One thing that's not mentioned is that it's likely they live in an area with progressive electricity costs - One figure I saw was 11.4 cents per kwh for their first kwh, 35.5 for their last. Ouch...
Thus, 'undersizing' their system(for now), makes sense - they eliminate the highest cost bracket except for Dec-Jan when the panels are generating the least amount of power, and have insignificant bills in the summer when the panels are most productive. Each additional watt he installed would have cost just about the same as the previous one, but there's points where each resulting kwh doesn't give him the same return. Given the various information available, it sounds like he sized it right at a sweet spot. He'd be able to get a good idea of electricty usage from historical bills, there's charts for how much solar power to expect in different locations and at what times of the year, etc...
Don't forget that it's at least somewhat of a test system - he's reviewing them. Hmm.... He's doing a review, on a professional site he's a paid reviewer for... Maybe the panels are doubly tax-deductable!;)
My conclusion is that this kind of investment is close to making sense, but not close enough.
Given the level of rebates; I'm not surprised. If it made easy sense, everybody would be jumping on the solar panel bandwagon and the governments providing the rebates couldn't keep up, thus the rebates would drop until it no longer made sense for most people again.
If it ever makes sense even without rebates (cheap, high efficiency panels, perhaps?), then installing them would be about as standard as toilets.
I have to disagree somewhat with this, or at least clarify. The Inverter is the most expensive single component in most installations, but the total cost of the panels generally exceed it very quickly. 3.3kw Inverter, 240V, $2,250 Looking at their solar panels: Call it $5/watt While a single panel costs $1,100, you can put 16-17 of them on the inverter. You could go with a substantially cheaper inverter if you're only going to have 3 panels in the system. Note on economy - If you live in a southern state with high electricity costs and substantial solar install rebates, it can make sense. In my northern climate, minimal rebate, low electricity cost state, it doesn't. I'd be better off with wind.
i mean, if someone is promoting road safety and encouraging people to wear seatbelts while discouraging drunk driving, even if they personally don't wear seatbelts and drive under the influence, i wouldn't criticize them for actually promoting safe habits--nor would i stop wearing seatbelts just to spite them.
I'd still critize them for not taking their own advice and call them a hypocrite. Though I'll still keep wearing my seatbelt.;)
Of course, I do that already - whenever a police chief/head of the anti-DUI task force/legislater who introduced tough new anti-dui laws gets popped for DUI.
mostly because it's easier to criticize a spokesperson than to refute his arguments logically.
My problem with a lot of his proposals is that they either don't scale well enough or are still too expensive to be mainstream, and they don't yet have a viable theory to make it economical in most areas. IE they still belong in the lab and special purposes.
If Gore is going to champion carbon neutral living, he should lead the way. Above and beyond and all that. Not get beat by 'oil baron' Bush's house.
They're paying for California electricity. Since it's mostly powered by hopes and dreams(and out of state coal plants), and haven't built a signifcant new plant in decades, they pay through the nose.
Me, I pay ~10 cents a kwh up to a thousand. After than it's 8 cents. Haven't busted the higher caps ever. I could get it even cheaper if I signed up for a load management system where stuff like my water heater shuts off when demand peaks.
Why not just come out and admit that you're just experiencing a severe case of class envy and be done with it? It's clear you have no rational basis for your argument, so it's obviously an emotional basis rooted in jealousy of anyone who has more than you.
My objection to Al Gore is that I see him as being hypocritical. Here he is advocating we do all these things; these expensive things, with questionable paybacks, to stop global warming. Yet he doesn't do this things himself.
While he now owns a hybrid; I've read he doesn't normally drive it, instead he drives a huge gas guzzeling SUV(or has his chauffeur do it). His home lacked all the stuff we were supposed to install, etc...
Of course, I said the same thing when I heard about Kennedy and his opposition to an off-shore wind farm(because he sails in the area).
We need solutions, and opposing one of the better ones to favor your view, or championing a cause of sustainability while not leading the way irks me.
Notice that we aren't complaining about the energy usage of Bill Gates's house. That's because Bill hasn't made quite the campaign on carbon control and global warming. While flying around to summits in his private plane.
You could argue that his energy bills should be lower, after all, he's gone much of the time.
Basically, Al Gore is rich enough to actually reduce his footprint; but didn't until people made an issue of it. Even then, I remember reading that after energy saving renovations his electricity bill went up compared to the year before.
He's asking us to make sacrifices; shouldn't he lead the way?
Well, yeah, a smaller class doesn't fix a bad teacher. Still, I'd also have to question about the professor with the huge class - did he structure it so that attendance was necessary to stroke his ego or did he actually teach during it?
Hmm.. you claim to respect rights, but imply that those that don't wish to be vaccinated be forced to live somewhere else.
I have a 'right' to not be attacked by you. Whether by weapon or disease. You don't have the right to be a carrier, when it's so easy to prevent.
I'm inclined to believe that the other nurses are just as capable
When she's available, she's generally the one to do it. When she's not somebody else does. Try to keep up.
as if the hospital only has doctors fresh out of med school. Please. Also, feel free to tell a cardiac surgeon they only have knowledge, but no skill. I have a feeling they will disagree.
I exaggerated. Still, my aunt's been around for longer than most of the doctors in her ward. And you specified doctor, not surgeon. Besides, I never stated that doctor's don't have skills, I said that they're employed on the basis of their knowledge. Give a doctor and a nurse ten years experience and guess which one will have more experience inserting needles.
I dislike the notion that anyone be forced to be vaccinated, especially when there is a risk involved with getting the vaccine in the first place.
Given that I specified 'without a good reason', what risk? Vaccines are extremely safe except for a few segments of society. In order to protect them, we want to vaccinate as many of the rest as we can.
Banning transfats is another such example.
Transfats don't jump from carrier to carrier. They aren't contageous. Makes a big difference.
You seem to think people are nothing more than cattle.
Not me, the diseases act like we are. Discounting the whole different germs thing.
Fortunately, the rest of us realize that people have rights, and that includes the right to refuse any injection or medical procedure.
Fine and dandy, enjoy the non-vaccination without a good reason colony.
you've qualified what it means to be "the best in her ward?"
Nope, why I used the word 'apparently'. I say that on the basis of OTHER nurses and doctor's words. That and she's the first one called for when the need crops up.
And personally, if I'm having a heart attack, I'd much prefer a doctor over a RN.
Really? You'd prefer a doctor fresh out of med school over a RN who's done CPR hundreds of times? Doctors are employed based on their knowledge; Nurses are more skill oriented.
Yet I'm not about to go out and force every other person to have the vaccine.
My grandfather had polio. I've studied the issue. We're far better off having people vaccinated than unvaccinated. Without the pressure to become vaccinated, we wouldn't have eliminated smallpox from the wild and come close with polio.
There are good reasons why schools require vaccinations for students to attend.
still think constant monitoring is a bad thing. Ya know, a huge violation of rights?
And you're comparing a shot, cup, or mist up against a police state.
I'm reminded of a saying I once heard: What's the most expensive army? One that loses.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I didn't learn in that class. Oh, I eventually learned the subject material, but I ended up doing it my self. I paid hundreds of dollars for a class that, on average, taught me nothing due to it's presentation.
Why don't all students have their own personal tutor
Many end up getting one. One they might not of had to get if the class was 30 instead of 130.
Because teachers cost money, rooms cost money, equipment cost money.
Those huge auditorium sized classrooms cost amazing amounts, and require expensive equipment to try to make up for the class size.
If you can get 150 students through with one professor, rather than one professor per 30, well you've just saved 4 salaries.
And if it has double the fail rate as a smaller class, how much is that saving the student?
I, however, wasn't lucky enough to get a professor with eidetic memory. What I got was a professor who, if I was lucky, realized he had a class.
There are good teachers, there are bad teachers. I generally posit average. You need a very excellent teacher to effectively teach a class size over a hundred. There are reasons states pass restrictions on class sizes in primary education.
What I discovered was that attending lecture in such a huge class was effectively useless for me. The sheer number of noises(coughs, chair creaks, whispering, pen clicks, etc...) often drowned out the teacher. It was often difficult to get a seat at the right range to effectively see the slides. The books ended up explaining it better, but people don't learn just by reading. Lecture helps, in my case discussion helps a lot more. Experimentation, hands on is even better.
I have to agree. What's the use of having a class so huge that the professor can't even know all his students, doesn't grade papers(his TAs do that), the student can't necessarily see the screen well or hear the professor.
Questions can't realistically be asked, etc...?
I learned more from reading the book, the slides mostly restated the book. And one of the classes the professor forbid tape recorders* and didn't hand out slides. I have poor vision. It sucked.
*Couldn't exactly hide the mic, I'd have needed a boom.
Not sure why I punched in 1956. I'm normally a better typist than that, I did acknowledge my error.
Whitman was giving off warning bells for decades. There were LOTS of previous signs. Let's check the list:
20/20 hindsight investigation. By that I mean that there are plenty of people who did/had all the 'signs' you list that DON'T go on a shooting spree. Basically, even with all the signs combined, you have too high of a false positive rate for the test to be useful.
There's no way to tell if the addition of guns would have stopped him...
Going by incidents where a defensive party is armed, generally what happens is that either the killer ends up surrendering, is disabled/killed from fire by the defensive shooter(far better than even odds), or ends up in a gunfight with the shooter - which is the opposite of careful and methodical. We're talking emptying an entire magazine into the defensive shooter, because the shooter is a THREAT. It goes from a shooting to a fight. Note: I keep informal track of this stuff, and am only aware of one case of the defensive shooter being shot and killed by the spree killer. In his case - he's still accredited with delaying the shooter long enough for the police to get somebody in position to take the shooter out.
What's with the dates for the Whitman shootings? I assume we're talking about the same incident, but we BOTH got the dates wrong. It happened August 1, 1966(double checks). Maybe we both fat fingerd it? At least, I figure we're talking about the same incident, I'd imagine that there'd be notes about two back to back shootings in the same city with the same count of killed/injured. Reading further - he actually killed 16, the 14 don't count his wife or mother.
The Parallels are actually pretty scary. Whitman also killed before his spree - in Whitman's case, his wife and mother. Both had mental issues - Whitman had a deady brain cancer.
You underestimate the ability of a obsessed amateur over a trained marine
In this case, what I'm saying is that had Whitman attempted to perform his acts the same way as Cho(Virginia Tech), he'd likely have been stopped sooner due to the more ready access to firearms by civilians. Casualties were kept down because Whitman had to utilize cover and tactics that limited his opportunities to kill because he was receiving return fire. Of course, we're hindsight quarterbacking. Whitman and Cho were different in many ways as well. Whitman used his marine training, Cho a method more from movies. One thing to remember that, while a Marine, Whitman wasn't a sniper or designated marksman. Whitman had a malignant brain tumor that was probably affecting his thinking, Cho was, well, nuts.
While there are many things I'd hold a parent responsible for, unfortunately we haven't identified the parenting method that leads to school shootings.
Until we have done so and teach the avoidance measures necessary, I find it premature to hold parents responsible when a child goes off the deep end that far.
Much like straight suicide, often these kids are already receiving professional help; but again sometimes like suicide there's no obvious sign they're going to commit a spree killing before they do so and the 20/20 hindsight investigation happens.
For example, I've long had an arsenal 'under my bed', but despite my profession I've never shot anybody. Yet on the news, obtaining of arms is considered one of the signs. The possession was also considered a risk factor for suicide in one of the anti-suicide classes I attended. My response was 'A gun is a vector, a tool, of suicide, not a risk. You might as well check to see if somebody owns rope, a knife, or has sleeping pills.
I blame the rise of spree killings on a number of factors - first is that we've gone from local reporting to national, even world reporting. How many incidents would have been reported in the 1950s? Consider that school shootings are not even an annual event, and back then we had half the population. Second would be opportunity. It was much rarer to have access to a completely disarmed target area back then. For example, a school shooting DID occur - in 1956, by Charles Whitman. He killed 14, wounded 32. He faced suppressive fire from civilians, forcing him to keep his head down, limiting his opportunities to kill more. How much worse could he have been if he'd attempted that at Virginia Tech, in the year 2007? After all, Whitman was a trained marine. Third would be the possible link to prescribed anti-depressants. Whitman had some sort of brain tumor.
Finally, I'll end with the note that despite our violent movies and violent video games, that most violent offenders don't play video games, and the rate of violent crime in minors has been dropping.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, digging up the landfills is a combined metric, there's lots of recyclable stuff in there of various types and grades. So while rising copper prices alone isn't going to have us digging them up, it'd be a combination of rising oil/plastic and all metal prices, combined with new technology reducing the recovery costs/increasing the value of recovered materials.
Before that I'd expect to see systems going into landfill sites that recycle most of what's comming in right now, such that very few items actually end up in the fill. When trash flows drop for whatever reason, dig up a layer and process that(they should need only a minimal amount of extra equipment for this. Or when prices peak such that it's worth running the system on overtime. Whatever.
One potential roadblock is our current regulations concerning hazardous waste. Part of the problem is that X substances, spread over many tons of garbage, isn't considered hazardous. However, concentrate them as you're removing tons of recyclable materials that would otherwise add to the total, and suddenly you're dealing with hazardous waste and far more complicated disposal methods - sometimes enough to make the removal and sale of the recyclable stuff uneconomic.
Oh well. That's life. People get sick, and sometimes die.
But, due to the wonder that is herd immunity, we can keep that way down for diseases we have vaccines against.
Well, sucks to be her then I guess.
Yes, it does in some ways. However, she's also a Registered Nurse, and apparently the best in her ward at CPR. Do you really want somebody like her to be out sick when you or one of your loved ones to have a heart attack?
I only care about my family and friends. Anyone else I'm not going to worry about.
What if you or your family/friends happens to be one of the ones the vaccine doesn't work for? Sucks to be them, I guess.
What makes iron feasible is an economically justifiable and feasible deposit, a large amount of iron in one place.
See: Oil. Here's the deal. You ever see those quotes about 'known oil reserves'? In the fine print there's a 'At $XX/barrel'. There's only so much oil that costs $20/barrel to extract, there's a lot more if you're willing to spend $40, even more at $80 or even $120. Though at $120 you're getting to the point that artificial synthesis is competitive, which is why we'll leave the hardest to tap oil reserves in the ground. Alternative methods will eventually be cheaper.
Iron, just like copper, is normally recycled. The steel in your car? It'll get recycled. The steel in appliances? Recycled. It's the little things that tend to avoid this. Scrap iron is selling around ten cents a pound at the moment. If, due to demand, prices soar to 20 cents a pound, you'll see a lot more recycling of the smaller items, and more expensive sources of iron will make financial sense, raising supply.
the iron there tends to be rather sparse and massive amounts of other rubbish to be sifted through.
Thus the push for methods that don't require hand sorting, preferably any sorting at all. Besides, if you're after iron you can use an electromagnet to help with the sort.
This also assumes that no sorting was done at the landfill; Besides, if the iron there 'tends to be rather sparse' doesn't that mean it's not getting thrown away?
It would be too resource and energy intensive at a time when we will have an energy shortage.
We don't have any real energy shortages right now. Besides, a number of the recycling techinques that we'd employee when we go dig up the landfills produce fuels out of the organic stuff.
The best way is mandate 100% recycling, or at least store all metal bearing items in a lined water tight facility so it can be recycled later.
Dirty secret: In many cases recycling is more expensive AND more energy intensive than using virgin materials! That's why you don't see many glass bottles anymore - the amount of energy to make a glass bottle eclipses the oil/gas necessary to make a plastic one. The gas needed to heat water to wash and sterilize a glass bottle, even in an energy efficient mass system, is more than what's needed to make a new plastic one.
As for a the storage - a proper landfill already does this.
Besides, if you're talking about overriding a signal, you have to beat the signal strength of the transmitting station.
For 'full power' US terrestrial stations, this can be over 500 kilowatts of power. Basically, even though a plane has a favorable position when it comes to line of sight, it generally doesn't have the power budget to override.
In a situation dire enough for the president to want to transmit a TV broadcast regardless of terrestrial stations, he's going to be better off using the dedicated planes for the purpose.
No matter what, much like Obama when he takes office, the current batch of big 3 CEOs took over their companies when most of the bad decisions, like the selling of past benefits at the expense of future income, for example, already made.
If they'd done things correctly, they wouldn't have the current huge legacy cost problem because they'd have paid the money for retirement benefits into a fund when the workers were working.
Same deal as with Social Security - you're okay as long as the worker pool paying in keeps expanding and your revenue stream stays up.
.The time and expense in acquiring new AF1s are mostly in the customization for long duration missions, survivability, and communications. This plan to replace AF1 circa 2020 is probably a misuse of taxpayer money. The current aircraft should be refitted where necessary including re-engined and flown to 2030 at least.
Somebody mentioned that due to the extra weight the AF1 planes fly with, they suffer more stress. Wing spars only have so much life to them. I read on Wiki that most airlines have sold off their 747-200s to lower tier airlines and agencies. DC-9s are a substantially different plane.
I'm sure somebody has run the numbers and determined that replacement around 2020 makes sense. It includes costs like the upgrades you mention.
If anything as another poster pointed out, the President could probably use a smaller supplement aircraft like a 737 or maybe 787 for visiting less developed nations, and flying into smaller closer in airports to his final destination that can't handle a 747 or A380.
I don't remember the President having to ever travel extra on the ground due to airport restrictions. As you note, the customization is the expensive part; not the plane. So what use is going for a smaller plane? Besides publicity, what's the use of going with a smaller plane if the presidential caravan normally takes three planes anyways? You'd just be flying even more planes.
I agree about the recyclability of most large appliances. For that matter, a HUGE portion of our waste stream is recyclable through known methods. It's just not economical at this time. Exasperated by how tiny cell phones are in the scale of things.
We've improved our technology quite a bit. At some point it'll make economic sense to recycle them. Meanwhile, they're perfectly fine sitting in a properly designed landfill.
As for the chargers. ISO, law, something like that. China passed one.
Iron and copper could be depleted by the end of the century.
A landfill isn't a blackhole. That's why I mentioned digging it out of the landfill eventually. Besides, as Freefrag mentioned, we're unlikely to run out of iron, while copper is already mostly recycled.
What's actually happening is that as the rest of the world industrializes, they want copper for their infrastructure and devices, so the total tons of copper needed is increasing substantially.
Copper@$1.50/pound might not make it economical to recycle some of the small stuff, but at $3/pound it makes sense, and at $4.50 we're digging it out of the landfills.
As for computers, while the components are expensive, ultimately are negligible in respect to their power. They've also enabled far more effective usage of resources.
I'd worry more about oil than our mineral resources. Even if we end up digging up our landfills for various metals, at least they can be recycled. Once oil's burned, well, you're basically starting from scratch to make more oil.
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One thing that's not mentioned is that it's likely they live in an area with progressive electricity costs - One figure I saw was 11.4 cents per kwh for their first kwh, 35.5 for their last. Ouch...
Thus, 'undersizing' their system(for now), makes sense - they eliminate the highest cost bracket except for Dec-Jan when the panels are generating the least amount of power, and have insignificant bills in the summer when the panels are most productive. Each additional watt he installed would have cost just about the same as the previous one, but there's points where each resulting kwh doesn't give him the same return. Given the various information available, it sounds like he sized it right at a sweet spot. He'd be able to get a good idea of electricty usage from historical bills, there's charts for how much solar power to expect in different locations and at what times of the year, etc...
Don't forget that it's at least somewhat of a test system - he's reviewing them. Hmm.... He's doing a review, on a professional site he's a paid reviewer for... Maybe the panels are doubly tax-deductable! ;)
My conclusion is that this kind of investment is close to making sense, but not close enough.
Given the level of rebates; I'm not surprised. If it made easy sense, everybody would be jumping on the solar panel bandwagon and the governments providing the rebates couldn't keep up, thus the rebates would drop until it no longer made sense for most people again.
If it ever makes sense even without rebates (cheap, high efficiency panels, perhaps?), then installing them would be about as standard as toilets.
I have to disagree somewhat with this, or at least clarify.
The Inverter is the most expensive single component in most installations, but the total cost of the panels generally exceed it very quickly.
3.3kw Inverter, 240V, $2,250
Looking at their solar panels: Call it $5/watt
While a single panel costs $1,100, you can put 16-17 of them on the inverter. You could go with a substantially cheaper inverter if you're only going to have 3 panels in the system.
Note on economy - If you live in a southern state with high electricity costs and substantial solar install rebates, it can make sense. In my northern climate, minimal rebate, low electricity cost state, it doesn't. I'd be better off with wind.
i mean, if someone is promoting road safety and encouraging people to wear seatbelts while discouraging drunk driving, even if they personally don't wear seatbelts and drive under the influence, i wouldn't criticize them for actually promoting safe habits--nor would i stop wearing seatbelts just to spite them.
I'd still critize them for not taking their own advice and call them a hypocrite. Though I'll still keep wearing my seatbelt. ;)
Of course, I do that already - whenever a police chief/head of the anti-DUI task force/legislater who introduced tough new anti-dui laws gets popped for DUI.
mostly because it's easier to criticize a spokesperson than to refute his arguments logically.
My problem with a lot of his proposals is that they either don't scale well enough or are still too expensive to be mainstream, and they don't yet have a viable theory to make it economical in most areas. IE they still belong in the lab and special purposes.
If Gore is going to champion carbon neutral living, he should lead the way. Above and beyond and all that. Not get beat by 'oil baron' Bush's house.
They're paying for California electricity. Since it's mostly powered by hopes and dreams(and out of state coal plants), and haven't built a signifcant new plant in decades, they pay through the nose.
Me, I pay ~10 cents a kwh up to a thousand. After than it's 8 cents. Haven't busted the higher caps ever. I could get it even cheaper if I signed up for a load management system where stuff like my water heater shuts off when demand peaks.
Why not just come out and admit that you're just experiencing a severe case of class envy and be done with it? It's clear you have no rational basis for your argument, so it's obviously an emotional basis rooted in jealousy of anyone who has more than you.
My objection to Al Gore is that I see him as being hypocritical. Here he is advocating we do all these things; these expensive things, with questionable paybacks, to stop global warming. Yet he doesn't do this things himself.
While he now owns a hybrid; I've read he doesn't normally drive it, instead he drives a huge gas guzzeling SUV(or has his chauffeur do it). His home lacked all the stuff we were supposed to install, etc...
Of course, I said the same thing when I heard about Kennedy and his opposition to an off-shore wind farm(because he sails in the area).
We need solutions, and opposing one of the better ones to favor your view, or championing a cause of sustainability while not leading the way irks me.
How dare he use a ton of electricity!
Notice that we aren't complaining about the energy usage of Bill Gates's house. That's because Bill hasn't made quite the campaign on carbon control and global warming. While flying around to summits in his private plane.
You could argue that his energy bills should be lower, after all, he's gone much of the time.
Basically, Al Gore is rich enough to actually reduce his footprint; but didn't until people made an issue of it. Even then, I remember reading that after energy saving renovations his electricity bill went up compared to the year before.
He's asking us to make sacrifices; shouldn't he lead the way?
Well, yeah, a smaller class doesn't fix a bad teacher. Still, I'd also have to question about the professor with the huge class - did he structure it so that attendance was necessary to stroke his ego or did he actually teach during it?
Hmm.. you claim to respect rights, but imply that those that don't wish to be vaccinated be forced to live somewhere else.
I have a 'right' to not be attacked by you. Whether by weapon or disease. You don't have the right to be a carrier, when it's so easy to prevent.
I'm inclined to believe that the other nurses are just as capable
When she's available, she's generally the one to do it. When she's not somebody else does. Try to keep up.
as if the hospital only has doctors fresh out of med school. Please. Also, feel free to tell a cardiac surgeon they only have knowledge, but no skill. I have a feeling they will disagree.
I exaggerated. Still, my aunt's been around for longer than most of the doctors in her ward. And you specified doctor, not surgeon. Besides, I never stated that doctor's don't have skills, I said that they're employed on the basis of their knowledge. Give a doctor and a nurse ten years experience and guess which one will have more experience inserting needles.
I dislike the notion that anyone be forced to be vaccinated, especially when there is a risk involved with getting the vaccine in the first place.
Given that I specified 'without a good reason', what risk? Vaccines are extremely safe except for a few segments of society. In order to protect them, we want to vaccinate as many of the rest as we can.
Banning transfats is another such example.
Transfats don't jump from carrier to carrier. They aren't contageous. Makes a big difference.
You seem to think people are nothing more than cattle.
Not me, the diseases act like we are. Discounting the whole different germs thing.
Fortunately, the rest of us realize that people have rights, and that includes the right to refuse any injection or medical procedure.
Fine and dandy, enjoy the non-vaccination without a good reason colony.
you've qualified what it means to be "the best in her ward?"
Nope, why I used the word 'apparently'. I say that on the basis of OTHER nurses and doctor's words. That and she's the first one called for when the need crops up.
And personally, if I'm having a heart attack, I'd much prefer a doctor over a RN.
Really? You'd prefer a doctor fresh out of med school over a RN who's done CPR hundreds of times? Doctors are employed based on their knowledge; Nurses are more skill oriented.
Yet I'm not about to go out and force every other person to have the vaccine.
My grandfather had polio. I've studied the issue. We're far better off having people vaccinated than unvaccinated. Without the pressure to become vaccinated, we wouldn't have eliminated smallpox from the wild and come close with polio.
There are good reasons why schools require vaccinations for students to attend.
still think constant monitoring is a bad thing. Ya know, a huge violation of rights?
And you're comparing a shot, cup, or mist up against a police state.
It's more cost efficient. It saves money.
I'm reminded of a saying I once heard: What's the most expensive army? One that loses.
Basically, what I'm saying is that I didn't learn in that class. Oh, I eventually learned the subject material, but I ended up doing it my self. I paid hundreds of dollars for a class that, on average, taught me nothing due to it's presentation.
Why don't all students have their own personal tutor
Many end up getting one. One they might not of had to get if the class was 30 instead of 130.
Because teachers cost money, rooms cost money, equipment cost money.
Those huge auditorium sized classrooms cost amazing amounts, and require expensive equipment to try to make up for the class size.
If you can get 150 students through with one professor, rather than one professor per 30, well you've just saved 4 salaries.
And if it has double the fail rate as a smaller class, how much is that saving the student?
I, however, wasn't lucky enough to get a professor with eidetic memory. What I got was a professor who, if I was lucky, realized he had a class.
There are good teachers, there are bad teachers. I generally posit average. You need a very excellent teacher to effectively teach a class size over a hundred. There are reasons states pass restrictions on class sizes in primary education.
What I discovered was that attending lecture in such a huge class was effectively useless for me. The sheer number of noises(coughs, chair creaks, whispering, pen clicks, etc...) often drowned out the teacher. It was often difficult to get a seat at the right range to effectively see the slides. The books ended up explaining it better, but people don't learn just by reading. Lecture helps, in my case discussion helps a lot more. Experimentation, hands on is even better.
I have to agree. What's the use of having a class so huge that the professor can't even know all his students, doesn't grade papers(his TAs do that), the student can't necessarily see the screen well or hear the professor.
Questions can't realistically be asked, etc...?
I learned more from reading the book, the slides mostly restated the book. And one of the classes the professor forbid tape recorders* and didn't hand out slides. I have poor vision. It sucked.
*Couldn't exactly hide the mic, I'd have needed a boom.
I realize I screwed it up
Not sure why I punched in 1956. I'm normally a better typist than that, I did acknowledge my error.
Whitman was giving off warning bells for decades. There were LOTS of previous signs. Let's check the list:
20/20 hindsight investigation. By that I mean that there are plenty of people who did/had all the 'signs' you list that DON'T go on a shooting spree. Basically, even with all the signs combined, you have too high of a false positive rate for the test to be useful.
There's no way to tell if the addition of guns would have stopped him...
Going by incidents where a defensive party is armed, generally what happens is that either the killer ends up surrendering, is disabled/killed from fire by the defensive shooter(far better than even odds), or ends up in a gunfight with the shooter - which is the opposite of careful and methodical. We're talking emptying an entire magazine into the defensive shooter, because the shooter is a THREAT. It goes from a shooting to a fight. Note: I keep informal track of this stuff, and am only aware of one case of the defensive shooter being shot and killed by the spree killer. In his case - he's still accredited with delaying the shooter long enough for the police to get somebody in position to take the shooter out.
Austin Texas 1965 : 14 killed 32 wounded - with armed civilians
What's with the dates for the Whitman shootings? I assume we're talking about the same incident, but we BOTH got the dates wrong. It happened August 1, 1966(double checks). Maybe we both fat fingerd it? At least, I figure we're talking about the same incident, I'd imagine that there'd be notes about two back to back shootings in the same city with the same count of killed/injured. Reading further - he actually killed 16, the 14 don't count his wife or mother.
The Parallels are actually pretty scary. Whitman also killed before his spree - in Whitman's case, his wife and mother. Both had mental issues - Whitman had a deady brain cancer.
You underestimate the ability of a obsessed amateur over a trained marine
In this case, what I'm saying is that had Whitman attempted to perform his acts the same way as Cho(Virginia Tech), he'd likely have been stopped sooner due to the more ready access to firearms by civilians. Casualties were kept down because Whitman had to utilize cover and tactics that limited his opportunities to kill because he was receiving return fire. Of course, we're hindsight quarterbacking. Whitman and Cho were different in many ways as well. Whitman used his marine training, Cho a method more from movies. One thing to remember that, while a Marine, Whitman wasn't a sniper or designated marksman. Whitman had a malignant brain tumor that was probably affecting his thinking, Cho was, well, nuts.
While there are many things I'd hold a parent responsible for, unfortunately we haven't identified the parenting method that leads to school shootings.
Until we have done so and teach the avoidance measures necessary, I find it premature to hold parents responsible when a child goes off the deep end that far.
Much like straight suicide, often these kids are already receiving professional help; but again sometimes like suicide there's no obvious sign they're going to commit a spree killing before they do so and the 20/20 hindsight investigation happens.
For example, I've long had an arsenal 'under my bed', but despite my profession I've never shot anybody. Yet on the news, obtaining of arms is considered one of the signs. The possession was also considered a risk factor for suicide in one of the anti-suicide classes I attended. My response was 'A gun is a vector, a tool, of suicide, not a risk. You might as well check to see if somebody owns rope, a knife, or has sleeping pills.
I blame the rise of spree killings on a number of factors - first is that we've gone from local reporting to national, even world reporting. How many incidents would have been reported in the 1950s? Consider that school shootings are not even an annual event, and back then we had half the population. Second would be opportunity. It was much rarer to have access to a completely disarmed target area back then. For example, a school shooting DID occur - in 1956, by Charles Whitman. He killed 14, wounded 32. He faced suppressive fire from civilians, forcing him to keep his head down, limiting his opportunities to kill more. How much worse could he have been if he'd attempted that at Virginia Tech, in the year 2007? After all, Whitman was a trained marine. Third would be the possible link to prescribed anti-depressants. Whitman had some sort of brain tumor.
Finally, I'll end with the note that despite our violent movies and violent video games, that most violent offenders don't play video games, and the rate of violent crime in minors has been dropping.
Oh, and I forgot to mention, digging up the landfills is a combined metric, there's lots of recyclable stuff in there of various types and grades. So while rising copper prices alone isn't going to have us digging them up, it'd be a combination of rising oil/plastic and all metal prices, combined with new technology reducing the recovery costs/increasing the value of recovered materials.
Before that I'd expect to see systems going into landfill sites that recycle most of what's comming in right now, such that very few items actually end up in the fill. When trash flows drop for whatever reason, dig up a layer and process that(they should need only a minimal amount of extra equipment for this. Or when prices peak such that it's worth running the system on overtime. Whatever.
One potential roadblock is our current regulations concerning hazardous waste. Part of the problem is that X substances, spread over many tons of garbage, isn't considered hazardous. However, concentrate them as you're removing tons of recyclable materials that would otherwise add to the total, and suddenly you're dealing with hazardous waste and far more complicated disposal methods - sometimes enough to make the removal and sale of the recyclable stuff uneconomic.
Oh well. That's life. People get sick, and sometimes die.
But, due to the wonder that is herd immunity, we can keep that way down for diseases we have vaccines against.
Well, sucks to be her then I guess.
Yes, it does in some ways. However, she's also a Registered Nurse, and apparently the best in her ward at CPR. Do you really want somebody like her to be out sick when you or one of your loved ones to have a heart attack?
I only care about my family and friends. Anyone else I'm not going to worry about.
What if you or your family/friends happens to be one of the ones the vaccine doesn't work for? Sucks to be them, I guess.
What makes iron feasible is an economically justifiable and feasible deposit, a large amount of iron in one place.
See: Oil. Here's the deal. You ever see those quotes about 'known oil reserves'? In the fine print there's a 'At $XX/barrel'. There's only so much oil that costs $20/barrel to extract, there's a lot more if you're willing to spend $40, even more at $80 or even $120. Though at $120 you're getting to the point that artificial synthesis is competitive, which is why we'll leave the hardest to tap oil reserves in the ground. Alternative methods will eventually be cheaper.
Iron, just like copper, is normally recycled. The steel in your car? It'll get recycled. The steel in appliances? Recycled. It's the little things that tend to avoid this. Scrap iron is selling around ten cents a pound at the moment. If, due to demand, prices soar to 20 cents a pound, you'll see a lot more recycling of the smaller items, and more expensive sources of iron will make financial sense, raising supply.
the iron there tends to be rather sparse and massive amounts of other rubbish to be sifted through.
Thus the push for methods that don't require hand sorting, preferably any sorting at all. Besides, if you're after iron you can use an electromagnet to help with the sort.
This also assumes that no sorting was done at the landfill; Besides, if the iron there 'tends to be rather sparse' doesn't that mean it's not getting thrown away?
It would be too resource and energy intensive at a time when we will have an energy shortage.
We don't have any real energy shortages right now. Besides, a number of the recycling techinques that we'd employee when we go dig up the landfills produce fuels out of the organic stuff.
The best way is mandate 100% recycling, or at least store all metal bearing items in a lined water tight facility so it can be recycled later.
Dirty secret: In many cases recycling is more expensive AND more energy intensive than using virgin materials! That's why you don't see many glass bottles anymore - the amount of energy to make a glass bottle eclipses the oil/gas necessary to make a plastic one. The gas needed to heat water to wash and sterilize a glass bottle, even in an energy efficient mass system, is more than what's needed to make a new plastic one.
As for a the storage - a proper landfill already does this.
Yes, but we're talking about the top 3 executives of three different companies. Not 100% of senior leadership for any one of them.
We lump them together so much today it's sometimes difficult to remember that GM, Ford, and Chrysler are different companies.
There's dedicated AF planes for that.
Besides, if you're talking about overriding a signal, you have to beat the signal strength of the transmitting station.
For 'full power' US terrestrial stations, this can be over 500 kilowatts of power. Basically, even though a plane has a favorable position when it comes to line of sight, it generally doesn't have the power budget to override.
In a situation dire enough for the president to want to transmit a TV broadcast regardless of terrestrial stations, he's going to be better off using the dedicated planes for the purpose.
I'll point to another of my posts for this one.
No matter what, much like Obama when he takes office, the current batch of big 3 CEOs took over their companies when most of the bad decisions, like the selling of past benefits at the expense of future income, for example, already made.
If they'd done things correctly, they wouldn't have the current huge legacy cost problem because they'd have paid the money for retirement benefits into a fund when the workers were working.
Same deal as with Social Security - you're okay as long as the worker pool paying in keeps expanding and your revenue stream stays up.
.The time and expense in acquiring new AF1s are mostly in the customization for long duration missions, survivability, and communications. This plan to replace AF1 circa 2020 is probably a misuse of taxpayer money. The current aircraft should be refitted where necessary including re-engined and flown to 2030 at least.
Somebody mentioned that due to the extra weight the AF1 planes fly with, they suffer more stress. Wing spars only have so much life to them. I read on Wiki that most airlines have sold off their 747-200s to lower tier airlines and agencies. DC-9s are a substantially different plane.
I'm sure somebody has run the numbers and determined that replacement around 2020 makes sense. It includes costs like the upgrades you mention.
If anything as another poster pointed out, the President could probably use a smaller supplement aircraft like a 737 or maybe 787 for visiting less developed nations, and flying into smaller closer in airports to his final destination that can't handle a 747 or A380.
I don't remember the President having to ever travel extra on the ground due to airport restrictions. As you note, the customization is the expensive part; not the plane. So what use is going for a smaller plane? Besides publicity, what's the use of going with a smaller plane if the presidential caravan normally takes three planes anyways? You'd just be flying even more planes.
I agree about the recyclability of most large appliances. For that matter, a HUGE portion of our waste stream is recyclable through known methods. It's just not economical at this time. Exasperated by how tiny cell phones are in the scale of things.
We've improved our technology quite a bit. At some point it'll make economic sense to recycle them. Meanwhile, they're perfectly fine sitting in a properly designed landfill.
As for the chargers. ISO, law, something like that. China passed one.
Iron and copper could be depleted by the end of the century.
A landfill isn't a blackhole. That's why I mentioned digging it out of the landfill eventually. Besides, as Freefrag mentioned, we're unlikely to run out of iron, while copper is already mostly recycled.
What's actually happening is that as the rest of the world industrializes, they want copper for their infrastructure and devices, so the total tons of copper needed is increasing substantially.
Copper@$1.50/pound might not make it economical to recycle some of the small stuff, but at $3/pound it makes sense, and at $4.50 we're digging it out of the landfills.
As for computers, while the components are expensive, ultimately are negligible in respect to their power. They've also enabled far more effective usage of resources.
I'd worry more about oil than our mineral resources. Even if we end up digging up our landfills for various metals, at least they can be recycled. Once oil's burned, well, you're basically starting from scratch to make more oil.