Do you have a choice of the gender of the TSA screener, or just a right to one of the same gender?
Must make it fun dealing with people with Klinefelter's. Just how do you define "gender" in today's society? Today we're just getting started with the marriage debate, but in 20 years we'll progress to figuring out what to do with bathrooms and workplace etiquette.
So, as others pointed out acetaminophen is actually fairly dangerous as drugs go. However, let's pick on something like ibuprofen instead which is definitely safer.
Today even ibuprofen would have trouble making it as a non-prescription drug.
Pain-killers in general have the deck stacked against them. For something like a heart medication to get on the market you basically have to show that it saves more lives than it takes. So, if it prevents 10k more heart attacks per year than any other drug on the market, and it kills 10 people per year due to liver toxicity, then it isn't hard to get it approved.
Painkillers don't benefit from this kind of calculus. If it kills 3 people a year, you can't point to a single life that they save to balance it out. So, our regulatory system tends to keep painkillers off the market. It is hard to balance lives cut short vs long lives lived in agony.
Diet medications have a lot of problems with suicide and tend to be kept off the market for the same reason. (Which makes me really wonder about the interaction between diet, obesity, and depression - eating is a basic instinct and we already know that people eat when they're upset - the need to eat is in many ways driven by emotion.)
And this is part of why all the drug development work ends up happening in private industry.
A scientist will come up with a molecule that inhibits some enzyme and get some publishable result. At that point they issue the typical "possible cure for cancer" press release and move on to the next thing. 5 years and $10M later a pharma company figures out that it causes heart valve degeneration or that inhibiting the enzyme isn't the magic bullet everybody hoped for. They don't bother publishing it, but none of their scientists get paid by the publication anyway. The companies interest is that if it eventually works out they make billions.
So, in that sense you actually have an example of a way in which industrial research is actually less risk-averse than academia, which should be shocking.
That said, when it comes to the basic research side of things pharma companies do tend to let the academics do the work for them.
When you think about it, this is the only sensible approach. Do you want every municipality that owns a helicopter to be trying to police aircraft that are flying overhead? Maybe the plane's registration is bogus. Great, call it in to the FAA as a good citizen and let them deal with it.
There are a lot of safety issues when you try to deal with issues in the air. Indeed, I've heard ATC recordings where ATC is basically trying to ream somebody out for not following procedures correctly, and that is also something that shouldn't happen. Deal with problems on the ground - if somebody violates the rules they should record it and refer it for enforcement action and write up a report. Trying to deal with problems in the air just means you're putting others at risk by not doing your job.
I'm all for enforcement, but at the right time and place.
Agree. The US even has the FCPA - it is outright illegal to bribe foreign officials. That law isn't enforced as well as it probably could be, but it is enforced and you do hear about a scandal from time to time. I know that my employer trains on the act and makes compliance a clear policy (though I have no idea how much they follow-through in practice - I wouldn't be privy to enforcement actions).
I'm not sure to what degree this is the case in other countries.
Yeah, I was thinking something much smaller/lighter. Almost something fieldable by an amateur (the telescope itself would be in the amateur range, but the drone would be a bit large if you wanted it to go high-altitude.
I've read in astronomy forums (a while ago) that there is a lot of emphasis on really big telescope projects, but for much less money you can get a lot of science done if you take a much smaller instrument but manage it professionally (automation, calibration, etc). It isn't unlike in computing where there is a place for both the big fancy supercomputer with high memory bandwidth and super-fast CPU, and the massively parallel commodity cluster. Different problems are best solved with either approach. Maybe the Hubble can image galaxies at the edge of the visible universe, but for the same price you could have 20,000 cheap telescopes doing continuous surveys of large regions of the sky. Each has its place.
For the 3rd world, though, the A10 seems risky. Its main advantage is getting in low and slow and basically fighting "melee" against batallions of vehicles.
For what it does it is a GREAT platform, but you wouldn't send a lot of these against an enemy and not expect losses. They've vulnerable to fire from MANPADs and such which even terrorist groups could have.
What they can do is fly in at 300 feel where the nearby SA-10 site won't see them and drop bombs, while the F15s would be shot down 80 miles away by the SAM.
If the enemy doesn't have advanced SAMs, then the F15 can just loiter at 40k feet and drop a bomb when requested. Nothing a terrorist has is going to be able to touch it, and if there are older SAMs those can be effectively destroyed at the start of the mission.
I agree that drones are really where everybody should be going. Just look at them like multi-stage cruise missiles. A drone would have a lower radar cross section due to its size, it WOULD be cheaper/faster to mass-produce/replace, and it could fly the terminal portion of its mission at very low altitude. It only costs money, so fighting a war of attrition is politically acceptable - losing 1000 drones in a fight isn't the same as losing 1000 pilots with the POWs being fought over for decades later. It also enables distraction tactics that involve sacrificing aircraft.
SSL goes beyond the naivety of government trust. It also suffers from what amounts to a global namespace/trust/etc issue.
Any CA can issue a certificate for any domain, a domain generally can only have one certificate, and the trusted CA list is managed by the browser, not the user.
So, if you trust your government (naievely), and distrust everybody else, it won't work. Your browser will constantly be wanting to add CAs you don't trust, and might not include ones you trust. Then, if you drop a bunch of CAs then a bunch of websites won't work. A website doesn't have the option of getting certificates from 14 different CAs so as to be trusted by everybody - they have to pick one and everybody has to trust them.
So, users are basically forced to accept CAs they've never heard of, and the whole system is a mess as a result.
That makes me wonder if you couldn't stick a somewhat decent telescope on top of a drone. I'm talking something in the 12-18" range - not some monster that should be on top of a mountain. There is probably a lot of science that could be done with a very good quality small mirror with little atmosphere and always above the clouds. If you wanted to go really high you'd need turbines though - so it would be reasonably large (need lots of fuel, relatively speaking). Stability would be important - one of the advantages of no atmosphere is that you can take very long exposures without much background.
Do you think it's strategically possible to get into a shooting war with China and/or Russia, two nuclear-capable nations, and emerge meaningfully victorious? Does the F-35 change that? Why or why not?
It depends on the objectives. If your goal is to annex them, no.
If your goal is to deter a conflict, or fight a conflict over some remote piece of land where the war could possibly be contained, then maybe. Nobody has incentive to start a nuclear war, so it would likely stay conventional. Meaningful missile defense might also have an impact on the calculus - if a small nuclear strike could be reliably defeated that would probably make a foe less likely to try to escalate to a regional nuclear conflict (all in is just suicide).
However, it would be really costly for all sides, so the interest would have to be something actually worth fighting for. The US could probably deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, by stationing forces in Lithuania sufficient to threaten Moscow. The relative strength of both sides would probably allow a US victory (crazy thought), if the Russians didn't kill everybody on Earth, but it would depend on them actually allowing a US buildup, since we're separated by an ocean and resupply in that area would be very threatened by Russian Navy/Air/etc. Most likely there would be a Naval war, which could result in attacks on US ports/interior/etc, but on the whole the Russians don't have much of a navy these days and they wouldn't last too long.
But, like I said it would have to be an interest worth fighting for and the US really isn't going to risk even conventional bombs going off in DC and Manhattan and Saudi Arabia over Ukraine. So, all the above is really just a fantasy scenario. Maybe if somebody like Russia went really nuts going after US vital interests it would come to war, but that seems rather unlikely. But, on the other hand having modern weapons platforms only makes it less likely.
He has some valid points (I only listed to most of the first part), but I'm not sure it is entirely current. For example, he claims that it is trivial for maneuverable aircraft to dodge SAMs. That was true back in the Vietnam days (though we still lost many), and true in Iraq (which was basically Modern US vs Vietnam-era Iraq), but if we go into a modern war those fighters will have to dodge the likes of SA-10s. The missile sensors are much harder to fool, and they have thrust vectoring and are very light at their terminal stage which basically makes them potentially very hard to evade.
Even stealth aircraft are unproven in that scenario since nobody reveals their full capabilities. We'll never know until we actually get into a war with somebody who can actually hurt us, instead of bombing countries that are 30 years behind.
The US likes to maintain foreign interests like Eastern Europe, Taiwan, etc that are very far away from us but fairly close to whoever they're likely to get into conflict with. That means that the US will need all the capability it can get in a war. Since our fighters will be tanker-supported from fields hundreds of miles away, we'll probably be outnumbered, and fighting near foreign territory. Also, the US likes to meddle and voters don't like to hear about dead pilots.
The A10 was a wonder of an aircraft, but I'm not entirely sure it would still be useful in a serious war.
Against ISIS it might be useful, assuming that they're fighting in open terrain. An A10 is not particularly useful against targets in the middle of a city - if anything an aircraft that can loiter at altitude might be more useful for dropping bombs on designated buildings - nobody is going to be swooping over city blocks and hitting the right building visually.
Really the advantage of the A10 over other aircraft is that it can potentially use terrain masking to protect itself from large SAM emplacements. That doesn't matter in a place like Iraq. It could matter in a serious war with a modern defender. The reality is that we don't know how effective modern SAMs will be against things like the F22, and we also don't know how effective aircraft like the A10 will be at getting past them. The former is going to depend greatly on the F22's stealthiness and maybe its ability to maneuver, and the latter is mainly going to depend on tactics since the only advantage the A10 has is terrain masking and that is very situational.
Sure, the A10 can land with half of a wing left, but it is still out of action even if the pilot makes it. Modern aircraft are really hard to replace - it isn't like they'll be rolling out by the hundreds from assembly lines during a war making the pilots the major limitation. We of course should try to protect the pilots, but that isn't going to make the plane all that much more useful in a war.
All that said I wouldn't look to get rid of them either. The reality is that we don't know what the next serious war will be - better to hedge your bets especially if you can do it with really cheap aircraft. I imagine you could field a lot of aircraft like the A10 with some modern redesigns for far less than you're going to pay to make something in the class of the F35 and F22.
There is no effective difference between the two. There is a rate for people with the monitoring and a rate for people without it, and the latter is higher. The only difference is what you call the "default."
Yes, and that's a difference. Which one is the default makes people who don't care (the majority) more likely to do the default one.
This is only because the practice isn't well established. When you call around for car insurance and find that everybody's default rate is $5k/yr, but they all offer a $4500/yr discount if you accept monitoring, few people will stick with the default. I also wonder how many new Progressive customers don't accept the monitoring - I would imagine that the company would advertise it to anybody who asks for a quote since it lets them give out a lower number which makes them more competitive. Bottom line the consumer is given two rates and has to choose between them.
(Very similarly, we give "time off for good behavior" for prison. That's awful.. Good behavior should be the default, they should be able to add time, with some kind of maximum unless a new crime is committed (in prison), for bad behavior.)
This will just result in either base prison sentences being shortened, or people being let out early all the same on some other pretense. You can call the label whatever you want, but for various reasons society wants people who behave well in prison for n duration, and people who don't behave well for n+m duration. It would take time for things to change - I don't suggest that prison sentencing is "economically efficient" (I realize I'm being very loose with that term, but I suspect you will get what I'm trying to say without going on about it). Actually, something like prison terms is a pretty poor analogy because there is so much politics involved - voters/officials/etc don't decide on how long to punish a murderer the way they decide on how much to pay for a new car.
Yup - there are some criteria that we've explicitly decided NOT to let people use (i.e. even if you could show that race and auto insurance costs were correlated, and that the relationship was statistically significant, you still couldn't charge people more for being black/white/Asian/whatever), but credit score isn't one of those.
Actuaries are pretty clever, they can typically find a benign-sounding proxy for the forbidden criteria.
To some extent they don't have much choice, unless insurance is compulsory and enforced.
Insurance only works in the absence of knowledge. If I had a magic machine that could predict the locations of every house fire the next day, the fire insurance industry would cease to exist, unless they were allowed to require coverage to be purchased two days in advance without an option to cancel without paying two days premium. Otherwise everybody would drop fire coverage and sign up the day before their house burns down, and insurance companies would basically have to charge the replacement cost of the house for their policy, making it pointless to buy in the first place.
You can't legislate around this sort of thing without mandating universal coverage. If you prevent insurers from discriminating against those purchasing insurance on some basis, then you also need to prevent people from being able to avoid buying insurance on the same basis.
Suppose life insurers can't charge people with diabetes a different rate. Diabetics have a much higher cost to insure, so on average the rate would have to be much higher. A non-diabetic would look at the risk of needing insurance vs the cost of buying it and conclude that insurance isn't worth buying. Now the risk pool changes so insurance companies are ONLY insuring diabetics so they have to REALLY increase the premiums. Previously diabetics were signing up in droves since the rates were cheap, but now there is no incentive for them to buy insurance since it actually reflects real costs. The result of preventing an insurer from charging more for a particular group is that they just charge more for everybody instead, and this is unavoidable as they'll end up there whether they start out that way or not.
[vaccination caused] 25 deaths. All to stop a flu that never exceeded 5 infections contained to Fort Dix
Yes, but you can't go back in time and discover what would have happened if they didn't mass vaccinate. Sure dumb luck may have caught all five cases before it spread further, but do you want to bet your life on dumb luck?
Yup, this sounds a bit like Y2K in retrospective. Was money wasted on it because it turned out to be a non-event, or was it a non-event because so much was spent on it?
Always money to do it over, never money to do it right...:)
Again, if someone publicly acuses you of a crime that is later proved you didn't commit, you are entitled to indemnification by damages caused to your reputation and your business/whatever. As this is not a matter of crime, it is a dispute filed on a civil court. There is no prosecuter on this. It is a dispute between two entities.
No argument with that, but in this case Qualcomm isn't publicly accusing anybody of anything. They mailed a private letter to a service provider, and that was it for their part.
Please tell me one well-known, widespread OSS project that is completely community-driven and mostly built with unpaid volunteer work. And no, stuff like foundations don't count - they're done for tax purposes.
Sure - Gentoo Linux. To my knowledge they've never paid a dime to any contributor, other than covering a fairly small number of expenses with the resulting assets owned by the Foundation. SleepyHead is another that I'm aware of - the author accepts donations, but they don't come close to covering his time. Until fairly recently projects like CyanogenMod were purely donation-based and those certainly didn't cover the time involved (and only a few of the contributors actually get donation money).
I have no doubt that people have contributed to many of those projects using time compensated by another employer, but we're talking a very minor share here compared to something like Fedora/etc.
I'd call volunteer projects the norm. Very few projects turn into Apache/Mozilla/etc. For every one of those there are a thousand gtklifes.
The problem with this kind of approach is that it basically punishes kids for the mistakes made by their parents.
It would make far more sense to take care of the people who are actually born and maybe try not to have so many that the state ends up having to pay for.
Maybe parents would be more involved in public education if you had to pre-pay 12 years of tuition in order to be allowed to have a child.:)
Except that credit score is actually quite a good predictor of car insurance risk. Not saying that it's causal, but, overall, people who pay their bills on time also tend to drive more cautiously and get into fewer accidents.
Yup - the beauty of actuarial tables is that they contain all those non-politically-correct correlations we're not supposed to talk about. We can hate what is in the tables, but they are cold hard statistics. Certainly they are open to over-interpretation, but the correlations are what they are.
Just have to switch it around - instead of "offering a discount" for people who do this, think of it more as "charging a penalty" for people who don't.
There is no effective difference between the two. There is a rate for people with the monitoring and a rate for people without it, and the latter is higher. The only difference is what you call the "default."
If this takes off you'll see the difference in price grow, until the non-discounted rate represents the cost to insure a very-high-risk driver, and the discounted rate reflects the current rate minus whatever those drivers used to cost. It is just a form of the insurance death spiral. If you offered a discount on health insurance for people who don't have diabetes over time the cost for non-diabetics would go down, and the rate for "everybody else" aka diabetics would go WAY up. Since diabetics represent an incredible percentage of insurance costs the split would be fairly dramatic.
Very true. Ideally corporations would figure out that there are no demonstrated outcomes for diet composition, and thus it isn't in their interests to force their customers to adhere to one. In practice they may not do so, or there might be government pressure to pick whatever is the fad of the day.
I'd LOVE for there to be some decent clinical trials that study diet in a scientific manner. Just about all the data which exists is basically uncontrolled - no blinding, often no randomization, no actual outcomes, etc. Obviously doing a real trial is expensive, and nobody wants to foot the bill since you can't patent "eat less HFCS" or even "eat more HFCS."
That and it'll only be offered as long as everyone isn't doing it.
Reminds me of all the water conservation efforts. We used less water, the utilities brought in less money, so they had to raise the rates to offset the loss. In the end we all use less water, but pay more for the service.
I bet this will only work for insurance up the point where hospitals have to charge more to make up for empty rooms.
The difference between a utility and a hospital is that the former is a natural monopoly. The latter may or may not be one.
If the utility needs to charge more money to survive, you don't really have a choice about paying it if the charges are unavoidable. You can change WHO pays them (taxes vs bills, public vs private, etc), but unless you want to ditch running water you're stuck.
Hospitals aren't quite as locked in. If a community has 3 hospitals (I realize that not all do), and as a result of cost containment they all are 1/3rd utilized, then you can continue to force reimbursements lower until one goes bankrupt. Now utilization goes up, and the lower costs become sustainable.
If a community has a population of 1000 and is 300 miles away from everybody else and you want a hospital, then you won't have any choice in paying a premium, though you can choose who pays for it (taxpayers vs sick people, or maybe taxpayers living someplace else). Undercapacity is the price of not being an hour flight from a hospital if you have a heart attack.
Wow, if we discover the exact region and mechanism for how consciousness emerges from brain activity, then this, in my mind, is the final nail in the coffin of the Soul Hypothesis ( the religious explanation for consciousness being external to the brain, and as something that survives death ).
So, the devil's advocate argument would be that finding a center of consciousness in the brain is no different from discovering that the brain and not the heart is the center of consciousness for the body. Back when that was figured out it didn't end the practice of religion.
We already know that if you're shot in the head you stop acting like a conscious human being. We already have people in vegetative states lying on hospital beds who can do little more than breathe. So, it is already completely evident that consciousness depends on physical structures in the brain operating correctly.
I doubt that religion will go away even after artificial beings that don't contain (human) brains at all are walking around taking our jobs away...
It is only perjury or fraud if it is done knowingly. For all we know some rogue employee typed up a license without talking to anybody, and thus the company could hardly be expected to be aware of it.
Perjury is only rarely pursued because it is rather hard to prove. It isn't enough that a false statement is made - it has to be knowingly made. If you can find an email between two employees saying, "hey, why don't you just lie and say foo" then you can get them. If all you know is that they said foo but you can prove that is really bar, they can just say that they had no idea and all the information they had access to said foo, or that the possibility of bar seemed unlikely to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically that link just gets an access denied message for anybody hosting a tor relay node (not an exit node)... :)
Do you have a choice of the gender of the TSA screener, or just a right to one of the same gender?
Must make it fun dealing with people with Klinefelter's. Just how do you define "gender" in today's society? Today we're just getting started with the marriage debate, but in 20 years we'll progress to figuring out what to do with bathrooms and workplace etiquette.
So, as others pointed out acetaminophen is actually fairly dangerous as drugs go. However, let's pick on something like ibuprofen instead which is definitely safer.
Today even ibuprofen would have trouble making it as a non-prescription drug.
Pain-killers in general have the deck stacked against them. For something like a heart medication to get on the market you basically have to show that it saves more lives than it takes. So, if it prevents 10k more heart attacks per year than any other drug on the market, and it kills 10 people per year due to liver toxicity, then it isn't hard to get it approved.
Painkillers don't benefit from this kind of calculus. If it kills 3 people a year, you can't point to a single life that they save to balance it out. So, our regulatory system tends to keep painkillers off the market. It is hard to balance lives cut short vs long lives lived in agony.
Diet medications have a lot of problems with suicide and tend to be kept off the market for the same reason. (Which makes me really wonder about the interaction between diet, obesity, and depression - eating is a basic instinct and we already know that people eat when they're upset - the need to eat is in many ways driven by emotion.)
I'm just looking forward to when the TSA hears about this. Pretty soon we'll all be sporting new traveler's hairdos!
And this is part of why all the drug development work ends up happening in private industry.
A scientist will come up with a molecule that inhibits some enzyme and get some publishable result. At that point they issue the typical "possible cure for cancer" press release and move on to the next thing. 5 years and $10M later a pharma company figures out that it causes heart valve degeneration or that inhibiting the enzyme isn't the magic bullet everybody hoped for. They don't bother publishing it, but none of their scientists get paid by the publication anyway. The companies interest is that if it eventually works out they make billions.
So, in that sense you actually have an example of a way in which industrial research is actually less risk-averse than academia, which should be shocking.
That said, when it comes to the basic research side of things pharma companies do tend to let the academics do the work for them.
When you think about it, this is the only sensible approach. Do you want every municipality that owns a helicopter to be trying to police aircraft that are flying overhead? Maybe the plane's registration is bogus. Great, call it in to the FAA as a good citizen and let them deal with it.
There are a lot of safety issues when you try to deal with issues in the air. Indeed, I've heard ATC recordings where ATC is basically trying to ream somebody out for not following procedures correctly, and that is also something that shouldn't happen. Deal with problems on the ground - if somebody violates the rules they should record it and refer it for enforcement action and write up a report. Trying to deal with problems in the air just means you're putting others at risk by not doing your job.
I'm all for enforcement, but at the right time and place.
Agree. The US even has the FCPA - it is outright illegal to bribe foreign officials. That law isn't enforced as well as it probably could be, but it is enforced and you do hear about a scandal from time to time. I know that my employer trains on the act and makes compliance a clear policy (though I have no idea how much they follow-through in practice - I wouldn't be privy to enforcement actions).
I'm not sure to what degree this is the case in other countries.
Yeah, I was thinking something much smaller/lighter. Almost something fieldable by an amateur (the telescope itself would be in the amateur range, but the drone would be a bit large if you wanted it to go high-altitude.
I've read in astronomy forums (a while ago) that there is a lot of emphasis on really big telescope projects, but for much less money you can get a lot of science done if you take a much smaller instrument but manage it professionally (automation, calibration, etc). It isn't unlike in computing where there is a place for both the big fancy supercomputer with high memory bandwidth and super-fast CPU, and the massively parallel commodity cluster. Different problems are best solved with either approach. Maybe the Hubble can image galaxies at the edge of the visible universe, but for the same price you could have 20,000 cheap telescopes doing continuous surveys of large regions of the sky. Each has its place.
For the 3rd world, though, the A10 seems risky. Its main advantage is getting in low and slow and basically fighting "melee" against batallions of vehicles.
For what it does it is a GREAT platform, but you wouldn't send a lot of these against an enemy and not expect losses. They've vulnerable to fire from MANPADs and such which even terrorist groups could have.
What they can do is fly in at 300 feel where the nearby SA-10 site won't see them and drop bombs, while the F15s would be shot down 80 miles away by the SAM.
If the enemy doesn't have advanced SAMs, then the F15 can just loiter at 40k feet and drop a bomb when requested. Nothing a terrorist has is going to be able to touch it, and if there are older SAMs those can be effectively destroyed at the start of the mission.
I agree that drones are really where everybody should be going. Just look at them like multi-stage cruise missiles. A drone would have a lower radar cross section due to its size, it WOULD be cheaper/faster to mass-produce/replace, and it could fly the terminal portion of its mission at very low altitude. It only costs money, so fighting a war of attrition is politically acceptable - losing 1000 drones in a fight isn't the same as losing 1000 pilots with the POWs being fought over for decades later. It also enables distraction tactics that involve sacrificing aircraft.
SSL goes beyond the naivety of government trust. It also suffers from what amounts to a global namespace/trust/etc issue.
Any CA can issue a certificate for any domain, a domain generally can only have one certificate, and the trusted CA list is managed by the browser, not the user.
So, if you trust your government (naievely), and distrust everybody else, it won't work. Your browser will constantly be wanting to add CAs you don't trust, and might not include ones you trust. Then, if you drop a bunch of CAs then a bunch of websites won't work. A website doesn't have the option of getting certificates from 14 different CAs so as to be trusted by everybody - they have to pick one and everybody has to trust them.
So, users are basically forced to accept CAs they've never heard of, and the whole system is a mess as a result.
That makes me wonder if you couldn't stick a somewhat decent telescope on top of a drone. I'm talking something in the 12-18" range - not some monster that should be on top of a mountain. There is probably a lot of science that could be done with a very good quality small mirror with little atmosphere and always above the clouds. If you wanted to go really high you'd need turbines though - so it would be reasonably large (need lots of fuel, relatively speaking). Stability would be important - one of the advantages of no atmosphere is that you can take very long exposures without much background.
Do you think it's strategically possible to get into a shooting war with China and/or Russia, two nuclear-capable nations, and emerge meaningfully victorious? Does the F-35 change that? Why or why not?
It depends on the objectives. If your goal is to annex them, no.
If your goal is to deter a conflict, or fight a conflict over some remote piece of land where the war could possibly be contained, then maybe. Nobody has incentive to start a nuclear war, so it would likely stay conventional. Meaningful missile defense might also have an impact on the calculus - if a small nuclear strike could be reliably defeated that would probably make a foe less likely to try to escalate to a regional nuclear conflict (all in is just suicide).
However, it would be really costly for all sides, so the interest would have to be something actually worth fighting for. The US could probably deter a Russian invasion of Ukraine, for example, by stationing forces in Lithuania sufficient to threaten Moscow. The relative strength of both sides would probably allow a US victory (crazy thought), if the Russians didn't kill everybody on Earth, but it would depend on them actually allowing a US buildup, since we're separated by an ocean and resupply in that area would be very threatened by Russian Navy/Air/etc. Most likely there would be a Naval war, which could result in attacks on US ports/interior/etc, but on the whole the Russians don't have much of a navy these days and they wouldn't last too long.
But, like I said it would have to be an interest worth fighting for and the US really isn't going to risk even conventional bombs going off in DC and Manhattan and Saudi Arabia over Ukraine. So, all the above is really just a fantasy scenario. Maybe if somebody like Russia went really nuts going after US vital interests it would come to war, but that seems rather unlikely. But, on the other hand having modern weapons platforms only makes it less likely.
He has some valid points (I only listed to most of the first part), but I'm not sure it is entirely current. For example, he claims that it is trivial for maneuverable aircraft to dodge SAMs. That was true back in the Vietnam days (though we still lost many), and true in Iraq (which was basically Modern US vs Vietnam-era Iraq), but if we go into a modern war those fighters will have to dodge the likes of SA-10s. The missile sensors are much harder to fool, and they have thrust vectoring and are very light at their terminal stage which basically makes them potentially very hard to evade.
Even stealth aircraft are unproven in that scenario since nobody reveals their full capabilities. We'll never know until we actually get into a war with somebody who can actually hurt us, instead of bombing countries that are 30 years behind.
The US likes to maintain foreign interests like Eastern Europe, Taiwan, etc that are very far away from us but fairly close to whoever they're likely to get into conflict with. That means that the US will need all the capability it can get in a war. Since our fighters will be tanker-supported from fields hundreds of miles away, we'll probably be outnumbered, and fighting near foreign territory. Also, the US likes to meddle and voters don't like to hear about dead pilots.
The A10 was a wonder of an aircraft, but I'm not entirely sure it would still be useful in a serious war.
Against ISIS it might be useful, assuming that they're fighting in open terrain. An A10 is not particularly useful against targets in the middle of a city - if anything an aircraft that can loiter at altitude might be more useful for dropping bombs on designated buildings - nobody is going to be swooping over city blocks and hitting the right building visually.
Really the advantage of the A10 over other aircraft is that it can potentially use terrain masking to protect itself from large SAM emplacements. That doesn't matter in a place like Iraq. It could matter in a serious war with a modern defender. The reality is that we don't know how effective modern SAMs will be against things like the F22, and we also don't know how effective aircraft like the A10 will be at getting past them. The former is going to depend greatly on the F22's stealthiness and maybe its ability to maneuver, and the latter is mainly going to depend on tactics since the only advantage the A10 has is terrain masking and that is very situational.
Sure, the A10 can land with half of a wing left, but it is still out of action even if the pilot makes it. Modern aircraft are really hard to replace - it isn't like they'll be rolling out by the hundreds from assembly lines during a war making the pilots the major limitation. We of course should try to protect the pilots, but that isn't going to make the plane all that much more useful in a war.
All that said I wouldn't look to get rid of them either. The reality is that we don't know what the next serious war will be - better to hedge your bets especially if you can do it with really cheap aircraft. I imagine you could field a lot of aircraft like the A10 with some modern redesigns for far less than you're going to pay to make something in the class of the F35 and F22.
Yes, and that's a difference. Which one is the default makes people who don't care (the majority) more likely to do the default one.
This is only because the practice isn't well established. When you call around for car insurance and find that everybody's default rate is $5k/yr, but they all offer a $4500/yr discount if you accept monitoring, few people will stick with the default. I also wonder how many new Progressive customers don't accept the monitoring - I would imagine that the company would advertise it to anybody who asks for a quote since it lets them give out a lower number which makes them more competitive. Bottom line the consumer is given two rates and has to choose between them.
(Very similarly, we give "time off for good behavior" for prison. That's awful.. Good behavior should be the default, they should be able to add time, with some kind of maximum unless a new crime is committed (in prison), for bad behavior.)
This will just result in either base prison sentences being shortened, or people being let out early all the same on some other pretense. You can call the label whatever you want, but for various reasons society wants people who behave well in prison for n duration, and people who don't behave well for n+m duration. It would take time for things to change - I don't suggest that prison sentencing is "economically efficient" (I realize I'm being very loose with that term, but I suspect you will get what I'm trying to say without going on about it). Actually, something like prison terms is a pretty poor analogy because there is so much politics involved - voters/officials/etc don't decide on how long to punish a murderer the way they decide on how much to pay for a new car.
Actuaries are pretty clever, they can typically find a benign-sounding proxy for the forbidden criteria.
To some extent they don't have much choice, unless insurance is compulsory and enforced.
Insurance only works in the absence of knowledge. If I had a magic machine that could predict the locations of every house fire the next day, the fire insurance industry would cease to exist, unless they were allowed to require coverage to be purchased two days in advance without an option to cancel without paying two days premium. Otherwise everybody would drop fire coverage and sign up the day before their house burns down, and insurance companies would basically have to charge the replacement cost of the house for their policy, making it pointless to buy in the first place.
You can't legislate around this sort of thing without mandating universal coverage. If you prevent insurers from discriminating against those purchasing insurance on some basis, then you also need to prevent people from being able to avoid buying insurance on the same basis.
Suppose life insurers can't charge people with diabetes a different rate. Diabetics have a much higher cost to insure, so on average the rate would have to be much higher. A non-diabetic would look at the risk of needing insurance vs the cost of buying it and conclude that insurance isn't worth buying. Now the risk pool changes so insurance companies are ONLY insuring diabetics so they have to REALLY increase the premiums. Previously diabetics were signing up in droves since the rates were cheap, but now there is no incentive for them to buy insurance since it actually reflects real costs. The result of preventing an insurer from charging more for a particular group is that they just charge more for everybody instead, and this is unavoidable as they'll end up there whether they start out that way or not.
[vaccination caused] 25 deaths. All to stop a flu that never exceeded 5 infections contained to Fort Dix
Yes, but you can't go back in time and discover what would have happened if they didn't mass vaccinate. Sure dumb luck may have caught all five cases before it spread further, but do you want to bet your life on dumb luck?
Yup, this sounds a bit like Y2K in retrospective. Was money wasted on it because it turned out to be a non-event, or was it a non-event because so much was spent on it?
Always money to do it over, never money to do it right... :)
Again, if someone publicly acuses you of a crime that is later proved you didn't commit, you are entitled to indemnification by damages caused to your reputation and your business/whatever. As this is not a matter of crime, it is a dispute filed on a civil court. There is no prosecuter on this. It is a dispute between two entities.
No argument with that, but in this case Qualcomm isn't publicly accusing anybody of anything. They mailed a private letter to a service provider, and that was it for their part.
Please tell me one well-known, widespread OSS project that is completely community-driven and mostly built with unpaid volunteer work. And no, stuff like foundations don't count - they're done for tax purposes.
Sure - Gentoo Linux. To my knowledge they've never paid a dime to any contributor, other than covering a fairly small number of expenses with the resulting assets owned by the Foundation. SleepyHead is another that I'm aware of - the author accepts donations, but they don't come close to covering his time. Until fairly recently projects like CyanogenMod were purely donation-based and those certainly didn't cover the time involved (and only a few of the contributors actually get donation money).
I have no doubt that people have contributed to many of those projects using time compensated by another employer, but we're talking a very minor share here compared to something like Fedora/etc.
I'd call volunteer projects the norm. Very few projects turn into Apache/Mozilla/etc. For every one of those there are a thousand gtklifes.
The problem with this kind of approach is that it basically punishes kids for the mistakes made by their parents.
It would make far more sense to take care of the people who are actually born and maybe try not to have so many that the state ends up having to pay for.
Maybe parents would be more involved in public education if you had to pre-pay 12 years of tuition in order to be allowed to have a child. :)
Except that credit score is actually quite a good predictor of car insurance risk. Not saying that it's causal, but, overall, people who pay their bills on time also tend to drive more cautiously and get into fewer accidents.
Yup - the beauty of actuarial tables is that they contain all those non-politically-correct correlations we're not supposed to talk about. We can hate what is in the tables, but they are cold hard statistics. Certainly they are open to over-interpretation, but the correlations are what they are.
Just have to switch it around - instead of "offering a discount" for people who do this, think of it more as "charging a penalty" for people who don't.
There is no effective difference between the two. There is a rate for people with the monitoring and a rate for people without it, and the latter is higher. The only difference is what you call the "default."
If this takes off you'll see the difference in price grow, until the non-discounted rate represents the cost to insure a very-high-risk driver, and the discounted rate reflects the current rate minus whatever those drivers used to cost. It is just a form of the insurance death spiral. If you offered a discount on health insurance for people who don't have diabetes over time the cost for non-diabetics would go down, and the rate for "everybody else" aka diabetics would go WAY up. Since diabetics represent an incredible percentage of insurance costs the split would be fairly dramatic.
Very true. Ideally corporations would figure out that there are no demonstrated outcomes for diet composition, and thus it isn't in their interests to force their customers to adhere to one. In practice they may not do so, or there might be government pressure to pick whatever is the fad of the day.
I'd LOVE for there to be some decent clinical trials that study diet in a scientific manner. Just about all the data which exists is basically uncontrolled - no blinding, often no randomization, no actual outcomes, etc. Obviously doing a real trial is expensive, and nobody wants to foot the bill since you can't patent "eat less HFCS" or even "eat more HFCS."
That and it'll only be offered as long as everyone isn't doing it.
Reminds me of all the water conservation efforts. We used less water, the utilities brought in less money, so they had to raise the rates to offset the loss. In the end we all use less water, but pay more for the service.
I bet this will only work for insurance up the point where hospitals have to charge more to make up for empty rooms.
The difference between a utility and a hospital is that the former is a natural monopoly. The latter may or may not be one.
If the utility needs to charge more money to survive, you don't really have a choice about paying it if the charges are unavoidable. You can change WHO pays them (taxes vs bills, public vs private, etc), but unless you want to ditch running water you're stuck.
Hospitals aren't quite as locked in. If a community has 3 hospitals (I realize that not all do), and as a result of cost containment they all are 1/3rd utilized, then you can continue to force reimbursements lower until one goes bankrupt. Now utilization goes up, and the lower costs become sustainable.
If a community has a population of 1000 and is 300 miles away from everybody else and you want a hospital, then you won't have any choice in paying a premium, though you can choose who pays for it (taxpayers vs sick people, or maybe taxpayers living someplace else). Undercapacity is the price of not being an hour flight from a hospital if you have a heart attack.
Wow, if we discover the exact region and mechanism for how consciousness emerges from brain activity, then this, in my mind, is the final nail in the coffin of the Soul Hypothesis ( the religious explanation for consciousness being external to the brain, and as something that survives death ).
So, the devil's advocate argument would be that finding a center of consciousness in the brain is no different from discovering that the brain and not the heart is the center of consciousness for the body. Back when that was figured out it didn't end the practice of religion.
We already know that if you're shot in the head you stop acting like a conscious human being. We already have people in vegetative states lying on hospital beds who can do little more than breathe. So, it is already completely evident that consciousness depends on physical structures in the brain operating correctly.
I doubt that religion will go away even after artificial beings that don't contain (human) brains at all are walking around taking our jobs away...
It is only perjury or fraud if it is done knowingly. For all we know some rogue employee typed up a license without talking to anybody, and thus the company could hardly be expected to be aware of it.
Perjury is only rarely pursued because it is rather hard to prove. It isn't enough that a false statement is made - it has to be knowingly made. If you can find an email between two employees saying, "hey, why don't you just lie and say foo" then you can get them. If all you know is that they said foo but you can prove that is really bar, they can just say that they had no idea and all the information they had access to said foo, or that the possibility of bar seemed unlikely to them.