When even the cops use these databases on on other cops you know the only solution is to stop building the databases in the first place.
That's kind of like saying we should get rid of bittorrent. Information is very easy to compile and distribute, and it is getting easier all the time. Right now it is abuse of government databases. Pretty soon EVERYBODY will have access to these databases, and they will store far more.
The app this article is about lets you snap a picture and get a search result in a minute - that's just an issue with CPU/bandwidth. In a few years the app can just run all the time, searching every face you see and imposing a name like a HUD, and the results will be retrieved instantly. The device knows your GPS location, so you can also log where they were seen and when. At first it will be just some data aggregators collecting this info, but soon there will be apps that let you store this data yourself and share it in an open database. Now we have an open database listing the locations of every person and object with a unique number on it (like a license plate, but not limited to this) for the entire planet for their entire lives.
You can't stop this sort of thing, any more than you can stop people from downloading movies. Society will just have to adjust to a complete lack of privacy and anonymity.
Hate to self-reply, but I will clarify that last bit. I'd actually love an FOSS Google Docs. Unfortunately, I've yet to see anything close. Requirement #1 is that it has to run in a browser, so libreoffice doesn't count. That is a big weakness in FOSS these days - very little cloud-centric software has been created - everything is X11, which makes it useless unless I'm anchored to one PC.
In general I'm not scared at all by applications having their own custom look but I guess familiarity helps. I just don't agree with the design decisions which has been done with KDE (I dislike the ugly tool bars, I dislike vertical tabs with 90 degree rotated text, I feel so-so about tree-views, I have no need to be able to pull apart my windows into separate components.)
Haven't noticed that, but I don't really use any KDE applications. I use the window manager, launcher, taskbar, and other widgets at about that level of the UI. I appreciate features like window-presentation if I mouse over to a corner. I don't use koffice, kde-pim, knoqueror, or kde-just-about-anything-else.
Looking at my screen right now I don't have a single KDE toolbar anywhere or vertical tabs. The only kde application I have open right now is konsole.
To me the desktop environment is really about the window management and launcher elements. I don't need another Google Docs.
KDE made the same traditional desktop demand more resources, making it unusable.
Only if the computer's beyond ancient. My laptop's 10 years old (2GHz Centrino, 1GB of RAM) yet it easily handles KDE 4.8 with blur & transparency effects as my everyday desktop, and I usually have 2-3 hefty programs active like Firefox, OpenOffice or GIMP, plus several smaller ones like QMMP, Kopete, Knote, or SpiderOak
Now try that with KDE 4.0 with the default settings of that era (including no option to turn off nepomuk). I believe KDE generally reduced the performance requirements quite a bit since then. Also, 10 years ago 1GB of RAM was about the same price as 16GB of RAM today, and I don't see too many laptops with 16GB of RAM today, so your experience isn't quite typical.
I moved away from KDE for a few years on a desktop PC, and it was largely due to performance during the 4.0 transition.
It changes the sorts of things you buy online. Before it was about stuff that you stockpiled before you needed. With Prime it replaces quite a few trips to the local Walmart. Need a box of pens? How about a light bulb? Need new wiper blades before the car inspection next week (local place loves selling $35 cheapo blades)? Groceries?
I've been a member for a year. If I get the $79 rate I'd probably keep it. If they try to up the rate I'd probably cancel, at least for a while. It drives me nuts that they don't have an Android video client, that they're now moving to USPS for many deliveries, and they now charge sales tax in my state. Granted, they can't control the last bit, but they're losing the ability to command a premium all the same...
Except I normally just wait to buy until I have $35 worth of stuff in my cart. Don't get me wrong, I use prime, it's just the 'savings on shipping' is bs to me. I rarely pay for shipping, especially on amazon. The main advantage of prime is fast shipping, and not having to worry about a minimum.
That's what I used to think until I got Prime. I found myself buying a lot more cheap stuff that normally would sit in my cart until I accumulated $25 worth (at the time). Except, half the time I'd end up buying it at Walmart before then anyway because I couldn't wait any longer. With Prime I can usually have something delivered before I even get a chance to go to Walmart, and there are no minimums. I buy a lot more from Amazon as a result.
Amazon also isn't the only game in town. If Newegg or whatever charges the same price, doesn't charge sales tax, and has $3 shipping with no minimum order size, I need to buy a lot of stuff on Prime for it to make sense.
Sure, if you live in a metro area surrounded by Best Buys and WalMarts it makes less sense, but many of us don't.
Bestbuy is almost guaranteed to cost as much as Amazon plus paying for overnight shipping - that varies but is often the case. Walmart could be better/worse depending on the item.
However, convenience is what causes me to use Prime heavily. I don't want to go to Walmart on some random weeknight to get one thing and then stand in line for 15min, plus parking a mile away from the store in the winter. Instead I can buy that item on Amazon and have it at my door in a day or two. Unless I was going to drop everything and go to Walmart THAT NIGHT Amazon gets me the item just as fast or faster, and certainly more conveniently.
I've noticed this as well. 95% of the time I do get it in two days, but:
1. Tracking is awful. With UPS I knew where the package was practically in realtime. The guy would drop it at my door and I'd get a text in 15min. I'd know at 5AM that it was out for delivery. With USPS the tracking might start working before the package is delivered half the time, and it is anybody's guess when it will be delivered.
2. With UPS the guarantee was 2 days, but maybe half the time I got it in one. I buy something at 2PM and I have it at lunch the next day for free. That caused me to but a LOT of stuff from Amazon that I'd normally run to Walmart or whatever for. Who wants to stand at a checkout? Any better and I'd be ordering milk and eggs from them. With USPS I'm basically not going to get it in less than 2 days.
The one benefit to USPS is they deliver on Sat. If they used USPS when the timing was such that it would enable a Sat delivery I could live with the lousy tracking.
Aside - I recently rented some textbooks on Amazon and the free returns were all via USPS. That bothered me - the cost if those shipments were lost was substantial and I couldn't use a courier with decent tracking. As far as I'm aware you can't get a receipt for dropping off a package with USPS like you can with UPS/etc. When I return things with substantial value I ALWAYS get a receipt from the place I drop it off at. Oh, UPS drop-offs are more convenient - they don't close at lunch on Sat and they are open on Sun.
I have to agree. I was on the fence at $79, signed up, and I think I've gotten good value from it. However, I'd be back on the fence at the new rate.
Maybe they should offer prime members some incentive to use super-saver shipping on orders they don't need in two days. The price is the same either way so there is no incentive for me to save them money, but there are some orders that I really don't care about delivery time on.
They also need to release a video app for Android. They already have it - they just need to release it. The video offerings aren't going to sway customers when the competition works on any tablet and theirs only works on a Kindle that isn't as good for reading books.
Now that they charge sales tax there are also a lot of vendors which can beat them on price - sales tax and shipping are basically a wash. Also, I've noticed that more of my prime orders show up USPS with poor tracking in two days, instead of UPS with excellent tracking in 1-2 days.
I'll probably stick with Prime for $79 - two-day shipping is really convenient - more convenient than a store much of the time. However, if they hike the price I'd probably cancel and see how much I live with the pain. They might end up giving a bunch of please-come-back deals and end up losing more money than they'd have made if they just left the price alone.
Yup, and the sad thing is that I really like kmail, but stayed away for the longest time because it required akonadi to run. Now you can at least disable the indexing part so that it doesn't kill your system.
I think the other thing that worked out for kde4 is that they managed to reduce the demand for resources, and systems caught up. There was a big jump in requirements from 3.5 to 4.0, and a lot of older systems just couldn't handle it. These days needing 4GB of RAM and a GPU isn't such a big deal.
Yup - this is why I run KDE. It is about as clean as xfce interface-wise, but it has the searchable launcher that most of us like, and it is extremely tweakable with applets/widgets/etc. You can basically stick anything anywhere (a desktop in your task bar, a window pager on your desktop, etc).
I keep it fairly classic, but I appreciate the fact that in any of the native apps I can just use a fish:// URL to browse files on remote ssh servers, automounting works, and all that. I still tend to use the command line more than anything but sometimes the power comes in handy.
My second choice would be xfce, but I mainly run that in situations where I'm really RAM-constrained. UI-wise it isn't really all that much cleaner, but lacking all the bells-and-whistles it takes way less in the way of resources.
Uh, the plan is to mothball it as soon as it is done, at a cost of $800k per year. So, it is a bargain in the same way that buying junk that is on sale that you don't need is.
Sometimes plans change, and spending that used to make sense no longer makes sense. If finishing the project actually has some benefit that is great, but unless they can use this tower for something else it is just a waste to keep going.
"A nuclear submarine had its electricity cut by an electricity company at a naval base due to unpaid bills. The submarine's cooling system ceased to function and the reactor "came close to meltdown""
The other problem with plans are the ones that collect your premiums in the hope that you don't get sick. If you do and it is expensive, then they just find a pretext to disqualify you. Maybe they refund your premiums.
Take someone who - by definition of willingness to complete their duties - counts as a complete sociopath...
Somehow I doubt the definition of duties includes the word "sociopath." Messed up describes the nature of humanity that necessitates their job in the first place...
I don't have firsthand knowledge but the question is whether the power produced by decay is larger than the power dissipation via passive cooling. Fissile material is dense, so very high mass to a given surface area, and that surface area is surrounded by materials like concrete/etc that probably don't have high conductivity. It isn't like fissile materials are just left out exposed to the air.
If power produced is greater than power dissipated it will heat up. At some point the increased temperature relative to surroundings will cause the rate of power dissipation to rise and equalize, but that could be a very high temperature if there is sufficient insulation. Now, if the difference is low it might very well take a long time for it to heat up enough to cause problems, and power production is constantly dropping as the pile decays.
So, I don't know what the practical limits are, but certainly I'd want to have done the math and properly maintain cooling systems until the math says they aren't needed.
Having studied for government certification exams before, a more likely set of questions is:
What is the regulation that allows a warhead restraining bolt to be inspected without a current bolt inspector certification certificate? a. 19.393.7(b)3 b. 17.101.4 c 19.393.9(c)4 d 19.393.12(d)7.5
What is the model number of the restraining bolt for a launch button assembly? (not mentioned: As of the time of printing of this 5 year old test.) a. 413 b. 74A3 c. 802 d. 7/12
Why should we listen to someone that get's paid to murder people? Or paid to help others murder people. Despicable. And the nerve to call yourself "educated".
And who do you think pays them to do it? That is, unless you're positing your lofty sentiments from a prison cell for tax evasion.
I'll be the first to say that we're using our military inappropriately. However, there is a big difference between that and not having one. The reason that you can sit at home and type on your computer without owning a gun is because you've decided to pay other people to use guns to keep your greedy neighbor from just killing you in your sleep and taking your computer. I think the best military is one that you don't have to use, but that doesn't mean that there is no need for it.
I suspect that joining the military will involve sacrifice even if the rest of us don't go out of our way to make their lives miserable. While we shouldn't be just handing privates $100k/yr to go sit on a beach, that doesn't mean that somebody who does their job well for their entire life shouldn't be able to afford to retire, or that they should have to live like 3rd world citizens for all the time they're in the service.
High security clearances (and the implication that they are therefore trustworthy), technical training plus an unblemished record will take you far.
Their training consists of opening safes, validating launch orders by comparing codes, and turning keys. I'm sure they also know to call in an engineer if they get a red light on their board or whatever.
These aren't guys loading cargo onto jets or manning control towers. They aren't fixing tanks.
I'm sure they're still employable, but they don't really have transferrable high-skill experience unless the guys launching the missiles also maintain things.
Sunlamps, water recycling, underground nuclear power plants. The thousands of people that could sustain is all you need to "win".
Yeah, somehow I doubt that the average leader with the ability to make nuclear war a reality is going to want to trade their life of limos, private planes, and steak on plates that cost a year's salary for Vault 101 and hydroponic soybeans. At least as long as nobody else tries to take away their toys...
The sad thing about the whole debate is that the health care industry really is in dire need of reform in terms of what government oversight and regulations exist within the industry, and a fundamental rethinking about how healthcare ought to be provided. That debate never happened.
I can find no end to articles on the subject - I'd say the debate is certainly out there. Sure, I can't find any recordings of Congress having one set of reps stand up being pro-doctors-union and another set being pro-ban-doctors-union.
I don't even agree with you that the reason it is in the current state is a result of any kind of legislative negotiation.
Well, it probably wasn't a negotiation with Republicans so much as a negotiation with industry reps and Democrats. The concern seemed to be that too large a disruption to the status quo would have triggered enough protest to prevent its passage, so it was watered down quite a bit.
I even question the need for "universal coverage", but that is a separate debate.
This is probably one of the most critical questions, because it surrounds many of the complaints about the AHA and the recently-announced Republican alternative proposal.
The AHA achieves universal coverage, though I'd argue it does so in a way that does not raise sufficient revenue to make it sustainable. Right now every US citizen has health insurance. They might not have signed up for it, but they're paying a premium for it. If they don't sign up their premium comes in the form of a $600/yr (or whatever it is) tax penalty, which doesn't nearly pay for the coverage they're actually getting. If you sign up then you can actually have your current medical bills paid, and if you don't sign up then you're given the option to still have your future medical bills paid when you do sign up (which is a considerable level of coverage even if most don't realize it).
Without universal coverage you need to deny benefits for pre-existing conditions. The problem with medicine, however, is that it is almost impossible to prove whether many conditions really were pre-existing. Car accidents and house fires are events that take place in a short duration and the date on which they happened is fairly obvious. Medical problems tend to fester undetected for a long period of time before doctors diagnose them, and individuals can even choose to hide them.
Requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions gives individuals incentive to sign up for insurance only when they're sick, which means that insurance quickly becomes unaffordable to anybody. That's why the most affordable forms of insurance prior to the AHA are group plans set up by employers - the employer ensures universal coverage. When you have universal coverage there are no pre-existing conditions.
If it were just a matter of individual choice there would be no problem, but the fact that it isn't clear when a condition started gives insurance companies incentive to accept a customer and then deny their claims later, at most refunding their premiums. This is the reason that universal coverage ends up being important.
The main problem with the AHA seems to be that not enough healthy people are signing up for it. That's only a problem because we're providing universal coverage, but not charging universal premiums. The solution would be simple - the tax penalty for not signing up for a plan should be set to whatever the cheapest plan in the marketplace is plus 10%.
As long as increased productivity leads to increased wages (which it can), then it will lead to increased revenue.
For an individual that might be true. For the system this is only true if the increase in wages is at least proportional to the decrease in labor utilization. This is almost never the case.
Generally productivity increases as the result of capital investment (training, automation, etc). Almost always this investment comes from an employer, and an employer wouldn't make that investment unless they expected to be spending less in wages after the investment than before per unit of production.
Now, if demand for services is rising a company might pay more in payroll after increasing productivity, but even in that case more would have been spent on wages if productivity had remained constant.
Don't get me wrong - improved productivity is a great thing. It just doesn't generally result in more money in the average worker's pocket.
We are all for local governments making up whatever crazy laws the people who live there decided they want to live by.
Does that include laws passing tariffs on things imported from other states? If not, then states can't pass any of the laws that libertarians oppose at the Federal level, because otherwise local industry will just move to another state.
If you don't let a factory pollute your rivers they'll just fire all the local workers and move to another state where they can pollute the river. If you're really unlucky that river might just run through your own state anyway.
Local regulation only works if you can actually regulate imports.
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When even the cops use these databases on on other cops you know the only solution is to stop building the databases in the first place.
That's kind of like saying we should get rid of bittorrent. Information is very easy to compile and distribute, and it is getting easier all the time. Right now it is abuse of government databases. Pretty soon EVERYBODY will have access to these databases, and they will store far more.
The app this article is about lets you snap a picture and get a search result in a minute - that's just an issue with CPU/bandwidth. In a few years the app can just run all the time, searching every face you see and imposing a name like a HUD, and the results will be retrieved instantly. The device knows your GPS location, so you can also log where they were seen and when. At first it will be just some data aggregators collecting this info, but soon there will be apps that let you store this data yourself and share it in an open database. Now we have an open database listing the locations of every person and object with a unique number on it (like a license plate, but not limited to this) for the entire planet for their entire lives.
You can't stop this sort of thing, any more than you can stop people from downloading movies. Society will just have to adjust to a complete lack of privacy and anonymity.
I don't need another Google Docs.
Hate to self-reply, but I will clarify that last bit. I'd actually love an FOSS Google Docs. Unfortunately, I've yet to see anything close. Requirement #1 is that it has to run in a browser, so libreoffice doesn't count. That is a big weakness in FOSS these days - very little cloud-centric software has been created - everything is X11, which makes it useless unless I'm anchored to one PC.
In general I'm not scared at all by applications having their own custom look but I guess familiarity helps. I just don't agree with the design decisions which has been done with KDE (I dislike the ugly tool bars, I dislike vertical tabs with 90 degree rotated text, I feel so-so about tree-views, I have no need to be able to pull apart my windows into separate components.)
Haven't noticed that, but I don't really use any KDE applications. I use the window manager, launcher, taskbar, and other widgets at about that level of the UI. I appreciate features like window-presentation if I mouse over to a corner. I don't use koffice, kde-pim, knoqueror, or kde-just-about-anything-else.
Looking at my screen right now I don't have a single KDE toolbar anywhere or vertical tabs. The only kde application I have open right now is konsole.
To me the desktop environment is really about the window management and launcher elements. I don't need another Google Docs.
KDE made the same traditional desktop demand more resources, making it unusable.
Only if the computer's beyond ancient. My laptop's 10 years old (2GHz Centrino, 1GB of RAM) yet it easily handles KDE 4.8 with blur & transparency effects as my everyday desktop, and I usually have 2-3 hefty programs active like Firefox, OpenOffice or GIMP, plus several smaller ones like QMMP, Kopete, Knote, or SpiderOak
Now try that with KDE 4.0 with the default settings of that era (including no option to turn off nepomuk). I believe KDE generally reduced the performance requirements quite a bit since then. Also, 10 years ago 1GB of RAM was about the same price as 16GB of RAM today, and I don't see too many laptops with 16GB of RAM today, so your experience isn't quite typical.
I moved away from KDE for a few years on a desktop PC, and it was largely due to performance during the 4.0 transition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
It changes the sorts of things you buy online. Before it was about stuff that you stockpiled before you needed. With Prime it replaces quite a few trips to the local Walmart. Need a box of pens? How about a light bulb? Need new wiper blades before the car inspection next week (local place loves selling $35 cheapo blades)? Groceries?
I've been a member for a year. If I get the $79 rate I'd probably keep it. If they try to up the rate I'd probably cancel, at least for a while. It drives me nuts that they don't have an Android video client, that they're now moving to USPS for many deliveries, and they now charge sales tax in my state. Granted, they can't control the last bit, but they're losing the ability to command a premium all the same...
Except I normally just wait to buy until I have $35 worth of stuff in my cart. Don't get me wrong, I use prime, it's just the 'savings on shipping' is bs to me. I rarely pay for shipping, especially on amazon. The main advantage of prime is fast shipping, and not having to worry about a minimum.
That's what I used to think until I got Prime. I found myself buying a lot more cheap stuff that normally would sit in my cart until I accumulated $25 worth (at the time). Except, half the time I'd end up buying it at Walmart before then anyway because I couldn't wait any longer. With Prime I can usually have something delivered before I even get a chance to go to Walmart, and there are no minimums. I buy a lot more from Amazon as a result.
Amazon also isn't the only game in town. If Newegg or whatever charges the same price, doesn't charge sales tax, and has $3 shipping with no minimum order size, I need to buy a lot of stuff on Prime for it to make sense.
Sure, if you live in a metro area surrounded by Best Buys and WalMarts it makes less sense, but many of us don't.
Bestbuy is almost guaranteed to cost as much as Amazon plus paying for overnight shipping - that varies but is often the case. Walmart could be better/worse depending on the item.
However, convenience is what causes me to use Prime heavily. I don't want to go to Walmart on some random weeknight to get one thing and then stand in line for 15min, plus parking a mile away from the store in the winter. Instead I can buy that item on Amazon and have it at my door in a day or two. Unless I was going to drop everything and go to Walmart THAT NIGHT Amazon gets me the item just as fast or faster, and certainly more conveniently.
I've noticed this as well. 95% of the time I do get it in two days, but:
1. Tracking is awful. With UPS I knew where the package was practically in realtime. The guy would drop it at my door and I'd get a text in 15min. I'd know at 5AM that it was out for delivery. With USPS the tracking might start working before the package is delivered half the time, and it is anybody's guess when it will be delivered.
2. With UPS the guarantee was 2 days, but maybe half the time I got it in one. I buy something at 2PM and I have it at lunch the next day for free. That caused me to but a LOT of stuff from Amazon that I'd normally run to Walmart or whatever for. Who wants to stand at a checkout? Any better and I'd be ordering milk and eggs from them. With USPS I'm basically not going to get it in less than 2 days.
The one benefit to USPS is they deliver on Sat. If they used USPS when the timing was such that it would enable a Sat delivery I could live with the lousy tracking.
Aside - I recently rented some textbooks on Amazon and the free returns were all via USPS. That bothered me - the cost if those shipments were lost was substantial and I couldn't use a courier with decent tracking. As far as I'm aware you can't get a receipt for dropping off a package with USPS like you can with UPS/etc. When I return things with substantial value I ALWAYS get a receipt from the place I drop it off at. Oh, UPS drop-offs are more convenient - they don't close at lunch on Sat and they are open on Sun.
I have to agree. I was on the fence at $79, signed up, and I think I've gotten good value from it. However, I'd be back on the fence at the new rate.
Maybe they should offer prime members some incentive to use super-saver shipping on orders they don't need in two days. The price is the same either way so there is no incentive for me to save them money, but there are some orders that I really don't care about delivery time on.
They also need to release a video app for Android. They already have it - they just need to release it. The video offerings aren't going to sway customers when the competition works on any tablet and theirs only works on a Kindle that isn't as good for reading books.
Now that they charge sales tax there are also a lot of vendors which can beat them on price - sales tax and shipping are basically a wash. Also, I've noticed that more of my prime orders show up USPS with poor tracking in two days, instead of UPS with excellent tracking in 1-2 days.
I'll probably stick with Prime for $79 - two-day shipping is really convenient - more convenient than a store much of the time. However, if they hike the price I'd probably cancel and see how much I live with the pain. They might end up giving a bunch of please-come-back deals and end up losing more money than they'd have made if they just left the price alone.
Yup, and the sad thing is that I really like kmail, but stayed away for the longest time because it required akonadi to run. Now you can at least disable the indexing part so that it doesn't kill your system.
I think the other thing that worked out for kde4 is that they managed to reduce the demand for resources, and systems caught up. There was a big jump in requirements from 3.5 to 4.0, and a lot of older systems just couldn't handle it. These days needing 4GB of RAM and a GPU isn't such a big deal.
Yup - this is why I run KDE. It is about as clean as xfce interface-wise, but it has the searchable launcher that most of us like, and it is extremely tweakable with applets/widgets/etc. You can basically stick anything anywhere (a desktop in your task bar, a window pager on your desktop, etc).
I keep it fairly classic, but I appreciate the fact that in any of the native apps I can just use a fish:// URL to browse files on remote ssh servers, automounting works, and all that. I still tend to use the command line more than anything but sometimes the power comes in handy.
My second choice would be xfce, but I mainly run that in situations where I'm really RAM-constrained. UI-wise it isn't really all that much cleaner, but lacking all the bells-and-whistles it takes way less in the way of resources.
Uh, the plan is to mothball it as soon as it is done, at a cost of $800k per year. So, it is a bargain in the same way that buying junk that is on sale that you don't need is.
Sometimes plans change, and spending that used to make sense no longer makes sense. If finishing the project actually has some benefit that is great, but unless they can use this tower for something else it is just a waste to keep going.
"A nuclear submarine had its electricity cut by an electricity company at a naval base due to unpaid bills. The submarine's cooling system ceased to function and the reactor "came close to meltdown""
Why does this come to mind?
The other problem with plans are the ones that collect your premiums in the hope that you don't get sick. If you do and it is expensive, then they just find a pretext to disqualify you. Maybe they refund your premiums.
Take someone who - by definition of willingness to complete their duties - counts as a complete sociopath...
Somehow I doubt the definition of duties includes the word "sociopath." Messed up describes the nature of humanity that necessitates their job in the first place...
I don't have firsthand knowledge but the question is whether the power produced by decay is larger than the power dissipation via passive cooling. Fissile material is dense, so very high mass to a given surface area, and that surface area is surrounded by materials like concrete/etc that probably don't have high conductivity. It isn't like fissile materials are just left out exposed to the air.
If power produced is greater than power dissipated it will heat up. At some point the increased temperature relative to surroundings will cause the rate of power dissipation to rise and equalize, but that could be a very high temperature if there is sufficient insulation. Now, if the difference is low it might very well take a long time for it to heat up enough to cause problems, and power production is constantly dropping as the pile decays.
So, I don't know what the practical limits are, but certainly I'd want to have done the math and properly maintain cooling systems until the math says they aren't needed.
Having studied for government certification exams before, a more likely set of questions is:
What is the regulation that allows a warhead restraining bolt to be inspected without a current bolt inspector certification certificate?
a. 19.393.7(b)3
b. 17.101.4
c 19.393.9(c)4
d 19.393.12(d)7.5
What is the model number of the restraining bolt for a launch button assembly? (not mentioned: As of the time of printing of this 5 year old test.)
a. 413
b. 74A3
c. 802
d. 7/12
Why should we listen to someone that get's paid to murder people? Or paid to help others murder people. Despicable. And the nerve to call yourself "educated".
And who do you think pays them to do it? That is, unless you're positing your lofty sentiments from a prison cell for tax evasion.
I'll be the first to say that we're using our military inappropriately. However, there is a big difference between that and not having one. The reason that you can sit at home and type on your computer without owning a gun is because you've decided to pay other people to use guns to keep your greedy neighbor from just killing you in your sleep and taking your computer. I think the best military is one that you don't have to use, but that doesn't mean that there is no need for it.
I suspect that joining the military will involve sacrifice even if the rest of us don't go out of our way to make their lives miserable. While we shouldn't be just handing privates $100k/yr to go sit on a beach, that doesn't mean that somebody who does their job well for their entire life shouldn't be able to afford to retire, or that they should have to live like 3rd world citizens for all the time they're in the service.
High security clearances (and the implication that they are therefore trustworthy), technical training plus an unblemished record will take you far.
Their training consists of opening safes, validating launch orders by comparing codes, and turning keys. I'm sure they also know to call in an engineer if they get a red light on their board or whatever.
These aren't guys loading cargo onto jets or manning control towers. They aren't fixing tanks.
I'm sure they're still employable, but they don't really have transferrable high-skill experience unless the guys launching the missiles also maintain things.
Sunlamps, water recycling, underground nuclear power plants. The thousands of people that could sustain is all you need to "win".
Yeah, somehow I doubt that the average leader with the ability to make nuclear war a reality is going to want to trade their life of limos, private planes, and steak on plates that cost a year's salary for Vault 101 and hydroponic soybeans. At least as long as nobody else tries to take away their toys...
The sad thing about the whole debate is that the health care industry really is in dire need of reform in terms of what government oversight and regulations exist within the industry, and a fundamental rethinking about how healthcare ought to be provided. That debate never happened.
I can find no end to articles on the subject - I'd say the debate is certainly out there. Sure, I can't find any recordings of Congress having one set of reps stand up being pro-doctors-union and another set being pro-ban-doctors-union.
I don't even agree with you that the reason it is in the current state is a result of any kind of legislative negotiation.
Well, it probably wasn't a negotiation with Republicans so much as a negotiation with industry reps and Democrats. The concern seemed to be that too large a disruption to the status quo would have triggered enough protest to prevent its passage, so it was watered down quite a bit.
I even question the need for "universal coverage", but that is a separate debate.
This is probably one of the most critical questions, because it surrounds many of the complaints about the AHA and the recently-announced Republican alternative proposal.
The AHA achieves universal coverage, though I'd argue it does so in a way that does not raise sufficient revenue to make it sustainable. Right now every US citizen has health insurance. They might not have signed up for it, but they're paying a premium for it. If they don't sign up their premium comes in the form of a $600/yr (or whatever it is) tax penalty, which doesn't nearly pay for the coverage they're actually getting. If you sign up then you can actually have your current medical bills paid, and if you don't sign up then you're given the option to still have your future medical bills paid when you do sign up (which is a considerable level of coverage even if most don't realize it).
Without universal coverage you need to deny benefits for pre-existing conditions. The problem with medicine, however, is that it is almost impossible to prove whether many conditions really were pre-existing. Car accidents and house fires are events that take place in a short duration and the date on which they happened is fairly obvious. Medical problems tend to fester undetected for a long period of time before doctors diagnose them, and individuals can even choose to hide them.
Requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions gives individuals incentive to sign up for insurance only when they're sick, which means that insurance quickly becomes unaffordable to anybody. That's why the most affordable forms of insurance prior to the AHA are group plans set up by employers - the employer ensures universal coverage. When you have universal coverage there are no pre-existing conditions.
If it were just a matter of individual choice there would be no problem, but the fact that it isn't clear when a condition started gives insurance companies incentive to accept a customer and then deny their claims later, at most refunding their premiums. This is the reason that universal coverage ends up being important.
The main problem with the AHA seems to be that not enough healthy people are signing up for it. That's only a problem because we're providing universal coverage, but not charging universal premiums. The solution would be simple - the tax penalty for not signing up for a plan should be set to whatever the cheapest plan in the marketplace is plus 10%.
As long as increased productivity leads to increased wages (which it can), then it will lead to increased revenue.
For an individual that might be true. For the system this is only true if the increase in wages is at least proportional to the decrease in labor utilization. This is almost never the case.
Generally productivity increases as the result of capital investment (training, automation, etc). Almost always this investment comes from an employer, and an employer wouldn't make that investment unless they expected to be spending less in wages after the investment than before per unit of production.
Now, if demand for services is rising a company might pay more in payroll after increasing productivity, but even in that case more would have been spent on wages if productivity had remained constant.
Don't get me wrong - improved productivity is a great thing. It just doesn't generally result in more money in the average worker's pocket.
We are all for local governments making up whatever crazy laws the people who live there decided they want to live by.
Does that include laws passing tariffs on things imported from other states? If not, then states can't pass any of the laws that libertarians oppose at the Federal level, because otherwise local industry will just move to another state.
If you don't let a factory pollute your rivers they'll just fire all the local workers and move to another state where they can pollute the river. If you're really unlucky that river might just run through your own state anyway.
Local regulation only works if you can actually regulate imports.