Rates in CA are already tiered that way, and the way it works out, if you so much as run a snigle lightbulb fulltime, that's enough to throw you into a higher rate tier.
That's how the CA utilities got out of rate regulation reducing their profits -- they got the tiering set so low that you will ALWAYS pay the max.
Realworld electric bills after the tiering was set that low: I'm using 30% less electricity than I was 10 years ago, yet my SoCalEdison bill is now 10 times as high.
Cripes, when my mom was gone for a whole month and left nothing running but the fridge, it was still enough to make her bill hit the max-charge tier (even tho it's a new and efficient fridge).
"a democracy will only last until the general populace learns to vote itself money from the public coffers"
I couldn't find the reference offhand, but I vaguely recall that this quote dates to about 250AD, when the Roman Empire was at about the same point as the U.S. is today. However, the U.S. is heading toward fiscal disaster at a much faster rate, if only because of modern communication speeds.
I'm also reminded that some of the Founders wanted to restrict the vote to landowners. When I was a renter I thought this was horrible. Now that I'm a property owner... I see their point. MOST of my property taxes go to programs which benefit people who don't have a vested interest in keeping costs down -- they're spending someone else's money, and they have the voting majority, so if they want to vote to raise taxes that will only impact someone *other* than themselves -- they can do so. (CA's Prop13 is no protection against "special assessments", which now comprise over half of what I pay in property tax.)
I'm reminded that most copyrighted works of previous centuries were done essentially as work for hire, so yes, the protection really was for the distributors, all the way back. Only rarely was the creator also the distributor, and not very often the owner of the work either.
Actually, I wonder if that might not be so farfetched... could a case be made that the *AA-type powers actually support content piracy, provided it's aimed at their competitors??
Well, generally buildings don't fall down if you take out a single wall... I expect structural damage to the building might actually be greater in total (spreading forces likely to knock the whole thing off-plumb rather than just taking one wall out) but still probably beats having a carbomb arrive on your desk. And you've generally got more time to get out of a wobbly building than you do to get away from a detonation.
Also, probably not so useful for defensive retrofitting as for either quick-and-dirty HQs where you're making do with what you find on the spot (ie. immediate risk reduction), or for brand new construction.
I doubt wrecking balls are what it's intended to stop, that just makes a handy demo. Think carful of explosives driven through the front wall, vs. stopped outside the wall. You still get a wrecked building but you're less likely to lose the people inside when the explosion is kept outside.
So if the aim is to secure a building, you also put this inside your hollow-core doors, and put it over your windows instead (or inside of) glass. For doors that don't blow off easily, some sort of hinge arrangement in the kevlar seems doable, and you'd just paper right over the windows.
It'd be useful for areas where deluded folks drive carbombs into buildings, and would stop other larger-than-bullets low-speed projectiles as well.
How can your DSL go out and your dialup still work??
I didn't realise V had been resurrected... might have to look for that! I don't get any TV at all here so... if they want me to watch it, they better make it available. Hell, I wouldn't even mind getting the same commercials with it as broadcast, if it was reliable enough.
BTW I don't disagree that it happens.. In fact I think this is the core constituency, so to speak, of the Great ObamaCare Bill. Who will benefit? I think it'll be that unsung fastest growing and most profitable segment of the healthcare industry, corporate-owned hospital chains.
Not for this market at that time, and I vaguely recall Combiotic (pen-strep) was their top seller to boot; you could get a generic by then but it hadn't dislodged the old reliable brand. And now instead of most of the ag market buying their core antibiotic from Pfizer, the market got scattered among a number of producers. I don't see any benefit in it for Pfizer at all, tho doubtless some other ag-drug manufacturers were delighted -- there was a rash of advertising by one and all (including Pfizer, what choice did they have but to make the best of it?) for tetracycline products as a proposed substitute (which it wasn't, really). Tetracycline was long since a generic, so no huge financial benefit, but ag producers are not going to pay outrageous newly-R&D'd prices for drugs they buy by the crate. If it's not cost-effective, they'll do without.
(And I bought the last two bottles of pen-strep my then-supplier had left.:(
Hmmm... looks like it can be had from overseas sources again, but at an appallingly high price!! ($40/100ml; used to be about $5, and pen alone is *presently* about $8/100ml. Never mind!!)
It would, except at the time Pfizer (who would have been dinged the cost of testing injectable pen-strep) was screaming bloody murder about it right along with ranchers, and there was not yet any reasonable alternative in the ranch-affordable drug market. So they had nothing to gain from killing the product, and probably lost a year or so worth of sales while other products geared up.
Note that the FDA hasn't tried to pull this with aspirin or with straight penicillin (neither of which has undergone modern testing), which I attribute to the sheer size of the expected backlash if they did try it... rather akin to what would happen if they tried to prohibit caffeine in ordinary soft drinks.
It probably stems from about a decade back, when the FDA decided that to require testing for all the very old drugs that had been on the market for decades, since long before testing was even thought of, let alone required. This came to my attention because pen-strep antibiotic, which had been in use for over 70 years at that time with ZERO problems (other than the ordinary stuff like random people being allergic) was one of the drug combos that the FDA decided to require be tested. At a cost of over a million bucks to test a cheap generic, the manufacturers said fuck you, and stopped making it -- much to the horror of the entire agriculture industry, who are now forced to substitute more expensive drugs that don't work as well, or scrounge up and mix their own replacements. (Actually, tho penicillin is widely available, I'm not sure you can buy streptomycin by itself anymore, except as laboratory grade which is very expensive.) The irony is that the newer drugs don't have nearly the long and broad history of safe use, but hey, they passed the FDA test requirements!
Sometimes the FDA makes no sense. Oh wait, it's part of the government, never mind!!
Same as for a small segment, a single drink can trigger alcoholism. Or that aspirin you just took could be the one that triggers an allergic reaction. Nothing in life is risk-free.
Interesting about the hallucinations... the "I dunno if I did this already, what was I doing again??" is something I've observed in some regular pot users, too. And I know someone who quit smoking pot after an episode of seeing people with three heads (and he hadn't taken any other drugs). Might be a threshold of susceptibility for some people.
Since the question was raised, what IS the LD50 for THC?
[Personally I think it should all be legalized, regulated, and taxed.]
And keeps prices high due to artificial scarcity, much to the joy of the drug lords. (Who I suspect are the major driving force behind the 'war on drugs', without which their profits would substantially shrink, at least in the short term.)
It's better to have some people fuck up, and maybe even hurt other people along the way, than it is to restrict everyone to the lowest common denominator.
Since clearly this has been a common chemical mixture for at least a couple hundred years, why in hell isn't GRAS by default? (Generally Recognised As Safe)
Slashdot Mirror
They got it backwards. In reality, technology has run out of the steam required to keep up with science fiction.
If this weren't the case, where are my flying car, my immortality, my starship? ;)
Rates in CA are already tiered that way, and the way it works out, if you so much as run a snigle lightbulb fulltime, that's enough to throw you into a higher rate tier.
That's how the CA utilities got out of rate regulation reducing their profits -- they got the tiering set so low that you will ALWAYS pay the max.
Realworld electric bills after the tiering was set that low: I'm using 30% less electricity than I was 10 years ago, yet my SoCalEdison bill is now 10 times as high.
Cripes, when my mom was gone for a whole month and left nothing running but the fridge, it was still enough to make her bill hit the max-charge tier (even tho it's a new and efficient fridge).
"I am altering the bargain." -- Darth Lincoln
"a democracy will only last until the general populace learns to vote itself money from the public coffers"
I couldn't find the reference offhand, but I vaguely recall that this quote dates to about 250AD, when the Roman Empire was at about the same point as the U.S. is today. However, the U.S. is heading toward fiscal disaster at a much faster rate, if only because of modern communication speeds.
I'm also reminded that some of the Founders wanted to restrict the vote to landowners. When I was a renter I thought this was horrible. Now that I'm a property owner... I see their point. MOST of my property taxes go to programs which benefit people who don't have a vested interest in keeping costs down -- they're spending someone else's money, and they have the voting majority, so if they want to vote to raise taxes that will only impact someone *other* than themselves -- they can do so. (CA's Prop13 is no protection against "special assessments", which now comprise over half of what I pay in property tax.)
I'm reminded that most copyrighted works of previous centuries were done essentially as work for hire, so yes, the protection really was for the distributors, all the way back. Only rarely was the creator also the distributor, and not very often the owner of the work either.
Actually, I wonder if that might not be so farfetched... could a case be made that the *AA-type powers actually support content piracy, provided it's aimed at their competitors??
Well, generally buildings don't fall down if you take out a single wall... I expect structural damage to the building might actually be greater in total (spreading forces likely to knock the whole thing off-plumb rather than just taking one wall out) but still probably beats having a carbomb arrive on your desk. And you've generally got more time to get out of a wobbly building than you do to get away from a detonation.
Also, probably not so useful for defensive retrofitting as for either quick-and-dirty HQs where you're making do with what you find on the spot (ie. immediate risk reduction), or for brand new construction.
I doubt wrecking balls are what it's intended to stop, that just makes a handy demo. Think carful of explosives driven through the front wall, vs. stopped outside the wall. You still get a wrecked building but you're less likely to lose the people inside when the explosion is kept outside.
So if the aim is to secure a building, you also put this inside your hollow-core doors, and put it over your windows instead (or inside of) glass. For doors that don't blow off easily, some sort of hinge arrangement in the kevlar seems doable, and you'd just paper right over the windows.
It'd be useful for areas where deluded folks drive carbombs into buildings, and would stop other larger-than-bullets low-speed projectiles as well.
Yeah, I keep meaning to/forgetting to give it a look!!
How the heck do you use those magnet links? Seamonkey just looks at me funny, and uTorrent ignores them.
Damn, that sounds like you're lost at sea ;(
How can your DSL go out and your dialup still work??
I didn't realise V had been resurrected... might have to look for that! I don't get any TV at all here so... if they want me to watch it, they better make it available. Hell, I wouldn't even mind getting the same commercials with it as broadcast, if it was reliable enough.
Any port in a swarm....
[banned sopssa (1498795)]
BTW I don't disagree that it happens.. In fact I think this is the core constituency, so to speak, of the Great ObamaCare Bill. Who will benefit? I think it'll be that unsung fastest growing and most profitable segment of the healthcare industry, corporate-owned hospital chains.
I explain my reasoning here:
http://www.city-data.com/forum/11630712-post402.html
Not for this market at that time, and I vaguely recall Combiotic (pen-strep) was their top seller to boot; you could get a generic by then but it hadn't dislodged the old reliable brand. And now instead of most of the ag market buying their core antibiotic from Pfizer, the market got scattered among a number of producers. I don't see any benefit in it for Pfizer at all, tho doubtless some other ag-drug manufacturers were delighted -- there was a rash of advertising by one and all (including Pfizer, what choice did they have but to make the best of it?) for tetracycline products as a proposed substitute (which it wasn't, really). Tetracycline was long since a generic, so no huge financial benefit, but ag producers are not going to pay outrageous newly-R&D'd prices for drugs they buy by the crate. If it's not cost-effective, they'll do without.
(And I bought the last two bottles of pen-strep my then-supplier had left. :(
Hmmm... looks like it can be had from overseas sources again, but at an appallingly high price!! ($40/100ml; used to be about $5, and pen alone is *presently* about $8/100ml. Never mind!!)
It would, except at the time Pfizer (who would have been dinged the cost of testing injectable pen-strep) was screaming bloody murder about it right along with ranchers, and there was not yet any reasonable alternative in the ranch-affordable drug market. So they had nothing to gain from killing the product, and probably lost a year or so worth of sales while other products geared up.
Note that the FDA hasn't tried to pull this with aspirin or with straight penicillin (neither of which has undergone modern testing), which I attribute to the sheer size of the expected backlash if they did try it... rather akin to what would happen if they tried to prohibit caffeine in ordinary soft drinks.
It probably stems from about a decade back, when the FDA decided that to require testing for all the very old drugs that had been on the market for decades, since long before testing was even thought of, let alone required. This came to my attention because pen-strep antibiotic, which had been in use for over 70 years at that time with ZERO problems (other than the ordinary stuff like random people being allergic) was one of the drug combos that the FDA decided to require be tested. At a cost of over a million bucks to test a cheap generic, the manufacturers said fuck you, and stopped making it -- much to the horror of the entire agriculture industry, who are now forced to substitute more expensive drugs that don't work as well, or scrounge up and mix their own replacements. (Actually, tho penicillin is widely available, I'm not sure you can buy streptomycin by itself anymore, except as laboratory grade which is very expensive.) The irony is that the newer drugs don't have nearly the long and broad history of safe use, but hey, they passed the FDA test requirements!
Sometimes the FDA makes no sense. Oh wait, it's part of the government, never mind!!
Since I asked about the LD50 for THC...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrocannabinol#Toxicity
Appears you could kill yourself with pure THC, but smoking pot doesn't seem like a very practical method of suicide. ;)
Same as for a small segment, a single drink can trigger alcoholism. Or that aspirin you just took could be the one that triggers an allergic reaction. Nothing in life is risk-free.
Interesting about the hallucinations... the "I dunno if I did this already, what was I doing again??" is something I've observed in some regular pot users, too. And I know someone who quit smoking pot after an episode of seeing people with three heads (and he hadn't taken any other drugs). Might be a threshold of susceptibility for some people.
Since the question was raised, what IS the LD50 for THC?
[Personally I think it should all be legalized, regulated, and taxed.]
And keeps prices high due to artificial scarcity, much to the joy of the drug lords. (Who I suspect are the major driving force behind the 'war on drugs', without which their profits would substantially shrink, at least in the short term.)
Hear, hear!! Enough with the nannying already!
It's better to have some people fuck up, and maybe even hurt other people along the way, than it is to restrict everyone to the lowest common denominator.
Since clearly this has been a common chemical mixture for at least a couple hundred years, why in hell isn't GRAS by default? (Generally Recognised As Safe)