A few years back I took $100 out of one bank and deposited it at another. The second bank only credited me $80, and sent me a letter informing me that one of the bills was counterfeit. I called the bank and explained that while I'm sure they were right, I'd been handed the bill by another bank and I had no chance of detecting the counterfeit bill so it wasn't fair to punish me. They, of course, wouldn't agree with that but they *did* give me a $20 counter credit because they wanted to keep me as a customer.
A couple decades ago when all paper money was as counterfeitable as the $1 bill remains, I worked at a fast food joint and would encounter counterfeit money on a fairly regular basis. The thing is, it was obvious to me that the poor schmo trying to buy a burger hadn't made the bill, and was just handing me a stack of money he'd been handed by somebody else. Who knows where the counterfeiter was? So unless I thought the customer was actually trying to swindle I'd just take the money and let the banks sort it out later.
Similar thing here: the purchasers are unwittingly caught in the crosshairs. Nothing good comes of attacking the person who's already been unknowingly swindled.
All very good points. The US has a long history of questionable business dealings to develop emerging infrastructure, and the rail barons of the late 19th and early 20th century are perhaps an even better example than GM of the 1950s.
But my point was really about the willful and malicious destruction of infrastructure. And of course all the auto companies were culpable in this, but GM, as far and away the biggest of them, is the most guilty. Of course GM was smart enough to realize that it wasn't competing against other auto manufacturers in quite the same way it was competing against trains, just as Microsoft and Sun are aware that they don't compete against each other the same way they both (as proprietary software companies) compete against Linux. So the fact that GM had automotive competitors that it could not be monopolistic against does not change the fact that they waged a monopolistic war against competing technologies.
And finally, your point about the interstate defense system is well made: it's important to remember that Eisenhower envisioned the highways as a way to (1) move military vehicles during a war; (2) provide additional airfields if needed; and (3) drain the cities in the event of nuclear attack. He did not envision them cutting through cities and being the primary way that people would get around. Regardless, the military-industrial complex (which Eisenhower eventually grew weary of himself) had a very active stake in the construction of the Interstate system. So General Motors, and indeed auto makers as a group were not solely culpable for the intentional destruction of rail.
I definitely read my history. I'm a professional historian.
It could certainly be stated that my piece pins the blame on GM instead of the wider pro-auto lobby, but the truth is that GM specifically *was* the big auto company in those days - in the 1960s GM controlled over 30% of the market by themselves! General Motors did indeed buy rail lines all over the country, not just in LA, and in most cases immediately began dismantlement. You are right that in some markets it was a bet-hedging mechanism; but for the most part, it was about competition.
I'd quote some sources, but it's 11:30 PM and I'm keeping my daughter awake...
We had trains and they simply could not compete with the plane and the car. Planes are much faster and more flexible for travel across the country but the automobile, however, is the ultimate train killer. Nothing else beats it's flexibility, convenience, price, autonomy and privacy.
Actually, you're almost right but not quite. The automobile wasn't the train killer, General Motors was the train killer. Most people don't know that in the 1950s General Motors corporation actually asked and received the right from the US government to buy and destroy rail corridors, which they paid the US government for the right to do. They intentionally destroyed millions of miles of railroad track in this country.
Ever wonder why it is that in the 1900s railroad barons controlled the US and yet today there isn't any infrastructure for trains? It's because General Motors tore it up to make sure that trains wouldn't be practical and that they would have no competition. This was combined with a massive advertisement campaign to convince Americans that automobiles were the wave of the future, and that to be modern and advanced, one needed a car. Nobody talked about the rail getting ripped up by GM workers.
Now that's a reason to be outraged, and it rather undermines the argument that cars won out in the US because they were simply more adapted for the US problems. Remember that in the 1940s the US had a very extensive rail network but no freeways and very few good highways - have you seen pictures of Route 66? And that was the best highway in the country at the time. Cars were horribly impractical and slow compared to trains in the 1940s; but by the 1960s that problem was solved by General Motors' capitalistic, monopolistic decision.
Purposely and maliciously destroying national infrastructure is what conquering armies do to the vanquished as a way of making sure they never rise up again; and in war it's now considered a war crime to do such an act needlessly. And yet General Motors was rewarded with a 30-year near-monopoly of the US transportation markets...
Veovis is right that *this device* will not allow you to use you cellphone to connect a computer to an analog dialup ISP. However, at least with T-Mobile this is moot because you can do that without any devices except your phone.
I do *NOT* pay for gprs packet service from T-Mobile. However, sometimes I find myself in the middle of nowhere (Waterloo, IA) in a hostile environment (my mother-in-law's spyware-infested computer) and am dying for any other way to get a safe connection. Since long-distance is free on my cell phone, I hook my V600 up to my Powerbook (either with the cable or by bluetooth), use the modem scripts from here and dial in to the back-up modem pool offered by my DSL ISP. Sure, it only goes at 9600Kbps, but that's a totally free connection anywhere in the US. It's good enough for email.
T-Mobile's network is smart enough to tell that it's a data call, not a voice call, but it's billed within my minutes (as minutes) and not as data service (as bytes). With unlimited weekend and evening minutes, there's literally no cost whatsoever.
I don't know about the poor sods who are still on CDMA/TDMA, but those of us with GSM can still choose not to pay for GPRS service if we choose.
The Electoral College today can serve the purpose of saving us from a demagogue. If the public elects somebody deemed by the Electoral College to be a dangerous threat to American democracy, they can give the election to somebody else. However, the electoral college is no longer a very popular idea and is widely held to be a hindrance to direct democracy.
In any situation in which such a "safety fuse" were used, the already unpopular institution would be considered to have blocked the election of a popular figure. Constitutional amendments would be proposed immediately to do away with the electoral college, and congressmen, wary of standing against their constituency, would pass it. The states would likely be able to organize constitutional conventions very quickly, and the amendment would be passed in no time.
Of course, this would all be moot for the election that triggered it - there's nothing currently illegal about that action by the electors - so we'd have four years for better sense to return before the same demagogue could run again. But at that point the safety fuse would be used, and we would be reliant on direct election.
That's why it's a one-time safety fuse - if it's ever used, it will be so unpopular that it will bring an end to itself. With any luck however, we'll be through the woods.
In a similar vein, the Constitution allows a president to disband Congress at any time for up to a year. This has never been used, and if it were, a Constitutional Amendment would probably be the first thing on the Congress' agenda when they reconvened.
THe biggest reason for this is that unlike cars without power steering, which generally have a direct system of gears between the steering wheel and the mechanism, a power steering system actively alters the steering mechanism. No concern is given for making sure the system works well without it, and the system itself becomes a drag on the steering.
Think of this: power steering intercepts your commands and assists you with them. When it is dead, not only are you working against the road (as in a non-power-steering car) but you're also working against the dead power steering system. The stronger the power steering system when functional, the stronger it will fight your steering commands when it's dead.
Click and Clack (the tappit brothers: cartalk.com) did an article about this, basically saying, "look knuckleheads, just because cars without power steering work just fine, don't expect that your car with power steering will work fine without it." I'm too lazy to find their story; but go to the link and search.
Also, the point about the steering wheel locking is a very real and serious concern.
Actually, the last part isn't true. The electoral college has select a president by absolute majority, or else it goes to Congress to choose a President. So, the electoral results above (255/261/22) would mean one of two things: (1) at least 9 electors would have to switch to Bush or at least 15 would have to switch to Gore; or (2) the Congress would get to choose the President. Considering that the vote would have occurred *before* the new Senators and representatives took their seats, and both houses were controlled by the Republicans for that session, this would have guaranteed Bush/Cheney the White House.
Wow, I set out to write a quick response, but it became quite long...
Right, that's the biggest thing that strikes me as stupid about this proposal. I've often thought that getting rid of "winner take all" and going back to proportional selection of electors makes sense. However, One elector casts one vote, which means that it's no more granular than the integer number of electors.
Obviously, at the point that the electoral vote is divided into pieces smaller than the integer number of electors, the whole point of the college is moot - there's no reason for them to meet, since at that point it's a straight popular vote, simply converted into a smaller base number than the number of voters.
It's important to remember why winner-take-all crept in in the first place. In the beginning, there were two important things about the electoral college: first, it was up to state legislators to decide how the electors were chosen, which meant in some instances they were elected and in others they were appointed. Second, they were sent to Washington to choose a president, and they had no requirement to vote according to the wishes of their home state. Both of these is technically still true; but since all states today choose the electors by popular vote and then let the parties choose the electors for their candidate, as a general rule they vote for the candidate they're supposed to vote for.
The winner-take-all system started because it allowed a few states with a lot of electors but a very divided population to have greater sway within the College and hence more attention from candidates. For instance, New York has a very large number of electors; but if their electors are split two ways, roughly resembling the overall split in the nation, then New York's massive number of electors is not going to particularly help or hurt either candidate. If a candidate knows that he can secure roughly half of New York's electors, it's not worth wasting any time there because one elector is unlikely to make a difference.
So when bigger states started switching to winner-take-all, suddenly the difference between a 45-55 decision and a 55-45 decision in New York, which might have made a difference of 5 or six electors before, was worth 40 electors. Guaranteeing a win in New York became very important for a potential candidate, and New York became disproportionately important. In order to compete for attention, more states followed and eventually the entire nation (except a few now-insignificant states) switched to winner-take-all.
Only politically-idealistic or unaware people would call for individual states (let alone their own state) to switch back to proportional selection of electors; but the winner-take-all system is fundamentally flawed. I think that a national election law (or possibly an amendment) requiring that states distribute electors propotionally is the only way to get out of the winner-take-all dilemma.
Unfortunately, that brings about problems of its own. The usefulness of the Electoral College is that it's a one-time-use safety fuse on the American Presidency. It means that if an extremely dangerous figure won an election, the electors could decide to give the election to somebody else. This would of course end the electoral college, hence the reason it's a one-time-use mechanism in the contemporary period. But the reason that they can do this at all is because currently they are not legally bound in any way whatsoever, at least at the national level. Any attempt to require electors to be selected proportionally would also necessitate that their votes be attached to a given candidate and their loyalty assured. At this point, an electoral college would actually be meaningless, because the only thing that makes it interesting is that it prevents direct election of a president. Once electoral votes become irrevocably tied to the popular vote, the electoral system becomes meaningless.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong; however, a lot of people miss what these prizes mean.
It's not a "wow, if there is a prize for X dollars, and we can build a ship to win the prize for less than X dollars, we'll make money." If that were all it was about, it wouldn't be worth it. Think of the billions that Boeing makes from its government contracts; these prizes, if actually a profit in themselves, are pocket change compared to that.
However, these companies are building things that could be profitable on their own, for a blossoming space tourism business. The prize *is* a financial benefit: if one plans to make a profit of $1 million per year but has an up-front cost of $20 million, it will take twenty years to break even. If, however, that R&D cost of $20 million is enough to win a $10 million prize - or even if the rush for the prize costs an extra $5 million, raising the project up-front cost to $25 million - it will take less time to amortize the up-front costs than without the prize.
So when one considers a slightly more complex economic model, it is possible to see that a craft, even if it's much more expensive than the prize amount, is worth it so long as there's a sound underlying business model - the prize itself isn't a net profit, but it shortens the amortization period on the initial investment, which allows a positive net flow much sooner than without. This is why a prize of any significant amount will attract attention - a $50 million prize for a $500 million rocket which is based on a firm business plan still represents a 10% savings for the venture capitalists who build it, thus increasing the odds that their business will succeed.
I'm lucky if I can convince him to go out for a run or a bike ride - he'd rather play starship creator or throw in a DVD and watch episodes.
This is OT; but I'm interested in people's opinions.
I'm glad your kid's creative; but aren't you concerned about him being inside so much? I'm about to become a parent for the first time, and I'm quite concerned about this. As a kid, I always played outside with other people, went camping, rode my bike, etc. Other than a VIC-20 in the living room, a library of books and four channels of broadcast television, there was nothing to do inside.
Now, I have lots of technology around the house and things that may keep one occupied inside. I'm concerned that these things may distract my daughter - real social interaction and physical play are important, especially when young, since this is how kids learn to be social and well-adjusted (and physically healthy) adults. I know of so many children of IT pros who are overexposed and over-reliant on technology in a way we weren't, and I'm concerned about what this means for their health, their social welfare, and so forth.
Of course, I imagine that many of the 14-18 year-olds here on slashdot grew up with this ever-present media; am I overly concerned? Opinions?
That is amazingly cool - I first learned about computers on a PET at my grade school, and then my dad bought us a VIC-20 with a datasette drive. I remember at the time wishing that we could have a 1540 disk drive for home use, but my dad said they were too expensive and fragile - which is true. I remember that my grade school got some 1541s when they replaced the PETs with Commodore 64s, and the 1541s were constantly being repaired. My datasette at home, while slow and bizarre, never broke.
And then they ruined it all by giving up on the quirky British company that couldn't make a profit and throwing all their cereal box tops at Apple Computer, replacing most of the (still new) Commodore 64s with Apple II+ machines, IIRC (the ones that were light orange with brown keys and a black bottom underneath the front wedge). And it's not like those early Apples could do better than a 40-column display anyway.
Excellent. Thanks much! I read all the details, priced out my iMac, and contemplated placing an order this morning, but I missed that detail. I know what's going in my kitchen now...
I agree. I currently have a sunray with a flat panel hanging on my kitchen wall, but the keyboard and mouse are a PITA. If this were a touchscreen, it would be better.
I also would like to know whether it's possible to take off the stand and hang this on the wall. If I could replace my sunray/flat panel combos with iMacs hanging on the walls, using bluetooth keyboard and mouse, that would be a definite improvement. Does anybody know if this is possible?
There's a big difference between "I'm into cameras" and a serious photography enthusiast. Whereas a digicam may be great fun, it's not a serious tool, and the poster sounds like she or he is looking for a serious tool - a basic one, but a serious tool nonetheless.
Just as any serious photographer would not consider getting a point-and-click film camera, serious photographers aren't interested in toy digital cameras either. I think it's safe to say this person needs an SLR.
* that's not to say there's anything wrong with toy cameras - they cause less trouble at airports and are just fine for sightseeing pictures. I intend to get one of the canon toy digitals myself soon. So don't be offended by my characterization of them as toys - we all like toys!
Right, but you could whore yourself out to 500 of those fat chicks at $100 a piece, or to 10 really fat chicks for $5000 a piece, and you'd make $50,000. Then you could pay off that biodiesel-burning boat of yours before your house got taken away...
That's a very good point, and I agree. Things that get people involved and cause them to think about history experientially represent a large improvement over dull anecdotes repeated on chalk boards.
I suppose we'll have to wait to see the end result of this project...
I agree with you, which you probably noticed from my final comment about school boards controlling K-12 history curricula and about college intro history having to essentially "unteach" what's been done before they get there.
There are exceptions of course, but grade school and high school history in America often have little to do with teaching students to think critically about history and to ask difficult questions. History for kids is one of the most politicized subjects, if not the very most. School districts and parents argue that their kids should learn the nice, happy stories they were taught, which have nice morals to them and make us better people.
Of course, much of what you're reciting above is the same thing - essentialized stories, this time designed to refute the old stories. Any time history is about neat little stories, whether positive or negative, it's not getting anywhere. History as a field explores questions and is meant to be argumentative, not narrative. There are no neat, tidy answers that don't essentialize the problem to such an extent as to lose meaning.
Let me give a quick (shabby) example: most grade schools teach that the Civil War was about southern slaveholders who wanted to have slaves. The North protested, and the Northerners fought a holy war to free the slaves. Separately, the traditional southern story of the War Between the States teaches that Southerners were upset that a Federal government was telling them what to do. The war was about states' rights, not slavery. The northerners forced unfair government on the South.
Well, I could say that both of these stories are false, and I would be fairly accurate. However, it's not useful simply to say they are false. The point is, both stories have some elements of truth to them, but the problem is far more complex. Was slavery a central issue? Sure. Was States' rights a central issue? Yes. It also had a bit to do with how people interpreted the founding documents of the United States, and how they viewed the struggle that had been the American Revolution. It was tied up in the fact that the United States were expanding rapidly, and the new states had no stake in the original compromises that had brought about the Constitution. It had a lot to do with the death of an old political party (the Whigs) and the birth of a new one (the Republicans). The reality is, the war came about thanks to a whole lot of factors, and every individual involved had a different way of interpreting what it was about.
One of the interesting questions that emerges from this is, what caused individuals to view the Civil War the way they viewed it? How could two brothers, living in the same city with the same upbringing, come to opposite conclusions about the war and fight on opposite sides? What was at stake for these people, and why did they view the struggle as something worth dying for? How were these many and varied views and opinions united into armies, and how did those in power (journalists, politicians, etc) appeal to people about the war? What does this tell us about Modernity and the emergence of print culture in the middle of the 19th Century?
These are the types of questions that professional historians ask (though I'm a European historian, so I may be ten years out of date on what questions are hot right now on the American Civil War). These questions cannot be addressed by a video game, and they're rarely addressed by grade schools, high schools, or popular history in general.
I'm torn on whether or not this is a good thing. As a professional historian, my immediate response is against this sort of thing - it essentializes history and is likely to remove much of the complexity from history for the students. Games also tend to be quite anachronistic, project contemporary (modern?) views, beliefs and stereotypes back across periods and events preceding these views and beliefs. Video games rarely teach people to think critically and analytically about history.
On the other hand, I have to admit that Civilization (the original DOS game) had a lot to do with getting me fired up about history in high school. I now know (and was vaguely aware then) that the game was (and continues to be) *HORRIBLE* in terms of historical accuracy or methodology, but it *did* get me fired up about history and caused me to sign up for the advanced history classes, which led to me choosing history as a major in college. Had I not gotten so fired up about history when I was 16, perhaps I would not have pursued a PhD in it.
So I suppose I'm on the fence - games such as Civ and Age of Empires mislead people into some horribly skewed views of history, but since they do get people interested in becoming history students, we (professional historians) get a chance to "unlearn" the errors when they take our classes. With any luck, we can keep some of the excitement while doing so. Since college intro history spends much of its time undoing the damage of the (highly political) K-12 school-board-driven history classes anyway, it's not likely to hurt.
Re:Car-centric design is the problem
on
Alternatives to Cars?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That's exactly right, but there's hope in New Urbanism. I'm going to do it a horrible injustice in my explanation, but New Urbanism is a movement to shift city planning back to walkable spaces. The idea is to look at how communities were (unconsciously) formed before mass transit as we know it, and then consciously design in adapted but similar ways.
For example, one of the tenets of New Urbanism is that all services for daily life must be available within every two-mile circle of population, and these should be arranged around centers such that nobody is more than a mile from everything he/she needs. In cities such as Minneapolis, the New Urbanist movement has largely been responsible for the formation of legally-recognized Neighborhoods within the city, which get their own separate pool of taxpayer money (within the city's budget) to develop local business, residences, and other Urban Renewal programs.
In Minneapolis it's been spectacularly successful - according to the 2000 census, the Minneapolis/St. Paul area is the only Metro Area in America which saw population *growth* for the urban cores from 1990 to 2000. I live in the city of Minneapolis and I don't need to use my car for most daily tasks (including going to work), though because of our foul winters I often end up doing so for a few months of the year.
I grew up in the suburbs, where you couldn't buy a cup of coffee without driving ten miles and burning half a gallon of gas. Even though all my family lives 600 miles away, I put less than 10K a year on my car now. It's truly wonderful.
So yes, I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree that the car-centric design of the suburbs is the problem. Outer suburbs probably will never change; but if more cities and inner suburbs can succeed with New Urbanism, at least some people will be drawn back in from the outer ring car parks into the walkable communities of urban life...
I end up filling up the tank half as often as most people. That's gotta be worth something.
That is worth something - pretty impressive if you have a longish commute. But what's the price difference between the convenient gas station in the city and the one you go to? They say that most people actually go out of their way to save on gas; but considering that prices usually only differ by ten cents per gallon or less, it's often only marginally cheaper in the grand scheme of things. I do it too - but perhaps it's not worth the marginal $2 per week that you save to go out of your way?
Of course, this comes from a person who keeps track of every single detail about a car (mileage at every fill-up, every repair, every car wash, cost of gas, exact (to the thousandth) amount of gas, etc. so I'm not one to be talking about wasted effort...
And at this point you probably know your car so well that you can catch it at the last pint of gas. I used to be able to do that with my old car - I'd drive 50 miles after the gas light came on - but I don't have a feel for my new one... I also don't buy into the "tank half full" crap, and since I live in Minnesota (-30 F winters) and have *NEVER* had any trouble from letting the tank go down to the last pint, I don't believe it. However, I've never run a car out of gas either, and I imagine that would be rather more drastic, especially on a cold day...
You apparently haven't looked recently at how many perfectly normal gas automobiles are ULEVs and SULEVs. My Elantra GT (138hp) is a ULEV, and in California it's tuned slightly differently to be a SULEV (132hp). I believe the Corolla, Mazda 3, and base Civic are all ULEVs. The ULEV standard is just that - standard - for compact cars today, and most are available as SULEVs in California. With the notable absence of VW, every major car manufacturer makes at least one conventional SULEV car for the California market.
And there are other savings from the higher mileage: less frequent stops, like eliminating wasting time, which is more important to me than wasting gas.
I hear this argument all the time. However, assuming you're driving a *car* and not one of those urban assault vehicles, you're going to get at least 20mpg on the highway and the smallest gas tanks are 10.3 gallons (40 liters). This means that even if your car had the smallest gas tank and got bad gas mileage (not a common combination) you'd have to drive 200 miles to use up a tank of gas. At 70MPH that's just under three hours.
Anybody who knows anything about fatigue, exhaustion, blood clots, bladders, and health knows that it's a *REALLY BAD IDEA* for anybody to drive more than about two to three hours without a quick break to get up and stretch, which is what a mandatory gas stop provides.
Realistically, most cars that get under 30mpg highway have tanks at least 14.5 gallons (55 liters?) so your time between breaks is already stretched to about 300 miles at 20mpg, which comes out to over four hours!!! At a more reasonable 30mpg (My Elantra gets 35mpg and has a 14.5 gallon tank, hence my comparison), a 14.5 gallon tank gives you about 450 miles, or 6 hours of driving time between stops. If you're driving six hours without stopping, I don't want to be in the car next to you...
Now if you're referring to having to stop on your daily commute, well that's a different problem. Since you're already stopped at both ends of your commute (and I'm sure your commute takes less than one tank of gas) it makes sense just to fill up at the beginning or end. That's what I used to do when I had a 90-mile round trip commute from a suburb into downtown Saint Louis when I was younger...
Yeah, same story with my '04 Elantra GT. 138hp, ~35mpg on the highway, ~30mpg combined, and only $13,600. Oh, and it has leather.
Don't get me wrong, I think about how my friend with the Prius is environmentally conscious. I also genuinely like her car. But then I remember that my car is faster, accelerates better, has a leather interior, costs just over half as much, takes up far less space on the road and has more interior volume, and is still a ULEV (Ultra-low emissions vehicle). My gas mileage is not quite as good - she gets about 39-40mpg - but my car pollutes as little per mile as hers, so I feel pretty environmentally conscious too.
Of course, my car was probably built by laborers working for $.05/hour on an assembly line in South Korea so I probably shouldn't feel globally conscious...
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back I took $100 out of one bank and deposited it at another. The second bank only credited me $80, and sent me a letter informing me that one of the bills was counterfeit. I called the bank and explained that while I'm sure they were right, I'd been handed the bill by another bank and I had no chance of detecting the counterfeit bill so it wasn't fair to punish me. They, of course, wouldn't agree with that but they *did* give me a $20 counter credit because they wanted to keep me as a customer.
A couple decades ago when all paper money was as counterfeitable as the $1 bill remains, I worked at a fast food joint and would encounter counterfeit money on a fairly regular basis. The thing is, it was obvious to me that the poor schmo trying to buy a burger hadn't made the bill, and was just handing me a stack of money he'd been handed by somebody else. Who knows where the counterfeiter was? So unless I thought the customer was actually trying to swindle I'd just take the money and let the banks sort it out later.
Similar thing here: the purchasers are unwittingly caught in the crosshairs. Nothing good comes of attacking the person who's already been unknowingly swindled.
All very good points. The US has a long history of questionable business dealings to develop emerging infrastructure, and the rail barons of the late 19th and early 20th century are perhaps an even better example than GM of the 1950s.
But my point was really about the willful and malicious destruction of infrastructure. And of course all the auto companies were culpable in this, but GM, as far and away the biggest of them, is the most guilty. Of course GM was smart enough to realize that it wasn't competing against other auto manufacturers in quite the same way it was competing against trains, just as Microsoft and Sun are aware that they don't compete against each other the same way they both (as proprietary software companies) compete against Linux. So the fact that GM had automotive competitors that it could not be monopolistic against does not change the fact that they waged a monopolistic war against competing technologies.
And finally, your point about the interstate defense system is well made: it's important to remember that Eisenhower envisioned the highways as a way to (1) move military vehicles during a war; (2) provide additional airfields if needed; and (3) drain the cities in the event of nuclear attack. He did not envision them cutting through cities and being the primary way that people would get around. Regardless, the military-industrial complex (which Eisenhower eventually grew weary of himself) had a very active stake in the construction of the Interstate system. So General Motors, and indeed auto makers as a group were not solely culpable for the intentional destruction of rail.
I definitely read my history. I'm a professional historian.
It could certainly be stated that my piece pins the blame on GM instead of the wider pro-auto lobby, but the truth is that GM specifically *was* the big auto company in those days - in the 1960s GM controlled over 30% of the market by themselves! General Motors did indeed buy rail lines all over the country, not just in LA, and in most cases immediately began dismantlement. You are right that in some markets it was a bet-hedging mechanism; but for the most part, it was about competition.
I'd quote some sources, but it's 11:30 PM and I'm keeping my daughter awake...
Actually, you're almost right but not quite. The automobile wasn't the train killer, General Motors was the train killer. Most people don't know that in the 1950s General Motors corporation actually asked and received the right from the US government to buy and destroy rail corridors, which they paid the US government for the right to do. They intentionally destroyed millions of miles of railroad track in this country.
Ever wonder why it is that in the 1900s railroad barons controlled the US and yet today there isn't any infrastructure for trains? It's because General Motors tore it up to make sure that trains wouldn't be practical and that they would have no competition. This was combined with a massive advertisement campaign to convince Americans that automobiles were the wave of the future, and that to be modern and advanced, one needed a car. Nobody talked about the rail getting ripped up by GM workers.
Now that's a reason to be outraged, and it rather undermines the argument that cars won out in the US because they were simply more adapted for the US problems. Remember that in the 1940s the US had a very extensive rail network but no freeways and very few good highways - have you seen pictures of Route 66? And that was the best highway in the country at the time. Cars were horribly impractical and slow compared to trains in the 1940s; but by the 1960s that problem was solved by General Motors' capitalistic, monopolistic decision.
Purposely and maliciously destroying national infrastructure is what conquering armies do to the vanquished as a way of making sure they never rise up again; and in war it's now considered a war crime to do such an act needlessly. And yet General Motors was rewarded with a 30-year near-monopoly of the US transportation markets...
Veovis is right that *this device* will not allow you to use you cellphone to connect a computer to an analog dialup ISP. However, at least with T-Mobile this is moot because you can do that without any devices except your phone.
I do *NOT* pay for gprs packet service from T-Mobile. However, sometimes I find myself in the middle of nowhere (Waterloo, IA) in a hostile environment (my mother-in-law's spyware-infested computer) and am dying for any other way to get a safe connection. Since long-distance is free on my cell phone, I hook my V600 up to my Powerbook (either with the cable or by bluetooth), use the modem scripts from here and dial in to the back-up modem pool offered by my DSL ISP. Sure, it only goes at 9600Kbps, but that's a totally free connection anywhere in the US. It's good enough for email.
T-Mobile's network is smart enough to tell that it's a data call, not a voice call, but it's billed within my minutes (as minutes) and not as data service (as bytes). With unlimited weekend and evening minutes, there's literally no cost whatsoever.
I don't know about the poor sods who are still on CDMA/TDMA, but those of us with GSM can still choose not to pay for GPRS service if we choose.
Actually, what I mean is this:
The Electoral College today can serve the purpose of saving us from a demagogue. If the public elects somebody deemed by the Electoral College to be a dangerous threat to American democracy, they can give the election to somebody else. However, the electoral college is no longer a very popular idea and is widely held to be a hindrance to direct democracy.
In any situation in which such a "safety fuse" were used, the already unpopular institution would be considered to have blocked the election of a popular figure. Constitutional amendments would be proposed immediately to do away with the electoral college, and congressmen, wary of standing against their constituency, would pass it. The states would likely be able to organize constitutional conventions very quickly, and the amendment would be passed in no time.
Of course, this would all be moot for the election that triggered it - there's nothing currently illegal about that action by the electors - so we'd have four years for better sense to return before the same demagogue could run again. But at that point the safety fuse would be used, and we would be reliant on direct election.
That's why it's a one-time safety fuse - if it's ever used, it will be so unpopular that it will bring an end to itself. With any luck however, we'll be through the woods.
In a similar vein, the Constitution allows a president to disband Congress at any time for up to a year. This has never been used, and if it were, a Constitutional Amendment would probably be the first thing on the Congress' agenda when they reconvened.
THe biggest reason for this is that unlike cars without power steering, which generally have a direct system of gears between the steering wheel and the mechanism, a power steering system actively alters the steering mechanism. No concern is given for making sure the system works well without it, and the system itself becomes a drag on the steering.
Think of this: power steering intercepts your commands and assists you with them. When it is dead, not only are you working against the road (as in a non-power-steering car) but you're also working against the dead power steering system. The stronger the power steering system when functional, the stronger it will fight your steering commands when it's dead.
Click and Clack (the tappit brothers: cartalk.com) did an article about this, basically saying, "look knuckleheads, just because cars without power steering work just fine, don't expect that your car with power steering will work fine without it." I'm too lazy to find their story; but go to the link and search.
Also, the point about the steering wheel locking is a very real and serious concern.
Actually, the last part isn't true. The electoral college has select a president by absolute majority, or else it goes to Congress to choose a President. So, the electoral results above (255/261/22) would mean one of two things: (1) at least 9 electors would have to switch to Bush or at least 15 would have to switch to Gore; or (2) the Congress would get to choose the President. Considering that the vote would have occurred *before* the new Senators and representatives took their seats, and both houses were controlled by the Republicans for that session, this would have guaranteed Bush/Cheney the White House.
Wow, I set out to write a quick response, but it became quite long...
Right, that's the biggest thing that strikes me as stupid about this proposal. I've often thought that getting rid of "winner take all" and going back to proportional selection of electors makes sense. However, One elector casts one vote, which means that it's no more granular than the integer number of electors.
Obviously, at the point that the electoral vote is divided into pieces smaller than the integer number of electors, the whole point of the college is moot - there's no reason for them to meet, since at that point it's a straight popular vote, simply converted into a smaller base number than the number of voters.
It's important to remember why winner-take-all crept in in the first place. In the beginning, there were two important things about the electoral college: first, it was up to state legislators to decide how the electors were chosen, which meant in some instances they were elected and in others they were appointed. Second, they were sent to Washington to choose a president, and they had no requirement to vote according to the wishes of their home state. Both of these is technically still true; but since all states today choose the electors by popular vote and then let the parties choose the electors for their candidate, as a general rule they vote for the candidate they're supposed to vote for.
The winner-take-all system started because it allowed a few states with a lot of electors but a very divided population to have greater sway within the College and hence more attention from candidates. For instance, New York has a very large number of electors; but if their electors are split two ways, roughly resembling the overall split in the nation, then New York's massive number of electors is not going to particularly help or hurt either candidate. If a candidate knows that he can secure roughly half of New York's electors, it's not worth wasting any time there because one elector is unlikely to make a difference.
So when bigger states started switching to winner-take-all, suddenly the difference between a 45-55 decision and a 55-45 decision in New York, which might have made a difference of 5 or six electors before, was worth 40 electors. Guaranteeing a win in New York became very important for a potential candidate, and New York became disproportionately important. In order to compete for attention, more states followed and eventually the entire nation (except a few now-insignificant states) switched to winner-take-all.
Only politically-idealistic or unaware people would call for individual states (let alone their own state) to switch back to proportional selection of electors; but the winner-take-all system is fundamentally flawed. I think that a national election law (or possibly an amendment) requiring that states distribute electors propotionally is the only way to get out of the winner-take-all dilemma.
Unfortunately, that brings about problems of its own. The usefulness of the Electoral College is that it's a one-time-use safety fuse on the American Presidency. It means that if an extremely dangerous figure won an election, the electors could decide to give the election to somebody else. This would of course end the electoral college, hence the reason it's a one-time-use mechanism in the contemporary period. But the reason that they can do this at all is because currently they are not legally bound in any way whatsoever, at least at the national level. Any attempt to require electors to be selected proportionally would also necessitate that their votes be attached to a given candidate and their loyalty assured. At this point, an electoral college would actually be meaningless, because the only thing that makes it interesting is that it prevents direct election of a president. Once electoral votes become irrevocably tied to the popular vote, the electoral system becomes meaningless.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong; however, a lot of people miss what these prizes mean.
It's not a "wow, if there is a prize for X dollars, and we can build a ship to win the prize for less than X dollars, we'll make money." If that were all it was about, it wouldn't be worth it. Think of the billions that Boeing makes from its government contracts; these prizes, if actually a profit in themselves, are pocket change compared to that.
However, these companies are building things that could be profitable on their own, for a blossoming space tourism business. The prize *is* a financial benefit: if one plans to make a profit of $1 million per year but has an up-front cost of $20 million, it will take twenty years to break even. If, however, that R&D cost of $20 million is enough to win a $10 million prize - or even if the rush for the prize costs an extra $5 million, raising the project up-front cost to $25 million - it will take less time to amortize the up-front costs than without the prize.
So when one considers a slightly more complex economic model, it is possible to see that a craft, even if it's much more expensive than the prize amount, is worth it so long as there's a sound underlying business model - the prize itself isn't a net profit, but it shortens the amortization period on the initial investment, which allows a positive net flow much sooner than without. This is why a prize of any significant amount will attract attention - a $50 million prize for a $500 million rocket which is based on a firm business plan still represents a 10% savings for the venture capitalists who build it, thus increasing the odds that their business will succeed.
Great! Now I can pay $3000 to throw up and shit myself while feeling disoriented, light-headed, and dizzy.
I can do that for $5 by going to the liquor store and buying a liter of anything in a cheap plastic bottle.
I'm lucky if I can convince him to go out for a run or a bike ride - he'd rather play starship creator or throw in a DVD and watch episodes.
This is OT; but I'm interested in people's opinions.
I'm glad your kid's creative; but aren't you concerned about him being inside so much? I'm about to become a parent for the first time, and I'm quite concerned about this. As a kid, I always played outside with other people, went camping, rode my bike, etc. Other than a VIC-20 in the living room, a library of books and four channels of broadcast television, there was nothing to do inside.
Now, I have lots of technology around the house and things that may keep one occupied inside. I'm concerned that these things may distract my daughter - real social interaction and physical play are important, especially when young, since this is how kids learn to be social and well-adjusted (and physically healthy) adults. I know of so many children of IT pros who are overexposed and over-reliant on technology in a way we weren't, and I'm concerned about what this means for their health, their social welfare, and so forth.
Of course, I imagine that many of the 14-18 year-olds here on slashdot grew up with this ever-present media; am I overly concerned? Opinions?
That is amazingly cool - I first learned about computers on a PET at my grade school, and then my dad bought us a VIC-20 with a datasette drive. I remember at the time wishing that we could have a 1540 disk drive for home use, but my dad said they were too expensive and fragile - which is true. I remember that my grade school got some 1541s when they replaced the PETs with Commodore 64s, and the 1541s were constantly being repaired. My datasette at home, while slow and bizarre, never broke.
And then they ruined it all by giving up on the quirky British company that couldn't make a profit and throwing all their cereal box tops at Apple Computer, replacing most of the (still new) Commodore 64s with Apple II+ machines, IIRC (the ones that were light orange with brown keys and a black bottom underneath the front wedge). And it's not like those early Apples could do better than a 40-column display anyway.
Ah, if only my VIC-20 still worked...
Excellent. Thanks much! I read all the details, priced out my iMac, and contemplated placing an order this morning, but I missed that detail. I know what's going in my kitchen now...
I agree. I currently have a sunray with a flat panel hanging on my kitchen wall, but the keyboard and mouse are a PITA. If this were a touchscreen, it would be better.
I also would like to know whether it's possible to take off the stand and hang this on the wall. If I could replace my sunray/flat panel combos with iMacs hanging on the walls, using bluetooth keyboard and mouse, that would be a definite improvement. Does anybody know if this is possible?
There's a big difference between "I'm into cameras" and a serious photography enthusiast. Whereas a digicam may be great fun, it's not a serious tool, and the poster sounds like she or he is looking for a serious tool - a basic one, but a serious tool nonetheless.
Just as any serious photographer would not consider getting a point-and-click film camera, serious photographers aren't interested in toy digital cameras either. I think it's safe to say this person needs an SLR.
* that's not to say there's anything wrong with toy cameras - they cause less trouble at airports and are just fine for sightseeing pictures. I intend to get one of the canon toy digitals myself soon. So don't be offended by my characterization of them as toys - we all like toys!
Right, but you could whore yourself out to 500 of those fat chicks at $100 a piece, or to 10 really fat chicks for $5000 a piece, and you'd make $50,000. Then you could pay off that biodiesel-burning boat of yours before your house got taken away...
That's a very good point, and I agree. Things that get people involved and cause them to think about history experientially represent a large improvement over dull anecdotes repeated on chalk boards.
I suppose we'll have to wait to see the end result of this project...
I agree with you, which you probably noticed from my final comment about school boards controlling K-12 history curricula and about college intro history having to essentially "unteach" what's been done before they get there.
There are exceptions of course, but grade school and high school history in America often have little to do with teaching students to think critically about history and to ask difficult questions. History for kids is one of the most politicized subjects, if not the very most. School districts and parents argue that their kids should learn the nice, happy stories they were taught, which have nice morals to them and make us better people.
Of course, much of what you're reciting above is the same thing - essentialized stories, this time designed to refute the old stories. Any time history is about neat little stories, whether positive or negative, it's not getting anywhere. History as a field explores questions and is meant to be argumentative, not narrative. There are no neat, tidy answers that don't essentialize the problem to such an extent as to lose meaning.
Let me give a quick (shabby) example: most grade schools teach that the Civil War was about southern slaveholders who wanted to have slaves. The North protested, and the Northerners fought a holy war to free the slaves. Separately, the traditional southern story of the War Between the States teaches that Southerners were upset that a Federal government was telling them what to do. The war was about states' rights, not slavery. The northerners forced unfair government on the South.
Well, I could say that both of these stories are false, and I would be fairly accurate. However, it's not useful simply to say they are false. The point is, both stories have some elements of truth to them, but the problem is far more complex. Was slavery a central issue? Sure. Was States' rights a central issue? Yes. It also had a bit to do with how people interpreted the founding documents of the United States, and how they viewed the struggle that had been the American Revolution. It was tied up in the fact that the United States were expanding rapidly, and the new states had no stake in the original compromises that had brought about the Constitution. It had a lot to do with the death of an old political party (the Whigs) and the birth of a new one (the Republicans). The reality is, the war came about thanks to a whole lot of factors, and every individual involved had a different way of interpreting what it was about.
One of the interesting questions that emerges from this is, what caused individuals to view the Civil War the way they viewed it? How could two brothers, living in the same city with the same upbringing, come to opposite conclusions about the war and fight on opposite sides? What was at stake for these people, and why did they view the struggle as something worth dying for? How were these many and varied views and opinions united into armies, and how did those in power (journalists, politicians, etc) appeal to people about the war? What does this tell us about Modernity and the emergence of print culture in the middle of the 19th Century?
These are the types of questions that professional historians ask (though I'm a European historian, so I may be ten years out of date on what questions are hot right now on the American Civil War). These questions cannot be addressed by a video game, and they're rarely addressed by grade schools, high schools, or popular history in general.
I'm torn on whether or not this is a good thing. As a professional historian, my immediate response is against this sort of thing - it essentializes history and is likely to remove much of the complexity from history for the students. Games also tend to be quite anachronistic, project contemporary (modern?) views, beliefs and stereotypes back across periods and events preceding these views and beliefs. Video games rarely teach people to think critically and analytically about history.
On the other hand, I have to admit that Civilization (the original DOS game) had a lot to do with getting me fired up about history in high school. I now know (and was vaguely aware then) that the game was (and continues to be) *HORRIBLE* in terms of historical accuracy or methodology, but it *did* get me fired up about history and caused me to sign up for the advanced history classes, which led to me choosing history as a major in college. Had I not gotten so fired up about history when I was 16, perhaps I would not have pursued a PhD in it.
So I suppose I'm on the fence - games such as Civ and Age of Empires mislead people into some horribly skewed views of history, but since they do get people interested in becoming history students, we (professional historians) get a chance to "unlearn" the errors when they take our classes. With any luck, we can keep some of the excitement while doing so. Since college intro history spends much of its time undoing the damage of the (highly political) K-12 school-board-driven history classes anyway, it's not likely to hurt.
That's exactly right, but there's hope in New Urbanism. I'm going to do it a horrible injustice in my explanation, but New Urbanism is a movement to shift city planning back to walkable spaces. The idea is to look at how communities were (unconsciously) formed before mass transit as we know it, and then consciously design in adapted but similar ways.
For example, one of the tenets of New Urbanism is that all services for daily life must be available within every two-mile circle of population, and these should be arranged around centers such that nobody is more than a mile from everything he/she needs. In cities such as Minneapolis, the New Urbanist movement has largely been responsible for the formation of legally-recognized Neighborhoods within the city, which get their own separate pool of taxpayer money (within the city's budget) to develop local business, residences, and other Urban Renewal programs.
In Minneapolis it's been spectacularly successful - according to the 2000 census, the Minneapolis/St. Paul area is the only Metro Area in America which saw population *growth* for the urban cores from 1990 to 2000. I live in the city of Minneapolis and I don't need to use my car for most daily tasks (including going to work), though because of our foul winters I often end up doing so for a few months of the year.
I grew up in the suburbs, where you couldn't buy a cup of coffee without driving ten miles and burning half a gallon of gas. Even though all my family lives 600 miles away, I put less than 10K a year on my car now. It's truly wonderful.
So yes, I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree that the car-centric design of the suburbs is the problem. Outer suburbs probably will never change; but if more cities and inner suburbs can succeed with New Urbanism, at least some people will be drawn back in from the outer ring car parks into the walkable communities of urban life...
I end up filling up the tank half as often as most people. That's gotta be worth something.
That is worth something - pretty impressive if you have a longish commute. But what's the price difference between the convenient gas station in the city and the one you go to? They say that most people actually go out of their way to save on gas; but considering that prices usually only differ by ten cents per gallon or less, it's often only marginally cheaper in the grand scheme of things. I do it too - but perhaps it's not worth the marginal $2 per week that you save to go out of your way?
Of course, this comes from a person who keeps track of every single detail about a car (mileage at every fill-up, every repair, every car wash, cost of gas, exact (to the thousandth) amount of gas, etc. so I'm not one to be talking about wasted effort...
And at this point you probably know your car so well that you can catch it at the last pint of gas. I used to be able to do that with my old car - I'd drive 50 miles after the gas light came on - but I don't have a feel for my new one... I also don't buy into the "tank half full" crap, and since I live in Minnesota (-30 F winters) and have *NEVER* had any trouble from letting the tank go down to the last pint, I don't believe it. However, I've never run a car out of gas either, and I imagine that would be rather more drastic, especially on a cold day...
You apparently haven't looked recently at how many perfectly normal gas automobiles are ULEVs and SULEVs. My Elantra GT (138hp) is a ULEV, and in California it's tuned slightly differently to be a SULEV (132hp). I believe the Corolla, Mazda 3, and base Civic are all ULEVs. The ULEV standard is just that - standard - for compact cars today, and most are available as SULEVs in California. With the notable absence of VW, every major car manufacturer makes at least one conventional SULEV car for the California market.
And there are other savings from the higher mileage: less frequent stops, like eliminating wasting time, which is more important to me than wasting gas.
I hear this argument all the time. However, assuming you're driving a *car* and not one of those urban assault vehicles, you're going to get at least 20mpg on the highway and the smallest gas tanks are 10.3 gallons (40 liters). This means that even if your car had the smallest gas tank and got bad gas mileage (not a common combination) you'd have to drive 200 miles to use up a tank of gas. At 70MPH that's just under three hours.
Anybody who knows anything about fatigue, exhaustion, blood clots, bladders, and health knows that it's a *REALLY BAD IDEA* for anybody to drive more than about two to three hours without a quick break to get up and stretch, which is what a mandatory gas stop provides.
Realistically, most cars that get under 30mpg highway have tanks at least 14.5 gallons (55 liters?) so your time between breaks is already stretched to about 300 miles at 20mpg, which comes out to over four hours!!! At a more reasonable 30mpg (My Elantra gets 35mpg and has a 14.5 gallon tank, hence my comparison), a 14.5 gallon tank gives you about 450 miles, or 6 hours of driving time between stops. If you're driving six hours without stopping, I don't want to be in the car next to you...
Now if you're referring to having to stop on your daily commute, well that's a different problem. Since you're already stopped at both ends of your commute (and I'm sure your commute takes less than one tank of gas) it makes sense just to fill up at the beginning or end. That's what I used to do when I had a 90-mile round trip commute from a suburb into downtown Saint Louis when I was younger...
Yeah, same story with my '04 Elantra GT. 138hp, ~35mpg on the highway, ~30mpg combined, and only $13,600. Oh, and it has leather.
Don't get me wrong, I think about how my friend with the Prius is environmentally conscious. I also genuinely like her car. But then I remember that my car is faster, accelerates better, has a leather interior, costs just over half as much, takes up far less space on the road and has more interior volume, and is still a ULEV (Ultra-low emissions vehicle). My gas mileage is not quite as good - she gets about 39-40mpg - but my car pollutes as little per mile as hers, so I feel pretty environmentally conscious too.
Of course, my car was probably built by laborers working for $.05/hour on an assembly line in South Korea so I probably shouldn't feel globally conscious...