I seem to recall making that argument last time this topic came around:) "You drive more miles than anyone can possibly explain. You must be up to something illegal!"
And if your odometer shows significantly less than the norm in your area (as mine does, since I don't commute), you'll be suspected of tampering with it.
This cannot be said too often:
"You should not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon Johnson, 36th President of the U.S.
Tractor-trailers and other trucks also pay a bunch of road-use taxes and weight-determined fees that automobiles don't.
California, in their zeal to screw over 18-wheelers, passed a law that quadrupled the licensing costs for trucks (this was back about 1985)... failing to notice that even a mini-pickup (weight 2500 lbs.) is licensed as a "commercial truck" and pays the same weight fees per pound as an 18-wheeler. However, a SUV is a "passenger vehicle" and does NOT pay those weight fees, despite having 3 times the mass of that pickup.
Someone mod this guy up. I've seen all the same situations when I was a cyclist. And ya know what? I found I was safest when I behaved EXACTLY LIKE A CAR, which also meant I did the EXPECTED THING while on the road. Stoplights, stopsigns, speed limits (my old 10-speed could hit 50-60 mph on a good downslope), crosswalks, turn lanes, whatever.
But that sort of sense was the norm when I was a cyclist, back in the 1970s. Fast-forward a couple decades, into the nanny era where no one is responsible for their own actions anymore, and what's with all the cyclists blowing through red lights??! Back when I rode a bike, that would get you a ticket!
Speaking both as driver and former everyday-cyclist, my observation is exactly the other way around -- cyclists may have fewer blocks in their vision but they pay attention less -- most seem to only look straight ahead, and are often startled by anything that comes at them from the side or from behind. Conversely, drivers are accustomed to and look for vehicles coming out of side streets (and in the rearview mirror) as a matter of course.
And I've seen cyclists do all sorts of risky maneuvers in traffic that would get a driver ticketed, including run stopsigns and red lights. In Bozeman MT, cyclists will be ticketed for such safety violations, but I've never seen it happen elsewhere.
I dunno about cyclists, but back in 1981 I drove thru Portland, and TWICE in the space of a few miles, I had someone purposefully try to run me off the road (this is on I-5, not even a local street. And at the time I had Montana plates, not the much-hated California plates.)
A few miles further along, I tried to stop at a park along I-84, found no parking places (all cars present had OR plates, too), and by the time I got back to the entrance there were a bunch of kids blocking it, arm in arm to form a human chain across the road. This didn't look good... distrusting their intentions, I gunned my truck and went for 'em, and they scattered. I didn't stop again til I reached Idaho.
Anyway, that was MY introduction to Portland's "rules of the road".
And then when these transportation-nazis bitch about lettuce being $6 a head, we can point at the punitive tax levied against the trucks that hauled it to market.
I too drive a truck, and it's damned rare that I'm not hauling some sort of load with it.
Shallow wells (first water, which in some areas can be just a few feet down -- in MT I had water coming up in a hole only a foot deep!) or old-fashioned wells that lack casing -- yeah, whatever leaches down from up top can be an issue. That's why septics are required to be NNN-feet away (really should apply to barns too), and why modern wells are usually cased and sealed all the way up -- to prevent rodents, dirt, manure, and what-have-you from falling in, and to keep surface water out.
And surface storage and piping can be contaminated easily enough, through any gap in the system.
But deep wells that are 2nd water or below -- there's no nutrient down there, and if they're properly cased and the top sealed, there's no surface leaching or access, thus no bugglies in the well itself.
First water here is about 100-150 feet. It's safe enough but a bit high in magnesium salts (tastes "dusty"). Second water is 250-500 feet and very high in calcium (but tastes better). The local municipal wells are about 1500 feet. (There's a thick layer of calichi starting at 6-10 feet that's effectively impermeable, and no organics below that.) 2nd water and below actually comes from hundreds of miles away, filtered thru lots of rock. -- Very different from, say, the Red River valley, which last I looked was not readily distinguishable from an inland sea!! And I can imagine what Devil's Lake is doing to wells in that area, being a salt lake and what with the way it's grown over the past few years. (I was hatched there:)
Mineral contaminants can be anywhere -- a ways to the NE of me, a mountain well (which thereabouts is an exercise in futility anyway, lots of 500' dry holes) can hit a uranium deposit, which is probably not the best thing to drink.;)
BTW our local so-called soil (sand) tests out at ZERO nitrogen content. The person who did the testing thought her equipment was broken at first.:)
Haven't seen any flammable water (that would make a fun party trick!), but well water can contain all manner of solubles. However, it doesn't normally come with free bacteria, unless the well is very shallow.
[My own well is 405 feet deep, and hits water starting at 270 feet below the surface. I doubt there's much of anything organic down there.]
So why not just occasionally dip the whole shower head in undiluted bleach? That will kill almost all viruses, and most if not all bacteria. Of course it'll tend to eat the shower head too, but it's probably more replaceable than you are.;)
Occurs to me that it's probably not the dosage or the environment so much as that the shower does a good job of turning the water and *anything* it carries into a nice inhalable aeresol, perfect for pulling deep into your lungs.
Well water is not exposed to passing/flying/swimming and occasionally sick/dead critters the way surface water supplies are. Guess which is more likely to contain microbes -- sand and rocks, or critters??
But what about the androgen insensitivity issue that can screw up expression of gender characteristics, regardless of whether the fetus is XX or XY ?? Gotta wonder if this might be influenced by genes that also influence general gender-based behaviours. So say an XY fetus chances to inherit a lot of other "female behaviour" genes -- could that genetic mix lead to androgen insensitivity??
There are too many factors to ever really test that out, but it makes for an interesting speculation. Who knows, maybe the Buddhists are on to something.;)
Nope, this is actually within the city of Lancaster, just NE of the corner of Sierra Hwy (old Hwy 6) and Ave.H; built this past summer. Two mirror towers (tho they took the mirror assembly back off one of them already, why I dunno) and 6 or 8 openwork towers which I've been told are there to function as lightning rods. There was supposed to be a visitor's center built with it but so far that doesn't seem to have materialized. I don't know if it's actually functioning or not; I drive by it all the time, but can't see anything else through the fence (they put up chainlink with a privacy covering).
I don't recall seeing any such setup at Kramer Junction, but it's been about 4-5 years since I last went through there in daylight.
And that's why I use Corel PhotoPaint instead -- everything is reasonably intuitive, and most especially RightClick operates as you'd naturally expect (either to reverse or invoke, depending on context). I can do the same work in half the time of PSPro, and a fraction of the time it takes in PhotoShop or GIMP.
A simple example is zoom. Click to zoom in, RClick to zoom out, repeat as desired. Far as I've seen NO other app does this simple and intuitive action; ALL require returning to the menu to reverse or reset zoom factor.
(And it doesn't mung up JPGs as much from multiple saves, either. Corel's compression engine is selective rather than shotgun.)
Very interesting. And that does describe my real problem with linux... I keep trying to find a linux I can love, but in every case I persistently run into little nagging annoyances that no one seems to want to fix. Often they are not showstoppers, they're little things like when the file browser's display settings wouldn't stick between sessions -- so every single time I used it I had to reset everything. (I guess this finally got fixed, but it took over 10 years!!)
When something big is broken or absent, I don't expect *anything* of it *at all*, and that's easier to be okay with; I just won't go there. But when it's something that's only a little bit broken and I run into it constantly -- that's TOO annoying to live with.
I don't know why they'd need to do conditions-testing; look at the auto glass in the same neighbourhood, and figure that at a couple hundred feet off the ground you get maybe 10% as much wear and tear (most of the harsh blowing sand is at ground level).
There's a new solar-mirror setup just north of Lancaster CA. It's some sort of test prototype, I don't recall the details. The way the mirror array is situated here, the collector is visible from the ground as you go by on the highway, and the reflection is bright enough that I expect it could damage eyesight.
The reply from the Safety Engineer (somewhere up above) illustrates the problem: his feeling was that since we CAN mitigate risks, we should NEVER take risks we can avoid. His post sadly illustrate the risk-averse society we've had since the late Cold War stopped keeping us on the alert and looking for that advantage.
But there's something to having boots on the ground that a robot can't accomplish. It's partly that robots can't make judgment calls, but more important, having someone THERE motivates the rest of us like a robot cannot.
I think it was the end of the Cold War. After that, we no longer LIVED WITH risk -- there was no longer any threat capable of asserting risk against America on a scale large enough to matter. Lacking that pressure, we gradually lost the ability to adapt to and cope with risk. As a result, we now think incidents like 9/11 and a shuttle crash are the end of the world and are a reason to eliminate ALL risk.
Any biologist will tell you -- stress (which is caused by risk) equals life. When there is no stress, there is no incentive to live.
I think it would be hard NOT to be aware of the risks. And these aren't stupid people who can't figure it out for themselves, even from partial data.
But here's something else. Every kid used to want to grow up to be an astronaut; now hardly anyone has such sentiments. What if the reason wasn't because it was new, but because it was RISKY?? Maybe risk *attracts* the very sort of person whom we most need to explore new frontiers.
As to the problem the article mentions re Google and other online book archives being a mess to find anything in, and hopeless for browsing -- what on earth would be wrong with cataloging them by the LOC system (which is *extremely* precise) or at least by Dewey Decimal (which is much fuzzier but at least you CAN find a category of interest without already knowing the titles/authors/keywords). That would bring their cataloging into alignment with libraries everywhere, and make it one helluva lot easier to find related stuff, or to just browse a general section.
I just spent a couple hours trying to browse that new hathitrust.org book archive, and that was one of the problems -- search terms tended to bring up either a lot of irrelevant crap, or to miss stuff that is what I want but doesn't happen to have quite the right keywords. (And some were from another galaxy, WTF?) But if I could cruise a list of works organized by LOC or Dewey, I could tell just from that whether a given work was likely to hit my field of interest, even if not a single search term matched.
How much money is NOT being made by NOT publishing stuff that's still under copyright but that isn't profitable enough to pay royalties?? (And maybe isn't profitable enough to justify tracking down an absentee copyright holder.)
Clearly there IS money in publishing old stuff, or most of the pre-1900 classics would be long since out of print, and such is not the case. They continue to be reprinted to this day.
I would guess that over the long haul, long copyrights result in a net reduction of money to be made all along the chain -- remember it's NOT just the author and his agent and the first publishing rights, but also all the reprint houses, distributors, and bookstores. It occurs to me to wonder how much long copyright contributed to the demise of small local bookstores, and may now be contributing to libraries that are social hubs but no longer house vast numbers of books.
In my high school (a 3 year school in Montana), it was. You needed at least one basic course and one advanced course to graduate. In Junior High (grades 7-8-9, what most places now call middle school) it was required all 3 years. Math was also required in H.S. up through at least one advanced class. History was required through the 11th grade and English through 12th.
Starting in the 10th grade you could opt which field of science to study (the basic paths were physics, chemistry, and biology) but you couldn't entirely opt out.
So no, I don't wonder why people educated under that system are less likely to believe in "magic".
Slashdot Mirror
I seem to recall making that argument last time this topic came around :) "You drive more miles than anyone can possibly explain. You must be up to something illegal!"
And if your odometer shows significantly less than the norm in your area (as mine does, since I don't commute), you'll be suspected of tampering with it.
This cannot be said too often:
"You should not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered."
-- Lyndon Johnson, 36th President of the U.S.
The estimates I've seen say that gov't bureaucracy chews up about 70% of every tax dollar.
Tractor-trailers and other trucks also pay a bunch of road-use taxes and weight-determined fees that automobiles don't.
California, in their zeal to screw over 18-wheelers, passed a law that quadrupled the licensing costs for trucks (this was back about 1985)... failing to notice that even a mini-pickup (weight 2500 lbs.) is licensed as a "commercial truck" and pays the same weight fees per pound as an 18-wheeler. However, a SUV is a "passenger vehicle" and does NOT pay those weight fees, despite having 3 times the mass of that pickup.
Someone mod this guy up. I've seen all the same situations when I was a cyclist. And ya know what? I found I was safest when I behaved EXACTLY LIKE A CAR, which also meant I did the EXPECTED THING while on the road. Stoplights, stopsigns, speed limits (my old 10-speed could hit 50-60 mph on a good downslope), crosswalks, turn lanes, whatever.
But that sort of sense was the norm when I was a cyclist, back in the 1970s. Fast-forward a couple decades, into the nanny era where no one is responsible for their own actions anymore, and what's with all the cyclists blowing through red lights??! Back when I rode a bike, that would get you a ticket!
What was the topic again? ;)
Speaking both as driver and former everyday-cyclist, my observation is exactly the other way around -- cyclists may have fewer blocks in their vision but they pay attention less -- most seem to only look straight ahead, and are often startled by anything that comes at them from the side or from behind. Conversely, drivers are accustomed to and look for vehicles coming out of side streets (and in the rearview mirror) as a matter of course.
And I've seen cyclists do all sorts of risky maneuvers in traffic that would get a driver ticketed, including run stopsigns and red lights. In Bozeman MT, cyclists will be ticketed for such safety violations, but I've never seen it happen elsewhere.
I dunno about cyclists, but back in 1981 I drove thru Portland, and TWICE in the space of a few miles, I had someone purposefully try to run me off the road (this is on I-5, not even a local street. And at the time I had Montana plates, not the much-hated California plates.)
A few miles further along, I tried to stop at a park along I-84, found no parking places (all cars present had OR plates, too), and by the time I got back to the entrance there were a bunch of kids blocking it, arm in arm to form a human chain across the road. This didn't look good... distrusting their intentions, I gunned my truck and went for 'em, and they scattered. I didn't stop again til I reached Idaho.
Anyway, that was MY introduction to Portland's "rules of the road".
And then when these transportation-nazis bitch about lettuce being $6 a head, we can point at the punitive tax levied against the trucks that hauled it to market.
I too drive a truck, and it's damned rare that I'm not hauling some sort of load with it.
BTW thanks for the link -- good info. Interesting about using deep-rooted crops to scavenge nitrogen.
Shallow wells (first water, which in some areas can be just a few feet down -- in MT I had water coming up in a hole only a foot deep!) or old-fashioned wells that lack casing -- yeah, whatever leaches down from up top can be an issue. That's why septics are required to be NNN-feet away (really should apply to barns too), and why modern wells are usually cased and sealed all the way up -- to prevent rodents, dirt, manure, and what-have-you from falling in, and to keep surface water out.
And surface storage and piping can be contaminated easily enough, through any gap in the system.
But deep wells that are 2nd water or below -- there's no nutrient down there, and if they're properly cased and the top sealed, there's no surface leaching or access, thus no bugglies in the well itself.
First water here is about 100-150 feet. It's safe enough but a bit high in magnesium salts (tastes "dusty"). Second water is 250-500 feet and very high in calcium (but tastes better). The local municipal wells are about 1500 feet. (There's a thick layer of calichi starting at 6-10 feet that's effectively impermeable, and no organics below that.) 2nd water and below actually comes from hundreds of miles away, filtered thru lots of rock. -- Very different from, say, the Red River valley, which last I looked was not readily distinguishable from an inland sea!! And I can imagine what Devil's Lake is doing to wells in that area, being a salt lake and what with the way it's grown over the past few years. (I was hatched there :)
Mineral contaminants can be anywhere -- a ways to the NE of me, a mountain well (which thereabouts is an exercise in futility anyway, lots of 500' dry holes) can hit a uranium deposit, which is probably not the best thing to drink. ;)
BTW our local so-called soil (sand) tests out at ZERO nitrogen content. The person who did the testing thought her equipment was broken at first. :)
Haven't seen any flammable water (that would make a fun party trick!), but well water can contain all manner of solubles. However, it doesn't normally come with free bacteria, unless the well is very shallow.
[My own well is 405 feet deep, and hits water starting at 270 feet below the surface. I doubt there's much of anything organic down there.]
So why not just occasionally dip the whole shower head in undiluted bleach? That will kill almost all viruses, and most if not all bacteria. Of course it'll tend to eat the shower head too, but it's probably more replaceable than you are. ;)
Occurs to me that it's probably not the dosage or the environment so much as that the shower does a good job of turning the water and *anything* it carries into a nice inhalable aeresol, perfect for pulling deep into your lungs.
Well water is not exposed to passing/flying/swimming and occasionally sick/dead critters the way surface water supplies are. Guess which is more likely to contain microbes -- sand and rocks, or critters??
But what about the androgen insensitivity issue that can screw up expression of gender characteristics, regardless of whether the fetus is XX or XY ?? Gotta wonder if this might be influenced by genes that also influence general gender-based behaviours. So say an XY fetus chances to inherit a lot of other "female behaviour" genes -- could that genetic mix lead to androgen insensitivity??
There are too many factors to ever really test that out, but it makes for an interesting speculation. Who knows, maybe the Buddhists are on to something. ;)
Nope, this is actually within the city of Lancaster, just NE of the corner of Sierra Hwy (old Hwy 6) and Ave.H; built this past summer. Two mirror towers (tho they took the mirror assembly back off one of them already, why I dunno) and 6 or 8 openwork towers which I've been told are there to function as lightning rods. There was supposed to be a visitor's center built with it but so far that doesn't seem to have materialized. I don't know if it's actually functioning or not; I drive by it all the time, but can't see anything else through the fence (they put up chainlink with a privacy covering).
I don't recall seeing any such setup at Kramer Junction, but it's been about 4-5 years since I last went through there in daylight.
Argh, sorry to hear that. :(
And that's why I use Corel PhotoPaint instead -- everything is reasonably intuitive, and most especially RightClick operates as you'd naturally expect (either to reverse or invoke, depending on context). I can do the same work in half the time of PSPro, and a fraction of the time it takes in PhotoShop or GIMP.
A simple example is zoom. Click to zoom in, RClick to zoom out, repeat as desired. Far as I've seen NO other app does this simple and intuitive action; ALL require returning to the menu to reverse or reset zoom factor.
(And it doesn't mung up JPGs as much from multiple saves, either. Corel's compression engine is selective rather than shotgun.)
Very interesting. And that does describe my real problem with linux... I keep trying to find a linux I can love, but in every case I persistently run into little nagging annoyances that no one seems to want to fix. Often they are not showstoppers, they're little things like when the file browser's display settings wouldn't stick between sessions -- so every single time I used it I had to reset everything. (I guess this finally got fixed, but it took over 10 years!!)
When something big is broken or absent, I don't expect *anything* of it *at all*, and that's easier to be okay with; I just won't go there. But when it's something that's only a little bit broken and I run into it constantly -- that's TOO annoying to live with.
I don't know why they'd need to do conditions-testing; look at the auto glass in the same neighbourhood, and figure that at a couple hundred feet off the ground you get maybe 10% as much wear and tear (most of the harsh blowing sand is at ground level).
There's a new solar-mirror setup just north of Lancaster CA. It's some sort of test prototype, I don't recall the details. The way the mirror array is situated here, the collector is visible from the ground as you go by on the highway, and the reflection is bright enough that I expect it could damage eyesight.
The reply from the Safety Engineer (somewhere up above) illustrates the problem: his feeling was that since we CAN mitigate risks, we should NEVER take risks we can avoid. His post sadly illustrate the risk-averse society we've had since the late Cold War stopped keeping us on the alert and looking for that advantage.
But there's something to having boots on the ground that a robot can't accomplish. It's partly that robots can't make judgment calls, but more important, having someone THERE motivates the rest of us like a robot cannot.
I think it was the end of the Cold War. After that, we no longer LIVED WITH risk -- there was no longer any threat capable of asserting risk against America on a scale large enough to matter. Lacking that pressure, we gradually lost the ability to adapt to and cope with risk. As a result, we now think incidents like 9/11 and a shuttle crash are the end of the world and are a reason to eliminate ALL risk.
Any biologist will tell you -- stress (which is caused by risk) equals life. When there is no stress, there is no incentive to live.
I think it would be hard NOT to be aware of the risks. And these aren't stupid people who can't figure it out for themselves, even from partial data.
But here's something else. Every kid used to want to grow up to be an astronaut; now hardly anyone has such sentiments. What if the reason wasn't because it was new, but because it was RISKY?? Maybe risk *attracts* the very sort of person whom we most need to explore new frontiers.
As to the problem the article mentions re Google and other online book archives being a mess to find anything in, and hopeless for browsing -- what on earth would be wrong with cataloging them by the LOC system (which is *extremely* precise) or at least by Dewey Decimal (which is much fuzzier but at least you CAN find a category of interest without already knowing the titles/authors/keywords). That would bring their cataloging into alignment with libraries everywhere, and make it one helluva lot easier to find related stuff, or to just browse a general section.
I just spent a couple hours trying to browse that new hathitrust.org book archive, and that was one of the problems -- search terms tended to bring up either a lot of irrelevant crap, or to miss stuff that is what I want but doesn't happen to have quite the right keywords. (And some were from another galaxy, WTF?) But if I could cruise a list of works organized by LOC or Dewey, I could tell just from that whether a given work was likely to hit my field of interest, even if not a single search term matched.
How much money is NOT being made by NOT publishing stuff that's still under copyright but that isn't profitable enough to pay royalties?? (And maybe isn't profitable enough to justify tracking down an absentee copyright holder.)
Clearly there IS money in publishing old stuff, or most of the pre-1900 classics would be long since out of print, and such is not the case. They continue to be reprinted to this day.
I would guess that over the long haul, long copyrights result in a net reduction of money to be made all along the chain -- remember it's NOT just the author and his agent and the first publishing rights, but also all the reprint houses, distributors, and bookstores. It occurs to me to wonder how much long copyright contributed to the demise of small local bookstores, and may now be contributing to libraries that are social hubs but no longer house vast numbers of books.
In my high school (a 3 year school in Montana), it was. You needed at least one basic course and one advanced course to graduate. In Junior High (grades 7-8-9, what most places now call middle school) it was required all 3 years. Math was also required in H.S. up through at least one advanced class. History was required through the 11th grade and English through 12th.
Starting in the 10th grade you could opt which field of science to study (the basic paths were physics, chemistry, and biology) but you couldn't entirely opt out.
So no, I don't wonder why people educated under that system are less likely to believe in "magic".