I sometimes wonder if feudalism isn't the economic system that is just historically more sustainable over time than anything else once your population exceeds the numbers associated with tribal organization.
How long have we actually had "capitalism" and the kind of capitalism that assumes that its participants should pay fair prices or receive fair wages? Historically it seems like a total anomaly and it requires a ton of energy (political, economic, human) to sustain it.
Given the chance, those who can will hoard resources and charge exorbitant prices for them and will pay as little as possible for labor, with no concern over the standard of living of labor. Slavery isn't inconsistent with feudal organization.
At least in agrarian feudalism there were some limits -- underfed agricultural labor tends to produce less, putting the entire enterprise at risk, and some kinds of feudalism, though unfair by many standards, evolved to at least have a sort of reciprocal welfare, where the continuance of the system was more important than its efficiency.
Costs actually *paid* are part of open records laws, but discounts *offered* but unpurchased or only proposed probably don't get in records easily, especially as they were probably put up on a screen or on some kind of media that wasn't taken away or filed.
From what I've seen, there are a lot of computer products, regardless of how high profile the client is, where a company will basically throw away their profit margin on product and support in order to not lose a sale, either at all, or to a particular competitor.
I've heard this a lot with EMC -- EMC sales people have basically been told that losing a sale to some specific competitor means you're fired, so the sales people will give away pretty much everything to keep the customer.
And I'm sure the same thing happens with ANY product for high profile sales where the customer's choice is very likely to become public. The last thing Microsoft wants ANYONE to hear is that some $LargeEntity has decided to switch to something other than Office. ANY notion in the marketplace that there's a choice could set off a landslide of defections which would really hurt Microsoft.
They were probably willing to go in there and offer Munich cost-of-media-only discounts and basically lose all their margin just to keep "Munich leaves MS Office" out of the paper.
My guess has always been the "enlightenment" as its pitched in college classes generally means the intellectual enlightenment.
It's always struck me that it was a byproduct of the wars and political divisions as the Holy Roman Empire dissolved -- without the 30 years war, you don't get the power of the Church checked and you don't get large regions freer from religious persecution.
Maybe that's what the Islamic world needs -- to fight an internal war? Unfortunately there's not a lot of Muslims lining up to fight on the side of the reformation.
At one point in history, Western culture was as religiously zealous as many Islamists are today -- the Inquisition, wars, Salem witch trials, etc.
But at some point the larger culture and its leaders turned away from this kind of mindset. Sure, we still have money & publicity seeking zealots on TV and a few anti-abortion protesters were inclined toward violence, but overall the West hasn't seen the level of religious extremism that grips the Islamic world today.
Even Islamic countries with established governments and no ongoing military conflict have laws that would make the Inquisition leaders blush -- amputations, beheadings, really severe laws against expression which could even remotely be considered blasphemous. And not just in the Middle East, either.
So, despite counter-factual examples in the West and despite the benefits of science, Islamic culture remains highly punitive and opposed to change, yet the West changed when information wasn't as easily available and science wasn't nearly as advanced. Why?
Why not make memory its own card type and have optical interconnects for memory? That should allow enough speed for memory access and with a common interface standard you could design your CPU to do it natively or have a translation controller on your CPU card.
Considering the power the military has traditionally had, what kept them from doing this early or even late in the Erdogan era?
I'm familiar (at least from what I read in the NY Times...) with the jailing of the military officers (most ex-military from what I read) on somewhat shaky grounds, but I would think that if the active duty military wanted to depose him, they would easily as the vast majority of the officer corps and probably most senior enlisted had likely already been vetted for their secularism a long time ago.
You don't build that kind of power base over the past 75 years just to have a bunch of politicians dismantle it in 5 years.
What I don't know is whether the past military putsches had been truly directed by the active duty military in the actual cause of secularism or if that was mostly window dressing and they had actually been directed by a clique of ex-military with lucrative state contracts and influence who were worried about losing said influence and financial interests, and the active duty forces went along with it more than leading it.
I think they're less enthusiastic about joining than they used to be.
Turkey's been doing relatively well economically, especially relative to the general economic drain-circling that the EU has been experiencing for the last couple of years and I don't see them as eager to join in the mess that the Euro Zone has become.
What they seem more interested in is regaining their Ottoman Empire regional standing. I keep waiting for them to say "enough" and intervene in Syria, allowing them to recreate some of the Ottoman empire. Lebanon would fall into that orbit very quickly in the absence of Syrian influence.
Didn't most people populate Slot 0 with a 16k RAM card on the ][+?
Mine (er, the one my parents bought us in 1982...) had one, and I'm pretty sure they weren't pimping it for my benefit.
It was less common on the vanilla ][s because they had Integer BASIC in ROM and used Slot 0 for AppleSoft Basic cards, and I think if you put a 16k card in the ][ you had to load AppleSoft basic from disk.
The irony being that the 16k card wasn't ordinarily useful because it shared the memory pages with AppleSoft on the ][+ and it took assembly to use the memory, as paging it in to make it accessible, you lost AppleSoft until you flipped the page switch again. I wrote one simple program (AppleSoft) with an assembly routine to use the memory and remember rebooting a number of times because I would exit back to my AppleSoft program without flipping the paging switch and crash because the entry point to get back to my AppleSoft was just garbage in the 16k pages, not AppleSoft.
Third party software made better use for it because the better programs were written in assembler and didn't need the ROMs paged in and could make use of the "whole" 64k (minus the memory mapped text and graphics regions).
That makes perfect sense for a reasonable chunk of Android and even some iPhone users, but the userbase for Windows Mobile 8 phones is really small, and I doubt the people with the technical sophistication to download a model and print it at even a walk-in 3D place are Windows Mobile 8 users.
Sure, there are some die-hard Windows devs or people with a lot of money who might do this, but it's a vanishingly small group of people.
I would wager that most people using Win Phone 8 are ordinary consumers and maybe a few corporate types, neither of which seems like the kind likely to print their own phone case. They would likely buy one at the cell phone store or from Amazon, et al.
The people with the know-how and access to the equipment don't seem like the kinds of people who own a Windows phone, and even if they did and wanted a custom case, they are also skilled enough or have access to the equipment to come up with their own designs.
The only people this seems to benefit are people....who make cases for a living, and something tells me that they already have the specs for the cases or the scanners and other tech to rapidly create a case design simply by having a phone they can scan/measure.
You've never been in education, have you? It shows.
"Educators" are the actual teachers. They have near zero say in what systems get selected, and those doing the selecting seldom have any experience in being an educator, and usually the selection committee ("Committee Decisions: Because you can't fire the committee") is judging the software on features and functionality, not on underlying technology.
If there is someone in a specific educational organization who has specific architectural biases against Windows, I can assure you they have nothing to do with system selection, only implementation.
And what are the VIABLE alternatives? Professionally I've worked with several educational institutions that have made a run at being all Macintosh, and it has always been a dismal and expensive failure on the back end. They all migrated to Windows servers and kept Macs only for teachers and students, if that.
Linux may be viable for some functions, but with most of these things it boils down to dollars. Linux may be "free" but support isn't, and finding people who can support it is expensive for school districts, at least a datacenter level and not a kludged whitebox install level. Maintaining an all-Linux backend usually requires a lot of high level administrative support and the administrators I can guarantee you are looking at COST first THEN functionality and they will ALWAYS see a Microsoft-based solution as inherently cheaper "because we already do that."
Here in Minnesota we elect state judges and there was one woman running for a judgeship whose lawn signs said "Police endorsed" -- I thought really? Why would I ever want to vote for a supposedly impartial judge who is in cahoots with the police? Would anyone stand a chance with this judge if they were brought up on criminal charges?
At a minimum this judge should never hear criminal cases since there will always be an appearance of bias due to her political association with the police.
But even so, judges seem to have close relationships with prosecutors because prosecutors are in front of them all the time. This alone seems to introduce bias, especially since both tend to want to curry favor with each other.
As for prosecutors, there should be an impartial panel who decides if the charges can be brought at all, similar to a grand jury but staffed by people who have no ties to the prosecution and who aren't under the prosecution's control or influence.
I like the idea of a shotgun, but it's really only valuable at very close ranges (under 25 yards), but can be a force multiplier against massed attackers.
I agree with you about bolt actions for actual long-range shots, anything out past 100 yards, but my larger point is that when you boil down firearms, a lever action rifle beats a bolt-action hands-down yet can supply reasonable accuracy to at least 200 yards and likely is comparable to a bolt action at any range under that.
I'm assuming that the rifle would be the primary gun and that the revolver would be something you use when your rifle doesn't work or you can't get to it. Clint Smith I think said that a handgun is only something you use to get you to your rifle.
The majority are essentially ARs cut down to meet ATF's definition of a pistol instead of a short-barreled rifle, meaning they suffer from all the usual problems that any AR might have (feed, dirty actions, etc), in addition to being relatively big to accommodate the gas system and recoil spring.
They add in an ammo problem, though. SBR ARs have an ammo selection problem since the shorter barrel in those kinds of ARs means less muzzle velocity. While switching to a 1:7 barrel twist and heavier bullets might help the SBR inside of a couple hundred yards, you would need more serious help getting a.223 to work well from a pistol and a rifle with the same ammo.
The revolver concept doesn't make them more viable, either, since bottlenecked cartridges and revolvers don't mix. Read up on the.22 Jet for more info.
"Addressing the obvious privacy concerns, the company said it wouldn't allow users to search content that wasn't already shared with them (or already public). "
Translation:
"This is totally worthless without shared, public data, so we plan to completely fuck with our privacy settings a whole bunch before this rolls out so that we can make sure your data is public and shared."
I've always suspected that when you worked through all the possible angles, you were better off with a.44 Magnum revolver and a lever-action.44 Magnum rifle than you were with an AR-15 and a typical autoloading pistol like a Glock.
Up front, the AR can shoot faster with fewer reloads and the ballistics of the 5.56x45 provide more range and accuracy. A Glock has the same advantages from a magazine capacity perspective and would likely be easier to shoot in most common pistol calibers (eg, 9mm).
When you start to think about it, though, the.44 setup starts to make some sense. The.44 mag platform allows for shooting both magnum and.44 special ammo, making for greater ammo flexibility, and in many situations the.44 special round will provide the average shooter with greater accuracy while still retaining great knock-down power. For the very long haul, you might even be able to create home-grown black powder reloads, since the.44 Special's is directly derived from a black powder case and still retains case volume sufficient to create a black powder load. More modern case designs don't have the volume sufficient to create black powder versions and rely on higher energy density smokeless powders.
Generally speaking, revolvers are also more reliable than autoloaders -- misfires and jams will be less likely even with a very reliable and indestructible gun like a Glock. I'd also suspect that a lever action rifle is likely to be long-term more reliable than a typical (gas-impingement) AR-15 -- they are old designs, with modern materials and engineering improvements.
While effective range is less with.44 ammo, it's still effective at most common urban combat ranges where it matters. We'd all like 1,000 yard strike capacity, but most people can't shoot that far even with excellent equipment and most urban distances are 100 yards or less.
And from a legal perspective, lever-action rifles and revolvers are some of the last weapons likely to be banned (although a magazine capacity restriction might affect a lever-action rifle, but the Marlin 1894 has only a 10 round tube capacity anyway). When/if "they" come after guns we already, "hunting" guns will be lower profile than assault weapons and 10+ capacity handguns.
PlanetMoney did a show about Bain's investments and highlighted both a success story and a failure story.
IMHO, Bain made out really well both times, but the problem was that they made out even when the compan(ies) they were buying/merging did really poorly, and Bain made out primarily based on the heavy debt burden they placed on the companies they bought.
The script seemed to be:
1) Buy Company -- adding debt 2) Borrow for acquisitions/mergers -- adding debt 3) Pay Bain first. A lot. 4) Add more debt and companies (optional)
It struck me that the calculated strategy of Bain either worked or it didn't, but regardless Bain got paid handsomely but was insulated from risk when it didn't work out.
The show did make a good point, which is fair to Bain, that if they're just saddling acquired companies with debt to pay themselves management fees, why do banks keep loaning them money? If all they ever did was get paid and destroy businesses, banks wouldn't loan them money.
The program didn't' say this, but it may be that Bain is in league with the banks and that the loans are structured in a way that even when the companies saddled with them default on them that the banks don't really lose money (ie, high fees paid up front for the loans) or there is some kind of asset made a collateral for the loan which protects the bank from incurring real losses.
My guess is that there's some of that, but that more generally Bain does win more than they lose and that this is reflected in their ability to raise capital.
This is a neat system but it requires a lot of known information about the cartridge ahead of time (bullet weight, muzzle velocity, etc) to do the ballistic calculations in addition to some of the environment variables (cant, range, wind, etc).
It'd be cool if the scope could do some kind of impact POI tracking so that the displayed point of aim could be adjusted for the actual flight path of the bullet. This would allow it to compensate (or try to) for other variance in field conditions, such as differences in wind (shooting from cover to an open area), deviation in cartridge loads as well as shooter performance.
Now, I don't know how they would actually do this on the fly -- a sensor may be able to track a tracer round, but actual bullet impact at any distance would be hard to track.
Maybe it would be of value to shoot some quantity of test rounds at a target and then tell the scope where you aimed and where you hit and let it do some statistical analysis to figure out what's going on and then use that information in the field to at least partially compensate.
This is the problem with the mindset that everytime something bad happens we need a law to prevent it from happening again.
We have so many laws now that new laws often go unenforced (or the old ones they supplement go unenforced), and the police now have a laundry list of bullshit laws they can whip out when convenient.
This has largely been my experience working in SMB consulting.
I went to work with a SMB VAR thinking it'd help me figure out how to be a freelancer and the best lesson I have learned is the raw economics of it. We're so small of a company that our timesheets largely tell the tale of how much we're bringing in.
You start doing the math on your salary and benefits and then subtract that from the monthly billable number and it's not really get rich money, especially if you think in terms of the extra taxes and overhead you would have if you were on your own.
It's more money if you can take on longer gigs, but project work means it's nearly impossible to have any recurring business. And the longer the gig, the harder it is to get involved with another project because you're less certain of when the existing project will end, meaning you will have some down time (ie, no income time) when longer projects end.
Recurring business is superior from a consistency perspective because you can schedule it and it means regular income and deeper hours, but the work is a lot less engaging dumb maintenance tasks, and you occasionally get hammered by multiple clients who decide to have a "crisis" at the same time. But it seems more immune to economic downturns than project work, as unless an organization decides to fold, doing nothing at all with computers isn't viable.
Overall, I think just being an employee is easier than trying to be a total freelancer. For some people the stars may align and they end up with the right skills/technology/labor mix where they get consistent project work, but it's not always the case.
I'm fine with firing them over this, as this seems to be a science-based issue where there's good scientific evidence to support the idea that flu vaccination has a meaningful public health benefit. (I'd also support a denial of insurance coverage for people who don't get vaccinated and get whatever illness they could have been vaccinated for).
I'm more intrigued with the low, 60 percent vaccination rate. Why would this be? Are you telling me 40% of these people are anti-vaccine lunatics? Or is there something they know, or think they know, that causes them to avoid this vaccine?
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I sometimes wonder if feudalism isn't the economic system that is just historically more sustainable over time than anything else once your population exceeds the numbers associated with tribal organization.
How long have we actually had "capitalism" and the kind of capitalism that assumes that its participants should pay fair prices or receive fair wages? Historically it seems like a total anomaly and it requires a ton of energy (political, economic, human) to sustain it.
Given the chance, those who can will hoard resources and charge exorbitant prices for them and will pay as little as possible for labor, with no concern over the standard of living of labor. Slavery isn't inconsistent with feudal organization.
At least in agrarian feudalism there were some limits -- underfed agricultural labor tends to produce less, putting the entire enterprise at risk, and some kinds of feudalism, though unfair by many standards, evolved to at least have a sort of reciprocal welfare, where the continuance of the system was more important than its efficiency.
Costs actually *paid* are part of open records laws, but discounts *offered* but unpurchased or only proposed probably don't get in records easily, especially as they were probably put up on a screen or on some kind of media that wasn't taken away or filed.
From what I've seen, there are a lot of computer products, regardless of how high profile the client is, where a company will basically throw away their profit margin on product and support in order to not lose a sale, either at all, or to a particular competitor.
I've heard this a lot with EMC -- EMC sales people have basically been told that losing a sale to some specific competitor means you're fired, so the sales people will give away pretty much everything to keep the customer.
And I'm sure the same thing happens with ANY product for high profile sales where the customer's choice is very likely to become public. The last thing Microsoft wants ANYONE to hear is that some $LargeEntity has decided to switch to something other than Office. ANY notion in the marketplace that there's a choice could set off a landslide of defections which would really hurt Microsoft.
They were probably willing to go in there and offer Munich cost-of-media-only discounts and basically lose all their margin just to keep "Munich leaves MS Office" out of the paper.
Except that the Ottoman empire occupied much of Southeastern Europe until the late 17th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna
If the Ottoman occupation of Hungary, Yugoslavia and parts of Austria wasn't colonial imperialism, I'm not sure what it was.
My guess has always been the "enlightenment" as its pitched in college classes generally means the intellectual enlightenment.
It's always struck me that it was a byproduct of the wars and political divisions as the Holy Roman Empire dissolved -- without the 30 years war, you don't get the power of the Church checked and you don't get large regions freer from religious persecution.
Maybe that's what the Islamic world needs -- to fight an internal war? Unfortunately there's not a lot of Muslims lining up to fight on the side of the reformation.
So it will be someone else's problem.
At one point in history, Western culture was as religiously zealous as many Islamists are today -- the Inquisition, wars, Salem witch trials, etc.
But at some point the larger culture and its leaders turned away from this kind of mindset. Sure, we still have money & publicity seeking zealots on TV and a few anti-abortion protesters were inclined toward violence, but overall the West hasn't seen the level of religious extremism that grips the Islamic world today.
Even Islamic countries with established governments and no ongoing military conflict have laws that would make the Inquisition leaders blush -- amputations, beheadings, really severe laws against expression which could even remotely be considered blasphemous. And not just in the Middle East, either.
So, despite counter-factual examples in the West and despite the benefits of science, Islamic culture remains highly punitive and opposed to change, yet the West changed when information wasn't as easily available and science wasn't nearly as advanced. Why?
Why not make memory its own card type and have optical interconnects for memory? That should allow enough speed for memory access and with a common interface standard you could design your CPU to do it natively or have a translation controller on your CPU card.
Considering the power the military has traditionally had, what kept them from doing this early or even late in the Erdogan era?
I'm familiar (at least from what I read in the NY Times...) with the jailing of the military officers (most ex-military from what I read) on somewhat shaky grounds, but I would think that if the active duty military wanted to depose him, they would easily as the vast majority of the officer corps and probably most senior enlisted had likely already been vetted for their secularism a long time ago.
You don't build that kind of power base over the past 75 years just to have a bunch of politicians dismantle it in 5 years.
What I don't know is whether the past military putsches had been truly directed by the active duty military in the actual cause of secularism or if that was mostly window dressing and they had actually been directed by a clique of ex-military with lucrative state contracts and influence who were worried about losing said influence and financial interests, and the active duty forces went along with it more than leading it.
I think they're less enthusiastic about joining than they used to be.
Turkey's been doing relatively well economically, especially relative to the general economic drain-circling that the EU has been experiencing for the last couple of years and I don't see them as eager to join in the mess that the Euro Zone has become.
What they seem more interested in is regaining their Ottoman Empire regional standing. I keep waiting for them to say "enough" and intervene in Syria, allowing them to recreate some of the Ottoman empire. Lebanon would fall into that orbit very quickly in the absence of Syrian influence.
Didn't most people populate Slot 0 with a 16k RAM card on the ][+?
Mine (er, the one my parents bought us in 1982...) had one, and I'm pretty sure they weren't pimping it for my benefit.
It was less common on the vanilla ][s because they had Integer BASIC in ROM and used Slot 0 for AppleSoft Basic cards, and I think if you put a 16k card in the ][ you had to load AppleSoft basic from disk.
The irony being that the 16k card wasn't ordinarily useful because it shared the memory pages with AppleSoft on the ][+ and it took assembly to use the memory, as paging it in to make it accessible, you lost AppleSoft until you flipped the page switch again. I wrote one simple program (AppleSoft) with an assembly routine to use the memory and remember rebooting a number of times because I would exit back to my AppleSoft program without flipping the paging switch and crash because the entry point to get back to my AppleSoft was just garbage in the 16k pages, not AppleSoft.
Third party software made better use for it because the better programs were written in assembler and didn't need the ROMs paged in and could make use of the "whole" 64k (minus the memory mapped text and graphics regions).
That makes perfect sense for a reasonable chunk of Android and even some iPhone users, but the userbase for Windows Mobile 8 phones is really small, and I doubt the people with the technical sophistication to download a model and print it at even a walk-in 3D place are Windows Mobile 8 users.
Sure, there are some die-hard Windows devs or people with a lot of money who might do this, but it's a vanishingly small group of people.
I would wager that most people using Win Phone 8 are ordinary consumers and maybe a few corporate types, neither of which seems like the kind likely to print their own phone case. They would likely buy one at the cell phone store or from Amazon, et al.
The people with the know-how and access to the equipment don't seem like the kinds of people who own a Windows phone, and even if they did and wanted a custom case, they are also skilled enough or have access to the equipment to come up with their own designs.
The only people this seems to benefit are people....who make cases for a living, and something tells me that they already have the specs for the cases or the scanners and other tech to rapidly create a case design simply by having a phone they can scan/measure.
It looks like it was recorded from a skype type video conference. She was probably using the video camera in her laptop.
You've never been in education, have you? It shows.
"Educators" are the actual teachers. They have near zero say in what systems get selected, and those doing the selecting seldom have any experience in being an educator, and usually the selection committee ("Committee Decisions: Because you can't fire the committee") is judging the software on features and functionality, not on underlying technology.
If there is someone in a specific educational organization who has specific architectural biases against Windows, I can assure you they have nothing to do with system selection, only implementation.
And what are the VIABLE alternatives? Professionally I've worked with several educational institutions that have made a run at being all Macintosh, and it has always been a dismal and expensive failure on the back end. They all migrated to Windows servers and kept Macs only for teachers and students, if that.
Linux may be viable for some functions, but with most of these things it boils down to dollars. Linux may be "free" but support isn't, and finding people who can support it is expensive for school districts, at least a datacenter level and not a kludged whitebox install level. Maintaining an all-Linux backend usually requires a lot of high level administrative support and the administrators I can guarantee you are looking at COST first THEN functionality and they will ALWAYS see a Microsoft-based solution as inherently cheaper "because we already do that."
Here in Minnesota we elect state judges and there was one woman running for a judgeship whose lawn signs said "Police endorsed" -- I thought really? Why would I ever want to vote for a supposedly impartial judge who is in cahoots with the police? Would anyone stand a chance with this judge if they were brought up on criminal charges?
At a minimum this judge should never hear criminal cases since there will always be an appearance of bias due to her political association with the police.
But even so, judges seem to have close relationships with prosecutors because prosecutors are in front of them all the time. This alone seems to introduce bias, especially since both tend to want to curry favor with each other.
As for prosecutors, there should be an impartial panel who decides if the charges can be brought at all, similar to a grand jury but staffed by people who have no ties to the prosecution and who aren't under the prosecution's control or influence.
I like the idea of a shotgun, but it's really only valuable at very close ranges (under 25 yards), but can be a force multiplier against massed attackers.
I agree with you about bolt actions for actual long-range shots, anything out past 100 yards, but my larger point is that when you boil down firearms, a lever action rifle beats a bolt-action hands-down yet can supply reasonable accuracy to at least 200 yards and likely is comparable to a bolt action at any range under that.
I'm assuming that the rifle would be the primary gun and that the revolver would be something you use when your rifle doesn't work or you can't get to it. Clint Smith I think said that a handgun is only something you use to get you to your rifle.
.223 pistols are non-starters.
The majority are essentially ARs cut down to meet ATF's definition of a pistol instead of a short-barreled rifle, meaning they suffer from all the usual problems that any AR might have (feed, dirty actions, etc), in addition to being relatively big to accommodate the gas system and recoil spring.
They add in an ammo problem, though. SBR ARs have an ammo selection problem since the shorter barrel in those kinds of ARs means less muzzle velocity. While switching to a 1:7 barrel twist and heavier bullets might help the SBR inside of a couple hundred yards, you would need more serious help getting a .223 to work well from a pistol and a rifle with the same ammo.
The revolver concept doesn't make them more viable, either, since bottlenecked cartridges and revolvers don't mix. Read up on the .22 Jet for more info.
"Addressing the obvious privacy concerns, the company said it wouldn't allow users to search content that wasn't already shared with them (or already public). "
Translation:
"This is totally worthless without shared, public data, so we plan to completely fuck with our privacy settings a whole bunch before this rolls out so that we can make sure your data is public and shared."
I've always suspected that when you worked through all the possible angles, you were better off with a .44 Magnum revolver and a lever-action .44 Magnum rifle than you were with an AR-15 and a typical autoloading pistol like a Glock.
Up front, the AR can shoot faster with fewer reloads and the ballistics of the 5.56x45 provide more range and accuracy. A Glock has the same advantages from a magazine capacity perspective and would likely be easier to shoot in most common pistol calibers (eg, 9mm).
When you start to think about it, though, the .44 setup starts to make some sense. The .44 mag platform allows for shooting both magnum and .44 special ammo, making for greater ammo flexibility, and in many situations the .44 special round will provide the average shooter with greater accuracy while still retaining great knock-down power. For the very long haul, you might even be able to create home-grown black powder reloads, since the .44 Special's is directly derived from a black powder case and still retains case volume sufficient to create a black powder load. More modern case designs don't have the volume sufficient to create black powder versions and rely on higher energy density smokeless powders.
Generally speaking, revolvers are also more reliable than autoloaders -- misfires and jams will be less likely even with a very reliable and indestructible gun like a Glock. I'd also suspect that a lever action rifle is likely to be long-term more reliable than a typical (gas-impingement) AR-15 -- they are old designs, with modern materials and engineering improvements.
While effective range is less with .44 ammo, it's still effective at most common urban combat ranges where it matters. We'd all like 1,000 yard strike capacity, but most people can't shoot that far even with excellent equipment and most urban distances are 100 yards or less.
And from a legal perspective, lever-action rifles and revolvers are some of the last weapons likely to be banned (although a magazine capacity restriction might affect a lever-action rifle, but the Marlin 1894 has only a 10 round tube capacity anyway). When/if "they" come after guns we already, "hunting" guns will be lower profile than assault weapons and 10+ capacity handguns.
PlanetMoney did a show about Bain's investments and highlighted both a success story and a failure story.
IMHO, Bain made out really well both times, but the problem was that they made out even when the compan(ies) they were buying/merging did really poorly, and Bain made out primarily based on the heavy debt burden they placed on the companies they bought.
The script seemed to be:
1) Buy Company -- adding debt
2) Borrow for acquisitions/mergers -- adding debt
3) Pay Bain first. A lot.
4) Add more debt and companies (optional)
It struck me that the calculated strategy of Bain either worked or it didn't, but regardless Bain got paid handsomely but was insulated from risk when it didn't work out.
The show did make a good point, which is fair to Bain, that if they're just saddling acquired companies with debt to pay themselves management fees, why do banks keep loaning them money? If all they ever did was get paid and destroy businesses, banks wouldn't loan them money.
The program didn't' say this, but it may be that Bain is in league with the banks and that the loans are structured in a way that even when the companies saddled with them default on them that the banks don't really lose money (ie, high fees paid up front for the loans) or there is some kind of asset made a collateral for the loan which protects the bank from incurring real losses.
My guess is that there's some of that, but that more generally Bain does win more than they lose and that this is reflected in their ability to raise capital.
Yes.
This is a neat system but it requires a lot of known information about the cartridge ahead of time (bullet weight, muzzle velocity, etc) to do the ballistic calculations in addition to some of the environment variables (cant, range, wind, etc).
It'd be cool if the scope could do some kind of impact POI tracking so that the displayed point of aim could be adjusted for the actual flight path of the bullet. This would allow it to compensate (or try to) for other variance in field conditions, such as differences in wind (shooting from cover to an open area), deviation in cartridge loads as well as shooter performance.
Now, I don't know how they would actually do this on the fly -- a sensor may be able to track a tracer round, but actual bullet impact at any distance would be hard to track.
Maybe it would be of value to shoot some quantity of test rounds at a target and then tell the scope where you aimed and where you hit and let it do some statistical analysis to figure out what's going on and then use that information in the field to at least partially compensate.
This is the problem with the mindset that everytime something bad happens we need a law to prevent it from happening again.
We have so many laws now that new laws often go unenforced (or the old ones they supplement go unenforced), and the police now have a laundry list of bullshit laws they can whip out when convenient.
This has largely been my experience working in SMB consulting.
I went to work with a SMB VAR thinking it'd help me figure out how to be a freelancer and the best lesson I have learned is the raw economics of it. We're so small of a company that our timesheets largely tell the tale of how much we're bringing in.
You start doing the math on your salary and benefits and then subtract that from the monthly billable number and it's not really get rich money, especially if you think in terms of the extra taxes and overhead you would have if you were on your own.
It's more money if you can take on longer gigs, but project work means it's nearly impossible to have any recurring business. And the longer the gig, the harder it is to get involved with another project because you're less certain of when the existing project will end, meaning you will have some down time (ie, no income time) when longer projects end.
Recurring business is superior from a consistency perspective because you can schedule it and it means regular income and deeper hours, but the work is a lot less engaging dumb maintenance tasks, and you occasionally get hammered by multiple clients who decide to have a "crisis" at the same time. But it seems more immune to economic downturns than project work, as unless an organization decides to fold, doing nothing at all with computers isn't viable.
Overall, I think just being an employee is easier than trying to be a total freelancer. For some people the stars may align and they end up with the right skills/technology/labor mix where they get consistent project work, but it's not always the case.
I'm fine with firing them over this, as this seems to be a science-based issue where there's good scientific evidence to support the idea that flu vaccination has a meaningful public health benefit. (I'd also support a denial of insurance coverage for people who don't get vaccinated and get whatever illness they could have been vaccinated for).
I'm more intrigued with the low, 60 percent vaccination rate. Why would this be? Are you telling me 40% of these people are anti-vaccine lunatics? Or is there something they know, or think they know, that causes them to avoid this vaccine?