The cuts and stimulus were based on the Laffer Curve, which allows for lower tax rates that pick the economy up and result in higher employment and wages, thus resulting in higher revenues. It's counter to normal logic, and I didn't buy it until a few years ago (and some well-respected economists still don't buy it). It's hard to predict what effect the Laffer curve will have, and whether it will help in a given situation (like now).
He boosted military funding in an effort to stay ahead of the Soviet Union. However, Democrats insisted that if military spending was to jump that much, then social spending needed to jump a lot, too. He gave in and let it happen. If you go back and look at how much has been spent historically in different government sectors, you'll see the same huge leaps in social spending that make up 75% or more of the budget, and that is part of what led to the massive deficits even at a time of skyrocketing revenues (through lower taxes, I might add).
Actuaally, no. The Missouri has been turned into a floating museum, as may be the case with the New Jersey (I heard something about a plan to do this but didn't follow up). The damage to the Iowa following the explosion in the #2 turret was deemed too expensive to fix. Not sure what happened to the Wisconsin.
In any case, all have been stricken from the records, as the ships were deemed too expensive to maintain. They're reasonably good at shore bombardment, but their most recent effective uses were simply as very expensive T-LAM launch platforms, something far better handled by ships designed for it from the start.
The ship's keel was laid in 1998, meaning it was approved a few years (at least) before that. The economy wasn't in such a scary position at that time. Carriers take a long time to build; this wasn't come kind of recent decision to just throw a few billion dollars at the Newport News shipyards.
Ignoring the numerous Navy and Marine Corps officers who have gone up, not to mention the occasional civilian...
You're right to some extent. We can do a lot more science with the money spent. There are valid technical reasons for having the shuttle (such as the repairs and upgrades on the HST on parts that were never meant to be replaced), but for the most part those could be done by capsule for less money and risk.
Not sure if you read the entire article, but the researcher that wrote it agrees that this is very much a condition of the human desire to explore new places, but contrary to your position agrees that it's a valid reason. He just wants that acknowledged. The acknowledgement won't ever come from NASA for fear of some members of Congress overhearing and slashing their funding, but there are those of us that can admit to it.
The labels are not invincible in the US. They lost the first round of the Kazaa case in Los Angeles, when the judge decided that the legal uses of Kazaa outweighed the potential illegal uses.
If the programs all worked efficiently, I wouldn't mind so much, and in fact, I do think the government should supply certain safety nets. The government has been so slow to institute reforms that there is a great deal of fraud and waste involved in the programs, with some estimates suggesting 20% to 25%. In addition, there is often a lot of money thrown at the problems without looking at whether they work (look at public housing, which you know is a mess if you live in most major cities).
Re:No Overtime No Vacation
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
I must have found a dream job. I work four-on, four-off, three-on, three-off 12-hour shifts in a network operations center. It can be demanding sometimes, especially when shift change comes (three months on days, three months on nights), but I get flexibility in what I do with my time here, and I can swap shifts with other guys when I need an extra day off here and there. I get 80 hours of vacation every year, plus three personal days, and it's easy to get a block of five days in a row off of work for travel or just to not work with the adjustment of a day here and there with someone else.
I took my first ever two-week vacation a couple of months ago (I'm 28), and only my third ever vacation longer than two work days off, and was told that if they needed me, they'd call me on the cell, and that I should not call in nor check e-mail while I was gone. The same applies on days off -- don't call, don't log in. If they need something, they will call. That's what days off are for.
It would be nice, though, if the non-NOC positions weren't so transitory. I've yet to see anyone who is a specialist here, save for the lead Unix admin and our Cisco and dedicated circuit guys, last more than six months before some slight business downturn results in their layoff. Makes me fear promotions.:(
Re:capitalists love it
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 1
Especially machinists. My dad is a QA inspector for a plastics company, and he said that they're having a bastard of a time finding good machinists, even when they raise the pay scales. Same thing happened at his last job in aerospace. People perceive machining as being a menial labor role when it is, in fact, highly skilled and well-paid.
Re:hardly working
on
Working Hard?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Would you be referring to the $124 billion in the 2002 budget to cover housing assistance, food and nutrition programs, Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, child support, short-term assitance, and child care entitlement? That comes out to somewhere around $750, give or take, per working person. I don't consider that "a few dollars", nor do I consider "a few dollars" the many other things the government throws money at, such as the corporate welfare to which you refer.
I had a college class recently where one of the students had retired after a career as a professional lobbyist in Washington and was taking the class for fun.
PHP pages delivered over IIS that should be gzipped aren't coming up properly for me (PHP 4.3.2). It's compressing them, but IIS isn't sending anything recognizable to the browser as decompressable code. Mozilla delivers gibberish, and IE is prompting to save. Once I save and decompress it, it's the HTML for the page.
Because this would pose an undue burden on such companies as newspapers, which if pushed forward would place an undue burden on the copyright office since it would be handling dozens of copyright submissions for each article from hundreds (thousands?) of newspapers. This doesn't even touch on news agencies that can put out a hundred or more articles a day.
There's a difference between being able to run through a basic configuration and being able to thoroughly configure something. Like I said, I could get a RH box up and running as a web server, but it would not be the best configuration.
I've seen plenty of MCSE's that know nothing more than the book told them, and sometimes less. I've seen far too many that have used only the cram books to pass them, and this leaves them with even less knowledge. The instructors know enough to teach the book, and occasionally a little more.
I know I'm mostly a Windows person. I'm trying to add Linux, FreeBSD, and Cisco to that, and maybe OSX. Just because there are a lot of flaming idiots out there with credentials doesn't mean that we all are. I've met more than enough flaming idiots with CNE's and various Cisco certs to know that paper means nothing to anyone who has been in the trenches for more than a year. I imagine I'll be meeting some RHCE's and LPIC's in the near future that will be similarly aggravating.
A lot of the paper MCSE's are just that. I've only recently begun getting my certs, and only because my company's new deal with Microsoft requires that we have two MCSE's on-staff. (That it looks good to some people on a resume also helps.) Most of my knowledge has come from finding a problem, and looking to find a solution to it, rather than getting into reformatting and restoring a backup. I have read several of the NSA docs, I spent two weeks analyzing the security templates, I'm one of the few people I know of who has gotten into the IIS metabase, and the only one to have fixed something in it.
Having started as a DOS guy, I'm still very much a keyboard jockey, and I go looking for files and registry entries whenever I can, instead of just thinking it's unfixable and rebuilding things. Problems are rarely unfixable in any OS; it just takes some time and sometimes some understanding to be able to come up with a solution. Once that solution is obtained, you will, theoretically, be able to fix it again, or at least have a clue of what the original problem was.
I'd like to see comparisons on a number of purposes (webserver, database server, etc) done on a range of identical hardware (low-end, mid-range, and high-end servers, or as equivalent as possible in the case of OSX) where the OS installations are done by technicians who are intimately familiar with their particular OS. I'd like to also see these stats updated from time to time with significant new releases from each company.
It bothers me when I see people with a whole lot of experience on one OS and some experience on another OS criticizing something about the one in which they have little experience, and this applies in any direction. As one who has far more experience in Windows than in Linux, I wouldn't expect to be able to set up a well-configured RH web server (working on learning), though I could probably get something basic in place. I've seen the reverse when dealing with Unix people, who have difficulty understanding some of the ways in which Windows handles things.
So far, most of the tests I have seen have either not been comprehensive enough, or have been slanted by the bias of the testing group. I've seen few examples of tests including OSX server, and it would be nice to see how well some OSes scale *down*, since not everyone can afford a $10K or more server for their first foray into whatever it is they want to do.
Then maybe you can explain why it is that my last receipt from the gas station showed the price as $1.939 (California 91 octane)? Was that last 9 a misprint? If so, it must have been a misprint for the last 10 years in which I've been driving.
This has been done, actually. I forget the actual year, but at some point Congress decided it would be a good idea to sort through things again, and thus was created the current USC (United States Code) reference we use today.
Sometimes I think this should be done on a periodic basis, perhaps every fifty years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
The cuts and stimulus were based on the Laffer Curve, which allows for lower tax rates that pick the economy up and result in higher employment and wages, thus resulting in higher revenues. It's counter to normal logic, and I didn't buy it until a few years ago (and some well-respected economists still don't buy it). It's hard to predict what effect the Laffer curve will have, and whether it will help in a given situation (like now).
He boosted military funding in an effort to stay ahead of the Soviet Union. However, Democrats insisted that if military spending was to jump that much, then social spending needed to jump a lot, too. He gave in and let it happen. If you go back and look at how much has been spent historically in different government sectors, you'll see the same huge leaps in social spending that make up 75% or more of the budget, and that is part of what led to the massive deficits even at a time of skyrocketing revenues (through lower taxes, I might add).
Actuaally, no. The Missouri has been turned into a floating museum, as may be the case with the New Jersey (I heard something about a plan to do this but didn't follow up). The damage to the Iowa following the explosion in the #2 turret was deemed too expensive to fix. Not sure what happened to the Wisconsin.
In any case, all have been stricken from the records, as the ships were deemed too expensive to maintain. They're reasonably good at shore bombardment, but their most recent effective uses were simply as very expensive T-LAM launch platforms, something far better handled by ships designed for it from the start.
If it makes them feel any better, the next carrier due to join the fleet in 2009 is to be named the USS George H.W. Bush.
i ps /ship-cv.html
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/sh
The ship's keel was laid in 1998, meaning it was approved a few years (at least) before that. The economy wasn't in such a scary position at that time. Carriers take a long time to build; this wasn't come kind of recent decision to just throw a few billion dollars at the Newport News shipyards.
I believe aksansai meant that if NASA had anticipated this kind of problem, all missions would be sent up with enough fuel to reach the ISS.
Delivery of a two-pound, 20"x15"x2" package from California to London:
UPS: $66 (2-5 days)
FedEx: $65 (4-5 days)
USPS: $15 (4-6 days)
You can guess who I went with. It took four days to get there.
How can water be a lot easier to find than hydrogen? If you have found water, have you not then also found hydrogen?
Until I find work anywhere else in the world, I have to consider this a dream job -- which it more or less is for being in the US.
No, his math was right. And Social Security is 12.5 cents per dollar.
Ignoring the numerous Navy and Marine Corps officers who have gone up, not to mention the occasional civilian...
You're right to some extent. We can do a lot more science with the money spent. There are valid technical reasons for having the shuttle (such as the repairs and upgrades on the HST on parts that were never meant to be replaced), but for the most part those could be done by capsule for less money and risk.
Not sure if you read the entire article, but the researcher that wrote it agrees that this is very much a condition of the human desire to explore new places, but contrary to your position agrees that it's a valid reason. He just wants that acknowledged. The acknowledgement won't ever come from NASA for fear of some members of Congress overhearing and slashing their funding, but there are those of us that can admit to it.
The labels are not invincible in the US. They lost the first round of the Kazaa case in Los Angeles, when the judge decided that the legal uses of Kazaa outweighed the potential illegal uses.
If the programs all worked efficiently, I wouldn't mind so much, and in fact, I do think the government should supply certain safety nets. The government has been so slow to institute reforms that there is a great deal of fraud and waste involved in the programs, with some estimates suggesting 20% to 25%. In addition, there is often a lot of money thrown at the problems without looking at whether they work (look at public housing, which you know is a mess if you live in most major cities).
I must have found a dream job. I work four-on, four-off, three-on, three-off 12-hour shifts in a network operations center. It can be demanding sometimes, especially when shift change comes (three months on days, three months on nights), but I get flexibility in what I do with my time here, and I can swap shifts with other guys when I need an extra day off here and there. I get 80 hours of vacation every year, plus three personal days, and it's easy to get a block of five days in a row off of work for travel or just to not work with the adjustment of a day here and there with someone else.
:(
I took my first ever two-week vacation a couple of months ago (I'm 28), and only my third ever vacation longer than two work days off, and was told that if they needed me, they'd call me on the cell, and that I should not call in nor check e-mail while I was gone. The same applies on days off -- don't call, don't log in. If they need something, they will call. That's what days off are for.
It would be nice, though, if the non-NOC positions weren't so transitory. I've yet to see anyone who is a specialist here, save for the lead Unix admin and our Cisco and dedicated circuit guys, last more than six months before some slight business downturn results in their layoff. Makes me fear promotions.
Especially machinists. My dad is a QA inspector for a plastics company, and he said that they're having a bastard of a time finding good machinists, even when they raise the pay scales. Same thing happened at his last job in aerospace. People perceive machining as being a menial labor role when it is, in fact, highly skilled and well-paid.
Would you be referring to the $124 billion in the 2002 budget to cover housing assistance, food and nutrition programs, Supplemental Security Income, food stamps, child support, short-term assitance, and child care entitlement? That comes out to somewhere around $750, give or take, per working person. I don't consider that "a few dollars", nor do I consider "a few dollars" the many other things the government throws money at, such as the corporate welfare to which you refer.
I had a college class recently where one of the students had retired after a career as a professional lobbyist in Washington and was taking the class for fun.
Her career length? Twelve years.
Her age? 37.
PHP pages delivered over IIS that should be gzipped aren't coming up properly for me (PHP 4.3.2). It's compressing them, but IIS isn't sending anything recognizable to the browser as decompressable code. Mozilla delivers gibberish, and IE is prompting to save. Once I save and decompress it, it's the HTML for the page.
Works fine with gzip off, though.
Because this would pose an undue burden on such companies as newspapers, which if pushed forward would place an undue burden on the copyright office since it would be handling dozens of copyright submissions for each article from hundreds (thousands?) of newspapers. This doesn't even touch on news agencies that can put out a hundred or more articles a day.
There's a difference between being able to run through a basic configuration and being able to thoroughly configure something. Like I said, I could get a RH box up and running as a web server, but it would not be the best configuration.
I've seen plenty of MCSE's that know nothing more than the book told them, and sometimes less. I've seen far too many that have used only the cram books to pass them, and this leaves them with even less knowledge. The instructors know enough to teach the book, and occasionally a little more.
I know I'm mostly a Windows person. I'm trying to add Linux, FreeBSD, and Cisco to that, and maybe OSX. Just because there are a lot of flaming idiots out there with credentials doesn't mean that we all are. I've met more than enough flaming idiots with CNE's and various Cisco certs to know that paper means nothing to anyone who has been in the trenches for more than a year. I imagine I'll be meeting some RHCE's and LPIC's in the near future that will be similarly aggravating.
A lot of the paper MCSE's are just that. I've only recently begun getting my certs, and only because my company's new deal with Microsoft requires that we have two MCSE's on-staff. (That it looks good to some people on a resume also helps.) Most of my knowledge has come from finding a problem, and looking to find a solution to it, rather than getting into reformatting and restoring a backup. I have read several of the NSA docs, I spent two weeks analyzing the security templates, I'm one of the few people I know of who has gotten into the IIS metabase, and the only one to have fixed something in it.
Having started as a DOS guy, I'm still very much a keyboard jockey, and I go looking for files and registry entries whenever I can, instead of just thinking it's unfixable and rebuilding things. Problems are rarely unfixable in any OS; it just takes some time and sometimes some understanding to be able to come up with a solution. Once that solution is obtained, you will, theoretically, be able to fix it again, or at least have a clue of what the original problem was.
I'd like to see comparisons on a number of purposes (webserver, database server, etc) done on a range of identical hardware (low-end, mid-range, and high-end servers, or as equivalent as possible in the case of OSX) where the OS installations are done by technicians who are intimately familiar with their particular OS. I'd like to also see these stats updated from time to time with significant new releases from each company.
It bothers me when I see people with a whole lot of experience on one OS and some experience on another OS criticizing something about the one in which they have little experience, and this applies in any direction. As one who has far more experience in Windows than in Linux, I wouldn't expect to be able to set up a well-configured RH web server (working on learning), though I could probably get something basic in place. I've seen the reverse when dealing with Unix people, who have difficulty understanding some of the ways in which Windows handles things.
So far, most of the tests I have seen have either not been comprehensive enough, or have been slanted by the bias of the testing group. I've seen few examples of tests including OSX server, and it would be nice to see how well some OSes scale *down*, since not everyone can afford a $10K or more server for their first foray into whatever it is they want to do.
Found a receipt. Here are the numbers:
14.932G at $1.779
Total: $26.56
That's right from the receipt. Pulling open a calculator, I find that
14.932 * $1.779 = $26.564028
Or, rounded off, $26.56.
Time to put away the conspiracy theories.
Then maybe you can explain why it is that my last receipt from the gas station showed the price as $1.939 (California 91 octane)? Was that last 9 a misprint? If so, it must have been a misprint for the last 10 years in which I've been driving.
This has been done, actually. I forget the actual year, but at some point Congress decided it would be a good idea to sort through things again, and thus was created the current USC (United States Code) reference we use today.
Sometimes I think this should be done on a periodic basis, perhaps every fifty years or so.