Personally, I think your better off enforcing minimal use of exceptions, and solving the problem higher up at the architectural level with a transaction/thread cancellation model where any unusual exceptions are handed with one or two extremely high level catch routines.
I agree, but this doesn't counter the argument laid out in the Google style guide, which boils down to "it's really hard to safely add exceptions into a large code base which wasn't written with exception safety in mind."
Yes, Ford would have survived but the others would have ceased to exist. There was NO FUCKING CREDIT. PERIOD.
Utter nonsense. Granted that the deficit means treasuries have soaked up a large portion of available investment capital, but that's far from saying none was available. None was available to the automakers in their current form, because investors quite rightly recognized that it would be throwing good money after bad (as was the federal bailout money). But automakers forcibly restructured into greater efficiency would have been a different issue.
(BTW, using obscenities doesn't add strength to your arguments... quite the opposite. Facts and logic work much better.)
The reason for the bank failures was deregulation. We ditched Glass-Stegall and to add insult to injury, we let the banks institute bullshit insurance in the form of CDSs.
LOL. You do know that CDSs, and various other mortgage-backed securities existed and were growing in popularity before the end of Glass-Steagall (note the correct spelling, BTW). The most that economists (actual economists, not media talking heads) agree upon is that GLBA probably accelerated the banking crisis. Many, however, think that's probably a good thing since delaying the crises would have made it worse.
Here's a question for you: Which specific investment banking practices which led to the sub-prime lending collapse would have been curtailed had Glass-Steagall remained in effect? If you find something and document it well you'll have a publishable econ research paper.
If you want to prevent this shit from happening again, fully reinstate Glass-Stegall and outlaw CDSs. Problem solved....Your problem is you believe in ideology rather than pragmatism.
Pot, kettle. There is no evidence that the same problem wouldn't have happened without GLBA, and to believe that banning one very particular form of financial instrument will save us all... that's pure ideology.
You spend a lot of time writing while ignoring the point of my post.
The people that always clamor for "more guns!" use the excuse that the "criminals" are out there.
It's the same thing as bandying about the word terrorist to get their way.
So... your claim is that there aren't significant numbers of criminals? That's a heck of a claim.
The comparison with terrorists -- who really are very, very small in numbers -- is silly.
And the reason for this is that the middle man adds value. It's often hard to see the value added by middlemen that appear to do nothing but pass goods/services through in one direction and cash through in the other, but they arise because they actually add efficiency to the market. The sort of efficiencies they add depend on the context, but unless the middleman has some sort of ability to coerce he wouldn't be there if he weren't a net benefit to the transaction.
Of course, changes technology, infrastructure or business practices can offer alternative approaches that route around a middle man and are more efficient, and middle men do get cut out, but it's because something else changed that made the middleman's operation a net inefficiency.
In the case of mass media production, the reason music labels and movie studios came into existence originally was because making and distributing content was expensive, and risky. The expensive part is obvious, but the risk was a bigger part of the reason. Especially in the music business; if it costs a few hundred thousand to make a high quality recording, promote the band to get airplay, press ten thousands records and distributed them to retailers... but only 2% of new bands ever manage to sell enough to recoup more than a small portion of that initial investment, then you pretty much have to have an entity that looks like a music label which signs what appear to be horribly one-sided deals with large numbers of bands, because they have to rape the successful 2% to cover the costs incurred by the 98% and then clear a profit. The primary function of record labels has been the same as that of insurance companies, risk spreading, though the mechanisms couldn't be more different.
If it weren't for the high failure rate, bands and moviemakers could just get a bank loan. But if bankers were to make such loans, they'd have to do it on terms similar to what record labels do, or they'd lose their shirts.
Of course, the fact that they're necessary doesn't make a lot of what those big content houses do any less distasteful.
Now the world is changing and risk spreading is becoming almost irrelevant for music, and important only at the big budget end for movies and games. In theory, Internet-based distribution means that distribution should also be disintermediated, but the reality is that consumers prefer their media to be aggregated for convenience, and aggregation also reduces transaction cost overhead. So what we're seeing is the rise of new middlemen (just as you said), but middlemen whose purpose is different, and who offer different sorts of efficiencies to content producers and consumers. Of course, the value provided by aggregation and transaction streamlining is much smaller than that provided by risk spreading, so the fees collected by the new middlemen are much smaller.
Markets aren't perfectly efficient, but they're never very inefficient, either, not for long, and they tend to find structures that make the most sense, in much the same way that evolution finds good solutions to various ecological niches, through the simple mechanism of allowing the fittest to displace the less fit.
Since they're so proud of their guns. And since guns are mainly intended to secure by deterrence, publicly advertising their presence makes a home that much safer from intruders.
While the latter is true, your contention doesn't necessarily follow.
Gun crime is as much crimes of passion, negligence, and stupidity by people that wouldn't have been considered "criminals" until after the fact.
Cite?
In point of fact, there's a lot of evidence that your claim is untrue. Look, for example, at the crime rates for concealed weapon permit holders. They're significantly lower than for the population as a whole, and their violent crime rates are lower still... and relative gun crime rates are even lower.
About the only form of crime for which your statement has some validity is domestic violence. There is evidence that people who are not otherwise criminals have a tendency to reach for a gun if available rather than using a fist or a striking weapon when involved in a domestic dipute. This is why all states in the country ban firearm possession for anyone convicted of domestic violence in any degree. There's also statistical evidence that that particular form of gun control is beneficial, which makes sense because of the intense emotion involved in domestic disputes and the fact that domestic violence is almost never a single-occurrence event.
The flip side of the domestic violence issue is that a large minority of domestic violence gun deaths are women shooting an abusive partner, most of which are determined to be justifiable and are not prosecuted, so those women wouldn't fit your description of people who aren't considered criminals until after the fact.
Outside of domestic violence, the "guy flipped out and started shooting because a gun was handy" scenario never happens. Active shooters are about the closest realistic equivalent and active shootings are all pre-meditated, not crimes of passion.
Well, there is one other "crime" of "passion" that could be motivated/made possible by firearm availability: suicide. Suicides account for the majority of all gun deaths in this country. Exactly how much guns contribute is debatable, since people who are determined to kill themselves can find many ways to do it. There's no doubt, however, that firearms provide a suicide mechanism which is highly likely to succeed, while many of the other options are less reliable.
You also mention negligence and stupidity, and discharges caused by negligence and stupidity do happen, but people who do that aren't generally considered criminals, before or after. There are a very small number of cases each year of people who are charged with negligent homicide (or similar crimes but which didn't result in a death), because they were playing with a gun, but not many. Double digits annually, nationwide. The bigger impact of negligent discharges is in so-called "accidental" firearms deaths. Those do happen, and they're tragic and we need to continue working to reduce them, but the numbers are also pretty small, at least on a national scale. There are approximately 600 accidental firearms deaths per year, and about three times that number of injuries (most of the injuries are to the individual who was handling the gun, most of the deaths are of someone else).
You miss the point. Weapons shouldn't be registered to start with.
Oh, I don't know. Early on many states in the US registered all military arms, but for an entirely different purpose than registration today: They were registered so that people could prove they were complying with the law that required every man of militia age to purchase and maintain a military rifle. I don't think that sort of registration would cause much heartburn. A map of gun owners in that case would simply be a map of the population.
A well regulated machine is one that has proper preventative maintenance and can preform when called upon without fail. Not because it is regulated by law to preform or function.
Although to be fair, in many parts of the early union men of militia age (17-45) were required by law to purchase, maintain and demonstrate proficiency with military firearms. Personally, I'd be just fine with going back to that and dismantling most of our standing military forces. It'd be a lot cheaper than the DoD we have today and it would make it hard for presidents to engage in foreign adventures whenever their popular support needs a shot in the arm. As for the United States' defensive posture, it would make any invasion by a foreign power impossible. "A rifle behind every blade of grass", as the saying apocryphally attributed to Admiral Yamamoto goes.
IMHO it is really HARD to keep a gun physically secure
No it isn't. It's extremely easy, and there are many options available. Which ones you use depend on what you're trying to achieve.
If you just want to make sure that kids can't play with your guns and accidentally shoot each other, you can ask at your nearby police department offices and they'll be glad to give you chamber locks for free. These just consist of a padlock with the hasp replaced with a steel cable. You pass the cable through the chamber and close the lock. If you also want to make the gun hard to steal, loop it around some firmly-attached object.
For securing it in a vehicle, there are numerous small safes available which bolt to the foor or other convenient surface of your vehicle. If you use security fasteners on the outside, with the nuts on the inside of the safe, it becomes quite difficult to detach safe from vehicle, and many of the safes are made of fairly thick sheet steel (depending on price). They're only 21-gauge steel, but for the price I really like these: http://center-of-mass.com/Store_InCarGunSafe.htm
For quick-access handgun safes there are several manufacturers of small safes with combination locks designed to be easy to open in less than a second, in the dark. GunVault pioneered this segment of the market, but there are many others. Again, you can get safes that are made of heavy steel, and different safes offer many different options for securing them inside your home.
For quick-access shotgun safes there are quick-opening combination secured wall-mountable lockers which enclose the action and hold the gun in position on the wall.
There are the classic floor-standing safes, also. The better ones are serious safes with very heavy duty construction and even fire resistance, weighing many hundreds of pounds. If the weight alone doesn't provide enough protection against theft of the entire safe, you can also bolt them down. I'm looking at getting a 36-gun safe in a few months with four hours of fire resistance and bolting it to the cement of my basement floor. The guns I put in there will be VERY hard to steal.
Imagine if gun owners needed to buy gun liability insurance and key questions were asked like "do you have any one with previous or current psychological or criminal issues in your home". I'm not saying that insurance is the right answer, but just as a thought it probably would get a more formal risk assesment done.
Transaction costs would utterly dominate the cost of any such insurance, because the risk of covering the liability incurred by lawful gun ownership is very close to zero.
I think the US will avoid going the way of Greece, but you're right that the massive accumulation of debt, and the resulting "sea anchor" drag on the availability of investment capital and credit is going to be very painful to escape. One reason it won't be as painful for us as for Greece is that we do control our own currency, so at the end of the day we can inflate our way out -- which is also going to be very painful, but less than having bond markets simply lose all faith in US treasuries.
And you're absolutely right that we need, desperately, to allow our major industries to restructure themselves into effectiveness. It would be a little bit painful in the short term, but not doing it means that they'll fail again just when we really need them to be powering us out of our government's deepest troubles.
Had we let the auto companies fail, what would have been created in its place? Nothing.
Nonsense.
Had we let the auto companies fail, their assets would have been bought up at fire sale prices and their employees hired by new enterprises with a focus on efficient competition. Perhaps struggling innovators like Aptera motors could have found the resources they needed to bring their vehicles to market, or growing companies like Teslas could have taken advantage of the opportunity to more rapidly expand. But the truth is that probably none of the big three would actually have outright failed anyway. Ford most likely could have weathered the storm without any assistance, GM and Chrysler would have gone through chapter 11 reorganization and then recovered -- but after the bankruptcy their creditors would have demanded more efficient operations and greater competitiveness. Most likely, the bailout has served the American public by propping up inertia at the expense of innovation, and the result will be that we'll get to bail them out again in a few years.
You make a point of singling out unions but fail to mention all the banks that were too big to fail and have no unions. Should we have let them fail?
Yes.
There would have been some short-term pain, but by bailing them out we've just created more pain in the long term. Again, not all of the big banks would have failed; some actually tried to reject the bailout money because they didn't need it, but were required to take it so their competitors didn't look bad. Why the hell wouldn't we want mismanaged institutions to look bad?
Markets depend on the incentives provided by potential profits and potential losses. Remove the threat of loss and even outright failure and you eliminate the incentive for caution and conservatism which is crucial to all big businesses, and especially to big banking and finance. You can be certain that after having bailed the banks out once, we'll have to do it again in the future. We can try to counter that by imposing increasingly burdensome regulations, to force responsible behavior, but it won't work, and it will stifle innovation that could have provided better allocation of capital to businesses and industries that could have created new jobs.
Your metabolism can only adjust so far, and it's not actually all that far. If that weren't true, then people wouldn't starve to death, their metabolism would just keep adjusting until they could live on practically nothing.
Actually, they can. It's really rather amazing. I'm not inclined to do your research for you; but look it up.
I have. By everything I can find, the maximum range of metabolic efficiency is only about 30%, even across individuals. For a given individual, the amount your metabolic rate can adjust is much smaller, perhaps 15-20%. Note that this is BMR adjustment, and BMR is only about 70% of most peoples' total caloric burn.
Interesting idea. My experience is that consistently eating less calories than I burn, regardless of the composition of those calories, leads to steady, continuous weight loss. I think I'll stick with that.
Google doesn't ban multiple inheritance, though in most cases multiple inheritance of anything but pure interfaces is discouraged, and there's rarely any need for Google engineers to use all of the BOOST libraries, given Google's extensive internal libraries.
I do wish that exceptions were allowed, but I understand the rationale for avoiding them (it's spelled out in the style guide), and can't disagree with the decision.
If at some point you'd like to have a rational, fact-based discussion on this topic, let me know. For now I'm going to assume you just want to wave your hands and shout obscenities and I'm really not interested in that.
I do want to thank you for providing evidence to support my contention in another discussion, though. I was pointing out to a colleague that in firearms policy discussion it's always the gun control proponents who get nasty, crude and emotional, not the "uneducated redneck gun-lovers." I was able to point him to your comments here as an example of what I meant.
I don't think so. Google Glass is supposed to go on sale next year, I believe, though it wouldn't surprise me if it slips into 2014. The self-driving cars are definitely still in the concept phase, but that's because it's going to take a long time to address the legal questions.
"The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned." — Bruce Ediger
And the nipple isn't all that intuitive, either. Babies have to learn how to latch on correctly. In recent years, where young mothers often don't have the support of their mothers and other older women around to help them teach their babies, this has led to the creation of a new career: Lactation consultants are employed by hospitals to help teach mothers how to teach their babies to use the nipple.
It would be real news if they weren't working on a new phone.
It would be real news if Google's Motorola division weren't working on a new phone, but this implies that the Google X labs (which are working on Google Glass, self-driving cars and other projects) are working on a phone. That's different. Motorola is clearly working on the next incremental improvements to the smartphone, but Google X is all about radically-different directions. I find it hard to think what could be done differently enough to justify Google X interest, myself.
The only way to prevent them is to remove the freedom.
Or the means, or the opportunity. Removing the means for mass murder is impossible, because there are so very many ways to do it, and all of those means have alternative, productive, useful uses to the non-mass-murdering segment of society.
That leaves removing the opportunity... which also can't be done, not completely, but the window of opportunity can be dramatically reduced if the potential victims have access to the tools and skills they need to fight back.
A constant theme around these is that plenty of people noticed "red flags" in the person, and yet none of them did anything about it to get them help.
Well, apparently two people on the U of Iowa admissions committee saw something wrong with him before the fact -- the program director, Daniel Tranel, said "Do NOT offer admission under any circumstances". I don't think Tranel has ever said what he saw, though.
Another important question to ask is how many other applicants he similarly denied. Apparently he had one true-positive, but how many false positives? Tests that try to pick out extremely rare conditions require extraordinary precision, and I really doubt that the Tranel test offers that precision.
Seriously, try a very-low-carb diet. Easy. Really easy. No hunger. It's infinitely easier than the other way. I've done your way before, and I blew back up. This way works because I don't have a problem with eating like this for the rest of my life.
I've tried low carb. I do lose weight with low-carb, but I suffer more. I really like bread.
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Personally, I think your better off enforcing minimal use of exceptions, and solving the problem higher up at the architectural level with a transaction/thread cancellation model where any unusual exceptions are handed with one or two extremely high level catch routines.
I agree, but this doesn't counter the argument laid out in the Google style guide, which boils down to "it's really hard to safely add exceptions into a large code base which wasn't written with exception safety in mind."
Your reading comprehension needs some work my friend.
Nope. But you really should stop deluding yourself.
If you bail out NY to the tune of 500 billion and more, it is entirely OK to bail out Detroit for 100 billion.
Both are stupid and counterproductive decisions which do long-term damage to our economic prospects.
Yes, Ford would have survived but the others would have ceased to exist. There was NO FUCKING CREDIT. PERIOD.
Utter nonsense. Granted that the deficit means treasuries have soaked up a large portion of available investment capital, but that's far from saying none was available. None was available to the automakers in their current form, because investors quite rightly recognized that it would be throwing good money after bad (as was the federal bailout money). But automakers forcibly restructured into greater efficiency would have been a different issue.
(BTW, using obscenities doesn't add strength to your arguments... quite the opposite. Facts and logic work much better.)
The reason for the bank failures was deregulation. We ditched Glass-Stegall and to add insult to injury, we let the banks institute bullshit insurance in the form of CDSs.
LOL. You do know that CDSs, and various other mortgage-backed securities existed and were growing in popularity before the end of Glass-Steagall (note the correct spelling, BTW). The most that economists (actual economists, not media talking heads) agree upon is that GLBA probably accelerated the banking crisis. Many, however, think that's probably a good thing since delaying the crises would have made it worse.
Here's a question for you: Which specific investment banking practices which led to the sub-prime lending collapse would have been curtailed had Glass-Steagall remained in effect? If you find something and document it well you'll have a publishable econ research paper.
If you want to prevent this shit from happening again, fully reinstate Glass-Stegall and outlaw CDSs. Problem solved. ...Your problem is you believe in ideology rather than pragmatism.
Pot, kettle. There is no evidence that the same problem wouldn't have happened without GLBA, and to believe that banning one very particular form of financial instrument will save us all... that's pure ideology.
You spend a lot of time writing while ignoring the point of my post. The people that always clamor for "more guns!" use the excuse that the "criminals" are out there. It's the same thing as bandying about the word terrorist to get their way.
So... your claim is that there aren't significant numbers of criminals? That's a heck of a claim.
The comparison with terrorists -- who really are very, very small in numbers -- is silly.
Getting rid of the middle man is far from easy.
And the reason for this is that the middle man adds value. It's often hard to see the value added by middlemen that appear to do nothing but pass goods/services through in one direction and cash through in the other, but they arise because they actually add efficiency to the market. The sort of efficiencies they add depend on the context, but unless the middleman has some sort of ability to coerce he wouldn't be there if he weren't a net benefit to the transaction.
Of course, changes technology, infrastructure or business practices can offer alternative approaches that route around a middle man and are more efficient, and middle men do get cut out, but it's because something else changed that made the middleman's operation a net inefficiency.
In the case of mass media production, the reason music labels and movie studios came into existence originally was because making and distributing content was expensive, and risky. The expensive part is obvious, but the risk was a bigger part of the reason. Especially in the music business; if it costs a few hundred thousand to make a high quality recording, promote the band to get airplay, press ten thousands records and distributed them to retailers... but only 2% of new bands ever manage to sell enough to recoup more than a small portion of that initial investment, then you pretty much have to have an entity that looks like a music label which signs what appear to be horribly one-sided deals with large numbers of bands, because they have to rape the successful 2% to cover the costs incurred by the 98% and then clear a profit. The primary function of record labels has been the same as that of insurance companies, risk spreading, though the mechanisms couldn't be more different.
If it weren't for the high failure rate, bands and moviemakers could just get a bank loan. But if bankers were to make such loans, they'd have to do it on terms similar to what record labels do, or they'd lose their shirts.
Of course, the fact that they're necessary doesn't make a lot of what those big content houses do any less distasteful.
Now the world is changing and risk spreading is becoming almost irrelevant for music, and important only at the big budget end for movies and games. In theory, Internet-based distribution means that distribution should also be disintermediated, but the reality is that consumers prefer their media to be aggregated for convenience, and aggregation also reduces transaction cost overhead. So what we're seeing is the rise of new middlemen (just as you said), but middlemen whose purpose is different, and who offer different sorts of efficiencies to content producers and consumers. Of course, the value provided by aggregation and transaction streamlining is much smaller than that provided by risk spreading, so the fees collected by the new middlemen are much smaller.
Markets aren't perfectly efficient, but they're never very inefficient, either, not for long, and they tend to find structures that make the most sense, in much the same way that evolution finds good solutions to various ecological niches, through the simple mechanism of allowing the fittest to displace the less fit.
Since they're so proud of their guns. And since guns are mainly intended to secure by deterrence, publicly advertising their presence makes a home that much safer from intruders.
While the latter is true, your contention doesn't necessarily follow.
Gun crime is as much crimes of passion, negligence, and stupidity by people that wouldn't have been considered "criminals" until after the fact.
Cite?
In point of fact, there's a lot of evidence that your claim is untrue. Look, for example, at the crime rates for concealed weapon permit holders. They're significantly lower than for the population as a whole, and their violent crime rates are lower still... and relative gun crime rates are even lower.
About the only form of crime for which your statement has some validity is domestic violence. There is evidence that people who are not otherwise criminals have a tendency to reach for a gun if available rather than using a fist or a striking weapon when involved in a domestic dipute. This is why all states in the country ban firearm possession for anyone convicted of domestic violence in any degree. There's also statistical evidence that that particular form of gun control is beneficial, which makes sense because of the intense emotion involved in domestic disputes and the fact that domestic violence is almost never a single-occurrence event.
The flip side of the domestic violence issue is that a large minority of domestic violence gun deaths are women shooting an abusive partner, most of which are determined to be justifiable and are not prosecuted, so those women wouldn't fit your description of people who aren't considered criminals until after the fact.
Outside of domestic violence, the "guy flipped out and started shooting because a gun was handy" scenario never happens. Active shooters are about the closest realistic equivalent and active shootings are all pre-meditated, not crimes of passion.
Well, there is one other "crime" of "passion" that could be motivated/made possible by firearm availability: suicide. Suicides account for the majority of all gun deaths in this country. Exactly how much guns contribute is debatable, since people who are determined to kill themselves can find many ways to do it. There's no doubt, however, that firearms provide a suicide mechanism which is highly likely to succeed, while many of the other options are less reliable.
You also mention negligence and stupidity, and discharges caused by negligence and stupidity do happen, but people who do that aren't generally considered criminals, before or after. There are a very small number of cases each year of people who are charged with negligent homicide (or similar crimes but which didn't result in a death), because they were playing with a gun, but not many. Double digits annually, nationwide. The bigger impact of negligent discharges is in so-called "accidental" firearms deaths. Those do happen, and they're tragic and we need to continue working to reduce them, but the numbers are also pretty small, at least on a national scale. There are approximately 600 accidental firearms deaths per year, and about three times that number of injuries (most of the injuries are to the individual who was handling the gun, most of the deaths are of someone else).
You miss the point. Weapons shouldn't be registered to start with.
Oh, I don't know. Early on many states in the US registered all military arms, but for an entirely different purpose than registration today: They were registered so that people could prove they were complying with the law that required every man of militia age to purchase and maintain a military rifle. I don't think that sort of registration would cause much heartburn. A map of gun owners in that case would simply be a map of the population.
A well regulated machine is one that has proper preventative maintenance and can preform when called upon without fail. Not because it is regulated by law to preform or function.
Although to be fair, in many parts of the early union men of militia age (17-45) were required by law to purchase, maintain and demonstrate proficiency with military firearms. Personally, I'd be just fine with going back to that and dismantling most of our standing military forces. It'd be a lot cheaper than the DoD we have today and it would make it hard for presidents to engage in foreign adventures whenever their popular support needs a shot in the arm. As for the United States' defensive posture, it would make any invasion by a foreign power impossible. "A rifle behind every blade of grass", as the saying apocryphally attributed to Admiral Yamamoto goes.
IMHO it is really HARD to keep a gun physically secure
No it isn't. It's extremely easy, and there are many options available. Which ones you use depend on what you're trying to achieve.
If you just want to make sure that kids can't play with your guns and accidentally shoot each other, you can ask at your nearby police department offices and they'll be glad to give you chamber locks for free. These just consist of a padlock with the hasp replaced with a steel cable. You pass the cable through the chamber and close the lock. If you also want to make the gun hard to steal, loop it around some firmly-attached object.
For securing it in a vehicle, there are numerous small safes available which bolt to the foor or other convenient surface of your vehicle. If you use security fasteners on the outside, with the nuts on the inside of the safe, it becomes quite difficult to detach safe from vehicle, and many of the safes are made of fairly thick sheet steel (depending on price). They're only 21-gauge steel, but for the price I really like these: http://center-of-mass.com/Store_InCarGunSafe.htm
For quick-access handgun safes there are several manufacturers of small safes with combination locks designed to be easy to open in less than a second, in the dark. GunVault pioneered this segment of the market, but there are many others. Again, you can get safes that are made of heavy steel, and different safes offer many different options for securing them inside your home.
For quick-access shotgun safes there are quick-opening combination secured wall-mountable lockers which enclose the action and hold the gun in position on the wall.
There are the classic floor-standing safes, also. The better ones are serious safes with very heavy duty construction and even fire resistance, weighing many hundreds of pounds. If the weight alone doesn't provide enough protection against theft of the entire safe, you can also bolt them down. I'm looking at getting a 36-gun safe in a few months with four hours of fire resistance and bolting it to the cement of my basement floor. The guns I put in there will be VERY hard to steal.
Imagine if gun owners needed to buy gun liability insurance and key questions were asked like "do you have any one with previous or current psychological or criminal issues in your home". I'm not saying that insurance is the right answer, but just as a thought it probably would get a more formal risk assesment done.
Transaction costs would utterly dominate the cost of any such insurance, because the risk of covering the liability incurred by lawful gun ownership is very close to zero.
I think the US will avoid going the way of Greece, but you're right that the massive accumulation of debt, and the resulting "sea anchor" drag on the availability of investment capital and credit is going to be very painful to escape. One reason it won't be as painful for us as for Greece is that we do control our own currency, so at the end of the day we can inflate our way out -- which is also going to be very painful, but less than having bond markets simply lose all faith in US treasuries.
And you're absolutely right that we need, desperately, to allow our major industries to restructure themselves into effectiveness. It would be a little bit painful in the short term, but not doing it means that they'll fail again just when we really need them to be powering us out of our government's deepest troubles.
Had we let the auto companies fail, what would have been created in its place? Nothing.
Nonsense.
Had we let the auto companies fail, their assets would have been bought up at fire sale prices and their employees hired by new enterprises with a focus on efficient competition. Perhaps struggling innovators like Aptera motors could have found the resources they needed to bring their vehicles to market, or growing companies like Teslas could have taken advantage of the opportunity to more rapidly expand. But the truth is that probably none of the big three would actually have outright failed anyway. Ford most likely could have weathered the storm without any assistance, GM and Chrysler would have gone through chapter 11 reorganization and then recovered -- but after the bankruptcy their creditors would have demanded more efficient operations and greater competitiveness. Most likely, the bailout has served the American public by propping up inertia at the expense of innovation, and the result will be that we'll get to bail them out again in a few years.
You make a point of singling out unions but fail to mention all the banks that were too big to fail and have no unions. Should we have let them fail?
Yes.
There would have been some short-term pain, but by bailing them out we've just created more pain in the long term. Again, not all of the big banks would have failed; some actually tried to reject the bailout money because they didn't need it, but were required to take it so their competitors didn't look bad. Why the hell wouldn't we want mismanaged institutions to look bad?
Markets depend on the incentives provided by potential profits and potential losses. Remove the threat of loss and even outright failure and you eliminate the incentive for caution and conservatism which is crucial to all big businesses, and especially to big banking and finance. You can be certain that after having bailed the banks out once, we'll have to do it again in the future. We can try to counter that by imposing increasingly burdensome regulations, to force responsible behavior, but it won't work, and it will stifle innovation that could have provided better allocation of capital to businesses and industries that could have created new jobs.
I think you're speaking for yourself there pal.
So you are vain and insecure about the smoothness of your skin?
Your metabolism can only adjust so far, and it's not actually all that far. If that weren't true, then people wouldn't starve to death, their metabolism would just keep adjusting until they could live on practically nothing.
Actually, they can. It's really rather amazing. I'm not inclined to do your research for you; but look it up.
I have. By everything I can find, the maximum range of metabolic efficiency is only about 30%, even across individuals. For a given individual, the amount your metabolic rate can adjust is much smaller, perhaps 15-20%. Note that this is BMR adjustment, and BMR is only about 70% of most peoples' total caloric burn.
Interesting idea. My experience is that consistently eating less calories than I burn, regardless of the composition of those calories, leads to steady, continuous weight loss. I think I'll stick with that.
So RMS doesn't like C++ -- this doesn't stop people who can use it properly from writing their projects in it, does it?
Yeah, after they enforce a company-wide ban on multiple inheritance, exceptions, and 95% of the publicly available libraries.
Google doesn't ban multiple inheritance, though in most cases multiple inheritance of anything but pure interfaces is discouraged, and there's rarely any need for Google engineers to use all of the BOOST libraries, given Google's extensive internal libraries.
I do wish that exceptions were allowed, but I understand the rationale for avoiding them (it's spelled out in the style guide), and can't disagree with the decision.
(I write C++ code for Google.)
If at some point you'd like to have a rational, fact-based discussion on this topic, let me know. For now I'm going to assume you just want to wave your hands and shout obscenities and I'm really not interested in that.
I do want to thank you for providing evidence to support my contention in another discussion, though. I was pointing out to a colleague that in firearms policy discussion it's always the gun control proponents who get nasty, crude and emotional, not the "uneducated redneck gun-lovers." I was able to point him to your comments here as an example of what I meant.
Sounds like it tastes nasty. I've yet to find a multi-grain "health" bread that I like.
I don't think so. Google Glass is supposed to go on sale next year, I believe, though it wouldn't surprise me if it slips into 2014. The self-driving cars are definitely still in the concept phase, but that's because it's going to take a long time to address the legal questions.
"The only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned." — Bruce Ediger
And the nipple isn't all that intuitive, either. Babies have to learn how to latch on correctly. In recent years, where young mothers often don't have the support of their mothers and other older women around to help them teach their babies, this has led to the creation of a new career: Lactation consultants are employed by hospitals to help teach mothers how to teach their babies to use the nipple.
It's all learned.
It would be real news if they weren't working on a new phone.
It would be real news if Google's Motorola division weren't working on a new phone, but this implies that the Google X labs (which are working on Google Glass, self-driving cars and other projects) are working on a phone. That's different. Motorola is clearly working on the next incremental improvements to the smartphone, but Google X is all about radically-different directions. I find it hard to think what could be done differently enough to justify Google X interest, myself.
The only way to prevent them is to remove the freedom.
Or the means, or the opportunity. Removing the means for mass murder is impossible, because there are so very many ways to do it, and all of those means have alternative, productive, useful uses to the non-mass-murdering segment of society.
That leaves removing the opportunity... which also can't be done, not completely, but the window of opportunity can be dramatically reduced if the potential victims have access to the tools and skills they need to fight back.
Well, apparently two people on the U of Iowa admissions committee saw something wrong with him before the fact -- the program director, Daniel Tranel, said "Do NOT offer admission under any circumstances". I don't think Tranel has ever said what he saw, though.
Another important question to ask is how many other applicants he similarly denied. Apparently he had one true-positive, but how many false positives? Tests that try to pick out extremely rare conditions require extraordinary precision, and I really doubt that the Tranel test offers that precision.
Seriously, try a very-low-carb diet. Easy. Really easy. No hunger. It's infinitely easier than the other way. I've done your way before, and I blew back up. This way works because I don't have a problem with eating like this for the rest of my life.
I've tried low carb. I do lose weight with low-carb, but I suffer more. I really like bread.