Ditto, though I don't have 12 foot ceilings. I too bought into the CFL craze when they first came out, but I have always found their life claims to be disappointing. Have you ever had one catch fire? I had one get actual flames, thankfully went out when I turned the power off.
LED tech will eventually solve the issue and CFLs can go in the trash bin of history, They've already largely replaced incandescent flashlights and Christmas tree lights. Only a matter of time until they get the cost for larger LEDs down. Still' I've stocked up on incandescent bulbs in case it takes 10 years to get things worked out.
Don't get all up on the "Oh look at how many cheap aircraft they crank out!" The reason is that as you note the man matters and put a trained pilot in an amazing aircraft, and you can cause a lot of trouble. It gets really hard to just throw away tons of aircraft and get no results, and harder still to find pilots to do so. Also as you run through them, you get worse and worse quality leading to worse and worse results.
The Germans lost WWII following your strategy. They invested in higher and higher tech and got stomped by inferior technology that could be produced in large numbers and manned them with competent pilots. "The best" very often gets trounced by "good enough".
As for pilots, the US withdrew their top pilots from combat after they had experience and used them to train new pilots. The Germans kept their top pilots on the front line until they were killed.
For example take a look at the F-16: It is about 102 to 0 in terms of actual combat (meaning 102 air-to-air kills, no losses). Or the F-14 which is about 135 to 4, and most of those kills (and all the losses) were Iran during the Iran/Iraq.
Apples to anvils. You are comparing good aircraft and often good pilots to often obsolete/export model aircraft with inexperienced pilots. A lot of information is left out in those numbers. German tank crews killed allied tanks at a 4-to-1 ratio until the end of the war, they still lost.
Well if you have numbers like that, it is extremely problematic for a "just have lots of jets" force. You CAN afford to put your extremely expensive fighter, with the best pilots, forward if zero losses is a reasonable scenario. Even with a few losses, that is fine. Heck, say that they figure they can kill one F-22 with 50 SU-27s. Ok, that means you have to expend almost 10,000 aircraft to take out the current F-22 fleet. Then of course there's the 500 F/A-18 E/Fs, and few hundred F-16s and so on.
With that few numbers, zero losses is not a reasonable scenario. You simply send a few SU-27s to run the F-22 to Bingo fuel and the second wave comes and slaughters them because they can't maneuver or fight because they don't have the fuel. That or you send a large wave and take out their tankers. You also do not have a large enough force to cover multiple fronts or a wide front 24/7
You are also forgetting the ungodly high logistics costs of the F-22. You don't have enough planes or logistics supporting them to keep enough up and running in the air 24/7. Your F-22's will be sitting on the ground waiting and not in the air patrolling. The US lost Desert Storm, they never made it to Baghdad like originally planned, because of the poor logistics of the M1 Abrams tank, they ran out of fuel trying to peruse retreating Iraqi tanks. There is a good reason why during OIF they only sent 850 Abrams, but even more logistics support than in DS1, and even then it took them 2 weeks to get to Baghdad. The US will lose an air war with the F22 for the same reasons.
The problem is also that flying an aircraft is difficult period, a fighter more so and actually fighting in one effectively is really hard. So you don't find some dude in your armed forces and say "Here's a new plane, go get 'em!" and expect any results other than a plane shaped hole in the control tower. A tank rush like the USSR did is more feasible, takes a lot less training particularly for low tech tanks. Not so much for aircraft.
The US solved this in WWII by taking their top aces and using them to train pilots.
Not to mention you can make the same argument about combat in general, The US still lost Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan by a numerically superior enemy who was willing to suffer the losses necessary.
That's the reason the US is willing to go extremely high end on the aircraft. You get a really good pilot, and give them a really good aircraft and you aren't talking 2 to 1 or 3
Also note that there is a limit as to what you can get slaves to do, some slaves in the south had to be paid. As Thomas Sowell points out:
Most slaves performing most tasks were of course not paid, but were simply forced to work by the threat of punishment. That was sufficient for galley slaves or plantation slaves. But there were various kinds of work where that was not sufficient.
Tasks involving judgment or talents were different, because no one can know in advance how much judgment or talent someone else has. In short, knowledge is an inherent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it.
Payment can vary in amount and in kind. Some slaves, especially eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, could amass both wealth and power. One reason they could be trusted in positions of power was that they had no incentive to betray the existing rulers and try to establish their own dynasties, which would obviously have been physically impossible for them.
At more mundane levels, such tasks as diving operations in the Carolina swamps required a level of discretion and skill far in excess of that required to pick cotton in the South or cut sugar cane in the tropics. Slaves doing this kind of work had financial incentives and were treated far better. So were slaves working in Virginia’s tobacco factories.
The point of all this is that when even slaves had to be paid to get certain kinds of work done, this shows the limits of what can be accomplished by power alone. Yet so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seems to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.
Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today, but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.
Have a stack of hard drives in my garage from work that I use for such purposes as needed. We don't deploy used drives at work, any money we save reusing drives is going to be eaten up in 8 hour drives to do service calls, we tried this in the past and it did NOT end well. Hard drives, and PSUs are two areas where you don't cut corners. We deploy used mobos, processors, and RAM with no problems. (The systems at the customers site are our machines, as long as they work the customer doesn't know/care what is in them.) So I end up with lots of used hard drives, boss doesn't care since we won't be using them, most with, according to SpinRite, only a few thousand hours on them at most.
The great thing is that I can backup in triplicate since I'm swimming in drives. The bad ones get taken to the range. Hard drives make quite nice reactive targets. If you hit them right on the spindle with a.45 they can blow completely apart. They stop most pistol bullets quite well, rifle rounds will zip through them like they aren't there though.
Sadly to me this is proof that capitalism like all other isms are simply doomed to die, because just like communism promoted party loyalty over competences and promoted apathy and stagnation so too does capitalism promote an elite class of multinationals that attain God like powers and can literally start wars or have laws written by simple bribes and edicts. as much as I miss him I doubt seriously my grandfather would find much to be proud of what has happened to his country he fought so hard for. Maybe this is why no society lasts, the corruption gets so bad people would rather let it fall apart than try to fix it, who knows. But you can't blame any of those countries in red for not liking us none too much.
I agree with much of what you said in the above post, but I would point out that what we have today is crony capitalism/soft fascism where the winners are the ones who have control of the government gun.
You saw nothing like that during the 19th century when we were the closest we ever were to free market capitalism. Heck, during the War of 1812 northern banks actually REFUSED to lend to the US government to fund the war. (Imagine if that were possible today.) There were no lobbyists in Washington because there was nothing to buy there. There was indeed some corruption at the state level, but that influence stopped at the state line, making it easy for business and people to flee states with stupid policies. In the name of "helping the people" the government grew to "control" the corporations....yea, and the fox wants to guard the hen-house to keep the hens safe.
It was the corporations who wanted that government regulation because it protects them from having to compete. Even at its peak, Standard Oil had dozens of competitors, some quite large and had to continually innovate to stay ahead. The forward thinking leadership of Rockefeller kept Standard Oil one step ahead of anyone else, once he retired in 1896 conservative management at Standard oil led to a sharp decline of their market share as they were outmaneuvered by smaller competitors well before the Anti-Trust laws, which are nothing more than a tool for corporations to beat up on their competitors via the government, came into play. (Seriously, go look up who files the anti-trust claim, it's mostly one business wanting to beat up on another business.)
Just TRY to set up an oil company today, even a non-profit, you'll be buried by the regulations, which is exactly what the large firms want. The solution is to take away that government power and make firms actually compete, but still too many people think that the regulations are there to protect the environment or the people. They aren't. The purpose of those regulations, just like the current political system, is to protected the large firms and shut down any start-up competition. Just like the establishment tries to shut down Ron Paul, the regulations are designed to shut down small time business that could pose a threat to large firms.
Heartland funded some of his work that showed the surface station record to be unreliable, so what? Is the research bad or invalid? Please show where he made his mistakes and why putting weather station next to AC units is a good idea.
I could just turn that around and dismiss the work of the government funded "shills". Just as valid as what you did, but I'm not going to and don't need to. The fact that you can't debate and discuss shows that you have lost the argument.
It's also not some grand conspiracy, it's simply group-think combined with the fact that if CO2 ISN'T the driver behind climate those scientists and government bureaucrats lose their funding and jobs. You see the same thing when it comes to welfare or education reform. The welfare bureaucrats are against reform because the reforms are aimed at reducing the number of bureaucrats. The teachers are against it because they will lose the seniority and job security they enjoy. No conspiracy, simply perusing their own self interest. Look at MADD still pretending there is a serious drunk driving problem.
Even IF CO2 was the cause, any meaningful action will cause more harm than good. Cheaper to simply adapt than put billions into energy poverty.
He was a rebel but not because he believed in slavery, in fact he never owned a slave, it was Sherman burning as he went that got him involved.
If only people would understand it is THAT kind of stuff that motivates the majority of people attacking our troops in the Middle East today. (and the troops that fought us in Vietnam.)
I paid attention during History class and I don't recall them sending suicide fire ships into our harbors in the 1840's. I don't remember them sending suicide bombers to our cities in the 1920's. There was piracy around their shores sure, but they weren't crossing the Atlantic and raiding coastal towns.
Only after we had overthrown the elected Iranian government in 53, because the British weren't getting the oil profits they used to, and installed and defended puppet dictators elsewhere did people there suddenly start to have a hatred for the US. Hmmmmm. I wonder if the two are POSSIBLY connected? Why all of a sudden, after centuries of killing each other, and not caring about us, did they suddenly more-or-less stop and start attacking us?
Yes one can make the argument that this was all necessary to thwart the Soviet Union, I don't buy that argument though. However, now that the Soviet Union is gone there is no need for us to be in the region. All the money blown on the wars we could have instead spent BUYING the oil and still had change to spare. We'd get the oil, they'd go on killing each other and not us. Win-Win.
It took 800+ years for the West to get this whole representative secular government thing figured out. Not gonna happen in 6 months over there and forcing it on them will only make them fight it even more.
Hey Hairyfeet, have a question for ya since you're the one I search for when criticizing Linux on the technical level.
I was on a car trip with my brother yesterday and we got on the subject of Linux's sh*t driver model and he was insisting that wasn't Torvalds fault that Linux doesn't have a stable ABI and API, he insists that since Torvalds only works on the Kernel, the lack of an ABI and API is someone else's fault. I of course said that was crap since the ABI and API are KERNEL LEVEL, but he would have none of it. He insisted that if you used one of the server distros like CentOS or RedHat that all the supposed problems disappear. (I of course know that's not true, but I could see we weren't getting anywhere productive and dropped it.)
So that seems to be the latest excuse on the lack of a stable/standardized API/ABI, "it's not Torvalds fault." What do you say to that?
Um, Dawkins book is an angry incoherent rambling against religion. It could have been written by a 6 year old. I read the whole thing waiting for him to say something substantial, but he never does. Seriously, read some of Antony Flew's Atheistic work side by side with C. S. Lewis, for the theist side. Basing your thoughts of religion on Dawkins is like basing your thoughts on Asian food by eating Wal-Mart Ramen noodles. Dawkins has been criticized repeatedly for his amateur and sloppy philosophy.
If you don't like reading, I know I prefer audio or video lecturers to reading, here is William Lane Craig at Oxford dismantling Dawkins piece by piece.
Yes it's a two hour video, complicated issues take time to discuss. I'm open minded enough to listen to and read the atheists side and weigh both sides. I'm not a Christian because I'm told it's true, or because I like going to 7:30 AM mass rather than sleeping in, I'm a Christian because I think the evidence points to it being true. I tend to focus on natural theology when talking with atheists, since it takes away all their arguments against Christianity and focuses just on the existence of a god, but not necessarily the christian god.
As for TFA, what happens when those religious people look for and then find answers to the questions that their Analytic thinking brought up? For me at least, it made my religious belief stronger because it led to a greater understanding of the issues at hand.
That's why the rest of the world uses the Liter, no confusion about it!
No, they use it because they were forced at gunpoint by their governments to use it. If you doubt this, just try to sell using pounds and ounces in certain metric countries.
The metric system has its flaws, base 10 being only divisible by 10, 5 and 2 before having to use awkward decimals, since fractions are "officially" not allowed in metric measurements. (Though people use them anyway.) There is a reason that every civilization based its measurements using a number base that was divisible by at least 4 units, the foot is divisible 5 different ways without using fractions; 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. Then metric unit sizes are often awkward for everyday use. Try building a shed or cut drywall using centimeters/millimeters vs feet and inches by memory. Metric units don't fit in the brains short term memory like imperial measurements do. Young carpenters in Canada still use feet and inches. No surprise given that it was designed by intellectuals who never worked a day in their life and who gave us other great things, like the Reign of Terror and Napoleon.
My guess is because the EPA keeps rewriting the diesel engine regulations every few years. Nobody wants to play poker when the dealer changes the rules every other hand.
Actually, yes they will be, they have been more expensive for over 100 years and show no sign of changing. The fundamental problem is that batteries suck when it comes to energy density, even at their theoretical maximums they can't compete even with LNG. You might as well advocate for coal fired steam cars.
Physics says that electric cars suck and always will. If you don't like that then either pray that God will alter the laws of physics for you or start looking at realistic alternatives. The only possible hope that EV fans have to compete with gasoline is zinc-slurry batteries, but even their power per pound loses to gasoline and they are still experimental. Though they could be useful for grid storage. Liquified coal, the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, in an ICE car would still probably beat EVs.
120 pounds of gasoline can propel my work pickup, loaded down with telephone equipment, 350 miles. 400 pounds of batteries can't get the Volt, with only two people, even a fraction of that distance. Adding more batteries won't work because you'll then need to beef up the suspension, power-train, and structure of the car to compensate, which will then require even more batteries to extend the range, repeat to infinity.
Batteries work fine if you are trying to power a stationary device, like UPS units, since once you set them up you never move them until you replace them. Batteries work fine for low power devices like cell phones. For power hungry mobile applications like propelling a car larger than a golf cart, not so much.
Add to that the fact that producing an ICE requiters virtually no rare earth metals, Iron and Aluminum are your two major metals needed with only trace amounts of other metals needed for alloying. Producing an ICE is stupid easy and cheap with modern investment casing and CNC machining. Working with rare earth metals is a PITA even on a good day and the mining process for them makes driving a 1970's land yacht look green by comparison.
I would personally love to see hybrid LNG/Gasoline vehicles take off in the US like they have in parts of South America. Run on cheap LNG for day to day travels and if you run out you just flip a switch and run on gasoline. Unfortunately, the government isn't shoveling money into them so nobody is interested in building or marketing either new LNG/Gasoline cars or conversion kits for existing cars. In the meantime, I'll just tinker with my mopeds.
The deduction for donations had nothing to do with religion. When the government first passed the income tax, and later estate tax, charities, the arts, research scientists, and universities were screaming bloody murder because money that rich businessmen had previously been donating to them was going to government. Yes, at the time the rates were low, but with no government funding to those groups, those rates still put a huge dent in their finances.
In typical fashion the government tried to fix one wrong with another wrong and created the donation deduction and, over time, started taking over funding charities and universities. Funding that was previously given directly by the rich, like Rockefeller and Carnegie, was instead laundered through Washington DC first so the politicians could get their cut.
You are right, it does have nothing at all to do with the place they find themselves today.
Japanese-Americans were exploited for cheap labor in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so badly discriminated against in the 20th century that their property was effectively confiscated and they were imprisoned for years, yet within a few decades of WWII ending they had exceeded whites in household income even though they continued to be widely discriminated against.
Blacks like Bill Cosby, Walter Williams, and Thomas Sowell are right when they point out that it is the black community and black culture that is holding back blacks today.
When blacks from former Apartheid South Africa immigrate to the US and kick the crud out of US blacks economically, that should tell you that the problem is not racism from whites, as racists don't really differentiate between an African black and an American black.
I've met plenty of successful blacks, the one distinguishing feature among them is that all of them reject affirmative action and what passes for mainstream black culture. Getting called "Uncle Tom" doesn't bother them, they're laughing all the way to the bank as they are the ones with well paying full-time jobs, aren't living in the ghetto or jail, and the only shooting they do is at the range.
500 years from now, given the results is has produced, historians will believe that Affirmative Action was devised by the Klan.
That WOULD be possible. Something like a Chevy Sprint would work reasonably well. My dad had one. That 1 liter 3 cylinder engine could deliver 50 MPG without trying too hard and had reasonable acceleration if you didn't load it down. Bit of a deathtrap for people in the back seat, but people in the front weren't that badly protected in a crash.
The problem is that it is simply impossible to deliver on that price point with the current regulations in place. Airbags are a failure from a cost/benefit standpoint, a point the government would rather you not know about. (Benefits are only about one third of the cost. http://www.swov.nl/uk/research/kennisbank/inhoud/50_maatregel/50_voertuig/airbags.htm ) Sure they save lives, they also kill people and their high cost per life saved, high cost per vehicle, and mandated use has delayed other, potentially superior, passive safety features into cars, like metal foam crumple zones which would increase the effectiveness of seat-belts and other passive safety systems by improving structural integrety and lowering g-loads on the occupants in a crash.
In the end we have to ask ourselves what is better: For the working man/woman to be driving 20 year old cars with 20 year old safety systems or driving more modern cars with better passive safety systems, but without the expensive active safety systems that push those cars out of their price range. Let the buyer decide what they want and the car insurance companies set rates for cars with and without those systems and if the Ralph Naders of the world have a problem with that then let them convince people to change their ways on their own dime rather than forcing things upon them.
The simple fact is that by mandating all these new safety systems the government is forcing more and more people into older and less safe cars as the price for new and newer used cars gets pushed higher and higher, meaning cars that would have been scrapped in the past are kept on the road. The average age of a passenger car in 1995 was 8.4 years. In 2011 it is now 11.1 years. Part of that is because of improved quality, but part of it is also due to the increasing cost of new cars.
Very true. The phone line controllers we use at work use 8088 processors. The whole controller requires no active cooling and are incredibly reliable. The "newer" controllers are built far more compact with more processing power and require active cooling and have been incredibly unreliable, we've been removing them from service.
We also still have customers running 286 based voice mail systems because they are so reliable.
In many applications reliability trumps speed. Not to mention that you have a design that is already paid for and can be built on otherwise obsolete chip fabbing equipment OR can be built on newer equipment with die shrinks for better power consumption.
Thanks, it is a very good example. I struggled for a long time to come up with a soundbite-ish way to sum up the problem and finally settled on that because it is something that everyone can relate to.
For those who don't get the example. Even if you gave an engineer in 1906 the plans for a 747 and even showed him video of it working they couldn't produce it, not because they are stupid, but because so many of the technologies necessary to build it simply do not exist and many of those technologies are interdependent. They couldn't produce the aluminum alloys used in the airframe, they couldn't produce the high temp alloys used in the engines, they couldn't produce the transistors for the avionics, they couldn't produce the tires for it, they couldn't produce the hydraulics that move the control surfaces, they couldn't even produce the rivets used to hold the airplane together.
No amount of central planning and money throwing would be able to overcome that because the central planners have no way of knowing the correct path to take and, as in the Soviet Union, frequently took the wrong path. The only way it could work is the way it did, Market actors pursuing their own interests, finding what worked and what didn't and others building atop the efforts of those before them.
Trying to go non-fossil fuels at this point is like trying to built a 747 in the year 1906. It will fail for the simple reason that the technology base does not exist to support such an endeavor. Throwing more and more money at the project will not change that fact and will do nothing but waste resources that are better spent elsewhere in our society.
The transition will occur when the market says it should and not a moment before. We transitioned from whale oil, to kerosene, to electricity for illumination seamlessly with no government intervention. When the technology became cost effective people started using it.
No it is not. There always has been and always will be wealth disparity. My boss, who has the ability to create a business that is spread across 5 states will, by the fact of him having that ability, have more wealth than me, who does not have that ability. I, with my various skills, will have more wealth than someone who lacks any skills.
The problem is not disparity, but the Crony Capitalists using government regulations to cripple smaller Market Capitalist competitors from competing with them and a government imposed central bank stealing the purchasing power from the poor and middle class and giving it to those same large firms via inflation. (Ever ask yourself WHERE those speculators get the money with which to bid up the price of oil? The Federal Reserve, who gives it to the large banks who then gives it to Wall Street.)
Not to mention the computer labs in most schools and libraries.
Doesn't do the parent any good. A parent is not going to drive/bike/walk to the public library to check an email account to tell them if little Tommy needs a permission slip signed.
Tough shit, the only people left out on internet access in America are people lacking in resourcefulness.
or people who chose to put their money and effort into more important things, like perhaps saving up to replace the old family car, get glasses for their children, go hunting the thrift stores for clothing that fits them, etc. We all only have so much time during the day with which to do things.
Most modern libertarians are functional anarchists.
By that standard, most modern liberals are functional communists.
/So does that mean that most modern Buddhists are functional Presbyterians? //and that most modern Mac users are functional COBOL programers? ///coming up with these is kinda fun.
If someone shoots an unarmed person, until they have been cleared by a court of law, they should be behind bars.
Is that difficult to understand?
There is no such thing as an "unarmed person". My brothers friend was beaten into a 5 week coma by an "unarmed person". If you have working arms and legs, you are capable of doing harm.
It also has to do with flight risk. On top of the lack of clear evidence of murder they could have determined that Zimmerman was a low flight risk.
Stalking someone is often a prelude to assault, robbery and/or murder. In any case, it is not only a provocation, but a direct threat to the subjects safety.
Wrong on so many levels it is not even funny.
Following someone is neither provocation or a direct threat to ones safety, it is suspicious, nothing more. Neither side is in the wrong so long as neither is trespassing. Whoever strikes the first blow is the aggressor.
Try this thought experiment: You are at a bar and you see a women you think you like, but haven't worked up the courage to talk to her. She leaves and you follow her on food at a distance to the bar down the block. You still don't have the courage to talk to her before she leaves again, you follow her down the block at a distance further before giving up and going home.
Now, was what you were doing provocation or threatening? No, it was suspicious, nothing more.
While it does not give a right to attack, hindering someone's movements such that they DO have to pass through you or near you would, under most courts, be at your fault.
What court? No, whoever threw the first blow is the one who is the aggressor. Plenty of people are in jail because the other side egged them into throwing the first punch. While a defense attorney may be able to convince the jury into returning with a "not guilty" on account of the other side egging you on, it will still be the person who threw the first punch in the defendants seat.
The fact that you have to argue for the right to stalk and threaten other people while defending someone who stalked and ultimately killed a youth is sickening to say the least.
Repeating this does not make it the truth. Cry all you want about it, it won't change reality. Stalking is the repeated following and harassing of another person. This was not stalking and the cops would hang up on you for trying to claim it as such.
Simply brandishing a gun is typically enough to stop an unarmed opponent.
Only if you do so before the physical attack begins. Brandishing can also seriously ESCALATE a situation. Not to mention that Zimmerman's reputation in the community would be badly tarnished if he pulled a gun on everybody he followed and his CWP likely revoked.
As a CWP holder, the only reason I would take my gun out is if I feel that there is a good possibility that I am going to have to use it. Until then I use my brain and words to defuse a situation.
For someone who knows even the basics on how to conceal, it's hard to tell for certain is someone is carrying. The myrad of holsters available makes that a simple matter of shopping around. Martin probably did not know that Zimmerman was armed. A Kel-Tec PF-9 is stupid easy to conceal, given that it was designed for CCW.
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Ditto, though I don't have 12 foot ceilings. I too bought into the CFL craze when they first came out, but I have always found their life claims to be disappointing. Have you ever had one catch fire? I had one get actual flames, thankfully went out when I turned the power off.
LED tech will eventually solve the issue and CFLs can go in the trash bin of history, They've already largely replaced incandescent flashlights and Christmas tree lights. Only a matter of time until they get the cost for larger LEDs down. Still' I've stocked up on incandescent bulbs in case it takes 10 years to get things worked out.
Don't get all up on the "Oh look at how many cheap aircraft they crank out!" The reason is that as you note the man matters and put a trained pilot in an amazing aircraft, and you can cause a lot of trouble. It gets really hard to just throw away tons of aircraft and get no results, and harder still to find pilots to do so. Also as you run through them, you get worse and worse quality leading to worse and worse results.
The Germans lost WWII following your strategy. They invested in higher and higher tech and got stomped by inferior technology that could be produced in large numbers and manned them with competent pilots. "The best" very often gets trounced by "good enough".
As for pilots, the US withdrew their top pilots from combat after they had experience and used them to train new pilots. The Germans kept their top pilots on the front line until they were killed.
For example take a look at the F-16: It is about 102 to 0 in terms of actual combat (meaning 102 air-to-air kills, no losses). Or the F-14 which is about 135 to 4, and most of those kills (and all the losses) were Iran during the Iran/Iraq.
Apples to anvils. You are comparing good aircraft and often good pilots to often obsolete/export model aircraft with inexperienced pilots. A lot of information is left out in those numbers. German tank crews killed allied tanks at a 4-to-1 ratio until the end of the war, they still lost.
Well if you have numbers like that, it is extremely problematic for a "just have lots of jets" force. You CAN afford to put your extremely expensive fighter, with the best pilots, forward if zero losses is a reasonable scenario. Even with a few losses, that is fine. Heck, say that they figure they can kill one F-22 with 50 SU-27s. Ok, that means you have to expend almost 10,000 aircraft to take out the current F-22 fleet. Then of course there's the 500 F/A-18 E/Fs, and few hundred F-16s and so on.
With that few numbers, zero losses is not a reasonable scenario. You simply send a few SU-27s to run the F-22 to Bingo fuel and the second wave comes and slaughters them because they can't maneuver or fight because they don't have the fuel. That or you send a large wave and take out their tankers. You also do not have a large enough force to cover multiple fronts or a wide front 24/7
You are also forgetting the ungodly high logistics costs of the F-22. You don't have enough planes or logistics supporting them to keep enough up and running in the air 24/7. Your F-22's will be sitting on the ground waiting and not in the air patrolling. The US lost Desert Storm, they never made it to Baghdad like originally planned, because of the poor logistics of the M1 Abrams tank, they ran out of fuel trying to peruse retreating Iraqi tanks. There is a good reason why during OIF they only sent 850 Abrams, but even more logistics support than in DS1, and even then it took them 2 weeks to get to Baghdad. The US will lose an air war with the F22 for the same reasons.
The problem is also that flying an aircraft is difficult period, a fighter more so and actually fighting in one effectively is really hard. So you don't find some dude in your armed forces and say "Here's a new plane, go get 'em!" and expect any results other than a plane shaped hole in the control tower. A tank rush like the USSR did is more feasible, takes a lot less training particularly for low tech tanks. Not so much for aircraft.
The US solved this in WWII by taking their top aces and using them to train pilots.
Not to mention you can make the same argument about combat in general, The US still lost Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan by a numerically superior enemy who was willing to suffer the losses necessary.
That's the reason the US is willing to go extremely high end on the aircraft. You get a really good pilot, and give them a really good aircraft and you aren't talking 2 to 1 or 3
Also note that there is a limit as to what you can get slaves to do, some slaves in the south had to be paid. As Thomas Sowell points out:
Most slaves performing most tasks were of course not paid, but were simply forced to work by the threat of punishment. That was sufficient for galley slaves or plantation slaves. But there were various kinds of work where that was not sufficient.
Tasks involving judgment or talents were different, because no one can know in advance how much judgment or talent someone else has. In short, knowledge is an inherent constraint on power. Payment can bring forth the knowledge or talent by giving those who have it an incentive to reveal it and to develop it.
Payment can vary in amount and in kind. Some slaves, especially eunuchs in the days of the Ottoman Empire, could amass both wealth and power. One reason they could be trusted in positions of power was that they had no incentive to betray the existing rulers and try to establish their own dynasties, which would obviously have been physically impossible for them.
At more mundane levels, such tasks as diving operations in the Carolina swamps required a level of discretion and skill far in excess of that required to pick cotton in the South or cut sugar cane in the tropics. Slaves doing this kind of work had financial incentives and were treated far better. So were slaves working in Virginia’s tobacco factories.
The point of all this is that when even slaves had to be paid to get certain kinds of work done, this shows the limits of what can be accomplished by power alone. Yet so much of what is said and done by those who rely on the power of government to direct ever more sweeping areas of our life seems to have no sense of the limits of what can be accomplished that way.
Even the totalitarian governments of the 20th century eventually learned the hard way the limits of what could be accomplished by power alone. China still has a totalitarian government today, but, after the death of Mao, the Chinese government began to loosen its controls on some parts of the economy, in order to reap the economic benefits of freer markets.
Have a stack of hard drives in my garage from work that I use for such purposes as needed. We don't deploy used drives at work, any money we save reusing drives is going to be eaten up in 8 hour drives to do service calls, we tried this in the past and it did NOT end well. Hard drives, and PSUs are two areas where you don't cut corners. We deploy used mobos, processors, and RAM with no problems. (The systems at the customers site are our machines, as long as they work the customer doesn't know/care what is in them.) So I end up with lots of used hard drives, boss doesn't care since we won't be using them, most with, according to SpinRite, only a few thousand hours on them at most.
.45 they can blow completely apart. They stop most pistol bullets quite well, rifle rounds will zip through them like they aren't there though.
The great thing is that I can backup in triplicate since I'm swimming in drives. The bad ones get taken to the range. Hard drives make quite nice reactive targets. If you hit them right on the spindle with a
Sadly to me this is proof that capitalism like all other isms are simply doomed to die, because just like communism promoted party loyalty over competences and promoted apathy and stagnation so too does capitalism promote an elite class of multinationals that attain God like powers and can literally start wars or have laws written by simple bribes and edicts. as much as I miss him I doubt seriously my grandfather would find much to be proud of what has happened to his country he fought so hard for. Maybe this is why no society lasts, the corruption gets so bad people would rather let it fall apart than try to fix it, who knows. But you can't blame any of those countries in red for not liking us none too much.
I agree with much of what you said in the above post, but I would point out that what we have today is crony capitalism/soft fascism where the winners are the ones who have control of the government gun.
You saw nothing like that during the 19th century when we were the closest we ever were to free market capitalism. Heck, during the War of 1812 northern banks actually REFUSED to lend to the US government to fund the war. (Imagine if that were possible today.) There were no lobbyists in Washington because there was nothing to buy there. There was indeed some corruption at the state level, but that influence stopped at the state line, making it easy for business and people to flee states with stupid policies. In the name of "helping the people" the government grew to "control" the corporations....yea, and the fox wants to guard the hen-house to keep the hens safe.
It was the corporations who wanted that government regulation because it protects them from having to compete. Even at its peak, Standard Oil had dozens of competitors, some quite large and had to continually innovate to stay ahead. The forward thinking leadership of Rockefeller kept Standard Oil one step ahead of anyone else, once he retired in 1896 conservative management at Standard oil led to a sharp decline of their market share as they were outmaneuvered by smaller competitors well before the Anti-Trust laws, which are nothing more than a tool for corporations to beat up on their competitors via the government, came into play. (Seriously, go look up who files the anti-trust claim, it's mostly one business wanting to beat up on another business.)
Just TRY to set up an oil company today, even a non-profit, you'll be buried by the regulations, which is exactly what the large firms want. The solution is to take away that government power and make firms actually compete, but still too many people think that the regulations are there to protect the environment or the people. They aren't. The purpose of those regulations, just like the current political system, is to protected the large firms and shut down any start-up competition. Just like the establishment tries to shut down Ron Paul, the regulations are designed to shut down small time business that could pose a threat to large firms.
Heartland funded some of his work that showed the surface station record to be unreliable, so what? Is the research bad or invalid? Please show where he made his mistakes and why putting weather station next to AC units is a good idea.
I could just turn that around and dismiss the work of the government funded "shills". Just as valid as what you did, but I'm not going to and don't need to. The fact that you can't debate and discuss shows that you have lost the argument.
It's also not some grand conspiracy, it's simply group-think combined with the fact that if CO2 ISN'T the driver behind climate those scientists and government bureaucrats lose their funding and jobs. You see the same thing when it comes to welfare or education reform. The welfare bureaucrats are against reform because the reforms are aimed at reducing the number of bureaucrats. The teachers are against it because they will lose the seniority and job security they enjoy. No conspiracy, simply perusing their own self interest. Look at MADD still pretending there is a serious drunk driving problem.
Even IF CO2 was the cause, any meaningful action will cause more harm than good. Cheaper to simply adapt than put billions into energy poverty.
He was a rebel but not because he believed in slavery, in fact he never owned a slave, it was Sherman burning as he went that got him involved.
If only people would understand it is THAT kind of stuff that motivates the majority of people attacking our troops in the Middle East today. (and the troops that fought us in Vietnam.)
I paid attention during History class and I don't recall them sending suicide fire ships into our harbors in the 1840's. I don't remember them sending suicide bombers to our cities in the 1920's. There was piracy around their shores sure, but they weren't crossing the Atlantic and raiding coastal towns.
Only after we had overthrown the elected Iranian government in 53, because the British weren't getting the oil profits they used to, and installed and defended puppet dictators elsewhere did people there suddenly start to have a hatred for the US. Hmmmmm. I wonder if the two are POSSIBLY connected? Why all of a sudden, after centuries of killing each other, and not caring about us, did they suddenly more-or-less stop and start attacking us?
Yes one can make the argument that this was all necessary to thwart the Soviet Union, I don't buy that argument though. However, now that the Soviet Union is gone there is no need for us to be in the region. All the money blown on the wars we could have instead spent BUYING the oil and still had change to spare. We'd get the oil, they'd go on killing each other and not us. Win-Win.
It took 800+ years for the West to get this whole representative secular government thing figured out. Not gonna happen in 6 months over there and forcing it on them will only make them fight it even more.
Hey Hairyfeet, have a question for ya since you're the one I search for when criticizing Linux on the technical level.
I was on a car trip with my brother yesterday and we got on the subject of Linux's sh*t driver model and he was insisting that wasn't Torvalds fault that Linux doesn't have a stable ABI and API, he insists that since Torvalds only works on the Kernel, the lack of an ABI and API is someone else's fault. I of course said that was crap since the ABI and API are KERNEL LEVEL, but he would have none of it. He insisted that if you used one of the server distros like CentOS or RedHat that all the supposed problems disappear. (I of course know that's not true, but I could see we weren't getting anywhere productive and dropped it.)
So that seems to be the latest excuse on the lack of a stable/standardized API/ABI, "it's not Torvalds fault." What do you say to that?
Um, Dawkins book is an angry incoherent rambling against religion. It could have been written by a 6 year old. I read the whole thing waiting for him to say something substantial, but he never does. Seriously, read some of Antony Flew's Atheistic work side by side with C. S. Lewis, for the theist side. Basing your thoughts of religion on Dawkins is like basing your thoughts on Asian food by eating Wal-Mart Ramen noodles. Dawkins has been criticized repeatedly for his amateur and sloppy philosophy.
If you don't like reading, I know I prefer audio or video lecturers to reading, here is William Lane Craig at Oxford dismantling Dawkins piece by piece.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP9CwDTRoOE
Yes it's a two hour video, complicated issues take time to discuss. I'm open minded enough to listen to and read the atheists side and weigh both sides. I'm not a Christian because I'm told it's true, or because I like going to 7:30 AM mass rather than sleeping in, I'm a Christian because I think the evidence points to it being true. I tend to focus on natural theology when talking with atheists, since it takes away all their arguments against Christianity and focuses just on the existence of a god, but not necessarily the christian god.
As for TFA, what happens when those religious people look for and then find answers to the questions that their Analytic thinking brought up? For me at least, it made my religious belief stronger because it led to a greater understanding of the issues at hand.
That's why the rest of the world uses the Liter, no confusion about it!
No, they use it because they were forced at gunpoint by their governments to use it. If you doubt this, just try to sell using pounds and ounces in certain metric countries.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1078648/Victory-Metric-Martyrs-finally-win-right-sell-fruit-veg-pounds-ounces.html
The metric system has its flaws, base 10 being only divisible by 10, 5 and 2 before having to use awkward decimals, since fractions are "officially" not allowed in metric measurements. (Though people use them anyway.) There is a reason that every civilization based its measurements using a number base that was divisible by at least 4 units, the foot is divisible 5 different ways without using fractions; 2, 3, 4, 6, and 12. Then metric unit sizes are often awkward for everyday use. Try building a shed or cut drywall using centimeters/millimeters vs feet and inches by memory. Metric units don't fit in the brains short term memory like imperial measurements do. Young carpenters in Canada still use feet and inches. No surprise given that it was designed by intellectuals who never worked a day in their life and who gave us other great things, like the Reign of Terror and Napoleon.
My guess is because the EPA keeps rewriting the diesel engine regulations every few years. Nobody wants to play poker when the dealer changes the rules every other hand.
If people are choosing the 4 hour commute then they have obviously considered your option and rejected it for whatever reason.
Actually, yes they will be, they have been more expensive for over 100 years and show no sign of changing. The fundamental problem is that batteries suck when it comes to energy density, even at their theoretical maximums they can't compete even with LNG. You might as well advocate for coal fired steam cars.
Look at this chart and the problem will become painfully clear.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Energy_density.svg
Physics says that electric cars suck and always will. If you don't like that then either pray that God will alter the laws of physics for you or start looking at realistic alternatives. The only possible hope that EV fans have to compete with gasoline is zinc-slurry batteries, but even their power per pound loses to gasoline and they are still experimental. Though they could be useful for grid storage. Liquified coal, the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal, in an ICE car would still probably beat EVs.
120 pounds of gasoline can propel my work pickup, loaded down with telephone equipment, 350 miles. 400 pounds of batteries can't get the Volt, with only two people, even a fraction of that distance. Adding more batteries won't work because you'll then need to beef up the suspension, power-train, and structure of the car to compensate, which will then require even more batteries to extend the range, repeat to infinity.
Batteries work fine if you are trying to power a stationary device, like UPS units, since once you set them up you never move them until you replace them. Batteries work fine for low power devices like cell phones. For power hungry mobile applications like propelling a car larger than a golf cart, not so much.
Add to that the fact that producing an ICE requiters virtually no rare earth metals, Iron and Aluminum are your two major metals needed with only trace amounts of other metals needed for alloying. Producing an ICE is stupid easy and cheap with modern investment casing and CNC machining. Working with rare earth metals is a PITA even on a good day and the mining process for them makes driving a 1970's land yacht look green by comparison.
I would personally love to see hybrid LNG/Gasoline vehicles take off in the US like they have in parts of South America. Run on cheap LNG for day to day travels and if you run out you just flip a switch and run on gasoline. Unfortunately, the government isn't shoveling money into them so nobody is interested in building or marketing either new LNG/Gasoline cars or conversion kits for existing cars. In the meantime, I'll just tinker with my mopeds.
The deduction for donations had nothing to do with religion. When the government first passed the income tax, and later estate tax, charities, the arts, research scientists, and universities were screaming bloody murder because money that rich businessmen had previously been donating to them was going to government. Yes, at the time the rates were low, but with no government funding to those groups, those rates still put a huge dent in their finances.
In typical fashion the government tried to fix one wrong with another wrong and created the donation deduction and, over time, started taking over funding charities and universities. Funding that was previously given directly by the rich, like Rockefeller and Carnegie, was instead laundered through Washington DC first so the politicians could get their cut.
You are right, it does have nothing at all to do with the place they find themselves today.
Japanese-Americans were exploited for cheap labor in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so badly discriminated against in the 20th century that their property was effectively confiscated and they were imprisoned for years, yet within a few decades of WWII ending they had exceeded whites in household income even though they continued to be widely discriminated against.
Blacks like Bill Cosby, Walter Williams, and Thomas Sowell are right when they point out that it is the black community and black culture that is holding back blacks today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKgHc6bWqZ4 How Much Can Discrimination Explain? | Walter Williams
When blacks from former Apartheid South Africa immigrate to the US and kick the crud out of US blacks economically, that should tell you that the problem is not racism from whites, as racists don't really differentiate between an African black and an American black.
I've met plenty of successful blacks, the one distinguishing feature among them is that all of them reject affirmative action and what passes for mainstream black culture. Getting called "Uncle Tom" doesn't bother them, they're laughing all the way to the bank as they are the ones with well paying full-time jobs, aren't living in the ghetto or jail, and the only shooting they do is at the range.
500 years from now, given the results is has produced, historians will believe that Affirmative Action was devised by the Klan.
That WOULD be possible. Something like a Chevy Sprint would work reasonably well. My dad had one. That 1 liter 3 cylinder engine could deliver 50 MPG without trying too hard and had reasonable acceleration if you didn't load it down. Bit of a deathtrap for people in the back seat, but people in the front weren't that badly protected in a crash.
The problem is that it is simply impossible to deliver on that price point with the current regulations in place. Airbags are a failure from a cost/benefit standpoint, a point the government would rather you not know about. (Benefits are only about one third of the cost. http://www.swov.nl/uk/research/kennisbank/inhoud/50_maatregel/50_voertuig/airbags.htm ) Sure they save lives, they also kill people and their high cost per life saved, high cost per vehicle, and mandated use has delayed other, potentially superior, passive safety features into cars, like metal foam crumple zones which would increase the effectiveness of seat-belts and other passive safety systems by improving structural integrety and lowering g-loads on the occupants in a crash.
In the end we have to ask ourselves what is better: For the working man/woman to be driving 20 year old cars with 20 year old safety systems or driving more modern cars with better passive safety systems, but without the expensive active safety systems that push those cars out of their price range. Let the buyer decide what they want and the car insurance companies set rates for cars with and without those systems and if the Ralph Naders of the world have a problem with that then let them convince people to change their ways on their own dime rather than forcing things upon them.
The simple fact is that by mandating all these new safety systems the government is forcing more and more people into older and less safe cars as the price for new and newer used cars gets pushed higher and higher, meaning cars that would have been scrapped in the past are kept on the road. The average age of a passenger car in 1995 was 8.4 years. In 2011 it is now 11.1 years. Part of that is because of improved quality, but part of it is also due to the increasing cost of new cars.
https://www.polk.com/images/uploads/20120117-tablea.jpg
If I had to be in a car crash with only seat-belts and the cars structure to protect me, I know I'd rather be in a car made in 2005 than 1995.
Very true. The phone line controllers we use at work use 8088 processors. The whole controller requires no active cooling and are incredibly reliable. The "newer" controllers are built far more compact with more processing power and require active cooling and have been incredibly unreliable, we've been removing them from service.
We also still have customers running 286 based voice mail systems because they are so reliable.
In many applications reliability trumps speed. Not to mention that you have a design that is already paid for and can be built on otherwise obsolete chip fabbing equipment OR can be built on newer equipment with die shrinks for better power consumption.
Thanks, it is a very good example. I struggled for a long time to come up with a soundbite-ish way to sum up the problem and finally settled on that because it is something that everyone can relate to.
For those who don't get the example. Even if you gave an engineer in 1906 the plans for a 747 and even showed him video of it working they couldn't produce it, not because they are stupid, but because so many of the technologies necessary to build it simply do not exist and many of those technologies are interdependent. They couldn't produce the aluminum alloys used in the airframe, they couldn't produce the high temp alloys used in the engines, they couldn't produce the transistors for the avionics, they couldn't produce the tires for it, they couldn't produce the hydraulics that move the control surfaces, they couldn't even produce the rivets used to hold the airplane together.
No amount of central planning and money throwing would be able to overcome that because the central planners have no way of knowing the correct path to take and, as in the Soviet Union, frequently took the wrong path. The only way it could work is the way it did, Market actors pursuing their own interests, finding what worked and what didn't and others building atop the efforts of those before them.
Spot on.
Trying to go non-fossil fuels at this point is like trying to built a 747 in the year 1906. It will fail for the simple reason that the technology base does not exist to support such an endeavor. Throwing more and more money at the project will not change that fact and will do nothing but waste resources that are better spent elsewhere in our society.
The transition will occur when the market says it should and not a moment before. We transitioned from whale oil, to kerosene, to electricity for illumination seamlessly with no government intervention. When the technology became cost effective people started using it.
The problem we face is wealth disparity.
No it is not. There always has been and always will be wealth disparity. My boss, who has the ability to create a business that is spread across 5 states will, by the fact of him having that ability, have more wealth than me, who does not have that ability. I, with my various skills, will have more wealth than someone who lacks any skills.
The problem is not disparity, but the Crony Capitalists using government regulations to cripple smaller Market Capitalist competitors from competing with them and a government imposed central bank stealing the purchasing power from the poor and middle class and giving it to those same large firms via inflation. (Ever ask yourself WHERE those speculators get the money with which to bid up the price of oil? The Federal Reserve, who gives it to the large banks who then gives it to Wall Street.)
Dial-up can be had for free.
What about the phone line required for that?
Not to mention the computer labs in most schools and libraries.
Doesn't do the parent any good. A parent is not going to drive/bike/walk to the public library to check an email account to tell them if little Tommy needs a permission slip signed.
Tough shit, the only people left out on internet access in America are people lacking in resourcefulness.
or people who chose to put their money and effort into more important things, like perhaps saving up to replace the old family car, get glasses for their children, go hunting the thrift stores for clothing that fits them, etc. We all only have so much time during the day with which to do things.
Most modern libertarians are functional anarchists.
By that standard, most modern liberals are functional communists.
/So does that mean that most modern Buddhists are functional Presbyterians?
//and that most modern Mac users are functional COBOL programers?
///coming up with these is kinda fun.
If someone shoots an unarmed person, until they have been cleared by a court of law, they should be behind bars.
Is that difficult to understand?
There is no such thing as an "unarmed person". My brothers friend was beaten into a 5 week coma by an "unarmed person". If you have working arms and legs, you are capable of doing harm.
It also has to do with flight risk. On top of the lack of clear evidence of murder they could have determined that Zimmerman was a low flight risk.
Stalking someone is often a prelude to assault, robbery and/or murder. In any case, it is not only a provocation, but a direct threat to the subjects safety.
Wrong on so many levels it is not even funny. Following someone is neither provocation or a direct threat to ones safety, it is suspicious, nothing more. Neither side is in the wrong so long as neither is trespassing. Whoever strikes the first blow is the aggressor.
Try this thought experiment: You are at a bar and you see a women you think you like, but haven't worked up the courage to talk to her. She leaves and you follow her on food at a distance to the bar down the block. You still don't have the courage to talk to her before she leaves again, you follow her down the block at a distance further before giving up and going home.
Now, was what you were doing provocation or threatening? No, it was suspicious, nothing more.
While it does not give a right to attack, hindering someone's movements such that they DO have to pass through you or near you would, under most courts, be at your fault.
What court? No, whoever threw the first blow is the one who is the aggressor. Plenty of people are in jail because the other side egged them into throwing the first punch. While a defense attorney may be able to convince the jury into returning with a "not guilty" on account of the other side egging you on, it will still be the person who threw the first punch in the defendants seat.
The fact that you have to argue for the right to stalk and threaten other people while defending someone who stalked and ultimately killed a youth is sickening to say the least.
Repeating this does not make it the truth. Cry all you want about it, it won't change reality. Stalking is the repeated following and harassing of another person. This was not stalking and the cops would hang up on you for trying to claim it as such.
Simply brandishing a gun is typically enough to stop an unarmed opponent.
Only if you do so before the physical attack begins. Brandishing can also seriously ESCALATE a situation. Not to mention that Zimmerman's reputation in the community would be badly tarnished if he pulled a gun on everybody he followed and his CWP likely revoked.
As a CWP holder, the only reason I would take my gun out is if I feel that there is a good possibility that I am going to have to use it. Until then I use my brain and words to defuse a situation.
For someone who knows even the basics on how to conceal, it's hard to tell for certain is someone is carrying. The myrad of holsters available makes that a simple matter of shopping around. Martin probably did not know that Zimmerman was armed. A Kel-Tec PF-9 is stupid easy to conceal, given that it was designed for CCW.