It's not just quitting that can land you in prison, you get to live under the UCMJ. You aren't entitled to a jury of your peers either. During the first few years you are often expected to live in on base dormitories which are inspectable at any time, and have wages garnished to pay for a chow hall whether or not you choose to use it. Required to maintain specific standards both for fitness and dress/grooming, and I would add that at least for the AF the PT standards are weighted heavily to punish people that aren't slim regardless of physical capability. They can demand over time whenever without offering compensation of any kind, they will tell you that they straight up own you 24/7/365. And of course change your place of duty to riding shotgun on a convoy through a war zone or any other place they feel like it with a week or two for RR every few months where you might get to see your family. Then there is the ability to declare a stop loss order when you near the end of your contract and keep you in until they decide they're done with you. Even once you're out they can call you back to active duty at anytime for a few years.
The US military still essentially runs company towns. A relative of mine and his family were living in one when he was unexpectedly separated. They were notified on a Thursday and had to be out of their home by Monday.
In my experience the Broadband is pretty widely available in cities and their suburbs. Frequently you can even get it on the fringes of those places. Usually it's when you get out among the farm fields that you have a problem finding a provider.
That's contrary to what I've seen. Usually it's touted as a replacement for all or nearly all current welfare systems. The single exception usually being some kind of disability system to ensure that such people are taken care of.
The lottery example isn't really pertinent in discussing UBI. Sure people are typically very bad at managing money. That fact is evidenced by the majority of households not having enough savings to handle a $500 unexpected expense. I've even seen lots of examples of people I would categorize as rich living hand to mouth. But being handed a million dollars or more out of the blue is such an unimaginable circumstance that most people make poor decisions with it. Those decisions though aren't made in a vacuum, typically there is family and friends coming out of the woodwork begging for a handout. Then there are the scammers and con artists that specifically target lottery winners. The reason all that happens though is because someone has just gotten a small mountain of money that is completely out of the ordinary, UBI would be the opposite.
First, UBI is usually put forward as a very modest or small amount of money, $1.5k or less a month. And while I say per month, there is no reason that it couldn't be distributed on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Second, the 'U' is for Universal, that means everyone gets it. That means you wouldn't see a mountain of people dog piling on top of a recipient trying to beg a piece of the pie. I think we would definitely see some market turbulence from land lords trying to immediately siphon off most of the UBI right at the start in the form of rising rents, but that should even out as everything balances.
You can keep telling yourself that you're better than poor people simply because you're smarter and more hard working, but it's typically not true. Poverty is a trap and begets more poverty. The obvious truth is that as your income increases you have to spend a smaller and smaller proportion on non-discretionary expenses. When you are poor non-discretionary spending represents 90% plus of your income. That leaves you very little room, even when living a monastic lifestyle, to save for emergencies. To complicate matters even more the poor are pushed into or left behind in areas that turn into ghettos of a sort. Property values decline, tax bases shrink, parental involvement at school declines, and so the schools go to hell. People that watched their parents barely eek out a living trying to work within the system, are tempted to try a different route and are less well equipped to try and escape the poverty cycle. On top of all that they're left with working the most menial and physically exhausting jobs with shit schedules. I think about how unmotivated I am too cook dinner after a "long" day of sitting in the office and can only imagine how bad it must be for someone that has to put in a 12 hour day of actual physical labor.
You can definitely attribute poverty to poor decisions but that ignores the fact that people that start higher in the income brackets get more favorable treatment and are often protected from their poor decisions. One of my brothers had a couple encounters with law enforcement as a teenager that would have any child of color in serious trouble, my brother was just warned to behave better. The same brother married a psycho who divorced him and left him with more than $20k in credit card debt. He also blew nearly $40K from an inheritance on a POS truck that fell apart inside of five years. Then there was the five years when he worked for a buddy that was paying him as a 1099, and he didn't bother paying any payroll taxes until the IRS came after him. Today he has a well paying job and a nice house in an expensive suburb, largely because he met a girl who's family networked him a good welding job.
I've known plenty of poor people and only a few of them were in poverty because of their own idiocy. Most of them by and large were victims of circumstances beyond their control.
The sad fact is that our economy hasn't worked like that in a very long time. Even 30 years ago I can remember seeing plenty of older people working low pay, hourly, menial jobs. There simply are not enough better jobs for workers to move up to. So you end up with over qualified mature workers filling a lot of those crap jobs because they usually have responsibilities and will simply accept what they can get to keep from becoming homeless. And frankly these kind of jobs have never been meant for any purpose other than to wring what profitable work can be gotten out of a person to the advantage of the employer. The only time when what you say would have been true would be when apprentice systems were in place for most professions. Sure people might tell themselves those things but that is more about making the work palatable, because management past the front line supervisor sure as hell doesn't care one whit about their minions career.
I agree with you that arrested does not equate to being a criminal, but I've also met plenty of people who don't agree with that. Getting wrongly arrested can seriously screw with a persons life both in the long and short term. Missing a single day of work, or even being significantly late can lose a person a job. On top of that there is the cost of paying bail or a bail bondsman, and possibly a lawyer. And god help you and your family if you end up wrongly convicted.
You're absolutely right that cops aren't perfect and like simple solutions. Which should make it incredibly obvious that giving them broad access to facial recognition technology is a bad idea. Our crime rates are sufficiently low enough that something like this will easily cause more harm than good in our society.
That's not how a lineup usually works. For a lineup the cops put in their suspect(s) and then fill out the numbers with other people that could broadly fit the description. Then a witness tries to pick out the person(s) they saw. So the only people in the lineup are people the police already know aren't involved and people they already suspect for other reasons. Facial recognition would give you a list of people who aren't already suspect. That could be a good thing if there is no other leads to be pursuing, otherwise it's just muddying the waters. At worst, even when one of the hits is the guilty party, it is providing a list of innocent people to subject to police harassment.
I believe you mean "freely available" as there are tons of more recent works available for purchase. Having to purchase them of course obviously puts them out of competition with libraries and into opposition to book stores. Even as a store front though the internet is still frequently a disappointment. I don't read nearly as much as I used to and I still find series that are only partially available as ebooks. Recently I was reading The Culture novels and found that books 4, 5, and 6 apparently aren't available digitally, but books 1, 2, 3, and 7 are... I really just don't get how that happens, there is no good reason to not sell digital copies of some books in a series.
Assemblers of Infinity, by Kevin J Anderson and Doug Beason, touch on the subject very briefly. Their story passes on a colony ship though for a rather more interesting method.
Narcos is a funny counter example. I heard a lot of swearing that was toned down a lot in the subtitles. Sometimes a whole string of epitaphs would get turned into a one or two word insult.
Humans are undoubtedly what started the problem, however removing the humans from the area doesn't mean the rats magically pack up and leave as well. While rats are quite happy to live around humans and take advantage of our proclivities, they don't need us to flourish. Rats thrive where they have abundant food sources and little to no predators to contend with. There have been cases of removing rats and keeping them out, but this has thus far relied on natural barriers and a very high level of awareness.
I really don't have any experience with how difficult it is or isn't to legally immigrate to any country. What I do have is friends who were legally in the immigration system for more than a decade before finally getting everything sorted out. One friend in particular immigrated as a young child, grew up here, married a citizen, had multiple children via that marriage, and wasn't granted citizenship until she was nearly 30. During that time her records were lost multiple time by the government, which required her to resubmit all her documentation and pay fees to correct their mistakes. At one point she was stopped by border patrol at an internal checkpoint and deported with her citizen children to Mexico because her records had been lost again.
That all happened more than a decade ago but I doubt very much that it has gotten any better in the intervening years. In my opinion it shouldn't matter if other countries are worse about it than the USA. There is clearly lots of room for improvement and pointing out that others are even worse is a cop out. The poster you're replying to though was probably thinking about the European Union where moving between member countries is rather simple.
You could get convection back by putting the reactor in a spinning part of your habitat/ship or whatever. That does of course complicate things as the reactor is likely to be very heavy and it'd have to be counter weighted in some way. Cooling would be down to just radiative, and I think that'd always be the biggest hurdle. You'd need a very large system of cooling panels to off load enough heat.
The stock valuation is definitely high because of speculation, but it's long term not short. If they can actually maintain sales and production of 5000 Model 3's a week that will generate profits around a couple billion a year, working from the assumption that their gross profit margin is only 20%. If production and sales go higher and stay there the margins will be better, and could be better than we estimate anyways. Speculation in Tesla is driven by the fact that every day it seems to be coming closer to realistically eating a huge share of the automotive market.
Most of the cases I hear about it's the DA's Office actively fighting exoneration. The Police can get involved too depending on who's ego or reputation it would tarnish. There are plenty of cases where groups like The Innocence Project have spent the time and money to prove that someone is innocent but the DA's fight it like hell, going so far as to try and use Alford Pleas so they can keep a conviction on their record.
I don't expect the Police to keep investigating old closed cases on their own. But when new evidence comes to light the least they can do is not hinder the work that other people are doing.
This always brings up an interesting conundrum in my mind. I think that we frequently give too much power to the States to run stuff, like medicaid, and disproportionate representation in the Senate. Then I think of issues like gay marriage or medical and recreational marijuana, where the States have led the way.
That argument is akin to "I was just following orders!" If a law is immoral then it should not be followed or enforced. The Government is not some magical entity, it is composed of individual people who are tasked with doing its work. Of course the problem in that regard is that our country is not some monolithic homogeneous culture where everyone shares the same beliefs in regards to what is right or wrong.
From what I understand of the family separation issue, the law has allowed for the current situation for a long while. However family separations are just one of several options given in the law, but Trump has ordered that only the harshest option be used. In my opinion this is short sighted, foolish, and plainly inhumane. I wouldn't set out to do some home repairs and throw out my whole toolbox except the rubber mallet.
I was curious as to how much UPS makes per employee and it looks like for 2017 it was around $16,500 per employee at the very best. So the profit margins on package delivery already look pretty slim even when operating at the largest of scales, they have 454,000+ employees. This is definitely looking like a horrible idea for anyone looking to start their own business.
Every time I see an article talking about how the prices are coming down I go and look, and surprise everything is still really expensive. For instance only a few sketchy places are advertising new 1080's for under the MSRP that was listed a year ago.
I get that producing new planes and parts like wing assemblies would likely require rebuilding factories and production lines. That said the total cost for the A-10s was about 20% of the projected cost for the F-35 on a per plane basis. A not insignificant part of that cost would have been the cost of developing the plane to begin with. Combined with better materials and processes we might actually be able to do a whole new run of A-10s more cheaply than before even with having to build new facilities and train personnel.
Do you have any citations for the A-10 being expensive to maintain? When I googled that topic I found news articles saying that the per hour operational cost for the A-10 was about a third of the projected costs for the F-35. The USAF wants to ditch the A-10 because it represents money they can't spend on sexy new fighter jets. The top brass in the USAF has traditionally been heavy with fighter jocks, that leads to a group think that just wants more sleek jets. If the age of the A-10 air frames was really a problem we could just contract to build a whole new batch of them, it isn't like the design needs updating.
I'd bet that at least in the USA the biggest reason this doesn't happen is the convenience factor. On the business side plastic bottles are probably cheaper to buy than just the cost of cleaning old bottles, not to mention the cost of transport.
Number 4 really depends on how successful you are at saving. My Father retired a few years back and so far because of the required minimum distributions he has yet to get into lower tax brackets. The earlier you start and the more you are saving the better the odds that your retirement income will be higher than your working income. There is also the concern that at some point in the future as the baby boomers retire the tax base could shrink and require raising taxes.
I had a friend in the military that was stuck working on their service desk immediately after they stood up a major portal service. When people signed up for a portal account they were automatically assigned an account name based on their first and last name. If there was already an account matching that, then a sequential number was added at the end. One day he fielded a call from an irate O-3 who was incensed that a lowly E-3 had the username he wanted, a username without the number at the end. And of course the username in contention belonged to my friend, who being stunned by the shear audacity of such a demand promptly told him to f*ck off and hung up.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually we have another such system that is frequently lauded and praised, indeed people volunteer for it all the time, the military.
It's not just quitting that can land you in prison, you get to live under the UCMJ. You aren't entitled to a jury of your peers either. During the first few years you are often expected to live in on base dormitories which are inspectable at any time, and have wages garnished to pay for a chow hall whether or not you choose to use it. Required to maintain specific standards both for fitness and dress/grooming, and I would add that at least for the AF the PT standards are weighted heavily to punish people that aren't slim regardless of physical capability. They can demand over time whenever without offering compensation of any kind, they will tell you that they straight up own you 24/7/365. And of course change your place of duty to riding shotgun on a convoy through a war zone or any other place they feel like it with a week or two for RR every few months where you might get to see your family. Then there is the ability to declare a stop loss order when you near the end of your contract and keep you in until they decide they're done with you. Even once you're out they can call you back to active duty at anytime for a few years.
The US military still essentially runs company towns. A relative of mine and his family were living in one when he was unexpectedly separated. They were notified on a Thursday and had to be out of their home by Monday.
In my experience the Broadband is pretty widely available in cities and their suburbs. Frequently you can even get it on the fringes of those places. Usually it's when you get out among the farm fields that you have a problem finding a provider.
That's contrary to what I've seen. Usually it's touted as a replacement for all or nearly all current welfare systems. The single exception usually being some kind of disability system to ensure that such people are taken care of.
The lottery example isn't really pertinent in discussing UBI. Sure people are typically very bad at managing money. That fact is evidenced by the majority of households not having enough savings to handle a $500 unexpected expense. I've even seen lots of examples of people I would categorize as rich living hand to mouth. But being handed a million dollars or more out of the blue is such an unimaginable circumstance that most people make poor decisions with it. Those decisions though aren't made in a vacuum, typically there is family and friends coming out of the woodwork begging for a handout. Then there are the scammers and con artists that specifically target lottery winners. The reason all that happens though is because someone has just gotten a small mountain of money that is completely out of the ordinary, UBI would be the opposite.
First, UBI is usually put forward as a very modest or small amount of money, $1.5k or less a month. And while I say per month, there is no reason that it couldn't be distributed on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Second, the 'U' is for Universal, that means everyone gets it. That means you wouldn't see a mountain of people dog piling on top of a recipient trying to beg a piece of the pie. I think we would definitely see some market turbulence from land lords trying to immediately siphon off most of the UBI right at the start in the form of rising rents, but that should even out as everything balances.
You can keep telling yourself that you're better than poor people simply because you're smarter and more hard working, but it's typically not true. Poverty is a trap and begets more poverty. The obvious truth is that as your income increases you have to spend a smaller and smaller proportion on non-discretionary expenses. When you are poor non-discretionary spending represents 90% plus of your income. That leaves you very little room, even when living a monastic lifestyle, to save for emergencies. To complicate matters even more the poor are pushed into or left behind in areas that turn into ghettos of a sort. Property values decline, tax bases shrink, parental involvement at school declines, and so the schools go to hell. People that watched their parents barely eek out a living trying to work within the system, are tempted to try a different route and are less well equipped to try and escape the poverty cycle. On top of all that they're left with working the most menial and physically exhausting jobs with shit schedules. I think about how unmotivated I am too cook dinner after a "long" day of sitting in the office and can only imagine how bad it must be for someone that has to put in a 12 hour day of actual physical labor.
You can definitely attribute poverty to poor decisions but that ignores the fact that people that start higher in the income brackets get more favorable treatment and are often protected from their poor decisions. One of my brothers had a couple encounters with law enforcement as a teenager that would have any child of color in serious trouble, my brother was just warned to behave better. The same brother married a psycho who divorced him and left him with more than $20k in credit card debt. He also blew nearly $40K from an inheritance on a POS truck that fell apart inside of five years. Then there was the five years when he worked for a buddy that was paying him as a 1099, and he didn't bother paying any payroll taxes until the IRS came after him. Today he has a well paying job and a nice house in an expensive suburb, largely because he met a girl who's family networked him a good welding job.
I've known plenty of poor people and only a few of them were in poverty because of their own idiocy. Most of them by and large were victims of circumstances beyond their control.
The sad fact is that our economy hasn't worked like that in a very long time. Even 30 years ago I can remember seeing plenty of older people working low pay, hourly, menial jobs. There simply are not enough better jobs for workers to move up to. So you end up with over qualified mature workers filling a lot of those crap jobs because they usually have responsibilities and will simply accept what they can get to keep from becoming homeless. And frankly these kind of jobs have never been meant for any purpose other than to wring what profitable work can be gotten out of a person to the advantage of the employer. The only time when what you say would have been true would be when apprentice systems were in place for most professions. Sure people might tell themselves those things but that is more about making the work palatable, because management past the front line supervisor sure as hell doesn't care one whit about their minions career.
I agree with you that arrested does not equate to being a criminal, but I've also met plenty of people who don't agree with that. Getting wrongly arrested can seriously screw with a persons life both in the long and short term. Missing a single day of work, or even being significantly late can lose a person a job. On top of that there is the cost of paying bail or a bail bondsman, and possibly a lawyer. And god help you and your family if you end up wrongly convicted.
You're absolutely right that cops aren't perfect and like simple solutions. Which should make it incredibly obvious that giving them broad access to facial recognition technology is a bad idea. Our crime rates are sufficiently low enough that something like this will easily cause more harm than good in our society.
That's not how a lineup usually works. For a lineup the cops put in their suspect(s) and then fill out the numbers with other people that could broadly fit the description. Then a witness tries to pick out the person(s) they saw. So the only people in the lineup are people the police already know aren't involved and people they already suspect for other reasons. Facial recognition would give you a list of people who aren't already suspect. That could be a good thing if there is no other leads to be pursuing, otherwise it's just muddying the waters. At worst, even when one of the hits is the guilty party, it is providing a list of innocent people to subject to police harassment.
I believe you mean "freely available" as there are tons of more recent works available for purchase. Having to purchase them of course obviously puts them out of competition with libraries and into opposition to book stores. Even as a store front though the internet is still frequently a disappointment. I don't read nearly as much as I used to and I still find series that are only partially available as ebooks. Recently I was reading The Culture novels and found that books 4, 5, and 6 apparently aren't available digitally, but books 1, 2, 3, and 7 are... I really just don't get how that happens, there is no good reason to not sell digital copies of some books in a series.
Assemblers of Infinity, by Kevin J Anderson and Doug Beason, touch on the subject very briefly. Their story passes on a colony ship though for a rather more interesting method.
Narcos is a funny counter example. I heard a lot of swearing that was toned down a lot in the subtitles. Sometimes a whole string of epitaphs would get turned into a one or two word insult.
Humans are undoubtedly what started the problem, however removing the humans from the area doesn't mean the rats magically pack up and leave as well. While rats are quite happy to live around humans and take advantage of our proclivities, they don't need us to flourish. Rats thrive where they have abundant food sources and little to no predators to contend with. There have been cases of removing rats and keeping them out, but this has thus far relied on natural barriers and a very high level of awareness.
I really don't have any experience with how difficult it is or isn't to legally immigrate to any country. What I do have is friends who were legally in the immigration system for more than a decade before finally getting everything sorted out. One friend in particular immigrated as a young child, grew up here, married a citizen, had multiple children via that marriage, and wasn't granted citizenship until she was nearly 30. During that time her records were lost multiple time by the government, which required her to resubmit all her documentation and pay fees to correct their mistakes. At one point she was stopped by border patrol at an internal checkpoint and deported with her citizen children to Mexico because her records had been lost again.
That all happened more than a decade ago but I doubt very much that it has gotten any better in the intervening years. In my opinion it shouldn't matter if other countries are worse about it than the USA. There is clearly lots of room for improvement and pointing out that others are even worse is a cop out. The poster you're replying to though was probably thinking about the European Union where moving between member countries is rather simple.
You could get convection back by putting the reactor in a spinning part of your habitat/ship or whatever. That does of course complicate things as the reactor is likely to be very heavy and it'd have to be counter weighted in some way. Cooling would be down to just radiative, and I think that'd always be the biggest hurdle. You'd need a very large system of cooling panels to off load enough heat.
The stock valuation is definitely high because of speculation, but it's long term not short. If they can actually maintain sales and production of 5000 Model 3's a week that will generate profits around a couple billion a year, working from the assumption that their gross profit margin is only 20%. If production and sales go higher and stay there the margins will be better, and could be better than we estimate anyways. Speculation in Tesla is driven by the fact that every day it seems to be coming closer to realistically eating a huge share of the automotive market.
Most of the cases I hear about it's the DA's Office actively fighting exoneration. The Police can get involved too depending on who's ego or reputation it would tarnish. There are plenty of cases where groups like The Innocence Project have spent the time and money to prove that someone is innocent but the DA's fight it like hell, going so far as to try and use Alford Pleas so they can keep a conviction on their record.
I don't expect the Police to keep investigating old closed cases on their own. But when new evidence comes to light the least they can do is not hinder the work that other people are doing.
This always brings up an interesting conundrum in my mind. I think that we frequently give too much power to the States to run stuff, like medicaid, and disproportionate representation in the Senate. Then I think of issues like gay marriage or medical and recreational marijuana, where the States have led the way.
That argument is akin to "I was just following orders!" If a law is immoral then it should not be followed or enforced. The Government is not some magical entity, it is composed of individual people who are tasked with doing its work. Of course the problem in that regard is that our country is not some monolithic homogeneous culture where everyone shares the same beliefs in regards to what is right or wrong.
From what I understand of the family separation issue, the law has allowed for the current situation for a long while. However family separations are just one of several options given in the law, but Trump has ordered that only the harshest option be used. In my opinion this is short sighted, foolish, and plainly inhumane. I wouldn't set out to do some home repairs and throw out my whole toolbox except the rubber mallet.
I was curious as to how much UPS makes per employee and it looks like for 2017 it was around $16,500 per employee at the very best. So the profit margins on package delivery already look pretty slim even when operating at the largest of scales, they have 454,000+ employees. This is definitely looking like a horrible idea for anyone looking to start their own business.
Every time I see an article talking about how the prices are coming down I go and look, and surprise everything is still really expensive. For instance only a few sketchy places are advertising new 1080's for under the MSRP that was listed a year ago.
I get that producing new planes and parts like wing assemblies would likely require rebuilding factories and production lines. That said the total cost for the A-10s was about 20% of the projected cost for the F-35 on a per plane basis. A not insignificant part of that cost would have been the cost of developing the plane to begin with. Combined with better materials and processes we might actually be able to do a whole new run of A-10s more cheaply than before even with having to build new facilities and train personnel.
Do you have any citations for the A-10 being expensive to maintain? When I googled that topic I found news articles saying that the per hour operational cost for the A-10 was about a third of the projected costs for the F-35. The USAF wants to ditch the A-10 because it represents money they can't spend on sexy new fighter jets. The top brass in the USAF has traditionally been heavy with fighter jocks, that leads to a group think that just wants more sleek jets. If the age of the A-10 air frames was really a problem we could just contract to build a whole new batch of them, it isn't like the design needs updating.
I'd bet that at least in the USA the biggest reason this doesn't happen is the convenience factor. On the business side plastic bottles are probably cheaper to buy than just the cost of cleaning old bottles, not to mention the cost of transport.
Number 4 really depends on how successful you are at saving. My Father retired a few years back and so far because of the required minimum distributions he has yet to get into lower tax brackets. The earlier you start and the more you are saving the better the odds that your retirement income will be higher than your working income. There is also the concern that at some point in the future as the baby boomers retire the tax base could shrink and require raising taxes.
I had a friend in the military that was stuck working on their service desk immediately after they stood up a major portal service. When people signed up for a portal account they were automatically assigned an account name based on their first and last name. If there was already an account matching that, then a sequential number was added at the end. One day he fielded a call from an irate O-3 who was incensed that a lowly E-3 had the username he wanted, a username without the number at the end. And of course the username in contention belonged to my friend, who being stunned by the shear audacity of such a demand promptly told him to f*ck off and hung up.