Fourth and Eighth Amendments, which take precedence over the Letter of Marque, preclude such a silly scheme. I'd rather the US dissolve into a chaotic mess than implement that kind of thievery.
It's interesting how the people supposedly concerned about the fairness of taxation turn out to be a bunch of thugs.
And we've long had calculators. The original argument was that we had to do certain calculations in our head. When I pointed out that by that reasoning the reciprocal was more useful for more calculations that we would have to do than the few mentioned, I get the reply that we have "trip computers" for that even though most cars don't.
It really hasn't mattered which equivalent presentation we use. It has the same information content and fairly close computational complexity. Various regions use their own formulation and I see no reason for any of them to change. It simply is not worth the bother.
Your plan to fix an obvious lack of regulation is deregulation?
Mercantilism isn't lack of regulation. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
Mercantilism is the economic doctrine that government control of foreign trade is of paramount importance for ensuring the military security of the state. In particular, it demands a positive balance of trade. Mercantilism dominated Western European economic policy and discourse from the 16th to late-18th centuries. Mercantilism was a cause of frequent European wars in that time and motivated colonial expansion. Mercantilist theory varied in sophistication from one writer to another and evolved over time. Favours for powerful interests were often defended with mercantilist reasoning.
Nothing there about low regulation. Instead, trade barriers, state-own businesses, conflicts (military and economic) over control of resources, and such are the norm.
Free trade (here, trade with low regulation and zero tariffs and trade barriers) is the obvious way. If someone sets up trade barriers, respond in kind. That's how it's commonly done today though there are obvious counterexamples (agriculture subsidies, employment subsidies, etc).
If it's legal, it's as honest as taxpaying will ever get. More power to Apple. Maybe we'll get some serious tax and spending reform out of this sort of thing.
Keep in mind that Apple has an obligation to its shareholders, employees, and customers. It doesn't have an obligation to prop up corrupt and spendthrift governments.
L/100km might contain the same information, but using distance as the domain is preferred. This is far more useful as people don't drive to burn fuel, they drive to travel. Distance is the important variable so fuel mileage should be with respect to distance. It makes comparing given fuel economy ratings easier as it better correlates with the amount of fuel you will use / cost of driving.
Fuel use is the other equally important variable. People don't like to run out of gas in the middle of the highway either. So they do like to know how far they can go on the gas they currently have. Please keep in mind that the usual point of traveling between points A and B is to arrive at point B.
So for example, my gas needle is far down. I estimate I have two gallons left in the tank and my car does at least 35 MPG. Hence, I can go safely another 70 miles. Oh look, there's a major town 65 miles down the road. I'll pull off there.
I wager this calculation is done more often than your calculation above.
I did see that Wikipedia link. A table and some verbiage. Since it doesn't support your argument, it is indeed irrelevant. Maybe I should clean it up since it seems to have a lot of directionless rambling. Deletion appears to be a good approach since there doesn't appear to be any point to the section at all.
Because you've got absolutely no evidence that there was any reason the mist would magically just go away.
Sure, I do. The mist is generated by man-made equipment not a natural waterfall. Everything made by man eventually fails. And stuff that requires considerable active maintenance from humans? That'll fail even faster.
The mist will have been generated by the features of the environment, a waterfall or whatever. What makes you think that without mans intervention and destruction of the habitat that a waterfall was going to magically ping out of existence in the near future?
Human interference is just as natural as a waterfall drying up. And yes, sooner or later that waterfall would have "pinged out of existence" or some other accident come along and wipe those frogs out. What makes preservation of this species useful? You seem to indicate that it'll save a few kilograms of other organisms (those millions of organisms). That's not much gain for the effort.
Or in other words, you know little about complex systems so you're going to remove all talk of them from the equation and discuss the topic at your grade school level of knowledge. Right.
You have yet to show "complex systems" have any relevance to the frog problem. It's just an excuse to you for not thinking about the problem. We can't "know" because the system is incredibly complex or whatever (be sure to wiggle your fingers mysteriously as you say this). As I said earlier, that's reductionist tripe.
"They need a host. Any atmospheric oxygen imbalance that kills off humans globally without mechanical assistance, is going to wipe out the non-human hosts."
Well that's blatantly not true - there are many species that can survive in much tougher conditions than we can, especially bacteria, again, the bacteria behind anthrax being one of the most potent examples we know of. I'm amazed you feel the need to try and reduce the discussion to such an absurd level by outright denying the existence of some pretty well documented things.
No, you're wrong here as well. Anthrax spores can survive for a while outside of a host, decades even. But if it's ever going to pass on its genes, it's going to have to infect a host before the spore dies. And that's the problem. When is that anthrax going to find a host? The animals it infects all died off, except for the few living with people. And the people wouldn't have been thoughtful enough to bring some anthrax spores with them.
If anthrax really was that hardy, then we'd never have gotten rid of it in the developed world. Or the nastier stuff like hoof and mouth disease. Keep in mind that current agriculture animals are inbred to an incredible degree.
"And once humans come into contact with diseases again, they'll build up immunity again just as they did over the past few thousand years."
You still clearly show know knowledge of how disease resistance works. There is much that can kill us without the availability of modern medicine and without modern medicine to artifically protect us from these illnesses then we end up like every other creature, where the only way to build up resistance is to have a large enough population that at least one of those has the genetic variability needed to survive it so he/she can breed it into their future children. The problem is, that once again, we're not talking about a healthy enough sized gene pool. You still clearly do not get even first year degree level biology in this respect.
It'd be at least several thousand people (there are a lot of nuclear subs, you know). We already know, from observation of mitochondrial DNA, that we've probably passed through a similar bottleneck back 70-80k years ago, and yet recovered to gain our current level of disease resistance (most diseases which showed up in the last 3,000 years).
How big a factor over budget was this project again? Almost a factor of three by the time it was canceled and construction had been underway for a short while. And these sorts of huge science projects are always way over budget in the US.
GPM is far more accurate than MPG. Yes, the difference between 30 MPG and 50 MPG sounds great, but in reality, the 1.3 gallons saved it is not anywhere near the difference between 10 and 20 MPG (which saves 5 gallons per 100 miles.
No, it's not. That's not what "accuracy" means. I shouldn't have to tell you this. I'm just amazed at the number of people who have an opinion on a pretty irrelevant matter (which due to common usage of MPG, probably isn't ever going to happen either).
funny, I go with the lowest bidder for airlines based in other parts of the world and the food, beer & wine, entertainment and courteous service are included. the US airlines *could* do it if money-grubbing scum weren't allowed to get away with excessivly lining their own pockets
Just remember that customers are on that short list of "money-grubbing scum". Shop for those other criteria, if that's what you want and pay a little more like you do with those "lowest bidders" in other parts of the world.
Please stop playing stupid on the internet. The SSC was just burning money. Canceling it was a great thing for US science (and everything else except the graft and corruption industry).
The point here is that "safe" is not an optimization problem. Even doing things right can still lead to risk of death. With a cellar shelter, the point is that you have a much better chance of survival, than chilling outside with the flying glass shards and timber beams. You can do other things to improve your chances of survival. They might even be worth the bother.
But let's consider your examples of defenses. Reinforce the top of the cellar basement to handling dropped cars and houses or run outside to a separate shelter. In the first case, the tornado can drop these items on you with pretty arbitrary levels of force (the car can get pretty high before it gets dropped).
In the second case, you might not make it to the shelter before the tornado arrives. And a dropped car with enough kinetic energy might still mess up your day. So you have two modes of defense that have some value, but also some cost and in the case of the outdoor shelter, some drawbacks.
For a tornado shelter, I do see some value in reinforcing the shelter. But not that much. F4 and F5 tornadoes are pretty rare and they're pretty survivable even in a unreinforced basement. But if a better shelter helps you sleep at night, then the emotional support might be worth it, even if riskwise, it doesn't provide much of value.
I'd have to say that you have a poor coping mechanism for minor disagreement. There's always a problem with fraudulent builders and maybe the people who go for fortified homes will be particularly vulnerable to that sort of exploitation. Doesn't mean the fraud will be associated with groups du jour that you happen to dislike.
Don't get me wrong. I hope the Tea Party movement wins this election big and reverses a lot of the authoritarian crap that has been collecting for the past couple of decades. But I don't see your concerns as having anything to do with them, and it's pointless to introduce ideology here.
It's both funny and sad how it's usually people who never really had to handle the human factor on that scale that make this claim.
Well, don't be one of those people then.
In the US, a lot of that red tape is regulatory, governments keeping track of money flows, the ethnicity of loan recipients, proscriptions against various sorts of investments, and anything else that some congresscritter decided to throw in. It doesn't have anything to do with actual "human factor". Banks in addition often throw in fee generating red tape (making it a revenue center instead of a cost center) and security theater.
So tell me, where were you when people were laughing at those fancy motor carriages that got caught in the mud, had to be refuel at inconvenient times and couldn't even be used to make sausage?
Couldn't you be bothered to make this argument when it's an actual step forward? Why don't you tell us primitives how superior it is to use smoke signals instead of these primitive "computers" and "phones" to communicate? Or stone tools instead of woefully inadequate power tools?
of course, our infrastructure is in fine shape, our roads don't need upgrading. neither do our comms infra or any of the other social programs that help raise the overall qualtiy of life for everyone.
And if you were right, you'd have a point. Let's start with those social programs. Complete waste of money, top to bottom. I don't even understand how someone can claim that they raise quality of life when the primary effect is take tax money from people who need it and toss it down many, many ratholes. Oh, and raise the cost of many components of that standard of living (such as real estate, health care, and education).
And we spend plenty on infrastructure building and just not enough on infrastructure maintenance. Guess the latter just isn't that sexy. But if we moved some funding from new construction to maintenance, that would fix this issue.
the me-generation should have run out of steam, but it only gets stronger as time goes on. no one wants to invest in our own infrastructure or help those who are below what should be a minimum american standard of living.
That's a standard outcome for greed-based public spending. It turns a growing economy into a zero-sum public funded economy. And that's why the me-generation keeps gathering steam. It's a growing battle with more to fight over each year.
It's worth noting that Indochina and Indonesia are much more diverse ethnically (including large ethnic Chinese populations in much of Indochina). Those are generally considered part of the Far East as well.
I keep seeing the author use the phrase "ample space for luggage" without once saying what that means. I doubt we'd agree on that phrase either. I think I routinely have more junk packed into my car than could fit in his velomobile even if we took everything out, including the driver and all internal machinery.
And I don't relish turning a day long trip of 750 miles (a particular trip which I do several times a year incidentally, hence that specific number) into a multiday expedition, with my body contributing most of the work. I think most of humanity has established that they prefer quicker travel times and more comfortable commutes over better fuel economy.
Widespread adoption of velomobiles (as the author advocates at one point) or similar vehicles incapable of long trips at fast speeds seems a big step backwards in human progress.
The problem with calling it an "illusion" is that it's not. All that costly structure will make the home safer in the event of a hurricane and many other such things. And when such a home gets washed away by a storm surge? I'll bet that a direct hit by hurricane isn't covered by the warranty.
Slashdot Mirror
Fourth and Eighth Amendments, which take precedence over the Letter of Marque, preclude such a silly scheme. I'd rather the US dissolve into a chaotic mess than implement that kind of thievery.
It's interesting how the people supposedly concerned about the fairness of taxation turn out to be a bunch of thugs.
And we've long had calculators. The original argument was that we had to do certain calculations in our head. When I pointed out that by that reasoning the reciprocal was more useful for more calculations that we would have to do than the few mentioned, I get the reply that we have "trip computers" for that even though most cars don't.
It really hasn't mattered which equivalent presentation we use. It has the same information content and fairly close computational complexity. Various regions use their own formulation and I see no reason for any of them to change. It simply is not worth the bother.
Your plan to fix an obvious lack of regulation is deregulation?
Mercantilism isn't lack of regulation. Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
Mercantilism is the economic doctrine that government control of foreign trade is of paramount importance for ensuring the military security of the state. In particular, it demands a positive balance of trade. Mercantilism dominated Western European economic policy and discourse from the 16th to late-18th centuries. Mercantilism was a cause of frequent European wars in that time and motivated colonial expansion. Mercantilist theory varied in sophistication from one writer to another and evolved over time. Favours for powerful interests were often defended with mercantilist reasoning.
Nothing there about low regulation. Instead, trade barriers, state-own businesses, conflicts (military and economic) over control of resources, and such are the norm.
Except how to stop mercantilism?
Free trade (here, trade with low regulation and zero tariffs and trade barriers) is the obvious way. If someone sets up trade barriers, respond in kind. That's how it's commonly done today though there are obvious counterexamples (agriculture subsidies, employment subsidies, etc).
You either do your taxes honestly, or you don't.
If it's legal, it's as honest as taxpaying will ever get. More power to Apple. Maybe we'll get some serious tax and spending reform out of this sort of thing.
Keep in mind that Apple has an obligation to its shareholders, employees, and customers. It doesn't have an obligation to prop up corrupt and spendthrift governments.
L/100km might contain the same information, but using distance as the domain is preferred. This is far more useful as people don't drive to burn fuel, they drive to travel. Distance is the important variable so fuel mileage should be with respect to distance. It makes comparing given fuel economy ratings easier as it better correlates with the amount of fuel you will use / cost of driving.
Fuel use is the other equally important variable. People don't like to run out of gas in the middle of the highway either. So they do like to know how far they can go on the gas they currently have. Please keep in mind that the usual point of traveling between points A and B is to arrive at point B.
So for example, my gas needle is far down. I estimate I have two gallons left in the tank and my car does at least 35 MPG. Hence, I can go safely another 70 miles. Oh look, there's a major town 65 miles down the road. I'll pull off there.
I wager this calculation is done more often than your calculation above.
I did see that Wikipedia link. A table and some verbiage. Since it doesn't support your argument, it is indeed irrelevant. Maybe I should clean it up since it seems to have a lot of directionless rambling. Deletion appears to be a good approach since there doesn't appear to be any point to the section at all.
Because you've got absolutely no evidence that there was any reason the mist would magically just go away.
Sure, I do. The mist is generated by man-made equipment not a natural waterfall. Everything made by man eventually fails. And stuff that requires considerable active maintenance from humans? That'll fail even faster.
The mist will have been generated by the features of the environment, a waterfall or whatever. What makes you think that without mans intervention and destruction of the habitat that a waterfall was going to magically ping out of existence in the near future?
Human interference is just as natural as a waterfall drying up. And yes, sooner or later that waterfall would have "pinged out of existence" or some other accident come along and wipe those frogs out. What makes preservation of this species useful? You seem to indicate that it'll save a few kilograms of other organisms (those millions of organisms). That's not much gain for the effort.
Or in other words, you know little about complex systems so you're going to remove all talk of them from the equation and discuss the topic at your grade school level of knowledge. Right.
You have yet to show "complex systems" have any relevance to the frog problem. It's just an excuse to you for not thinking about the problem. We can't "know" because the system is incredibly complex or whatever (be sure to wiggle your fingers mysteriously as you say this). As I said earlier, that's reductionist tripe.
"They need a host. Any atmospheric oxygen imbalance that kills off humans globally without mechanical assistance, is going to wipe out the non-human hosts."
Well that's blatantly not true - there are many species that can survive in much tougher conditions than we can, especially bacteria, again, the bacteria behind anthrax being one of the most potent examples we know of. I'm amazed you feel the need to try and reduce the discussion to such an absurd level by outright denying the existence of some pretty well documented things.
No, you're wrong here as well. Anthrax spores can survive for a while outside of a host, decades even. But if it's ever going to pass on its genes, it's going to have to infect a host before the spore dies. And that's the problem. When is that anthrax going to find a host? The animals it infects all died off, except for the few living with people. And the people wouldn't have been thoughtful enough to bring some anthrax spores with them.
If anthrax really was that hardy, then we'd never have gotten rid of it in the developed world. Or the nastier stuff like hoof and mouth disease. Keep in mind that current agriculture animals are inbred to an incredible degree.
"And once humans come into contact with diseases again, they'll build up immunity again just as they did over the past few thousand years."
You still clearly show know knowledge of how disease resistance works. There is much that can kill us without the availability of modern medicine and without modern medicine to artifically protect us from these illnesses then we end up like every other creature, where the only way to build up resistance is to have a large enough population that at least one of those has the genetic variability needed to survive it so he/she can breed it into their future children. The problem is, that once again, we're not talking about a healthy enough sized gene pool. You still clearly do not get even first year degree level biology in this respect.
It'd be at least several thousand people (there are a lot of nuclear subs, you know). We already know, from observation of mitochondrial DNA, that we've probably passed through a similar bottleneck back 70-80k years ago, and yet recovered to gain our current level of disease resistance (most diseases which showed up in the last 3,000 years).
How big a factor over budget was this project again? Almost a factor of three by the time it was canceled and construction had been underway for a short while. And these sorts of huge science projects are always way over budget in the US.
I glanced through the link you provided. There was nothing relevant there so I moved on.
GPM is far more accurate than MPG. Yes, the difference between 30 MPG and 50 MPG sounds great, but in reality, the 1.3 gallons saved it is not anywhere near the difference between 10 and 20 MPG (which saves 5 gallons per 100 miles.
No, it's not. That's not what "accuracy" means. I shouldn't have to tell you this. I'm just amazed at the number of people who have an opinion on a pretty irrelevant matter (which due to common usage of MPG, probably isn't ever going to happen either).
funny, I go with the lowest bidder for airlines based in other parts of the world and the food, beer & wine, entertainment and courteous service are included. the US airlines *could* do it if money-grubbing scum weren't allowed to get away with excessivly lining their own pockets
Just remember that customers are on that short list of "money-grubbing scum". Shop for those other criteria, if that's what you want and pay a little more like you do with those "lowest bidders" in other parts of the world.
Oh, and thanks for cancelling the SSC, Texans.
Please stop playing stupid on the internet. The SSC was just burning money. Canceling it was a great thing for US science (and everything else except the graft and corruption industry).
It's the same information presented in an easier to use form, because it's easier to multiply in your head than to divide.
Nonsense. You would have to divide as well. For example, while figuring out how many miles you can go on your tank of gas. There's no benefit here.
Even still litres per 100 km is the better representation than mpg or km per litre
Not at all. It's the same information.
Ditto. It'd be nice if people would actually listen to their own advice rather than stoop to self-parody.
The point here is that "safe" is not an optimization problem. Even doing things right can still lead to risk of death. With a cellar shelter, the point is that you have a much better chance of survival, than chilling outside with the flying glass shards and timber beams. You can do other things to improve your chances of survival. They might even be worth the bother.
But let's consider your examples of defenses. Reinforce the top of the cellar basement to handling dropped cars and houses or run outside to a separate shelter. In the first case, the tornado can drop these items on you with pretty arbitrary levels of force (the car can get pretty high before it gets dropped).
In the second case, you might not make it to the shelter before the tornado arrives. And a dropped car with enough kinetic energy might still mess up your day. So you have two modes of defense that have some value, but also some cost and in the case of the outdoor shelter, some drawbacks.
For a tornado shelter, I do see some value in reinforcing the shelter. But not that much. F4 and F5 tornadoes are pretty rare and they're pretty survivable even in a unreinforced basement. But if a better shelter helps you sleep at night, then the emotional support might be worth it, even if riskwise, it doesn't provide much of value.
"tea bagger builders"? "screaming 'NO REGULATION'"? "Ayn Rand Objectivist way"?
I'd have to say that you have a poor coping mechanism for minor disagreement. There's always a problem with fraudulent builders and maybe the people who go for fortified homes will be particularly vulnerable to that sort of exploitation. Doesn't mean the fraud will be associated with groups du jour that you happen to dislike.
Don't get me wrong. I hope the Tea Party movement wins this election big and reverses a lot of the authoritarian crap that has been collecting for the past couple of decades. But I don't see your concerns as having anything to do with them, and it's pointless to introduce ideology here.
Maybe the internets just isn't for you.
It's both funny and sad how it's usually people who never really had to handle the human factor on that scale that make this claim.
Well, don't be one of those people then.
In the US, a lot of that red tape is regulatory, governments keeping track of money flows, the ethnicity of loan recipients, proscriptions against various sorts of investments, and anything else that some congresscritter decided to throw in. It doesn't have anything to do with actual "human factor". Banks in addition often throw in fee generating red tape (making it a revenue center instead of a cost center) and security theater.
So tell me, where were you when people were laughing at those fancy motor carriages that got caught in the mud, had to be refuel at inconvenient times and couldn't even be used to make sausage?
Couldn't you be bothered to make this argument when it's an actual step forward? Why don't you tell us primitives how superior it is to use smoke signals instead of these primitive "computers" and "phones" to communicate? Or stone tools instead of woefully inadequate power tools?
of course, our infrastructure is in fine shape, our roads don't need upgrading. neither do our comms infra or any of the other social programs that help raise the overall qualtiy of life for everyone.
And if you were right, you'd have a point. Let's start with those social programs. Complete waste of money, top to bottom. I don't even understand how someone can claim that they raise quality of life when the primary effect is take tax money from people who need it and toss it down many, many ratholes. Oh, and raise the cost of many components of that standard of living (such as real estate, health care, and education).
And we spend plenty on infrastructure building and just not enough on infrastructure maintenance. Guess the latter just isn't that sexy. But if we moved some funding from new construction to maintenance, that would fix this issue.
the me-generation should have run out of steam, but it only gets stronger as time goes on. no one wants to invest in our own infrastructure or help those who are below what should be a minimum american standard of living.
That's a standard outcome for greed-based public spending. It turns a growing economy into a zero-sum public funded economy. And that's why the me-generation keeps gathering steam. It's a growing battle with more to fight over each year.
It's worth noting that Indochina and Indonesia are much more diverse ethnically (including large ethnic Chinese populations in much of Indochina). Those are generally considered part of the Far East as well.
I keep seeing the author use the phrase "ample space for luggage" without once saying what that means. I doubt we'd agree on that phrase either. I think I routinely have more junk packed into my car than could fit in his velomobile even if we took everything out, including the driver and all internal machinery.
And I don't relish turning a day long trip of 750 miles (a particular trip which I do several times a year incidentally, hence that specific number) into a multiday expedition, with my body contributing most of the work. I think most of humanity has established that they prefer quicker travel times and more comfortable commutes over better fuel economy.
Widespread adoption of velomobiles (as the author advocates at one point) or similar vehicles incapable of long trips at fast speeds seems a big step backwards in human progress.
The problem with calling it an "illusion" is that it's not. All that costly structure will make the home safer in the event of a hurricane and many other such things. And when such a home gets washed away by a storm surge? I'll bet that a direct hit by hurricane isn't covered by the warranty.
Some sorts of disasters are far more predictable and frequent than others. Flooding is particularly notorious.
I don't have a problem with people living in bad areas. I just have a problem paying for their lifestyle.