The Eastern Bloc collapse wasn't the same as an invasion of Russia (or the USSR at the time). Stepping military foot on Russia proper is inviting an over-response.
True. The trip across the Atlantic is shorter (one to two weeks, depending on the location), but travel by rail might be competitive with that in terms of time, and if it can undercut the pricing of ship-borne cargo, it could be worth it.
Chinese trade is a reason that I focused on the rail traffic. Russia's benefit there would be in providing the transit corridor, and prices could easily be set in roubles US dollars, helping fill its coffers with roubles (helping to strengthen the rouble on the open market) or foreign currency (that could be used to buy roubles, helping to strengthen it on the open market).
Generally, yes, but Russia has made a habit of providing "preferential" pricing to some customers that can be well below market value, willing to guarantee the price for a very long time. They also have a habit of finding reasons to break the contract when it's convenient, blaming it on provocations, late payments, etc.
You make some good points. It would add to the cost of the bridge, but there may be economic incentives for doing so separate from the bridge, including improving the ability to transport goods into Alaska that currently go by truck for long portions of the journey. The additional economic incentives of a bridge might be enough when combined with the above to justify it.
Now, I'm not completely sure of this. It's possible, but some much more significant studies would have to be done to determine feasibility. Russia and especially China have the advantage of not having to convince their publics of the need for building this; the US might just have to build the end-points and Alaska-side rail yard.
The economic reasons I can think of largely involve more rapid transportation between hubs all over Asia (and maybe even Europe) to hubs in North America. A trip across the Pacific from Hong Kong to Seattle can take two or more weeks, while a rail trip from Hong Kong to Seattle could be done in perhaps one week, depending on how many yard changes would be needed. (Transit times between Hong Kong and the East Coast via the Panama Canal are even longer, taking a month or more, while the additional time required to cross Canada or the US would be measured in days.) Using Google Earth and some admittedly straight lines, the distance from Hong Kong to Seattle was about 6600 miles. If a train can average even 60MPH over that, the trip would take less than five days, and even some curves and detours wouldn't extend it by much. Of course, most train traffic wouldn't originate from Hong Kong, but would instead go directly, more or less, from the other hub cities scattered across China, reducing the factory-to-destination time even further.
Rail gauges might not even need to be considered, since the US and China use the same gauge, and the tracks through Siberia could be laid as dual-gauge or even just 1435mm gauge and the Russians can start adopting that (it would make trade with Europe easier, too).
Such a bridge would have to allow a significant amount of rail traffic to cross, but the economics could work out over a very long term (many decades at least). The trillion-dollar price tag is for a network of roads and rail running from London to New York; the bridge itself would probably be in the range of $100 billion for a road and dual tracks. Amortizing that at 2% interest over 50 years gets annual costs of $3.18 billion for the loan itself.
A North Carolina Dept. of Transportation study placed the approximate cost of a 4000 SEU Panamax vessel at 80% capacity at about $1500 per TEU and a New Panamax (capacity 12,000 TEU) at 51% capacity at about $950 per TEU. Those capacities can be matched using 4.5 or 8.5 trains, respectively, of 180 wagons (the max length allowed in the US) double-stacked and able to handle four TEU each (so 720 TEU). I'm not sure about the basic economics, but I imagine that the costs for train travel are less than that. Even if they're higher per day, they would probably be lower per trip.
If the toll per TEU is about the same as it is in Panama ($72), each nearly-full train crossing would bring in about $50,000. If maintenance consumed a quarter of that and the rest went to the loan, it would require almost 85,000 annual train trips, or about 232 per day. Even at zero interest, it would require more than 53,000 annual train crossings, or about 146 per day, and all of those at around 95% capacity.
However, if the tolls were higher but the cost per TEU were lower, it might work out. At 50 trains per day, the toll would need to be about $250 per TEU (plus some amount for maintenance) to pay off the loan. That's still a lot of trains for two tracks, but it might be workable. This doesn't include any road tolls or oil/gas transit fees for lines running along the bridge, which could add a fair amount, but I'm not sure it would dent it significantly.
Another reason that I can think of, though, is to get part of North America reliant on Russian natural gas, particularly as Alaska's petroleum-derived production slows over the coming decades. That could bring an influence level that's hard to achieve any other way. Russia has a history of slowing or shutting off gas supplies to Ukraine and other places during winter when it wants leverage. I'm sure it would love to have that leverage over the US and Canada as well.
(Mind you, I don't know how replicable the results may be, and I won't be at all surprised to find them not replicated, but I'm not the one stating that they're absolutely false.)
They did use non-St-36 locations. There were four groups, three of which were given the same stressors, with a fourth given no stressors and no treatment. The stressor groups received either St-36 treatment, treatment where needles were not inserted into any meridian point, or no treatment. I imagine an argument could be made for a group given treatment but not stressors.
I don't know if this provides any vindication for acupuncture (or even electroacupuncture)--something like this really needs to be repeated before I'll believe it--but the research was a little more robust than you imply.
I can't speak for Debian, but Fedora has it available at least for Gnome in F21 and F22, and they're trying to make it the default under F23. You could create a live-boot USB drive to test it out on your hardware.
It can be easily argued that any money spent to reduce waste that results in expenditures above what the waste would cost is itself waste. If you have a $1 billion project and identify that $100 million of it is waste (whether through fraud, abuse, or inefficiency), spending money to reduce the waste only makes sense as long as the combined costs of waste and waste-reduction are equal to or less than $100 million. Anything more than that and you're just adding to the waste.
When you have a more complex situation like a federal budget, it might be argued that the money can be more effectively spent elsewhere, and that's where it can get subjective, but that doesn't stop money spent to avoid waste that costs more than the waste becoming waste.
It's not a correction. It's a lie. The original article says $45 million, not billion. The total revenues for the commercial satellite industry were about $195 billion in 2013, and that includes satellite TV, photography, and communications. Even the US military isn't providing a quarter of that industry's revenue.
Sometimes looking at the smaller items gives a better idea of systemic problems that contribute to larger amounts elsewhere. The procedures meant to prevent losses have gummed up the works to such a degree that an alternate path was found that, while more expensive, got the job done. It might provide some opportunity to alter how things operate and ultimately save money later. (I'm not holding my breath, but it does sometimes happen.)
This is pretty common in the military. Red tape is just an obstruction to go around.
That's just for this part of things. One of the problems with putting in mechanisms to deal with fraud, waste, and abuse--a major part of the red tape--is that it adds waste to the process. Financially, this is acceptable up to the cost of the waste it's fighting, but after that, it becomes a bigger drain and should be curtailed.
Any large system is going to have some level of fraud, waste, and abuse, and it should be dealt with to a degree. Perfection in such systems cannot be obtained, so a certain amount of loss must be tolerated. Unfortunately, that's a lesson that politicians can never publicly learn.
Show floors are one of the places where union control got *WAY* out of hand. When someone paying to rent space for a booth can get into trouble--and sometimes even be fined--for emptying a trash can because of union rules, it's gone overboard. It contributes to the sky-high cost of exhibits and puts small companies at a disadvantage.
It's not that unions are dead. Unions are very much alive in some places and working for everyone's betterment. Many nurses' unions fall into this.
Unions have seriously declined (they peaked at only about a third of all workers in the 1950s), but that's because protections have been built into the law to ensure that most of those things unions fought for are available to all workers.
He specifically says he's not looking for advice. He's asking opinions on the moral and ethical lines associated with the practice itself. Some people are going to be fine with it, others outraged. He's formed a basic opinion of things, but he's still fine-tuning it and wants to hear potential alternate viewpoints to factor in.
Morally, I have no problem with it unless the 1099 staff is being dramatically underpaid (which often happens to inexperienced people and that leads to its own inefficiencies when undertaking projects). Ethically, the state has a duty to ensure that its laws are being followed, and the contracts should state all requirements related to them. If the law requires W2 employees, an exclusion of 1099 employees, at least on a general basis, should be in the contract and be subject to auditing by the state, which should happen at least once for every contract term. Exceptions could be made for specialists brought in for short time periods, depending on the law.
Hitler actually reduced firearm ownership restrictions starting in 1938. Jews weren't allowed to buy guns, of course, but most Germans could buy long arms and ammunition without a permit, it got much easier to get a pistol permit, and members of the Nazi Party (and some other groups) were exempted from gun control laws altogether.
The laws that Hitler used to disarm portionsthe populace were actually from the previous government, the Weimar Republic. The Nazi Party just took advantage of what was there.
UPS and FedEx don't manufacture their trucks, but they're heavily involved in the development of the vehicles they use (other than perhaps the tractor-trailers). They have engineers that work directly with manufacturers on the layouts, materials, aerodynamics, and powerplants to find a mix of cost, fuel efficiency, security, and even safety.
SpaceX is trying to break into a business with a completely new cost model, and a relatively new rocket model (mix of some proven technologies with some new ones and even some completely experimental items. They have every incentive already to become more reliable, especially since the goal is reuse of at least Stage 1. If NASA wants them to buy insurance to cover future failures, that's NASA's call, but it will ultimately come out of NASA's pocket and won't change the push for highest possibility reliability all that much.
Without buying extra insurance, you're limited to what the carrier is willing to pay out as specified in the contract agreed to at the time of purchase. In the US, both UPS and FedEx cap their payout at $100 unless additional insurance is purchased.
China, perhaps (there might be regulatory issues associated with moving US loans overseas, even if China had banks chartered in the US), but probably not Chinese banks which would be interested in relatively solid loan portfolios. US securities are still seen as guaranteed payoffs, so even if the economy sours, they can still be as certain as possible of a return. Loan assets don't have that luxury.
However, I've had concerns about the Chinese economy for a few years. They're much more shadowy about these things than Western government, and it's hard to say how much money they have. The Chinese government may be hiding a fiscal nightmare that is worse in percentages than Greece and will certainly have more worldwide impact than a complete collapse of the Greek economy.
The bond purchases are at trick that might get used more often in part because of the slow rate at which additional money enters circulation. Social Security has done it for decades, but that's been even more of an accounting trick because the first step of the money stays within a smaller group (namely, retirees and the disabled). The profits from the Fed can get paid out to government contractors, employees, tax refunds, and anything else the government chooses to spend its money on.
There's a tipping point, of course, but I think it's far above what's being used now. Still, QE purchases ended last year because the Fed believed the economy to have stabilized sufficiently, so if it does get used again, it's going to make a lot of news, and may rattle the markets.
That's an historic claim, and one that keeps the people happy (they want to believe their country is the strongest in the world, or at least in the region), but it's one they need to let go of because it's based on China's power from centuries ago, and it could lose an actual naval war if all of the other countries with claims to the area fought against it, even if the US didn't get involved. The problem is that they can't figure out how to do that and save face with the people. The government fears the people far more than it lets on largely because a country with 1.3 billion people and only 3 million soldiers (including reserves), it's in a precarious position, even if all of the millions of national and local police could be pulled in.
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The Eastern Bloc collapse wasn't the same as an invasion of Russia (or the USSR at the time). Stepping military foot on Russia proper is inviting an over-response.
True. The trip across the Atlantic is shorter (one to two weeks, depending on the location), but travel by rail might be competitive with that in terms of time, and if it can undercut the pricing of ship-borne cargo, it could be worth it.
Chinese trade is a reason that I focused on the rail traffic. Russia's benefit there would be in providing the transit corridor, and prices could easily be set in roubles US dollars, helping fill its coffers with roubles (helping to strengthen the rouble on the open market) or foreign currency (that could be used to buy roubles, helping to strengthen it on the open market).
Generally, yes, but Russia has made a habit of providing "preferential" pricing to some customers that can be well below market value, willing to guarantee the price for a very long time. They also have a habit of finding reasons to break the contract when it's convenient, blaming it on provocations, late payments, etc.
You make some good points. It would add to the cost of the bridge, but there may be economic incentives for doing so separate from the bridge, including improving the ability to transport goods into Alaska that currently go by truck for long portions of the journey. The additional economic incentives of a bridge might be enough when combined with the above to justify it.
Now, I'm not completely sure of this. It's possible, but some much more significant studies would have to be done to determine feasibility. Russia and especially China have the advantage of not having to convince their publics of the need for building this; the US might just have to build the end-points and Alaska-side rail yard.
The economic reasons I can think of largely involve more rapid transportation between hubs all over Asia (and maybe even Europe) to hubs in North America. A trip across the Pacific from Hong Kong to Seattle can take two or more weeks, while a rail trip from Hong Kong to Seattle could be done in perhaps one week, depending on how many yard changes would be needed. (Transit times between Hong Kong and the East Coast via the Panama Canal are even longer, taking a month or more, while the additional time required to cross Canada or the US would be measured in days.) Using Google Earth and some admittedly straight lines, the distance from Hong Kong to Seattle was about 6600 miles. If a train can average even 60MPH over that, the trip would take less than five days, and even some curves and detours wouldn't extend it by much. Of course, most train traffic wouldn't originate from Hong Kong, but would instead go directly, more or less, from the other hub cities scattered across China, reducing the factory-to-destination time even further.
Rail gauges might not even need to be considered, since the US and China use the same gauge, and the tracks through Siberia could be laid as dual-gauge or even just 1435mm gauge and the Russians can start adopting that (it would make trade with Europe easier, too).
Such a bridge would have to allow a significant amount of rail traffic to cross, but the economics could work out over a very long term (many decades at least). The trillion-dollar price tag is for a network of roads and rail running from London to New York; the bridge itself would probably be in the range of $100 billion for a road and dual tracks. Amortizing that at 2% interest over 50 years gets annual costs of $3.18 billion for the loan itself.
A North Carolina Dept. of Transportation study placed the approximate cost of a 4000 SEU Panamax vessel at 80% capacity at about $1500 per TEU and a New Panamax (capacity 12,000 TEU) at 51% capacity at about $950 per TEU. Those capacities can be matched using 4.5 or 8.5 trains, respectively, of 180 wagons (the max length allowed in the US) double-stacked and able to handle four TEU each (so 720 TEU). I'm not sure about the basic economics, but I imagine that the costs for train travel are less than that. Even if they're higher per day, they would probably be lower per trip.
If the toll per TEU is about the same as it is in Panama ($72), each nearly-full train crossing would bring in about $50,000. If maintenance consumed a quarter of that and the rest went to the loan, it would require almost 85,000 annual train trips, or about 232 per day. Even at zero interest, it would require more than 53,000 annual train crossings, or about 146 per day, and all of those at around 95% capacity.
However, if the tolls were higher but the cost per TEU were lower, it might work out. At 50 trains per day, the toll would need to be about $250 per TEU (plus some amount for maintenance) to pay off the loan. That's still a lot of trains for two tracks, but it might be workable. This doesn't include any road tolls or oil/gas transit fees for lines running along the bridge, which could add a fair amount, but I'm not sure it would dent it significantly.
Another reason that I can think of, though, is to get part of North America reliant on Russian natural gas, particularly as Alaska's petroleum-derived production slows over the coming decades. That could bring an influence level that's hard to achieve any other way. Russia has a history of slowing or shutting off gas supplies to Ukraine and other places during winter when it wants leverage. I'm sure it would love to have that leverage over the US and Canada as well.
What are you putting up for your guarantee?
(Mind you, I don't know how replicable the results may be, and I won't be at all surprised to find them not replicated, but I'm not the one stating that they're absolutely false.)
They did use non-St-36 locations. There were four groups, three of which were given the same stressors, with a fourth given no stressors and no treatment. The stressor groups received either St-36 treatment, treatment where needles were not inserted into any meridian point, or no treatment. I imagine an argument could be made for a group given treatment but not stressors.
I don't know if this provides any vindication for acupuncture (or even electroacupuncture)--something like this really needs to be repeated before I'll believe it--but the research was a little more robust than you imply.
Except it will change when Ubuntu moves to Mir by default.
RDP can do seamless remote applications, but you have to have a Terminal Server to use it. It's not available, AFAICT, from the basic version.
I can't speak for Debian, but Fedora has it available at least for Gnome in F21 and F22, and they're trying to make it the default under F23. You could create a live-boot USB drive to test it out on your hardware.
The accounting perspective is what the General Accounting Office examines. What you're talking about is more of a political exercise.
It can be easily argued that any money spent to reduce waste that results in expenditures above what the waste would cost is itself waste. If you have a $1 billion project and identify that $100 million of it is waste (whether through fraud, abuse, or inefficiency), spending money to reduce the waste only makes sense as long as the combined costs of waste and waste-reduction are equal to or less than $100 million. Anything more than that and you're just adding to the waste.
When you have a more complex situation like a federal budget, it might be argued that the money can be more effectively spent elsewhere, and that's where it can get subjective, but that doesn't stop money spent to avoid waste that costs more than the waste becoming waste.
It's not a correction. It's a lie. The original article says $45 million, not billion. The total revenues for the commercial satellite industry were about $195 billion in 2013, and that includes satellite TV, photography, and communications. Even the US military isn't providing a quarter of that industry's revenue.
Sometimes looking at the smaller items gives a better idea of systemic problems that contribute to larger amounts elsewhere. The procedures meant to prevent losses have gummed up the works to such a degree that an alternate path was found that, while more expensive, got the job done. It might provide some opportunity to alter how things operate and ultimately save money later. (I'm not holding my breath, but it does sometimes happen.)
This is pretty common in the military. Red tape is just an obstruction to go around.
That's just for this part of things. One of the problems with putting in mechanisms to deal with fraud, waste, and abuse--a major part of the red tape--is that it adds waste to the process. Financially, this is acceptable up to the cost of the waste it's fighting, but after that, it becomes a bigger drain and should be curtailed.
Any large system is going to have some level of fraud, waste, and abuse, and it should be dealt with to a degree. Perfection in such systems cannot be obtained, so a certain amount of loss must be tolerated. Unfortunately, that's a lesson that politicians can never publicly learn.
Show floors are one of the places where union control got *WAY* out of hand. When someone paying to rent space for a booth can get into trouble--and sometimes even be fined--for emptying a trash can because of union rules, it's gone overboard. It contributes to the sky-high cost of exhibits and puts small companies at a disadvantage.
It's not that unions are dead. Unions are very much alive in some places and working for everyone's betterment. Many nurses' unions fall into this.
Unions have seriously declined (they peaked at only about a third of all workers in the 1950s), but that's because protections have been built into the law to ensure that most of those things unions fought for are available to all workers.
He specifically says he's not looking for advice. He's asking opinions on the moral and ethical lines associated with the practice itself. Some people are going to be fine with it, others outraged. He's formed a basic opinion of things, but he's still fine-tuning it and wants to hear potential alternate viewpoints to factor in.
Morally, I have no problem with it unless the 1099 staff is being dramatically underpaid (which often happens to inexperienced people and that leads to its own inefficiencies when undertaking projects). Ethically, the state has a duty to ensure that its laws are being followed, and the contracts should state all requirements related to them. If the law requires W2 employees, an exclusion of 1099 employees, at least on a general basis, should be in the contract and be subject to auditing by the state, which should happen at least once for every contract term. Exceptions could be made for specialists brought in for short time periods, depending on the law.
Hitler actually reduced firearm ownership restrictions starting in 1938. Jews weren't allowed to buy guns, of course, but most Germans could buy long arms and ammunition without a permit, it got much easier to get a pistol permit, and members of the Nazi Party (and some other groups) were exempted from gun control laws altogether.
The laws that Hitler used to disarm portionsthe populace were actually from the previous government, the Weimar Republic. The Nazi Party just took advantage of what was there.
UPS and FedEx don't manufacture their trucks, but they're heavily involved in the development of the vehicles they use (other than perhaps the tractor-trailers). They have engineers that work directly with manufacturers on the layouts, materials, aerodynamics, and powerplants to find a mix of cost, fuel efficiency, security, and even safety.
SpaceX is trying to break into a business with a completely new cost model, and a relatively new rocket model (mix of some proven technologies with some new ones and even some completely experimental items. They have every incentive already to become more reliable, especially since the goal is reuse of at least Stage 1. If NASA wants them to buy insurance to cover future failures, that's NASA's call, but it will ultimately come out of NASA's pocket and won't change the push for highest possibility reliability all that much.
Without buying extra insurance, you're limited to what the carrier is willing to pay out as specified in the contract agreed to at the time of purchase. In the US, both UPS and FedEx cap their payout at $100 unless additional insurance is purchased.
China, perhaps (there might be regulatory issues associated with moving US loans overseas, even if China had banks chartered in the US), but probably not Chinese banks which would be interested in relatively solid loan portfolios. US securities are still seen as guaranteed payoffs, so even if the economy sours, they can still be as certain as possible of a return. Loan assets don't have that luxury.
However, I've had concerns about the Chinese economy for a few years. They're much more shadowy about these things than Western government, and it's hard to say how much money they have. The Chinese government may be hiding a fiscal nightmare that is worse in percentages than Greece and will certainly have more worldwide impact than a complete collapse of the Greek economy.
The bond purchases are at trick that might get used more often in part because of the slow rate at which additional money enters circulation. Social Security has done it for decades, but that's been even more of an accounting trick because the first step of the money stays within a smaller group (namely, retirees and the disabled). The profits from the Fed can get paid out to government contractors, employees, tax refunds, and anything else the government chooses to spend its money on.
There's a tipping point, of course, but I think it's far above what's being used now. Still, QE purchases ended last year because the Fed believed the economy to have stabilized sufficiently, so if it does get used again, it's going to make a lot of news, and may rattle the markets.
That's an historic claim, and one that keeps the people happy (they want to believe their country is the strongest in the world, or at least in the region), but it's one they need to let go of because it's based on China's power from centuries ago, and it could lose an actual naval war if all of the other countries with claims to the area fought against it, even if the US didn't get involved. The problem is that they can't figure out how to do that and save face with the people. The government fears the people far more than it lets on largely because a country with 1.3 billion people and only 3 million soldiers (including reserves), it's in a precarious position, even if all of the millions of national and local police could be pulled in.