2) Our current enemies don't have fighters that can best our current fighters.
I'd rate this invalid. We don't know who our next adversary will be, nor do we know from where they will equip. We need to be able to beat anything a country other than us can produce to be able to ensure the ability to take air superiority as a given
So we need to keep pissing money away against some phantom boogieman, yea sure.
Let me let you in on a little secret, your fantasy will NEVER play out. If Migs ever have air superiority over Seattle covering a troop landing then that's not the time we start worrying about Fighter development, that's when you start loading targeting data into the ICBMs and SLBMs.
Nuclear weapons made this big military obsolete. For national DEFENSE all you need is a good nuclear stockpile for the major powers and a small conventional force to take care of things like Somali Pirates.
3) We have too many carriers (adversaries have a couple and bad ones at that)
I'd rate this invalid. The carriers are less about tactical ability and need and much more about projecting power and influence. Sending a carrier strike group to the persian gulf or near north korea, enables the secretary of state to put muscle behind words, and that is well worth the cost, boondoggle or not.
Translation: Yes I realize that carriers are quickly becoming obsolete due to increasingly advanced missles and AIP submarines are being developed, but we need to keep spending ourselves into bankruptcy so our "leaders" can continue playing world police against counties that pose no threat to the shores of the US.
You do realize that the biggest thing keeping the ruling party in Iran in power is the continued US presence in the region? I've talked with Iranians online and they don't like the current leadership, but they also remember what the US did the last time they tried to change their government.
As far as my view, given what we spend vs the rest of the world, FOR STARTERS the military budget needs to be cut in half, ultimately it should be more like a quarter to a third of what it is now. That is easily doable for a military focused on DEFENSE, not global empire and world policing.
That WILL happen at some point, the only question will be if we do it voluntarily or are forced to when the dollar collapses and the government cannot defect spend anymore. Economic collapse has killed far more empires than any military,war just tends to speed that progress along. Our leaders have been eating the seed corn for decades, they have only been able to do so because the world has been willing to accept our paper money. That is already beginning to end. China and Russia no longer trade in the US dollar. China is diverting 100% of its gold production into its vaults and buying as much gold as they can on the open market without sending the price through the roof. The world is getting ready to end the 40 year experiment with accepting a fiat US dollar and our leaders are oblivious to what is going to happen.
And its not even the first time the US government has been busted pulling a false flag, 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese died thanks to the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident, and just like in this case the full details won't be learned until the principals involved are long dead and can't be prosecuted, then the MSM will just do a "Oh BTW" and then act like we should just pretend it never happened, just like Vietnam.
It is this sort of stuff that needs to be pointed out REPEATEDLY. There's no need to make stuff up, like 9/11 inside job garbage, when you have real world examples slapping you in the face. The GoT incident has personal ramifications for me, as my uncle died in in Vietnam, his name is on the Vietnam memorial. He was a dog handler, which were considered by the VC, along with the dogs themselves, to be top priority targets, more than officers or the M60 gunner. My dad or my other uncles don't talk about him, it obviously was a big event for them.
You do realize that is exactly what the US did in Vietnam. Destroyed entire villages and killing everyone and everything inside. Burning fields or destroying them with chemicals from the air. Carpet bombed entire regions. The US government still lost despite the fact that the VCs were armed almost exclusively with small arms. Only 12 tons of supplies per day had to be imported for the VC to keep going. For comparison, 10 tons of illegal drugs passes over the Arizona/Mexico border per day today.
The same thing is more-or-less happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. A large portion of the people there view us as an illegitimate authority and are willing to take the casualties necessary to resist.
Against a domestic insurgency the favor tilts heavily in favor of the insurgents if they posses even basic weapons. All those fancy weapons are little more than scrap metal without resupply. That resupply takes the form of unarmored wheeled trucks. A 30-06 from a deer gun takes out the radiator of one of those trucks, the convoy has to either stop or abandon the truck. If they stop they have to either invest a huge number of resources securing the area or risk the guy changing the tire taking the second bullet or, lets say the guy shooting is a doesn't like killing, just shoot out another tire, perhaps with a 22 rimfire, figure the drop you need and you can use a 22 out past 200 yards. Truck tires are expensive. Spending resources replacing those is resources not spent on more bombs and bullets. Simply slowing down those convoys enacts a burden. It is death by a thousand cuts, the same thing those in Afghanistan are doing, except they are a lot more incompetent than an American insurgent would be.
Terminal? Over the PHONE? Easier? You have got to be sh*tting me. I help people troubleshoot equipment over the phone and the ONLY thing I EVER have them use via a terminal window for is ipconfig and even that gets iffy if they hear "icconfig" instead. If I need to have them check for internet access I have them just open a browser window and go to google rather then get them to properly enter a ping command.
I'd rather be caught stealing from the company than caught making customers troubleshoot via a terminal window over the phone. Please tell me you work on cash registers or something that doesn't have a GUI to begin with.
I think you and I are both agreeing on this subject, we're just interpreting it differently. You see it as a lack of regulations. I see it as too many ineffective and special interest regulations mixed in with politicians who think they're smart enough to understand all this. I would agree that things need to be setup to have the barrier to entry be set as low as possible. Relying on regulators is a fools errand because they face no repercussions for failure.
What I think should be looked at is how the telephone service contracts are done in the jails I work in. Every 3 to 5 years the contract comes up for renewal. If you're doing a good job you get renewed, if someone else comes in with a better bid and a better service contract, then they get to have the contract. Whatever the solution, we're not going to be able to just copy what another country does. (Especially not South Korea's internet police state.) We're going to need to look around and customize what works for each individual situation.
That being said, Midco has great internet service here in North Dakota.
Well what did Congress honestly expect? They did the same frigin thin in the 19th century. Subsidized the fark out of the railroads. Remember the transcontinental railroad? What the history books don't mention is that it was so poorly constructed that it was next to useless. Once completed it had to be completely rebuilt in order to actually be useable, a process that took over half a decade. Even then it was so inefficient that turning a profit was difficult
Compare that with James J Hill, who built his railroad completely with his own money. It took him decades to build out to the west coast, but the reward for that was that he had the most efficient railroad in the country. in 1893 when virtually every other railroad went bankrupt, Hill turned a profit.
Politicians who think they can pass regulations that don't make things worse combined with a lack of competition caused by those regulations make for a messed up network. Sure there's obvious stuff, like don't steal stuff, but at work we have to route customers phone calls across state lines because interstate is so much cheaper than intrastate because the way the regulations on rates are done.
Might want to check your history book. Despite a 3-to-1 numerical superiority in infantry, total air superiority, superior small arms, and no Japanese resupply, the defending Japanese managed to inflict 37% casualties on the Americans and nearly 10% KIA. That's as bad as some WW1 battles. Seems like given what was available that was a great defense.
Not disagreeing with you, but another problem with building an AI is that there is a very compelling case to be made that "true" intelligence is non-algorithmic and therefore cannot be created via our current computer technology no matter how powerful it is. The best you could manage is a virtual intelligence (VI).
Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose goes into great detail about this and I find his ideas compelling, though others disagree. We simply don't know enough about how an actual self-aware mind works to know for certain either way, though it does make pursuit of creating an AI look like a bit of a fools errand until we know more about how an actual mind works. As my favorite example goes, they're trying to build a Boeing 747 in the year 1909.
Exactly, you got me interested in the E series chips, before I was 100% intel, because that was what we used at the office and I just grabbed the old stuff. Now I have an E-450, two E-350s, and two C-60's. (People tend to hate on the C60, but it works well within its limits.) Only problem is that I tend to buy used off eBay and the AMD section is often limited.
That's only a problem if you ever intended to sell them.
Some of the most fun shooting I have ever had was where I was politely told to put the camera in the car and leave it there. If some of the gun grabbers knew how many "illegal" guns are in the hands of otherwise law abiding citizens their heads would explode. All of mine are legal, but I've seen my share of those that clearly are not, but nobody cares because the only thing they are hurting with them is their own wallet. Just like the number of people I've seen smoking weed. Nobody cares and nobody is gonna call the cops.
That is far more true about cars. Focusing on that first would save far more lives.
Heck, banning Automatic transmissions for everyone except those with disabilities would seriously reduce the number of serious accidents by forcing people to be more attentive when they drive.
Since 1996 in Australia, homicides are up 3.2 percent; Assaults are up 8.6 percent , armed robberies have climbed nearly 45 percent; In the Australian state of Victoria, gun homicides have climbed 300 percent In the 25 years before the gun bans, crime in Australia had been dropping steadily, not anymore.
Violent crime rate, not murder rate. There is a difference
The violent crime rate in the US is about 4-5 times higher than it is in the US. So while you are less likely to be murdered, you're far more likely to be beaten within an inch of your life in the UK than the US.
The difference we have here is the price, you seem to think that the corps would pay,
By the end of the 19th century US corporations were paying the highest wages in the world, yet American made goods were the cheapest in the world, even when you factored in the cost of shipping them overseas.
I believe that the ONLY reason you have minimum wage jobs at all is because that makes people cheaper than the machine so they hire people.
The reason you have minimum wage jobs is because the people in question have a marginal productivity that is only worth $8 an hour.
Lets take fast food as an example...what job is there in Mickey D's that couldn't be done BETTER by a fully automated assembly line? After all its less than a dozen ingredients all told being used and probably a good 85% of their sales are the preset combos, so why would they need ANY humans in Mickey D, or Wendy's or any of those pre-fab fast food joints?
It can't be, at least with current or near future tech, which is why it isn't. Those automated food assembly lines you see on Discovery Channel? Those are high speed/high volume machines and they take a gargantuan amount of space and require an army of skilled technicians to maintain. You're not going to fit something like that into a McDonalds. You're the one claiming it's possible, you should at least be able to come up with some sort of proof of concept.
In the western part of North Dakota where the oil boom has been happening for years, you have people working at McDonalds earning $20 an hour, yet there is no sign of even attempting to increase automation. Why do they make $20 in the western part of ND and $9 in the eastern part? Because the demand for unskilled labor in that area outstrips the supply. in the eastern part, there is a lower demand for unskilled labor and a greater supply.
The reason you even HAVE a minimum wage law in the first place is to keep Blacks and Hispanics "in their place" on the cotton and cabbage farms and not competing with skilled white workers, as skilled and unskilled workers can be substituted for one another in many areas of the economy by various means. It's one of the last Jim Crow laws that are still on the books in the US, along with the Wagner Act.
The answer is the same answer as to why there are more Chinese working than Americans right now, which is they DON'T need the humans at all they are just cheaper so to maximize profits the smart move is to go with the cheaper resource which is the human. but the only reason those humans are cheaper is because of government subsidy, without that the machine would win.
No, the only reason their workers are cheaper than our workers is because of the over-regulation of the US combined with the fiat money system we have today (and the Chinese pegging their currency to the devaluing US dollar, stealing the purchasing power of their citizens and giving it to Americans.) Again, Henry Ford paid the highest wages and yet produced the cheapest cars.
The machines would also not win, a robot with the dexterity of a 5 year old is an immensely expensive thing and a robot with the reasoning skill of a 5 year old has yet to be built.
Look at the auto industry, unions got a living wage, the humans got replaced by robots.
No they didn't. They got replaced with cheaper and more versatile non-union workers elsewhere. What Auto makers wanted even more than cheaper workers was a more flexible workforce. The Union work rules make it very difficult to have a cross-trained and flexible workforce that can respond to changing market conditions.
As for the robots, the ones you so frequently see on TV are the ones spot welding the chassis together. They are not used because machines are inherently cheaper than humans. Have you ever seen a spot welder appropriate for welding a car frame? Have you ever used one? Do you
Imperial stuff does work in nearly every field. That why guys who know how to do fractions can hand build rafters in houses with simple tools. I have yet to see a metric version of the imperial roofers square that "just works".
In most of the building industry, very few things are the size they claim to be but they work together in a system. A modern 1/2 pipe has no dimension that is 1/2 inch (just like a modern 12 mm pipe or is that 13 mm?). Carpet is sold by yards but its width assumes normal installation wastage so a 12 foot roll will fit in a 12 ft room that might be 12'1" wide (which is typical).The metric world seems to be working hard on recreating the foot since nearly all building materials are based on multiplies of 300 mm units (what I call a "metric foot")
I've never seen someone confuse feet and inches but I've seen lots of people drop a an order of magnitude in the metric system. I've even seen furniture at Ikea that claims it was 8 cm wide. I've also noticed that people who can estimate in feet tend to get their numbers about +/- 2 feet when guessing at room sizes but metric people tend to be +/- 2 meters. I'm not convinced that humans and metric are such a good match anymore.
In short, use what works for you and shut the hell up, the adults have work to do. I'll standardize on Metric instead of Imperial if the French standard on English instead of French, as the latter will do far more to make trade easier than the US going metric for daily life.
People are always in favor of diversity, as long as it it's THEIR diversity.
Exactly, take one particular hobby of mine, ammunition reloading. Everything is in grains when it comes to weight. 1 gram = 15.4323584 grains
Bullet weight, case capacity (in grains of water.)
Of VITAL importance is the powder charge weight. It is stated town to the tenth of a grain and most scales are accurate down to tenth of a grain. Milligrams are too small and result in numbers are too large to be easily held in ones head. Ounces or grams result in nasty decimal messes. Much like feet and inches, grains results in easy to remember sets of numbers.
When the penalty for screwing up is having a pipe bomb inches from your face people are going to use something that minimizes the chances of mistakes.
I sometimes think the government does what it can to let those sorts of movements grow in order to keep people distracted from the much more boring, but much more harmful things the government is really doing.
That and I would bet quite a few of those people would be absolutely fine if it was George Bush doing it. I and others have said it repeatedly that Obama is just repeating all the policies of George Bush. The rhetoric is a little different, but the policies are effectively the same, more bailouts, more war, more of the same failed low interest rate economic policy. So in some ways, they need some way to denounce Obama, yet do it without denouncing the policies that they would support if it was Bush/Romney doing them.
Seems like nothing is going to change until the dollar tanks and 40 years of exported inflation come back to the US.
You cherrypick exactly ONE type of situation that would fare badly for the "insurgents". Let me run another one past you.
The Federal government imposes a massive cap and trade scheme that means the price of energy will quadruple, forcing many businesses to close. Seven Midwestern state governments, with massive popular support, tell the Feds to go piss up a rope and in retaliation begin collecting all revenue that would otherwise be destined for the federal government. All major LEO agencies in those states pledge not to cooperate with the Feds in any way.
You're the Federal government, what do you do? What CAN you do that would actually work long term and not make more of a mess?
Please provide a source of a US gun manufacturer knowingly selling guns to n illegal organization, other than the US government.
I worked the gun counter at the local Wal-Mart when I was going to school. I denied many sales and my manager discovered many instances of straw buys. The ATF did not care how many straw buy attempts we reported, they never prosecuted a single one.
That right there is the problem, the government does not enforce the laws on the books already. How is passing more going to change anything?
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2) Our current enemies don't have fighters that can best our current fighters.
I'd rate this invalid. We don't know who our next adversary will be, nor do we know from where they will equip. We need to be able to beat anything a country other than us can produce to be able to ensure the ability to take air superiority as a given
So we need to keep pissing money away against some phantom boogieman, yea sure.
Let me let you in on a little secret, your fantasy will NEVER play out. If Migs ever have air superiority over Seattle covering a troop landing then that's not the time we start worrying about Fighter development, that's when you start loading targeting data into the ICBMs and SLBMs.
Nuclear weapons made this big military obsolete. For national DEFENSE all you need is a good nuclear stockpile for the major powers and a small conventional force to take care of things like Somali Pirates.
3) We have too many carriers (adversaries have a couple and bad ones at that)
I'd rate this invalid. The carriers are less about tactical ability and need and much more about projecting power and influence. Sending a carrier strike group to the persian gulf or near north korea, enables the secretary of state to put muscle behind words, and that is well worth the cost, boondoggle or not.
Translation: Yes I realize that carriers are quickly becoming obsolete due to increasingly advanced missles and AIP submarines are being developed, but we need to keep spending ourselves into bankruptcy so our "leaders" can continue playing world police against counties that pose no threat to the shores of the US.
You do realize that the biggest thing keeping the ruling party in Iran in power is the continued US presence in the region? I've talked with Iranians online and they don't like the current leadership, but they also remember what the US did the last time they tried to change their government.
As far as my view, given what we spend vs the rest of the world, FOR STARTERS the military budget needs to be cut in half, ultimately it should be more like a quarter to a third of what it is now. That is easily doable for a military focused on DEFENSE, not global empire and world policing.
That WILL happen at some point, the only question will be if we do it voluntarily or are forced to when the dollar collapses and the government cannot defect spend anymore. Economic collapse has killed far more empires than any military,war just tends to speed that progress along. Our leaders have been eating the seed corn for decades, they have only been able to do so because the world has been willing to accept our paper money. That is already beginning to end. China and Russia no longer trade in the US dollar. China is diverting 100% of its gold production into its vaults and buying as much gold as they can on the open market without sending the price through the roof. The world is getting ready to end the 40 year experiment with accepting a fiat US dollar and our leaders are oblivious to what is going to happen.
And its not even the first time the US government has been busted pulling a false flag, 58,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese died thanks to the false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident, and just like in this case the full details won't be learned until the principals involved are long dead and can't be prosecuted, then the MSM will just do a "Oh BTW" and then act like we should just pretend it never happened, just like Vietnam.
It is this sort of stuff that needs to be pointed out REPEATEDLY. There's no need to make stuff up, like 9/11 inside job garbage, when you have real world examples slapping you in the face. The GoT incident has personal ramifications for me, as my uncle died in in Vietnam, his name is on the Vietnam memorial. He was a dog handler, which were considered by the VC, along with the dogs themselves, to be top priority targets, more than officers or the M60 gunner. My dad or my other uncles don't talk about him, it obviously was a big event for them.
You do realize that is exactly what the US did in Vietnam. Destroyed entire villages and killing everyone and everything inside. Burning fields or destroying them with chemicals from the air. Carpet bombed entire regions. The US government still lost despite the fact that the VCs were armed almost exclusively with small arms. Only 12 tons of supplies per day had to be imported for the VC to keep going. For comparison, 10 tons of illegal drugs passes over the Arizona/Mexico border per day today.
The same thing is more-or-less happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. A large portion of the people there view us as an illegitimate authority and are willing to take the casualties necessary to resist.
Against a domestic insurgency the favor tilts heavily in favor of the insurgents if they posses even basic weapons. All those fancy weapons are little more than scrap metal without resupply. That resupply takes the form of unarmored wheeled trucks. A 30-06 from a deer gun takes out the radiator of one of those trucks, the convoy has to either stop or abandon the truck. If they stop they have to either invest a huge number of resources securing the area or risk the guy changing the tire taking the second bullet or, lets say the guy shooting is a doesn't like killing, just shoot out another tire, perhaps with a 22 rimfire, figure the drop you need and you can use a 22 out past 200 yards. Truck tires are expensive. Spending resources replacing those is resources not spent on more bombs and bullets. Simply slowing down those convoys enacts a burden. It is death by a thousand cuts, the same thing those in Afghanistan are doing, except they are a lot more incompetent than an American insurgent would be.
Terminal? Over the PHONE? Easier? You have got to be sh*tting me. I help people troubleshoot equipment over the phone and the ONLY thing I EVER have them use via a terminal window for is ipconfig and even that gets iffy if they hear "icconfig" instead. If I need to have them check for internet access I have them just open a browser window and go to google rather then get them to properly enter a ping command.
I'd rather be caught stealing from the company than caught making customers troubleshoot via a terminal window over the phone. Please tell me you work on cash registers or something that doesn't have a GUI to begin with.
I think you and I are both agreeing on this subject, we're just interpreting it differently. You see it as a lack of regulations. I see it as too many ineffective and special interest regulations mixed in with politicians who think they're smart enough to understand all this. I would agree that things need to be setup to have the barrier to entry be set as low as possible. Relying on regulators is a fools errand because they face no repercussions for failure.
What I think should be looked at is how the telephone service contracts are done in the jails I work in. Every 3 to 5 years the contract comes up for renewal. If you're doing a good job you get renewed, if someone else comes in with a better bid and a better service contract, then they get to have the contract. Whatever the solution, we're not going to be able to just copy what another country does. (Especially not South Korea's internet police state.) We're going to need to look around and customize what works for each individual situation.
That being said, Midco has great internet service here in North Dakota.
Well what did Congress honestly expect? They did the same frigin thin in the 19th century. Subsidized the fark out of the railroads. Remember the transcontinental railroad? What the history books don't mention is that it was so poorly constructed that it was next to useless. Once completed it had to be completely rebuilt in order to actually be useable, a process that took over half a decade. Even then it was so inefficient that turning a profit was difficult
Compare that with James J Hill, who built his railroad completely with his own money. It took him decades to build out to the west coast, but the reward for that was that he had the most efficient railroad in the country. in 1893 when virtually every other railroad went bankrupt, Hill turned a profit.
Politicians who think they can pass regulations that don't make things worse combined with a lack of competition caused by those regulations make for a messed up network. Sure there's obvious stuff, like don't steal stuff, but at work we have to route customers phone calls across state lines because interstate is so much cheaper than intrastate because the way the regulations on rates are done.
Might want to check your history book. Despite a 3-to-1 numerical superiority in infantry, total air superiority, superior small arms, and no Japanese resupply, the defending Japanese managed to inflict 37% casualties on the Americans and nearly 10% KIA. That's as bad as some WW1 battles. Seems like given what was available that was a great defense.
Yup, I have my old Win7 install still on my 1tb data drive so in case my SSD dies I can still boot into a functioning computer.
Though to be honest, I've been quite disappointed at the performance boost from the SSD. Having a crapload of RAM may be the difference.
Not disagreeing with you, but another problem with building an AI is that there is a very compelling case to be made that "true" intelligence is non-algorithmic and therefore cannot be created via our current computer technology no matter how powerful it is. The best you could manage is a virtual intelligence (VI).
Not sure if I've mentioned this before, but "The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose goes into great detail about this and I find his ideas compelling, though others disagree. We simply don't know enough about how an actual self-aware mind works to know for certain either way, though it does make pursuit of creating an AI look like a bit of a fools errand until we know more about how an actual mind works. As my favorite example goes, they're trying to build a Boeing 747 in the year 1909.
Exactly, you got me interested in the E series chips, before I was 100% intel, because that was what we used at the office and I just grabbed the old stuff. Now I have an E-450, two E-350s, and two C-60's. (People tend to hate on the C60, but it works well within its limits.) Only problem is that I tend to buy used off eBay and the AMD section is often limited.
and people die in hospitals because of mistakes between milligrams and micrograms when it comes to medication doses. What's your point?
That's only a problem if you ever intended to sell them.
Some of the most fun shooting I have ever had was where I was politely told to put the camera in the car and leave it there. If some of the gun grabbers knew how many "illegal" guns are in the hands of otherwise law abiding citizens their heads would explode. All of mine are legal, but I've seen my share of those that clearly are not, but nobody cares because the only thing they are hurting with them is their own wallet. Just like the number of people I've seen smoking weed. Nobody cares and nobody is gonna call the cops.
That is far more true about cars. Focusing on that first would save far more lives. Heck, banning Automatic transmissions for everyone except those with disabilities would seriously reduce the number of serious accidents by forcing people to be more attentive when they drive.
You don't use PVC, you use black pipe. Builds a lot more pressure before bursting.
The violent crime rate has skyrocketed however.
Since 1996 in Australia, homicides are up 3.2 percent; Assaults are up 8.6 percent , armed robberies have climbed nearly 45 percent; In the Australian state of Victoria, gun homicides have climbed 300 percent In the 25 years before the gun bans, crime in Australia had been dropping steadily, not anymore.
Violent crime rate, not murder rate. There is a difference
The violent crime rate in the US is about 4-5 times higher than it is in the US. So while you are less likely to be murdered, you're far more likely to be beaten within an inch of your life in the UK than the US.
The difference we have here is the price, you seem to think that the corps would pay,
By the end of the 19th century US corporations were paying the highest wages in the world, yet American made goods were the cheapest in the world, even when you factored in the cost of shipping them overseas.
I believe that the ONLY reason you have minimum wage jobs at all is because that makes people cheaper than the machine so they hire people.
The reason you have minimum wage jobs is because the people in question have a marginal productivity that is only worth $8 an hour.
Lets take fast food as an example...what job is there in Mickey D's that couldn't be done BETTER by a fully automated assembly line? After all its less than a dozen ingredients all told being used and probably a good 85% of their sales are the preset combos, so why would they need ANY humans in Mickey D, or Wendy's or any of those pre-fab fast food joints?
It can't be, at least with current or near future tech, which is why it isn't. Those automated food assembly lines you see on Discovery Channel? Those are high speed/high volume machines and they take a gargantuan amount of space and require an army of skilled technicians to maintain. You're not going to fit something like that into a McDonalds. You're the one claiming it's possible, you should at least be able to come up with some sort of proof of concept.
In the western part of North Dakota where the oil boom has been happening for years, you have people working at McDonalds earning $20 an hour, yet there is no sign of even attempting to increase automation. Why do they make $20 in the western part of ND and $9 in the eastern part? Because the demand for unskilled labor in that area outstrips the supply. in the eastern part, there is a lower demand for unskilled labor and a greater supply.
The reason you even HAVE a minimum wage law in the first place is to keep Blacks and Hispanics "in their place" on the cotton and cabbage farms and not competing with skilled white workers, as skilled and unskilled workers can be substituted for one another in many areas of the economy by various means. It's one of the last Jim Crow laws that are still on the books in the US, along with the Wagner Act.
The answer is the same answer as to why there are more Chinese working than Americans right now, which is they DON'T need the humans at all they are just cheaper so to maximize profits the smart move is to go with the cheaper resource which is the human. but the only reason those humans are cheaper is because of government subsidy, without that the machine would win.
No, the only reason their workers are cheaper than our workers is because of the over-regulation of the US combined with the fiat money system we have today (and the Chinese pegging their currency to the devaluing US dollar, stealing the purchasing power of their citizens and giving it to Americans.) Again, Henry Ford paid the highest wages and yet produced the cheapest cars.
The machines would also not win, a robot with the dexterity of a 5 year old is an immensely expensive thing and a robot with the reasoning skill of a 5 year old has yet to be built.
Look at the auto industry, unions got a living wage, the humans got replaced by robots.
No they didn't. They got replaced with cheaper and more versatile non-union workers elsewhere. What Auto makers wanted even more than cheaper workers was a more flexible workforce. The Union work rules make it very difficult to have a cross-trained and flexible workforce that can respond to changing market conditions.
As for the robots, the ones you so frequently see on TV are the ones spot welding the chassis together. They are not used because machines are inherently cheaper than humans. Have you ever seen a spot welder appropriate for welding a car frame? Have you ever used one? Do you
Imperial stuff does work in nearly every field. That why guys who know how to do fractions can hand build rafters in houses with simple tools. I have yet to see a metric version of the imperial roofers square that "just works".
In most of the building industry, very few things are the size they claim to be but they work together in a system. A modern 1/2 pipe has no dimension that is 1/2 inch (just like a modern 12 mm pipe or is that 13 mm?). Carpet is sold by yards but its width assumes normal installation wastage so a 12 foot roll will fit in a 12 ft room that might be 12'1" wide (which is typical).The metric world seems to be working hard on recreating the foot since nearly all building materials are based on multiplies of 300 mm units (what I call a "metric foot")
I've never seen someone confuse feet and inches but I've seen lots of people drop a an order of magnitude in the metric system. I've even seen furniture at Ikea that claims it was 8 cm wide. I've also noticed that people who can estimate in feet tend to get their numbers about +/- 2 feet when guessing at room sizes but metric people tend to be +/- 2 meters. I'm not convinced that humans and metric are such a good match anymore.
In short, use what works for you and shut the hell up, the adults have work to do. I'll standardize on Metric instead of Imperial if the French standard on English instead of French, as the latter will do far more to make trade easier than the US going metric for daily life.
People are always in favor of diversity, as long as it it's THEIR diversity.
Exactly, this is why Toyota built car plants in the US. Bulk shipping parts and assembling locally is far cheaper than shipping completed cars.
Exactly, take one particular hobby of mine, ammunition reloading. Everything is in grains when it comes to weight. 1 gram = 15.4323584 grains
Bullet weight, case capacity (in grains of water.)
Of VITAL importance is the powder charge weight. It is stated town to the tenth of a grain and most scales are accurate down to tenth of a grain. Milligrams are too small and result in numbers are too large to be easily held in ones head. Ounces or grams result in nasty decimal messes. Much like feet and inches, grains results in easy to remember sets of numbers.
When the penalty for screwing up is having a pipe bomb inches from your face people are going to use something that minimizes the chances of mistakes.
You know what they meant. The last time I used a thermometer for boiling water was in 10th grade chemistry class.
I sometimes think the government does what it can to let those sorts of movements grow in order to keep people distracted from the much more boring, but much more harmful things the government is really doing.
That and I would bet quite a few of those people would be absolutely fine if it was George Bush doing it. I and others have said it repeatedly that Obama is just repeating all the policies of George Bush. The rhetoric is a little different, but the policies are effectively the same, more bailouts, more war, more of the same failed low interest rate economic policy. So in some ways, they need some way to denounce Obama, yet do it without denouncing the policies that they would support if it was Bush/Romney doing them.
Seems like nothing is going to change until the dollar tanks and 40 years of exported inflation come back to the US.
You cherrypick exactly ONE type of situation that would fare badly for the "insurgents". Let me run another one past you.
The Federal government imposes a massive cap and trade scheme that means the price of energy will quadruple, forcing many businesses to close. Seven Midwestern state governments, with massive popular support, tell the Feds to go piss up a rope and in retaliation begin collecting all revenue that would otherwise be destined for the federal government. All major LEO agencies in those states pledge not to cooperate with the Feds in any way.
You're the Federal government, what do you do? What CAN you do that would actually work long term and not make more of a mess?
Not to mention that shooting people and stealing their stuff attracts a lot more police resources than someone who just steals people's stuff.
Please provide a source of a US gun manufacturer knowingly selling guns to n illegal organization, other than the US government.
I worked the gun counter at the local Wal-Mart when I was going to school. I denied many sales and my manager discovered many instances of straw buys. The ATF did not care how many straw buy attempts we reported, they never prosecuted a single one.
That right there is the problem, the government does not enforce the laws on the books already. How is passing more going to change anything?