Except it was built by contractors, like Google would be, not by the government itself. I work for a government contractor and I used to be a an officer doing technical work in the Army. The government farms out anything more complicated than setting up a COTS office network, and quite frankly they wouldn't do badly to farm those out too.
To further your point, it is quite common for car dealerships to sell used cars that they receive in trade for their new cars. These used cars are often not the same brand as the dealership's "primary" brand. Hence would be neither odd nor wrong for "John Smith Ford" to want use the "Toyota" key word in the sales of all of their used Toyotas.
Are you serious? The courts have repeatedly held that anti-discrimination laws are enforceable. You can't ask questions about race, religion, certain medical conditions, all kinds of stuff. If you ask those questions to reference you'll open yourself to a really easy lawsuit.
Yes, but there are firm legal limits on questions you can ask references. Whether those references are provided by the potential employee or not. A dedicated search of my name on the Internet will reveal that I am not Christian. If an employer is biased against non-Christians, and does a through search, it could hurt me. They could never ask my references about my religion and get away with it. Now, as it happens, I'd rather not work for someone who wouldn't hire me solely based on my religion, but if I got laid off I might reconsider that stance after the third month of a Ramen diet. It should not, at any rate, even be in play.
The question McCain would never or could never answer about this wonderful plan of his was how he was going to get around the essential problem of health insurance "The people that need it most can afford it least". The elderly and ill are the most expensive part of of any health insurance plan. When I have a job and I'm part of a health care "group" my group provider is forced to provide care to everyone at the same rate. I pay the same as my cube-mate with the diabetes and the 72 year old women across the isle. Because of this I pay more than I would if I were in this on my own, but my cube-mate and the lady across the isle pay a reasonable amount for their coverage. In "free" insurance markets such as the existing non-employer provided coverage market, people like the ones in my example either pay through the nose or can't get coverage at all.
From a business point of view it makes perfect sense, charge the most to the people who are most likely to cost the most. if it seems likely that care will cost more that you could hope to make from the person, don't accept them at all. The government has a responsibility to look beyond such business concerns. If we don't cover the elderly, or do so only at extreme costs, what happens when we are elderly? If we don't cover the already sick, what happens when we become sick? All of us will get old. Most of us will experience a major health event at some point in our lives. What happens then? Our $5,000 tax credit, which seemed like a lot when we were young and healthy is small comfort when the insurance company cancels our coverage because we're diagnosed with a long-term illness, or simple grow to old to be profitable. Think it can't happen? Ask people in Florida or Louisiana what happens to your home insurance rates after a major storm.
Group plans work because they insist that the insurance company cover everyone in the group: the young and healthy (and profitable) along side the elderly and infirm (and less profitable). Everyone pays the same (which may be screwing you now, but will help you later), so no one is charged a completely outrageous amount. You might pay a few hundred or a thousand more a year now to cover your obese smoking cube-mate and his ilk, but you are ensured that next year your premiums won't go stratospheric because your baby was diagnosed with some terrible and expensive disease. If you're paying for your own insurance and the kid gets something awful, what do you think happens to your premiums the next year? or can you even insure him?
I was looking at legal means, because even if you want to make the argument that Pirate bay is OK for movies and music because of obscene industry profits, I'd like to make my favorite authors a few bucks. Very few of them are rich, and publishing companies aren't exactly rolling in money either most of the time. As to scanning a book to PDF, how do you recommend I do this without either a) spending hours scanning one page at a time, or b) tearing all the pages out and running them trough a document feeder? Please note that I said their was no way to "easily or non-destructively" get a book into digital format, not that there was no way at all. I put a CD in, run some software and ten minutes later I have MP3s and a usable CD. Doing the equivalent with a book will either take me long boring hours, or destroy my book.
I'm not expert on the Kindle or e-books, but it seems to me that if Amazon wants $10 a book, then this is a very different situation from digital music players. With a digital music player I can get music one of two ways. I can either purchase a traditional media format of the music, a CD, then rip the music into a file format that my device accepts; or I can pay for the music on a digital store (Ala iTunes), and download it directly in a player accepted format. In either case I am paying the same amount or possibly less for the music. I paid for my player separately, it's true, but I'm not expected to get all of my content from a store that charges more that a traditional CD would cost me. With the Kindle the ONLY source for content is Amazon. I can't buy a book from B&N and get the right to ALSO have a digital copy, and I can't (trivially or non-destructively) digitize the book myself. The available online store also (apparently, I'm just basing this on the article) charges me more than a paperback version of the book would cost. When I buy an album from iTunes it costs me less than the same thing would cost me on CD, not more. Plus I can put the tracks I bought on a CD if I chose (I'll get some compression loss perhaps, but it'll be usable at least).
Digital music, especially now that DRM is waning on it, generally provides me with MORE options than I had before. Digital books, at least as the technology stands now, seems to provide me with FEWER options. At a higher cost, plus the cost of the reader. The portability and storage capabilities are nice, and for books that are not available as trade paperbacks a $10 cost might be a deal, but in general it doesn't seem like the Kindle is economical yet.
And, as i pointed out elsewhere, video games are ideal for this kind of economy of scale. The vast majority of production cost for a game is up front. The actual "unit cost" is trivial. If you can sell 3 times as many for half the price, you make more money. If a game cost me $50 million to make, and each copy costs me $2 to get to a buyer, my break even point at $50 a copy is just over a million copies. My break even point at $25 a copy is just over 2.2 million copies. So if I can sell 3x as many copies at half the price I'm making WAY more money.
I definitely agree here. I never saw any of the end game content of the original WOW because I never made it to 60 before Burning Crusades came out. I didn't see much of the end game of BC either, because I didn't have much time to play early on in the BC time frame and never really caught up. I've seen (and enjoyed) A LOT of the WOTLK end game content because I got to 80 fairly early and found a good guild to the content with before i was 2 or 3 tier behind on gear. When the "mini-expansions" come out I know I'll be able to do the new Raids and dungeons because my gear is pretty decent from running current end game stuff.
I think the even better argument than the amount of entertainment you get is the number of units that company is likely to sell. Game companies tend to argue that they sell far fewer units than movie companies so they need to charge more per unit. The anecdotal evidence that the article presents suggests that they may be artificially limiting themselves. If you cut your price in half and sell 4x as many units (assuming reasonable distribution costs, which is generally the case in this industry) you've increased your profit tremendously. Valve noticed a 3000% short term increase. That's probably not sustainable over the long term, but it suggests that they could make a lot more sales if they went toward the movie industry model of cheaper, but sell more.
Remember that games share an important economic reality with movies. They are all upfront cost. When you pay $10,000 for a car, it probably cost $5000-6000 to make and ship; that's $4000-5000 per unit to split between profit and recouping the R&D and other upfront costs. When you buy a $50 game, it only cost say $1-2 to "make and ship" (as in pressing the CD, making the box, printing the manual, etc). Most of the money was spent upfront writing the game. That mean that if you sell a lot more units at a cheaper price, you make a lot more money. The main cost for you isn't in producing "units" it's in creating the content. That price was already fixed when the game went gold. I'm ignoring some stuff like ongoing support costs, but in general a game manufacturer makes something approaching "pure profit" (not profit per se, a lot of it has to go to cover costs incurred during development, but you get the idea) on every unit sold. I doubt they would even need to triple their sales to make double the money at half the price. Preliminary evidence seems to indicate that could do a good bit better than tripling their sales with such a price cut.
We lost the two net admins (we're big enough to have segregated systems and network roles). Thankfully the other sys admin and I had enough of an idea what was going on to keep from being a total disaster. But yes, it was definitely a documentation problem, they should have done a much better job. Losing both at once was a bit of a shock, especially since I had been here just over a month at the time and hadn't gotten much of the lay of the land myself.
This kinda falls into the single bus point of failure. You get hit by a bus, who knows those scripts? Even if it's not JUST you, a lack of documentation can hurt. We lost both of our network admins withing two weeks of each other. We had documentation, but like you they chose to leave somethings out of it because they worried about the wrong people using the information badly. Now we simply have to recreate both the information AND the knowledge and experience that led to the information. No one every thought it was a big deal that only those two people knew the info, because there were two of them. Oops.
The government has a responsibility to limit potential harm, not just direct harm. As sibling points out, driving while distracted significantly increases the risk that you will harm someone. No, you won't get in an accident every time you text while driving, but texting while driving significantly increases you risk of an accident. Since that accident will likely cause harm to someone else (either financial or medical), the government tries to limit the risky behavior. There is no similar law about texting while walking because you're not likely to kill anyone (except maybe yourself) by running into something on your walk. Your right to swing your arm ends at my face. Your right to take risks ends where those risks stand a good chance of getting me killed or injured.
As a side note: WTF? I got modded troll? The guy just admitted that I interrupted his post correctly. How as that a troll?
So wait... Are you saying that it should be OK for you to drive however you want because it's your car? That the government fascists are imposing on you for dictating that you actually pay attention when in control of 2000 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic moving 60-70 miles per hour? I do believe that this might be the worst personal freedom argument I've seen.
You're completely missing the point of "bail". It's not a punishment, it's a prod; a goad intended to ensure your appearance in court. You get it back at the conclusion of your trial regardless of whether or not you are found guilty. Other fines may be assessed if you are found guilty, and they may be equal to or even greater than the "bail" you paid, but you get that money back regardless.
So let us assume two men, one a high school drop out with (for all intents and purposes) no money, the other an industrialist with a few million in liquid or near liquid assets. Both men are accused of a white collar crime (we'll say the same crime for the sake of argument), both men given a one hundred thousand dollar bail. The broke man is either going to rot in jail or have to take out a short term loan (normally a "Bail bond") which is co-signed by some family member or (really good) friend. The person either CAN'T miss their court date (because they're being driven there by the cops), or has a strong motivator to be there. They don't want to hurt their family or friend or lose whatever collateral they put up for the loan. The industrialist on the other hand has put up a small fraction of his liquid assets. If he is guilty (or innocent but he feels the case against him is very strong), his motivation for sticking around is pretty slim. He could just up and leave, abandoning his money. To make matter worse, because the bail was only 2-3% of his available capital, he now has plenty of resources available to him for his fugitive run. Another 2-3 hundred grand and he has an untraceable fake passport, and a trip to somewhere tropical that we don't have an extradition treaty with.
Not worth it for something that may result in a year or two of jail maybe, but what about 5 or 6 years of jail? That's why bail amounts are adjusted based on both the seriousness of the crime and the resources available to the defendant (or should be), it's supposed to hurt if you break bail. Fines are a completely different argument. In that case I agree that basing them on income is unfair, but bail is always supposed to be enough to make running for it a less attractive option than facing trial.
You are correct. However this statement tends to ignore that fact that the secessions of the mid 19th century were about slavery. I find it very disingenuous when people ignore this fact. The Civil War (I love that name, it makes things sound so pleasant) was about a lot of things. Secession was the Causis Beli, but the southern states didn't just secede to see what would happen. They objected to how the some things were being done by the Federal Government. One of the most important of those things was Federal policy on slavery. Slavery had not been abolished, but the Federal Government had been leaning steadily more abolitionist, and the governments of most states believed that Lincoln would push a strongly abolitionist agenda. So they tried to leave before he could take their slaves away.
The leaving provoked the war, slavery policy (mostly, there were other, less important, factors as well) provoked the leaving.
I'm actually states-side now. I didn't mean to imply that I was currently in Baghdad. I got out in 2006. Thanks for the offer though and if YOU need anything next time you're OCONUS let ME know.
I'll take the "poorly modified" up-armored vehicles over a canvas passenger compartment on my patrol of Baghdad any day. When we were in Iraq in 2004-5 my brigade lost a few soldiers, but at least as many and probably more were saved by vehicle armor as were lost. The armor provided some maintenance headaches for sure, but I'd rather (and the mechanics, would rather, especially since they ran in the same vehicles when they went outside) the mechanics have to work a bit harder than having the fatality rate double. Would it have been better if we have an existing light armored fighting vehicle deployed to all of our troops? Yeah. Was the solution a damn sight better than the problem it fixed? Ohh yeah.
I don't know the history of the thing so maybe this is a new development, but I just heard on NPR yesterday that the prison guard's union is supporting an inmate class-action suit against the State of California to forcibly reduce prison populations. That doesn't sound like the actions of an organization trying to enforce overcrowding to improve overtime.
Pretty much, yes. I am unaware of any laws in Sweden that prevent you from having your stuff seized and searched and your reputation ruined if you are suspected of a crime (and they can gather enough evidence). This isn't an "the American Government are all Nazis" article it's a "Being investigated for a crimes sucks almost as much as being convicted" article. It's pretty much true anywhere. The Police in more "civilized" countries still search for evidence, they still arrest you before you are put on trial, and good attorneys still cost lots of money. The man's argument is undeniable. If the Police suspect you of a crime, they can make your life hard. If they can get enough evidence to search your premises, they can make your life VERY hard. If they can get enough evidence to arrest you, they can make your life MISERABLE. Even if you wind up getting acquitted, It will cost you time, reputation, and money. In Sweden, the United States, Canada, or the North Pole.
It's still arbitrary. Why water? Why not alcohol, or oxygen, or iron? We chose water for obvious reasons: it's a substance we all use, its freeze point is noticeable in nature and boiling point observable with minimal effort, etc, but we could have chosen to measure based on anything and we chose water. Similarly the gram and the meter are arbitrary amounts that became standards. You have to start somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Except it was built by contractors, like Google would be, not by the government itself. I work for a government contractor and I used to be a an officer doing technical work in the Army. The government farms out anything more complicated than setting up a COTS office network, and quite frankly they wouldn't do badly to farm those out too.
To further your point, it is quite common for car dealerships to sell used cars that they receive in trade for their new cars. These used cars are often not the same brand as the dealership's "primary" brand. Hence would be neither odd nor wrong for "John Smith Ford" to want use the "Toyota" key word in the sales of all of their used Toyotas.
Are you serious? The courts have repeatedly held that anti-discrimination laws are enforceable. You can't ask questions about race, religion, certain medical conditions, all kinds of stuff. If you ask those questions to reference you'll open yourself to a really easy lawsuit.
Yes, but there are firm legal limits on questions you can ask references. Whether those references are provided by the potential employee or not. A dedicated search of my name on the Internet will reveal that I am not Christian. If an employer is biased against non-Christians, and does a through search, it could hurt me. They could never ask my references about my religion and get away with it. Now, as it happens, I'd rather not work for someone who wouldn't hire me solely based on my religion, but if I got laid off I might reconsider that stance after the third month of a Ramen diet. It should not, at any rate, even be in play.
The question McCain would never or could never answer about this wonderful plan of his was how he was going to get around the essential problem of health insurance "The people that need it most can afford it least". The elderly and ill are the most expensive part of of any health insurance plan. When I have a job and I'm part of a health care "group" my group provider is forced to provide care to everyone at the same rate. I pay the same as my cube-mate with the diabetes and the 72 year old women across the isle. Because of this I pay more than I would if I were in this on my own, but my cube-mate and the lady across the isle pay a reasonable amount for their coverage. In "free" insurance markets such as the existing non-employer provided coverage market, people like the ones in my example either pay through the nose or can't get coverage at all.
From a business point of view it makes perfect sense, charge the most to the people who are most likely to cost the most. if it seems likely that care will cost more that you could hope to make from the person, don't accept them at all. The government has a responsibility to look beyond such business concerns. If we don't cover the elderly, or do so only at extreme costs, what happens when we are elderly? If we don't cover the already sick, what happens when we become sick? All of us will get old. Most of us will experience a major health event at some point in our lives. What happens then? Our $5,000 tax credit, which seemed like a lot when we were young and healthy is small comfort when the insurance company cancels our coverage because we're diagnosed with a long-term illness, or simple grow to old to be profitable. Think it can't happen? Ask people in Florida or Louisiana what happens to your home insurance rates after a major storm.
Group plans work because they insist that the insurance company cover everyone in the group: the young and healthy (and profitable) along side the elderly and infirm (and less profitable). Everyone pays the same (which may be screwing you now, but will help you later), so no one is charged a completely outrageous amount. You might pay a few hundred or a thousand more a year now to cover your obese smoking cube-mate and his ilk, but you are ensured that next year your premiums won't go stratospheric because your baby was diagnosed with some terrible and expensive disease. If you're paying for your own insurance and the kid gets something awful, what do you think happens to your premiums the next year? or can you even insure him?
I was looking at legal means, because even if you want to make the argument that Pirate bay is OK for movies and music because of obscene industry profits, I'd like to make my favorite authors a few bucks. Very few of them are rich, and publishing companies aren't exactly rolling in money either most of the time. As to scanning a book to PDF, how do you recommend I do this without either a) spending hours scanning one page at a time, or b) tearing all the pages out and running them trough a document feeder? Please note that I said their was no way to "easily or non-destructively" get a book into digital format, not that there was no way at all. I put a CD in, run some software and ten minutes later I have MP3s and a usable CD. Doing the equivalent with a book will either take me long boring hours, or destroy my book.
I'm not expert on the Kindle or e-books, but it seems to me that if Amazon wants $10 a book, then this is a very different situation from digital music players. With a digital music player I can get music one of two ways. I can either purchase a traditional media format of the music, a CD, then rip the music into a file format that my device accepts; or I can pay for the music on a digital store (Ala iTunes), and download it directly in a player accepted format. In either case I am paying the same amount or possibly less for the music. I paid for my player separately, it's true, but I'm not expected to get all of my content from a store that charges more that a traditional CD would cost me. With the Kindle the ONLY source for content is Amazon. I can't buy a book from B&N and get the right to ALSO have a digital copy, and I can't (trivially or non-destructively) digitize the book myself. The available online store also (apparently, I'm just basing this on the article) charges me more than a paperback version of the book would cost. When I buy an album from iTunes it costs me less than the same thing would cost me on CD, not more. Plus I can put the tracks I bought on a CD if I chose (I'll get some compression loss perhaps, but it'll be usable at least).
Digital music, especially now that DRM is waning on it, generally provides me with MORE options than I had before. Digital books, at least as the technology stands now, seems to provide me with FEWER options. At a higher cost, plus the cost of the reader. The portability and storage capabilities are nice, and for books that are not available as trade paperbacks a $10 cost might be a deal, but in general it doesn't seem like the Kindle is economical yet.
And, as i pointed out elsewhere, video games are ideal for this kind of economy of scale. The vast majority of production cost for a game is up front. The actual "unit cost" is trivial. If you can sell 3 times as many for half the price, you make more money. If a game cost me $50 million to make, and each copy costs me $2 to get to a buyer, my break even point at $50 a copy is just over a million copies. My break even point at $25 a copy is just over 2.2 million copies. So if I can sell 3x as many copies at half the price I'm making WAY more money.
I definitely agree here. I never saw any of the end game content of the original WOW because I never made it to 60 before Burning Crusades came out. I didn't see much of the end game of BC either, because I didn't have much time to play early on in the BC time frame and never really caught up. I've seen (and enjoyed) A LOT of the WOTLK end game content because I got to 80 fairly early and found a good guild to the content with before i was 2 or 3 tier behind on gear. When the "mini-expansions" come out I know I'll be able to do the new Raids and dungeons because my gear is pretty decent from running current end game stuff.
I think the even better argument than the amount of entertainment you get is the number of units that company is likely to sell. Game companies tend to argue that they sell far fewer units than movie companies so they need to charge more per unit. The anecdotal evidence that the article presents suggests that they may be artificially limiting themselves. If you cut your price in half and sell 4x as many units (assuming reasonable distribution costs, which is generally the case in this industry) you've increased your profit tremendously. Valve noticed a 3000% short term increase. That's probably not sustainable over the long term, but it suggests that they could make a lot more sales if they went toward the movie industry model of cheaper, but sell more.
Remember that games share an important economic reality with movies. They are all upfront cost. When you pay $10,000 for a car, it probably cost $5000-6000 to make and ship; that's $4000-5000 per unit to split between profit and recouping the R&D and other upfront costs. When you buy a $50 game, it only cost say $1-2 to "make and ship" (as in pressing the CD, making the box, printing the manual, etc). Most of the money was spent upfront writing the game. That mean that if you sell a lot more units at a cheaper price, you make a lot more money. The main cost for you isn't in producing "units" it's in creating the content. That price was already fixed when the game went gold. I'm ignoring some stuff like ongoing support costs, but in general a game manufacturer makes something approaching "pure profit" (not profit per se, a lot of it has to go to cover costs incurred during development, but you get the idea) on every unit sold. I doubt they would even need to triple their sales to make double the money at half the price. Preliminary evidence seems to indicate that could do a good bit better than tripling their sales with such a price cut.
We lost the two net admins (we're big enough to have segregated systems and network roles). Thankfully the other sys admin and I had enough of an idea what was going on to keep from being a total disaster. But yes, it was definitely a documentation problem, they should have done a much better job. Losing both at once was a bit of a shock, especially since I had been here just over a month at the time and hadn't gotten much of the lay of the land myself.
This kinda falls into the single bus point of failure. You get hit by a bus, who knows those scripts? Even if it's not JUST you, a lack of documentation can hurt. We lost both of our network admins withing two weeks of each other. We had documentation, but like you they chose to leave somethings out of it because they worried about the wrong people using the information badly. Now we simply have to recreate both the information AND the knowledge and experience that led to the information. No one every thought it was a big deal that only those two people knew the info, because there were two of them. Oops.
The government has a responsibility to limit potential harm, not just direct harm. As sibling points out, driving while distracted significantly increases the risk that you will harm someone. No, you won't get in an accident every time you text while driving, but texting while driving significantly increases you risk of an accident. Since that accident will likely cause harm to someone else (either financial or medical), the government tries to limit the risky behavior. There is no similar law about texting while walking because you're not likely to kill anyone (except maybe yourself) by running into something on your walk. Your right to swing your arm ends at my face. Your right to take risks ends where those risks stand a good chance of getting me killed or injured.
As a side note: WTF? I got modded troll? The guy just admitted that I interrupted his post correctly. How as that a troll?
So wait... Are you saying that it should be OK for you to drive however you want because it's your car? That the government fascists are imposing on you for dictating that you actually pay attention when in control of 2000 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic moving 60-70 miles per hour? I do believe that this might be the worst personal freedom argument I've seen.
You're completely missing the point of "bail". It's not a punishment, it's a prod; a goad intended to ensure your appearance in court. You get it back at the conclusion of your trial regardless of whether or not you are found guilty. Other fines may be assessed if you are found guilty, and they may be equal to or even greater than the "bail" you paid, but you get that money back regardless.
So let us assume two men, one a high school drop out with (for all intents and purposes) no money, the other an industrialist with a few million in liquid or near liquid assets. Both men are accused of a white collar crime (we'll say the same crime for the sake of argument), both men given a one hundred thousand dollar bail. The broke man is either going to rot in jail or have to take out a short term loan (normally a "Bail bond") which is co-signed by some family member or (really good) friend. The person either CAN'T miss their court date (because they're being driven there by the cops), or has a strong motivator to be there. They don't want to hurt their family or friend or lose whatever collateral they put up for the loan. The industrialist on the other hand has put up a small fraction of his liquid assets. If he is guilty (or innocent but he feels the case against him is very strong), his motivation for sticking around is pretty slim. He could just up and leave, abandoning his money. To make matter worse, because the bail was only 2-3% of his available capital, he now has plenty of resources available to him for his fugitive run. Another 2-3 hundred grand and he has an untraceable fake passport, and a trip to somewhere tropical that we don't have an extradition treaty with.
Not worth it for something that may result in a year or two of jail maybe, but what about 5 or 6 years of jail? That's why bail amounts are adjusted based on both the seriousness of the crime and the resources available to the defendant (or should be), it's supposed to hurt if you break bail. Fines are a completely different argument. In that case I agree that basing them on income is unfair, but bail is always supposed to be enough to make running for it a less attractive option than facing trial.
You are correct. However this statement tends to ignore that fact that the secessions of the mid 19th century were about slavery. I find it very disingenuous when people ignore this fact. The Civil War (I love that name, it makes things sound so pleasant) was about a lot of things. Secession was the Causis Beli, but the southern states didn't just secede to see what would happen. They objected to how the some things were being done by the Federal Government. One of the most important of those things was Federal policy on slavery. Slavery had not been abolished, but the Federal Government had been leaning steadily more abolitionist, and the governments of most states believed that Lincoln would push a strongly abolitionist agenda. So they tried to leave before he could take their slaves away.
The leaving provoked the war, slavery policy (mostly, there were other, less important, factors as well) provoked the leaving.
I'm actually states-side now. I didn't mean to imply that I was currently in Baghdad. I got out in 2006. Thanks for the offer though and if YOU need anything next time you're OCONUS let ME know.
I'll take the "poorly modified" up-armored vehicles over a canvas passenger compartment on my patrol of Baghdad any day. When we were in Iraq in 2004-5 my brigade lost a few soldiers, but at least as many and probably more were saved by vehicle armor as were lost. The armor provided some maintenance headaches for sure, but I'd rather (and the mechanics, would rather, especially since they ran in the same vehicles when they went outside) the mechanics have to work a bit harder than having the fatality rate double. Would it have been better if we have an existing light armored fighting vehicle deployed to all of our troops? Yeah. Was the solution a damn sight better than the problem it fixed? Ohh yeah.
I don't know the history of the thing so maybe this is a new development, but I just heard on NPR yesterday that the prison guard's union is supporting an inmate class-action suit against the State of California to forcibly reduce prison populations. That doesn't sound like the actions of an organization trying to enforce overcrowding to improve overtime.
Pretty much, yes. I am unaware of any laws in Sweden that prevent you from having your stuff seized and searched and your reputation ruined if you are suspected of a crime (and they can gather enough evidence). This isn't an "the American Government are all Nazis" article it's a "Being investigated for a crimes sucks almost as much as being convicted" article. It's pretty much true anywhere. The Police in more "civilized" countries still search for evidence, they still arrest you before you are put on trial, and good attorneys still cost lots of money. The man's argument is undeniable. If the Police suspect you of a crime, they can make your life hard. If they can get enough evidence to search your premises, they can make your life VERY hard. If they can get enough evidence to arrest you, they can make your life MISERABLE. Even if you wind up getting acquitted, It will cost you time, reputation, and money. In Sweden, the United States, Canada, or the North Pole.
It's a really big wrench
That would require it to evolve. Clearly not possible :-)
It's still arbitrary. Why water? Why not alcohol, or oxygen, or iron? We chose water for obvious reasons: it's a substance we all use, its freeze point is noticeable in nature and boiling point observable with minimal effort, etc, but we could have chosen to measure based on anything and we chose water. Similarly the gram and the meter are arbitrary amounts that became standards. You have to start somewhere.
Thankfully we have not decided to go OFF the second standard just because the metric system adopted it. (Sometimes it wouldn't surprise me)
I'd argue MacOS on that particular point. Mainly because it's a BIG deal for a non-trivial part of their traditional user base.