I wonder how many people have a clue as to the potential of 3D printing. Printing housing is already a fact. Imagine forming the plumbing runs inside the plastic walls. The toilets and sinks could be printed as part of the structure as well. Instead of running conduit one simply prints tunnels for the wiring. A printed roof may need no overhang and that alone would add enormous wind resistance in a hurricane. This technology may displace almost the entire construction industry in short order.
We do need to put plans in place for the safety and comfort of those whose work will be displaced by technology. The velocity of change is likely to increase rather radically as we are probably now at the toggle point at which computer intelligence and robotics seem to have unlimited growth of abilities.
As much as I love robotics I just can't see how the leaders in India could exist with the guilt of spending the sums involved in building a modern military. Too much poverty, suffering and need to go down this road. Maybe building useful robots for export in order to raise funds to help the suffering would be a better goal. What would Ghandi have done?
It is my understanding that private videos helped identify the Boston terror strikers. The public has a very big stake in wanting lots and lots of private and business cams being in action.
It sort of starts with the meaning of security. To lock down or prevent movement is one definition of security. So a security guard walking by a client who does not move and is stretched out on the asphalt in the parking area need do nothing. The body would be even more secure if it were chained to a tree. The guard's duty is to observe and report so if he notices that the building is on fire he should note it in his report for end of shift.
This works like the cabinet shop on the corner. The owner can not compete if he pays his workers more than what he suspects his competitors pay their workers. So if Europe does not apply the most modern methods in raising food the food providers will be out of business in short order. Since food is vital in essence Europe has no real option. Whether it is good, safe, moral or wise are not even part of the decision process.
Our politicians can never confront the problem. We have way too large numbers of people to care for and the only real solution is serious birth control. Science does provide breakthroughs and the edge of the cliff does get pushed back a bit from time to time but the plain and simple truth is that we are in a death spiral due to over population. It is the root of almost all of our issues. Pollution, global warming, employment, energy are all nothing more than proof of excess population. Wars and hostile politics are also driven by over population.
The sad truth is that only in a dictatorship does the government have the ability to consider reproduction a privilege and determine exactly who can create babies. In the US if a politician breathed a hint of wanting firm reproduction control he would be out of a job permanently.
Private acts really are not done in places where they can be observed by others. This is a feelings vs. reason issue. For example a young girl in a string bikini may feel that her privacy has been violated when the wrong guy looks at her or someone snaps pics even though she is on a public beach. The reality is that if it is done withing public view it can not be private.
I come from a generation and area in which extra credit was something that only a kid who had skipped school or suffered a suspension would ever be involved in. Sadly it was also a path that could corrupt teachers as the rich could make arrangements to get extra credit for their kids in such a way that straight A report cards were assured no matter what.
A better notion might be to refer kids to online courses at places like the Kahn Academy where mini courses can earn some sort of badge or token. For example you might see a course for first exposure to scientific notation that is designed to last a couple of hours. Or an introduction to exponents, or the basics of beginning physics or organic chemistry. My suspicion is that science in many fields will become more and more a purely mathematical experience as we are getting very close to the deepest visual resolutions that we can hope to reach barring some really radical breakthroughs. In short observation is decline whereas calculation is on the rise which is partially due to the use of computers.
Most normal mortals won't have any knowledge of why a large database is useful. Frankly the first thing that leaps to my humble mind is trying to harvest money from the stock markets. Obviously there are numerous companies applying all kinds of computing power to the stock market. I do wonder if more computing power helps at this point or whether there is some toggle point at which massive data crunching would yield much better results.
For example I don't know if people buy or sell more stocks if they are happy or if they are in a bit of suspense or under pressure. So how could a system that tries to compute the mood of the qualified buyers help me at all? It is rather like the car salesman's observation that the nonsense about gimmicks and hyping up the vehicle didn't sell many cars. The man told me that he signed deals when the buyers were worn out from going to dealership after dealership trying to decide what to do. They simply get so tired that they want relief and at that point can be sold most any old thing. How does one apply data to such complex beings as humans?
Serious research was taking place on robots to replace kitchen workers way back in 1984. Back then the main obstacles were initial costs as well as the expense of keeping the machines and their programs running correctly.
It is interesting that China seems to be adopting these technologies. I suspect it has a lot to do with the availability of service technicians.
The entire restaurant industry is soon to be vastly reshaped by robotics. Yet in the US there has been no consideration of setting up out economic system to deal with the permanent displacement of workers. Technology will force us to change our social and political systems and we will be forced to do this at a fast pace. Obviously if people can not work they can not purchase. Therefore the restaurant can not sell its product. Rather than thinking in terms of welfare or unemployment compensation we will shift to a system in which people must be given a real paycheck even though they do not work. The flow is government pays people. People spend money. Businesses pay taxes. In essence people will vote on which businesses survive by choosing where they spend their money.
The next level will be when robots actually own a business and take profits and reinvest back into their own beings with upgrades in their components or in the acquisition of more robotic workers. The robot owned business would be taxed and the taxes used to pay humans not to work.
Bacteria would out rank humans if we looked deeply at your posting. Obviously bacteria can travel at least as fast as humans as humans are always loaded with bacteria. Bacteria persist by stunning levels of reproduction. Bacteria can wipe out a human easily. Bacteria can thrive in areas that humans can never contact. Bacteria can alter their environment and also enjoy very few restraints upon their prosperity. Some can even reproduce in boiling water.
Bacteria seem to us to operate without thought or planning or need for education. But bacteria are loaded with a life long instruction to be in action. That one simple logic that is born inside bacteria seems to trump all human intelligence. Now if we could just get bacteria to play the violin!
Biology has an advantage over many other sciences. You can apply close study to the subject. But when one crosses over into fields like physics there are situations where the degree of resolution has reached its end and now mathematics becomes almost the singular tool. The ability to use various unusual logics and to reduce the question into equations is perhaps as far as we can ever hope to go. Trying to approach subjects like the underlying fabric that supports the universe or much of quantum mechanics is quickly becoming a mathematics only type of situation.
One wonders how these critters prosper. It may be that they taste lousy to predators or that they simply can get by in such stark environments that they don't have to compete much to get by. But if the gene sequence is available I would think we could cross breed some species and perhaps generate a fish of great use to humans. Cross breeding species seems to not be mentioned a lot but surely the scientists are trying it out. Is it so hard to do something like cross breed a trout with a bass or a catfish with a carp? One would think some great results might flow from such work.
War is not like a baseball game where there is a score and an official ruling at the end. Whether we "won" in Vietnam is not really established. If we intended to occupy and dominate South Vietnam in the long term then we lost that war. But if the intention was to simply delay until old, Stalin style communism moderated into a more moderate political system then the war in Vietnam was quite a success. In the early 1960s old style communism was frantic and world domination was the clear goal. China was in a radical frame of mind. In the 1970s when Vietnam was winding down communism was altering its posture and intentions were no longer involving world domination. The end result is that Vietnam is doing rather well and its people are also doing much better than they were before American intervention in their affairs. North Korea stood as an example that prolonged clinging to old style communism was expensive and undesirable. The moderation of politics inside China and even in south America was moderated by our efforts in Vietnam.
If all we sought was traditional victory in war we could have eliminated all hostilities in Vietnam on day one. If that had been done there would be no Vietnamese left alive. Iraq presents the same problem. Iraq is dangerous and unstable. Ultimately we can play around with the situation and if possible tolerate the instability but one day the elimination of their nation may be the only choice in play just as it is now in Iran and N. Korea. Money and manpower may well decide what we do with nations when diplomacy fails. Total war for 15 minutes is inexpensive for us compared to situations like ones currently costing us money and lives of our troops.
The most pressing point is not about Boston and may have nothing to do with Al Quiida at all. The real problem is frequency of incidents. We are seeing more and more people or groups acting out in violent ways. The media and politicians can make remarks all day long but the public is missing the point. Here we have several bombs made from pressure cookers. About one week back we had some nut attack 14 people with some sort of box cutter or utility knife. In the mean time we have had organized killings of people in public jobs such as prison wardens. Then we have the recurring loonies who have urges to shoot school kids or even college kids. There are so many incidents it is hard to keep track of them. I do not believe it is bad diet or lead in the drinking water. I think we simply have a population under too much pressure and people are acting out. Yet our politicians will not address the real problems. For example many in congress would like more background checks on gun purchases. They are smart enough to give lip service to claim advancing the mental health care system but that is a huge lie. America has never funded mental health and is not about to provide decent funding for mental health. And it gets even worse. The fertilizer plant explosion in Texas may well be a worse problem than the Boston incident. The company involved has already admitted that they failed to have mandatory fire and incident equipment in place. In a very real way that company may well have been far more outrageous than the nut that placed the bombs in Boston. Yet media won't jump on it at all. I can also tell you that Ft. Lauderdale had a fertilizer plant burn a few decades ago and the responding firemen came down with cancer almost universally. Apparently the gasses expelled in a fertilizer plant fire tend to be very, very lethal in the long term. Where is the media on this? Frankly American news media is really in the crapper these days.
People are not even mentioning the size of the agency that would have to be created to handle denial of applications in any sane way. Picture a guy in the Marines in the Vietnam era that was disciplined for a bar fight in Vietnam with a fellow soldier and maybe demoted from corporal back to private for the offense. Will we deny him a gun permit because he had a fist fight while in service in another nation forty years 50 years ago? After all a fight is a violent crime. Who is going to sit in judgement of these applications? How about crimes that are supposedly sheltered under the youthful offender act? How about arrests in which no trial or judgement ever comes to pass? How about an alcoholic who was Baker Acted many times but has been sober for eight years?
What we are voting for is the creation of a large and expensive new branch of government that will have little effect on gun violence and be very invasive in the study of lives of the population.
There has been a war on exposure of school systems that are inadequate in training young people. Many mayors and governors fought tooth and nail to avoid any kind of standardized testing or releasing of results. The GED is one great reference standard. If certain high schools fail to have large percentages of their kids doing well on the GED it is a warning that the school is not adequate. Mayors know that if new industry or business is to be attracted that a poor school system will drive away any prospects. Kids have been fed nonsense for decades about how wonderful their school is but in reality many of them were being graduated from awful schools.
This game extends into the ruin of colleges as well. One criteria for judging the quality of a college is the average GED score of the new crop of freshmen who took the test as high school seniors. Make note that small, private colleges rarely use the better accrediting services but hire only a service that focuses on other small colleges. The last thing they want is to be known as providing a lesser value education than a state school. And the game goes on. Few students are aware that individual departments within a college may not be accredited even though the college or university as a whole is accredited. When the graduate goes job hunting he may be in for a very rude shock as some employers will not consider him a graduate at all. You could be a highly, specialized, engineer with no acceptable diplomas at all.
It is even worse. Think of a city like Miami which is close to ocean level and the implications of flooding. The location of garbage pits, graves, fuel and chemical wells that have accumulated over the last 160 years would be astounding and every bit of that would end up in the ocean. Long term flooding of Miami would probably pretty much destroy the Atlantic ocean eco system at the very least and maybe a great deal more than that. And that is one city of two million people. So many coastal cities would go under that the impact would be unbelievable. Florida even has several nuclear reactors built near or on beaches with no real elevation at all. As far as I know even if we started today there is no way to shut down those reactors and clean them out as well as cleaning out spent fuel in storage. The farm land west of South Florida's cities is pretty much exclusively the land that produces American food crops in fall and winter.
The notion that states or governments have some sort of legitimacy that individuals do not is wrong headed. If the government can spy on you then why can I not spy on you? And if you can be filmed from public places just where is the expectation of privacy?
In all seriousness we have numerous large businesses and residences that have people on foot patrol all night. If a quiet, low flying, small device can do those patrols why would be not go that route? Large condominium complexes are one example of areas frequently patrolled at all times..
What is more of a real issue is that wealthy areas now use a lot of cams and as a result are far safer. Poorer neighborhoods generally can not afford to operate such cams. Drones will be similar. Wealthy neighborhoods can easily have drone patrols. It could easily get to the point where cars that speed in the neighborhood could all be captured on drone cams and turned over for law enforcement to simply mail out the tickets. These devices can stop crime to a large degree. If the devices are armed then we could use thousands to patrol our Mexican border. People crossing illegally would simply hear a message broadcast from the drone to stay still until humans arrived to take them into custody and if they continue to move simply use force.
Boats illegally fishing or dumping waste could be discovered with drones. Ranches and farms could also make great use of drones.
The point being that there is simply no reason to limit the use of a wonderful, new, technology.
Immigration is a thorny issue. For me it is as simple as feeling that our nation has way too large a population and that most of our woes flow from excessive population regardless of whether they are field hands, laborers are Nobel laureates. I think we need to totally freeze all immigration. We also need to have objective testing of young people and apply reproduction permits such that the most able both mentally and physically are allowed to reproduce in a limited way and all others banned from child making for life. To go from over 300 million down to 60 million or so would go a long way in stopping pollution, sprawl, energy shortages, materials shortages and shortages of decent jobs.
I am very aware that many people in some regions will feel that any anti-immigration views are anti Mexican or anti Latino or Hispanic and I can only say that that is not part of my thinking. Whether a Swede or from the Pacific regions or whatever is not part of my thinking. I simply want an absolute block on every instance of immigration and enforcement by military action at all of our borders. Right now we have blockaded immigration from Haiti by use of our Navy for 30 years or so. Why is it we fail to use our Army on our southern border? And then we have the wet foot Cuban as opposed to the dry foot Cuban comedy of really bad laws that has been in effect for decades as well. What the heck are we thinking?
In order for people to be disabled according to Social Security they must be disabled from all work whether the work is available or not. In other words if you went from a $150K position to a situation where you simply sat in a chair in a closed warehouse for minimum wage you would be disqualified for disability even if no such watchman posts existed in the community.
One older man that I knew broke his neck and was wearing the crown of thorns device to keep his head in place and was denied disability when the referee asked if he could make change. The notion that he was older, not accustomed to work that involved being presentable, and that no employer was likely to touch a person in that medical condition did not matter one bit. The neck did heal eventually.
Florida's position on gambling seems to boil down to greed. We allow gambling on Indian reservations here and we allow casino type operations in our horse racing tracks. Then we also allow gambling in which coupons are won rather than cash.
Apparently it is all based upon greed. Florida government seems to feel that gambling is just dandy as long as the money stays in Florida. Or put differently morality simply plays no role at all in the decision process. For example we have a lottery system in which the earnings go to education and therefore that gambling is acceptable. We have bingo everywhere and that is ok as long as a token portion goes to charity.
All of this is supposedly a counter balance to the problem of our unusual number of seniors who become very vulnerable to extreme gambling addiction. You can bet that many a grandmother or grandfather has gambled their way out of house, home and life savings.
There is no easy answer. Essentially i believe that people should be free to gamble. Yet the public will be forced to pay for the carnage that inevitably caused by that gambling. And the state doesn't give a hoot as long as the state perceives that they profit by allowing gambling. Our gambling laws and policies might be better thought out if we simply allow internet gambling and get the profit motive out of the state congress.
The entire legal issue of privacy is schizophrenic. Government agencies can now decode almost all encrypted material with ease. So how can they claim no expectation of privacy of emails? After all, some email is encrypted. Now picture a hacker breaking into the servers of a large corporation and simply looking around. What is the difference between a hacker viewing a corporations emails on their servers and a government agency viewing your email on Yahoo's servers? In essence we have lost the idea of the sovereignty of the individual being as vital as the sovereignty of the state or the corporation. So we have moved from a system based upon equality,law and natural and legal rights to a system that compels the subservience of the individual even when no wrong doing by that individual is suspected. In other words some people cheat on taxes and therefore we must have the right to examine all people. Yet we pass laws that give some people entirely different rules by which taxes can be applied. We even allow entirely different systems of accounting.
This is exactly why many people fear more gun laws. Look what has gone on with the income taxes. First income taxes were declared to be temporary to overcome and emergency shortage of funds. Then they became permanent. Then they became more and more oppressive. And now they want not only the right to audit and insist upon record keeping but also demand covert searches of emails.
Meanwhile an ignorant public relies on the notion that laws can fix things. Only laws the we can afford to truly enforce combined with real rehabilitation for offenders has any chance of working at all. As it stands already we don't enforce even 1% of our current laws. Yet we support an expensive congress whose only real power is to pass more laws. More gun control laws will do no good what-so-ever. We just had a lunatic run into a college in Texas and use a box cutter or some sort of razor knife to slash up 14 students. Passing gun laws is about as silly as passing laws against the public owning a box cutter or steak knife.
Google provides a great service to the public and has more than earned their spot in the sun.
I wonder how many people on this thread have ever worked in a situation in which the company was frightened that employees would talk to each other at all. From simple issues such as the size of individual pay checks, or putting together information on senior staff or on bad things going on internally or even being able to figure out the companies business strategy were dreaded by management. In some cases it gets so off the rails that employees are warned that they will be fired if their is any association with employees assigned to other projects.
It is wonderful when one is doing well in a company that has good intentions.
Maybe there is a lot of money in owning bankrupt airlines. In all seriousness we do see endless parades of airlines coming and going out of business. If they are such an awful monetary risk would we really see them cropping up? One way or another airlines make money whether the books and "official" paper work indicates it or not.
It is rather like a valley full of farmers who know that raising carrots in their valley simply fails every time. If that is true you would only see total idiots starting a carrot farm in that valley. So if investors see one airline after the next pleading poverty and going out of business they would have to be drooling imbeciles to invest in another airline start up.
I don't know how happy Kissinger is or the rest of his ilk. I do know that nations can not take treaties with the US seriously at all. Just the example of the treaties signed with native American peoples alone are enough to force me to believe that treaties with the US are worthless.
It is all very depressing. But I suspect that without slavery, forced labor, creation of deliberate poverty to force low wages, and usurping land and generally scheming to rob the world blind I doubt that the US would ever have existed at all. Human history seems to be all about this evil mindset. The Apache rampaged and attacked others and took what they wanted as normal practice. The later immigrants into the Americas did no differently at all. The one difference is that the Apaches did not hide what they did at all. Even admitting that such things go on is dangerous for Americans. Dr. King is an example of what our government can do when people speak out.
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I wonder how many people have a clue as to the potential of 3D printing. Printing housing is already a fact. Imagine forming the plumbing runs inside the plastic walls. The toilets and sinks could be printed as part of the structure as well. Instead of running conduit one simply prints tunnels for the wiring. A printed roof may need no overhang and that alone would add enormous wind resistance in a hurricane. This technology may displace almost the entire construction industry in short order.
We do need to put plans in place for the safety and comfort of those whose work will be displaced by technology. The velocity of change is likely to increase rather radically as we are probably now at the toggle point at which computer intelligence and robotics seem to have unlimited growth of abilities.
As much as I love robotics I just can't see how the leaders in India could exist with the guilt of spending the sums involved in building a modern military. Too much poverty, suffering and need to go down this road. Maybe building useful robots for export in order to raise funds to help the suffering would be a better goal. What would Ghandi have done?
It is my understanding that private videos helped identify the Boston terror strikers. The public has a very big stake in wanting lots and lots of private and business cams being in action.
It sort of starts with the meaning of security. To lock down or prevent movement is one definition of security. So a security guard walking by a client who does not move and is stretched out on the asphalt in the parking area need do nothing. The body would be even more secure if it were chained to a tree. The guard's duty is to observe and report so if he notices that the building is on fire he should note it in his report for end of shift.
This works like the cabinet shop on the corner. The owner can not compete if he pays his workers more than what he suspects his competitors
pay their workers. So if Europe does not apply the most modern methods in raising food the food providers will be out of business in short order.
Since food is vital in essence Europe has no real option. Whether it is good, safe, moral or wise are not even part of the decision process.
Our politicians can never confront the problem. We have way too large numbers of people to care for and the only real solution is serious birth control. Science does provide breakthroughs and the edge of the cliff does get pushed back a bit from time to time but the plain and simple truth is that we are in a death spiral due to over population. It is the root of almost all of our issues. Pollution, global warming, employment, energy are all nothing more than proof of excess population. Wars and hostile politics are also driven by over population.
The sad truth is that only in a dictatorship does the government have the ability to consider reproduction a privilege and determine exactly
who can create babies. In the US if a politician breathed a hint of wanting firm reproduction control he would be out of a job permanently.
Private acts really are not done in places where they can be observed by others. This is a feelings vs. reason issue. For example a young girl in a string bikini may feel that her privacy has been violated when the wrong guy looks at her or someone snaps pics even though she is on a public beach. The reality is that if it is done withing public view it can not be private.
I come from a generation and area in which extra credit was something that only a kid who had skipped school or suffered a suspension would ever be involved in. Sadly it was also a path that could corrupt teachers as the rich could make arrangements to get extra credit for their kids in such a way that straight A report cards were assured no matter what.
A better notion might be to refer kids to online courses at places like the Kahn Academy where mini courses can earn some sort of badge or token. For example you might see a course for first exposure to scientific notation that is designed to last a couple of hours. Or an introduction to exponents, or the basics of beginning physics or organic chemistry. My suspicion is that science in many fields will become more and more a purely mathematical experience as we are getting very close to the deepest visual resolutions that we can hope to reach barring some really radical breakthroughs. In short observation is decline whereas calculation is on the rise which is partially due to the use of computers.
Most normal mortals won't have any knowledge of why a large database is useful. Frankly the first thing that leaps to my humble mind is
trying to harvest money from the stock markets. Obviously there are numerous companies applying all kinds of computing power to the stock market. I do wonder if more computing power helps at this point or whether there is some toggle point at which massive data crunching would yield much better results.
For example I don't know if people buy or sell more stocks if they are happy or if they are in a bit of suspense or under pressure. So how could a system that tries to compute the mood of the qualified buyers help me at all? It is rather like the car salesman's observation that the nonsense about gimmicks and hyping up the vehicle didn't sell many cars. The man told me that he signed deals when the buyers were worn out from going to dealership after dealership trying to decide what to do. They simply get so tired that they want relief and at that point can be sold most any old thing. How does one apply data to such complex beings as humans?
Serious research was taking place on robots to replace kitchen workers way back in 1984. Back then the main obstacles were initial costs
as well as the expense of keeping the machines and their programs running correctly.
It is interesting that China seems to be adopting these technologies. I suspect it has a lot to do with the availability of service technicians.
The entire restaurant industry is soon to be vastly reshaped by robotics. Yet in the US there has been no consideration of setting up out economic system to deal with the permanent displacement of workers. Technology will force us to change our social and political systems and we will be forced to do this at a fast pace. Obviously if people can not work they can not purchase. Therefore the restaurant can not sell its product. Rather than thinking in terms of welfare or unemployment compensation we will shift to a system in which people must be given a real paycheck even though they do not work. The flow is government pays people. People spend money. Businesses pay taxes. In essence people will vote on which businesses survive by choosing where they spend their money.
The next level will be when robots actually own a business and take profits and reinvest back into their own beings with upgrades in their components or in the acquisition of more robotic workers. The robot owned business would be taxed and the taxes used to pay humans not to work.
Bacteria would out rank humans if we looked deeply at your posting. Obviously bacteria can travel at least as fast as humans as humans are always loaded with bacteria. Bacteria persist by stunning levels of reproduction. Bacteria can wipe out a human easily. Bacteria can thrive in areas that humans can never contact. Bacteria can alter their environment and also enjoy very few restraints upon their prosperity. Some can even reproduce in boiling water.
Bacteria seem to us to operate without thought or planning or need for education. But bacteria are loaded with a life long instruction to be in action. That one simple logic that is born inside bacteria seems to trump all human intelligence. Now if we could just get bacteria to play the violin!
Biology has an advantage over many other sciences. You can apply close study to the subject. But when one crosses over into fields like physics there are situations where the degree of resolution has reached its end and now mathematics becomes almost the singular tool. The ability to use various unusual logics and to reduce the question into equations is perhaps as far as we can ever hope to go. Trying to approach subjects like the underlying fabric that supports the universe or much of quantum mechanics is quickly becoming a mathematics only type of situation.
One wonders how these critters prosper. It may be that they taste lousy to predators or that they simply can get by in such stark environments that they don't have to compete much to get by. But if the gene sequence is available I would think we could cross breed some species and perhaps generate a fish of great use to humans. Cross breeding species seems to not be mentioned a lot but surely the scientists are trying it out. Is it so hard to do something like cross breed a trout with a bass or a catfish with a carp? One would think some great results might flow from such work.
War is not like a baseball game where there is a score and an official ruling at the end. Whether we "won" in Vietnam is not really established. If we intended to occupy and dominate South Vietnam in the long term then we lost that war. But if the intention was to simply delay until old, Stalin style communism moderated into a more moderate political system then the war in Vietnam was quite a success. In the early 1960s old style communism was frantic and world domination was the clear goal. China was in a radical frame of mind. In the 1970s when Vietnam was winding down communism was altering its posture and intentions were no longer involving world domination. The end result is that Vietnam is doing rather well and its people are also doing much better than they were before American intervention in their affairs. North Korea stood as an example that prolonged clinging to old style communism was expensive and undesirable. The moderation of politics inside China and even in south America was moderated by our efforts in Vietnam.
If all we sought was traditional victory in war we could have eliminated all hostilities in Vietnam on day one. If that had been done there would be no Vietnamese left alive. Iraq presents the same problem. Iraq is dangerous and unstable. Ultimately we can play around with the situation and if possible tolerate the instability but one day the elimination of their nation may be the only choice in play just as it is now in Iran and N. Korea. Money and manpower may well decide what we do with nations when diplomacy fails. Total war for 15 minutes is inexpensive for us compared to situations like ones currently costing us money and lives of our troops.
The most pressing point is not about Boston and may have nothing to do with Al Quiida at all. The real problem is frequency of incidents.
We are seeing more and more people or groups acting out in violent ways. The media and politicians can make remarks all day long but the public is
missing the point. Here we have several bombs made from pressure cookers. About one week back we had some nut attack 14 people with some sort of box cutter or utility knife. In the mean time we have had organized killings of people in public jobs such as prison wardens. Then we have the recurring loonies who have urges to shoot school kids or even college kids. There are so many incidents it is hard to keep track of them. I do not believe it is bad diet or lead in the drinking water. I think we simply have a population under too much pressure and people are acting out. Yet our politicians will not address the real problems. For example many in congress would like more background checks on gun purchases. They are smart enough to give lip service to claim advancing the mental health care system but that is a huge lie. America has never funded mental health and is not about to provide decent funding for mental health. And it gets even worse. The fertilizer plant explosion in Texas may well be a worse problem than the Boston incident. The company involved has already admitted that they failed to have mandatory fire and incident equipment in place. In a very real way that company may well have been far more outrageous than the nut that placed the bombs in Boston. Yet media won't jump on it at all. I can also tell you that Ft. Lauderdale had a fertilizer plant burn a few decades ago and the responding firemen came down with cancer almost universally. Apparently the gasses expelled in a fertilizer plant fire tend to be very, very lethal in the long term. Where is the media on this? Frankly American news media is really in the crapper these days.
People are not even mentioning the size of the agency that would have to be created to handle denial of applications in any sane way. Picture a guy in the Marines in the Vietnam era that was disciplined for a bar fight in Vietnam with a fellow soldier and maybe demoted from corporal back to private for the offense. Will we deny him a gun permit because he had a fist fight while in service in another nation forty years 50 years ago? After all a fight is a violent crime. Who is going to sit in judgement of these applications? How about crimes that are supposedly sheltered under the youthful offender act? How about arrests in which no trial or judgement ever comes to pass? How about an alcoholic who was Baker Acted many times but has been sober for eight years?
What we are voting for is the creation of a large and expensive new branch of government that will have little effect on gun violence and be very invasive in the study of lives of the population.
There has been a war on exposure of school systems that are inadequate in training young people. Many mayors and governors fought tooth and nail to avoid any kind of standardized testing or releasing of results. The GED is one great reference standard. If certain high schools fail to have large percentages of their kids doing well on the GED it is a warning that the school is not adequate. Mayors know that if new industry or business is to be attracted that a poor school system will drive away any prospects. Kids have been fed nonsense for decades about how wonderful their school is but in reality many of them were being graduated from awful schools.
This game extends into the ruin of colleges as well. One criteria for judging the quality of a college is the average GED score of the new crop of freshmen who took the test as high school seniors. Make note that small, private colleges rarely use the better accrediting services but hire only a service that focuses on other small colleges. The last thing they want is to be known as providing a lesser value education than a state school. And the game goes on. Few students are aware that individual departments within a college may not be accredited even though the college or university as a whole is accredited. When the graduate goes job hunting he may be in for a very rude shock as some employers will not consider him a graduate at all. You could be a highly, specialized, engineer with no acceptable diplomas at all.
It is even worse. Think of a city like Miami which is close to ocean level and the implications of flooding. The location of garbage pits, graves, fuel and chemical wells that have accumulated over the last 160 years would be astounding and every bit of that would end up in the ocean. Long term flooding of Miami would probably pretty much destroy the Atlantic ocean eco system at the very least and maybe a great deal more than that. And that is one city of two million people. So many coastal cities would go under that the impact would be unbelievable. Florida even has several nuclear reactors built near or on beaches with no real elevation at all. As far as I know even if we started today there is no way to shut down those reactors and clean them out as well as cleaning out spent fuel in storage. The farm land west of South Florida's cities is pretty much exclusively the land that produces American food crops in fall and winter.
The notion that states or governments have some sort of legitimacy that individuals do not is wrong headed. If the government can spy on you then why can I not spy on you? And if you can be filmed from public places just where is the expectation of privacy?
In all seriousness we have numerous large businesses and residences that have people on foot patrol all night. If a quiet, low flying, small device can do those patrols why would be not go that route? Large condominium complexes are one example of areas frequently patrolled at all times..
What is more of a real issue is that wealthy areas now use a lot of cams and as a result are far safer. Poorer neighborhoods generally can not afford to operate such cams. Drones will be similar. Wealthy neighborhoods can easily have drone patrols. It could easily get to the point where cars that speed in the neighborhood could all be captured on drone cams and turned over for law enforcement to simply mail out the tickets. These devices can stop crime to a large degree. If the devices are armed then we could use thousands to patrol our Mexican border. People crossing illegally would simply hear a message broadcast from the drone to stay still until humans arrived to take them into custody and if they continue to move simply use force.
Boats illegally fishing or dumping waste could be discovered with drones. Ranches and farms could also make great use of drones.
The point being that there is simply no reason to limit the use of a wonderful, new, technology.
Immigration is a thorny issue. For me it is as simple as feeling that our nation has way too large a population and that most of our woes flow from excessive population regardless of whether they are field hands, laborers are Nobel laureates. I think we need to totally freeze all immigration. We also need to have objective testing of young people and apply reproduction permits such that the most able both mentally and physically are allowed to reproduce in a limited way and all others banned from child making for life. To go from over 300 million down to 60 million or so would go a long way in stopping pollution, sprawl, energy shortages, materials shortages and shortages of decent jobs.
I am very aware that many people in some regions will feel that any anti-immigration views are anti Mexican or anti Latino or Hispanic and I can only say that that is not part of my thinking. Whether a Swede or from the Pacific regions or whatever is not part of my thinking. I simply want an absolute block on every instance of immigration and enforcement by military action at all of our borders. Right now we have blockaded immigration from Haiti by use of our Navy for 30 years or so. Why is it we fail to use our Army on our southern border? And then we have the wet foot Cuban as opposed to the dry foot Cuban comedy of really bad laws that has been in effect for decades as well. What the heck are we thinking?
In order for people to be disabled according to Social Security they must be disabled from all work whether the work is available or not. In other words if you went from a $150K position to a situation where you simply sat in a chair in a closed warehouse for minimum wage you would be disqualified for disability even if no such watchman posts existed in the community.
One older man that I knew broke his neck and was wearing the crown of thorns device to keep his head in place and was denied disability when the referee asked if he could make change. The notion that he was older, not accustomed to work that involved being presentable, and that no employer was likely to touch a person in that medical condition did not matter one bit. The neck did heal eventually.
Florida's position on gambling seems to boil down to greed. We allow gambling on Indian reservations here and we allow casino type operations in our horse racing tracks. Then we also allow gambling in which coupons are won rather than cash.
Apparently it is all based upon greed. Florida government seems to feel that gambling is just dandy as long as the money stays in Florida. Or put differently morality simply plays no role at all in the decision process. For example we have a lottery system in which the earnings go to education and therefore that gambling is acceptable. We have bingo everywhere and that is ok as long as a token portion goes to charity.
All of this is supposedly a counter balance to the problem of our unusual number of seniors who become very vulnerable to extreme gambling addiction. You can bet that many a grandmother or grandfather has gambled their way out of house, home and life savings.
There is no easy answer. Essentially i believe that people should be free to gamble. Yet the public will be forced to pay for the carnage that inevitably caused by that gambling. And the state doesn't give a hoot as long as the state perceives that they profit by allowing gambling. Our gambling laws and policies might be better thought out if we simply allow internet gambling and get the profit motive out of the state congress.
The entire legal issue of privacy is schizophrenic. Government agencies can now decode almost all encrypted material with ease. So how can they claim no expectation of privacy of emails? After all, some email is encrypted. Now picture a hacker breaking into the servers of a large corporation and simply looking around. What is the difference between a hacker viewing a corporations emails on their servers and a government agency viewing your email on Yahoo's servers? In essence we have lost the idea of the sovereignty of the individual being as vital as the sovereignty of the state or the corporation. So we have moved from a system based upon equality,law and natural and legal rights to a system that compels the subservience of the individual even when no wrong doing by that individual is suspected. In other words some people cheat on taxes and therefore we must have the right to examine all people. Yet we pass laws that give some people entirely different rules by which taxes can be applied. We even allow entirely different systems of accounting.
This is exactly why many people fear more gun laws. Look what has gone on with the income taxes. First income taxes were declared to be temporary to overcome and emergency shortage of funds. Then they became permanent. Then they became more and more oppressive. And now they want not only the right to audit and insist upon record keeping but also demand covert searches of emails.
Meanwhile an ignorant public relies on the notion that laws can fix things. Only laws the we can afford to truly enforce combined with real rehabilitation for offenders has any chance of working at all. As it stands already we don't enforce even 1% of our current laws. Yet we support an expensive congress whose only real power is to pass more laws. More gun control laws will do no good what-so-ever. We just had a lunatic run into a college in Texas and use a box cutter or some sort of razor knife to slash up 14 students. Passing gun laws is about as silly as passing laws against the public owning a box cutter or steak knife.
Google provides a great service to the public and has more than earned their spot in the sun.
I wonder how many people on this thread have ever worked in a situation in which the company was frightened that employees would talk to each other at all. From simple issues such as the size of individual pay checks, or putting together information on senior staff or on bad things going on internally or even being able to figure out the companies business strategy were dreaded by management.
In some cases it gets so off the rails that employees are warned that they will be fired if their is any association with employees assigned to other projects.
It is wonderful when one is doing well in a company that has good intentions.
Maybe there is a lot of money in owning bankrupt airlines. In all seriousness we do see endless parades of airlines coming and going out of business. If they are such an awful monetary risk would we really see them cropping up? One way or another airlines make money whether the books and "official" paper work indicates it or not.
It is rather like a valley full of farmers who know that raising carrots in their valley simply fails every time. If that is true you would only see total idiots starting a carrot farm in that valley. So if investors see one airline after the next pleading poverty and going out of business they would have to be drooling imbeciles to invest in another airline start up.
I don't know how happy Kissinger is or the rest of his ilk. I do know that nations can not take treaties with the US seriously at all. Just the example of the treaties signed with native American peoples alone are enough to force me to believe that treaties with the US are worthless.
It is all very depressing. But I suspect that without slavery, forced labor, creation of deliberate poverty to force low wages, and usurping land and generally scheming to rob the world blind I doubt that the US would ever have existed at all. Human history seems to be all about this evil mindset. The Apache rampaged and attacked others and took what they wanted as normal practice. The later immigrants into the Americas did no differently at all. The one difference is that the Apaches did not hide what they did at all. Even admitting that such things go on is dangerous for Americans. Dr. King is an example of what our government can do when people speak out.