Car dealers aren't going away anytime soon, they are exceedingly influential in local politics limiting auto manufacturers ability to side step them and earn fat commissions. Were it possible, no doubt around 1,000 apple store like super stores would replace most dealers for test drives/car fitting, warranty work, and help anyone who desires it with ordering.
Yeah that's effective, Saddam Hussein had the 7th largest army in the world prior to the Gulf War, it caused 148 deaths while suffering 30,000 over a month (100 hours on the ground). No conventional army is big enough to cause the US meaningful losses (especially as drone tech improves). It's WMD or bust.
Affluence means having more stuff, stuff requires that you have either slaves (how humanity acquired stuff from the dawn of humanity to 1800s) or energy (cheapest til we run out is fossil fuel). What stuff do you value that didn't require energy to make, store, or transport?
True but only hoarders care about stuff, for the sake of stuff, people mostly care dearly about status (read that as people who envy/want to sleep with you) which is pretty close to zero sum.
In my opinion, Palistine lost any claim on the lands given to them by the UN/UK when they starte and lost the '48 war. International warfare should always be played for keeps. You start the war and lose and you're lucky if your women aren't simply prizes for the victorious army and your lands become little more than a reminder to future nations not to attack someone stronger than you.
Every pilot I've ever met, GA, military or commercial, to a man (and that's only because I haven't met any women pilots), fucking loves flying, in ways that most people simply don't. Most of them spend the kind of money on it that is usually reserved for things that float or fornicate, even when it's their day job.
Also cars aren't such a good example because the US is basically an open range for people (ie no matter what they were doing it's almost always the driver's liability if they hit a person). In a closed range state/county (ie the driver has an unrestricted right of way vs animals), the owner of an animal hit by a car is absolutely liable for the damage their animal causes to the person's car (the responsibility is on the animal's owner to is maintain their fences to prevent the collision)
My concern is it sounds like your policy is basically pick on the westerners because they're either cowed or maturely shrug off insults, but don't pick on Muslems because they will react badly. To use your school yard bully example, it's still bullying to pickon the kid who knows he will be tried as an adult for assult (or who has a father with a belt if he gets suspended one more time). The threatened violent protesters are just as much bullies as the artists.
If you wish, to use a more contriversial example, how about abortion doctor shootings? They must be aware that their continued practice will deeply offend people (frequent angry protests, I'm sure they receive threats). Should the doctor be partly responsible, when they are shot? Taking offense does not give someone license to respond with violence or chaos. If we're endowed with inalienable rights (like speech or privacy). It's encumbent on the government to protect the excercise those rights, even in cases where most of the population doesn't agree with the expression.
Let's use the example of Piss Christ as an expression that is offensive to Christian groups. Are you seriously suggesting that the creator be held even partly responsible for any outbreak of Christian violence that should occur? It's caused enough offense that vandals destroyed a print in France, but other prints are still exhibited (one's in at a smaller gallery in New York right now).
I hold an intense dislike a view that expression should be regulated based on the potential violence of the group that an expression offends, that's a very poor incentive structure (rewarding violent outbreaks is very likely to increase their occurrence).
Couldn't they simply be, um, very frisky? Not every nation's total fertility rate is similar to the West's (below replacement). Here's charts on Muslem population by country note how fast many of the nations (Egypt, Afganistan, Indonesia, and Banglidesh for example) are growing even as emmigration to many other nations boosts populations rapidly in those nations.
That was the price in 1960. Even at a modern price of $500 it's still way, way below the rate of price increases for other goods (like homes, cars, and gasoline).
Correct, the price of a NY to SFO ticket in the 1960s was $363 (today it's still $320). But keep in mind that in 1960, the median home cost $13,000; a new car was $2500; and gas was $0.25/gallon. The new prices are approximately 13x higher (thanks inflation). Which means that relative to other goods, the current price of a ticket would be about $5000-6000!
If the mandated lowest price for a round trip cross country flight was $5500, and airlines could only compete via what services they offered, how much service do you thing they would offer to get that business and most of the $5,000 premium? It turned out that most people didn't place anywhere near $5,000 on those services (it's only people who weren't paying anywhere near that price to fly (like travel agents and family of airline employees) who miss the old days.
Pre-regulation all classes were basically: you can't afford it. Flying was a once in a rare while treat prior to deregulation in 1978, unless you had family that worked at an airline or were a travel agent.
Here's basically my point. Expensive infastructure occurs when there are large areas of moderate density. It's cheap (per person) to deliver services to highly dense areas of people, and there simply aren't enough people to be globally costly in very sparsely populated areas. The use has about half the country's land area that's moderately populated (meaning good services must be delivered to a huge spread of land). Europe is mostly densely populated, while Australia has only a small swath of moderate to dense population:
http://keep3.sjfc.edu/students/jmm02377/e-port/populatilon-density%20australia.gif
The vast majority of the population lives 100 miles or less inland on the South Eastern coast (there are other places, but very little of the population lives far from the coast even in those other places). And while there are isolated towns like Alice Springs, the are quite few and far between by American Standards.
This is much more costly. Yes, it would be cheaper to not have made policies that caused all the wealthy people to leave the cities, for lower density housing all around them, but those decisions were mostly made generations before now (with the results of those decisions forcing future ones).
I agree, though our state most impacted by tropical cyclones does have better infastructure than the rest of the Union. But many Europeans seem to imagine US weather as being very similar to European weather (and then when they get the rare storm that's on par with US weather experience issues as well). I know I was very surprised to find that snow and bitterly cold weather (as well as hot weather and large thunder storms) were much less common in most European cities even though I knew that the Gulf stream moderated things quite a bit there. I had just imagined they had similar weather to the US.
The climates of the US and Europe are similar, but Europe is much more mild than the US. Using a pair of large inland cities on a similar latitude, Paris can expect 10-15 light snow days each winter (light enough that I couldn't find any measure of seasonal averages). Chicago averages over a meter. Europe doesn't get hurricanes and the US is basically the only place in the world that powerful tornados occur regularly.
A storm like this occurs almost every year in most of the US.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2095509/Snow-Rome-1st-time-26-YEARS-36c-temperatures-eastern-Europe.html
Slashdot Mirror
Car dealers aren't going away anytime soon, they are exceedingly influential in local politics limiting auto manufacturers ability to side step them and earn fat commissions. Were it possible, no doubt around 1,000 apple store like super stores would replace most dealers for test drives/car fitting, warranty work, and help anyone who desires it with ordering.
Yeah that's effective, Saddam Hussein had the 7th largest army in the world prior to the Gulf War, it caused 148 deaths while suffering 30,000 over a month (100 hours on the ground). No conventional army is big enough to cause the US meaningful losses (especially as drone tech improves). It's WMD or bust.
Affluence means having more stuff, stuff requires that you have either slaves (how humanity acquired stuff from the dawn of humanity to 1800s) or energy (cheapest til we run out is fossil fuel). What stuff do you value that didn't require energy to make, store, or transport?
I would. What's the point of life if you're a slave?
True but only hoarders care about stuff, for the sake of stuff, people mostly care dearly about status (read that as people who envy/want to sleep with you) which is pretty close to zero sum.
Tshi? Was your duck overcooked?
Except they keep giving them lands back in exchange for peace.
In my opinion, Palistine lost any claim on the lands given to them by the UN/UK when they starte and lost the '48 war. International warfare should always be played for keeps. You start the war and lose and you're lucky if your women aren't simply prizes for the victorious army and your lands become little more than a reminder to future nations not to attack someone stronger than you.
Every pilot I've ever met, GA, military or commercial, to a man (and that's only because I haven't met any women pilots), fucking loves flying, in ways that most people simply don't. Most of them spend the kind of money on it that is usually reserved for things that float or fornicate, even when it's their day job.
Our oil, it never mattered where it was buried.
Also cars aren't such a good example because the US is basically an open range for people (ie no matter what they were doing it's almost always the driver's liability if they hit a person). In a closed range state/county (ie the driver has an unrestricted right of way vs animals), the owner of an animal hit by a car is absolutely liable for the damage their animal causes to the person's car (the responsibility is on the animal's owner to is maintain their fences to prevent the collision)
My concern is it sounds like your policy is basically pick on the westerners because they're either cowed or maturely shrug off insults, but don't pick on Muslems because they will react badly. To use your school yard bully example, it's still bullying to pickon the kid who knows he will be tried as an adult for assult (or who has a father with a belt if he gets suspended one more time). The threatened violent protesters are just as much bullies as the artists.
If you wish, to use a more contriversial example, how about abortion doctor shootings? They must be aware that their continued practice will deeply offend people (frequent angry protests, I'm sure they receive threats). Should the doctor be partly responsible, when they are shot? Taking offense does not give someone license to respond with violence or chaos. If we're endowed with inalienable rights (like speech or privacy). It's encumbent on the government to protect the excercise those rights, even in cases where most of the population doesn't agree with the expression.
Also due to very different rules about emissions and safety equipment, Smart cars don't achieve nearly the same milage in the US as in Europe
Let's use the example of Piss Christ as an expression that is offensive to Christian groups. Are you seriously suggesting that the creator be held even partly responsible for any outbreak of Christian violence that should occur? It's caused enough offense that vandals destroyed a print in France, but other prints are still exhibited (one's in at a smaller gallery in New York right now). I hold an intense dislike a view that expression should be regulated based on the potential violence of the group that an expression offends, that's a very poor incentive structure (rewarding violent outbreaks is very likely to increase their occurrence).
Couldn't they simply be, um, very frisky? Not every nation's total fertility rate is similar to the West's (below replacement). Here's charts on Muslem population by country note how fast many of the nations (Egypt, Afganistan, Indonesia, and Banglidesh for example) are growing even as emmigration to many other nations boosts populations rapidly in those nations.
If the penalty for any sex outside marriage is death, how does one additionally punish rape?
That was the price in 1960. Even at a modern price of $500 it's still way, way below the rate of price increases for other goods (like homes, cars, and gasoline).
Correct, the price of a NY to SFO ticket in the 1960s was $363 (today it's still $320). But keep in mind that in 1960, the median home cost $13,000; a new car was $2500; and gas was $0.25/gallon. The new prices are approximately 13x higher (thanks inflation). Which means that relative to other goods, the current price of a ticket would be about $5000-6000!
If the mandated lowest price for a round trip cross country flight was $5500, and airlines could only compete via what services they offered, how much service do you thing they would offer to get that business and most of the $5,000 premium? It turned out that most people didn't place anywhere near $5,000 on those services (it's only people who weren't paying anywhere near that price to fly (like travel agents and family of airline employees) who miss the old days.
Pre-regulation all classes were basically: you can't afford it. Flying was a once in a rare while treat prior to deregulation in 1978, unless you had family that worked at an airline or were a travel agent.
However, Americans use their phones far more than other nations, too. The price per minute of use in the US is lowest in the world.
The windup girl. Resource constrained Thailand, miserable existence for what's essentially a genetically engineered sex toy.
What if using drugs resulted in less stress from training and lower mortality?
Here's basically my point. Expensive infastructure occurs when there are large areas of moderate density. It's cheap (per person) to deliver services to highly dense areas of people, and there simply aren't enough people to be globally costly in very sparsely populated areas. The use has about half the country's land area that's moderately populated (meaning good services must be delivered to a huge spread of land). Europe is mostly densely populated, while Australia has only a small swath of moderate to dense population:
http://keep3.sjfc.edu/students/jmm02377/e-port/populatilon-density%20australia.gif
The vast majority of the population lives 100 miles or less inland on the South Eastern coast (there are other places, but very little of the population lives far from the coast even in those other places). And while there are isolated towns like Alice Springs, the are quite few and far between by American Standards.
In the US, moderately dense infastructure must basically cover the entire Eastern half of the country.
http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/512popdn.pdf
This is much more costly. Yes, it would be cheaper to not have made policies that caused all the wealthy people to leave the cities, for lower density housing all around them, but those decisions were mostly made generations before now (with the results of those decisions forcing future ones).
I agree, though our state most impacted by tropical cyclones does have better infastructure than the rest of the Union. But many Europeans seem to imagine US weather as being very similar to European weather (and then when they get the rare storm that's on par with US weather experience issues as well). I know I was very surprised to find that snow and bitterly cold weather (as well as hot weather and large thunder storms) were much less common in most European cities even though I knew that the Gulf stream moderated things quite a bit there. I had just imagined they had similar weather to the US.
The climates of the US and Europe are similar, but Europe is much more mild than the US. Using a pair of large inland cities on a similar latitude, Paris can expect 10-15 light snow days each winter (light enough that I couldn't find any measure of seasonal averages). Chicago averages over a meter. Europe doesn't get hurricanes and the US is basically the only place in the world that powerful tornados occur regularly. A storm like this occurs almost every year in most of the US. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2095509/Snow-Rome-1st-time-26-YEARS-36c-temperatures-eastern-Europe.html