> you stopped watching several years after the program had ended?
Only if the AC was also in Britain. Most of us in the USA had to watch it if and when our Public (aka Educational) stations bought the reruns. I saw most of Dr Who during the period when it was off the air, over there.
> So they can already make the most real fake notes.
Any Xerox machine could do a good job on US currency of the 1970s, and a hand-carved engraving could match the governments, if the engraver cared to put in the effort. The trick was and is to get the paper right. The US Government closely monitors its few suppliers of paper, to ensure that nothing gets left outside or falls off the truck, or any other such dodge.
> generally as a rule of practical warfare you do not attack your suppliers or your customers
This might be a Godwin violation, but in 1939, Germany's biggest trading partner was France. They also had a fair trade with Poland and Britain.
Actually, as a rule, one does tend to attack one's suppliers, to force them to lower prices, or just seize the supplied products. One may also attack customers who do not want to allow your products sold to their citizens; look up the Opium Wars, for example.
No, if you went back before Prince Albert (Queen Victoria's husband), they would be almost broke. He was something of a genius investor, especially in real estate. The family is supposedly worth about $7 billion (US billion, of course)(unaudited, equally of course) today, mostly from London real estate. They do NOT own Buckingham Palace, BTW; that is "royal" property, thus owned by the government for her use.
> FWIW, they were late for World War I as well. Don't know the excuse for that one
Zimmermann Telegram. Countries tend to dislike it when another country starts discussing how to dismember the first, especially with a third country. Fortunately for Mexico, no one was crazy enough to respond to the German offer, if it was ever formally presented.
Lacking that provocation, no one would have cared if you Europeans exterminated each other in WWI (well, we would have cared, but no enough to do more than pray for our particular relatives to survive, whichever side they were, or that our particular hated enemy all died, in the case of Irish-Americans).
OTOH, what was the reason that you Europeans were fighting WWI? Someone didn't like that Austria took it poorly when a Serbian group assassinated the heir to the throne? BTW, it turns out that the Serbian group actually WAS supported by the Serbian Government, as the Austrians charged (without any evidence, at the time)(obviously, the Serbian Government didn't think that (translate-into-serbian "Al Quaida") group would do THAT). So, Britain and France were fighting to support the right to murder Austrians without consequences?
> Not to mention the Americans turning up late for World War II which started in 1939, not 1941.
Don't tell the Chinese that. Their phase started in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria, and was certainly going strong during the Rape Of Nanking in 1937, and I didn't notice any European countries doing anything but making strong diplomatic protests about the Japanese in the League Of Nations, until the Japanese took your Asian possessions.
but I wish America had someone official to hand out awards for generating culture.
Someone forgot to tune into "Kennedy Center Honors" last night, apparently.
We have halls of fame and parades but they're reserved for athletes and soldiers, the most useless occupations ever invented.
Oddly, I feel the reverse. Actors, movie writers, directors, etc., are the most useless occupations ever invented, to my mind, and certainly the most self-important. That my sister was in "the business" has nothing to do with it, of course.:-)
Anyway, there are lots of other Halls Of Fame, but (except for the Rock'n Roll HoF) no one who is not in, or possibly in at some time in the future, tends to care. Did you know that Einstein was in the Inventor's Hall Of Fame? Do you care? I certainly never did, figuring being known for writing the Theory Of General Relativity a good enough honor in itself. Likewise, do you know who is Poet Laureate of the USA, and do you care?
But I will say one thing. I think the shuttles were an utter failure, a terrible engineering compromise between the original intention and what a combination of technological limits and Congressional pork barreling.
(boldface mine)
Lack of intelligent pork-barreling, more like it. If an important (read: expensive) part had been built in Wisconsin, Senator Wm. Proxmire wouldn't have, well, proxmired it down to the DC-1.5 level that it was. We might have had the original design with geosynchronus orbit capability.
We would have been much better off continuing from the Apollo programs, and putting off reusable vehicles until we were further down the road.
Continuing the Apollo program would have been a nice dream, but unfortunately, that is all that it could be. It was reduce the price to orbit or give up the program. As planned, the orbiter was expected to reduce the price per pound to LEO, even more than cheap expendables.
Well, that theory worked for Eddie And The Cruisers, which did nothing much in the theaters, then kept selling in video tape and DVD form.
> Of course, if "The Long Tail" is wrong, then this independant film will more likely resemble "Howard The Duck".
The film or the comic book? The comic book was famous, when I was in college, for being the most valuable on the market, because so few copies had been made of the few episodes. One HtD was worth 10-20 copies of Action Comics No. 1 (which introduced this guy called Superman).
The movie sucked, though. ITS long tail will require more time than the Heat Death of the Universe or the Big Rip (whichever comes first), unless someone burns all but ten copies (we can only hope!).
These guys could *actually* have been terrorists. Did Nokia Navigator commission them to photograph and document Indian military installations?
Even if they were commissioned, if mapping that close to a base was prohibited and posted, then they broke the Act, just as the US DoD worker who was convicted of espionage for Jane's Publications (Jane's Fighting Ships, Jane's Armies Of The World, etc). If the area WASN'T posted, then the government screwed up, especially as it was apparently a public road. Unless GPs-mapping is, ipso facto, terrorism in India, in which case they should ban importing them, just as California bans impoting fresh fruit.
I cry bullshit. MANAGEMENT and the AMERICA CARBUYING public are solely responsible for the devastation in the America automobile market. If the big SUVs hadn't been Detroits sole focus for the past 10 years, they wouldn't be in this mess. If they had better international penetration, they wouldn't be in this mess.
No, SUVs were the sole focus because they were far more profitable than small cars, and Detroit needed to pay for expensive retirement plans for their union workers. Plus, people liked them; they were more manly than minivans (why?) and safer in collisions than the small cars that Detroit had to produce to get under CAFE standards. In the late 1990s, Japanese manufacturers were criticized for not producing enough of them, in fact. Then gas prices rose, and the world changed, and SUVs were seen as dinosaurs.
As for international penetration, Cadillac was once selling more cars in Germany than any other non-German manufacturer. Horrible to contemplate (like Budweiser outselling German beers IN Germany) but true (thankfully, unlike the beer analogy).
BTW, since the entire thread is about cars, we need a computer analogy. The situation is like IBM having its PC manufacturing clock cleaned by the small companies (except imagine that IBM had unions, too) after the attempted shift to PC/2 production (analogous to gas prices tripling or worse) killed it. The difference is that IBM had smaller pensions, smaller plants, and more cash on hand, and could turn around to where they are today without a government bailout (although Ford claims that they would have been fine if not for the recession hitting now, as well).
> And if the auto companies wanted (or still want) worker > concessions one way to achieve that is employee ownership. > They could have discussed stock plans with the unions > as part of contract negotiations.
It is simpler to move all the jobs overseas, like Honda, Toyota, and VW ("overseas", meaning to the US:-) did (actually, the US plants produce mainly for the US or North America markets).
Also, Chrysler DID have union reps on the company board, during the Bailout and for a few years later. They got out as soon as they could, because they could not handle the conflict of interest between the stockholders (including the union members and pension fund) and their members (weak members want to be treated like the best workers, all wanted as much as they could get, regardless of any long-term damage to Chrysler, etc.).
> Look at Steel, textiles.
US steel plants produces as much as ever, they just need a very few well-trained workers per plant rather than the thousands of unskilled laborers they employed in the United Steel Workers Golden Age, and smaller plants than the 1900s era monsters that the used up during the 20th Century. The old monsters were designed to produce megatons of a few basic steel types, whereas new mills produce a few tons of hundreds of precisely varying formulae.
Textiles closed because they were too hard to mechanize, which still would have slashed the jobs.
If they would just refinance the so called "Toxic debt" mortgages at 3% over prime it would drop the payments down to a point where most of the "toxic" loans would be workable for the debtors and then they wouldn't be toxic. At 3% over prime it would be plenty profitable too. If they would force the mortgage companies to carry the paper on a portion of the loans (selected at random) it would guarantee that they wouldn't write fraudulent loans either...
Oddly enough, this was the original finance industry bailout plan, basically.
One problem with your suggestion is that property values have fallen in some areas to the point where it is a better deal for someone owning a home with an affordable mortgage to default, then rebuy it at "market price" with the worst loan (i.e., highest mortgage) that they can get. This is especially a problem in areas where real estate speculation by ordinary homeowners occurred, like Southern California. What I read is that they expect prices to fall by as much as 70% there (which is only about 4 or 5 years of increase, though).
And it would certainly help some if the Collateralized Debt Obligations went away. It wouldn't help Iceland, though, and I expect that there are lots of other cases where "normal" investments at high leverages are the problem.
> There are a lot of people that believe Ares is largely > corporate welfare for Thiokol, and frankly I believe > them. Thank you, Senator Orrin Hatch.
Well, if that allegation is true, then it is guaranteed that Ares I will be canceled or changed beyond belief. All the political influence on NASA will be to cut Republicans off at the knees, by reducing or canceling every project that employs even one constituent.
> A LAPP stack sounds kind of cool... Folks could call themselves LAPP-landers.
I think that most people would like to be a different kind of cool than to be outdoors in the cold, herding reindeer. Maybe, if you are Finnish, you cannot tell which you would rather be, but most of us want to think about reindeer only one night a year.
When a law is abusive, it becomes the citizen's duty to violate it.
I disagree. When a law is abusive, it is the citizen's duty to protest and get the law changed. Violation of the law should be the means of second-to-last resort[1] (revolution, of course, being the last resort).
So you obey all the speed limits? More seriously, you would have obeyed the Fugitive Slave Laws after the Dredd Scott Decision? Assuming, of course, that you disagree with the DSD and the FS Laws.
Not if its usual host is something entirely different (probable reason that Ebola is as lethal as 90%). Then it can be as lethal to us as it needs for its main host, and any spreading that we do is gravy to it.
The scenario makes for kewel fiction but even in fiction Andromeda evolved.
Except that Andromeda was fiction, so it had to evolve or exterminate its buying public, which was not in Crighton's interest.
If you are going to bring up fiction, remember that Captain Trips (from Stephen King's The Stand) didn't isolate humanity enough, let alone the real contact plagues that American Indians suffered in the 1500s and 1600s, which reduced the population by 90-95%.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, no one (again, at least in the news I saw) pointed out that it would make no sense for Saddam to use WMDs against the US because it would be a sure-fire for him to lose power, which was the one thing he would never want to do.
You were not watching enough, then. OTOH, those who did usually skipped over the idea that he might think it in his interest to sell WMDs to third parties. Before you pooh-pooh this idea to much, consider the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand, which kicked off WWI. The Austrians accused Serbia of having helped the plotters, which everyone outside of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires considered ridiculous, as starting a war against Austria would have been a sure-fire way of the Serbian government losing power in a losing war. Later, in the 1930s, evidence was found that the Serbian Intelligence services had, in fact, been supporting the group that killed the Arch-Duke, expecting that they would just be a thorn in Austria's side, and not do anything so "successful" as they did.
In the wake of 9/11 (and still today), neither liberals nor conservatives publicly considered the true motives of terrorists. It's just, "they hate freedom and they hate us for our wonderful freedom".
Good shorthand for what ticked off the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, though, who had spent several years in the US getting an education, and getting more and more against infidel women and their free ways. He didn't mind our economic superiority nearly as much as bare arms and legs on women claiming to not be common whores. Al Quaeda shares much of the same ideology.
Sorry to disappoint you, but the simple explanation is better than the complicated musings of those who think that it is because we burn their precious oil without a care (they love that we pay so much for "their" crap, it is what keeps them in AK-47s and ammo) or because we overthrew a Socialist Iranian Prime Minister half a century ago (ignoring that the mullahs hate his memory more than we ever did his presence, because he was worse on them than the Shahs ever were).
I once read an anecdote, I don't know if this is true, that in the 1700s the British set couples of goats loose in desert islands. The rationale was that castaways who eventually arrived at those islands would have a source of meat and milk.
It is false. The Spanish set loose cattle and pigs throughout the Caribbean, for that very purpose. Buccaneers got their start by trading jerky from those animals to passing ships.
However, when someone visited those islands years later, there wasn't any life at all in the islands, only goat skeletons everywhere. The goats reproduced as long as there was food, and after they had eaten every plant they all died.
False, as the buccaneers presence demonstrated.
Obviously, you never played with the rabbits and cougar computer models that were popular when I was in college. No number of cougars can kill all the rabbits before starvation reduces the number of cougars. This didn't happen with ice-age hunters and mammoths (a possible counter-example) because the mammoths bred back too slowly and the ice-age hunters were able to shift to other prey when they couldn't find the larger prey. So as long as we don't develop a dependency on oak or hickory bark, humanity is safe. Sorry to spoil your Doomsday.
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> you stopped watching several years after the program had ended?
Only if the AC was also in Britain. Most of us in the USA had to watch it if and when our Public (aka Educational) stations bought the reruns. I saw most of Dr Who during the period when it was off the air, over there.
> So they can already make the most real fake notes.
Any Xerox machine could do a good job on US currency of the 1970s, and a hand-carved engraving could match the governments, if the engraver cared to put in the effort. The trick was and is to get the paper right. The US Government closely monitors its few suppliers of paper, to ensure that nothing gets left outside or falls off the truck, or any other such dodge.
> generally as a rule of practical warfare you do not attack your suppliers or your customers
This might be a Godwin violation, but in 1939, Germany's biggest trading partner was France. They also had a fair trade with Poland and Britain.
Actually, as a rule, one does tend to attack one's suppliers, to force them to lower prices, or just seize the supplied products. One may also attack customers who do not want to allow your products sold to their citizens; look up the Opium Wars, for example.
No, if you went back before Prince Albert (Queen Victoria's husband), they would be almost broke. He was something of a genius investor, especially in real estate. The family is supposedly worth about $7 billion (US billion, of course)(unaudited, equally of course) today, mostly from London real estate. They do NOT own Buckingham Palace, BTW; that is "royal" property, thus owned by the government for her use.
> FWIW, they were late for World War I as well. Don't know the excuse for that one
Zimmermann Telegram. Countries tend to dislike it when another country starts discussing how to dismember the first, especially with a third country. Fortunately for Mexico, no one was crazy enough to respond to the German offer, if it was ever formally presented.
Lacking that provocation, no one would have cared if you Europeans exterminated each other in WWI (well, we would have cared, but no enough to do more than pray for our particular relatives to survive, whichever side they were, or that our particular hated enemy all died, in the case of Irish-Americans).
OTOH, what was the reason that you Europeans were fighting WWI? Someone didn't like that Austria took it poorly when a Serbian group assassinated the heir to the throne? BTW, it turns out that the Serbian group actually WAS supported by the Serbian Government, as the Austrians charged (without any evidence, at the time)(obviously, the Serbian Government didn't think that (translate-into-serbian "Al Quaida") group would do THAT). So, Britain and France were fighting to support the right to murder Austrians without consequences?
> Not to mention the Americans turning up late for World War II which started in 1939, not 1941.
Don't tell the Chinese that. Their phase started in 1931 with the invasion of Manchuria, and was certainly going strong during the Rape Of Nanking in 1937, and I didn't notice any European countries doing anything but making strong diplomatic protests about the Japanese in the League Of Nations, until the Japanese took your Asian possessions.
Someone forgot to tune into "Kennedy Center Honors" last night, apparently.
Oddly, I feel the reverse. Actors, movie writers, directors, etc., are the most useless occupations ever invented, to my mind, and certainly the most self-important. That my sister was in "the business" has nothing to do with it, of course. :-)
Anyway, there are lots of other Halls Of Fame, but (except for the Rock'n Roll HoF) no one who is not in, or possibly in at some time in the future, tends to care. Did you know that Einstein was in the Inventor's Hall Of Fame? Do you care? I certainly never did, figuring being known for writing the Theory Of General Relativity a good enough honor in itself. Likewise, do you know who is Poet Laureate of the USA, and do you care?
(boldface mine)
Lack of intelligent pork-barreling, more like it. If an important (read: expensive) part had been built in Wisconsin, Senator Wm. Proxmire wouldn't have, well, proxmired it down to the DC-1.5 level that it was. We might have had the original design with geosynchronus orbit capability.
Continuing the Apollo program would have been a nice dream, but unfortunately, that is all that it could be. It was reduce the price to orbit or give up the program. As planned, the orbiter was expected to reduce the price per pound to LEO, even more than cheap expendables.
Well, that theory worked for Eddie And The Cruisers, which did nothing much in the theaters, then kept selling in video tape and DVD form.
> Of course, if "The Long Tail" is wrong, then this independant film will more likely resemble "Howard The Duck".
The film or the comic book? The comic book was famous, when I was in college, for being the most valuable on the market, because so few copies had been made of the few episodes. One HtD was worth 10-20 copies of Action Comics No. 1 (which introduced this guy called Superman).
The movie sucked, though. ITS long tail will require more time than the Heat Death of the Universe or the Big Rip (whichever comes first), unless someone burns all but ten copies (we can only hope!).
Hey, that was good enough for NASA for the first two Mercury flights, with Al Shepard and Gus Grissom.
Even if they were commissioned, if mapping that close to a base was prohibited and posted, then they broke the Act, just as the US DoD worker who was convicted of espionage for Jane's Publications (Jane's Fighting Ships, Jane's Armies Of The World, etc). If the area WASN'T posted, then the government screwed up, especially as it was apparently a public road. Unless GPs-mapping is, ipso facto, terrorism in India, in which case they should ban importing them, just as California bans impoting fresh fruit.
> Is it not the right of a country to determine who shall make maps?
No, although it may be in their power. But this was India, which claims to be a modern democracy, not China, let alone North Korea.
No, SUVs were the sole focus because they were far more profitable than small cars, and Detroit needed to pay for expensive retirement plans for their union workers. Plus, people liked them; they were more manly than minivans (why?) and safer in collisions than the small cars that Detroit had to produce to get under CAFE standards. In the late 1990s, Japanese manufacturers were criticized for not producing enough of them, in fact. Then gas prices rose, and the world changed, and SUVs were seen as dinosaurs.
As for international penetration, Cadillac was once selling more cars in Germany than any other non-German manufacturer. Horrible to contemplate (like Budweiser outselling German beers IN Germany) but true (thankfully, unlike the beer analogy).
BTW, since the entire thread is about cars, we need a computer analogy. The situation is like IBM having its PC manufacturing clock cleaned by the small companies (except imagine that IBM had unions, too) after the attempted shift to PC/2 production (analogous to gas prices tripling or worse) killed it. The difference is that IBM had smaller pensions, smaller plants, and more cash on hand, and could turn around to where they are today without a government bailout (although Ford claims that they would have been fine if not for the recession hitting now, as well).
> What about the Chrysler bailout
Which the US Government made money on, even if no one else did.
> And if the auto companies wanted (or still want) worker
> concessions one way to achieve that is employee ownership.
> They could have discussed stock plans with the unions
> as part of contract negotiations.
It is simpler to move all the jobs overseas, like Honda, Toyota, and VW ("overseas", meaning to the US :-) did (actually, the US plants produce mainly for the US or North America markets).
Also, Chrysler DID have union reps on the company board, during the Bailout and for a few years later. They got out as soon as they could, because they could not handle the conflict of interest between the stockholders (including the union members and pension fund) and their members (weak members want to be treated like the best workers, all wanted as much as they could get, regardless of any long-term damage to Chrysler, etc.).
> Look at Steel, textiles.
US steel plants produces as much as ever, they just need a very few well-trained workers per plant rather than the thousands of unskilled laborers they employed in the United Steel Workers Golden Age, and smaller plants than the 1900s era monsters that the used up during the 20th Century. The old monsters were designed to produce megatons of a few basic steel types, whereas new mills produce a few tons of hundreds of precisely varying formulae.
Textiles closed because they were too hard to mechanize, which still would have slashed the jobs.
Oddly enough, this was the original finance industry bailout plan, basically.
One problem with your suggestion is that property values have fallen in some areas to the point where it is a better deal for someone owning a home with an affordable mortgage to default, then rebuy it at "market price" with the worst loan (i.e., highest mortgage) that they can get. This is especially a problem in areas where real estate speculation by ordinary homeowners occurred, like Southern California. What I read is that they expect prices to fall by as much as 70% there (which is only about 4 or 5 years of increase, though).
And it would certainly help some if the Collateralized Debt Obligations went away. It wouldn't help Iceland, though, and I expect that there are lots of other cases where "normal" investments at high leverages are the problem.
What's the matter? Can't find your spin-complementary particle, so none of us can, either?
> I'm a geek you insensitive clod.
> A world of difference there is.
So, bit off any good live chicken heads, lately?
Or do you just get by shoving sharp objects into your flesh?
Personally, I would not proclaim myself a carnival freak, but that is everyone's personal decision.
> There are a lot of people that believe Ares is largely
> corporate welfare for Thiokol, and frankly I believe
> them. Thank you, Senator Orrin Hatch.
Well, if that allegation is true, then it is guaranteed that Ares I will be canceled or changed beyond belief. All the political influence on NASA will be to cut Republicans off at the knees, by reducing or canceling every project that employs even one constituent.
> How am I supposed to download last night's episodes of Smallville and Supernatural
Silly person, last night's episodes were repeats. New episodes don't resume until mid-January.
> A LAPP stack sounds kind of cool... Folks could call themselves LAPP-landers.
I think that most people would like to be a different kind of cool than to be outdoors in the cold, herding reindeer. Maybe, if you are Finnish, you cannot tell which you would rather be, but most of us want to think about reindeer only one night a year.
So you obey all the speed limits? More seriously, you would have obeyed the Fugitive Slave Laws after the Dredd Scott Decision? Assuming, of course, that you disagree with the DSD and the FS Laws.
> I'm a 56 year old geezer. When I was a kid, I never saw a man with boobs. Never.
49 year old. Obviously, you never saw my grandfather with his undershirt off.
To be fair, it was my maternal grandfather, and had (OK, engendered) only the one child.
> And there seem to be a lot more homosexuals and lesbians, although that may be
> that they've just come out of the closet.
Yup. And concentrated in certain areas, pushing out others (How many straight San Franciscan males does it take to change a lightbulb? Both of them).
Except that Andromeda was fiction, so it had to evolve or exterminate its buying public, which was not in Crighton's interest.
If you are going to bring up fiction, remember that Captain Trips (from Stephen King's The Stand) didn't isolate humanity enough, let alone the real contact plagues that American Indians suffered in the 1500s and 1600s, which reduced the population by 90-95%.
You were not watching enough, then. OTOH, those who did usually skipped over the idea that he might think it in his interest to sell WMDs to third parties. Before you pooh-pooh this idea to much, consider the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand, which kicked off WWI. The Austrians accused Serbia of having helped the plotters, which everyone outside of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires considered ridiculous, as starting a war against Austria would have been a sure-fire way of the Serbian government losing power in a losing war. Later, in the 1930s, evidence was found that the Serbian Intelligence services had, in fact, been supporting the group that killed the Arch-Duke, expecting that they would just be a thorn in Austria's side, and not do anything so "successful" as they did.
Good shorthand for what ticked off the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, though, who had spent several years in the US getting an education, and getting more and more against infidel women and their free ways. He didn't mind our economic superiority nearly as much as bare arms and legs on women claiming to not be common whores. Al Quaeda shares much of the same ideology.
Sorry to disappoint you, but the simple explanation is better than the complicated musings of those who think that it is because we burn their precious oil without a care (they love that we pay so much for "their" crap, it is what keeps them in AK-47s and ammo) or because we overthrew a Socialist Iranian Prime Minister half a century ago (ignoring that the mullahs hate his memory more than we ever did his presence, because he was worse on them than the Shahs ever were).
It is false. The Spanish set loose cattle and pigs throughout the Caribbean, for that very purpose. Buccaneers got their start by trading jerky from those animals to passing ships.
False, as the buccaneers presence demonstrated.
Obviously, you never played with the rabbits and cougar computer models that were popular when I was in college. No number of cougars can kill all the rabbits before starvation reduces the number of cougars. This didn't happen with ice-age hunters and mammoths (a possible counter-example) because the mammoths bred back too slowly and the ice-age hunters were able to shift to other prey when they couldn't find the larger prey. So as long as we don't develop a dependency on oak or hickory bark, humanity is safe. Sorry to spoil your Doomsday.