You get "scammed" on insurance because you likely have to pay for full coverage as a requirment of your loan. The bank doesn't want to get scammed if you are killed in an accident with an uninsured motorist or you are at fault. No one's a perfect driver all of the time, crap happens, insurance is a necessary evil.
You get "scammed" on a loan because your collateral is an asset that will depreciate very fast. The bank is likely loaning you 10 grand or more on a for profit basis, they don't do it out of charity and need to recover their expenses as well as make a profit.
You get "scammed" on depreciation because a new car is a status symbol. Generally the more complex a machine is the less and less value it retains as it ages. This doesn't necesarily account for the steep decline in value many vehicles experience. But a free market where the majority of people will pay a premium for a brand new car accounts for the difference.
The solution of course is to not buy a new car. Or more accurately don't buy a car that you can not afford to buy outright with cash.
In the last twelve years I have owned 6 different cars. Two were totalled out in accidents where I was not at fault and was reimbursed for the vehicle by the faulted driver's insurance company. I've spent $17,000 for vehicles and repairs in that time and recieved $5,800 from sales of those vehicles and insurance reimbursements. One of those cars was a Porsche 944, which I eventually gave to a nephew, it was the costliest of my cars but also the one that I drove the longest, five years or so. My current car is a 1990 Corolla and it even has working AC!
So for twelve years of car ownership I've paid $11,200.
That would be comically awesome if we as a species managed to catastrophically degrade the orbit of our planet by bringing too much crap back with us! Although I suspect the amount of stuff we'd have to bring back would be almost impossibly large, the Earth masses a good deal already. Of course ultimately I wouldn't care if the Earth's orbit degraded and it plunged into the sun. I'd rather see us spread out and infect... erm colonize the stars.
Not all of our time sleeping is spent in the important parts of sleep. Or at least as far as we understand it only about half of our sleep time is spent in stages that are necessary for our body and mind to recuperate. If you can train your self to sleep soundly and get in all your stage cycles with enough time in the deeper cycles four hours should be enough.
I remember reading something in my Psychology class in college where some study showed that a person could get by on four hours of sleep a night. That is provided that they properly trained their system to rapidly fall into REM sleep patterns. One of the details I remember was that the subjects had to slowly work their sleep time down, a minute or two at a time. Trying to do it suddenly didn't seem to work and led to plenty of bad side affects of sleep deprivation.
Have you been checked for Sleep Apnea. I seem to remember seeing results from a study that up to 40% of the worlds population might have it to some degree or another.
I have Mild Sleep Apnea which means I don't warrant an expensive C-PAP machine but I do wear an oral device to help keep my airway unrestricted. A friend of mine has Severe Sleep Apnea and he has to use a C-PAP or he'll sleep for 12+ hours and still be exhausted.
Even with my device I pretty much never wake up feeling refreshed though. It's always a drag to get out of bed and get going, unless there is something I am very excited about doing that day.
You could ask the same question in regards to why we don't have sensory organs to detect in the Infrared spectrum like pit vipers do. It would certainly have been an evolutionary edge. The answer is probably that what we have developed is good enough.
The Bailouts have helped prop up people or businesses who were or are still operating in financially irresponsible ways. While yes I have benefitted in some way from the bailouts the people benefitting most are the biggest offenders.
Space exploration can and likely will lead to advancements that benefit our civilization tremendously. Just because you can't see the benefit now does not mean it won't happen. And no one is likely to starve to death in this country unless they foolishly allow it to happen to themselves. In which case they would likely starve anyways. It's not like the money spent on space exploration is put on the next capsule to the stars.
They can harvest and send back resources to hopefully prevent violent conflict. Granted I don't think a utopian world of unlimited resources is really possible nor that it would precent war. People will always seek to one up each other somehow and find a reason to go to war for ultimate bragging rights.
We need humans involved in exploring our solar system because they can think entirely independantly and react appropriately. The farther away our robotic explorers go the longer the delay and the more diffucult proper control becomes.
I'm for a hybrid program. Lets get people in space and in orbits around the other planets controling robotic explorers on the surface. Putting boots onto the surface could always be an eventual option but we should definitely send down robots first.
It's to help stave of frostbite on your nose. Even if the mucus feels cold it's warmer than the ambient temperature. A good strategy to keep your nose warmer is to breathe in through your mouth and out yoru nose. This can prevent your nose from running, at least until the temperature gets even colder.
My family used to raise a couple hundred chickens for slaughter each spring. We used the same breed that Tyson uses, and trust me putting them in a cage where they don't have to move around is what makes them happy. We raised ours in a coop with an open door to a free range area. They would venture outside maybe once in their eight week life. They would instead fight over sitting in the optimum location with the shortest path between the food and water feeders. They put on eight pounds of edible meat in as many weeks, they don't have time to do anything except eat and sleep all day.
I'm more interest in how many Libraries of Congress we'd have to burn to recharge it, or rather how many Volts we could charge to full with our one Library of Congress.
They figured mileage based on the idea that you only drive the car 50 miles at a time and that it will be fully charged between each trip. Since the first 40 miles of any trip after a full charge are done without consuming gas this boosts the MPG rating hugely. The Volts real MPG while it's burning fuel is around 50MPG. So in a 50 mile drive it will use up the battery and then use.2 gallons of gas.
So they said well you can make five trips on one gallon of gas so that puts it's MPG up at around 250 MPG. The number, 230, that they are touting is a bit lower but I'm just using the roundish numbers here. But that's the basic method that they used. The people marketing the Volt know it's a completely BS number but are using it while they can.
That said, the Volt would easily get me to work and back for a complete work week without having to recharge it once. So I would probably get a MPG rating nearing infinity.
I seriously considered adopting instead of having children of my own. There are several downsides to adopting though. Your child could wind up having disabilities because the birth mother made poor choices, this a half selfish arguement though in that those kids could still really use a loving and succesful parent and the reason not to be that parent is that it'd be tougher. It is also a very long and drawn out process to adopt in some places. It can be extremely expensive, as can having a baby in the hospital but there insurance will foot most of the bill.
My wife and I have one child so far and plan to have another few. That is of course conditional on us being able to support that many. But I am still thinking about possibly adopting the last couple of children. I'll be getting on in age and the likelyhood of a child having disabilities because of that will be getting pretty high.
Actually way back when the tobacco industry did advertise that smoking was good for you lungs. Granted it was before lung cancers was a known concern but I highly doubt that they had any data showing that smoking improved the function or health of the lungs.
Are you kidding me? Chairforce... erm Air Force pilots do not under go the same kind of small arms training that a Marine does. Every branch of service has their own basic training courses. When I went through basic we spent most of one whole day learning about the M16A2 and got to shoot about 100 rounds at the range. The targets were all at simulated range. Meaning that it's a big sheet of paper with targets of varying size and shape.
I knew a girl who enlisted in the army to drive trucks and even she had an entire month of weapons training, some of which was with a.50 cal machine gun. The only people I am aware of in the Air Force that do anything more than qualify with small arms are Security Forces, Para Rescue and Combat Controllers,
All that said I'm not sure that adjusting for shots past 100 yards is something that anyone but snipers need to worry about in todays typical fighting environment.
Well I believe in an afterlife, but I don't know that it exists, so I see no point in allowing myself to die if I don't have to. And I believe that the god that created us gave us the intellect to do the things we do. And so long as it doesn't hurt or restrain another individual I can't see a reason why s/he wouldn't want us to improve ourselves and pursue our own goals. So I have no moral objections to making myself into a cyborg, or even a completely mechanical robot controled by my 'consience' or an electronic copy of my brain.
The other advantage that simulating the brain would give us is that the elictrical signals and such in our simulation would move and process much faster than the chemical reactions in our brains do. It would be inherently faster than the flesh equivilant.
This is likely be true for the first few artificial brains we develop. But these brains shuld be far and away faster than our own chemicaly limited brains. So we could clock them at a speed possibly thousands of times faster than what our brains can handle and condense their initial learning phases into a much shorter time frame. Once the brain is trained up to a specific level you could let it start learning on it's own in the real world.
That's why I'd like to see it implemented in such a way that once my wet brain starts to deteriorate and lose functionality those processes would be picked up by the chip. Eventually all the brain bunctions would be handled by the chip but there hopefully wouldn't be any defining point in time where there would be two copies of me functioning at the same time. This would likely allow me to gradually become a cyborg and be unaware of no longer being me.
We may not be able to build a chip that it's self perfectly mimicks the human brain. But we can very likely build a chip that can process the software necessary to simulate the brain. Think of it as a programming problem where you have object classes for each major type of cell in the brain. You then have to keep track of which ones are connected to which others at any one time. The real difficulty will be in allowing the individual cells to change their behavior over time and depending on the stimulus they have individually recieved. Otherwise the brain simulation would not be capable of learning and growing, but would instead be stuck at whatever development stage it was created at.
Within the next couple decades. My biggest dream is to live long enough to be able to explore other planets and solar systems. Replacing our brains with chips is likely the only way we'll be capable of doing this within the next few hundred years, if not ever.
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You get "scammed" on insurance because you likely have to pay for full coverage as a requirment of your loan. The bank doesn't want to get scammed if you are killed in an accident with an uninsured motorist or you are at fault. No one's a perfect driver all of the time, crap happens, insurance is a necessary evil.
You get "scammed" on a loan because your collateral is an asset that will depreciate very fast. The bank is likely loaning you 10 grand or more on a for profit basis, they don't do it out of charity and need to recover their expenses as well as make a profit.
You get "scammed" on depreciation because a new car is a status symbol. Generally the more complex a machine is the less and less value it retains as it ages. This doesn't necesarily account for the steep decline in value many vehicles experience. But a free market where the majority of people will pay a premium for a brand new car accounts for the difference.
The solution of course is to not buy a new car. Or more accurately don't buy a car that you can not afford to buy outright with cash.
In the last twelve years I have owned 6 different cars. Two were totalled out in accidents where I was not at fault and was reimbursed for the vehicle by the faulted driver's insurance company. I've spent $17,000 for vehicles and repairs in that time and recieved $5,800 from sales of those vehicles and insurance reimbursements. One of those cars was a Porsche 944, which I eventually gave to a nephew, it was the costliest of my cars but also the one that I drove the longest, five years or so. My current car is a 1990 Corolla and it even has working AC!
So for twelve years of car ownership I've paid $11,200.
That's because they are pandering to the **AA instead. The DoJ is set to become the acting counsel for those industries in the near future.
That would be comically awesome if we as a species managed to catastrophically degrade the orbit of our planet by bringing too much crap back with us! Although I suspect the amount of stuff we'd have to bring back would be almost impossibly large, the Earth masses a good deal already. Of course ultimately I wouldn't care if the Earth's orbit degraded and it plunged into the sun. I'd rather see us spread out and infect... erm colonize the stars.
In theory the election is the vetting process for that position.
Not all of our time sleeping is spent in the important parts of sleep. Or at least as far as we understand it only about half of our sleep time is spent in stages that are necessary for our body and mind to recuperate. If you can train your self to sleep soundly and get in all your stage cycles with enough time in the deeper cycles four hours should be enough.
I remember reading something in my Psychology class in college where some study showed that a person could get by on four hours of sleep a night. That is provided that they properly trained their system to rapidly fall into REM sleep patterns. One of the details I remember was that the subjects had to slowly work their sleep time down, a minute or two at a time. Trying to do it suddenly didn't seem to work and led to plenty of bad side affects of sleep deprivation.
Have you been checked for Sleep Apnea. I seem to remember seeing results from a study that up to 40% of the worlds population might have it to some degree or another.
I have Mild Sleep Apnea which means I don't warrant an expensive C-PAP machine but I do wear an oral device to help keep my airway unrestricted. A friend of mine has Severe Sleep Apnea and he has to use a C-PAP or he'll sleep for 12+ hours and still be exhausted.
Even with my device I pretty much never wake up feeling refreshed though. It's always a drag to get out of bed and get going, unless there is something I am very excited about doing that day.
You could ask the same question in regards to why we don't have sensory organs to detect in the Infrared spectrum like pit vipers do. It would certainly have been an evolutionary edge. The answer is probably that what we have developed is good enough.
Comically enough I'm not sure if I've seen a single Sheep outside of the state fair here in Alabama. I did see them quite often in Ohio though.
The Bailouts have helped prop up people or businesses who were or are still operating in financially irresponsible ways. While yes I have benefitted in some way from the bailouts the people benefitting most are the biggest offenders.
Space exploration can and likely will lead to advancements that benefit our civilization tremendously. Just because you can't see the benefit now does not mean it won't happen. And no one is likely to starve to death in this country unless they foolishly allow it to happen to themselves. In which case they would likely starve anyways. It's not like the money spent on space exploration is put on the next capsule to the stars.
They can harvest and send back resources to hopefully prevent violent conflict. Granted I don't think a utopian world of unlimited resources is really possible nor that it would precent war. People will always seek to one up each other somehow and find a reason to go to war for ultimate bragging rights.
We need humans involved in exploring our solar system because they can think entirely independantly and react appropriately. The farther away our robotic explorers go the longer the delay and the more diffucult proper control becomes.
I'm for a hybrid program. Lets get people in space and in orbits around the other planets controling robotic explorers on the surface. Putting boots onto the surface could always be an eventual option but we should definitely send down robots first.
It's to help stave of frostbite on your nose. Even if the mucus feels cold it's warmer than the ambient temperature. A good strategy to keep your nose warmer is to breathe in through your mouth and out yoru nose. This can prevent your nose from running, at least until the temperature gets even colder.
My family used to raise a couple hundred chickens for slaughter each spring. We used the same breed that Tyson uses, and trust me putting them in a cage where they don't have to move around is what makes them happy. We raised ours in a coop with an open door to a free range area. They would venture outside maybe once in their eight week life. They would instead fight over sitting in the optimum location with the shortest path between the food and water feeders. They put on eight pounds of edible meat in as many weeks, they don't have time to do anything except eat and sleep all day.
I'm more interest in how many Libraries of Congress we'd have to burn to recharge it, or rather how many Volts we could charge to full with our one Library of Congress.
What they did is pretty rediculous.
They figured mileage based on the idea that you only drive the car 50 miles at a time and that it will be fully charged between each trip. Since the first 40 miles of any trip after a full charge are done without consuming gas this boosts the MPG rating hugely. The Volts real MPG while it's burning fuel is around 50MPG. So in a 50 mile drive it will use up the battery and then use .2 gallons of gas.
So they said well you can make five trips on one gallon of gas so that puts it's MPG up at around 250 MPG. The number, 230, that they are touting is a bit lower but I'm just using the roundish numbers here. But that's the basic method that they used. The people marketing the Volt know it's a completely BS number but are using it while they can.
That said, the Volt would easily get me to work and back for a complete work week without having to recharge it once. So I would probably get a MPG rating nearing infinity.
/nitpick Dubai is an Emirate, although the name is comonly used for the main City in the Emirate, not a country.
I seriously considered adopting instead of having children of my own. There are several downsides to adopting though. Your child could wind up having disabilities because the birth mother made poor choices, this a half selfish arguement though in that those kids could still really use a loving and succesful parent and the reason not to be that parent is that it'd be tougher. It is also a very long and drawn out process to adopt in some places. It can be extremely expensive, as can having a baby in the hospital but there insurance will foot most of the bill.
My wife and I have one child so far and plan to have another few. That is of course conditional on us being able to support that many. But I am still thinking about possibly adopting the last couple of children. I'll be getting on in age and the likelyhood of a child having disabilities because of that will be getting pretty high.
Actually way back when the tobacco industry did advertise that smoking was good for you lungs. Granted it was before lung cancers was a known concern but I highly doubt that they had any data showing that smoking improved the function or health of the lungs.
Are you kidding me? Chairforce... erm Air Force pilots do not under go the same kind of small arms training that a Marine does. Every branch of service has their own basic training courses. When I went through basic we spent most of one whole day learning about the M16A2 and got to shoot about 100 rounds at the range. The targets were all at simulated range. Meaning that it's a big sheet of paper with targets of varying size and shape.
I knew a girl who enlisted in the army to drive trucks and even she had an entire month of weapons training, some of which was with a .50 cal machine gun. The only people I am aware of in the Air Force that do anything more than qualify with small arms are Security Forces, Para Rescue and Combat Controllers,
All that said I'm not sure that adjusting for shots past 100 yards is something that anyone but snipers need to worry about in todays typical fighting environment.
Well I believe in an afterlife, but I don't know that it exists, so I see no point in allowing myself to die if I don't have to. And I believe that the god that created us gave us the intellect to do the things we do. And so long as it doesn't hurt or restrain another individual I can't see a reason why s/he wouldn't want us to improve ourselves and pursue our own goals. So I have no moral objections to making myself into a cyborg, or even a completely mechanical robot controled by my 'consience' or an electronic copy of my brain.
The other advantage that simulating the brain would give us is that the elictrical signals and such in our simulation would move and process much faster than the chemical reactions in our brains do. It would be inherently faster than the flesh equivilant.
This is likely be true for the first few artificial brains we develop. But these brains shuld be far and away faster than our own chemicaly limited brains. So we could clock them at a speed possibly thousands of times faster than what our brains can handle and condense their initial learning phases into a much shorter time frame. Once the brain is trained up to a specific level you could let it start learning on it's own in the real world.
That's why I'd like to see it implemented in such a way that once my wet brain starts to deteriorate and lose functionality those processes would be picked up by the chip. Eventually all the brain bunctions would be handled by the chip but there hopefully wouldn't be any defining point in time where there would be two copies of me functioning at the same time. This would likely allow me to gradually become a cyborg and be unaware of no longer being me.
We may not be able to build a chip that it's self perfectly mimicks the human brain. But we can very likely build a chip that can process the software necessary to simulate the brain. Think of it as a programming problem where you have object classes for each major type of cell in the brain. You then have to keep track of which ones are connected to which others at any one time. The real difficulty will be in allowing the individual cells to change their behavior over time and depending on the stimulus they have individually recieved. Otherwise the brain simulation would not be capable of learning and growing, but would instead be stuck at whatever development stage it was created at.
Within the next couple decades. My biggest dream is to live long enough to be able to explore other planets and solar systems. Replacing our brains with chips is likely the only way we'll be capable of doing this within the next few hundred years, if not ever.