Sorry, but the cyberpunk future is all around us right now. This doesn't make alternative currencies a good idea. Money is given value by the community that uses it. If you are a part of a community, then it makes sense to use the money that is used by that community If you aren't, then invest in something tangible. The problem is if it isn't something you use, then it's not a good investment, and if it isn't durable then it isn't a good investment. That's why real estate is so popular as an investment. But real estate comes with a high tax burden, so it's got to pay for itself at higher than the rate of taxation. Money tends to get devalued by financial manipulations both of government and of financiers. Banks pay interest at less than the rate of inflation. The stock market is chancy. Etc.
If you're young, invest in yourself. Get yourself a stronger skill set. etc. But avoid accumulating debts. Sorry to give conflicting advice, but there it is. If you learn German well enough you can get a free college education...in Germany. Possibly some other countries offer the same deal. Unfortunately, it's hard to predict what skills will continue to be valuable. Blacksmiths are doing fairly well right now, because few are being trained, and there are those who value their work...but it's easier to get trained as a welder, and specialized varieties of welding are also well compensated. You will notice that I'm mentioning professions that are already in decline, but where the number of practitioners is smaller than the demand for their skills. Rising professions tend to be targeted for automation, flooding the market by low-wage competition, etc. Plumber is probably a good choice if you can manage it, but it can be hard to get training licenses can be problematical. Etc.
Don't take authorial fantasies as a reasonable prediction of the future. They were never intended that way, only as sketches of possibilities seen from a distant vantage point, and the authors intentionally left out anything that would be boring or detract from the story they were telling. The current world *is* the early cyberpunk era. If you look at the correct pieces of it you can see that. But it's the early part...give it another 5-10 years to get well established...and it will still have most of the people living as they do now...barring, of course, civilization collapsing.
P.S.: You want to know why Trump is so popular? People look into the future and they get scared, and when they get scared they retreat to versions of the simple beliefs of their childhood. They are right to be scared, but that's the wrong answer. (None of the major candidates is offering a reasonable answer, but Bernie Sanders comes closest. Nothing that involves an economy centered around jobs is going to be a reasonable answer....only a recipe for a collapse of civilization. Notice how much effort is being put into developing various forms of robot soldiers.)
If I remember running MSWind with a virus checker, "runs like a champ" in comparison is only a relative complement.
As for systemd...most users don't seem to have trouble with it these days. In fact on checking I seem to have it installed. I don't like the idea of it, and I don't like the way it was pushed into the system, but most of the problems reported with it appear to have been developmental problems. And how certain are you that Mint doesn't have systemd? The pages I see indicate that Mint also uses systemd, unless you take steps to avoid it...probably exactly the same as Debian. And I'm not going to recommend a new user look at Slackware or Gentoo....or BlackBox.
YES. I've got a MSWind95 machine that's going to stay running until it dies because I've got some data in applications that cannot be transferred. I've got an Apple Sys 10.4 that's warehoused and will never be upgraded (not that it can be any more) because it has proprietary file format data only accessible with programs that don't run on any modern system. And that's not talking about data that I've lost in the past because it just wouldn't transfer.
As soon as open source file formats and the applications that use them got good enough I switched. Since I switched mainly to Linux around 1998 I stopped losing data to proprietary file formats. This was worth putting up with Linux at that time not having an acceptable word processor. That's how bad the data loss problem was.
Don't expect Linux to be safe against the NSA. They helped write some of the security code. Don't know about the BSDs, but I expect that they are also permeable.
OTOH, most people probably aren't worth the effort, and it keeps out the viruses and ordinary commercial spies.
While I'm glad you like Mint, you might give Ubuntu a try. (I suggest the KDE version.) I found mind to be relatively slow on my machine. (Warning: KDE was slow until I disabled Nepomuk. Perhaps there's a similar problem with Mint that I just didn't stumble across the answer to.)
OTOH, If you like older MSWind desktops, check out the xfce desktop. Perhaps you can use that in Mint, you can certainly use that in Ubuntu.
That said, I prefer Debian. But it's not what I recommend to newcomers. My wife uses Ubuntu + KDE (perhaps it was actually Kubuntu, but it's about the same thing) and had minimal problems with it.
THAT said, try looking at something from a LiveCD before you install it. You can't get a feel for the speed or action from one, but you can really see what it looks like.
Depends on what you mean. I believe that any program complicated enough to count as an OS is guaranteed to have bugs, and if it is also connected to the Internet it's probably guaranteed to be exploitable.
OTOH, for different values of trust one could say that any OS not connected to the Internet is trustable...but then someone could sneak in and write the saved data to a removable storage medium...so you need to ensure that it can't write to removable storage media...but then they could sneak in and copy the disk drive, so you need to ensure that it doesn't save data to disk...
When I was in my teens I followed instructions in Scientific American and built a computer out of matchboxes, pieces of paper, ink, thread, and pieces of candy. It could learn how to play tic-tak-toe. (AND you got to eat the candy when the computer made a losing move while learning.) But even THAT isn't secure against physical surveilance, unless at the end of the training session you eat ALL the candy, so it forgets the moves it learned.
Sorry, but it's not FUD. I have binary files from 2 decades ago that I've never been able to convert to working on a modern system. That the lock-in is based around proprietary applications rather than around the OS doesn't keep if from being lock-in.
Well, if that's so then their cheapest solution should be to replace the current system with a virtual system running MSVista (or earlier) and a tight firewall around all internet connections to prevent virus infections. By firewall I don't just mean a set of IPTables, I means something that will sanitize outgoing, and probably incoming, messages. What the firewall would allow would need to depend on the required connections, of course, but it should certainly limit the IPs that binary messages could be sent to or be accepted from.
Well, Linux is not only weak on the desktop, it doesn't even have one. Now KDE, Gnome, Mate, xfce, etc., they have desktops. The problem is that there are too many for a new user to wrap their mind around. I find that KDE is the best general desktop, with xfce next. Gnome used to be right up there, and for awhile Gnome2 was ahead of KDE4, but Gnome3 I find totally useless. (Some people seem to like it.) xfce works well in low resource environments, though if you've got a really low resource environment, there are other options...but they aren't suitable for a new user.
The problem is desktop applications. This has largely been well addressed, but not totally. There are still niches that are not well served by Linux based programs. And sometimes the problem is that people just don't want to learn a new program...which can be the real problem even though it may manifest as complaints about missing features that aren't really used.
FWIW, after decades of redoing work, I decided that proprietary file formats were totally unacceptable. So for me Linux is the far superior system.
There's a number of reasons. The top one is that I'm unwilling to devote significant effort to following the stock market. A large secondary reason is the cost/trade overhead. And just about as important as the other two is that if you don't have enough money to risk losing it, you don't take long odds.
None of these apply is you're handling other people's money. I doubt that most financial advisors follow their own recommendations...even though they might believe them, because the risk of losing is more than they can afford.
OTOH, if you're talking about the personal decisions made by the wealthy and powerful, they are frequently operating off of information that you don't have, and they certainly have connections that you don't have. (It's also true that many of them have only a "don't get caught" respect for the law, and no concern for the consequences to others. But this is not true of all of them, while the preceding statements are.)
Well, financial advisors have often (not usually, but often) been out performed by random number generators. So it shouldn't be hard to do better than they do.
Unfortunately, if people are cold calling on commission, then I consider them accomplices in fraud. They may, perhaps, not know that they are accomplices, but that doesn't make them innocent.
How often, do you think, on a percentage basis, are cold-call sales pitches not fraud? My guess would be 10% or less.
Well, my wife got dunned by several different collection agencies for the debts of some guy who had the discourtesy to die an a hospital without paying his bills.
She had never lived even in the same city as he had. Admittedly, the did have the same name, but nothing else even close.
I don't, however, believe that it's being dumb. I think it's a combination of malice and fraud. Unfortunately, proving that in court would be difficult.
You are counting the United States as if it were one unified entity. I'm sure it would benefit some parties who normally live in the United States. It would damage a much larger number of citizens. Possibly there would be a net combined monetary gain, but there would not be a net marginal gain. A dollar is worth a lot more to someone barely getting by that it is to someone extremely wealthy.
The TPP is an ongoing disaster, and anybody who supports it should be considered a traitor to his/her country. And I'm particularly including Hillary Clinton, one of the authors.
This isn't a commercial reactor, it's a research project. I'm not sure exactly what the $5 billion includes. The first fission plant was done out of the laboratory's budget in a squash court. That's not practical for fusion. But research is often more expensive than the commercial incarnation. Also, I'm not clear why the amount of deliverable power should be so much less than the amount of produced power, given that it only takes 5MW to start. It *could* be that that is a limitation in the electrical system somewhere. Or it could be that the machine requires a lot more than 5MW to run. Or something else. But the provided figures don't add up to a consistent picture. Something's missing, and that 300MW has to go somewhere...if it were released as heat, as it would be if they fed it back into the reactor, I don't think the project would be feasible.
Better, you figure the best number of reactors to put in a single facility, and then distribute several facilities around the city, rather as the electric company distributes substations.
That way you minimize distribution costs AND have redundancy in case a building collapses.
This isn't really ideal, because there *will* be generated radioactive wastes. But they should be an order of magnitude less than those of fission power, and they can probably be controlled by controlling the design of the reaction vessels. With any luck it will be possible to have the radioactive wastes be useful.
That's a problem of historic nomenclature. Originally the States were independent nations acting independently, and banded together for common goals. And in frequent disagreement. This was under the "Articles of Confederation". Some people thought this was a bad idea, so they got together a revolutionary committee and wrote the "Federal Constitution". They had no legal authority do to so, but many were strongly connected politically, so they got away with it, and got most of the original states to agree (after including the first 10 amendments). Officially the states were still independent nations, but bound together a bit more tightly. The Constitution was supposed to be a limitation of what the Federal Government was allowed to do. And the states were still in theory independent states. As such the common reference was "These United States". Then there arose a massive disagreement and about half these states decided that they didn't like the federal government, so they were going to split and form a new government. They called it the Confederacy. Well, the Federal government didn't like that much, and so a war was fought to keep them from leaving. (There was no enabling power to allow this to be done in the Constitution, and that was supposed to mean that the Feds couldn't stop them, but military power disagreed.) Since then the US has been "The United States", and the states have continually lost power which has accrued to the Federal government in defiance of the Constitution. Patrick Henry predicted this whole thing (well, sort of) when after reading the constitution he said of it "I smell a rat. It stinks of monarchy."
So the states are called states not because of an improper use of the term, but rather as a part of the process of history. One may confidently predict that if the EU survives over the centuries, some similar process will occur.
I can accept that that is true where you were working, but it's not a universal, and I don't know if it's even especially common. I do know of many areas where the neighborhoods have campaigned for slower speeds and stricter enforcement, so this might be what you are seeing. And it's true, the neighborhoods don't ask traffic engineers. They ask "Are people driving here faster than is safe?", and believing their own judgment rather than that of some traffic engineer, whose goals they neither know or care about.
As someone who lives in an area where that is happening, I agree with the neighborhood. I'm a pedestrian in this area, and around here I'm not real interested in pushing the cars through, I'm interested in being safe when I cross the street. (That said, I also consider the number of jaywalkers incredible. The other day I saw someone crossing a main street diagonally while apparently texting on their phone. I would have considered this both illegal and reckless even on a residential street.)
Well, idling speed is adjustable, so OK. Earlier I posted that going slower took a lot of concentration, but I live in a hilly area, where there literally *aren't* any level streets. So I can see that as feasible on a flat street. (As well as the respondent who said he idled at 30 mph...idling speed being adjustable.)
I'm well past "old enough to drive", and on a residential street 25 mph is too fast. The only reason calling you "boy racer" might be inappropriate is that I'm not sure you're a boy.
If you can't sprint that fast, then you're going too fast for a residential street. That's why they have arterials every few blocks. Of course, I'm talking about a designed suburb. One that just grew is still designed that 25 mph is too fast for a residential street, but there may not *be* a nearby arterial. Sorry, that area wasn't designed for through traffic. Either go around it or don't go. There are good reasons why the designers of residential areas like cul de sacs nearly as much as the fire department hates them. As a compromise you can turn most intersections into low lying parks, with barriers in them that are low enough for a fire engine to drive over, but which route cars along a twisting route. People who live there and know the area can figure out a reasonable way to get through at low speed, but strangers will need directions. And it will still be slow.
If you want I'll agree that it's a shame that areas should need to go in for such measures. Arterial streets are a much better solution (though they generally should have much better separation from the residential areas than they do). But when an area has been designed with the assumption that there will be no through traffic, then to just route traffic through it anyway is just asking for problems. Perhaps elevated roadways would be a better answer, but I think you'll find them too expensive, and that the inhabitants would vociferously object. I also understand the tremendous objections that arise when PART of a property is condemned to allow a street to be put through. This frequently destroys half the value of the property to the inhabitants, but the compensation doesn't generally allow them to purchase an equivalent habitation elsewhere...not to mention the considerable costs of moving. Then there's the matter of people who have an emotional attachment to their home. There's really no way of compensating for that.
So the best answer is to route around the places that weren't designed to allow for through traffic. It's unfortunate that various on-line services have started to find routes for people to travel that lead directly through areas that should not be for through traffic. Understanding why they do that, and why non-residents like them, does not lead to forgiveness and acceptance, but only to the desire to do things which cause them to choose some other way. Fast traffic on residential streets is unforgivable, and when it results in death the charge should be murder.
People who do that are showing that either they don't care about the non-central results of their actions or that they aren't aware that their actions have any results that they didn't intend. Or that they rate the lives of other people as unimportant. I count those as the worst kinds of scumbag. Do you have any categorization that you think is worse which isn't already included within that characterization?
Kensington handled the problem by refusing to fill in potholes. Given that some of the roads edged cliffs, this tended to slow down traffic quite effectively.
FWIW, people in fancy cars with good suspension systems seem to nearly ignore speed bumps. Perhaps this just means they're willing to pay at the garage, but it also means the worst traffic isn't effectively slowed. (Well, half the worst traffic. The worst traffic seems to be evenly split between wealthy bastards that don't care about anyone else and stupid teenagers who haven't learned any better yet...with some who remain teenagers through their 20's and into their 30's. I know a couple of the latter.)
Actually I feel that 25 mph is too fast on a residential area street. Unfortunately most cars seem to be so designed that it becomes increasingly difficult to drive as you go slower than about 25 mph. But I've seen 4 year olds driving their toy cars enter the street without looking. I've seen 6 year olds chase a ball into the street without looking. And they often aren't dressed to be particularly visible.
Residential areas should not be driven faster than about 15 mph between the hours of 10am and 9pm. This is just a rule of thumb, and depends on the composition of families in the neighborhood...but a driver can't tell. And people have a poor estimate of their reaction time in a high velocity situation. (I consider even 10 mph to be a high velocity situation...that's faster than most people run, or even sprint.) There are good reasons why suburbs are composed of small residential streets pierced through by arterial roads. The fast traffic should ALL be on the arterials.
P.S.: I'm responding to the discussion, not to the article, which I haven't read, so I don't know what kind of street he set up his "speed trap" on.
The other considerations included Hillary's close connection with the Democratic party machine, and frequent reports of election fraud of one form or another by BOTH of the major parties.
OTOH, the story appears to have been wrong...or should I say highly sensationalized off of meager data where a fuller analysis of the data would yield a different result. Other reports say there were a lot more then 6 coin flip choices, that many didn't get reported, that Bernie won many (some reports say most) of them. Etc.
As far as I can determine there is no accepted as accurate even COUNT of the number of coin flip choices.
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Sorry, but the cyberpunk future is all around us right now. This doesn't make alternative currencies a good idea. Money is given value by the community that uses it. If you are a part of a community, then it makes sense to use the money that is used by that community If you aren't, then invest in something tangible. The problem is if it isn't something you use, then it's not a good investment, and if it isn't durable then it isn't a good investment. That's why real estate is so popular as an investment. But real estate comes with a high tax burden, so it's got to pay for itself at higher than the rate of taxation. Money tends to get devalued by financial manipulations both of government and of financiers. Banks pay interest at less than the rate of inflation. The stock market is chancy. Etc.
If you're young, invest in yourself. Get yourself a stronger skill set. etc. But avoid accumulating debts. Sorry to give conflicting advice, but there it is. If you learn German well enough you can get a free college education...in Germany. Possibly some other countries offer the same deal. Unfortunately, it's hard to predict what skills will continue to be valuable. Blacksmiths are doing fairly well right now, because few are being trained, and there are those who value their work...but it's easier to get trained as a welder, and specialized varieties of welding are also well compensated. You will notice that I'm mentioning professions that are already in decline, but where the number of practitioners is smaller than the demand for their skills. Rising professions tend to be targeted for automation, flooding the market by low-wage competition, etc. Plumber is probably a good choice if you can manage it, but it can be hard to get training licenses can be problematical. Etc.
Don't take authorial fantasies as a reasonable prediction of the future. They were never intended that way, only as sketches of possibilities seen from a distant vantage point, and the authors intentionally left out anything that would be boring or detract from the story they were telling. The current world *is* the early cyberpunk era. If you look at the correct pieces of it you can see that. But it's the early part...give it another 5-10 years to get well established...and it will still have most of the people living as they do now...barring, of course, civilization collapsing.
P.S.: You want to know why Trump is so popular? People look into the future and they get scared, and when they get scared they retreat to versions of the simple beliefs of their childhood. They are right to be scared, but that's the wrong answer. (None of the major candidates is offering a reasonable answer, but Bernie Sanders comes closest. Nothing that involves an economy centered around jobs is going to be a reasonable answer....only a recipe for a collapse of civilization. Notice how much effort is being put into developing various forms of robot soldiers.)
If I remember running MSWind with a virus checker, "runs like a champ" in comparison is only a relative complement.
As for systemd...most users don't seem to have trouble with it these days. In fact on checking I seem to have it installed. I don't like the idea of it, and I don't like the way it was pushed into the system, but most of the problems reported with it appear to have been developmental problems. And how certain are you that Mint doesn't have systemd? The pages I see indicate that Mint also uses systemd, unless you take steps to avoid it...probably exactly the same as Debian. And I'm not going to recommend a new user look at Slackware or Gentoo....or BlackBox.
YES. I've got a MSWind95 machine that's going to stay running until it dies because I've got some data in applications that cannot be transferred. I've got an Apple Sys 10.4 that's warehoused and will never be upgraded (not that it can be any more) because it has proprietary file format data only accessible with programs that don't run on any modern system. And that's not talking about data that I've lost in the past because it just wouldn't transfer.
As soon as open source file formats and the applications that use them got good enough I switched. Since I switched mainly to Linux around 1998 I stopped losing data to proprietary file formats. This was worth putting up with Linux at that time not having an acceptable word processor. That's how bad the data loss problem was.
Don't expect Linux to be safe against the NSA. They helped write some of the security code. Don't know about the BSDs, but I expect that they are also permeable.
OTOH, most people probably aren't worth the effort, and it keeps out the viruses and ordinary commercial spies.
While I'm glad you like Mint, you might give Ubuntu a try. (I suggest the KDE version.) I found mind to be relatively slow on my machine. (Warning: KDE was slow until I disabled Nepomuk. Perhaps there's a similar problem with Mint that I just didn't stumble across the answer to.)
OTOH, If you like older MSWind desktops, check out the xfce desktop. Perhaps you can use that in Mint, you can certainly use that in Ubuntu.
That said, I prefer Debian. But it's not what I recommend to newcomers. My wife uses Ubuntu + KDE (perhaps it was actually Kubuntu, but it's about the same thing) and had minimal problems with it.
THAT said, try looking at something from a LiveCD before you install it. You can't get a feel for the speed or action from one, but you can really see what it looks like.
Depends on what you mean. I believe that any program complicated enough to count as an OS is guaranteed to have bugs, and if it is also connected to the Internet it's probably guaranteed to be exploitable.
OTOH, for different values of trust one could say that any OS not connected to the Internet is trustable...but then someone could sneak in and write the saved data to a removable storage medium...so you need to ensure that it can't write to removable storage media...but then they could sneak in and copy the disk drive, so you need to ensure that it doesn't save data to disk...
When I was in my teens I followed instructions in Scientific American and built a computer out of matchboxes, pieces of paper, ink, thread, and pieces of candy. It could learn how to play tic-tak-toe. (AND you got to eat the candy when the computer made a losing move while learning.) But even THAT isn't secure against physical surveilance, unless at the end of the training session you eat ALL the candy, so it forgets the moves it learned.
Sorry, but it's not FUD. I have binary files from 2 decades ago that I've never been able to convert to working on a modern system. That the lock-in is based around proprietary applications rather than around the OS doesn't keep if from being lock-in.
Well, if that's so then their cheapest solution should be to replace the current system with a virtual system running MSVista (or earlier) and a tight firewall around all internet connections to prevent virus infections. By firewall I don't just mean a set of IPTables, I means something that will sanitize outgoing, and probably incoming, messages. What the firewall would allow would need to depend on the required connections, of course, but it should certainly limit the IPs that binary messages could be sent to or be accepted from.
Well, Linux is not only weak on the desktop, it doesn't even have one. Now KDE, Gnome, Mate, xfce, etc., they have desktops. The problem is that there are too many for a new user to wrap their mind around. I find that KDE is the best general desktop, with xfce next. Gnome used to be right up there, and for awhile Gnome2 was ahead of KDE4, but Gnome3 I find totally useless. (Some people seem to like it.) xfce works well in low resource environments, though if you've got a really low resource environment, there are other options...but they aren't suitable for a new user.
The problem is desktop applications. This has largely been well addressed, but not totally. There are still niches that are not well served by Linux based programs. And sometimes the problem is that people just don't want to learn a new program...which can be the real problem even though it may manifest as complaints about missing features that aren't really used.
FWIW, after decades of redoing work, I decided that proprietary file formats were totally unacceptable. So for me Linux is the far superior system.
There's a number of reasons. The top one is that I'm unwilling to devote significant effort to following the stock market. A large secondary reason is the cost/trade overhead. And just about as important as the other two is that if you don't have enough money to risk losing it, you don't take long odds.
None of these apply is you're handling other people's money. I doubt that most financial advisors follow their own recommendations...even though they might believe them, because the risk of losing is more than they can afford.
OTOH, if you're talking about the personal decisions made by the wealthy and powerful, they are frequently operating off of information that you don't have, and they certainly have connections that you don't have. (It's also true that many of them have only a "don't get caught" respect for the law, and no concern for the consequences to others. But this is not true of all of them, while the preceding statements are.)
Well, financial advisors have often (not usually, but often) been out performed by random number generators. So it shouldn't be hard to do better than they do.
Unfortunately, if people are cold calling on commission, then I consider them accomplices in fraud. They may, perhaps, not know that they are accomplices, but that doesn't make them innocent.
How often, do you think, on a percentage basis, are cold-call sales pitches not fraud? My guess would be 10% or less.
Well, my wife got dunned by several different collection agencies for the debts of some guy who had the discourtesy to die an a hospital without paying his bills.
She had never lived even in the same city as he had. Admittedly, the did have the same name, but nothing else even close.
I don't, however, believe that it's being dumb. I think it's a combination of malice and fraud. Unfortunately, proving that in court would be difficult.
You are counting the United States as if it were one unified entity. I'm sure it would benefit some parties who normally live in the United States. It would damage a much larger number of citizens. Possibly there would be a net combined monetary gain, but there would not be a net marginal gain. A dollar is worth a lot more to someone barely getting by that it is to someone extremely wealthy.
The TPP is an ongoing disaster, and anybody who supports it should be considered a traitor to his/her country. And I'm particularly including Hillary Clinton, one of the authors.
Yes, but Hillary was one of the authors of the TPP. And in the debate she didn't say she wouldn't support it when asked, she just waffled.
This isn't a commercial reactor, it's a research project. I'm not sure exactly what the $5 billion includes. The first fission plant was done out of the laboratory's budget in a squash court. That's not practical for fusion. But research is often more expensive than the commercial incarnation. Also, I'm not clear why the amount of deliverable power should be so much less than the amount of produced power, given that it only takes 5MW to start. It *could* be that that is a limitation in the electrical system somewhere. Or it could be that the machine requires a lot more than 5MW to run. Or something else. But the provided figures don't add up to a consistent picture. Something's missing, and that 300MW has to go somewhere...if it were released as heat, as it would be if they fed it back into the reactor, I don't think the project would be feasible.
Better, you figure the best number of reactors to put in a single facility, and then distribute several facilities around the city, rather as the electric company distributes substations.
That way you minimize distribution costs AND have redundancy in case a building collapses.
This isn't really ideal, because there *will* be generated radioactive wastes. But they should be an order of magnitude less than those of fission power, and they can probably be controlled by controlling the design of the reaction vessels. With any luck it will be possible to have the radioactive wastes be useful.
That's a problem of historic nomenclature. Originally the States were independent nations acting independently, and banded together for common goals. And in frequent disagreement. This was under the "Articles of Confederation". Some people thought this was a bad idea, so they got together a revolutionary committee and wrote the "Federal Constitution". They had no legal authority do to so, but many were strongly connected politically, so they got away with it, and got most of the original states to agree (after including the first 10 amendments). Officially the states were still independent nations, but bound together a bit more tightly. The Constitution was supposed to be a limitation of what the Federal Government was allowed to do. And the states were still in theory independent states. As such the common reference was "These United States". Then there arose a massive disagreement and about half these states decided that they didn't like the federal government, so they were going to split and form a new government. They called it the Confederacy. Well, the Federal government didn't like that much, and so a war was fought to keep them from leaving. (There was no enabling power to allow this to be done in the Constitution, and that was supposed to mean that the Feds couldn't stop them, but military power disagreed.) Since then the US has been "The United States", and the states have continually lost power which has accrued to the Federal government in defiance of the Constitution. Patrick Henry predicted this whole thing (well, sort of) when after reading the constitution he said of it "I smell a rat. It stinks of monarchy."
So the states are called states not because of an improper use of the term, but rather as a part of the process of history. One may confidently predict that if the EU survives over the centuries, some similar process will occur.
I can accept that that is true where you were working, but it's not a universal, and I don't know if it's even especially common. I do know of many areas where the neighborhoods have campaigned for slower speeds and stricter enforcement, so this might be what you are seeing. And it's true, the neighborhoods don't ask traffic engineers. They ask "Are people driving here faster than is safe?", and believing their own judgment rather than that of some traffic engineer, whose goals they neither know or care about.
As someone who lives in an area where that is happening, I agree with the neighborhood. I'm a pedestrian in this area, and around here I'm not real interested in pushing the cars through, I'm interested in being safe when I cross the street. (That said, I also consider the number of jaywalkers incredible. The other day I saw someone crossing a main street diagonally while apparently texting on their phone. I would have considered this both illegal and reckless even on a residential street.)
Well, idling speed is adjustable, so OK. Earlier I posted that going slower took a lot of concentration, but I live in a hilly area, where there literally *aren't* any level streets. So I can see that as feasible on a flat street. (As well as the respondent who said he idled at 30 mph...idling speed being adjustable.)
I'm well past "old enough to drive", and on a residential street 25 mph is too fast. The only reason calling you "boy racer" might be inappropriate is that I'm not sure you're a boy.
If you can't sprint that fast, then you're going too fast for a residential street. That's why they have arterials every few blocks. Of course, I'm talking about a designed suburb. One that just grew is still designed that 25 mph is too fast for a residential street, but there may not *be* a nearby arterial. Sorry, that area wasn't designed for through traffic. Either go around it or don't go. There are good reasons why the designers of residential areas like cul de sacs nearly as much as the fire department hates them. As a compromise you can turn most intersections into low lying parks, with barriers in them that are low enough for a fire engine to drive over, but which route cars along a twisting route. People who live there and know the area can figure out a reasonable way to get through at low speed, but strangers will need directions. And it will still be slow.
If you want I'll agree that it's a shame that areas should need to go in for such measures. Arterial streets are a much better solution (though they generally should have much better separation from the residential areas than they do). But when an area has been designed with the assumption that there will be no through traffic, then to just route traffic through it anyway is just asking for problems. Perhaps elevated roadways would be a better answer, but I think you'll find them too expensive, and that the inhabitants would vociferously object. I also understand the tremendous objections that arise when PART of a property is condemned to allow a street to be put through. This frequently destroys half the value of the property to the inhabitants, but the compensation doesn't generally allow them to purchase an equivalent habitation elsewhere...not to mention the considerable costs of moving. Then there's the matter of people who have an emotional attachment to their home. There's really no way of compensating for that.
So the best answer is to route around the places that weren't designed to allow for through traffic. It's unfortunate that various on-line services have started to find routes for people to travel that lead directly through areas that should not be for through traffic. Understanding why they do that, and why non-residents like them, does not lead to forgiveness and acceptance, but only to the desire to do things which cause them to choose some other way. Fast traffic on residential streets is unforgivable, and when it results in death the charge should be murder.
"Among the worst kinds of scumbag?"
People who do that are showing that either they don't care about the non-central results of their actions or that they aren't aware that their actions have any results that they didn't intend. Or that they rate the lives of other people as unimportant. I count those as the worst kinds of scumbag. Do you have any categorization that you think is worse which isn't already included within that characterization?
Kensington handled the problem by refusing to fill in potholes. Given that some of the roads edged cliffs, this tended to slow down traffic quite effectively.
FWIW, people in fancy cars with good suspension systems seem to nearly ignore speed bumps. Perhaps this just means they're willing to pay at the garage, but it also means the worst traffic isn't effectively slowed. (Well, half the worst traffic. The worst traffic seems to be evenly split between wealthy bastards that don't care about anyone else and stupid teenagers who haven't learned any better yet...with some who remain teenagers through their 20's and into their 30's. I know a couple of the latter.)
Actually I feel that 25 mph is too fast on a residential area street. Unfortunately most cars seem to be so designed that it becomes increasingly difficult to drive as you go slower than about 25 mph. But I've seen 4 year olds driving their toy cars enter the street without looking. I've seen 6 year olds chase a ball into the street without looking. And they often aren't dressed to be particularly visible.
Residential areas should not be driven faster than about 15 mph between the hours of 10am and 9pm. This is just a rule of thumb, and depends on the composition of families in the neighborhood...but a driver can't tell. And people have a poor estimate of their reaction time in a high velocity situation. (I consider even 10 mph to be a high velocity situation...that's faster than most people run, or even sprint.) There are good reasons why suburbs are composed of small residential streets pierced through by arterial roads. The fast traffic should ALL be on the arterials.
P.S.: I'm responding to the discussion, not to the article, which I haven't read, so I don't know what kind of street he set up his "speed trap" on.
The other considerations included Hillary's close connection with the Democratic party machine, and frequent reports of election fraud of one form or another by BOTH of the major parties.
OTOH, the story appears to have been wrong...or should I say highly sensationalized off of meager data where a fuller analysis of the data would yield a different result. Other reports say there were a lot more then 6 coin flip choices, that many didn't get reported, that Bernie won many (some reports say most) of them. Etc.
As far as I can determine there is no accepted as accurate even COUNT of the number of coin flip choices.