The only thing I remember hearing about specifically was making smaller tunnels. Smaller tunnels require removing a lot less material, and also mean having to use less material to line the tunnel. With a focus on faster transport and using the available space efficiently they should be able to get throughput as good or better than the traditional large tunnels.
I think the idea is to setup a punching dummy that the public can rage at. Once someone expresses their rage on social media they are less likely to do something more that would require an expensive response from the MTA, like actually fixing whatever it is that is broken.
I know when I was in the military there was an annual workforce survey that was basically a joke. The survey had two purposes. First it served as an outlet for troops that were frustrated about something to think their voice was getting heard. Secondly it gave leadership a source of numbers they could twist however they wanted to justify themselves.
The only time I've ever actually seen a bellhop his services were greatly appreciated. We were late arriving to our hotel and were supposed to be somewhere else in a couple minutes for a dinner reservation. The bellhop took our luggage and delivered it to our room while we headed to our dinner.
If there is one job I would love to subsidize it's editors of any stripe. I am always amazed at the poor quality of editing that I see basically everywhere. It is clearly evident that the world needs more editors, and Slashdot summaries are a great example of this.
So far as I can tell Sign Spinners are used for two reasons. First, to exploit an area where a business can't legally post an advertisement permanently. Secondly, to draw extra attention to an advertisement by paying some poor schmuck to stand around all day holding the sign.
I'm from the same age group I believe. School sports largely sucked. I participated a bit but it wasn't geared towards being fun. We'd spend hours doing all kinds of crap practice activities during the week so that we could have a chance at playing in a game on Friday night for a couple hours. I let myself get peer pressured into it, but I'll definitely do my best to keep my own kids out of it. If the point of the sports teams were actually to build confidence and team skills while having fun, then I'd be all for them. But usually they're really just a program for trying to get a couple kids scholarships and boost a schools reputation for a little while. I really do regret wasting part of my youth on sports.
That said I had plenty of time out doors and being active. I learned to sail small boats, and canoes. As a Scout I did tons of camping in all weather and even hiked part of the Appalachian Trail. I learned to hunt with bow and arrow, as well as rifles. I learned and got to use construction and land clearing skills, far more than I would have liked. I spent countless hours playing PC games and reading books. A teacher asked us to keep track of our reading and it turned out I read more than 50 novels in the course of that school year.
Once upon a time I was visiting New York City with my kid Sister when I saw a gaggle of teenage girls carrying diaper bags. When I pointed them out to my sister and wondered aloud why they all had diaper bags when there wasn't a child in sight, she about lost it. Apparently the latest fashion at the time in purses was these really large bags made with bright floral and polka dot prints. Those bags were high fashion and easily cost more than the entirety of my adult wardrobe. Kids spending large sums of money on fashion items only to come out looking like middle class soccer moms is kind of hilarious.
So far as finer control goes; Every manual seat I've ever used had a fixed number of positions for sliding forward and back. So adjusting the seat is always about finding the one fixed position that is good enough for you. In a power seat you typically have a much greater variety in the number of positions and can in theory pick the setting that suites you perfectly. It isn't a matter of physical dexterity, but the capacity for adjustment of the mechanism.
Just to be clear, Gerrymandering is an abomination that both major US political parties actively engage in. As citizens we shouldn't tolerate it from either of them. However there isn't really a good way to clean up that mess without changing up our entire electoral system, so we're likely stuck with it.
The big advantage that I see for power seats over standard is the degree of adjustability. Not that my experience is encyclopedic or anything, but I've only ever seen 3 degrees of adjustment in a non-power seat. You can typically slide the seat forward or back, change the seat back angle, and sometimes adjust a lumbar support. With power seats you typically get all that and add on seat height adjustment as well as seat tilt. Additionally power seats usually have much finer control over those various settings.
I don't think creatives are the intended target there. The music and movie industry that continues to rip off the people actually creating stuff is normally what people are up in arms about. Whether or not you can take down those conglomerates without wrecking most of the independent artists is certainly a real concern. Even if the industry falls apart completely though I'm sure we'll still have more artists creating stuff than can find customers willing to support them. That is how it has always seemed to be anyways.
Fossilization of remains is a pretty rare occurrence. Such preservation requires very specific conditions. As another poster mentioned Dinosaurs were around for longer than they've been extinct, tens of millions of years ago. Yet finding new deposits of fossilized dinosaur remains is newsworthy. Then you have things like the Coelacanth that we thought went extinct with the dinosaurs because we couldn't find newer fossils. Turns out Coelacanth's are still around, they just weren't in the right places to leave fossils, we think.
It is entirely possible that small and relatively primitive civilizations could have existed before we evolved. They could have simply failed to leave any fossil records. Or even if they did there is no guarantee that we'd have found it by now? Consider how much of the landmass has been thoroughly searched geologically for fossils. Then think about how we haven't even fully mapped the oceans except for some very crude sonar stuff.
It's just more protection money, you already pay lots of protection money and just aren't used to looking at it like that. In most every country taxes support things like Military, Police, Courts, Legislatures, and innumerable other agencies that serve the common good.
If the robot worker apocalypse does ever manifest it is very likely that the only peaceful solution will be some sort of UBI. It could just so happen that human workers end up being replaced as human workers expire. I find it more likely that some big advancements will happen that lead to rapidly replacing human workers with automation. At that point whether or not UBI is protection money or not becomes more of an academic question, because you'll either pay it or take your chances. The one thing I'm most certain of in that kind of situation is that the unemployed and destitute would be very unlikely to simply lie down and die somewhere out of sight.
Potatoes are actually a good example of how you can change the method for farming them to get incredibly higher yield for your area. Although I don't expect this project to be interested in doing root vegetables as they aren't a big spoilage risk.
To farm potatoes in a small space you start your plants in the bottom of a garbage can with a little soil. As the plant grows you add more soil. Eventually you end up with a plant on top of a can full of dirt and potatoes. I've read about people getting 25 to 40 pounds of potatoes from a single can this way.
It is the Fed and State that should be figuring the taxes, and whether or not you should get a refund at the end of the year. Practically everything is already reported to the Government already anyways. If you have ever actually looked at your 1099 forms you'd notice that it says they've already sent a copy to the IRS. If you get a tax document from anyone you can be sure that they've already sent a copy to the IRS because it's required by law.
In the USA our entire tax filing system is basically a giant trap. By requiring that each and every wage earner file taxes every year the IRS gets to collect fees and fines from people who make honest mistakes. They also get to keep extra taxes that should have been refunded because the tax payer was being lazy or not aware of how best to account for everything. The current system essentially requires each person to be a tax expert at some level or, and this is key, pay an expert to file their taxes.
Practically every year there is a bill to fix this facet of the tax system and it is killed every time by lobbyists for companies like H&R Block. It is in their best interest that filing taxes be complex and confusing to lay people. More than half of the tax paying population every year pays someone else to figure out their taxes, and that's a pretty huge customer base to lose. I use a system that costs me about $40, and that is a cheap solution. I've seen bills for tax preparation that were over $200 for a relatively simple filing from a big name tax prep company. Even if the 79 million people that pay for tax prep used the cheap $40 solution that'd be an industry worth $3.16 billion annually.
The IRS should have a system where each tax payer can log in and review their taxes for the year. It should have an option to submit changes that the IRS didn't know about like deductions and cash income. Keep it open year round and let people update their records as the year progresses. When you get to the end of the year everyone gets a few months to make any last minute changes and certify their records. Then the Government sends out the refund checks/direct deposits your funds, or sends you a bill for what you owe. For people that don't have access to the internet the government can mail the tax records they've received at the end of the year, and you can mail them back with any changes or confirmation that it's correct.
Federal and State income taxes are only part of the taxes being levied on people. The lower your income the larger the portion of your money that goes to those other taxes. Where I live for example there is a flat 10% sales tax that is levied on everything, even groceries. Where I grew up only food items that were considered a luxury were taxed, things like soda and prepared food.
Some kind of food chain collapse I would guess. Given how we routinely fail to comprehend modern ecosystems I would honestly be very surprised if we ever figured out such ancient systems with much certainty.
It bears noting that #1 doesn't necessarily mean buying better internet access at home. The file could always be transferred to a removable drive and then take that to somewhere with a better upload connection.
It was on video. But I seem to remember the perspective being on a level with the base as if you were standing on the surface of whatever celestial body it was.
It would be distinctly unwise to put the president out there on the front lines. Replacing the commander and chief is too much work, and would cause too much disruption to the daily function of the government. Congress Critters however are relatively cheap and easy to replace, and in reality, as a group, hold most of the power in our system of government. There are enough of them though that losing a few here and there wouldn't interrupt business much.
When political leaders were required to risk themselves in war they were motivated in large part by the possibility of personal gain, or preserving their life. In our modern system the carrot of personal gain has been largely removed, and the US hasn't faced anything like an existential threat since the world wars. Although even during the world wars it wasn't clear that losing would mean being wiped out.Which is why you see the people in charge staying as far from combat as possible, they aren't required to put any skin in the game.
There is a lot to be said though for keeping war messy. If it becomes to sterile and clean then the disincentive to engage in it starts to wane. In the US we already have enough trouble reigning in war hawks that want to use military might to resolve every conflict. Being in their positions of power largely protects them and their families from the dangers of war while they get to engage in profiting from it. Personally I'd like to see every congress critter be required to serve on the front lines as a non-combatant in a, non-leadership position, whenever the troops deploy. I figure after a few rounds of that they'd have little trouble finding peaceful resolutions to more conflicts.
There is definitely a cost burden to using electronic forms of payment. However there is also costs associated with accepting cash. We are usually oblivious to that cost simply because it has traditionally always been the baseline. Checks, Credit, and Debit have been viewed as add-ons. Now however they can be used as a baseline alternative. So which form of payments a vendor supports comes down purely to what their customers are willing to use and which is affordable for the vendor.
The costs of using cash that I can think of are: Time, making deposits. Time, withdraws for change. Time, to process transaction (this can vary depending on technology). Time, to process end of day activities like counting out tills. Money, employee theft. Exposure to robberies, and associated risk of violence.
Now I'm not saying that the real costs of accepting cash out weighs that of other forms of payment in all situations. I would wager though that depending on circumstances taking only electronic payments could work out to be cheaper, and quite likely safer. The fees associated with electronic payments are not pure profit for a middleman as they pay for fraud protection and such.
You must have some fast terminals or networks in your area. Where I live the chip card transactions always feel like they take forever. A number of places I frequent actually reverted to the old system because it was holding up the line too much during the lunch rush.
I've never seen Lawrence of Arabia so don't have an opinion on that. The issue in particular for the scene I mentioned is that it adds nothing at all to the movie. It doesn't progress the plot, it doesn't reveal anything related to the story, and it doesn't entertain.
It's only purpose I could imagine would be to try and entertain but it fails there because the entire scene is a model of a space ship gradually lowering to a landing, and a few blinking lights. There is music that constantly sounds like it is building to something that never actually happens. You could film a constipated person trying unsuccessfully to take a dump with the same music playing and actually be more successful at entertaining. Know that I think about it, I guess that is the opposite of a jump scare, a scene with all kinds of buildup and no payoff. On top of that the scene drags on for what feels like forever, which I seem to remember being a theme of the movie.
The movie was clearly made to be a work of art, not entertainment. It just so happens it's the kind of art I don't value. I would wager with a little work it could have been cut down to fit a twilight zone episode and been just as thought provoking. Like I said the book was pretty short and I enjoyed that well enough to read the rest of the series.
2001 is a prime example of a movie that doesn't age well. I read and enjoyed the book, which was relatively short and to the point. The Movie however was mostly 2 hours of impossibly bad tedium. I'll never forget the spaceship landing scene where a model of a space ship descends at a glacial pace towards a moon base or something while music builds and build and builds... until nothing happens and we cut to the next scene.
I believe they were referring specifically to Mammoths diets. However it is unlikely that mammoths were sustaining themselves by eating pine needles and bark. According to an article I'll link below we've been able to analyze stomach contents and permafrost samples of the appropriate period and such fare doesn't get mentioned at all.
Pretty much. For the last 60+ years the idea of a surprise land invasion hasn't been practical. Aerial surveillance has been too good for any of our enemies to have a prayer of approaching US borders without being spotted a long ways off, along with MAD from nuclear weapons. Land invasion has been out of the picture for a very long time. If an invasion force was spotted they would be met out in the field, not at the borders of a base. The US borders are huge, it's way to much to try and fortify against military incursions. So we've always relied on meeting the foe in the field.
The USA has plenty of weapons and ammo for fighting policing actions around the world at any given time. But you start to talk about fighting a for real war against a large opponent and suppliers would have to ramp up ammunition production quickly once the first few months pass. Also the portion of the military that is actually meant as a fighting force is pretty small. I know in the AF a decade or so ago the ratio was something like 1:7 for combat personnel to support personnel.
Hell if you want to talk about highly secured facilities and how laughable that actually is, there was a nuclear facility a few years back that had a bunch of Nuns break into it and spray paint anti-nuke graffiti everywhere before eventually being found.
Slashdot Mirror
The only thing I remember hearing about specifically was making smaller tunnels. Smaller tunnels require removing a lot less material, and also mean having to use less material to line the tunnel. With a focus on faster transport and using the available space efficiently they should be able to get throughput as good or better than the traditional large tunnels.
I think the idea is to setup a punching dummy that the public can rage at. Once someone expresses their rage on social media they are less likely to do something more that would require an expensive response from the MTA, like actually fixing whatever it is that is broken.
I know when I was in the military there was an annual workforce survey that was basically a joke. The survey had two purposes. First it served as an outlet for troops that were frustrated about something to think their voice was getting heard. Secondly it gave leadership a source of numbers they could twist however they wanted to justify themselves.
The only time I've ever actually seen a bellhop his services were greatly appreciated. We were late arriving to our hotel and were supposed to be somewhere else in a couple minutes for a dinner reservation. The bellhop took our luggage and delivered it to our room while we headed to our dinner.
If there is one job I would love to subsidize it's editors of any stripe. I am always amazed at the poor quality of editing that I see basically everywhere. It is clearly evident that the world needs more editors, and Slashdot summaries are a great example of this.
So far as I can tell Sign Spinners are used for two reasons. First, to exploit an area where a business can't legally post an advertisement permanently. Secondly, to draw extra attention to an advertisement by paying some poor schmuck to stand around all day holding the sign.
I'm from the same age group I believe. School sports largely sucked. I participated a bit but it wasn't geared towards being fun. We'd spend hours doing all kinds of crap practice activities during the week so that we could have a chance at playing in a game on Friday night for a couple hours. I let myself get peer pressured into it, but I'll definitely do my best to keep my own kids out of it. If the point of the sports teams were actually to build confidence and team skills while having fun, then I'd be all for them. But usually they're really just a program for trying to get a couple kids scholarships and boost a schools reputation for a little while. I really do regret wasting part of my youth on sports.
That said I had plenty of time out doors and being active. I learned to sail small boats, and canoes. As a Scout I did tons of camping in all weather and even hiked part of the Appalachian Trail. I learned to hunt with bow and arrow, as well as rifles. I learned and got to use construction and land clearing skills, far more than I would have liked. I spent countless hours playing PC games and reading books. A teacher asked us to keep track of our reading and it turned out I read more than 50 novels in the course of that school year.
Once upon a time I was visiting New York City with my kid Sister when I saw a gaggle of teenage girls carrying diaper bags. When I pointed them out to my sister and wondered aloud why they all had diaper bags when there wasn't a child in sight, she about lost it. Apparently the latest fashion at the time in purses was these really large bags made with bright floral and polka dot prints. Those bags were high fashion and easily cost more than the entirety of my adult wardrobe. Kids spending large sums of money on fashion items only to come out looking like middle class soccer moms is kind of hilarious.
So far as finer control goes; Every manual seat I've ever used had a fixed number of positions for sliding forward and back. So adjusting the seat is always about finding the one fixed position that is good enough for you. In a power seat you typically have a much greater variety in the number of positions and can in theory pick the setting that suites you perfectly. It isn't a matter of physical dexterity, but the capacity for adjustment of the mechanism.
Just to be clear, Gerrymandering is an abomination that both major US political parties actively engage in. As citizens we shouldn't tolerate it from either of them. However there isn't really a good way to clean up that mess without changing up our entire electoral system, so we're likely stuck with it.
The big advantage that I see for power seats over standard is the degree of adjustability. Not that my experience is encyclopedic or anything, but I've only ever seen 3 degrees of adjustment in a non-power seat. You can typically slide the seat forward or back, change the seat back angle, and sometimes adjust a lumbar support. With power seats you typically get all that and add on seat height adjustment as well as seat tilt. Additionally power seats usually have much finer control over those various settings.
I don't think creatives are the intended target there. The music and movie industry that continues to rip off the people actually creating stuff is normally what people are up in arms about. Whether or not you can take down those conglomerates without wrecking most of the independent artists is certainly a real concern. Even if the industry falls apart completely though I'm sure we'll still have more artists creating stuff than can find customers willing to support them. That is how it has always seemed to be anyways.
Fossilization of remains is a pretty rare occurrence. Such preservation requires very specific conditions. As another poster mentioned Dinosaurs were around for longer than they've been extinct, tens of millions of years ago. Yet finding new deposits of fossilized dinosaur remains is newsworthy. Then you have things like the Coelacanth that we thought went extinct with the dinosaurs because we couldn't find newer fossils. Turns out Coelacanth's are still around, they just weren't in the right places to leave fossils, we think.
It is entirely possible that small and relatively primitive civilizations could have existed before we evolved. They could have simply failed to leave any fossil records. Or even if they did there is no guarantee that we'd have found it by now? Consider how much of the landmass has been thoroughly searched geologically for fossils. Then think about how we haven't even fully mapped the oceans except for some very crude sonar stuff.
It's just more protection money, you already pay lots of protection money and just aren't used to looking at it like that. In most every country taxes support things like Military, Police, Courts, Legislatures, and innumerable other agencies that serve the common good.
If the robot worker apocalypse does ever manifest it is very likely that the only peaceful solution will be some sort of UBI. It could just so happen that human workers end up being replaced as human workers expire. I find it more likely that some big advancements will happen that lead to rapidly replacing human workers with automation. At that point whether or not UBI is protection money or not becomes more of an academic question, because you'll either pay it or take your chances. The one thing I'm most certain of in that kind of situation is that the unemployed and destitute would be very unlikely to simply lie down and die somewhere out of sight.
Potatoes are actually a good example of how you can change the method for farming them to get incredibly higher yield for your area. Although I don't expect this project to be interested in doing root vegetables as they aren't a big spoilage risk.
To farm potatoes in a small space you start your plants in the bottom of a garbage can with a little soil. As the plant grows you add more soil. Eventually you end up with a plant on top of a can full of dirt and potatoes. I've read about people getting 25 to 40 pounds of potatoes from a single can this way.
It is the Fed and State that should be figuring the taxes, and whether or not you should get a refund at the end of the year. Practically everything is already reported to the Government already anyways. If you have ever actually looked at your 1099 forms you'd notice that it says they've already sent a copy to the IRS. If you get a tax document from anyone you can be sure that they've already sent a copy to the IRS because it's required by law.
In the USA our entire tax filing system is basically a giant trap. By requiring that each and every wage earner file taxes every year the IRS gets to collect fees and fines from people who make honest mistakes. They also get to keep extra taxes that should have been refunded because the tax payer was being lazy or not aware of how best to account for everything. The current system essentially requires each person to be a tax expert at some level or, and this is key, pay an expert to file their taxes.
Practically every year there is a bill to fix this facet of the tax system and it is killed every time by lobbyists for companies like H&R Block. It is in their best interest that filing taxes be complex and confusing to lay people. More than half of the tax paying population every year pays someone else to figure out their taxes, and that's a pretty huge customer base to lose. I use a system that costs me about $40, and that is a cheap solution. I've seen bills for tax preparation that were over $200 for a relatively simple filing from a big name tax prep company. Even if the 79 million people that pay for tax prep used the cheap $40 solution that'd be an industry worth $3.16 billion annually.
The IRS should have a system where each tax payer can log in and review their taxes for the year. It should have an option to submit changes that the IRS didn't know about like deductions and cash income. Keep it open year round and let people update their records as the year progresses. When you get to the end of the year everyone gets a few months to make any last minute changes and certify their records. Then the Government sends out the refund checks/direct deposits your funds, or sends you a bill for what you owe. For people that don't have access to the internet the government can mail the tax records they've received at the end of the year, and you can mail them back with any changes or confirmation that it's correct.
Federal and State income taxes are only part of the taxes being levied on people. The lower your income the larger the portion of your money that goes to those other taxes. Where I live for example there is a flat 10% sales tax that is levied on everything, even groceries. Where I grew up only food items that were considered a luxury were taxed, things like soda and prepared food.
Some kind of food chain collapse I would guess. Given how we routinely fail to comprehend modern ecosystems I would honestly be very surprised if we ever figured out such ancient systems with much certainty.
It bears noting that #1 doesn't necessarily mean buying better internet access at home. The file could always be transferred to a removable drive and then take that to somewhere with a better upload connection.
It was on video. But I seem to remember the perspective being on a level with the base as if you were standing on the surface of whatever celestial body it was.
It would be distinctly unwise to put the president out there on the front lines. Replacing the commander and chief is too much work, and would cause too much disruption to the daily function of the government. Congress Critters however are relatively cheap and easy to replace, and in reality, as a group, hold most of the power in our system of government. There are enough of them though that losing a few here and there wouldn't interrupt business much.
When political leaders were required to risk themselves in war they were motivated in large part by the possibility of personal gain, or preserving their life. In our modern system the carrot of personal gain has been largely removed, and the US hasn't faced anything like an existential threat since the world wars. Although even during the world wars it wasn't clear that losing would mean being wiped out.Which is why you see the people in charge staying as far from combat as possible, they aren't required to put any skin in the game.
There is a lot to be said though for keeping war messy. If it becomes to sterile and clean then the disincentive to engage in it starts to wane. In the US we already have enough trouble reigning in war hawks that want to use military might to resolve every conflict. Being in their positions of power largely protects them and their families from the dangers of war while they get to engage in profiting from it. Personally I'd like to see every congress critter be required to serve on the front lines as a non-combatant in a, non-leadership position, whenever the troops deploy. I figure after a few rounds of that they'd have little trouble finding peaceful resolutions to more conflicts.
There is definitely a cost burden to using electronic forms of payment. However there is also costs associated with accepting cash. We are usually oblivious to that cost simply because it has traditionally always been the baseline. Checks, Credit, and Debit have been viewed as add-ons. Now however they can be used as a baseline alternative. So which form of payments a vendor supports comes down purely to what their customers are willing to use and which is affordable for the vendor.
The costs of using cash that I can think of are:
Time, making deposits.
Time, withdraws for change.
Time, to process transaction (this can vary depending on technology).
Time, to process end of day activities like counting out tills.
Money, employee theft.
Exposure to robberies, and associated risk of violence.
Now I'm not saying that the real costs of accepting cash out weighs that of other forms of payment in all situations. I would wager though that depending on circumstances taking only electronic payments could work out to be cheaper, and quite likely safer. The fees associated with electronic payments are not pure profit for a middleman as they pay for fraud protection and such.
You must have some fast terminals or networks in your area. Where I live the chip card transactions always feel like they take forever. A number of places I frequent actually reverted to the old system because it was holding up the line too much during the lunch rush.
I've never seen Lawrence of Arabia so don't have an opinion on that. The issue in particular for the scene I mentioned is that it adds nothing at all to the movie. It doesn't progress the plot, it doesn't reveal anything related to the story, and it doesn't entertain.
It's only purpose I could imagine would be to try and entertain but it fails there because the entire scene is a model of a space ship gradually lowering to a landing, and a few blinking lights. There is music that constantly sounds like it is building to something that never actually happens. You could film a constipated person trying unsuccessfully to take a dump with the same music playing and actually be more successful at entertaining. Know that I think about it, I guess that is the opposite of a jump scare, a scene with all kinds of buildup and no payoff. On top of that the scene drags on for what feels like forever, which I seem to remember being a theme of the movie.
The movie was clearly made to be a work of art, not entertainment. It just so happens it's the kind of art I don't value. I would wager with a little work it could have been cut down to fit a twilight zone episode and been just as thought provoking. Like I said the book was pretty short and I enjoyed that well enough to read the rest of the series.
2001 is a prime example of a movie that doesn't age well. I read and enjoyed the book, which was relatively short and to the point. The Movie however was mostly 2 hours of impossibly bad tedium. I'll never forget the spaceship landing scene where a model of a space ship descends at a glacial pace towards a moon base or something while music builds and build and builds... until nothing happens and we cut to the next scene.
I believe they were referring specifically to Mammoths diets. However it is unlikely that mammoths were sustaining themselves by eating pine needles and bark. According to an article I'll link below we've been able to analyze stomach contents and permafrost samples of the appropriate period and such fare doesn't get mentioned at all.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technol...
Pretty much. For the last 60+ years the idea of a surprise land invasion hasn't been practical. Aerial surveillance has been too good for any of our enemies to have a prayer of approaching US borders without being spotted a long ways off, along with MAD from nuclear weapons. Land invasion has been out of the picture for a very long time. If an invasion force was spotted they would be met out in the field, not at the borders of a base. The US borders are huge, it's way to much to try and fortify against military incursions. So we've always relied on meeting the foe in the field.
The USA has plenty of weapons and ammo for fighting policing actions around the world at any given time. But you start to talk about fighting a for real war against a large opponent and suppliers would have to ramp up ammunition production quickly once the first few months pass. Also the portion of the military that is actually meant as a fighting force is pretty small. I know in the AF a decade or so ago the ratio was something like 1:7 for combat personnel to support personnel.
Hell if you want to talk about highly secured facilities and how laughable that actually is, there was a nuclear facility a few years back that had a bunch of Nuns break into it and spray paint anti-nuke graffiti everywhere before eventually being found.