Of course, Americans are free to shut down the American servers if they like. But they can't make laws that magically apply to people on the other side of the world.
You obviously have little experience with the standard "America Fuck Yeah, We Are The Greatest Nation On The Planet" morons that come from our side of the pond. They think every single American law applies wherever they go.
If the dropbox frontend servers are left to run, but the dropbox DATA servers are taken offline, the theory goes that the dropbox frontend might indicate a "no data" result to every single client, causing the local clients to delete any previously cached data.
Or so the theory goes. There's also the theory that someone nefarious might re-code the frontend servers to issue "delete all data" commands to any incoming client connection.
and any other computer synced to that same folder will get it deleted as well.
Provided three things are true: #1 - the computers are actually syncing (and not, say, on a turned-on laptop currently disconnected from any wireless networks) and #2 - the file has not been copied to another folder on another machine it was previously synced to and #3 - the file has not been edited and re-saved by someone else, marking it as "theirs" instead of "yours" according to Dropbox.
This is one of the big things that freaks out the lawyers when it comes to work files getting anywhere near Dropbox: once it's been there, it is impossible to actually ensure that it is deleted from all the places it may have been copied to.
In reality, farmers care a great deal. Even a few days' change in the growing season, or an increase in the temperatures during the hottest part of it, will change what crops are able to grow and the taste that'll come from them. Wineries in particularly are heavily affected by even one or two days' difference in warm or cold temperatures at the right or wrong time for the grapes.
Civil traffic engineers should care, since temperature changes impact what planned maintenance needs to be done on roads. A colder or snowier winter (one doesn't necessarily mean the other, oftentimes a severe cold snap removes enough moisture from the air to limit snowfall while a milder winter can mean more snowfall) means a need to stock up on road salt and gravel. A hotter summer means a need to resurface roads more often and a need to plan against using looser surfacing that can fall apart in high heat (ever noticed a freshly pave asphalt road in midsummer a bit too far south?).
Tourism? Shifting weather conditions can reduce the skiing season in many regions. Even one lost week can mean going out of business if it happens 2-3 years in a row for the smaller operations such as restaurants or private home renters, and the employees suffer too since they don't just lose tips; most of them lose working hours. Too-hot summer weather makes people avoid some destinations in the middle of summer as well.
Don't forget your power bills. Use a lot of air conditioning?
The US's reach grows ever longer, and the idiocy ever more severe. Nobody can place exactly when we became the Corporate States of America; historians 50 years from now may point to Citizens United, or they may point to the various copyright extension bills, especially the repetitive Mickey Mouse Protection Acts bought by Disney over and over again.
If you want worker protections, the first place you can start is by attaining a position of self employment.
You try getting a "position of self employment" with a congenital condition.
Want to take out a small business loan? Whoops - your "condition" carries a slightly higher risk, even if well managed, that you'll be incapacitated by it. So the bankers won't clear you for a loan.
Want to try to buy health insurance for yourself or any employees? Fat fucking chance. No insurance will take you, "preexisting condition."
Have a kid who's been born with something? Forget it, no coverage for them. Worse yet as happened to a buddy of mine who had gone the self-employed route - his kid has leukemia. Prognosis: 10 years max. 7 year old kid. Oh, to make matters worse, the health insurance company dropped his business, which leaves him, his wife, their kid, AND his 5 employees with no health insurance. To get it back, he'd have had to sign a "waiver" leaving his kid off of having insurance forevermore.
Retardicans at work.
but if I had lived on 1/2 of my income instead of 9/10 for the last 20 years
You're assuming you HAD income that entire time. In the Retardican economy, chances are you've been laid off three times in the past 15 years through buyouts/acquisitions/mergers when some bigger company decided they wanted your current workplace's patents. You went through your savings each time, and maybe a little more, surviving till you were able to find another job. That's how the Retardican economic system works, unless you were born up at the top.
Your entire premise rests on a few bad assumptions, however:
#1 - that the PHB will know what the fuck he is doing and adequately schedule enough time to document the code. #2 - that the marketing fucktards will know what the fuck THEY are doing and not overpromise or promise delivery schedules so tight that the PHB has time to allocate to documentation in the first place. #3 - that the company bosses are not "doing more with less" and overworking their employees to start with, relying on a down economy to fuck the working class by making everyone too scared to quit (for fear of not finding another job and being unable to support their families or being tied down by the risk of losing medical coverage) do 3-4 persons' jobs.
Now let me tell you how the "real world", the world created by the Retardicans for the last 15 years works: - Employees ARE, as a general rule, overworked. The upper class HAVE, as a general rule, been playing the "do more with less" card so often that employees are doing the work that 5 years ago was done by 3 people. - Employees ARE, as a general rule, fucked by the system. Need to find another job? Better hope it covers healthcare. The upper class don't have to give a crap about health care, the poor will never get out of people poor because if they ever did medical bills will put them right back, and the middle class lives in daily fear of losing health care coverage and being put into the poorhouse by medical bills - for themselves, spouses, parents, kids, anyone in the family. - Managers are fucking assholes whose job it is not to work with the employees, not to ensure that enough time is allocated for things that need doing, but to be slave drivers. We just had a slashdot article covering the latest problem of people feeling too scared to take vacation because of how managers behave about it.
What we need are far stronger worker protections. The Retardicans have been screaming about "obamacare obamacare obamacare" like it's some kind of bogeyman, but actually, single-payer and guaranteed healthcare coverage are GREAT for the working class, because it's removing the iron ball of "healthcare tied to your asshole fucking boss" from their legs and will let more people actually look for better jobs, or even start their own businesses without the fear of one accident or one unexpected illness ruining their entire lives.
Indeed. The rise of "metrics for job performance" has caused a lot of pain for many sectors of IT.
Judging your programmers by "lines of code written"? Great. They'll write a solution with as many redundant lines of code as possible. They won't comment, because commenting doesn't count. Bugfixes will generally involve patch code that means more lines, rather than cleaning up the code itself.
Judging your IT support by "number of tickets cleared"? Great, you get just what people expect out of those @##$@#$ crapass "phone lines" that bank out of India or Malaysia; they'll do anything to get you off the phone as fast as possible and mark your issue "resolved", whether it is or not. Your in-house guys will have to triage: do we handle 5 "my flash isn't working and I can't watch youtube on company time" issues, or do we handle the issue for one person that's going to take ALL MORNING to resolve but since it's only one ticket, will red-flag us as "not getting enough done" according to The Almighty Metrics.
The Retardicans have started to try to put this into play in the education field, too - teachers' pay will now be dependent on the grades the kids get and their performance on certain tests. You can - as my mother has - put in 70 hour workweeks, staying after every day to tutor kids who have problems, seeking out specialists to help the couple of kids who actually may wind up diagnosed with a learning disability (example: one in particular can write at an 8th-grade level but can't seem to wrap his head around long division after 6 months of trying), trying to figure out what's with the others only to find out come P/T conference night that they aren't learning because they've internalized their parents' opinion of school as glorified daycare and therefore just don't want to pay attention - but the parents DEMAND that they be passed on to the next grade because it'll hurt Little Dumbass McAsswipe Junior's "self esteem" to be held back a grade. You can do all that and it WON'T MATTER, because the kids with learning disabilities won't be diagnosed for another 4 years, and there are enough Dumbass McAsswipe Juniors in the class to pull "the metric" down.
The more numbers the better, especially when you're trying to shine the light of truth on a bunch of MafiAA types who ran phoney-baloney "hearings" with Congressrobots hearing about how "anything not-us is doubleplusungood so there and you are all on our payroll so pass the law we wrote for you to pass."
The start of said world war was when a certain political party came to power on a racist platform, spouting about how "the foreigners" had destroyed a certain country, and proceeded to eliminate any newspaper or news outlet that wasn't a part of their propaganda machine.
Then they came up with even worse things to do. But it started with propaganda and censorship.
- If I were to drive drunk and run someone over, I'd be doing 5-to-20 for vehicular manslaughter. - Meanwhile, when some drug company fucks up and kills thousands of people, they get a slap on the wrist from the FDA and laugh all the way to the bank when their bought congresscritter awards them yet another contract.
This article is by Galen Gruman, finally getting around to the other side from his "I hate IT, all IT people are stuck up overlords who won't let me have a toy to play Farmville on at work" garbage.
Infoworld has so caught on to his blitherings that they pre-emptively disabled comments on his latest column.
I don't understand why they don't just fire him. He must be related to someone in charge.
Actually, not so much. Setting aside diploma mills like DeVry, University of Phoenix, etc, it is helpful to society to have professors in colleges who aren't just there to provide "here's the video for the lecture, here's the choose-a-guess test, here's your certificate" classes but instead provide actual interactive discussions, answer questions relevant to the topic at hand from a learned perspective, continue to do research in the subjects they are teaching, and continually update the curriculum thereby.
On the flipside, yes, there are certain areas of the economy where "college" has taken over the role previously taken by what were called "trade schools", and there's the inevitable degree-creep that's been caused by the brainless HR sector constantly requiring more and more of a checklist of "must have this, must have that" to apply for jobs that has come with the computerization era. The idea of "all jobs require a college degree", whereas 30 years ago it was a HS diploma, or the number of jobs now requiring a Master's rather than a mere Associate's or Bachelor's degree, all pushed even further by a complete refusal by companies to actually provide on-the-job training, instead insisting that all new hires should drop in like made-to-order cogs on day one.
Khan and MITx look a lot to me like the Idiocracy approach to "education" - one size fits all, just take your multiple-guess test and keep taking it till you get your cert.
What's really funny is that Galen "I'm a fucking moron" Gruman just wrote this second article, which was the answer to why those supposed "high priests" - really, IT people trying to implement the policies put forth by PHB's high up the chain and legal teams trying to stop the risk of trade secrets going out the door - did the things he didn't like in the first article.
Phone has an outlook client, automatic email login, and no password.
Phone can connect to Outlook, where someone emailed an Excel document with a few thousand customer SSN's, credit card numbers or other contact info. Employee checked the "remember password" button, so it automagically logs in.
Phone gets lost, someone picks it up, downloads document to phone memory. One SD reader later, Excel document is in the hands of someone who has "fun things" to do with the excel document's information.
Hey look. A lost phone = a few thousand customer SSN's.
"The best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
And then...
"I will tell you: It's three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone: Commerce, Education and the -- what's the third one there? Let's see.... OK. So Commerce, Education and the --... The third agency of government I would -- I would do away with the Education, the... Commerce and -- let's see -- I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops." –Rick Perry, at the time frontrunner for the GOP nomination.
"I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed." - Mitt Romney, talking to people in Florida in 2011. What he left out: Mitt Romney is independently wealthy to the tune of $200 million in the bank, and never has to fear homelessness or anything else, basically ever.
"I have two grandchildren – Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."
"I have two grandchildren – Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American." - Newt Gingrich. Apparently he hasn't the brainpower to realize that "secular atheist" and "radical islamist" governments are contradictory.
"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." - Rick Santorum. Pretty much self-explanatory.
That was your first mistake. The amount of force required to accelerate a vehicle of mass M, from dead stop to speed Y, over time T, does not change. Modern engines have increased by a marginal amount of efficiency at best. Drive trains have not become terribly more efficient since the introduction of the slushbox, and are far lossier than a standard (e.g. manual) transmission driven properly is. Continuously Variable Transmissions haven't come close to automotive implementation yet, so we're stuck with most of the US driving on a shoddy piece of crap technology that invariably HAS to slip by at least 10% in order to provide the mindless gear changing that ADD-afflicted Americans, unable to wrap their atrophied brains around the concepts of a clutch and shifter, continue to demand.
And we've seen how often they actually worked as designed. And how often the retarded "blow everything up" Rambo fucktards of the US military just targeted villages, houses, and water supplies anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
Be glad they're beating you up with a wrench designed to withstand the rigors of being frozen to very close to absolute zero without shattering...
Of course, Americans are free to shut down the American servers if they like. But they can't make laws that magically apply to people on the other side of the world.
You obviously have little experience with the standard "America Fuck Yeah, We Are The Greatest Nation On The Planet" morons that come from our side of the pond. They think every single American law applies wherever they go.
If the dropbox frontend servers are left to run, but the dropbox DATA servers are taken offline, the theory goes that the dropbox frontend might indicate a "no data" result to every single client, causing the local clients to delete any previously cached data.
Or so the theory goes. There's also the theory that someone nefarious might re-code the frontend servers to issue "delete all data" commands to any incoming client connection.
and any other computer synced to that same folder will get it deleted as well.
Provided three things are true:
#1 - the computers are actually syncing (and not, say, on a turned-on laptop currently disconnected from any wireless networks) and
#2 - the file has not been copied to another folder on another machine it was previously synced to and
#3 - the file has not been edited and re-saved by someone else, marking it as "theirs" instead of "yours" according to Dropbox.
This is one of the big things that freaks out the lawyers when it comes to work files getting anywhere near Dropbox: once it's been there, it is impossible to actually ensure that it is deleted from all the places it may have been copied to.
Well said.
In reality, farmers care a great deal. Even a few days' change in the growing season, or an increase in the temperatures during the hottest part of it, will change what crops are able to grow and the taste that'll come from them. Wineries in particularly are heavily affected by even one or two days' difference in warm or cold temperatures at the right or wrong time for the grapes.
Civil traffic engineers should care, since temperature changes impact what planned maintenance needs to be done on roads. A colder or snowier winter (one doesn't necessarily mean the other, oftentimes a severe cold snap removes enough moisture from the air to limit snowfall while a milder winter can mean more snowfall) means a need to stock up on road salt and gravel. A hotter summer means a need to resurface roads more often and a need to plan against using looser surfacing that can fall apart in high heat (ever noticed a freshly pave asphalt road in midsummer a bit too far south?).
Tourism? Shifting weather conditions can reduce the skiing season in many regions. Even one lost week can mean going out of business if it happens 2-3 years in a row for the smaller operations such as restaurants or private home renters, and the employees suffer too since they don't just lose tips; most of them lose working hours. Too-hot summer weather makes people avoid some destinations in the middle of summer as well.
Don't forget your power bills. Use a lot of air conditioning?
Indeed.
The US's reach grows ever longer, and the idiocy ever more severe. Nobody can place exactly when we became the Corporate States of America; historians 50 years from now may point to Citizens United, or they may point to the various copyright extension bills, especially the repetitive Mickey Mouse Protection Acts bought by Disney over and over again.
I suggest someone check the judge's finances.
And I'm pointing out that his experience is atypical.
If you want worker protections, the first place you can start is by attaining a position of self employment.
You try getting a "position of self employment" with a congenital condition.
Want to take out a small business loan? Whoops - your "condition" carries a slightly higher risk, even if well managed, that you'll be incapacitated by it. So the bankers won't clear you for a loan.
Want to try to buy health insurance for yourself or any employees? Fat fucking chance. No insurance will take you, "preexisting condition."
Have a kid who's been born with something? Forget it, no coverage for them. Worse yet as happened to a buddy of mine who had gone the self-employed route - his kid has leukemia. Prognosis: 10 years max. 7 year old kid. Oh, to make matters worse, the health insurance company dropped his business, which leaves him, his wife, their kid, AND his 5 employees with no health insurance. To get it back, he'd have had to sign a "waiver" leaving his kid off of having insurance forevermore.
Retardicans at work.
but if I had lived on 1/2 of my income instead of 9/10 for the last 20 years
You're assuming you HAD income that entire time. In the Retardican economy, chances are you've been laid off three times in the past 15 years through buyouts/acquisitions/mergers when some bigger company decided they wanted your current workplace's patents. You went through your savings each time, and maybe a little more, surviving till you were able to find another job. That's how the Retardican economic system works, unless you were born up at the top.
Your entire premise rests on a few bad assumptions, however:
#1 - that the PHB will know what the fuck he is doing and adequately schedule enough time to document the code.
#2 - that the marketing fucktards will know what the fuck THEY are doing and not overpromise or promise delivery schedules so tight that the PHB has time to allocate to documentation in the first place.
#3 - that the company bosses are not "doing more with less" and overworking their employees to start with, relying on a down economy to fuck the working class by making everyone too scared to quit (for fear of not finding another job and being unable to support their families or being tied down by the risk of losing medical coverage) do 3-4 persons' jobs.
Now let me tell you how the "real world", the world created by the Retardicans for the last 15 years works:
- Employees ARE, as a general rule, overworked. The upper class HAVE, as a general rule, been playing the "do more with less" card so often that employees are doing the work that 5 years ago was done by 3 people.
- Employees ARE, as a general rule, fucked by the system. Need to find another job? Better hope it covers healthcare. The upper class don't have to give a crap about health care, the poor will never get out of people poor because if they ever did medical bills will put them right back, and the middle class lives in daily fear of losing health care coverage and being put into the poorhouse by medical bills - for themselves, spouses, parents, kids, anyone in the family.
- Managers are fucking assholes whose job it is not to work with the employees, not to ensure that enough time is allocated for things that need doing, but to be slave drivers. We just had a slashdot article covering the latest problem of people feeling too scared to take vacation because of how managers behave about it.
What we need are far stronger worker protections. The Retardicans have been screaming about "obamacare obamacare obamacare" like it's some kind of bogeyman, but actually, single-payer and guaranteed healthcare coverage are GREAT for the working class, because it's removing the iron ball of "healthcare tied to your asshole fucking boss" from their legs and will let more people actually look for better jobs, or even start their own businesses without the fear of one accident or one unexpected illness ruining their entire lives.
Indeed. The rise of "metrics for job performance" has caused a lot of pain for many sectors of IT.
Judging your programmers by "lines of code written"? Great. They'll write a solution with as many redundant lines of code as possible. They won't comment, because commenting doesn't count. Bugfixes will generally involve patch code that means more lines, rather than cleaning up the code itself.
Judging your IT support by "number of tickets cleared"? Great, you get just what people expect out of those @##$@#$ crapass "phone lines" that bank out of India or Malaysia; they'll do anything to get you off the phone as fast as possible and mark your issue "resolved", whether it is or not. Your in-house guys will have to triage: do we handle 5 "my flash isn't working and I can't watch youtube on company time" issues, or do we handle the issue for one person that's going to take ALL MORNING to resolve but since it's only one ticket, will red-flag us as "not getting enough done" according to The Almighty Metrics.
The Retardicans have started to try to put this into play in the education field, too - teachers' pay will now be dependent on the grades the kids get and their performance on certain tests. You can - as my mother has - put in 70 hour workweeks, staying after every day to tutor kids who have problems, seeking out specialists to help the couple of kids who actually may wind up diagnosed with a learning disability (example: one in particular can write at an 8th-grade level but can't seem to wrap his head around long division after 6 months of trying), trying to figure out what's with the others only to find out come P/T conference night that they aren't learning because they've internalized their parents' opinion of school as glorified daycare and therefore just don't want to pay attention - but the parents DEMAND that they be passed on to the next grade because it'll hurt Little Dumbass McAsswipe Junior's "self esteem" to be held back a grade. You can do all that and it WON'T MATTER, because the kids with learning disabilities won't be diagnosed for another 4 years, and there are enough Dumbass McAsswipe Juniors in the class to pull "the metric" down.
Yes, but you can thank the Republicans for shouting "fuck the unions fuck the unions", since unionized shops actually protect their workforce.
Indeed.
The more numbers the better, especially when you're trying to shine the light of truth on a bunch of MafiAA types who ran phoney-baloney "hearings" with Congressrobots hearing about how "anything not-us is doubleplusungood so there and you are all on our payroll so pass the law we wrote for you to pass."
The start of said world war was when a certain political party came to power on a racist platform, spouting about how "the foreigners" had destroyed a certain country, and proceeded to eliminate any newspaper or news outlet that wasn't a part of their propaganda machine.
Then they came up with even worse things to do. But it started with propaganda and censorship.
Proof that corporations are not people:
- If I were to drive drunk and run someone over, I'd be doing 5-to-20 for vehicular manslaughter.
- Meanwhile, when some drug company fucks up and kills thousands of people, they get a slap on the wrist from the FDA and laugh all the way to the bank when their bought congresscritter awards them yet another contract.
Hat tip for you:
This article is by Galen Gruman, finally getting around to the other side from his "I hate IT, all IT people are stuck up overlords who won't let me have a toy to play Farmville on at work" garbage.
Infoworld has so caught on to his blitherings that they pre-emptively disabled comments on his latest column.
I don't understand why they don't just fire him. He must be related to someone in charge.
Actually, not so much. Setting aside diploma mills like DeVry, University of Phoenix, etc, it is helpful to society to have professors in colleges who aren't just there to provide "here's the video for the lecture, here's the choose-a-guess test, here's your certificate" classes but instead provide actual interactive discussions, answer questions relevant to the topic at hand from a learned perspective, continue to do research in the subjects they are teaching, and continually update the curriculum thereby.
On the flipside, yes, there are certain areas of the economy where "college" has taken over the role previously taken by what were called "trade schools", and there's the inevitable degree-creep that's been caused by the brainless HR sector constantly requiring more and more of a checklist of "must have this, must have that" to apply for jobs that has come with the computerization era. The idea of "all jobs require a college degree", whereas 30 years ago it was a HS diploma, or the number of jobs now requiring a Master's rather than a mere Associate's or Bachelor's degree, all pushed even further by a complete refusal by companies to actually provide on-the-job training, instead insisting that all new hires should drop in like made-to-order cogs on day one.
Khan and MITx look a lot to me like the Idiocracy approach to "education" - one size fits all, just take your multiple-guess test and keep taking it till you get your cert.
What's really funny is that Galen "I'm a fucking moron" Gruman just wrote this second article, which was the answer to why those supposed "high priests" - really, IT people trying to implement the policies put forth by PHB's high up the chain and legal teams trying to stop the risk of trade secrets going out the door - did the things he didn't like in the first article.
Sure you can.
Phone has an outlook client, automatic email login, and no password.
Phone can connect to Outlook, where someone emailed an Excel document with a few thousand customer SSN's, credit card numbers or other contact info. Employee checked the "remember password" button, so it automagically logs in.
Phone gets lost, someone picks it up, downloads document to phone memory. One SD reader later, Excel document is in the hands of someone who has "fun things" to do with the excel document's information.
Hey look. A lost phone = a few thousand customer SSN's.
We don't even have enough money to maintain the national infrastructure we have
Actually, if we weren't wasting $500 billion on toys for the military every year...
"The best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter." - Winston Churchill.
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." - George Carlin
And then...
"I will tell you: It's three agencies of government, when I get there, that are gone: Commerce, Education and the -- what's the third one there? Let's see. ... OK. So Commerce, Education and the -- ... The third agency of government I would -- I would do away with the Education, the ... Commerce and -- let's see -- I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops." –Rick Perry, at the time frontrunner for the GOP nomination.
"I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed." - Mitt Romney, talking to people in Florida in 2011. What he left out: Mitt Romney is independently wealthy to the tune of $200 million in the bank, and never has to fear homelessness or anything else, basically ever.
"I have two grandchildren – Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."
"I have two grandchildren – Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American." - Newt Gingrich. Apparently he hasn't the brainpower to realize that "secular atheist" and "radical islamist" governments are contradictory.
"If the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual (gay) sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything." - Rick Santorum. Pretty much self-explanatory.
There's your first mistake again. Or rather, a mistake of how fucked up US city design is.
"Laws of physics."
I don't think...
That was your first mistake. The amount of force required to accelerate a vehicle of mass M, from dead stop to speed Y, over time T, does not change. Modern engines have increased by a marginal amount of efficiency at best. Drive trains have not become terribly more efficient since the introduction of the slushbox, and are far lossier than a standard (e.g. manual) transmission driven properly is. Continuously Variable Transmissions haven't come close to automotive implementation yet, so we're stuck with most of the US driving on a shoddy piece of crap technology that invariably HAS to slip by at least 10% in order to provide the mindless gear changing that ADD-afflicted Americans, unable to wrap their atrophied brains around the concepts of a clutch and shifter, continue to demand.
And we've seen how often they actually worked as designed.
And how often the retarded "blow everything up" Rambo fucktards of the US military just targeted villages, houses, and water supplies anyways.