The representatives decide WHAT the agencies need to accomplish to improve society. That's their job. They know what their constituents want, they know what the societal and economic impact of certain objectives are (or at least they're supposed to), so they decide what goals need furthering--better health care, better technology, better financial regulation, etc.
The agencies decide HOW to do it. That's *their* job. They don't just blindly do whatever Congress says. They know the specific details of their operations, the costs of doing certain things in certain places and certain ways, they know how to analyze the impact of specific actions on the immediate communities relative to all their other actions, and the efficiency of those actions toward furthering an objective.
Take, for example, a National Science Foundation grant authorized by Congress. The Congress specifies that XXX dollars should be used to further a specific research goal, like cancer treatment or clean energy, based on their expertise social, economic, and international policy decisions, and this is called a mandate. Then the NSF gets applications from lots of researchers and decides which projects will give the taxpayer the biggest bang for the buck to meet the goals laid out by Congress, based on their deep technical knowledge of the field.
If, however, a congresscritter decides to slip into the bill a line that says the NSF has to fund a researcher Y with X dollars (from among several similar ones), that is called an earmark. Unless said congresscritter solicited competitive bids and has a team of scientists to decide which one is best (duplicating the NSF's own effort), there is no way you can say the money will be spent in the best possible way. If that researcher really were the best place to spend the money, then the NSF would have picked them anyways, and the earmark was unnecessary. If not, then the earmark is wasting taxpayer money on less efficient projects. If the agency is so incompetent that the earmarks prove more efficient than the agency's own process, then it's time to fix the agency, not do end-runs around it.
If the original authorization had been to provide X dollars to researcher Y, there would be no problem. It would simply be Congress doling out money to a certain group without regard for value to the taxpayer, which is unethical but not dishonest. But because the authorization gave a general goal with a specific implementation riding on it, it is both unethical and deceitful. People read in the paper that XXX tax dollars are going to research, but don't know that only XX of them are being used efficiently.
In conclusion: Yes, there is someone better informed of the details on the ground in every conceivable field than the representative. All the agencies in the civil service were created because everyone knows Congress cannot--and should not--control every minutiae of what the government does. The agencies must act within the mandate and funding provided by Congress, but those are the only two knobs Congress should turn to control them. Micromanagement is never a good thing, and that is why earmarks should be eliminated.
Earmarks just direct the funding to specific sources, which is the point of having a representative, it's doesn't increase funding at all.
So the point of having representatives is to make sure the government cannot complete its mandated missions efficiently? What you describe is what we call an "unfunded mandate", and we in the civil service dread those like the plague. It means that we don't get enough money to do our jobs properly because half of our "budget" is directed toward boondoggles in one state or another.
The trouble with earmarks is they all too frequently result in "We will give you $20 million to do a $30 million job that would be best done in California, but you have to spend $5 million of it in North Dakota because otherwise that guy wouldn't vote for it." So we effectively get half the money they need and an albatross to boot. It's all very fine and good for representatives to decide what the mission of the government should be, but earmarks are just a way to get re-elected while de-funding an agency's primary mandate. This is both a disservice to the public and disgrace to the Congress.
You don't want to wait 5 minutes for a recharge? It takes longer than that to fuel a gas car. If it were such a big problem they would have invented swappable gas tanks long ago.
Besides, it's far easier to standardize a plug than an entire battery pack. Car manufacturers would hate the constraint of standardized battery packs--it's much easier to design a usable car if you can shove batteries wherever you want. But it's relatively easy to put any kind of plug on any kind of car.
It's also one thing for a gas station to have three different plugs at each booth; another thing to stock 10 different kinds of batteries for trucks, SUVs, sport cars, family cars, mini cars, etc etc etc. Not to mention the huge investment in robotic battery changers at all the gas stations--that costs way more than plugs on a rack.
Don't worry, by the time EVs are common enough for battery swapping to make any sense at all, the batteries themselves will be so advanced they will charge in a reasonable amount of time and it will be unnecessary. In the meantime, we have to put up with the practicalities of boot-strapping an entire market in the face of subsidized competition (petroleum industry).
Sure, this wouldn't have happened if there were no license fees at all, but at face value this doesn't appear to be a media industry issue. Based on Sound Exchange's post, it would appear that SWCast was a fraudulent operation, plain and simple. This is no different from a Ponzi scheme or any other fraud. People thought they were paying for a service and instead the money went into a black hole. The radio stations were stupid to sign up without checking they were in compliance, and now they should sue the crap out of SWCast.
If you build in the new avionics to the old airframes, doesn't that go a long way toward negating the cost difference? Isn't stealth our main advantage against sophisticated targets? Half of our potential opponents only have significant weapon capability because we sold it to them, so going at them with the same tech would not be like taking candy from a baby, which is how we like our wars.
And again, we are building to deal with the threats of the next 30 years--does that really include dogfights with swarms of Russian or Chinese fighters? Or just more wars of choice against "terrorists" and "evil dictators"? I find it hard to believe that all-out conventional warfare would go that far before nuclear missiles became the primary threat, at which point fighters would be useless.
The whole decision is so complicated that it's tempting to fall back to the baseline political requirement: lining the pockets of contractors to no coherent end.
I'm sorry, but we use X-rays for medical scans precisely because they penetrate WORSE than lower frequencies--otherwise they would go straight through the body tissues and we would not see anything! Not to mention that longer wavelengths would produce lower-resolution images.
It's a well-known fact that the attenuation of electromagnetic waves is a direct function of the size of the obstacle relative to the wavelength of the energy (d/lambda). This is why lower frequencies (with longer wavelengths) travel farther with the same amount of output power.
Refilled ink cartridges are avaialable everywhere, they may not be as cheap as doing it yourself but they are out there. And the yare pretty decent these days too.
But they still void the warranty on your printer. At least the manufacturer doesn't try to brick it if they find out.
Call me a pessimist, but that's assuming that Monsanto hasn't developed a *new* patented seed and forced everyone to switch to it just before the old patent runs out, ensuring that there is zero supply of the patent-expired seed and everyone is stuck with the new patented version for the next 17 years. Let's hope there's some rogue farmers saving those seeds so they can export them for a fortune in a few years.
LOL, normally on/. we get mad at people for taking one scientific study at face value before it's been reviewed or corroborated. Let me know when you have a probe on Titan to verify the presence of this ocean that we think "may" be there based on limited observational evidence which is not yet strong enough to draw a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Until then, don't muddy the waters by asserting certainty where there is none. If all you want are the "facts" produced by scientific research, then don't read cutting edge science articles about the process of discovery and uncertainty that leads to them.
(But I'm not defending sensationally inaccurate/. editors.)
China has lots of territory at the same latitude as Kennedy and Edwards, so they can go anywhere the space shuttle can go now. (source) They don't have anything comparable to the Marshall Islands, which is actually at the equator, so that gives SpaceX a definite advantage.
Didn't the rebels basically sever all the connections to Tripoli and set up a new master routing system with its own satellite uplink? It would be stupid if they still had fiber going into Gadaffi's territory.
On another note, being an amateur radio operator, I wondered why they didn't set up less infrastructure-intensive radio comms, but that kind of equipment is hard to get, especially military radios with any kind of encryption. Everybody has cell phones already so they didn't need to get lots of radios and train people to use them for it to be useful.
Then you should try the U.S. We would rather bring the entire government to a standstill than compromise on any of our principles. Oh wait, nevermind, that was just a game of political chicken to please the media. Sorry.
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The representatives decide WHAT the agencies need to accomplish to improve society. That's their job. They know what their constituents want, they know what the societal and economic impact of certain objectives are (or at least they're supposed to), so they decide what goals need furthering--better health care, better technology, better financial regulation, etc.
The agencies decide HOW to do it. That's *their* job. They don't just blindly do whatever Congress says. They know the specific details of their operations, the costs of doing certain things in certain places and certain ways, they know how to analyze the impact of specific actions on the immediate communities relative to all their other actions, and the efficiency of those actions toward furthering an objective.
Take, for example, a National Science Foundation grant authorized by Congress. The Congress specifies that XXX dollars should be used to further a specific research goal, like cancer treatment or clean energy, based on their expertise social, economic, and international policy decisions, and this is called a mandate. Then the NSF gets applications from lots of researchers and decides which projects will give the taxpayer the biggest bang for the buck to meet the goals laid out by Congress, based on their deep technical knowledge of the field.
If, however, a congresscritter decides to slip into the bill a line that says the NSF has to fund a researcher Y with X dollars (from among several similar ones), that is called an earmark. Unless said congresscritter solicited competitive bids and has a team of scientists to decide which one is best (duplicating the NSF's own effort), there is no way you can say the money will be spent in the best possible way. If that researcher really were the best place to spend the money, then the NSF would have picked them anyways, and the earmark was unnecessary. If not, then the earmark is wasting taxpayer money on less efficient projects. If the agency is so incompetent that the earmarks prove more efficient than the agency's own process, then it's time to fix the agency, not do end-runs around it.
If the original authorization had been to provide X dollars to researcher Y, there would be no problem. It would simply be Congress doling out money to a certain group without regard for value to the taxpayer, which is unethical but not dishonest. But because the authorization gave a general goal with a specific implementation riding on it, it is both unethical and deceitful. People read in the paper that XXX tax dollars are going to research, but don't know that only XX of them are being used efficiently.
In conclusion: Yes, there is someone better informed of the details on the ground in every conceivable field than the representative. All the agencies in the civil service were created because everyone knows Congress cannot--and should not--control every minutiae of what the government does. The agencies must act within the mandate and funding provided by Congress, but those are the only two knobs Congress should turn to control them. Micromanagement is never a good thing, and that is why earmarks should be eliminated.
Earmarks just direct the funding to specific sources, which is the point of having a representative, it's doesn't increase funding at all.
So the point of having representatives is to make sure the government cannot complete its mandated missions efficiently? What you describe is what we call an "unfunded mandate", and we in the civil service dread those like the plague. It means that we don't get enough money to do our jobs properly because half of our "budget" is directed toward boondoggles in one state or another.
The trouble with earmarks is they all too frequently result in "We will give you $20 million to do a $30 million job that would be best done in California, but you have to spend $5 million of it in North Dakota because otherwise that guy wouldn't vote for it." So we effectively get half the money they need and an albatross to boot. It's all very fine and good for representatives to decide what the mission of the government should be, but earmarks are just a way to get re-elected while de-funding an agency's primary mandate. This is both a disservice to the public and disgrace to the Congress.
Homosexuality may not be a trait of liberalism, but homophobia appears to be popular among conservatives...
So I was right that the present supply is a small amount imported from Japan, but wrong about the reason. Thanks.
IIRC, the Nissan Leaf is actually being assembled in Japan, since they aren't making enough of them yet for a U.S. factory to be worth it.
You don't want to wait 5 minutes for a recharge? It takes longer than that to fuel a gas car. If it were such a big problem they would have invented swappable gas tanks long ago.
Besides, it's far easier to standardize a plug than an entire battery pack. Car manufacturers would hate the constraint of standardized battery packs--it's much easier to design a usable car if you can shove batteries wherever you want. But it's relatively easy to put any kind of plug on any kind of car.
It's also one thing for a gas station to have three different plugs at each booth; another thing to stock 10 different kinds of batteries for trucks, SUVs, sport cars, family cars, mini cars, etc etc etc. Not to mention the huge investment in robotic battery changers at all the gas stations--that costs way more than plugs on a rack.
Don't worry, by the time EVs are common enough for battery swapping to make any sense at all, the batteries themselves will be so advanced they will charge in a reasonable amount of time and it will be unnecessary. In the meantime, we have to put up with the practicalities of boot-strapping an entire market in the face of subsidized competition (petroleum industry).
Why don't you just shove the Japanese plug up your arse and turn it on full current. Why would we want foreign plugs?
Because they work well with our foreign cars?
Which are built in the U.S.?
$17.50 for 5 ml...You gotta be kiddin' me!!!!
Almost as expensive as printer ink.
They may be calling themselves "researchers", but it's pretty obvious they're just a bunch of really creepy dudes.
How did they know the anonymous feed was a man? They were probably hoping it was a chick, and got pissed that it wasn't and started stalking the guy.
I didn't know Microsoft contracted with the Boy Scouts of America to do copyright enforcement. Those corporate tentacles go everywhere, don't they?
Sure, this wouldn't have happened if there were no license fees at all, but at face value this doesn't appear to be a media industry issue. Based on Sound Exchange's post, it would appear that SWCast was a fraudulent operation, plain and simple. This is no different from a Ponzi scheme or any other fraud. People thought they were paying for a service and instead the money went into a black hole. The radio stations were stupid to sign up without checking they were in compliance, and now they should sue the crap out of SWCast.
If we were still using cubits, we'd really be up a creek.
LOL! You made my day.
If you build in the new avionics to the old airframes, doesn't that go a long way toward negating the cost difference? Isn't stealth our main advantage against sophisticated targets? Half of our potential opponents only have significant weapon capability because we sold it to them, so going at them with the same tech would not be like taking candy from a baby, which is how we like our wars.
And again, we are building to deal with the threats of the next 30 years--does that really include dogfights with swarms of Russian or Chinese fighters? Or just more wars of choice against "terrorists" and "evil dictators"? I find it hard to believe that all-out conventional warfare would go that far before nuclear missiles became the primary threat, at which point fighters would be useless.
The whole decision is so complicated that it's tempting to fall back to the baseline political requirement: lining the pockets of contractors to no coherent end.
Thanks for explaining that, I was about to start googling for something about a race of Vole people.
I'm sorry, but we use X-rays for medical scans precisely because they penetrate WORSE than lower frequencies--otherwise they would go straight through the body tissues and we would not see anything! Not to mention that longer wavelengths would produce lower-resolution images.
It's a well-known fact that the attenuation of electromagnetic waves is a direct function of the size of the obstacle relative to the wavelength of the energy (d/lambda). This is why lower frequencies (with longer wavelengths) travel farther with the same amount of output power.
Refilled ink cartridges are avaialable everywhere, they may not be as cheap as doing it yourself but they are out there. And the yare pretty decent these days too.
But they still void the warranty on your printer. At least the manufacturer doesn't try to brick it if they find out.
Call me a pessimist, but that's assuming that Monsanto hasn't developed a *new* patented seed and forced everyone to switch to it just before the old patent runs out, ensuring that there is zero supply of the patent-expired seed and everyone is stuck with the new patented version for the next 17 years. Let's hope there's some rogue farmers saving those seeds so they can export them for a fortune in a few years.
They are basically back-porting the last 100 years of farming improvements to the pre-petroleum install base. Awesome!
LOL, normally on /. we get mad at people for taking one scientific study at face value before it's been reviewed or corroborated. Let me know when you have a probe on Titan to verify the presence of this ocean that we think "may" be there based on limited observational evidence which is not yet strong enough to draw a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Until then, don't muddy the waters by asserting certainty where there is none. If all you want are the "facts" produced by scientific research, then don't read cutting edge science articles about the process of discovery and uncertainty that leads to them.
(But I'm not defending sensationally inaccurate /. editors.)
China has lots of territory at the same latitude as Kennedy and Edwards, so they can go anywhere the space shuttle can go now. (source) They don't have anything comparable to the Marshall Islands, which is actually at the equator, so that gives SpaceX a definite advantage.
Didn't the rebels basically sever all the connections to Tripoli and set up a new master routing system with its own satellite uplink? It would be stupid if they still had fiber going into Gadaffi's territory.
On another note, being an amateur radio operator, I wondered why they didn't set up less infrastructure-intensive radio comms, but that kind of equipment is hard to get, especially military radios with any kind of encryption. Everybody has cell phones already so they didn't need to get lots of radios and train people to use them for it to be useful.
I'd rather have no policy than bad policy.
Then you should try the U.S. We would rather bring the entire government to a standstill than compromise on any of our principles. Oh wait, nevermind, that was just a game of political chicken to please the media. Sorry.
A story about Google doing something wrong gets spammed with goatse links...who'da thunk it?
Now you can refresh your Facebook page twice as fast!