Mr. Potato Head, risk management is not a secret. There are plenty of people out there making big money gaming the system because they know how it works. Banks themselves are some of the biggest crooks in history. The manage the risk that the general public actually begins to understand what they do (count money, basically, and then collect a little off the top, and take some of your risk from you). There are well-versed criminals who will never be caught.
On the flip side, you have other people managing risk in order to make money legally. A good example would be any bank that makes a loan. They assess risk, usually using a specific formula that a person verifies. A credit card company just gives you money, and doesn't really care if you eventually default. They just charge a high enough interest on the remaining good borrowers to make up the loss. Oh, and that money they lent you? They BORROWED IT.
The fact of the matter is people need to be more aware of their data, and I think banks should be REQUIRED to carry a large bond or other insurance to pay off people who have their credit scores (or worse) ruined by ID theft. I remember a story of some loan officer or another leaving a box of files in his car overnight. When he came out, his window--and the box--were gone. The police or FBI later found them in a storage unit with THOUSANDS of other files. ID Theft is big business, especially in the illegal immigrant market. And the value of a good credit report can be very very high.
However, I don't see the credit bureaus lasting through the current and continuing crisis. For one thing, they are not secure enough for the consumers. Their risk models are flawed, as was proven. A+ does not guarantee you're getting your principal back, even if you take the house. The automated scoring models are flawed. Countrywide was basically a software company that "did loans"; they had their own scoring application (which took in credit score as an input, along with a lot of other data, such as income, asset, rental history, etc etc). Most other banks used the Fannie Mae desktop underwriter system. The only way you can have a flawless system is if your underwriter (and servicer) has all seeing eyes; real income, real assets, real everything. Such a system would be even more vulnerable to ID theft than the credit system. Who would run such a system? The government?!? HAHA, the IRS can barely collect 90% and they have 10 year prison sentences for that stuff.
Hell, I'm already hearing about banks coming up with alternate programs where the borrower actually goes to their utility bills, and their lenders and gets letters of credit. The credit report is on it's way out, and that's the bread and butter of ID theft. Hey, guess what Jose, I can get you a social security card so you can work in the U.S. Oh! Bien! Then once they get here they realize they can use that same number to get free money they never have to pay back! You see where I'm going with this. And thus the current crisis.
I suffer from OTD, by the way... Off-Topic Disorder
When I was a PC tech I always had a sense of honor. They are trusting me with their PC and they need me to fix it and I'm going to do a good job and respect their privacy. Just like you'd want from your mechanic--or doctor, for that matter. I can't believe people would snoop into other people's data like that. It's like reading someone's diary.
Well, I could write a tool to open Word 03 documents in PHP for instance, and then convert them to PDF, on Linux, without some proprietary library. Granted, people have already done this, but now you could do it for real. I couldn't open a service to do that for the public, but I could convert all of the docs I might use in a normal business sense.
Whereas the 2007 files are all in XML. Really crappy, horribly confusing XML, but XML none the less. I mean, each WORD of a document (and sometimes each LETTER) has several tags around it. And the worst part is if spell checker finds a bad word, and you save it without correcting, it gets tagged. It's horrible, but it's XML. And it's possible to extend the schema and add your own tags so you can make a mail merge script in Perl without any binary bullshit.
Implementing robots will result in a massive unemployment epidemic. See this article by Marshall Brian, the creator of How Stuff Works.
You MUST take into account sociological factors when you're talking about a major robotic influx. The bottom line is that our economy is set up to use human labor right now. If there is not something in place to help people continue to work, perhaps at a lower rate (such as a 20 hour workweek limit, or something), all of the money will just flow up into the top 10% like it has been. It has to be on our terms, not the gigantic companies. Cargill already uses robotically controlled tractors to harvest the fields. But is it giving me, the average American, any additionaly leisure time? No.
The opportunity is such that we can either have a permanent vacation, and the robots allow us to flower and flourish culturally, or it will be permanent enslavement and povery since the upper classes no longer have a use for us workers.
And that was the problem with Marxism. Someone had to do the work, and they wanted to get more if they did more of their fair share. Well, if robots are doing the work, why can't we as a people collectively own them, and collectively enjoy the fruits of their labors; food, housing, etc. Granted some of those top 10% people will have to give up some of their power and come down to our level, but in this world of robots, any luxury can be had for almost nothing.
Marshall Brain wrote a novel about it called Manna.
If we had a real plan NOW to build a society of leisure based on robots that no one owns, I think it could be accomplished in a few decades. It would involve the formation of a large non-profit stock company where we all buy shares to get this thing built. It's not going to be totally simple, but it will be worth it.
Yeah, but how are they going to generate the waves of stupid people we need to continue our way of life in this country? Guess what, education leads people to stop believing in this country. The more educated you become, the more you see the fundamental flaws. The more you see through the facade of the American Dream. Of course, then they pay you a lot and you stop worrying about all that:)
All I'm saying is, if Louisiana wants to screw itself, let them. What difference does it make to a dirt farmer if he's decended from monkeys? It's just going to make him that much more depressed, and make it that much more difficult for him to get up in the morning to tend his crops. LET PEOPLE BELIEVE IN CREATIONISM. It's ok if someone doesn't want to know everything. Just because you do, and see the logic, does not mean other people do.
If you want to be a doctor, guess what? Medical school is not going to take credits from a biology class with creationism on the syllabus. The guy who invented the styrofoam beer can insulator probably didn't believe in evolution. Yet miraculously, somehow, this great progress was made and our beer can be kept cold.
When the framers said "church and state" et al, they weren't talking about facts. Politicians lie all fricking day. They talk like their policy hurts no one when we all know that someone is the loser in EVERY transaction, be it monetary, social or otherwise. There is no happy medium. So, maybe having a poor class with no education that believes in creationism is the way to go? And if they want to sacrifice their public education dollars in that way, let them. I won't be one of them, but if they want to, god help them.
Just a friendly little tip for you. People who know the meanings of words recognize when someone is using words they don't know the meanings of.
Also, along the same lines: some of us didn't sleep through high school physics. Some of us even went on to study at the university. Either go crack open a textbook or go play counterstrike but if you babble like that in here you're gonna get your ass handed to you by people who know what they're talking about.
Excuse me for a second:
Sublimation was not the point. The point was that the water is in the atmosphere. If snow melts, then ends up in the atmosphere as water vapor, it has effectively sublimated; So it entered the liquid phase for a minute, who gives a fuck?
Since you're only able to think in terms of the things you memorized in school and not the abstract, maybe you should go spend some time actually thinking rather than killing yourself correcting others. Dick Feynman would KICK you out of his class. You don't get anywhere by thinking conventionally. All you kids born in the 80's are all alike. So fucking full of yourselves.
Oh, and snow sublimates, you cock fuck. So while you were busy in school, learning what your uneducated, probably drug addicted high school teacher was telling you, I was reading the Journal of Climatology. Next time you post on Slashdot, remember: Google First. Kids...*sigh*
Well, unfortunately there's this thing called "sublimation", which means that moisture is in the atmosphere now. The atmosphere is so large it can hold a bunch of water. There is a tipping point that happens at 100% relative humidity, of course, in which case the atmosphere is basically clouds (like Jupiter) and it's constantly condensing so the sea level rises.
Santa has used an under(frozen)sea base for at least the last 20 years. It's attached directly to the physical core of the earth with elven chain. Don't worry about Santa, he'll be fine.
Well, the thing is, a consumer doesn't have a need for everything. Take for example music: There is a definite long-tail model here. However, there is a limit to how much music you can listen to in a given time period. So the length of the tail is directly proportional to the number of consumers. Then you have to realize that people still tend to form groups, even if it's 5 people, or 50 or whatever. So the long tail pictured in all the literature is a smoothed out version of what's actually there. There's the exponential decay but if you zoom into that line, you'll have a series of peaks and valleys where groups form. If you sell to those groups, you can make money. The spaces in between have no customers, and there are a lot of those spaces. For instance, dogpoo.com is probably not going to sell too many units. However, tumbleweeds.com will.
The best security is unpredictable. For instance, the security the casinos use, or the scheduling the Army uses for patrols. They use random noise to generate the schedule. With this, you are installing predictable rules into the camera, which (like in the Matrix) can then be bent or broken.
You could add some unpredicability to the AI, but then you might miss something. The best thing is a nice preventative camera viewing cone covering every inch of the surface you intend to protect, preferably with multiple cameras.
This could be of use in other aspects, such as accident cams and such. I think there was something like this in demolition man (Brave New World) wherein the nearest camera to a detected incident swiveled and zoomed. Everything of course was recorded. Crime of course was completely gone, bred out of society. Well, until an unconventional enemy showed up.
Yeah, there's a ton of variety out there. Good toy stores (like the one in my sig) have everything from those little block kits to the 500 in 1 electronic springboard kits (remember those). I think you might be looking for something a little more advanced.
I remember putting together a few kits from Ramsey Electronics, including the venerable FM10 stereo FM transmitter. They have a lot of interesting stuff there. Also Information Unlimited is a classic for fun stuff like high-voltage, etc.
It's pretty simple. They have to pass this bill. Otherwise the telcos will roll the administration in court to prevent losing the cases.
It will reveal that a lot of things were done to put a lot of money into the hands of a few people. And the bottom line is that we need to take that money back, since it was obtained dishonestly.
However, it's been part of the game as long as governments/businesses have been around to declare war and game the system. The problem is that they infringed upon rights, they broke the law, and now they are trying to retroactively change the law. It doesn't work that way.
This is good news. Rather than "Fight and it'll cost you" in reality they are offering a discount to people who settle. See, the thing is, one man cannot fight the RIAA in court. But now they are faced with hundreds, even thousands of people challenging them. And they haven't been winning, usually due to lack of evidence that any infringement actually occured. So they aren't recouping the cost of their really expensive teams of corporate attorneys, long discovery sessions, return after return to the courtroom, etc. If we ALL fought at once, they would go out of business or be forced to change their model. They are starting to recognize it, and now they just want to capture as much as they can to pay their lawyers huge bills.
This also works well when you forgot to get your wife/girlfriend (I should say Mother, this is Slashdot..) a gift and you need to whip something out at the last minute. Although I did a big basket of $50 gift cards to many various places and she loved that. It's basically like giving money but its also saying "it's ok for you to shop" which they love. Money, while effectively the same thing, doesn't work. Why? Why is the sky blue? It just is, Timmy.
I'm interested to know what the grey lines of the roles military vs. intel play in this cyber battle. What are the rules of engagement for the military? And we're talking about DEFENSE of course, they don't call it the Department of Offense. I mean, are you guys tasked with monitoring all of our undersea cables and satellites also? What layers of the OSI stack are you active in? Purely IP and packets, or the physical layer as well? And what about deploying covert datacenters inside the enemy network? Do you work with the NSA? I don't understand why we need a cyber task force when we have the NSA. Unless this is a purely offensive force. In which case I'm not interested.
weed isnt physiologically addictive either until you get to about a few pounds of it a day. If you are doing that much weed addiction is the least of your problems. Good luck finding a study that says any different.
unfortunately weed prevents capitalizing the first word in your sentence and if I may be quite frank here the proper use of the comma.
I know that it's easy to make up excuses about the tree huggers ruining everything, but unfortunately sometimes you have to use your brain and think straight. Industrial production is never coming back to the USA! Not unless Americans are going to accept Bangladesh style wages/living standards.
It's interesting you should say that. Almost all of the job growth over the past decade or so has been in construction and the "service industry". The service industry is just ancillary to the construction industry (ie: someone has to clean the houses, sell them, make loans for them, etc.). So the service industry is drying up. No one is going out to eat if they can't pay their bills. Anyway, if enough people lose their jobs here, the minimum wages they will take goes down. Because hey, it's better to work than not have a job at all.
Of course, the money has all gone to the rich, and the government has printed so much of it that even more has just debased the currency. So, it's time to raise taxes and take the money back from the rich and give it to the people. They all know it's coming and they all plan for it. This is part of the regular US economic cycle. People here are just too thickheaded and don't see it, and those that do profit from it. So while everyone else was buying an Escalade and expensive drinks with their service industry income, some of us were planning ahead, working on our education and skills so that we could still work when the fall came.
Hopefully crime doesn't go up too much because I'd rather see that new tax money go to the people and not the industrial prision complex..
If you go out of town on Las Vegas Blvd. South on a Friday night after dark, you can see I-15 stretching out into the desert and up the hill about 10-20 miles. The northbound traffic into Las Vegas is a steady stream of headlights all the way to S. California. The trip is 200 miles, more or less, at 30mpg you are looking at 6.5 gallons per side of the trip, 13 gallons total. Multiply that by the number of visitors to Vegas each year (40M+) and (assuming wrongly that they all only go 200 miles), you have 520M gallons of gas used each year just to get to Vegas. 520M x $4.00 a gallon = $2.08B per year in energy costs alone. Never mind the cost of all those miles in depreciation, auto maintenance, road maintenance, police, car accidents, insurance claims, etc.
Now, this is blowing it out of proportion as there are only about 20M visitors from S. California each year. But I heard that they wanted to move a lot of the Long Beach port processing into Las Vegas and it's tax free environment, at least those packages destined up the I-15 corridor. So this train could supplant a lot of container trucks also, and at higher speed. It's a win for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr. Potato Head, risk management is not a secret. There are plenty of people out there making big money gaming the system because they know how it works. Banks themselves are some of the biggest crooks in history. The manage the risk that the general public actually begins to understand what they do (count money, basically, and then collect a little off the top, and take some of your risk from you). There are well-versed criminals who will never be caught.
On the flip side, you have other people managing risk in order to make money legally. A good example would be any bank that makes a loan. They assess risk, usually using a specific formula that a person verifies. A credit card company just gives you money, and doesn't really care if you eventually default. They just charge a high enough interest on the remaining good borrowers to make up the loss. Oh, and that money they lent you? They BORROWED IT.
The fact of the matter is people need to be more aware of their data, and I think banks should be REQUIRED to carry a large bond or other insurance to pay off people who have their credit scores (or worse) ruined by ID theft. I remember a story of some loan officer or another leaving a box of files in his car overnight. When he came out, his window--and the box--were gone. The police or FBI later found them in a storage unit with THOUSANDS of other files. ID Theft is big business, especially in the illegal immigrant market. And the value of a good credit report can be very very high.
However, I don't see the credit bureaus lasting through the current and continuing crisis. For one thing, they are not secure enough for the consumers. Their risk models are flawed, as was proven. A+ does not guarantee you're getting your principal back, even if you take the house. The automated scoring models are flawed. Countrywide was basically a software company that "did loans"; they had their own scoring application (which took in credit score as an input, along with a lot of other data, such as income, asset, rental history, etc etc). Most other banks used the Fannie Mae desktop underwriter system. The only way you can have a flawless system is if your underwriter (and servicer) has all seeing eyes; real income, real assets, real everything. Such a system would be even more vulnerable to ID theft than the credit system. Who would run such a system? The government?!? HAHA, the IRS can barely collect 90% and they have 10 year prison sentences for that stuff.
Hell, I'm already hearing about banks coming up with alternate programs where the borrower actually goes to their utility bills, and their lenders and gets letters of credit. The credit report is on it's way out, and that's the bread and butter of ID theft. Hey, guess what Jose, I can get you a social security card so you can work in the U.S. Oh! Bien! Then once they get here they realize they can use that same number to get free money they never have to pay back! You see where I'm going with this. And thus the current crisis.
I suffer from OTD, by the way... Off-Topic Disorder
Surely it would be a good time to also tell them what crooks the REAL credit card companies are.
When I was a PC tech I always had a sense of honor. They are trusting me with their PC and they need me to fix it and I'm going to do a good job and respect their privacy. Just like you'd want from your mechanic--or doctor, for that matter. I can't believe people would snoop into other people's data like that. It's like reading someone's diary.
Well, I could write a tool to open Word 03 documents in PHP for instance, and then convert them to PDF, on Linux, without some proprietary library. Granted, people have already done this, but now you could do it for real. I couldn't open a service to do that for the public, but I could convert all of the docs I might use in a normal business sense.
Whereas the 2007 files are all in XML. Really crappy, horribly confusing XML, but XML none the less. I mean, each WORD of a document (and sometimes each LETTER) has several tags around it. And the worst part is if spell checker finds a bad word, and you save it without correcting, it gets tagged. It's horrible, but it's XML. And it's possible to extend the schema and add your own tags so you can make a mail merge script in Perl without any binary bullshit.
Implementing robots will result in a massive unemployment epidemic. See this article by Marshall Brian, the creator of How Stuff Works.
You MUST take into account sociological factors when you're talking about a major robotic influx. The bottom line is that our economy is set up to use human labor right now. If there is not something in place to help people continue to work, perhaps at a lower rate (such as a 20 hour workweek limit, or something), all of the money will just flow up into the top 10% like it has been. It has to be on our terms, not the gigantic companies. Cargill already uses robotically controlled tractors to harvest the fields. But is it giving me, the average American, any additionaly leisure time? No.
The opportunity is such that we can either have a permanent vacation, and the robots allow us to flower and flourish culturally, or it will be permanent enslavement and povery since the upper classes no longer have a use for us workers.
And that was the problem with Marxism. Someone had to do the work, and they wanted to get more if they did more of their fair share. Well, if robots are doing the work, why can't we as a people collectively own them, and collectively enjoy the fruits of their labors; food, housing, etc. Granted some of those top 10% people will have to give up some of their power and come down to our level, but in this world of robots, any luxury can be had for almost nothing.
Marshall Brain wrote a novel about it called Manna.
If we had a real plan NOW to build a society of leisure based on robots that no one owns, I think it could be accomplished in a few decades. It would involve the formation of a large non-profit stock company where we all buy shares to get this thing built. It's not going to be totally simple, but it will be worth it.
Yeah, but how are they going to generate the waves of stupid people we need to continue our way of life in this country? Guess what, education leads people to stop believing in this country. The more educated you become, the more you see the fundamental flaws. The more you see through the facade of the American Dream. Of course, then they pay you a lot and you stop worrying about all that :)
All I'm saying is, if Louisiana wants to screw itself, let them. What difference does it make to a dirt farmer if he's decended from monkeys? It's just going to make him that much more depressed, and make it that much more difficult for him to get up in the morning to tend his crops. LET PEOPLE BELIEVE IN CREATIONISM. It's ok if someone doesn't want to know everything. Just because you do, and see the logic, does not mean other people do.
If you want to be a doctor, guess what? Medical school is not going to take credits from a biology class with creationism on the syllabus. The guy who invented the styrofoam beer can insulator probably didn't believe in evolution. Yet miraculously, somehow, this great progress was made and our beer can be kept cold.
When the framers said "church and state" et al, they weren't talking about facts. Politicians lie all fricking day. They talk like their policy hurts no one when we all know that someone is the loser in EVERY transaction, be it monetary, social or otherwise. There is no happy medium. So, maybe having a poor class with no education that believes in creationism is the way to go? And if they want to sacrifice their public education dollars in that way, let them. I won't be one of them, but if they want to, god help them.
Just a friendly little tip for you. People who know the meanings of words recognize when someone is using words they don't know the meanings of.
Also, along the same lines: some of us didn't sleep through high school physics. Some of us even went on to study at the university. Either go crack open a textbook or go play counterstrike but if you babble like that in here you're gonna get your ass handed to you by people who know what they're talking about.
Excuse me for a second:
Sublimation was not the point. The point was that the water is in the atmosphere. If snow melts, then ends up in the atmosphere as water vapor, it has effectively sublimated; So it entered the liquid phase for a minute, who gives a fuck?
Since you're only able to think in terms of the things you memorized in school and not the abstract, maybe you should go spend some time actually thinking rather than killing yourself correcting others. Dick Feynman would KICK you out of his class. You don't get anywhere by thinking conventionally. All you kids born in the 80's are all alike. So fucking full of yourselves.
Oh, and snow sublimates, you cock fuck. So while you were busy in school, learning what your uneducated, probably drug addicted high school teacher was telling you, I was reading the Journal of Climatology. Next time you post on Slashdot, remember: Google First. Kids...*sigh*
Well, unfortunately there's this thing called "sublimation", which means that moisture is in the atmosphere now. The atmosphere is so large it can hold a bunch of water. There is a tipping point that happens at 100% relative humidity, of course, in which case the atmosphere is basically clouds (like Jupiter) and it's constantly condensing so the sea level rises.
Santa has used an under(frozen)sea base for at least the last 20 years. It's attached directly to the physical core of the earth with elven chain. Don't worry about Santa, he'll be fine.
Well, the thing is, a consumer doesn't have a need for everything. Take for example music: There is a definite long-tail model here. However, there is a limit to how much music you can listen to in a given time period. So the length of the tail is directly proportional to the number of consumers. Then you have to realize that people still tend to form groups, even if it's 5 people, or 50 or whatever. So the long tail pictured in all the literature is a smoothed out version of what's actually there. There's the exponential decay but if you zoom into that line, you'll have a series of peaks and valleys where groups form. If you sell to those groups, you can make money. The spaces in between have no customers, and there are a lot of those spaces. For instance, dogpoo.com is probably not going to sell too many units. However, tumbleweeds.com will.
You mean Topfreedom?
Might be NSFW, by the way, I'm not going to check, since I'm at work.
The best security is unpredictable. For instance, the security the casinos use, or the scheduling the Army uses for patrols. They use random noise to generate the schedule. With this, you are installing predictable rules into the camera, which (like in the Matrix) can then be bent or broken.
You could add some unpredicability to the AI, but then you might miss something. The best thing is a nice preventative camera viewing cone covering every inch of the surface you intend to protect, preferably with multiple cameras.
This could be of use in other aspects, such as accident cams and such. I think there was something like this in demolition man (Brave New World) wherein the nearest camera to a detected incident swiveled and zoomed. Everything of course was recorded. Crime of course was completely gone, bred out of society. Well, until an unconventional enemy showed up.
Blame the CIA and the Catholic Church in one fell swoop? Now if that isn't a match made for UCB, then I don't know what is.
Yeah, everyone knows the Catholics are all in the FBI.
Yeah, there's a ton of variety out there. Good toy stores (like the one in my sig) have everything from those little block kits to the 500 in 1 electronic springboard kits (remember those). I think you might be looking for something a little more advanced.
I remember putting together a few kits from Ramsey Electronics, including the venerable FM10 stereo FM transmitter. They have a lot of interesting stuff there. Also Information Unlimited is a classic for fun stuff like high-voltage, etc.
That's too much work.
It's pretty simple. They have to pass this bill. Otherwise the telcos will roll the administration in court to prevent losing the cases.
It will reveal that a lot of things were done to put a lot of money into the hands of a few people. And the bottom line is that we need to take that money back, since it was obtained dishonestly.
However, it's been part of the game as long as governments/businesses have been around to declare war and game the system. The problem is that they infringed upon rights, they broke the law, and now they are trying to retroactively change the law. It doesn't work that way.
This is good news. Rather than "Fight and it'll cost you" in reality they are offering a discount to people who settle. See, the thing is, one man cannot fight the RIAA in court. But now they are faced with hundreds, even thousands of people challenging them. And they haven't been winning, usually due to lack of evidence that any infringement actually occured. So they aren't recouping the cost of their really expensive teams of corporate attorneys, long discovery sessions, return after return to the courtroom, etc. If we ALL fought at once, they would go out of business or be forced to change their model. They are starting to recognize it, and now they just want to capture as much as they can to pay their lawyers huge bills.
This also works well when you forgot to get your wife/girlfriend (I should say Mother, this is Slashdot..) a gift and you need to whip something out at the last minute. Although I did a big basket of $50 gift cards to many various places and she loved that. It's basically like giving money but its also saying "it's ok for you to shop" which they love. Money, while effectively the same thing, doesn't work. Why? Why is the sky blue? It just is, Timmy.
I'm interested to know what the grey lines of the roles military vs. intel play in this cyber battle. What are the rules of engagement for the military? And we're talking about DEFENSE of course, they don't call it the Department of Offense. I mean, are you guys tasked with monitoring all of our undersea cables and satellites also? What layers of the OSI stack are you active in? Purely IP and packets, or the physical layer as well? And what about deploying covert datacenters inside the enemy network? Do you work with the NSA? I don't understand why we need a cyber task force when we have the NSA. Unless this is a purely offensive force. In which case I'm not interested.
TAKE down your damn post. I'm reporting you to the FBI for cracking my password!
That's the combination for my luggage!
weed isnt physiologically addictive either until you get to about a few pounds of it a day. If you are doing that much weed addiction is the least of your problems. Good luck finding a study that says any different.
unfortunately weed prevents capitalizing the first word in your sentence and if I may be quite frank here the proper use of the comma.
I know that it's easy to make up excuses about the tree huggers ruining everything, but unfortunately sometimes you have to use your brain and think straight. Industrial production is never coming back to the USA! Not unless Americans are going to accept Bangladesh style wages/living standards.
It's interesting you should say that. Almost all of the job growth over the past decade or so has been in construction and the "service industry". The service industry is just ancillary to the construction industry (ie: someone has to clean the houses, sell them, make loans for them, etc.). So the service industry is drying up. No one is going out to eat if they can't pay their bills. Anyway, if enough people lose their jobs here, the minimum wages they will take goes down. Because hey, it's better to work than not have a job at all.
Of course, the money has all gone to the rich, and the government has printed so much of it that even more has just debased the currency. So, it's time to raise taxes and take the money back from the rich and give it to the people. They all know it's coming and they all plan for it. This is part of the regular US economic cycle. People here are just too thickheaded and don't see it, and those that do profit from it. So while everyone else was buying an Escalade and expensive drinks with their service industry income, some of us were planning ahead, working on our education and skills so that we could still work when the fall came.
Hopefully crime doesn't go up too much because I'd rather see that new tax money go to the people and not the industrial prision complex..
Why would you want to buy a U.S. made car?
In Soviet Russia, sight destroys your bootleg vodka.
If you go out of town on Las Vegas Blvd. South on a Friday night after dark, you can see I-15 stretching out into the desert and up the hill about 10-20 miles. The northbound traffic into Las Vegas is a steady stream of headlights all the way to S. California. The trip is 200 miles, more or less, at 30mpg you are looking at 6.5 gallons per side of the trip, 13 gallons total. Multiply that by the number of visitors to Vegas each year (40M+) and (assuming wrongly that they all only go 200 miles), you have 520M gallons of gas used each year just to get to Vegas. 520M x $4.00 a gallon = $2.08B per year in energy costs alone. Never mind the cost of all those miles in depreciation, auto maintenance, road maintenance, police, car accidents, insurance claims, etc.
Now, this is blowing it out of proportion as there are only about 20M visitors from S. California each year. But I heard that they wanted to move a lot of the Long Beach port processing into Las Vegas and it's tax free environment, at least those packages destined up the I-15 corridor. So this train could supplant a lot of container trucks also, and at higher speed. It's a win for everyone.