Taxes don't hurt the economy, that's a right wing furphy, taxes just hurt the insatiable greed of the rich, just like having to pay for stuff instead of being able to steal it. Taxes kick the economy along because the government spends the money rather than sitting on it. Growth comes from spending rather than clumping in stagnant pools where slime try to outgrowth each others obesity.
If Oregon is serious about better balancing the budget they should start shifting more responsibilities from local government back to state government and substantively cut back on administrative costs, policing, schools, fire brigade are all services that could save enormous amounts with just one point of administration versus hundreds. So property taxes could be divided between state and local.
So if we were taxed at 100% and got everything through the government (AKA communism), the economy would do better?
Alright, the long version. Taxes above a certain level will harm the economy. This will happen because, as you said in your post, governments are notoriously inefficient, and seem to have a poor ability to tighten their belts, ever.
More specifically, regressive taxes tend to hurt the economy. A regressive tax is one that increases the imbalance of wealth. This is because those with less money have to choose to spend less on other things due to the taxes, while the amount taken from the rich is negligible from their perspective. Therefore, the net effect on the economy will almost always be worse than not taxing. Times when it doesn't have an effect is when the overall tax level is so small that it's impact is negligible or when the average wealth is so high that no one is worried about a little extra tax.
On the other hand, progressive taxes may have a net benefit on the economy. A progressive tax is one that takes more from those who have more, whether due to being based directly on income or targeted at things that the wealthy purchase more. These are taxes which do what you said, take accrued wealth from those who have a lot of it, and re-inject it into the economy. This doesn't take into account just how good the government is at spending the money, how much of a tax burden the wealthy are already under (not really a problem in the USA), or what the wealthy were doing with that money in the first place (hint: most of them aren't keeping it under a mattress - they don't make them big enough). Of course, if a progressive tax is large enough, there is a good chance it will harm the economy, from tax evasion and all the burdens that entails, and other possible issues I can't bother thinking about right now.
Now for the final point. Which of those tax types do you think a gas tax falls under? That's right, regressive. Even more ironically, which end of the spectrum do you think you will find those who are buying electric vehicles and, hence, paying less of those taxes? Once again, those with more money than average.
Seriously. The mere act of trusting someone will eventually lead to that person betraying said trust. Trusting someone puts them in a position of power, and power corrupts. You can't trust anyone.
I'm guessing you have parental issues. And lots of puppies.
Way I read this...they were unsure if this guy stole code from the company he worked for, they were pushing to seize his computer at home because they felt he had stolen code to release as an open-source option to the software he helped write that they wanted to lease out instead. The court, torn on the issue, decides that because he calls himself a 'hacker' he's able to not only steal the code, but cover his tracks. So they better seize his equipment before he gets a chance.
The part that kills me about this is that any programmer who is capable of actually having programming be his primary occupation, will have the skills necessary to perform this task. I know how to zip files and use DropBox. I can remember the password for that service, and access it from just about any device I can get my hands on. So can many of my computer-literate, non-programmer friends. The only things special about this guy is: he's a (very) strong advocate of open source; and he calls himself a hacker. The first doesn't mean he's about to violate his contract (code written under work-for-hire), and the second means nothing at all.
I really hope this guy gets a lawyer, gets this BS seizure overturned, and gets his stuff back ASAP. If he's smart and diligent, he may have a backup on a server at an ISP somewhere, and it will not only not be egregious, it won't be effective.
I'm doubly certain that all the stores in Portland (esp. those which sell large items, such as furniture) would appreciate seeing a huge drop in business from Washington State shoppers.
Oregon set this up. The fact that its own retailers have exploited a situation, and will be hurt by the fixing of said distortion, is its own fault. The way to deal with that is to implement it over time, e.g. add 0.5% per year until it is at a level commensurate with its neighbors.
And that's how we test new ideas to see which is a better model, and allow other states to make their own choices in how they will deal with their problems!
This would mostly cause the price of shipping by truck to increase, increasing the costs of consumer goods, which we will all pay for. Why risk damaging the economy by increaing consumer prices when you can just raise the gas tax? Remember, when I buy a good that has been shipped by truck, I am benefiting from the damage that truck caused to the highway. It's not actually fair to make truckers pay the majority of the cost.
And who exactly do you think is paying for the damage to the highways if the trucks are taxed and prices increase? And how exactly would this hurt the economy more than taking it directly from the people?
Taxes hurt the economy. Period. But so do shitty roads. Some reasonable method needs to be used to maintain them, and realistically, gas consumption is no longer a fair meterstick for how much you cause.
If this was the only thing like this that employers were doing, I might be inclined to agree with you. Unfortunately, there are more abuses than that described in this article, in just the last month. It sometimes seems like the goal of employers is to see how much they can screw employees over without getting in trouble.
Fortunately, things aren't as bad as they were in the Great Depression, but I imagine Steinbeck would be writing about company practices like these if he were to write Grapes of Wrath today. Of course, we also have some laws to minimize the abuses employers can perpetrate upon their employees - due in no small part to the reaction to such abuses perpetrated in the past.
If you want a loan, go to the bank, show them certified copies of your pay statements, sign a legal document listing your other debts (or whatever other information the bank needs for a decision), and that ought to be it.
That only works if the bank wants to limit itself to only lending to credible borrowers. The problem is that there is much more money to be made lending money to non-credible borrowers at usurious rates. The last thing they want is a pile of signed legal documents proving that they knew they were gambling with their deposits on likely deadbeats. If that were the case, they might be held responsible for their calculated risks rather than bailed out when the inevitable occurs. Credit scores act as a buffer (fig leaf).
That's one way to look at it. Another is, the interest rate is partially based on the risk of your defaulting. This is basic statistical analysis: If you increase the rate on high-risk people, you can actually lend to them and still make a profit. The other option is to not lend to high-risk people, which doesn't make their lives easier. Remember, these high-risk borrowers came to the lender, and knew they were high-risk in the first place. After all, there are two real options: Either they mitigate the risk of lending to high-risk borrowers; or, don't lend to high-risk borrowers.
The other part that a third-party credit bureau brings to the situation is that it gives a more-reliable means of verifying someone's risk to default on the payment. There are people out there who are happy to defraud the lenders, and the lenders having no easy way to corroborate the borrower's statements of their risk level to default.
It's no straw man. Part of the definition of bullying usually involves persistent behaviour in the part of the bully - random acts of violence tend to be a different problem. Bullies often have their preferred targets. Therefore, many bullies engage in stalking and harassment, both of which have persistent behaviour as part of their definition. So yes, I think that bullies should be dealt with. I also think that dealing with bullies should include expulsion as a last resort. The bullies have a problem, just as those bullied do. Explaining they are wrong and teaching them appropriate behaviour solves a lot more problems than just suspending or expelling them.
How does bullying fall into the "serious crime" level, and when?
Let's say we're both adults. What if I lived in the same neighborhood as you, and worked in the same building as you? In this situation, I went out of my way to cross paths with you multiple times a day, and would verbally abuse you, taunt you, and say harmful untrue things about you. Every now and then, I hit you. Do we have names for this? Yes we do: stalking, harassment, slander, and assault. If you were an adult (and I could prove these things), you would be at risk for a restraining order, fines, and jail time.
Now we have a law, targeted at children, which simplifies the proof of and amalgamates these four laws with respect to children. So my question to you is: Why do you think that kids should be allowed, or even encouraged, to do these things to other people?
Translation: Let's start with a really big infrastructure project on standardization that will affect maybe 1% of the world's population instead of a smaller one that affects more than 80% of the world by some counts. Yeah, I can't imagine why they would start there, either.
"If [the more labor-friendly party] wins, we'll be closing up operations here and firing all of you. Remember that when you vote"
And this is in BC, Canada
And while they can say that, they can't prove you voted for who they want, nor can the vote of your organization make a significant difference in the outcome, unless its employees number in the tens of thousands. Even then, the difference will be minor. So now its clear your employer is either blustering, or fear-mongering by making threats to your well-being over outcomes you have almost no control over.
So what are you doing to reduce the odds that you're working for a total dick?
P.S. Being a Canadian and having studied how our election process works, I'm aware that you can install a majority government with as little as 20% of the popular vote, perhaps less. This doesn't change anything I said about your situation, or your boss's actions.
Once again, I have to wonder if these guys are actually qualified to be running nuclear reactors. Because this is two accidents in a few days, and I get the impression that a lot of this was also caused by human error.
The mind boggles.
I guess it wasn't the Germans that bought the Springfield nuclear power plant. And then they used Homer as the model employee when HR went on a hiring spree.
I thought collecting interstellar hydrogen atoms with giant magnetic scoops while accelerating to near lightspeed and using them in a fusion ramjet was what Bussard was working on...
The guy was profligate! He had at least two ideas over the span of his career!
[End sarcasm] I wish I didn't believe that was needed.
The idea of distributing the wealth created by the machines without some form of easily arguable moral reason seems quite dangerous.
Okay, that's a somewhat fair statement. But if the net amount of work done by others to provide for the necessities of the average person's life is 10 hours per week, why would it make sense to have to work 40 hours per week (or more!)? Now, I'm not saying we're at the point where 10 hours per week supplies for our needs at this time, but as automation and advanced manufacturing processes continue, that day could very well come. And how will we distribute the rewards of that labour?
I've been hearing bad things about Japan's nuclear industry for over a decade now. I personally think the best "minor" event was when a technician witnessed a criticality event outside of a reactor, while carrying the nuclear material in a metal bucket. He wasn't even aware of what the blue flash signified. I wasn't either, until that story, but I don't work with nuclear materials. The news stories surrounding this incident mentioned a number of minor to moderate handling violations. Ah, here's a link to the event. September, 1999. Okay, not so minor. Second biggest, after Fukushima.
Pretty much every control system in the world relies on 'backups' for safety.
Building a system where the regular "process control" wont fail if equipment breaks is prohibitively expensive and is rarely done.
You build a system that works unless something breaks, then you add a second "Process Shutdown" or "Emergency Shutdown" system on top of that to handle all the safety functions.
For instance, at most oil rigs you have emergency shutdown solenoids on valves to the flare boom. If an emergency shutdown is triggered these solenoids open the valves and normalize the pressurized systems. This ESD system logic is usually completely separate in function from the process control system.
In essence it is what you could call a "backup" system.
Yes, backups are placed for safety purposes. No, that doesn't mean an incident hasn't occurred just because the backup system saved your ass. Relying on the backup system to cover for your incompetence just means that one day there will be a failure of the backup system and your incompetence will manifest at the same time. Then you will go from a near miss to possibly a catastrophe.
Here's a story from a while back in my career. I had a client with a RDBMS for running their service management. It was hosted on its own server, had redundant power supplies, backup system, and the RDBMS had concurrent logging. One day the network admin decided to test the redundant power supplies. He made a number of poor choices: he didn't perform a backup prior to testing; he did the test during the day, while the RDBMS was running; he did it while users were on the system. When he pulled the primary power supply plug, everything was fine. He plugged it back in. When he pulled the secondary power supply plug, he discovered that the primary power supply was already dead. This necessitated a phone call to support (me), and a full test on the system. Fortunately, the concurrent logging worked fine and they lost less than 15 minutes of data entry. Due to his poor timing, they lost over two hours of access to the system (and a bill for those two hours). Had that last failsafe not worked (or the hard drive gotten corrupted), he could have lost data to the last backup. Hours, or perhaps a day of data.
The moral of the story: backups are there in case something goes wrong, not so that you can be lax with your procedures.
It's common knowledge that, unlike the arctic, Antarctic ice has been increasing.
As is often the case this common knowledge is actually a common misconception. While the sea ice is increasing, the land ice is shedding mass at an accelerating rate. Since the sea ice is already in the sea, it does not affect sea levels at all. Thawing land ice does increase sea levels, since it introduces water to the sea that used to sit on land.
Sea ice clearly affects sea level. Take a glass of water, put in two cubes, Mark the line. Add two more ice cubes. The water will rise.
If all the ice slid off Antarctica, the sea level would rise. Calving a greater total volume of ice bergs over a given time period will cause a rise in sea levels. But the easiest way to determine the overall effect of global warming on sea levels is to measure the mass of ice that isn't floating in the ocean. It's also worth noting that the total volume of water on earth doesn't vary greatly over time (yes, we lose some water vapor to space, and gain some from comets).
Of course, total ice volumes are a determining factor in the salinity of the ocean, which is also significant.
Over the course of any given week, every National Park I am aware of could easily become a high risk situation from any number of natural events. A very simple example is a camper going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, or another with a snake bite, and no staff on duty with the walkie-talkie that would alert base who in turn would call in the resources to keep the person alive.
It is understandable that the USA National Parks would not want to be hit with negligence lawsuits were this to happen. And it would definitely happen: most visitors to national parks are not prepared to handle emergencies on their own. And there are an awful lot of park visitors-- the probability that someone would get into serious trouble approaches 1.000.
While there is a cost to shutting down the National Parks, keeping them open without the personnel that keep the park experience safe would be the crime of creating an attractive nuisance. The Park Service has a legal duty to not only shut down when staff is furloughed, but to patrol to keep persons out.
Now explain how your statement would apply to, say, the Lincoln Memorial.
Males and females have absolutely no difference between them, despite the overwhelming experiential, physiological, neurological, anatomical, and hormonal evidence to the contrary, you sexist pigs, and how dare you even conduct this research into the issue!
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go open a jar of mayo for the little lady, though that in no way suggests she lacks the wrist and forearm strength to grasp and twist just as well as any man.
It's pretty clear her grasp and twist capability is far superior to yours, she's just not using it on the jar.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you sentence the guy to thirty years, should the jury have to house, feed and guard him?
If they pay taxes, they do.
Taxes don't hurt the economy, that's a right wing furphy, taxes just hurt the insatiable greed of the rich, just like having to pay for stuff instead of being able to steal it. Taxes kick the economy along because the government spends the money rather than sitting on it. Growth comes from spending rather than clumping in stagnant pools where slime try to outgrowth each others obesity.
If Oregon is serious about better balancing the budget they should start shifting more responsibilities from local government back to state government and substantively cut back on administrative costs, policing, schools, fire brigade are all services that could save enormous amounts with just one point of administration versus hundreds. So property taxes could be divided between state and local.
So if we were taxed at 100% and got everything through the government (AKA communism), the economy would do better?
Alright, the long version. Taxes above a certain level will harm the economy. This will happen because, as you said in your post, governments are notoriously inefficient, and seem to have a poor ability to tighten their belts, ever.
More specifically, regressive taxes tend to hurt the economy. A regressive tax is one that increases the imbalance of wealth. This is because those with less money have to choose to spend less on other things due to the taxes, while the amount taken from the rich is negligible from their perspective. Therefore, the net effect on the economy will almost always be worse than not taxing. Times when it doesn't have an effect is when the overall tax level is so small that it's impact is negligible or when the average wealth is so high that no one is worried about a little extra tax.
On the other hand, progressive taxes may have a net benefit on the economy. A progressive tax is one that takes more from those who have more, whether due to being based directly on income or targeted at things that the wealthy purchase more. These are taxes which do what you said, take accrued wealth from those who have a lot of it, and re-inject it into the economy. This doesn't take into account just how good the government is at spending the money, how much of a tax burden the wealthy are already under (not really a problem in the USA), or what the wealthy were doing with that money in the first place (hint: most of them aren't keeping it under a mattress - they don't make them big enough). Of course, if a progressive tax is large enough, there is a good chance it will harm the economy, from tax evasion and all the burdens that entails, and other possible issues I can't bother thinking about right now.
Now for the final point. Which of those tax types do you think a gas tax falls under? That's right, regressive. Even more ironically, which end of the spectrum do you think you will find those who are buying electric vehicles and, hence, paying less of those taxes? Once again, those with more money than average.
Seriously. The mere act of trusting someone will eventually lead to that person betraying said trust. Trusting someone puts them in a position of power, and power corrupts. You can't trust anyone.
I'm guessing you have parental issues. And lots of puppies.
Joking.
It looks like all they did with the "hacker" identification is determine that they were intermediate level with computers and networking.
And here I figured being a programmer would have already demonstrated that point.
Way I read this...they were unsure if this guy stole code from the company he worked for, they were pushing to seize his computer at home because they felt he had stolen code to release as an open-source option to the software he helped write that they wanted to lease out instead. The court, torn on the issue, decides that because he calls himself a 'hacker' he's able to not only steal the code, but cover his tracks. So they better seize his equipment before he gets a chance.
The part that kills me about this is that any programmer who is capable of actually having programming be his primary occupation, will have the skills necessary to perform this task. I know how to zip files and use DropBox. I can remember the password for that service, and access it from just about any device I can get my hands on. So can many of my computer-literate, non-programmer friends. The only things special about this guy is: he's a (very) strong advocate of open source; and he calls himself a hacker. The first doesn't mean he's about to violate his contract (code written under work-for-hire), and the second means nothing at all.
I really hope this guy gets a lawyer, gets this BS seizure overturned, and gets his stuff back ASAP. If he's smart and diligent, he may have a backup on a server at an ISP somewhere, and it will not only not be egregious, it won't be effective.
I'm doubly certain that all the stores in Portland (esp. those which sell large items, such as furniture) would appreciate seeing a huge drop in business from Washington State shoppers.
Oregon set this up. The fact that its own retailers have exploited a situation, and will be hurt by the fixing of said distortion, is its own fault. The way to deal with that is to implement it over time, e.g. add 0.5% per year until it is at a level commensurate with its neighbors.
And that's how we test new ideas to see which is a better model, and allow other states to make their own choices in how they will deal with their problems!
This would mostly cause the price of shipping by truck to increase, increasing the costs of consumer goods, which we will all pay for. Why risk damaging the economy by increaing consumer prices when you can just raise the gas tax? Remember, when I buy a good that has been shipped by truck, I am benefiting from the damage that truck caused to the highway. It's not actually fair to make truckers pay the majority of the cost.
And who exactly do you think is paying for the damage to the highways if the trucks are taxed and prices increase? And how exactly would this hurt the economy more than taking it directly from the people?
Taxes hurt the economy. Period. But so do shitty roads. Some reasonable method needs to be used to maintain them, and realistically, gas consumption is no longer a fair meterstick for how much you cause.
If this was the only thing like this that employers were doing, I might be inclined to agree with you. Unfortunately, there are more abuses than that described in this article, in just the last month. It sometimes seems like the goal of employers is to see how much they can screw employees over without getting in trouble.
Fortunately, things aren't as bad as they were in the Great Depression, but I imagine Steinbeck would be writing about company practices like these if he were to write Grapes of Wrath today. Of course, we also have some laws to minimize the abuses employers can perpetrate upon their employees - due in no small part to the reaction to such abuses perpetrated in the past.
First they came...
Not speaking out about wrongs that don't directly affect you harms the society you live in.
If you want a loan, go to the bank, show them certified copies of your pay statements, sign a legal document listing your other debts (or whatever other information the bank needs for a decision), and that ought to be it.
That only works if the bank wants to limit itself to only lending to credible borrowers. The problem is that there is much more money to be made lending money to non-credible borrowers at usurious rates. The last thing they want is a pile of signed legal documents proving that they knew they were gambling with their deposits on likely deadbeats. If that were the case, they might be held responsible for their calculated risks rather than bailed out when the inevitable occurs. Credit scores act as a buffer (fig leaf).
That's one way to look at it. Another is, the interest rate is partially based on the risk of your defaulting. This is basic statistical analysis: If you increase the rate on high-risk people, you can actually lend to them and still make a profit. The other option is to not lend to high-risk people, which doesn't make their lives easier. Remember, these high-risk borrowers came to the lender, and knew they were high-risk in the first place. After all, there are two real options: Either they mitigate the risk of lending to high-risk borrowers; or, don't lend to high-risk borrowers.
The other part that a third-party credit bureau brings to the situation is that it gives a more-reliable means of verifying someone's risk to default on the payment. There are people out there who are happy to defraud the lenders, and the lenders having no easy way to corroborate the borrower's statements of their risk level to default.
It's no straw man. Part of the definition of bullying usually involves persistent behaviour in the part of the bully - random acts of violence tend to be a different problem. Bullies often have their preferred targets. Therefore, many bullies engage in stalking and harassment, both of which have persistent behaviour as part of their definition. So yes, I think that bullies should be dealt with. I also think that dealing with bullies should include expulsion as a last resort. The bullies have a problem, just as those bullied do. Explaining they are wrong and teaching them appropriate behaviour solves a lot more problems than just suspending or expelling them.
How does bullying fall into the "serious crime" level, and when?
Let's say we're both adults. What if I lived in the same neighborhood as you, and worked in the same building as you? In this situation, I went out of my way to cross paths with you multiple times a day, and would verbally abuse you, taunt you, and say harmful untrue things about you. Every now and then, I hit you. Do we have names for this? Yes we do: stalking, harassment, slander, and assault. If you were an adult (and I could prove these things), you would be at risk for a restraining order, fines, and jail time.
Now we have a law, targeted at children, which simplifies the proof of and amalgamates these four laws with respect to children. So my question to you is: Why do you think that kids should be allowed, or even encouraged, to do these things to other people?
Let's standardize all of the electrical outlets first. Which one should we choose?? http://www.kropla.com/electric2.htm
Translation: Let's start with a really big infrastructure project on standardization that will affect maybe 1% of the world's population instead of a smaller one that affects more than 80% of the world by some counts. Yeah, I can't imagine why they would start there, either.
Goodness ,that's hard ,to read
I swear, after the second comma I started hearing that in William Shatner's voice!
"If [the more labor-friendly party] wins, we'll be closing up operations here and firing all of you. Remember that when you vote"
And this is in BC, Canada
And while they can say that, they can't prove you voted for who they want, nor can the vote of your organization make a significant difference in the outcome, unless its employees number in the tens of thousands. Even then, the difference will be minor. So now its clear your employer is either blustering, or fear-mongering by making threats to your well-being over outcomes you have almost no control over.
So what are you doing to reduce the odds that you're working for a total dick?
P.S. Being a Canadian and having studied how our election process works, I'm aware that you can install a majority government with as little as 20% of the popular vote, perhaps less. This doesn't change anything I said about your situation, or your boss's actions.
Once again, I have to wonder if these guys are actually qualified to be running nuclear reactors. Because this is two accidents in a few days, and I get the impression that a lot of this was also caused by human error.
The mind boggles.
I guess it wasn't the Germans that bought the Springfield nuclear power plant. And then they used Homer as the model employee when HR went on a hiring spree.
Will Apple suit follow?
I thought collecting interstellar hydrogen atoms with giant magnetic scoops while accelerating to near lightspeed and using them in a fusion ramjet was what Bussard was working on...
The guy was profligate! He had at least two ideas over the span of his career!
[End sarcasm] I wish I didn't believe that was needed.
The idea of distributing the wealth created by the machines without some form of easily arguable moral reason seems quite dangerous.
Okay, that's a somewhat fair statement. But if the net amount of work done by others to provide for the necessities of the average person's life is 10 hours per week, why would it make sense to have to work 40 hours per week (or more!)? Now, I'm not saying we're at the point where 10 hours per week supplies for our needs at this time, but as automation and advanced manufacturing processes continue, that day could very well come. And how will we distribute the rewards of that labour?
I've been hearing bad things about Japan's nuclear industry for over a decade now. I personally think the best "minor" event was when a technician witnessed a criticality event outside of a reactor, while carrying the nuclear material in a metal bucket. He wasn't even aware of what the blue flash signified. I wasn't either, until that story, but I don't work with nuclear materials. The news stories surrounding this incident mentioned a number of minor to moderate handling violations. Ah, here's a link to the event. September, 1999. Okay, not so minor. Second biggest, after Fukushima.
Pretty much every control system in the world relies on 'backups' for safety. Building a system where the regular "process control" wont fail if equipment breaks is prohibitively expensive and is rarely done.
You build a system that works unless something breaks, then you add a second "Process Shutdown" or "Emergency Shutdown" system on top of that to handle all the safety functions.
For instance, at most oil rigs you have emergency shutdown solenoids on valves to the flare boom. If an emergency shutdown is triggered these solenoids open the valves and normalize the pressurized systems. This ESD system logic is usually completely separate in function from the process control system. In essence it is what you could call a "backup" system.
Yes, backups are placed for safety purposes. No, that doesn't mean an incident hasn't occurred just because the backup system saved your ass. Relying on the backup system to cover for your incompetence just means that one day there will be a failure of the backup system and your incompetence will manifest at the same time. Then you will go from a near miss to possibly a catastrophe.
Here's a story from a while back in my career. I had a client with a RDBMS for running their service management. It was hosted on its own server, had redundant power supplies, backup system, and the RDBMS had concurrent logging. One day the network admin decided to test the redundant power supplies. He made a number of poor choices: he didn't perform a backup prior to testing; he did the test during the day, while the RDBMS was running; he did it while users were on the system. When he pulled the primary power supply plug, everything was fine. He plugged it back in. When he pulled the secondary power supply plug, he discovered that the primary power supply was already dead. This necessitated a phone call to support (me), and a full test on the system. Fortunately, the concurrent logging worked fine and they lost less than 15 minutes of data entry. Due to his poor timing, they lost over two hours of access to the system (and a bill for those two hours). Had that last failsafe not worked (or the hard drive gotten corrupted), he could have lost data to the last backup. Hours, or perhaps a day of data.
The moral of the story: backups are there in case something goes wrong, not so that you can be lax with your procedures.
It's common knowledge that, unlike the arctic, Antarctic ice has been increasing.
As is often the case this common knowledge is actually a common misconception. While the sea ice is increasing, the land ice is shedding mass at an accelerating rate. Since the sea ice is already in the sea, it does not affect sea levels at all. Thawing land ice does increase sea levels, since it introduces water to the sea that used to sit on land.
Sea ice clearly affects sea level. Take a glass of water, put in two cubes, Mark the line. Add two more ice cubes. The water will rise.
If all the ice slid off Antarctica, the sea level would rise. Calving a greater total volume of ice bergs over a given time period will cause a rise in sea levels. But the easiest way to determine the overall effect of global warming on sea levels is to measure the mass of ice that isn't floating in the ocean. It's also worth noting that the total volume of water on earth doesn't vary greatly over time (yes, we lose some water vapor to space, and gain some from comets).
Of course, total ice volumes are a determining factor in the salinity of the ocean, which is also significant.
EVERY civilian as an ENEMY? Including the civilians who work in the police stations?
Those aren't civilians, those are brothers in arms.
Over the course of any given week, every National Park I am aware of could easily become a high risk situation from any number of natural events. A very simple example is a camper going into anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, or another with a snake bite, and no staff on duty with the walkie-talkie that would alert base who in turn would call in the resources to keep the person alive.
It is understandable that the USA National Parks would not want to be hit with negligence lawsuits were this to happen. And it would definitely happen: most visitors to national parks are not prepared to handle emergencies on their own. And there are an awful lot of park visitors-- the probability that someone would get into serious trouble approaches 1.000.
While there is a cost to shutting down the National Parks, keeping them open without the personnel that keep the park experience safe would be the crime of creating an attractive nuisance. The Park Service has a legal duty to not only shut down when staff is furloughed, but to patrol to keep persons out.
Now explain how your statement would apply to, say, the Lincoln Memorial.
Males and females have absolutely no difference between them, despite the overwhelming experiential, physiological, neurological, anatomical, and hormonal evidence to the contrary, you sexist pigs, and how dare you even conduct this research into the issue! Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go open a jar of mayo for the little lady, though that in no way suggests she lacks the wrist and forearm strength to grasp and twist just as well as any man.
It's pretty clear her grasp and twist capability is far superior to yours, she's just not using it on the jar.