oh no i saw the movie the day it came out and i thought it was a waste of 5 bucks (matinee)
its fantasy... i dont to this day think about real life when watching fantasy. those who do IMO are wasting their time because whats the point of fantasy if you are going to do nothing but complain about how its close to X, if you squint real hard and spin around 3 times, it could be taken as racist
these people need to get lives
Most fantasy is actually a lot more interesting if you relate it to the real world. The entire reason Star Trek, for example, has a rep as a more adult/thinking man's type Space Opera is that a significant proportion of their episodes aren't Cool Shit IN SPACE!, but are commentaries on the real world.
Even some of the stuff that doesn't have a reputation of being intellectual gains a whole new dimension if you you relate it to the real world. The Wheel of Time series, for example, has it's share of cool for cool's sake, but it's also got a lot of real exploration of gender roles. If you're just reading for the cool shit's sake you're not getting nearly as much out of the text as you would if you paid attention to all the weird ways he shakes up the gender roles.
You're Australian. You people find specifically invent vaguely insulting ethnic terms and then use then to refers to yourselves (are you a Pom, a Wop, or other, Mr Harlequin80?). You also don't have a large West Indian minority, so the Jamaican accent angle not occur to you.
You'll note that even over here it was not uncontroversial to call Jar-Jar racist, but if you were paying attention to pop culture in the US in '99 you would have had a position on this.
He won't do anything different to Star Wars. But it will work because it's Star Wars.
He doesn't have to be in the movement to get why Boba Fett is cool, he just has to know that a dude in that armor with that last name will make fans very happy in between action scenes. Then he has to deliver on a) cool world-building, b) cool scenes, and c) over-dramatic everything.
Perfect for the guy who cut his teeth giving Sydney Bristow new family members every season on Alias because the "Which Dad is hers?" story-line was fascinating.
OTOH, Khan as a lone terrorist played as a cool un-charismatic character? Bullshit, no matter what color the actor is. Time travel that creates an alternate timeline? Heresy, and the movies aren't good enough to justify it. The Federation putting one of their 12 Constitution-class cruisers in the hands of a Midshipman who has technically not graduated college yet because a tiny-little Commander told a Captain that would be a very good idea? Ridiculous.
I suspect Abrams is less likely to fuck it up then Lucas.
His Star Trek films have pissed me the fuck off, but that's because they'd be great Star Wars films. Highly dramatic action sequences, great visuals, better acting then either franchise had the first go around, lots of references to shit that's happened before, etc. As Star Trek they were annoying because he doesn't seem to get the details of what makes references to past work cool (ie: Khan is supposed to be so alpha-male sexy that straight guys would have trouble refusing him a blow-job; Benedict Cumberbatch could possibly play that guy, but he did not).
It's likely he'll get a great team of actors and actresses, get them to have chemistry in half an hour, spend another 15 establishing that if they don't do something amazing THE UNIVERSE WILL DIE, include roughly 25 minutes of references to past films and/or cool world-building in that 45, and then give you an hour of incredibly cool action.
I spent probably the last half-hour of his most recent Star Trek movie going "shit, that was a perfect ending, let's see the credits" every five minutes. And then the fight scene would go on some more.
On the other hand, with these movies he's probably got a story arc already mapped out, and most of the appeal of Star Wars is poorly drawn yet compelling characters involved in endless extremely cool action sequences. So this could easily work.
Jar Jar's speech sounds a lot like Jamaican patois to me. Whether that is racist or not is another story, but Jar Jar's general behavior; stupid, lazy, and addled, do conjure up the way Pot Smokers were portrayed in literature and films for a rather long time.
Fixed it for you.
Has anyone ever noticed that the black stereotypes are also the stereotypes applied to pot smokers?
Dude, don't go down this rabbit hole. There is a black stereotype that matches every single bad thing you could say about people. More then you can count. They range from perfect servant (who should be trusted with your beautiful daughter), to rapist who can only be stopped by vigilante justice (who should be trusted with your beautiful daughter, but only after Dylan Roof has shot him in the head).
The bad black Jamaican stereotype is related to weed, but if Lucas had wanted to make a bunch of weed jokes he didn't have to give the dude an accent. And if he had to pick an accent he could have used almost anything but Jamaica. Make it British, and not cockney, make it fucking Received Pronunciation. That contrast would be hilarious. Dude talks like the queen, acts like your buddy from High School who can't quite function in society. What we have with Jar-Jar is just a sad mix of annoying and anti-Jamaican racism.
You would have been 14 or 15 when Episode I came out. Of course you don't remember what us slightly older people meant when we said it sucked. You were busy watching the podracing scene.
One of the major criticisms of Jar-Jar back then was they thought he was speaking with a Jamaican accent. It's so universal that everybody my age or older (and I'm only 34) knows precisely what the phrase "Jar-Jar racist" means. The flying dude with the nose was also widely considered to be a reference to either Jews or Arabs. And I believe there was at least one other group of aliens Lucas put in there that had everyone going "What the fuck George Lucas?"
Most Attorneys charge a couple hundred an hour. For $400-500 you'd have an expert opinion on precisely how good their cases were, how to deal with those cases (paying another $250 for a lawyer's letter might work, for example), and you'd probably get a nice little lesson in registering trademarks and searching the uspto.gov website too.
Now if you're far from the US that could be a hassle, but OTOH if US Law is getting your business thrown out of the Google Play Store then it's kinda important you know what the fuck you're doing, and that means Skyping an American lawyer.
They get a default judgement against you in Delaware, then whenever you do business in the US they can legally take your shit. If you don't do business in the US you're not doing business with a fifth of the world's economy, and that's a pretty high price to pay. Granted it's not a higher price to pay then your first-born, but if somebody has a trademark dispute you could get rid of simply by spending $1,500 on a lawyer in Delaware...
Frankly in an economy like the internet economy one world government, with one set of rules governing trademark, copyright, patent, and contract law, makes a lot more sense then what we've got now.
First time I've met another Home Depot person on Slashdot. You're in a growing, upper-middle-class suburb, which as a much different demographic profile then Maple. It's a lot whiter, and per capita income is roughly $69k vs. Maple Height's $19k.
And, as long as you're here, has your store cut back on hours this year? In Maple most of our departments have roughly the same level of coverage in June they did in February, despite us hitting out revenue targets pretty well. And I'm trying to figure out if I should be blaming our new manager for it, or Atlanta.
It's surprising how many of them have cars. Virtually nobody I work with takes the bus, and Home Depot has a strong tendency to arrange things so that you get fired if you manage to break the $10 an hour barrier without entering management. They're great on benefits (I only make $9.75, but I've got full dental), and their scheduling is much less sadistic then most retailers, but the salary ain't worth shit.
And almost none of the cars are gifts. Sometimes a first car is a gift, and it's quite common for somebody in their social network to hook them up with a guy who knows a guy to get a deal, but most of the time they are completely on their own in terms of actually paying for it.
What they end up with is a cheap-ass $500-$1,500 hoopty that takes an astonishing amount of their time/energy to keep running. An electric model that will only run after you pay $1,500 for a new battery is not gonna cut it, even tho I strongly suspect that everyone will know that if they did manage to save up the $1,500, plus $1,000 for the car, they'd save money over the long term. Probably less drama to repair, too. A lot of the problems are caused by the failure of the starter (because at this economic level pretty much the only damage that's so bad you don't drive the car is damage that keeps the car rom running), and you can generally get an EV to and from work without engaging the starter.
the article explicitly defines "EV" to include four types of vehicle, only two of which are the battery-powered vehicles you';re talking about:
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
So my appeal to authority is backed by a National Academy of Sciences paper, which I will now conflate with science itself because I'm that guy.
The article explicitly defines electric vehicle to include hybrids and three other forms of Plug-in Electric Vehicle, only two of which are the Battery-powered EV you are talking about:
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
So my Appeal to Authority is backed by none other then a paper published by National Academy of Science, which I will now conflate with al of science because I'm that guy.
The Air Force is like the Navy. We always spend a lot on both in the hopes we'll never have to use them.
It also makes those counter-insurgencies easier on the Strategic and Grand Strategic level, because Poland is a lot more likely to contribute boots on the ground to an effort led by the guys who can definitely keep Russia out of their skies then they would contribute to a country that had 350k in light infantry sitting around just in case Iraq needed to be invaded.
In many ways things like this (and most of the Navy) are prestige purchases in the sense that they cost a lot of money that will only be useful under extremely unusual circumstances, but in the real world a hegemon has to make a lot of those or the non-hegemon states will be like "Dude, I don't need you for light infantry and 40-year-old-planes. I have light infantry and 40-year-old-planes and I can barely afford to educate my people to the 10th grade level."
On a somewhat related note, perhaps if the last guy had gone through that course you're talking about (which was presumably given by a bunch of Light Infantry/Spec Ops guys) perhaps he would not have fallen for Rummy's (paraphrasing, because I can't find the exact quote) "it beggars belief that it will take more men to hold Iraq then take it" line.
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
I think the National Academy of Science is a pretty good source for an appeal to authority, don't you?
That $10k is low-balled. $2.50 a gallon is the floor of gas prices in most of the country. Ceiling's in the $4 range. 20-miles is also a below-avereage commute.
As for the earnings potential of $10k, how old are you? You're taking inflation-risk seriously, talking about the interest on your bank account, and ignoring the fact that over the past decade $3.50 has been a much more typical price for gas then $2.50. Sounds like a baby-boomer to me.
The way most Gen Xers and Millennials think of this is that they're paying an extra couple hundred bucks for a couple years of the car loan in exchange for being free of a) the $86.67 or so we'd be paying every month under the low-balled model for gasoline, b) our life experience that actual cost will be $100-150, and c) our primal fear that the Indian and Chinese economies will pick up and it will be more like $300 per month. With an EV we're free of all that shit for roughly a decade. That is not a bad deal.
Electricity costs are a problem, but not nearly as much as you'd think. I pay 6.67 cents per kilowatt hour. EV batteries only hold 16 or so kilowatt hours, so even if I managed to drain the battery to zero every day I'm only paying $1.10 or so. More realistic estimates are in $0.50-$0.75 range. Whereas with the gas-car, I'd be paying $2.85.
With that kind of savings the range stuff can be worked around. Hybrids, for example, actually have gasoline engines and gas tanks. So if you really wanted to drive from Seattle to Minneapolis all in one go you could do it. It's just that instead of using the battery for power on almost the entire trip you'd stop at gas stations. Car rentals are also much easier to do if you're saving $800 a month on gasoline.
The problem with basing the dang things in immigrants houses is it doesn't scale. 400k immigrants are not a small number, so somebody would notice, and if one guy decides to tell his American girlfriend about why he's got a huge plane in his garage you're screwed.
A 10,000 drone force would take some time to track down, but any base capable of supporting an aircraft that actually has air-to-air-combat specs (ie: 300 MPH speed, 50k feet service ceiling, a couple hard-points and the range to make them useful) is not gonna be hard to track down. The Navy is quite good at nailing surface warships, landing strips look very obvious from above, it's hard to disguise shipments of AvGas as anything else, etc.
Pretty much the only way this strategy works is if you use submarines (which presents interesting coordination issues when the drone needs to land), or you also have some amazing solar-powered aircraft tech that allows you to go pretty much base-free. Right now with enough money you can get an Octocopter with solar in the air, but giving it the speed so that cocky little ground-pounders with their tiny little M-16s couldn't take it out, a sufficiently high service ceiling that the F-35 can't out-dog-fight it, all-weather operation, and the hard-points so that it's a threat would probably wipe out your budgetary savings vs. the F-35.
2,000 F-35s at 50k feet are just fine, and immune to drone attacks,
You don't have 2000, you have 150, because they cost so damn much. This is sort of my point. Any defence needs aircraft numbers in the thousands. Like the B2, the F35 will be too expensive to use and therefore pointless.
A $1 Trillion budget definitely you 2,000 F-35s, because that's what we're spending and we're getting 2,400 of the damn things.
And in point of fact, there are precisely two air forces in the world with thousands of combat aircraft. And it's far from clear the Chinese have any aircraft that could out-dog-fight an F-16, much less detect an F-35 and survive it's air-to-air missiles long enough to start a dogfight with it. The Russians are at 1,900, and their fifth-generation fighter project has just been shelved indefinitely because they can't afford it (sanctions), and the Indians (~1,100 or so) decided that paying 100% of development costs for somebody else's plane was a stupid plan they were not gonna go along with.
Almost none of aerial warfare since the Battle of Britain has turned on which side had better planes. It's all been about protecting your ground-based facilities.
That's right. The US has had the best planes since WW2 yet still hasn't won any major war since. Why do you think that is? Planes aren't such great defence against IEDs and suicide bombers.
In the Air Force's defense, it's not their fault that the President insists on dragging them into land wars in Asia.
As I've said before in most of the EVs I'm actually talking about range is not an issue at all because they have a gas tank. People think it's an issue because they haven't gotten into the car and seen the gas gauge.
A woman who has gotten through college and gotten a job in a male-dominated culture has done so by being really really smart, and if she comes to the US it's probably partly because she's sick of saying a smart thing in a meeting, and being ignored till the some guy repeats her. So you're almost certainly dealing with someone who knows what she's doing and wants to be helpful.
Guys, OTOH, are much more likely to be in it for the paycheck and the "I worked in America" resume line.
Tells you a lot about the design goals of the people who make the program.
MS wants to sell you a new version of Office, so the file format is always in flux and you buddy with a brand new machine makes documents you can't read until you upgrade.
Siesmologists need to do really long term studies, so they wouldn't even consider making a program that couldn't read the old format perfectly, and they'd probably stubbornly resist a new data format even if it was a good idea.
I'm only assuming you're using the same terminology as the original article. They talk about Hybrids as one of four categories of Electric Vehicle. If you want to specifically change the subject from Electric Vehicles (including hybrids) to just pure Electrics you can do so, but don't expect the rest of us to be psychic.
As for your explanations, most of them are verifiably wrong. This is not unusual. If markets actually had perfect information at all times prices would be a lot more stable. When people have taken a single test drive in a Prius they will know that range is not an issue. Since the number of people who have taken a test drive/ridden in a friend's car/etc. is not gonna get smaller it follows that if the market is truly choosing non-EVs (including Hybrids) because the market thinks that range is an issue, then in the relatively near future the market will change it's mind.
Slashdot Mirror
oh no i saw the movie the day it came out and i thought it was a waste of 5 bucks (matinee)
its fantasy... i dont to this day think about real life when watching fantasy. those who do IMO are wasting their time because whats the point of fantasy if you are going to do nothing but complain about how its close to X, if you squint real hard and spin around 3 times, it could be taken as racist
these people need to get lives
Most fantasy is actually a lot more interesting if you relate it to the real world. The entire reason Star Trek, for example, has a rep as a more adult/thinking man's type Space Opera is that a significant proportion of their episodes aren't Cool Shit IN SPACE!, but are commentaries on the real world.
Even some of the stuff that doesn't have a reputation of being intellectual gains a whole new dimension if you you relate it to the real world. The Wheel of Time series, for example, has it's share of cool for cool's sake, but it's also got a lot of real exploration of gender roles. If you're just reading for the cool shit's sake you're not getting nearly as much out of the text as you would if you paid attention to all the weird ways he shakes up the gender roles.
You're Australian. You people find specifically invent vaguely insulting ethnic terms and then use then to refers to yourselves (are you a Pom, a Wop, or other, Mr Harlequin80?). You also don't have a large West Indian minority, so the Jamaican accent angle not occur to you.
OTOH, in the states:
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
http://articles.baltimoresun.c...
http://www.cnn.com/SHOWBIZ/Mov...
You'll note that even over here it was not uncontroversial to call Jar-Jar racist, but if you were paying attention to pop culture in the US in '99 you would have had a position on this.
He won't do anything different to Star Wars. But it will work because it's Star Wars.
He doesn't have to be in the movement to get why Boba Fett is cool, he just has to know that a dude in that armor with that last name will make fans very happy in between action scenes. Then he has to deliver on a) cool world-building, b) cool scenes, and c) over-dramatic everything.
Perfect for the guy who cut his teeth giving Sydney Bristow new family members every season on Alias because the "Which Dad is hers?" story-line was fascinating.
OTOH, Khan as a lone terrorist played as a cool un-charismatic character? Bullshit, no matter what color the actor is. Time travel that creates an alternate timeline? Heresy, and the movies aren't good enough to justify it. The Federation putting one of their 12 Constitution-class cruisers in the hands of a Midshipman who has technically not graduated college yet because a tiny-little Commander told a Captain that would be a very good idea? Ridiculous.
I suspect Abrams is less likely to fuck it up then Lucas.
His Star Trek films have pissed me the fuck off, but that's because they'd be great Star Wars films. Highly dramatic action sequences, great visuals, better acting then either franchise had the first go around, lots of references to shit that's happened before, etc. As Star Trek they were annoying because he doesn't seem to get the details of what makes references to past work cool (ie: Khan is supposed to be so alpha-male sexy that straight guys would have trouble refusing him a blow-job; Benedict Cumberbatch could possibly play that guy, but he did not).
It's likely he'll get a great team of actors and actresses, get them to have chemistry in half an hour, spend another 15 establishing that if they don't do something amazing THE UNIVERSE WILL DIE, include roughly 25 minutes of references to past films and/or cool world-building in that 45, and then give you an hour of incredibly cool action.
Or his movies.
I spent probably the last half-hour of his most recent Star Trek movie going "shit, that was a perfect ending, let's see the credits" every five minutes. And then the fight scene would go on some more.
On the other hand, with these movies he's probably got a story arc already mapped out, and most of the appeal of Star Wars is poorly drawn yet compelling characters involved in endless extremely cool action sequences. So this could easily work.
Jar Jar's speech sounds a lot like Jamaican patois to me. Whether that is racist or not is another story, but Jar Jar's general behavior; stupid, lazy, and addled, do conjure up the way Pot Smokers were portrayed in literature and films for a rather long time.
Fixed it for you.
Has anyone ever noticed that the black stereotypes are also the stereotypes applied to pot smokers?
Dude, don't go down this rabbit hole. There is a black stereotype that matches every single bad thing you could say about people. More then you can count. They range from perfect servant (who should be trusted with your beautiful daughter), to rapist who can only be stopped by vigilante justice (who should be trusted with your beautiful daughter, but only after Dylan Roof has shot him in the head).
The bad black Jamaican stereotype is related to weed, but if Lucas had wanted to make a bunch of weed jokes he didn't have to give the dude an accent. And if he had to pick an accent he could have used almost anything but Jamaica. Make it British, and not cockney, make it fucking Received Pronunciation. That contrast would be hilarious. Dude talks like the queen, acts like your buddy from High School who can't quite function in society. What we have with Jar-Jar is just a sad mix of annoying and anti-Jamaican racism.
You would have been 14 or 15 when Episode I came out. Of course you don't remember what us slightly older people meant when we said it sucked. You were busy watching the podracing scene.
One of the major criticisms of Jar-Jar back then was they thought he was speaking with a Jamaican accent. It's so universal that everybody my age or older (and I'm only 34) knows precisely what the phrase "Jar-Jar racist" means. The flying dude with the nose was also widely considered to be a reference to either Jews or Arabs. And I believe there was at least one other group of aliens Lucas put in there that had everyone going "What the fuck George Lucas?"
And it probably would not cost that much.
Most Attorneys charge a couple hundred an hour. For $400-500 you'd have an expert opinion on precisely how good their cases were, how to deal with those cases (paying another $250 for a lawyer's letter might work, for example), and you'd probably get a nice little lesson in registering trademarks and searching the uspto.gov website too.
Now if you're far from the US that could be a hassle, but OTOH if US Law is getting your business thrown out of the Google Play Store then it's kinda important you know what the fuck you're doing, and that means Skyping an American lawyer.
So?
They get a default judgement against you in Delaware, then whenever you do business in the US they can legally take your shit. If you don't do business in the US you're not doing business with a fifth of the world's economy, and that's a pretty high price to pay. Granted it's not a higher price to pay then your first-born, but if somebody has a trademark dispute you could get rid of simply by spending $1,500 on a lawyer in Delaware...
Frankly in an economy like the internet economy one world government, with one set of rules governing trademark, copyright, patent, and contract law, makes a lot more sense then what we've got now.
Email sent.
First time I've met another Home Depot person on Slashdot. You're in a growing, upper-middle-class suburb, which as a much different demographic profile then Maple. It's a lot whiter, and per capita income is roughly $69k vs. Maple Height's $19k.
And, as long as you're here, has your store cut back on hours this year? In Maple most of our departments have roughly the same level of coverage in June they did in February, despite us hitting out revenue targets pretty well. And I'm trying to figure out if I should be blaming our new manager for it, or Atlanta.
The Home Depot in Maple Heights, OH.
It's surprising how many of them have cars. Virtually nobody I work with takes the bus, and Home Depot has a strong tendency to arrange things so that you get fired if you manage to break the $10 an hour barrier without entering management. They're great on benefits (I only make $9.75, but I've got full dental), and their scheduling is much less sadistic then most retailers, but the salary ain't worth shit.
And almost none of the cars are gifts. Sometimes a first car is a gift, and it's quite common for somebody in their social network to hook them up with a guy who knows a guy to get a deal, but most of the time they are completely on their own in terms of actually paying for it.
What they end up with is a cheap-ass $500-$1,500 hoopty that takes an astonishing amount of their time/energy to keep running. An electric model that will only run after you pay $1,500 for a new battery is not gonna cut it, even tho I strongly suspect that everyone will know that if they did manage to save up the $1,500, plus $1,000 for the car, they'd save money over the long term. Probably less drama to repair, too. A lot of the problems are caused by the failure of the starter (because at this economic level pretty much the only damage that's so bad you don't drive the car is damage that keeps the car rom running), and you can generally get an EV to and from work without engaging the starter.
the article explicitly defines "EV" to include four types of vehicle, only two of which are the battery-powered vehicles you';re talking about:
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
So my appeal to authority is backed by a National Academy of Sciences paper, which I will now conflate with science itself because I'm that guy.
Neener-neener-neener.
The article explicitly defines electric vehicle to include hybrids and three other forms of Plug-in Electric Vehicle, only two of which are the Battery-powered EV you are talking about:
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
So my Appeal to Authority is backed by none other then a paper published by National Academy of Science, which I will now conflate with al of science because I'm that guy.
Neener-neener-neener.
$2k is still more then most of the people I work with can afford to pay for a car.
When your income is sub-$20k, and you have family obligations, saving up even $1,500 isa virtually impossible.
The Air Force is like the Navy. We always spend a lot on both in the hopes we'll never have to use them.
It also makes those counter-insurgencies easier on the Strategic and Grand Strategic level, because Poland is a lot more likely to contribute boots on the ground to an effort led by the guys who can definitely keep Russia out of their skies then they would contribute to a country that had 350k in light infantry sitting around just in case Iraq needed to be invaded.
In many ways things like this (and most of the Navy) are prestige purchases in the sense that they cost a lot of money that will only be useful under extremely unusual circumstances, but in the real world a hegemon has to make a lot of those or the non-hegemon states will be like "Dude, I don't need you for light infantry and 40-year-old-planes. I have light infantry and 40-year-old-planes and I can barely afford to educate my people to the 10th grade level."
On a somewhat related note, perhaps if the last guy had gone through that course you're talking about (which was presumably given by a bunch of Light Infantry/Spec Ops guys) perhaps he would not have fallen for Rummy's (paraphrasing, because I can't find the exact quote) "it beggars belief that it will take more men to hold Iraq then take it" line.
Dude, per the original article:
The array of options can be bewildering, says the National Academy of Sciences' report. Commissioned by Congress, it examines the hurdles to adopting plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). The Academy splits PEVs into four classes: Long-range battery EV (BEV)s like the Tesla Model S, short-range BEVs like Nissan Leaf, range-extended plug-in hybrid EV (PHEV)s like the Chevrolet Volt (which drive on electric power most of the time), and minimal PHEVs like the plug-in BMW i8 (which can perform short trips on battery power alone).
I think the National Academy of Science is a pretty good source for an appeal to authority, don't you?
That $10k is low-balled. $2.50 a gallon is the floor of gas prices in most of the country. Ceiling's in the $4 range. 20-miles is also a below-avereage commute.
As for the earnings potential of $10k, how old are you? You're taking inflation-risk seriously, talking about the interest on your bank account, and ignoring the fact that over the past decade $3.50 has been a much more typical price for gas then $2.50. Sounds like a baby-boomer to me.
The way most Gen Xers and Millennials think of this is that they're paying an extra couple hundred bucks for a couple years of the car loan in exchange for being free of a) the $86.67 or so we'd be paying every month under the low-balled model for gasoline, b) our life experience that actual cost will be $100-150, and c) our primal fear that the Indian and Chinese economies will pick up and it will be more like $300 per month. With an EV we're free of all that shit for roughly a decade. That is not a bad deal.
Electricity costs are a problem, but not nearly as much as you'd think. I pay 6.67 cents per kilowatt hour. EV batteries only hold 16 or so kilowatt hours, so even if I managed to drain the battery to zero every day I'm only paying $1.10 or so. More realistic estimates are in $0.50-$0.75 range. Whereas with the gas-car, I'd be paying $2.85.
With that kind of savings the range stuff can be worked around. Hybrids, for example, actually have gasoline engines and gas tanks. So if you really wanted to drive from Seattle to Minneapolis all in one go you could do it. It's just that instead of using the battery for power on almost the entire trip you'd stop at gas stations. Car rentals are also much easier to do if you're saving $800 a month on gasoline.
The problem with basing the dang things in immigrants houses is it doesn't scale. 400k immigrants are not a small number, so somebody would notice, and if one guy decides to tell his American girlfriend about why he's got a huge plane in his garage you're screwed.
A 10,000 drone force would take some time to track down, but any base capable of supporting an aircraft that actually has air-to-air-combat specs (ie: 300 MPH speed, 50k feet service ceiling, a couple hard-points and the range to make them useful) is not gonna be hard to track down. The Navy is quite good at nailing surface warships, landing strips look very obvious from above, it's hard to disguise shipments of AvGas as anything else, etc.
Pretty much the only way this strategy works is if you use submarines (which presents interesting coordination issues when the drone needs to land), or you also have some amazing solar-powered aircraft tech that allows you to go pretty much base-free. Right now with enough money you can get an Octocopter with solar in the air, but giving it the speed so that cocky little ground-pounders with their tiny little M-16s couldn't take it out, a sufficiently high service ceiling that the F-35 can't out-dog-fight it, all-weather operation, and the hard-points so that it's a threat would probably wipe out your budgetary savings vs. the F-35.
2,000 F-35s at 50k feet are just fine, and immune to drone attacks,
You don't have 2000, you have 150, because they cost so damn much. This is sort of my point. Any defence needs aircraft numbers in the thousands. Like the B2, the F35 will be too expensive to use and therefore pointless.
A $1 Trillion budget definitely you 2,000 F-35s, because that's what we're spending and we're getting 2,400 of the damn things.
And in point of fact, there are precisely two air forces in the world with thousands of combat aircraft. And it's far from clear the Chinese have any aircraft that could out-dog-fight an F-16, much less detect an F-35 and survive it's air-to-air missiles long enough to start a dogfight with it. The Russians are at 1,900, and their fifth-generation fighter project has just been shelved indefinitely because they can't afford it (sanctions), and the Indians (~1,100 or so) decided that paying 100% of development costs for somebody else's plane was a stupid plan they were not gonna go along with.
Almost none of aerial warfare since the Battle of Britain has turned on which side had better planes. It's all been about protecting your ground-based facilities.
That's right. The US has had the best planes since WW2 yet still hasn't won any major war since. Why do you think that is? Planes aren't such great defence against IEDs and suicide bombers.
In the Air Force's defense, it's not their fault that the President insists on dragging them into land wars in Asia.
Speaking of stubbornly stuck...
As I've said before in most of the EVs I'm actually talking about range is not an issue at all because they have a gas tank. People think it's an issue because they haven't gotten into the car and seen the gas gauge.
It doesn't surprise me.
A woman who has gotten through college and gotten a job in a male-dominated culture has done so by being really really smart, and if she comes to the US it's probably partly because she's sick of saying a smart thing in a meeting, and being ignored till the some guy repeats her. So you're almost certainly dealing with someone who knows what she's doing and wants to be helpful.
Guys, OTOH, are much more likely to be in it for the paycheck and the "I worked in America" resume line.
Tells you a lot about the design goals of the people who make the program.
MS wants to sell you a new version of Office, so the file format is always in flux and you buddy with a brand new machine makes documents you can't read until you upgrade.
Siesmologists need to do really long term studies, so they wouldn't even consider making a program that couldn't read the old format perfectly, and they'd probably stubbornly resist a new data format even if it was a good idea.
I'm only assuming you're using the same terminology as the original article. They talk about Hybrids as one of four categories of Electric Vehicle. If you want to specifically change the subject from Electric Vehicles (including hybrids) to just pure Electrics you can do so, but don't expect the rest of us to be psychic.
As for your explanations, most of them are verifiably wrong. This is not unusual. If markets actually had perfect information at all times prices would be a lot more stable. When people have taken a single test drive in a Prius they will know that range is not an issue. Since the number of people who have taken a test drive/ridden in a friend's car/etc. is not gonna get smaller it follows that if the market is truly choosing non-EVs (including Hybrids) because the market thinks that range is an issue, then in the relatively near future the market will change it's mind.