The problem in the US is that unions don't accomplish their stated goals. They're money grubbing, self serving[...]
I thought that was how the free market worked. Everyone negotiates the best deal they can for themselves. So why is it 'self-serving' and 'money-grubbing' when working stiffs band together to form a union to negotiate [1] collectively for more money or better conditions, and not when a banker or CEO gets a million dollar golden parachute? I'll be transfer my outrage to the common working stiff when I see all examples of the latter disappear.
Disclaimer: I belong to no union. But I have worked with union members, and found them to contain the approximately the same proportion of decent hard-working folk as non-union members.
[1] key word: negotiate. If you don't like the deal that the unions got, have a word with the management that negotiated the deal. And yes, that CEO negotiated his deal too. He was just better at negotiating. Or perhaps because he was negotiating with his fellow board members with a wink and a nod that they would all 'negotiate' the same golden parachute. Hmmm.
Congress mandates that much of the IT work be contracted out (free market at work, can't have gummint employees competing with LockMart). The place I work used to have less expensive in-house IT, but Congress passed a law, and now it gets contracted out and costs N times as much. $600 hammer expensive.
Where do you think all those Ph.D particle physicists went? A few lucky ones went into astrophysics, only to see a litany of missions get cancelled (SIM, LISA, TPF-I and TPF-C, and many others), and the rest went off to be quants on Wall Street, with the results obvious to all.
Now (maybe) we'll get JWST, and so the students who will work on that won't have their careers nullified, but every other science project at NASA, and those students, scientists, and engineers, is going to take a hit.
You're spot on, but for a different reason. HR isn't going to care about baby years, but Hospitals have security measures because they are great places to find and steal babies.
This has got to be extremely rare. My guess is similar to the odds of getting struck by lightning.
So the odds of your baby being stolen and unrecovered are about the same as being struck by lightning in any given year (1 in a million), and the odds of your baby being stolen at all are about the same as your lifetime risk of getting struck by lightning (1 in ten thousand). While the infant mortality rate is about 7 per thousand, or 70 times higher.
I'm not saying don't worry, but maybe worry appropriate to relative risks.
It took decades/centuries of research and inventions before we got to the point where we actually directly benefit from Wright Brother's initial flight efforts. And at that time idiots like you existed who denounced it all as a waste of money.
Maybe. Maybe not. Historically, people might have said that it was impossible, or improbable, or that the inventors were wasting their time, but I doubt that many claimed it was a waste of money, because all those inventors/discoverers didn't do it with taxpayer money. No one even knew the Wright brothers were doing it, until they had done it.
Similarly, no one is objecting to you spending your money on this. You might be called crazy, but it's your money to spend. But if you want to spend Other People's Money, i.e., tax dollars, then you have to justify it. Proposing that NASA fund missions to outer planets to mine fuel for a process that doesn't exist, and won't for the foreseeable future, is a long stretch for an agency that can't afford to fly TPF, or LISA, or SIM, or IXO, or ESJM, or... well, how many recently canceled missions do you want listed here?
And can't manage the ones they can get funded. The 2010 Astro Decadal was DOA because there is no money to fund any missions in this decade. JWST is sucking all the air out of the room.
Besides, moon shots with unmanned vehicles are pretty cheap, and probably comparable to the costs of developing the deep water surveying and placement technologies needed to set casks in subduction trenches.
Where do you get that moon shots are cheap? A Delta IV Heavy launch costs upwards of $300M, independent of the cost of the payload. Word on the street is that the real cost is something like $700M (big launch vehicles are heavily subsidized by the military. Shuttle launches cost something like $1B). SpaceX claims that they'll get that cost down to $60M for the equivalent of a DIV medium, but that won't go to the moon. I wish them the best, but I'll believe it when I can use my Visa Plutonium to make the deposit on one.
In addition, a not small percentage of these will fail. And rockets, like nuclear power plants, tend to work when they work, and fail spectacularly when they don't, and for the same reasons. Lots of energy in a small volume. Something between 7-10%. So every 15 launches, you get to write off a complete launch facility due to radioactive contamination (blowing up on the launch pad - best case), and a whole lot of downwind real estate (airburst - worst case).
Subduction zones don't seem like a great idea; too many unknowns, though I'd bet that undersea researchers would be thrilled to get a fraction of the cost of moon shot to explore the idea. The next generation deep sea submersible had an estimated cost of $21M in 2008.
Antarctica is not a good comparison. The reason why we do not have a self-sustaining colony there is not primarily technical, but rather economical. It is way simpler to fly in supplies to the few research stations we have there than to setup a whole economy there. Technically - set up a nuclear reactor, use waste heat to heat some greenhouses and off you go.
Antarctica is still an excellent comparison. Are you going to mine the uranium for your nuclear reactor in Antarctica? The metals? The diesel generators to keep it online when it scrams? The diesel for the generators? Or all those things going to be flown in?
You've just kicked the can down the road. It's still not self-sustaining, not in the sense of what happens when the supply ships stop coming, whether those ships are icebreakers or spacecraft from Earth.
Tariffs played a large role in this. Honda et al. can avoid paying tariffs if some large fraction of the car is manufactured/assembled here. Otherwise there's as much as a 25% tariff. For years the Japanese could make cars cheaper than Americans, so this didn't matter, but then when prices started approaching parity, they started moving factories over here to get around it.
The tariff on trucks was much higher, and that's why there were no full-sized Japanese trucks in the US until the laws changed around 1999. The Japanese manufacturers lobbied hard to get those changed (and the US companies lobbied hard against it - some deal was made) so Toyota/Nissan could compete in the very profitable F150 market, and traded off moving entire factories here to get it.
I'd like to go home at the end of my day too, and unlike a cop, I'm not getting paid to take risks in trade for getting to carry a gun, and didn't take an oath to protect and serve. Cops are, and did.
If you'd rather kill a citizen by mistake to avoid all risks, maybe you shouldn't be a cop.
48 in a year? From shootings? Or does that number include car wrecks, etc? I suspect that working at a convenience store, on a farm, as a garbageman, miner, or cabbie is more dangerous than being a cop. But they don't get to shoot other people or call them pedophiles.
I actually would argue that the Statute of Limitations should be extended on sex crimes, but that is only because I regard these crimes as particularly heinous.
Off topic, but:
The other logic behind not making sex crimes (and many other particularly heinous crimes, such as kidnapping) subject to no SoL (and no death penalty, for that matter) is that it provides negative incentives for the perpetrator. If the penalty and SoL for rape is the same for murder, there is very little incentive to leave the victim alive. As a society, we'd rather have live victims now, able to testify, than dead perpetrators later.
That would be wonderful. Can you tell me how we do this, short of starting over? Which is not a bad idea.
Every election, more laws get passed so that pols can look tough. Every incident, however rare, requires the passing of a law. It rarely goes the other way. How do you keep the pols from passing daft laws in your country?
Thing is, I believe the majority of folks are like Mr. Earl. They want the cameras installed, marijuana outlawed (a daft, unworkable law), alcohol sold only in state stores and at 3.2% (another daft law), make it illegal to pass within one lane of a cop pulled over for a traffic stop (a daft law that apparently is only applicable to cars with out-of-state plates in Utah), etc. What to me is a daft law and a horrible invasion of privacy, is to someone, perhaps even a majority, a perfectly sensible and acceptable state of affairs.
Give me video evidence any day of the week over the "memories" of the best police officers in existence.
Replace police officers with prosecutors. Currently it's the police whose judgement you would replace with cameras. But that just bumps it up to prosecutors. And if not them, another bureaucrat for whom score is kept on convictions, and who is unaccountable.
And how about all the times the cameras mysterious go offline, or the footage disappears. Do you think that is more, or less, likely to occur in your panopticon? I can find links for you, if you like. There are famous examples.
I'm not particularly worried about serious crimes; I'm not going to commit one, neither are you. I'm worried about everything else. Everyone breaks laws whether they know it or not. Ever taken an item off a shelf and not returned it where you got it? That's a crime. Perhaps you haven't. But you've done something. Cross the wrong person and your life could become miserable.
I just happen to think that there is a middle way.
I don't. Properly audited and maintained law enforcement systems rarely, if ever, exist now. Accountability is non-existent. With more power available due to continous surveillance, why do you think the system will limit its power then, if it doesn't now?
Where do you live that you get to pick the laws imposed on you? And they're easily changed? Around here, I haven't noticed it working that way.
And everywhere I've lived, jaywalking is a crime. Even in NYC, where everyone does it all the time.
It is a law that is used to harass people at cops choice, but it's also revenue enhancement, just like speeding tickets. That's why they raised the fine from some amount like $20 to several hundred. And there was outrage, but the law, and the fine, is still on the books.
It is interesting that you would quote wikipedia and leave out the sentence that precedes your first sentence.
Wow. I quoted Wikipedia without even looking? I just wrote that off the top of my head.
The point being that it used to be only murder that had no SoL. Now no SoL is being extended to sex crimes. You might argue that this is a good thing, but it will be extended to other crimes, one at a time. These things are a ratchet. No politician will ever lose an election by being more tough on crime than their opponent.
The SoL arises from memories fading, not the other way around. When memories cease to fade, the SoL will fade also. Just as the fourth amendment has.
You point to automated systems being more fair than police officers, but someone still has to decide who and what to prosecute. If everything is recorded, then everyone can be shown to be guilty of something, be it speeding, jaywalking, whatever. And anyone may be subject to a prosecution based on the recorded evidence, at the leisure of who ever has it in for you.
We can't even stop the abuses that go on in the system now. If you don't believe that, read the op-ed in the NYT today by the fellow who was imprisoned on death row for 14 years because prosecutors deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence. The people who committed that crime still walk free with not a single judgement against them. Now give those same prosecutors the power to search through every camera to find evidence against anyone they like, to use with no restraint whatsoever.
When the first plant exploded due to the hydrogen buildup, and they said in effect that "It isn't a big deal - just the superficial structure over the reactors was damaged"
That's actually correct. They downplayed other things but that was totally accurate. You and people like you are spreading unwarranted fear [...] It has ever been thus, those willfully ignorant of science and facts blocking progress
You should have a talk with the professor of mechanical engineering from Caltech, a nuclear reactor safety expert, who gave us a talk on Fukushima last week. You could set him straight. He, in his ignorance, thought that the explosions were an unmitigated disaster, and used the video and photo evidence to show why he thought so. He also thought that due to the poor hydrogen vent design of the plant that they didn't have any choice. But he didn't say that the explosions weren't a big deal. Rather the opposite.
It will be a happy society when everyone who jaywalks can expect a ticket in the mail (and in LA, that ticket is several hundred dollars). Citizen, wait patiently at the marked crosswalk for the light to change, even though it is 3 am and no cars are coming for miles.
Does this crosswalk button even work? I've been standing here for quite a while. But I bet the security camera works flawlessly.
The statute of limitations was instituted because memories fade, evidence deteriorates, people move and it's hard to find them and question them.
But none of those things are true anymore. So how long will statutes of limitations survive videos, license plate cameras, stored emails, and tracked mobile phones? Not long, I'm guessing. Citizen, be prepared to be prosecuted for anything you ever did in your life, should someone decide to put the evidence together of the candy bar you shoplifted in high school.
And cue the "if you have nothing to hide" defense of this in 3, 2, 1...
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The problem in the US is that unions don't accomplish their stated goals. They're money grubbing, self serving[...]
I thought that was how the free market worked. Everyone negotiates the best deal they can for themselves. So why is it 'self-serving' and 'money-grubbing' when working stiffs band together to form a union to negotiate [1] collectively for more money or better conditions, and not when a banker or CEO gets a million dollar golden parachute? I'll be transfer my outrage to the common working stiff when I see all examples of the latter disappear.
Disclaimer: I belong to no union. But I have worked with union members, and found them to contain the approximately the same proportion of decent hard-working folk as non-union members.
[1] key word: negotiate. If you don't like the deal that the unions got, have a word with the management that negotiated the deal. And yes, that CEO negotiated his deal too. He was just better at negotiating. Or perhaps because he was negotiating with his fellow board members with a wink and a nod that they would all 'negotiate' the same golden parachute. Hmmm.
Congress mandates that much of the IT work be contracted out (free market at work, can't have gummint employees competing with LockMart). The place I work used to have less expensive in-house IT, but Congress passed a law, and now it gets contracted out and costs N times as much. $600 hammer expensive.
It isn't OS agnostic though, it doesn't run on OS X, and hasn't for a couple of years.
And with many nullified careers.
Where do you think all those Ph.D particle physicists went? A few lucky ones went into astrophysics, only to see a litany of missions get cancelled (SIM, LISA, TPF-I and TPF-C, and many others), and the rest went off to be quants on Wall Street, with the results obvious to all.
Now (maybe) we'll get JWST, and so the students who will work on that won't have their careers nullified, but every other science project at NASA, and those students, scientists, and engineers, is going to take a hit.
Pasadena, California must be the sister city of Zurich.
You're spot on, but for a different reason. HR isn't going to care about baby years, but Hospitals have security measures because they are great places to find and steal babies.
This has got to be extremely rare. My guess is similar to the odds of getting struck by lightning.
And a 30 second google turns up that in 1983, 101 babies were stolen and 94 of them recovered, out of 4 million babies born (old and new statistics, but I don't imagine they're off by more than a factor of two).
So the odds of your baby being stolen and unrecovered are about the same as being struck by lightning in any given year (1 in a million), and the odds of your baby being stolen at all are about the same as your lifetime risk of getting struck by lightning (1 in ten thousand). While the infant mortality rate is about 7 per thousand, or 70 times higher.
I'm not saying don't worry, but maybe worry appropriate to relative risks.
*all statistics US.
That's why heading south always feels like going downhill.
Well, for miles and miles around here, downhill is south.
It took decades/centuries of research and inventions before we got to the point where we actually directly benefit from Wright Brother's initial flight efforts. And at that time idiots like you existed who denounced it all as a waste of money.
Maybe. Maybe not. Historically, people might have said that it was impossible, or improbable, or that the inventors were wasting their time, but I doubt that many claimed it was a waste of money, because all those inventors/discoverers didn't do it with taxpayer money. No one even knew the Wright brothers were doing it, until they had done it.
Similarly, no one is objecting to you spending your money on this. You might be called crazy, but it's your money to spend. But if you want to spend Other People's Money, i.e., tax dollars, then you have to justify it. Proposing that NASA fund missions to outer planets to mine fuel for a process that doesn't exist, and won't for the foreseeable future, is a long stretch for an agency that can't afford to fly TPF, or LISA, or SIM, or IXO, or ESJM, or... well, how many recently canceled missions do you want listed here?
And can't manage the ones they can get funded. The 2010 Astro Decadal was DOA because there is no money to fund any missions in this decade. JWST is sucking all the air out of the room.
Besides, moon shots with unmanned vehicles are pretty cheap, and probably comparable to the costs of developing the deep water surveying and placement technologies needed to set casks in subduction trenches.
Where do you get that moon shots are cheap? A Delta IV Heavy launch costs upwards of $300M, independent of the cost of the payload. Word on the street is that the real cost is something like $700M (big launch vehicles are heavily subsidized by the military. Shuttle launches cost something like $1B). SpaceX claims that they'll get that cost down to $60M for the equivalent of a DIV medium, but that won't go to the moon. I wish them the best, but I'll believe it when I can use my Visa Plutonium to make the deposit on one.
In addition, a not small percentage of these will fail. And rockets, like nuclear power plants, tend to work when they work, and fail spectacularly when they don't, and for the same reasons. Lots of energy in a small volume. Something between 7-10%. So every 15 launches, you get to write off a complete launch facility due to radioactive contamination (blowing up on the launch pad - best case), and a whole lot of downwind real estate (airburst - worst case).
Even in the best case, it ain't cheap to abandon a launch site - "the $4 billion SLC-6 was refurbished at a cost of about $300 million to accommodate Delta IV missions.".
Subduction zones don't seem like a great idea; too many unknowns, though I'd bet that undersea researchers would be thrilled to get a fraction of the cost of moon shot to explore the idea. The next generation deep sea submersible had an estimated cost of $21M in 2008.
Antarctica is not a good comparison. The reason why we do not have a self-sustaining colony there is not primarily technical, but rather economical. It is way simpler to fly in supplies to the few research stations we have there than to setup a whole economy there. Technically - set up a nuclear reactor, use waste heat to heat some greenhouses and off you go.
Antarctica is still an excellent comparison. Are you going to mine the uranium for your nuclear reactor in Antarctica? The metals? The diesel generators to keep it online when it scrams? The diesel for the generators? Or all those things going to be flown in?
You've just kicked the can down the road. It's still not self-sustaining, not in the sense of what happens when the supply ships stop coming, whether those ships are icebreakers or spacecraft from Earth.
Where do you get these $0.10 bullets? I haven't been able to find anything that low in years.
Wait, you mean I can be just as unhappy being rich as I am being middle class?
I'll take rich, please.
Tariffs played a large role in this. Honda et al. can avoid paying tariffs if some large fraction of the car is manufactured/assembled here. Otherwise there's as much as a 25% tariff. For years the Japanese could make cars cheaper than Americans, so this didn't matter, but then when prices started approaching parity, they started moving factories over here to get around it.
The tariff on trucks was much higher, and that's why there were no full-sized Japanese trucks in the US until the laws changed around 1999. The Japanese manufacturers lobbied hard to get those changed (and the US companies lobbied hard against it - some deal was made) so Toyota/Nissan could compete in the very profitable F150 market, and traded off moving entire factories here to get it.
I'd like to go home at the end of my day too, and unlike a cop, I'm not getting paid to take risks in trade for getting to carry a gun, and didn't take an oath to protect and serve. Cops are, and did.
If you'd rather kill a citizen by mistake to avoid all risks, maybe you shouldn't be a cop.
48 in a year? From shootings? Or does that number include car wrecks, etc? I suspect that working at a convenience store, on a farm, as a garbageman, miner, or cabbie is more dangerous than being a cop. But they don't get to shoot other people or call them pedophiles.
I actually would argue that the Statute of Limitations should be extended on sex crimes, but that is only because I regard these crimes as particularly heinous.
Off topic, but:
The other logic behind not making sex crimes (and many other particularly heinous crimes, such as kidnapping) subject to no SoL (and no death penalty, for that matter) is that it provides negative incentives for the perpetrator. If the penalty and SoL for rape is the same for murder, there is very little incentive to leave the victim alive. As a society, we'd rather have live victims now, able to testify, than dead perpetrators later.
That would be wonderful. Can you tell me how we do this, short of starting over? Which is not a bad idea.
Every election, more laws get passed so that pols can look tough. Every incident, however rare, requires the passing of a law. It rarely goes the other way. How do you keep the pols from passing daft laws in your country?
Thing is, I believe the majority of folks are like Mr. Earl. They want the cameras installed, marijuana outlawed (a daft, unworkable law), alcohol sold only in state stores and at 3.2% (another daft law), make it illegal to pass within one lane of a cop pulled over for a traffic stop (a daft law that apparently is only applicable to cars with out-of-state plates in Utah), etc. What to me is a daft law and a horrible invasion of privacy, is to someone, perhaps even a majority, a perfectly sensible and acceptable state of affairs.
Yes, but one of the nice things about video evidence is that you don't have to be an expert to interpret the result.
Tell that to Rodney King.
Whether you agree with the verdict or not, scads of experts testified about the video on both sides.
Cameras are not perfect, never will be, and will never be installed everywhere at every angle.
Give me video evidence any day of the week over the "memories" of the best police officers in existence.
Replace police officers with prosecutors. Currently it's the police whose judgement you would replace with cameras. But that just bumps it up to prosecutors. And if not them, another bureaucrat for whom score is kept on convictions, and who is unaccountable.
And how about all the times the cameras mysterious go offline, or the footage disappears. Do you think that is more, or less, likely to occur in your panopticon? I can find links for you, if you like. There are famous examples.
I'm not particularly worried about serious crimes; I'm not going to commit one, neither are you. I'm worried about everything else. Everyone breaks laws whether they know it or not. Ever taken an item off a shelf and not returned it where you got it? That's a crime. Perhaps you haven't. But you've done something. Cross the wrong person and your life could become miserable.
I just happen to think that there is a middle way.
I don't. Properly audited and maintained law enforcement systems rarely, if ever, exist now. Accountability is non-existent. With more power available due to continous surveillance, why do you think the system will limit its power then, if it doesn't now?
Help yourself.
Where do you live that you get to pick the laws imposed on you? And they're easily changed? Around here, I haven't noticed it working that way.
And everywhere I've lived, jaywalking is a crime. Even in NYC, where everyone does it all the time.
It is a law that is used to harass people at cops choice, but it's also revenue enhancement, just like speeding tickets. That's why they raised the fine from some amount like $20 to several hundred. And there was outrage, but the law, and the fine, is still on the books.
It is interesting that you would quote wikipedia and leave out the sentence that precedes your first sentence.
Wow. I quoted Wikipedia without even looking? I just wrote that off the top of my head.
The point being that it used to be only murder that had no SoL. Now no SoL is being extended to sex crimes. You might argue that this is a good thing, but it will be extended to other crimes, one at a time. These things are a ratchet. No politician will ever lose an election by being more tough on crime than their opponent.
The SoL arises from memories fading, not the other way around. When memories cease to fade, the SoL will fade also. Just as the fourth amendment has.
You point to automated systems being more fair than police officers, but someone still has to decide who and what to prosecute. If everything is recorded, then everyone can be shown to be guilty of something, be it speeding, jaywalking, whatever. And anyone may be subject to a prosecution based on the recorded evidence, at the leisure of who ever has it in for you.
We can't even stop the abuses that go on in the system now. If you don't believe that, read the op-ed in the NYT today by the fellow who was imprisoned on death row for 14 years because prosecutors deliberately withheld exculpatory evidence. The people who committed that crime still walk free with not a single judgement against them. Now give those same prosecutors the power to search through every camera to find evidence against anyone they like, to use with no restraint whatsoever.
How do we protect against these abuses?
When the first plant exploded due to the hydrogen buildup, and they said in effect that "It isn't a big deal - just the superficial structure over the reactors was damaged"
That's actually correct. They downplayed other things but that was totally accurate. You and people like you are spreading unwarranted fear [...] It has ever been thus, those willfully ignorant of science and facts blocking progress
You should have a talk with the professor of mechanical engineering from Caltech, a nuclear reactor safety expert, who gave us a talk on Fukushima last week. You could set him straight. He, in his ignorance, thought that the explosions were an unmitigated disaster, and used the video and photo evidence to show why he thought so. He also thought that due to the poor hydrogen vent design of the plant that they didn't have any choice. But he didn't say that the explosions weren't a big deal. Rather the opposite.
It will be a happy society when everyone who jaywalks can expect a ticket in the mail (and in LA, that ticket is several hundred dollars). Citizen, wait patiently at the marked crosswalk for the light to change, even though it is 3 am and no cars are coming for miles.
Does this crosswalk button even work? I've been standing here for quite a while. But I bet the security camera works flawlessly.
The statute of limitations was instituted because memories fade, evidence deteriorates, people move and it's hard to find them and question them.
But none of those things are true anymore. So how long will statutes of limitations survive videos, license plate cameras, stored emails, and tracked mobile phones? Not long, I'm guessing. Citizen, be prepared to be prosecuted for anything you ever did in your life, should someone decide to put the evidence together of the candy bar you shoplifted in high school.
And cue the "if you have nothing to hide" defense of this in 3, 2, 1...
I assume that you are volunteering to crew that boat?
Don't say remote control or robots, because the ocean is not full of remote controlled or robotic ships, and certainly would be if it were feasible.