Not only that, the workers should be able to leave and go to work for other companies if they want. The new company can take over the fee in that case.
Here in Arizona, our judges are elected (or at least, they have to get enough votes in the election to keep their jobs; I think the initial term is an appointment). So if a judge does anything highly unpopular, it's quite possible someone could campaign to vote "no" on that judge keeping their job. It hardly ever happens though.
Exactly. The big difference between the two is the sheer scale of drone attacks; they've increased tremendously under Obama. But that's not because of Obama, but rather because drones have become far more capable and ubiquitous than they were back in Bush's time. Obama is merely taking advantage of the increase in technological capability.
If you just want a place for humans to live, the Moon can do that too, and it's a lot closer. What does Mars have that the Moon doesn't? An atmosphere? Mars' atmosphere is too thin to be of any use. Gravity? Mars has 1/3g, Moon has 1/6g; BFD, they're both pretty low. A magnetosphere to protect you from radiation? Neither one has it. Resources? Maybe I'm missing something, but we don't seem to know a lot about either one as far as resources, because we haven't investigated them that much. It's not like we've done any drilling on either body, and we only recently discovered water ice on the Moon. The moon is really close by and will be much easier to travel to.
Seems to me that if you're going to go to all that trouble, it'd be easier to just build a base on the moon for most operations, except those things which absolutely must be done in zero-g.
No, there's many other improvements too; any ship you build on Earth would have to withstand severe stresses in being launched out of the atmosphere. With a ship assembled in space, you don't have this problem; only the smaller assemblies need to withstand such stress, and that's much easier and cheaper. You don't have to build the ship to be as robust in this case.
The other big improvement is that if you have some space-based or lunar-based infrastructure, you can mine the moon or asteroids for materials to build your ships, instead of mining it on earth's surface in someone's backyard, and then lifting it out of the gravity well. Yes, developing that infrastructure is by no means trivial, but once it's in place, it'll pay for itself over time.
Not to mention the coal and oil deposits discovered later.
Columbus didn't know about that stuff, and no one found out about or made use of those things until hundreds of years later.
We know a lot more about what's on the moon than Columbus (or the Spaniards) did about North America, but what we know is that it's not all that. The moon, sadly, is kind of crappy resource-wise.
You don't know that. It's not like we've done any drilling there; all we've done is collect a few rock samples on the surface. There's probably lots of valuable minerals there, just like we've found many in the earth's crust. Most of our minerals on Earth came from meteorite bombardment; well, take a look at the moon. What do you think all those round things are? And without an atmosphere, the minerals won't be dispersed so much on the Moon, they'll be concentrated at the impact sites. There's probably lots of resources on the Moon we don't know about yet, because we haven't looked. We only recently discovered that there's water ice there; sending up a few astronauts in a half-hearted rock-gathering mission totally missed that important detail.
They're idiots. People DO use the start menu, they just don't use it very often, but when they need it, they want it to work like they expect.
On my car, when I check the oil, it's really simple: there's a dipstick right in the front when I open the hood. Do I check the oil often? Certainly not. But when I do, I know how to do it, and it's simple; I don't want some car company coming up with some weird-ass procedure for checking the oil just because I don't do it every day.
Maybe, but I'm doubtful. Go to any nice leather store and look around; when was the last time you saw barbed-wire scars on a leather jacket? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing, and I've been wearing leather jackets for a very long time. Surely they separate pieces of the leather by grade (i.e., any scarred parts get lower grades), and sell the higher-grade stuff for more money, so RR would just have to pay the premium price for the top-grade leather, right?
Exactly. There are precisely zero cows killed for their skin; they're killed for their meat. The only way lab-grown leather would make any sense is if they simultaneously introduce lab-grown beef. As long as cows are killed for their meat, there's going to be piles of left-over cow skin. If you don't use it for leather, it's just going to go to waste.
Support contracts work great when you're making desktop OSes that can be used in businesses. Then you can release the same OS (or a slightly different version) for free to home users and other non-payers, to build more mindshare. Exactly the way that Red Hat and Fedora do it.
The way Apple's been acting, I wonder who they could find who'd really want to get involved with them without a similar one-sided contract. Any other suppliers (not just for CPUs, this probably goes for anything) would probably be very concerned about getting involved with them, after seeing how they've treated what's probably their biggest and most important supplier. Doesn't Samsung also supply their LCD screens?
Not only is it reality, it's perfectly warranted. Apple was the one that started down this road of nastiness, not Samsung, so they'd just be 'hoist by their own petard'. Remember, Samsung was (and still is) a major supplier of components for Apple. Suing them was absolutely stupid. Why Samsung doesn't just suddenly cut off their supply of CPUs for the iPhone, I'm not sure (probably contractual obligations).
That would be nice, but this is Apple we're talking about. They've proven over and over how petty and vindictive and what control freaks they are. If you continue to be a customer of theirs, you have to know what you're getting into, and expecting good behavior from them is naive in the extreme.
The US government did loan money to the European nations, but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about all the US industry that profited greatly from the rebuilding effort. Europe didn't have any industries left after the war: they were all bombed out. American industry was not only untouched, but it had been massively built up for the war effort, so it had a very high production capacity. They shifted from building war materiel to building stuff to sell to the Europeans. The government may have lost money in the Marshall Plan loans, but American industry profited immensely.
Why should anyone give a shit if Google can "outgrow their backyard hot tub origins"? Google is already a big company, and globally recognized. Isn't that good enough? This American obsession with growing and growing without end needs to stop. Companies don't need to grow. They need to grow to a comfortable size, and then when they're at an efficient size for whatever they're doing, they should be able to just maintain that size, provide good products and services and provide good employment for their employees and be profitable, and that should be good enough, without a bunch of morons whining about how they're not growing any more and this makes them "stagnant".
I agree about their crappy coffee and driving indie places out of business, but you have some good points there I never thought of. So I guess Starbucks is profiting by driving rental offices out of business? (like those places where you spend $500/month and get a single furnished office with access to a color copier/printer)
People don't realize it, but growing government is not a good thing. Government shouldn't be growing all the time, it should do a few things and stay about the same in terms of size and power.
No, ideally, it should be growing, but only at the rate of population increase. The amount of government per capita should ideally remain constant. And accordingly, the tax rates should remain constant, though revenues should rise and fall with the health of the economy and the size of the population.
I completely disagree. You're right, the UK and France didn't really "win" since they weren't better off, however, the USA was much better off after the war. Maybe not right on V-J day, but in the decade or so after, the US got very rich rebuilding Europe.
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Not only that, the workers should be able to leave and go to work for other companies if they want. The new company can take over the fee in that case.
Here in Arizona, our judges are elected (or at least, they have to get enough votes in the election to keep their jobs; I think the initial term is an appointment). So if a judge does anything highly unpopular, it's quite possible someone could campaign to vote "no" on that judge keeping their job. It hardly ever happens though.
Yep, that sums up the situation quite well.
If MapQuest is so great, then why didn't Apple use them for their default mapping app?
Exactly. The big difference between the two is the sheer scale of drone attacks; they've increased tremendously under Obama. But that's not because of Obama, but rather because drones have become far more capable and ubiquitous than they were back in Bush's time. Obama is merely taking advantage of the increase in technological capability.
If you just want a place for humans to live, the Moon can do that too, and it's a lot closer. What does Mars have that the Moon doesn't? An atmosphere? Mars' atmosphere is too thin to be of any use. Gravity? Mars has 1/3g, Moon has 1/6g; BFD, they're both pretty low. A magnetosphere to protect you from radiation? Neither one has it. Resources? Maybe I'm missing something, but we don't seem to know a lot about either one as far as resources, because we haven't investigated them that much. It's not like we've done any drilling on either body, and we only recently discovered water ice on the Moon. The moon is really close by and will be much easier to travel to.
Seems to me that if you're going to go to all that trouble, it'd be easier to just build a base on the moon for most operations, except those things which absolutely must be done in zero-g.
No, there's many other improvements too; any ship you build on Earth would have to withstand severe stresses in being launched out of the atmosphere. With a ship assembled in space, you don't have this problem; only the smaller assemblies need to withstand such stress, and that's much easier and cheaper. You don't have to build the ship to be as robust in this case.
The other big improvement is that if you have some space-based or lunar-based infrastructure, you can mine the moon or asteroids for materials to build your ships, instead of mining it on earth's surface in someone's backyard, and then lifting it out of the gravity well. Yes, developing that infrastructure is by no means trivial, but once it's in place, it'll pay for itself over time.
Not to mention the coal and oil deposits discovered later.
Columbus didn't know about that stuff, and no one found out about or made use of those things until hundreds of years later.
We know a lot more about what's on the moon than Columbus (or the Spaniards) did about North America, but what we know is that it's not all that.
The moon, sadly, is kind of crappy resource-wise.
You don't know that. It's not like we've done any drilling there; all we've done is collect a few rock samples on the surface. There's probably lots of valuable minerals there, just like we've found many in the earth's crust. Most of our minerals on Earth came from meteorite bombardment; well, take a look at the moon. What do you think all those round things are? And without an atmosphere, the minerals won't be dispersed so much on the Moon, they'll be concentrated at the impact sites. There's probably lots of resources on the Moon we don't know about yet, because we haven't looked. We only recently discovered that there's water ice there; sending up a few astronauts in a half-hearted rock-gathering mission totally missed that important detail.
They're idiots. People DO use the start menu, they just don't use it very often, but when they need it, they want it to work like they expect.
On my car, when I check the oil, it's really simple: there's a dipstick right in the front when I open the hood. Do I check the oil often? Certainly not. But when I do, I know how to do it, and it's simple; I don't want some car company coming up with some weird-ass procedure for checking the oil just because I don't do it every day.
Stretch marks??? Maybe I just don't know leather that well or haven't noticed them on my leather jackets and furniture. Weird.
Wrong, the utilities get away with it because the government, which is supposed to regulate them, is corrupt.
Maybe, but I'm doubtful. Go to any nice leather store and look around; when was the last time you saw barbed-wire scars on a leather jacket? I don't think I've ever seen such a thing, and I've been wearing leather jackets for a very long time. Surely they separate pieces of the leather by grade (i.e., any scarred parts get lower grades), and sell the higher-grade stuff for more money, so RR would just have to pay the premium price for the top-grade leather, right?
Exactly. There are precisely zero cows killed for their skin; they're killed for their meat. The only way lab-grown leather would make any sense is if they simultaneously introduce lab-grown beef. As long as cows are killed for their meat, there's going to be piles of left-over cow skin. If you don't use it for leather, it's just going to go to waste.
Support contracts work great when you're making desktop OSes that can be used in businesses. Then you can release the same OS (or a slightly different version) for free to home users and other non-payers, to build more mindshare. Exactly the way that Red Hat and Fedora do it.
The way Apple's been acting, I wonder who they could find who'd really want to get involved with them without a similar one-sided contract. Any other suppliers (not just for CPUs, this probably goes for anything) would probably be very concerned about getting involved with them, after seeing how they've treated what's probably their biggest and most important supplier. Doesn't Samsung also supply their LCD screens?
Not only is it reality, it's perfectly warranted. Apple was the one that started down this road of nastiness, not Samsung, so they'd just be 'hoist by their own petard'. Remember, Samsung was (and still is) a major supplier of components for Apple. Suing them was absolutely stupid. Why Samsung doesn't just suddenly cut off their supply of CPUs for the iPhone, I'm not sure (probably contractual obligations).
That would be nice, but this is Apple we're talking about. They've proven over and over how petty and vindictive and what control freaks they are. If you continue to be a customer of theirs, you have to know what you're getting into, and expecting good behavior from them is naive in the extreme.
I think your statement is highly insulting to fungus.
The US government did loan money to the European nations, but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about all the US industry that profited greatly from the rebuilding effort. Europe didn't have any industries left after the war: they were all bombed out. American industry was not only untouched, but it had been massively built up for the war effort, so it had a very high production capacity. They shifted from building war materiel to building stuff to sell to the Europeans. The government may have lost money in the Marshall Plan loans, but American industry profited immensely.
Why should anyone give a shit if Google can "outgrow their backyard hot tub origins"? Google is already a big company, and globally recognized. Isn't that good enough? This American obsession with growing and growing without end needs to stop. Companies don't need to grow. They need to grow to a comfortable size, and then when they're at an efficient size for whatever they're doing, they should be able to just maintain that size, provide good products and services and provide good employment for their employees and be profitable, and that should be good enough, without a bunch of morons whining about how they're not growing any more and this makes them "stagnant".
I disagree; I'm sure there's some places where there's lots of real freedom and clean air. The south pole comes to mind....
I agree about their crappy coffee and driving indie places out of business, but you have some good points there I never thought of. So I guess Starbucks is profiting by driving rental offices out of business? (like those places where you spend $500/month and get a single furnished office with access to a color copier/printer)
People don't realize it, but growing government is not a good thing. Government shouldn't be growing all the time, it should do a few things and stay about the same in terms of size and power.
No, ideally, it should be growing, but only at the rate of population increase. The amount of government per capita should ideally remain constant. And accordingly, the tax rates should remain constant, though revenues should rise and fall with the health of the economy and the size of the population.
I completely disagree. You're right, the UK and France didn't really "win" since they weren't better off, however, the USA was much better off after the war. Maybe not right on V-J day, but in the decade or so after, the US got very rich rebuilding Europe.