I don't disagree that they aren't perfect substitutes for each other, but it's not about total replacement it's about trying to get people to prefer the less harmful one over the more harmful one.
I think long-term we'd have less total alcohol consumption, even if some people used both or if some people preferred alcohol.
At least anecdotally, it's the effect I've seen. People who smoke pot wind up drinking less, sometimes even not at all, at least when they're smoking pot.
This seems naive, like that somehow AMD isn't a business motivated primarily by increasing the wealth of its executives and shareholders.
As gross underdogs in terms of market share they may *appear* to be completely customer focused, delivering a superior product because its the right thing to do but it would seem like that they would become less like this as their market power increases. Would the market share with Intel be flip-flopped, I'm sure they would face the same moral hazards and economics leverage that led Intel to be a "bad actor".
I won't disagree with the study's statistical conclusions, alcohol really is a pretty corrosive drug even if some plurality of the population manages to drink at moderate levels.
The problem is their desire to turn to meaningful legal restrictions on alcohol availability. Almost inevitably these will result in some levels of increased criminality to skirt restrictions on availability and obsessive behaviors like stockpiling or increased binge drinking among heavier drinkers.
It's hard to see any legal restrictions that don't come with side effects which greatly dilute whatever positive effects they produce. It may still produce some large-scale aggregate statistical benefit, but really are these worth it?
I know the math says "all drinking is harmful" but I wonder if the better benefit doesn't come with expending the money and effort associated with greater restrictions actually teaching people how to drink to achieve harm reduction -- strategies which allow users to achieve their desired effects of with the minimum amount of total alcohol consumption. It wouldn't surprise me if the answer was something counter-intuitive and counter to the morality surrounding alcohol consumption -- like instead of drinking 3-4 drinks over a 4 hour period, instead drink two drinks quickly, and then abstain the rest of the evening. You get a nice peak level of intoxication and end up reducing total consumption.
We rely far too much on cultural norms and habits for "teaching" alcohol consumption. My parents were light to moderate drinkers, but really everything I know about "how to drink" was discovered the hard way through experimentation, and often experimentation with deleterious side effects.
The only other option which seems equally valuable is literally advancing substitutes for alcohol consumption with fewer negative health impacts, like vaporized or edible cannabis concentrates. That's the first (and maybe only) one I can think of, but we haven't ever tasked our pharmaceutical industry to research the ability to produce substitute drugs that min-max harmful effects and desirable effects, either, so there aren't many other viable choices with more benign effects.
Even then, it may be that allowing small quantities of low-dose tranquilizers to be available to adults might actually be better than alcohol consumption. It'd be interesting to know what the health effects of 2-3 mg per week of xanax is like vs. 6 oz of alcohol per week. Of course there are known problems with addiction associated with xanax or other tranquilizers that may make this impractical, but on a mg-mg basis they may still be less unhealthy.
Alcohol consumption isn't going away. History has demonstrated time and again that prohibition is simply worse than the problem it tries to solve and that restrictions less than prohibition tend to be ineffective to the extent they are less than prohibition. They also produce side effects similar to prohibition to the extent they are extensive enough to be effective.
It may be true that "nothing" is actually better, but a zero mind altering substance culture seems impossible to actually achieve and something like a projected or confirmation bias by people with specific personality and psychological traits compatible with it.
I think you and the parent are both kind of right and your opinions less contradictory than you think.
I can remember when Facebook was pretty new and the Facebook newsfeed was a chronological list of your freinds' posts. Then they started manipulating it in various ways, people would comment on not seeing some posts by people they used to, then the flood of companies, advertising and so forth until the 'newsfeed' was a totally manipulated entity where "engagement" was somehow a barometer of clickbaitiness and controversy.
I think Facebook mostly aligned the newsfeed with how wound up people got, their version of engagement. As it turns out, others found out that with enough effort you could use that to push controversial issues on Facebook since their controversy was likely to result in high levels of "engagement".
Dislike of refugees in Germany is just another controversy that Facebook's system manages to amplify. And it's not that people aren't *actually* upset in Germany over immigration. Merkel is barely hanging onto her job after bulk-importing Syrians and larger Germany society is taking a beating for suppressing news/discussion of ethnic conflicts within Germany.
After a while, it's hard to separate the organic anger about issues and the amplified version of it. And there's a point at which being bombarded with people's marginally informed outrage constantly just makes you hostile. I had to quit using Facebook, despite its ease of keeping me informed on some people/family I liked, because it was making me really dislike people I actually liked in real life, people I invite to my house for dinner and have long conversations with without being angry.
I think political control largely boils down to control of available resources.
I think the concept of political liberty is tied up in private property. If you can say you own resources, you are free from someone else who controls the same resources.
I think its no coincidence that democracy and capitalism evolved together, and no coincidence that totalitarian communism eliminated private property.
This isn't to say that private property can't run amok. I would argue that capital concentration is actually anti-private property as it tends to concentrate ownership in smaller numbers of people.
I guess my point was thought it pays well and they have developed some great skills which require a lot of information and intelligence, we treat some idiot office worker who's 20% of that so much better even when they make much less.
The "equivalent" office worker with as much skill as a master electrician is treated like a fucking deity at work, and not brownbeaten by their manager or made to toe a bunch of bullshit work rules.
It turns out that those jobs pay reasonably well and a plumber who gains sufficient experience and starts his or her own business would not have much trouble netting six figures. But that is seen as an "undesirable" occupation.
At a past job where I was a vanilla and fairly inexperienced network administrator, we were replacing all the premise wiring from Cat-3 to Cat-5 in conjunction with a major overhaul of our first generation network plant.
I spent a lot of time coordinating with the electricians who were doing the work and got to know them pretty well. I was fascinated with the union aspect of their job and as it turned out, they were making more money than me and had some desirable benefits.
But I gotta tell you, I wouldn't have switched jobs. And not that their actual day-day tasks were bad, either. It was the *supervisory structure* that sucked so hard for them. They had a total jerk of a supervisor and many of their work rules were kind of severe. The whole setup seemed extremely confrontational, as if their bosses felt like they had to dick them over at every opportunity and they in turn felt like they had to resist/foil management at every opportunity.
We had some demanding executives and annoying users, but none of them made my work experience quite like the stuff the electricians had to put up with.
I think the whole blue collar trade thing would solve much of its labor shortages if they quit treating the workers like "blue collar workers", like they were slightly dangerous animals that needed a regular whipping and strict rules to be kept in line.
Discussing some of the projects they worked on, there was a lot of complexity in some of their high voltage work in addition to some tricky and very good materials estimation. I saw them show up to do some high voltage work for us and I was like "that's not nearly enough conduit" and low and behold they had barely enough leftover material to fill a lunch bag. Had I done a similar task at home, there would have been much more scrap.
I might argue that the collapse of journalism isn't a phenomenon of the last 10 years, but a much slower process that started maybe around the time of the advent of television news.
The power of television to tell stories with audio and video but constrained by time and depth created something of a propaganda monster that political actors began to resent because could so easily move the population's opinion on issues.
1968 saw the Chicago convention riots widely televised, including journalists actively scolding the political leadership for inciting and perpetuating violence against protesters. The Vietnam war brought home all its horrors every night on TV, resulting in significant resistance to the war and no small amount of social upheaval.
The Nixon administration hated the press for these things and others, kind of culminating in the Pentagon Papers where the press actively demonstrated government dishonesty on the Vietnam war.
That this occurred during a Republican administration and combined with Watergate led the Republicans to begin to condemn the press as having a liberal bias. This liberal bias continued through the 1980s (remember the famous "Rather Biased" criticism of CBS and Dan Rather?). Belief in the media a neutral arbiter of news events and facts was really on life support even at this point.
This perception of the media as biased gained traction, contributing to partisan distrust of the media. Once we hit the Internet age the stage was then set for all manner of alternative media sources "trusted" to be free of the "other side's bias". The economics of online news just simply gutted whatever was left of those former institutions.
I always figured the way to beat baggage screening was a kind of x-ray stenography. Pack your contraband items in close proximity to familiar and non-contraband items that are readily identifiable to x-ray screeners. Unless its entirely obvious, they will just assume the contraband is another similar item to what they can "see" and let it pass, or the item density and overlap will be such they can't quite make out anything and might just assume it's a collection of toiletries or some other innocuous content.
Of course I just made this all up and don't have any experience in smuggling, so perhaps this is all just errant speculation.
Part of the problem is we used to largely achieve this separation (imperfectly, of course) by paying intelligent adults reasonable salaries to do things like verify sources, check facts, and more or less make the news more reasonable. I believe this once somewhat honorable profession was called "journalism". It had its flaws (Hearst, et al) but by and large it worked.
Now that journalism has collapsed or been sucked into "the infotainment content business" nobody's willing to pay for that or they expect an algorithm that can automate the cost of doing down to zero.
It's also complicated somewhat by the increase in diversity. Part of the effectiveness (and flaw) of journalism was that, yes, some of what made it through the journalism filters was "fake news" but it was more or less fake news built off of shared assumptions and biases of a more homogeneous population.
Now that we have fewer shared assumptions and biases, it's getting more and more difficult even to decide on what's "fake news" unless the fakeness can be determined by physical science and mathematics.
My money is on all of this getting worse before it gets better.
I'm mostly inclined to think that it's some kind knee-jerk moralism. Smoking is "bad" not just because of its health effects but because it involves drug consumption for pleasure.
Vaping is the moral equivalent, so it must be just as bad in spite of less health effects because of morality.
I'm fairly convinced that if you invented a drug that had the same pleasurable effects of heroin but was magically free of addiction, overdose or any other measurable health side affects most of the same people enraged about opiate use would be just as enraged about this drug.
They make out like it's the *health* effects that they're wound up about, but really it's some kind of Calvinistic moralism that opposed to pleasure without some kind of pain.
Are you really bothered by the fact that people might be doing something vaguely harmful to themselves, or is it some other stylistic aspect of "vapers" that you don't like?
I mean, I watch people consume known toxin ethyl alcohol all the time and despite their occasionally destructive and violent behavior, I don't get quite as angry as you seem to be at vapers.
I don't really care about vapers, it looks fairly silly in practice but I can't think of a reason to be mad at them. But boy, a lot of people seem to heap hate on vapers.
What's the density of steel? Is it just a wee bit more dense than water? 'Cause steel is a large percentage of the weight of a bomb.
The whole bomb isn't made of steel, just the shell. The explosive content is only 30% of the bomb's weight despite the casing being only around half-inch thick. A "500 pound" bomb made of water is a sphere radius of only 0.37 meters, so it's not too different from an actual steel-case high explosive bomb.
Sweet! That 2 square feet of ground now has retardant on it. Now, how about the surrounding 500 acres?
You've never thrown a water balloon? They don't just get the point of impact wet, just like napalm bombs don't just light 2 square feet of ground on fire. A water bomb, like a napalm bomb, would hit with significant horizontal velocity and spread the water/retardant. I'd wager a polymer casing with baffles could be designed to improve dispersing over a wider area.
You just implied that water is somewhat close to the density of steel. You can stop pretending you've got insight now.
You clearly don't understand how actual bombs are constructed or the basic physics of water dispersion. You can stop pretending your objections to this idea have any merit.
The difference is you're either not sending any soldiers into the area before dropping those bombs.
The firefighting aircraft frequently drop retardant or water on firefighters. Even "close air support" bombing is much further from the soldiers than firefighting.
I doubt anyone would advocate for the use of anything besides liquid dispersal around people or valuable structures. Although I'm waiting for the boatload of liability suits when all the firefighters hit with flame retardant start complaining of cancer.
You also completely ignore the issue of duds and turn around time when you attempt to talk about the technological problems.
It only matters if the duds are somehow dangerous. We're not afraid to blanket firefighters or civilians in flame retardant now, a "dud" firefighting bomb could potentially be just a cracked polymer container leaking retardant. It doesn't have to be something armed with a dangerous explosive.
You're mistaking weight for volume. Bombs are relatively dense, so the aircraft can carry a heavy weight. That doesn't directly translate into carrying the same weight in firefighting equipment, even if it is bomb-shaped, because the density of the payload is much lower.
Water is dense. This could work out to be something as simple as water-filled polymer bombs that burst on impact.
Generally I think you're naysaying this for reasons we don't even know for sure would be a problem. I'm not insisting this would necessarily be a perfect solution for every wildfire, but it might be very useful for remote fires or difficult to reach areas. Bonus points if "water bombs" turn out to be useful with low-tech materials and without explosives. If anything, it's worth looking into to get some useful value out of fucking bombers that sit around doing nothing.
It's funny how being abroad alters your perceptions.
I was in London just after the Brexit vote and I couldn't believe the number of Britons who asked my American opinion of it. I would have thought the last thing they cared about was what an American thought of it. Certainly the last thing I wanted to be asked to defend was Trump!
But pretty much anyone who asked me about it seemed genuinely interested in my opinion. I don't know if that's just because people who ask are chatty by nature of there was something about the opinion of an American that mattered. The ones that did bring it up tended to be in favor of Brexit, so maybe they thought it would be something Americans would identify with, our nationalism or a certain American tendency to isolation or xenophobia or something.
I hadn't considered the role of exaggerated self-importance.
It's not that Australia doesn't punch above its weight in terms of population and cultural prominence -- I'd wager its seen as kind of a peer to most European countries that are actually much larger in terms of population and economy in the US and probably elsewhere.
But it's not like it carries the diplomatic weight or military power of a Britain or France, either. And while it has a certain geographic strategic importance, it's relatively remote and it's not like its border is a bulwark against invasion for some larger region (sort of like West Germany was).
I guess if I was Australian, I might think of myself as playing in the deep end of the pool, too, what with the regional power of the Chinese and the sheer numbers of Indonesia combined with a certain on-our-own remoteness.
As an American, I think I know who I'm supposed to be afraid of and that justifies government intrusion. It doesn't mean I believe it, but at least it seems plausible -- we've been bombing and killing plenty of people, so really any group fills in.
How about Australians? I know there have been 1-2 incidents with Muslims, but is it that big a fear thing there? Or is a secret cabal of Chinese? Some kind of panic over a wave of Indonesians? Some kind of organized crime thing?
It just seems odd that there would be all that much to be paranoid about in Australia that the government could get away with the same kinds of BS that they do here. I thought maybe besides not enough rain or no shrimps for the barbie there wouldn't be much to be worried about.
So is software like a thing or an object, where it's the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow? Like a hammer or something?
Or is it more like a living thing that needs to be fed to stay alive, like a dog?
I mean there's some software I still use all the time that I've had since the late 1990s and I don't know how it still works on Windows 2016, but it does. But there's applications I've bought much more recently that I'd like to use, but they don't work anymore because the OS changed in some way and it broke the application.
And then there's some that I don't want to run anymore, they don't do what I need done anymore. Not enough pixels, or not enough SMP, or something about it is inadequate for what I want to do. Or the data it uses it out of date and irrelevant, like an encyclopedia.
I think mostly the software world is in constant flux and it takes a lot of maintenance to keep it running right and doing what's relevant. I'm just disappointed they charge money like they were going to do meaningful fixes and improvements and instead just create monopolies and never tend to the software.
I'm left with a worthless hammer and a mean and unpredictable dog.
Even though there's no firefighting bombs right now, there's already a ton of expertise with both thermobaric weapons (which require a very precise fuel/air mixture to work) and past designs for spreading chemical/biological agents, which also have dispersion requirements similar to retardants.
It's not like such a design should be a huge leap forward in technology. Maybe you couldn't have one by Friday, but it's also not like we're waiting for some fundamental advancement in science to develop a fire fighting "bomb". It's only a question of engineering -- parachute drop with a pressure spray nozzle? Some kind of lightweight polymer bomb case that uses impact pressure to spray its load, like a napalm strike? I'm telling you, we've done nearly all of this before, just not for fighting fires.
I still disagree on payloads -- existing bomber designs have huge payloads, bigger than DC-10 tankers. Subdividing those payloads over individual bomb units shouldn't be a problem and might even allow a single plane to hit multiple hot spots.
Turnaround time is less of an issue for the military as well, they have more planes and the force multiplier of 5 B-1Bs hitting a fire simultaneously is worth some larger cost in reload time. I suspect the Air Force is pretty good at re-arming bombers and turning them back out again.
I spent a few days in the Arizona back country with my family, and then spent a couple of days at the Venetian. I had a locked case with me for a gun which I wanted to check with hotel security for the duration of my visit. I made it about halfway through the lobby (with a 6 year old boy in tow, no less) before security stopped me. I told them I had a weapon I wanted to have held in security, and everything was fine.
This was what seemed weird about the Mandalay Bay shooting, how that guy was able to get a giant arsenal into his room without security wondering WTF he was doing. I'm not pushing a conspiracy here, I think there was video of him coming in the self-park elevators with a luggage cart packed with bags, so its obvious it happened.
My gun case was a brief-case sized aluminum case with an obvious lock on it, I'm sure it said "GUN!" unlike a generic nylon zip case or suitcase.
I don't know for sure, but there may be local laws in Clark County that prohibit weapon carry on casino property. I spoke with the security director at the Venetian when I checked out and he said they get a lot of guns for storage and they're happy to do it (vs. loose guns in guest rooms). It wasn't clear if keeping them in your room or traversing the casino floor (necessary often to get to the room elevators) with a weapon was a violation of just casino security rules or actual law. Can't say I blame them, drinking, gambling and losing money with easy access to loaded weapons sounds like a problem waiting to happen.
I spoke with the security directory because their protocol was kind of fucked up. When I checked in, the check-in clerk knew nothing about security for weapons. And when I claimed my weapon at check-out, the security officer on duty didn't know what to do. I ended up with an armed escort all the way out to the taxi line, which was kind of amusing because the guard let/made us jump the entire taxi line -- he just walked us up to the line and told the cabstand guy "these people are next".
The air force happens to be equipped with a bunch of planes specifically designed to carry large loads to be dropped, accurately, on targets.
The use of high explosives to snuff out fires is obviously problematic and probably not practical in all but the most remote and/or desperate situations.
But I don't see why the use of the planes with "bomb" loads that are designed to spread flame retardant or extinguishing chemicals would be at all controversial. The only real question is whether we have a bomb technology capable of working as a dispersal technology and not just an explosive.
B1s or B52s can dump massive payloads pretty accurately and the air force has the logistics to turn these around quickly, too, amplifying the potential effectiveness. A B-1B has a payload 25% higher than a DC-10 converted to tanker capability and probably a lot better low level handling capability. Plus there's a whole lot more B-1Bs than DC-10 tankers. Hitting a fire's leading edge with 5 planes in rapid succession is probably worth more than 5 DC-10 loads spread over hours.
My guess is that we probably do have some dusty old designs from the chemical and biological warfare eras that could be adapted for use with retardant or extinguishing materials. Clearly if we once had a way to spread VX or anthrax or whatever with bombers, we could probably figure out a way to bomb fires with flame retardant that didn't involve blowing up whatever's on the ground.
It also seems like the kind of technology the military itself would find useful. The Japanese tried to use balloons to set forest fires during WW II, and it seems reasonable the military would gain some value in a "bomb" technology that would let them fight fires using their existing bomber fleet.
All the other arguments about forest fires seem a distraction -- should we or shouldn't we put them out, should people build in fire-prone areas or not, etc. Once we've decided we shouldn't allow some area to burn, then its really about how do you control the fire if conventional methods and equipment don't seem up to the task.
Only because it emphasizes the ridiculous sense of entitlement that's taken hold.
Let's face it, if you have someone's IP without paying for it, it's IP theft, and no amount of "but I'm poor" justifies it. Food, housing and healthcare I'd feel differently about, but it seems the sense of entitlement anymore has been extended to everything that people want that mean old capitalists won't give them for free.
I will grant that some old ROM to a game that hasn't been sold or rebooted in decades is a pretty low-rent type of "theft" that not even the corporate shills at Nintendo should waste time on.
But the specifics of the thing people feel entitled to isn't what bothers me, it's the sense of entitlement that because people don't have the material resources for something optional in life that makes it OK to just take it.
The irony is that material prosperity is pretty high these days, because people are whining about their entitlement to intellectual property. 100 years ago it would have been food or shelter and they would have felt entitled to take that by force of arms if necessary.
Many game developers and people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives, especially those who grew up in low-income households or outside a Western country, wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs.
Many people who didn't grow up with a yacht wouldn't have been inspired to take up naval architecture or oceanography. That doesn't mean you're entitled to a yacht.
People seem to forget that just because you want something doesn't mean you're entitled to it.
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I don't disagree that they aren't perfect substitutes for each other, but it's not about total replacement it's about trying to get people to prefer the less harmful one over the more harmful one.
I think long-term we'd have less total alcohol consumption, even if some people used both or if some people preferred alcohol.
At least anecdotally, it's the effect I've seen. People who smoke pot wind up drinking less, sometimes even not at all, at least when they're smoking pot.
This seems naive, like that somehow AMD isn't a business motivated primarily by increasing the wealth of its executives and shareholders.
As gross underdogs in terms of market share they may *appear* to be completely customer focused, delivering a superior product because its the right thing to do but it would seem like that they would become less like this as their market power increases. Would the market share with Intel be flip-flopped, I'm sure they would face the same moral hazards and economics leverage that led Intel to be a "bad actor".
I won't disagree with the study's statistical conclusions, alcohol really is a pretty corrosive drug even if some plurality of the population manages to drink at moderate levels.
The problem is their desire to turn to meaningful legal restrictions on alcohol availability. Almost inevitably these will result in some levels of increased criminality to skirt restrictions on availability and obsessive behaviors like stockpiling or increased binge drinking among heavier drinkers.
It's hard to see any legal restrictions that don't come with side effects which greatly dilute whatever positive effects they produce. It may still produce some large-scale aggregate statistical benefit, but really are these worth it?
I know the math says "all drinking is harmful" but I wonder if the better benefit doesn't come with expending the money and effort associated with greater restrictions actually teaching people how to drink to achieve harm reduction -- strategies which allow users to achieve their desired effects of with the minimum amount of total alcohol consumption. It wouldn't surprise me if the answer was something counter-intuitive and counter to the morality surrounding alcohol consumption -- like instead of drinking 3-4 drinks over a 4 hour period, instead drink two drinks quickly, and then abstain the rest of the evening. You get a nice peak level of intoxication and end up reducing total consumption.
We rely far too much on cultural norms and habits for "teaching" alcohol consumption. My parents were light to moderate drinkers, but really everything I know about "how to drink" was discovered the hard way through experimentation, and often experimentation with deleterious side effects.
The only other option which seems equally valuable is literally advancing substitutes for alcohol consumption with fewer negative health impacts, like vaporized or edible cannabis concentrates. That's the first (and maybe only) one I can think of, but we haven't ever tasked our pharmaceutical industry to research the ability to produce substitute drugs that min-max harmful effects and desirable effects, either, so there aren't many other viable choices with more benign effects.
Even then, it may be that allowing small quantities of low-dose tranquilizers to be available to adults might actually be better than alcohol consumption. It'd be interesting to know what the health effects of 2-3 mg per week of xanax is like vs. 6 oz of alcohol per week. Of course there are known problems with addiction associated with xanax or other tranquilizers that may make this impractical, but on a mg-mg basis they may still be less unhealthy.
Alcohol consumption isn't going away. History has demonstrated time and again that prohibition is simply worse than the problem it tries to solve and that restrictions less than prohibition tend to be ineffective to the extent they are less than prohibition. They also produce side effects similar to prohibition to the extent they are extensive enough to be effective.
It may be true that "nothing" is actually better, but a zero mind altering substance culture seems impossible to actually achieve and something like a projected or confirmation bias by people with specific personality and psychological traits compatible with it.
I think you and the parent are both kind of right and your opinions less contradictory than you think.
I can remember when Facebook was pretty new and the Facebook newsfeed was a chronological list of your freinds' posts. Then they started manipulating it in various ways, people would comment on not seeing some posts by people they used to, then the flood of companies, advertising and so forth until the 'newsfeed' was a totally manipulated entity where "engagement" was somehow a barometer of clickbaitiness and controversy.
I think Facebook mostly aligned the newsfeed with how wound up people got, their version of engagement. As it turns out, others found out that with enough effort you could use that to push controversial issues on Facebook since their controversy was likely to result in high levels of "engagement".
Dislike of refugees in Germany is just another controversy that Facebook's system manages to amplify. And it's not that people aren't *actually* upset in Germany over immigration. Merkel is barely hanging onto her job after bulk-importing Syrians and larger Germany society is taking a beating for suppressing news/discussion of ethnic conflicts within Germany.
After a while, it's hard to separate the organic anger about issues and the amplified version of it. And there's a point at which being bombarded with people's marginally informed outrage constantly just makes you hostile. I had to quit using Facebook, despite its ease of keeping me informed on some people/family I liked, because it was making me really dislike people I actually liked in real life, people I invite to my house for dinner and have long conversations with without being angry.
I think political control largely boils down to control of available resources.
I think the concept of political liberty is tied up in private property. If you can say you own resources, you are free from someone else who controls the same resources.
I think its no coincidence that democracy and capitalism evolved together, and no coincidence that totalitarian communism eliminated private property.
This isn't to say that private property can't run amok. I would argue that capital concentration is actually anti-private property as it tends to concentrate ownership in smaller numbers of people.
I guess my point was thought it pays well and they have developed some great skills which require a lot of information and intelligence, we treat some idiot office worker who's 20% of that so much better even when they make much less.
The "equivalent" office worker with as much skill as a master electrician is treated like a fucking deity at work, and not brownbeaten by their manager or made to toe a bunch of bullshit work rules.
It turns out that those jobs pay reasonably well and a plumber who gains sufficient experience and starts his or her own business would not have much trouble netting six figures. But that is seen as an "undesirable" occupation.
At a past job where I was a vanilla and fairly inexperienced network administrator, we were replacing all the premise wiring from Cat-3 to Cat-5 in conjunction with a major overhaul of our first generation network plant.
I spent a lot of time coordinating with the electricians who were doing the work and got to know them pretty well. I was fascinated with the union aspect of their job and as it turned out, they were making more money than me and had some desirable benefits.
But I gotta tell you, I wouldn't have switched jobs. And not that their actual day-day tasks were bad, either. It was the *supervisory structure* that sucked so hard for them. They had a total jerk of a supervisor and many of their work rules were kind of severe. The whole setup seemed extremely confrontational, as if their bosses felt like they had to dick them over at every opportunity and they in turn felt like they had to resist/foil management at every opportunity.
We had some demanding executives and annoying users, but none of them made my work experience quite like the stuff the electricians had to put up with.
I think the whole blue collar trade thing would solve much of its labor shortages if they quit treating the workers like "blue collar workers", like they were slightly dangerous animals that needed a regular whipping and strict rules to be kept in line.
Discussing some of the projects they worked on, there was a lot of complexity in some of their high voltage work in addition to some tricky and very good materials estimation. I saw them show up to do some high voltage work for us and I was like "that's not nearly enough conduit" and low and behold they had barely enough leftover material to fill a lunch bag. Had I done a similar task at home, there would have been much more scrap.
I might argue that the collapse of journalism isn't a phenomenon of the last 10 years, but a much slower process that started maybe around the time of the advent of television news.
The power of television to tell stories with audio and video but constrained by time and depth created something of a propaganda monster that political actors began to resent because could so easily move the population's opinion on issues.
1968 saw the Chicago convention riots widely televised, including journalists actively scolding the political leadership for inciting and perpetuating violence against protesters. The Vietnam war brought home all its horrors every night on TV, resulting in significant resistance to the war and no small amount of social upheaval.
The Nixon administration hated the press for these things and others, kind of culminating in the Pentagon Papers where the press actively demonstrated government dishonesty on the Vietnam war.
That this occurred during a Republican administration and combined with Watergate led the Republicans to begin to condemn the press as having a liberal bias. This liberal bias continued through the 1980s (remember the famous "Rather Biased" criticism of CBS and Dan Rather?). Belief in the media a neutral arbiter of news events and facts was really on life support even at this point.
This perception of the media as biased gained traction, contributing to partisan distrust of the media. Once we hit the Internet age the stage was then set for all manner of alternative media sources "trusted" to be free of the "other side's bias". The economics of online news just simply gutted whatever was left of those former institutions.
I always figured the way to beat baggage screening was a kind of x-ray stenography. Pack your contraband items in close proximity to familiar and non-contraband items that are readily identifiable to x-ray screeners. Unless its entirely obvious, they will just assume the contraband is another similar item to what they can "see" and let it pass, or the item density and overlap will be such they can't quite make out anything and might just assume it's a collection of toiletries or some other innocuous content.
Of course I just made this all up and don't have any experience in smuggling, so perhaps this is all just errant speculation.
Part of the problem is we used to largely achieve this separation (imperfectly, of course) by paying intelligent adults reasonable salaries to do things like verify sources, check facts, and more or less make the news more reasonable. I believe this once somewhat honorable profession was called "journalism". It had its flaws (Hearst, et al) but by and large it worked.
Now that journalism has collapsed or been sucked into "the infotainment content business" nobody's willing to pay for that or they expect an algorithm that can automate the cost of doing down to zero.
It's also complicated somewhat by the increase in diversity. Part of the effectiveness (and flaw) of journalism was that, yes, some of what made it through the journalism filters was "fake news" but it was more or less fake news built off of shared assumptions and biases of a more homogeneous population.
Now that we have fewer shared assumptions and biases, it's getting more and more difficult even to decide on what's "fake news" unless the fakeness can be determined by physical science and mathematics.
My money is on all of this getting worse before it gets better.
I'm mostly inclined to think that it's some kind knee-jerk moralism. Smoking is "bad" not just because of its health effects but because it involves drug consumption for pleasure.
Vaping is the moral equivalent, so it must be just as bad in spite of less health effects because of morality.
I'm fairly convinced that if you invented a drug that had the same pleasurable effects of heroin but was magically free of addiction, overdose or any other measurable health side affects most of the same people enraged about opiate use would be just as enraged about this drug.
They make out like it's the *health* effects that they're wound up about, but really it's some kind of Calvinistic moralism that opposed to pleasure without some kind of pain.
Are you really bothered by the fact that people might be doing something vaguely harmful to themselves, or is it some other stylistic aspect of "vapers" that you don't like?
I mean, I watch people consume known toxin ethyl alcohol all the time and despite their occasionally destructive and violent behavior, I don't get quite as angry as you seem to be at vapers.
I don't really care about vapers, it looks fairly silly in practice but I can't think of a reason to be mad at them. But boy, a lot of people seem to heap hate on vapers.
What's the density of steel? Is it just a wee bit more dense than water? 'Cause steel is a large percentage of the weight of a bomb.
The whole bomb isn't made of steel, just the shell. The explosive content is only 30% of the bomb's weight despite the casing being only around half-inch thick. A "500 pound" bomb made of water is a sphere radius of only 0.37 meters, so it's not too different from an actual steel-case high explosive bomb.
Sweet! That 2 square feet of ground now has retardant on it. Now, how about the surrounding 500 acres?
You've never thrown a water balloon? They don't just get the point of impact wet, just like napalm bombs don't just light 2 square feet of ground on fire. A water bomb, like a napalm bomb, would hit with significant horizontal velocity and spread the water/retardant. I'd wager a polymer casing with baffles could be designed to improve dispersing over a wider area.
You just implied that water is somewhat close to the density of steel. You can stop pretending you've got insight now.
You clearly don't understand how actual bombs are constructed or the basic physics of water dispersion. You can stop pretending your objections to this idea have any merit.
I put them over the logo on my Dell laptop.
If security ever asks me anything about them, I just tell them "the maze wasn't meant for you" and "it doesn't look like anything to me."
The difference is you're either not sending any soldiers into the area before dropping those bombs.
The firefighting aircraft frequently drop retardant or water on firefighters. Even "close air support" bombing is much further from the soldiers than firefighting.
I doubt anyone would advocate for the use of anything besides liquid dispersal around people or valuable structures. Although I'm waiting for the boatload of liability suits when all the firefighters hit with flame retardant start complaining of cancer.
You also completely ignore the issue of duds and turn around time when you attempt to talk about the technological problems.
It only matters if the duds are somehow dangerous. We're not afraid to blanket firefighters or civilians in flame retardant now, a "dud" firefighting bomb could potentially be just a cracked polymer container leaking retardant. It doesn't have to be something armed with a dangerous explosive.
You're mistaking weight for volume. Bombs are relatively dense, so the aircraft can carry a heavy weight. That doesn't directly translate into carrying the same weight in firefighting equipment, even if it is bomb-shaped, because the density of the payload is much lower.
Water is dense. This could work out to be something as simple as water-filled polymer bombs that burst on impact.
Generally I think you're naysaying this for reasons we don't even know for sure would be a problem. I'm not insisting this would necessarily be a perfect solution for every wildfire, but it might be very useful for remote fires or difficult to reach areas. Bonus points if "water bombs" turn out to be useful with low-tech materials and without explosives. If anything, it's worth looking into to get some useful value out of fucking bombers that sit around doing nothing.
It's funny how being abroad alters your perceptions.
I was in London just after the Brexit vote and I couldn't believe the number of Britons who asked my American opinion of it. I would have thought the last thing they cared about was what an American thought of it. Certainly the last thing I wanted to be asked to defend was Trump!
But pretty much anyone who asked me about it seemed genuinely interested in my opinion. I don't know if that's just because people who ask are chatty by nature of there was something about the opinion of an American that mattered. The ones that did bring it up tended to be in favor of Brexit, so maybe they thought it would be something Americans would identify with, our nationalism or a certain American tendency to isolation or xenophobia or something.
I hadn't considered the role of exaggerated self-importance.
It's not that Australia doesn't punch above its weight in terms of population and cultural prominence -- I'd wager its seen as kind of a peer to most European countries that are actually much larger in terms of population and economy in the US and probably elsewhere.
But it's not like it carries the diplomatic weight or military power of a Britain or France, either. And while it has a certain geographic strategic importance, it's relatively remote and it's not like its border is a bulwark against invasion for some larger region (sort of like West Germany was).
I guess if I was Australian, I might think of myself as playing in the deep end of the pool, too, what with the regional power of the Chinese and the sheer numbers of Indonesia combined with a certain on-our-own remoteness.
As an American, I think I know who I'm supposed to be afraid of and that justifies government intrusion. It doesn't mean I believe it, but at least it seems plausible -- we've been bombing and killing plenty of people, so really any group fills in.
How about Australians? I know there have been 1-2 incidents with Muslims, but is it that big a fear thing there? Or is a secret cabal of Chinese? Some kind of panic over a wave of Indonesians? Some kind of organized crime thing?
It just seems odd that there would be all that much to be paranoid about in Australia that the government could get away with the same kinds of BS that they do here. I thought maybe besides not enough rain or no shrimps for the barbie there wouldn't be much to be worried about.
So is software like a thing or an object, where it's the same today as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow? Like a hammer or something?
Or is it more like a living thing that needs to be fed to stay alive, like a dog?
I mean there's some software I still use all the time that I've had since the late 1990s and I don't know how it still works on Windows 2016, but it does. But there's applications I've bought much more recently that I'd like to use, but they don't work anymore because the OS changed in some way and it broke the application.
And then there's some that I don't want to run anymore, they don't do what I need done anymore. Not enough pixels, or not enough SMP, or something about it is inadequate for what I want to do. Or the data it uses it out of date and irrelevant, like an encyclopedia.
I think mostly the software world is in constant flux and it takes a lot of maintenance to keep it running right and doing what's relevant. I'm just disappointed they charge money like they were going to do meaningful fixes and improvements and instead just create monopolies and never tend to the software.
I'm left with a worthless hammer and a mean and unpredictable dog.
Even though there's no firefighting bombs right now, there's already a ton of expertise with both thermobaric weapons (which require a very precise fuel/air mixture to work) and past designs for spreading chemical/biological agents, which also have dispersion requirements similar to retardants.
It's not like such a design should be a huge leap forward in technology. Maybe you couldn't have one by Friday, but it's also not like we're waiting for some fundamental advancement in science to develop a fire fighting "bomb". It's only a question of engineering -- parachute drop with a pressure spray nozzle? Some kind of lightweight polymer bomb case that uses impact pressure to spray its load, like a napalm strike? I'm telling you, we've done nearly all of this before, just not for fighting fires.
I still disagree on payloads -- existing bomber designs have huge payloads, bigger than DC-10 tankers. Subdividing those payloads over individual bomb units shouldn't be a problem and might even allow a single plane to hit multiple hot spots.
Turnaround time is less of an issue for the military as well, they have more planes and the force multiplier of 5 B-1Bs hitting a fire simultaneously is worth some larger cost in reload time. I suspect the Air Force is pretty good at re-arming bombers and turning them back out again.
Vegas hotels frown on weapons in guest rooms.
I spent a few days in the Arizona back country with my family, and then spent a couple of days at the Venetian. I had a locked case with me for a gun which I wanted to check with hotel security for the duration of my visit. I made it about halfway through the lobby (with a 6 year old boy in tow, no less) before security stopped me. I told them I had a weapon I wanted to have held in security, and everything was fine.
This was what seemed weird about the Mandalay Bay shooting, how that guy was able to get a giant arsenal into his room without security wondering WTF he was doing. I'm not pushing a conspiracy here, I think there was video of him coming in the self-park elevators with a luggage cart packed with bags, so its obvious it happened.
My gun case was a brief-case sized aluminum case with an obvious lock on it, I'm sure it said "GUN!" unlike a generic nylon zip case or suitcase.
I don't know for sure, but there may be local laws in Clark County that prohibit weapon carry on casino property. I spoke with the security director at the Venetian when I checked out and he said they get a lot of guns for storage and they're happy to do it (vs. loose guns in guest rooms). It wasn't clear if keeping them in your room or traversing the casino floor (necessary often to get to the room elevators) with a weapon was a violation of just casino security rules or actual law. Can't say I blame them, drinking, gambling and losing money with easy access to loaded weapons sounds like a problem waiting to happen.
I spoke with the security directory because their protocol was kind of fucked up. When I checked in, the check-in clerk knew nothing about security for weapons. And when I claimed my weapon at check-out, the security officer on duty didn't know what to do. I ended up with an armed escort all the way out to the taxi line, which was kind of amusing because the guard let/made us jump the entire taxi line -- he just walked us up to the line and told the cabstand guy "these people are next".
The air force happens to be equipped with a bunch of planes specifically designed to carry large loads to be dropped, accurately, on targets.
The use of high explosives to snuff out fires is obviously problematic and probably not practical in all but the most remote and/or desperate situations.
But I don't see why the use of the planes with "bomb" loads that are designed to spread flame retardant or extinguishing chemicals would be at all controversial. The only real question is whether we have a bomb technology capable of working as a dispersal technology and not just an explosive.
B1s or B52s can dump massive payloads pretty accurately and the air force has the logistics to turn these around quickly, too, amplifying the potential effectiveness. A B-1B has a payload 25% higher than a DC-10 converted to tanker capability and probably a lot better low level handling capability. Plus there's a whole lot more B-1Bs than DC-10 tankers. Hitting a fire's leading edge with 5 planes in rapid succession is probably worth more than 5 DC-10 loads spread over hours.
My guess is that we probably do have some dusty old designs from the chemical and biological warfare eras that could be adapted for use with retardant or extinguishing materials. Clearly if we once had a way to spread VX or anthrax or whatever with bombers, we could probably figure out a way to bomb fires with flame retardant that didn't involve blowing up whatever's on the ground.
It also seems like the kind of technology the military itself would find useful. The Japanese tried to use balloons to set forest fires during WW II, and it seems reasonable the military would gain some value in a "bomb" technology that would let them fight fires using their existing bomber fleet.
All the other arguments about forest fires seem a distraction -- should we or shouldn't we put them out, should people build in fire-prone areas or not, etc. Once we've decided we shouldn't allow some area to burn, then its really about how do you control the fire if conventional methods and equipment don't seem up to the task.
I think in the olden days of city fires that got out of control it wasn't unusual to use dynamite to try to snuff out parts of the fire.
As a kid, I found that a burning cereal box would stop burning if you set off firecrackers in the fire.
Only because it emphasizes the ridiculous sense of entitlement that's taken hold.
Let's face it, if you have someone's IP without paying for it, it's IP theft, and no amount of "but I'm poor" justifies it. Food, housing and healthcare I'd feel differently about, but it seems the sense of entitlement anymore has been extended to everything that people want that mean old capitalists won't give them for free.
I will grant that some old ROM to a game that hasn't been sold or rebooted in decades is a pretty low-rent type of "theft" that not even the corporate shills at Nintendo should waste time on.
But the specifics of the thing people feel entitled to isn't what bothers me, it's the sense of entitlement that because people don't have the material resources for something optional in life that makes it OK to just take it.
The irony is that material prosperity is pretty high these days, because people are whining about their entitlement to intellectual property. 100 years ago it would have been food or shelter and they would have felt entitled to take that by force of arms if necessary.
Many game developers and people who have otherwise made video games a major part of their lives, especially those who grew up in low-income households or outside a Western country, wouldn't have been inspired to take that path if it wasn't for ROMs.
Many people who didn't grow up with a yacht wouldn't have been inspired to take up naval architecture or oceanography. That doesn't mean you're entitled to a yacht.
People seem to forget that just because you want something doesn't mean you're entitled to it.