Quality isn't the only issue - what about ordering replacements if you're at war.
You have a contract with some supply house to supply parts on demand. They've been slipping you chinese-made parts and saying they're made in the USA. You go to war with China. Suddenly your parts supplier has "mysterious shortages" of their "usa made" parts.
You can't make your military dependent on supplies from a country you might go to war with. Sure, it is expensive to source it all locally, but war is expensive, and starting a war and losing it is WAY more expensive. I'm all for avoiding wars and doing it a lot better than we have been. However, you do need some kind of military even if just for self-defense, and there is no sense not doing that right.
Good point, parent probably deserves positive mods.
Weapons don't have to be used to be effective. Personally I'd rather live in a world where nobody needs guns, but being the only person alive on a planet would be rather lonely, so I can see how they have their place.
I'd probably never buy a gun without having a security system as well, with full lights applied when it is set off. I think half of my fear if owning a gun is that if there is some creaking noise outside the room I'd have no idea if it is just environmental conditions, some kid looking to steal something, somebody who means serious harm, or just one of the kids using the bathroom. Something like an alarm would wake the house and allow me to be alerted to a problem with sufficient time that my eyes might actually be working before I'm confronted with a potential target. In fact, being groggy and having a gun in your hand is really a bad situation to be in for many reasons - if you're armed and your adversary is as well, you've just placed yourself into a your-life-or-mine situation with somebody who has the element of surprise. If you're unarmed they have less incentive to just fire immediately. The gun really only works out in your favor if you have at least a moment of surprise to identify your target before they realize you're there. The bad guy already knows anybody in the house is unfriendly.
If automated cars become ubiquitous there will be all kinds of incentives to remove the ability to operate around non-automated cars. That will include stuff like getting rid of traffic control devices like signs and signals. Your car will be given reservations for the space it uses, and if it tries to go faster it will just find other cars blocking the way as everybody drives a foot apart. About the only thing such modifications are likely to accomplish is getting people hurt. More likely than not cars that don't interact properly with the network will simply be flagged for repairs, and if the car doesn't drive itself to the shop as ordered while you're at work, the police will show up and impound it.
Cars will operate much more like aircraft with coordinated control. What happens if a pilot decides to cut in line when taxing to the runway, or when on approach? They'd be warned at best (assume a mistake), and if their actions are remotely dangerous they'd be immediately visited by the FAA on arrival. Ever notice how at the airport planes don't jockey for position? They're simply told where to go, and who yields to who. Everybody just parks nicely with safe distances as they queue up at the runway, knowing that the controller will get everybody there in due time. The unlucky plane sent halfway around the airport to ease traffic just goes along with it, since they have absolutely no choice in the matter. Since planes aren't fully automated, mistakes still happen, but they only rarely cause injury. And of course, in a fully automated world there will still be breakdowns, but we'll have to accept that the system that saves 10s of thousands of lives per year might still miss a few.
Likely true, and a big reason why I'd like to see some kind of special legal framework for civil suits against the manufacturer in the case of self-driving cars.
Suppose Google builds a fleet of self driving cars and puts them out on the market and captures 90% market share. Suppose that due to a design flaw that could have been prevented with better diligence those cars kill 100 people per year, but those are the only accidents the cars have. In a court they'd be treated as mass murders, but in reality they would have eliminated one of the highest causes of death in the US (32k people per year - same order of magnitude as things like diabetes). The ubiquitous use of self-driving cars would likely greatly reduce emissions and gasoline use as well. They'd have the potential to greatly reduce the amount of paved land as well - all good for the environment, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. They'd be able to make much better use of electrical power as well.
How is all of this possible? Self-driving cars don't need to stop at intersections to safely manage traffic, can dynamically adjust the number of travel lanes in each direction, can park themselves someplace other than directly in front of the store you're visiting in, can deliver packages on their own, can form convoys to minimize drag, can potentially complete an entire trip with only an application of regenerative brakes at the destination, and plan all deceleration for coasting or minimal regenerative braking. They can easily function as taxis or operate in other kinds of ride-share modes. And, of course, they are much less likely to crash into things. All of this adds up to a huge increase in efficiency around the use of the roads in general.
The DMV already administers an eye test when you renew your license.
That depends on your DMV. The last time I checked there were 50 of those in the US alone. Mine certainly does not check vision regularly, and I've yet to hear of any that check annually, which is what current rules around contact lens prescriptions revolve around.
Are blood tests even covered by insurance? I doubt it. Also not every doctor is going to agree with you that you need to be tested so you'll ultimately have to pay out of pocket for some tests.
Every insurance plan I've ever had will pay for them, but of course individual plans almost certainly vary. The figures I posted are generally reflective of my own experience, and no doubt the experience of others will vary, based on how much their employer spent on their plan.
Most insurance policies dictate when they will pay for various tests, though the doctor is typically the gatekeeper. The guidelines are usually based on the recommendations of the medical profession, and the guidelines set by Medicare in the US.
Well, the fundamental issue is that kickstarter depends on trust, and buying retail does not. Either way the investor takes the most risk, but with kickstarter the investor is the consumer. With larger private investors, there us usually more oversight. If I'm the sole investor in a $700k project, I can drop in at any time and see how things are going, fire people at any time, and generally exercise due diligence. If I contribute $20 to a $700k project, maybe I'll get a free T-shirt if they're nice, but it sounds like there isn't even a chance to elect a board of directors, let alone exercise direct management.
All of those periods of peace involved considerable spending on the military. You could argue that it was the military spending which created the period of peace in the first place, as nobody dared to challenge the dominant power.
So, pointing to these periods of time does nothing for the argument that people are inherently non-warlike, or that we don't need to spend so much on the military. If anything it points to the fact that people are very much warlike and as a result if you want to have peace you have to spend quite a bit on the military.
Yup. The only difference between for-profit and non-profit institutions is who elects the board, and whether the CEO has to share their plunder with shareholders or if the execs get to keep 100% of it. Either way the bigwigs running the job usually are in it for self-interest, unless you're talking about a non-profit that doesn't actually have much money.
Yup, they even want to go a step further than that.
The AMA model is this:
1. Doctor thinks you might need a DNA test. Doctor fills out a form and checks that he needs to know what variant you have on 3 particular genes. 2. DNA testing lab does an analysis giving the value of 750k different SNPs. 3. DNA testing lab notes the 3 that were ordered, sends a report back with the variant of each of those, and deletes the data for the other 749,997 positions. 4. Doctor decides he needs another SNP tested. Patient sends in another vial of spit and pays for another test, and so on.
The idea of just letting patients have a 1MB dump of their SNPs for $200 is completely foreign to the AMA. Apparently the better model is to pay $160 for two doctor's visits, plus $200 for a lab test to give you 3 SNPs, on a nice typewritten report that the doctor might let you have a copy of, perhaps requiring you to pay a fee for reproduction of your chart.
Then he went to the optometrist and found out that he was way off, so bad that he shouldn't have been driving that way.
So, the only solution to that problem is mandate a 100% annual vision test for all licensed drivers. Otherwise you miss anybody whose vision was good 30 years ago and isn't good today. Simply making people who wear disposable contacts doesn't solve the driving problem at all.
These laws basically just protect the medical industry from under-spending by consumers. They purport to have more noble goals, but if those goals were really important there are much more effective ways to accomplish them.
Uh, $60 is just the sticker price for those basic blood tests. Most insurance companies pay about $15, including the blood draw and all. Only suckers pay $60 - ie those without insurance. Actually, if you don't have insurance you can beg and plead with them and they'll knock the price down to $40 and you'll talk to your friends about how you get such a better deal without insurance.
Trust me, the insurance companies don't have a monopoly on greed in the healthcare industry. The pricing system is completely out of control.
The real fun thing is that now whenever I go to have blood taken they lady behind the counter says "you have an estimated patient responsibility of $120 - how would you like to pay that? We take cash, checks, and credit cards." I tell them to bill me, and they say, "no problem." They sure don't offer that up-front though. When the bill comes in typically the insurance pays about $15 and tells me I owe the lab $2 or so. Of course, if I had paid the $120 up-front I'm sure it wouldn't be any hassle at all to get that money back, right...?
Well, a base in Poland would tend to protect countries like Germany and the UK from places like the Middle East and the *stans.
Now, North Korea is a bit too far east for that - a great circle route would be much closer to the pole, and you'd need bases on the North side of Europe to protect against that. However, NK is more likely to shoot at the US anyway, so Japan is probably the best place to base your interceptors, or just off the coast at sea. I'm sure that is in the US plan.
I see all of this as less about missile defense per se, and more about military solidarity with Eastern Europe, and the resulting Russian grumbling over the same.
Europe is where the U.S. keeps most of its first strike nukes. Protecting those with a missile defense system leaves Russia at a huge disadvantage in any nuke war
Why on earth would you need to protect "first strike nukes" in the event of a nuclear war? If you do mount a first strike those missiles will already be in the air long before Russia knows an attack is even underway.
The only thing missile defense would do is protect other targets in Europe from retaliation, or block a Russian first strike. I will tend to agree that the former does tend to reduce the protection afforded by MAD. However, it has nothing to do with protecting "first strike nukes." The whole point of mounting a first strike is that it completely eliminates the possibility of the enemy hitting your nuclear forces while they're still on the ground at their most vulnerable.
I'm not sure that ABM will ever reach a point where it will be a realistic way to deal with MAD. The nature of the problem favors offense greatly. ABM does have the power to force your opponent to spend a great deal of money though (at a cost of your own expenditure of far more money - but with their economies in the state they are in the US can probably afford to waste $100 to get the Russians to waste $2). I suspect the real issue here is pride in any case...
It is not a defensive system, not to the Russians anyway. It's true enough that it could be used defensively against Iran and North Korea, but it has an offensive role in an all out war against Russia. It breaks MAD, and while MAD is a ridiculously suicidal way to run a planet, it did manage to get us through the cold war pretty well.
I find this whole situation remarkably ironic, considering the US was encouraging Russia to abandon ballistic missile defense back in the 60s, to which they famously replied:
"Defense is moral, offense is immoral", Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, 1967
Now the roles are reversed, and it is the Russians who are trying to get ABM banned.:)
I see that you have no knowledge about the laws a corporation operates under.
Uh, what evidence is there for that. The fact that I think those laws should be changed has no bearing on whether I understand those laws. I'm quite aware that our current laws require corporations to behave like scumbags. I think they should be otherwise.
Who the blazes is going to invest money into something that is being operated for the benefit of somebody else?
Well, if the laws are changed and corporations are required to be operated in a responsible manner, what else are they going to invest in?
In any case, I'm not proposing that corporations operate as charities - only that our tax code actually require them to pay up, and that courts not be so lenient in allowing loopholes to be used. If somebody exercises a bunch of transactions that make no sense except from the standpoint that they're avoiding taxes, then just rule that they have to pay the taxes anyway, regardless of the fine print. Perhaps require corporations to renew their licenses every 5 years or so, and allow voters to petition to have a referendum on their renewal. If a company really ticks people off they'll find themselves liquidated.
A base in Kuwait would do little to stop an Iran/Iraq/Afganistan missile launch against Europe. The missile trajectory has to actually pass fairly close to the defense base to be shot down.
Just think about the physics - rocket takes off heading North. Another rocket 100 miles south takes off heading North. The only way for the latter to intercept the former is if it is travelling much faster. Missile speed is basically a factor of technology and the amount of propellant inside, likely with a lot more emphasis on the latter. I doubt that US rocket technology is so much better than what is being fielded against them that they can make an interceptor with 2-3x the acceleration and sufficient range to hit a missile with a big head start.
The physics of missile interception lead to two strategies, which are best employed together: 1. Put bases in the path of the missile. 2. Put bases as close to the launcher as you can.
#1 means that your missiles need a lot less delta-V to get to the target, and you need a lot less advance warning (in the extreme of the example above you'd need warning before the target missile was even launched to have your interceptor in place). #2 means that you can catch the target while it is moving slower, and that your base is between the launcher and more of the earth's surface (see #1).
If you want to hit missiles coming in from the MIddle East, places like Turkey, Greece, and Eastern Europe are exactly where you want them. The latter covers areas like the *stan's, as well as independent states in the former USSR that have less than stable governments.
While I agree that the amount of equipment needed to service a charging station is likely smaller than a gas pump, and safety issues will eliminate some aspects of gas station design, I'm not convinced that we'll see rapid chargers that resemble parking lots.
Rapid charging involves megawatt-scale power delivery. The cables for that are going to be reasonably sizable - we're not talking lamp cord. Finding charging stations will be easy - just follow the 30kV power lines, and if EV really takes off follow the 300kV lines and look for the huge transformer banks. If my electric bill is typical, a single charging booth for a car might take as much electrical supply as the average usage in 1500 homes (granted, most homes are wired to supply far more than their "average" use, but the average use at a charging station is going to be near-peak during business hours).
Something like a grocery store or mall might offer charging, but likely only at scales that you'd associate with home/overnight charging. Sure, if you're at the mall all day it will make quite a dent in your tank, but forget getting a full charge in only an hour or two. They'd need to charge by the hour in those spots unless they wire the entire parking lot, or people will just hog them. Most people will find it more convenient to do this sort of charging at home.
The main purpose of remote charging for an EV is to extend range. I could see charging stations having a place at workplaces to increase commuting range without a recharge stop, but otherwise I see the gas station model having a lot more utility over charging at other locations, unless the cost/logistics involved get so cheap so as to be trivial.
The main reason cars have multiple hundred horse power engines is because acceleration is power demanding.
That is true (acceleration is really the only place where power is limiting in real-world car usage, unless real-world usage is a race track with long straightaways).
However, it is a bit misleading in some ways. Cars actually have way more horsepower than they really need to accelerate, because gasoline engines can only deliver that horsepower at high RPMs, and unless you have a transmission designed for a semi it takes a while to get to those RPMs. What tends to matter far more is torque at the low end, and electric motors have a huge advantage there.
If you throw in driving habits it becomes even more "important" - most people aren't comfortable with driving their engines at 6k RPM and most automatic transmissions won't kick back 2 gears as soon as you touch the gas. If you're a racecar driver and shift accordingly, then you can get quite a bit of power even out of mediocre engines, but most people won't push their cars past 3-4k RPM, and you're only getting a fraction of the car's advertised horsepower at those kinds of RPMs. An electric motor delivers very high power without sounding like a jet engine, so psychologically it is more suited to the average driver as well.
That's why cars with turbos are a waste for most consumers, beyond the status symbol aspect. Unless you're willing to kick back two gears when overtaking and go ahead and overtake 5 cars at a time when doing so, you'll never really get much boost out of it anyway. All a turbo does is even more dramatically increase the power output at high RPMs that most people don't like to operate at, and which aren't rapidly available anyway unless you're already moving and can shift back a few gears. In fact, manufacturers often reduce their engine sizes when they install a turbo, which lowers the torque at the low end even further.
For the way most people drive, a lower-power electric engine gets them better performance than a high-power gasoline one.
Making a profit is the reason for their existance.
I can see why this might appeal to the greedy, but why should I let a company operate whose sole purpose is making money? What good does their making money do me, that I should pay taxes to protect their property (obviously they're not paying taxes themselves to this end)? No, I don't own their stock.
I don't mind doing things to help out "others," but generally I don't include in that category sociopaths or organizations that behave like them, unless helping means compelling them to receive appropriate treatment.
Suppose I hire a maid, and pay them $50 or whatever to clean my house in preparation for a party in a few hours.
In the middle of cleaning they hear a scream. They look out the window and see somebody lying on the neighbor's sidewalk and some running down the street with a purse. They run outside and find the person bleeding from an apparent stab wound. They call 911, administer first aid, make sure the ambulance finds the poor victim, and end up giving 47 statements to the police. My house goes uncleaned.
I get home and am enraged - maybe I'll get my $50 back, but my reputation is going to suffer for throwing a party in a less-clean house. Maybe I'll succeed in bribing fewer politicians as a result, or I won't get some deal made I wanted to get made.
I sue the maid, because they had a fiduciary duty to me to complete the job they were paid to do, and I didn't pay them to help poor people on the street. I'm not a charity - I'm looking out for my own interests. Helping out dying people on the street is somebody else's job. If I should be stationing watches for dying people there should be a law in black and white to dictate this, so the fact that the poor SOB next door bleeds to death is really the fault of the legislators and voters.
Now, why is it that anybody exhibiting such a line of reasoning in real life is immediately branded a sociopath (and rightly so), but companies are expected to stretch every loophole they can to avoid the social responsibility of paying taxes?
Corporations should be the judged the same as people - it isn't about what you can get away with, it is about doing the thing. Corporations are largely a social construct to let people behave like filth and claim that they're just doing their job, with responsibility for actions being so diluted that nobody need lose too much sleep at night.
Take a set of 100 venture capitalists. They each have enough money to fail 3 times. On average they have a 1% success rate on their ventures.
You end up with 97 venture capitalists who fail 3 times and end up broke. Oh, and you end up with 3 who fail twice but then end up founding the next Facebook. Everybody talks about creative genius and how they were visionaries. What nobody realizes is that they're really not all that much more creative - they just happened to pick the ideas that actually took off. The other 97 end up forgotten like clinical trials that show that expensive drugs don't do much.
I dunno - why do the desktops need all the enterprise-y features, and what makes the tablets different? I can't think of any reason why there would be a reason to differentiate them.
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Quality isn't the only issue - what about ordering replacements if you're at war.
You have a contract with some supply house to supply parts on demand. They've been slipping you chinese-made parts and saying they're made in the USA. You go to war with China. Suddenly your parts supplier has "mysterious shortages" of their "usa made" parts.
You can't make your military dependent on supplies from a country you might go to war with. Sure, it is expensive to source it all locally, but war is expensive, and starting a war and losing it is WAY more expensive. I'm all for avoiding wars and doing it a lot better than we have been. However, you do need some kind of military even if just for self-defense, and there is no sense not doing that right.
You're still fighting the last war - the one on terror. You need to think ahead to the next war. It might not be against suicide bombers.
Good point, parent probably deserves positive mods.
Weapons don't have to be used to be effective. Personally I'd rather live in a world where nobody needs guns, but being the only person alive on a planet would be rather lonely, so I can see how they have their place.
I'd probably never buy a gun without having a security system as well, with full lights applied when it is set off. I think half of my fear if owning a gun is that if there is some creaking noise outside the room I'd have no idea if it is just environmental conditions, some kid looking to steal something, somebody who means serious harm, or just one of the kids using the bathroom. Something like an alarm would wake the house and allow me to be alerted to a problem with sufficient time that my eyes might actually be working before I'm confronted with a potential target. In fact, being groggy and having a gun in your hand is really a bad situation to be in for many reasons - if you're armed and your adversary is as well, you've just placed yourself into a your-life-or-mine situation with somebody who has the element of surprise. If you're unarmed they have less incentive to just fire immediately. The gun really only works out in your favor if you have at least a moment of surprise to identify your target before they realize you're there. The bad guy already knows anybody in the house is unfriendly.
If automated cars become ubiquitous there will be all kinds of incentives to remove the ability to operate around non-automated cars. That will include stuff like getting rid of traffic control devices like signs and signals. Your car will be given reservations for the space it uses, and if it tries to go faster it will just find other cars blocking the way as everybody drives a foot apart. About the only thing such modifications are likely to accomplish is getting people hurt. More likely than not cars that don't interact properly with the network will simply be flagged for repairs, and if the car doesn't drive itself to the shop as ordered while you're at work, the police will show up and impound it.
Cars will operate much more like aircraft with coordinated control. What happens if a pilot decides to cut in line when taxing to the runway, or when on approach? They'd be warned at best (assume a mistake), and if their actions are remotely dangerous they'd be immediately visited by the FAA on arrival. Ever notice how at the airport planes don't jockey for position? They're simply told where to go, and who yields to who. Everybody just parks nicely with safe distances as they queue up at the runway, knowing that the controller will get everybody there in due time. The unlucky plane sent halfway around the airport to ease traffic just goes along with it, since they have absolutely no choice in the matter. Since planes aren't fully automated, mistakes still happen, but they only rarely cause injury. And of course, in a fully automated world there will still be breakdowns, but we'll have to accept that the system that saves 10s of thousands of lives per year might still miss a few.
Likely true, and a big reason why I'd like to see some kind of special legal framework for civil suits against the manufacturer in the case of self-driving cars.
Suppose Google builds a fleet of self driving cars and puts them out on the market and captures 90% market share. Suppose that due to a design flaw that could have been prevented with better diligence those cars kill 100 people per year, but those are the only accidents the cars have. In a court they'd be treated as mass murders, but in reality they would have eliminated one of the highest causes of death in the US (32k people per year - same order of magnitude as things like diabetes). The ubiquitous use of self-driving cars would likely greatly reduce emissions and gasoline use as well. They'd have the potential to greatly reduce the amount of paved land as well - all good for the environment, and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. They'd be able to make much better use of electrical power as well.
How is all of this possible? Self-driving cars don't need to stop at intersections to safely manage traffic, can dynamically adjust the number of travel lanes in each direction, can park themselves someplace other than directly in front of the store you're visiting in, can deliver packages on their own, can form convoys to minimize drag, can potentially complete an entire trip with only an application of regenerative brakes at the destination, and plan all deceleration for coasting or minimal regenerative braking. They can easily function as taxis or operate in other kinds of ride-share modes. And, of course, they are much less likely to crash into things. All of this adds up to a huge increase in efficiency around the use of the roads in general.
The DMV already administers an eye test when you renew your license.
That depends on your DMV. The last time I checked there were 50 of those in the US alone. Mine certainly does not check vision regularly, and I've yet to hear of any that check annually, which is what current rules around contact lens prescriptions revolve around.
Are blood tests even covered by insurance? I doubt it. Also not every doctor is going to agree with you that you need to be tested so you'll ultimately have to pay out of pocket for some tests.
Every insurance plan I've ever had will pay for them, but of course individual plans almost certainly vary. The figures I posted are generally reflective of my own experience, and no doubt the experience of others will vary, based on how much their employer spent on their plan.
Most insurance policies dictate when they will pay for various tests, though the doctor is typically the gatekeeper. The guidelines are usually based on the recommendations of the medical profession, and the guidelines set by Medicare in the US.
Well, the fundamental issue is that kickstarter depends on trust, and buying retail does not. Either way the investor takes the most risk, but with kickstarter the investor is the consumer. With larger private investors, there us usually more oversight. If I'm the sole investor in a $700k project, I can drop in at any time and see how things are going, fire people at any time, and generally exercise due diligence. If I contribute $20 to a $700k project, maybe I'll get a free T-shirt if they're nice, but it sounds like there isn't even a chance to elect a board of directors, let alone exercise direct management.
All of those periods of peace involved considerable spending on the military. You could argue that it was the military spending which created the period of peace in the first place, as nobody dared to challenge the dominant power.
So, pointing to these periods of time does nothing for the argument that people are inherently non-warlike, or that we don't need to spend so much on the military. If anything it points to the fact that people are very much warlike and as a result if you want to have peace you have to spend quite a bit on the military.
Yup. The only difference between for-profit and non-profit institutions is who elects the board, and whether the CEO has to share their plunder with shareholders or if the execs get to keep 100% of it. Either way the bigwigs running the job usually are in it for self-interest, unless you're talking about a non-profit that doesn't actually have much money.
Yup, they even want to go a step further than that.
The AMA model is this:
1. Doctor thinks you might need a DNA test. Doctor fills out a form and checks that he needs to know what variant you have on 3 particular genes.
2. DNA testing lab does an analysis giving the value of 750k different SNPs.
3. DNA testing lab notes the 3 that were ordered, sends a report back with the variant of each of those, and deletes the data for the other 749,997 positions.
4. Doctor decides he needs another SNP tested. Patient sends in another vial of spit and pays for another test, and so on.
The idea of just letting patients have a 1MB dump of their SNPs for $200 is completely foreign to the AMA. Apparently the better model is to pay $160 for two doctor's visits, plus $200 for a lab test to give you 3 SNPs, on a nice typewritten report that the doctor might let you have a copy of, perhaps requiring you to pay a fee for reproduction of your chart.
Then he went to the optometrist and found out that he was way off, so bad that he shouldn't have been driving that way.
So, the only solution to that problem is mandate a 100% annual vision test for all licensed drivers. Otherwise you miss anybody whose vision was good 30 years ago and isn't good today. Simply making people who wear disposable contacts doesn't solve the driving problem at all.
These laws basically just protect the medical industry from under-spending by consumers. They purport to have more noble goals, but if those goals were really important there are much more effective ways to accomplish them.
Uh, $60 is just the sticker price for those basic blood tests. Most insurance companies pay about $15, including the blood draw and all. Only suckers pay $60 - ie those without insurance. Actually, if you don't have insurance you can beg and plead with them and they'll knock the price down to $40 and you'll talk to your friends about how you get such a better deal without insurance.
Trust me, the insurance companies don't have a monopoly on greed in the healthcare industry. The pricing system is completely out of control.
The real fun thing is that now whenever I go to have blood taken they lady behind the counter says "you have an estimated patient responsibility of $120 - how would you like to pay that? We take cash, checks, and credit cards." I tell them to bill me, and they say, "no problem." They sure don't offer that up-front though. When the bill comes in typically the insurance pays about $15 and tells me I owe the lab $2 or so. Of course, if I had paid the $120 up-front I'm sure it wouldn't be any hassle at all to get that money back, right...?
Well, a base in Poland would tend to protect countries like Germany and the UK from places like the Middle East and the *stans.
Now, North Korea is a bit too far east for that - a great circle route would be much closer to the pole, and you'd need bases on the North side of Europe to protect against that. However, NK is more likely to shoot at the US anyway, so Japan is probably the best place to base your interceptors, or just off the coast at sea. I'm sure that is in the US plan.
I see all of this as less about missile defense per se, and more about military solidarity with Eastern Europe, and the resulting Russian grumbling over the same.
Europe is where the U.S. keeps most of its first strike nukes. Protecting those with a missile defense system leaves Russia at a huge disadvantage in any nuke war
Why on earth would you need to protect "first strike nukes" in the event of a nuclear war? If you do mount a first strike those missiles will already be in the air long before Russia knows an attack is even underway.
The only thing missile defense would do is protect other targets in Europe from retaliation, or block a Russian first strike. I will tend to agree that the former does tend to reduce the protection afforded by MAD. However, it has nothing to do with protecting "first strike nukes." The whole point of mounting a first strike is that it completely eliminates the possibility of the enemy hitting your nuclear forces while they're still on the ground at their most vulnerable.
I'm not sure that ABM will ever reach a point where it will be a realistic way to deal with MAD. The nature of the problem favors offense greatly. ABM does have the power to force your opponent to spend a great deal of money though (at a cost of your own expenditure of far more money - but with their economies in the state they are in the US can probably afford to waste $100 to get the Russians to waste $2). I suspect the real issue here is pride in any case...
It is not a defensive system, not to the Russians anyway. It's true enough that it could be used defensively against Iran and North Korea, but it has an offensive role in an all out war against Russia. It breaks MAD, and while MAD is a ridiculously suicidal way to run a planet, it did manage to get us through the cold war pretty well.
I find this whole situation remarkably ironic, considering the US was encouraging Russia to abandon ballistic missile defense back in the 60s, to which they famously replied:
"Defense is moral, offense is immoral", Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin, 1967
Now the roles are reversed, and it is the Russians who are trying to get ABM banned. :)
Now, if only we did the same thing to the banks maybe we'd be able to afford the cost of the foreign policy you describe...
I see that you have no knowledge about the laws a corporation operates under.
Uh, what evidence is there for that. The fact that I think those laws should be changed has no bearing on whether I understand those laws. I'm quite aware that our current laws require corporations to behave like scumbags. I think they should be otherwise.
Who the blazes is going to invest money into something that is being operated for the benefit of somebody else?
Well, if the laws are changed and corporations are required to be operated in a responsible manner, what else are they going to invest in?
In any case, I'm not proposing that corporations operate as charities - only that our tax code actually require them to pay up, and that courts not be so lenient in allowing loopholes to be used. If somebody exercises a bunch of transactions that make no sense except from the standpoint that they're avoiding taxes, then just rule that they have to pay the taxes anyway, regardless of the fine print. Perhaps require corporations to renew their licenses every 5 years or so, and allow voters to petition to have a referendum on their renewal. If a company really ticks people off they'll find themselves liquidated.
Rich
A base in Kuwait would do little to stop an Iran/Iraq/Afganistan missile launch against Europe. The missile trajectory has to actually pass fairly close to the defense base to be shot down.
Just think about the physics - rocket takes off heading North. Another rocket 100 miles south takes off heading North. The only way for the latter to intercept the former is if it is travelling much faster. Missile speed is basically a factor of technology and the amount of propellant inside, likely with a lot more emphasis on the latter. I doubt that US rocket technology is so much better than what is being fielded against them that they can make an interceptor with 2-3x the acceleration and sufficient range to hit a missile with a big head start.
The physics of missile interception lead to two strategies, which are best employed together:
1. Put bases in the path of the missile.
2. Put bases as close to the launcher as you can.
#1 means that your missiles need a lot less delta-V to get to the target, and you need a lot less advance warning (in the extreme of the example above you'd need warning before the target missile was even launched to have your interceptor in place). #2 means that you can catch the target while it is moving slower, and that your base is between the launcher and more of the earth's surface (see #1).
If you want to hit missiles coming in from the MIddle East, places like Turkey, Greece, and Eastern Europe are exactly where you want them. The latter covers areas like the *stan's, as well as independent states in the former USSR that have less than stable governments.
While I agree that the amount of equipment needed to service a charging station is likely smaller than a gas pump, and safety issues will eliminate some aspects of gas station design, I'm not convinced that we'll see rapid chargers that resemble parking lots.
Rapid charging involves megawatt-scale power delivery. The cables for that are going to be reasonably sizable - we're not talking lamp cord. Finding charging stations will be easy - just follow the 30kV power lines, and if EV really takes off follow the 300kV lines and look for the huge transformer banks. If my electric bill is typical, a single charging booth for a car might take as much electrical supply as the average usage in 1500 homes (granted, most homes are wired to supply far more than their "average" use, but the average use at a charging station is going to be near-peak during business hours).
Something like a grocery store or mall might offer charging, but likely only at scales that you'd associate with home/overnight charging. Sure, if you're at the mall all day it will make quite a dent in your tank, but forget getting a full charge in only an hour or two. They'd need to charge by the hour in those spots unless they wire the entire parking lot, or people will just hog them. Most people will find it more convenient to do this sort of charging at home.
The main purpose of remote charging for an EV is to extend range. I could see charging stations having a place at workplaces to increase commuting range without a recharge stop, but otherwise I see the gas station model having a lot more utility over charging at other locations, unless the cost/logistics involved get so cheap so as to be trivial.
The main reason cars have multiple hundred horse power engines is because acceleration is power demanding.
That is true (acceleration is really the only place where power is limiting in real-world car usage, unless real-world usage is a race track with long straightaways).
However, it is a bit misleading in some ways. Cars actually have way more horsepower than they really need to accelerate, because gasoline engines can only deliver that horsepower at high RPMs, and unless you have a transmission designed for a semi it takes a while to get to those RPMs. What tends to matter far more is torque at the low end, and electric motors have a huge advantage there.
If you throw in driving habits it becomes even more "important" - most people aren't comfortable with driving their engines at 6k RPM and most automatic transmissions won't kick back 2 gears as soon as you touch the gas. If you're a racecar driver and shift accordingly, then you can get quite a bit of power even out of mediocre engines, but most people won't push their cars past 3-4k RPM, and you're only getting a fraction of the car's advertised horsepower at those kinds of RPMs. An electric motor delivers very high power without sounding like a jet engine, so psychologically it is more suited to the average driver as well.
That's why cars with turbos are a waste for most consumers, beyond the status symbol aspect. Unless you're willing to kick back two gears when overtaking and go ahead and overtake 5 cars at a time when doing so, you'll never really get much boost out of it anyway. All a turbo does is even more dramatically increase the power output at high RPMs that most people don't like to operate at, and which aren't rapidly available anyway unless you're already moving and can shift back a few gears. In fact, manufacturers often reduce their engine sizes when they install a turbo, which lowers the torque at the low end even further.
For the way most people drive, a lower-power electric engine gets them better performance than a high-power gasoline one.
Making a profit is the reason for their existance.
I can see why this might appeal to the greedy, but why should I let a company operate whose sole purpose is making money? What good does their making money do me, that I should pay taxes to protect their property (obviously they're not paying taxes themselves to this end)? No, I don't own their stock.
I don't mind doing things to help out "others," but generally I don't include in that category sociopaths or organizations that behave like them, unless helping means compelling them to receive appropriate treatment.
Suppose I hire a maid, and pay them $50 or whatever to clean my house in preparation for a party in a few hours.
In the middle of cleaning they hear a scream. They look out the window and see somebody lying on the neighbor's sidewalk and some running down the street with a purse. They run outside and find the person bleeding from an apparent stab wound. They call 911, administer first aid, make sure the ambulance finds the poor victim, and end up giving 47 statements to the police. My house goes uncleaned.
I get home and am enraged - maybe I'll get my $50 back, but my reputation is going to suffer for throwing a party in a less-clean house. Maybe I'll succeed in bribing fewer politicians as a result, or I won't get some deal made I wanted to get made.
I sue the maid, because they had a fiduciary duty to me to complete the job they were paid to do, and I didn't pay them to help poor people on the street. I'm not a charity - I'm looking out for my own interests. Helping out dying people on the street is somebody else's job. If I should be stationing watches for dying people there should be a law in black and white to dictate this, so the fact that the poor SOB next door bleeds to death is really the fault of the legislators and voters.
Now, why is it that anybody exhibiting such a line of reasoning in real life is immediately branded a sociopath (and rightly so), but companies are expected to stretch every loophole they can to avoid the social responsibility of paying taxes?
Corporations should be the judged the same as people - it isn't about what you can get away with, it is about doing the thing. Corporations are largely a social construct to let people behave like filth and claim that they're just doing their job, with responsibility for actions being so diluted that nobody need lose too much sleep at night.
Yup, and luck is a big part of it too.
Take a set of 100 venture capitalists. They each have enough money to fail 3 times. On average they have a 1% success rate on their ventures.
You end up with 97 venture capitalists who fail 3 times and end up broke. Oh, and you end up with 3 who fail twice but then end up founding the next Facebook. Everybody talks about creative genius and how they were visionaries. What nobody realizes is that they're really not all that much more creative - they just happened to pick the ideas that actually took off. The other 97 end up forgotten like clinical trials that show that expensive drugs don't do much.
I dunno - why do the desktops need all the enterprise-y features, and what makes the tablets different? I can't think of any reason why there would be a reason to differentiate them.