Actually, well-fitting parts generally wear less slowly. If a gear starts to turn and it isn't in contact with the next gear, then it accelerates quickly due to being unloaded, until it hits the next gear and then you have what amounts to an inelastic collision, with some of the energy being transferred to the next gear, but some of the energy being used to deform the various parts that just got jolted. If the gear starts to turn and is already in contact with the next gear then it smoothly accelerates up to operating speed without any jolts.
Any train operator could tell you as much. If you take a mile long train and put the engine on full speed, then you'll have a series of 100 jolts as the slack in each car gets taken up, and ditto if you slam on the brakes (front car is travelling at 10mph, rear car is travelling at 45mph, cars in-between each at a speed somewhere in-between, each car weighs 20 tons, what could go wrong?).
As the other reply mentioned, the reason there is slop in a design is manufacturing tolerances. It makes a huge difference in product quality and longevity.
And if every person was exactly the same then applying assembly line logic to cube farms would actually make sense.
What that thinking absolutely ignores is that Bob likes Alice and will do his job in such a way that it is easier for her to do hers (because her work depends in some way on his).
Yup. After completing all those courses on how to influence people, I quickly discovered that the training is nearly useless in a company which goes through constant re-organizations and layoffs. People used to do things at work like form internal networks, influence other orgs, and so on. These days nobody bothers with it other than for personal gain, because if you scratch somebody else's back it is nearly guaranteed that when you need them to scratch yours they will be gone. So, people form relationships mainly with the goal of being more mobile so that if they get separated they can find another job. If anything this probably makes employees more prone to spend time at work doing little things to help your competitors out, instead of each other.
The result of all of this is that everybody does stuff by the book, which results in maximum bureaucracy. Nobody could care less if it hurts the company - everybody just needs to make their own numbers look good or build as much margin into their budgets as they can so that when the next round of cuts come it is less likely to hurt them.
The irony is that the companies doing all this disruption believe they're doing it to stay more agile. That would be true if they were actually doing different things than they were doing 5 years ago. The reality is that the exact same work is getting done, but all the org charts look different.
Other electrodes in the helmet stimulate the part of the brain making you feel incredibly enthusiastic about applying Six Sigma to everything you imagine to be possible.
So, I have nothing against six sigma when it is actually applied to repetitive processes (you know, the kinds of activities that the term "sigma" even applies to). It makes a lot of sense in these cases. If somebody on Slashdot were writing a compiler and given the same set of source code the compiler took wildly varying amounts of time to execute, they'd probably wonder what is going on and they'd basically be applying or re-inventing six sigma to figure it out, whether they have a pink belt or not.
The problem is the mindset you describe here, but I think that this is as much the result of those MBAs you were talking about. At work they got on a Six Sigma kick a few years ago and pretty soon any project of any kind had to fit the six sigma mold, and had to have a set of deliverables following the formats dictated by the team running the initiative. So, anybody who wanted a nice bonus did what they were told to even if they recognized that for the typical corporate problem maybe 10% of it was applicable.
The thing I really was amused by was a "Design for Six Sigma" program they instituted which basically amounted to following your typical specify/design/build/test software development methodology. Bonus points were earned when it got applied to actual software development projects, which basically meant that you were going through all the formal system lifecycle activities twice.
Oh, and the best part of Six Sigma is the control phase. That's when you collect your bonus for completing your project, hand it off to somebody else, and watch them just drop the whole thing since they recognized it as adding little value and they're not going to get a bonus for continuing to collect all the data needed to prove that the first guy to came along earned his bonus. At least, not for the 95% of projects that didn't need to be six sigma in the first place - if you're actually running some kind of repeatable process then monitoring it just makes sense.
The burden of proof is on the vendor here, and standard of "proof" is conceptually simple at least: demonstrate that for some task this device offers any practical advantage whatsoever over the best available conventional technology. That could be in absolute performance against the best available tech(e.g. ASICs and supercomputers), in relative performance over similarly priced systems, or in some practical measure other than performance, such as power consumption. Any clearly identifiable and verifiable advantage counts as positive proof the vendor has something worth paying attention to.
That's why this whole thing smells to me.
They're the vendor. They have access to the hardware. They're the experts on how it works.
So, release some benchmarks. Release some source code to a problem the machine does well at, demonstrating that it behaves like a quantum computer, even if it is only for certain problem sets. Release your methods so that anybody else can run them on the machine they buy from you.
If I claimed that I had a machine that could turn lead into gold, and for $20M you can buy one and see how well it works for yourself, you would rightly laugh at me. If on the other hand I took a chunk of lead and fed it into the machine and out popped a chunk of gold, then you'd start listening (after doing the obvious checks to prevent parlor tricks). There needs to be a Randi prize or something for these kinds of claims - today companies are apparently happy to hand them the prize before doing the tests.
One, purely pragmatically, most countries that issue fiat currencies recognize that banks are de-facto extensions of ordinary currency circulation and regulate accordingly. This is probably all kinds of moral hazard; but it does mean that the IOU you get from a bank deposit has almost exactly the same backing as cash, up to whatever the FDIC's account threshold is.
True, but only in the country that issues the currency.
US Dollars are pretty dependable as fiat currencies go. The FDIC is about as good as it gets as far as personal deposit insurance goes. If you deposit your US Dollars in a US Bank you get both.
However, if you deposit your US Dollars into the First Bank of Basra, then you might want to take a look at the headlines, because while those US Dollars are pretty hard to counterfeit, they're pretty easy to haul off in a truck after blowing the door off the vault.
If some bank in the middle of Africa lost the US Dollars that you deposited with them, does that mean that there is something wrong with the US Dollar?
No, it just means that you were an idiot to deposit your money with a bank that didn't have some kind of backing from a trusted government.
The same is true of ANY bank in which you deposit Bitcoins right now. Don't deposit Bitcoins in banks, at least not without some kind of insurance from a reputable company behind it.
Or they just never use the contents of your letter in court, thus keeping it away from judicial review.
Read everybody's mail and figure out who you want to go after. Then find some other pretense to get a warrant and search their house. Maybe your weeds are a little too tall so the friendly neighborhood cop goes to leave a note on your door and could have sworn they smelled smoke, so exigent circumstances and all that...:)
I host a party, and take up a collection to pay for expenses. Everybody gives me $10, which I put in my wallet. I order pizza, drinks, rent a movie and some video games, etc. The total bill adds up to the collected amount. Does it matter whose money paid for what?
It does make sense for the total gas taxes to approximately equal the total highway expenses. From what I've read, the taxes are far less, so you're getting a free ride when you drive, but you're paying for roads when you import a diamond ring. Go figure.
Why the fuck did you reward their dishonesty by purchasing from them anyway? I would have walked out, bought the car at a competing dealer, and faxed them the sales slip when I was done to prove they lost a sale. Not to mention reporting them to my state's attorney general and truecar.com.
Simple - by the time you get far enough to realize what they're doing you've already invested a considerable amount of time. Additionally, I tend to drive cars until they are basically dead, and that was the situation I was in, so I didn't really want to deal with delaying another day with another dealer who might or might not do the same.
Hmm, another thought RE the subs. Submarines only carry maybe 20-30 rounds of ammunition. If they fire those at carriers and battleships that is a big impact. For a country like the US where 2 dead soldiers make the front page, then firing them against troop transports might end the war as well.
However, for a country like China I'm not sure if subs could actually do the trick. So, we have half a dozen subs sink 100 of their troop transports and then they're out of ammo. China is out 100k soldiers, and the other 300 troop transports complete the landing. It would take a few weeks to re-arm the subs and get them back into the theater.
If the Chinese can launch decoy targets then the math works out that much worse.
The US has a quality over quantity mentality which doesn't work when the enemy can just overwhelm you with numbers. Sure, every one of your shots will find a mark, but if you only have 30 Mk-48 torpedos you can only sink 30 of their $10k small boats before you're surfacing and using small arms.
A lot of people spend a lot of time on their phone. Maybe 30 minutes or more. If your phone lasts you a couple years, paying a dollar a day for a phone that is (and let's be honest) substantially better is probably worth it.
I get the argument if you're getting something for it.
However, I think a phone needs to be the very best on the market to command that kind of price. That should be a no-compromise price. From what I've seen about the Fire, it isn't THAT good.
I don't care if the Nexus 5 doesn't have the nicest camera of any phone, because it is 60% of the price of those other phones. If they wanted $700 for a Nexus 5, then I'd be much more critical of any flaw, though I wouldn't expect the camera to be as nice as what I'd get if I spent $700 on a dedicated camera.
This also includes any letter you think your great grandchildren might want to read some day.
Really? I have a copy of every non-spam email I have sent or received in the last 31 years, all fully indexed and searchable. I have zero copies of any paper letters. For a while, I had a box of letters from my old girlfriends, but my wife tossed those a decade ago.
Ironically I have copies of both, though the ability to search the ones that started out as paper is compromised by OCR.
Mail gets opened and placed on the scanner, and scanned and shredded as soon as possible. Dealing with the mail happens in software.
I'd gladly move to electronic billing, except they don't actually send you the bills - they just send you reminders to go log into yet another website with a password to go download your bill (maybe). It is actually less hassle to deal with the paper. If they emailed me a PDF and there was some kind of assurance that email gets delivered then I'd probably go electronic.
While more 'realistic', if I were testing the game, I'd definitely suggest disabling this 'feature' by default, as it really can hamper gameplay and discovery.
It is only realistic in the sense that this is what you get when you take a photo of something.
It is true that your eye has a limited depth of field like any camera, but that isn't how you actually perceive vision. To your brain the entire world is in focus, but you have an innate sense of depth as well. Your brain just discards the out-of-focus stuff you aren't looking at.
Photographers and cinematographers certainly use depth of field to draw your eye when creating their works. However, this is a carefully planned and scripted thing.
So, as you say, this is best saved for things like cutscenes which are scripted.
"There will always be a need for car dealerships,..."
Yes, because we just love to give cuts to as many people as possible for our purchases.
But, who is going to convince me to buy the $1000 paint protection treatment, or the $3000 extended warranty, or add $500 worth of mark-ups to a sticker that everybody already knows is a joke going in?
I actually went in with a bid from Truecar, and the dealer claimed that the price they quoted included discounts I wasn't eligible for. Never mind that they asked the eligibility questions online and I answered them correctly. I'm sure they violated their agreement with Truecar and what they did was illegal, but I wasn't about to try to fight it especially since they were in another state.
Still, I got a price much better than I probably could have negotiated. I thought the price they actually quoted was too good to be true, but I figured I was better off starting at a price 30% below sticker and having them talk me up, than starting at sticker price and having to talk them down. I got the price I figured was fair in the first place. I just felt dirty walking out all the same.
I think Naval power would decide any war in the Pacific. Again.
Tend to agree RE naval power, though China isn't going very far so their limited power projection isn't as big a factor as it would be if we were talking about an invasion of Hawaii or something like that.
That might well go tactical nuclear as nukes make near misses irrelevant.
Nobody is going to fire tactical nukes.
If the war becomes nuclear then China will lose, though most likely a few American cities will be irradiated, assuming that Russia doesn't get involved in which case we're all dead.
China could probably use tactical nukes against US naval forces without provoking a strategic response, since their attacks would only hit warships at sea for the most part.
On the other hand, the US tactical nuclear retaliation would have to be against targets on or near mainland China, since that is where all of their forces would actually be. They won't have ships and aircraft carriers surrounded by 100 miles of ocean to shoot at. If the US strikes at military bases/etc on Chinese soil using tactical nuclear weapons, then China seems likely launch ICBMs against US military bases in the mainland US.
Now, can you see the US not retaliating with strategic nuclear weapons if somebody sets off a tactical weapon in San Diego, or Norfolk? In that scenario the US will probably consider it likely that China will commit their entire nuclear force in retaliation to a US strategic strike, and thus the US would launch a full counterforce strike against all Chinese nuclear assets, which basically means nuking much of China. If the Chinese don't detect the attack and respond that would be mostly the end of it since they will be out of action (they'd fire whatever we missed). If they did detect the attack then they'd launch everything they had, and that would be the end of it since that is all they have left.
The Chinese nuclear arsenal isn't enough for a doomsday scenario. Sure, I wouldn't want to live in LA or NYC or DC (I assume their ICBMs can reach the east coast), but outside of maybe the top 5-10 cities there wouldn't be much carnage, and even the major cities would only be hit by a single warhead.
Obviously even this limited exchange is something to be avoided at almost any cost, so nobody is going to want to fire off tactical nuclear weapons in the first place. There is a saying with nukes that when one flies they all fly, and that is because using them at all crosses a threshold that it is really hard to step back from.
Japan could never prevent a Chinese invasion using conventional forces.
Why not? Japan has a substantial air force - over 300 fighters, along with AWACS. They also have one of the most advanced sub fleets in the world, and theater air defense via Aegis cruisers.
The problem would be one of attrition, though. The relative size of their territories makes it much easier for China to bomb Japanese factories than the reverse. Japan doesn't have any bases outside of Chinese reach.
As long as Japan can maintain air superiority I'd say they could hold off an invasion.
I wasn't actually aware of their having a significant sub fleet. If they can sustain that then that will also be a big help. Again, attrition would be key in a conventional war.
The Isrealis (and I'm sure many others) figured out a long time ago that you can't justify going to war over building homes in disputed areas if you care about international opinion. If somebody settles people on disputed islands, then they're as good as their property. Nobody is going to bomb an island full of civilians over a border dispute. At least, not since WWI/II.
All true, but there is also a certain political value in saying, "While I want to be a good neighbor and avoid producing nuclear bombs, I guess technically I could do it if I had to, not that I would." It is a bit like telling a potential thief that you're a peace-loving hippie who happens to have an antique shotgun under the bed that you'd never think of using against a robber.
Are we talking about the mass of Pu that was fissioned into other elements, or are we talking about the mass of Pu that was converted into energy? If you add up the mass of the fission products in a nuclear bomb they have less mass than what you start out with, because the released nuclear binding energy actually has mass. It is just E=mc^2 - in theory it works for any kind of energy-releasing reaction but when you get to nuclear warheads the masses actually become something measured in the same kinds of units you use on cans in the grocery store.
So, the mass of Pu that was converted to energy is much less than the mass of Pu that was fissioned.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, well-fitting parts generally wear less slowly. If a gear starts to turn and it isn't in contact with the next gear, then it accelerates quickly due to being unloaded, until it hits the next gear and then you have what amounts to an inelastic collision, with some of the energy being transferred to the next gear, but some of the energy being used to deform the various parts that just got jolted. If the gear starts to turn and is already in contact with the next gear then it smoothly accelerates up to operating speed without any jolts.
Any train operator could tell you as much. If you take a mile long train and put the engine on full speed, then you'll have a series of 100 jolts as the slack in each car gets taken up, and ditto if you slam on the brakes (front car is travelling at 10mph, rear car is travelling at 45mph, cars in-between each at a speed somewhere in-between, each car weighs 20 tons, what could go wrong?).
As the other reply mentioned, the reason there is slop in a design is manufacturing tolerances. It makes a huge difference in product quality and longevity.
And if every person was exactly the same then applying assembly line logic to cube farms would actually make sense.
What that thinking absolutely ignores is that Bob likes Alice and will do his job in such a way that it is easier for her to do hers (because her work depends in some way on his).
Yup. After completing all those courses on how to influence people, I quickly discovered that the training is nearly useless in a company which goes through constant re-organizations and layoffs. People used to do things at work like form internal networks, influence other orgs, and so on. These days nobody bothers with it other than for personal gain, because if you scratch somebody else's back it is nearly guaranteed that when you need them to scratch yours they will be gone. So, people form relationships mainly with the goal of being more mobile so that if they get separated they can find another job. If anything this probably makes employees more prone to spend time at work doing little things to help your competitors out, instead of each other.
The result of all of this is that everybody does stuff by the book, which results in maximum bureaucracy. Nobody could care less if it hurts the company - everybody just needs to make their own numbers look good or build as much margin into their budgets as they can so that when the next round of cuts come it is less likely to hurt them.
The irony is that the companies doing all this disruption believe they're doing it to stay more agile. That would be true if they were actually doing different things than they were doing 5 years ago. The reality is that the exact same work is getting done, but all the org charts look different.
Other electrodes in the helmet stimulate the part of the brain making you feel incredibly enthusiastic about applying Six Sigma to everything you imagine to be possible.
So, I have nothing against six sigma when it is actually applied to repetitive processes (you know, the kinds of activities that the term "sigma" even applies to). It makes a lot of sense in these cases. If somebody on Slashdot were writing a compiler and given the same set of source code the compiler took wildly varying amounts of time to execute, they'd probably wonder what is going on and they'd basically be applying or re-inventing six sigma to figure it out, whether they have a pink belt or not.
The problem is the mindset you describe here, but I think that this is as much the result of those MBAs you were talking about. At work they got on a Six Sigma kick a few years ago and pretty soon any project of any kind had to fit the six sigma mold, and had to have a set of deliverables following the formats dictated by the team running the initiative. So, anybody who wanted a nice bonus did what they were told to even if they recognized that for the typical corporate problem maybe 10% of it was applicable.
The thing I really was amused by was a "Design for Six Sigma" program they instituted which basically amounted to following your typical specify/design/build/test software development methodology. Bonus points were earned when it got applied to actual software development projects, which basically meant that you were going through all the formal system lifecycle activities twice.
Oh, and the best part of Six Sigma is the control phase. That's when you collect your bonus for completing your project, hand it off to somebody else, and watch them just drop the whole thing since they recognized it as adding little value and they're not going to get a bonus for continuing to collect all the data needed to prove that the first guy to came along earned his bonus. At least, not for the 95% of projects that didn't need to be six sigma in the first place - if you're actually running some kind of repeatable process then monitoring it just makes sense.
The burden of proof is on the vendor here, and standard of "proof" is conceptually simple at least: demonstrate that for some task this device offers any practical advantage whatsoever over the best available conventional technology. That could be in absolute performance against the best available tech(e.g. ASICs and supercomputers), in relative performance over similarly priced systems, or in some practical measure other than performance, such as power consumption. Any clearly identifiable and verifiable advantage counts as positive proof the vendor has something worth paying attention to.
That's why this whole thing smells to me.
They're the vendor. They have access to the hardware. They're the experts on how it works.
So, release some benchmarks. Release some source code to a problem the machine does well at, demonstrating that it behaves like a quantum computer, even if it is only for certain problem sets. Release your methods so that anybody else can run them on the machine they buy from you.
If I claimed that I had a machine that could turn lead into gold, and for $20M you can buy one and see how well it works for yourself, you would rightly laugh at me. If on the other hand I took a chunk of lead and fed it into the machine and out popped a chunk of gold, then you'd start listening (after doing the obvious checks to prevent parlor tricks). There needs to be a Randi prize or something for these kinds of claims - today companies are apparently happy to hand them the prize before doing the tests.
One, purely pragmatically, most countries that issue fiat currencies recognize that banks are de-facto extensions of ordinary currency circulation and regulate accordingly. This is probably all kinds of moral hazard; but it does mean that the IOU you get from a bank deposit has almost exactly the same backing as cash, up to whatever the FDIC's account threshold is.
True, but only in the country that issues the currency.
US Dollars are pretty dependable as fiat currencies go. The FDIC is about as good as it gets as far as personal deposit insurance goes. If you deposit your US Dollars in a US Bank you get both.
However, if you deposit your US Dollars into the First Bank of Basra, then you might want to take a look at the headlines, because while those US Dollars are pretty hard to counterfeit, they're pretty easy to haul off in a truck after blowing the door off the vault.
If some bank in the middle of Africa lost the US Dollars that you deposited with them, does that mean that there is something wrong with the US Dollar?
No, it just means that you were an idiot to deposit your money with a bank that didn't have some kind of backing from a trusted government.
The same is true of ANY bank in which you deposit Bitcoins right now. Don't deposit Bitcoins in banks, at least not without some kind of insurance from a reputable company behind it.
Or they just never use the contents of your letter in court, thus keeping it away from judicial review.
Read everybody's mail and figure out who you want to go after. Then find some other pretense to get a warrant and search their house. Maybe your weeds are a little too tall so the friendly neighborhood cop goes to leave a note on your door and could have sworn they smelled smoke, so exigent circumstances and all that... :)
Money is fungible.
I host a party, and take up a collection to pay for expenses. Everybody gives me $10, which I put in my wallet. I order pizza, drinks, rent a movie and some video games, etc. The total bill adds up to the collected amount. Does it matter whose money paid for what?
It does make sense for the total gas taxes to approximately equal the total highway expenses. From what I've read, the taxes are far less, so you're getting a free ride when you drive, but you're paying for roads when you import a diamond ring. Go figure.
And you would all do that for just a buck?
Heck, some disgruntled employees would pay them a buck for the payload to run on their work PC that might cause their employer a huge loss... :)
Why the fuck did you reward their dishonesty by purchasing from them anyway? I would have walked out, bought the car at a competing dealer, and faxed them the sales slip when I was done to prove they lost a sale. Not to mention reporting them to my state's attorney general and truecar.com.
Simple - by the time you get far enough to realize what they're doing you've already invested a considerable amount of time. Additionally, I tend to drive cars until they are basically dead, and that was the situation I was in, so I didn't really want to deal with delaying another day with another dealer who might or might not do the same.
I was tempted though.
Hmm, another thought RE the subs. Submarines only carry maybe 20-30 rounds of ammunition. If they fire those at carriers and battleships that is a big impact. For a country like the US where 2 dead soldiers make the front page, then firing them against troop transports might end the war as well.
However, for a country like China I'm not sure if subs could actually do the trick. So, we have half a dozen subs sink 100 of their troop transports and then they're out of ammo. China is out 100k soldiers, and the other 300 troop transports complete the landing. It would take a few weeks to re-arm the subs and get them back into the theater.
If the Chinese can launch decoy targets then the math works out that much worse.
The US has a quality over quantity mentality which doesn't work when the enemy can just overwhelm you with numbers. Sure, every one of your shots will find a mark, but if you only have 30 Mk-48 torpedos you can only sink 30 of their $10k small boats before you're surfacing and using small arms.
A lot of people spend a lot of time on their phone. Maybe 30 minutes or more. If your phone lasts you a couple years, paying a dollar a day for a phone that is (and let's be honest) substantially better is probably worth it.
I get the argument if you're getting something for it.
However, I think a phone needs to be the very best on the market to command that kind of price. That should be a no-compromise price. From what I've seen about the Fire, it isn't THAT good.
I don't care if the Nexus 5 doesn't have the nicest camera of any phone, because it is 60% of the price of those other phones. If they wanted $700 for a Nexus 5, then I'd be much more critical of any flaw, though I wouldn't expect the camera to be as nice as what I'd get if I spent $700 on a dedicated camera.
Piece work. Profits to the owner, risk to the worker. :)
Daily postal service to all citizens is the mark of an advanced society. I dont care how much money it loses, its necessary and dont fuck with it.
Free bread after the gladiators slug it out was once the mark of an advanced society... :)
This also includes any letter you think your great grandchildren might want to read some day.
Really? I have a copy of every non-spam email I have sent or received in the last 31 years, all fully indexed and searchable. I have zero copies of any paper letters. For a while, I had a box of letters from my old girlfriends, but my wife tossed those a decade ago.
Ironically I have copies of both, though the ability to search the ones that started out as paper is compromised by OCR.
Mail gets opened and placed on the scanner, and scanned and shredded as soon as possible. Dealing with the mail happens in software.
I'd gladly move to electronic billing, except they don't actually send you the bills - they just send you reminders to go log into yet another website with a password to go download your bill (maybe). It is actually less hassle to deal with the paper. If they emailed me a PDF and there was some kind of assurance that email gets delivered then I'd probably go electronic.
While more 'realistic', if I were testing the game, I'd definitely suggest disabling this 'feature' by default, as it really can hamper gameplay and discovery.
It is only realistic in the sense that this is what you get when you take a photo of something.
It is true that your eye has a limited depth of field like any camera, but that isn't how you actually perceive vision. To your brain the entire world is in focus, but you have an innate sense of depth as well. Your brain just discards the out-of-focus stuff you aren't looking at.
Photographers and cinematographers certainly use depth of field to draw your eye when creating their works. However, this is a carefully planned and scripted thing.
So, as you say, this is best saved for things like cutscenes which are scripted.
"Not specifically Tesla, but electric cars don't have alot of things that car dealers make money"
Electric cars need tires. Electric cars need brakes.
Even if they didn't the dealership would convince some percentage of the population to buy a plan that will replace them anyway.
"There will always be a need for car dealerships,..."
Yes, because we just love to give cuts to as many people as possible for our purchases.
But, who is going to convince me to buy the $1000 paint protection treatment, or the $3000 extended warranty, or add $500 worth of mark-ups to a sticker that everybody already knows is a joke going in?
I actually went in with a bid from Truecar, and the dealer claimed that the price they quoted included discounts I wasn't eligible for. Never mind that they asked the eligibility questions online and I answered them correctly. I'm sure they violated their agreement with Truecar and what they did was illegal, but I wasn't about to try to fight it especially since they were in another state.
Still, I got a price much better than I probably could have negotiated. I thought the price they actually quoted was too good to be true, but I figured I was better off starting at a price 30% below sticker and having them talk me up, than starting at sticker price and having to talk them down. I got the price I figured was fair in the first place. I just felt dirty walking out all the same.
I think Naval power would decide any war in the Pacific. Again.
Tend to agree RE naval power, though China isn't going very far so their limited power projection isn't as big a factor as it would be if we were talking about an invasion of Hawaii or something like that.
That might well go tactical nuclear as nukes make near misses irrelevant.
Nobody is going to fire tactical nukes.
If the war becomes nuclear then China will lose, though most likely a few American cities will be irradiated, assuming that Russia doesn't get involved in which case we're all dead.
China could probably use tactical nukes against US naval forces without provoking a strategic response, since their attacks would only hit warships at sea for the most part.
On the other hand, the US tactical nuclear retaliation would have to be against targets on or near mainland China, since that is where all of their forces would actually be. They won't have ships and aircraft carriers surrounded by 100 miles of ocean to shoot at. If the US strikes at military bases/etc on Chinese soil using tactical nuclear weapons, then China seems likely launch ICBMs against US military bases in the mainland US.
Now, can you see the US not retaliating with strategic nuclear weapons if somebody sets off a tactical weapon in San Diego, or Norfolk? In that scenario the US will probably consider it likely that China will commit their entire nuclear force in retaliation to a US strategic strike, and thus the US would launch a full counterforce strike against all Chinese nuclear assets, which basically means nuking much of China. If the Chinese don't detect the attack and respond that would be mostly the end of it since they will be out of action (they'd fire whatever we missed). If they did detect the attack then they'd launch everything they had, and that would be the end of it since that is all they have left.
The Chinese nuclear arsenal isn't enough for a doomsday scenario. Sure, I wouldn't want to live in LA or NYC or DC (I assume their ICBMs can reach the east coast), but outside of maybe the top 5-10 cities there wouldn't be much carnage, and even the major cities would only be hit by a single warhead.
Obviously even this limited exchange is something to be avoided at almost any cost, so nobody is going to want to fire off tactical nuclear weapons in the first place. There is a saying with nukes that when one flies they all fly, and that is because using them at all crosses a threshold that it is really hard to step back from.
Japan could never prevent a Chinese invasion using conventional forces.
Why not? Japan has a substantial air force - over 300 fighters, along with AWACS. They also have one of the most advanced sub fleets in the world, and theater air defense via Aegis cruisers.
The problem would be one of attrition, though. The relative size of their territories makes it much easier for China to bomb Japanese factories than the reverse. Japan doesn't have any bases outside of Chinese reach.
As long as Japan can maintain air superiority I'd say they could hold off an invasion.
I wasn't actually aware of their having a significant sub fleet. If they can sustain that then that will also be a big help. Again, attrition would be key in a conventional war.
I doubt the US is going to use nuclear arms to deter an invasion. They might very well use conventional ones though. Japan is not Crimea.
The Isrealis (and I'm sure many others) figured out a long time ago that you can't justify going to war over building homes in disputed areas if you care about international opinion. If somebody settles people on disputed islands, then they're as good as their property. Nobody is going to bomb an island full of civilians over a border dispute. At least, not since WWI/II.
All true, but there is also a certain political value in saying, "While I want to be a good neighbor and avoid producing nuclear bombs, I guess technically I could do it if I had to, not that I would." It is a bit like telling a potential thief that you're a peace-loving hippie who happens to have an antique shotgun under the bed that you'd never think of using against a robber.
Probably depends on what you measure.
Are we talking about the mass of Pu that was fissioned into other elements, or are we talking about the mass of Pu that was converted into energy? If you add up the mass of the fission products in a nuclear bomb they have less mass than what you start out with, because the released nuclear binding energy actually has mass. It is just E=mc^2 - in theory it works for any kind of energy-releasing reaction but when you get to nuclear warheads the masses actually become something measured in the same kinds of units you use on cans in the grocery store.
So, the mass of Pu that was converted to energy is much less than the mass of Pu that was fissioned.