GTA isn't any more toxic than paper comics were back when they were the bugaboo of choice. The kid was inquisitive, he learned, and while he misapplied the knowledge he isn't the first little kid to play with things he wasn't supposed to. I watched Captain Scarlet back in the 1960s, but instense marionette violence didn't trigger me to shoot people and torch the corpses.:)
Why should labor be able to chase jobs around the globe and displace locals?
[quote] When one poor, desperate country starts to get wealthy, corporations will simply move to the next one, and let the first slip back into poverty. [/quote]
If that country wants business it can CHOOSE to compete. If it did not so choose, a competing country will seize the opportunity.
Instead of feeling sorry for Ireland (who should have chosen to remain competitive) I cheer Poland. The rise of a strong Polish economy is good for both Poland and the EU. The further successful democracies push toward Russia the more secure the EU will be.
[quote]Would you say, "Can we please move beyond Mozart"? Some music is timeless.[/quote]
The Beatles were wildly popular, but their work is quite dated and much of it was lame fluff. Their now elderly original fan base is dying off, and their work is not the sort that will excite many new fans.
The Beatles didn't have anyone with the personal intensity of a Jim Morrison, or the amazing guitar ability of Jimi Hendrix. Their work was accessable, but tame and not very interesting.
Those stacks would be even more useful for unmanned payloads, and unlike NASA the military is getting very good at understanding machines should go on dangerous places instead of people.
We only need to send people to the moon to explore and exploit it. We can explore and exploit it remotely and get more missions up. Getting meat in space isn't urgently required to learn what is out there. The longevity of the Mars Rovers is yet more proof of this.
[quote]The sad reality is that terrorist/guerrilla tactics are the only way to fight an opponent with a technologically modern army if you don't have one yourself - bleed the enemy and your own civilians until civilians in the enemy country and the rest of the world make it politically impossible for the enemy to continue on their course.[/quote]
Unconventional war is effective against law-constrained Westernized societies that, essentially, have outlawed their own ability to fight back.
The cult of legal self-justification says that winning is wrong if you can't do it by the ritual process of killing uniformed enemy forces in a chivalrous way.
Imagine how much more we could have accomplished by using robot probes instead of wasting money on primitive systems like the Space Shuttle. We could send robot after robot after robot and leave the tourists at home for a few decades.
"When are we, as humans, going to learn that we don't have to cater to the whiny religious/moral nutcases out there?"
When there is enough backlash against the superstitionists to take them out of power, and that takes a lot. The most hopeful chance was Communism, because Communists are willing to kill religious people and destroy their institutions by force. The rest of Communism was awful, but they had the guts to fight superstition woith bullets. Religious people won't yield because their belief doesn't allow it, so they must be fought. That makes societies like mainland China the most hopeful for the future. While we in the West cravenly yield to the Evangeliban and the toxic flow of Muslim immigrants, China is willing to use force against religion.
Our laws insist that we must socially yield and surrender to everyone, so we do.
That's been obvious for years. I imagine many people can still recite a Windows 98 key from memory. Office 97 spread virally the same way.
As far as I'm concerned, Windows should become more bloated, more annoying, and harder to maintain. Geeks can handle it and make a few shekels on the side, while users will be pushed to other operating systems.
"The best thing that happened to the Internet was when Clinton exploited the Peace Dividend and starved the military, and thereby the defense contractors, and they (and their employees who sometimes left to form their own companies) had to figure out how to produce for civilians rather than for the military."
Except that he didn't starve the military, which had been living on the boost it got in the Reagan Era and was drawn down starting during the reign of Bush the Elder prior to Desert Shield.
BTW: The bipartisan AND senior military leadership choice not to follow the retirement of obsolete Cold War systems with systems and training more suitable for the new era meant that we "went to war with the Army we had" in Iraq Part II and weren't ready for the kind of urban warfare we should have been ready for in Mogadishu. I'll even use a heritage.org graph (they are hardly Clinton fans, nor am I):
"The workforce in Indiana, Kentucky and Alabama are also of such poor quality there (low education level) that they have had to stoop to pictogram instructions at work stations."
Rural male Americans don't value education, especially in the South where it is seen as a challenge to religion. Of course they are illiterate, they don't want intellectual stimulation. They can be taught physical skills and do very well, so training should focus on this. Lecture, demonstration, performance, and repetition. They are visual creatures, not readers. Keep it simple. The Army once had a comic for M-16 training,
because they understood their audience at the time. While the Army can have higher standards now, the civilian workforce isn't so lucky in many areas.
I work at a vo-tech in the South, and IMO because vocational education is also a dumping ground for people not destined for college it's no surprise that workers are often low performers.
IMO it's interesting how well many of the women perform, but they aren't as burdened by macho culture. There is an amazing disparity between female and male African-American performance. I don't claim to know why (I'm an old white guy) but the sisters put forth some impressive effort to become employable and have a future.
"I could use selective polling to find that 84% of Americans polled believe we should nuke France."
You could then observe activity over time to determine who is working towards doing it, who is supporting those working towards doing it, and who are merely cheerleaders. Nuclear explosions would certainly indicate something was afoot!
Thousands of rockets have hit Israel from many locations. This isn't just some model rocketeer with a grudge, it's a bombardment. Qassams don't just assemble, transport, and launch themselves. The results of the rocket program indicate a tremendous level of popular support.
Inserting an anti-SUV post is guaranteed (as proven by the subsequent posts, many of which don't address the OP) to trigger lots of anti-SUV frothing. I think most SUV customers would have been better off with a Buick Roadmaster but they don't care what we think.
Anyway, back to topic:
The idea that the auto companies could usefully "retool" to build railroad kit has one minor problem. It means replacing the auto industry. Automobile and railroad rolling stock assembly lines are different, and there are no "consumer" railroads so everything would rely on government purchases. There being nothing to save from car makers who know nothing about rail and have nothing useful to offer, it would make more sense to expand rail manufacturing and let the auto makers die off.
Me like railroads, but in most cases passenger rail isn't coming back no matter how much railfans yearn for it.
First, NIMBY. Rich-ass suburbanites won't want railroads near them any more than they want wind power next door. Next, regulatory approval for new routes. Next, the requirement to destroy stuff to clear rights-of-way. Next, cities that aren't designed for light rail. That means rail passenger traffic will need to go intermodal, with even more expense.
The size and geography of the US mean attempting to use passenger rail travel as more than a local solution except on certain routes like those on the East Coast is doomed. We don't have nearly the trackage we did when rail was the only way to move serious freight.
On the other hand, alternative powerplant bus transport can use existing roads, requires less investment, has a shorter vehicle lifecycle (facilitates faster system replacement/improvement), and UNLIKE rail, requires no ROUTE commitment. Bus fleets may run as many different routes as needed to adjust to customer needs.
They still won't replace the auto industry, because bus makers already exist. The auto industry is based on RAPID replacement of vehicles for reasons other than failure of the replaced vehicle. That is in contrast to fleet use vehicle life cycles. Millions of wrecked and worn vehicles are scrapped each year, but many are disposed of because credit makes it easy to stay in debt for new ones vs. the sudden, painful expense of an engine replacement or similar. Automobiles are NOT designed to be maintenance-friendly (ask any mechanic!) so labor expense serves to replace planned obsolescence as a way to push product to the recycling yard.
When the economy is tight, consumers learn that many of them don't need new cars. You can keep most cars on the road for ten years with little fuss, or twenty by investing a few thousand dollars over time in periodic maintenance and parts replacement. Customers not only don't need to buy from the Big Three, they don't need to buy period. There are plenty of used machines available. We have a vehicle glut to go with the housing glut.
Slashdot Mirror
GTA isn't any more toxic than paper comics were back when they were the bugaboo of choice. :)
The kid was inquisitive, he learned, and while he misapplied the knowledge he isn't the first little kid to play with things he wasn't supposed to.
I watched Captain Scarlet back in the 1960s, but instense marionette violence didn't trigger me to shoot people and torch the corpses.
"So does this mean we will have planes with bigger paunches to carry fat Americans?"
With in-flight liposuction we could literally tap them for fuel.
Heat the lipo-slop with bleed air, run it through a centrifugal separator to get the crumbs out, then send the result to the engines.
Why should labor be able to chase jobs around the globe and displace locals?
[quote] When one poor, desperate country starts to get wealthy, corporations will simply move to the next one, and let the first slip back into poverty. [/quote]
If that country wants business it can CHOOSE to compete. If it did not so choose, a competing country will seize the opportunity.
Instead of feeling sorry for Ireland (who should have chosen to remain competitive) I cheer Poland. The rise of a strong Polish economy is good for both Poland and the EU. The further successful democracies push toward Russia the more secure the EU will be.
[quote]Would you say, "Can we please move beyond Mozart"? Some music is timeless.[/quote]
The Beatles were wildly popular, but their work is quite dated and much of it was lame fluff.
Their now elderly original fan base is dying off, and their work is not the sort that will excite many new fans.
The Beatles didn't have anyone with the personal intensity of a Jim Morrison, or the amazing guitar ability of Jimi Hendrix. Their work was accessable, but tame and not very interesting.
Don't forget to harvest the handy magnets if you bother to do it that way.
Some hard disk platters are glass, so be careful!
They were abandoned in place. Sounds like free stuff to me!
[quote]Yeah, a Carthaginian Peace.[/quote]
That sort is the most lasting.
"You pay for the education, and if you do something brilliant
with what you paid for in full, they take it from you."
"In full"? What about the vast amounts of funding that the student does not provide? Endowments, investments, profits from other ventures, etc?
A student is paying for training and education, not sub-letting space to work on his own commercial projects.
Those stacks would be even more useful for unmanned payloads, and unlike NASA the military is getting very good at understanding machines should go on dangerous places instead of people.
We only need to send people to the moon to explore and exploit it. We can explore and exploit it remotely and get more missions up. Getting meat in space isn't urgently required to learn what is out there.
The longevity of the Mars Rovers is yet more proof of this.
[quote]The sad reality is that terrorist/guerrilla tactics are the only way to fight an opponent with a technologically modern army if you don't have one yourself - bleed the enemy and your own civilians until civilians in the enemy country and the rest of the world make it politically impossible for the enemy to continue on their course.[/quote]
Unconventional war is effective against law-constrained Westernized societies that, essentially, have outlawed their own ability to fight back.
The cult of legal self-justification says that winning is wrong if you can't do it by the ritual process of killing uniformed enemy forces in a chivalrous way.
Imagine how much more we could have accomplished by using robot probes instead of wasting money on primitive systems like the Space Shuttle. We could send robot after robot after robot and leave the tourists at home for a few decades.
"When are we, as humans, going to learn that we don't have to cater to the whiny religious/moral nutcases out there?"
When there is enough backlash against the superstitionists to take them out of power, and that takes a lot. The most hopeful chance was Communism, because Communists are willing to kill religious people and destroy their institutions by force. The rest of Communism was awful, but they had the guts to fight superstition woith bullets. Religious people won't yield because their belief doesn't allow it, so they must be fought. That makes societies like mainland China the most hopeful for the future. While we in the West cravenly yield to the Evangeliban and the toxic flow of Muslim immigrants, China is willing to use force against religion.
Our laws insist that we must socially yield and surrender to everyone, so we do.
"It was racism and racial profiling that got them kicked off the plane, "
Muslims are not a "race". You mean ethnic and religious profiling.
"If you want to post your breastfeeding pics why not do it where it's welcome?"
Toss them up on 4chan, where they will be treated with respect and archived for generations yet unborn.
"There would be no hiding then no matter how big or hungry their baby may be."
I'm 6'2", 235 lbs with a size 8 head, and willing to offer concealment services to deserving chestal appendages.
That's been obvious for years. I imagine many people can still recite a Windows 98 key from memory.
Office 97 spread virally the same way.
As far as I'm concerned, Windows should become more bloated, more annoying, and harder to maintain. Geeks can handle it and make a few shekels on the side, while users will be pushed to other operating systems.
"OT, I know, but God I hate manager speak."
Me too. It's time we pushed beyond it to embrace a new paradigm.
"We gave Muslims top secret printer technology."
We also gave them HP printer drivers. That's like requiring them to throw shoes at themselves if they want to print.
"The best thing that happened to the Internet was when Clinton exploited the Peace Dividend and starved the military, and thereby the defense contractors, and they (and their employees who sometimes left to form their own companies) had to figure out how to produce for civilians rather than for the military."
Except that he didn't starve the military, which had been living on the boost it got in the Reagan Era and was drawn down starting during the reign of Bush the Elder prior to Desert Shield.
BTW:
The bipartisan AND senior military leadership choice not to follow the retirement of obsolete Cold War systems with systems and training more suitable for the new era meant that we "went to war with the Army we had" in Iraq Part II and weren't ready for the kind of urban warfare we should have been ready for in Mogadishu. I'll even use a heritage.org graph (they are hardly Clinton fans, nor am I):
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/budgetchartbook/images/fed-rev-spend-2008-boc-S7-Despite-War-Costs-Defense.gif
"These people are INCREDIBLY picky about how their word, excel, etc documents look. "
No shit. That's their job. They don't have a reason to care about anything other than results.
Change does not serve them.
"The workforce in Indiana, Kentucky and Alabama are also of such poor quality there (low education level) that they have had to stoop to pictogram instructions at work stations."
Rural male Americans don't value education, especially in the South where it is seen as a challenge to religion. Of course they are illiterate, they don't want intellectual stimulation. They can be taught physical skills and do very well, so training should focus on this. Lecture, demonstration, performance, and repetition. They are visual creatures, not readers. Keep it simple. The Army once had a comic for M-16 training,
http://www.ep.tc/problems/25/
because they understood their audience at the time. While the Army can have higher standards now, the civilian workforce isn't so lucky in many areas.
I work at a vo-tech in the South, and IMO because vocational education is also a dumping ground for people not destined for college it's no surprise that workers are often low performers.
IMO it's interesting how well many of the women perform, but they aren't as burdened by macho culture. There is an amazing disparity between female and male African-American performance. I don't claim to know why (I'm an old white guy) but the sisters put forth some impressive effort to become employable and have a future.
"I could use selective polling to find that 84% of Americans polled believe we should nuke France."
You could then observe activity over time to determine who is working towards doing it, who is supporting those working towards doing it, and who are merely cheerleaders. Nuclear explosions would certainly indicate something was afoot!
Thousands of rockets have hit Israel from many locations. This isn't just some model rocketeer with a grudge, it's a bombardment. Qassams don't just assemble, transport, and launch themselves. The results of the rocket program indicate a tremendous level of popular support.
Inserting an anti-SUV post is guaranteed (as proven by the subsequent posts, many of which don't address the OP) to trigger lots of anti-SUV frothing. I think most SUV customers would have been better off with a Buick Roadmaster but they don't care what we think.
Anyway, back to topic:
The idea that the auto companies could usefully "retool" to build railroad kit has one minor problem. It means replacing the auto industry. Automobile and railroad rolling stock assembly lines are different, and there are no "consumer" railroads so everything would rely on government purchases. There being nothing to save from car makers who know nothing about rail and have nothing useful to offer, it would make more sense to expand rail manufacturing and let the auto makers die off.
Me like railroads, but in most cases passenger rail isn't coming back no matter how much railfans yearn for it.
First, NIMBY. Rich-ass suburbanites won't want railroads near them any more than they want wind power next door. Next, regulatory approval for new routes. Next, the requirement to destroy stuff to clear rights-of-way. Next, cities that aren't designed for light rail. That means rail passenger traffic will need to go intermodal, with even more expense.
The size and geography of the US mean attempting to use passenger rail travel as more than a local solution except on certain routes like those on the East Coast is doomed. We don't have nearly the trackage we did when rail was the only way to move serious freight.
On the other hand, alternative powerplant bus transport can use existing roads, requires less investment, has a shorter vehicle lifecycle (facilitates faster system replacement/improvement), and UNLIKE rail, requires no ROUTE commitment. Bus fleets may run as many different routes as needed to adjust to customer needs.
They still won't replace the auto industry, because bus makers already exist. The auto industry is based on RAPID replacement of vehicles for reasons other than failure of the replaced vehicle. That is in contrast to fleet use vehicle life cycles. Millions of wrecked and worn vehicles are scrapped each year, but many are disposed of because credit makes it easy to stay in debt for new ones vs. the sudden, painful expense of an engine replacement or similar. Automobiles are NOT designed to be maintenance-friendly (ask any mechanic!) so labor expense serves to replace planned obsolescence as a way to push product to the recycling yard.
When the economy is tight, consumers learn that many of them don't need new cars. You can keep most cars on the road for ten years with little fuss, or twenty by investing a few thousand dollars over time in periodic maintenance and parts replacement. Customers not only don't need to buy from the Big Three, they don't need to buy period. There are plenty of used machines available. We have a vehicle glut to go with the housing glut.
It's cheaper to buy another deck used or new than fix the old machine.
"1) Create perfect woman in petri dish"
Vagina candy mold + agar = profit!
Possibly NWS:
http://nawtythings.com/novelties/choc2/JC-CP-C161X.jpg