Blinded by your outrage at the US, you fail to understand that I'm not defending the constant meddling and overreach of the US government.
I'm merely pointing out that it's no picnic in any place you might decide to 'escape' the US government. Do you think that Putin does not demand tribute and fealty? Perhaps the experience of Mr. Khodorkovsky might be illuminating.
Well, feel free to cross into barbarian lands of Russia, North Korea, various parts of Africa, etc.
You won't pay tribute to the US, but you will still pay tribute, just as you would have paid tribute to the barbarians if they didn't just slaughter you outright.
I mostly share your optimism, but I don't think public opinion has shifted far enough to prevent the DEA from using negative publicity to try to close them down.
A lot will depend on the position that Hillary Clinton takes during the 2016 election cycle. If she blesses the current arrangement and gets elected, it will probably stay. If she doesn't or a Republican gets elected (except for maybe Christie), they could turn the tide.
It will take significant congressional action towards reclassifying cannabis to really make a guaranteed change and that seems unlikely in a Republican controlled House.
It's the CIA that's had its hands dirty with drug smuggling -- heroin in Indochina, coke for the Contras, and hashish for the the anti-Soviet Taliban in the 1980s.
They did work against the FARC and its role in coke production in Columbia, they could focus on Taliban heroin once the US military leaves Afghanistan; the military has avoided doing anything about Afghani opium production because it works against their counter-insurgency mission.
My guess that having them focus on overseas narco-funded terrorism would be a precursor to just rolling them into DHS.
I have a feeling they're going to get scared of losing their empire and will trump up some kind of hype that will cause them to swoop in and invalidate state level legalization. There has been hype lately about THC confections and children in emergency rooms, I suspect that it will be this kind of avenue used.
The FBI spent years working its way out of the woodshed after the revelations of COINTELPRO, black bag jobs, and all the abuses of the Hoover era. They probably don't want to go back.
About the best saving grace for the DEA would be turning it into some kind of counter-terrorism arm focused on narcotics-financed terrorism. There's some legitimate ability there, since they've worked pretty hard at tracking dirty money and drugs in a lot of places.
Sure, Secret Service protection is limited by law, but the head of the FBI has his own armed force and a ton of discretion on how to use it.
The FBI has a laundry list of people with grievances, from wingnut militia groups, criminal gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood, a ton of terrorist groups as well as a lengthy list of foreign intelligence services keen to target the principal domestic counterintelligence organization of the US.
I'm sure he has personal discretion on how much protection to accept and it may fluctuate with threat levels, but the idea that this guy sits in some ordinary surburban house with no one watching and just his trusty FBI issued pistol just isn't realistic.
I'd also guess that the head of the FBI has around the clock armed security, a home that has been hardened against attack & panic room, on-site fully automatic weapons, and an FBI tactical team on standby.
I wouldn't want to deliver a pizza, let alone attack the guy.
It seems to me that salaries should mostly be based on how much work was required and how much skill was demonstrated in gaining whatever accreditation a person has. It sort of is, doctors and lawyers work a long time to get their degrees and usually have to demonstrate fairly high skill in the process.
Gaining an engineering degree requires a lot of work and also a lot of demonstration of what was learned through testing (especially for a PE).
Somehow, though, it doesn't work this way, and even when it does it seems to get corrupted in weird ways.
I wonder if Apple is aiming to eliminate the need to remove your watch for charging.
I've owned basically waterproof watches since the 1980s and seldom take them off for any reason except for situations where the watch might get in the way.
One limitation to any smart watch seem to me to be how often it needs to be taken off to charge.
It's hard to see any smart watch that does anything useful charging solely by the means listed, but I do wonder if there's some way to maintain or extend the charge so that the watch has to be charged externally a lot less often.
Copper has been on the skids for a while, but I wonder if the MBA whiz kids have started doing the math on the long-term salvage value of copper.
At some point, I can see them just start deciding they're just not in the analog business enough to start demo-ing all that copper they have for its metal value.
Why are we applying our ridiculous, counter-productive calvinistic morality to pet comfort and pain relief?
It's bad enough that the drugs police, drug policy and our obsession with the idea that someone, somewhere may be enjoying themselves interferes with our ability to ameliorate pain in humans. But dogs? Even if the effect is principally anxiolytic, why would we worry whether a dog is high if its suffering is decreased?
There was an FDA panel that recently recommended or closely recommended removing all acetaminophen from opiate medications because of the serious risk of liver toxicity from acetaminophen.
Doctors who under-prescribe opiate-APAP medications contribute to it because people who don't get enough relief pile on maximum doses of acetaminophen per that bottle without understanding the total amount they're getting when they include the acetaminophen-containing opiates they also take.
Doctors who prescribe adequate quantities (pill count) of opiate-APAP meds run into trouble when they under-prescribe the opiate content and patients take too many total pills to get relief without paying attention to acetaminophen content.
They'd be better off prescribing 7.5-325 vs. 5-325. Superior pain relief with far less risk of liver toxicity.
I recently had a severe hand injury that involved emergency surgery. Got sent home with 80 5-325 Percocets and had to do the math for my wife to make sure she didn't poison me with the acetaminophen. They could have given me a half dozen 30mg Oxycontin for the first few days and then a third of the Percocets @ 7.5-325 for follow on and had overall lower risk of drug diversion and addiction and liver toxicity. Whatever nominal anti-inflammatory value the acetaminophen has could have been replaced or supplemented with a methylprednisolone course.
The people who do like this risk are of course the drugs police who believe it helps stop diversion and illegal drug use because it lowers the street value of these meds because serious street users can't concentrate them into large doses for injection, which of course the most desperate don't care about and end up with liver problems on the taxpayer's dime.
I think you're stacking the deck here pretty unfavorably.
In Minneapolis, the water utility is self funding and has done infrastrucure upgrades. Our water plant is state of the art, with filtration down to.03μ. They have been engaged in a multi-year project to reline water mains to prevent corrosive sclerosis of the iron piping.
I can't think of any specific catastrophes with the sewer system and I know for a fact that upgrades of the treatment plants are ongoing as I drive by one frequently and know it has been updated and expanded because I've seen the construction, plus Federal water quality rules would be unlikely to let them get worse.
Gas and electric utilities, while private in most places, are also heavily regulated. The state PUC has turned down or drastically reduced rate increases; the only reason they trim trees is to contain their own costs from damage, the cost is built into the states' approved rate structure and an inherent safety concern over downed lines. Don't kid yourself into thinking its done as a consumer initiative, especially with how badly they butcher the trees. Gas line maintenance is also heavily driven not by consumer need but by safety. There have been at least two gas line explosions I can think of in the last 10 years despite this.
Cable TV prices have oustripped inflation by nearly 10%, yet performance has stagnated and poor service is pretty much common, and cable does everything it can to resist any pro-consumer initiatives. Ala carte pricing where it exists is a joke, explicitly structured to be uncompetitive. Cable card was resisted with maximum effort to maintain device rental monopolies. Internet service remains slow, expensive and fraught with all manner of rules and restrictions, and likely to get worse with the recent loss of net neutrality rules.
I dont think most people want a purely municiple cable TV, I think what they want is a municipal fiber backbone that can be leased out to private operators to offer services. Cable doesn't want this because it would mean choice and choice would cut out their rent seeking and just further the march to internet delivered content from someone else.
How difficult is it to create a series of shell companies in various third world countries in order to more or less legitimately obtain narcotics or precursors at wholesale quantitites through global pharmaceutical or chemical supply chains?
I imagine that the likely places of manufacture, like India, have pretty strong controls on domestic wholesale, but what about international sales? If you're a wholesaler in Nairobi buyng from India and reselling to Paraguay, how closely is that monitored and by whom? How do the exporters in India vet who they sell to as distibutors overseas? And how much vetting is done by distributors to overseas end users?
Given the level of corruption in most of these places, it seems like it wouldn't be very hard to see this exploited, especially if the USA or other first-world country wasn't part of the list of transaction partners.
I dont think there's any credible African guides who would let you hunt dangerous game -- elephant, Cape buffalo, rhino or lion with anything smaller than.375 H&H mag to avoid a wounding shot, and of course to keep you from getting killed.
Many of the intermediate calibers are very versitile, but.270 tops out at 150gr bullets and hotting them up only gets you so far. With close ranges and great accuracy, Elk is about as big an animal as you'd want to take.
How is the data stored on the media is part of the question. Is it random files dumped to the media or is it a larger database or disk image file which contains the data you want? Do I need to pull a 512 GB image file to get a 10k JPG, or can I pull the jpg directly?
Either way you will need a catalog to identify what media to use and where on that media to look. If you need to pull large blocks of data to a hot filesystem to get at a database record or to extract a smaller file, tape seems like it has a slight advantage. If its just a raw filesystem dump of files, discs sound faster, but not much.
I like this idea, but have never used preloaded cards before. Do they work like "real" credit cards, ie, broadly accepted like any card? How do you load them up with money, can you buy value with a credit card or does it require a cash transaction?
There was a story in the paper today about banks reissuing 150 million cards due to the Target debacle and I thought -- why don't they just do that every year anyway? Or when they issue cards, maybe they should give you a 12 pack of cards that are only good for 30 days from first use, and then they auto-expire and you have to activate the next card in your pack. You can go on from there and get more restrictive and say that you can only have N active at a time, etc.
Then I start to wonder how big the pool of possible credit card numbers is -- are there enough numbers total to allow everyone to suddenly use 10-20x as many as they use now?
I think this happens all the time with complex infrastructure.
Many of the customers who buy it can use it but they lack installation expertise and patch/upgrade expertise, so they outsource it. Chances are when they bought it it came with installation from the vendor which, if the customer is too small to have in-house install talent, means that the OEM farmed that out to a support provider.
Time passes, IT turnover happens and they need to upgrade. They're still paying licensing and support costs.
In comes the next consultant. Nobody can tell this person what the fuck they really own, the support accounts are hosed, in somebody else's name, no login access. The consultant has been flown in for a two day gig, the downtime has been scheduled for a month or more, and there's a lot of sad faces all around if this doesn't get done.
A verbal discussion is had about licenses, support agreements, everybody thinks the bases are covered and then the expedient thing gets done. Consultant installs stuff, maybe even temporary licenses, until the customer can unfuck their accounts on the vendors hopelessly overcomplicated web site.
I see this happen all the time and mostly blame it on vendor support systems being a few orders of magnitude too complicated. It can take days of wrangling and exchanging emails to unlock support accounts that vendors mainly use to protect their software licenses. It's gotten to the point where managing the system is easier than managing the support agreement and navigating the support site.
Are customers to blame? Sure, but its a little fuzzier once you factor in turnover, the fact that they don't actively use the support account because nobody on site has that kind of knowledge, not to mention the never-ending "upgrades" to support sites.
Is there something in between a full-on Predator and a battery powered quadrocopter? A gas powered quadrocopter for increased range and better sensor payload?
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Blinded by your outrage at the US, you fail to understand that I'm not defending the constant meddling and overreach of the US government.
I'm merely pointing out that it's no picnic in any place you might decide to 'escape' the US government. Do you think that Putin does not demand tribute and fealty? Perhaps the experience of Mr. Khodorkovsky might be illuminating.
Well, feel free to cross into barbarian lands of Russia, North Korea, various parts of Africa, etc.
You won't pay tribute to the US, but you will still pay tribute, just as you would have paid tribute to the barbarians if they didn't just slaughter you outright.
I mostly share your optimism, but I don't think public opinion has shifted far enough to prevent the DEA from using negative publicity to try to close them down.
A lot will depend on the position that Hillary Clinton takes during the 2016 election cycle. If she blesses the current arrangement and gets elected, it will probably stay. If she doesn't or a Republican gets elected (except for maybe Christie), they could turn the tide.
It will take significant congressional action towards reclassifying cannabis to really make a guaranteed change and that seems unlikely in a Republican controlled House.
It's the CIA that's had its hands dirty with drug smuggling -- heroin in Indochina, coke for the Contras, and hashish for the the anti-Soviet Taliban in the 1980s.
They did work against the FARC and its role in coke production in Columbia, they could focus on Taliban heroin once the US military leaves Afghanistan; the military has avoided doing anything about Afghani opium production because it works against their counter-insurgency mission.
My guess that having them focus on overseas narco-funded terrorism would be a precursor to just rolling them into DHS.
I have a feeling they're going to get scared of losing their empire and will trump up some kind of hype that will cause them to swoop in and invalidate state level legalization. There has been hype lately about THC confections and children in emergency rooms, I suspect that it will be this kind of avenue used.
The FBI spent years working its way out of the woodshed after the revelations of COINTELPRO, black bag jobs, and all the abuses of the Hoover era. They probably don't want to go back.
About the best saving grace for the DEA would be turning it into some kind of counter-terrorism arm focused on narcotics-financed terrorism. There's some legitimate ability there, since they've worked pretty hard at tracking dirty money and drugs in a lot of places.
Sure, Secret Service protection is limited by law, but the head of the FBI has his own armed force and a ton of discretion on how to use it.
The FBI has a laundry list of people with grievances, from wingnut militia groups, criminal gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood, a ton of terrorist groups as well as a lengthy list of foreign intelligence services keen to target the principal domestic counterintelligence organization of the US.
I'm sure he has personal discretion on how much protection to accept and it may fluctuate with threat levels, but the idea that this guy sits in some ordinary surburban house with no one watching and just his trusty FBI issued pistol just isn't realistic.
I'd also guess that the head of the FBI has around the clock armed security, a home that has been hardened against attack & panic room, on-site fully automatic weapons, and an FBI tactical team on standby.
I wouldn't want to deliver a pizza, let alone attack the guy.
I wonder how long until they can connect it to a gun and have it automatically neutralize threats?
It's not hard to imagine a network of sensors and guns that can be used to automatically target infiltrators and neutralize them.
I'm surprised they don't just induce a coma as a treatment.
It seems to me that salaries should mostly be based on how much work was required and how much skill was demonstrated in gaining whatever accreditation a person has. It sort of is, doctors and lawyers work a long time to get their degrees and usually have to demonstrate fairly high skill in the process.
Gaining an engineering degree requires a lot of work and also a lot of demonstration of what was learned through testing (especially for a PE).
Somehow, though, it doesn't work this way, and even when it does it seems to get corrupted in weird ways.
I wonder if Apple is aiming to eliminate the need to remove your watch for charging.
I've owned basically waterproof watches since the 1980s and seldom take them off for any reason except for situations where the watch might get in the way.
One limitation to any smart watch seem to me to be how often it needs to be taken off to charge.
It's hard to see any smart watch that does anything useful charging solely by the means listed, but I do wonder if there's some way to maintain or extend the charge so that the watch has to be charged externally a lot less often.
I would imagine that some is easier to get at than others. I would bet that in more than a few areas there's a lot that's on poles above ground.
Copper has been on the skids for a while, but I wonder if the MBA whiz kids have started doing the math on the long-term salvage value of copper.
At some point, I can see them just start deciding they're just not in the analog business enough to start demo-ing all that copper they have for its metal value.
...platform solution..
So which is the parent? Do we have solution platforms or platform solutions?
Or do we have nested combinations, like platform solution platforms?
Why are we applying our ridiculous, counter-productive calvinistic morality to pet comfort and pain relief?
It's bad enough that the drugs police, drug policy and our obsession with the idea that someone, somewhere may be enjoying themselves interferes with our ability to ameliorate pain in humans. But dogs? Even if the effect is principally anxiolytic, why would we worry whether a dog is high if its suffering is decreased?
There was an FDA panel that recently recommended or closely recommended removing all acetaminophen from opiate medications because of the serious risk of liver toxicity from acetaminophen.
Doctors who under-prescribe opiate-APAP medications contribute to it because people who don't get enough relief pile on maximum doses of acetaminophen per that bottle without understanding the total amount they're getting when they include the acetaminophen-containing opiates they also take.
Doctors who prescribe adequate quantities (pill count) of opiate-APAP meds run into trouble when they under-prescribe the opiate content and patients take too many total pills to get relief without paying attention to acetaminophen content.
They'd be better off prescribing 7.5-325 vs. 5-325. Superior pain relief with far less risk of liver toxicity.
I recently had a severe hand injury that involved emergency surgery. Got sent home with 80 5-325 Percocets and had to do the math for my wife to make sure she didn't poison me with the acetaminophen. They could have given me a half dozen 30mg Oxycontin for the first few days and then a third of the Percocets @ 7.5-325 for follow on and had overall lower risk of drug diversion and addiction and liver toxicity. Whatever nominal anti-inflammatory value the acetaminophen has could have been replaced or supplemented with a methylprednisolone course.
The people who do like this risk are of course the drugs police who believe it helps stop diversion and illegal drug use because it lowers the street value of these meds because serious street users can't concentrate them into large doses for injection, which of course the most desperate don't care about and end up with liver problems on the taxpayer's dime.
I think you're stacking the deck here pretty unfavorably.
In Minneapolis, the water utility is self funding and has done infrastrucure upgrades. Our water plant is state of the art, with filtration down to .03μ. They have been engaged in a multi-year project to reline water mains to prevent corrosive sclerosis of the iron piping.
I can't think of any specific catastrophes with the sewer system and I know for a fact that upgrades of the treatment plants are ongoing as I drive by one frequently and know it has been updated and expanded because I've seen the construction, plus Federal water quality rules would be unlikely to let them get worse.
Gas and electric utilities, while private in most places, are also heavily regulated. The state PUC has turned down or drastically reduced rate increases; the only reason they trim trees is to contain their own costs from damage, the cost is built into the states' approved rate structure and an inherent safety concern over downed lines. Don't kid yourself into thinking its done as a consumer initiative, especially with how badly they butcher the trees. Gas line maintenance is also heavily driven not by consumer need but by safety. There have been at least two gas line explosions I can think of in the last 10 years despite this.
Cable TV prices have oustripped inflation by nearly 10%, yet performance has stagnated and poor service is pretty much common, and cable does everything it can to resist any pro-consumer initiatives. Ala carte pricing where it exists is a joke, explicitly structured to be uncompetitive. Cable card was resisted with maximum effort to maintain device rental monopolies. Internet service remains slow, expensive and fraught with all manner of rules and restrictions, and likely to get worse with the recent loss of net neutrality rules.
I dont think most people want a purely municiple cable TV, I think what they want is a municipal fiber backbone that can be leased out to private operators to offer services. Cable doesn't want this because it would mean choice and choice would cut out their rent seeking and just further the march to internet delivered content from someone else.
....for existing pharmaceuticals?
How difficult is it to create a series of shell companies in various third world countries in order to more or less legitimately obtain narcotics or precursors at wholesale quantitites through global pharmaceutical or chemical supply chains?
I imagine that the likely places of manufacture, like India, have pretty strong controls on domestic wholesale, but what about international sales? If you're a wholesaler in Nairobi buyng from India and reselling to Paraguay, how closely is that monitored and by whom? How do the exporters in India vet who they sell to as distibutors overseas? And how much vetting is done by distributors to overseas end users?
Given the level of corruption in most of these places, it seems like it wouldn't be very hard to see this exploited, especially if the USA or other first-world country wasn't part of the list of transaction partners.
I dont think there's any credible African guides who would let you hunt dangerous game -- elephant, Cape buffalo, rhino or lion with anything smaller than .375 H&H mag to avoid a wounding shot, and of course to keep you from getting killed.
Many of the intermediate calibers are very versitile, but .270 tops out at 150gr bullets and hotting them up only gets you so far. With close ranges and great accuracy, Elk is about as big an animal as you'd want to take.
How is the data stored on the media is part of the question. Is it random files dumped to the media or is it a larger database or disk image file which contains the data you want? Do I need to pull a 512 GB image file to get a 10k JPG, or can I pull the jpg directly?
Either way you will need a catalog to identify what media to use and where on that media to look. If you need to pull large blocks of data to a hot filesystem to get at a database record or to extract a smaller file, tape seems like it has a slight advantage. If its just a raw filesystem dump of files, discs sound faster, but not much.
I like this idea, but have never used preloaded cards before. Do they work like "real" credit cards, ie, broadly accepted like any card? How do you load them up with money, can you buy value with a credit card or does it require a cash transaction?
There was a story in the paper today about banks reissuing 150 million cards due to the Target debacle and I thought -- why don't they just do that every year anyway? Or when they issue cards, maybe they should give you a 12 pack of cards that are only good for 30 days from first use, and then they auto-expire and you have to activate the next card in your pack. You can go on from there and get more restrictive and say that you can only have N active at a time, etc.
Then I start to wonder how big the pool of possible credit card numbers is -- are there enough numbers total to allow everyone to suddenly use 10-20x as many as they use now?
I think this happens all the time with complex infrastructure.
Many of the customers who buy it can use it but they lack installation expertise and patch/upgrade expertise, so they outsource it. Chances are when they bought it it came with installation from the vendor which, if the customer is too small to have in-house install talent, means that the OEM farmed that out to a support provider.
Time passes, IT turnover happens and they need to upgrade. They're still paying licensing and support costs.
In comes the next consultant. Nobody can tell this person what the fuck they really own, the support accounts are hosed, in somebody else's name, no login access. The consultant has been flown in for a two day gig, the downtime has been scheduled for a month or more, and there's a lot of sad faces all around if this doesn't get done.
A verbal discussion is had about licenses, support agreements, everybody thinks the bases are covered and then the expedient thing gets done. Consultant installs stuff, maybe even temporary licenses, until the customer can unfuck their accounts on the vendors hopelessly overcomplicated web site.
I see this happen all the time and mostly blame it on vendor support systems being a few orders of magnitude too complicated. It can take days of wrangling and exchanging emails to unlock support accounts that vendors mainly use to protect their software licenses. It's gotten to the point where managing the system is easier than managing the support agreement and navigating the support site.
Are customers to blame? Sure, but its a little fuzzier once you factor in turnover, the fact that they don't actively use the support account because nobody on site has that kind of knowledge, not to mention the never-ending "upgrades" to support sites.
Is there something in between a full-on Predator and a battery powered quadrocopter? A gas powered quadrocopter for increased range and better sensor payload?
But with all that documentation you could fix anything that broke and people would still be driving 1980s era IBMs because they just worked.