Indeed, an ammo dump at Slinfah was hit by one of them as well - it was first assumed to be an Israeli airstrike, and only later determined to be a drone attack. The drones are perfectly designed for hitting soft targets - rather than single powerful charges, they use 8-20 PETN bomblets, packed full of ball bearings.
Concerning tracking them... these are not that large, and made of wood. I imagine they're pretty hard to track and home in on. Plus, having to waste an antiaircraft missile on someone people glued together with bargain basement parts is asymmetric to the benefit of the rebels. Russia's Hmeimim base is packed full of their most advanced antiaircraft systems, yet they still lost planes (ironically, as usual, they spent the next several days both simultaneously confirming and denying that they got hit;) ). Locals described the sky as lit up by antiaircraft fire.
The US should take a lesson from this and seriously up their efforts toward anti-drone defenses. For now, I expect Russian/Iranian/Assad/Hezbollah/etc forces to put more effort toward hardening depots, airfields, etc against attacks from the air. The drones have a 100km range, which lets them reach from well behind the frontlines.
I would expect GPS to have been jammed at Hmeimim. If not, Russia is incompetent. If so, the drones would appear to be prepared to deal with the loss of GPS signal. Russia was apparently caught off guard with the sophistication of the drones and is now trying to claim that they couldn't have figured out how to make them on their own. I don't buy this at all; both anti-ISIS rebels and ISIS have long been working on drone technology, as well as other "advanced" technology (such as remote-controlled robotic guns).
I'd put up with that if they'd go back to the days before they assumed that all of their users are 12 years old. I can't begin to express how annoying it is when I'm in a chat display and the screen gets flooded with animated hearts, or I hold down too long when scrolling and the interface tries to make me randomly insert an emoji. My phone has accidentally sent way too many emojis, often in completely inappropriate contexts. FB has also entirely thrown out the notion of "screen real estate", deciding that the goal is to fit as *little* info onto the screen as possible.
Oh, and let's not forget the incredible "walled garden" annoyance wherein they try to make you use Facebook as your web browser on cell phones.
And as for the "public content" reduction, sounds like they're just trying to encourage providers of "public content" to pay them, otherwise their posts get hidden. I "like"d various public content pages because I *want* to see their posts; if I didn't, I wouldn't have liked them:P
Where does this notion come from that a nation can "force" another nation to grant a particular individual diplomatic status? Diplomatic status is requested by the sending state, and then the nation in question either approves or denies their request.
The exact same thing applies to asylum. You can say whatever you want about a person "having asylum". Nobody else has to listen to your declaration. Some states have treaties mutually recognizing each other's asylum cases, but the vast majority do not.
And it's a damn good thing that international law works like this.
Right now the focus is being put on the payload adapter, which mates the spacecraft to the stage. Normally SpaceX provides their own adapters, but for this mission, Northrop created a custom adapter for the spacecraft (makes you wonder what the unusual requirements were?)
If the satellite was to be some sort of "stealth" payload, capable of hiding from ground observation, then "faking a separation failure" might be a perfectly prudent course of action. However, for most satellites, it would be immediately obvious whether it had separated or not, to any nation paying attention. And I'm sure lots of nations were paying attention to this.
A more important aspect is that NASA's costs don't inflate with the CPI. They inflate with the NNSI (Nasa New Start Index), which is a much steeper rate. Why? The CPI is based on a "grab bag" of consumer goods. Consumer goods have in general become much cheaper to produce over time, moving from domestic hand labour to varying combinations of mass production and overseas production. NASA, however, still builds things in small quantities with labour from a highly trained workforce. So it's natural that their inflation index would be higher than the CPI.
It depends entirely on the scale of the market at the time when BFR becomes available. If the market is huge, Saturn V-sized vehicles probably make significantly more sense (rockets in general benefit from scaleup, if the launch cadence can be kept up). If it's not, Falcon-sized vehicles make more sense. Note also that BFR is not just about size, but also full flow staged combustion methalox engines and composite (rather than alumium) construction, in addition to SpaceX's characteristic VTOL launch profile.
It's also worth noting that SpaceX is doing their damndest to try to ensure that the market is huge (a massive internet-access constellation, suborbital transcontinental flights, etc). That doesn't mean that they'll succeed, but it does argue for BFR from their perspective.
Meltdown (Intel-only) is just one implementation of Spectre; Spectre is a whole new family of possible attack vectors that affects everyone. Meltdown makes Spectre easy by forcing the processor to do what you need it to via a security exception in order to read the side effects of speculative processing, rather than hoping that it will. But we could see many forms of this in the future.
The concept that any random javascript could contain a new variant of Spectre which can read protected kernel pages on your system... this is not a good thing.
The fact alone that they're now up to over 1000 Model 3s per week is in and of itself ~$8m per day in extra revenue. Even if the production rate inexplicably ceases to rise (not going to happen) that'd be ~$1B by May that wasn't there when the "Seeking Alpha" crowd was making their "bankrupt in May at current burn rates" claims. More realistically, around $2B. One should also note that Tesla also had a disguised capital raise in the form of Roadster and Semi deposits (mainly Roadster).
Furthermore, one of the most valuable automakers in the world, with half a million preorders sitting on wait, is not just going to close its doors if it ran out of cash. They'll be forced to dilute stock, which no stockholders want, but they absolutely can get more cash as needed. I seriously, seriously doubt it will get that far, however.
One thing that I think Autopilot gets right versus most of its emerging competitors is the situation display. It tells you what it's thinking, how it sees the world - e.g., "I see you here in your lane, I sense something in your blind spot over here, I see two cars ahead of you, one to the front right..." etc. It may seem like such a little thing at first, but it's absolutely critical to owners being comfortable with any degree of automation (even glorified TACC+lanekeeping, aka Autopilot as it currently stands) that it not just be some "black box" randomly making inexplicable decisions. IMHO, Tesla could do even more to make clear why it decides things as it does - but they're at least much better than what most other companies are doing.
BMW makes an EV (i3), but it's way overpriced for what you get. Model 3 gives you a far, far better buy in every regard. The only thing the i3 wins on is that you can get it today.
It amazes me how much the other manufacturers completely missed the boat on fast charging networks. It seems that they simply stereotyped EVs as niche products for niche dirtie hippie buyers, and that anyone who wanted a "real car" that could go on road trips without excessive hassle would just buy an ICE.
Tesla's bet that EV buyers would, in fact, strongly want to road trip, and a "charge while you take a meal break" rate of charge would allow for that (~120kW max rather than ~50kW max for CHAdeMO and most CCS) is probably the single most fateful decision they've made in terms of their success so far - selling about as many nearly-six-figure and over-six-figure EVs in the US as their competitors sold mid-to-low-5-figure EVs.
Add to the list "has Motor Trend drooling about how much better it handles than a BMW 3-series". And the ability to get AWD + air suspension. And I can't wait to see the specs on that performance package;) The SR is already as fast as a 330i and the LR as fast as a 340i (but $5k cheaper than each, before incentives and operating cost savings) - and adding power on EVs is a lot cheaper than with gasoline.
I'd also stress the "efficient without being a weirdmobile" aspect. Tesla has really honed in on the optimization point here, how efficient you can make a vehicle be without having it start to look either unusual or dorky. So just ignoring the economies of scale that come from having invested far more in EV tech than all other manufacturers, all others start out at a disadvantage, in that if they try to make something look "sportier" or "more aggressive" to take market share away, they increase drag (thus cutting range, or increasing battery costs and vehicle mass, both while simultaneously reducing charging-miles-per-hour). They could go the other way and try to eke out some extra efficiency by, say, going down to 16" or less wheels (but people already complain about aero wheels, let alone little ones), or adding wheel skirts (most people don't want them), or tapering the trunk more (but then you lose trunk space), or going with a more aggressive roof taper (cutting rear passenger space), or swapping out aluminum panels for composite or magnesium (but then you seriously increase the cost), etc.
Yes, there's a ton of fancy "concept vehicles" out there, but concept vehicles are just glorified art pieces. Look at what happened to, say, the Mission E - now that we're seeing the actual vehicle, it's turned into just a glorified Panamera. Doesn't even look as nice as a Panamera. But this sort of stuff always happens. Concept cars act simply as ads, to get you interested in what a company is doing in hopes that you'll later get over your disappointment and buy the final product anyway.
No, ICEs face huge taxes and EVs avoid them, like I explicitly stated.
No, a Tesla does not produce 17,5 tonnes of CO2 to manufacture. That was not a peer-reviewed "study" and was based on data that was never valid let alone currently valid. More to the point, Tesla is moving toward having their production entirely solar powered.
The problem with watering with saltwater is that you leave the salts behind in your soil. And basically turn it into a salt pan. And nothing grows on salt pans. Forget the problems with biofuels in general, that right there is a showstopper.
It's anything but "pays you to own one". It's just that ICE vehicles are super-expensive, while EVs are just "normal priced". The other incentives, like parking, don't amass to that much money on average, and there's no tax deduction or rebate or anything like that (like the US's deduction).
On one hand, the government misses out on all of those sales taxes for EVs. On the other hand, I'm sure that a lot of people were buying a car specifically because they could afford an EV and wouldn't have purchased a vehicle otherwise.
Probably the biggest reason Norway is in front is that their per-capita incomes are so high - they spend more on vehicles, period, and EVs compete far better on the high end than the low end (although that inflection point keeps dropping). Aka, adding more electric motor power is a lot cheaper than adding more gasoline power, but batteries are a relatively fixed cost. In Iceland, our incentives aren't much different from Norway's, but we're only up to 20% adoption rates (that said, part of that is also due to how terrible our EV infrastructure is; Norway's is awesome, and keeps getting better).
Labour costs are too high for manual sorting like is widely used in China. As always, it'll need to be tech to the rescue. For example, modern plants can use processes like cryofreezing to make even foams brittle, crushing/grinding waste it into granules, separating by density, and optical sorting (spectral analysis) to assess colour, transparency, composition and quality.
Short hops aren't really what Boring Company is about. It's about long stretches - having a long, limited-access "fast lane" with a bunch of onramps and offramps serviced by car / passenger elevators. With a route this short, you'd never get up to speed. Sort of defeats the purpose. There's going to be significant overhead with just starting and ending a tunnel - importing the TBM, digging the initial pit, lowering it in, setting it and its tailings system up, etc. Boring Company is designed to be able to bore faster (much faster head rotation via advanced alloy, highly cooled, hot-swappable cutting discs, and via the TBM pushing off tunnel side walls rather than end walls), but that does nothing on its own to reduce initial TBM import and setup costs (apart from the fact that their TBMs are rather modest sized, since the tunnels are single-vehicle on a sled and need no lane margins).
Lol, how did I know that that article's source was going to be Petra Östergren? Literally whenever anyone wants to claim anything against the Nordic Model, it comes down to her rantings;)
The Swedish case thus seems to support the claim of a causal link from law to reduced trafficking. Furthermore, there are indications that traffickers consider the legal rules surrounding prostitution when choosing destination countries. For instance, Swedish police investigations using taped phone conversations show that traffickers have problems due to the Swedish law which criminalizes buying sex since; (i) time is lost because street prostitution is not viable; (ii) Swedish men fear being arrested which requires a lot of (costly) discretion; (iii) to avoid detection, several apartment brothels have to be used; this is costly and often requires more local contacts. Furthermore, victim testimonies have shown that traffickers prefer to operate in countries where prostitution is tolerated or legalized and the Latvian police have concluded that Latvian traffickers avoid Sweden due to the effect the Swedish law has on the profitability of their business (Ekberg 2004).
But hey, what's peer review when you can cite the unsupported minority opinion of a well known opposition activist...
1. So your concept of men is that if they can't pay for sex, they'll go out and rape someone? Man, you really have a terrible opinion of men.
2. As for your claim that Sweden is the "rape capital of Europe", Wikipedia sums it up nicely with lots of references:
UNODC report[edit] A frequently cited source when comparing Swedish rape statistics internationally is the regularly published report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). In 2012, according to the report by UNODC, Sweden was quoted as having 66.5 cases of reported rapes per 100,000 population,[29] based on official statistics by Brå.[30] This is the highest number of reported rape of any nation in the report. The high number of reported rapes in Sweden can partly be explained by the comparatively broad definition of rape, the method of which the Swedish police record rapes, a high confidence in the criminal justice system, and an effort by the Government to decrease the number of unreported rapes.[note 1][20][31][21][32]
Unreliable data for cross-national comparison[edit] For more details on this topic, see Swedish rape statistics. The UNODC itself discourages any cross-national comparisons based on their reports, because of the differences that exist between legal definitions, methods of offense counting and crime reporting.[29] In 2013, of the 129 countries listed in the UNODC report, a total of 67 countries had no reported data on rape.[19][29] Some majority-Muslim countries missing data—for example Egypt—classifies rape as assault.[33][34] A crime survey funded by the UN and published in The Lancet Global Health concluded that almost a quarter of all men admit to rape in parts of Asia.[35][36] Some of the countries with the highest percentage of men admitting rape in that study, China and Bangladesh for instance, are also not listed or have relatively low numbers of reported rape in the UNODC report.[29]
Do you think that China and Bangladesh have low rape rates?
I don't know every country which has it, but I can tell you that it's that way here in Iceland, too. And Finland. Denmark is the only Nordic which doesn't use it.
After Sweden introduced their ban on purchasing sex, violence against sex workers reportedly went up
This is a lie based around this report. The short of it: Since the law passed, the following reports of changes have occurred:
Verbal abuse: +17% Hair pulling: +167% (but still only a third of those surveyed reported any hair pulling) Being struck with a fist: -38% Rape: -48%.
Because when you consider them all together and equal, it's a net increase of 7% (52% to 59%), that's "violence is up". But most of those cases are verbal abuse. The most extreme examples, such as rape, went down by half.
Street prostitution decreased by 50% and indoor prostitution by 16% since the law was passed. The rate of prostitutes seeking help from the police decreased by 41%, but rather than this being some sort of "afraid of the police" situation (they're not legally liable for anything), rates of seeking help from ProSentret decreased by 54% - an even greater amount. The simple fact is, severe violence dramatically decreased since the Nordic Model was adopted.
The estimates on the number of prostitutes operating in Sweden dropped significantly after the law was passed, and are 1/10th the number as in (lower population) Denmark. A study by Durex found that Sweden had the lowest percentage of the population (among 34 countries surveyed) of men paying for sex, at 3%. But as for:
as did the number of "johns" going to Denmark for sex.
Obviously, just on the face of this, this is stupid. The concept that you'll get the same rate of people visiting prostitutes when they can get it where they live vs. where they have to drive for hours (Stockholm to Copenhagen = 10 hours round trip) and pay ~$50 each way to cross the bridge (let alone the super-expensive Nordic gas prices) is nonsense. Furthermore, the rate of people going to Denmark to buy prostitutes has not increased. A large majority of the population in countries with the Nordic model strongly support it, not just "politicians". Only 25% of Swedish men and 7% of Swedish women support repealing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, an ammo dump at Slinfah was hit by one of them as well - it was first assumed to be an Israeli airstrike, and only later determined to be a drone attack. The drones are perfectly designed for hitting soft targets - rather than single powerful charges, they use 8-20 PETN bomblets, packed full of ball bearings.
Concerning tracking them... these are not that large, and made of wood. I imagine they're pretty hard to track and home in on. Plus, having to waste an antiaircraft missile on someone people glued together with bargain basement parts is asymmetric to the benefit of the rebels. Russia's Hmeimim base is packed full of their most advanced antiaircraft systems, yet they still lost planes (ironically, as usual, they spent the next several days both simultaneously confirming and denying that they got hit ;) ). Locals described the sky as lit up by antiaircraft fire.
The US should take a lesson from this and seriously up their efforts toward anti-drone defenses. For now, I expect Russian/Iranian/Assad/Hezbollah/etc forces to put more effort toward hardening depots, airfields, etc against attacks from the air. The drones have a 100km range, which lets them reach from well behind the frontlines.
I would expect GPS to have been jammed at Hmeimim. If not, Russia is incompetent. If so, the drones would appear to be prepared to deal with the loss of GPS signal. Russia was apparently caught off guard with the sophistication of the drones and is now trying to claim that they couldn't have figured out how to make them on their own. I don't buy this at all; both anti-ISIS rebels and ISIS have long been working on drone technology, as well as other "advanced" technology (such as remote-controlled robotic guns).
I'd put up with that if they'd go back to the days before they assumed that all of their users are 12 years old. I can't begin to express how annoying it is when I'm in a chat display and the screen gets flooded with animated hearts, or I hold down too long when scrolling and the interface tries to make me randomly insert an emoji. My phone has accidentally sent way too many emojis, often in completely inappropriate contexts. FB has also entirely thrown out the notion of "screen real estate", deciding that the goal is to fit as *little* info onto the screen as possible.
Oh, and let's not forget the incredible "walled garden" annoyance wherein they try to make you use Facebook as your web browser on cell phones.
And as for the "public content" reduction, sounds like they're just trying to encourage providers of "public content" to pay them, otherwise their posts get hidden. I "like"d various public content pages because I *want* to see their posts; if I didn't, I wouldn't have liked them :P
Where does this notion come from that a nation can "force" another nation to grant a particular individual diplomatic status? Diplomatic status is requested by the sending state, and then the nation in question either approves or denies their request.
The exact same thing applies to asylum. You can say whatever you want about a person "having asylum". Nobody else has to listen to your declaration. Some states have treaties mutually recognizing each other's asylum cases, but the vast majority do not.
And it's a damn good thing that international law works like this.
It's about time Parker Brothers made a Monopoly Money coin ;) Then it would get real value!
A nominal launch by definition launches a payload into the contracted trajectory.
Yep.
Right now the focus is being put on the payload adapter, which mates the spacecraft to the stage. Normally SpaceX provides their own adapters, but for this mission, Northrop created a custom adapter for the spacecraft (makes you wonder what the unusual requirements were?)
If the satellite was to be some sort of "stealth" payload, capable of hiding from ground observation, then "faking a separation failure" might be a perfectly prudent course of action. However, for most satellites, it would be immediately obvious whether it had separated or not, to any nation paying attention. And I'm sure lots of nations were paying attention to this.
A more important aspect is that NASA's costs don't inflate with the CPI. They inflate with the NNSI (Nasa New Start Index), which is a much steeper rate. Why? The CPI is based on a "grab bag" of consumer goods. Consumer goods have in general become much cheaper to produce over time, moving from domestic hand labour to varying combinations of mass production and overseas production. NASA, however, still builds things in small quantities with labour from a highly trained workforce. So it's natural that their inflation index would be higher than the CPI.
It depends entirely on the scale of the market at the time when BFR becomes available. If the market is huge, Saturn V-sized vehicles probably make significantly more sense (rockets in general benefit from scaleup, if the launch cadence can be kept up). If it's not, Falcon-sized vehicles make more sense. Note also that BFR is not just about size, but also full flow staged combustion methalox engines and composite (rather than alumium) construction, in addition to SpaceX's characteristic VTOL launch profile.
It's also worth noting that SpaceX is doing their damndest to try to ensure that the market is huge (a massive internet-access constellation, suborbital transcontinental flights, etc). That doesn't mean that they'll succeed, but it does argue for BFR from their perspective.
Meltdown (Intel-only) is just one implementation of Spectre; Spectre is a whole new family of possible attack vectors that affects everyone. Meltdown makes Spectre easy by forcing the processor to do what you need it to via a security exception in order to read the side effects of speculative processing, rather than hoping that it will. But we could see many forms of this in the future.
The concept that any random javascript could contain a new variant of Spectre which can read protected kernel pages on your system... this is not a good thing.
The fact alone that they're now up to over 1000 Model 3s per week is in and of itself ~$8m per day in extra revenue. Even if the production rate inexplicably ceases to rise (not going to happen) that'd be ~$1B by May that wasn't there when the "Seeking Alpha" crowd was making their "bankrupt in May at current burn rates" claims. More realistically, around $2B. One should also note that Tesla also had a disguised capital raise in the form of Roadster and Semi deposits (mainly Roadster).
Furthermore, one of the most valuable automakers in the world, with half a million preorders sitting on wait, is not just going to close its doors if it ran out of cash. They'll be forced to dilute stock, which no stockholders want, but they absolutely can get more cash as needed. I seriously, seriously doubt it will get that far, however.
One thing that I think Autopilot gets right versus most of its emerging competitors is the situation display. It tells you what it's thinking, how it sees the world - e.g., "I see you here in your lane, I sense something in your blind spot over here, I see two cars ahead of you, one to the front right..." etc. It may seem like such a little thing at first, but it's absolutely critical to owners being comfortable with any degree of automation (even glorified TACC+lanekeeping, aka Autopilot as it currently stands) that it not just be some "black box" randomly making inexplicable decisions. IMHO, Tesla could do even more to make clear why it decides things as it does - but they're at least much better than what most other companies are doing.
BMW makes an EV (i3), but it's way overpriced for what you get. Model 3 gives you a far, far better buy in every regard. The only thing the i3 wins on is that you can get it today.
It amazes me how much the other manufacturers completely missed the boat on fast charging networks. It seems that they simply stereotyped EVs as niche products for niche dirtie hippie buyers, and that anyone who wanted a "real car" that could go on road trips without excessive hassle would just buy an ICE.
Tesla's bet that EV buyers would, in fact, strongly want to road trip, and a "charge while you take a meal break" rate of charge would allow for that (~120kW max rather than ~50kW max for CHAdeMO and most CCS) is probably the single most fateful decision they've made in terms of their success so far - selling about as many nearly-six-figure and over-six-figure EVs in the US as their competitors sold mid-to-low-5-figure EVs.
Welcome to the Internet, where people can make up whatever nonsense they want.
Add to the list "has Motor Trend drooling about how much better it handles than a BMW 3-series". And the ability to get AWD + air suspension. And I can't wait to see the specs on that performance package ;) The SR is already as fast as a 330i and the LR as fast as a 340i (but $5k cheaper than each, before incentives and operating cost savings) - and adding power on EVs is a lot cheaper than with gasoline.
I'd also stress the "efficient without being a weirdmobile" aspect. Tesla has really honed in on the optimization point here, how efficient you can make a vehicle be without having it start to look either unusual or dorky. So just ignoring the economies of scale that come from having invested far more in EV tech than all other manufacturers, all others start out at a disadvantage, in that if they try to make something look "sportier" or "more aggressive" to take market share away, they increase drag (thus cutting range, or increasing battery costs and vehicle mass, both while simultaneously reducing charging-miles-per-hour). They could go the other way and try to eke out some extra efficiency by, say, going down to 16" or less wheels (but people already complain about aero wheels, let alone little ones), or adding wheel skirts (most people don't want them), or tapering the trunk more (but then you lose trunk space), or going with a more aggressive roof taper (cutting rear passenger space), or swapping out aluminum panels for composite or magnesium (but then you seriously increase the cost), etc.
Yes, there's a ton of fancy "concept vehicles" out there, but concept vehicles are just glorified art pieces. Look at what happened to, say, the Mission E - now that we're seeing the actual vehicle, it's turned into just a glorified Panamera. Doesn't even look as nice as a Panamera. But this sort of stuff always happens. Concept cars act simply as ads, to get you interested in what a company is doing in hopes that you'll later get over your disappointment and buy the final product anyway.
As a general rule, Tesla owners tend to put as many or more miles on them per year as the national average.
No, ICEs face huge taxes and EVs avoid them, like I explicitly stated.
No, a Tesla does not produce 17,5 tonnes of CO2 to manufacture. That was not a peer-reviewed "study" and was based on data that was never valid let alone currently valid. More to the point, Tesla is moving toward having their production entirely solar powered.
The problem with watering with saltwater is that you leave the salts behind in your soil. And basically turn it into a salt pan. And nothing grows on salt pans. Forget the problems with biofuels in general, that right there is a showstopper.
Indeed. Oil producers aren't producing oil because they think it's fun. They do so because people want to buy it.
If you want to cut oil consumption, you have to attack demand, not production. Stop production in one place, it just moves elsewhere.
It's anything but "pays you to own one". It's just that ICE vehicles are super-expensive, while EVs are just "normal priced". The other incentives, like parking, don't amass to that much money on average, and there's no tax deduction or rebate or anything like that (like the US's deduction).
On one hand, the government misses out on all of those sales taxes for EVs. On the other hand, I'm sure that a lot of people were buying a car specifically because they could afford an EV and wouldn't have purchased a vehicle otherwise.
Probably the biggest reason Norway is in front is that their per-capita incomes are so high - they spend more on vehicles, period, and EVs compete far better on the high end than the low end (although that inflection point keeps dropping). Aka, adding more electric motor power is a lot cheaper than adding more gasoline power, but batteries are a relatively fixed cost. In Iceland, our incentives aren't much different from Norway's, but we're only up to 20% adoption rates (that said, part of that is also due to how terrible our EV infrastructure is; Norway's is awesome, and keeps getting better).
Labour costs are too high for manual sorting like is widely used in China. As always, it'll need to be tech to the rescue. For example, modern plants can use processes like cryofreezing to make even foams brittle, crushing/grinding waste it into granules, separating by density, and optical sorting (spectral analysis) to assess colour, transparency, composition and quality.
Short hops aren't really what Boring Company is about. It's about long stretches - having a long, limited-access "fast lane" with a bunch of onramps and offramps serviced by car / passenger elevators. With a route this short, you'd never get up to speed. Sort of defeats the purpose. There's going to be significant overhead with just starting and ending a tunnel - importing the TBM, digging the initial pit, lowering it in, setting it and its tailings system up, etc. Boring Company is designed to be able to bore faster (much faster head rotation via advanced alloy, highly cooled, hot-swappable cutting discs, and via the TBM pushing off tunnel side walls rather than end walls), but that does nothing on its own to reduce initial TBM import and setup costs (apart from the fact that their TBMs are rather modest sized, since the tunnels are single-vehicle on a sled and need no lane margins).
Lol, how did I know that that article's source was going to be Petra Östergren? Literally whenever anyone wants to claim anything against the Nordic Model, it comes down to her rantings ;)
Meanwhile...
But hey, what's peer review when you can cite the unsupported minority opinion of a well known opposition activist...
1. So your concept of men is that if they can't pay for sex, they'll go out and rape someone? Man, you really have a terrible opinion of men.
2. As for your claim that Sweden is the "rape capital of Europe", Wikipedia sums it up nicely with lots of references:
Do you think that China and Bangladesh have low rape rates?
I don't know every country which has it, but I can tell you that it's that way here in Iceland, too. And Finland. Denmark is the only Nordic which doesn't use it.
This is a lie based around this report. The short of it: Since the law passed, the following reports of changes have occurred:
Verbal abuse: +17%
Hair pulling: +167% (but still only a third of those surveyed reported any hair pulling)
Being struck with a fist: -38%
Rape: -48%.
Because when you consider them all together and equal, it's a net increase of 7% (52% to 59%), that's "violence is up". But most of those cases are verbal abuse. The most extreme examples, such as rape, went down by half.
Street prostitution decreased by 50% and indoor prostitution by 16% since the law was passed. The rate of prostitutes seeking help from the police decreased by 41%, but rather than this being some sort of "afraid of the police" situation (they're not legally liable for anything), rates of seeking help from ProSentret decreased by 54% - an even greater amount. The simple fact is, severe violence dramatically decreased since the Nordic Model was adopted.
The estimates on the number of prostitutes operating in Sweden dropped significantly after the law was passed, and are 1/10th the number as in (lower population) Denmark. A study by Durex found that Sweden had the lowest percentage of the population (among 34 countries surveyed) of men paying for sex, at 3%. But as for:
Obviously, just on the face of this, this is stupid. The concept that you'll get the same rate of people visiting prostitutes when they can get it where they live vs. where they have to drive for hours (Stockholm to Copenhagen = 10 hours round trip) and pay ~$50 each way to cross the bridge (let alone the super-expensive Nordic gas prices) is nonsense. Furthermore, the rate of people going to Denmark to buy prostitutes has not increased. A large majority of the population in countries with the Nordic model strongly support it, not just "politicians". Only 25% of Swedish men and 7% of Swedish women support repealing it.
Reading fail.
Or, if you'd rather:
#OfClients / #OfSexWorkers > 1
Or, if you'd rather, multiplying both sides...:
#OfClients > #OfSexWorkers