And while you're at it, the same wires or rails that delivered control signals could deliver power to top of your electric vehicle.
You'd simply pull into the robot lane, and a peg on your car would drop into a kind of... guide slot thingy, with a pair of power and signal rails on either side.
Seriously, this wouldn't be such a bad idea for small electric personal commuter vehicles. You'd program in your destination, the car and network would figure out whether you needed a power boost to reach it. Most people could do their commutes in an electric vehicle with just enough battery to give twenty miles range.
Well, first of all you don't have an basis to make that claim. According to the article the Deebs are cooperating voluntarily, and avoiding citations and fines as a result.
Secondly, when a homeowner does not or cannot correct certain violations, the municipality can take steps to correct that violation without the owner's consent. For example, if you live in a place prone to wild fires, city safety codes may prohibit letting large piles of brush collect on your property. If you receive a citation for having a brush pile and don't remove it in a timely fashion, the city doesn't have to wait for you to change your mind. It can hire a contractor to remove the brush even though its technically your property that is being disposed of. They can even send you the bill.
About the only Constitutional limitation on this process is that it has to be reasonable. If you had an extremely valuable antiqe car up on blocks on your front lawn, the city could ask you to remove it. If you didn't presumably the could dispose of the car, but they couldn't use that as a pretext to seize the car and auction it off to make money.
In this case, the chemicals might represent a considerable investment, but collectively they're worse than valueless; they represent a disposal expense.
is how many people don't know what their Constitutional rights actually are.
Not knowing the extents of your rights is asking for trouble.
OK, so maybe the administrative/criminal search dichotomy is a bit obscure. But you'd better believe that somebody who is in your home for a valid reason, even a private guest, sees your marijuana garden, then that can be probable cause for a criminal warrant. A lot of people here seem to think there's some kind of "no fair" rule that invalidates anything firefighters might notice during a call.
Another point that seems to be lost on people: the government did not bash in the Deebs' door. The Deebs have voluntarily cooperated with the authorities, so Fourth Amendment issues are moot.
No, hobbyists are more trusted than corporations, which is why they are expected to keep their activities on a hobbyist scale.
Corporations need things like discharge permits, which also involve both regular site inspections and sewer water testing. Hobbyists are subject to neither.
I didn't hear the part about the authorities bashing in this guy's front door. Where did you get that?
In any case, they wouldn't need a warrant to demand access to the house, under penalty of fines or other punishments, to investigate zoning or other code violations. That's called an "Administrative Search". The law governing administrative searches is different.
The fourth amendment only requires that such searches be "reasonable", not that it be supported by a warrant. Such searches have never customarily required warrants. About forty years ago the SC clarified the requirements for such searches, which hare somewhat different from the probable cause required for warrants. Pretty much it amounts to being part of a regulation standard which is rational and balanced.
I think you've got this situation well characterized. The question is, how much? You can do a little light manufacturing in your house, after all, without getting a zoning variance.
Likewise a little chemistry is not a problem, but at some point you should have the proper permits to discharge your waste into the sewers (which will probably require inspections), and you really should hire a private trash hauler to deal with your refuse.
There's no problem with experimenting, the issue is how much chemicals you can store of on your site and dispose of through municipal services like trash removal and sewer without a permit.
Details in the article are a bit thin, but nobody is getting raided in Massachusetts for doing chemistry set scale stuff.
According to the newspaper article "most likely" violated numerous state and local regulations. Nobody is tossing out specifics because the town isn't planning to issue a citation. At issue is "how much you're supposed to have, how it's detained, how it's disposed of" in a residential area. So the issue isn't "experimenting", it's storage, processing and disposal at a facility not zoned for those purposes.
Common sense will show you that the scale of experimentation makes a difference. Making a few quarts of biodiesel or a few bars of soap, that's home experimenting. Making a thousand gallons of biodiesel or a thousand pounds of soap is an industrial process. There isn't a precise line between chemistry set stuff and industrial production, but it's there. Making four gallons of beer a week is a lot for a home brewer, but making a hundred gallons a week probably means you've "crossed some line".
The story doesn't really give us enough details to know whether the raid was justified, or served any public purpose. That depends on what they expected to find, why the expected to find it, and what they actually found, none of which is at this time public knowledge. We don't even know what level of government initiated this, it appears it was the town.
One thing that's almost certain is that the search did not require a warrant. It is what is legally called an "administrative search". According to the dictionary an administrative search is "an inspection or search carried out under a regulatory or statutory scheme esp. in public or commercial premises and usu. to enforce compliance with regulations or laws pertaining to health, safety, or security. One of the fundamental principles of administrative searches is that the government may not use an administrative inspection scheme as a pretext to search for evidence of criminal violations."
So the health inspector doesn't need a warrant to check on the crazy lady who has 200 cats in her house, which is a code violation even if its perfectly permissible for her to have 2 cats, or even 20. Likewise I can have a dog or two, but I can't run a kennel in a densely populated suburban neighborhood unless I have a zoning variance (and possibly pay commercial tax rates).
You can argue that there shouldn't be such thing as zoning regulations. And its probably true that there are many places where there is little or no purpose to them. But zoning laws and administrative searches are NOT unconstitutional, at least by the interpretation of the Constitution that has held sway for a century or more.
First of all, they are not saying they'll make their entire economy sustainable and non-polluting. In fact, with the financial advantage of not worrying about pollution, they can well afford a showcase project.
China's track record on this sort of project is not good. For example, one of their showcase efforts at archaeological preservation during the Yangtze river dam project was to demolish one ancient site, and then build an inaccurate replica on higher ground, staffed with costumed interpreters. That's a creative reinterpretation of "preservation", whose value is mainly PR.
And there's even more ways to make an unrealistically favorable impression on a project like this, for example moving the pollution elsewhere.
The trick in building a sustainable, non-polluting system isn't in making it non-polluting. It's making it sustainable. Making a city that actually works. And the trick of sustainability is not to achieve it on a test scale, but on a useful scale. Eskimos dressing in wild sealskin is sustainable; dressing the entire world in sealskin is not.
Still, I think this is an interesting experiment. We'll just have to be skeptical of any results because the regime is very serious about quashing bad PR.
China practices a different kind of economic policy, one that's fallen out of favor in the West since the 1970s. It practices economic nationalism.
In Western democracies, voters have been persuaded to accept a kind of national economic altruism, in which the immediate economic interests of their nations are subjugated to a shared interest in a more efficient international economy. China is still playing the game of grabbing all the national benefit it can, and in an environment where its major trading partners are being altruistic (at least if we disregard class differences in economic impact), they're well positioned to win.
On top of that, China is far better at authoritarianism than most people in the West thought it was possible. It's far more efficient than any authoritarian system we've ever seen before. Rather than put up a page saying a website is banned, they might make the website so unreliable it disappears. Rather than provoke the people with harsh application of draconian laws, they let people know the authorities are watching and have the laws ready if needed.
They've mastered a soft form of authoritarianism which doesn't use crude force to keep the people in line, but by the clever application uncertainty gets the people police themselves. So China has a political system whose values are profoundly at odds with Western values, playing a more aggressive, zero sum game than Western nations do economically. It's perhaps natural that anything they do is viewed with some measure of distrust.
And this is the kind of project only an authoritarian regime could try.
Probably the biggest reasonable environmental concern with GM crops per se s the possibility of genes escaping from the crops into wild relatives or making their way into other domesticated lines, and possibly creating IP problems for poor farmers.
But I think your post drives at a somewhat different, but important point. It's not just the GM crops, but the practices and environmental incentives that make them desirable.
The "cattle industry" is essential to the ecology of places like the American West
Not every aspect of the cattle industry.
Cattle ranching is probably the most energy efficient and least environmentally problematic aspect of the industry. It's the feedlots, where an animal goes gain an additional 60% over its body weight, that are the problems. A feedlot is not only energy intensive, they concentrate what would otherwise be naturally recycled animal waste into pollution.
This is beside the fact that the fat the cattle gain in the feedlot is in the form of saturated fat, contributing to beef's poor health reputation.
Environmentalists, at least the serious environmental thinkers I've known, are aware of what you're saying. The idea that they're anti-farmer is a myth perpetuated by agribusiness. Sure, they might come into disagreement with ranchers over things like water rights and preserving or reestablishing wild predator populations. They're not out to get farmers; they're perfectly happy to see farmers on any scale profiting from efficient, sustainable agriculture. Environmentalists aren't anti-beef, so much as they are anti-feedlot.
Personally, I'd be happy to buy grass fed beef that went directly from rancher to slaughterhouse without the middleman. It's not exactly what I as a cook am used to, but that can be adjusted for, like cooking bison or the leaner pork we get these days. Although it'd be more expensive on a pound basis, it would be environmentally better and healthier to boot. It'd probably be economically better for ranchers as well. But it's almost impossible to find out here in the East. We can get grass fed bison, but not beef.
So, the only way for us to avoid the environmental problems of beef, which are largely concentrated in the feedlots, is to eat less beef, even though many of us would be perfectly happy to give cattle ranchers their share of our food dollar.
There is a branch of government that is in charge of this. It's called the judicial branch. In fact private civil rights organizations only exist to bring problems the courts' attention.
Now with respect to government being dysfunctional -- it is only so to the degree we tolerate it and even require it to be so.
The reason for bureaucracy and red tape is because we the people insist upon it. In the private sector if I hire my cousin Vinny to do a job, if this gets the job done fast at a reasonable price, my boss is happy. And this is right, because the company probably saves money in the end. In the public sector, my department pays more than the private sector does to get the job done, because of the documentation needed to show that I'm not hiring Vinny because he's my cousin, and that other vendors in Vinny's business got a fair shot at the job. And Vinny has to charge more because he has to prove that he isn't charging Uncle Sam more than private sector customers, although this is usually solved by spinning off groups that only sell to Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam ends up buying from vendors who specialize in meeting his unique contracting process needs.
And most of this is right too. Private enterprise is all about private benefit. People make deals and if the deals are profitable then there are no questions asked. Public enterprise is more ethically complicated. For one thing it is not voluntarily funded. You don't have a personal choice about how much tax and how much public benefit you're going to receive this year. This means things like fairness are a lot more important. And time consuming.
Nonetheless, government can do things effectively, if people care enough about them. It just can't do them without employing more red tape than the private sector would. The US military is a case in point. The US has a military that can kick the crap out of any other military in the world. It's highly effective, but it's not particularly financially efficient or red-tape free. The reason is that we the people care about assuring successful military outcomes. In fact we care enough that we're not exactly sharp consumers when it comes to military systems.
It's not so clear that we care about achieving successful outcomes when it comes to our legal and civil rights.
The main problem with the judicial branch is that it can't initiate anything. You have to have money and time to get it moving on a problem, which means that the courts are only for those who have money and time on their hands: the wealthy and organizations like ACLU.
The Justice Department should safeguard American citizens who don't have the money or power to insist upon their rights as individuals. But if we elect a President who thinks he has the power to detain and torture anybody based on suspicion, and let him appoint SC justices that are deferential to these claims, the JD is not much use. I'd say that this is because we the people don't really care about our rights.
The First Amendment doesn't mean that the government can't regulate speech, particularly the timing and method of speech, but even in some cases the content of the speech. However, such regulations must be narrowly tailored to fulfill a legitimate public purpose, such as national defense.
Addressing the vulnerabilities before they become widely exploited is obviously a legitimate public purpose. A restraining order delaying temporarily the release of the details of the vulnerabilities (not the fact of their existence) while they do this would be narrowly tailored to serve that purpose.
I'm not saying it's right, but you should know what your rights actually are. They don't include the right to say whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want without fear of punishment, and they never have.
The important points to remember are (a) legitimate public purpose and (b) narrow tailoring. The narrow tailoring requirement is probably the tougher of the two requirements to meet. In this case, since the details of the problems are in the wild, in part because of the authority's own actions (although this doesn't really matter), any further restriction doesn't serve the purpose of allowing the authority to respond in a timely fashion.
Well, you don't have to become a vegan in any case, and you can get most of the environmental benefit of vegetarianism by eating a reasonable amount of meat instead of the 3/4 pounds of meat an American eats every day.
If you ate, say, a 1/4 pound, you'd reduce your meat related impact by 2/3, and not have to worry about things like protein matching.
A drone is a male bee. Male bees do no work. Nor can they fight. They are stingless -- the female bee's sting is modified ovipositor (egg laying organ).
So an "unmanned drone" is a truly purposeless thing. Of course, they're heading there anyhow: their penises get ripped off during sexual intercourse, after which they die.
It's not the reporter, it's the editor. The reportage is fine but the title skews the effect of the article.
I'm an admirer of irony, but it has its place and other places it doesn't belong. I know that we'll be hearing for years from climate change skeptics that pollution reductions cause global warming, just like the whole "trees cause pollution" business. The problem with these memes is that they have a kernel of truth, from which utterly wrong conclusions will be promoted by people with an economic agenda.
The article itself is reasonably informative. Putting "Is Healthy Air Bad?" as the headline is what confuses the issue and turns what would be an informative piece, for practical purposes, into pro pollution propaganda. The scientist in the article doesn't think healthy air is bad, nor can anybody reasonably draw that conclusion from the facts presented in the article.
The lesson we ought to draw from this article is this: when you think about switching from one kind of polluting technology to another, you have to think about the specific effects of replacing one cocktail of pollution with different one. So, if your pollution plan calls to cut so many tons of CO2, and to reduce particulates from switching from coal to natural gas, you might have to come up with some extra tons of CO2 reduction to achieve the climate change impact you were hoping for.
Certainly, actually doing this is quite complex, but the important idea here isn't really that complicated. One thing is certain, if there were no pollution emissions, the air would be healthier and climate change would not be an issue.
Well, the news media couldn't exactly pass up this opportunity to confuse people even more on the global climate change issue, could they?
How amazingly stupid could an editor be, to take what is a straightforward, well known aspect of local climate, and then title an article with a spurious question like "Is Health Air Bad?" The answer is, he'd have to be so amazingly stupid and ignorant, that it must be deliberate. It's a blessing that nobody mentioned to the reporter that the brownish-yellow particulate haze probably contains high levels of ozone. That would have been yet another opportunity to confound different issues and further muddy public understanding (along with the manufacturers of ozone generators).
For years there have been studies decrying Americans' scientific ignorance, Still, if anything it's amazing they aren't even more ignorant and apathetic than they are, given that their major news sources are, to all appearances, trying to make them more confused about science than they were.
I see a big difference. There's nothing wrong with a sponsor taking credit for an athletes success. Using the medal count as proof of superiority, either racial or national, is quite a different matter. These myths are most meaningful when they're turned on their heads, as when Jesse Owens competed in '36 Berlin with the host country promoting Aryan racial superiority.
Well, you're 100% correct if the only thing that matters is the ostensibly intended consequences.
However, if we are talking about unintended, but foreseeable consequences, as the GP is, you are missing the point.
I'm inclined to agree with the GPs framing of this issue. Satellites have a limited lifespan, and political statements even shorter lifespans. The space junk in question will be up there a long time after the political statement is forgotten.
Slashdot Mirror
And while you're at it, the same wires or rails that delivered control signals could deliver power to top of your electric vehicle.
You'd simply pull into the robot lane, and a peg on your car would drop into a kind of ... guide slot thingy, with a pair of power and signal rails on either side.
Seriously, this wouldn't be such a bad idea for small electric personal commuter vehicles. You'd program in your destination, the car and network would figure out whether you needed a power boost to reach it. Most people could do their commutes in an electric vehicle with just enough battery to give twenty miles range.
Well, first of all you don't have an basis to make that claim. According to the article the Deebs are cooperating voluntarily, and avoiding citations and fines as a result.
Secondly, when a homeowner does not or cannot correct certain violations, the municipality can take steps to correct that violation without the owner's consent. For example, if you live in a place prone to wild fires, city safety codes may prohibit letting large piles of brush collect on your property. If you receive a citation for having a brush pile and don't remove it in a timely fashion, the city doesn't have to wait for you to change your mind. It can hire a contractor to remove the brush even though its technically your property that is being disposed of. They can even send you the bill.
About the only Constitutional limitation on this process is that it has to be reasonable. If you had an extremely valuable antiqe car up on blocks on your front lawn, the city could ask you to remove it. If you didn't presumably the could dispose of the car, but they couldn't use that as a pretext to seize the car and auction it off to make money.
In this case, the chemicals might represent a considerable investment, but collectively they're worse than valueless; they represent a disposal expense.
is how many people don't know what their Constitutional rights actually are.
Not knowing the extents of your rights is asking for trouble.
OK, so maybe the administrative/criminal search dichotomy is a bit obscure. But you'd better believe that somebody who is in your home for a valid reason, even a private guest, sees your marijuana garden, then that can be probable cause for a criminal warrant. A lot of people here seem to think there's some kind of "no fair" rule that invalidates anything firefighters might notice during a call.
Another point that seems to be lost on people: the government did not bash in the Deebs' door. The Deebs have voluntarily cooperated with the authorities, so Fourth Amendment issues are moot.
No, hobbyists are more trusted than corporations, which is why they are expected to keep their activities on a hobbyist scale.
Corporations need things like discharge permits, which also involve both regular site inspections and sewer water testing. Hobbyists are subject to neither.
I didn't hear the part about the authorities bashing in this guy's front door. Where did you get that?
In any case, they wouldn't need a warrant to demand access to the house, under penalty of fines or other punishments, to investigate zoning or other code violations. That's called an "Administrative Search". The law governing administrative searches is different.
The fourth amendment only requires that such searches be "reasonable", not that it be supported by a warrant. Such searches have never customarily required warrants. About forty years ago the SC clarified the requirements for such searches, which hare somewhat different from the probable cause required for warrants. Pretty much it amounts to being part of a regulation standard which is rational and balanced.
I think you've got this situation well characterized. The question is, how much? You can do a little light manufacturing in your house, after all, without getting a zoning variance.
Likewise a little chemistry is not a problem, but at some point you should have the proper permits to discharge your waste into the sewers (which will probably require inspections), and you really should hire a private trash hauler to deal with your refuse.
Don't forget the Krebs Cycle. That's a lot more advanced than, say, keeping your Hollandaise from curdling.
Well, you're the victim of a bad article summary.
There's no problem with experimenting, the issue is how much chemicals you can store of on your site and dispose of through municipal services like trash removal and sewer without a permit.
Details in the article are a bit thin, but nobody is getting raided in Massachusetts for doing chemistry set scale stuff.
According to the newspaper article "most likely" violated numerous state and local regulations. Nobody is tossing out specifics because the town isn't planning to issue a citation. At issue is "how much you're supposed to have, how it's detained, how it's disposed of" in a residential area. So the issue isn't "experimenting", it's storage, processing and disposal at a facility not zoned for those purposes.
Common sense will show you that the scale of experimentation makes a difference. Making a few quarts of biodiesel or a few bars of soap, that's home experimenting. Making a thousand gallons of biodiesel or a thousand pounds of soap is an industrial process. There isn't a precise line between chemistry set stuff and industrial production, but it's there. Making four gallons of beer a week is a lot for a home brewer, but making a hundred gallons a week probably means you've "crossed some line".
The story doesn't really give us enough details to know whether the raid was justified, or served any public purpose. That depends on what they expected to find, why the expected to find it, and what they actually found, none of which is at this time public knowledge. We don't even know what level of government initiated this, it appears it was the town.
One thing that's almost certain is that the search did not require a warrant. It is what is legally called an "administrative search". According to the dictionary an administrative search is "an inspection or search carried out under a regulatory or statutory scheme esp. in public or commercial premises and usu. to enforce compliance with regulations or laws pertaining to health, safety, or security. One of the fundamental principles of administrative searches is that the government may not use an administrative inspection scheme as a pretext to search for evidence of criminal violations."
So the health inspector doesn't need a warrant to check on the crazy lady who has 200 cats in her house, which is a code violation even if its perfectly permissible for her to have 2 cats, or even 20. Likewise I can have a dog or two, but I can't run a kennel in a densely populated suburban neighborhood unless I have a zoning variance (and possibly pay commercial tax rates).
You can argue that there shouldn't be such thing as zoning regulations. And its probably true that there are many places where there is little or no purpose to them. But zoning laws and administrative searches are NOT unconstitutional, at least by the interpretation of the Constitution that has held sway for a century or more.
Actually, a zSeries mainframe crashing at an opportune moment would be more remarkable than it crashing at an inopportune one.
First of all, they are not saying they'll make their entire economy sustainable and non-polluting. In fact, with the financial advantage of not worrying about pollution, they can well afford a showcase project.
China's track record on this sort of project is not good. For example, one of their showcase efforts at archaeological preservation during the Yangtze river dam project was to demolish one ancient site, and then build an inaccurate replica on higher ground, staffed with costumed interpreters. That's a creative reinterpretation of "preservation", whose value is mainly PR.
And there's even more ways to make an unrealistically favorable impression on a project like this, for example moving the pollution elsewhere.
The trick in building a sustainable, non-polluting system isn't in making it non-polluting. It's making it sustainable. Making a city that actually works. And the trick of sustainability is not to achieve it on a test scale, but on a useful scale. Eskimos dressing in wild sealskin is sustainable; dressing the entire world in sealskin is not.
Still, I think this is an interesting experiment. We'll just have to be skeptical of any results because the regime is very serious about quashing bad PR.
I think it's fear.
China practices a different kind of economic policy, one that's fallen out of favor in the West since the 1970s. It practices economic nationalism.
In Western democracies, voters have been persuaded to accept a kind of national economic altruism, in which the immediate economic interests of their nations are subjugated to a shared interest in a more efficient international economy. China is still playing the game of grabbing all the national benefit it can, and in an environment where its major trading partners are being altruistic (at least if we disregard class differences in economic impact), they're well positioned to win.
On top of that, China is far better at authoritarianism than most people in the West thought it was possible. It's far more efficient than any authoritarian system we've ever seen before. Rather than put up a page saying a website is banned, they might make the website so unreliable it disappears. Rather than provoke the people with harsh application of draconian laws, they let people know the authorities are watching and have the laws ready if needed.
They've mastered a soft form of authoritarianism which doesn't use crude force to keep the people in line, but by the clever application uncertainty gets the people police themselves. So China has a political system whose values are profoundly at odds with Western values, playing a more aggressive, zero sum game than Western nations do economically. It's perhaps natural that anything they do is viewed with some measure of distrust.
And this is the kind of project only an authoritarian regime could try.
Probably the biggest reasonable environmental concern with GM crops per se s the possibility of genes escaping from the crops into wild relatives or making their way into other domesticated lines, and possibly creating IP problems for poor farmers.
But I think your post drives at a somewhat different, but important point. It's not just the GM crops, but the practices and environmental incentives that make them desirable.
Not every aspect of the cattle industry.
Cattle ranching is probably the most energy efficient and least environmentally problematic aspect of the industry. It's the feedlots, where an animal goes gain an additional 60% over its body weight, that are the problems. A feedlot is not only energy intensive, they concentrate what would otherwise be naturally recycled animal waste into pollution.
This is beside the fact that the fat the cattle gain in the feedlot is in the form of saturated fat, contributing to beef's poor health reputation.
Environmentalists, at least the serious environmental thinkers I've known, are aware of what you're saying. The idea that they're anti-farmer is a myth perpetuated by agribusiness. Sure, they might come into disagreement with ranchers over things like water rights and preserving or reestablishing wild predator populations. They're not out to get farmers; they're perfectly happy to see farmers on any scale profiting from efficient, sustainable agriculture. Environmentalists aren't anti-beef, so much as they are anti-feedlot.
Personally, I'd be happy to buy grass fed beef that went directly from rancher to slaughterhouse without the middleman. It's not exactly what I as a cook am used to, but that can be adjusted for, like cooking bison or the leaner pork we get these days. Although it'd be more expensive on a pound basis, it would be environmentally better and healthier to boot. It'd probably be economically better for ranchers as well. But it's almost impossible to find out here in the East. We can get grass fed bison, but not beef.
So, the only way for us to avoid the environmental problems of beef, which are largely concentrated in the feedlots, is to eat less beef, even though many of us would be perfectly happy to give cattle ranchers their share of our food dollar.
There is a branch of government that is in charge of this. It's called the judicial branch. In fact private civil rights organizations only exist to bring problems the courts' attention.
Now with respect to government being dysfunctional -- it is only so to the degree we tolerate it and even require it to be so.
The reason for bureaucracy and red tape is because we the people insist upon it. In the private sector if I hire my cousin Vinny to do a job, if this gets the job done fast at a reasonable price, my boss is happy. And this is right, because the company probably saves money in the end. In the public sector, my department pays more than the private sector does to get the job done, because of the documentation needed to show that I'm not hiring Vinny because he's my cousin, and that other vendors in Vinny's business got a fair shot at the job. And Vinny has to charge more because he has to prove that he isn't charging Uncle Sam more than private sector customers, although this is usually solved by spinning off groups that only sell to Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam ends up buying from vendors who specialize in meeting his unique contracting process needs.
And most of this is right too. Private enterprise is all about private benefit. People make deals and if the deals are profitable then there are no questions asked. Public enterprise is more ethically complicated. For one thing it is not voluntarily funded. You don't have a personal choice about how much tax and how much public benefit you're going to receive this year. This means things like fairness are a lot more important. And time consuming.
Nonetheless, government can do things effectively, if people care enough about them. It just can't do them without employing more red tape than the private sector would. The US military is a case in point. The US has a military that can kick the crap out of any other military in the world. It's highly effective, but it's not particularly financially efficient or red-tape free. The reason is that we the people care about assuring successful military outcomes. In fact we care enough that we're not exactly sharp consumers when it comes to military systems.
It's not so clear that we care about achieving successful outcomes when it comes to our legal and civil rights.
The main problem with the judicial branch is that it can't initiate anything. You have to have money and time to get it moving on a problem, which means that the courts are only for those who have money and time on their hands: the wealthy and organizations like ACLU.
The Justice Department should safeguard American citizens who don't have the money or power to insist upon their rights as individuals. But if we elect a President who thinks he has the power to detain and torture anybody based on suspicion, and let him appoint SC justices that are deferential to these claims, the JD is not much use. I'd say that this is because we the people don't really care about our rights.
The First Amendment doesn't mean that the government can't regulate speech, particularly the timing and method of speech, but even in some cases the content of the speech. However, such regulations must be narrowly tailored to fulfill a legitimate public purpose, such as national defense.
Addressing the vulnerabilities before they become widely exploited is obviously a legitimate public purpose. A restraining order delaying temporarily the release of the details of the vulnerabilities (not the fact of their existence) while they do this would be narrowly tailored to serve that purpose.
I'm not saying it's right, but you should know what your rights actually are. They don't include the right to say whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want without fear of punishment, and they never have.
The important points to remember are (a) legitimate public purpose and (b) narrow tailoring. The narrow tailoring requirement is probably the tougher of the two requirements to meet. In this case, since the details of the problems are in the wild, in part because of the authority's own actions (although this doesn't really matter), any further restriction doesn't serve the purpose of allowing the authority to respond in a timely fashion.
Well, you don't have to become a vegan in any case, and you can get most of the environmental benefit of vegetarianism by eating a reasonable amount of meat instead of the 3/4 pounds of meat an American eats every day.
If you ate, say, a 1/4 pound, you'd reduce your meat related impact by 2/3, and not have to worry about things like protein matching.
A drone is a male bee. Male bees do no work. Nor can they fight. They are stingless -- the female bee's sting is modified ovipositor (egg laying organ).
So an "unmanned drone" is a truly purposeless thing. Of course, they're heading there anyhow: their penises get ripped off during sexual intercourse, after which they die.
It's not the reporter, it's the editor. The reportage is fine but the title skews the effect of the article.
I'm an admirer of irony, but it has its place and other places it doesn't belong. I know that we'll be hearing for years from climate change skeptics that pollution reductions cause global warming, just like the whole "trees cause pollution" business. The problem with these memes is that they have a kernel of truth, from which utterly wrong conclusions will be promoted by people with an economic agenda.
The article itself is reasonably informative. Putting "Is Healthy Air Bad?" as the headline is what confuses the issue and turns what would be an informative piece, for practical purposes, into pro pollution propaganda. The scientist in the article doesn't think healthy air is bad, nor can anybody reasonably draw that conclusion from the facts presented in the article.
The lesson we ought to draw from this article is this: when you think about switching from one kind of polluting technology to another, you have to think about the specific effects of replacing one cocktail of pollution with different one. So, if your pollution plan calls to cut so many tons of CO2, and to reduce particulates from switching from coal to natural gas, you might have to come up with some extra tons of CO2 reduction to achieve the climate change impact you were hoping for.
Certainly, actually doing this is quite complex, but the important idea here isn't really that complicated. One thing is certain, if there were no pollution emissions, the air would be healthier and climate change would not be an issue.
Well, the news media couldn't exactly pass up this opportunity to confuse people even more on the global climate change issue, could they?
How amazingly stupid could an editor be, to take what is a straightforward, well known aspect of local climate, and then title an article with a spurious question like "Is Health Air Bad?" The answer is, he'd have to be so amazingly stupid and ignorant, that it must be deliberate. It's a blessing that nobody mentioned to the reporter that the brownish-yellow particulate haze probably contains high levels of ozone. That would have been yet another opportunity to confound different issues and further muddy public understanding (along with the manufacturers of ozone generators).
For years there have been studies decrying Americans' scientific ignorance, Still, if anything it's amazing they aren't even more ignorant and apathetic than they are, given that their major news sources are, to all appearances, trying to make them more confused about science than they were.
Yes, but people know these lines are computer generated. They're only markers and they don't change what is going on, they only clarify it.
The advertisements are a bit more of a concern, although again they don't alter the substance of what you viewing.
I see a big difference. There's nothing wrong with a sponsor taking credit for an athletes success. Using the medal count as proof of superiority, either racial or national, is quite a different matter. These myths are most meaningful when they're turned on their heads, as when Jesse Owens competed in '36 Berlin with the host country promoting Aryan racial superiority.
Well, you're 100% correct if the only thing that matters is the ostensibly intended consequences.
However, if we are talking about unintended, but foreseeable consequences, as the GP is, you are missing the point.
I'm inclined to agree with the GPs framing of this issue. Satellites have a limited lifespan, and political statements even shorter lifespans. The space junk in question will be up there a long time after the political statement is forgotten.