Now toss in a fifteen hour work day so you don't have time to cook. Toss in no access to cooking facilities so you don't have ability if you had the time or money. Toss in cafeteria food described as "horrid". Toss in a lack of any other choice because you're forbidden to leave your job site. Toss in having to buy your own bedding. Toss in a lack of bathroom breaks for twelve hour shifts. Toss in widespread sexual harassment if you happen to be female.
How's that $3,042 a year looking now? I don't need to be an economist to see what's wrong with this picture.
His claim holds even if they're "only" breaking a few, or one. They're still exploiting people by breaking the law. So, your try at skepticism is nitpicking.
Your error is in assuming that the fact that BadAnalogyGuy used the phrase wrongly means that the phrase itself has no useful meaning. I noticed that both you and he used professions in your discussion, but that's not where "hate speech" is a useful term. It's when speech is used to generate hate about something that isn't reasonably changeable, like a person's skin color or religion, that it takes on meaning.
Virg
Re:Random health care thoughts
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It amazes me that with the high percentage of negative public opinion on the health care bill that congress is still considering it. This is supposed to be government by the will of the people, right? To me, the will of the people is not being executed here.
Right wingers say that there's almost no support for it, and left wingers say that it's pretty popular. You want to bet what the real truth is? It's in the fact that it's on the knife edge right now.
Also, this is apparent in the back door manner in which they are trying to pass the bill by some trick of house/senate rules. This isn't some bill to appropriate a few million dollars for federal park support but a bill involving a trillion dollars of outlay. Given the current administration's massive spending and addition to the national debt with little to show for it, does anybody have any real confidence that this will work?
Given that no administration in the last thirty years has come close to a balanced budget (except Clinton, but his administration was awash in money due to the economy running up) I don't see "massive spending" as very damning. What did the last adminstration have to show for all the money they pissed away? Or the administration before that? I agree that this piece of the reform puzzle has some significant flaws but it's a start that allows actual progress in the next decade.
Some comments on health care industries making money hand over fist. Everybody seems to be in an outrage with doctors making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but nobody bats an eye when some sports star signs a multi-million dollar contract.
What a dumb example. If you're poor and can't afford tickets to the big game, will you die from it? People don't care as much because sports stars aren't a requirement for living, whereas doctors are.
If you were going to the hospital for open heart surgery, would you want the lowest paid doctor that has no incentive for good performance cutting you open? I'd want the super-star doctor that drives the Porche. If he's good enough to earn that much money, he's got to be worth his salt.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA.....(gasp)....AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You must be new in town. Average salaries for primary care physicians (not the "superstars", but the rank and file) is $147,000, and that's the average for the lowest paid segment of doctors. The average salary for everyone else in the country is around $40,000, for comparison. If you think that astronomical salaries are any guarantee of competence, then you'd best hope that you don't ever need surgery.
If they were really serious about health care reform, why didn't they start with the biggest money issue in health care: tort reform.
Because tort reform is only a small part of a very ugly picture, no matter what Beck and Hannity have to say about it. Patent law reform would take a big bite out of health care costs too, but you never hear that mentioned on talk radio.
People are incensed about million dollar bonuses at financial firms, but nobody shines the light on lawyers that, for the amount of work put in, end up making thousands of dollars per hour in a settlement or ruling.
The very fact that this bill is wending its way through Congress is testament to the fact that plenty of people are quite incensed about the spending in health care.
Consider, also, that even though that doctor is making a quarter of a million dollars per year, he's paying 25 or 30 percent of that in malpractice insurance to protect himself from every Tom, Dick and Harry that decides to sue because they didn't follow instructions and ripped their stitches out.
Most people qould file the concept of earning "only" $175,000 in a year rather than $250,000 in the "cry me a river" slot. It's easy to point to tort reform with friv
Speaking of line-of-site, other than bandwidth what is the difference between networked LED signaling and a TV remote control?
The big difference is two-way communication. It's very seldom (if at all these days) that a TV ever sends data to the remote, so you only need the remote and TV to maintain line of sight while you're using the remote. Imagine the trouble if your TV only worked when it could see the remote.
Point one, line of sight. Second, line of sight issues can be addressed by multiple "heads" that can cover a room. Like a cell tower, you'd communicate with the head that can see your LED best, and if you move out of sight your system would locate and lock on to another head. If you position them correctly, you can cover anywhere in a room this way.
Sort of like whenever someone makes some completely retarded piece of "modern art", like a red circle on an otherwise huge, blank canvas, and goes around with their little possy of "art-knowers" looking down at everyone who dares point out that a red circle on a piece of canvas does not, in any damn way, constitute art. =P
Maybe it's just me, but if someone can make money selling the flag of Japan to a museum you should probably rethink calling them retarded.
They clearly and unambiguously said that the school never uses the webcams to monitor or discipline students.
They've also admitted that the picture was from the laptop's webcam and they threatened disciplinary action on the basis of that picture. These facts directly refute the statement that you pointed out.
Yes, we have enough uranium to meet our current demands for another 20 years or so, but we sure as hell don't have enough power plants. Consider the fact that it takes about 10 years to make a plant (don't forget to factor in the oil cost of BUILDING a plant), but our economy will have collapsed before that time. We would need 10,000 of the largest nukes to mitigate the energy discrepancy. Do you think we can build 10,000 nukes in under 10 years?
I'll let HungryHobo continue with the rest, but I wanted to interject on this. It currently takes ten years to build a nuclear power plant because of all of the safety regulations (design analysis, slow-start testing, extreme sefaty monitoring, security). If the economy was in imminent danger of collapse, it would happen a whole lot faster because the public would be much more willing to tolerate increased risk. If the red tape is cut down, the actual building of a nuclear power plant wouldn't take longer than building a coal-fired plant. It would still take longer to start, because a lot of the slow-start testing isn't avoidable, but it would definitely not take a decade if the alternative for the area was not having any electricity.
You made it all the way to the last sentence, and then you jumped the rails. There's no restriction (at least in reasonable terms) to inviting people to your house to watch your movie/show/whatever. You can even charge for drinks if you want, but there's a limit. You can't charge more for the drinks than it costs you to provide them. The problem comes when you start charging more than the cost to recoup your own expenses. At that point, you've moved into the territory of making a profit using something that's not commercially licensed. You can buy a license to show a movie for a profit; movie theaters do it daily. But you can't buy a home viewing version and then turn around and charge admission (unless that admission is less in total than the cost of the purchase).
CPR is a perfect example. In Florida for instance, if someone dies in front of you and CPR had a good chance of saving them, don't let anyone find out you are CPR certified (which every highschool student is at some point) as you will be punished.
This is a perfect example of why such a law is bad. This law would drive me personally to avoid certifying in CPR under any circumstances. The problem is that there are a lot of personal injury lawyers who salivate at the chance to clean out a Good Samaritan, and you don't even have to lose such a suit to rack up some pretty ruinous costs defending against it. My mother, the RN, had to carry an insurance policy specifically for such situations, and still had qualms about stopping at a traffic accident unless someone was in very obvious and life-threatening straits. The reason is that the fender-benders generated enormous numbers of "cash it in" lawsuits from people looking to grab a few bucks by claiming an injury after the fact. It's those lawsuits that drive people not to help, because getting involved carries significant risk. For example, you said: "No, I don't expect an unarmed person to go after some guy with a knife or gun, but I do expect an appropriate response such as calling for help or calling a doctor." I'll respond with a real life, happened to me issue. I saw a collision, and I called the police and gave a statement. That statement resulted in one of the victims suing me (among a bunch of others) for not doing more than calling the police. It cost me almost $2,000.00 to fight off the suit. Now, how many times since then do you think I've called in an accident? I'll have to say that you have quite a lot of nerve saying that I deserve to be attacked in revenge for staying out of it. I can't afford to be a Good Samaritan these days, and that's what's truly sad. Perhaps your righteous anger would be better directed toward getting Good Samaritan protection laws in place, before you go blaming me for not wanting to put my financial future on the line to help a stranger.
As long as there have been governments of any kind whatsoever, those who were rich have always had more influence and power than the poor.
The rule against unlimited campaign conntributions was an attempt to level this field a bit. Allowing corporations to circumvent those rules unlevels it. Just because it happened in history doesn't make it a good idea.
Flawed argument. All of the members would have to die at once, and the corporation would have to be such that owndership was uninheritable by anyone else. Since a corporation with these limits doesn't exist, your argument fails. A corporation can easily survive all of its founding members, and can be passed to heirs. Are you seriously positing that if every holder of Disney stock died tomorrow, that Disney, Inc. would cease to exist?
That is plainly an utterly false. All corporations that I have ever heard of are run by people. Corporations do not vote, only people, including their employees vote. Corporations can only persuade people to vote. The very word corporation comes from corpus which means body. A corporation is a body of real-life voting people, who have some sort of common bond. The right of people to form a common bond group is just as fundamental as the right to speak.
The breakdown here is that the right to form a common bond only relates to allowing corporations to spend on campaigns if the corporation's employees are all owners. The problem is that allowing a corporation to finance campaign stuff allows the owners of the corporations to "double-dip" the laws. The owners can donate personal funds to the maximum allowed, and then dump more of the corporation's money into the pot as well while the non-owner workers can't direct any portion of the corporation's money to their own choices. This circumvents the idea that rich people shouldn't have more chance to influence elections than poor people. By limiting corporations from contributing separately from the corporation's owners, the balance of incoming funds is better preserved.
The places where this sort of thing are valuable are places where you want to control or forbid access to an area without lethal force. An example above described use of sonic weapons against pirate boarding parties. Another would be at exit points to correctional facilities, to control prison riots. Alarm systems that interdict could use such devices to drive back unauthorized entry (for example, in case of a breakin at a nuclear power plant or military facility). They wouldn't be much use for crowd control, though, as you pointed out.
Sorry, but you are MASSIVELY overstating the cost and failure rate difference. These don't have to be ultra accurate sensors. I can make a thermostat from household items for a few dimes that will easily survive freezing weather. It isn't rocket science. No doubt someone more qualified than I could do a better job of it.
OK, I'll take an entirely different tack. A thermostat would be useless for this function. What good would a dime-store thermostat do for clearing snow off a bulb lens? How would a thermostat know the difference between a bright, sunny winter day with an ambient ten degree temperature and a snow-covered bulb? This means you're not talking about a cheap thermostat any more, you're talking about a sensor that can tell whether the lens of the bulb is blocked or not, which is a much more complex, expensive and fragile device than a simple thermostat.
Go ahead and disbelieve it if you want, but the point of the article is that LED lights don't have a resistance heater built in, and that has created a problem that wasn't there before because all of the old lights DID have a resistance heater built in. I certainly don't think that it costs more to build a resistance heater than it costs to build a resistance heater. So, yes. It would cost less than a dollar.
This is way too simplistic. A lighting filament is a "resistance heater" if you want to look at it this way, but the problem you've got is that you can't simply install a lighting filament in the bulb. The bulb has to house the LEDs and the circuitry to light them (and a transformer), and the heating element has to fit around all of those components, it has to be hot enough to clear the bulb during the time that the bulb has power (keep in mind that a standard housing will only deliver power when the lamp is supposed to be lit) but not hot enough to damage those components and has to be the kind of heating element that doesn't generate any light (lest the lit heater confuse drivers) so it has to be significantly less efficient than the light filament. And this whole apparatus with sensors, heater and ICs to control it all needs to handle hundreds of power cycles per day, and every component has got to outlast a standard bulb's life or you'll end up discarding the bulbs at the same rate as before, or faster. So no, it wouldn't cost less than a dollar.
Yes, the heater may fail, and produce the exact same results as burned out light. Just as you wouldn't find out that a regular bulb was out until someone reported that they couldn't see it, you wouldn't know the heater was out until someone reported it.
The problem is that it wouldn't produce the same result. It would result in a functional traffic signal that wouldn't clear when snow got on it. Moreover, anyone who can see can tell a regular bulb is blown, but that's not the same with an LED bulb. There's no visual evidence that the heater or sensor is dead if the light still works. So, you'd have to send crews out regularly to test the bulbs, or eat a big negligence lawsuit the first time a failed heater caused a crash. That's extra liability that doesn't exist with regular bulbs.
If the heater fails to on, you would eat up EXACTLY the same amount of energy that traditional bulbs which ARE resistance heaters do.
See above. The heater that would work for an LED bulb will eat more power than a regular light bulb.
I have never once in my life seen a single light bulb fail to on. I can say that I have seen thousands if not more than a million regular bulbs, so it isn't like I wouldn't have noticed if that were a real problem. How many light bulbs have you seen that have failed to an on position? The thermostats? Maybe, but it is unlikely, and a worst case scenario is using the amount of electricity that a traditional bulb uses.
It's not the light that fails to "on", it's the sensor that turns on the h
Wrong. Mechanical thermostats basically never break, and are dirt cheap. Virtually every single home in the country has a thermostat. When was the last time you had to replace a mechanical one because it failed?
Install it on the outside of your house, and then get back to me. Thermostats designed to endure all-weather use are more expensive than the house variety, and they still fail far more often.
You are MASSIVELY exaggerating both the complexity and cost. It would likely take less than a day of running the lights to offset the added cost of a thermostat and a heater.
You'll have to pardon my disbelief that one day's electricity would offset the cost of building a sensor and heating unit into an LED bulb. Do you really think that it costs less than a dollar to put those components together?
The liability still would not be as high as with older style bulbs because the rate of failure would still be multiple orders of magnitude less than what regular bulbs have.
The problem is that liability with an incandescent bulb isn't the same as liability with your suggestion. If the sensor or heater fails, you won't know about it until the snow builds up on it. If a regular bulb goes out, it's very obvious that it needs to be replaced. And what exactly do you use for evidence of failure rates on heating units and sensors that don't even exist at this point? Considering that the LED bulb will need to be replaced if any of the three systems fails (sensor, heater or light), I propose that you don't have a clue how often they'll fail. Moreover, if either the sensor or heater fails to "on" it'll eat an astonishing amount of energy, and nobody will have any easy way of knowing that it's happening. This is why I suggested that upgrading LED bulbs to self-clear will require changing the housings. If the housing handles the sensing/clearing functions, the bulbs will last a long time, and the housing unit can handle monitoring and reporting failures, and can be built with modular parts so replacing a sensor, bulb or heater doesn't require replacing all three. The problem is that doing it this way will cost money, and currently it's more expensive than putting LED bulbs in regular signal housings and then paying a crew to check and clear the lights manually.
First they retire the SR-71 without ANY proper replacement...
There's no need for a super high speed surveillance plane any more. The job the Blackbird did (and did well, I might add) can now be done just as well by spy satellites that are cheaper and safer. The SR-71 was simply made obsolete by advancing technology, so it disappeared just like the P-51 Mustang.
Or they could buy a bulb that fits into the existing light socket that heats when and only when covered with snow.
You're talking about adding significant complexity to the bulb, in this case. You'd have to incorporate a heating element into it, and you'd have to make it capable of detecting when to use that element. This would add more cost to the bulb and would shorten its operating life because you'd have multiple points of failure, any one of which would junk the bulb. If the sensing logic fails, the bulb won't clear so it would need replacing. If the heating unit fails, the bulb won't clear so it would need replacing. If there's no way for the bulb to signal that it's got a failed heater or logic circuit, it's a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's a nice idea in theory, but there are significant issues with implementation, and all of those issues come with added cost for monitoring and repair, which cuts into the cost savings for using them in the first place.
The downside to all of this that has municipalities resisting is that your suggestions all require infrastructure upgrades. All of your suggestions would require refitting or replacing the traffic signal housings, where the current LED bulbs are built to fit into standard housings without change. The up-front costs to do this frighten spend-wary local officials, especially when it's an easy sell to suggest that they can simply sennd out a crew with a whisk broom to fix the problem.
In fact just make sure you take a look at which countries have nukes before you comment on this again.
There are a lot of ways to correct factual errors that don't involve telling the other person to shut up.
He didn't tell you to shut up, he told you to do your research before you comment.
Your post had a lot of excellent points, but then you crapped all over it with an ad homid attack.
This isn't an ad hominem attack. Attacking your argument on the basis that it's factually incorrect isn't personal. It's not like he called you a hypersensitive, touchy bitch and then used that to deride your argument.
Also -- wikipedia? Seriously?
It's not really hard to back up the info found there on this subject, and it's a convenient first line for the information.
If she's so proactive why did she call for the no confidence vote so quickly, and then rush back to the planet with no plan 10 minutes later?
Stupid and quick on the draw. A hotter version of George W. Bush??
A lot of these characters are STUPID, but I don't think that's a good enough description for a redeeming movie.
This isn't stupid, it's a combination of inexperience as a politician and the desire to fix what's wrong. It turned out to be right based on a lot of luck and good diplomacy on her part, but it's not unlike what happens in real life to the young politico who thinks he can change the way things work with pluck and personal effort. She called for the vote of no confidence because she was tricked into it, and she left ten minutes later because the very act of having to call for that vote made her think that there was no help for her people forthcoming from the Senate so she had to go fix it herself.
I actually found her to be refreshingly real-life in a movie stuffed with caricatures.
Microsoft does enjoy a monopoly position in the OS market. They don't own every OS out there, but they have significant control over both horizontal and vertical markets based on their OS penetration. For example, if Microsoft said that Windows could only be installed on Intel processors they'd pretty much drive AMD out of the market. That's vertical control. If they said that you were not allowed to run any office software on Windows other than MS Office, and if you did then you'd be violating your Windows license, then it wouldn't matter that OO.o is free, it would phase out. That's hosizontal control. Apple cannot exert anywhere near that level of control on the industry as a whole due to the fact that they don't have the market penetration. This means that Microsoft has to play by different rules than Apple. Antitrust legislation exists for a good reason. Trying to say that Microsoft isn't a monopoly and therefore isn't subject to that legislation is self-deceit.
For some research from the guys who actually know what the fuck they're doing:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/conghand/nuclear.htm
Your so-called blast wave isn't eliminated simply because there's no atmosphere. You STILL have to deal with all that radiation.
From your own link, "First, in the absence of an atmosphere, blast disappears completely." This directly contradicts your statement, so you should be more cautious about telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. Secondly, also from your link, "There is no longer any air for the blast wave to heat and much higher frequency radiation is emitted from the weapon itself." The effect of this high energy radiation on steel balls, which is what this thread discusses, is to heat them up considerably much like a nuclear reaction would heat air in an atmosphere.
So in short, your own link contradicts both of the statements you made about what I got wrong. Moreover, I mentioned the radiation issues in my post, so you can't even say I screwed that up.
Slashdot Mirror
Now toss in a fifteen hour work day so you don't have time to cook. Toss in no access to cooking facilities so you don't have ability if you had the time or money. Toss in cafeteria food described as "horrid". Toss in a lack of any other choice because you're forbidden to leave your job site. Toss in having to buy your own bedding. Toss in a lack of bathroom breaks for twelve hour shifts. Toss in widespread sexual harassment if you happen to be female.
How's that $3,042 a year looking now? I don't need to be an economist to see what's wrong with this picture.
Virg
His claim holds even if they're "only" breaking a few, or one. They're still exploiting people by breaking the law. So, your try at skepticism is nitpicking.
Virg
Your error is in assuming that the fact that BadAnalogyGuy used the phrase wrongly means that the phrase itself has no useful meaning. I noticed that both you and he used professions in your discussion, but that's not where "hate speech" is a useful term. It's when speech is used to generate hate about something that isn't reasonably changeable, like a person's skin color or religion, that it takes on meaning.
Virg
It amazes me that with the high percentage of negative public opinion on the health care bill that congress is still considering it. This is supposed to be government by the will of the people, right? To me, the will of the people is not being executed here.
Right wingers say that there's almost no support for it, and left wingers say that it's pretty popular. You want to bet what the real truth is? It's in the fact that it's on the knife edge right now.
Also, this is apparent in the back door manner in which they are trying to pass the bill by some trick of house/senate rules. This isn't some bill to appropriate a few million dollars for federal park support but a bill involving a trillion dollars of outlay. Given the current administration's massive spending and addition to the national debt with little to show for it, does anybody have any real confidence that this will work?
Given that no administration in the last thirty years has come close to a balanced budget (except Clinton, but his administration was awash in money due to the economy running up) I don't see "massive spending" as very damning. What did the last adminstration have to show for all the money they pissed away? Or the administration before that? I agree that this piece of the reform puzzle has some significant flaws but it's a start that allows actual progress in the next decade.
Some comments on health care industries making money hand over fist. Everybody seems to be in an outrage with doctors making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, but nobody bats an eye when some sports star signs a multi-million dollar contract.
What a dumb example. If you're poor and can't afford tickets to the big game, will you die from it? People don't care as much because sports stars aren't a requirement for living, whereas doctors are.
If you were going to the hospital for open heart surgery, would you want the lowest paid doctor that has no incentive for good performance cutting you open? I'd want the super-star doctor that drives the Porche. If he's good enough to earn that much money, he's got to be worth his salt.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA.....(gasp)....AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. You must be new in town. Average salaries for primary care physicians (not the "superstars", but the rank and file) is $147,000, and that's the average for the lowest paid segment of doctors. The average salary for everyone else in the country is around $40,000, for comparison. If you think that astronomical salaries are any guarantee of competence, then you'd best hope that you don't ever need surgery.
If they were really serious about health care reform, why didn't they start with the biggest money issue in health care: tort reform.
Because tort reform is only a small part of a very ugly picture, no matter what Beck and Hannity have to say about it. Patent law reform would take a big bite out of health care costs too, but you never hear that mentioned on talk radio.
People are incensed about million dollar bonuses at financial firms, but nobody shines the light on lawyers that, for the amount of work put in, end up making thousands of dollars per hour in a settlement or ruling.
The very fact that this bill is wending its way through Congress is testament to the fact that plenty of people are quite incensed about the spending in health care.
Consider, also, that even though that doctor is making a quarter of a million dollars per year, he's paying 25 or 30 percent of that in malpractice insurance to protect himself from every Tom, Dick and Harry that decides to sue because they didn't follow instructions and ripped their stitches out.
Most people qould file the concept of earning "only" $175,000 in a year rather than $250,000 in the "cry me a river" slot. It's easy to point to tort reform with friv
Speaking of line-of-site, other than bandwidth what is the difference between networked LED signaling and a TV remote control?
The big difference is two-way communication. It's very seldom (if at all these days) that a TV ever sends data to the remote, so you only need the remote and TV to maintain line of sight while you're using the remote. Imagine the trouble if your TV only worked when it could see the remote.
Virg
Point one, line of sight. Second, line of sight issues can be addressed by multiple "heads" that can cover a room. Like a cell tower, you'd communicate with the head that can see your LED best, and if you move out of sight your system would locate and lock on to another head. If you position them correctly, you can cover anywhere in a room this way.
Virg
Sort of like whenever someone makes some completely retarded piece of "modern art", like a red circle on an otherwise huge, blank canvas, and goes around with their little possy of "art-knowers" looking down at everyone who dares point out that a red circle on a piece of canvas does not, in any damn way, constitute art. =P
Maybe it's just me, but if someone can make money selling the flag of Japan to a museum you should probably rethink calling them retarded.
Virg
They clearly and unambiguously said that the school never uses the webcams to monitor or discipline students.
They've also admitted that the picture was from the laptop's webcam and they threatened disciplinary action on the basis of that picture. These facts directly refute the statement that you pointed out.
Virg
Yes, we have enough uranium to meet our current demands for another 20 years or so, but we sure as hell don't have enough power plants. Consider the fact that it takes about 10 years to make a plant (don't forget to factor in the oil cost of BUILDING a plant), but our economy will have collapsed before that time. We would need 10,000 of the largest nukes to mitigate the energy discrepancy. Do you think we can build 10,000 nukes in under 10 years?
I'll let HungryHobo continue with the rest, but I wanted to interject on this. It currently takes ten years to build a nuclear power plant because of all of the safety regulations (design analysis, slow-start testing, extreme sefaty monitoring, security). If the economy was in imminent danger of collapse, it would happen a whole lot faster because the public would be much more willing to tolerate increased risk. If the red tape is cut down, the actual building of a nuclear power plant wouldn't take longer than building a coal-fired plant. It would still take longer to start, because a lot of the slow-start testing isn't avoidable, but it would definitely not take a decade if the alternative for the area was not having any electricity.
Virg
Why is this funny? People have been lampooning posts for several years now.
Virg
You made it all the way to the last sentence, and then you jumped the rails. There's no restriction (at least in reasonable terms) to inviting people to your house to watch your movie/show/whatever. You can even charge for drinks if you want, but there's a limit. You can't charge more for the drinks than it costs you to provide them. The problem comes when you start charging more than the cost to recoup your own expenses. At that point, you've moved into the territory of making a profit using something that's not commercially licensed. You can buy a license to show a movie for a profit; movie theaters do it daily. But you can't buy a home viewing version and then turn around and charge admission (unless that admission is less in total than the cost of the purchase).
Virg
CPR is a perfect example. In Florida for instance, if someone dies in front of you and CPR had a good chance of saving them, don't let anyone find out you are CPR certified (which every highschool student is at some point) as you will be punished.
This is a perfect example of why such a law is bad. This law would drive me personally to avoid certifying in CPR under any circumstances. The problem is that there are a lot of personal injury lawyers who salivate at the chance to clean out a Good Samaritan, and you don't even have to lose such a suit to rack up some pretty ruinous costs defending against it. My mother, the RN, had to carry an insurance policy specifically for such situations, and still had qualms about stopping at a traffic accident unless someone was in very obvious and life-threatening straits. The reason is that the fender-benders generated enormous numbers of "cash it in" lawsuits from people looking to grab a few bucks by claiming an injury after the fact. It's those lawsuits that drive people not to help, because getting involved carries significant risk. For example, you said: "No, I don't expect an unarmed person to go after some guy with a knife or gun, but I do expect an appropriate response such as calling for help or calling a doctor." I'll respond with a real life, happened to me issue. I saw a collision, and I called the police and gave a statement. That statement resulted in one of the victims suing me (among a bunch of others) for not doing more than calling the police. It cost me almost $2,000.00 to fight off the suit. Now, how many times since then do you think I've called in an accident? I'll have to say that you have quite a lot of nerve saying that I deserve to be attacked in revenge for staying out of it. I can't afford to be a Good Samaritan these days, and that's what's truly sad. Perhaps your righteous anger would be better directed toward getting Good Samaritan protection laws in place, before you go blaming me for not wanting to put my financial future on the line to help a stranger.
Virg
As long as there have been governments of any kind whatsoever, those who were rich have always had more influence and power than the poor.
The rule against unlimited campaign conntributions was an attempt to level this field a bit. Allowing corporations to circumvent those rules unlevels it. Just because it happened in history doesn't make it a good idea.
Virg
Flawed argument. All of the members would have to die at once, and the corporation would have to be such that owndership was uninheritable by anyone else. Since a corporation with these limits doesn't exist, your argument fails. A corporation can easily survive all of its founding members, and can be passed to heirs. Are you seriously positing that if every holder of Disney stock died tomorrow, that Disney, Inc. would cease to exist?
Virg
That is plainly an utterly false. All corporations that I have ever heard of are run by people. Corporations do not vote, only people, including their employees vote. Corporations can only persuade people to vote. The very word corporation comes from corpus which means body. A corporation is a body of real-life voting people, who have some sort of common bond. The right of people to form a common bond group is just as fundamental as the right to speak.
The breakdown here is that the right to form a common bond only relates to allowing corporations to spend on campaigns if the corporation's employees are all owners. The problem is that allowing a corporation to finance campaign stuff allows the owners of the corporations to "double-dip" the laws. The owners can donate personal funds to the maximum allowed, and then dump more of the corporation's money into the pot as well while the non-owner workers can't direct any portion of the corporation's money to their own choices. This circumvents the idea that rich people shouldn't have more chance to influence elections than poor people. By limiting corporations from contributing separately from the corporation's owners, the balance of incoming funds is better preserved.
Virg
The places where this sort of thing are valuable are places where you want to control or forbid access to an area without lethal force. An example above described use of sonic weapons against pirate boarding parties. Another would be at exit points to correctional facilities, to control prison riots. Alarm systems that interdict could use such devices to drive back unauthorized entry (for example, in case of a breakin at a nuclear power plant or military facility). They wouldn't be much use for crowd control, though, as you pointed out.
Virg
Sorry, but you are MASSIVELY overstating the cost and failure rate difference. These don't have to be ultra accurate sensors. I can make a thermostat from household items for a few dimes that will easily survive freezing weather. It isn't rocket science. No doubt someone more qualified than I could do a better job of it.
OK, I'll take an entirely different tack. A thermostat would be useless for this function. What good would a dime-store thermostat do for clearing snow off a bulb lens? How would a thermostat know the difference between a bright, sunny winter day with an ambient ten degree temperature and a snow-covered bulb? This means you're not talking about a cheap thermostat any more, you're talking about a sensor that can tell whether the lens of the bulb is blocked or not, which is a much more complex, expensive and fragile device than a simple thermostat.
Go ahead and disbelieve it if you want, but the point of the article is that LED lights don't have a resistance heater built in, and that has created a problem that wasn't there before because all of the old lights DID have a resistance heater built in. I certainly don't think that it costs more to build a resistance heater than it costs to build a resistance heater. So, yes. It would cost less than a dollar.
This is way too simplistic. A lighting filament is a "resistance heater" if you want to look at it this way, but the problem you've got is that you can't simply install a lighting filament in the bulb. The bulb has to house the LEDs and the circuitry to light them (and a transformer), and the heating element has to fit around all of those components, it has to be hot enough to clear the bulb during the time that the bulb has power (keep in mind that a standard housing will only deliver power when the lamp is supposed to be lit) but not hot enough to damage those components and has to be the kind of heating element that doesn't generate any light (lest the lit heater confuse drivers) so it has to be significantly less efficient than the light filament. And this whole apparatus with sensors, heater and ICs to control it all needs to handle hundreds of power cycles per day, and every component has got to outlast a standard bulb's life or you'll end up discarding the bulbs at the same rate as before, or faster. So no, it wouldn't cost less than a dollar.
Yes, the heater may fail, and produce the exact same results as burned out light. Just as you wouldn't find out that a regular bulb was out until someone reported that they couldn't see it, you wouldn't know the heater was out until someone reported it.
The problem is that it wouldn't produce the same result. It would result in a functional traffic signal that wouldn't clear when snow got on it. Moreover, anyone who can see can tell a regular bulb is blown, but that's not the same with an LED bulb. There's no visual evidence that the heater or sensor is dead if the light still works. So, you'd have to send crews out regularly to test the bulbs, or eat a big negligence lawsuit the first time a failed heater caused a crash. That's extra liability that doesn't exist with regular bulbs.
If the heater fails to on, you would eat up EXACTLY the same amount of energy that traditional bulbs which ARE resistance heaters do.
See above. The heater that would work for an LED bulb will eat more power than a regular light bulb.
I have never once in my life seen a single light bulb fail to on. I can say that I have seen thousands if not more than a million regular bulbs, so it isn't like I wouldn't have noticed if that were a real problem. How many light bulbs have you seen that have failed to an on position? The thermostats? Maybe, but it is unlikely, and a worst case scenario is using the amount of electricity that a traditional bulb uses.
It's not the light that fails to "on", it's the sensor that turns on the h
Wrong. Mechanical thermostats basically never break, and are dirt cheap. Virtually every single home in the country has a thermostat. When was the last time you had to replace a mechanical one because it failed?
Install it on the outside of your house, and then get back to me. Thermostats designed to endure all-weather use are more expensive than the house variety, and they still fail far more often.
You are MASSIVELY exaggerating both the complexity and cost. It would likely take less than a day of running the lights to offset the added cost of a thermostat and a heater.
You'll have to pardon my disbelief that one day's electricity would offset the cost of building a sensor and heating unit into an LED bulb. Do you really think that it costs less than a dollar to put those components together?
The liability still would not be as high as with older style bulbs because the rate of failure would still be multiple orders of magnitude less than what regular bulbs have.
The problem is that liability with an incandescent bulb isn't the same as liability with your suggestion. If the sensor or heater fails, you won't know about it until the snow builds up on it. If a regular bulb goes out, it's very obvious that it needs to be replaced. And what exactly do you use for evidence of failure rates on heating units and sensors that don't even exist at this point? Considering that the LED bulb will need to be replaced if any of the three systems fails (sensor, heater or light), I propose that you don't have a clue how often they'll fail. Moreover, if either the sensor or heater fails to "on" it'll eat an astonishing amount of energy, and nobody will have any easy way of knowing that it's happening. This is why I suggested that upgrading LED bulbs to self-clear will require changing the housings. If the housing handles the sensing/clearing functions, the bulbs will last a long time, and the housing unit can handle monitoring and reporting failures, and can be built with modular parts so replacing a sensor, bulb or heater doesn't require replacing all three. The problem is that doing it this way will cost money, and currently it's more expensive than putting LED bulbs in regular signal housings and then paying a crew to check and clear the lights manually.
Virg
First they retire the SR-71 without ANY proper replacement...
There's no need for a super high speed surveillance plane any more. The job the Blackbird did (and did well, I might add) can now be done just as well by spy satellites that are cheaper and safer. The SR-71 was simply made obsolete by advancing technology, so it disappeared just like the P-51 Mustang.
Virg
Or they could buy a bulb that fits into the existing light socket that heats when and only when covered with snow.
You're talking about adding significant complexity to the bulb, in this case. You'd have to incorporate a heating element into it, and you'd have to make it capable of detecting when to use that element. This would add more cost to the bulb and would shorten its operating life because you'd have multiple points of failure, any one of which would junk the bulb. If the sensing logic fails, the bulb won't clear so it would need replacing. If the heating unit fails, the bulb won't clear so it would need replacing. If there's no way for the bulb to signal that it's got a failed heater or logic circuit, it's a lawsuit waiting to happen. It's a nice idea in theory, but there are significant issues with implementation, and all of those issues come with added cost for monitoring and repair, which cuts into the cost savings for using them in the first place.
Virg
The downside to all of this that has municipalities resisting is that your suggestions all require infrastructure upgrades. All of your suggestions would require refitting or replacing the traffic signal housings, where the current LED bulbs are built to fit into standard housings without change. The up-front costs to do this frighten spend-wary local officials, especially when it's an easy sell to suggest that they can simply sennd out a crew with a whisk broom to fix the problem.
Virg
In fact just make sure you take a look at which countries have nukes before you comment on this again.
There are a lot of ways to correct factual errors that don't involve telling the other person to shut up.
He didn't tell you to shut up, he told you to do your research before you comment.
Your post had a lot of excellent points, but then you crapped all over it with an ad homid attack.
This isn't an ad hominem attack. Attacking your argument on the basis that it's factually incorrect isn't personal. It's not like he called you a hypersensitive, touchy bitch and then used that to deride your argument.
Also -- wikipedia? Seriously?
It's not really hard to back up the info found there on this subject, and it's a convenient first line for the information.
Virg
If she's so proactive why did she call for the no confidence vote so quickly, and then rush back to the planet with no plan 10 minutes later?
Stupid and quick on the draw. A hotter version of George W. Bush??
A lot of these characters are STUPID, but I don't think that's a good enough description for a redeeming movie.
This isn't stupid, it's a combination of inexperience as a politician and the desire to fix what's wrong. It turned out to be right based on a lot of luck and good diplomacy on her part, but it's not unlike what happens in real life to the young politico who thinks he can change the way things work with pluck and personal effort. She called for the vote of no confidence because she was tricked into it, and she left ten minutes later because the very act of having to call for that vote made her think that there was no help for her people forthcoming from the Senate so she had to go fix it herself.
I actually found her to be refreshingly real-life in a movie stuffed with caricatures.
Virg
Microsoft does enjoy a monopoly position in the OS market. They don't own every OS out there, but they have significant control over both horizontal and vertical markets based on their OS penetration. For example, if Microsoft said that Windows could only be installed on Intel processors they'd pretty much drive AMD out of the market. That's vertical control. If they said that you were not allowed to run any office software on Windows other than MS Office, and if you did then you'd be violating your Windows license, then it wouldn't matter that OO.o is free, it would phase out. That's hosizontal control. Apple cannot exert anywhere near that level of control on the industry as a whole due to the fact that they don't have the market penetration. This means that Microsoft has to play by different rules than Apple. Antitrust legislation exists for a good reason. Trying to say that Microsoft isn't a monopoly and therefore isn't subject to that legislation is self-deceit.
Virg
For some research from the guys who actually know what the fuck they're doing: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/conghand/nuclear.htm Your so-called blast wave isn't eliminated simply because there's no atmosphere. You STILL have to deal with all that radiation.
From your own link, "First, in the absence of an atmosphere, blast disappears completely." This directly contradicts your statement, so you should be more cautious about telling me I don't know what I'm talking about. Secondly, also from your link, "There is no longer any air for the blast wave to heat and much higher frequency radiation is emitted from the weapon itself." The effect of this high energy radiation on steel balls, which is what this thread discusses, is to heat them up considerably much like a nuclear reaction would heat air in an atmosphere.
So in short, your own link contradicts both of the statements you made about what I got wrong. Moreover, I mentioned the radiation issues in my post, so you can't even say I screwed that up.
Virg