The UK used to pay 17/18 year olds a small stipend (£30/week IIRC) for attending college, this was during the mid-90s to mid-00s when it was abolished by the Tories. Attendance rates climbed when it was introduced and dropped after it was abolished.
I'd rather see it more universally applied to all people of that age rather than by some false or corruptible measures of merit or need. For societies with fiat money, cost should not be a barrier to implement any program. With no finite supply money is simply a measure of relative worth. With a universal stipend we are saying that everyone deserves a chance at a good beginning to adult life.
What happens if, by accident or malicious intent, the storage medium you are using is destroyed? Or ironically enough, if you are attacked with malware that encrypts your drive. How do you explain that you can't decrypt the drive to so they can decrypt your messages? Or that the cloud solution provider you were using is down for a undetermined amount of time?
It depends what you are accused of and how politically connected or rich you are. Seriously, a law like this is meant as a catch all that nobody will be able to ensure their compliance with. Basically it outlaws encryption for all practical purposes. So if you are accused of something, anything, and you happened to use encryption then at least they can jail or fine you on a technicality when they can't prove that any real crime has been committed.
I think an interesting test of this idea would be to apply this to 18 to 22 year olds or even starting at 16. Let them do whatever they want with the money. Go to college, start a business, buy stuff, blow it all, etc.
I think the downside of any subsidy is that it would tend to inflate the costs of things people need, think they need or really want. The upside is that if people are given enough discretion and choice of how they spend (or save) the subsidy then it can level the playing field somewhat and the effects of the subsidy on raising prices of anything in particular is lessened.
Of course for all of us who had very little money when we were starting out we are suddenly at a competitive disadvantage to young kids who are give a free ride and don't have college debts or are able to save up to buy things that took use years and years to do. Also, the same can be said of any scheme like this even if it applied to everyone. Suddenly applied to society. The people that didn't get the benefit of this are put at a disadvantage because we have been (or still are) carrying debts that the younger generation now will never have to incur at all. At some point it is about the next generation and not us anymore, but still this is a major societal shift and it is hard to imagine that it would be quite as simple as this to truly level the playing field.
I think he was taking the position that H1Bs are undermining the American Job market. So really the goal is to eliminate the requirement that H1B need a sponsor at all in order to make sure that a person has job mobility and isn't a preferable candidate because of the indentured nature of the H1B program. Or at least eliminate the sponsor requirement after 30 days or something like that. And put minimum salary/income requirements that for the person to get a yearly renewal of their visa their income over the previous year has to be above the prevailing wage for that job and only applicable for jobs in the top 20% by income so they aren't just importing indentured servants.
So if I brought my pistol to the US Open and fired it straight up, you'd be OK with that if it only hit an empty seat?
I'd be more okay with it than if you had shot me in the head.
The more relevant example would be if you flew a small toy helicopter in the air that could maybe cause someone to go "ouch" or in the extreme could have caused about as much damage as a baseball or a small rock thrown in the air and it didn't hit anyone.... again... didn't hit anyone. Don't do it again. Have a nice day. End of story.
Sure, but the charge should have been trespassing or something like that. The drone hit some seats. This isn't like having a gasoline fight at a gas station kind of reckless.
No, this was having a baseball game in a crowded park kind of reckless. You could easily wind up hitting someone with a ball (or even a bat) in that kind of environment. This drone was easily heavy enough to harm someone if it fell on them, and he clearly wasn't as in control of it as he thought he was. As well, odds are it was powered by a LiPo, which is a fire hazard. (I have LiPos, I use them, but any time they are outside of their protective storage, you should have an extinguisher ready and you should be able to access any place it might ignite...)
Come on... someone just walking around could knock into someone and knock them over and they could hit their head and spontaneously combust... when someone does something stupid and not allowed in a public place like that the response is usually to simply ask them to stop and not do it again and then only if they are non-compliant then you charge them with trespass.
This is a bit of an overreaction or example setting charge because of the word "drone". The fact that he disrupted the event was at issue, like someone running out onto the field. Sure someone running out onto the field could knock someone over and then they could hit their head and even die, but unless someone actually got hit I think the endangerment charge is overblown.
Sure, but the charge should have been trespassing or something like that. The drone hit some seats. This isn't like having a gasoline fight at a gas station kind of reckless.
This appears to apply to all software installed on something that is licensed by the FCC... so what about third party software on smartphones? This proposed rule seems to give the FCC certification holder all the power to decide what is or is not legally allowed on their devices.
Is that *in theory* you could understand why they come to a particular result, but in practice it could be potentially very hard with a large network for any person to get their head around the processes leading up to the output. This means that unless safety rules are changed we won't be seeing these things driving cars or flying aircraft anytime soon since the software needs to be verifiable and neural networks are not.
I would agree that neural networks shouldn't be in a learning mode while they should be in a fixed operational mode, but once they are trained and the neural network is no longer being modified to fit the training set then a neural net is like any other algorithm and will output predictable results.
"Companies make money creating a product that no one checks to make sure it's not bogus"
In this case, carbon credits are mandated for a product that literally doesn't exist: CO2 supposedly not emitted. Of course it's going to be a joke.
Worse it's a protection racket... 'You give us money and we won't do bad things'. Paying people not to do things that you fear they might do otherwise. It incentivizes doing bad things otherwise you start thinking they weren't really going to do bad things in the first place. In this case it incentivized extra emissions in order to justify credits for cut backs.
It is like the West subsidizing dictators in order to prevent extremism... it incentivizes those same dictators to promote just enough extremism to keep the money flowing.
If you want to cut carbon emissions then you need viable alternatives, not carbon credit deals with polluters.
So, all Jack the Ripper needs is to put a flashing light on his car and he can force his victims to a stop? No thanks.
Hell, it's not unheard of for actual police officers to engage in kidnapping, rape, and murder - if you suspect such a situation, they should NOT be able to trivially disable your vehicle.
Sure, it should automatically respond to police signals just as a conscientious driver would. But you should also be able to override that behavior, just as a driver with a sense of self-preservation sometimes must.
Meanwhile, an unconscious occupant would seem to me to be one of the points of an automated vehicle. Any automated vehicle which needs me to continue to pay attention to the road in case of emergency is a horrible danger to everyone else, because passengers won't do so reliably. And if I don't have to pay attention to the road, then I may as well play video games, take a nap, etc. Just like if I had a chauffeur. You wouldn't pull over a limo because the passengers were unconscious would you?
That is the case now. You are obligated to pull over. Now... I agree with a manual override. If Jack the ripper starts walking towards the car, then I would like to be able to hit a button and drive away. Or if you really feel unsafe where the car wants to pull over, then similarly I would want a manual override.
I agree that having an automated car will actually save lives where now if the driver has a medical issue the likely outcome is a high speed collision which endangers even more lives. But if the passenger has truly had a medical issue and can't stop the car then it would be good to have the ability to pull the car over. Again, manual override should take precedence. But if the person is on the phone with 911 and passes out the car should be capable of getting pulled over by a single patrol car. Something as simple as a directive to slow down and pull over when a car with flashing lights is behind you.
stop trying to correct this with the obvious suggestions to shell out $60. This is a good thing.
Problem is when they get a new hard drive and the policy becomes "as long as we got the space"... the part about Windows XP should have been the red flag in the story. These records are very likely not well secured. Policies on record retention and archiving should reflect the risk that old systems can become compromised and only what is really needed should be kept online. Policies on record retention that merely reflect the physical limitations of hard drives are bad.
In the past these were discounts. Now they're licenses to steal.
We seriously need procurement reform and standardization across government at all levels. Not sure there is a silver bullet there, since more procurement regulations have often meant less and less competition as fewer people are making purchasing decisions and fewer and fewer companies can afford to play the bidding game. Just saying that government needs to get the best deal doesn't make it so.
For things like a hard drive which should be considered a commodity I would think there should just be some combination of a max price list where people can just buy from any source as long as it is less than the max price. Also, someone to internally review purchase history and provide feedback or decrease purchasing authority for those that regularly make bad decisions.
The litany of red tape is how you get $1000 toilet seats or whatever at the Pentagon. Because even though it is a cheap item the add on costs of all the contracts on top of it mean that the installation and all the red tape adds to the cost. And then the line item says "toilet seat" but you are really counting all the associated costs which you have layered on and on. In the Pentagon case, you have security costs. Just like in the Police Department case you really can't just hire some high school kid without having a company backing them up with training and liability. But still... how is this not a case for Best Buy's Geek Squad? Maybe a few hundred bucks... or better yet a new computer.
Reasonably short records retention should be a policy anyway. But having your license plates on a computer without adequate security because it never got updated to a fully patched and supported OS is an issue. Forget the size of the hard drive... in this case I am glad the size of the hard drive is forcing a better policy, but come on.
Also, I would expect that most owned vehicles (not taxis) would offer a driver manual override feature... So, what is the value of a police override that can itself be overridden by the driver? Again, if you don't allow a driver/passenger override then you have created a safety issue, potentially a large scale safety and security issue if you consider the possibility of a widespread hacking attack.
There is no need or reason to offer electronic remote kill capabilities.
'Nough said. But the car should respond automatically to police intervention. I would want the car to pull over when a car with flashing lights pulls up behind it. Or when a person with a uniform steps out in front of it and gives an order to stop or pull over. A person could be unconscious and need to be pulled over. Shouldn't rely on the driver for that. But that functionality should be based on visual and audio rather than any specialized equipment that would have to be distributed to millions of police before it would be effective and would be expensive to maintain and unreliable.
There is going to have to be a device which police carry that broadcasts a standardized signal to pull over and stop. It will have to be secure against being imitated by criminals, perhaps with frequently-changed security keys.
No, no, no. The car should have the same inputs as a human driver. Visual and audio only. Otherwise you are 1) creating a different system which is expensive, more complicated and unreliable. 2) Opening the door to criminal hackers and terrorists to take control over cars remotely.
This is just a rewording of the old saw that illegal immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won't do -- at salaries that are too low. If the flow of H1-Bs dried up, then wages would rise as the American tech workers would become more valuable. As wages rose, then becoming a tech worker would be viewed more favorably.
With the same evidence, Huff Po could have argued that H1-Bs are depressing wages for American tech workers.
Also, when the cost goes up or availability of low wage workers goes down then it is often technology which is used to make up the difference. That dynamic increases the flow of wealth to STEM workers.
Ultimately, from a more Humanistic world view I don't see anything wrong with giving jobs to skilled foreign workers. Yes it does undermine middle class wages, but if these folks become Americans then they have just as much right to make a living as I do. But the H1B guest worker program undermines American Liberty when we allow thousands of people to come to America and live here in our midst, but then deprive those people American Liberty for years and years while they wait for green cards. With this model we risk going back to a time when indentured servitude was the norm. When one person's Liberty is diminished it diminishes us all.
Always consider the source. This "study" is totally biased and funded by the libertarian--regulation hating Koch Brothers and their CATO institute. This is false and not true.
And in this case they are saying they are Libertarian, but really it is just advocating for rich people that want modern slaves. There is nothing Libertarian about promoting a modern form of slavery or indentured servitude. If America needs more people with skills, then let them in with green cards and a path to citizenship. This isn't fucking Saudi Arabia where we want or need a bunch of slaves to build our stuff. H1Bs undermine American Liberty.
Like I've said before. If you are going to make an argument for H1B visas then it should be based on jobs where real apparent scarcity of talent has been shown to have driven up salaries. In other words, Doctors, Lawyers, CEOs.... professions with layer upon layer of protectionism. Once those salaries are down closer to a median income, then we can talk about needing to import a bunch of indentured servants who are clearly in-fact lowering the prevailing wages of middle income American families. And if you just want more people overall, then increase immigration quotas. We need immigration of people that want to come here, not hundreds of thousands of indentured servants like we are Saudi Arabia.
Any scenario in which mutually exclusive strategic resources are at play. Or heck you just need a charismatic tyrant with a "vision" on either side. We've experienced two world wars started under false pretenses in the last hundred years. It is not reasonable, but it happens with alarming regularity.
The day the US have a proportional election system and frequent referendums is the day they have achieved democracy.
And people usually forget that the mission statement of the United States is: Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Democracy, Republic are merely a means in pursuit of those goals. People truly believe that a representative form of government is superior to a dictatorial form of government because the represented self interest of the many will outweigh the interests of the few. Also, if you haven't noticed, dictatorships (even the well established monarchies) usually lead to violent transitions of government and often civil war. The UK is a notable exception with relatively long periods of stability, but the monarchy has pretty much outsourced government under their model of being above the day to day nitty gritty details of running their kingdom and transitions of government are dealt with democratically.
actually the costs of planes go up as they get older.
there are no new replacement parts for the A10.
all 'new' parts come from mothballed birds in the boneyard at Davis-Motham.
the cost of restarting or retooling a line for the A10 is nearly as much as for a new jet.
I was about to disagree with you, but then I thought.... The cost of restarting or retooling a line for the A10 is probably just about exactly the amount it would cost to build a single new F-35.
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The UK used to pay 17/18 year olds a small stipend (£30/week IIRC) for attending college, this was during the mid-90s to mid-00s when it was abolished by the Tories. Attendance rates climbed when it was introduced and dropped after it was abolished.
I'd rather see it more universally applied to all people of that age rather than by some false or corruptible measures of merit or need. For societies with fiat money, cost should not be a barrier to implement any program. With no finite supply money is simply a measure of relative worth. With a universal stipend we are saying that everyone deserves a chance at a good beginning to adult life.
What happens if, by accident or malicious intent, the storage medium you are using is destroyed? Or ironically enough, if you are attacked with malware that encrypts your drive. How do you explain that you can't decrypt the drive to so they can decrypt your messages? Or that the cloud solution provider you were using is down for a undetermined amount of time?
It depends what you are accused of and how politically connected or rich you are. Seriously, a law like this is meant as a catch all that nobody will be able to ensure their compliance with. Basically it outlaws encryption for all practical purposes. So if you are accused of something, anything, and you happened to use encryption then at least they can jail or fine you on a technicality when they can't prove that any real crime has been committed.
I think an interesting test of this idea would be to apply this to 18 to 22 year olds or even starting at 16. Let them do whatever they want with the money. Go to college, start a business, buy stuff, blow it all, etc.
I think the downside of any subsidy is that it would tend to inflate the costs of things people need, think they need or really want. The upside is that if people are given enough discretion and choice of how they spend (or save) the subsidy then it can level the playing field somewhat and the effects of the subsidy on raising prices of anything in particular is lessened.
Of course for all of us who had very little money when we were starting out we are suddenly at a competitive disadvantage to young kids who are give a free ride and don't have college debts or are able to save up to buy things that took use years and years to do. Also, the same can be said of any scheme like this even if it applied to everyone. Suddenly applied to society. The people that didn't get the benefit of this are put at a disadvantage because we have been (or still are) carrying debts that the younger generation now will never have to incur at all. At some point it is about the next generation and not us anymore, but still this is a major societal shift and it is hard to imagine that it would be quite as simple as this to truly level the playing field.
The privacy and constitutional issues aside for a bit, I agree it isn't safe to collect all this information. But it never will be.
I think he was taking the position that H1Bs are undermining the American Job market. So really the goal is to eliminate the requirement that H1B need a sponsor at all in order to make sure that a person has job mobility and isn't a preferable candidate because of the indentured nature of the H1B program. Or at least eliminate the sponsor requirement after 30 days or something like that. And put minimum salary/income requirements that for the person to get a yearly renewal of their visa their income over the previous year has to be above the prevailing wage for that job and only applicable for jobs in the top 20% by income so they aren't just importing indentured servants.
The drone hit some seats.
So if I brought my pistol to the US Open and fired it straight up, you'd be OK with that if it only hit an empty seat?
I'd be more okay with it than if you had shot me in the head. The more relevant example would be if you flew a small toy helicopter in the air that could maybe cause someone to go "ouch" or in the extreme could have caused about as much damage as a baseball or a small rock thrown in the air and it didn't hit anyone.... again... didn't hit anyone. Don't do it again. Have a nice day. End of story.
Sure, but the charge should have been trespassing or something like that. The drone hit some seats. This isn't like having a gasoline fight at a gas station kind of reckless.
No, this was having a baseball game in a crowded park kind of reckless. You could easily wind up hitting someone with a ball (or even a bat) in that kind of environment. This drone was easily heavy enough to harm someone if it fell on them, and he clearly wasn't as in control of it as he thought he was. As well, odds are it was powered by a LiPo, which is a fire hazard. (I have LiPos, I use them, but any time they are outside of their protective storage, you should have an extinguisher ready and you should be able to access any place it might ignite...)
Come on... someone just walking around could knock into someone and knock them over and they could hit their head and spontaneously combust... when someone does something stupid and not allowed in a public place like that the response is usually to simply ask them to stop and not do it again and then only if they are non-compliant then you charge them with trespass. This is a bit of an overreaction or example setting charge because of the word "drone". The fact that he disrupted the event was at issue, like someone running out onto the field. Sure someone running out onto the field could knock someone over and then they could hit their head and even die, but unless someone actually got hit I think the endangerment charge is overblown.
Sure, but the charge should have been trespassing or something like that. The drone hit some seats. This isn't like having a gasoline fight at a gas station kind of reckless.
It wasn't harmless.
It was harmless. As in, according to the story, there was no harm caused.
This appears to apply to all software installed on something that is licensed by the FCC... so what about third party software on smartphones? This proposed rule seems to give the FCC certification holder all the power to decide what is or is not legally allowed on their devices.
Is that *in theory* you could understand why they come to a particular result, but in practice it could be potentially very hard with a large network for any person to get their head around the processes leading up to the output. This means that unless safety rules are changed we won't be seeing these things driving cars or flying aircraft anytime soon since the software needs to be verifiable and neural networks are not.
I would agree that neural networks shouldn't be in a learning mode while they should be in a fixed operational mode, but once they are trained and the neural network is no longer being modified to fit the training set then a neural net is like any other algorithm and will output predictable results.
"Companies make money creating a product that no one checks to make sure it's not bogus"
In this case, carbon credits are mandated for a product that literally doesn't exist: CO2 supposedly not emitted. Of course it's going to be a joke.
Worse it's a protection racket... 'You give us money and we won't do bad things'. Paying people not to do things that you fear they might do otherwise. It incentivizes doing bad things otherwise you start thinking they weren't really going to do bad things in the first place. In this case it incentivized extra emissions in order to justify credits for cut backs.
It is like the West subsidizing dictators in order to prevent extremism... it incentivizes those same dictators to promote just enough extremism to keep the money flowing.
If you want to cut carbon emissions then you need viable alternatives, not carbon credit deals with polluters.
So, all Jack the Ripper needs is to put a flashing light on his car and he can force his victims to a stop? No thanks.
Hell, it's not unheard of for actual police officers to engage in kidnapping, rape, and murder - if you suspect such a situation, they should NOT be able to trivially disable your vehicle.
Sure, it should automatically respond to police signals just as a conscientious driver would. But you should also be able to override that behavior, just as a driver with a sense of self-preservation sometimes must.
Meanwhile, an unconscious occupant would seem to me to be one of the points of an automated vehicle. Any automated vehicle which needs me to continue to pay attention to the road in case of emergency is a horrible danger to everyone else, because passengers won't do so reliably. And if I don't have to pay attention to the road, then I may as well play video games, take a nap, etc. Just like if I had a chauffeur. You wouldn't pull over a limo because the passengers were unconscious would you?
That is the case now. You are obligated to pull over. Now... I agree with a manual override. If Jack the ripper starts walking towards the car, then I would like to be able to hit a button and drive away. Or if you really feel unsafe where the car wants to pull over, then similarly I would want a manual override.
I agree that having an automated car will actually save lives where now if the driver has a medical issue the likely outcome is a high speed collision which endangers even more lives. But if the passenger has truly had a medical issue and can't stop the car then it would be good to have the ability to pull the car over. Again, manual override should take precedence. But if the person is on the phone with 911 and passes out the car should be capable of getting pulled over by a single patrol car. Something as simple as a directive to slow down and pull over when a car with flashing lights is behind you.
Seriously? This is a networked Windows XP computer storing data on the movements of private individuals until they run out of space...
Yes: "Support for Windows XP ended April 8th, 2014"
stop trying to correct this with the obvious suggestions to shell out $60. This is a good thing.
Problem is when they get a new hard drive and the policy becomes "as long as we got the space"... the part about Windows XP should have been the red flag in the story. These records are very likely not well secured. Policies on record retention and archiving should reflect the risk that old systems can become compromised and only what is really needed should be kept online. Policies on record retention that merely reflect the physical limitations of hard drives are bad.
In the past these were discounts. Now they're licenses to steal.
We seriously need procurement reform and standardization across government at all levels. Not sure there is a silver bullet there, since more procurement regulations have often meant less and less competition as fewer people are making purchasing decisions and fewer and fewer companies can afford to play the bidding game. Just saying that government needs to get the best deal doesn't make it so.
For things like a hard drive which should be considered a commodity I would think there should just be some combination of a max price list where people can just buy from any source as long as it is less than the max price. Also, someone to internally review purchase history and provide feedback or decrease purchasing authority for those that regularly make bad decisions.
The litany of red tape is how you get $1000 toilet seats or whatever at the Pentagon. Because even though it is a cheap item the add on costs of all the contracts on top of it mean that the installation and all the red tape adds to the cost. And then the line item says "toilet seat" but you are really counting all the associated costs which you have layered on and on. In the Pentagon case, you have security costs. Just like in the Police Department case you really can't just hire some high school kid without having a company backing them up with training and liability. But still... how is this not a case for Best Buy's Geek Squad? Maybe a few hundred bucks... or better yet a new computer.
Reasonably short records retention should be a policy anyway. But having your license plates on a computer without adequate security because it never got updated to a fully patched and supported OS is an issue. Forget the size of the hard drive... in this case I am glad the size of the hard drive is forcing a better policy, but come on.
Also, I would expect that most owned vehicles (not taxis) would offer a driver manual override feature... So, what is the value of a police override that can itself be overridden by the driver? Again, if you don't allow a driver/passenger override then you have created a safety issue, potentially a large scale safety and security issue if you consider the possibility of a widespread hacking attack.
There is no need or reason to offer electronic remote kill capabilities.
'Nough said. But the car should respond automatically to police intervention. I would want the car to pull over when a car with flashing lights pulls up behind it. Or when a person with a uniform steps out in front of it and gives an order to stop or pull over. A person could be unconscious and need to be pulled over. Shouldn't rely on the driver for that. But that functionality should be based on visual and audio rather than any specialized equipment that would have to be distributed to millions of police before it would be effective and would be expensive to maintain and unreliable.
There is going to have to be a device which police carry that broadcasts a standardized signal to pull over and stop. It will have to be secure against being imitated by criminals, perhaps with frequently-changed security keys.
No, no, no. The car should have the same inputs as a human driver. Visual and audio only. Otherwise you are 1) creating a different system which is expensive, more complicated and unreliable. 2) Opening the door to criminal hackers and terrorists to take control over cars remotely.
This is just a rewording of the old saw that illegal immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won't do -- at salaries that are too low. If the flow of H1-Bs dried up, then wages would rise as the American tech workers would become more valuable. As wages rose, then becoming a tech worker would be viewed more favorably.
With the same evidence, Huff Po could have argued that H1-Bs are depressing wages for American tech workers.
Also, when the cost goes up or availability of low wage workers goes down then it is often technology which is used to make up the difference. That dynamic increases the flow of wealth to STEM workers. Ultimately, from a more Humanistic world view I don't see anything wrong with giving jobs to skilled foreign workers. Yes it does undermine middle class wages, but if these folks become Americans then they have just as much right to make a living as I do. But the H1B guest worker program undermines American Liberty when we allow thousands of people to come to America and live here in our midst, but then deprive those people American Liberty for years and years while they wait for green cards. With this model we risk going back to a time when indentured servitude was the norm. When one person's Liberty is diminished it diminishes us all.
Always consider the source. This "study" is totally biased and funded by the libertarian--regulation hating Koch Brothers and their CATO institute. This is false and not true.
And in this case they are saying they are Libertarian, but really it is just advocating for rich people that want modern slaves. There is nothing Libertarian about promoting a modern form of slavery or indentured servitude. If America needs more people with skills, then let them in with green cards and a path to citizenship. This isn't fucking Saudi Arabia where we want or need a bunch of slaves to build our stuff. H1Bs undermine American Liberty.
Like I've said before. If you are going to make an argument for H1B visas then it should be based on jobs where real apparent scarcity of talent has been shown to have driven up salaries. In other words, Doctors, Lawyers, CEOs.... professions with layer upon layer of protectionism. Once those salaries are down closer to a median income, then we can talk about needing to import a bunch of indentured servants who are clearly in-fact lowering the prevailing wages of middle income American families. And if you just want more people overall, then increase immigration quotas. We need immigration of people that want to come here, not hundreds of thousands of indentured servants like we are Saudi Arabia.
Any scenario in which mutually exclusive strategic resources are at play. Or heck you just need a charismatic tyrant with a "vision" on either side. We've experienced two world wars started under false pretenses in the last hundred years. It is not reasonable, but it happens with alarming regularity.
The US is not a full democracy, it's a republic.
The day the US have a proportional election system and frequent referendums is the day they have achieved democracy.
And people usually forget that the mission statement of the United States is: Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Democracy, Republic are merely a means in pursuit of those goals. People truly believe that a representative form of government is superior to a dictatorial form of government because the represented self interest of the many will outweigh the interests of the few. Also, if you haven't noticed, dictatorships (even the well established monarchies) usually lead to violent transitions of government and often civil war. The UK is a notable exception with relatively long periods of stability, but the monarchy has pretty much outsourced government under their model of being above the day to day nitty gritty details of running their kingdom and transitions of government are dealt with democratically.
actually the costs of planes go up as they get older. there are no new replacement parts for the A10. all 'new' parts come from mothballed birds in the boneyard at Davis-Motham. the cost of restarting or retooling a line for the A10 is nearly as much as for a new jet.
I was about to disagree with you, but then I thought.... The cost of restarting or retooling a line for the A10 is probably just about exactly the amount it would cost to build a single new F-35.