Well, at least the first few times. Once a significant percentage 'catch on', it starts becoming dangerous, and it's cheaper to force a re-weigh than lose a ship.
Thus my comment about 'the first few times'. Once it's dangerous... Of course, the ship's captain and owners might not know precisely where the danger point is. There's supposed to be all sorts of safety margins, of course, but if they make a stupid decision...
How much balance? Within a few thousand pounds? Can he figure out which container it is, specifically? Are the owners going to let a ship's captain order 7k or so containers offloaded to find the illegally heavy ones? After all, it's just cheaper to haul it despite the extra mass rather than quibble about it.
Well, at least the first few times. Once a significant percentage 'catch on', it starts becoming dangerous, and it's cheaper to force a re-weigh than lose a ship.
Same deal with nuisance lawsuits, really. Give in and you only encourage them, even though it's cheaper this time. Even older you have the danegeld.
How is that any different than in the world of government where the right greased palms can get this project approved or policy approved or killed?
Macro vs Micro. The results are generally the same though; generalized nastiness on the macro part while the micro occasionally gets people killed like here.
I'd say that Macro is generally less bloody/more efficient, but on second thought I don't think so.
What if somebody is bribing the crane operator or whoever collects up all the paperwork? Sadly, in the world of business you have to count on corruption more than not, especially outside the USA.
Residential weight scales, when they're digital, are generally accurate to 1,.5, or.2 pounds. Figuring that people who worry about that are 200 pounds(for ease), that's around.5,.25,.1% margin of error.
A standard 20' container can weigh as much as 53k pounds. 5 pounds for that would be.009% error. Or around 10 times more accurate than the best commonly available bathroom scales.
I'd call that 'precise'. Of course, given industry I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they're accurate to within the pound.
1. 'Inadvertently' seeing classified, for somebody with any clearance, is a single piece of paper. 2. It's simple enough to say they have 'need to know' 3. Paperwork snafus aside, once something is leaked it's no longer classified. The paperwork snafus have been epic with the latest leaks though...
Going by it's grandfather, the FP-45 Liberator, a WWII metallic version of the modern one, but with a similar barrel length and lack of rifling, "about 25 feet", 7.6 meters.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot less though. Even the WWII gun was at least strong enough to be reusable a dozen times or so...
The way you could get around this would be multiple assistants before your assassination attempt, or perhaps multiple visits.
You sneak the ammo and the weapon in separately. Heck, smuggle the ammo in 1 round at a time, stash somewhere, like a planter or the bottom of the trash bin in the restroom, not in the bag. Not many people look deeply in those.
If you're caught with a round, go 'How'd that get there?', shrug and toss into trash.
Crazy people (i.e. the sort of people who commit random murders) aren't all that likely to machine their own gun. But if you make it as easy as a few key strokes on a PC, they're a lot more likely to do that.
I'd argue that they're also unlikely to have a 3D printer in the first place. I think there's still likely more people with access to machine shops than 3D printers at this point, and if you want the parts made out of plastic a machine shop can still do that - create a mold, and if necessary machine it down a bit. You might use a different bit to carve up plastic than you do wood or metal, but it's known.
Plus, well, it's probably still far cheaper to have a shop make your bits than to buy a 3D printer solely for that task.
Manufacturing guns used to mean specialist equipment, specialist suppliers.
Manufacturing a good firearm means this. But in reality, any decently equipped machine shop can churn out firearms if it so chooses.
For example, the FP-45 Liberator, produced during WWII. Unit cost was $2.10 per firearm, 1M were built by 300 workers over 11 weeks. By my figuring, that works out to 8 minutes per firearm, using WWII manufacturing techniques. If you want deluxe, the M3 Machine gun ran $20 back in WWII. Too expensive? Go with a Sten.
Consider if I'm a legal gun maker, of course I'm going to obey the law. So how much does the government need to track me? Besides, all my equipment(see above) is for working with metal.
It gets very complicated if you're trying to prevent people from making non-metallic firearms - because you have to look away from the developed firearm industry. You have to worry about injection molds(all over the place, fairly easy to make, actually), not sheet metal presses. People who buy ABS plastic, not order a highly metallic rifled barrel online. Etc...
then making something plastic is the way to go as sometimes... a single lucky shot is all you need.
Igw's point still stands. While I'm sure it'll happen at some point, nobody to date has been killed, or even faced a serious assassination attempt, by an assassin attempting to use a plastic gun. Not even the CIA's rather incompetent and rather silly attempts to assassinate Castro, at one point attempting to poison his cigars, has attempted the use of a plastic or otherwise non-metallic firearm.
The Liberator is printed using the same ABS plastic that Legos have been made from for decades. Just like legos, there have been developed processes for making parts out of ABS plastic that, while it isn't 3D printing, is fully up to making all the parts used in a Liberator.
While if you're making 1-10(estimate) of these firearms it's probably cheaper manpower wise to print them, there's nothing about the designs that prevents the use of conventional molds to pop off a few thousand liberators at a drastically reduced cost. These processes were available in the '40s. They've had well over 60 years to create a plastic gun, perhaps at greater expense, but in the realm of assassination the use of rifles and bombs that run in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars is accepted. Worst case, you might have to do some subtractive piece work - use a drill or router to 'clean up' a piece.
Conclusion: The Liberator is the best 99% plastic gun yet(firing pin is still metallic), but it's still a single use zip gun of such anemic performance that you're probably going to be better off making a zip gun that has metal parts that look innocent that you can fashion into a firearm once past security. Or using a bomb, poison, rocket, longer ranged rifle, knife, garrote, bare hands, etc...
I remember reading an article where they've never really traced a drug-resistant strain as having come from preventative antibiotic use, that the biggest source of resistant strains is people failing to take the full course of their antibiotics.
The theory espoused was that preventative doses of antibiotics, being below that of clinical treatment, are enough to 'disadvantage' targeted bacteria such that immune systems did most of the heavy lifting, preventing infections from taking hold. But at the same time the lower doses don't trigger the major evolution steps to become immune to the antibiotic, as the evolutionary pressure isn't there.
It was also mentioned in the study that antibiotic use tended to be stable whether they used antibiotics as a preventative or not - Therapeutic doses are far higher, thus the additional occasional need to actually treat the cattle with full up antibiotic courses to treat actual illness evens out(within error of margin) total average use. It's just in sharp spikes rather than being even.
All this being said, if you're going to be dosing cattle with antibiotics to help them grow faster, you should probably stick to the older drugs, not 'front line' antibiotics intended for patients with resistant strains.
electrical: ~40-70% efficient generation, 95% transmission, 70-80% efficient car. (some others have posted batteries at 99%, for example). Gasoline: Pumping oil: Varies wildly. Transfer to refinery: another wildly Refining: 88% for barrel efficiency Other refining costs: Pumping costs withing the station 4-8 kwh per gallon Transfer to fueling station: varies wildly Pumping into vehicle: cheap Use in vehicle: 20% if you're lucky
The studies I've seen mostly say that the only time your CO2 production equals that of a gasoline vehicle is if you get 100% of your power from coal.
It's still an, em, intimdating number of panels, though.
If you go back to the '50s there were people envisioning that the panels would be made and installed by self-manufacturing machines. "von Neumann devices"
If we could make some sort of machine, or more likely a set of machines, that could manufacture more of themselves as well as machines that make and install the solar panels, while taking sufficiently less energy to maintain themselves(and being efficient about the panel process itself), we'd only need to set up a number of them with the appropriate programming and wait.
There's also the transmission problem, but that's nothing that superconducting DC power lines couldn't handle.
At what stage of their service life? And what *is* their service life?
1. All of it, until something breaks, at least. 2. The life of an electric motor of the sort put into EVs should outlast the EV itself.
We have electric motors that have been in continuous operation for over a century. Given the limited mechanical wear, you should only need to maybe replace the bearings. Other than that you're looking at the breakdown period for the insulation.
Quick lesson on electric motors: The 'strength' of an electric motor is limited by around three major factors: 1. The voltage the insulation can withstand before it breaks down. 2. The amount of heat the insulation can withstand without breaking down 3. The amount of heat the motor can dissipate.
If the motor becomes less efficient, that means it's resistance has risen. That means it's dumping more heat into the motor itself, raising it's own temperature. While there's overhead, they don't put huge amounts of overhead in. That means that a electric motor that's operating less efficiently, for whatever reason, is going to either burn itself out or trip temperature safeties. Probably the latter for a motor in an EV. A computer fan burning itself out isn't a big deal; the motor in an EV is big and expensive enough to justify additional safeties/diagnostics.
Really, the most likely bit of maintenance would be replacing the bearing every so often, but outside of trouble we already have the capability of making bearings that are expected to last well over 500k hours. That's 57 years per bearing set...
Not detracting from your figures, but I do wonder about the 60% figure. The charging process can easily be over 90% efficient, you get 90% of the electricity back from the batteries, 90% efficient controller, 90% efficient engine(and GOOD regeneration from braking).
You should be hitting 65-70%, not 60%, and that's before considering the benefits of regenerative braking.
Okay, that makes much more sense, but does alter my perception.
He's not mobile, he's living with mom. He's actually LESS mobile than you or I. I could move out and put my house up for rent in a couple weeks, for example.
It would cost him as much to live somewhere else as it would for me to gain an additional residence, at most, depending on relative costs and how quickly I could rent out/sell my current place.
It seems the cocky fuckers blathering on about how their school taught these basic concepts
I'll admit to being warped - both my parents are accountants, so I practically grew up with this stuff. Double entry bookkeeping in college? My first reaction was "This is how mom taught me how to balance my checkbook!".
But until I got to college and that class from what I remember my lower-middle class primary school system barely covered 'practical financial management'.
He has the freedom to pick up and move whenever he wants to, while I do not.
While at some point having a stable home is cheaper than the alternatives, his constantly overdrawing his checking account is, I feel, a separate issue from mobility, though I can understand why you/he has them conflated.
There have been a number of actors who essentially declared hotel rooms their homes for extended periods of time. Heck, I've lived in tents for well over a year at this point for my job. My job means that 10% of the time I'm sleeping in a tent. Oh well.
Take your friend, for example. I figure each overdraft costs him $50. That's $600/year. Over a decade that's a very good start on an emergency fund. If he decides that living in long term motels is his gig, that's his gig. Apartments he can move out of in a month if he wants? Sure, why not? He can be mobile if he wants to and is willing to sacrifice the benefits of a stable living area, but that's his choice, and is actually separate from overdrawing his accounts.
have zero financial management ability whatsoever.
I think this is the critical part for that little bit, plus they might not stick around for the requisite 5 months either.
I'm reminded of a saying: It's expensive to be poor.
I'm going to expand on that a bit. "Rich" and "Poor" are more statements of assets than income. My mother is a personal accountant. She's known of people with more or less identical incomes and family situations, but one's a multimillionaire who lives in a modest house, and one's broke every month that lives in a slightly less modest house. And no, the difference in houses doesn't come anywhere NEAR explaining the difference in assets. In addition, every so often you hear about some janitor dying of old age and his will donates his estate to the University or whatever, and it's several million dollars.
I thus present my theory: Being 'rich' or 'poor' is less about income than it is about spending. Poor people tend to get horrible effectiveness with their money - they end up paying lots of non-productive fees just for using money(NSF, check cashing), high interest rates(credit cards if they're lucky, payday loans, 'buy here pay here', etc... if they're not), and any cash they do manage to save ends up in a mattress losing value due to inflation as opposed to invested making a return.
Middle class and rich are far more effective. Please note that buying a $100k pizza that comes in a diamond encrusted box isn't a move of the 'rich', it's a move of a poor person who managed to become rich temporarily due to income managing to exceed their expenses, and is a sign that they're on their way back down.
One example from Pratchett's Diskworld was boots - the poor man would buy cheap ones with cardboard soles, the rich man would buy good leather ones. The good ones cost 10X as much as the cheap - but the cheap boots only lasted a few months, the good ones would last decades. But because the poor man could never scrape up that 10X, he was actually stuck paying more for footwear... I remember reading a real world example where a poor person would buy the smallest ketchup bottle(for example), even though the economy size with double the amount was only like $.25 more because it was the cheapest unit, not because it was the cheapest per unit of Ketchup... Many poor people have economic blinders on.
That being said, I think regulation is needed to keep employees from being raped too badly by these debit cards. I also have the fear that where a poor person might be able to understand cash, they might not understand their card's balance, especially when it costs money to so much as check.
I was mostly concentrating on Bush's reasons to go to war. It does seem that Saddam was playing a coy game about possibly still having/working on them, they did have a rather nasty shooting war with Iran, and having the weapons was supposed to be a way to defend against their rapidly improving military.
Roughly speaking, I hate it when people post things like 'it's all about the oil!!!!'. Let's face it: A government isn't a person. It doesn't have views, much less feelings. The best you can do is look at a general trend of the individuals within the government. Everything else is complicated interactions.
For example - Oil might explain the first gulf war, but Iraq doesn't have the oil reserves Kuwait did. Even if it did, you'd logically get a Saudi Arabia situation - hate their guts all you like, but the black gold will flow. If it was truly about the oil, it would have been far cheaper to ignore Saddam's abuses and simply paid his price. Even if he refused to sell to the USA, he probably would have sold to Europe & China, and those areas would simply have bought less US, Canada, Mexico, Central and South American oil, leaving it equally cheaper on the international market.
In reality, I figure 'possible WMDs' was actually pretty far down Bush's list of reasons for invading Iraq. But it was the one that sold for getting what international cooperation he was able to get, thus is the one he ended up pushing everywhere. I mean, we talk about politicians being dishonest left and right but believe Bush when he says it was about the WMD? Or attribute it to 'Oil!' when we went about it in a way that that would be so inefficient about it? One wants to get into nitpick theories, it was also a 'safe' way to validate US military combat theories. We paid a heavy price to gain our current skills in the area; and they're subject to degradation if you don't have combat to keep them up.
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Well, at least the first few times. Once a significant percentage 'catch on', it starts becoming dangerous, and it's cheaper to force a re-weigh than lose a ship.
Thus my comment about 'the first few times'. Once it's dangerous... Of course, the ship's captain and owners might not know precisely where the danger point is. There's supposed to be all sorts of safety margins, of course, but if they make a stupid decision...
How much balance? Within a few thousand pounds? Can he figure out which container it is, specifically? Are the owners going to let a ship's captain order 7k or so containers offloaded to find the illegally heavy ones? After all, it's just cheaper to haul it despite the extra mass rather than quibble about it.
Well, at least the first few times. Once a significant percentage 'catch on', it starts becoming dangerous, and it's cheaper to force a re-weigh than lose a ship.
Same deal with nuisance lawsuits, really. Give in and you only encourage them, even though it's cheaper this time. Even older you have the danegeld.
How is that any different than in the world of government where the right greased palms can get this project approved or policy approved or killed?
Macro vs Micro. The results are generally the same though; generalized nastiness on the macro part while the micro occasionally gets people killed like here.
I'd say that Macro is generally less bloody/more efficient, but on second thought I don't think so.
What if somebody is bribing the crane operator or whoever collects up all the paperwork? Sadly, in the world of business you have to count on corruption more than not, especially outside the USA.
Residential weight scales, when they're digital, are generally accurate to 1, .5, or .2 pounds. Figuring that people who worry about that are 200 pounds(for ease), that's around .5, .25, .1% margin of error.
A standard 20' container can weigh as much as 53k pounds. 5 pounds for that would be .009% error. Or around 10 times more accurate than the best commonly available bathroom scales.
I'd call that 'precise'. Of course, given industry I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they're accurate to within the pound.
1. 'Inadvertently' seeing classified, for somebody with any clearance, is a single piece of paper.
2. It's simple enough to say they have 'need to know'
3. Paperwork snafus aside, once something is leaked it's no longer classified. The paperwork snafus have been epic with the latest leaks though...
Heh, reminds me of a joke involving Militias -
Roughly speaking, you have an extremist militia going, then they go to do the bust, but it turns out EVERYONE is a member of some police department.
Or they're running a very quirky honeypot...
My Documents folder is filled with Badgers. Lots of Badgers. ;)
Going by it's grandfather, the FP-45 Liberator, a WWII metallic version of the modern one, but with a similar barrel length and lack of rifling, "about 25 feet", 7.6 meters.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot less though. Even the WWII gun was at least strong enough to be reusable a dozen times or so...
The way you could get around this would be multiple assistants before your assassination attempt, or perhaps multiple visits.
You sneak the ammo and the weapon in separately. Heck, smuggle the ammo in 1 round at a time, stash somewhere, like a planter or the bottom of the trash bin in the restroom, not in the bag. Not many people look deeply in those.
If you're caught with a round, go 'How'd that get there?', shrug and toss into trash.
Crazy people (i.e. the sort of people who commit random murders) aren't all that likely to machine their own gun. But if you make it as easy as a few key strokes on a PC, they're a lot more likely to do that.
I'd argue that they're also unlikely to have a 3D printer in the first place. I think there's still likely more people with access to machine shops than 3D printers at this point, and if you want the parts made out of plastic a machine shop can still do that - create a mold, and if necessary machine it down a bit. You might use a different bit to carve up plastic than you do wood or metal, but it's known.
Plus, well, it's probably still far cheaper to have a shop make your bits than to buy a 3D printer solely for that task.
Manufacturing guns used to mean specialist equipment, specialist suppliers.
Manufacturing a good firearm means this. But in reality, any decently equipped machine shop can churn out firearms if it so chooses.
For example, the FP-45 Liberator, produced during WWII. Unit cost was $2.10 per firearm, 1M were built by 300 workers over 11 weeks. By my figuring, that works out to 8 minutes per firearm, using WWII manufacturing techniques. If you want deluxe, the M3 Machine gun ran $20 back in WWII. Too expensive? Go with a Sten.
Consider if I'm a legal gun maker, of course I'm going to obey the law. So how much does the government need to track me? Besides, all my equipment(see above) is for working with metal.
It gets very complicated if you're trying to prevent people from making non-metallic firearms - because you have to look away from the developed firearm industry. You have to worry about injection molds(all over the place, fairly easy to make, actually), not sheet metal presses. People who buy ABS plastic, not order a highly metallic rifled barrel online. Etc...
then making something plastic is the way to go as sometimes... a single lucky shot is all you need.
Igw's point still stands. While I'm sure it'll happen at some point, nobody to date has been killed, or even faced a serious assassination attempt, by an assassin attempting to use a plastic gun. Not even the CIA's rather incompetent and rather silly attempts to assassinate Castro, at one point attempting to poison his cigars, has attempted the use of a plastic or otherwise non-metallic firearm.
The Liberator is printed using the same ABS plastic that Legos have been made from for decades. Just like legos, there have been developed processes for making parts out of ABS plastic that, while it isn't 3D printing, is fully up to making all the parts used in a Liberator.
While if you're making 1-10(estimate) of these firearms it's probably cheaper manpower wise to print them, there's nothing about the designs that prevents the use of conventional molds to pop off a few thousand liberators at a drastically reduced cost. These processes were available in the '40s. They've had well over 60 years to create a plastic gun, perhaps at greater expense, but in the realm of assassination the use of rifles and bombs that run in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars is accepted. Worst case, you might have to do some subtractive piece work - use a drill or router to 'clean up' a piece.
Conclusion: The Liberator is the best 99% plastic gun yet(firing pin is still metallic), but it's still a single use zip gun of such anemic performance that you're probably going to be better off making a zip gun that has metal parts that look innocent that you can fashion into a firearm once past security. Or using a bomb, poison, rocket, longer ranged rifle, knife, garrote, bare hands, etc...
I remember reading an article where they've never really traced a drug-resistant strain as having come from preventative antibiotic use, that the biggest source of resistant strains is people failing to take the full course of their antibiotics.
The theory espoused was that preventative doses of antibiotics, being below that of clinical treatment, are enough to 'disadvantage' targeted bacteria such that immune systems did most of the heavy lifting, preventing infections from taking hold. But at the same time the lower doses don't trigger the major evolution steps to become immune to the antibiotic, as the evolutionary pressure isn't there.
It was also mentioned in the study that antibiotic use tended to be stable whether they used antibiotics as a preventative or not - Therapeutic doses are far higher, thus the additional occasional need to actually treat the cattle with full up antibiotic courses to treat actual illness evens out(within error of margin) total average use. It's just in sharp spikes rather than being even.
All this being said, if you're going to be dosing cattle with antibiotics to help them grow faster, you should probably stick to the older drugs, not 'front line' antibiotics intended for patients with resistant strains.
electrical: ~40-70% efficient generation, 95% transmission, 70-80% efficient car. (some others have posted batteries at 99%, for example).
Gasoline:
Pumping oil: Varies wildly.
Transfer to refinery: another wildly
Refining: 88% for barrel efficiency
Other refining costs: Pumping costs withing the station 4-8 kwh per gallon
Transfer to fueling station: varies wildly
Pumping into vehicle: cheap
Use in vehicle: 20% if you're lucky
The studies I've seen mostly say that the only time your CO2 production equals that of a gasoline vehicle is if you get 100% of your power from coal.
It's still an, em, intimdating number of panels, though.
If you go back to the '50s there were people envisioning that the panels would be made and installed by self-manufacturing machines. "von Neumann devices"
If we could make some sort of machine, or more likely a set of machines, that could manufacture more of themselves as well as machines that make and install the solar panels, while taking sufficiently less energy to maintain themselves(and being efficient about the panel process itself), we'd only need to set up a number of them with the appropriate programming and wait.
There's also the transmission problem, but that's nothing that superconducting DC power lines couldn't handle.
At what stage of their service life? And what *is* their service life?
1. All of it, until something breaks, at least.
2. The life of an electric motor of the sort put into EVs should outlast the EV itself.
We have electric motors that have been in continuous operation for over a century. Given the limited mechanical wear, you should only need to maybe replace the bearings. Other than that you're looking at the breakdown period for the insulation.
Quick lesson on electric motors: The 'strength' of an electric motor is limited by around three major factors:
1. The voltage the insulation can withstand before it breaks down.
2. The amount of heat the insulation can withstand without breaking down
3. The amount of heat the motor can dissipate.
If the motor becomes less efficient, that means it's resistance has risen. That means it's dumping more heat into the motor itself, raising it's own temperature. While there's overhead, they don't put huge amounts of overhead in. That means that a electric motor that's operating less efficiently, for whatever reason, is going to either burn itself out or trip temperature safeties. Probably the latter for a motor in an EV. A computer fan burning itself out isn't a big deal; the motor in an EV is big and expensive enough to justify additional safeties/diagnostics.
Really, the most likely bit of maintenance would be replacing the bearing every so often, but outside of trouble we already have the capability of making bearings that are expected to last well over 500k hours. That's 57 years per bearing set...
Not detracting from your figures, but I do wonder about the 60% figure. The charging process can easily be over 90% efficient, you get 90% of the electricity back from the batteries, 90% efficient controller, 90% efficient engine(and GOOD regeneration from braking).
You should be hitting 65-70%, not 60%, and that's before considering the benefits of regenerative braking.
Okay, that makes much more sense, but does alter my perception.
He's not mobile, he's living with mom. He's actually LESS mobile than you or I. I could move out and put my house up for rent in a couple weeks, for example.
It would cost him as much to live somewhere else as it would for me to gain an additional residence, at most, depending on relative costs and how quickly I could rent out/sell my current place.
It seems the cocky fuckers blathering on about how their school taught these basic concepts
I'll admit to being warped - both my parents are accountants, so I practically grew up with this stuff. Double entry bookkeeping in college? My first reaction was "This is how mom taught me how to balance my checkbook!".
But until I got to college and that class from what I remember my lower-middle class primary school system barely covered 'practical financial management'.
He has the freedom to pick up and move whenever he wants to, while I do not.
While at some point having a stable home is cheaper than the alternatives, his constantly overdrawing his checking account is, I feel, a separate issue from mobility, though I can understand why you/he has them conflated.
There have been a number of actors who essentially declared hotel rooms their homes for extended periods of time. Heck, I've lived in tents for well over a year at this point for my job. My job means that 10% of the time I'm sleeping in a tent. Oh well.
Take your friend, for example. I figure each overdraft costs him $50. That's $600/year. Over a decade that's a very good start on an emergency fund. If he decides that living in long term motels is his gig, that's his gig. Apartments he can move out of in a month if he wants? Sure, why not? He can be mobile if he wants to and is willing to sacrifice the benefits of a stable living area, but that's his choice, and is actually separate from overdrawing his accounts.
have zero financial management ability whatsoever.
I think this is the critical part for that little bit, plus they might not stick around for the requisite 5 months either.
I'm reminded of a saying: It's expensive to be poor.
I'm going to expand on that a bit. "Rich" and "Poor" are more statements of assets than income. My mother is a personal accountant. She's known of people with more or less identical incomes and family situations, but one's a multimillionaire who lives in a modest house, and one's broke every month that lives in a slightly less modest house. And no, the difference in houses doesn't come anywhere NEAR explaining the difference in assets. In addition, every so often you hear about some janitor dying of old age and his will donates his estate to the University or whatever, and it's several million dollars.
I thus present my theory: Being 'rich' or 'poor' is less about income than it is about spending. Poor people tend to get horrible effectiveness with their money - they end up paying lots of non-productive fees just for using money(NSF, check cashing), high interest rates(credit cards if they're lucky, payday loans, 'buy here pay here', etc... if they're not), and any cash they do manage to save ends up in a mattress losing value due to inflation as opposed to invested making a return.
Middle class and rich are far more effective. Please note that buying a $100k pizza that comes in a diamond encrusted box isn't a move of the 'rich', it's a move of a poor person who managed to become rich temporarily due to income managing to exceed their expenses, and is a sign that they're on their way back down.
One example from Pratchett's Diskworld was boots - the poor man would buy cheap ones with cardboard soles, the rich man would buy good leather ones. The good ones cost 10X as much as the cheap - but the cheap boots only lasted a few months, the good ones would last decades. But because the poor man could never scrape up that 10X, he was actually stuck paying more for footwear... I remember reading a real world example where a poor person would buy the smallest ketchup bottle(for example), even though the economy size with double the amount was only like $.25 more because it was the cheapest unit, not because it was the cheapest per unit of Ketchup... Many poor people have economic blinders on.
That being said, I think regulation is needed to keep employees from being raped too badly by these debit cards. I also have the fear that where a poor person might be able to understand cash, they might not understand their card's balance, especially when it costs money to so much as check.
Hamas is big enough that it's pretty much a military organization. Though I don't think they're missiles(guided), I think they're rockets(unguided).
The impact triggers are probably imported from Egypt or other sympathetic country.
Hmm...
One's replacing the program chip in the car, the other is converting it from gasoline to diesel. ;)
I was mostly concentrating on Bush's reasons to go to war. It does seem that Saddam was playing a coy game about possibly still having/working on them, they did have a rather nasty shooting war with Iran, and having the weapons was supposed to be a way to defend against their rapidly improving military.
Roughly speaking, I hate it when people post things like 'it's all about the oil!!!!'. Let's face it: A government isn't a person. It doesn't have views, much less feelings. The best you can do is look at a general trend of the individuals within the government. Everything else is complicated interactions.
For example - Oil might explain the first gulf war, but Iraq doesn't have the oil reserves Kuwait did. Even if it did, you'd logically get a Saudi Arabia situation - hate their guts all you like, but the black gold will flow. If it was truly about the oil, it would have been far cheaper to ignore Saddam's abuses and simply paid his price. Even if he refused to sell to the USA, he probably would have sold to Europe & China, and those areas would simply have bought less US, Canada, Mexico, Central and South American oil, leaving it equally cheaper on the international market.
In reality, I figure 'possible WMDs' was actually pretty far down Bush's list of reasons for invading Iraq. But it was the one that sold for getting what international cooperation he was able to get, thus is the one he ended up pushing everywhere. I mean, we talk about politicians being dishonest left and right but believe Bush when he says it was about the WMD? Or attribute it to 'Oil!' when we went about it in a way that that would be so inefficient about it? One wants to get into nitpick theories, it was also a 'safe' way to validate US military combat theories. We paid a heavy price to gain our current skills in the area; and they're subject to degradation if you don't have combat to keep them up.