Of course, pushing the 'start' or 'stop' button is effectively make-work, since it could be automated as well.
You hit the mark better than you may think but miss the bigger picture. Manufacturing is not where the money is. It never has been and never will be. The skilled craftsman with a stranglehold on the production of complex goods was outmoded by mass production, where legions of relatively-untrained laborers could perform a serious of relatively-simple task to create a complex product like the first automobile. While this no doubt really hurt those skilled craftsmen, it brought affordability to complex goods that heretofore had been exclusively toys for the rich. Yes, Henry Ford became rich, but the average Joe got something out of the deal as well. I'm sure there are some people who would happily have denied Henry his money even if it meant the cars never became affordable. Those people are idiots willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
Today, laborers can now largely be replaced by robots (and likely would be completely replaced by now if it weren't for unions). Again, the union laborers lose out, but if goods can be produced more cheaply, more quickly, more reliably, or all of the above, the *end user benefits immensely*! And if companies choose to simply capitalize on this efficiency and not decrease prices, increase production, or decrease defects, some competitor will eventually do it for them and either force them to compete or put them out of business...unless some government lobbied official shelters them from the cause-effect relationship of the free market, but that's a political problem best dealt with at the ballot box, not the board room.
But what *can't* be so easily replaced is the creative talent behind the origin of that car. Ideas make money. Brainless muscles, not so much. If you want to make money, use your head and your creative talents.
It may be tough, but we should *celebrate* when automation displaces human labor. After all, that's why we developed these handy big brains of ours, so we could create tools that would do our work for us and leave our brains more time to think with.
Exactly. Don't shoot them in a place that could kill them.
You've been watching too many movies about gunfights and obviously know very little about the human body and the effects of being shot. As a former Marine I have a bit of knowledge and experience on the subject so I can say this with reasonable certainty: there are very few places you can shoot a person that does not carry the serious risk of death, and those places that are "safe" (and I use the term *very* loosely) tend to be places that would not incapacitate a determined attacker.
Let's examine the Hollywood option, shall we? Shoot someone in the leg? You've got major arteries in the leg. A lethal shot need not be instant, and bleeding someone out is just as deadly as shooting them in the head. Shoot them in shoulder? Lots of bones *and* arteries there, guaranteed massive trauma. In fact, about the only place you can shoot someone and have negligible (but *not* zero) chance of killing them is in the foot or hand. Or maybe the earlobe. I hear there are few major organs, arteries, and bones in an earlobe so you're pretty safe to shoot someone there. End sarcasm.
But good luck with that idea. After you're done piercing your assailant's ear, he'll be free to eviscerate you with his knife once he gets into stabbing range. And good luck trying to hit someone in a non-lethal area like a hand or a foot when they're running around trying *not* to get shot while coming towards you with lethal intent. You're more likely to miss your target and hit something (or *someone*) else further downrange of your target.
It's stupid fucktards like you that give responsible gun owners like me a bad rap. You see, if you came at me with a knife, or throwing knives, I would shoot you in the leg. Poblem solved. You get to live, in severe pain likely for hours, then possible suffer permanent mobility issues for life.
"Responsible gun owner"? Any person who's ever both owned a gun *and* taken any kind of training for using it is taught one immutable lesson: do not point the weapon at anything you do not intend to kill. There's no such thing as "shooting to wound" someone. If you're discharging a firearm at a living being, you are prima facie intending to kill them. Even highly-trained, professional marksmen with decades of experience and perfect conditions know you can't count on being able to wound someone in a specific place. Your target is moving, you may be moving, there can be innocent bystanders drifting in and out of the target area...the list of variables is too huge. Therefore you aim for center mass, giving the highest probability of a hit that will likely kill or at least seriously disable your target.
In short, your "responsible gun owner" claim rings hollow to those of us who *are* responsible gun owners. You sound more like some anarchist agitator who's never handled a firearm in his life but desperately wants to impugn those who have.
Really? Are you in Canada or Mexico? Because you sure as shit aren't in the USA. The local, state, and federal governments regulate most everything I do all fucking day long.
The education system in whatever-country-you're-from must suck because you somehow believe the word "subsidize" means the same thing as "regulate." The OP's point remains true despite your error: governments don't subsidize *anything* because governments -- despite their printing presses -- don't produce any money. People produce money, are taxed on it, and those taxes fund government activities and subsidies. This is just basic economics and government principles...which probably means you were educated in the U.S. public education system, since that would explain your ignorance of it.
This is not something I really had interest in answering
I kind of gathered that from the obvious amount of thought you put into your original argument.
it's not unfathomable to create a "best business practices" entity akin to the FCC (but nothing like the useless BBB)
The BBB is only useless if consumers ignore it. The FCC has the power of law, which gives it actual teeth where the BBB has none. However, if people used the BBB as the end-all, be-all of information about a company before choosing to do business with them, the BBB would effectively have more power than any FCC ever could. For example, see how sales (usually) plunge at a company when Consumer Reports pans their products. See the old "Suzuki Samurai" review from the late 80's for a concrete example. The Samurai was hugely popular with younger drivers back then until CR did a "tip over" study and found the thing tended to roll over during sharp cornering. Suzuki complained bitterly -- even going so far as to do its own tests "proving" CR's tests were biased -- but sales tanked. Rightly or wrongly, CR effectively killed the product and Suzuku introduced a shorter, wider vehicle to replace it shortly thereafter.
An independent agency of the Government, separated from financial/political interests, and authoritative enough to guide the industry to ethical paths.
HAHAHA! OMG, I just fell out of my chair laughing! You put forth a scenario presuming a government agency can be separated from financial/political interests and trusted to make decisions on purely ethical grounds. Jeez! How old are you? Can you even vote? Because I swear you act like you were born yesterday...and I mean that in the kindest way possible. Now, let me tell you about my idea for pollution-free, unlimited-range, totally-free automobiles, made out of fairy dust and powered by unicorn tears. Big investment opportunity! Get in on the ground floor!
It scares me that you might actually trust in government enough that you could believe that such an institution could actually exist.
OK, I know it's hard to understand, but all bandwidth is shared at some point.
If it's so hard to understand then I excuse you for not understanding it the first time around. My post was an attempt to clue you in to this basic fact but I apparently failed. I am so ashamed. First you say:
Since Verizon does not oversell FiOS in any way...
But then you say:
You share bandwidth with other users in your neighborhood, and if every home in your neighborhood subscribes to FiOS at 100Mbps, you won't all be able to get it right now, as not all of their network is upgraded...the concentrators would limit you to 80Mbps. In the future, that limit will be about 300Mbps.
The statements "Verizon does not oversell FiOS" and "you won't all be able to get it right now [due to everyone in the neighborhood using more than the concentrator will provide]" are mutually exclusive, just in case you didn't realize that when you were typing it.
So, if Verizon FiOS sells you (and 30 other people in your neighborhood) a 100Mbit/sec link from their concentrator to your home but limits their concentrator uplink to, say, 1Gbit/sec, they're oversold by 3:1. So long as no more than a third of the subscribers are maxing out their links, you'll never know it's not dedicated. But as soon as they do (and they eventually will...count on it) then your worse case is getting 33Mbit/sec from your "promised" 100Mbit/sec. Which is exactly the same scenario as any cable or DSL user is currently experience and which this discussion is based on. Just because you haven't hit a congestion situation doesn't mean your scenario is somehow immune to it. The only way it could be is if your ISP sold all its bandwidth in a 1:1 ratio for everyone everywhere, and such an offering is not financially viable at the pricing levels available to residential customers.
They should make ISPs advertise minimum speeds, and not 'up to' speeds.
They *already* to this, and you'd know this if you ever bothered to read the contract. The advertised minimum is *zero*. The advertised maximum is the "up to" speed. Always has been and they've never claimed otherwise.
I have. The monopoly issue is a political problem, not a the-ISP-is-lying-to-me-about-bandwidth problem. The former is affected by the ballot box, not a breach-of-contract or false-advertising lawsuit.
All I was saying is that there has to be some threshold (read: less than 100%) where consumers could ARGUE false advertisement.
And your point, while certainly noble and well-intentioned, is still completely unworkable. Who gets to decide what that threshold is? You? Me? The ISP? Some elected politician who is usually beholden to some lobbyist somewhere that may or may not be on your side? You're arguing "there has to be some threshold" when such a thing is completely subjective. And as with all things subjective, no matter where you draw the imaginary threshold line, there will *always* be someone somewhere that will claim it's unfair, biased against them, etc.
This is why we have things called "contracts" where a "service level agreement" is agreed upon by the seller and the buyer. If the seller fails to live up the obligations clearly spelled out in the contract, the buyer may sue for breach of contract and win. If not, the buyer has no case. Ignorance of the contract terms is no defense, nor should it be. To offer such a thing destroys the very basis on which contracts rest in the first place.
Logic. Try to use it and apply it in all situations. ESPECIALLY in ones you disagree with.
And why are people like you so ready to bend over and take it up the ass for the corporations?
And why are people like you ignorant enough to assume I'm doing this out of some desire to defend the ISP's? I'm not. If I pay for 25Mbit/sec and get 1Mbit/sec, I'm unhappy about it. I'd dump that ISP and find another one. If that's not possible due to local monopolies, I'd go to the local news station's consumer advocate reporter and get them interested in a story that would embarass the hell out of the ISP, either forcing them to change their policies or scaring the local politicians away from covering for them in the first place.
But I will *not* stand by and allow such idiotic leaps of illogic to stand unchallenged on a site *supposedly* frequented by users who claim to be more intelligent than the average consumer. Claiming that you can sue a company for failing to meet a requirement they never agreed to in the first place (i.e. "promised bandwidth") is ridiculous. How would you feel if your employer could fire you and sue you for damages for failing to work weekends when your employment contract never obligated you to work weekends in the first place? No doubt you'd change your tune if the shoe were on the other foot. That only proves your premise is illogical.
They could be used together in advertising: You get up to the average in speed with ISP-R-us.
Aha! And with that thinking, your business plan looks something like this:
1. Offer guaranteed average speed SLA to your customer. 2. Customers buy service. 3. Customers try to access site that has uplink on *some other network* which is slower than the average speed your guarantee on *your* network. 4. Customers sue you for a problem that is beyond your control and publicly ruin your image to the point where you start losing customers and can't find new ones. 5. You go out of business due to legal costs. 6. ??? 7. PROFIT!!! (for the lawyers...you end up in the poor house)
There's a reason a residential 25Mbit/sec line costs $79.99/month and a *business line* which guarantees a minimum bandwidth cost 10x-20x that same amount. And it's not a conspiracy.
Why not? FiOS is often cheaper than other services.
Yes, technically FiOS is shared bandwidth...
And thus Captain Obvious answers his own question. If you're on a shared circuit and nobody else is using it then it's effectively acting dedicated. And it will remain acting a such until it's not, at which point you're back to the original situation of the ISP selling oversubcribed bandwidth in order to make it affordable in the first place.
Gee, why does the square peg fit in the square hold instead of the round hole? Perhaps because it's (drum roll please)...SQUARE?
Go to speedtest.net and test your line, if you see less than 7Mbps down, call customer service to get your problem fixed. Any company WILL have problems with areas or individual customers, but if people don't call to report the problems, how is Cablevision supposed to know and test to find the source of the problem?
And as soon as you call customer service, a kindly representative will happily inform you that, if you'd bother to read the contract, you'd already know there is no guaranteed minimum bandwidth, so there's nothing to fix in the first place. Thank you for calling, and try back next time when you have a legitimate complaint.
The problem is that it's dishonest and misleading if you never receive the stated bandwidth.
Whew! That's a relief! Then the ISP's have nothing to fear because there is no "stated bandwidth" listed *anywhere* in their contracts or their advertising. It always says "speeds up to" and "actual speeds may vary."
Go ahead. Look closely. I dare you to find any instance where the ISP's are guaranteeing a stated bandwidth larger than zero in any residential ISP contract.
Now that *that's* out of the way...what was the basis of your complaint again?
However, there certainly has to be a threshold where a user could claim false advertisement.
Really? Why? How? They're advertising "speeds up to" and the voiceover at the end usually includes an "actual speeds may vary" disclaimer. This isn't false advertising by any possible, logical definition. You may *wish* it were, and it might be *nice for the consumer* if it were, but that does not make it so.
I agree that offering a 25Mbit/sec plan and delivering only 50% of that on a regular basis is atrocious but it's not illegal. The proper thing to do in this situation, however, is *not* to call a lawyer or pull the old "there ought to be a law" nonsense. The *proper* thing to do is to roast then in the in the court of public opinion. Call your local news station and speak to their consumer advocate reporter. Most major stations have them and the love jumping on stuff like this. If the ISP starts losing customers, they *will* alter their policies. If they don't, they go out of business and a superior ISP takes their place.
If they don't, feel free to go and start one on your own that offers guaranteed speeds for similar prices. You'll find it impossible to do so, however, because it's completely impossible to sell 25Mbit/sec guaranteed circuits to mass residential customers for $79.99/month with a 1:1 bandwidth oversubscription rate. Bandwidth costs more than that. The only way it's affordable to sell a 25Mbit/sec circuit to anyone for $79.99/month is to sell the same 25Mbit/sec to, say, 30 customers and statistically plan that all 30 won't demand maximum bandwidth all at the same time, thus violating your SLA. If they do demand it and don't get it, then *you* get sued for false advertising, breach of contract, and all the other lovely legal stuff that comes along with not living up to your end of the bargain. Ain't being the boss of business grand? The fun never stops!
See? There's a reason stuff is the way it is. It's not some grand conspiracy unless there's some kind of protected monopoly involved, and in those cases, the law is being actively manipulated (i.e. politically) to protect the monopoly by some well-paid lobbying group somewhere.
I would say that any company that was listed that never reached an average of their advertised speed should be taken to task for false advertising. Maybe dragged in front of the FTC, and possible legal action since it looks like most providers are never able to deliver their advertised speed.
*sigh* The knee-jerk "call the lawyers!" response never fails to find a taker, does it? And precisely what "false advertising" could you charge them with? Look carefully at the advertising *and* the actual end-user contract. You'll find no promises of any bandwidth anywhere. Quite the contrary, you'll find lots of "speeds up to XX" and "actual speeds may vary" language liberally peppered everywhere. This means precisely what it says: you *may* get speeds "up to" the advertised amount, but you may not. In fact, a strict interpretation of the contract allows them to deliver exactly *zero* bandwidth to you should conditions allow. I know of no ISP that ever does this to anyone, but the contract language is clear.
Next someone will claim the advertising is "misleading" or "taking advantage of uninformed customers." There is no law against selling something to someone who is too stupid to take the time to understand what they're buying, nor should there be. Neither is it misleading to anyone who takes the time to read the fine print, which everyone *should* do before entering *any* contract. If not, you have no one to blame but yourself if you get less than what you *thought* you were bargaining for.
Cablevision users, on the other hand, shouldn't expect more than half of the promised bandwidth (youch!).
"Promised bandwidth"? I'm sure if you read the fine print on *any* residential broadband SLA, you'll find the ISP "promises" exactly *zero* bandwidth. Every contract I've ever seen says they promise speeds "up to" a certain amount but there is no lower limit to what they actually deliver. This is akin to the good old days of zero CIR frame relay where the provider had the right to discard up to 100% of your packets if network congestion became an issue. In return, you got rock-bottom pricing. I never saw any ISP ever drop 100% of packets due to a zero CIR, so you were essentially gambling (and winning) that the ISP would always have some spare bandwidth.
I'm sure people who opt for the 22Mbit/sec package expect they should get 22Mbit/sec or something close to it on a regular basis, and if the ISP is only regularly providing, say, 2Mbit/sec then the customer has a reason to be upset. However, to say the ISP is "promising" bandwidth is a complete fabrication. The OP should read up and understand the different between "up to" and "no less than."
IIRC there was an SF story by A.C. Clark where a space craft used a huge block of ice as a radiation shield.
Probably work great until the thing has totally sublimated.
I've followed most of this whole freeze vs. sublimate thread thus far, but your comment raises what should be an obvious question: if ice sublimates so readily and quickly in space that it's not considered suitable as a shielding material, how do things like the rings of Saturn continue to exist? Last I heard, the rings are thought to be composed of various ices, some of which is likely water ice.
The rings have been there a long, long, *long* time and haven't sublimated away, yet they don't appear to be continually replenished by any external source.
I'm not asking to be a smart ass. I really don't know the answer and I'm hoping someone can give insight. I have no idea how ice behaves under conditions of zero pressure but extreme low temperatures. I would presume it would sublimate because it has to (zero pressure) but that low temps would make such sublimation so slow as to be negligible, but that's just a semi-informed guess.
Yes in perfect 20/20 hindsite, the plant should have been rated for a 9.5 quake plus tsunami. That is bloody expensive- and hard to justify in advance. I'm impressed that it held this well. We live in a world of compromises, even if you make wise decisions your going to get bit from time to time. I don't have the background to know if this was actually a bad decision, or a decent decision with bad circumstance. It doesn't seem on the face of it to be a negligent decision, or serious mismanagement
The plant was commissioned in 1971, which means it was build with 60's era technology and engineering knowledge It was actually scheduled for decommissioning in 2012, I believe. Some, like you, are saying the plant should've been engineered for a 9.5 quake. So what would you say if there'd been a 9.6 quake? Somebody somewhere would be complaining it wasn't built strong enough even then. No matter how strong you build something, it can (and eventually will be) destroyed, either on purpose (planned demolition, terrorism, etc.) or by accident (quake, tsunami, etc.). At some point you have to say it was engineered to withstand all but the most fractional corner cases, and covering those cases would be wildly impractical either from an engineering or financial standpoint (or both).
Seriously, what if the plant had been hit by a meteorite that breached containment and caused a meltdown? Would everyone that's now running around waving their hands and screaming about better engineering for quakes and tsunamis instead be screaming about protection from giant rocks falling from outer space? You simply can't protect everything from everything. Life cannot be 100% free of danger. Engineering 99.9% of the danger out of it is damned impressive and that's what we've got right now, yet everyone is complaining.
the plain truth; To wit: That this is a nuclear disaster of the most serious proportions, which should have been completely and totally avoidable; and that its occurrence is a damning indictment of the private nuclear power industry as a whole, both technically, professionally, and publicly.
And this is what passes for "truth" in the reality you inhabit?
"should have been completely and totally avoidable"? I sincerely hope you're not an engineer because you should turn in whatever credentials you have if you are. Complex systems and structures are designed to certain tolerances. When those tolerances are exceeded, failures are not only likely, they are the expected outcome. You're conveniently ignoring that this quake is the fifth largest earthquake in all recorded history, followed up by a massive tsunami, affecting a plant built in 1971 with technology designed in the 1960's. And thus far not a single person's death can be directly attributed to anything radioactive at all, while tens of thousands lie dead or dying all around the plant due to the aforementioned quake and tsunami. Thousands more will likely die of wounds and disease before this is all over without ever getting a single mSv from this incident. Yet this is a "damning indictment of the private nuclear power industry" by your standards.
You might as well have said it's a damning indictment of seawall construction around the entire island nation of Japan! After all, if they'd only built hundreds of kilometers of seawall hundreds of meters high and hundreds of meters thick, designed to resist an earthquakes, supervolcanoes, and hypervelocity asteroid/comet impacts, nobody would be dead! That does leave out the odd attack by hyper-aggressive, advanced aliens bent on enslaving and/or using us as a source of food, but I didn't want to seem like I'm advocating over the top measures. End sarcasm.
The point is that everything can only be built so strong, and engineers can only anticipate so many different permutations. That does not mean you abandon doing anything where you can't engineer out 100% of the danger. If that were the case, we'd never have emerged from caves in the first place. Oh, wait...what about cave in's? Gosh, this whole "life" thing is kinda dangerous just existing, isn't it?
30km away radiation levels are 10 times higher than normal.
Saying something is 10x higher than normal means absolutely nothing. It's like saying something is "low fat" or "low calorie." The description is useless without a metric that means something. What are the biological hazards of 10x higher? "Normal" radiation levels implies something that sounds like "natural background radiation." If you experience 10x that, you're still not experiencing much of anything. A single chest X-ray could put you in more danger. Flying on an airliner once a week as a traveling salesman could put you in more danger. Hell, getting a sunburn could put you in more danger for various skin cancers.
Is radiation something to be taken seriously? Absolutely. So start taking it seriously and stop with the "but it's 10X higher than normal!!!! ZOMG!!!" alarmist talk. You want to talk radiation dangers? Start talking sieverts (or in this case, mSv's) and comparing them with real examples of exposure effects. I've taken the liberty of doing a little of that work for you courtesy Wikipedia.org (which, I admit, is not always a canonical source but in this case the figures track with other sources that can be Googled if you so desire):
Single dose examples
Eating one banana: 0.0001 mSv
Sleeping next to a human for 8 hours: 0.0005 mSv
Dental radiography: 0.005 mSv
Average dose to people living within 16 km of Three Mile Island accident: 0.08 mSv; maximum dose: 1 mSv
Mammogram: 3 mSv
Brain CT scan: 0.8–5 mSv
Chest CT scan: 6–18 mSv
Gastrointestinal series X-ray investigation: 14 mSv
International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended limit for volunteers averting major nuclear escalation: 500 mSv
International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended limit for volunteers rescuing lives or preventing serious injuries: 1000 mSv
The following is an excerpt from an IAEA announcement about a leak at the Japanese plant:
"As reported earlier, a 400 millisieverts (mSv) per hour radiation dose observed at Fukushima Daiichi occurred between 1s 3 and 4. This is a high dose-level value, but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time. The IAEA continues to confirm the evolution and value of this dose rate. It should be noted that because of this detected value, non-indispensible staff was evacuated from the plant, in line with the Emergency Response Plan, and that the population around the plant is already evacuated."
Note the dose, while high, was short-lived and confined to the plant and its immediate vicinity. And thus far no one has been identified as being exposed to this kind of dosage even though it occurred; it was merely recorded on instruments designed to detect it in the first place. Plant personnel aren't standing around in the nude waiting to be irradiated, you know. A 400mSv leak in the containment does not translate into a 400mSv exposure to the crew working in the control room.
The situation is not good, but neither is it anywhere near as bad as you're making it sound. It is what it is. Enough with the running around and waving of hands.
Except for the fact that if you're actively assisting the enemy by creating a distraction, you're quite deserving of the rounds that are going to be headed your way very, very soon, so the whole "soon to be dead" concept still applies.
Now I could see how the enemy could use this for propaganda value by getting kids to throw fireworks at specific places and times, coordinating with insurgent strikes, hoping we'll gun down some kids so they can parade it around on national TV. Wouldn't be the first time they've used such tactics.
Ah, but then what motivation would there be for Congress to tell NASA what they want in the first place? Congresscritters control the purse strings of the national budget, which means they control what gets spent and where. Naturally, they want as much of it as possible to be spent in their state to maximize the state's economy, thus maximizing its prosperity, thus ensuring their re-election. Remove the money from the process and Congress will cease to give two damns about NASA, which will promptly die.
Look, ever wonder why everything is launched from Florida but managed from Texas? Florida's ideal because of the weather (except for hurricanes) and its closeness to the equator (giving rockets a running start due to the Earth's rotation). But why is everything managed from Houston? Because Vice President Lyndon Johnson was extremely powerful, and he controlled a bunch of tax dollars associated with the space program, and he was from (drum roll please) Texas.
You're making the common mistake of thinking that most of the people in Congress are altruist. They're not. They're opportunists. Remove the "opportunity" from the space program and they seek them in other projects.
Paid for by who? Lockheed-Martin? You assume they could afford to pay for a tank out of their own pocket, especially a tank built (as you put it) in the most expensive way possible. The result would very likely be the financial doom of the company, causing hundreds if not thousands of people to lose their jobs. But, hey! You'd feel righteous, wouldn't you? Because your life wouldn't be affected by such boneheaded actions. Just somebody else. Unless, of course, you work somewhere that provides goods or services that would've been bought by those laid-off workers, in which case you might get laid off yourself. But hey! You gotta break a few eggs to make a Righteous Indignation Omlette, and I'm sure you don't mind shared sacrifice when your Internet connection gets cut off because you can't afford it anymore. Who am I kidding? You're probably using a feed on some college campus somewhere.
And if LM didn't pay for a new tank, who would? There's no other entity involved that isn't federally funded, which means the taxpayer would pay for it...to be built in the most expensive manner possible. Yeah, that's a wonderful way to spend tax dollars in this day and age when we're already carrying the largest deficit in the history of the country.
Sheesh. I guess they don't bother teaching economics or business or government to any of you kids out there anymore, do they?
and if they walk away with the difference in costs, well who'se going to even notice?
I imagine that if the tank failed, blew up another shuttle, and killed another seven astronauts, an awful lot of people will notice. And Congress will call an inquiry. And constituents will demand that heads roll. And anyone and everyone associated with the tank -- working, retired, resigned, fired, or whatever -- can and will be roasted alive in the court of public opinion, fined into oblivion, professionally ruined for life, and perhaps even jailed. Never underestimate the power of the public's desire for a scapegoat, nor any legislative body's desire to satiate the public for it. And that assumes there's a scapegoat that actually exists in the first place, but if there isn't, one or more will be created for the occasion.
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Of course, pushing the 'start' or 'stop' button is effectively make-work, since it could be automated as well.
You hit the mark better than you may think but miss the bigger picture. Manufacturing is not where the money is. It never has been and never will be. The skilled craftsman with a stranglehold on the production of complex goods was outmoded by mass production, where legions of relatively-untrained laborers could perform a serious of relatively-simple task to create a complex product like the first automobile. While this no doubt really hurt those skilled craftsmen, it brought affordability to complex goods that heretofore had been exclusively toys for the rich. Yes, Henry Ford became rich, but the average Joe got something out of the deal as well. I'm sure there are some people who would happily have denied Henry his money even if it meant the cars never became affordable. Those people are idiots willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
Today, laborers can now largely be replaced by robots (and likely would be completely replaced by now if it weren't for unions). Again, the union laborers lose out, but if goods can be produced more cheaply, more quickly, more reliably, or all of the above, the *end user benefits immensely*! And if companies choose to simply capitalize on this efficiency and not decrease prices, increase production, or decrease defects, some competitor will eventually do it for them and either force them to compete or put them out of business...unless some government lobbied official shelters them from the cause-effect relationship of the free market, but that's a political problem best dealt with at the ballot box, not the board room.
But what *can't* be so easily replaced is the creative talent behind the origin of that car. Ideas make money. Brainless muscles, not so much. If you want to make money, use your head and your creative talents.
It may be tough, but we should *celebrate* when automation displaces human labor. After all, that's why we developed these handy big brains of ours, so we could create tools that would do our work for us and leave our brains more time to think with.
Exactly. Don't shoot them in a place that could kill them.
You've been watching too many movies about gunfights and obviously know very little about the human body and the effects of being shot. As a former Marine I have a bit of knowledge and experience on the subject so I can say this with reasonable certainty: there are very few places you can shoot a person that does not carry the serious risk of death, and those places that are "safe" (and I use the term *very* loosely) tend to be places that would not incapacitate a determined attacker.
Let's examine the Hollywood option, shall we? Shoot someone in the leg? You've got major arteries in the leg. A lethal shot need not be instant, and bleeding someone out is just as deadly as shooting them in the head. Shoot them in shoulder? Lots of bones *and* arteries there, guaranteed massive trauma. In fact, about the only place you can shoot someone and have negligible (but *not* zero) chance of killing them is in the foot or hand. Or maybe the earlobe. I hear there are few major organs, arteries, and bones in an earlobe so you're pretty safe to shoot someone there. End sarcasm.
But good luck with that idea. After you're done piercing your assailant's ear, he'll be free to eviscerate you with his knife once he gets into stabbing range. And good luck trying to hit someone in a non-lethal area like a hand or a foot when they're running around trying *not* to get shot while coming towards you with lethal intent. You're more likely to miss your target and hit something (or *someone*) else further downrange of your target.
It's stupid fucktards like you that give responsible gun owners like me a bad rap. You see, if you came at me with a knife, or throwing knives, I would shoot you in the leg. Poblem solved. You get to live, in severe pain likely for hours, then possible suffer permanent mobility issues for life.
"Responsible gun owner"? Any person who's ever both owned a gun *and* taken any kind of training for using it is taught one immutable lesson: do not point the weapon at anything you do not intend to kill. There's no such thing as "shooting to wound" someone. If you're discharging a firearm at a living being, you are prima facie intending to kill them. Even highly-trained, professional marksmen with decades of experience and perfect conditions know you can't count on being able to wound someone in a specific place. Your target is moving, you may be moving, there can be innocent bystanders drifting in and out of the target area...the list of variables is too huge. Therefore you aim for center mass, giving the highest probability of a hit that will likely kill or at least seriously disable your target.
In short, your "responsible gun owner" claim rings hollow to those of us who *are* responsible gun owners. You sound more like some anarchist agitator who's never handled a firearm in his life but desperately wants to impugn those who have.
Really? Are you in Canada or Mexico? Because you sure as shit aren't in the USA. The local, state, and federal governments regulate most everything I do all fucking day long.
The education system in whatever-country-you're-from must suck because you somehow believe the word "subsidize" means the same thing as "regulate." The OP's point remains true despite your error: governments don't subsidize *anything* because governments -- despite their printing presses -- don't produce any money. People produce money, are taxed on it, and those taxes fund government activities and subsidies. This is just basic economics and government principles...which probably means you were educated in the U.S. public education system, since that would explain your ignorance of it.
This is not something I really had interest in answering
I kind of gathered that from the obvious amount of thought you put into your original argument.
it's not unfathomable to create a "best business practices" entity akin to the FCC (but nothing like the useless BBB)
The BBB is only useless if consumers ignore it. The FCC has the power of law, which gives it actual teeth where the BBB has none. However, if people used the BBB as the end-all, be-all of information about a company before choosing to do business with them, the BBB would effectively have more power than any FCC ever could. For example, see how sales (usually) plunge at a company when Consumer Reports pans their products. See the old "Suzuki Samurai" review from the late 80's for a concrete example. The Samurai was hugely popular with younger drivers back then until CR did a "tip over" study and found the thing tended to roll over during sharp cornering. Suzuki complained bitterly -- even going so far as to do its own tests "proving" CR's tests were biased -- but sales tanked. Rightly or wrongly, CR effectively killed the product and Suzuku introduced a shorter, wider vehicle to replace it shortly thereafter.
An independent agency of the Government, separated from financial/political interests, and authoritative enough to guide the industry to ethical paths.
HAHAHA! OMG, I just fell out of my chair laughing! You put forth a scenario presuming a government agency can be separated from financial/political interests and trusted to make decisions on purely ethical grounds. Jeez! How old are you? Can you even vote? Because I swear you act like you were born yesterday...and I mean that in the kindest way possible. Now, let me tell you about my idea for pollution-free, unlimited-range, totally-free automobiles, made out of fairy dust and powered by unicorn tears. Big investment opportunity! Get in on the ground floor!
It scares me that you might actually trust in government enough that you could believe that such an institution could actually exist.
OK, I know it's hard to understand, but all bandwidth is shared at some point.
If it's so hard to understand then I excuse you for not understanding it the first time around. My post was an attempt to clue you in to this basic fact but I apparently failed. I am so ashamed.
First you say:
Since Verizon does not oversell FiOS in any way...
But then you say:
You share bandwidth with other users in your neighborhood, and if every home in your neighborhood subscribes to FiOS at 100Mbps, you won't all be able to get it right now, as not all of their network is upgraded...the concentrators would limit you to 80Mbps. In the future, that limit will be about 300Mbps.
The statements "Verizon does not oversell FiOS" and "you won't all be able to get it right now [due to everyone in the neighborhood using more than the concentrator will provide]" are mutually exclusive, just in case you didn't realize that when you were typing it.
So, if Verizon FiOS sells you (and 30 other people in your neighborhood) a 100Mbit/sec link from their concentrator to your home but limits their concentrator uplink to, say, 1Gbit/sec, they're oversold by 3:1. So long as no more than a third of the subscribers are maxing out their links, you'll never know it's not dedicated. But as soon as they do (and they eventually will...count on it) then your worse case is getting 33Mbit/sec from your "promised" 100Mbit/sec. Which is exactly the same scenario as any cable or DSL user is currently experience and which this discussion is based on. Just because you haven't hit a congestion situation doesn't mean your scenario is somehow immune to it. The only way it could be is if your ISP sold all its bandwidth in a 1:1 ratio for everyone everywhere, and such an offering is not financially viable at the pricing levels available to residential customers.
They should make ISPs advertise minimum speeds, and not 'up to' speeds.
They *already* to this, and you'd know this if you ever bothered to read the contract. The advertised minimum is *zero*. The advertised maximum is the "up to" speed. Always has been and they've never claimed otherwise.
I have. The monopoly issue is a political problem, not a the-ISP-is-lying-to-me-about-bandwidth problem. The former is affected by the ballot box, not a breach-of-contract or false-advertising lawsuit.
All I was saying is that there has to be some threshold (read: less than 100%) where consumers could ARGUE false advertisement.
And your point, while certainly noble and well-intentioned, is still completely unworkable. Who gets to decide what that threshold is? You? Me? The ISP? Some elected politician who is usually beholden to some lobbyist somewhere that may or may not be on your side? You're arguing "there has to be some threshold" when such a thing is completely subjective. And as with all things subjective, no matter where you draw the imaginary threshold line, there will *always* be someone somewhere that will claim it's unfair, biased against them, etc.
This is why we have things called "contracts" where a "service level agreement" is agreed upon by the seller and the buyer. If the seller fails to live up the obligations clearly spelled out in the contract, the buyer may sue for breach of contract and win. If not, the buyer has no case. Ignorance of the contract terms is no defense, nor should it be. To offer such a thing destroys the very basis on which contracts rest in the first place.
Logic. Try to use it and apply it in all situations. ESPECIALLY in ones you disagree with.
And why are people like you so ready to bend over and take it up the ass for the corporations?
And why are people like you ignorant enough to assume I'm doing this out of some desire to defend the ISP's? I'm not. If I pay for 25Mbit/sec and get 1Mbit/sec, I'm unhappy about it. I'd dump that ISP and find another one. If that's not possible due to local monopolies, I'd go to the local news station's consumer advocate reporter and get them interested in a story that would embarass the hell out of the ISP, either forcing them to change their policies or scaring the local politicians away from covering for them in the first place.
But I will *not* stand by and allow such idiotic leaps of illogic to stand unchallenged on a site *supposedly* frequented by users who claim to be more intelligent than the average consumer. Claiming that you can sue a company for failing to meet a requirement they never agreed to in the first place (i.e. "promised bandwidth") is ridiculous. How would you feel if your employer could fire you and sue you for damages for failing to work weekends when your employment contract never obligated you to work weekends in the first place? No doubt you'd change your tune if the shoe were on the other foot. That only proves your premise is illogical.
They could be used together in advertising: You get up to the average in speed with ISP-R-us.
Aha! And with that thinking, your business plan looks something like this:
1. Offer guaranteed average speed SLA to your customer.
2. Customers buy service.
3. Customers try to access site that has uplink on *some other network* which is slower than the average speed your guarantee on *your* network.
4. Customers sue you for a problem that is beyond your control and publicly ruin your image to the point where you start losing customers and can't find new ones.
5. You go out of business due to legal costs.
6. ???
7. PROFIT!!! (for the lawyers...you end up in the poor house)
There's a reason a residential 25Mbit/sec line costs $79.99/month and a *business line* which guarantees a minimum bandwidth cost 10x-20x that same amount. And it's not a conspiracy.
Why not? FiOS is often cheaper than other services.
Yes, technically FiOS is shared bandwidth...
And thus Captain Obvious answers his own question. If you're on a shared circuit and nobody else is using it then it's effectively acting dedicated. And it will remain acting a such until it's not, at which point you're back to the original situation of the ISP selling oversubcribed bandwidth in order to make it affordable in the first place.
Gee, why does the square peg fit in the square hold instead of the round hole? Perhaps because it's (drum roll please)...SQUARE?
Go to speedtest.net and test your line, if you see less than 7Mbps down, call customer service to get your problem fixed. Any company WILL have problems with areas or individual customers, but if people don't call to report the problems, how is Cablevision supposed to know and test to find the source of the problem?
And as soon as you call customer service, a kindly representative will happily inform you that, if you'd bother to read the contract, you'd already know there is no guaranteed minimum bandwidth, so there's nothing to fix in the first place. Thank you for calling, and try back next time when you have a legitimate complaint.
The problem is that it's dishonest and misleading if you never receive the stated bandwidth.
Whew! That's a relief! Then the ISP's have nothing to fear because there is no "stated bandwidth" listed *anywhere* in their contracts or their advertising. It always says "speeds up to" and "actual speeds may vary."
Go ahead. Look closely. I dare you to find any instance where the ISP's are guaranteeing a stated bandwidth larger than zero in any residential ISP contract.
Now that *that's* out of the way...what was the basis of your complaint again?
However, there certainly has to be a threshold where a user could claim false advertisement.
Really? Why? How? They're advertising "speeds up to" and the voiceover at the end usually includes an "actual speeds may vary" disclaimer. This isn't false advertising by any possible, logical definition. You may *wish* it were, and it might be *nice for the consumer* if it were, but that does not make it so.
I agree that offering a 25Mbit/sec plan and delivering only 50% of that on a regular basis is atrocious but it's not illegal. The proper thing to do in this situation, however, is *not* to call a lawyer or pull the old "there ought to be a law" nonsense. The *proper* thing to do is to roast then in the in the court of public opinion. Call your local news station and speak to their consumer advocate reporter. Most major stations have them and the love jumping on stuff like this. If the ISP starts losing customers, they *will* alter their policies. If they don't, they go out of business and a superior ISP takes their place.
If they don't, feel free to go and start one on your own that offers guaranteed speeds for similar prices. You'll find it impossible to do so, however, because it's completely impossible to sell 25Mbit/sec guaranteed circuits to mass residential customers for $79.99/month with a 1:1 bandwidth oversubscription rate. Bandwidth costs more than that. The only way it's affordable to sell a 25Mbit/sec circuit to anyone for $79.99/month is to sell the same 25Mbit/sec to, say, 30 customers and statistically plan that all 30 won't demand maximum bandwidth all at the same time, thus violating your SLA. If they do demand it and don't get it, then *you* get sued for false advertising, breach of contract, and all the other lovely legal stuff that comes along with not living up to your end of the bargain. Ain't being the boss of business grand? The fun never stops!
See? There's a reason stuff is the way it is. It's not some grand conspiracy unless there's some kind of protected monopoly involved, and in those cases, the law is being actively manipulated (i.e. politically) to protect the monopoly by some well-paid lobbying group somewhere.
I would say that any company that was listed that never reached an average of their advertised speed should be taken to task for false advertising. Maybe dragged in front of the FTC, and possible legal action since it looks like most providers are never able to deliver their advertised speed.
*sigh* The knee-jerk "call the lawyers!" response never fails to find a taker, does it? And precisely what "false advertising" could you charge them with? Look carefully at the advertising *and* the actual end-user contract. You'll find no promises of any bandwidth anywhere. Quite the contrary, you'll find lots of "speeds up to XX" and "actual speeds may vary" language liberally peppered everywhere. This means precisely what it says: you *may* get speeds "up to" the advertised amount, but you may not. In fact, a strict interpretation of the contract allows them to deliver exactly *zero* bandwidth to you should conditions allow. I know of no ISP that ever does this to anyone, but the contract language is clear.
Next someone will claim the advertising is "misleading" or "taking advantage of uninformed customers." There is no law against selling something to someone who is too stupid to take the time to understand what they're buying, nor should there be. Neither is it misleading to anyone who takes the time to read the fine print, which everyone *should* do before entering *any* contract. If not, you have no one to blame but yourself if you get less than what you *thought* you were bargaining for.
Cablevision users, on the other hand, shouldn't expect more than half of the promised bandwidth (youch!).
"Promised bandwidth"? I'm sure if you read the fine print on *any* residential broadband SLA, you'll find the ISP "promises" exactly *zero* bandwidth. Every contract I've ever seen says they promise speeds "up to" a certain amount but there is no lower limit to what they actually deliver. This is akin to the good old days of zero CIR frame relay where the provider had the right to discard up to 100% of your packets if network congestion became an issue. In return, you got rock-bottom pricing. I never saw any ISP ever drop 100% of packets due to a zero CIR, so you were essentially gambling (and winning) that the ISP would always have some spare bandwidth.
I'm sure people who opt for the 22Mbit/sec package expect they should get 22Mbit/sec or something close to it on a regular basis, and if the ISP is only regularly providing, say, 2Mbit/sec then the customer has a reason to be upset. However, to say the ISP is "promising" bandwidth is a complete fabrication. The OP should read up and understand the different between "up to" and "no less than."
IIRC there was an SF story by A.C. Clark where a space craft used a huge block of ice as a radiation shield.
Probably work great until the thing has totally sublimated.
I've followed most of this whole freeze vs. sublimate thread thus far, but your comment raises what should be an obvious question: if ice sublimates so readily and quickly in space that it's not considered suitable as a shielding material, how do things like the rings of Saturn continue to exist? Last I heard, the rings are thought to be composed of various ices, some of which is likely water ice.
The rings have been there a long, long, *long* time and haven't sublimated away, yet they don't appear to be continually replenished by any external source.
I'm not asking to be a smart ass. I really don't know the answer and I'm hoping someone can give insight. I have no idea how ice behaves under conditions of zero pressure but extreme low temperatures. I would presume it would sublimate because it has to (zero pressure) but that low temps would make such sublimation so slow as to be negligible, but that's just a semi-informed guess.
Yes in perfect 20/20 hindsite, the plant should have been rated for a 9.5 quake plus tsunami. That is bloody expensive- and hard to justify in advance. I'm impressed that it held this well. We live in a world of compromises, even if you make wise decisions your going to get bit from time to time. I don't have the background to know if this was actually a bad decision, or a decent decision with bad circumstance. It doesn't seem on the face of it to be a negligent decision, or serious mismanagement
The plant was commissioned in 1971, which means it was build with 60's era technology and engineering knowledge It was actually scheduled for decommissioning in 2012, I believe. Some, like you, are saying the plant should've been engineered for a 9.5 quake. So what would you say if there'd been a 9.6 quake? Somebody somewhere would be complaining it wasn't built strong enough even then. No matter how strong you build something, it can (and eventually will be) destroyed, either on purpose (planned demolition, terrorism, etc.) or by accident (quake, tsunami, etc.). At some point you have to say it was engineered to withstand all but the most fractional corner cases, and covering those cases would be wildly impractical either from an engineering or financial standpoint (or both).
Seriously, what if the plant had been hit by a meteorite that breached containment and caused a meltdown? Would everyone that's now running around waving their hands and screaming about better engineering for quakes and tsunamis instead be screaming about protection from giant rocks falling from outer space? You simply can't protect everything from everything. Life cannot be 100% free of danger. Engineering 99.9% of the danger out of it is damned impressive and that's what we've got right now, yet everyone is complaining.
the plain truth; To wit: That this is a nuclear disaster of the most serious proportions, which should have been completely and totally avoidable; and that its occurrence is a damning indictment of the private nuclear power industry as a whole, both technically, professionally, and publicly.
And this is what passes for "truth" in the reality you inhabit?
"should have been completely and totally avoidable"? I sincerely hope you're not an engineer because you should turn in whatever credentials you have if you are. Complex systems and structures are designed to certain tolerances. When those tolerances are exceeded, failures are not only likely, they are the expected outcome. You're conveniently ignoring that this quake is the fifth largest earthquake in all recorded history, followed up by a massive tsunami, affecting a plant built in 1971 with technology designed in the 1960's. And thus far not a single person's death can be directly attributed to anything radioactive at all, while tens of thousands lie dead or dying all around the plant due to the aforementioned quake and tsunami. Thousands more will likely die of wounds and disease before this is all over without ever getting a single mSv from this incident. Yet this is a "damning indictment of the private nuclear power industry" by your standards.
You might as well have said it's a damning indictment of seawall construction around the entire island nation of Japan! After all, if they'd only built hundreds of kilometers of seawall hundreds of meters high and hundreds of meters thick, designed to resist an earthquakes, supervolcanoes, and hypervelocity asteroid/comet impacts, nobody would be dead! That does leave out the odd attack by hyper-aggressive, advanced aliens bent on enslaving and/or using us as a source of food, but I didn't want to seem like I'm advocating over the top measures. End sarcasm.
The point is that everything can only be built so strong, and engineers can only anticipate so many different permutations. That does not mean you abandon doing anything where you can't engineer out 100% of the danger. If that were the case, we'd never have emerged from caves in the first place. Oh, wait...what about cave in's? Gosh, this whole "life" thing is kinda dangerous just existing, isn't it?
30km away radiation levels are 10 times higher than normal.
Saying something is 10x higher than normal means absolutely nothing. It's like saying something is "low fat" or "low calorie." The description is useless without a metric that means something. What are the biological hazards of 10x higher? "Normal" radiation levels implies something that sounds like "natural background radiation." If you experience 10x that, you're still not experiencing much of anything. A single chest X-ray could put you in more danger. Flying on an airliner once a week as a traveling salesman could put you in more danger. Hell, getting a sunburn could put you in more danger for various skin cancers.
Is radiation something to be taken seriously? Absolutely. So start taking it seriously and stop with the "but it's 10X higher than normal!!!! ZOMG!!!" alarmist talk. You want to talk radiation dangers? Start talking sieverts (or in this case, mSv's) and comparing them with real examples of exposure effects. I've taken the liberty of doing a little of that work for you courtesy Wikipedia.org (which, I admit, is not always a canonical source but in this case the figures track with other sources that can be Googled if you so desire):
Single dose examples
Eating one banana: 0.0001 mSv
Sleeping next to a human for 8 hours: 0.0005 mSv
Dental radiography: 0.005 mSv
Average dose to people living within 16 km of Three Mile Island accident: 0.08 mSv; maximum dose: 1 mSv
Mammogram: 3 mSv
Brain CT scan: 0.8–5 mSv
Chest CT scan: 6–18 mSv
Gastrointestinal series X-ray investigation: 14 mSv
International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended limit for volunteers averting major nuclear escalation: 500 mSv
International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended limit for volunteers rescuing lives or preventing serious injuries: 1000 mSv
The following is an excerpt from an IAEA announcement about a leak at the Japanese plant:
"As reported earlier, a 400 millisieverts (mSv) per hour radiation dose observed at Fukushima Daiichi occurred between 1s 3 and 4. This is a high dose-level value, but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time. The IAEA continues to confirm the evolution and value of this dose rate. It should be noted that because of this detected value, non-indispensible staff was evacuated from the plant, in line with the Emergency Response Plan, and that the population around the plant is already evacuated."
Note the dose, while high, was short-lived and confined to the plant and its immediate vicinity. And thus far no one has been identified as being exposed to this kind of dosage even though it occurred; it was merely recorded on instruments designed to detect it in the first place. Plant personnel aren't standing around in the nude waiting to be irradiated, you know. A 400mSv leak in the containment does not translate into a 400mSv exposure to the crew working in the control room.
The situation is not good, but neither is it anywhere near as bad as you're making it sound. It is what it is. Enough with the running around and waving of hands.
Except for the fact that if you're actively assisting the enemy by creating a distraction, you're quite deserving of the rounds that are going to be headed your way very, very soon, so the whole "soon to be dead" concept still applies.
Now I could see how the enemy could use this for propaganda value by getting kids to throw fireworks at specific places and times, coordinating with insurgent strikes, hoping we'll gun down some kids so they can parade it around on national TV. Wouldn't be the first time they've used such tactics.
Ah, but then what motivation would there be for Congress to tell NASA what they want in the first place? Congresscritters control the purse strings of the national budget, which means they control what gets spent and where. Naturally, they want as much of it as possible to be spent in their state to maximize the state's economy, thus maximizing its prosperity, thus ensuring their re-election. Remove the money from the process and Congress will cease to give two damns about NASA, which will promptly die.
Look, ever wonder why everything is launched from Florida but managed from Texas? Florida's ideal because of the weather (except for hurricanes) and its closeness to the equator (giving rockets a running start due to the Earth's rotation). But why is everything managed from Houston? Because Vice President Lyndon Johnson was extremely powerful, and he controlled a bunch of tax dollars associated with the space program, and he was from (drum roll please) Texas.
You're making the common mistake of thinking that most of the people in Congress are altruist. They're not. They're opportunists. Remove the "opportunity" from the space program and they seek them in other projects.
Paid for by who? Lockheed-Martin? You assume they could afford to pay for a tank out of their own pocket, especially a tank built (as you put it) in the most expensive way possible. The result would very likely be the financial doom of the company, causing hundreds if not thousands of people to lose their jobs. But, hey! You'd feel righteous, wouldn't you? Because your life wouldn't be affected by such boneheaded actions. Just somebody else. Unless, of course, you work somewhere that provides goods or services that would've been bought by those laid-off workers, in which case you might get laid off yourself. But hey! You gotta break a few eggs to make a Righteous Indignation Omlette, and I'm sure you don't mind shared sacrifice when your Internet connection gets cut off because you can't afford it anymore. Who am I kidding? You're probably using a feed on some college campus somewhere.
And if LM didn't pay for a new tank, who would? There's no other entity involved that isn't federally funded, which means the taxpayer would pay for it...to be built in the most expensive manner possible. Yeah, that's a wonderful way to spend tax dollars in this day and age when we're already carrying the largest deficit in the history of the country.
Sheesh. I guess they don't bother teaching economics or business or government to any of you kids out there anymore, do they?
and if they walk away with the difference in costs, well who'se going to even notice?
I imagine that if the tank failed, blew up another shuttle, and killed another seven astronauts, an awful lot of people will notice. And Congress will call an inquiry. And constituents will demand that heads roll. And anyone and everyone associated with the tank -- working, retired, resigned, fired, or whatever -- can and will be roasted alive in the court of public opinion, fined into oblivion, professionally ruined for life, and perhaps even jailed. Never underestimate the power of the public's desire for a scapegoat, nor any legislative body's desire to satiate the public for it. And that assumes there's a scapegoat that actually exists in the first place, but if there isn't, one or more will be created for the occasion.