The sick thing was that Russia could have been high up the ladder if not on top... if they had been patient.
The US had great hopes of rehabiliating Russia and integrating them into the first world as a partner.
Something that annoys the US is that the Europeans have all demilitarized and are thus basically useless at maintaining the military credibility of the first world.
The idea was to partner with Russia... share our technology, give them industrial contracts, help them exploit their resources, give them the diplomatic inroads they would need to correct decades of antagonism with... EVERYONE.
We tried. We really did. The international space station was our attempt to give Russia an olive branch and keep their space program going. We thought that would be another nice thing we could do together.
We had this idea of former cold war enemies uniting in peace and common cause to obtain common interests for mutual prosperity and security.
Russia however is full of morons. I wish I could put that more diplomatically but I'll just be honest.
I think of them in terms of the old Byzantines who made from what I can see... the exact same mistake. The Byzantines were surrounded by enemies and losing ground. They were sieged behind their walls.
The Venetians visited them and offered them alliance, trade, western European mercenaries, holy crusaders, the good will of the Pope, money, credit... everything they would need to save their empire.
The king of Byzantium blinded the man. Reports on that are mixed and contradictory. But what we do know is that the Venetian diplomat had very bad relations with the Byzantines and in his later years when he became Doge of Venice... it was the custom of Venice to draw their diplomats and leaders from the same social class. The Doge of Venice brought the Crusade through Constantinople and sacked it. To this day loot from that sack is still proudly displayed in Venice. The city held for another 200 years but that was just managing the decline.
They could have had it all.
And whatever you think of the historical reference, the US did geniunely want to rehabiliate Russia. We forgave them. We wanted to be friends. Brothers in arms. Long years of hate and distrust turned to an understanding of each other and ourselves... something we could build a relationship on.
Putin pissed it all away.
As to being a Chinese protectorate. Good luck with that. China is very insular and pragmatic. They will not extend their protection over Russia unless they control Russia. And even then... it is not in their interest to control all of it. They would perhaps want part of Siberia.
Russia's future is to be eaten alive by rats. Little nibbles along the border until it has collapsed down to a few core cities full of rusted war relics and bitterness.
What is your specific problem with the Price Anderson Act when it has never been invoked so far as I know?
As to your study... you want me to read that whole thing? Shall I list 50 peer review studies and demand you read them? You can either make a quotation from the study and paraphrase the argument or I'm not going to go reading through in detail anything you post. Its not time effective. I get dozens of these things EVERY DAY. I can't read them all and I think it is incumbent on you to make a point that does not require I read that unless there is actually something in there that I need.
Given that the study was published in Holland and you keep referencing US legislation... I'm not seeing the connection.
As to pro nuclear at any cost, I categorically reject your assertion. I've never seen such a camp nor seen any indication that one has ever existed. I find the assertion on your part to be unsupportable, specious, and frankly damaging to your credibility.
As to your use of the term fanboi... I assume that means "fan boy"... then you say other people use ad hominem... hmmm... You're coming off as irrational. That's my honest read as of this portion in your post.
As to regulations, the issue is that the regulatory process is exploited by people that just don't want nuclear to make the process expensive. Look at how many plants have been approved. Why is that? Look at how long it takes to develop and then build them and how much of that time is spent getting all the paper work filed.
And then of course there is the whole issue with the storage for the spent fuel. I'm sorry, you can't claim that there isn't fucktarded opposition to nuclear power in the west.
As to your rebuttal to my point about nuclear storage... you have not even one fucking leg to stand on in this case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"" The location has been highly contested by environmentalists and some Nevada residents[2]. It was approved in 2002 by the United States Congress. Federal funding for the site ended in 2011 under the Obama Administration via amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011.[3] The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[3] "" Quote: For political not technical or safety reasons.
You lose that point. Touch it again and I'll slap your hands for touching other people's stuff. That one's mine.
Common myth? I can't believe you said that. Seriously. That issue is categorically lost to you.
As to the decommissioning cost, it depends on how you build the plant. You keep talking about the old 1960s nuke plant designs. That's not what anyone is talking about at this point. Your entire concept is obsolete. If we go with a pebble bed for example then the fucking plant literally can't melt down with or without power. There are many other designs that likewise are failsafe.
One of the better designs that I like is one that has the reactors as small sealed modules that are not opened at the power plant. They are delivered from a factory prefueled, operate for so many years, and then are unplugged and sent back to the factory. Another reactor is clicked into the spot where the old one was and generation continues. The reactors are relatively small. Around the size of a nuclear submarine's reactor. A power plant would ideally have many of these operating at once and they would ideally not need to be replaced all at once but rather in series. So a given year you replace a couple reactors, the next year a couple others, and so on. Never all of them at once. And they're small enough that a given reactor can fit onto the back of a heavy semi truck.
What I also like about that system is that it is exportable. various nations want nuclear power. You sell them this... they don't need special training. They don't need a nuclear program. They
This feeds into my general opinion that every industry should work like the desktop PC industry... aka modular components. By all means... have custom enclosures and innovate your various modules. But have the fittings between module A and module B cooperate with each other.
That's not in the interest of some perhaps because they like to make shit but its in the consumer's interest.
I'd love to see everything work that way.
And funnier still, it is probably a huge environmental problem. Think about it. With all the enviro crap going around these days does anyone talk about the environmental cost of planned obsolescence? Think of how many products have some simple cheap shit part in them break and people throw the whole thing out when really they just need a new slightly less shit but probably similarly cheap part.
No UN panel on that eh? Another way I know the people pushing that whole thing are either morons or insincere. Its obvious and we could reduce consumption radically.
Well, the likes of netflix, amazon, and itunes are crossing a lot of jurisdictions already and the status quo business and regulatory framework that the industries were used to is being phased out as they realize it makes piracy more of a problem.
An issue for example was movies not all releasing at the same time. That wasn't a big deal before the internet. But now that it is you can't tolerate it.
I think we're headed to a system where the internet is a jurisdiction unto itself in a lot of ways and thus able to transgress national borders on the general theory that it is the user that enters it and not the internet that enters the country... from a legal perspective.
The companies and artists etc only care about being able to get paid. So long as they get paid they're going to be happy.
The various governments have their own ideas about things... often they want things censored "because"... but the technology doesn't lend itself well to both connecting a country to the internet and yet having just your specific country censor X or Y. And the idea of getting the entire world to censor X or Y because your country doesn't like something... its a tough sell and practically isn't enforceable even if you can get the diplomats and then politicians to agree to it.
We'll see. I don't care about this specific issue of course. Its just that I am dubious of their streaming service being able to function given the many problems they're going to deal with, the whole lets reinvent the wheel thing, and then what I have to assume is a much smaller market to ultimately support the whole thing.
ehm... don't over play your hand. The culture from one organization to the next changes. At a lot of places they let the IT department handle it. The execs say what they want, they give a budget with the regular warning that things will be audited and you need to keep the costs as low as possible... and then they let the CIO or possibly lower down the chain deal with it.
True, some CIOs are fuckwits but that's a reflection on the competence of the organization as a whole. Organizations in the 21st century with idiot CIOs are generally full of other problems that render that issue the least of their problems.
A thing to consider as well is that just because software X or Y is shit under context M or L, you have to keep in mind your user base, maintenance, labor, etc.
I'm a big believer in customizing GUIs to suit the job. I think too much of corporate america is sitting there looking at a windows desktop or a macos desktop or a linux desktop or a ios home screen etc. None of these things are designed for the specific application. So one of the things I make a point of is using various programs to create custom GUIs for different users and then I impose that on top of the operating system to constrain and simplify the use of the system for the intended function.
The problems with the system and time spent training fell dramatically when I did this... the users only use a few different programs and that is it... and they constantly can't find shit that is right in front of their blind little eyes. So I gave them giant play school buttons and literally about four of them. The systme is also set up very clearly to only work one way which is the way I want it to work. And while I get the occasional douchebag saying "I can't install ittunes on this, help me do that"... most users understand because of the highly goal orrented interface that they're dealing with a WORK computer.
The systems don't get viruses. They don't get malware. People are not jerking off to whatever because block all that nonsense with the firewalls.
Its very civilized.
And I think GUI is something that people want to make very generic and universal and the same everywhere. And I think that's wrong. I think the interface for jet shouldn't be the same as the interface for a commercial airlines as the same for a car as the same for a tractor as the same for corn combine. You have to have custom interfaces for different contexts.
Sorry for the soap box rant.:) I just wanted to riff about that for a minute for my own sanity.
Oh, that isn't the problem with Oracle. The problem is that their tech is increasingly less special and the price structure has not adapted to take that into consideration.
They have a lot of lock in on legacy systems but going forward... any time something gets redesigned... there's a good chance Oracle is either going to have to lower their rates or risk getting dropped permanently.
By the same token then why do you need whatever this new thing is?
As to restaurants... you're talking apples and astronauts there. You can't compare a streaming music service with a restaurant. There's no commitment to a restaurant. The technological barriers are basically non-existent. you don't need to get everyone in the continent of africa to sign on to a restaurant to make it work but you do if you want your music streaming service to work. And no... i don't mean literally every single person... but most of them.
There's just a lot more involved with setting up a streaming service that actually works and people actually want to use and actually has artists than you'd have to go through to set up ONE restaurant in ONE location that really just has to figure out how to get enough hungry people to sit down and order food on a regular basis to keep the doors open.
Its not comparable.
And as I said, the Africans are using American Search Engines, American designed computers, American designed operating systems... and your streaming service is going to be competing against American streaming services that got there first, are more established, have more artists signed to them, have likely better programmed software, have better hardware tie ins, have better industrial support, and those streaming services are offering their service at such a low price point that how do you expect to make any profit to keep your business going when you're competing against a more established industry, that is more innovative, more competitive, and if they feel threatened can out bid your artists to get them exclusively in one service or another to starve you out.
Point being... there is a reason things work the way they do. I'm not trying to be a jerk here. I'm just saying... know what is on the other side of a door before you open it.
The US has been holdings its own when it comes to software against the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Indians, and all of Europe.
I don't know, I'm reacting more to the walls you have in your home which architecturally offend me.
Maybe its cultural. The fashion in the US these days is to have as few walls as possible to create as many large rooms as possible. Often a given room will have sections of it for different things. One part of the room had a dining room table, another had a couch, another had an oven... etc. Everything flowed into everything else with no doors or walls. The fashion in the US is that the only rooms that should be segmented should be rooms requiring privacy. So bedrooms and bathrooms. If it isn't either then the style or fashion is to have no walls or doors. Zones are generally demarcated with rugs or the placement of furniture.
Anyway, a typical American house has upwards of 2000 square feet. Anyway... I've seen Roombas shit the bed in many situations. I'd like them to be able to navigate.
As to your citation, I actually addressed that point at length. I conceded that there are contexts where a tank is inferior. But I pointed out that is true with anything. I then pointed out that the trick to military tactics with ANYTHING is to avoid situations where your forces are weak, avoid situations where the enemy strong, try to stay in situations where you are strong, and lastly try to hit the enemy where they are weakest.
Saying "in this one specific context tanks are shitty" doesn't really undermine my position because everything has such a context and the trick is to NOT allow your forces to be in that position.
I talked about a lot of things going back and forth with the fellow. Battleships for example are strongest in a particular context... ideally at long range. A battleship can have a range of up to about 20km at least in WW2. Future models of the same concept might have different ranges. However, a fishing boat with a magnetic limpet can sink a battleship if the fishing boat is able to get that close and attach a limpet against the hull. Now obviously... rule one for a battleship is to not let that happen. And battleships have the ability to stop that from happening because they have an array of weaponry that can destroy such ships long before they get into that kind of range.
And the same is true with destroyers and cruisers and aircraft carriers. They each have a context where they're strong and another context where they are weak. Aircraft carriers are considered to be the strongest naval warships of the modern era and generally have been so since WW2. They are so powerful because they have greater range and accuracy than any other ship unless you want to cite cruise missile ships or Boomer Submarines. they also have incredible fire power and because of the extreme range, accuracy, and fire power they have relatively light armor. Now, a battleship versus an aircraft carrier at a range of a couple miles is a very bad situation for the carrier. A WW2 era battleship easily destroy a modern Ford Class US carrier before the US carrier was able to really do anything to the battleship. In THAT context the battleship is superior.
Now does this mean that units shouldn't be used together? No, they obviously should. Tanks with infantry are typically better. However, the argument was made that tanks could not fight without infantry where as infantry could. And this is not accurate.
Under the right circumstances either tanks or infantry can operate independently though they are more flexible together.
There are of course many instances of infantry fighting alone sometimes against tanks sometimes not. And there are also many incidents of tanks fighting alone with and without infantry.
The argument made against the tanks is that they're bad against dug in infantry with AT rockets. And to that, I say only if the tanks get too close to the enemy, lose the ability to manuver, and otherwise throw away their advantages while failing to exploit the weaknesses of their enemy.
As such... I did respond to him as I am responding to you.
I am not wrong.
The problem with people like you Dbill, my little melted ice cream cone, is that you don't care if you're right. All you care about is winning. You just look for things to nit pick me on so you can claim a win. But as to whether anything you're saying is actually accurate or rational or informed or insightful... you have no interest.
And the mind fucking truth that sophists like you have grasped about stoics like me... is that when push comes to shove... you lose against people like me because we don't care if we win. We care if we're RIGHT. And in being right we are bulletproof. You can't touch me. And because I'm bulletproof I can walk through your fire as if it isn't even there... and choke your stupid position to death while looking into your stupid little eyes... and smiling.
You won't understand... people like you never do. You think winning is the same a
Given Russia's demographics which were quite different during the old imperial period, I question the wisdom of that approach.
That said, I'm generally quite pessimistic on Russia's long term future. The country has enormous potential but it is systematically squandered and they have long term strategic threats that they are not only not addressing but actively making worse.
Things change and things stay the same. The wisdom is in knowing what has and will change and what has not and will not change.
... absent legal barriers. Why would Africa need their own? they don't need their own version of the CPU. They don't need their own operating systems. They don't need their own word processors.
They appropriate existing third world technology for all that stuff. So... why would they need a music platform?
Obviously all the people that cheated on their spouses is sad. Its all betrayal and treachery.
The actually shocking betrayal though was the response by Ashely Madison to not shut down.
An establishment like that has an ethical obligation to protect the identities of its clients. Obviously their security was poor. But ignoring that, they were given an ultimatum and they should have caved. Instead they put the survival of the site above the security of the client and since the survival of the site is existentially threatened by the security, they can't maintain the site and betray their clients.
But they did.
This makes it clear that if you deal with them... they'll betray you the same way you're betraying your spouse.
There's no respect or honor here. Its just weasels screwing each other.
I'm generally pleased the people cheating on their spouses are getting outted. People get upset about the "judgementalism" of that but the same people fail to grasp the hypocrisy in that they're judging others for being judgmental.
You either have judgements of people or you have no opinion. I choose to have opinions. Those that have opinions that other people shouldn't have opinions are fucking retards. I don't really have a strong enough insult to sum up what fucking lackwit, slackjawed, nitwits they are... and that's not really the most irritating thing about them. the TRULY obnoxious thing about them is that they don't know they're morons and people don't label them as such with impunity.
Frankly I think the people that don't like the judgements are mostly trying to protect themselves from quite righteous contemplations.
It doesn't seem to work very effectively in multi room situations. It invariably runs out of power in the second or third room and is unable to find its way back. And even if it does, it just revacuums the same areas it already vacuumed and peters out before it gets to the stuff it didn't do last time.
The LG Hom Bot appears to resolve that situation because it maps the ceiling which is innovative. And from that it is able to orrient in your home. So when it gets low, it returns directly and predictably to the charger using the map and then once recharged it goes back to where it was when it got low on power and resumes without revacuuming the same areas again.
It also permits patterned vacuuming. Some people like the pattern in the carpet made by vacuuming. Those even rows. And the Hom Bot can do that instead of bouncing around like drunken clown car.
Any weapons system can fail if it doesn't anticipate and adapt to the enemy's weapons tech.
Take US carrier fleets. What if we didn't think the enemy had hypersonic anti ship missiles? Such weapons have a 50 mile max range so far as I know. And stopping them if an enemy gets within that range is apparently problematic.
We have a series of counter measures... specifically some computer controlled hyper sonic intercept missiles that the Navy is pretty confident can protect a US ship from such threats. However, generally US carrier groups like to operate at least out of sight of the coast. The enemy not being able to get an optical bead on your position from the coast is considered to be a good practice.
The Israelis in both those conflicts could have dealt with the situation if they knew it was there. They were surprised at point blank range.
I did not say that you couldn't ambush armor with AT weapons at point blank range.
I did say that armor if they know what is going on which is not unreasonable... can adapt strategy to mitigate the threat. Shelling enemy positions prior to advancing is a good idea. Remaining mobile so that you can open the distance with an enemy force using your range to best advantage.
In the Lebanon war, Hezbollah was apparently closing to within 100 FEET in many cases prior to firing on Israeli tanks. The advance through those mountains was also a gigantic shit show because the mountains were perfect for ambushes and terrible for the tanks. Tight mountain passes with natural caves everywhere for Hezbollah to boil out of in a continuous stream? Generally to be avoided. What is more the whole area had no strategic relevance to Israel and so should not have been fought over at all. The entire area should have been bypassed. A sea invasion could have been done if there are no land routes... or you could use heavy cargo planes. The US is able if slowly to move our own Main Battle tanks that way.
Look, with any weapons system you want to maximize your strengths while minimizing your weaknesses. Everything has strengths and weaknesses. Armor has the weakness that it gets into trouble in tight spots, is a larger target than a man, and have more difficulty making use of improvised camouflage or obstructional barriers. But infantry has its own weaknesses. Infantry is comparatively fragile to threats that heavy tanks can ignore with impunity, infantry has radically less fire power by mass or per person. And so far as I know, there are no man portable weapons systems able to engage a tank at the range a tank can engage you.
So who wins is largely a matter of that context. A guy with a fishing boat can destroy a battleship... if the battleship lets the guy with the fishing boat get that close and attach a magnetic limpet mine to the hull. Sure. But like the first thing they would teach you about fighting with a battleship is that you don't let the enemy get that close to you. You treasure your range. The great advantage of the battleship which was basically the old mega tank of the seas was that it had a 20 km range in many cases and could shrug off a hit by anything short of a torpedo barrage or another battleship. And the torpedoes while surprising like the AT weapons only became relevant if the damned thing could get in range to hit you. Most torpedoes had a much much shorter range than the battleships... I think they were generally limited to about 4~10km. Which means you'd be well under the guns of the battleship before you got into torpedo range. Now the trick of that was to dodge and weave to try and make it hard for the battleship to actually land a hit. There are many examples of destroyers getting into knife range with battleships just with speed, guts, and luck. One example in WW2 had an American destroy get so close to a Japanese... I think it was only a heavy cruiser but it might have been a battleship. But the point was that it was so close that the japanese ship couldn't depress its guns to fire back. The US destroyer sat there for THIRTY minutes
Not really. You give it the existing bit of code that it already operates on if its independent. And when slaved to a computer via wifi, the unit would basically operate like a remote controlled car. The computer would tell it "go forward" "go Back" "turn left" "turn on your vacuum"... etc.
Would the code on the computer need to be debugged... the idea here would be that Roomba releases an API for operating their robot and then releases a default control program for various platforms. I have no doubt that if Roomba does that and their default program isn't amazing... that there are going to be a lot of people hammering together open source control packages that have increasingly elaborate and unpredictable functionality.
I'm using Bing which I think hasn't been targeted by as much of this stuff. Its as good as google in my opinion. DuckDuckGo is my next move if bing goes tits up. My issue with duckduckgo is that the site handles very strangely... and there are odd things about how text is copied from search results. I think the site might require active javascript to do a search which neither google nor bing require for searching. They need it for other things but the searching requires none.
Well, that's a good point... however that craze started when the government told employers they couldn't require employees to pass IQ tests. The degrees are used as a proxy for that as I understand.
That said, I generally agree with your position that the degrees are and the general shitshow that is HR in corporate America is involved in this nonsense.
However, it is important to understand that that shitshow is largely a liability shield. The US department of labor etc creates liabilities that can only be mitigated by jumping through a lot of hoops. Unintended consequences.
As to non-profits being run by nurses and professors etc, the problem with this communal system is who takes responsibility? I know in the non-profits the directors and presidents just buck pass or otherwise mitigate responsibility but there's at least some sense that someone is ultimately in charge of the thing. Still its an interesting idea and I have no real problem with it.
I'm given to understand that in hospitals a major cost is the administration and accounting departments. The top three flours of many hospitals is just pure administration. My understanding is that insurance and medicare claims are a nightmare and you need a Brazil-like (reference to the movie) bureaucracy to deal with it all.
As to keeping politicians out of education, then don't take public money. If you take the public dime then you're in the system. You can't have it both ways. Sorry. We're not cutting you a blank check and letting you do whatever without oversight or input. We paid you. That money from the government entitles them to a say in how you conduct yourself.
Its like the people that say they want government funded healthcare but think the government shouldn't have a say in how healthcare is run. You can't have it both ways. You want the money... there is a price and it isn't just in taxes. You become involved and entangled. I appreciate that the modern university system can't function without the subsidies and your point about the HR departments being somewhat complicit in the situation is apt. However the systems did work prior to those subsidies and absent the specious demands for degrees they may well be quite viable without them in the future.
As to Title IX being an on going legislative toxic waste dump that mutant horrors continue to crawl out of... everyone is aware. The problem is the atmosphere of political correctness which... frankly the universities have not been helping with... the rest of society is having a hard time dealing with it. The only effective strategies are either to smile and give it lip service while secretly doing everything in your power to isolate its hold on you. Or to render yourself immune from various reactionary elements that take political correctness seriously and then treat the entire concept with contempt.
No one has as yet found a solution to it besides that. Though I assure you, society at large throughout the Western world is attempting to find the mass producible silver bullet that will put that monster down. Any help from Academia would be appreciated.
As to online education being over-hyped because it hasn't been relevant in the past. Things change and things stay the same. I can say things will change and you can say they'll stay the same and neither of us will be wrong. I'm talking to you over the internet... that's a new thing. But both of us will have dinner tonight on food our ancestors would have likely found as appealing and possibly recognizable as we do... thus things stay the same.
I think in practice we're both going to be right on this last point. I think aspects of education are going to be increasingly handled exclusively in this fashion. You can have the best lecturers in the country produce the best lecture on a given subject. And if that is the class why settle for second best? Quite a few in person classes are just listening to lectures, taking tests, writing a paper... people that raise their hands should be shot. I had a lot of
As to the Iraqis not having the right type of man portable AT weaponry... really their main tanks couldn't really hurt the Abrams either. The ambrams was giggling at the enemy rounds plinking off the armor. And I think what the US tanks were doing was a combination of blowing them up at long range if they had eyes on them... or rushing them and literally getting so in and amongst the enemy that they lost all unit cohesion. I was watching a documentary on it after this discussion started so I could inform myself a bit better. And US tanks were at literal KNIFE point with Iraqi tanks. There was an amusing situation where a Bradely went over a dune... and there was an iraqi tank two feet to the right of the bradly dug into the dune... and apparently oblivious to the bradly just "there". The bradly pointed its cannon about as low as it would go and was able to fire through the thinner armor on the top of the turret apparently.
It was apparently pretty crazy.
As to optics being a huge advantage. Couldn't agree more. From what I understand, thermal played a big role. They used it during the day to see through dust and smoke. The enemy couldn't see the US tanks and the US could.
As to air superiority, yes, but I'm just talking about ground forces vs ground forces. There was a lot more of that in Iraq war 1 than I had previously realized. There were some large tank vs tank battles. From what i could tell, the infantry played no relevant role either way. But admittedly the US wasn't occupying cities either.
As to the Israelis having issues with AT rockets, they were surprised every time that happened from what I can tell. The two wars they had issues with were with the Egyptians in around 1973 and they had problems again in 2006 in Lebanon. In both cases the Israelis were surprised by the weapons and their doctrine did not account for them... and I think that more than anything caused the problem.
As to the wider issues of urban warfare etc... this is just a question of enemies hiding behind women and children. If you're willing to kill women and children then this defense is gone. If you're not... then the enemy is invulnerable. But it has nothing to do with tanks or AT weapons or urban built up areas. You could do the same thing in a perfectly flat desert. Have 10,000 women and small children... and babies in the arms of women walk before your fighters as a human shield.
Will you shoot through them? You don't and the enemy kills you with impunity. You do shoot them and you get branded a monster for shooting women and children. Choose between death and being called a monster by idiots. Choices choices.
As to shifting the debt burden to the taxpayer, that's how you lower interest rates for student loans.
Interest rates are about risk. Safe borrowers pay low interest rates and risky borrowers pay high interest rates.
The government talked to the banks and said "how do we lower interest rates" and the banks said "well, you can cosign the loan and the interest rates will then be the same as loans to the government"... only students are still getting ripped off because if you look at what the government pays for its interest... you'll laugh: http://www.treasurydirect.gov/...
The difference between A and B is profit... which is pretty fucking tasty.
I'd like to look at alternative ways of funding education... One idea I like is trading a percentage of future income. This idea isn't useful for the trust fund kids that are just going to take art history classes and then go fuck prostitutes in where ever. But for poor kids that really need a lot of help getting into the middle class, this is excellent. Why? Because the university has a vested interest in your success. Under the current system if you fail immediately after you graduate the university doesn't really give a shit. But under this system, they don't get paid if you don't succeed. And they get paid more depending on how much you succeed.
So that means the school pushes you into classes that are more likely to make you more marketable in the job market and they'll take an interest in getting you internships prior to graduation, and try as best as possible to get you into a high paying job right out of school because they'll be taking a cut of your pay check for the next X years under that system.
Now if you go to work flipping burgers they're not going to get anything. Obviously you want a minimum earning cut off point. There's no point taking a cut of someone's pay if they're making minimum wage. That's as pointless as it is cruel.
So that's one idea I like that I think would motivate the system to take a long term interest in the future of students.
I don't agree that tanks cannot operate any less independently than infantry.
In Iraq 1 we had armored columns attacking dug in Iraqi defenses all by themselves and annihilating everything. They blew up tanks, they killed soldiers...
Tanks just like infantry in a right context are quite happy all by themselves. And before you say "but the tanks never got close to anything... in some of those tank battles the US tanks were literally 2 feet from Iraqi tanks. There were dust storms and dunes and lots of the iraqi stuff was dug into the desert so that only the turret poked out so it was really easy to miss things.
As to what you'd rather be... your funeral.
As to video games, my impressions on this are not based on video games but on accounts from the last big US tank battle which was Iraq war 1. The tank crews didn't have a lot of trouble smearing troops. And I'll point out that they deployed with Bradlys that have much better optics and are better optimized for killing infantry.
As to the Israelis killing these guys... I don't know... I think if you look at what was going on in the air, you see a pattern of the Israelis just wiping out their attackers across the board at a very very high k/d ratio. I question how much of that was tech.
If you'd like to reverse that on me and say "well what about Saddam in Gulf war 1"... I grant the point... but it was still US tanks rolling through fixed iraqi defenses with tanks and infantry.
As to men with spears, you totally missed what I was saying... no offense. I am saying that you're ignoring attrition figures in the incidents where tanks go up against infantry.
Which ever side has the better newer weapons is going to get an advantage. What we can see is that the old soviet tech sold to the arabs is shit compared to slightly news American hardware which is what the Israelis had. Also, the Israelis are much better trained, led, and far more motivated. The arabs win and they get to kill some jews. The Israelis lose and they get genocided. It focuses the mind.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with baselines and food chains. As to being cautious... I am being cautious... I'm cautious about what I believe and I'm skeptical about taking action unless I am in possession of all the facts.
As to acidification and the Ca ions... the ocean is a deep system. Total atmospheric carbon is something like 0.04%... and it was something like.032% in 1960... so the doom of the world is a.008% change?
I think the system is buffered but I think it is buffered on multiple levels. Why are there those Ca ions in the water in the first place and what is the ability of the minerals or biology to regenerate them? I question whether that system can be over whelmed by the current rate of carbon release.
Look, here is the thing... we don't disagree with each other about the facts. What is in contention is the EXTENT to whether various variables are relevant.
But that they are relevant and whether they do something is not in contention.
Look, there's no question that adding CO2 to the oceans creates acid that then goes through a chemical reaction trending towards maximum entropy. No question.
And you can't deny furthermore that the chemistry we take for granted in our oceans is buffered and regenerates at SOME rate. No question.
The only thing in contention is whether X acid is able to overwhelm Y equilibrium.
Now you could say "but can we take the chance!"... I don't like this question because I have a collection of people in my mind... and one of my mental conscripts is contract weasel and the contract weasel in me knows that that argument can be used to defend ANYTHING. And an argument that can be used to defend anything is by definition fallacious.
So I don't want to hear "can we afford to take the risk" I need more than that.
And if you really want to descend into the well of AGW craziness my next point will be that most of the heavily advocated solutions won't actually do a great deal while also costing huge sums and coincidentally making some people very rich and very powerful. Conspiracy theory or innocent coincidence... either way... under those programs legacy industry with their old money and lobbyists gets protected, and upstart industry with no such connections gets shafted. Coincidence or conspiracy... does it really matter?
Okay so what is my solution?
1. Spend a lot of money on research into alternative energy. Not into building alternative energy (until it has evolved a bit more), not spending stupidly huge sums on propaganda, research on the technology we need to replace our existing energy infrastructure.
2. A relatively small but significant sum on geo engineering. This is at worst something we can use to buy time. But we might be able to figure out how to simply cancel the negative effects entirely or figure out how to sequester CO2 faster than we emit it.
3. The climate change lobby is robbing a lot of more serious issues the world is facing of funding and I'd like to see some of that get redistributed BACK to what the money was taken from... things like aid to help the third world develop.
4. Education programs for third world literacy and baked into that we should include western philosophical concepts like democracy etc... we're paying for it so it is entirely appropriate that we spread some of our ideas in the process.
5. Increase funding into disease research, find ways to make medical healthcare affordable for the world, etc.
I could go on... But all of this and more is affordable for what the UN wants to spend on climate change prevention and even the UN admits that their plan under the best case scenario won't work.
So... if you don't like my idea... fine. But compared to what? The UN's goofy corrupt plan? You're not going to solve this until you convince the entire world to buy into it... including china and india. and that means you need a non-fossil fuel energy program that is ACTUALLY REALLY NO REALLY competitive with c
Slashdot Mirror
I've been all over the internet and they apparently don't exist.
The sick thing was that Russia could have been high up the ladder if not on top... if they had been patient.
The US had great hopes of rehabiliating Russia and integrating them into the first world as a partner.
Something that annoys the US is that the Europeans have all demilitarized and are thus basically useless at maintaining the military credibility of the first world.
The idea was to partner with Russia... share our technology, give them industrial contracts, help them exploit their resources, give them the diplomatic inroads they would need to correct decades of antagonism with... EVERYONE.
We tried. We really did. The international space station was our attempt to give Russia an olive branch and keep their space program going. We thought that would be another nice thing we could do together.
We had this idea of former cold war enemies uniting in peace and common cause to obtain common interests for mutual prosperity and security.
Russia however is full of morons. I wish I could put that more diplomatically but I'll just be honest.
I think of them in terms of the old Byzantines who made from what I can see... the exact same mistake. The Byzantines were surrounded by enemies and losing ground. They were sieged behind their walls.
The Venetians visited them and offered them alliance, trade, western European mercenaries, holy crusaders, the good will of the Pope, money, credit... everything they would need to save their empire.
The king of Byzantium blinded the man. Reports on that are mixed and contradictory. But what we do know is that the Venetian diplomat had very bad relations with the Byzantines and in his later years when he became Doge of Venice... it was the custom of Venice to draw their diplomats and leaders from the same social class. The Doge of Venice brought the Crusade through Constantinople and sacked it. To this day loot from that sack is still proudly displayed in Venice. The city held for another 200 years but that was just managing the decline.
They could have had it all.
And whatever you think of the historical reference, the US did geniunely want to rehabiliate Russia. We forgave them. We wanted to be friends. Brothers in arms. Long years of hate and distrust turned to an understanding of each other and ourselves... something we could build a relationship on.
Putin pissed it all away.
As to being a Chinese protectorate. Good luck with that. China is very insular and pragmatic. They will not extend their protection over Russia unless they control Russia. And even then... it is not in their interest to control all of it. They would perhaps want part of Siberia.
Russia's future is to be eaten alive by rats. Little nibbles along the border until it has collapsed down to a few core cities full of rusted war relics and bitterness.
What is your specific problem with the Price Anderson Act when it has never been invoked so far as I know?
As to your study... you want me to read that whole thing? Shall I list 50 peer review studies and demand you read them? You can either make a quotation from the study and paraphrase the argument or I'm not going to go reading through in detail anything you post. Its not time effective. I get dozens of these things EVERY DAY. I can't read them all and I think it is incumbent on you to make a point that does not require I read that unless there is actually something in there that I need.
Given that the study was published in Holland and you keep referencing US legislation... I'm not seeing the connection.
As to pro nuclear at any cost, I categorically reject your assertion. I've never seen such a camp nor seen any indication that one has ever existed. I find the assertion on your part to be unsupportable, specious, and frankly damaging to your credibility.
As to your use of the term fanboi... I assume that means "fan boy"... then you say other people use ad hominem... hmmm... You're coming off as irrational. That's my honest read as of this portion in your post.
As to regulations, the issue is that the regulatory process is exploited by people that just don't want nuclear to make the process expensive. Look at how many plants have been approved. Why is that? Look at how long it takes to develop and then build them and how much of that time is spent getting all the paper work filed.
And then of course there is the whole issue with the storage for the spent fuel. I'm sorry, you can't claim that there isn't fucktarded opposition to nuclear power in the west.
As to your rebuttal to my point about nuclear storage... you have not even one fucking leg to stand on in this case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
""
The location has been highly contested by environmentalists and some Nevada residents[2]. It was approved in 2002 by the United States Congress. Federal funding for the site ended in 2011 under the Obama Administration via amendment to the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, passed on April 14, 2011.[3] The Government Accountability Office stated that the closure was for political, not technical or safety reasons.[3]
""
Quote: For political not technical or safety reasons.
You lose that point. Touch it again and I'll slap your hands for touching other people's stuff. That one's mine.
Common myth? I can't believe you said that. Seriously. That issue is categorically lost to you.
As to the decommissioning cost, it depends on how you build the plant. You keep talking about the old 1960s nuke plant designs. That's not what anyone is talking about at this point. Your entire concept is obsolete. If we go with a pebble bed for example then the fucking plant literally can't melt down with or without power. There are many other designs that likewise are failsafe.
One of the better designs that I like is one that has the reactors as small sealed modules that are not opened at the power plant. They are delivered from a factory prefueled, operate for so many years, and then are unplugged and sent back to the factory. Another reactor is clicked into the spot where the old one was and generation continues. The reactors are relatively small. Around the size of a nuclear submarine's reactor. A power plant would ideally have many of these operating at once and they would ideally not need to be replaced all at once but rather in series. So a given year you replace a couple reactors, the next year a couple others, and so on. Never all of them at once. And they're small enough that a given reactor can fit onto the back of a heavy semi truck.
What I also like about that system is that it is exportable. various nations want nuclear power. You sell them this... they don't need special training. They don't need a nuclear program. They
This feeds into my general opinion that every industry should work like the desktop PC industry... aka modular components. By all means... have custom enclosures and innovate your various modules. But have the fittings between module A and module B cooperate with each other.
That's not in the interest of some perhaps because they like to make shit but its in the consumer's interest.
I'd love to see everything work that way.
And funnier still, it is probably a huge environmental problem. Think about it. With all the enviro crap going around these days does anyone talk about the environmental cost of planned obsolescence? Think of how many products have some simple cheap shit part in them break and people throw the whole thing out when really they just need a new slightly less shit but probably similarly cheap part.
No UN panel on that eh? Another way I know the people pushing that whole thing are either morons or insincere. Its obvious and we could reduce consumption radically.
Well, the likes of netflix, amazon, and itunes are crossing a lot of jurisdictions already and the status quo business and regulatory framework that the industries were used to is being phased out as they realize it makes piracy more of a problem.
An issue for example was movies not all releasing at the same time. That wasn't a big deal before the internet. But now that it is you can't tolerate it.
I think we're headed to a system where the internet is a jurisdiction unto itself in a lot of ways and thus able to transgress national borders on the general theory that it is the user that enters it and not the internet that enters the country... from a legal perspective.
The companies and artists etc only care about being able to get paid. So long as they get paid they're going to be happy.
The various governments have their own ideas about things... often they want things censored "because"... but the technology doesn't lend itself well to both connecting a country to the internet and yet having just your specific country censor X or Y. And the idea of getting the entire world to censor X or Y because your country doesn't like something... its a tough sell and practically isn't enforceable even if you can get the diplomats and then politicians to agree to it.
We'll see. I don't care about this specific issue of course. Its just that I am dubious of their streaming service being able to function given the many problems they're going to deal with, the whole lets reinvent the wheel thing, and then what I have to assume is a much smaller market to ultimately support the whole thing.
ehm... don't over play your hand. The culture from one organization to the next changes. At a lot of places they let the IT department handle it. The execs say what they want, they give a budget with the regular warning that things will be audited and you need to keep the costs as low as possible... and then they let the CIO or possibly lower down the chain deal with it.
True, some CIOs are fuckwits but that's a reflection on the competence of the organization as a whole. Organizations in the 21st century with idiot CIOs are generally full of other problems that render that issue the least of their problems.
A thing to consider as well is that just because software X or Y is shit under context M or L, you have to keep in mind your user base, maintenance, labor, etc.
I'm a big believer in customizing GUIs to suit the job. I think too much of corporate america is sitting there looking at a windows desktop or a macos desktop or a linux desktop or a ios home screen etc. None of these things are designed for the specific application. So one of the things I make a point of is using various programs to create custom GUIs for different users and then I impose that on top of the operating system to constrain and simplify the use of the system for the intended function.
The problems with the system and time spent training fell dramatically when I did this... the users only use a few different programs and that is it... and they constantly can't find shit that is right in front of their blind little eyes. So I gave them giant play school buttons and literally about four of them. The systme is also set up very clearly to only work one way which is the way I want it to work. And while I get the occasional douchebag saying "I can't install ittunes on this, help me do that"... most users understand because of the highly goal orrented interface that they're dealing with a WORK computer.
The systems don't get viruses. They don't get malware. People are not jerking off to whatever because block all that nonsense with the firewalls.
Its very civilized.
And I think GUI is something that people want to make very generic and universal and the same everywhere. And I think that's wrong. I think the interface for jet shouldn't be the same as the interface for a commercial airlines as the same for a car as the same for a tractor as the same for corn combine. You have to have custom interfaces for different contexts.
Sorry for the soap box rant. :) I just wanted to riff about that for a minute for my own sanity.
Oh, that isn't the problem with Oracle. The problem is that their tech is increasingly less special and the price structure has not adapted to take that into consideration.
They have a lot of lock in on legacy systems but going forward... any time something gets redesigned... there's a good chance Oracle is either going to have to lower their rates or risk getting dropped permanently.
By the same token then why do you need whatever this new thing is?
As to restaurants... you're talking apples and astronauts there. You can't compare a streaming music service with a restaurant. There's no commitment to a restaurant. The technological barriers are basically non-existent. you don't need to get everyone in the continent of africa to sign on to a restaurant to make it work but you do if you want your music streaming service to work. And no... i don't mean literally every single person... but most of them.
There's just a lot more involved with setting up a streaming service that actually works and people actually want to use and actually has artists than you'd have to go through to set up ONE restaurant in ONE location that really just has to figure out how to get enough hungry people to sit down and order food on a regular basis to keep the doors open.
Its not comparable.
And as I said, the Africans are using American Search Engines, American designed computers, American designed operating systems... and your streaming service is going to be competing against American streaming services that got there first, are more established, have more artists signed to them, have likely better programmed software, have better hardware tie ins, have better industrial support, and those streaming services are offering their service at such a low price point that how do you expect to make any profit to keep your business going when you're competing against a more established industry, that is more innovative, more competitive, and if they feel threatened can out bid your artists to get them exclusively in one service or another to starve you out.
Point being... there is a reason things work the way they do. I'm not trying to be a jerk here. I'm just saying... know what is on the other side of a door before you open it.
The US has been holdings its own when it comes to software against the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans, the Indians, and all of Europe.
We're good at what we do. Trust me.
... that's 710 square feet... or so... ehm... My last apartment was 800 square feet and had 3 rooms.
1. Living/dining/kitchen room
2. Bathroom
3. Bedroom
I don't know, I'm reacting more to the walls you have in your home which architecturally offend me.
Maybe its cultural. The fashion in the US these days is to have as few walls as possible to create as many large rooms as possible. Often a given room will have sections of it for different things. One part of the room had a dining room table, another had a couch, another had an oven... etc. Everything flowed into everything else with no doors or walls. The fashion in the US is that the only rooms that should be segmented should be rooms requiring privacy. So bedrooms and bathrooms. If it isn't either then the style or fashion is to have no walls or doors. Zones are generally demarcated with rugs or the placement of furniture.
Anyway, a typical American house has upwards of 2000 square feet. Anyway... I've seen Roombas shit the bed in many situations. I'd like them to be able to navigate.
Dbill, you're adorable. Never change.
As to your citation, I actually addressed that point at length. I conceded that there are contexts where a tank is inferior. But I pointed out that is true with anything. I then pointed out that the trick to military tactics with ANYTHING is to avoid situations where your forces are weak, avoid situations where the enemy strong, try to stay in situations where you are strong, and lastly try to hit the enemy where they are weakest.
Saying "in this one specific context tanks are shitty" doesn't really undermine my position because everything has such a context and the trick is to NOT allow your forces to be in that position.
I talked about a lot of things going back and forth with the fellow. Battleships for example are strongest in a particular context... ideally at long range. A battleship can have a range of up to about 20km at least in WW2. Future models of the same concept might have different ranges. However, a fishing boat with a magnetic limpet can sink a battleship if the fishing boat is able to get that close and attach a limpet against the hull. Now obviously... rule one for a battleship is to not let that happen. And battleships have the ability to stop that from happening because they have an array of weaponry that can destroy such ships long before they get into that kind of range.
And the same is true with destroyers and cruisers and aircraft carriers. They each have a context where they're strong and another context where they are weak. Aircraft carriers are considered to be the strongest naval warships of the modern era and generally have been so since WW2. They are so powerful because they have greater range and accuracy than any other ship unless you want to cite cruise missile ships or Boomer Submarines. they also have incredible fire power and because of the extreme range, accuracy, and fire power they have relatively light armor. Now, a battleship versus an aircraft carrier at a range of a couple miles is a very bad situation for the carrier. A WW2 era battleship easily destroy a modern Ford Class US carrier before the US carrier was able to really do anything to the battleship. In THAT context the battleship is superior.
Now does this mean that units shouldn't be used together? No, they obviously should. Tanks with infantry are typically better. However, the argument was made that tanks could not fight without infantry where as infantry could. And this is not accurate.
Under the right circumstances either tanks or infantry can operate independently though they are more flexible together.
There are of course many instances of infantry fighting alone sometimes against tanks sometimes not. And there are also many incidents of tanks fighting alone with and without infantry.
The argument made against the tanks is that they're bad against dug in infantry with AT rockets. And to that, I say only if the tanks get too close to the enemy, lose the ability to manuver, and otherwise throw away their advantages while failing to exploit the weaknesses of their enemy.
As such... I did respond to him as I am responding to you.
I am not wrong.
The problem with people like you Dbill, my little melted ice cream cone, is that you don't care if you're right. All you care about is winning. You just look for things to nit pick me on so you can claim a win. But as to whether anything you're saying is actually accurate or rational or informed or insightful... you have no interest.
And the mind fucking truth that sophists like you have grasped about stoics like me... is that when push comes to shove... you lose against people like me because we don't care if we win. We care if we're RIGHT. And in being right we are bulletproof. You can't touch me. And because I'm bulletproof I can walk through your fire as if it isn't even there... and choke your stupid position to death while looking into your stupid little eyes... and smiling.
You won't understand... people like you never do. You think winning is the same a
Oracle is largely indifferent to consumer complaints because most of their consumers are big organizations that are often captive to their products.
But... if you're willing to eat the pain to get their attention, apparently you can get through to them that they're behaving like jackasses.
Given Russia's demographics which were quite different during the old imperial period, I question the wisdom of that approach.
That said, I'm generally quite pessimistic on Russia's long term future. The country has enormous potential but it is systematically squandered and they have long term strategic threats that they are not only not addressing but actively making worse.
Things change and things stay the same. The wisdom is in knowing what has and will change and what has not and will not change.
... absent legal barriers. Why would Africa need their own? they don't need their own version of the CPU. They don't need their own operating systems. They don't need their own word processors.
They appropriate existing third world technology for all that stuff. So... why would they need a music platform?
Possibly there is a licensing issue.
Obviously all the people that cheated on their spouses is sad. Its all betrayal and treachery.
The actually shocking betrayal though was the response by Ashely Madison to not shut down.
An establishment like that has an ethical obligation to protect the identities of its clients. Obviously their security was poor. But ignoring that, they were given an ultimatum and they should have caved. Instead they put the survival of the site above the security of the client and since the survival of the site is existentially threatened by the security, they can't maintain the site and betray their clients.
But they did.
This makes it clear that if you deal with them... they'll betray you the same way you're betraying your spouse.
There's no respect or honor here. Its just weasels screwing each other.
I'm generally pleased the people cheating on their spouses are getting outted. People get upset about the "judgementalism" of that but the same people fail to grasp the hypocrisy in that they're judging others for being judgmental.
You either have judgements of people or you have no opinion. I choose to have opinions. Those that have opinions that other people shouldn't have opinions are fucking retards. I don't really have a strong enough insult to sum up what fucking lackwit, slackjawed, nitwits they are... and that's not really the most irritating thing about them. the TRULY obnoxious thing about them is that they don't know they're morons and people don't label them as such with impunity.
Frankly I think the people that don't like the judgements are mostly trying to protect themselves from quite righteous contemplations.
It doesn't seem to work very effectively in multi room situations. It invariably runs out of power in the second or third room and is unable to find its way back. And even if it does, it just revacuums the same areas it already vacuumed and peters out before it gets to the stuff it didn't do last time.
The LG Hom Bot appears to resolve that situation because it maps the ceiling which is innovative. And from that it is able to orrient in your home. So when it gets low, it returns directly and predictably to the charger using the map and then once recharged it goes back to where it was when it got low on power and resumes without revacuuming the same areas again.
It also permits patterned vacuuming. Some people like the pattern in the carpet made by vacuuming. Those even rows. And the Hom Bot can do that instead of bouncing around like drunken clown car.
hey buddy. :)
okay, why don't you quote me what he said that you felt I didn't address. And we'll see who didn't read what.
Your move.
Any weapons system can fail if it doesn't anticipate and adapt to the enemy's weapons tech.
Take US carrier fleets. What if we didn't think the enemy had hypersonic anti ship missiles? Such weapons have a 50 mile max range so far as I know. And stopping them if an enemy gets within that range is apparently problematic.
We have a series of counter measures... specifically some computer controlled hyper sonic intercept missiles that the Navy is pretty confident can protect a US ship from such threats. However, generally US carrier groups like to operate at least out of sight of the coast. The enemy not being able to get an optical bead on your position from the coast is considered to be a good practice.
The Israelis in both those conflicts could have dealt with the situation if they knew it was there. They were surprised at point blank range.
I did not say that you couldn't ambush armor with AT weapons at point blank range.
I did say that armor if they know what is going on which is not unreasonable... can adapt strategy to mitigate the threat. Shelling enemy positions prior to advancing is a good idea. Remaining mobile so that you can open the distance with an enemy force using your range to best advantage.
In the Lebanon war, Hezbollah was apparently closing to within 100 FEET in many cases prior to firing on Israeli tanks. The advance through those mountains was also a gigantic shit show because the mountains were perfect for ambushes and terrible for the tanks. Tight mountain passes with natural caves everywhere for Hezbollah to boil out of in a continuous stream? Generally to be avoided. What is more the whole area had no strategic relevance to Israel and so should not have been fought over at all. The entire area should have been bypassed. A sea invasion could have been done if there are no land routes... or you could use heavy cargo planes. The US is able if slowly to move our own Main Battle tanks that way.
Look, with any weapons system you want to maximize your strengths while minimizing your weaknesses. Everything has strengths and weaknesses. Armor has the weakness that it gets into trouble in tight spots, is a larger target than a man, and have more difficulty making use of improvised camouflage or obstructional barriers. But infantry has its own weaknesses. Infantry is comparatively fragile to threats that heavy tanks can ignore with impunity, infantry has radically less fire power by mass or per person. And so far as I know, there are no man portable weapons systems able to engage a tank at the range a tank can engage you.
So who wins is largely a matter of that context. A guy with a fishing boat can destroy a battleship... if the battleship lets the guy with the fishing boat get that close and attach a magnetic limpet mine to the hull. Sure. But like the first thing they would teach you about fighting with a battleship is that you don't let the enemy get that close to you. You treasure your range. The great advantage of the battleship which was basically the old mega tank of the seas was that it had a 20 km range in many cases and could shrug off a hit by anything short of a torpedo barrage or another battleship. And the torpedoes while surprising like the AT weapons only became relevant if the damned thing could get in range to hit you. Most torpedoes had a much much shorter range than the battleships... I think they were generally limited to about 4~10km. Which means you'd be well under the guns of the battleship before you got into torpedo range. Now the trick of that was to dodge and weave to try and make it hard for the battleship to actually land a hit. There are many examples of destroyers getting into knife range with battleships just with speed, guts, and luck. One example in WW2 had an American destroy get so close to a Japanese... I think it was only a heavy cruiser but it might have been a battleship. But the point was that it was so close that the japanese ship couldn't depress its guns to fire back. The US destroyer sat there for THIRTY minutes
Not really. You give it the existing bit of code that it already operates on if its independent. And when slaved to a computer via wifi, the unit would basically operate like a remote controlled car. The computer would tell it "go forward" "go Back" "turn left" "turn on your vacuum"... etc.
Would the code on the computer need to be debugged... the idea here would be that Roomba releases an API for operating their robot and then releases a default control program for various platforms. I have no doubt that if Roomba does that and their default program isn't amazing... that there are going to be a lot of people hammering together open source control packages that have increasingly elaborate and unpredictable functionality.
I'm using Bing which I think hasn't been targeted by as much of this stuff. Its as good as google in my opinion. DuckDuckGo is my next move if bing goes tits up. My issue with duckduckgo is that the site handles very strangely... and there are odd things about how text is copied from search results. I think the site might require active javascript to do a search which neither google nor bing require for searching. They need it for other things but the searching requires none.
Well, that's a good point... however that craze started when the government told employers they couldn't require employees to pass IQ tests. The degrees are used as a proxy for that as I understand.
That said, I generally agree with your position that the degrees are and the general shitshow that is HR in corporate America is involved in this nonsense.
However, it is important to understand that that shitshow is largely a liability shield. The US department of labor etc creates liabilities that can only be mitigated by jumping through a lot of hoops. Unintended consequences.
As to non-profits being run by nurses and professors etc, the problem with this communal system is who takes responsibility? I know in the non-profits the directors and presidents just buck pass or otherwise mitigate responsibility but there's at least some sense that someone is ultimately in charge of the thing. Still its an interesting idea and I have no real problem with it.
I'm given to understand that in hospitals a major cost is the administration and accounting departments. The top three flours of many hospitals is just pure administration. My understanding is that insurance and medicare claims are a nightmare and you need a Brazil-like (reference to the movie) bureaucracy to deal with it all.
As to keeping politicians out of education, then don't take public money. If you take the public dime then you're in the system. You can't have it both ways. Sorry. We're not cutting you a blank check and letting you do whatever without oversight or input. We paid you. That money from the government entitles them to a say in how you conduct yourself.
Its like the people that say they want government funded healthcare but think the government shouldn't have a say in how healthcare is run. You can't have it both ways. You want the money... there is a price and it isn't just in taxes. You become involved and entangled. I appreciate that the modern university system can't function without the subsidies and your point about the HR departments being somewhat complicit in the situation is apt. However the systems did work prior to those subsidies and absent the specious demands for degrees they may well be quite viable without them in the future.
As to Title IX being an on going legislative toxic waste dump that mutant horrors continue to crawl out of... everyone is aware. The problem is the atmosphere of political correctness which... frankly the universities have not been helping with... the rest of society is having a hard time dealing with it. The only effective strategies are either to smile and give it lip service while secretly doing everything in your power to isolate its hold on you. Or to render yourself immune from various reactionary elements that take political correctness seriously and then treat the entire concept with contempt.
No one has as yet found a solution to it besides that. Though I assure you, society at large throughout the Western world is attempting to find the mass producible silver bullet that will put that monster down. Any help from Academia would be appreciated.
As to online education being over-hyped because it hasn't been relevant in the past. Things change and things stay the same. I can say things will change and you can say they'll stay the same and neither of us will be wrong. I'm talking to you over the internet... that's a new thing. But both of us will have dinner tonight on food our ancestors would have likely found as appealing and possibly recognizable as we do... thus things stay the same.
I think in practice we're both going to be right on this last point. I think aspects of education are going to be increasingly handled exclusively in this fashion. You can have the best lecturers in the country produce the best lecture on a given subject. And if that is the class why settle for second best? Quite a few in person classes are just listening to lectures, taking tests, writing a paper... people that raise their hands should be shot. I had a lot of
As to the Iraqis not having the right type of man portable AT weaponry... really their main tanks couldn't really hurt the Abrams either. The ambrams was giggling at the enemy rounds plinking off the armor. And I think what the US tanks were doing was a combination of blowing them up at long range if they had eyes on them... or rushing them and literally getting so in and amongst the enemy that they lost all unit cohesion. I was watching a documentary on it after this discussion started so I could inform myself a bit better. And US tanks were at literal KNIFE point with Iraqi tanks. There was an amusing situation where a Bradely went over a dune... and there was an iraqi tank two feet to the right of the bradly dug into the dune... and apparently oblivious to the bradly just "there". The bradly pointed its cannon about as low as it would go and was able to fire through the thinner armor on the top of the turret apparently.
It was apparently pretty crazy.
As to optics being a huge advantage. Couldn't agree more. From what I understand, thermal played a big role. They used it during the day to see through dust and smoke. The enemy couldn't see the US tanks and the US could.
As to air superiority, yes, but I'm just talking about ground forces vs ground forces. There was a lot more of that in Iraq war 1 than I had previously realized. There were some large tank vs tank battles. From what i could tell, the infantry played no relevant role either way. But admittedly the US wasn't occupying cities either.
As to the Israelis having issues with AT rockets, they were surprised every time that happened from what I can tell. The two wars they had issues with were with the Egyptians in around 1973 and they had problems again in 2006 in Lebanon. In both cases the Israelis were surprised by the weapons and their doctrine did not account for them... and I think that more than anything caused the problem.
As to the wider issues of urban warfare etc... this is just a question of enemies hiding behind women and children. If you're willing to kill women and children then this defense is gone. If you're not... then the enemy is invulnerable. But it has nothing to do with tanks or AT weapons or urban built up areas. You could do the same thing in a perfectly flat desert. Have 10,000 women and small children... and babies in the arms of women walk before your fighters as a human shield.
Will you shoot through them? You don't and the enemy kills you with impunity. You do shoot them and you get branded a monster for shooting women and children. Choose between death and being called a monster by idiots. Choices choices.
As to shifting the debt burden to the taxpayer, that's how you lower interest rates for student loans.
Interest rates are about risk. Safe borrowers pay low interest rates and risky borrowers pay high interest rates.
The government talked to the banks and said "how do we lower interest rates" and the banks said "well, you can cosign the loan and the interest rates will then be the same as loans to the government"... only students are still getting ripped off because if you look at what the government pays for its interest... you'll laugh:
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/...
And look what the students are paying:
https://studentloanhero.com/fe...
The difference between A and B is profit... which is pretty fucking tasty.
I'd like to look at alternative ways of funding education... One idea I like is trading a percentage of future income. This idea isn't useful for the trust fund kids that are just going to take art history classes and then go fuck prostitutes in where ever. But for poor kids that really need a lot of help getting into the middle class, this is excellent. Why? Because the university has a vested interest in your success. Under the current system if you fail immediately after you graduate the university doesn't really give a shit. But under this system, they don't get paid if you don't succeed. And they get paid more depending on how much you succeed.
So that means the school pushes you into classes that are more likely to make you more marketable in the job market and they'll take an interest in getting you internships prior to graduation, and try as best as possible to get you into a high paying job right out of school because they'll be taking a cut of your pay check for the next X years under that system.
Now if you go to work flipping burgers they're not going to get anything. Obviously you want a minimum earning cut off point. There's no point taking a cut of someone's pay if they're making minimum wage. That's as pointless as it is cruel.
So that's one idea I like that I think would motivate the system to take a long term interest in the future of students.
thanks for the correction... I'll try to remember that. :-)
I don't agree that tanks cannot operate any less independently than infantry.
In Iraq 1 we had armored columns attacking dug in Iraqi defenses all by themselves and annihilating everything. They blew up tanks, they killed soldiers...
Tanks just like infantry in a right context are quite happy all by themselves. And before you say "but the tanks never got close to anything... in some of those tank battles the US tanks were literally 2 feet from Iraqi tanks. There were dust storms and dunes and lots of the iraqi stuff was dug into the desert so that only the turret poked out so it was really easy to miss things.
As to what you'd rather be... your funeral.
As to video games, my impressions on this are not based on video games but on accounts from the last big US tank battle which was Iraq war 1. The tank crews didn't have a lot of trouble smearing troops. And I'll point out that they deployed with Bradlys that have much better optics and are better optimized for killing infantry.
As to the Israelis killing these guys... I don't know... I think if you look at what was going on in the air, you see a pattern of the Israelis just wiping out their attackers across the board at a very very high k/d ratio. I question how much of that was tech.
If you'd like to reverse that on me and say "well what about Saddam in Gulf war 1"... I grant the point... but it was still US tanks rolling through fixed iraqi defenses with tanks and infantry.
As to men with spears, you totally missed what I was saying... no offense. I am saying that you're ignoring attrition figures in the incidents where tanks go up against infantry.
Which ever side has the better newer weapons is going to get an advantage. What we can see is that the old soviet tech sold to the arabs is shit compared to slightly news American hardware which is what the Israelis had. Also, the Israelis are much better trained, led, and far more motivated. The arabs win and they get to kill some jews. The Israelis lose and they get genocided. It focuses the mind.
I'm not sure what you're talking about with baselines and food chains. As to being cautious... I am being cautious... I'm cautious about what I believe and I'm skeptical about taking action unless I am in possession of all the facts.
As to acidification and the Ca ions... the ocean is a deep system. Total atmospheric carbon is something like 0.04%... and it was something like .032% in 1960... so the doom of the world is a .008% change?
I think the system is buffered but I think it is buffered on multiple levels. Why are there those Ca ions in the water in the first place and what is the ability of the minerals or biology to regenerate them? I question whether that system can be over whelmed by the current rate of carbon release.
Look, here is the thing... we don't disagree with each other about the facts. What is in contention is the EXTENT to whether various variables are relevant.
But that they are relevant and whether they do something is not in contention.
Look, there's no question that adding CO2 to the oceans creates acid that then goes through a chemical reaction trending towards maximum entropy. No question.
And you can't deny furthermore that the chemistry we take for granted in our oceans is buffered and regenerates at SOME rate. No question.
The only thing in contention is whether X acid is able to overwhelm Y equilibrium.
Now you could say "but can we take the chance!"... I don't like this question because I have a collection of people in my mind... and one of my mental conscripts is contract weasel and the contract weasel in me knows that that argument can be used to defend ANYTHING. And an argument that can be used to defend anything is by definition fallacious.
So I don't want to hear "can we afford to take the risk" I need more than that.
And if you really want to descend into the well of AGW craziness my next point will be that most of the heavily advocated solutions won't actually do a great deal while also costing huge sums and coincidentally making some people very rich and very powerful. Conspiracy theory or innocent coincidence... either way... under those programs legacy industry with their old money and lobbyists gets protected, and upstart industry with no such connections gets shafted. Coincidence or conspiracy... does it really matter?
Okay so what is my solution?
1. Spend a lot of money on research into alternative energy. Not into building alternative energy (until it has evolved a bit more), not spending stupidly huge sums on propaganda, research on the technology we need to replace our existing energy infrastructure.
2. A relatively small but significant sum on geo engineering. This is at worst something we can use to buy time. But we might be able to figure out how to simply cancel the negative effects entirely or figure out how to sequester CO2 faster than we emit it.
3. The climate change lobby is robbing a lot of more serious issues the world is facing of funding and I'd like to see some of that get redistributed BACK to what the money was taken from... things like aid to help the third world develop.
4. Education programs for third world literacy and baked into that we should include western philosophical concepts like democracy etc... we're paying for it so it is entirely appropriate that we spread some of our ideas in the process.
5. Increase funding into disease research, find ways to make medical healthcare affordable for the world, etc.
I could go on... But all of this and more is affordable for what the UN wants to spend on climate change prevention and even the UN admits that their plan under the best case scenario won't work.
So... if you don't like my idea... fine. But compared to what? The UN's goofy corrupt plan? You're not going to solve this until you convince the entire world to buy into it... including china and india. and that means you need a non-fossil fuel energy program that is ACTUALLY REALLY NO REALLY competitive with c