Given the vast weirdness of the government bureaucracy and its penchant for contingency plans for all kinds of events, I wonder if contingency plans for some branch of the government trying to take over based on paranoid contingency plans has ever happened.
I wonder if this is a byproduct of the general corporate tendency to look at "innovation" as a way to get a patent which is then used to enforce a monopoly and collect rents. Collecting rents is a disincentive towards more innovation, product improvements and other business efficiencies. Why compete when you can just charge rents?
If there wasn't a patent-and-monopoly mindset, perhaps there would be greater effort put into innovation as a means to more rapidly improve products (as well as a focus on other business efficiencies). If somebody "stole" your IP in this model, it would matter less because your pace of innovation may render the stolen IP retrograde by the time it was turned into useful products, and your sales would be driven by the strength of your products not because you had a legalized monopoly.
I haven't found inter-vendor HDMI control to work well. When I turn on my Sharp TV, my Pioneer receiver turns on and promptly switches the input to a different device than the one that was last on.
That kind of thing has always been an option, but the glue from Velcro tape is a mess.
I'd rather see slots of a standard dimension molded into the TV enclosure. STB makers could either mold in matching rails or supply a bracket that would mate with them. Third parties could make accessory rails that would adapt the little keyhole openings so that legacy devices could use the molded in slots.
Most TVs are so big these days that there's a ton of real estate on the back of them for hanging accessories, but other than the VESA mounting bracket standard(s) there isn't a standard for mounting STBs.
Some of the larger STBs (like DVRs with spinning rust) maybe wouldn't be practical rear mounted due to weight, but the smaller boxes like Apple TV or Roku would.
IR transmission for remotes might be an issue, but so many of these boxes can be controlled via wifi that it wouldn't be an issue.
It would also be useful for NUC type PCs where in many use cases IR isn't even a factor.
Since I didn't use the phrase "war on women" in my post, I've got an inclination you know what I'm talking about.
Republicans have a huge problem with human sexuality. They don't appear to like it much, whether it's teaching sex ed or making contraception easy to get. They don't like the HPV vaccine given to teen age girls (because obviously it turns them into insatiable sex maniacs).
With abortion, they've been opposed to even exceptions in the case of rape, including Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin's quote: âoeIt seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, itâ(TM)s really rare. If itâ(TM)s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.â
I think that quote kind of neatly describes the fairly ridiculous attitude toward's women's sexual health.
Look, I get it. If somebody is a religious person and they don't want to have an abortion, that's great, don't have one. You don't want to use contraception for the same reasons -- be my guest, don't use it. But where do you get off trying to restrict access to everyone?
I would recast it as a plane that launches projectiles but becomes a bomb at the end of its mission.
I think the advantage it would have would be in local (company or battalion level) control and targeting. Combat situations are loose and fluid and there's more than a little complexity involved in having ground troops ID a target, relay this to forward air controllers, relay it to a pilot and have the right target get hit and still be the right target.
In some circumstances you can do this with IR designation but it can be complicated by weather, line of sight and other issues that make this difficult.
Having the troops on the front line both identifying the target and controlling the actual delivery of ordinance to the target could make it much more effective in terms of timing and accuracy versus other methods. They could do this now with existing drones, but existing drones are expensive and there aren't enough of them.
And maybe rather than a more complex drone with its own projectile launching capacity, maybe it's a hybrid between a drone and a guided missile. A missile that has the ability to loiter for a period of time over a target.
It seems to be fairly well reported that "conservative party activists" have an influence beyond their numbers in Republican policies which forces a lot of Republican candidates to take more extreme positions on social issues, especially early in the campaign where activists hold a lot of sway in primaries, straw polls, etc.
The Republican party seems to be trying to do something about this -- in a typically Republican-minded fashion -- by altering the nomination rules to minimize the influence that grass-roots activists can have in the primary process.
Mostly this gets described as a strategy designed to limit an "embarrassing" and combative primary process that pits Republicans against Republicans, expending resources that should be directed towards defeating Democrats in the general election.
But I also think that despite the chiding of Republicans as stupid by the left this strategy is also embraced by shrewder Republicans who see a handful of cranky old white people forcing support for their divisive social issues and costing the Republicans votes and ruining their image with younger and more centrist voters.
It remains to be seen if this change will just be exploited for enforcing the power of present party leadership or if it will be used for a more strategic long-term purpose of modernizing the Republican party's positions.
At the end of the day, I don't think the die-hard socially conservatives should be that big of a concern to Republicans. They are something of a PR nightmare for the party image and I would suspect that as many of them would still vote Republican, just like left wing progressives vote for less-than-progressive Democrats.
The die hards don't have enough numbers to mount a compelling challenge on their core ideals and I think that they would be unwilling to see an election become a mass public renunciation of their ideals and deflate the perceived power of their influence.
It's a big leap from NOT trying to outlaw abortion, making contraceptives hard to get and outlaw homosexuals to free birth control and cash entitlements to gays.
I'm surprised there's not more corporate business support for easier access contraception, too, even if the medicine itself costs money. Hormonal birth control for women is dirt cheap. Unplanned pregnancy costs a ton of money in entitlement benefits, school problems and crime in low income women which translates into higher taxes, especially hard-to-escape property taxes that fund schools.
White collar women who get pregnant early in their career path cost corporations money by reducing their labor force participation in addition to throwing out the money spent in their on the job training and experience if they quit or don't come back to their jobs for years. Plus due to pay differentials, they tend to be cheaper in terms of wages up front.
It's far more economical to make birth control cheap and easy to obtain and retain their services until they hit their 30s. These women will be less likely to abandon more established careers and their deeper experience and skill sets will make them more likely to return to work, more quickly, and easier to reintegrate back into the work force if they do take time off.
Plus with more established careers they are more likely to have elevated incomes to pay for child care services which is the primary obstacle to returning to the workforce. For younger women at lower payscales, going back to work and paying for childcare is often a net loss and many of them make the choice to stay out of the labor market until their children hit school age. This makes it harder for them to get back into the labor market due to out of date skills.
If you're pro-money, being against gays is just bad business. Despite discrimination, gays tend to be better educated and have higher incomes. Business should be falling over themselves in support of gays, even if they want to gripe about fags at the country club.
I think this bias comes largely from IT workers who have to deal with rank and file marketing employees who are often clueless when it comes to a lot of technology.
I'm sure I too am biased because of this, but it also seems like your low-level IT employee has more practical intelligence than a lot of low-level marketing employees who seem to trade on good looks and social skills versus any specific practical skill or insight with marketing, at least at the undergrad-only level of education.
The thing is, for the marketing people their social intelligence is far superior to most IT workers and in general it enables a lot of them to advance up the food chain versus the IT worker.
...decide to back legalizing pot and abandon their sex war against abortion, contraception and gays and probably pick up a lot of voters who might otherwise go Democratic.
Backing pot legalization would probably be popular with white collar swing voters who probably like the Republicans on taxes and ultimately take a lot of the harassment heat off blacks by stripping the police of one of their major repression avenues. They might even temper it by announcing that they're going to repurpose those resources being even more law and order on other criminal justice issues to mollify the cops and the law-and-order segment of the electorate.
Ending the anti-sex campaign against women may be even more beneficial. I've read that a lot of middle class women tend towards a certain conservatism and if you stop acting completely anti-woman this could be a major source of support.
Both parties are so close for the most part that it seems like only semi-radical changes on a handful of small issues is necessary to move swing voters. And both of these issues are big from a publicity perspective but probably less meaningful to the corporate guys who fund them.
Republicans could still be the anti-tax/pro-corporate party, pro-military and keep most of their base intact. They may alienate born agains and some law and order cranks with those changes, but who are those people going to vote for anyway? They're not going to vote for tax-hiking, gun-grabbing, affirmative action Democrats (intentional facetious remarks) no matter what.
It's harder to see the issues on which Democrats could being "radical" on. About the only one I can think of is giving up on their general penchant for gun control. They might consider bring more pro-labor when it comes to issues of immigration/H1-Bs but this runs counter to their larger embrace of multiculturalism and also gets them in trouble with Silicon Valley money that wants more tech immigrants.
I've always been curious why there haven't been battlefield "disposable" drones that could be launched from a high altitude bomber, controlled by units in the field, fire a couple of guided missiles and then be delivered as a weapon itself on a target.
I've always wondered why city busses and other utility vehicles couldn't be mounted with sensors to measure the condition of the road surface in urban areas. You could get multiple times per day readings on many arterial streets and probably the entire city's road surface 3D scanned annually.
The data could be used for planning and organizing street patching and repair tasks at a minimum. It might also help with surfacing technology and better determine long-term major maintenance.
Laws against drug use are used as a means of control and intimidation by providing the police with a tool to suspect, stop and search people, usually the underclass. It's mostly a coincidence that the underclass is predominantly minority and it certainly enables further intimidation and control of minorities to be sure.
But I think a big reason marijuana remains illegal is not because of any specific risk from marijuana use itself, but because marijuana use is so widespread it provides the police with near limitless justification, opportunity and motivation to suspect and search people. If you legalized marijuana you move the decimal point several places to the left on the chances someone you randomly stop may actually be a person of legitimae interest. You also lose the influence you had over people who use marijuana.
Bottom line is legalization means the cops lose a major rationale to treat most people like criminal suspects. It makes it harder to run roughshod over minorities, too, but I think the general power and control outweighs its specific utility against minorities.
The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in 1914, but the impetus started closer to 1901.
While it's a common theme in anti-drug control rhetoric to blame racism for drug bans, I think the race/drug tie-in is possibly something that happened later and not a prime mover for the origin of drug controls. I think once drugs were already illegal, the laws were adjusted in ways that made them more effective tools to use against people deemed undesirable.
Personally I think the laws against drug use were probably at least as much motivated by industrialists who saw drug use as an obstacle in using low-skilled poor people in the new mass-production factories. Prior to the assembly line, I think a fair amount of industrial work was little more than scaling up the work of skilled artisans, people who probably had internalized a certain amount of self-discipline and work ethic. They were probably also drunks, too, but by virtue of their holding a skilled trade they were sort of self-selected into the group of people who could more or less hold their liquor.
Once you got the assembly line and mass production involved, the growth in industrial employment required large workforces of unskilled workers from the lower classes of society, a demographic at the time that came from cultures where alcohol use was high and who probably used drugs and alcohol more like a crude anti-depressant tonic against the fairly harsh standard of living of being poor in the late 19th century.
But you can't build an industrial empire with people who see a subsistence living under the influence as more desirable than industrial wage slavery, so better to criminalize their substance use and make work a slightly more palatable option than prison.
It was really no different for the Harrison Act -- the impetus was some Protestant religious figure appalled with opium-consuming native savages in the Philippines who knew that he wasn't going to convert them into good little Protestants if chasing the dragon and lying in the sun was an alternative.
I think a lot of the opposition to marijuana legalization really boils down to this -- a lot of moral cluckers who worry that if Johnny smokes pot, he won't be enthusiastic about going $150.000 in debt for a college degree and buying a house in the suburbs -- he'll think that it'd make much more sense to, in the words of Grandmaster Flash, "...learn to smoke reefer and be a street sweeper."
Society *needs* bodies on the treadmill to keep it going. People who use substances tend to give a lot less of a shit about the treadmill.
I'm pretty sure my set of categories there is naive in the extreme, but the good news is that the minmax category is only a third of admissions.
If I was actually implementing such a thing, I would probably use SAT scores as the principal deciding factor and only use high school grades as a tiebreaker. The kids who score in the top percent or even higher on the SAT are probably pretty gifted academically and I suspect that the minmaxers probably are as a group less gifted and flag a little on SATs, relying on their high school grades and other "accomplishments" for boosting their overall "package" value.
For better or for worse, at least the SAT is uniform and is harder to game than high school grades. I don't know how much SAT prep classes actually help the kinds of kids who score in the top few percent on the SAT anyway -- my guess is that test prep is principally helpful for kids bad at tests or helps kids go from dead-average to slightly above dead average. It may get an average student into an above average state University but probably doesn't do much more than that.
Doing it as objectively as possible would probably require a fairly elaborate scoring system for high school grades, adding (or removing) weight for things like AP/non-AP, science, and perhaps even the school itself. I would imagine this might be tough to get data that mattered, but you might be able to rig something that was at least more beneficial than just a GPA score.
I would imagine that the minmaxers go to great lengths to game high school grades, from class shopping down to school and district shopping to find a setting where they have the least competition but without compromising the value by being in a district that's seen as too soft.
What I like about the tripartite system is that it somewhat balances itself a little and makes it much harder to overall game the admissions system. You can play the minmax game, but unless you really are gifted, academic performance won't guarantee placement. Harvard gets a free pass at whatever social engineering it wants to perform, but being "eclectic" or a race group alone won't be enough. The random lottery insures that some sampling of worthy but not on-paper excellent kids have a chance to get in, too, which further frustrates those who try to package an academic resume.
This was in the Minneapolis paper today and one of the businesses is a bowling alley. The owner has temporary ramps he sets up for the rare occasion where a wheelchair bound person wants to bowl.
Why would he consider settling? For the same reason these douchebag lawyers went after him -- they know that full ADA compliance could eliminate his profitability for a year or two, and if he gets these guys to go away he's probably never going to hear about this again -- how many people in a small town are wheelchair bound and capable of actually rolling a ball down an alley?
The news reports all say the train was traveling over 100 MPH when it hit the curve.
I'm not a train guy, but what's the maximum speed for that entire line? For some reason I'm thinking that line isn't ever supposed to hit that kind of speed and it makes me wonder why those engines don't have a speed governor that keeps the train from ever exceeding the maximum speed allowable across the entire route.
I'd also think that such a governor should be tied to GPS to determine speed and if it can do that, it could use position to determine the maximum speed for wherever it is.
I can't, but I can give you plenty of citations of civil asset forfeiture for even less illegal activity -- like driving on the highway and having a large amount of cash or just making a wrong turn. Many areas have been extremely aggressive to the point of insanity with civil forfeiture.
Existing drug tests now require more extensive court orders, but if you have basically a fingerprint scanner which can provide prima facie evidence of involvement in the cocaine business it's naive to believe this won't be leveraged as an excuse to engage in civil forfeiture when far lesser offenses with far less evidence of criminal behavior are already used.
You're forgetting the for-profit civil forfeiture power they have.
I guarantee you someone is working a spreadsheet figuring out if they buy a bunch of high tech scanners and can get more people with positive results they can seize a lot more stuff to pay for it.
Test positive? We'll take everything you have on you, your car and possibly your house and we can do it all now without any court approving it. You have to prove to us that it's not ill-gotten gains.
Both your quoted article link and another posted by another reply to my original post critical of alternative wind generator designs were written by the same person.
I'm still skeptical, but my BS meter also says that one guy with an axe to grind shouldn't be the only source of criticism of something, too.
I wonder if a combination of strategies would help.
Divide available slots into 1/3s:
1) Harvard Criteria -- Harvard chooses candidates based on whatever Harvard likes for standards. Academics, interviews, choice of major, race, economic standing, chutzpah, whatever voodoo that Harvard thinks is right from this pool. Legacies come from this pool.
2) Straight-up academics -- Best grades, test scores and objective-ish analysis of things like essays. No legacies, racial categories or any other subjective analysis. As close as you can get to pure merit, although you may have to do some balancing of majors so you don't get a single class that all wants to be lawyers or doctors or something.
3) Lottery -- All remaining applicants above some baseline test score go into the lottery pool. Winners chosen purely at random. Minimizes gamesmanship by de-emphasizing how good your high school was, your charity work, being student council president, captain of the swim team, your science fair prizes, your 1st chair Oboe achievement, etc.
2 & 3 eliminate racial preferences. 1 & 3 minimize gaming the system to create academic robots -- 1 because Harvard can use any subjective standard they like, 3 because it eliminates the Potemkin Village-style application. 1 may allow for racial or socioeconomics but because its the only category that can it prevents discrimination against talent vs. racial categories.
I think the decline in truck driver "craftsmanship" is also a consequence of the general decline in pay for less skilled jobs and the increased scheduling demands from the just-in-time, GPS-enabled inventory practices of today.
That's not a combination that attracts the best and brightest, and I'm sure that corporatization and a decline in owner-operators adds something to do it as well.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a psychological factor -- a kind of pathology to being behind the wheel a lot and subject to moronic drivers, crushing traffic and idiotic road designs coupled with maybe a little blue collar rage -- that didn't make truck drivers prone to aggressive driving.
Has anyone heard of these? They built a demonstration model in Chaska.
It basically looks like an enclosed tower with an opening at the top and a "tail" at the bottom. The web page says it tunnels moving air and utilizes the venturi effect to increase the wind velocity. The actual turbine is enclosed at the end of the "tail".
It claims to have a number of advantages -- extremely low cut-in speed (2 mph), no cut out speed, lower maintenance costs, multiple turbines per tower possible, and no external moving parts.
The web site says there are several projects commissioned, albeit somewhat smaller (200-400KW).
It looks interesting and since I've actually seen a full-size unit (the size of maybe a small water tower) I know it's not complete BS. It does kind of set off my bullshit meter a little, though, simply because if the design concept was so good I wouldn't every single wind generator look the same.
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Given the vast weirdness of the government bureaucracy and its penchant for contingency plans for all kinds of events, I wonder if contingency plans for some branch of the government trying to take over based on paranoid contingency plans has ever happened.
I wonder if this is a byproduct of the general corporate tendency to look at "innovation" as a way to get a patent which is then used to enforce a monopoly and collect rents. Collecting rents is a disincentive towards more innovation, product improvements and other business efficiencies. Why compete when you can just charge rents?
If there wasn't a patent-and-monopoly mindset, perhaps there would be greater effort put into innovation as a means to more rapidly improve products (as well as a focus on other business efficiencies). If somebody "stole" your IP in this model, it would matter less because your pace of innovation may render the stolen IP retrograde by the time it was turned into useful products, and your sales would be driven by the strength of your products not because you had a legalized monopoly.
I haven't found inter-vendor HDMI control to work well. When I turn on my Sharp TV, my Pioneer receiver turns on and promptly switches the input to a different device than the one that was last on.
That kind of thing has always been an option, but the glue from Velcro tape is a mess.
I'd rather see slots of a standard dimension molded into the TV enclosure. STB makers could either mold in matching rails or supply a bracket that would mate with them. Third parties could make accessory rails that would adapt the little keyhole openings so that legacy devices could use the molded in slots.
Most TVs are so big these days that there's a ton of real estate on the back of them for hanging accessories, but other than the VESA mounting bracket standard(s) there isn't a standard for mounting STBs.
Some of the larger STBs (like DVRs with spinning rust) maybe wouldn't be practical rear mounted due to weight, but the smaller boxes like Apple TV or Roku would.
IR transmission for remotes might be an issue, but so many of these boxes can be controlled via wifi that it wouldn't be an issue.
It would also be useful for NUC type PCs where in many use cases IR isn't even a factor.
Since I didn't use the phrase "war on women" in my post, I've got an inclination you know what I'm talking about.
Republicans have a huge problem with human sexuality. They don't appear to like it much, whether it's teaching sex ed or making contraception easy to get. They don't like the HPV vaccine given to teen age girls (because obviously it turns them into insatiable sex maniacs).
With abortion, they've been opposed to even exceptions in the case of rape, including Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin's quote: âoeIt seems to be, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, itâ(TM)s really rare. If itâ(TM)s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.â
I think that quote kind of neatly describes the fairly ridiculous attitude toward's women's sexual health.
Look, I get it. If somebody is a religious person and they don't want to have an abortion, that's great, don't have one. You don't want to use contraception for the same reasons -- be my guest, don't use it. But where do you get off trying to restrict access to everyone?
I would recast it as a plane that launches projectiles but becomes a bomb at the end of its mission.
I think the advantage it would have would be in local (company or battalion level) control and targeting. Combat situations are loose and fluid and there's more than a little complexity involved in having ground troops ID a target, relay this to forward air controllers, relay it to a pilot and have the right target get hit and still be the right target.
In some circumstances you can do this with IR designation but it can be complicated by weather, line of sight and other issues that make this difficult.
Having the troops on the front line both identifying the target and controlling the actual delivery of ordinance to the target could make it much more effective in terms of timing and accuracy versus other methods. They could do this now with existing drones, but existing drones are expensive and there aren't enough of them.
And maybe rather than a more complex drone with its own projectile launching capacity, maybe it's a hybrid between a drone and a guided missile. A missile that has the ability to loiter for a period of time over a target.
It seems to be fairly well reported that "conservative party activists" have an influence beyond their numbers in Republican policies which forces a lot of Republican candidates to take more extreme positions on social issues, especially early in the campaign where activists hold a lot of sway in primaries, straw polls, etc.
The Republican party seems to be trying to do something about this -- in a typically Republican-minded fashion -- by altering the nomination rules to minimize the influence that grass-roots activists can have in the primary process.
Mostly this gets described as a strategy designed to limit an "embarrassing" and combative primary process that pits Republicans against Republicans, expending resources that should be directed towards defeating Democrats in the general election.
But I also think that despite the chiding of Republicans as stupid by the left this strategy is also embraced by shrewder Republicans who see a handful of cranky old white people forcing support for their divisive social issues and costing the Republicans votes and ruining their image with younger and more centrist voters.
It remains to be seen if this change will just be exploited for enforcing the power of present party leadership or if it will be used for a more strategic long-term purpose of modernizing the Republican party's positions.
At the end of the day, I don't think the die-hard socially conservatives should be that big of a concern to Republicans. They are something of a PR nightmare for the party image and I would suspect that as many of them would still vote Republican, just like left wing progressives vote for less-than-progressive Democrats.
The die hards don't have enough numbers to mount a compelling challenge on their core ideals and I think that they would be unwilling to see an election become a mass public renunciation of their ideals and deflate the perceived power of their influence.
It's a big leap from NOT trying to outlaw abortion, making contraceptives hard to get and outlaw homosexuals to free birth control and cash entitlements to gays.
I'm surprised there's not more corporate business support for easier access contraception, too, even if the medicine itself costs money. Hormonal birth control for women is dirt cheap. Unplanned pregnancy costs a ton of money in entitlement benefits, school problems and crime in low income women which translates into higher taxes, especially hard-to-escape property taxes that fund schools.
White collar women who get pregnant early in their career path cost corporations money by reducing their labor force participation in addition to throwing out the money spent in their on the job training and experience if they quit or don't come back to their jobs for years. Plus due to pay differentials, they tend to be cheaper in terms of wages up front.
It's far more economical to make birth control cheap and easy to obtain and retain their services until they hit their 30s. These women will be less likely to abandon more established careers and their deeper experience and skill sets will make them more likely to return to work, more quickly, and easier to reintegrate back into the work force if they do take time off.
Plus with more established careers they are more likely to have elevated incomes to pay for child care services which is the primary obstacle to returning to the workforce. For younger women at lower payscales, going back to work and paying for childcare is often a net loss and many of them make the choice to stay out of the labor market until their children hit school age. This makes it harder for them to get back into the labor market due to out of date skills.
If you're pro-money, being against gays is just bad business. Despite discrimination, gays tend to be better educated and have higher incomes. Business should be falling over themselves in support of gays, even if they want to gripe about fags at the country club.
I think this bias comes largely from IT workers who have to deal with rank and file marketing employees who are often clueless when it comes to a lot of technology.
I'm sure I too am biased because of this, but it also seems like your low-level IT employee has more practical intelligence than a lot of low-level marketing employees who seem to trade on good looks and social skills versus any specific practical skill or insight with marketing, at least at the undergrad-only level of education.
The thing is, for the marketing people their social intelligence is far superior to most IT workers and in general it enables a lot of them to advance up the food chain versus the IT worker.
...decide to back legalizing pot and abandon their sex war against abortion, contraception and gays and probably pick up a lot of voters who might otherwise go Democratic.
Backing pot legalization would probably be popular with white collar swing voters who probably like the Republicans on taxes and ultimately take a lot of the harassment heat off blacks by stripping the police of one of their major repression avenues. They might even temper it by announcing that they're going to repurpose those resources being even more law and order on other criminal justice issues to mollify the cops and the law-and-order segment of the electorate.
Ending the anti-sex campaign against women may be even more beneficial. I've read that a lot of middle class women tend towards a certain conservatism and if you stop acting completely anti-woman this could be a major source of support.
Both parties are so close for the most part that it seems like only semi-radical changes on a handful of small issues is necessary to move swing voters. And both of these issues are big from a publicity perspective but probably less meaningful to the corporate guys who fund them.
Republicans could still be the anti-tax/pro-corporate party, pro-military and keep most of their base intact. They may alienate born agains and some law and order cranks with those changes, but who are those people going to vote for anyway? They're not going to vote for tax-hiking, gun-grabbing, affirmative action Democrats (intentional facetious remarks) no matter what.
It's harder to see the issues on which Democrats could being "radical" on. About the only one I can think of is giving up on their general penchant for gun control. They might consider bring more pro-labor when it comes to issues of immigration/H1-Bs but this runs counter to their larger embrace of multiculturalism and also gets them in trouble with Silicon Valley money that wants more tech immigrants.
I've always been curious why there haven't been battlefield "disposable" drones that could be launched from a high altitude bomber, controlled by units in the field, fire a couple of guided missiles and then be delivered as a weapon itself on a target.
I've always wondered why city busses and other utility vehicles couldn't be mounted with sensors to measure the condition of the road surface in urban areas. You could get multiple times per day readings on many arterial streets and probably the entire city's road surface 3D scanned annually.
The data could be used for planning and organizing street patching and repair tasks at a minimum. It might also help with surfacing technology and better determine long-term major maintenance.
Laws against drug use are used as a means of control and intimidation by providing the police with a tool to suspect, stop and search people, usually the underclass. It's mostly a coincidence that the underclass is predominantly minority and it certainly enables further intimidation and control of minorities to be sure.
But I think a big reason marijuana remains illegal is not because of any specific risk from marijuana use itself, but because marijuana use is so widespread it provides the police with near limitless justification, opportunity and motivation to suspect and search people. If you legalized marijuana you move the decimal point several places to the left on the chances someone you randomly stop may actually be a person of legitimae interest. You also lose the influence you had over people who use marijuana.
Bottom line is legalization means the cops lose a major rationale to treat most people like criminal suspects. It makes it harder to run roughshod over minorities, too, but I think the general power and control outweighs its specific utility against minorities.
The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act was passed in 1914, but the impetus started closer to 1901.
While it's a common theme in anti-drug control rhetoric to blame racism for drug bans, I think the race/drug tie-in is possibly something that happened later and not a prime mover for the origin of drug controls. I think once drugs were already illegal, the laws were adjusted in ways that made them more effective tools to use against people deemed undesirable.
Personally I think the laws against drug use were probably at least as much motivated by industrialists who saw drug use as an obstacle in using low-skilled poor people in the new mass-production factories. Prior to the assembly line, I think a fair amount of industrial work was little more than scaling up the work of skilled artisans, people who probably had internalized a certain amount of self-discipline and work ethic. They were probably also drunks, too, but by virtue of their holding a skilled trade they were sort of self-selected into the group of people who could more or less hold their liquor.
Once you got the assembly line and mass production involved, the growth in industrial employment required large workforces of unskilled workers from the lower classes of society, a demographic at the time that came from cultures where alcohol use was high and who probably used drugs and alcohol more like a crude anti-depressant tonic against the fairly harsh standard of living of being poor in the late 19th century.
But you can't build an industrial empire with people who see a subsistence living under the influence as more desirable than industrial wage slavery, so better to criminalize their substance use and make work a slightly more palatable option than prison.
It was really no different for the Harrison Act -- the impetus was some Protestant religious figure appalled with opium-consuming native savages in the Philippines who knew that he wasn't going to convert them into good little Protestants if chasing the dragon and lying in the sun was an alternative.
I think a lot of the opposition to marijuana legalization really boils down to this -- a lot of moral cluckers who worry that if Johnny smokes pot, he won't be enthusiastic about going $150.000 in debt for a college degree and buying a house in the suburbs -- he'll think that it'd make much more sense to, in the words of Grandmaster Flash, "...learn to smoke reefer and be a street sweeper."
Society *needs* bodies on the treadmill to keep it going. People who use substances tend to give a lot less of a shit about the treadmill.
I'm pretty sure my set of categories there is naive in the extreme, but the good news is that the minmax category is only a third of admissions.
If I was actually implementing such a thing, I would probably use SAT scores as the principal deciding factor and only use high school grades as a tiebreaker. The kids who score in the top percent or even higher on the SAT are probably pretty gifted academically and I suspect that the minmaxers probably are as a group less gifted and flag a little on SATs, relying on their high school grades and other "accomplishments" for boosting their overall "package" value.
For better or for worse, at least the SAT is uniform and is harder to game than high school grades. I don't know how much SAT prep classes actually help the kinds of kids who score in the top few percent on the SAT anyway -- my guess is that test prep is principally helpful for kids bad at tests or helps kids go from dead-average to slightly above dead average. It may get an average student into an above average state University but probably doesn't do much more than that.
Doing it as objectively as possible would probably require a fairly elaborate scoring system for high school grades, adding (or removing) weight for things like AP/non-AP, science, and perhaps even the school itself. I would imagine this might be tough to get data that mattered, but you might be able to rig something that was at least more beneficial than just a GPA score.
I would imagine that the minmaxers go to great lengths to game high school grades, from class shopping down to school and district shopping to find a setting where they have the least competition but without compromising the value by being in a district that's seen as too soft.
What I like about the tripartite system is that it somewhat balances itself a little and makes it much harder to overall game the admissions system. You can play the minmax game, but unless you really are gifted, academic performance won't guarantee placement. Harvard gets a free pass at whatever social engineering it wants to perform, but being "eclectic" or a race group alone won't be enough. The random lottery insures that some sampling of worthy but not on-paper excellent kids have a chance to get in, too, which further frustrates those who try to package an academic resume.
This was in the Minneapolis paper today and one of the businesses is a bowling alley. The owner has temporary ramps he sets up for the rare occasion where a wheelchair bound person wants to bowl.
Why would he consider settling? For the same reason these douchebag lawyers went after him -- they know that full ADA compliance could eliminate his profitability for a year or two, and if he gets these guys to go away he's probably never going to hear about this again -- how many people in a small town are wheelchair bound and capable of actually rolling a ball down an alley?
The news reports all say the train was traveling over 100 MPH when it hit the curve.
I'm not a train guy, but what's the maximum speed for that entire line? For some reason I'm thinking that line isn't ever supposed to hit that kind of speed and it makes me wonder why those engines don't have a speed governor that keeps the train from ever exceeding the maximum speed allowable across the entire route.
I'd also think that such a governor should be tied to GPS to determine speed and if it can do that, it could use position to determine the maximum speed for wherever it is.
I can't, but I can give you plenty of citations of civil asset forfeiture for even less illegal activity -- like driving on the highway and having a large amount of cash or just making a wrong turn. Many areas have been extremely aggressive to the point of insanity with civil forfeiture.
Existing drug tests now require more extensive court orders, but if you have basically a fingerprint scanner which can provide prima facie evidence of involvement in the cocaine business it's naive to believe this won't be leveraged as an excuse to engage in civil forfeiture when far lesser offenses with far less evidence of criminal behavior are already used.
You're forgetting the for-profit civil forfeiture power they have.
I guarantee you someone is working a spreadsheet figuring out if they buy a bunch of high tech scanners and can get more people with positive results they can seize a lot more stuff to pay for it.
Test positive? We'll take everything you have on you, your car and possibly your house and we can do it all now without any court approving it. You have to prove to us that it's not ill-gotten gains.
Bullshit meter vindicated:
Yes and no.
Both your quoted article link and another posted by another reply to my original post critical of alternative wind generator designs were written by the same person.
I'm still skeptical, but my BS meter also says that one guy with an axe to grind shouldn't be the only source of criticism of something, too.
No, I'm saying it's management's fault for shifting the externalities of poor road safety onto the public.
I wonder if a combination of strategies would help.
Divide available slots into 1/3s:
1) Harvard Criteria -- Harvard chooses candidates based on whatever Harvard likes for standards. Academics, interviews, choice of major, race, economic standing, chutzpah, whatever voodoo that Harvard thinks is right from this pool. Legacies come from this pool.
2) Straight-up academics -- Best grades, test scores and objective-ish analysis of things like essays. No legacies, racial categories or any other subjective analysis. As close as you can get to pure merit, although you may have to do some balancing of majors so you don't get a single class that all wants to be lawyers or doctors or something.
3) Lottery -- All remaining applicants above some baseline test score go into the lottery pool. Winners chosen purely at random. Minimizes gamesmanship by de-emphasizing how good your high school was, your charity work, being student council president, captain of the swim team, your science fair prizes, your 1st chair Oboe achievement, etc.
2 & 3 eliminate racial preferences. 1 & 3 minimize gaming the system to create academic robots -- 1 because Harvard can use any subjective standard they like, 3 because it eliminates the Potemkin Village-style application. 1 may allow for racial or socioeconomics but because its the only category that can it prevents discrimination against talent vs. racial categories.
I think the decline in truck driver "craftsmanship" is also a consequence of the general decline in pay for less skilled jobs and the increased scheduling demands from the just-in-time, GPS-enabled inventory practices of today.
That's not a combination that attracts the best and brightest, and I'm sure that corporatization and a decline in owner-operators adds something to do it as well.
I also wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a psychological factor -- a kind of pathology to being behind the wheel a lot and subject to moronic drivers, crushing traffic and idiotic road designs coupled with maybe a little blue collar rage -- that didn't make truck drivers prone to aggressive driving.
Has anyone heard of these? They built a demonstration model in Chaska.
It basically looks like an enclosed tower with an opening at the top and a "tail" at the bottom. The web page says it tunnels moving air and utilizes the venturi effect to increase the wind velocity. The actual turbine is enclosed at the end of the "tail".
It claims to have a number of advantages -- extremely low cut-in speed (2 mph), no cut out speed, lower maintenance costs, multiple turbines per tower possible, and no external moving parts.
The web site says there are several projects commissioned, albeit somewhat smaller (200-400KW).
It looks interesting and since I've actually seen a full-size unit (the size of maybe a small water tower) I know it's not complete BS. It does kind of set off my bullshit meter a little, though, simply because if the design concept was so good I wouldn't every single wind generator look the same.