Remove the bank of switches, put in a mechanical timer. The prisoner is executed, not by any one 'person', but by the failure of a dozen people to flip the safety switch or resetting the timer.
Yeah, I may support the death penalty in limited cases*, just in a 'it can always get worse' deterrent. But even I bang my head when I hear somebody spouting that it wouldn't hurt enough.
My thought is that you're putting down a 'mad dog' at that point. There's no real point to making them suffer.
Plus, Nitrogen asphixiation: 1. Requires no drugs from countries that might refuse to export them to us if we use them for executions. 2. Resources are readily available from any industrial gas supplier, including welding shops. 3. Requires no trained medical staff 4. Does NOT require tying the prisoner down if you use a chamber 5. Is really, really hard to screw up.
*My general rule is '3 or more, or deliberate torture for one'
I've bought a couple of LED replacement fixtures for less than the cost of putting LED 'bulbs' into the old ones, rated for the same amount of light even.
I agree, design the fixture for the type of light, and consider replacing the whole fixture. By the time the thing dies, I might be tired of looking at that design anyways.
I'll note that due to the extra space of having the light come from a fixture rather than a 'bulb', the concerns about heat-sinking are generally eliminated.
One thing I did do, however, was install a whole-house surge suppressor. It 'should' protect my lights and everything else from any dirty power. The computer still has it's dedicated one.
In a recent corruption case (to which you can disagree as to the seriousness, I think it is very serious but definitely not as serious as terrorism),
Hmm... I'm going to go with 'less serious than those I really consider terrorists', but 'more serious than a teenager scrawling a bomb threat on a bathroom wall'.
Given that I can only get the general idea from the google translation, I can't really say further because I don't know how wide reaching it is. If the Dutch law enforcement really likes their wire taps and are abusing them, then yes, they need to draw back. It's a constant fight between people's freedoms and law enforcement's need to enforce the law, but I think that they shouldn't get everything they want simply to make their jobs 'easier'.
The biggest problem with the mining of uranium is the amount of energy required to extract the ore from the rock...
Not much of a problem then. It takes more energy to mine a kwh worth of coal than it does to mine and refine a kwh worth of Uranium.
Again this becomes an issue of how much energy goes into getting the uranium out of the seawater, you would probably look to extracting uranium from coal station smoke stacks or from the fly ash before turning to seawater
??? The energy that goes into extracting the Uranium from seawater is factored into it's cost. We know it would take X kWh to get 1 Kg of it.
Trick is, while you get 8 kWh worth of heat* per kg of coal, you get 24M kWh from 1 kg of Uranium.
I'm not disputing recovering Uranium and other nuclear materials from smoke stacks and ash deposits before we start filtering seawater, heck, building breeder reactors probably** makes more sense by that point, but the point is that it can be done, and yes, it'd be energy positive.
even more energy because you can't demolish it like any normal building.
24M kWh per kg of Uranium, and a reactor will go through tons and tons of the stuff through it's lifetime.... By the way, there's lots of issues currently with coal ash. Because we produce billions of tons of it a year. Coal power plants often end up being superfund sites due to contamination by trace amounts(in the coal) of lead, mercury, and other nasty elements.
Also, decommissioned after 50 years? We're looking at operating much of the current plants for 80+, why would we only be able to operate(at least most) of their replacements for only 50?
Again, nuclear power is so dense that we could settle on having a nuclear power plant site eternally(well, next 10k years or so) having 1 reactor set in operation, 1 reactor set 'decommissioned' waiting for the radioactivity to die down before being demolished, and 1 set being demolished/rebuilt to replace the current operators.
*Not electricity, multiply by around.3-.5 to get electricity. **Nothing in life is sure...
at a 10% growth rate per annum (probably a bit big, but gets the point across)
You're assuming that the exponential growth will hold true for extended periods. Meanwhile, in developed countries energy use per person is dropping, as has breeding/replacement for population growth.
Once China/India and such catch up with the 'developed world', we'll see peak energy usage.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Because it'll get us off coal(for the most part, some use for making steel and such will still exist), saving hundreds of thousands of lives a year while we 'work out' how to harness the sun or something else.
I note you've not answered my accusation that we don't know if fission is a power source due to not knowing the costs of decommissioning.
Somehow didn't see that. So my 'not answering' wasn't dodging the accusation, it was a reading error on my part. To wit, I wrote the part about the military, went back up, and started reading after the line about decommissioning. I'll answer now.
We know fission is a power source because, during it's lifetime, the amount of power generated by nuclear power stations is quite enormous. If you took the energy generated by a nuclear power plant and compressed it into, say, a day, you would melt and/or vaporize the whole plant. I'm talking lava here.
You're also wrong on no plant ever having been 'successfully' fully decommissioned. There are 11 sites in the USA alone. Big Rock Point, Fort St. Vrain, Haddam Neck, Maine Yankee, Pathfinder, Rancho Seco, Saxton, Shippingport, Shoreham, Trojan, and Yankee Rowe.
Lithium isn't 'the most common' of materials, but it's nearly everywhere, with an estimated 230 Billion tons dissolved in seawater alone...
If we're mining seawater for uranium and thorium for nuclear reactors, we might as well pull the lithium out as well.
Yes, especially considering that in my experience, I'd say the mean time before the state prosecutor WOULD be using this law to 'go after bike theft' is about 5 years*, it's necessary.
I mean, here in the USA they swore up and down that the new terrorism laws would only be used against 'real terrorists'. Apparently today, that includes teenagers who scrawl a 'bomb threat' onto a partition of their school's bathroom.
*Keep in mind that this means that half the time they'd be exploiting it in LESS than five.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
1. The military hardly uses plutonium. Enriched Uranium was eventually where it's at 2. We haven't seen lots of exploration for new uranium sources because we've been running off the military stockpiles for the last 20 or so years. It's depressed the market enough that expanding mining wasn't worth it. That source is coming to an end, ergo more mining operations are starting up. 3. Even without expansion of exploration like we've seen with oil/gas, we have enough Uranium within about double the current price to last several hundred years. 4. Before price increases would make the fuel costs for a nuclear plant 'significant', IE something you'd actually see in your electricity bill, we'd be able to filter the stuff out of sea water profitably. 5. Breeder reactors allow much more complete burn up, which means that about 80-90% of all the 'waste' we currently have sitting around can be turned into new fuel.
Fusion: I honestly think it ends up being an issue of scaling. 'Double' the dimensions of your fusion chamber and you end up using 8 times the resources, but get 16 times the power. I'm afraid that by the time we get it figured out, it'll turn out that the *smallest* practical plant is something like 20GW, and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days,
Now this I don't disagree with. They were talking about how on the radio battery prices have come down so much that using them for grid storage is actually starting to make sense.
Solar wise, they need to get the panels a couple percent more efficient and a couple percent cheaper before they make enough sense for me to bolt them to my house, but then I'm practically within shouting distance of the arctic circle. I seriously looked at them last summer.
That being said, I'm honestly trying to get my parents(in Florida) to invest in them, but the government is interfering there. Heck, I think solar car ports covering parking lots would be nifty. Solar panels(most of them) are structural enough that if you don't need a tight seal they can act as a shade/roof without an underlying layer.
Your second point reminds me of the marijuana tax stamps that are still law in 20 or so states. You incriminate yourself just by asking to buy the stamp in the first place.
Supreme court tossed this out. Besides, near as anybody can tell, all the tax stamps sold have been to stamp collectors and people looking for curiosity items. So not much good.
And engraving 1,2,3,4,5 into ones rifles is surely no problem with this mill.
Even if it can't, or is too much a pain to do it with, You can get an electric engraver and freehand it for about $8. Note, you have to put a maker's mark on there as well if you're going to sell it.
Look up 'zip guns'. The ability to home produce a firearm has always been there. A 3D printer or CNC mill just makes it fractionally easier while also making it approximately an OOM more expensive.
Training dogs is expensive, especially if you're not sure of the results. Will a dog be able to sniff for the biomarkers for cancer? There's anecdotal evidence prior that maybe they could (untrained dogs have been shown to detect cancers in their owners).
Yeah, 'difficult' to me encompasses 'expensive', but I should have probably specified this more. Step 1 to training a dog to sniff cancer is... figuring out how to train a dog to sniff cancer.;)
We can get a start with looking at how we train dogs to sniff drugs, explosives, and cadavers, but that's just a start. Like I said, they might of started with 10 dogs, and out of the 10, only Frankie is statistically good enough for further testing. After that might be training another set of 10 dogs, figuring out if males or females are better, etc...
Regardless of breed, breeding frankie with any other cancer-sniffing dogs might give you some puppies(even/especially if they're mutts), that are better disposed to the activity.
Or they could figure out what Frankie is sniffing for and design a more straightforward chemical test for it. Something along the lines of 'X is this high over average, Y this low, and Z is present'.
Given that my previous work did drug testing(I called it 'golden flow'), I read up some on it. Turns out they normally use a 'cheap' test that actually has a pretty high false-positive rate. There's quite a few things you could eat or ingest that aren't drugs that would set it off.
Of course, they knew this, so out came the more specific, but also more expensive test. Then, if you still popped positive, then they'd retest, and if you still came up positive, then you were in trouble.
Same deal with cancer. Different people are different, genetics, environment, lifestyle. Cancers are different as well. After all, most of them are from independent mutations. So you look for markers that tend to be present when the cancer is present, but in many cases 'tend' is just that.
Much like how the rare person can have the flu and not develop a fever from it.
Most petty criminals are idiots. They commit high-stakes crimes for petty rewards.
As for the AC, I'm not saying that the camera can't be defeated. I'm saying that it adds 'expenses', IE makes committing a successful burglary more difficult/less rewarding. You have to remember to bring the masks. You have to make sure they fit. Rubber masks tend to be hot, restrict vision, and collect sweat. A T-shirt over the head may not defeat modern facial recognition. Covering your license plates is a cop magnet during the crime. Wearing cheap obvious masks tends to attract attention, while an expensive good one that looks like a real person other than you, at least at moderate distances, tends to be expensive enough that you don't want to dispose of it after 'every' job. Matter of fact, if you wear a mask enough, I'm sure they can pull DNA evidence off it today.
Currently burglars count on either not being caught on camera, or there being so many petty criminals that the police can't match their face with the camera footage.
I'm just saying, if you have 50 year droughts, with rainy 'seasons' only lasting a couple years, then you should probably stop considering the 'majority' rain conditions as 'drought conditions' and just accept that they are the norm, and you get occasionally lucky with a couple years of rain every so often.
Why don't they use 10 dogs and run the sample by each?
Because research funding is limited, and it's difficult to train the proper behavior. They might of tried training 10 dogs, and only Frankie gave good results.
As for missed diagnoses or false positive, you're expecting the tests to be independent(statistics term, means each dog has the same chance to be right/wrong no matter what the other dogs are). They're probably not.
For example, it might be that Frankie is sniffing for a specific set of chemical markers that just aren't present when he ends up with a false negative. The markers might not be strong enough, they might be there tomorrow, there might be some bit of diet that brings it out. Without further research, we just don't know.
So you could have a raging tumor and the dog's won't trigger on it because, for whatever reason, your cancer doesn't give out the necessary 'smell'.
Now, yes, 3-5 dogs 'cooperating' can help moderate other factors, but you still have to be careful.
That said, it's a short term fix. As burglars become more aware of the presence of cameras, they'll start wearing a mask just like folk robbing stores and banks where CCTV is expected already do. Once outdoor cameras become more prevalent, they won't use your driveway to park.
Both increase the 'costs' of burglary though. A mask is generally hot, a pain in the but, and outside the home signals that you're up to no good. Having to park elsewhere increases the distance you have to carry your loot, not necessarily a big deal for jewelry, but if you're trying to steal big screen TVs and other heavy or bulky goods, decreases your haul capability significantly. Plus, well, hauling stuff a longer ways increases the chances of the neighbors calling you in. You look less like a moving/delivery company.
Increased expense, lower haul, should reduce the amount of robbery,
(Note, I like playing opposing force in exercises)
IE if gasoline is high enough, long enough, lots of people buy fuel efficient vehicles. They don't instantly dispose of them just because oil(and gasoline) prices subsequently drop.
If you 'suddenly' increase the price of water for one year, the farmers will grumble and pay for it. Some will go out of business, but that happens whenever you increase the price of something, or even don't decrease it fast enough. Some farmers just aren't good businessmen.
If you go, okay, now it's $1 per 100k liters(1/2 the price British Columbia recently started charging), while telling them that the price is going to double each year for the next 10 years, they'll start adjusting how they do business.
We know that there are wasteful watering methods that lose over half the water used to evaporation before it hits the plants. We also know there are systems where the only water lost is pretty much confined to the food products you take out of the specialized recycling greenhouses.
The trick is to get the farmers to use a sustainable amount of water. Even just burying seep lines can drop usage by over 75% over daytime spray irrigation.
Except that fines for DUI offenses are so expensive to collect that it runs into the broken window problem - on average you'd be better off just paying the extra mill on your property taxes than it is dealing with the negative effects of DUI convictions, even if you yourself do not drive drunk.
That's without considering that 'revenue generators' will eventually have them busting you for even minor stuff for exceedingly inappropriate amounts of money when/if your time comes up.
Hell, the increased insurance premiums alone probably cost you more.
3 years is still term insurance. New cars are often under full warranty for over 3 years, so they can roll in "full coverage" insurance for the price of liability, and market it as a savings. They might be getting a better profit margin on that insurance than the insurance company!;)
Which is why I said 'out of whack'. The car makers have realized that young drivers, at least in cheap cars, are less of a risk than what the insurance companies think.
Ergo, the car companies can reduce the total cost of ownership of said cheap new automobile down to less than the cost of a used car + loan + insurance.
Yes, it's still 'term insurance'. But my point is that it's entirely possible for the car companies to build the liability into the cost of a self driving car, especially if the computer is less dangerous than the average driver, much less less dangerous than a new driver.
The way the law is written, it is fully legal to create your own lower receiver and convert it to a fully functional weapon without registration as long as it is for your own personal use. It can never be given away nor sold.
Actually, it can. Beware of state rules, it has to have a maker's mark and serial #, and you definitely can't be 'in the business' without a FFL, But if you make a firearm, the decide to sell it(and it's the only one you sell) in a used condition 4 years later, having fed 1k rounds through it, then you're good to go. Selling a non-used individually manufactured firearm is an indication that you 'might' be in the business, so don't do that. Try to not make a profit on your hobby. Definitely don't make a business so you can deduct your tools & supplies.
But I still recommend on reading up on the rules first.
You've been able to get '80%' finished receivers for decades that didn't need much more than a drill press to finish. This does lower the bar, but not by much.
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Remove the bank of switches, put in a mechanical timer. The prisoner is executed, not by any one 'person', but by the failure of a dozen people to flip the safety switch or resetting the timer.
Yeah, I may support the death penalty in limited cases*, just in a 'it can always get worse' deterrent. But even I bang my head when I hear somebody spouting that it wouldn't hurt enough.
My thought is that you're putting down a 'mad dog' at that point. There's no real point to making them suffer.
Plus, Nitrogen asphixiation:
1. Requires no drugs from countries that might refuse to export them to us if we use them for executions.
2. Resources are readily available from any industrial gas supplier, including welding shops.
3. Requires no trained medical staff
4. Does NOT require tying the prisoner down if you use a chamber
5. Is really, really hard to screw up.
*My general rule is '3 or more, or deliberate torture for one'
I've bought a couple of LED replacement fixtures for less than the cost of putting LED 'bulbs' into the old ones, rated for the same amount of light even.
I agree, design the fixture for the type of light, and consider replacing the whole fixture. By the time the thing dies, I might be tired of looking at that design anyways.
I'll note that due to the extra space of having the light come from a fixture rather than a 'bulb', the concerns about heat-sinking are generally eliminated.
One thing I did do, however, was install a whole-house surge suppressor. It 'should' protect my lights and everything else from any dirty power. The computer still has it's dedicated one.
In a recent corruption case (to which you can disagree as to the seriousness, I think it is very serious but definitely not as serious as terrorism),
Hmm... I'm going to go with 'less serious than those I really consider terrorists', but 'more serious than a teenager scrawling a bomb threat on a bathroom wall'.
Given that I can only get the general idea from the google translation, I can't really say further because I don't know how wide reaching it is. If the Dutch law enforcement really likes their wire taps and are abusing them, then yes, they need to draw back. It's a constant fight between people's freedoms and law enforcement's need to enforce the law, but I think that they shouldn't get everything they want simply to make their jobs 'easier'.
Any form of your 5th point would use plutonium.
So? Breeder reactors MAKE plutonium.
The biggest problem with the mining of uranium is the amount of energy required to extract the ore from the rock...
Not much of a problem then. It takes more energy to mine a kwh worth of coal than it does to mine and refine a kwh worth of Uranium.
Again this becomes an issue of how much energy goes into getting the uranium out of the seawater, you would probably look to extracting uranium from coal station smoke stacks or from the fly ash before turning to seawater
??? The energy that goes into extracting the Uranium from seawater is factored into it's cost. We know it would take X kWh to get 1 Kg of it.
Trick is, while you get 8 kWh worth of heat* per kg of coal, you get 24M kWh from 1 kg of Uranium.
I'm not disputing recovering Uranium and other nuclear materials from smoke stacks and ash deposits before we start filtering seawater, heck, building breeder reactors probably** makes more sense by that point, but the point is that it can be done, and yes, it'd be energy positive.
even more energy because you can't demolish it like any normal building.
24M kWh per kg of Uranium, and a reactor will go through tons and tons of the stuff through it's lifetime.... By the way, there's lots of issues currently with coal ash. Because we produce billions of tons of it a year. Coal power plants often end up being superfund sites due to contamination by trace amounts(in the coal) of lead, mercury, and other nasty elements.
Also, decommissioned after 50 years? We're looking at operating much of the current plants for 80+, why would we only be able to operate(at least most) of their replacements for only 50?
Again, nuclear power is so dense that we could settle on having a nuclear power plant site eternally(well, next 10k years or so) having 1 reactor set in operation, 1 reactor set 'decommissioned' waiting for the radioactivity to die down before being demolished, and 1 set being demolished/rebuilt to replace the current operators.
*Not electricity, multiply by around .3-.5 to get electricity.
**Nothing in life is sure...
at a 10% growth rate per annum (probably a bit big, but gets the point across)
You're assuming that the exponential growth will hold true for extended periods. Meanwhile, in developed countries energy use per person is dropping, as has breeding/replacement for population growth.
Once China/India and such catch up with the 'developed world', we'll see peak energy usage.
Doesn't matter a bit when you retire and your successor takes over.
VERY good point. I darn well know I was intending to put it in my post. Most cabinet level positions don't actually last all that long.
All this is irrelevant. Uranium, is limited in supply, even if it's a large supply. This limit means we will eventually have to stop using it and use something else. So why bother starting?
Because it'll get us off coal(for the most part, some use for making steel and such will still exist), saving hundreds of thousands of lives a year while we 'work out' how to harness the sun or something else.
I note you've not answered my accusation that we don't know if fission is a power source due to not knowing the costs of decommissioning.
Somehow didn't see that. So my 'not answering' wasn't dodging the accusation, it was a reading error on my part. To wit, I wrote the part about the military, went back up, and started reading after the line about decommissioning. I'll answer now.
We know fission is a power source because, during it's lifetime, the amount of power generated by nuclear power stations is quite enormous. If you took the energy generated by a nuclear power plant and compressed it into, say, a day, you would melt and/or vaporize the whole plant. I'm talking lava here.
You're also wrong on no plant ever having been 'successfully' fully decommissioned. There are 11 sites in the USA alone. Big Rock Point, Fort St. Vrain, Haddam Neck, Maine Yankee, Pathfinder, Rancho Seco, Saxton, Shippingport, Shoreham, Trojan, and Yankee Rowe.
Lithium isn't 'the most common' of materials, but it's nearly everywhere, with an estimated 230 Billion tons dissolved in seawater alone...
If we're mining seawater for uranium and thorium for nuclear reactors, we might as well pull the lithium out as well.
Yes, especially considering that in my experience, I'd say the mean time before the state prosecutor WOULD be using this law to 'go after bike theft' is about 5 years*, it's necessary.
I mean, here in the USA they swore up and down that the new terrorism laws would only be used against 'real terrorists'. Apparently today, that includes teenagers who scrawl a 'bomb threat' onto a partition of their school's bathroom.
*Keep in mind that this means that half the time they'd be exploiting it in LESS than five.
Nuclear Fission: suffers from exactly the same scarcity issues as oil/gas. The only sane fusion to do is to wrest the plutonium from the military and then dispose of it in Fast Breeders. Fisson is not necessarily a power source, we do not know the cleanup cost (in energy terms) as noone has ever successfully fully decommissioned a nuclear power plant and dealt with all the waste
1. The military hardly uses plutonium. Enriched Uranium was eventually where it's at
2. We haven't seen lots of exploration for new uranium sources because we've been running off the military stockpiles for the last 20 or so years. It's depressed the market enough that expanding mining wasn't worth it. That source is coming to an end, ergo more mining operations are starting up.
3. Even without expansion of exploration like we've seen with oil/gas, we have enough Uranium within about double the current price to last several hundred years.
4. Before price increases would make the fuel costs for a nuclear plant 'significant', IE something you'd actually see in your electricity bill, we'd be able to filter the stuff out of sea water profitably.
5. Breeder reactors allow much more complete burn up, which means that about 80-90% of all the 'waste' we currently have sitting around can be turned into new fuel.
Fusion: I honestly think it ends up being an issue of scaling. 'Double' the dimensions of your fusion chamber and you end up using 8 times the resources, but get 16 times the power. I'm afraid that by the time we get it figured out, it'll turn out that the *smallest* practical plant is something like 20GW, and it'd take so long to build that it'd never be economical.
but a set of decent storage technologies with in-out efficiencies in the 90%s and capable of maintaining that store for a few days,
Now this I don't disagree with. They were talking about how on the radio battery prices have come down so much that using them for grid storage is actually starting to make sense.
Solar wise, they need to get the panels a couple percent more efficient and a couple percent cheaper before they make enough sense for me to bolt them to my house, but then I'm practically within shouting distance of the arctic circle. I seriously looked at them last summer.
That being said, I'm honestly trying to get my parents(in Florida) to invest in them, but the government is interfering there. Heck, I think solar car ports covering parking lots would be nifty. Solar panels(most of them) are structural enough that if you don't need a tight seal they can act as a shade/roof without an underlying layer.
Your second point reminds me of the marijuana tax stamps that are still law in 20 or so states. You incriminate yourself just by asking to buy the stamp in the first place.
Supreme court tossed this out. Besides, near as anybody can tell, all the tax stamps sold have been to stamp collectors and people looking for curiosity items. So not much good.
And engraving 1,2,3,4,5 into ones rifles is surely no problem with this mill.
Even if it can't, or is too much a pain to do it with, You can get an electric engraver and freehand it for about $8. Note, you have to put a maker's mark on there as well if you're going to sell it.
Look up 'zip guns'. The ability to home produce a firearm has always been there. A 3D printer or CNC mill just makes it fractionally easier while also making it approximately an OOM more expensive.
Training dogs is expensive, especially if you're not sure of the results. Will a dog be able to sniff for the biomarkers for cancer? There's anecdotal evidence prior that maybe they could (untrained dogs have been shown to detect cancers in their owners).
Yeah, 'difficult' to me encompasses 'expensive', but I should have probably specified this more. Step 1 to training a dog to sniff cancer is... figuring out how to train a dog to sniff cancer. ;)
We can get a start with looking at how we train dogs to sniff drugs, explosives, and cadavers, but that's just a start. Like I said, they might of started with 10 dogs, and out of the 10, only Frankie is statistically good enough for further testing. After that might be training another set of 10 dogs, figuring out if males or females are better, etc...
Regardless of breed, breeding frankie with any other cancer-sniffing dogs might give you some puppies(even/especially if they're mutts), that are better disposed to the activity.
Or they could figure out what Frankie is sniffing for and design a more straightforward chemical test for it. Something along the lines of 'X is this high over average, Y this low, and Z is present'.
Given that my previous work did drug testing(I called it 'golden flow'), I read up some on it. Turns out they normally use a 'cheap' test that actually has a pretty high false-positive rate. There's quite a few things you could eat or ingest that aren't drugs that would set it off.
Of course, they knew this, so out came the more specific, but also more expensive test. Then, if you still popped positive, then they'd retest, and if you still came up positive, then you were in trouble.
Same deal with cancer. Different people are different, genetics, environment, lifestyle. Cancers are different as well. After all, most of them are from independent mutations. So you look for markers that tend to be present when the cancer is present, but in many cases 'tend' is just that.
Much like how the rare person can have the flu and not develop a fever from it.
At least, a significant number appear so.
Most petty criminals are idiots. They commit high-stakes crimes for petty rewards.
As for the AC, I'm not saying that the camera can't be defeated. I'm saying that it adds 'expenses', IE makes committing a successful burglary more difficult/less rewarding. You have to remember to bring the masks. You have to make sure they fit. Rubber masks tend to be hot, restrict vision, and collect sweat. A T-shirt over the head may not defeat modern facial recognition. Covering your license plates is a cop magnet during the crime. Wearing cheap obvious masks tends to attract attention, while an expensive good one that looks like a real person other than you, at least at moderate distances, tends to be expensive enough that you don't want to dispose of it after 'every' job. Matter of fact, if you wear a mask enough, I'm sure they can pull DNA evidence off it today.
Currently burglars count on either not being caught on camera, or there being so many petty criminals that the police can't match their face with the camera footage.
I'm just saying, if you have 50 year droughts, with rainy 'seasons' only lasting a couple years, then you should probably stop considering the 'majority' rain conditions as 'drought conditions' and just accept that they are the norm, and you get occasionally lucky with a couple years of rain every so often.
Why don't they use 10 dogs and run the sample by each?
Because research funding is limited, and it's difficult to train the proper behavior. They might of tried training 10 dogs, and only Frankie gave good results.
As for missed diagnoses or false positive, you're expecting the tests to be independent(statistics term, means each dog has the same chance to be right/wrong no matter what the other dogs are). They're probably not.
For example, it might be that Frankie is sniffing for a specific set of chemical markers that just aren't present when he ends up with a false negative. The markers might not be strong enough, they might be there tomorrow, there might be some bit of diet that brings it out. Without further research, we just don't know.
So you could have a raging tumor and the dog's won't trigger on it because, for whatever reason, your cancer doesn't give out the necessary 'smell'.
Now, yes, 3-5 dogs 'cooperating' can help moderate other factors, but you still have to be careful.
That said, it's a short term fix. As burglars become more aware of the presence of cameras, they'll start wearing a mask just like folk robbing stores and banks where CCTV is expected already do. Once outdoor cameras become more prevalent, they won't use your driveway to park.
Both increase the 'costs' of burglary though. A mask is generally hot, a pain in the but, and outside the home signals that you're up to no good. Having to park elsewhere increases the distance you have to carry your loot, not necessarily a big deal for jewelry, but if you're trying to steal big screen TVs and other heavy or bulky goods, decreases your haul capability significantly. Plus, well, hauling stuff a longer ways increases the chances of the neighbors calling you in. You look less like a moving/delivery company.
Increased expense, lower haul, should reduce the amount of robbery,
(Note, I like playing opposing force in exercises)
It has a history of 50+ year long droughts (and some much longer in reality- just with 1-2 year breaks between 50 year spells).
Doesn't this mean that 'desert' is the normal situation, with occasional 50 year flooding/rains?
Exactly. There's 'inertia' to consider as well.
IE if gasoline is high enough, long enough, lots of people buy fuel efficient vehicles. They don't instantly dispose of them just because oil(and gasoline) prices subsequently drop.
If you 'suddenly' increase the price of water for one year, the farmers will grumble and pay for it. Some will go out of business, but that happens whenever you increase the price of something, or even don't decrease it fast enough. Some farmers just aren't good businessmen.
If you go, okay, now it's $1 per 100k liters(1/2 the price British Columbia recently started charging), while telling them that the price is going to double each year for the next 10 years, they'll start adjusting how they do business.
We know that there are wasteful watering methods that lose over half the water used to evaporation before it hits the plants. We also know there are systems where the only water lost is pretty much confined to the food products you take out of the specialized recycling greenhouses.
The trick is to get the farmers to use a sustainable amount of water. Even just burying seep lines can drop usage by over 75% over daytime spray irrigation.
Except that fines for DUI offenses are so expensive to collect that it runs into the broken window problem - on average you'd be better off just paying the extra mill on your property taxes than it is dealing with the negative effects of DUI convictions, even if you yourself do not drive drunk.
That's without considering that 'revenue generators' will eventually have them busting you for even minor stuff for exceedingly inappropriate amounts of money when/if your time comes up.
Hell, the increased insurance premiums alone probably cost you more.
3 years is still term insurance. New cars are often under full warranty for over 3 years, so they can roll in "full coverage" insurance for the price of liability, and market it as a savings. They might be getting a better profit margin on that insurance than the insurance company! ;)
Which is why I said 'out of whack'. The car makers have realized that young drivers, at least in cheap cars, are less of a risk than what the insurance companies think.
Ergo, the car companies can reduce the total cost of ownership of said cheap new automobile down to less than the cost of a used car + loan + insurance.
Yes, it's still 'term insurance'. But my point is that it's entirely possible for the car companies to build the liability into the cost of a self driving car, especially if the computer is less dangerous than the average driver, much less less dangerous than a new driver.
Personally, I object to Fedex's position because they're citing concerns about the law, when the law says nothing about gun-smithing tools.
And yes, a lot of guns get shipped despite their policy marked as 'machine parts'.
If they just said 'we don't want to ship this because we don't support gun-rights', then we could boycott them with a clear heart.
(Note: More libertarian than conservative).
The way the law is written, it is fully legal to create your own lower receiver and convert it to a fully functional weapon without registration as long as it is for your own personal use. It can never be given away nor sold.
Actually, it can. Beware of state rules, it has to have a maker's mark and serial #, and you definitely can't be 'in the business' without a FFL, But if you make a firearm, the decide to sell it(and it's the only one you sell) in a used condition 4 years later, having fed 1k rounds through it, then you're good to go. Selling a non-used individually manufactured firearm is an indication that you 'might' be in the business, so don't do that. Try to not make a profit on your hobby. Definitely don't make a business so you can deduct your tools & supplies.
But I still recommend on reading up on the rules first.
You've been able to get '80%' finished receivers for decades that didn't need much more than a drill press to finish. This does lower the bar, but not by much.
If I got something like this, I'd