The issue is that it is cheaper by far than the current methods available. We could applaud this because it could be construed as a way to lower the cost of law enforcement. But in reality we all know that it just means they'll just keep spending the same if not more and just keep eyes on more people. Which moves us that much closer to a police state..
Why are we even assuming a return trip? I guess there is the highly improbable possibility of that planet having some physical good or resource that would be worth shipping back. But planning that into the process as a given seems a huge waste.
Sending a ship there would be tremendously expensive but I doubt there would be a lack of volunteers, even knowing that there is no return and that living long enough to actually arrive is very unlikely. Make it a massive spinning colony ship with several hundred or thousand crew members. Put a few million eggs and spem from unrelated donors in the freezer and send them on their way with ion drives or some such powered by thorium reactors.
$2 for the materials to make some expensive designer item could be true but I don't really have any experience with that though it sounds implausibly low to me.
My counter example would be my highschool football Jersey. That thing endured some pretty rough use and came out in pretty good condition. It was around $50 though. I definitely agree that the commemorative jerseys are way overpriced, but that doesn't mean that they can't be very well made and require some expensive materials and or manufacturing.
This could appear to be a waste of resources if you could show that otherwise they would have gone towards the other problems you mentioned. But that is generally not how budgetting works out at the federal level. So in this case it was probably more about either working on this bust or dozens of smaller ones. And if you believe that they have shown undue preference towards protecting the NFL's profits in this case then please unlighten us as to why you feel that way.
Nope, you are free to believe whatever you choose. Stating your belief as if it were established fact is just a bit trollish when it's essentially an accusation.
Which does bring up one of my pet peeves about religions in my experience, even the LDS church. Which is the insistence on "knowing" something as opposed to just "believing" in it. For instance saying "I believe that Christ was ressurrected" might not be good enough for some people even though it's obviously more honest than asserting a belief as fact.
Meh, the same is largely true of many if not all religions the world over. Mormonism is just a relatively new one and so gets picked on a lot for both being new and different from the mainstream. Saying that a religion should never change or adapt is kind of like saying that we shouldn't write new laws.
Not that wikipedia is infallible or anything but the list of women who may have been married to Joseph Smith don't show any 12 year olds. There are some of unknown age, and a couple 14 year olds. Are you just trolling as normal or do you have some kind of source?
In anycase one of the core beliefs of Mormonism is Free Agency, which agrees with the law of the US, that any contract entered into against ones free will is invalid. So if you are trying to insinuate that forced marriages are A-Okay under the Mormon beliefs, you would be wrong. And while I would definitely not advocate marriages involving people under the age of 18, yeck I wouldn't mind seeing it revised to 23 or so, the age at which societies have allowed it in the past are in the past and not something we can fairly judge them for.
Anyways, this is getting off topic, did you have something actually pertinent to add to the discussion?
That's not entirely accurate. There was no declared war, and they were not at the top of the list of groups to be concerned about. That said we haven't been in a war since World War II. Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the rest have been policing actions of one sort or another.
Being at war in reality though doesn't require declarations from both sides, or maybe even any side. When one organized group systematically starts commiting violence against another I'd call it a war.
It's not like there needs to be a war declared for hostilities to start anyways. In fact usually the hostilities are what start the war. Remember Pearl Harbor? Even though Japan told their Ambassador to deliver the declaration of war before the first bombs fell, they had started their attack by launching their fleet with Pearl Harbor as the intended target weeks if not months before hand.
A less aggressive measure could be to simply reduce the taxes on sale of stock that has been owned for some sufficiently long period. Maybe start taxing it as regular income if sold within one year, then lower the rate bit by bit until either there is no taxes at all or a minimum of some sort.
It's sad that those people with those skill sets may no longer be able to work in those professions and earn a living. But it's not our job as a society to prop them up and pass laws to make their chosen profession economically tenable. I want to be paid to sit at home all day and play games and watch movies, where's the legislation to make "coach potato" a workable profession?
People by and large are violating copyright because they don't care about it, which is to say that they don't value the IP enough to pay for it or jump through extra hoops just to be nice when they want to try something out. Or at least don't value it as much as the owners seem to think they should.
I'm actually for keeping copyright laws around, just with much shorter time frames. Maybe 7 years initially, then allow extensions of 1 year with a fee paid into a national public library fund that scales such that anything more than 20 years is practically impossible.
The only position (giggle) that I've ever heard from LDS leadership, or seen in print, has been that what a couple does in the bedroom is nobody elses damn business.
The one caveat to that of course is that they still need to abide by "the law of chastity". Which is that you will not have any kind of sexual relations with anyone but your lawfully wedded spouse. Which of course they'll have to amend whenever gay marriage finally gets nationwide acceptance under the law.
I have gathered from what older people have said in my presence that at one time or another some church leader may have actually explicitly forbidden anything but missionary position. And I've seen a number of books regarding sexual hangups among members in my wifes book collection, she's a Clinical Social Worker. But I haven't heard or seen anything in any kind of official capacity in the last 20 years other than sticking to the law of chastity and minding your own business.
1. "large laundry list" is comically incorrect, you can probably look up the entire text of the "secret" stuff online. I'd wager it'd take less than 20 minutes to read the entire text version. People might write mountains of stuff to explain it themselves, but the actual material is vanishingly small.
2. "not to be discussed with outsiders" is actually "Do not discuss outside of the temple". That is to say, do not discuss it between members anywhere but inside an actual dedicated Temple, which is different from the standard Chapel or meeting house. I can see the arguement that this has the same affect, and that could even be it's intention to some degree. The stated reason is that it's sacred. And even in this day and age where anyone can look it up online people at least in my experience will still abide by their promise to keep it sacred themselves and not discuss it outside of a Temple.
Just so you know, they don't need to have "strayed" as you put it to be open minded in the bedroom. Well in so far as it involves just a man and a woman who are married to each other, there is no constraint against props or costumes that I'm aware of. Some of the older folks are prudish about it I guess, but that's probably true in much of the US regardless of religion.
Now what's funny about that is the idea that essentially a few congresses of differing religous sects met together and debated and voted on what Jesus really meant for them to believe and do.... 300 years after the fact. Things like which scriptures were actually scripture and the nature of the Trinity. I'm too lazy too look it up but I believe the first of these was held because a Roman Emperor wanted a standardized state religion.
For a great example of how this kind of thing goes sideways quickly just look at the state of affairs in the USA. We actually started out with a written and distributed Constitution written to the days legal standard. Little more than 200 years later we've added all kinds of new laws, some of which flagrantly violate the spirit of the original document. And we've had access to the exact text the whole time, in the same language.
Compare that to the Christian scriptural writings, many of which are of uncertain authorship and date. Not to mention the difficulty in making true translations between languages when everyone has their own interpretation even when reading the same versions.
Just imagine how fucked we'd be if there was no surviving copies of the constitution, just bits and pieces of what people happened to write down about it, for hundreds of years before Congress wrote out our body of laws. Essentially there is no way to know, in the factual sense, that any church in existence today is anything but a crude approximation of what Christ actually established.
My wife will on occasion relate a story from when she was in grade school. Another girl was making fun of her for being Mormon, questioning how many Mothers she had. My wife replied that she had only ever had one, whereas the other girl was on her second or third Step Mom.
I suppose the arguement could be made that it's double dipping if the moneys you are paying capital gains taxes on were already subjected to corprate income taxes. But that could only really apply to things like dividends that are shares of corporate profit.
But most capital gains taxed income is likely from sales of stock and such. The price for a stock is not directly tied to the real world value of a corporations assets. In fact the stock is often more than 20 times the value of the company. So the justification that the money was already subject to corporate takes is pretty pretty thin with the exception of dividends. And that's ignoring the fiasco that is corporate taxes, where some huge companies get off not paying any (cough cough GE) while still being profitable for their shareholders.
And the whole investing is a patriotic activity and job creating thing is just silly too. I don't invest in the market because I want to make jobs and help some mega corp. I invest because it has a higher rate of return on average than a savings account. Just like I go to work because the paycheck is more than I could hope to earn sitting at home playing games and reading entertaining books. I invest my time in a job, which helps the economy blah blah blah, so why can't all my income from that be taxed at 15%? The simple answer is because I can't afford a stable of high powered lobbyist.
Actually one of the biggest reasons for the spotter is situational awareness. A Sniper needs to be focused on the target. The Spotter provides information about the target's vicinity, which a remote spotter could do. But the Spotter is also responsible for being aware of the area immediately around the team since the Sniper will be focused on an area hundreds of meters away. You know, benefits of the Buddy System and all that.
I can see this replacing the need for highly skilled and trained snipers for stationary targets. But I wonder whether or not it'll be able to adjust quickly enough for moving targets.
The bullet isn't calculating where the target will be, rather it is directing it's self to where ever that target is at the instant of it's calculation. If that target is moving erratically and or quickly enough it could be well beyond the ability of the smart bullet to correct it's course. They've already said that it's accuracy increases a good deal for targets over a mile away because it has more time to finely adjust it's aim. But how much change in the targets location does it take to overcome the bullets capability to change course.
I realize that these are challenges that human shooters already face. But our brains are able to see patterns and anticipate a targets motion and then send a bullet downrange to intercept a moving target. Whereas this bullet sounds like it could easily end up always trailing a moving target because it can't plot an intercept course.
This was actually already done in the initial attacks of the Iraq War. Going back and reading old news articles it doesn't appear to have been done with enough bombs to have worked, they only used two smaller bombs. I would imagine if we hit a facility with a dozen or so of our largest bunker busters, each a few seconds behind the first it'd work.
Are you washing your clothes with a pound of broken glass or something? The generic clothing I've purchased from Target has held up for years of daily wear. The only retailer that's sold me clothes that fell apart fast was Old Navy, and even there I have some shirts that I've been wearing for 7 years now.
I was in Best Buy a couple weeks ago. I went to buy a HDMI Mini C to HDMI A adapter or cable. Finding the cable proved to be a 40 minute fruitless search. I found 3 separate sections where they had cabling and adapters with HDMI stuff in each. All I managed to find on my own was a DVI to HDMI A adapter for $30. When I finally got a sales person to help he located the cable I needed pretty quickly, kudos to him! But it was buried among a mountain of other cables, no joke they must have had 200 identical HDMI A cables on their shelves all in the wrong spaces blocking other products.
So I guess my Customer Service experience was good. But like you said the store layout was bad, three separate locations for the same products. And the organization of the shelves was atrocious, 80% of the products out of place making it impossible for a customer to locate anything quickly.
I was in a different country once with some friends, one of whom wanted to do some shopping for a watch. I was impressed enough with the watch he picked out I decided I wanted one myself. The salesperson was a bit put out since he didn't have any more of that particular model and I wasn't interested in any of his other wares. We were going to be at that mall for a few hours, so he actually sent one of his people out to a sister store 40 minutes away to fetch another watch to sell me. We went and watched a movie and stopped by the store on our way out to buy my watch.
To this day that has been the best customer service experience at a retail location I've ever had. And it makes me a little sad to know that I'll never be able to give that store more business because it is literally on the other side of the world from where I live.
In one of my Technical Training classes we had a guy that was actively pacing back and worth in the back of the classroom tying to stay awake. He kept stumbling though and I was just waiting for him to really fall asleep and knock all of his teeth out or something.
I never had trouble staying awake in classes until I joined the military. I suspect it had to do with keeping you up till 11pm every night and having to be in formation ready for class at 4:30am
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The issue is that it is cheaper by far than the current methods available. We could applaud this because it could be construed as a way to lower the cost of law enforcement. But in reality we all know that it just means they'll just keep spending the same if not more and just keep eyes on more people. Which moves us that much closer to a police state..
On the positive side, pack animals can be delicous!
The article seemed to indicate that this was a new prototype for them to test. There were several mentions of ongoing testing of previous prototypes.
Why are we even assuming a return trip? I guess there is the highly improbable possibility of that planet having some physical good or resource that would be worth shipping back. But planning that into the process as a given seems a huge waste.
Sending a ship there would be tremendously expensive but I doubt there would be a lack of volunteers, even knowing that there is no return and that living long enough to actually arrive is very unlikely. Make it a massive spinning colony ship with several hundred or thousand crew members. Put a few million eggs and spem from unrelated donors in the freezer and send them on their way with ion drives or some such powered by thorium reactors.
$2 for the materials to make some expensive designer item could be true but I don't really have any experience with that though it sounds implausibly low to me.
My counter example would be my highschool football Jersey. That thing endured some pretty rough use and came out in pretty good condition. It was around $50 though. I definitely agree that the commemorative jerseys are way overpriced, but that doesn't mean that they can't be very well made and require some expensive materials and or manufacturing.
This could appear to be a waste of resources if you could show that otherwise they would have gone towards the other problems you mentioned. But that is generally not how budgetting works out at the federal level. So in this case it was probably more about either working on this bust or dozens of smaller ones. And if you believe that they have shown undue preference towards protecting the NFL's profits in this case then please unlighten us as to why you feel that way.
Nope, you are free to believe whatever you choose. Stating your belief as if it were established fact is just a bit trollish when it's essentially an accusation.
Which does bring up one of my pet peeves about religions in my experience, even the LDS church. Which is the insistence on "knowing" something as opposed to just "believing" in it. For instance saying "I believe that Christ was ressurrected" might not be good enough for some people even though it's obviously more honest than asserting a belief as fact.
Meh, the same is largely true of many if not all religions the world over. Mormonism is just a relatively new one and so gets picked on a lot for both being new and different from the mainstream. Saying that a religion should never change or adapt is kind of like saying that we shouldn't write new laws.
Not that wikipedia is infallible or anything but the list of women who may have been married to Joseph Smith don't show any 12 year olds. There are some of unknown age, and a couple 14 year olds. Are you just trolling as normal or do you have some kind of source?
In anycase one of the core beliefs of Mormonism is Free Agency, which agrees with the law of the US, that any contract entered into against ones free will is invalid. So if you are trying to insinuate that forced marriages are A-Okay under the Mormon beliefs, you would be wrong. And while I would definitely not advocate marriages involving people under the age of 18, yeck I wouldn't mind seeing it revised to 23 or so, the age at which societies have allowed it in the past are in the past and not something we can fairly judge them for.
Anyways, this is getting off topic, did you have something actually pertinent to add to the discussion?
That's not entirely accurate. There was no declared war, and they were not at the top of the list of groups to be concerned about. That said we haven't been in a war since World War II. Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq, and all the rest have been policing actions of one sort or another.
Being at war in reality though doesn't require declarations from both sides, or maybe even any side. When one organized group systematically starts commiting violence against another I'd call it a war.
It's not like there needs to be a war declared for hostilities to start anyways. In fact usually the hostilities are what start the war. Remember Pearl Harbor? Even though Japan told their Ambassador to deliver the declaration of war before the first bombs fell, they had started their attack by launching their fleet with Pearl Harbor as the intended target weeks if not months before hand.
A less aggressive measure could be to simply reduce the taxes on sale of stock that has been owned for some sufficiently long period. Maybe start taxing it as regular income if sold within one year, then lower the rate bit by bit until either there is no taxes at all or a minimum of some sort.
The answer is, Buggy Whip Manufacturer.
It's sad that those people with those skill sets may no longer be able to work in those professions and earn a living. But it's not our job as a society to prop them up and pass laws to make their chosen profession economically tenable. I want to be paid to sit at home all day and play games and watch movies, where's the legislation to make "coach potato" a workable profession?
People by and large are violating copyright because they don't care about it, which is to say that they don't value the IP enough to pay for it or jump through extra hoops just to be nice when they want to try something out. Or at least don't value it as much as the owners seem to think they should.
I'm actually for keeping copyright laws around, just with much shorter time frames. Maybe 7 years initially, then allow extensions of 1 year with a fee paid into a national public library fund that scales such that anything more than 20 years is practically impossible.
The only position (giggle) that I've ever heard from LDS leadership, or seen in print, has been that what a couple does in the bedroom is nobody elses damn business.
The one caveat to that of course is that they still need to abide by "the law of chastity". Which is that you will not have any kind of sexual relations with anyone but your lawfully wedded spouse. Which of course they'll have to amend whenever gay marriage finally gets nationwide acceptance under the law.
I have gathered from what older people have said in my presence that at one time or another some church leader may have actually explicitly forbidden anything but missionary position. And I've seen a number of books regarding sexual hangups among members in my wifes book collection, she's a Clinical Social Worker. But I haven't heard or seen anything in any kind of official capacity in the last 20 years other than sticking to the law of chastity and minding your own business.
Two corrections:
1. "large laundry list" is comically incorrect, you can probably look up the entire text of the "secret" stuff online. I'd wager it'd take less than 20 minutes to read the entire text version. People might write mountains of stuff to explain it themselves, but the actual material is vanishingly small.
2. "not to be discussed with outsiders" is actually "Do not discuss outside of the temple". That is to say, do not discuss it between members anywhere but inside an actual dedicated Temple, which is different from the standard Chapel or meeting house. I can see the arguement that this has the same affect, and that could even be it's intention to some degree. The stated reason is that it's sacred. And even in this day and age where anyone can look it up online people at least in my experience will still abide by their promise to keep it sacred themselves and not discuss it outside of a Temple.
Just so you know, they don't need to have "strayed" as you put it to be open minded in the bedroom. Well in so far as it involves just a man and a woman who are married to each other, there is no constraint against props or costumes that I'm aware of. Some of the older folks are prudish about it I guess, but that's probably true in much of the US regardless of religion.
Now what's funny about that is the idea that essentially a few congresses of differing religous sects met together and debated and voted on what Jesus really meant for them to believe and do.... 300 years after the fact. Things like which scriptures were actually scripture and the nature of the Trinity. I'm too lazy too look it up but I believe the first of these was held because a Roman Emperor wanted a standardized state religion.
For a great example of how this kind of thing goes sideways quickly just look at the state of affairs in the USA. We actually started out with a written and distributed Constitution written to the days legal standard. Little more than 200 years later we've added all kinds of new laws, some of which flagrantly violate the spirit of the original document. And we've had access to the exact text the whole time, in the same language.
Compare that to the Christian scriptural writings, many of which are of uncertain authorship and date. Not to mention the difficulty in making true translations between languages when everyone has their own interpretation even when reading the same versions.
Just imagine how fucked we'd be if there was no surviving copies of the constitution, just bits and pieces of what people happened to write down about it, for hundreds of years before Congress wrote out our body of laws. Essentially there is no way to know, in the factual sense, that any church in existence today is anything but a crude approximation of what Christ actually established.
My wife will on occasion relate a story from when she was in grade school. Another girl was making fun of her for being Mormon, questioning how many Mothers she had. My wife replied that she had only ever had one, whereas the other girl was on her second or third Step Mom.
I suppose the arguement could be made that it's double dipping if the moneys you are paying capital gains taxes on were already subjected to corprate income taxes. But that could only really apply to things like dividends that are shares of corporate profit.
But most capital gains taxed income is likely from sales of stock and such. The price for a stock is not directly tied to the real world value of a corporations assets. In fact the stock is often more than 20 times the value of the company. So the justification that the money was already subject to corporate takes is pretty pretty thin with the exception of dividends. And that's ignoring the fiasco that is corporate taxes, where some huge companies get off not paying any (cough cough GE) while still being profitable for their shareholders.
And the whole investing is a patriotic activity and job creating thing is just silly too. I don't invest in the market because I want to make jobs and help some mega corp. I invest because it has a higher rate of return on average than a savings account. Just like I go to work because the paycheck is more than I could hope to earn sitting at home playing games and reading entertaining books. I invest my time in a job, which helps the economy blah blah blah, so why can't all my income from that be taxed at 15%? The simple answer is because I can't afford a stable of high powered lobbyist.
Actually one of the biggest reasons for the spotter is situational awareness. A Sniper needs to be focused on the target. The Spotter provides information about the target's vicinity, which a remote spotter could do. But the Spotter is also responsible for being aware of the area immediately around the team since the Sniper will be focused on an area hundreds of meters away. You know, benefits of the Buddy System and all that.
I can see this replacing the need for highly skilled and trained snipers for stationary targets. But I wonder whether or not it'll be able to adjust quickly enough for moving targets.
The bullet isn't calculating where the target will be, rather it is directing it's self to where ever that target is at the instant of it's calculation. If that target is moving erratically and or quickly enough it could be well beyond the ability of the smart bullet to correct it's course. They've already said that it's accuracy increases a good deal for targets over a mile away because it has more time to finely adjust it's aim. But how much change in the targets location does it take to overcome the bullets capability to change course.
I realize that these are challenges that human shooters already face. But our brains are able to see patterns and anticipate a targets motion and then send a bullet downrange to intercept a moving target. Whereas this bullet sounds like it could easily end up always trailing a moving target because it can't plot an intercept course.
This was actually already done in the initial attacks of the Iraq War. Going back and reading old news articles it doesn't appear to have been done with enough bombs to have worked, they only used two smaller bombs. I would imagine if we hit a facility with a dozen or so of our largest bunker busters, each a few seconds behind the first it'd work.
Are you washing your clothes with a pound of broken glass or something? The generic clothing I've purchased from Target has held up for years of daily wear. The only retailer that's sold me clothes that fell apart fast was Old Navy, and even there I have some shirts that I've been wearing for 7 years now.
I was in Best Buy a couple weeks ago. I went to buy a HDMI Mini C to HDMI A adapter or cable. Finding the cable proved to be a 40 minute fruitless search. I found 3 separate sections where they had cabling and adapters with HDMI stuff in each. All I managed to find on my own was a DVI to HDMI A adapter for $30. When I finally got a sales person to help he located the cable I needed pretty quickly, kudos to him! But it was buried among a mountain of other cables, no joke they must have had 200 identical HDMI A cables on their shelves all in the wrong spaces blocking other products.
So I guess my Customer Service experience was good. But like you said the store layout was bad, three separate locations for the same products. And the organization of the shelves was atrocious, 80% of the products out of place making it impossible for a customer to locate anything quickly.
I was in a different country once with some friends, one of whom wanted to do some shopping for a watch. I was impressed enough with the watch he picked out I decided I wanted one myself. The salesperson was a bit put out since he didn't have any more of that particular model and I wasn't interested in any of his other wares. We were going to be at that mall for a few hours, so he actually sent one of his people out to a sister store 40 minutes away to fetch another watch to sell me. We went and watched a movie and stopped by the store on our way out to buy my watch.
To this day that has been the best customer service experience at a retail location I've ever had. And it makes me a little sad to know that I'll never be able to give that store more business because it is literally on the other side of the world from where I live.
I would disagree on the customer bases for the two being very different.
Someone that can and would spend $30,000 for a single passenger electric vehicle is probably not going to shy away from buying a Model S.
In one of my Technical Training classes we had a guy that was actively pacing back and worth in the back of the classroom tying to stay awake. He kept stumbling though and I was just waiting for him to really fall asleep and knock all of his teeth out or something.
I never had trouble staying awake in classes until I joined the military. I suspect it had to do with keeping you up till 11pm every night and having to be in formation ready for class at 4:30am