You're arguing a straw man. I didn't say that there never should be any national environmental regulations, I said that for wood stoves, the regulations should be state and local.
Extremists like you are responsible for much of the dysfunction in Washington.
AFAIK, the problem with "stack rank" was that it let go of people at the bottom regardless of how good their performance was in absolute terms; that's not reasonable, because sooner or later you end up kicking out good performers. Letting people go who actually are performing badly is different, and seems reasonable.
It's possible to assist the poor with buying better stoves, and the up-front costs of doing so would probably be lower than the residual Medicare and Medicaid payouts for respiratory diseases caused or worsened by their old stoves
But not just the poor have to buy these stoves, everybody does. So the costs are much higher. And you don't assist "the poor", you make them poor in the first place by increasing the amount of money they need to get by. Furthermore, the cost/benefit tradeoffs of this rules are unclear. Most particulates don't come from wood stoves. And the number of lives saved is unclear as well.
But I guess it's easier to denigrate every federal employee as a rich, do-nothing "busybody" who drives home to their "mansion" after "throwing the poor under the bus" than it is to see an obvious solution where the poor are healthier and more comfortable for less money than we're already putting out, and everyone breathes less soot.
This isn't the federal government's business. And there is little that is "obvious" about this solution; whether its cost/benefits are worth it, whether it is effective, and who benefits and gets hurt by it are far from clear.
The busybodies in our government have no problem throwing the poor under the bus to achieve some feel-good goal so they can go home to their mansions at night and feel good about themselves. They're hurting real people.
Don't worry: they'll give you government handouts that they get by taxing the middle class.
It strikes me as reasonable to ask the government to step in and tell you that you can't have such things on your property because it affects me.
That's entirely reasonable for government to do. The question is how.
It isn't reasonable for the federal government to do this. This is a matter for state and local governments. And it should primarily be a matter for the courts and civil liability, unless this becomes such a widespread issue that making a law is warranted.
Honestly, I don't think is was bought. Wood burning stoves are a huge, huge source of dangerous particulate pollutions in many states in the north
The effects of this are local, not national. Northern states and towns should be able to make these tradeoffs locally. There is no reason for the federal government setting rules or the entire nation.
If they have risen in the UK, it's due to poor government regulations and taxes. In the US, electricity prices have fallen significantly since 1988 in constant dollars, and unless people like Obama destroy the economy and energy market, they are going to continue to fall..
Furthermore, you are paying a significant opportunity cost on the money; you'd likely have gotten a 250% return if you had invested the money since 1987. And even if PV were worth it, you'd probably be better off waiting a few years for a newer, cheaper system. And that's not even counting the cost of maintenance, repairs, and cleaning.
"The German government has responded to the next big challenge in its energy transition – storing the output from the solar boom it has created — by doing exactly what it has successfully done to date: greasing the wheels of finance to bring down the cost of new technology.
Unfortunately, that's been ineffective: costs for solar have come down no faster than they would have without German government intervention. Also at EU 20-28k, you can pay for decades of electricity usage, and that's not even taking into account maintenance. Waste of money.
Except, of course, when competitors use and lobby for fake "safety" concerns in order to hurt competitors, or when politicians drum up fake "safety" concerns in order to get votes.
I doesn't have "2x the CPU hardware"; the number of cores bears little relationship to the amount of "CPU hardware" a chip has. For mobile systems, people often use more cores but slower cores to save battery life, because for most tasks only one core needs to be activated. You'd use all cores only on compute-intensive tasks. And for benchmark comparisons, it gets even trickier because some benchmarks may be able to take advantage of lots of slow cores, while others prefer fewer faster cores. In the end, what really matters is the price/performance on real software, and the Nexus 5 certainly "beats the crap" out of the iPhone in that regard, giving you similar performance at a fraction of the price. (FWIW, I think both Java and Objective-C suck, but that's an entirely different discussion.)
Yup, because burning CPU cycles at twice the rate to run "fast enough" is the way to awesome battery life.
It makes no difference to battery life; almost all the battery usage on Android phones goes to the display and the radio. And CPU-bound applications (e.g., PhotoSphere) are written using native code anyway.
You're going to lose the customer anyway because you're selling an obsolete item, something that joins expensive fountain pens, handmade suits, and buggy whips as items that once used to be commonplace but now are only used by elites with too much money.
This is kind of like people used to design cryptography before there were sound mathematical and information theoretic results: "Hey, this looks complicated to us. It must be a good crypto algorithm. Bet you can't break it."
Unlike cryptography, this actually looks like a solution in search of a problem.
You're right: it's all about moral bankruptcy and tu quoque fallacies. Europeans are trying to assuage their guilty collective conscience by demonizing the US and trying to avoid coming to terms with their own genocidal and imperialist history. Not only is that a "tu quoque" fallacy, the analogy is actually completely wrong: flawed and misguided as the use of US military force in the world is, there is no analogy to the crimes against humanity that the European militaries and nations have been guilty of over the past few centuries.
Unlike conservatives, I think the US should call Europe's bluff. The US should leave NATO, reduce its military spending to 1% of GDP (more than enough for domestic defense needs), largely withdraw from Europe and the Middle East, and tell Europeans to f*ck themselves next time the shit hits the fan in Russia, the Middle East, or Africa.
Americans just don't like to think of themselves as the most militaristic nation on Earth, which is why they either can't see it, or keep denying it
Yes, we are the "most militaristic nation on Earth", by default. It's because Europe is hiding behind our coattails, still hurting badly from WWII and trying to pretend that Europeans didn't rape, pillage, and commit genocide around the world for centuries. And while people like you wallow in their self-righteous indignation, your politicians still beg the US for military help whenever there is the slightest problem anywhere.
I think the US should call Europe's bluff, withdraw its troops from Europe and leave NATO. Europe has the resources to defend itself. Faced with unrest and threats in its own neighborhood, and without the US to run to, Europeans will have to make a choice whether to defend themselves or live with the consequences.
My experience is that Europeans recognized the satire immediately, while Americans thought it was a serious movie glamourising American militarism.
No, we understood that it was meant as satire. We also understood what you don't seem to understand, namely that as satire, it is an expression of a European inability to deal in a mature and reasonable way with their own history and their own defense. Grow up people.
I will note that the movie made no attempt to delve into the political statements made in the book. Of course, Hollyweird isn't really into libertarian thought, so they would have brushed over that if they did understand it.
Place blame where it belongs: the politics of the film are a consequence of Verhoeven's attitudes and beliefs, not of Hollywood. Hollywood doesn't give a hoot about the politics of a movie as long as it doesn't interfere with sales.
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Wow, you really are that dumb.
Are you really so dumb to think that the only way in which counties or states can resolve differences is by a regulation from the federal government?
The federal government should limit exercise of its powers to those areas where all local solutions have failed. That's clearly not the case here.
You're arguing a straw man. I didn't say that there never should be any national environmental regulations, I said that for wood stoves, the regulations should be state and local.
Extremists like you are responsible for much of the dysfunction in Washington.
AFAIK, the problem with "stack rank" was that it let go of people at the bottom regardless of how good their performance was in absolute terms; that's not reasonable, because sooner or later you end up kicking out good performers. Letting people go who actually are performing badly is different, and seems reasonable.
And Fairbanks can make local rules for wood burning stoves; it is for them to make the necessary trade-offs.
The idea that the federal government can make a trade-off that works in both Fairbanks and Florida is the error here.
But not just the poor have to buy these stoves, everybody does. So the costs are much higher. And you don't assist "the poor", you make them poor in the first place by increasing the amount of money they need to get by. Furthermore, the cost/benefit tradeoffs of this rules are unclear. Most particulates don't come from wood stoves. And the number of lives saved is unclear as well.
This isn't the federal government's business. And there is little that is "obvious" about this solution; whether its cost/benefits are worth it, whether it is effective, and who benefits and gets hurt by it are far from clear.
Don't worry: they'll give you government handouts that they get by taxing the middle class.
That's entirely reasonable for government to do. The question is how.
It isn't reasonable for the federal government to do this. This is a matter for state and local governments. And it should primarily be a matter for the courts and civil liability, unless this becomes such a widespread issue that making a law is warranted.
So is the "Ministry of Truth". See a pattern?
It's far worse elsewhere; just have a look at Europe.
The effects of this are local, not national. Northern states and towns should be able to make these tradeoffs locally. There is no reason for the federal government setting rules or the entire nation.
If they have risen in the UK, it's due to poor government regulations and taxes. In the US, electricity prices have fallen significantly since 1988 in constant dollars, and unless people like Obama destroy the economy and energy market, they are going to continue to fall..
Furthermore, you are paying a significant opportunity cost on the money; you'd likely have gotten a 250% return if you had invested the money since 1987. And even if PV were worth it, you'd probably be better off waiting a few years for a newer, cheaper system. And that's not even counting the cost of maintenance, repairs, and cleaning.
Unfortunately, that's been ineffective: costs for solar have come down no faster than they would have without German government intervention. Also at EU 20-28k, you can pay for decades of electricity usage, and that's not even taking into account maintenance. Waste of money.
Except, of course, when competitors use and lobby for fake "safety" concerns in order to hurt competitors, or when politicians drum up fake "safety" concerns in order to get votes.
I doesn't have "2x the CPU hardware"; the number of cores bears little relationship to the amount of "CPU hardware" a chip has. For mobile systems, people often use more cores but slower cores to save battery life, because for most tasks only one core needs to be activated. You'd use all cores only on compute-intensive tasks. And for benchmark comparisons, it gets even trickier because some benchmarks may be able to take advantage of lots of slow cores, while others prefer fewer faster cores. In the end, what really matters is the price/performance on real software, and the Nexus 5 certainly "beats the crap" out of the iPhone in that regard, giving you similar performance at a fraction of the price. (FWIW, I think both Java and Objective-C suck, but that's an entirely different discussion.)
It makes no difference to battery life; almost all the battery usage on Android phones goes to the display and the radio. And CPU-bound applications (e.g., PhotoSphere) are written using native code anyway.
Android already supports applications using native code. But a lot of apps just don't need it.
You're going to lose the customer anyway because you're selling an obsolete item, something that joins expensive fountain pens, handmade suits, and buggy whips as items that once used to be commonplace but now are only used by elites with too much money.
No, it is not a satire about Europe. It is a reflection of Verhoeven's prejudices and bigotry, rooted in his background.
And yours for that matter.
Well, you certainly need something, because you still haven't learned from history.
This is kind of like people used to design cryptography before there were sound mathematical and information theoretic results: "Hey, this looks complicated to us. It must be a good crypto algorithm. Bet you can't break it."
Unlike cryptography, this actually looks like a solution in search of a problem.
You're right: it's all about moral bankruptcy and tu quoque fallacies. Europeans are trying to assuage their guilty collective conscience by demonizing the US and trying to avoid coming to terms with their own genocidal and imperialist history. Not only is that a "tu quoque" fallacy, the analogy is actually completely wrong: flawed and misguided as the use of US military force in the world is, there is no analogy to the crimes against humanity that the European militaries and nations have been guilty of over the past few centuries.
Unlike conservatives, I think the US should call Europe's bluff. The US should leave NATO, reduce its military spending to 1% of GDP (more than enough for domestic defense needs), largely withdraw from Europe and the Middle East, and tell Europeans to f*ck themselves next time the shit hits the fan in Russia, the Middle East, or Africa.
Yes, we are the "most militaristic nation on Earth", by default. It's because Europe is hiding behind our coattails, still hurting badly from WWII and trying to pretend that Europeans didn't rape, pillage, and commit genocide around the world for centuries. And while people like you wallow in their self-righteous indignation, your politicians still beg the US for military help whenever there is the slightest problem anywhere.
I think the US should call Europe's bluff, withdraw its troops from Europe and leave NATO. Europe has the resources to defend itself. Faced with unrest and threats in its own neighborhood, and without the US to run to, Europeans will have to make a choice whether to defend themselves or live with the consequences.
No, we understood that it was meant as satire. We also understood what you don't seem to understand, namely that as satire, it is an expression of a European inability to deal in a mature and reasonable way with their own history and their own defense. Grow up people.
Place blame where it belongs: the politics of the film are a consequence of Verhoeven's attitudes and beliefs, not of Hollywood. Hollywood doesn't give a hoot about the politics of a movie as long as it doesn't interfere with sales.
But not a change from killing environmental activists on the Rainbow Warrior.
Note that the French court is attempting to impose a worldwide ban. How's that for European legal overreach?