Self driving cars don't need to be better or even as good as all drivers. They just need to be better than 50% of drivers. Considering how bad most people drive that isn't that high a bar.
Most of the time in really averse weather conditions the first thing that local government does is tell people not to drive. Most of the time people ignore this and end up in the ditch, stalled out in a puddle, or even washed away in a flood. You're right. Self driving cars won't handle that. People don't handle that well, they just think they do and shouldn't actually be out on the road.
Actually what will happen is that over time self-driving cars will replace human drivers. At some point insurance companies will start to give self driving car legal targets (either the owners, manufacturers or software companies, i.e. the people that can be sued) discount rates because the self-driving car always follows the laws. That will be the tipping point that will really push the balance. Eventually only self-driving cars will be allowed on the interstates.
Once self-driving cars dominate even human driven cars will have to have always on communication and telemetry. At that point the state will start issuing citations based on big brother watching and people will change their behavior. That already happens in places where there are speed and red-light cameras.
At a nearby intersection there use to be a bad problem with people running the light after it changed, with up to six people going after the light turned red. They put in cameras and got hundreds of violations a day at first. Now all they catch are tourists since everyone local knows they'll get cited if they don't stop.
Not factual. The Supreme Court grabbed authority to interpret the constitution pretty much without authority to do so. The constitution itself certainly did not grant it. By now it has the element of precedence and is not likely to be challenged.
Of course the fact is the Supreme Court has on more than one occasion later overturned its own decisions, effectively meaning its original interpretation was wrong. It has not yet (that I'm aware) manged to throw out its second interpretation and returned to the first, though I expect we'll see that eventually.
At that point we'll have the people pointing out the inconsistency of allowing an effectively uncontrollable (over the short term) political court to carry such power.
You do realize if things get so bad that armed citizens are ready to face down the government using armed conflict that FFL's are likely not a factor?
I mean if things are so bad that you're willing to raise a firearm against the government the laws preventing that gun from being converted to full automatic are probably not going to be a deterrent. Likewise laws controlling explosives.
Last time I checked nuking your own population and land is a loser. You can't lord it over corpses and resources are awful hard to get out of glassed territory.
"Appeal to authority" is the backbone of the AGW movement. Climate scientists won't release their raw data to be checked by people that disagree with their conclusions.
Societies of scientists, like the APS votes on the reality of AGW, based not on the data, but on belief and then tell individuals they should accept AGW based on the fact that 98% of "scientist" support it, like science was a popularity contest.
It's really great when you can put imaginary words in your opponent's mouths to make them sound foolish.
The fact that such words have no relationship to reality is irrelevant to you I guess.
No Republican is saying "All scientists are liars, and thermometers are a hoax invented by Democrats."
What many are saying is that certain scientists are refusing to release their raw data so that it can be independently by verified by experts who don't have an agenda based on preconceived political views. What they are also saying is that emails which were composed by certain scientists involved with the United Nations show a pattern of manipulating the peer review process in a way that punishes scientists who don't agree with them, while also manipulating data to support their preconceived conclusions.
At the most, from a political view, Conservatives are saying some non-scientists, who support a policy of radical income transfer from industrialized nations to third world countries are using the concept of anthropogenic global warming as an excuse to bring about that income transfer.
The purpose of the electoral collage is to prevent the high population urban areas from dominating elections. It fulfilled it's purpose admirably in the last election.
The founders spoke of why they instituted the electoral college, Hamilton speaks of it in the Federalist Papers and Jefferson and Madison wrote on the subject. It is one of the Constitutional limitations designed as part of the balance of power between the states and the federal government which Progressives have been trying to dismantle since the early 20th century.
Attributing it to slavery is a purely modern innovation, mostly pushed by Liberals.
Most of the time mail-in ballots are not even counted. If the difference in vote tallies is less than the number of mail-in ballots most states don't even tally the mail-in ballots.
However with close elections mail-in ballots matter, and you are correct. A better way of verifying mail in ballot validity is required. This is particularly true with some states now allowing anyone to vote mail-in. It use to be that only military people, expatriates and Washington staffers voted by mail-in ballot. Now in some states everyone can do so.
In my experience the reason students don't know about version control is that they never need it. Most of the code they write has one version, the one they turn it for their specific assignment.
Just looking at the present CS program at my old school. There's a lot of math. An algorithm course. One on data and file structures. Computer engineering and digital logic design courses. A C++ and Program language concepts course. Even a single Operating Systems course.
At the 400 (senior) level the student selects three courses from a variety of courses which include Database Management, Operating Systems II, Crypto and network security, Compilers, AI, robotics, Android and something called software design and development.
Very little on anything like User Interface Design, Versioning or Software lifecycles, or anything that would really prepare a student to write programs or more important maintain other people's code in a software organization.
Remember also that at the 400 level a student is only taking three out of 15 or so courses. I suspect a lot of students pick some combination like AI, Robotics and Principles and Applications of Multimedia or some other not highly useful combination, at least not highly useful in a real job, just because they think they're interesting (or easy.)
Just playing devil's advocate here but the benefit to you is that someone who could potentially rob you will be prosecuted and with luck removed to where they can no longer rob you. Society benefits by the prosecution of law breakers.
Having said that I don't believe that such wide nets meet the constitutional requirements. If the FBI has a suspect and can delineate a narrow enough query such as "Where was Joe Shmo at these particular times" or better yet "was Joe Shmo here at this particular time" all well and good. Asking for Google to data mine for a John Doe and cough up a list of people with 40% match to all of the locations or some other vague criteria is the definition of unreasonable search as it violates the rights of all of the innocent people who were in no way involved with the robberies.
NO some ideas are not so harmful we criminalize them. We criminalize actions. Trying to control thought, or speech, is tyranny.
It's surely easier to try to criminalize thought and speech, than to ensure a citizenry which is smart enough to reject harmful ideas, but that is one of the prices of freedom.
True. But such anonymous sources can only be trusted when the reporters/news organizations can be trusted.
One problem in the present is that news organizations and professional reporters have through their actions managed to tarnish their reputations to such an extent that the general public no longer is willing to blindly trust them.
When the Washington Post said they had a reliable source willing to out Nixon people believed them, because they thought they were trustworthy. Were they to say the same thing today I believe most people would demand they identify their source before they would believe it. I know I certainly would.
This is based on the Post's behavior, reporting and more, what they decided not to report, during the last two or three administrations. They no longer deserve the blind trust they once
had, because of their own actions.
So call reputable news organizations basically made up stuff because they didn't like the occupant of the oval office or the candidate running for that office. Or they flagrantly supported one candidate over the other because they preferred the narrative or politics of that candidate.
The reputation of most mainstream news organizations is in the crapper. Gallup reports trust in reporters is at an all time low. In some areas local officials are rated more highly for trust than national news organizations. That's appalling. Over half the people surveyed believe news organizations are biased and that bias effects the way they report the news and what they're reporting.
Oh please. You act like Trump is the first lying sack of shit who has been president, You obviously haven't been looking at the rest of occupants of the oval office for the last hundred years.
Anybody who doesn't believe that Christians are under worldwide attack is obviously not paying attention.
By the way Muslims are under worldwide attack too.
Jews have been under worldwide attack since they traveled to Egypt to escape famine in the ancient past.
We all get you don't like the president. He can't be controlled by the political elites of either party and is actually keeping his campaign promises, which terrifies professional politicians on both sides.
The problem with calling something "Fake news", and Trump has this problem too, is that the term has no real meaning. One can promulgate lies as truth, but one can also promulgate truth as lies. The best way to lie is to tell the truth, just not the whole truth. Leave out context and the truth can become a lie. Then there's the whole point about presenting opinion as fact, ignoring facts that don't match the narrative, etc.
This is not way a left or right problem. It is a left and right problem, and a moderate problem too. Moderates love to ignore inconvenient facts presented by the political far right or far left, even when the facts themselves are actually factual.
People form their ideological perspective based on the information to which they are exposed. If they are exposed primarily to socialist teachers teaching from textbooks that promote socialism, get much of their information from media dominated by socialist then they will form their ideology based on what they have been exposed to.
The fact that a few countries which are primarily monocultural, with populations smaller than some U.S. states, and which have no defense costs because the U.S. protects them, have made some kind of high tax cost social safety nets kind of work is not reflective of the viability of socialism. It just means they haven't run out of other people's money yet.
Let's take a look at Sweden's healthcare system. It has one of the longest waiting times. They're having problems with certain kinds of cancer treatments. Having low patient healthcare costs is no help if you can't get treatment, or the treatment you need is unavailable to you.
U.S. citizens have experience with government run healthcare. It's the VA and anyone who has had to go to the VA for care knows how bad that system is.
That is just not a fact. Any number of entry level positions in the trades do not require a BS/BA. In many cases these jobs lead to positions which have salaries which are higher than what can be expected by someone having a BA/BS.
I myself have a BA and three masters degrees and didn't have to accumulate massive debt to accomplish the task. I'm not rich, I'm just smart. Community college is cheap compared to four year public university. If you work as you attend you can still pay your own way. If you get good grades (and in some cases are just the right gender or minority) you can get scholarships that will cover the next two years after you get your associate at community college. You'll probably have to work too to cover living expenses, though. Once you have your BS/BA many jobs will pay for the masters. If you go into a PhD program you can bet that you'll be on a stipend and someone else will be paying.
Of course you can't party for four years on borrowed money if you actually work and pay. Often while working on my masters I'd put in 40 hours+, sometimes on shift work while carrying 9 credit hours (a full graduate load.) And you need to maintain high grades instead of just squeaking by. Heck most colleges now days don't care what kinds of grades you get as long as you keep paying. The days of expulsion for being on the dean's (bad) list are pretty much gone.
So no. They don't need to go into massive debt to enter the job market
The fact is that we use, industrially, many substances which can lead to health risks if misused. So the real question, which is not discussed by the link, is what kinds of uses of asbestos are being considered and what kinds of mitigations will be in place to insure the use is safe?
The fact the EPA is looking at allowing use of the substance is itself not counter to science. We let people use gasoline, which can be carcinogenic under the right circumstances. A s matter a fact, according to California law we allow people to use all kinds of things which the state of California knows can cause cancer under the right circumstances. It's all about mitigation and whether there is another way to accomplish the goal of the use which is just as good and has no risks.
The reason socialism and every other system will never work is corruption and greed. The problems which are occurring in the United States with crony capitalism are the result of corruption and greed. The reason socialism doesn't work is corruption and greed.
A working economic system must be corruption and greed tolerant, because any economic system that exists will have to deal with corruption and greed because it will contain human beings and some of them will be corrupt and greedy.
The biggest problem with capitalism as it exists in the United States in the present is that corporations are out of control. This is a governance problem. Corporations are an instrument of the state. They were originally created to protect investors engaged in risky business ventures which were socially beneficial, like the transcontinental railway. As originally structured corporations were only allowed to engage in commerce in a very narrow manner. They were specifically barred from diversifying. This was to keep them too weak to do what they have done, which is regulatory capture,
You want to fix crony capitalism? Break up corporations. Revise corporate law to prevent diversification and strengthen stockholder control over boards and corporate executives, and make corporate executives and board members legally responsible for corporate decisions. Yes I know technically they are legally responsible, but very seldom are they criminally prosecuted for corporate actions. Keep corporations small, weak, and narrowly engaged in commerce.
As for fairness, fairness is our problem. Bureaucracies always try to be fair. That's why governments are bad at doing what charities should be doing. A charity can look at two people who are in the same position and help one and refuse to help the other, because one person was just unlucky and the other is a lazy slob. Government must help both, because it's fair. Eventually the unlucky one will recover. The lazy slob will suck at the teat of government forever.
The problem from the beginning of safety nets, in the U.S. at least, has always been that it is cheaper to throw money at people than to actually solve problems. For example welfare programs were suppose to provide temporary support to the marginally employed or unemployed while providing programs that would make them both employable and better, more contributory members of society.
Unfortunately training programs that really work with structured incentives and social intervention that changes people's behavior are really expensive and require a great deal of social commitment. It's cheaper to just throw money at people. So that's what we do.
So what happened was the training programs and intervention programs either never started or were greatly underfunded. Then the failure resulting from underfunding was used as an excuse to kill them. Meanwhile the dole continues.
You know there is no reason that DefCon or any other conference has to take place on the Vegas Strip. There are many other venues available, even in other places in Nevada, that won't require putting up with intrusive Hotel employees.
They better watch it or they just might find people finding other places to hold their conferences.
Because voter fraud does happen. It's not an accident that places like Chicago are have such a reputation for voter fraud that late night talk show hosts make jokes about it.
It becomes even more important in an age where elections are coming down to fractions of a percent and the change of 1 vote in a 1000 can change the election small numbers of fraudulent votes can make a difference.
Check the Wikipedia article on close elections. There are instances where a difference of 1 or 2 votes made a difference. Many more when a few hundred votes carry the day. Lets be clear here. There are two situations which are occurring which benefit Democrats. That is undocumented non-citizens illegally voting and legally disenfranchised felons illegally voting. Voter ID, that would prevent those populations from illegally voting would hurt Democrats and help Republicans. The reason Democrat fight voter ID so strongly.
One can't buy cigarettes or liquor in most places without ID, but somehow having it to vote is burdensome.
I expect these folk are living hand to mouth and the possibility of buying enough solar and batteries plus a refrigerator are beyond their budget. Also you shouldn't underestimate the increased cost of everything just because you're in the middle of no where.
I haven't been to Australia for decades, but as I recall practically everything is shipped by truck, the rail lines went belly up years ago. Gas prices are ~$7 a gallon. Diesel is even more expensive. That has to translate to higher cost for everything, except maybe locally produced foods, which aren't many in the middle of the desert.
Slashdot Mirror
Self driving cars don't need to be better or even as good as all drivers. They just need to be better than 50% of drivers. Considering how bad most people drive that isn't that high a bar.
Most of the time in really averse weather conditions the first thing that local government does is tell people not to drive. Most of the time people ignore this and end up in the ditch, stalled out in a puddle, or even washed away in a flood. You're right. Self driving cars won't handle that. People don't handle that well, they just think they do and shouldn't actually be out on the road.
Actually what will happen is that over time self-driving cars will replace human drivers. At some point insurance companies will start to give self driving car legal targets (either the owners, manufacturers or software companies, i.e. the people that can be sued) discount rates because the self-driving car always follows the laws. That will be the tipping point that will really push the balance. Eventually only self-driving cars will be allowed on the interstates.
Once self-driving cars dominate even human driven cars will have to have always on communication and telemetry. At that point the state will start issuing citations based on big brother watching and people will change their behavior. That already happens in places where there are speed and red-light cameras.
At a nearby intersection there use to be a bad problem with people running the light after it changed, with up to six people going after the light turned red. They put in cameras and got hundreds of violations a day at first. Now all they catch are tourists since everyone local knows they'll get cited if they don't stop.
Not factual. The Supreme Court grabbed authority to interpret the constitution pretty much without authority to do so. The constitution itself certainly did not grant it. By now it has the element of precedence and is not likely to be challenged.
Of course the fact is the Supreme Court has on more than one occasion later overturned its own decisions, effectively meaning its original interpretation was wrong. It has not yet (that I'm aware) manged to throw out its second interpretation and returned to the first, though I expect we'll see that eventually.
At that point we'll have the people pointing out the inconsistency of allowing an effectively uncontrollable (over the short term) political court to carry such power.
You do realize if things get so bad that armed citizens are ready to face down the government using armed conflict that FFL's are likely not a factor?
I mean if things are so bad that you're willing to raise a firearm against the government the laws preventing that gun from being converted to full automatic are probably not going to be a deterrent. Likewise laws controlling explosives.
Last time I checked nuking your own population and land is a loser. You can't lord it over corpses and resources are awful hard to get out of glassed territory.
"Appeal to authority" is the backbone of the AGW movement. Climate scientists won't release their raw data to be checked by people that disagree with their conclusions.
Societies of scientists, like the APS votes on the reality of AGW, based not on the data, but on belief and then tell individuals they should accept AGW based on the fact that 98% of "scientist" support it, like science was a popularity contest.
It's really great when you can put imaginary words in your opponent's mouths to make them sound foolish.
The fact that such words have no relationship to reality is irrelevant to you I guess.
No Republican is saying "All scientists are liars, and thermometers are a hoax invented by Democrats."
What many are saying is that certain scientists are refusing to release their raw data so that it can be independently by verified by experts who don't have an agenda based on preconceived political views. What they are also saying is that emails which were composed by certain scientists involved with the United Nations show a pattern of manipulating the peer review process in a way that punishes scientists who don't agree with them, while also manipulating data to support their preconceived conclusions.
At the most, from a political view, Conservatives are saying some non-scientists, who support a policy of radical income transfer from industrialized nations to third world countries are using the concept of anthropogenic global warming as an excuse to bring about that income transfer.
The purpose of the electoral collage is to prevent the high population urban areas from dominating elections. It fulfilled it's purpose admirably in the last election.
The founders spoke of why they instituted the electoral college, Hamilton speaks of it in the Federalist Papers and Jefferson and Madison wrote on the subject. It is one of the Constitutional limitations designed as part of the balance of power between the states and the federal government which Progressives have been trying to dismantle since the early 20th century.
Attributing it to slavery is a purely modern innovation, mostly pushed by Liberals.
Most of the time mail-in ballots are not even counted. If the difference in vote tallies is less than the number of mail-in ballots most states don't even tally the mail-in ballots.
However with close elections mail-in ballots matter, and you are correct. A better way of verifying mail in ballot validity is required. This is particularly true with some states now allowing anyone to vote mail-in. It use to be that only military people, expatriates and Washington staffers voted by mail-in ballot. Now in some states everyone can do so.
It's a problem that must be solved.
In my experience the reason students don't know about version control is that they never need it. Most of the code they write has one version, the one they turn it for their specific assignment.
Just looking at the present CS program at my old school. There's a lot of math. An algorithm course. One on data and file structures. Computer engineering and digital logic design courses. A C++ and Program language concepts course. Even a single Operating Systems course.
At the 400 (senior) level the student selects three courses from a variety of courses which include Database Management, Operating Systems II, Crypto and network security, Compilers, AI, robotics, Android and something called software design and development.
Very little on anything like User Interface Design, Versioning or Software lifecycles, or anything that would really prepare a student to write programs or more important maintain other people's code in a software organization.
Remember also that at the 400 level a student is only taking three out of 15 or so courses. I suspect a lot of students pick some combination like AI, Robotics and Principles and Applications of Multimedia or some other not highly useful combination, at least not highly useful in a real job, just because they think they're interesting (or easy.)
Just playing devil's advocate here but the benefit to you is that someone who could potentially rob you will be prosecuted and with luck removed to where they can no longer rob you. Society benefits by the prosecution of law breakers.
Having said that I don't believe that such wide nets meet the constitutional requirements. If the FBI has a suspect and can delineate a narrow enough query such as "Where was Joe Shmo at these particular times" or better yet "was Joe Shmo here at this particular time" all well and good. Asking for Google to data mine for a John Doe and cough up a list of people with 40% match to all of the locations or some other vague criteria is the definition of unreasonable search as it violates the rights of all of the innocent people who were in no way involved with the robberies.
NO some ideas are not so harmful we criminalize them. We criminalize actions. Trying to control thought, or speech, is tyranny.
It's surely easier to try to criminalize thought and speech, than to ensure a citizenry which is smart enough to reject harmful ideas, but that is one of the prices of freedom.
True. But such anonymous sources can only be trusted when the reporters/news organizations can be trusted.
One problem in the present is that news organizations and professional reporters have through their actions managed to tarnish their reputations to such an extent that the general public no longer is willing to blindly trust them.
When the Washington Post said they had a reliable source willing to out Nixon people believed them, because they thought they were trustworthy. Were they to say the same thing today I believe most people would demand they identify their source before they would believe it. I know I certainly would.
This is based on the Post's behavior, reporting and more, what they decided not to report, during the last two or three administrations. They no longer deserve the blind trust they once had, because of their own actions.
So call reputable news organizations basically made up stuff because they didn't like the occupant of the oval office or the candidate running for that office. Or they flagrantly supported one candidate over the other because they preferred the narrative or politics of that candidate.
The reputation of most mainstream news organizations is in the crapper. Gallup reports trust in reporters is at an all time low. In some areas local officials are rated more highly for trust than national news organizations. That's appalling. Over half the people surveyed believe news organizations are biased and that bias effects the way they report the news and what they're reporting.
Oh please. You act like Trump is the first lying sack of shit who has been president, You obviously haven't been looking at the rest of occupants of the oval office for the last hundred years.
How can you tell if a politician is lying?
Their mouth is moving.
Anybody who doesn't believe that Christians are under worldwide attack is obviously not paying attention.
By the way Muslims are under worldwide attack too.
Jews have been under worldwide attack since they traveled to Egypt to escape famine in the ancient past.
We all get you don't like the president. He can't be controlled by the political elites of either party and is actually keeping his campaign promises, which terrifies professional politicians on both sides.
The problem with calling something "Fake news", and Trump has this problem too, is that the term has no real meaning. One can promulgate lies as truth, but one can also promulgate truth as lies. The best way to lie is to tell the truth, just not the whole truth. Leave out context and the truth can become a lie. Then there's the whole point about presenting opinion as fact, ignoring facts that don't match the narrative, etc.
This is not way a left or right problem. It is a left and right problem, and a moderate problem too. Moderates love to ignore inconvenient facts presented by the political far right or far left, even when the facts themselves are actually factual.
People form their ideological perspective based on the information to which they are exposed. If they are exposed primarily to socialist teachers teaching from textbooks that promote socialism, get much of their information from media dominated by socialist then they will form their ideology based on what they have been exposed to.
The fact that a few countries which are primarily monocultural, with populations smaller than some U.S. states, and which have no defense costs because the U.S. protects them, have made some kind of high tax cost social safety nets kind of work is not reflective of the viability of socialism. It just means they haven't run out of other people's money yet.
Let's take a look at Sweden's healthcare system. It has one of the longest waiting times. They're having problems with certain kinds of cancer treatments. Having low patient healthcare costs is no help if you can't get treatment, or the treatment you need is unavailable to you.
U.S. citizens have experience with government run healthcare. It's the VA and anyone who has had to go to the VA for care knows how bad that system is.
Ikea is my hero. They funnel their profits through a non-profit so they don't have to pay taxes on it. Crony capitalism at its finest.
That is just not a fact. Any number of entry level positions in the trades do not require a BS/BA. In many cases these jobs lead to positions which have salaries which are higher than what can be expected by someone having a BA/BS.
I myself have a BA and three masters degrees and didn't have to accumulate massive debt to accomplish the task. I'm not rich, I'm just smart. Community college is cheap compared to four year public university. If you work as you attend you can still pay your own way. If you get good grades (and in some cases are just the right gender or minority) you can get scholarships that will cover the next two years after you get your associate at community college. You'll probably have to work too to cover living expenses, though. Once you have your BS/BA many jobs will pay for the masters. If you go into a PhD program you can bet that you'll be on a stipend and someone else will be paying.
Of course you can't party for four years on borrowed money if you actually work and pay. Often while working on my masters I'd put in 40 hours+, sometimes on shift work while carrying 9 credit hours (a full graduate load.) And you need to maintain high grades instead of just squeaking by. Heck most colleges now days don't care what kinds of grades you get as long as you keep paying. The days of expulsion for being on the dean's (bad) list are pretty much gone.
So no. They don't need to go into massive debt to enter the job market
The fact is that we use, industrially, many substances which can lead to health risks if misused. So the real question, which is not discussed by the link, is what kinds of uses of asbestos are being considered and what kinds of mitigations will be in place to insure the use is safe?
The fact the EPA is looking at allowing use of the substance is itself not counter to science. We let people use gasoline, which can be carcinogenic under the right circumstances. A s matter a fact, according to California law we allow people to use all kinds of things which the state of California knows can cause cancer under the right circumstances. It's all about mitigation and whether there is another way to accomplish the goal of the use which is just as good and has no risks.
The reason socialism and every other system will never work is corruption and greed. The problems which are occurring in the United States with crony capitalism are the result of corruption and greed. The reason socialism doesn't work is corruption and greed.
A working economic system must be corruption and greed tolerant, because any economic system that exists will have to deal with corruption and greed because it will contain human beings and some of them will be corrupt and greedy.
The biggest problem with capitalism as it exists in the United States in the present is that corporations are out of control. This is a governance problem. Corporations are an instrument of the state. They were originally created to protect investors engaged in risky business ventures which were socially beneficial, like the transcontinental railway. As originally structured corporations were only allowed to engage in commerce in a very narrow manner. They were specifically barred from diversifying. This was to keep them too weak to do what they have done, which is regulatory capture,
You want to fix crony capitalism? Break up corporations. Revise corporate law to prevent diversification and strengthen stockholder control over boards and corporate executives, and make corporate executives and board members legally responsible for corporate decisions. Yes I know technically they are legally responsible, but very seldom are they criminally prosecuted for corporate actions. Keep corporations small, weak, and narrowly engaged in commerce.
As for fairness, fairness is our problem. Bureaucracies always try to be fair. That's why governments are bad at doing what charities should be doing. A charity can look at two people who are in the same position and help one and refuse to help the other, because one person was just unlucky and the other is a lazy slob. Government must help both, because it's fair. Eventually the unlucky one will recover. The lazy slob will suck at the teat of government forever.
The problem from the beginning of safety nets, in the U.S. at least, has always been that it is cheaper to throw money at people than to actually solve problems. For example welfare programs were suppose to provide temporary support to the marginally employed or unemployed while providing programs that would make them both employable and better, more contributory members of society.
Unfortunately training programs that really work with structured incentives and social intervention that changes people's behavior are really expensive and require a great deal of social commitment. It's cheaper to just throw money at people. So that's what we do.
So what happened was the training programs and intervention programs either never started or were greatly underfunded. Then the failure resulting from underfunding was used as an excuse to kill them. Meanwhile the dole continues.
You know there is no reason that DefCon or any other conference has to take place on the Vegas Strip. There are many other venues available, even in other places in Nevada, that won't require putting up with intrusive Hotel employees.
They better watch it or they just might find people finding other places to hold their conferences.
Proof.
You can maintain anything is true, but people don't have to believe your unfounded assertions just because you make them.
Because voter fraud does happen. It's not an accident that places like Chicago are have such a reputation for voter fraud that late night talk show hosts make jokes about it.
It becomes even more important in an age where elections are coming down to fractions of a percent and the change of 1 vote in a 1000 can change the election small numbers of fraudulent votes can make a difference.
Check the Wikipedia article on close elections. There are instances where a difference of 1 or 2 votes made a difference. Many more when a few hundred votes carry the day. Lets be clear here. There are two situations which are occurring which benefit Democrats. That is undocumented non-citizens illegally voting and legally disenfranchised felons illegally voting. Voter ID, that would prevent those populations from illegally voting would hurt Democrats and help Republicans. The reason Democrat fight voter ID so strongly.
One can't buy cigarettes or liquor in most places without ID, but somehow having it to vote is burdensome.
I expect these folk are living hand to mouth and the possibility of buying enough solar and batteries plus a refrigerator are beyond their budget. Also you shouldn't underestimate the increased cost of everything just because you're in the middle of no where.
I haven't been to Australia for decades, but as I recall practically everything is shipped by truck, the rail lines went belly up years ago. Gas prices are ~$7 a gallon. Diesel is even more expensive. That has to translate to higher cost for everything, except maybe locally produced foods, which aren't many in the middle of the desert.