, then proceeds to also use the wrong CSS property name, resulting in the property "adobe-hyphenate" instead of "-adobe-hyphens" as it should be, with values of "none", "explicit", and "auto" instead of "none", "manual", and "auto". Nice, job, Adobe.... [redacted swearing at what feels like the hundredth instance of Adobe flagrantly violating the CSS specification that I've run into personally]
I think you have that backwards. If you have fewer than 6 holes, it didn't originate in California. If you have fewer than 10, it didn't originate in NYC. If you have fewer than a hundred or if the hubcaps are still intact, it didn't originate in East St. Louis.
Let me count the reasons.
There are probably many more reasons I could think of if I took the time, but that's just what comes to mind off the top of my head. Knowing what I know now, if I had to do my latest project over again, I would have written a custom typesetter in JavaScript that runs in a custom WebKit-based app. It would have been faster, and I would have had more control. I can't even imagine trying to use LaTeX in an eBook reader. It would be like printing a book using a million Chinese workers with quill pens.
What math and CS book publishers should be doing is formatting formulas using LaTeX and converting the PDFs to SVG images. That should give you nicely formatted formulas whose text is still searchable. The rest of the content should be HTML, just like any other eBook. It isn't rocket science; the publishers you've dealt with just don't care about those books enough to do the job correctly. :-)
Uh, no. Amazon isn't a printer or publisher in any meaningful sense of the word. Many eBooks distributed by Amazon have an actual publisher associated with them, and for their print editions, have an actual printer, too. Amazon is more properly described as a distributor and a bookseller. Traditionally, neither has had any say in grammar, style, or formatting; their sole recourse is to refuse to carry a title that they feel is of insufficient quality, which is what Amazon does.
The real problem with Amazon is that they also exercise monopolistic control over what can be read by Kindle readers, by not publishing the details of their file format and by disallowing the use of their publishing tools to create content for sale through any means other than their own online store. It is the electronic equivalent of the only bookstore chain in an entire country requiring you to use a nonstandard set of book dimensions and requiring that you exclusively sell any books with those dimensions through their store (in perpetuity). It is simply beyond insane, and the net effect is that Amazon can't simply tell people to distribute their junk books elsewhere, because people aren't allowed to do so. So instead of a nice curated collection, you end up with a steaming pile of crap.
Actually, there are technical barriers, and steep ones. Amazon does not use a standard eBook format, but rather uses its own custom binary blob. Because Amazon does not publish information about that format, there is exactly one tool that is known to generate this format in a guaranteed forward-compatible way. That tool, kindlegen, was written by Amazon, and the licensing terms from 2.0 onwards (the first version to support nontrivial formatting) do not allow you to use it for creating content that is sold outside Amazon's store. So in order to distribute content elsewhere, you have to either:
None of these choices is viable, IMO. As such, I consider Kindle to be by far the single most locked-down eBook reader on the market today. At least when Apple puts licensing terms like that into their book generation software, they have the decency to document the format so that you aren't forced to use their toolchain....
Please don't encourage Amazon to do that. Deciding whether a particular editorial choice is correct or not programmatically is a lot more complex than deciding whether video is likely to be unstable, and programmatically fixing those mistakes correctly in a pile of inconsistent, semi-random text and markup is dramatically harder than applying an IS algorithm to video.
In my experience, whenever Amazon attempts to "fix" content, it just causes more work for the 90% of content creators who know what we're doing, as we have to find ways to work around Amazon's ingestion scripts' brain damage. For example, if Amazon deployed a Perl script to "fix" this, then odds are good that mathematics texts would also get "fixed", and by "fixed", I of course mean broken.
The best way for Amazon to handle this is to do almost exactly what they did: wait for someone to report a problem, examine the content to make sure the report isn't bogus, contact the content creator, and ask for a corrected edition. If the content creator responds by saying, "No, that's really what I meant," then let it go through. Anything else just gets in the way of everyone in a misguided attempt to help a small percentage of content submitters. And the number of people who are even capable of submitting a file with Unicode minus sign characters in place of hyphens is vanishingly small.
With that said, Amazon should have looked at the content more carefully and pointed out the Unicode minus signs, rather than saying "too many hyphens", which is just absurd; the hyphen count described here seems low to me by a factor of three or four, not high.
Too bad eBook readers are very inconsistent in their support for that. Some readers display an icon indicating an unknown glyph, many fail to insert the hyphen....
IMO, the best you can do is trust the reader's automatic hyphenation and hope for the best. To do so, in your stylesheet, add:
hyphens: auto;
-webkit-hyphens: auto;
-moz-hyphens: auto;
-o-hyphens: auto;
And set these to "manual" if you need to prevent hyphenation in certain spots (e.g. headings).
This. If I had my way, I would ban all touchscreen control systems in cars. They're fundamentally unsafe by design as long as there are humans behind the wheel. If it is unsafe for me to look down at my cell phone and read a text message, it's a hundred times as unsafe for me to look down at my radio, see what channel it is on, scroll through a list of channels, and choose the right one. It is almost as though someone at every auto company simultaneously thought to themselves, "We've been improving the road safety of our cars for three or four decades, and the lower accident rate has meant fewer replacement vehicles. What can we do to cause more car wrecks?"
Actually, there's one exception. If a driver slams on his or her brakes right after making a sudden lane change into your lane, then the accident is almost always the fault of the driver in front. However, without a dashboard camera, you're unlikely to be able to prove that the driver in front did this unless the driver admits fault, which is why this is a very common form of insurance fraud.
This is why we need to just have a government-provided baseline health insurance system, with the ability for folks to buy insurance to supplement it, if desired.
With that said, you could go a long way towards fixing the problem by making proportional health insurance coverage mandatory for all employees regardless of hours. Working 10 hours per week? The employer has to pay 25% of your health insurance costs, as a separate line item, above and beyond your wages. The entire notion of benefits being available only if you fall above some arbitrary threshold is just plain silly, and is practically designed for abuse.
The problem is, there are two magic lines. The first magic line is the point where you no longer need money to survive. Above that point, you can goof off and not do anything, and because most people are only self-motivating in groups, unless you happen to know a bunch of other people, you're unlikely to do much. Yes, you'll work on projects, and you'll make some progress on some of them, but you'll also end up goofing off a lot. The second magic line is the point where you have enough money to ensure that a dozen other people also don't have to work to survive. When you pass that point, suddenly you're able to form groups of people to work on interesting projects. Those groups tend to be self-motivating, so you start to accomplish things.
As a result, you're right that most people would do nothing, but that's mainly because so very few people have the option of not working. Once you get a critical mass—once you have enough unemployed people in a single area who aren't panicking trying to find jobs so they can eat and have a roof over their heads, things just start happening in ways that are wildly unpredictable, and often quite useful and interesting.
If you need proof of that, just look at all the cool things people create at a typical college. That's a perfect microcosm showing what a world would be like if everyone could survive without working. In college, the majority of people either don't work or do minimal work-study jobs related to their field of study to get extra spending money. Sure, some people spend their free time partying, but others create really cool things like independent films, small businesses, Facebook....
Yes, and that's why taxes on businesses don't work, either. They end up getting passed on as a glorified sales tax, and the people at the bottom pay all of it, while the people who own the business don't pay any of it.
Most sane property tax laws have limitations on valuation that kick in when you hit 65, precisely to ensure that seniors don't lose their homes.
See, that's where you lost me. Most participation in our economy is not in the form of sales, but rather the exchange of services for work, stock and bond exchanges, etc. And yes, I see that you plan to treat stocks as sales. The problem is, taxing sales regardless of whether you make or lose money causes people to hold securities longer and decreases speculation, which results in stocks having less liquidity, and basically breaks the market.
IMO, we should instead treat capital gains as ordinary income, with a small exemption sufficient to cover saving money for retirement. Because you only take the hit when you actually gain money, such a scheme is much less likely to significantly depress the stock market. Also, by making the taxation be proportional to your gains, you have the advantage of making the people who have the most money pay the most in taxes. By contrast, your scheme will lead to exactly the same sorts of abuse that we've seen with California's prop 13—businesses buy property and hold it forever, leasing it rather than selling it, to ensure that they never pay any taxes. The people with the most money end up paying the least in taxes, and the people at the bottom end up paying the most.
For jobs where humans are cogs in a machine, that works. For jobs that require interaction and higher-order brain skills, the communication burden is likely to increase with the square of the number of people involved, so you rapidly hit a point of diminishing returns, where your choices are either A. come up with unnecessary work to keep everyone occupied, or B. pay people to not work. Certainly choice A is simpler, but choice B has the potential to create a new renaissance of artistic work that is currently stymied by lack of free time, so there's something to be said about that approach—making work something you do to be able to afford nice things without scrimping and saving, rather than something you do to stay alive.
If we assume that everyone is good at teaching, that would be a great idea. Classes work a lot better with smaller class sizes. IMO, you really can't usefully learn anything in a class of 200 people. You might as well tell the students, "Read the book and we'll take a quiz on it" or hand them a DVD to watch for all the good those classes do. They're basically a complete waste of educators' time that could better be spent actually working with the students. Unfortunately, the state isn't willing to pay the cost of hiring enough teachers to actually teach them correctly, with sane class sizes, and to fix that, we'd actually have to fund our public universities, which is something that the general public seems to like doing even less than funding social programs, for some bizarre reason.
In short, it's a great idea, but I'm going to grow two more arms and become the king of soldering before that happens.
This. If there weren't a drought, they'd have to come up with some other means of artificially forcing ascetic behavior on everyone. That's what environmentalists do these days—keep the public's attention on them by taking things away from everyone. See also light bulbs, plastic bags, electricity conservation, etc., most of which don't actually have the results they're hoping for.
For example, any power conservation (including bulb bans) results first and foremost in a reduction of the most expensive power—baseline nuclear and/or spending towards future renewable power—not the cheapest, dirtiest power. If anything, the best way to get cleaner power is to use a lot more power to force them to build more clean power plants, then cut back usage to earlier levels and demand that they shut down coal plants through legislation. Cutting consumption first provides little to no benefit.
If anyone else has the key, then the system is pretty much useless. Cell networks already use encryption between your handset and the towers (which gets stronger periodically as folks crack the existing protocols), and the wires are only tappable by the government, realistically, which means Verizon's end-to-end encryption offers you exactly zero advantage over the encryption that you would otherwise be using without paying for it.
If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.
—Cardinal Richelieu (allegedly)
We call that core memory.
The First Ecumenical Council was not about uniting the RCC. It was about reducing divisions between the Apostolic Sees—Rome (the RCC), Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. Except for the Roman Catholic Church, the others on that list are Orthodox churches, which are autocephalous, and thus have their own popes that are separate and distinct from the Catholic pope. More to the point, although they were part of the Roman Empire at the time, they were not part of the Roman Catholic Church, and to the best of my knowledge, with the exception of one branch of the Church of Alexandria that joined the RCC in 1442 (a thousand years after Constantine), none of those other churches have joined with the RCC in the nearly two thousand years since.
More to the point, out of the two or three hundred bishops at that council, as I understand it, only about five were from the Latin rite (Roman Catholic) Church. That council had a far more significant impact on the Orthodox churches than the RCC. Its main achievement was disavowing the teachings of Arius (from the Alexandria Church, not the RCC).
Further, even if you were correct, the first Roman Catholic Pope was still the pope of the Roman Catholic Church hundreds of years before Constantine was even born, which means it clearly was, in fact, founded long before Constantine. Certainly, Constantine strengthened the Roman Catholic Church—particularly by recognizing it as a legal religion—but he most certainly did not found it, and any suggestion to the contrary is utterly absurd.
To put it another way, saying that Constantine founded the RCC is roughly like saying that FDR, by uniting the country with other nations against a common enemy, founded the United States of America.
Constantine did not found the RCC. He just changed Roman law so that it would be legal. The RCC predates Constantine, and was solidly entrenched in Roman society by the time Constantine made it a legal religion. Constantine's change in Roman law wasn't proactive; it was reactive.
Of course, I think most EVs are sold on the west coast, so that's probably a moot point. Besides, with EVs, you at least have the option of using clean energy (and even the ability to provide that energy yourself). With hydrogen, a truly green option doesn't even exist unless you use a grossly inefficient means of producing hydrogen, such as electrolysis of water, which is just horribly impractical.
That's the fault of the shortsighted engineers who chose to put hitting a price point ahead of usability. It isn't inherent to EVs, just EVs made by people who either don't understand the market or are deliberately trying to kill that market out of fears over high reliability of EVs leading to fewer car sales in the long term—it's hard to say which.
As long as you're within driving range of one of ten stations. By contrast, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of four thousand EV charging stations in California, and in a pinch, any electrical outlet can do the job, albeit more slowly. For that matter, a U-Haul trailer with a generator on it can probably keep you going indefinitely. :-D
"Whee! We're releasing the CO2 somewhere else instead of from your tailpipe, so now our car is green!"
What a load of crap.
IMO, the only subsidies and tax breaks should be for true electric vehicles, because they are the only ones that can realistically be powered from non-CO2-emitting power sources. Everything else is just a workaround—a step in the wrong direction, purely in the name of expediency, solely because doing it right is expensive and challenging, and fuel cells are (relatively) cheap and easy.
Err... pregnant. Safari's spell checker didn't flag that. Weird.
There are people who can have sex all they want and never get pregant, too, but evolution doesn't select for them, at least in subsequent generations. :-)
Too bad there isn't a rule that says you lose your citizenship if you sponsor a bill that is declared unconstitutional. Wiping your @$$ with the highest law in the nation should come with a very high price. If it does not, then there's no real incentive to not keep whittling away at it until it becomes a worthless piece of paper... just as our Congress is doing.