Company my friend worked for had a similar problem with cheating a standards body. In the end, company was fined and no single person/team was found guilty. Lower level employees were shifting blame one level up, upper level said it wasn't even a decision just a team issued directive to reach a milestone, programmers said it started as a test that never went away, CEO claimed he was under too much pressure from shareholders (to be able to stop it once he learned about it).
Umm... yeah.
At its basic level, a corporation is a legal fiction designed to shield liability. Success!
It's NOT an issue of bias in only looking at examples where old shit happened to last a long time. That's what the person I replied to claimed. It's horse shit. If that were the case, and new shit lasts just as long or longer than old shit, then the typical experience of someone with long-lived old things would be that the new shit is better. That's not the typical experience. If it were, people wouldn't bitch about new shit not lasting long.
I actually wonder about this a little, but not necessarily from the point of view you might think.
My parents got a washer/dryer set when they got married. The washer lasted about 22 years, the dryer lasted about 31 years. They were Maytags, which, 45 years ago, was a high-quality high-cost American brand. Maytag as a company/brand has been bought and sold about 5 times since then, and they are no longer a high-quality brand, nor are they an American brand any more, really.
I bought a house about 15 years ago, and bought a washer and dryer at the same time. Reasonable mid-range Maytags, actually (even though, even at the time, the brand wasn't what it once was). The dryer got replaced after about 11 years (after the third repair on it for a rusted drum roller, DIY repair cost about $20). Replaced it with an LG. The washer got replaced after 15 years, don't remember what I replaced it with, I think an inexpensive GE. I don't expect to get 15 years from either one.
Yeah, I complain that stuff doesn't last as long as it used to. But...
Part of that, really, is that the market has changed, and there is more low-end short-term crap available. This distorts the market, and makes it harder to be an informed consumer. It is harder to filter out the crap and only buy the high-quality stuff, and, frankly, because it is harder, the sales volumes for the high-quality stuff is lower, and therefore the unit costs go up even more, making the high-quality stuff even more expensive than it otherwise would "need" to be.
How many people are still willing to buy the high-end high-quality high-cost items that should last a long time? Fewer as a percentage of population than 40 years ago? How many of those (like me) are turned off by the high-tech crap that is needlessly added to appliances? (I avoided a washing machine with an LCD touchscreen display, because I don't expect that to work for 10+ years, and, frankly, I want real buttons. That touchscreen model was $300 more than what looked like an equivalent model with buttons. Was there a quality increase included with that $300 that wasn't appearent, that I missed out on becuase I didn't want the touchscreen? I doubt it, but how would I know?)
I do wonder if the problem isn't that good-quality stuff isn't around, it is just that the consumer can't tell the difference with all the identically-marketted cheap crap that floods the shelves and the Amazon pages. Read the user/buyer comments on the pages at Amazon, it helps avoid some of the crap... but not all of it.
I agree that we should end the drug war. It has gone worse than Prohibition.
Prohibition was, at least nominally, a moral stance that alcohol was bad and should be totally banned. The War on Drugs (also called "The War on (Some) Drugs" if you are trying to smear the pharmaceutical industry) was a law enforcement and social control program, really. You can make the argument that it, like criminalization of maurijuana, was to allow the government to lock up black people easier. There's a great conspiracy theory that maurijuana is illegal because FBI Director Hoover wanted to lock up the Black Panthers, and they weren't otherwise actually breaking laws that he could pin on them (not to say they were innocent, just the drug dealing was a lot easier to prove and convict). There's also a great conspiracy theory that maurijuana is illegal because Dow Chemical's new miracle nylon ropes couldn't compete against hemp ropes, so they got maurijuana (and hemp) made illegal.
If we want to stop immigration, we simply need a national employment database and fine the hell out of any employer employing people not approved to work.
Look up the E-Verify system. Employers can already verify citizenship/immigration status, but it is not currently required, and businesses don't want to do it, because it loses them access to cheap labor. It will especially impact small farms, and lots of agricultural and meat processing facilities. Also lawn services, construction, and plenty of other businesses where people work hard physical labor, usually outside. You know, the kind of jobs that most Americans want their kids to get good educations so they won't have to do, but that still need to be done.
But many of the people losing their children are not coming here simply for work. They are facing being murdered in their home country.
This is where I show I don't fit well into either Democrat or Republican columns. Coming to America for a better life, or a life where you can live the way you want with less government control, is a big part of how this country grew over the last 200 years. I'm a big believer in that. And that's what we have our normal legal immigration laws to cover. We also have the asylum immigration laws, and I don't know as much about that as I feel I should, but I've never agreed that "There is a high violent crime rate in my home country" is a good enough reason for an asylum claim. Government persecution, yes, organized crime, maybe, my spouse beats me, no, I don't think that should qualify. Bear in mind, I've always considered "asylum" to really be more about "political asylum" which is obvious in my thinking there, isn't it? Can you tell I don't acutally know the law there?
And Sessions is quoting the bible while ignoring Jesus and all the tales relating to being a good samaritan, kind to strangers, etc. And he's using the same verse used to justify slavery and many other heinous crimes.
If you look at the history for Paul's letters to the Romans, he wrote several of them while IN JAIL. You know, being imprisoned for breaking the law. He was a big believer in obeying a government's laws that represented the will of God, but not so much a government that did not represent God's will.
There's a saying that goes with this... "The Devil quotes scripture too". Simply finding a line in the Bible that seems to support your position is not enough to claim the moral high ground. You still have to make the case that what you are doing is right, and I don't think they've done that successfully yet. Half the Trump administration isn't even trying to do that, because they don't think what they are doing *is* right. They *may* believe it is the least bad of several very bad options, but that is not at all the same statement as "is good and right".
>>> General Flynn was an honorable man. I don't know what he did to make the dark state so angry - but clearly he did *something* to precipitate his purge. I believe he was trying to protect the Republic from its many enemies within.
General Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI regarding his Russian contacts. Drop the conspiracy theories already.
Best I can tell, Flynn's problem was he was too focused on one problem. He was a good example, unfortunately, of a large part of the US military from 2001-2014. Totally and completely focused on international terrorism to the exclusion of all else. He thought the only existential threat to the US was "radical Islamic terrorism" (you can conjure demons with those words, be careful) and that anything in the pursuit of stopping that was good for the country. So he cooperated with the Russians - and probably Turkey - in pursuit of that goal to a degree that crossed legal lines and got himself (and probably his son) into trouble. Then he lied about it. Then (the real problem that made Trump fire him) he admitted to lying about it.
I firmly believe General Flynn is a patriot who loves his country, and he was so focused on one problem facing his country that he ignored the real damage he was doing to his country. If he actually accepts what he did, he probably feels awful about his actions and the damage he has caused.
Of course, if you read the reports about people who worked with him in his 2-3 jobs before he retired from the military, he's also an egotistical ass. The two are not mutually exclusive.
>>Battery tech will improve dramatically, They've been saying that about smartphones too.. And we're still waiting for a smartphone that can last more then a day of heavy use.
Look at the volume of a battery in an old Nokia candybar phone from 2000. Now look at the volume of the battery on a current-production smartphone. The smartphone battery is less than half the size, and rated for a higher capacity.
Battery tech has improved dramatically, and manufacturers, generally, took those improvements and used them to make smaller batteries with the same capacity, not same-size batteries with larger capacity.
I disagree with that decision, I'd prefer a slightly thicker phone with a 2-day battery, because then 500 charge cycles on the phone means it lasts 3 years. For some reason, they didn't listen to me. Or maybe they did, and made a design choice that forces me to replace a phone more often (or at least the battery). You don't think they'd design things to make you need to buy their product more often, do you?
It is not restricted to guns, though that's certainly what most of the debate revolves around today. It's likely that even when the second amendment was written, it wasn't intended specifically to refer to guns. [snip] There's no reason to limit the second amendment to guns.
Remember, the founders had just finished fighting a war. They were pretty familiar with military speech and technology. They debated this stuff a lot. They said "Arms" on purpose. They did not say "Arms and Armaments", and they did not say "Arms and Artillery".
In the military, going back several hundred years before the American war for independence, and continuing to today, "Arms" means pistols, rifles, and such. "Armaments" and "Artillery" is, depending on time period, catapults, trebuchets, cannons, howitzers, mortars, things more in that range.
I think it is completely reasonable to believe many of the Founders would support "the people" as individuals owning full-auto M-16s and AK-47s. I don't think they would support individuals owning an US Army M198 or M777 155mm Howitzer.
Everything above that line I quoted makes sense. Actually, I agree with much of what follows that line, too, but I felt it worth noting one specific thing I did disagree with.
I see the labor force participation rate [bls.gov] climb from 1970 to 1990, flat until 2007, then fall. That decline is a pretty recent thing...
If all you are doing is talking about population distribution in age ranges, you might want to re-think your argument.
In the US we have a nice population spike right at/after WWII, we call that the Baby Boomers. Born between 1940 and 1960, or so. And, hey, now in 2016 those people are between 56 and 76 years old. So your complaint about a falling labor force participation rate starting around 2007 is when the big Baby Boomer spike started hitting 65 years old.
Definition: The civilian labor force participation rate is the number of employed and unemployed but looking for a job as a percentage of the population aged 16 years and over. (definition from http://www.tradingeconomics.co...)
You're complaining that old people are not forced to work until they drop dead on the job.
He donates to his own foundation to get tax breaks
Actually, you are wrong here. There isn't any evidence that he has donated to his foundation for many years. After all, if you don't pay any tax, there is no tax break to be had from donations!
Sort of. What I read with this, is that for several corporate personal appearances, he directed that his appearance fee be donated to his foundation. He did this with (I think) Comedy Central for a $400,000 fee. By the tax code, a directed donation under these circumstances is a donation by *him*, not by Comedy Central. The problem for Trump there, is that for a case like that, while he doesn't owe income tax for that directed donation (assuming the Trump Foundation keeps its tax-exempt status, which is looking less likely), he does owe payroll tax for it, which is about 12%.
So there is tax to be paid, but not income tax. This is part of how Hillary Clinton can (somewhat correctly, speculatively) accuse Trump of not paying any federal income tax for years, and Trump can (honestly) reply that he has paid lots of taxes over the years. She says "federal income tax" and he says "tax", and they aren't talking about the same thing. That's on purpose by both of them.
If they're receiving "free" money or services from the government, then they most certainly ARE taking money from those that are actually working hard and paying into the system
This is a serious question, and a big part of that "protestant work ethic" thing the parent poster complained about. I get a real sense of satisfaction by working to provide for my family. That comes with a certain feeling that other people should have to work like that too, to provide for themselves and their families.
But...
I'd love to live in your hypothetical world where the majority of people can just loaf around because they don't have to really work, yet our economy still won't collapse into the shitter
We really are rapidly moving to the point where 5% of the earth's population can provide *all* the needed goods and services for the world. What happens to the other 95% of people?
180 years ago, in the United States, 90% of the population was involved in food production. Now less than 5% is - I think it's closer to 3%, but I'm not sure of the exact number. The transition was a massive dislocation for all those ex-farmers and ranchers. But they (or their kids, if they couldn't handle the transition) became the workers in American factories, fuelling the industrial revolution in this country. The factory jobs are on the way out, replaced by automation. Most of those people moved to service industry jobs (or, again, their kids), and now those service industry jobs are on the way out.
Where do the people that had those jobs go?
Where do people that only have a high school education go? Not everyone is good college material, so Sanders' solution of free college for all really doesn't fix that. What do we, as a society, do with people that we can't really find a productive use for? My father-in-law says "The world needs ditch diggers" (sarcastically) but really, a back hoe is way better at that than a guy with a shovel.
So do we let them starve? Do we feed, house, and clothe them in some basic way? How? What kind of education do we give their kids, if 90+% of them will grow up just to sit around doing nothing? You want to educate them, because one of them might win the genetic lottery and grow up to make an amazing advancement in physics that will finally get us off this stinking planet in a reasonable way.:)
Since the inception of HT, is there a reason CPU design hasn't advanced to the point of executing 4 threads per core rather then the 2 it always has been?
Workload and system balance, mostly.
If you look back several years (2008? earlier?) you'll see some Sun Sparc designs, and some IBM POWER designs, that supported 4 or 8 threads per core. They worked well for very specific workloads and applications.
The Sun Sparc designs with 8 threads per core were mostly tailored for "simple" highly-scalable web servers, where a thread is blocking on I/O most of its time, and a web server could spawn many many threads to support many simultaneous connections. Worked very well for that purpose.
IBM did stuff like that with their POWER architecture for terminal servers and financial transaction processing, where, again, the thread spends most of its time blocking on I/O.
You don't get that so much for Intel x86/x64 systems, because, on the desktop side, frankly, most users don't use 4 cores well, and the few that do aren't doing I/O-blocking tasks, they are doing CPU-bound tasks, video encoding, stuff that hits the SIMD units hard. HT doesn't benefit nearly as well for CPU-bound tasks, and that market is small enough not to be worth the extra architecture/development time. For x64 servers, there is a bit more of a market there, but Intel would much rather serve that market with their high-end Xeon 4-socket systems. 10 cores per CPU, 4 CPUs, you get 40 cores and 80 threads. Oh, and you pay about $4,000 per CPU that way. That also gets you ridiculous amounts of RAM, and better networking support too. Usually you want both of those on your 80-thread server system, anyway.
So I suppose the answer is, basically, it has, but only where it's worthwhile.
The problem in the sig
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0. is really at the step
1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1
Because that is wrong. The step pretends to be sqrt() on both sides, but that's not what it is, because sqrt() really has 2 answers. sqrt(1) is either +1 or -1, simultaneously. To get the step as shown, what is really happening is abs(sqrt()).
Which obviously yields invalid results. You can't do abs() on both sides of an equal sign and expect to keep a valid equation.
But I agree with you, it looks like it should end "2=0", if you allow the wrong sqrt() step.
But maybe the real root of the problem is, why does the US truly need to 'project force' in a unilateral sense?
Because the 1800's taught us that wars on our own soil are bad. See, for example, the British burning Washington D.C. during the War of 1812 (which actually lasted 1812-14). The reason it is called the WHITE House was a not-so-subtle "Screw You!" to the British when we rebuilt it after they burned it to the ground.
The 1900's taught us that wars "over there" are much better. The US was the major economic and miltary superpower from 1945 to 1990 because our infrastructure wasn't destroyed by a continent-wide war 1939-1945.
A slightly different question is "Do we need to meddle in other people's affairs?" but, as a species, humans aren't good at not poking the bee hive.
If there is evidence that a legislator is guilty of insider trading, or any other crime, they should be tried by their peers in congress, not by the justice dept.
The problem here is that doesn't work in practice. For evidence supporting this statement, I give you every internal police investigation into officer wrong-doing ever. If you haven't found it yourself before, how about this article written by an Air Force colonel whose son was shot in the head by police while hand-cuffed in custody. The officers were cleared of wrong-doing by an internal investigation. I don't expect an unbiased viewpoint from this man, but the stats he found don't make "tried by their peers" sound like anything resembling a workable solution.
People and groups put in charge of writing laws, with a history of making laws that benefit themselves and hold themselves to a lower standard than the rest of the population, need more oversight, not less.
Extreme right: Cut spending to equal revenue. Extreme left: Raise revenue to equal spending. Center: Continue to give everyone whatever they want, and borrow money from China to pay for it.
Really?
I thought the Extreme Right plan was cut revenue to destroy government, the Extreme Left plan was raise revenue while raising spending more, and the Center just looks left and right with a bewildered expression while muttering "Don't you people have any brains???"
Most Extreme Right seem to want government services without paying for them, and/or want a system that is only good for the rich and lucky. I'm middle class with manageable debt, good job and health insurance, and no real medical problems. That counts as "lucky" in America.
Most Extreme Left seem to want the government to take most of the roles of family, and some of the roles of community (while usually not admitting that community used to equal church).
150 years ago it wasn't that unusual for 3 generations of a family to live in one house. That covered retirement for the old, child care for the young, and consolidated housing expenses that made life possible. We don't do that so much any more, and we are still trying to figure out how to make our new system work.
I admire the problem, but I don't have a good solution that scales to 300 million people.
I have a Maytag dryer that I bought in 2002. Bought the washing machine with it, like most people who buy appliances when setting up a new house.
That dryer developed a nasty high-pitched squeal - metal on metal rubbing that didn't used to do that. Spend some time looking around on google, and this model has a known problem with this. It's a front-load dryer, and the drum sits on two rollers. The right-side roller is directly under a vent and gets condensed water dripping on it. So the metal wheel inside the roller rusts, wears away, and the dryer starts squealing.
You can buy a replacement roller kit on Amazon for about $7. It takes 1-2 hours to take the dryer apart (door, front panel, drum access plates, drum) to get access to the drum roller on the back inside wall of the dryer, change the roller, and put it all back together again. There are videos on Youtube giving step-by-step directions for doing this.
I've done this twice now. The first time was a pain to do, the second was just annoying in a "What? Again?" kind of way. I assume I'll do it a third time in another year or two.
It's worth doing for $7 DIY.
No way I'd pay someone $100-$200 to fix it for me. The attitude is "The dryer's not worth that much!"
As you say, the labor costs kill the repair market.
But if you can use a screw driver and a pair of plyers, it's amazing how much stuff that is designed to fail with "planned obsolescence" you can fix and keep working.
I'm told you have the same issues with cars, but frankly there I'm willing to pay someone to do the maintenance for me. I think I'm mostly worried about an expensive "learning experience" that leaves me without a vehicle at an inconvenient time. But I've got friends that would never pay someone to do an oil change on their car. They can do it themselves easier and cheaper, plus they like working on cars.
It's personal comfort level as much as anything else.
I've gotten several speeding tickets in the last 20 years. Only contested one of them, just paid the rest. I *was* speeding, after all.
The one I went to court for? 53 in a 45 mph zone. When I looked down at my speedometer, after seeing the police cruiser, my speedometer read 50. I probably coasted a few mph slower between seeing the cop car, cursing quietly, and looking down, so that's fine.
But the cop wrote up the ticket for an intersection that doesn't exist, a block over and up where the two roads don't actually cross. I'm anal enough, I wanted the ticket corrected before I paid it. So I go in to court, and the officer can't find the certification for his speedometer calibration within the previous 6-month period, required by Florida law at the time for moving-mode radar guns - he was driving past me in the opposite direction. So I sat quietly, didn't say a word, and the judge dismissed the ticket before they ever talked to me.
And I got rewarded for being picky about details.:) Doesn't hapopen very often, but I take my victories where I can.
And you "save" not tax with a 401(k), you just get to defer some. The Roth is the only one that lets you "avoid" tax.
You don't avoid taxes with either of them. Not exactly. You make a guess about your current tax rates versus your future tax rates, and act based on the guess.
For a traditional IRA, or a 401(k), you contribute pre-tax dollars (salary that doesn't count towards income tax). This is generally assumed to be contributed at a time in your life when you are in a higher income tax bracket, and you are contributing dollars that would be taxed at a higher rate, 28%, maybe, and instead will pay tax on it when you withdraw it. The assumption is that, in your retirement, your "income" is lower, therefore your tax rate is lower, maybe only 20%, so you avoid paying 8% income tax by paying the tax later rather than sooner.
A Roth IRA is for people in one of two situations. They have maxed out their traditional IRA contributions (IRS only allows about $15,000/year), and/or they don't have a job-associated 401(k) or 403(b). Basically, a 403(b) is a 401(k) but your employer is a charity. For the Roth IRA, you pay taxes on contributions now, and when you take the money out in retirement, it is tax free because taxes were already paid on contributions. If your tax rate now is lower than you think your tax rate will be in retirement, this is a good option for you.
It's all about minimizing taxes based on expectations of current and future marginal tax rates.
My point is only that excess residential solar has little value, since it's generated when it's least needed. [Because if it was needed, houses wouldn't be generating extra.]
That's not usually how these kinds of rooftop solar systems are designed. Or, at least, its not the only way they can be designed.
The other way - that causes the grip operator the most trouble - is to spec the rooftop solar system so that it generates, over a year's time frame, the amount of kWh that the house uses. That makes you "net-0" for grid usage. That means that during the day, when you are getting power from the rooftop solar, you are almost *always* generating more than you use. And at night, when you are generating none, you get power from the grid. But over the course of a year, the power you draw from the grid and the power you supply to the grid approximately equal.
Your power bill should be zero, right? Well, not really. Because you're using the grid as a big redundant battery for overnight and cloudy days. And you should pay for that.
This is the situation that most clearly shows the need to separate the grid charges into "plant maintenance" and "electricity production". Plant maintenance covers the cost of the electrical lines, transformers, sub-stations, some reasonable percentage of the cost of the generating system (the coal plant or whatever), and labor for maintenance, plus reasonable overhead. Electricity production covers the cost of the fuel/coal/gas/whatever, the "rest" of the cost for the generating system, maintenance, and again reasonable overhead.
Honest grid operators (contradiction? I hope not) and honest rooftop solar advocates (err...) should both be pushing for this.
Fair enough; I will revise my statements in the future.
Hey, this is Slashdot. Changing your opinion based on facts you weren't previously aware of isn't allowed around here. Next thing you know, we'll be having rational discussions.
The crime rate has plummeted in recent decades, you know.
Not the only factor, I know, but...
There's a really interesting 10-15 year lag from the removal of leaded gas from American society, and the drop in the crime rate. It's almost like exposure to lead in early childhood causes developmental problems in the brain related to anger management and impulse control in adults. Maybe there's even some medical studies on the effects of lead in people...
Didn't the Romans have societal problems when they introduced lead-lined aqueducts?
Causation, correlation, and coincidence. Whatever, it's a fun little statistic (not to be confused with useful data).
Yeah, this is basically how I interpretted it. Where the hydrogen comes from is outside scope of the sales pitch. I don't care about a portable battery replacement though.
I have a house with "common asphalt shingles" like most home owners in the US. When that house needs to be re-roofed, I'd like to get a set of solar panels, if I can convince myself at the time that it is cost-effective. That will probably be in 10-15 years, as the house was built in the mid-1990s. A large part of the cost of consumer rooftop solar panels is the installation, not the panels. Double the number of panels, installation cost doesn't change that much, use the extra energy to split water into hydrogen, store the hydrogen and use it at night to power the house when the sun doesn't shine. Keep the electric utility connection (and, reasonably, pay some kind of "connection fee" even if I don't use any electricity, probably even if I net provide power instead of consume it) and I have self-sufficient home electrical power for a one-time payment. I can probably tax deduct the interest if I pay for it with a home improvement loan, too.
Now, is it really economically feasible to do that? The rooftop solar panels and DC-AC converters, yeah, they tend to have an okay ROI now, less than 15 years for a system that should last 25-30 years.
Add in a water electrolysis system, hydrogen storage, and a hydrogen fuel cell? Okay, that's harder to make the numbers work out right. I'm still hopeful for 10 years from now, though.
It's hard to convince myself this won't become standard in the southern US in 20 years, if the engineering can get worked out.
Come on now. If you see a traffic cop, he's not there to "protect and serve." They are the Badged Highwaymen, state-sanctioned assholes whose job it is to flip the lights on behind random people in the universal cop-sign for "stick em up and hand over your wallet, brownie."
Seriously? As an honest reply to this (okay, I admit, I just got trolled) traffic cops are there for several reasons. A) Revenue collection. I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit that up front.
B) Keeping traffic close to speed limits. Yeah, the definition of "close" varies from cop to cop, and that makes it hard for a driver to drive with a lot of confidence of just how fast you can drive without getting a ticket. I hate that. I'd like an up front admission of "The speed limit is 70, but we won't ticket anyone doing under 82 unless they are otherwise driving unsafely". We'll never see that. Besides, "driving unsafely" is hard to define, but it's easy to give the guy changing lanes unsafely a speeding ticket, and it punishes unsafe behavior about as well (which means, not very) as a reckless driving ticket does, but it takes less to defend in court.
C) Being nearby when there is an accident. A nearby traffic cop is a first-responder for a traffic accident, and that job saves lives. They also do care-and-comfort during and after accidents. You look in any highway patrolman's trunk, and you'll find a teddy bear to be given to the little kid that survived a traffic accident (whose parent maybe didn't).
Most good traffic cops (and almost all Highway Patrol) regard speeding tickets as a way to get traffic to slow down so when there is an accident, there will be fewer deaths. In their job, it's always "when" and not "if" there is an accident. Energy is mass times velocity squared, remember.
Doing A lets the state pay for more cops to be around for C. Can't really tell you if I like that trade-off or not.
And yeah, none of this stops me from being pissed when I get a speeding ticket. Don't they have something better to do than bug me when I'm not hurting anyone?!?!;)
This is one of those "Lying with facts" things that needs more context to correctly understand.
The House of Representatives is currently controlled by a Republican majority, 232 (R) vs 200 (D). A simple majority is all that is required to pass any Bill in the House of Representatives, therefore, so long as the Republican caucus can keep its members in line, they can pass anything, no matter how much Democrats hate it, with no thought at all about compromise.
The Senate, on the other hand, has a Democrat majority of 53 Democrats, plus 2 independents that caucus with the Democrats. That's 55 Democrati-caucussed Senators. That's a "Democratic-controlled Senate", true. However.... Functionally, the Senate can't pass much of anything, especially a budget bill, without a 60-vote majority. Therefore, they require at least 5 Republican Senators to agree to a mutually-acceptable Bill. Quoting myself above... "so long as the Republican caucus can keep its members in line"...
For the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass a budget bill, the Republicans and Democrats have to find an acceptable compromise. For the Republican-controlled House to pass a budget bill, the Republicans don't have to care about an acceptable compromise at all.
The House passes a Budget Bill. The Senate doesn't. Pretending those are equivalent situations is lying with facts.
The larger issue is that neither side seems willing to compromise much at all, so finding an acceptable compromise is much harder that you'd normally think it would be.
There are several other people on this thread that are giving similar (unsupported, oops) comments about T. Boone Pickens and his interest in water rights.
Honestly, I mostly admire his business sense. He saw/sees a bunch of related problems, and found a great way to make buckets of money off of providing a solution to the problems.
The problems that he is providing a solution to, in no particular order: A) Several large Texas cities are going to have to limit growth very soon if they don't get another reliable source of water. B) Automobiles produce a lot of CO2 as "pollution" in burning gasoline. C) Coal-fired electricity plants make a "lot" of CO2 pollution also. Society needs more electricity, but people claim to want "green" power. It is possible to build a clean coal plant, but, to my knowledge, it has not been done, and is estimated as being about the same cost to construct as a nuclear plant, but has continuing fuel costs that nuclear pants don't have.
Pickens has found a great solution to these problems, from his point of view.
1) He has a LOT of natural gas that he owns rights to in the US, and he wants to switch cars over to natural gas from the US, instead of oil imported from countries that, frankly, the US should not be sending large amounts of money to. With high oil prices ($140/barrel I think?), natural gas is competitive price-wise. 2) He can, with good financing, build wind turbine power systems that produce reasonable power, though it has the difficulty of all wind systems that it is "surgy". It is not a consistent supply, even averaged across 300,000 acres. He needs high voltage transmission lines to move this power around. My understanding is that Texas already recognizes the need for more high voltage power transmission lines anyway. Pickens wants the right of way for those lines for his companies, rather than someone else's. 3) If he gets right of way for utility services, he can build water pipes alongside those transmission lines to ship water from distant aquifers to those soon-to-be water-starved Texas cities. Strikes me as efficient use of the right of way land.
And he'll make a lot of money providing this solution. Is it a bad solution? Frankly, there are a lot worse ideas. But I have to wonder if Pickens views it as an all-or-nothing affair, or if he is willing to do just pieces of it. My impression so far is that he wants to do the whole thing, and thinks that it is a matter of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". He may even be right.
But from what I've seen, he only advertised the "clean wind energy" part of things heavily. He somewhat advertised the "cars burning natural gas" but I never could decide if he was advertising that as cleaner, or simply as not foreign dependent energy. I never really saw him advertising the water rights piece, but my impression was that it was very important to him and his plan.
How's that for a better explanation of an unsupported conspiracy theory?:)
Slashdot Mirror
Umm... yeah.
At its basic level, a corporation is a legal fiction designed to shield liability. Success!
Next?
I actually wonder about this a little, but not necessarily from the point of view you might think.
My parents got a washer/dryer set when they got married. The washer lasted about 22 years, the dryer lasted about 31 years. They were Maytags, which, 45 years ago, was a high-quality high-cost American brand. Maytag as a company/brand has been bought and sold about 5 times since then, and they are no longer a high-quality brand, nor are they an American brand any more, really.
I bought a house about 15 years ago, and bought a washer and dryer at the same time. Reasonable mid-range Maytags, actually (even though, even at the time, the brand wasn't what it once was). The dryer got replaced after about 11 years (after the third repair on it for a rusted drum roller, DIY repair cost about $20). Replaced it with an LG. The washer got replaced after 15 years, don't remember what I replaced it with, I think an inexpensive GE. I don't expect to get 15 years from either one.
Yeah, I complain that stuff doesn't last as long as it used to. But...
Part of that, really, is that the market has changed, and there is more low-end short-term crap available. This distorts the market, and makes it harder to be an informed consumer. It is harder to filter out the crap and only buy the high-quality stuff, and, frankly, because it is harder, the sales volumes for the high-quality stuff is lower, and therefore the unit costs go up even more, making the high-quality stuff even more expensive than it otherwise would "need" to be.
How many people are still willing to buy the high-end high-quality high-cost items that should last a long time? Fewer as a percentage of population than 40 years ago? How many of those (like me) are turned off by the high-tech crap that is needlessly added to appliances? (I avoided a washing machine with an LCD touchscreen display, because I don't expect that to work for 10+ years, and, frankly, I want real buttons. That touchscreen model was $300 more than what looked like an equivalent model with buttons. Was there a quality increase included with that $300 that wasn't appearent, that I missed out on becuase I didn't want the touchscreen? I doubt it, but how would I know?)
I do wonder if the problem isn't that good-quality stuff isn't around, it is just that the consumer can't tell the difference with all the identically-marketted cheap crap that floods the shelves and the Amazon pages. Read the user/buyer comments on the pages at Amazon, it helps avoid some of the crap... but not all of it.
Prohibition was, at least nominally, a moral stance that alcohol was bad and should be totally banned. The War on Drugs (also called "The War on (Some) Drugs" if you are trying to smear the pharmaceutical industry) was a law enforcement and social control program, really. You can make the argument that it, like criminalization of maurijuana, was to allow the government to lock up black people easier. There's a great conspiracy theory that maurijuana is illegal because FBI Director Hoover wanted to lock up the Black Panthers, and they weren't otherwise actually breaking laws that he could pin on them (not to say they were innocent, just the drug dealing was a lot easier to prove and convict). There's also a great conspiracy theory that maurijuana is illegal because Dow Chemical's new miracle nylon ropes couldn't compete against hemp ropes, so they got maurijuana (and hemp) made illegal.
Look up the E-Verify system. Employers can already verify citizenship/immigration status, but it is not currently required, and businesses don't want to do it, because it loses them access to cheap labor. It will especially impact small farms, and lots of agricultural and meat processing facilities. Also lawn services, construction, and plenty of other businesses where people work hard physical labor, usually outside. You know, the kind of jobs that most Americans want their kids to get good educations so they won't have to do, but that still need to be done.
This is where I show I don't fit well into either Democrat or Republican columns. Coming to America for a better life, or a life where you can live the way you want with less government control, is a big part of how this country grew over the last 200 years. I'm a big believer in that. And that's what we have our normal legal immigration laws to cover. We also have the asylum immigration laws, and I don't know as much about that as I feel I should, but I've never agreed that "There is a high violent crime rate in my home country" is a good enough reason for an asylum claim. Government persecution, yes, organized crime, maybe, my spouse beats me, no, I don't think that should qualify. Bear in mind, I've always considered "asylum" to really be more about "political asylum" which is obvious in my thinking there, isn't it? Can you tell I don't acutally know the law there?
If you look at the history for Paul's letters to the Romans, he wrote several of them while IN JAIL. You know, being imprisoned for breaking the law. He was a big believer in obeying a government's laws that represented the will of God, but not so much a government that did not represent God's will.
There's a saying that goes with this... "The Devil quotes scripture too". Simply finding a line in the Bible that seems to support your position is not enough to claim the moral high ground. You still have to make the case that what you are doing is right, and I don't think they've done that successfully yet. Half the Trump administration isn't even trying to do that, because they don't think what they are doing *is* right. They *may* believe it is the least bad of several very bad options, but that is not at all the same statement as "is good and right".
Best I can tell, Flynn's problem was he was too focused on one problem. He was a good example, unfortunately, of a large part of the US military from 2001-2014. Totally and completely focused on international terrorism to the exclusion of all else. He thought the only existential threat to the US was "radical Islamic terrorism" (you can conjure demons with those words, be careful) and that anything in the pursuit of stopping that was good for the country. So he cooperated with the Russians - and probably Turkey - in pursuit of that goal to a degree that crossed legal lines and got himself (and probably his son) into trouble. Then he lied about it. Then (the real problem that made Trump fire him) he admitted to lying about it.
I firmly believe General Flynn is a patriot who loves his country, and he was so focused on one problem facing his country that he ignored the real damage he was doing to his country. If he actually accepts what he did, he probably feels awful about his actions and the damage he has caused.
Of course, if you read the reports about people who worked with him in his 2-3 jobs before he retired from the military, he's also an egotistical ass. The two are not mutually exclusive.
Look at the volume of a battery in an old Nokia candybar phone from 2000. Now look at the volume of the battery on a current-production smartphone. The smartphone battery is less than half the size, and rated for a higher capacity.
Battery tech has improved dramatically, and manufacturers, generally, took those improvements and used them to make smaller batteries with the same capacity, not same-size batteries with larger capacity.
I disagree with that decision, I'd prefer a slightly thicker phone with a 2-day battery, because then 500 charge cycles on the phone means it lasts 3 years. For some reason, they didn't listen to me. Or maybe they did, and made a design choice that forces me to replace a phone more often (or at least the battery). You don't think they'd design things to make you need to buy their product more often, do you?
Hmm
You had me nodding until you got to here:
Remember, the founders had just finished fighting a war. They were pretty familiar with military speech and technology. They debated this stuff a lot. They said "Arms" on purpose. They did not say "Arms and Armaments", and they did not say "Arms and Artillery".
In the military, going back several hundred years before the American war for independence, and continuing to today, "Arms" means pistols, rifles, and such. "Armaments" and "Artillery" is, depending on time period, catapults, trebuchets, cannons, howitzers, mortars, things more in that range.
I think it is completely reasonable to believe many of the Founders would support "the people" as individuals owning full-auto M-16s and AK-47s. I don't think they would support individuals owning an US Army M198 or M777 155mm Howitzer.
Everything above that line I quoted makes sense. Actually, I agree with much of what follows that line, too, but I felt it worth noting one specific thing I did disagree with.
If all you are doing is talking about population distribution in age ranges, you might want to re-think your argument.
In the US we have a nice population spike right at/after WWII, we call that the Baby Boomers. Born between 1940 and 1960, or so. And, hey, now in 2016 those people are between 56 and 76 years old. So your complaint about a falling labor force participation rate starting around 2007 is when the big Baby Boomer spike started hitting 65 years old.
Definition: The civilian labor force participation rate is the number of employed and unemployed but looking for a job as a percentage of the population aged 16 years and over. (definition from http://www.tradingeconomics.co...)
You're complaining that old people are not forced to work until they drop dead on the job.
This is really the argument you want to make?
Sort of. What I read with this, is that for several corporate personal appearances, he directed that his appearance fee be donated to his foundation. He did this with (I think) Comedy Central for a $400,000 fee. By the tax code, a directed donation under these circumstances is a donation by *him*, not by Comedy Central. The problem for Trump there, is that for a case like that, while he doesn't owe income tax for that directed donation (assuming the Trump Foundation keeps its tax-exempt status, which is looking less likely), he does owe payroll tax for it, which is about 12%.
So there is tax to be paid, but not income tax. This is part of how Hillary Clinton can (somewhat correctly, speculatively) accuse Trump of not paying any federal income tax for years, and Trump can (honestly) reply that he has paid lots of taxes over the years. She says "federal income tax" and he says "tax", and they aren't talking about the same thing. That's on purpose by both of them.
This is a serious question, and a big part of that "protestant work ethic" thing the parent poster complained about. I get a real sense of satisfaction by working to provide for my family. That comes with a certain feeling that other people should have to work like that too, to provide for themselves and their families.
But...
We really are rapidly moving to the point where 5% of the earth's population can provide *all* the needed goods and services for the world. What happens to the other 95% of people?
180 years ago, in the United States, 90% of the population was involved in food production. Now less than 5% is - I think it's closer to 3%, but I'm not sure of the exact number. The transition was a massive dislocation for all those ex-farmers and ranchers. But they (or their kids, if they couldn't handle the transition) became the workers in American factories, fuelling the industrial revolution in this country. The factory jobs are on the way out, replaced by automation. Most of those people moved to service industry jobs (or, again, their kids), and now those service industry jobs are on the way out.
Where do the people that had those jobs go?
Where do people that only have a high school education go? Not everyone is good college material, so Sanders' solution of free college for all really doesn't fix that. What do we, as a society, do with people that we can't really find a productive use for? My father-in-law says "The world needs ditch diggers" (sarcastically) but really, a back hoe is way better at that than a guy with a shovel.
So do we let them starve? Do we feed, house, and clothe them in some basic way? How? What kind of education do we give their kids, if 90+% of them will grow up just to sit around doing nothing? You want to educate them, because one of them might win the genetic lottery and grow up to make an amazing advancement in physics that will finally get us off this stinking planet in a reasonable way. :)
What do you do with unneeded people?
Workload and system balance, mostly.
If you look back several years (2008? earlier?) you'll see some Sun Sparc designs, and some IBM POWER designs, that supported 4 or 8 threads per core. They worked well for very specific workloads and applications.
The Sun Sparc designs with 8 threads per core were mostly tailored for "simple" highly-scalable web servers, where a thread is blocking on I/O most of its time, and a web server could spawn many many threads to support many simultaneous connections. Worked very well for that purpose.
IBM did stuff like that with their POWER architecture for terminal servers and financial transaction processing, where, again, the thread spends most of its time blocking on I/O.
You don't get that so much for Intel x86/x64 systems, because, on the desktop side, frankly, most users don't use 4 cores well, and the few that do aren't doing I/O-blocking tasks, they are doing CPU-bound tasks, video encoding, stuff that hits the SIMD units hard. HT doesn't benefit nearly as well for CPU-bound tasks, and that market is small enough not to be worth the extra architecture/development time. For x64 servers, there is a bit more of a market there, but Intel would much rather serve that market with their high-end Xeon 4-socket systems. 10 cores per CPU, 4 CPUs, you get 40 cores and 80 threads. Oh, and you pay about $4,000 per CPU that way. That also gets you ridiculous amounts of RAM, and better networking support too. Usually you want both of those on your 80-thread server system, anyway.
So I suppose the answer is, basically, it has, but only where it's worthwhile.
Tim
The problem in the sig
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
is really at the step
1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1
Because that is wrong. The step pretends to be sqrt() on both sides, but that's not what it is, because sqrt() really has 2 answers. sqrt(1) is either +1 or -1, simultaneously. To get the step as shown, what is really happening is abs(sqrt()).
Which obviously yields invalid results. You can't do abs() on both sides of an equal sign and expect to keep a valid equation.
But I agree with you, it looks like it should end "2=0", if you allow the wrong sqrt() step.
Because the 1800's taught us that wars on our own soil are bad. See, for example, the British burning Washington D.C. during the War of 1812 (which actually lasted 1812-14). The reason it is called the WHITE House was a not-so-subtle "Screw You!" to the British when we rebuilt it after they burned it to the ground.
The 1900's taught us that wars "over there" are much better. The US was the major economic and miltary superpower from 1945 to 1990 because our infrastructure wasn't destroyed by a continent-wide war 1939-1945.
A slightly different question is "Do we need to meddle in other people's affairs?" but, as a species, humans aren't good at not poking the bee hive.
The problem here is that doesn't work in practice. For evidence supporting this statement, I give you every internal police investigation into officer wrong-doing ever. If you haven't found it yourself before, how about this article written by an Air Force colonel whose son was shot in the head by police while hand-cuffed in custody. The officers were cleared of wrong-doing by an internal investigation. I don't expect an unbiased viewpoint from this man, but the stats he found don't make "tried by their peers" sound like anything resembling a workable solution.
People and groups put in charge of writing laws, with a history of making laws that benefit themselves and hold themselves to a lower standard than the rest of the population, need more oversight, not less.
Try again.
Really?
I thought the Extreme Right plan was cut revenue to destroy government, the Extreme Left plan was raise revenue while raising spending more, and the Center just looks left and right with a bewildered expression while muttering "Don't you people have any brains???"
Most Extreme Right seem to want government services without paying for them, and/or want a system that is only good for the rich and lucky. I'm middle class with manageable debt, good job and health insurance, and no real medical problems. That counts as "lucky" in America.
Most Extreme Left seem to want the government to take most of the roles of family, and some of the roles of community (while usually not admitting that community used to equal church).
150 years ago it wasn't that unusual for 3 generations of a family to live in one house. That covered retirement for the old, child care for the young, and consolidated housing expenses that made life possible. We don't do that so much any more, and we are still trying to figure out how to make our new system work.
I admire the problem, but I don't have a good solution that scales to 300 million people.
I have a Maytag dryer that I bought in 2002. Bought the washing machine with it, like most people who buy appliances when setting up a new house.
That dryer developed a nasty high-pitched squeal - metal on metal rubbing that didn't used to do that. Spend some time looking around on google, and this model has a known problem with this. It's a front-load dryer, and the drum sits on two rollers. The right-side roller is directly under a vent and gets condensed water dripping on it. So the metal wheel inside the roller rusts, wears away, and the dryer starts squealing.
You can buy a replacement roller kit on Amazon for about $7. It takes 1-2 hours to take the dryer apart (door, front panel, drum access plates, drum) to get access to the drum roller on the back inside wall of the dryer, change the roller, and put it all back together again. There are videos on Youtube giving step-by-step directions for doing this.
I've done this twice now. The first time was a pain to do, the second was just annoying in a "What? Again?" kind of way. I assume I'll do it a third time in another year or two.
It's worth doing for $7 DIY.
No way I'd pay someone $100-$200 to fix it for me. The attitude is "The dryer's not worth that much!"
As you say, the labor costs kill the repair market.
But if you can use a screw driver and a pair of plyers, it's amazing how much stuff that is designed to fail with "planned obsolescence" you can fix and keep working.
I'm told you have the same issues with cars, but frankly there I'm willing to pay someone to do the maintenance for me. I think I'm mostly worried about an expensive "learning experience" that leaves me without a vehicle at an inconvenient time. But I've got friends that would never pay someone to do an oil change on their car. They can do it themselves easier and cheaper, plus they like working on cars.
It's personal comfort level as much as anything else.
I've gotten several speeding tickets in the last 20 years. Only contested one of them, just paid the rest. I *was* speeding, after all.
The one I went to court for? 53 in a 45 mph zone. When I looked down at my speedometer, after seeing the police cruiser, my speedometer read 50. I probably coasted a few mph slower between seeing the cop car, cursing quietly, and looking down, so that's fine.
But the cop wrote up the ticket for an intersection that doesn't exist, a block over and up where the two roads don't actually cross. I'm anal enough, I wanted the ticket corrected before I paid it. So I go in to court, and the officer can't find the certification for his speedometer calibration within the previous 6-month period, required by Florida law at the time for moving-mode radar guns - he was driving past me in the opposite direction. So I sat quietly, didn't say a word, and the judge dismissed the ticket before they ever talked to me.
And I got rewarded for being picky about details. :) Doesn't hapopen very often, but I take my victories where I can.
You don't avoid taxes with either of them. Not exactly. You make a guess about your current tax rates versus your future tax rates, and act based on the guess.
For a traditional IRA, or a 401(k), you contribute pre-tax dollars (salary that doesn't count towards income tax). This is generally assumed to be contributed at a time in your life when you are in a higher income tax bracket, and you are contributing dollars that would be taxed at a higher rate, 28%, maybe, and instead will pay tax on it when you withdraw it. The assumption is that, in your retirement, your "income" is lower, therefore your tax rate is lower, maybe only 20%, so you avoid paying 8% income tax by paying the tax later rather than sooner.
A Roth IRA is for people in one of two situations. They have maxed out their traditional IRA contributions (IRS only allows about $15,000/year), and/or they don't have a job-associated 401(k) or 403(b). Basically, a 403(b) is a 401(k) but your employer is a charity. For the Roth IRA, you pay taxes on contributions now, and when you take the money out in retirement, it is tax free because taxes were already paid on contributions. If your tax rate now is lower than you think your tax rate will be in retirement, this is a good option for you.
It's all about minimizing taxes based on expectations of current and future marginal tax rates.
That's not usually how these kinds of rooftop solar systems are designed. Or, at least, its not the only way they can be designed.
The other way - that causes the grip operator the most trouble - is to spec the rooftop solar system so that it generates, over a year's time frame, the amount of kWh that the house uses. That makes you "net-0" for grid usage. That means that during the day, when you are getting power from the rooftop solar, you are almost *always* generating more than you use. And at night, when you are generating none, you get power from the grid. But over the course of a year, the power you draw from the grid and the power you supply to the grid approximately equal.
Your power bill should be zero, right? Well, not really. Because you're using the grid as a big redundant battery for overnight and cloudy days. And you should pay for that.
This is the situation that most clearly shows the need to separate the grid charges into "plant maintenance" and "electricity production". Plant maintenance covers the cost of the electrical lines, transformers, sub-stations, some reasonable percentage of the cost of the generating system (the coal plant or whatever), and labor for maintenance, plus reasonable overhead. Electricity production covers the cost of the fuel/coal/gas/whatever, the "rest" of the cost for the generating system, maintenance, and again reasonable overhead.
Honest grid operators (contradiction? I hope not) and honest rooftop solar advocates (err...) should both be pushing for this.
Sounds fair, huh? Right, it'll never work.
The quote you are looking for is this:
For every complicated problem, there exists an answer that is simple, easy, and wrong.
Hey, this is Slashdot. Changing your opinion based on facts you weren't previously aware of isn't allowed around here. Next thing you know, we'll be having rational discussions.
Kids these days. Geez.
The crime rate has plummeted in recent decades, you know.
Not the only factor, I know, but...
There's a really interesting 10-15 year lag from the removal of leaded gas from American society, and the drop in the crime rate. It's almost like exposure to lead in early childhood causes developmental problems in the brain related to anger management and impulse control in adults. Maybe there's even some medical studies on the effects of lead in people...
Didn't the Romans have societal problems when they introduced lead-lined aqueducts?
Causation, correlation, and coincidence. Whatever, it's a fun little statistic (not to be confused with useful data).
Yeah, this is basically how I interpretted it. Where the hydrogen comes from is outside scope of the sales pitch. I don't care about a portable battery replacement though.
I have a house with "common asphalt shingles" like most home owners in the US. When that house needs to be re-roofed, I'd like to get a set of solar panels, if I can convince myself at the time that it is cost-effective. That will probably be in 10-15 years, as the house was built in the mid-1990s. A large part of the cost of consumer rooftop solar panels is the installation, not the panels. Double the number of panels, installation cost doesn't change that much, use the extra energy to split water into hydrogen, store the hydrogen and use it at night to power the house when the sun doesn't shine. Keep the electric utility connection (and, reasonably, pay some kind of "connection fee" even if I don't use any electricity, probably even if I net provide power instead of consume it) and I have self-sufficient home electrical power for a one-time payment. I can probably tax deduct the interest if I pay for it with a home improvement loan, too.
Now, is it really economically feasible to do that? The rooftop solar panels and DC-AC converters, yeah, they tend to have an okay ROI now, less than 15 years for a system that should last 25-30 years.
Add in a water electrolysis system, hydrogen storage, and a hydrogen fuel cell? Okay, that's harder to make the numbers work out right. I'm still hopeful for 10 years from now, though.
It's hard to convince myself this won't become standard in the southern US in 20 years, if the engineering can get worked out.
Seriously? As an honest reply to this (okay, I admit, I just got trolled) traffic cops are there for several reasons.
A) Revenue collection. I'd be dishonest if I didn't admit that up front.
B) Keeping traffic close to speed limits. Yeah, the definition of "close" varies from cop to cop, and that makes it hard for a driver to drive with a lot of confidence of just how fast you can drive without getting a ticket. I hate that. I'd like an up front admission of "The speed limit is 70, but we won't ticket anyone doing under 82 unless they are otherwise driving unsafely". We'll never see that. Besides, "driving unsafely" is hard to define, but it's easy to give the guy changing lanes unsafely a speeding ticket, and it punishes unsafe behavior about as well (which means, not very) as a reckless driving ticket does, but it takes less to defend in court.
C) Being nearby when there is an accident. A nearby traffic cop is a first-responder for a traffic accident, and that job saves lives. They also do care-and-comfort during and after accidents. You look in any highway patrolman's trunk, and you'll find a teddy bear to be given to the little kid that survived a traffic accident (whose parent maybe didn't).
Most good traffic cops (and almost all Highway Patrol) regard speeding tickets as a way to get traffic to slow down so when there is an accident, there will be fewer deaths. In their job, it's always "when" and not "if" there is an accident. Energy is mass times velocity squared, remember.
Doing A lets the state pay for more cops to be around for C. Can't really tell you if I like that trade-off or not.
And yeah, none of this stops me from being pissed when I get a speeding ticket. Don't they have something better to do than bug me when I'm not hurting anyone?!?! ;)
This is one of those "Lying with facts" things that needs more context to correctly understand.
The House of Representatives is currently controlled by a Republican majority, 232 (R) vs 200 (D). A simple majority is all that is required to pass any Bill in the House of Representatives, therefore, so long as the Republican caucus can keep its members in line, they can pass anything, no matter how much Democrats hate it, with no thought at all about compromise.
The Senate, on the other hand, has a Democrat majority of 53 Democrats, plus 2 independents that caucus with the Democrats. That's 55 Democrati-caucussed Senators. That's a "Democratic-controlled Senate", true. However.... Functionally, the Senate can't pass much of anything, especially a budget bill, without a 60-vote majority. Therefore, they require at least 5 Republican Senators to agree to a mutually-acceptable Bill. Quoting myself above... "so long as the Republican caucus can keep its members in line"...
For the Democratic-controlled Senate to pass a budget bill, the Republicans and Democrats have to find an acceptable compromise.
For the Republican-controlled House to pass a budget bill, the Republicans don't have to care about an acceptable compromise at all.
The House passes a Budget Bill. The Senate doesn't. Pretending those are equivalent situations is lying with facts.
The larger issue is that neither side seems willing to compromise much at all, so finding an acceptable compromise is much harder that you'd normally think it would be.
There are several other people on this thread that are giving similar (unsupported, oops) comments about T. Boone Pickens and his interest in water rights.
Honestly, I mostly admire his business sense. He saw/sees a bunch of related problems, and found a great way to make buckets of money off of providing a solution to the problems.
The problems that he is providing a solution to, in no particular order:
A) Several large Texas cities are going to have to limit growth very soon if they don't get another reliable source of water.
B) Automobiles produce a lot of CO2 as "pollution" in burning gasoline.
C) Coal-fired electricity plants make a "lot" of CO2 pollution also. Society needs more electricity, but people claim to want "green" power. It is possible to build a clean coal plant, but, to my knowledge, it has not been done, and is estimated as being about the same cost to construct as a nuclear plant, but has continuing fuel costs that nuclear pants don't have.
Pickens has found a great solution to these problems, from his point of view.
1) He has a LOT of natural gas that he owns rights to in the US, and he wants to switch cars over to natural gas from the US, instead of oil imported from countries that, frankly, the US should not be sending large amounts of money to. With high oil prices ($140/barrel I think?), natural gas is competitive price-wise.
2) He can, with good financing, build wind turbine power systems that produce reasonable power, though it has the difficulty of all wind systems that it is "surgy". It is not a consistent supply, even averaged across 300,000 acres. He needs high voltage transmission lines to move this power around. My understanding is that Texas already recognizes the need for more high voltage power transmission lines anyway. Pickens wants the right of way for those lines for his companies, rather than someone else's.
3) If he gets right of way for utility services, he can build water pipes alongside those transmission lines to ship water from distant aquifers to those soon-to-be water-starved Texas cities. Strikes me as efficient use of the right of way land.
And he'll make a lot of money providing this solution. Is it a bad solution? Frankly, there are a lot worse ideas. But I have to wonder if Pickens views it as an all-or-nothing affair, or if he is willing to do just pieces of it. My impression so far is that he wants to do the whole thing, and thinks that it is a matter of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". He may even be right.
But from what I've seen, he only advertised the "clean wind energy" part of things heavily. He somewhat advertised the "cars burning natural gas" but I never could decide if he was advertising that as cleaner, or simply as not foreign dependent energy. I never really saw him advertising the water rights piece, but my impression was that it was very important to him and his plan.
How's that for a better explanation of an unsupported conspiracy theory? :)