This is a good enough idea - but it only works up to about 100,000 feet. (20 miles). The problem is that balloons have a large volume by necessity and hense wind shear is a major issue.
Helium can work as well - so can hot air or hot hellium.
An idea that is similar and avoids the volume problem is to use helecopters.
These can be electrically powered since they are teathered. The issue with choppers is that one needs a way to take a motor down for repairs since it is an active system.
Whether we can count on an electrically powered chopper to run 24x7 for several years is an open question... and such as system will take a lot of juice.
The issue however is not vertical lift but imparting kinetic energy into the orbital vehical. Remember E=1/2m*v^2 and v=20,000 or so.
Stretch a long horizontal cable out to the east with the western end tied to the earth.
Stretch another cable straight up so that you can lift the free end of the horizontal cable.
Now lift the free end (eastern end) of horizontal cable such that the free end of the cable becomes stationary when you disregard the rotation of the earth. Thus the attached end of the cable will move at a velocity of about 1000 miles per hour relative to the free end. Another way to look at this is that the free end will move at a velocity of about 1000 miles per hour to the west relative to the attached end.
As the free end stretches to the limit of the cable length we get a sling shot formed.
If the energy of the earth can be translated into forward velocity on the free end of the cable as the surface of the earth whips by at a relative velocity of 1000 miles per hour, then we might be able to get say a 20:1 ratio in velocity from a sling shot effect and this would fire anything attached to the free end into space at orbital speeds - righto?
I've not used a bull whip recently but I figure that might be a good name for such a project.
Tell me, would YOU want to have a job where a mistake could cost you everything you own and 90% of what you earn for the next 20 years?
Would programming a computer qualify as such a job? Like if you make a mistake and not know about someone's troll patent and after your product becomes successful in the market someone claims you infringed if if there is prior art and you get to spend the next several years fighting in court?
Would designing a TV set qualify? Would Philo Farnsworth qualify?
Or is it that is these case they didn't even make a mistake?
Initially I thought the math must be out to lunch and I figured I'd follow the story and see if someone actually does the math. I'm too lazy - and it does seem to be out by up to an order of magnitude.
Nevertheless, I've used these in my office at home for over a decade now.
I have 3x13watt compacts in a nice fan/ceiling fixture. They give an excellent spectrum. These bulbs are rated for something like 10,000 hours.
1) The ratings are worng. I get over 5 years use from them and I run them 24x7. Do the math.
2) Since I'm in and out of my office 16 hours a day - the other 8 hours is no big deal. At 10c per KWatt-hr I burn about 10 cents / day or $3 bux per month. (confirm: 24x40=1000= 1Kwatt-hr=10 cents) Instead of turning them on and off I elect to spend the extra dollar per month.
3) by leaving them on (my computers are on 24x7 also) there is no thermal wear and tear except when the power goes off - which is maybe 2x a year and I have UPS"s but not on the lites. They need so little power I should use the UPS and back them up too. (Hmmm next project)
4) I know I get 5 years out of the bulbs because I know when I bought the 1st set was when I remodled my house 15 years ago and the 2nd set is still running and that was put in when I built my garage in 1999. I hired the same electrician to help me with the wiring and he did an excellent job! Hey Thanks Dave! I've had a lot of trades let me down but not Dave!
The power savings are considerable. The hardware savings are also considerable. However I run standard filiment bulbs everywhere else because I use the bulbs so infrequently that a package of 4 bulbs will last me 4 years for replacements.
Whether the artical's math is right or worng is not an issue. These are an excellent investment in the right areas...
Also - I'm not really conserned about the electricity usage because I live in Canada and my house needs to be heated. Unfortunately it needs to be heated and this is because the guys who built it decided to save me money on insulation! No kidding. Just like the same guys who decided that natural gas was a waste product and flared the Turner Valley oil field... they burned the gas cap off and left 90% of the oil almost unrecoverable.
Thanks guys! Next life learn some physics. Maybe the worng people rule the world.
Since my house needs to be heated unless I tear it apart and build it properly - any waste heat from the light bulbs cuts down on my use of natural gas.
Short answer is that these bulbs are pretty good. I recomend them to anyone. Find the ordinary looking bulbs not the pig tail (haha - if you were a farm boy!!!) style.
Also - many fixtures - especially mine with the fan above - will create a flikering effect. This is easily solved by buying a small bottle of glass paint and painting the top of the lense white. Just paint the upper 50%. It will look perfectly normal and fixes all problems of flicker as well as directing the light where you need it.
Next lecture! How to have fun and make profit by rebuilding your house!
HP use to make some good products. Clearly they are going downhill and perhaps we should be looking to short the stock.
Suing people for making ink is pretty lame when they could simply put the HP32s calculator back on the market and make money doing something useful supplying a product people really like.
Sure I'm on a rampage. My HP32s quit when I tried to install wine. (www.winehq.org)
This happened in 1996 - years before 911. The "white powder" was flour and I made pancakes for my kids with some of it for breakfast. I bought it at Safeway.
I got a call from a friend advising me of the issue. I was asked to drive to the fire station - which I did even though it meant I had to leave the kids unsupervised. I'm a single parent - my wife died.
I suppose there was a chance I could have been arrested.
When I drove to the fire station I pulled into the driveway and immediately two (2) firetrucks which were parked on the side of the road moved together to block off the driveway. So clearly they were waiting for me.
What happened is that I used the flour to mark the run. On part of the run I tossed a glob of flour on some old telephone poles...
The idjots swept up the flour from the telephone poles and tested it and found the creosote they also swept up was toxic. They were not smart enough to test another sample not on a telephone pole.
Next - some of the fire department personel run with us pretty much every Monday. In addition we have police officers who run with us. This was aired on the news. The person who reads the sports at the time has also run with us. All of our runs are published on the website. We have 1000's of pictures from former runs. We've been written up in several magazines. We're the largest running club in the WORLD and we have been doing this for over 60 years.
Yet - in spite of all of this - it happened again last year... another trail partly swept up by the same folks who tried to sweep up my trail in 1996 (and they missed most of it - it was a well marked trail and they were not able to follow it).
This has also happned in a number of other cities.
I do not know what we can do - I would think publishing what we are doing should be sufficient but it doesn't seem to be.
Quite franky, who you want to sleep with is NONE OF THE GOVERNMENTS BUSINESS.
Governments have been making this their business since at least the time of Jesus Christ.
This is where marriage comes from and marriage licenses
This is where the adultery laws come from.... and the incarceration and in some countries stoning of people. This is where the prostitution laws come from.
You are very misinformed if you think its None of their Business. Mind you - perhaps we the people need to take things back under control and make it none of their business. Call you your favorite pollie and start making this happen.
It would have to be disposed of innocently - not with intent. The issue here is the intent to get rid of the stuff. Had she done this before she was served then she could argue she didn't know what was going on, had no idea she was doing anything illegal, somehow got the idea that maybe there was something not quite right about the situtation and got rid of everything because she was being a good girl.
After she has been served that being a good girl argument becomes harder to make. But she certainly can say all her friends told her to just get rid of it.
She'll have a decent case if she is deaf. Or if she like me doesn't even own a CD player that works.
There is no evidence she downloaded anything. The RIAA has sued dead people. The only evidence is that someone might have used her computer for something and the something is not anymore clear than the someone is. When you connect your comnputer to the net you connect every keyboard in the world to. This means you litterally invite every kid in every bedroom in the world... and it is little different than if you just give them the keys to your house and go to the restaurant for dinner.
Windows is not secure.
If this was a windows machine then the RIAA should have to prove first that it wasn't owned and 2nd that she actually was doing the downloading and prove this via evidence that does not come from her machine.
IMHO - her reaction to get rid of it as fast as she can is a normal reaction and it was probably her friends who told her to do this. My son and daughter would come to this conclusion.
My brothers and sisters would also come to this conclusion - IE - just get it out of your life as fast as you can.
She should have been more cleaver and organised for one of her friends to break into her house and steal the damn thing and then report this to the cops as a theft.
If this goes to anything more than a light slap on the wrist then the judge should be kicked off the bench in the next election. Its too bad we can't do this in Canada... yet most of the judges I've dealt with have actually been pretty good.
The USA has put a greater percentage of the population and hense more people behind bars than the Soviet Union ever did. Of course - most of these people were black.:-)
What is even better is that the court and the RIAA are now going after what appears to be a single mom.
If they throw her in Jail there will be two kids in the "system". If this was a winders computer - likely - then it likely could have been owned.
This is like being charged for child pornography because a child molester calls you and you answer the phone. Of course the USA courts have thrown a number of single mothers in Jail because they took a message for a boyfriend who was dealing in drugs.... and they didn't know anything. There have even been movies made on this. In some respects the USA justice (sic) system is really sick.
The clear answer is that she probably didn't know it was there. If it was there, her boy friend probably put it there and she probably just tried to get rid of it because she probably loves her kids and wants to raise them.
The normal reaction from 90% of the women I know is that if something they don't want comes into their lives - they tend to say ewwwwhh! and try to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
Sometimes the reaction is to vomit.
Denis Richards did a really nice vomit scene in Star Ship Troupers.
A wiped hard drive is clearly not evidence of anything other than she wanted to keep the slate clean.
Of course - maybe the powers who run/. are toying with us and there is evidence of what was on the HDD before it was wiped.
This is why I use an IBM keyboard which is over 10 years old on my present machine. The short of it is if the computer will not run this keyboard then I won't buy it or use it.
Since I am one of the few people who rad slash dot who has actually programmed a stack machine - my opinion might count.
This is a good architecture. It makes a great deal of sense. One of the things that a stack machine does is pull the memory (at least the automatic variables) for the function currently being executed together at the top of the stack. This means it is feasable to load this memory into cache or even into cpu registers which greatly increases speed. The HP3000 only had 4 registers for the stack top - today a CPU can have 100's. Whether there is 4 or 40 or 400 registers the instruction set is the same.
This has always been a very smart way to organise a machine.
So I wonder how long it will take for the population to change who they look to for TDL services?
DNS is cooperative. If I don't like the LD services someone provides I am free to use someone else. Changing the routing is more difficult to get around.
My prediction is this part of the net will splinter and then heal itself.
You failed to mention fungus. There are at least 15 million species of fungus and we know only a smattering about a few of them. The rain forests are devoured by the fungus.
While you may not realise this - you were lucky. Your wife however was not.
My wife also died of a brain tumour (Glioma but not GBM). She survived for 10 years. 6 of those 10 years were very difficult for me because I had to provide 100% supervision.
Mind you my wife did reasonably well for the first 3-4 years. She finished uni and my son was born and now he has graduated with distinction. Nevertheless I had the tripple duty of providing for my family, looking after her and running my business and I did not get much in the way of help.
Since your wife's illness was quick - you probably don't know the stress that comes with years of having to look after a person who looks relatively heathy but is totally disabled. In addition, brain injuries can create a situation where the patient's actions create danger to others such as pre-school kids. This is what I faced.
May I suggest some ways that _might_ improve things.
I have felt for many years that government / Civil Service jobs should be filled with people over 45. In fact, I would suggest 50 might be a good entry level age.
The issue is not discrimination against those who are young. The issue is that we have many people over the age of 50 who end up unemployed for many reasons - including age discrimination. By age 50, these people have typically raised a family. People learn a great deal by being a parent. Also - I do recall a documentary which aired years ago about 55 yo laid off executives and how the stats are that most will never hold a meaningfull job again.
My consern is not about old executives (and I am one) holding a job. My consern is that people who are over 50 have learned many un-measurable things over the years. They have often much better judgement than the under 30 crowd (under 40? anyone? Never trust a person under 40?).
In addition - we know that the civil service is full of people who have retired by the age of 30. Then - what of the politics and skeletons in the closet?
Someone at age 50 who comes into the civil service has only 15 years to be a bastard. If someone comes in at age 25 then they can inflict their ideas for the next 40 years. So old age both selects more experiance while at the same time old age limits the damage people can inflict.
It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So what of our police forces?
Suppose we allowed an officer only say 10 years in the force... then off to some other occupation.
My feeling is that most bad cops don't start out bad. They learn on the job.
There is simply too much power trusted to the wrong group of people. We all know the personality types attracted to law enforcement.
When you have people who like to push people around and be in their face taking on a job which encourages this activity... then mix it with often low pay - at least lower pay than most people with more ability are willing to accept - this equals a receipe for disaster.
Since we generally agree we need to give our police forces the power they have so that they can fight crime - perhaps we need to limit the individuals in a temporal fashion.
A career path that for instance might include 5 years on the police force followed by say 5 years as a fire fighter followed by say some other public service occupation might be viewed as positive to those people who wish to follow such a career.
At the same time - if a bad apple is limited in the time period where he / she can inflict their harm then everyone benefits.
The USA presidency is limited to 2 terms. Here in Canada we have had pollies inflict their spew for decades.
Tennyson wrote:
"The old order changes, yeilding place to new And God fullfills himself in many ways Lest one good custom should corrupt the earth"
Maybe we need to apply what Tennyson wrote to our hired civil servants and our police.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a good enough idea - but it only works up to about 100,000 feet. (20 miles). The problem is that balloons have a large volume by necessity and hense wind shear is a major issue.
Helium can work as well - so can hot air or hot hellium.
An idea that is similar and avoids the volume problem is to use helecopters.
These can be electrically powered since they are teathered. The issue with choppers is that one needs a way to take a motor down for repairs since it is an active system.
Whether we can count on an electrically powered chopper to run 24x7 for several years is an open question... and such as system will take a lot of juice.
The issue however is not vertical lift but imparting kinetic energy into the orbital vehical. Remember E=1/2m*v^2 and v=20,000 or so.
Hey - a sling shot might work.
Stretch a long horizontal cable out to the east with the western end tied to the earth.
Stretch another cable straight up so that you can lift the free end of the horizontal cable.
Now lift the free end (eastern end) of horizontal cable such that the free end of the cable becomes stationary when you disregard the rotation of the earth. Thus the attached end of the cable will move at a velocity of about 1000 miles per hour relative to the free end. Another way to look at this is that the free end will move at a velocity of about 1000 miles per hour to the west relative to the attached end.
As the free end stretches to the limit of the cable length we get a sling shot formed.
If the energy of the earth can be translated into forward velocity on the free end of the cable as the surface of the earth whips by at a relative velocity of 1000 miles per hour, then we might be able to get say a 20:1 ratio in velocity from a sling shot effect and this would fire anything attached to the free end into space at orbital speeds - righto?
I've not used a bull whip recently but I figure that might be a good name for such a project.
Tell me, would YOU want to have a job where a mistake could cost you everything you own and 90% of what you earn for the next 20 years?
Would programming a computer qualify as such a job? Like if you make a mistake and not know about someone's troll patent and after your product becomes successful in the market someone claims you infringed if if there is prior art and you get to spend the next several years fighting in court?
Would designing a TV set qualify? Would Philo Farnsworth qualify?
Or is it that is these case they didn't even make a mistake?
Initially I thought the math must be out to lunch and I figured I'd follow the story and see if someone actually does the math. I'm too lazy - and it does seem to be out by up to an order of magnitude.
Nevertheless, I've used these in my office at home for over a decade now.
I have 3x13watt compacts in a nice fan/ceiling fixture. They give an excellent spectrum. These bulbs are rated for something like 10,000 hours.
1) The ratings are worng. I get over 5 years use from them and I run them 24x7. Do the math.
2) Since I'm in and out of my office 16 hours a day - the other 8 hours is no big deal. At 10c per KWatt-hr I burn about 10 cents / day or $3 bux per month. (confirm: 24x40=1000= 1Kwatt-hr=10 cents) Instead of turning them on and off I elect to spend the extra dollar per month.
3) by leaving them on (my computers are on 24x7 also) there is no thermal wear and tear except when the power goes off - which is maybe 2x a year and I have UPS"s but not on the lites. They need so little power I should use the UPS and back them up too. (Hmmm next project)
4) I know I get 5 years out of the bulbs because I know when I bought the 1st set was when I remodled my house 15 years ago and the 2nd set is still running and that was put in when I built my garage in 1999. I hired the same electrician to help me with the wiring and he did an excellent job! Hey Thanks Dave! I've had a lot of trades let me down but not Dave!
The power savings are considerable. The hardware savings are also considerable. However I run standard filiment bulbs everywhere else because I use the bulbs so infrequently that a package of 4 bulbs will last me 4 years for replacements.
Whether the artical's math is right or worng is not an issue. These are an excellent investment in the right areas...
Also - I'm not really conserned about the electricity usage because I live in Canada and my house needs to be heated. Unfortunately it needs to be heated and this is because the guys who built it decided to save me money on insulation! No kidding. Just like the same guys who decided that natural gas was a waste product and flared the Turner Valley oil field... they burned the gas cap off and left 90% of the oil almost unrecoverable.
Thanks guys! Next life learn some physics. Maybe the worng people rule the world.
Since my house needs to be heated unless I tear it apart and build it properly - any waste heat from the light bulbs cuts down on my use of natural gas.
Short answer is that these bulbs are pretty good. I recomend them to anyone. Find the ordinary looking bulbs not the pig tail (haha - if you were a farm boy!!!) style.
Also - many fixtures - especially mine with the fan above - will create a flikering effect. This is easily solved by buying a small bottle of glass paint and painting the top of the lense white. Just paint the upper 50%. It will look perfectly normal and fixes all problems of flicker as well as directing the light where you need it.
Next lecture! How to have fun and make profit by rebuilding your house!
onon.
HP use to make some good products. Clearly they are going downhill and perhaps we should be looking to short the stock.
Suing people for making ink is pretty lame when they could simply put the HP32s calculator back on the market and make money doing something useful supplying a product people really like.
Sure I'm on a rampage. My HP32s quit when I tried to install wine. (www.winehq.org)
I don't own an iPod but if I did and it fell in the toilet I don't think I'd admit ownership.
I've also discovered the joys of over-reaction. Read here: http://onon.org/asm/powder.html
This happened in 1996 - years before 911. The "white powder" was flour and I made pancakes for my kids with some of it for breakfast. I bought it at Safeway.
I got a call from a friend advising me of the issue. I was asked to drive to the fire station - which I did even though it meant I had to leave the kids unsupervised. I'm a single parent - my wife died.
I suppose there was a chance I could have been arrested.
When I drove to the fire station I pulled into the driveway and immediately two (2) firetrucks which were parked on the side of the road moved together to block off the driveway. So clearly they were waiting for me.
What happened is that I used the flour to mark the run. On part of the run I tossed a glob of flour on some old telephone poles...
The idjots swept up the flour from the telephone poles and tested it and found the creosote they also swept up was toxic. They were not smart enough to test another sample not on a telephone pole.
Next - some of the fire department personel run with us pretty much every Monday. In addition we have police officers who run with us. This was aired on the news. The person who reads the sports at the time has also run with us. All of our runs are published on the website. We have 1000's of pictures from former runs. We've been written up in several magazines. We're the largest running club in the WORLD and we have been doing this for over 60 years.
Yet - in spite of all of this - it happened again last year... another trail partly swept up by the same folks who tried to sweep up my trail in 1996 (and they missed most of it - it was a well marked trail and they were not able to follow it).
This has also happned in a number of other cities.
I do not know what we can do - I would think publishing what we are doing should be sufficient but it doesn't seem to be.
Quite franky, who you want to sleep with is NONE OF THE GOVERNMENTS BUSINESS.
Governments have been making this their business since at least the time of Jesus Christ.
This is where marriage comes from and marriage licenses
This is where the adultery laws come from.... and the incarceration and in some countries stoning of people. This is where the prostitution laws come from.
You are very misinformed if you think its None of their Business. Mind you - perhaps we the people need to take things back under control and make it none of their business. Call you your favorite pollie and start making this happen.
It would have to be disposed of innocently - not with intent. The issue here is the intent to get rid of the stuff. Had she done this before she was served then she could argue she didn't know what was going on, had no idea she was doing anything illegal, somehow got the idea that maybe there was something not quite right about the situtation and got rid of everything because she was being a good girl.
After she has been served that being a good girl argument becomes harder to make. But she certainly can say all her friends told her to just get rid of it.
She'll have a decent case if she is deaf. Or if she like me doesn't even own a CD player that works.
That would be dumb. Failed drives can be read just as Nixon's tapes were read....
Perhaps it looks obvious.
There is no evidence she downloaded anything. The RIAA has sued dead people. The only evidence is that someone might have used her computer for something and the something is not anymore clear than the someone is. When you connect your comnputer to the net you connect every keyboard in the world to. This means you litterally invite every kid in every bedroom in the world... and it is little different than if you just give them the keys to your house and go to the restaurant for dinner.
Windows is not secure.
If this was a windows machine then the RIAA should have to prove first that it wasn't owned and 2nd that she actually was doing the downloading and prove this via evidence that does not come from her machine.
IMHO - her reaction to get rid of it as fast as she can is a normal reaction and it was probably her friends who told her to do this. My son and daughter would come to this conclusion.
My brothers and sisters would also come to this conclusion - IE - just get it out of your life as fast as you can.
She should have been more cleaver and organised for one of her friends to break into her house and steal the damn thing and then report this to the cops as a theft.
If this goes to anything more than a light slap on the wrist then the judge should be kicked off the bench in the next election. Its too bad we can't do this in Canada... yet most of the judges I've dealt with have actually been pretty good.
The USA has put a greater percentage of the population and hense more people behind bars than the Soviet Union ever did. Of course - most of these people were black. :-)
What is even better is that the court and the RIAA are now going after what appears to be a single mom.
If they throw her in Jail there will be two kids in the "system". If this was a winders computer - likely - then it likely could have been owned.
This is like being charged for child pornography because a child molester calls you and you answer the phone. Of course the USA courts have thrown a number of single mothers in Jail because they took a message for a boyfriend who was dealing in drugs.... and they didn't know anything. There have even been movies made on this. In some respects the USA justice (sic) system is really sick.
The clear answer is that she probably didn't know it was there. If it was there, her boy friend probably put it there and she probably just tried to get rid of it because she probably loves her kids and wants to raise them.
What about those of us who never downloaded anything ever?
How do you prove a negative? I'm a mathematician!
The normal reaction from 90% of the women I know is that if something they don't want comes into their lives - they tend to say ewwwwhh! and try to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
/. are toying with us and there is evidence of what was on the HDD before it was wiped.
Sometimes the reaction is to vomit.
Denis Richards did a really nice vomit scene in Star Ship Troupers.
A wiped hard drive is clearly not evidence of anything other than she wanted to keep the slate clean.
Of course - maybe the powers who run
What "registry". Surely she would be smart enough to not use anything by M$. If not - then maybe its her own damn fault.
This judge does not deserve to be re-elected.
I am so glad I am not an American - yet I am - by birth. I'll look to be the first one to miagrate to Mars.
They didn't even sue the correct person.
There is no way on earth that I will ever buy anything the RIAA touches. Musicians should know this.
This is why I use an IBM keyboard which is over 10 years old on my present machine. The short of it is if the computer will not run this keyboard then I won't buy it or use it.
Since I am one of the few people who rad slash dot who has actually programmed a stack machine - my opinion might count.
This is a good architecture. It makes a great deal of sense. One of the things that a stack machine does is pull the memory (at least the automatic variables) for the function currently being executed together at the top of the stack. This means it is feasable to load this memory into cache or even into cpu registers which greatly increases speed. The HP3000 only had 4 registers for the stack top - today a CPU can have 100's. Whether there is 4 or 40 or 400 registers the instruction set is the same.
This has always been a very smart way to organise a machine.
Dell 49.04B market cap
IBM 114.64B market cap
Dell 56.74B revenue
IBM 88.50B revenue
It would be nice if even some basic facts could be checked. Of course - maybe some ppl think IBM is not a computer company.
So I wonder how long it will take for the population to change who they look to for TDL services?
DNS is cooperative. If I don't like the LD services someone provides I am free to use someone else. Changing the routing is more difficult to get around.
My prediction is this part of the net will splinter and then heal itself.
You failed to mention fungus. There are at least 15 million species of fungus and we know only a smattering about a few of them. The rain forests are devoured by the fungus.
While you may not realise this - you were lucky. Your wife however was not.
My wife also died of a brain tumour (Glioma but not GBM). She survived for 10 years. 6 of those 10 years were very difficult for me because I had to provide 100% supervision.
Mind you my wife did reasonably well for the first 3-4 years. She finished uni and my son was born and now he has graduated with distinction. Nevertheless I had the tripple duty of providing for my family, looking after her and running my business and I did not get much in the way of help.
Since your wife's illness was quick - you probably don't know the stress that comes with years of having to look after a person who looks relatively heathy but is totally disabled. In addition, brain injuries can create a situation where the patient's actions create danger to others such as pre-school kids. This is what I faced.
May I suggest some ways that _might_ improve things.
I have felt for many years that government / Civil Service jobs should be filled with people over 45. In fact, I would suggest 50 might be a good entry level age.
The issue is not discrimination against those who are young. The issue is that we have many people over the age of 50 who end up unemployed for many reasons - including age discrimination. By age 50, these people have typically raised a family. People learn a great deal by being a parent. Also - I do recall a documentary which aired years ago about 55 yo laid off executives and how the stats are that most will never hold a meaningfull job again.
My consern is not about old executives (and I am one) holding a job. My consern is that people who are over 50 have learned many un-measurable things over the years. They have often much better judgement than the under 30 crowd (under 40? anyone? Never trust a person under 40?).
In addition - we know that the civil service is full of people who have retired by the age of 30. Then - what of the politics and skeletons in the closet?
Someone at age 50 who comes into the civil service has only 15 years to be a bastard. If someone comes in at age 25 then they can inflict their ideas for the next 40 years. So old age both selects more experiance while at the same time old age limits the damage people can inflict.
It is said that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
So what of our police forces?
Suppose we allowed an officer only say 10 years in the force... then off to some other occupation.
My feeling is that most bad cops don't start out bad. They learn on the job.
There is simply too much power trusted to the wrong group of people. We all know the personality types attracted to law enforcement.
When you have people who like to push people around and be in their face taking on a job which encourages this activity... then mix it with often low pay - at least lower pay than most people with more ability are willing to accept - this equals a receipe for disaster.
Since we generally agree we need to give our police forces the power they have so that they can fight crime - perhaps we need to limit the individuals in a temporal fashion.
A career path that for instance might include 5 years on the police force followed by say 5 years as a fire fighter followed by say some other public service occupation might be viewed as positive to those people who wish to follow such a career.
At the same time - if a bad apple is limited in the time period where he / she can inflict their harm then everyone benefits.
The USA presidency is limited to 2 terms. Here in Canada we have had pollies inflict their spew for decades.
Tennyson wrote:
"The old order changes, yeilding place to new
And God fullfills himself in many ways
Lest one good custom should corrupt the earth"
Maybe we need to apply what Tennyson wrote to our hired civil servants and our police.
This is actually a very good comment.
Unfortunately the moderator seems to be somewhat challenged and clearly didn't double check the button he was pressing.