But the difference is, in this day and age, and after recent bombings, mixing random things together at the advice of your friend is really really stupid.
In other words: teenager victim of mass hysteria. I guess the same was true of the Salem witch trials. I can only hope that when my kids get to be teenagers, this is the stupidest thing they do.
That's how you get people "innocently" making real bombs and killing real people.
Right. Same goes for Diet Coke and Mentos. Anything less than felony charges and next they'll be stocking up on plutonium.
Mod parent up! Quoting in full for greater visibility. I don't know what Kafka could do these days to trump this. WTF happened to the fact that the government is supposed to work for us?
My now 17 year old Son was expelled from high school two years ago for... get this... popping a regular old helium balloon. He was charged with Disorderly Conduct (the catch-all "when we want to charge you with something" summary crime in Pennsylvania) but we managed to get that dismissed at the Magisterial District Court after about $15,000 in legal fees, most of which was spent trying to obtain school surveillance video showing that the balloon popped when he leaned up against a wall, pinching the balloon between his backpack and the wall, causing it to pop.
We've home-schooled him since then. It's truly amazing how absolutely brain-dead our government has become. It really does destroy everything it touches, including the education system.
As the saying goes, "zero tolerance = zero common sense"
it's now SOP for them to call the police when two kids get into a FIGHT
I have a friend w/ an autistic 6 y.o. son. One day he committed the destructive and threatening act of shaking a book case. They called the police. Understandably the police respond quickly when a school calls, but I can imagine the response of the three officers when they arrived. Apparently one of the hazards of being a police officer these days is pissing your uniform because you're laughing so hard at some of the calls you have to respond to.
You're talking about the school's reaction. The far more egregious issue is charging her with a felony, which is something the school has no say in. This is more about police overreaction and DA's whose only interest is self-aggrandizement. Law, justice, or even sanity be damned. What do you think happened to Aaron Swartz?
It's worse than that, they disqualified 50,000 black people from voting by using an intentionally broad filter do disqualify ex-felons (who can't vote in Florida and a few other Southern states). They had a list of ex-felons that listed little information about them, but did list their race. If a black guy named John Smith once committed a felony in Florida and you were a black guy named John Smith you'd likely be disqualified from voting (with no advance notice that would let you challenge it). Never mind checking for little details, like the two John Smith's being born thirty years apart. The company doing the work warned about this lacking of checking, but the State of Florida told them not to refine it.
I've got an acetylene tank around the house. I understand that I now have to turn myself into the DoHS, but can I first finish using it to fix the plumbing? On the bright side I may get a reduced sentence if I rat out all my neighbors who have propane tanks (allegedly for their barbeques).
If you think mixing toilet cleaner and aluminum foil is essentially making an IED, then you'd be perfect for a modern school's zero-tolerance enforcement officer. Personally I'd go for the potassium permanganate and glycerine experiment, or dropping metallic sodium into water. I suppose they qualify as WMD's.
I used to dismiss things like "driving while black" until, after a fracas about one such incident in New Jersey, several NJ state troopers came forward and said that it was "unofficial" policy. It's also been statistically documented. If I knew I was more likely to get pulled over because of the color of my skin, I'd be damn resentful for the rest of my life. Want an ever better example? Check out the racial stats on Mayor-for-life "Bill of Rights No Longer Applies" Bloomberg's stop and frisk police state program.
Also, given how absurd the government's reaction is, I don't blame anyone for playing the race card or using any other trick to do something about this. I thought it was a temporary suspension, which is no big deal, but apparently she "will be forced to complete her diploma through an expulsion program". WTF? Given the absurdity of "zero tolerance" (aka "zero brains") policies, the principal may have little choice. He did say she meant no harm. But being charged with a felony? WTF? Nobody was hurt. Nobody was likely to be hurt. Schoolyard fights have bigger physical consequences. Since the state has prosecutorial discretion, forget any nonsense about them not having any choice. If I'd been prosecuted this way for some of the "experiments" my brothers and I did as teenagers, I'd be doing life.
However given the length of the DOE process and the time to build LNG terminals, it is unlikely the US will become a major player in the international natural gas market until 2020 at the earliest.
Good, because exporting natural gas won't help me or most Americans, but keeping the domestic supply cheap will. Which reminds me that I've got to replace my hot water heater.
Skip back to the late 1800s. The CAPITALIST transportation infrastructure of the USA was based on rail, inland waterways and horses.
Does the CAPITALIST (is that enough emphasis?) transportation infrastructure of the USA include the GOVERNMENT built Erie canal? How about all the land grants given to railroads to encourage them to build railroads out west, and in particular the Pacific Railroad Acts that led to the transcontinental railroad. Back in the east the railroads didn't need such an incentive, but they were happy to have the government use the power of eminent domain to create rights of way.
Quit blaming "capitalism" for the perpetual failures of GOVERNMENT and central planning.
Since you lost your effort to claim the 19th century transportation infrastructure had no government "interference", I'll suggest a more straightforward argument. Just declare it axiomatic that capitalism never causes problems and government always does.
The thing which confuses me about peak oil theories is they don't account for the way economics and pricing work. Supply of oil isn't an on/off switch, it won't just suddenly evaporate in a year and thus yielding a worthless modern infrastructure that requires oil.
Peak oil doesn't say it will suddenly "switch off". The first line of the Wikipedia article:
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline.
The rest of the article is a pretty good description of the whole (often misunderstood) theory.
Depends... if the place warms up enough before it starts cooling down, too much of the oceans will evaporate, and water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas so it will just keep getting hotter.
It won't endlessly get hotter. During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum there were crocodiles in the arctic, but it was only a temporary (in geologic terms) situation. Of course there were large scale extinctions, and it's likely much of humanity wouldn't survive such a situation, but it won't be the end of (non-human) life on earth. One possible scenario is that with all those southern folks wanting to move north, we'd have nuclear war. Then we'd get to test the hypothesis that nuclear winter is the solution to global warming.
Kunstler is not worth reading. He occasionally makes some accurate points, but they're in the nature of a stopped clock being right twice a day. He is neither an environmentalist nor someone concerned with natural resources (although he often claims to be one or both). At heart he is, and always has been, an urban planner. His vision of the future is for every place to be like Saratoga, NY, and he will latch onto any currently fashionable dire future prediction in order to demonstrate the historical inevitability of his urban planning vision. Back in the 90's he claimed Y2K would do it, but when the world didn't blow up on 1/1/2000, he shifted to environmentalism and natural resource constraints.
I am not a "screw the environment" type, I believe that the limitless fossil fuel scenario in the Atlantic article is highly speculative (as the article itself says), and that AGW is real. However, anyone who tries to support their argument by citing someone as unserious and self-aggrandizing as Kunstler does their own argument a disservice.
Those frequencies are used in 'sell and forget' devices like cordless phones, cell phones, High-speed modems, wi-fi equipment.
Cell phones use different spectrum than the other things you list, which use the ISM bands.
If the allotted frequencies change then all those devices needed to change their firmware to the new permissions list. All spectrum buyers will need to obey the allocation decisions, so they all need some means to inform their online devices.
No cell phone firmware changes needed. The base stations already tell the cell phones what frequencies to transmit on (and time slot and code as needed).
I fail to see the point of what pot of gold it is plucked from.
Fairness. I see no reason to impose a tax specifically on how much one uses a cell phone (this from someone who rarely uses his dumb phone). You're the one who pointed out everyone potentially needs the public safety network, and I don't think that potential need is proportional to how much you use your cell.
Obviously we need a public safety network, but that does not mean it has to be paid for by what is essentially a cell phone tax. As you point out, everyone potentially needs the public safety network, therefore it's reasonable to pay for it out of general revenues.
A truly free market (more importantly, a truly competitive market) is one where new suppliers can enter the market. Unfortunately spectrum is a strictly limited resource. Therefore allowing currently entrenched companies to buy big chunks of spectrum and block future entrants into the market is highly anti-competitive.
It could even be done on a shorter term basis. There is no technical reason that spectrum couldn't be dynamically allocated amongst carriers. It's easy to build base stations that can operate over an entire band and then tell them to only use certain frequencies. Forget the bidding, or even charging for the spectrum (the customers just wind up paying for it anyway), and periodically adjust how much spectrum each carrier is given in a certain area to reflect the load on their system. If a competitor grabs some of an entrenched company's customers (perhaps by some nefarious technique like better service or lower prices) then just give some of the entrenched company's spectrum to the upstart. That would allow real competition.
How is cellular spectrum allocation done in other countries, and how many carriers do they have? Knowledge of any other country is appreciated. I've long wondered how it would be in cellular with an old Ma Bell (AT&T pre-divestiture) style monopoly. Part of me likes the competition idea, but with spectrum so limited and cellular infrastructure so expensive to build, it seems awfully wasteful. It's not quite a natural monopoly, but it verges on it.
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But the difference is, in this day and age, and after recent bombings, mixing random things together at the advice of your friend is really really stupid.
In other words: teenager victim of mass hysteria. I guess the same was true of the Salem witch trials. I can only hope that when my kids get to be teenagers, this is the stupidest thing they do.
That's how you get people "innocently" making real bombs and killing real people.
Right. Same goes for Diet Coke and Mentos. Anything less than felony charges and next they'll be stocking up on plutonium.
My now 17 year old Son was expelled from high school two years ago for... get this... popping a regular old helium balloon. He was charged with Disorderly Conduct (the catch-all "when we want to charge you with something" summary crime in Pennsylvania) but we managed to get that dismissed at the Magisterial District Court after about $15,000 in legal fees, most of which was spent trying to obtain school surveillance video showing that the balloon popped when he leaned up against a wall, pinching the balloon between his backpack and the wall, causing it to pop.
We've home-schooled him since then. It's truly amazing how absolutely brain-dead our government has become. It really does destroy everything it touches, including the education system.
As the saying goes, "zero tolerance = zero common sense"
it's now SOP for them to call the police when two kids get into a FIGHT
I have a friend w/ an autistic 6 y.o. son. One day he committed the destructive and threatening act of shaking a book case. They called the police. Understandably the police respond quickly when a school calls, but I can imagine the response of the three officers when they arrived. Apparently one of the hazards of being a police officer these days is pissing your uniform because you're laughing so hard at some of the calls you have to respond to.
Hey now, we disowned Florida a long time ago.You stop holding the rest of the South accountable for Florida, and we'll forgive you for New Jersey.
"Forgiving" New Jersey isn't charitable, it's insane.
dangerous, explosive devices detonated on school grounds
From how far away was the mushroom cloud seen?
You're talking about the school's reaction. The far more egregious issue is charging her with a felony, which is something the school has no say in. This is more about police overreaction and DA's whose only interest is self-aggrandizement. Law, justice, or even sanity be damned. What do you think happened to Aaron Swartz?
It's worse than that, they disqualified 50,000 black people from voting by using an intentionally broad filter do disqualify ex-felons (who can't vote in Florida and a few other Southern states). They had a list of ex-felons that listed little information about them, but did list their race. If a black guy named John Smith once committed a felony in Florida and you were a black guy named John Smith you'd likely be disqualified from voting (with no advance notice that would let you challenge it). Never mind checking for little details, like the two John Smith's being born thirty years apart. The company doing the work warned about this lacking of checking, but the State of Florida told them not to refine it.
expulsion from school for a few days is warranted
Agreed, but that's not what they mean. The article says she "will be forced to complete her diploma through an expulsion program".
I've got an acetylene tank around the house. I understand that I now have to turn myself into the DoHS, but can I first finish using it to fix the plumbing? On the bright side I may get a reduced sentence if I rat out all my neighbors who have propane tanks (allegedly for their barbeques).
At least we are teaching them that those with authority and political power are not to be trusted.
An excellent practical lesson for anybody, and especially those few Americans who still believe in the Spirit of 1776.
This girl essentially made an IED.
If you think mixing toilet cleaner and aluminum foil is essentially making an IED, then you'd be perfect for a modern school's zero-tolerance enforcement officer. Personally I'd go for the potassium permanganate and glycerine experiment, or dropping metallic sodium into water. I suppose they qualify as WMD's.
I used to dismiss things like "driving while black" until, after a fracas about one such incident in New Jersey, several NJ state troopers came forward and said that it was "unofficial" policy. It's also been statistically documented. If I knew I was more likely to get pulled over because of the color of my skin, I'd be damn resentful for the rest of my life. Want an ever better example? Check out the racial stats on Mayor-for-life "Bill of Rights No Longer Applies" Bloomberg's stop and frisk police state program. Also, given how absurd the government's reaction is, I don't blame anyone for playing the race card or using any other trick to do something about this. I thought it was a temporary suspension, which is no big deal, but apparently she "will be forced to complete her diploma through an expulsion program". WTF? Given the absurdity of "zero tolerance" (aka "zero brains") policies, the principal may have little choice. He did say she meant no harm. But being charged with a felony? WTF? Nobody was hurt. Nobody was likely to be hurt. Schoolyard fights have bigger physical consequences. Since the state has prosecutorial discretion, forget any nonsense about them not having any choice. If I'd been prosecuted this way for some of the "experiments" my brothers and I did as teenagers, I'd be doing life.
That's because the 'democratic' west have made it their business to keep these countries corrupt, so as to maintain control of the OIL.
How did we manage to do that with Russia?
However given the length of the DOE process and the time to build LNG terminals, it is unlikely the US will become a major player in the international natural gas market until 2020 at the earliest.
Good, because exporting natural gas won't help me or most Americans, but keeping the domestic supply cheap will. Which reminds me that I've got to replace my hot water heater.
Skip back to the late 1800s. The CAPITALIST transportation infrastructure of the USA was based on rail, inland waterways and horses.
Does the CAPITALIST (is that enough emphasis?) transportation infrastructure of the USA include the GOVERNMENT built Erie canal? How about all the land grants given to railroads to encourage them to build railroads out west, and in particular the Pacific Railroad Acts that led to the transcontinental railroad. Back in the east the railroads didn't need such an incentive, but they were happy to have the government use the power of eminent domain to create rights of way.
Quit blaming "capitalism" for the perpetual failures of GOVERNMENT and central planning.
Since you lost your effort to claim the 19th century transportation infrastructure had no government "interference", I'll suggest a more straightforward argument. Just declare it axiomatic that capitalism never causes problems and government always does.
The thing which confuses me about peak oil theories is they don't account for the way economics and pricing work. Supply of oil isn't an on/off switch, it won't just suddenly evaporate in a year and thus yielding a worthless modern infrastructure that requires oil.
Peak oil doesn't say it will suddenly "switch off". The first line of the Wikipedia article:
Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction is reached, after which the rate of production is expected to enter terminal decline.
The rest of the article is a pretty good description of the whole (often misunderstood) theory.
Depends... if the place warms up enough before it starts cooling down, too much of the oceans will evaporate, and water vapor is a strong greenhouse gas so it will just keep getting hotter.
It won't endlessly get hotter. During the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum there were crocodiles in the arctic, but it was only a temporary (in geologic terms) situation. Of course there were large scale extinctions, and it's likely much of humanity wouldn't survive such a situation, but it won't be the end of (non-human) life on earth. One possible scenario is that with all those southern folks wanting to move north, we'd have nuclear war. Then we'd get to test the hypothesis that nuclear winter is the solution to global warming.
Kunstler is not worth reading. He occasionally makes some accurate points, but they're in the nature of a stopped clock being right twice a day. He is neither an environmentalist nor someone concerned with natural resources (although he often claims to be one or both). At heart he is, and always has been, an urban planner. His vision of the future is for every place to be like Saratoga, NY, and he will latch onto any currently fashionable dire future prediction in order to demonstrate the historical inevitability of his urban planning vision. Back in the 90's he claimed Y2K would do it, but when the world didn't blow up on 1/1/2000, he shifted to environmentalism and natural resource constraints.
I am not a "screw the environment" type, I believe that the limitless fossil fuel scenario in the Atlantic article is highly speculative (as the article itself says), and that AGW is real. However, anyone who tries to support their argument by citing someone as unserious and self-aggrandizing as Kunstler does their own argument a disservice.
Those frequencies are used in 'sell and forget' devices like cordless phones, cell phones, High-speed modems, wi-fi equipment.
Cell phones use different spectrum than the other things you list, which use the ISM bands.
If the allotted frequencies change then all those devices needed to change their firmware to the new permissions list. All spectrum buyers will need to obey the allocation decisions, so they all need some means to inform their online devices.
No cell phone firmware changes needed. The base stations already tell the cell phones what frequencies to transmit on (and time slot and code as needed).
I fail to see the point of what pot of gold it is plucked from.
Fairness. I see no reason to impose a tax specifically on how much one uses a cell phone (this from someone who rarely uses his dumb phone). You're the one who pointed out everyone potentially needs the public safety network, and I don't think that potential need is proportional to how much you use your cell.
Obviously we need a public safety network, but that does not mean it has to be paid for by what is essentially a cell phone tax. As you point out, everyone potentially needs the public safety network, therefore it's reasonable to pay for it out of general revenues.
We need a truly free market to reduce abuses
A truly free market (more importantly, a truly competitive market) is one where new suppliers can enter the market. Unfortunately spectrum is a strictly limited resource. Therefore allowing currently entrenched companies to buy big chunks of spectrum and block future entrants into the market is highly anti-competitive.
It could even be done on a shorter term basis. There is no technical reason that spectrum couldn't be dynamically allocated amongst carriers. It's easy to build base stations that can operate over an entire band and then tell them to only use certain frequencies. Forget the bidding, or even charging for the spectrum (the customers just wind up paying for it anyway), and periodically adjust how much spectrum each carrier is given in a certain area to reflect the load on their system. If a competitor grabs some of an entrenched company's customers (perhaps by some nefarious technique like better service or lower prices) then just give some of the entrenched company's spectrum to the upstart. That would allow real competition.
How is cellular spectrum allocation done in other countries, and how many carriers do they have? Knowledge of any other country is appreciated. I've long wondered how it would be in cellular with an old Ma Bell (AT&T pre-divestiture) style monopoly. Part of me likes the competition idea, but with spectrum so limited and cellular infrastructure so expensive to build, it seems awfully wasteful. It's not quite a natural monopoly, but it verges on it.
it is still the crown's power
In case the crown ever gets uppity, here are two predecessors to mention: Charles I and James II.