Re:In the land of empty tanks
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 1
It's interesting to see the degree of absolutism that appears in such debates. No one's saying that bicycles and bicyclists are not dependent on oil. Only that they use much less oil. It takes less oil to build a bicycle, less oil to maintain it, and less to operate it.
Car drivers need almost as much food as bicyclists, so the fact that food depends on oil is rather irrelevant here. If we used less oil for things like commuting, where it's easy to conserve energy, there would be a lot more oil available for things like transporting food from California to Michigan, where fossil-fuelled trucks and trains are necessary. If we were concerned about running out of oil, it would make sense to use oil only where it's really necessary.
But why would I buy it from the CABLE company? I have comcast cable. I get computer network and their minimal TV network channels with no extras (not even their "basic cable" package). They have not attempted to force me to buy anything I didn't want. They'll offer, but no coercion when I say no.
So to the post above that suggests using a firewall, I ask again why anyone would choose to pay Comcast for a cable modem with built-in wireless that he doesn't plan to use. If he knows enough to put a firewall downstream, he knows enough not to choose this device.
It would make lots of sense to install an integraded cable modem/wireless base station and then try to put a firewall between it and all your wireless devices!
I went to school in the 1970s and athletes would regularly kick the snot out of kids who did studied hard. Popular songs of the time included the Rolling Stones's Midnight Rambler, which is just as violent as any song on the radio today:
I'm called the hit-and-run raper in anger The knife-sharpened tippie-toe Or just the shoot 'em dead, brainbell jangler ... I'll go easy with your cold fanged anger I'll stick my knife right down your throat, baby And it hurts!
Black kids in Boston had bricks thrown at them for trying to go to school with white kids. People got killed in school too. According to Time magazine, school gun violence is actually down 65% since the 1970s.
Honestly, I don't see things today as any worse than they were when I was a kid.
The article was not discussing parts that break from wear and tear, but parts that must be replaced after low-speed collisions that would have been repairable on an older car. I don't mind having expensive parts that I must replace only infrequently. What I don't like is the idea that my car is totalled by a 5 mph collision.
There is a real tradeoff between safety and repairability. Crumple zones save lives in higher-speed collisions, but result in needless damage to the car in low-speed collisions. Overall, my life is worth enough to me that I am willing to face a higher risk of irreparable damage to the car in order to reduce the risk of irreparable damage to my body.
Air bags, though are what really annoy me! They add only a small increment in safety if you're already wearing your belt, but they add a lot to the cost of the car and even more to the cost of collision repairs.
To say nothing about the cost of disposing of the remains of the car---it's a lot harder to recycle all the plastic and composite materials than plain old steel.
Actually, a big part of the problem is that U.S. radiologists don't like working the graveyard shift. Several U.S. companies are outsourcing X-Ray reading to Australia so radiologists can work daylight hours (local time) while reading middle-of-the-night X-Rays from the states.
Please read the statement as it's written in context, not just a single sentence and take it as you feel
I did read it in context, but perhaps you understood the context differently from me. Here is how I interpreted the context:
The/. article at the top is about workers being required to work overtime and not being paid for it because the corporate management tells the store managers that they must not pay any overtime wages.
This thread began with several people discussing the "proper way" to eliminate paying overtime wages:
LostClutter suggested that the "proper way to eliminate overtime" (i.e., to eliminate paying overtime wages) was to send workers home after 40 hours instead of making them work more than 40 but not paying them for the overtime.
KDan replied that because there are sometimes crises, the proper way not to pay overtime wages is to hire enough people that no one has to work overtime.
You responded that this was a very naive way to eliminate paying for overtime, since it would require paying workers to remain idle in case there was an emergency, which would inevitably be more expensive than paying overtime once in a while.
Since this thread was explicitly about the proper way for store managers should comply with orders from headquarters not to pay overtime wages, I interpreted your comments in that light. If you were changing the subject of the thread and were no longer discussing how to avoid paying overtime, I missed where you said this.
Were you in fact proposing that the store managers disregard company policy in this matter?
If so, I am sorry to have misunderstood you, but I fear that your suggestion would not work in the real world. The company would have little sympathy for your claim that overtime is inevitable, and would simply fire the managers who pay their workers for overtime hours.
You're engaging in rhetoric and 'tricky number manipulation.'
There's nothing wrong with rhetoric. It's simply the art of arguing persuasively. As to being tricky, I don't see how I'm doing that. I discussed Reagan's preference for military spending up front in an ancestor post on this thread:
Reagan's appetite was for defeating the Soviet Union, and his expensive arms race succeeded beautifully at this---something his liberal critics do not give him adequate credit for---but just like the baby in his metaphor, he showed no sense of fiscal responsibility in cutting other sorts of spending to balance his military spending.
My point is that when Reagan sent budget requests to Congress, he requested huge deficits. Our grandchildren will pay just as much for these military deficits as they would have for social-service deficits.
Reagan was not alone, but about half of the years he was in office, the deficit on the proposed budget he sent to Congress was larger than the deficit in the budget Congress passed.
If the Democrats are deficit-hungry spendthrifts, then what do you call Reagan, when he wanted to run bigger deficits than even the Democrats could stomache?
Ronald Regan said it best... "Government is like a baby. All appetite at one end, and no responsibility at the other."
Perhaps he was talking about himself---the person who presided over raising the national debt from less than one trillon, when he took office, to more than 2.6 trillion eight years later. And lest anyone blame the Democratic Congress, it's worth noting that Regan frequently proposed budgets with larger deficits than Congress was willing to pass.
Reagan's appetite was for defeating the Soviet Union, and his expensive arms race succeeded beautifully at this---something his liberal critics do not give him adequate credit for---but just like the baby in his metaphor, he showed no sense of fiscal responsibility in cutting other sorts of spending to balance his military spending.
It's also worth noting that Reagan did raise taxes significantly every year of his presidency except 1988. According to the National Review, the Reagan tax increases totalled 2.6 percent of the GDP---the equivalent of almost $300 billion per year in today's economy.
But this does not tell the whole picture. By spending even more than his tax increases could bring in, Reagan assured that future presidents would have to increae taxes further to pay for the debt they would inherit from him.
It's worth considering Reagan in this light because Government, after all, is not some foreign creature. It's just what the people of the United States want it to be.
Under Reagan, people were happy to have large tax increases and larger deficits and they overwhelmingly re-elected the man who made these things happen. Bill Clinton raised taxes even more, although he temporarily brought the deficits under control, and he enjoyed similar popularity.
If the people wanted to change the federal tax structure, all they would have to do is to vote for candidates who support the kinds of tax laws they want.
State taxes are even easier---from California to Massachusetts, voters have chosen the tax systems they want through plebiscites.
So before complaining about the taxes we pay, ask yourself whether the benefits of living in a democracy make it worth submitting to the taxes chosen by the people.
The "Made in Texas" and "Made in Mississippi" labels are there because unions drove the cost of manufacturing up so high that it made more economic sense to move down south than to stay in the North.
The Made in China labels are there because, union or not, no matter how poor a U.S. worker is, he won't work for $10 a week, even in Texas or Mississippi.
Sometimes things go wrong, or emergencies occur and people stay late.
I don't really follow your line of reasoning. I understand why you sometimes have to ask employees to work overtime. I don't understand why it's unreasonable to pay them the legal wage when they do.
Please explain what's wrong with paying the employees time and a half on those occasions.
If it's really $1/minute, doubling every minute, time and a half wouldn't even begin to cover the late fees. If the babysitters charge a quintillion dollars (about 100,000 times the gross domestic product of the United States) for being an hour late, it doesn't really matter whether you were paid $8 or $12 for that hour.
Let's lay off Walmart and prosecute the babysitters. They make Dennis Kozlowski, Ken Lay, and Jack Welch look like Mother Teresa by comparison.
the gains could be frickin' tremendous, so the effort should be pretty high.
The gains of a machine that could extract usable energy from the zero-point field of the vacuum would be literally infinite, so should we put an infinite amount of effort into a project of this sort?
OK, that's nice to know. I was not able to find the generating capacity of ships' reactors. But this does speak against the idea someone else raised above that the size of the reactor is an important factor in its safety:
The thing which I can not fathom about the American nuclear power policy is that they are encouraged to make HUGE reactors. (Had to look this up for nuclear physics class at one point) The US Navy has an almost perfect record with identical, small reactors.
It would seem that safety is more a factor of the cultural or organizational differences of the Navy versus the private sector. Possibly the balance of safety versus bottom line is weighed differently in the two organizations. If so, this would argue for nationalizing nuclear power plants and running them as the Navy does.
The Shah had over 1500 tanks and 650 advanced combat aircraft (450 fixed wing fighter and fighter-bomber, 200 Cobra attack helicopters, and various others). What weaponry did the militants have?
Can you describe the major battles between the revolutionaries and the Shah's forces?
As to the Nazis, most of the 6 million lived in countries that did not attempt systematic nonviolent resistance. Denmark saved over 95% of its Jews by nonviolent means. Can you name a country that achieved better results using armed resistance? I never said that nonviolent resistance would work in countries where it was not used!
I am a little skeptical of your estimate of the generating capacity. Peak power demand for a modest city is about 2 kW per person, so a power plant would have to generate 500 megawatts to supply a city of 250,000. Each unit at Three Mile Island had a capacity of about 800 megawatts. Are you saying that each power plant on the Enterprise is more than half the size of Three Mile Island?
Also, with all your confidence in Navy machinists' mates, I wonder how all those well-trained ex-Navy personnel allowed so much corrosion to attack the reactor vessel head at the Davis-Besse plant. According to the NRC, it was because they were not adequately trained, supervised, or audited.
There are no credible sources for estimates of hundreds of thousands of deaths. Even Greenpeace estimates the death toll at about 2500.
What's tough is that Chernobyl-induced cancer cases amount to an increase of between 0.004% and 0.01% above the baseline rate of cancers (the exact number is subject to dispute, but is commonly agreed to lie in this range). Thyroid cancer rates are the only ones observed to have increased after Chernobyl, with an increase of 0.9% for the adult population as a whole and 5% for children under 14. Thyroid cancer is very treatable and has a mortality rate of 0.7%, so 100,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer would cause only about 700 deaths.
Some anti-nuclear activists assert that these numbers dramatically underestimate the number of deaths due to Chernobyl because they want to count as Chernobyl deaths the number of abortions (frequently estimated at 50,000-100,000) performed on frightened mothers throughout Europe in the wake Chernobyl. I hadn't seen the anti-nuke crowd join the pro-life movement before this.
According to the UNSCEAR, the only long-term effect that's been seen is an increase in thyroid cancer. They were surprised to see no increase in leukemia, whose connection to exposure to radiation is well documented and well understood.
The exact toll of the Chernobyl accident may never be known. Determining which cancers are caused by fallout and which by other causes is not possible and the numbers are so small as to be statistically uncertain. Perhaps the WHO number of 3500 deaths that I cited was low by a factor of two or three (another estimate, published in the anti-nuke Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, puts the toll at 6000 and rising as of 1996), but there's no credible estimate that puts Chernobyl't toll within a factor of five of Hiroshima.
As far as the British were concerned in India, their response to nonviolent protests was to turn their machine guns on the protestors (e.g., Gandhi's protest march at Amritsar in 1919). At other times, as in Dharshana in 1930, they didn't want to waste bullets and simply smashed the skulls of hundreds of protestors with steel clubs. The British clearly did not care one whit about the Indian people's opinion.
Gandhi's struggle was anything but passive---satyagraha is an active political engagement with the enemy. It just doesn't use violence because violence is often not a very effective way of achieving your goals.
Also, your thesis does not explain how the Danes were able to use nonviolent tactics to save all but 500 of their 7300 Jews from going to the concentration camps, and managed to get special treatment for even those 500 who were sent to the camps, so that practically all of them survived the war. The Danes achieved all this through simple acts of civil disobedience.
Similarly, how do you explain the Gestapo's releasing hundreds of Jews from custody in Berlin in 1943 in response to a nonviolent protest?
The Shah of Iran was infamous for extracting information from suspected opponents of his government by torturing their children in front of them. Yet the Shah was deposed not by a violent uprising, but by nonviolent opposition.
Finally, I am kicking myself for not recognizing what many others have written in this regard: The Communist government of the Soviet Union---a government whose Gulags demonstrate clearly its disregard for the people's opinion---was brought down not by guns but by nonviolent opposition from within.
Is your thesis that Iran, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany were examples of "Judeo-Christian morality" that cared about their people's opinion? If not, how do you explain the success of Ghandian tactics in those countries?
The bomb at Hiroshima killed about 64,000 people. Chernobyl killed 30 people immediately after the accident and it is estimated that Chernobyl will, over the 50 years after the accident, kill a total of 3500 people (Greenpeace estimates 2500). The most authoritative study, by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation points out that this compares to 4,500 deaths in the U.S. from exposure to fallout from the Nevada nuclear weapons tests.
It's kind of misleading to talk about Hiroshima and Chernobyl as though they were the same.
Gandhi used the pen and other modes of nonviolent persuasion, while the British used machine guns against unarmed protestors. Who won?
We hear lots about armed resistance against the Nazis, but few people write about things like the time 6000 women picketed the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin in 1943 and got the Nazis to release their Jewish husbands, or the fact that nonviolent confrontation of the Nazis by the Danes saved the lives of almost all the Danish Jews. This was far more effective than violent resistance, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
And unarmed suasion by Martin Luther King and others did more than the violent tactics of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver to obtain civil rights for black Americans.
Perhaps most impressively, we look at the fall of the Shah of Iran. In 1978, the Shah had the largest military force in the middle east (715,000 men, 2500 tanks, 450 major fixed-wing combat aircraft) but was unable to hold power in the face of unarmed fundamentalist revolutionaries.
We'd have lots of excellent code, but no rights or freedom. Eben Moglen and Lawrence Lessig do at least as much to make America excellent as any coder does!
India got a good start at this. Mohandas Gandhi was a lawyer, after all, but today no one will sue or prosecute genocidal terrorists like Bal Thackeray. Perhaps India can outsource their legal work to the U.S. and defang Thackeray the way we did David Duke.
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Car drivers need almost as much food as bicyclists, so the fact that food depends on oil is rather irrelevant here. If we used less oil for things like commuting, where it's easy to conserve energy, there would be a lot more oil available for things like transporting food from California to Michigan, where fossil-fuelled trucks and trains are necessary. If we were concerned about running out of oil, it would make sense to use oil only where it's really necessary.
Indeed, anyone reading the links to IronPython would find that "IronPython is currently an unreleased research prototype."
So to the post above that suggests using a firewall, I ask again why anyone would choose to pay Comcast for a cable modem with built-in wireless that he doesn't plan to use. If he knows enough to put a firewall downstream, he knows enough not to choose this device.
Perhaps I was too subtle. Here's the point: Why pay extra for a cable-modem with built-in wireless if you're not going to use the wireless?
It would make lots of sense to install an integraded cable modem/wireless base station and then try to put a firewall between it and all your wireless devices!
There is a real tradeoff between safety and repairability. Crumple zones save lives in higher-speed collisions, but result in needless damage to the car in low-speed collisions. Overall, my life is worth enough to me that I am willing to face a higher risk of irreparable damage to the car in order to reduce the risk of irreparable damage to my body.
Air bags, though are what really annoy me! They add only a small increment in safety if you're already wearing your belt, but they add a lot to the cost of the car and even more to the cost of collision repairs.
To say nothing about the cost of disposing of the remains of the car---it's a lot harder to recycle all the plastic and composite materials than plain old steel.
Actually, a big part of the problem is that U.S. radiologists don't like working the graveyard shift. Several U.S. companies are outsourcing X-Ray reading to Australia so radiologists can work daylight hours (local time) while reading middle-of-the-night X-Rays from the states.
Were you in fact proposing that the store managers disregard company policy in this matter?
If so, I am sorry to have misunderstood you, but I fear that your suggestion would not work in the real world. The company would have little sympathy for your claim that overtime is inevitable, and would simply fire the managers who pay their workers for overtime hours.
There's nothing wrong with rhetoric. It's simply the art of arguing persuasively. As to being tricky, I don't see how I'm doing that. I discussed Reagan's preference for military spending up front in an ancestor post on this thread:
My point is that when Reagan sent budget requests to Congress, he requested huge deficits. Our grandchildren will pay just as much for these military deficits as they would have for social-service deficits.If the Democrats are deficit-hungry spendthrifts, then what do you call Reagan, when he wanted to run bigger deficits than even the Democrats could stomache?
Perhaps he was talking about himself---the person who presided over raising the national debt from less than one trillon, when he took office, to more than 2.6 trillion eight years later. And lest anyone blame the Democratic Congress, it's worth noting that Regan frequently proposed budgets with larger deficits than Congress was willing to pass.
Reagan's appetite was for defeating the Soviet Union, and his expensive arms race succeeded beautifully at this---something his liberal critics do not give him adequate credit for---but just like the baby in his metaphor, he showed no sense of fiscal responsibility in cutting other sorts of spending to balance his military spending.
It's also worth noting that Reagan did raise taxes significantly every year of his presidency except 1988. According to the National Review, the Reagan tax increases totalled 2.6 percent of the GDP---the equivalent of almost $300 billion per year in today's economy.
But this does not tell the whole picture. By spending even more than his tax increases could bring in, Reagan assured that future presidents would have to increae taxes further to pay for the debt they would inherit from him.
It's worth considering Reagan in this light because Government, after all, is not some foreign creature. It's just what the people of the United States want it to be.
Under Reagan, people were happy to have large tax increases and larger deficits and they overwhelmingly re-elected the man who made these things happen. Bill Clinton raised taxes even more, although he temporarily brought the deficits under control, and he enjoyed similar popularity.
If the people wanted to change the federal tax structure, all they would have to do is to vote for candidates who support the kinds of tax laws they want.
State taxes are even easier---from California to Massachusetts, voters have chosen the tax systems they want through plebiscites.
So before complaining about the taxes we pay, ask yourself whether the benefits of living in a democracy make it worth submitting to the taxes chosen by the people.
The Made in China labels are there because, union or not, no matter how poor a U.S. worker is, he won't work for $10 a week, even in Texas or Mississippi.
I don't really follow your line of reasoning. I understand why you sometimes have to ask employees to work overtime. I don't understand why it's unreasonable to pay them the legal wage when they do.
Please explain what's wrong with paying the employees time and a half on those occasions.
Let's lay off Walmart and prosecute the babysitters. They make Dennis Kozlowski, Ken Lay, and Jack Welch look like Mother Teresa by comparison.
The gains of a machine that could extract usable energy from the zero-point field of the vacuum would be literally infinite, so should we put an infinite amount of effort into a project of this sort?
It would seem that safety is more a factor of the cultural or organizational differences of the Navy versus the private sector. Possibly the balance of safety versus bottom line is weighed differently in the two organizations. If so, this would argue for nationalizing nuclear power plants and running them as the Navy does.
Can you describe the major battles between the revolutionaries and the Shah's forces?
As to the Nazis, most of the 6 million lived in countries that did not attempt systematic nonviolent resistance. Denmark saved over 95% of its Jews by nonviolent means. Can you name a country that achieved better results using armed resistance? I never said that nonviolent resistance would work in countries where it was not used!
I am a little skeptical of your estimate of the generating capacity. Peak power demand for a modest city is about 2 kW per person, so a power plant would have to generate 500 megawatts to supply a city of 250,000. Each unit at Three Mile Island had a capacity of about 800 megawatts. Are you saying that each power plant on the Enterprise is more than half the size of Three Mile Island?
Also, with all your confidence in Navy machinists' mates, I wonder how all those well-trained ex-Navy personnel allowed so much corrosion to attack the reactor vessel head at the Davis-Besse plant. According to the NRC, it was because they were not adequately trained, supervised, or audited.
What's tough is that Chernobyl-induced cancer cases amount to an increase of between 0.004% and 0.01% above the baseline rate of cancers (the exact number is subject to dispute, but is commonly agreed to lie in this range). Thyroid cancer rates are the only ones observed to have increased after Chernobyl, with an increase of 0.9% for the adult population as a whole and 5% for children under 14. Thyroid cancer is very treatable and has a mortality rate of 0.7%, so 100,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer would cause only about 700 deaths.
Some anti-nuclear activists assert that these numbers dramatically underestimate the number of deaths due to Chernobyl because they want to count as Chernobyl deaths the number of abortions (frequently estimated at 50,000-100,000) performed on frightened mothers throughout Europe in the wake Chernobyl. I hadn't seen the anti-nuke crowd join the pro-life movement before this.
According to the UNSCEAR, the only long-term effect that's been seen is an increase in thyroid cancer. They were surprised to see no increase in leukemia, whose connection to exposure to radiation is well documented and well understood.
The exact toll of the Chernobyl accident may never be known. Determining which cancers are caused by fallout and which by other causes is not possible and the numbers are so small as to be statistically uncertain. Perhaps the WHO number of 3500 deaths that I cited was low by a factor of two or three (another estimate, published in the anti-nuke Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, puts the toll at 6000 and rising as of 1996), but there's no credible estimate that puts Chernobyl't toll within a factor of five of Hiroshima.
Gandhi's struggle was anything but passive---satyagraha is an active political engagement with the enemy. It just doesn't use violence because violence is often not a very effective way of achieving your goals.
Also, your thesis does not explain how the Danes were able to use nonviolent tactics to save all but 500 of their 7300 Jews from going to the concentration camps, and managed to get special treatment for even those 500 who were sent to the camps, so that practically all of them survived the war. The Danes achieved all this through simple acts of civil disobedience.
Similarly, how do you explain the Gestapo's releasing hundreds of Jews from custody in Berlin in 1943 in response to a nonviolent protest?
The Shah of Iran was infamous for extracting information from suspected opponents of his government by torturing their children in front of them. Yet the Shah was deposed not by a violent uprising, but by nonviolent opposition.
Finally, I am kicking myself for not recognizing what many others have written in this regard: The Communist government of the Soviet Union---a government whose Gulags demonstrate clearly its disregard for the people's opinion---was brought down not by guns but by nonviolent opposition from within.
Is your thesis that Iran, the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany were examples of "Judeo-Christian morality" that cared about their people's opinion? If not, how do you explain the success of Ghandian tactics in those countries?
It's kind of misleading to talk about Hiroshima and Chernobyl as though they were the same.
We hear lots about armed resistance against the Nazis, but few people write about things like the time 6000 women picketed the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin in 1943 and got the Nazis to release their Jewish husbands, or the fact that nonviolent confrontation of the Nazis by the Danes saved the lives of almost all the Danish Jews. This was far more effective than violent resistance, such as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
And unarmed suasion by Martin Luther King and others did more than the violent tactics of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver to obtain civil rights for black Americans.
Perhaps most impressively, we look at the fall of the Shah of Iran. In 1978, the Shah had the largest military force in the middle east (715,000 men, 2500 tanks, 450 major fixed-wing combat aircraft) but was unable to hold power in the face of unarmed fundamentalist revolutionaries.
India got a good start at this. Mohandas Gandhi was a lawyer, after all, but today no one will sue or prosecute genocidal terrorists like Bal Thackeray. Perhaps India can outsource their legal work to the U.S. and defang Thackeray the way we did David Duke.