Currently an employer can demand a secret ballot election even if a majority of employees has signed cards authorizing a representative to bargain on their behalf, also known as a card check election. Under the EFCA, an employer can only dispute the legitimacy of an employee representative if less than a majority of employees have signed authorization cards, or if illegal coercion is alleged.
Either the organizers are acting within the law, and not coercing the signatories, or the management can give the workers to express their "uncoerced" opinions via secret ballot. So what's the problem?
The actual problem is that the EFCA takes away management's opportunity to spend a month preaching about how unionization will kill the company. That's why they're afraid of it, not out of any concern for the sanctity of the secret ballot.
Talk about cherry-picking your data. Are you really trying to tell us that, on average, unionized workers get lower pay and worse benefits than their non-unionized counterparts? If so, show me the data. Don't just name a couple of companies that you maybe think might be outliers.
It's not even clear whether you're talking about Toyota workers in Japan or here. If the former, well, they get an amazing benefits package just for being Japanese citizens. If the latter, doesn't that undercut the whole "high union wages destroyed the Big 3" narrative?
1) This legislation does not eliminate secret ballots. Secret ballots are still an option. But if over half of workers are ready to unionize, why should employers get the right to dismiss that, demand a secret ballot, and get a month where they can force employees to attend lectures on why unionizing will eat their children?
Scheduling a secret ballot puts all the power in the employer's hands. Employers can require their employees to attend anti-union meetings, while pro-union employees can only do their organizing on breaks, or during off-hours, voluntary meetings.
2) Under the EFCA, if the employer has evidence that coercion was used to gather the signatures, it can force a secret ballot anyways.
3) Corporate intimidation and retaliation are common, and (at least under the Bushified NLRB) consistently unpunished. You have to fight for years to get a wrongful termination suit, and the fines and back wages are always peanuts compared to the costs of unionization to the employer. So there is almost no incentive to follow the law.
4) The era of mobster unions is over, but even at their most corrupt, unions were able to increase workers' pay and improve their working conditions. There is no reason at all, other than your own biases, to assume that unions are usually corrupt while employers are usually law-abiding.
5) You lie when you say that the secret ballot actually protects workers from intimidation by bosses. Once a card check with a majority of signatures is presented to the company, intimidation is off the table, because the union is already formed. The secret ballot may protect some of the less active supporters of unionization from being targeted for firing (the more outspoken ones will still be known to management). But it opens up all manner of avenues for intimidation of the "vote for this and we'll just send all your jobs to Bangalore," or the variety, along with month-long misinformation campaigns.
I don't discount the value of being able to think at the level of machine code. A "bare-metal" language like ASM or C should be introduced in the first year of study. But there will be plenty of opportunities to get students thinking in 1's and 0's.
No matter which language you decide to introduce first, it's going to be the hardest one the students ever learn. My purpose in suggesting Python is to make sure that teaching the mechanics of the chosen language isn't overwhelming, to the extent that it obscures the concepts.
Starting with ASM has the following drawbacks:
* It makes the introductory course almost useless to anyone who doesn't intend to carry forward in CS.
* Showing students the frustration before showing them the power leads to high attrition. Some argue that high attrition just weeds out the weak. I would counter that it actually weeds out the atypical CS student, which is a different thing entirely.
* You can't implement important concepts like recursion in a straightforward, easily graspable way. Even straightforward concepts like the "function" and the "loop" get difficult to teach, with the mathematical properties getting lost in clumsy implementation details.
* It's hard to come up with assignments that apply to the real world in a meaningful way. What's the most complex, real-world project you could assign at the end of an ASM-based class? It's practically a guarantee that a Python-based project would hold more interest. The experience of building something very useful very early is critical, and I don't think ASM makes that likely. Python + pygame = "hey, I built a cool game!"
* You're going to spend the first two weeks of the course simply teaching the students how to set up and use their ASM software. Python is a quick install on any machine, and Ruby doesn't need an install at all: http://tryruby.hobix.com/
In the end, programming is about solving problems, breaking them down into simpler parts, and learning to reason about those problems. If you can bring that experience using real-world tasks, rather than assuming that moves and loads and stores are inherently interesting, you'll get a wider variety of students hooked on programming, which will eventually make for a healthier discipline. Trust me, there is plenty of time to teach students to think in 1's and 0's, once you've convinced them that it's worth their time to do so.
The production tax credit for wind power is 1.8 cents per kWh. And in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, new nuclear power plants got the same tax credit.
So that particular subsidy weighs in at around 20% of the total cost of the energy. According to you, the total subsidies are closer to 500%.
Where are these subsidies, and who out there is claiming that wind and solar are still 5-10 times as expensive as coal? What about the subsidy coal gets when they're allowed to dump their waste CO2 into our atmosphere for free?
You have the equation backwards. It actually goes "expensive and complicated nuclear power" + "government accepting unlimited liability for accidents" - "attention to proliferation concerns" - "the regulatory burden of working with such dangerous materials" - "watt for watt you can get more energy more cheaply through conservation" + "the ability to send NIMBYs to reeducation camps" + "the unstated assumption that uranium prices are stable over the 30+ year life of a reactor" - "the decade and a half it takes to roll out a nuclear plant" - "any guilt over denying poorer nations the right to use the same technology that fuels our economy"= "cheap and simple nuclear power".
Unfortunately, you are in high school. This means that you're going to have to work around the fact that A) the teacher may not have a full grasp of the material he's trying to teach, and B) the students are going to have a wide variety of prior experience and motivation. Don't begrudge the n00bs their need for help.
But by all means, talk to the teacher, ask for more challenging material, extra assignments, etc. Offer to prepare a lecture and teach a concept that you feel the class should include. Ask if you can write an assignment in a different language (or two, or three). If you're really up for a challenge, you could work on an auto-grading system that compiles programs, runs them, verifies the conformance of their output, and gives handy explanations.
Above all, don't give up on CompSci until you've gotten a few college courses under your belt. They're not perfect, but they'll be far above what you're getting now.
I think my advice is especially good for introductory courses that get a lot of crossover from other departments (business administration, sports medicine, etc.), whose students won't be making programming their career. Languages like Python and Ruby allow for a broader swath of concepts to be taught. Give them a C++ intro like I got*, and I guarantee they'll leave with two incorrect impressions:
1) Programming is all about bit-twiddling, making sure you free your mallocs, and tracking down null pointers.
2) It isn't worth the trouble for them to attempt to write truly useful programs.
But if your thinking is more in tune with Joel Spolsky's, that the intro to CS should be hard, you can have all sorts of mind-blowing, recursive, data-to-code-and-back in your course. I encourage it. But letting arcane syntaxes and gibberish compilation errors toughen the course is the lazy instructor's way out. Difficult experiences should lead to profound enlightenment, not "oh, I guess I needed to write there instead of 'stdio.h'."
* This may explain a lot about my eventual career path.
I say the exact opposite. Start them out with a simple, expressive, productive language with excellent library support. Give them a language that abstracts away a lot of the complexities, so they can start writing useful programs straight out of the gate.
I'd go with Ruby or Python. That way, you can introduce new paradigms (OO vs functional vs imperative) at your own choosing. Consider how much trouble it is to pass a function as an argument in Java (never mind C++) as opposed to Python. Or the fact that writing a fibonacci() function is easy in C, but writing one that will give you answers that exceed the bounds of your largest datatype is a nightmare.
One transition path to bare-metal might be to have students write something in Ruby with very poor performance, then create C bindings that speed it up tremendously. But the ASM-first crowd seems to be of the notion that their introduction to CompSci was an exercise in frustration, that all that frustration must therefore have had great value, therefore a route with a gentler learning curve is a disservice to students.
The story did lack some specifics, yes. How is that the fault of the researchers? Why would the Associated Press bore us with ratios of fructose to sucrose?
I'm not in the field, so I can't say that any particular bit is useful or novel. But it seems that knowing that this specific gene interacts with this specific diet to cause these specific brain structures that seem to promote Alzheimer's is well worth knowing.
It could lead to a genetic test that can gauge an individual's likelihood of getting the disease. That could lead to prescribing drugs or adopting lifestyles that combat the disease. It could show future researchers how to generate more brain tangles for study. Studying just how a junk food diet interacts with the gene could give us insight into the formation of tangles.
Maybe every bit of that was already known (I doubt it, but...). Even then, confirmation and repetition have their own utility. Every flash of insight has to be followed by years of grunt work.
What we had in the early days were near-monopolies that served relatively small regions. AT&T started out as one such monopoly, and barring anti-trust action by the government, would have become a monopoly with or without government sanction. Why? Because the economics of the telecom industry at the time were those of a natural monopoly. Agree or disagree with the government's decision to formalize it, but don't pretend that the idea was conjured out of thin air.
You're wrong on a couple of points. Even in the case of a coal-fired energy grid, electric cars produce less CO2 than their gas-fired brethren. Also, a few million cars wouldn't come close to using up the spare capacity in the existing grid. The assumption is that most of them would be charged at night, when demand is lowest and much of our energy infrastructure is just spinning because it takes too long to turn it on and off.
If we start converting to electric cars now, then at any point in the future where we replace a coal plant with some alternative energy source, millions of cars will instantly become a bit more carbon-efficient, without having to change anything under the hood.
I think you're being a bit unfair to Tesla. They do have more affordable models planned for the future. Early adopters are just shouldering the costs of refining the technology.
Also, while the Roadsters can in some instances be a "coal-fired" car, it's still more environmentally friendly to operate (I have no idea about lifecycle costs for all those batteries). Internal combustion engines run at about 10% well-to-wheel efficiency, whereas a coal plant operates at 30-40% efficiency. Once you factor in transmission, losses during recharging, etc., I believe it still works out to about 20 or 25% energy efficiency.
I'll pretend that the question wasn't rhetorical, and say that, by the simple fact that the Big 3 employ (directly and indirectly) about 4 million workers, there is a special need for their continuation. Tesla, not so many.
Still, it's hard to argue for playing favorites, and Tesla is doing work that ought to be supported. Detroit needs to change, and any bailout loans should hinge on such changes. Tesla, maybe, should get paid just to keep doing what it's doing.
Virtually nothing. If we assume that most of the vehicles do their recharging at night, then there is plenty of spare transmission capacity for twenty times that number.
I'm a little confused as to how the military could only defend my tax-paying neighbors from invasion. Nor do I see how we could not end up with massively duplicated infrastructure. Also, the superrich could develop their own infrastructure and rent it out at a loss until the government, deprived of all voluntary revenue, goes entirely bankrupt.
In short, I'm not sure if you're seriously proposing this, but I don't think anybody would be fine in such an economy. Okay, maybe the top 5%.
Then explain, O wise libertarian minipundit, how you would have set up the phone system in the 1950s in such a way that all these vast powers of competition would have been unleashed upon the land, thus saith the Lord. Without invoking six sets of phone lines to the same house.
Right. Because manipulation of the public is the proper role of our benevolent, market-elected corporate overlords.
If the Constitution deems that our society must let the free market decide how much CO2 should go into the atmosphere (I would argue that it says no such thing, but hey), then that's a flaw in our founding document, and I'm happy to look the other way while the government does it anyways.
I mostly agree with you. But when it comes to "why should we bail out the big 3," the answer is, because failing to do so could put them under entirely. Not downsize, not focus on core competencies. We're talking millions of people out of work, possibly for years. It's not just the manufacturers themselves. It will also destroy all the jobs manufacturing parts for those cars.
Any money should come with huge stipulations. They need to start manufacturing vehicles that reflect a gas-starved reality, not the vroom vroom dream they've been saturating the airwaves with for the last fifty years. They need to purge some deadwood from management. The shareholders will need to share the pain; a bailout should be about protecting livelihoods, not stock options. Ask them to devote more of their output to mass transit infrastructure, like LNG or electric buses. Install Amory Lovins on the board of directors. But above all, keep people working.
If I thought a buyout by Toyota might be a reasonably smooth affair, then sure, let the heads roll. But I think the shock of it would be more than the economy could take right now.
Agreed, though I would point out that there are some people whose income taxes are already at zero. For them, the solution would have to be either a reduction in payroll taxes, an expansion of the EITC, or a separate giveback.
I plugged your sig into my command line. A genie immediately sprang from my computer and granted me three wishes.
Were it not for you, I would not be enjoying this sabre-toothed tiger burger, the love of Kiera Knightly, or the prompt and loyal service of my new manservant, William H. Gates III.
Why is it that, whenever the media gets a hold of a single research paper, then draws wildly inaccurate or overly broad conclusions, people accuse the study of misinforming the public? From the story:
"All in all, the results give some indication of how Alzheimer's can be prevented, but more research in this field needs to be done before proper advice can be passed on to the general public," she said.
You wrongly claim that the researchers "fed the mice junk food." What they actually fed them was a high-fat, high-sugar diet that bears some nutritional similarity to a junk food diet. Again, from the story:
She studied mice genetically engineered to mimic the effect of the variant gene in humans, and which were fed a diet rich in fat, sugar and cholesterol for nine months -- meals representing the nutritional content of fast food.
Had they actually been feeding the critters junk food, including a hodge-podge of chemicals found nowhere in nature, then you could criticize the study for a lack of controls. I know that it's your inalienable right as a member of forum Slashdot to criticize the results of a study without
A) understanding how the study was conducted, or
B) understanding what the researchers are claiming, or
C) ever letting cross your mind the thought that maybe, just maybe, the people who make livings designing research experiments might have been smart enough to have accounted for the potentially confounding factors that you -- the untrained layman -- immediately spotted.
However, I still retain the right to find it annoying as hell.
I don't believe that this data farm of yours would work out too well. Sure, the ideal is there, of knowing everything about what everyone eats, then mining for useful correlations. But how would you deal with the following problems:
1) How would data be collected? We can't assign someone to write down every bite that goes into every mouth. If we track grocery purchases, there's no understanding of who in a household is eating what. Any approach is fraught with privacy issues that would have to be taken very seriously.
2) What data would be collected? The type of data we're interested in changes as we learn more. Had this program been started in the fifties, would we have known at the time to make distinctions between saturated and unsaturated, omega-3 and omega-6, HDLs and LDLs? Would this tracking account for things we've learned recently, like the fact that organic produce generally has more nutrients than their conventional counterparts? Every time you change the uber-database, it makes it that much harder to draw broad conclusions from the overall dataset.
3) When can we start expecting results? Some effects are the result of decades of behavior. It would be irresponsible to say, "let's wait thirty years to see if this junk-food/Alzheimer's thing pans out" when a... how did you put it?... mouse-torturing broad can give us a tentative answer with a few months of research.
4) Given that other behaviors also have profound health implications, would you add all behavior to this database? I've heard that the music you listen to also has an effect on your health. Will this database integrate with iTunes?
Sure, there is great value to your approach. But I think you're naive to think it would be a replacement for the current system, rather than a complement to it.
True enough. But don't you find it odd that living in the wealthiest nation on Earth* kills you just as fast as living in the desperate poverty of Cuba? Despite the fact that we spend a helluvalott more trying to extend our lives?
Previously I've argued that living in a shallow hierarchy is healthier and less stressful than living in a steep one. But to a first approximation, I think that the difference is, they don't have to eat the crap that we do.
Slashdot Mirror
Either the organizers are acting within the law, and not coercing the signatories, or the management can give the workers to express their "uncoerced" opinions via secret ballot. So what's the problem?
The actual problem is that the EFCA takes away management's opportunity to spend a month preaching about how unionization will kill the company. That's why they're afraid of it, not out of any concern for the sanctity of the secret ballot.
Talk about cherry-picking your data. Are you really trying to tell us that, on average, unionized workers get lower pay and worse benefits than their non-unionized counterparts? If so, show me the data. Don't just name a couple of companies that you maybe think might be outliers.
It's not even clear whether you're talking about Toyota workers in Japan or here. If the former, well, they get an amazing benefits package just for being Japanese citizens. If the latter, doesn't that undercut the whole "high union wages destroyed the Big 3" narrative?
Wow, you've fallen for it, and hard.
1) This legislation does not eliminate secret ballots. Secret ballots are still an option. But if over half of workers are ready to unionize, why should employers get the right to dismiss that, demand a secret ballot, and get a month where they can force employees to attend lectures on why unionizing will eat their children?
Scheduling a secret ballot puts all the power in the employer's hands. Employers can require their employees to attend anti-union meetings, while pro-union employees can only do their organizing on breaks, or during off-hours, voluntary meetings.
2) Under the EFCA, if the employer has evidence that coercion was used to gather the signatures, it can force a secret ballot anyways.
3) Corporate intimidation and retaliation are common, and (at least under the Bushified NLRB) consistently unpunished. You have to fight for years to get a wrongful termination suit, and the fines and back wages are always peanuts compared to the costs of unionization to the employer. So there is almost no incentive to follow the law.
4) The era of mobster unions is over, but even at their most corrupt, unions were able to increase workers' pay and improve their working conditions. There is no reason at all, other than your own biases, to assume that unions are usually corrupt while employers are usually law-abiding.
5) You lie when you say that the secret ballot actually protects workers from intimidation by bosses. Once a card check with a majority of signatures is presented to the company, intimidation is off the table, because the union is already formed. The secret ballot may protect some of the less active supporters of unionization from being targeted for firing (the more outspoken ones will still be known to management). But it opens up all manner of avenues for intimidation of the "vote for this and we'll just send all your jobs to Bangalore," or the variety, along with month-long misinformation campaigns.
I don't discount the value of being able to think at the level of machine code. A "bare-metal" language like ASM or C should be introduced in the first year of study. But there will be plenty of opportunities to get students thinking in 1's and 0's.
No matter which language you decide to introduce first, it's going to be the hardest one the students ever learn. My purpose in suggesting Python is to make sure that teaching the mechanics of the chosen language isn't overwhelming, to the extent that it obscures the concepts.
Starting with ASM has the following drawbacks:
* It makes the introductory course almost useless to anyone who doesn't intend to carry forward in CS.
* Showing students the frustration before showing them the power leads to high attrition. Some argue that high attrition just weeds out the weak. I would counter that it actually weeds out the atypical CS student, which is a different thing entirely.
* You can't implement important concepts like recursion in a straightforward, easily graspable way. Even straightforward concepts like the "function" and the "loop" get difficult to teach, with the mathematical properties getting lost in clumsy implementation details.
* It's hard to come up with assignments that apply to the real world in a meaningful way. What's the most complex, real-world project you could assign at the end of an ASM-based class? It's practically a guarantee that a Python-based project would hold more interest. The experience of building something very useful very early is critical, and I don't think ASM makes that likely. Python + pygame = "hey, I built a cool game!"
* You're going to spend the first two weeks of the course simply teaching the students how to set up and use their ASM software. Python is a quick install on any machine, and Ruby doesn't need an install at all: http://tryruby.hobix.com/
In the end, programming is about solving problems, breaking them down into simpler parts, and learning to reason about those problems. If you can bring that experience using real-world tasks, rather than assuming that moves and loads and stores are inherently interesting, you'll get a wider variety of students hooked on programming, which will eventually make for a healthier discipline. Trust me, there is plenty of time to teach students to think in 1's and 0's, once you've convinced them that it's worth their time to do so.
The production tax credit for wind power is 1.8 cents per kWh. And in the 2005 Energy Policy Act, new nuclear power plants got the same tax credit.
So that particular subsidy weighs in at around 20% of the total cost of the energy. According to you, the total subsidies are closer to 500%.
Where are these subsidies, and who out there is claiming that wind and solar are still 5-10 times as expensive as coal? What about the subsidy coal gets when they're allowed to dump their waste CO2 into our atmosphere for free?
You have the equation backwards. It actually goes "expensive and complicated nuclear power" + "government accepting unlimited liability for accidents" - "attention to proliferation concerns" - "the regulatory burden of working with such dangerous materials" - "watt for watt you can get more energy more cheaply through conservation" + "the ability to send NIMBYs to reeducation camps" + "the unstated assumption that uranium prices are stable over the 30+ year life of a reactor" - "the decade and a half it takes to roll out a nuclear plant" - "any guilt over denying poorer nations the right to use the same technology that fuels our economy"= "cheap and simple nuclear power".
Unfortunately, you are in high school. This means that you're going to have to work around the fact that A) the teacher may not have a full grasp of the material he's trying to teach, and B) the students are going to have a wide variety of prior experience and motivation. Don't begrudge the n00bs their need for help.
But by all means, talk to the teacher, ask for more challenging material, extra assignments, etc. Offer to prepare a lecture and teach a concept that you feel the class should include. Ask if you can write an assignment in a different language (or two, or three). If you're really up for a challenge, you could work on an auto-grading system that compiles programs, runs them, verifies the conformance of their output, and gives handy explanations.
Above all, don't give up on CompSci until you've gotten a few college courses under your belt. They're not perfect, but they'll be far above what you're getting now.
I think my advice is especially good for introductory courses that get a lot of crossover from other departments (business administration, sports medicine, etc.), whose students won't be making programming their career. Languages like Python and Ruby allow for a broader swath of concepts to be taught. Give them a C++ intro like I got*, and I guarantee they'll leave with two incorrect impressions:
1) Programming is all about bit-twiddling, making sure you free your mallocs, and tracking down null pointers.
2) It isn't worth the trouble for them to attempt to write truly useful programs.
But if your thinking is more in tune with Joel Spolsky's, that the intro to CS should be hard, you can have all sorts of mind-blowing, recursive, data-to-code-and-back in your course. I encourage it. But letting arcane syntaxes and gibberish compilation errors toughen the course is the lazy instructor's way out. Difficult experiences should lead to profound enlightenment, not "oh, I guess I needed to write there instead of 'stdio.h'."
* This may explain a lot about my eventual career path.
I say the exact opposite. Start them out with a simple, expressive, productive language with excellent library support. Give them a language that abstracts away a lot of the complexities, so they can start writing useful programs straight out of the gate.
I'd go with Ruby or Python. That way, you can introduce new paradigms (OO vs functional vs imperative) at your own choosing. Consider how much trouble it is to pass a function as an argument in Java (never mind C++) as opposed to Python. Or the fact that writing a fibonacci() function is easy in C, but writing one that will give you answers that exceed the bounds of your largest datatype is a nightmare.
One transition path to bare-metal might be to have students write something
in Ruby with very poor performance, then create C bindings that speed it up tremendously. But the ASM-first crowd seems to be of the notion that their introduction to CompSci was an exercise in frustration, that all that frustration must therefore have had great value, therefore a route with a gentler learning curve is a disservice to students.
The story did lack some specifics, yes. How is that the fault of the researchers? Why would the Associated Press bore us with ratios of fructose to sucrose?
I'm not in the field, so I can't say that any particular bit is useful or novel. But it seems that knowing that this specific gene interacts with this specific diet to cause these specific brain structures that seem to promote Alzheimer's is well worth knowing.
It could lead to a genetic test that can gauge an individual's likelihood of getting the disease. That could lead to prescribing drugs or adopting lifestyles that combat the disease. It could show future researchers how to generate more brain tangles for study. Studying just how a junk food diet interacts with the gene could give us insight into the formation of tangles.
Maybe every bit of that was already known (I doubt it, but...). Even then, confirmation and repetition have their own utility. Every flash of insight has to be followed by years of grunt work.
What we had in the early days were near-monopolies that served relatively small regions. AT&T started out as one such monopoly, and barring anti-trust action by the government, would have become a monopoly with or without government sanction. Why? Because the economics of the telecom industry at the time were those of a natural monopoly. Agree or disagree with the government's decision to formalize it, but don't pretend that the idea was conjured out of thin air.
You're wrong on a couple of points. Even in the case of a coal-fired energy grid, electric cars produce less CO2 than their gas-fired brethren. Also, a few million cars wouldn't come close to using up the spare capacity in the existing grid. The assumption is that most of them would be charged at night, when demand is lowest and much of our energy infrastructure is just spinning because it takes too long to turn it on and off.
If we start converting to electric cars now, then at any point in the future where we replace a coal plant with some alternative energy source, millions of cars will instantly become a bit more carbon-efficient, without having to change anything under the hood.
I think you're being a bit unfair to Tesla. They do have more affordable models planned for the future. Early adopters are just shouldering the costs of refining the technology.
Also, while the Roadsters can in some instances be a "coal-fired" car, it's still more environmentally friendly to operate (I have no idea about lifecycle costs for all those batteries). Internal combustion engines run at about 10% well-to-wheel efficiency, whereas a coal plant operates at 30-40% efficiency. Once you factor in transmission, losses during recharging, etc., I believe it still works out to about 20 or 25% energy efficiency.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/new_cars/4215681.html PM estimates that a Tesla has about half the per-mile operating costs of a Prius.
I'll pretend that the question wasn't rhetorical, and say that, by the simple fact that the Big 3 employ (directly and indirectly) about 4 million workers, there is a special need for their continuation. Tesla, not so many.
Still, it's hard to argue for playing favorites, and Tesla is doing work that ought to be supported. Detroit needs to change, and any bailout loans should hinge on such changes. Tesla, maybe, should get paid just to keep doing what it's doing.
Virtually nothing. If we assume that most of the vehicles do their recharging at night, then there is plenty of spare transmission capacity for twenty times that number.
Not that I'm against upgrading the power grid.
I'm a little confused as to how the military could only defend my tax-paying neighbors from invasion. Nor do I see how we could not end up with massively duplicated infrastructure. Also, the superrich could develop their own infrastructure and rent it out at a loss until the government, deprived of all voluntary revenue, goes entirely bankrupt.
In short, I'm not sure if you're seriously proposing this, but I don't think anybody would be fine in such an economy. Okay, maybe the top 5%.
Then explain, O wise libertarian minipundit, how you would have set up the phone system in the 1950s in such a way that all these vast powers of competition would have been unleashed upon the land, thus saith the Lord. Without invoking six sets of phone lines to the same house.
You are totally my bff now.
Right. Because manipulation of the public is the proper role of our benevolent, market-elected corporate overlords.
If the Constitution deems that our society must let the free market decide how much CO2 should go into the atmosphere (I would argue that it says no such thing, but hey), then that's a flaw in our founding document, and I'm happy to look the other way while the government does it anyways.
I mostly agree with you. But when it comes to "why should we bail out the big 3," the answer is, because failing to do so could put them under entirely. Not downsize, not focus on core competencies. We're talking millions of people out of work, possibly for years. It's not just the manufacturers themselves. It will also destroy all the jobs manufacturing parts for those cars.
Any money should come with huge stipulations. They need to start manufacturing vehicles that reflect a gas-starved reality, not the vroom vroom dream they've been saturating the airwaves with for the last fifty years. They need to purge some deadwood from management. The shareholders will need to share the pain; a bailout should be about protecting livelihoods, not stock options. Ask them to devote more of their output to mass transit infrastructure, like LNG or electric buses. Install Amory Lovins on the board of directors. But above all, keep people working.
If I thought a buyout by Toyota might be a reasonably smooth affair, then sure, let the heads roll. But I think the shock of it would be more than the economy could take right now.
Agreed, though I would point out that there are some people whose income taxes are already at zero. For them, the solution would have to be either a reduction in payroll taxes, an expansion of the EITC, or a separate giveback.
I plugged your sig into my command line. A genie immediately sprang from my computer and granted me three wishes.
Were it not for you, I would not be enjoying this sabre-toothed tiger burger, the love of Kiera Knightly, or the prompt and loyal service of my new manservant, William H. Gates III.
No, really. What's it do?
Why is it that, whenever the media gets a hold of a single research paper, then draws wildly inaccurate or overly broad conclusions, people accuse the study of misinforming the public? From the story:
You wrongly claim that the researchers "fed the mice junk food." What they actually fed them was a high-fat, high-sugar diet that bears some
nutritional similarity to a junk food diet. Again, from the story:
Had they actually been feeding the critters junk food, including a hodge-podge of chemicals found nowhere in nature, then you could criticize the study for a lack of controls. I know that it's your inalienable right as a member of forum Slashdot to criticize the results of a study without
A) understanding how the study was conducted, or
B) understanding what the researchers are claiming, or
C) ever letting cross your mind the thought that maybe, just maybe, the people who make livings designing research experiments might have been smart enough to have accounted for the potentially confounding factors that you -- the untrained layman -- immediately spotted.
However, I still retain the right to find it annoying as hell.
I don't believe that this data farm of yours would work out too well. Sure, the ideal is there, of knowing everything about what everyone eats, then mining for useful correlations. But how would you deal with the following problems:
1) How would data be collected? We can't assign someone to write down every bite that goes into every mouth. If we track grocery purchases, there's no understanding of who in a household is eating what. Any approach is fraught with privacy issues that would have to be taken very seriously.
2) What data would be collected? The type of data we're interested in changes as we learn more. Had this program been started in the fifties, would we have known at the time to make distinctions between saturated and unsaturated, omega-3 and omega-6, HDLs and LDLs? Would this tracking account for things we've learned recently, like the fact that organic produce generally has more nutrients than their conventional counterparts? Every time you change the uber-database, it makes it that much harder to draw broad conclusions from the overall dataset.
3) When can we start expecting results? Some effects are the result of decades of behavior. It would be irresponsible to say, "let's wait thirty years to see if this junk-food/Alzheimer's thing pans out" when a ... how did you put it? ... mouse-torturing broad can give us a tentative answer with a few months of research.
4) Given that other behaviors also have profound health implications, would you add all behavior to this database? I've heard that the music you listen to also has an effect on your health. Will this database integrate with iTunes?
Sure, there is great value to your approach. But I think you're naive to think it would be a replacement for the current system, rather than a complement to it.
True enough. But don't you find it odd that living in the wealthiest nation on Earth* kills you just as fast as living in the desperate poverty of Cuba? Despite the fact that we spend a helluvalott more trying to extend our lives?
Previously I've argued that living in a shallow hierarchy is healthier and less stressful than living in a steep one. But to a first approximation, I think that the difference is, they don't have to eat the crap that we do.
* 1776-2009