I see you're not listening. I'll just summarize my views. Let's start once again with your earlier observation:
I just find it amusing how it seems corporations will naturally move towards efficient & effective service to stay competitive, except when they're lying, money-hungry bastards that are only in it for themselves, and the sole criteria for which it will be today is whether their conclusions agree with your own.
The resolution to this apparent conundrum is that businesses are rather efficient and effective at pursuing their interests, but not at doing anything that isn't relevant (or made relevant, such as via customer or regulatory action) to those interests. For example, spending taxpayer money efficiently usually runs counter to the business's interests since it usually means less revenue for themselves.
In the case of the insurance company example, an officious document supporting the climate change propaganda, which incidentally costs peanuts, allows them access to a huge amount of funds allegedly assigned to "climate change" and related activities - both directly via the private profit, public risk mechanisms of shoving costs and liabilities onto the public, but also via the government creating and supporting risk-free profit opportunities (all insurers are investment companies, let us remember).
What I find particularly bizarre is your insistence that somehow businesses are being inefficient/ineffective to the pursuit of their interests completely counter to real world observation. Lockheed Martin scores $400 billion in revenue, but that somehow can be ignored because they have a lot of revenue and maybe could have done better, if they had sold something low tech and less complicated? What low tech item are they going to get $400 billion for that someone won't undercut? Ball point pens? It's time for you to start thinking here.
In our times I would most certainly expect that steps are accurate to *1* millimeter.
Considering that everything involved are industrial made parts
Then expect to be disappointed. First, everything involved is not industrially made parts. Second, a lot of it is put together by hand. Third, nobody is checking for those tolerances except in unusual cases. And fourth, a lot of stuff is put together by unrelated contractors.
milking from government teat is no more efficient or effective as government is efficient or effective.
Maybe you should think about that. The business is not the government. Lockheed Martin was quite efficient at acquiring $400 billion for the F-35 contract while the US government was not similarly efficient at getting a world-class fighter jet for the money spent.
For example, it takes money to maintain all that public hysteria, and money to lobby government to let you milk its teat. Isn't that your other complaint about climate change? That so much money is spent on "research" that keeps people scared?
It's not the insurance company's money. And coming up with hysterical studies that just so happen to coincide with the interests and ideologies of the power-builders in government is cheap lobbying.
It's also worth noting here that people's steps don't clear a step by a couple of millimeters nor do carpenters make steps that precise. There's a lot here that's foolish once one considers the statement in question.
In Tracy Kidder's book House, he interviews a carpenter who talks about stairs. The carpenter claims that if you were to play a slow motion film of people walking up stairs you'd see that the soles of their feet clear the top of each stair tread by a couple of millimeters. They take the first step and then instinctively lift each foot by no more than they absolutely have to clear each step. That's why it's critically important to get the height of the first step right; if it's just a little bit off the stairway will forever after be tripping people up, but they won't know why because the difference is imperceptible.
I heard this before, It's bullshit. There are plenty of examples of stairs which are grossly uneven and off by far more than a couple of millimeters and people don't have trouble climbing them. Classic examples are outdoor stairs which go up hills and mountains (like Mount Fuji in Japan).
There's something like that when it comes to buying land in a floodplain. The past performance of flood control structures is like that first step on the stairway; it sets peoples' expectations to future performance. But those structures introduce a discontinuity into a gradually increasing water level. The water may have come within an inch of the seawall top a half dozen times in the last year, but an inch is as good as a mile. But if the sea level rises an inch, well that doesn't sound like much but a lot of people will notice.
A floodplain is a river feature. A seawall is an ocean-based structure. You're thinking of a levee which is the corresponding river-based structure to a seawall.
And for a well built seawall, overlapping the wall is not all or nothing. The seawall still reduces flooding and the damaging effects of wave action on whatever is behind the wall even when the wall is overlapped.
A wise man once told me, any idea that can be dealt with in a nutshell, belongs in one.
Exactly. And my one liners address many such ideas and how broken they are.
As well, your circular arguments are not convincing anyone but yourself.
Circular argument implies I'm assuming something and then proving what I just assumed. You need to learn what fallacies mean. And it's worth noting here that when you've come to an erroneous conclusion, it's not circular logic to figure out what errors of reasoning led to that conclusion.
Reading the abstract of that paper is quite educational:
One view of the potential impact of climate change on insurance is that the industry would be able to absorb any increase in catastrophe costs through gradual increases in premium. Referring to the latest IPCC report, the Actuaries Institute submission to the Senate Inquiry, as well as analysis conducted by a number of climatologists on the potential impact of climate change on catastrophe modelling, we examine the potential impact of climate change on various natural perils. We consider the latest climate science in each case, and the uncertainties inherent both in the science and also the impact on catastrophe forecasts and home insurance pricing and affordability. Lastly, we consider the potential for abrupt changes in climate, and the role of the actuary.
In other words, the projection though no doubt well-sourced is no more accurate than the models that it is based off. And we have reason to believe that IPCC models of extreme weather are deeply broken.
I just find it amusing how it seems corporations will naturally move towards efficient & effective service to stay competitive, except when they're lying, money-hungry bastards that are only in it for themselves, and the sole criteria for which it will be today is whether their conclusions agree with your own.
Then you don't understand my position. Here, the efficient and effective service is milking the public teat and exploiting public hysteria over climate change.
No. They're angling for government swag. After all, if I can blame climate change for my poor business choices, then maybe I can get a piece of the several hundred billion dollars of public funds being spent over the next few years.
My point to this is that we have the official narrative and what actually happens. In addition, we have remarkably low expectations. When you wrote:
If I'm reading you correctly, that's the root of all your problems. You don't appear to understand the objectives, limitations, complexities, methods, or environment. Like most things, it's complicated. The F-35 is a good example. The F-35 was never meant to be, and will never be, what you're expecting. Being the best has absolutely nothing to do with the F-35. It was never a design goal, that's an impossible design goal. Once you get past that, you'll probably see where some of your other problems originate.
For the money that was actually spent ($400 billion last I checked), the US should have gotten the best fighter jet of the time (no matter what diminished expectations were stated of the project then or now). In reality, it got yet another vehicle (in a different sense of the word) for transferring public money to private hands.
Low expectations are a remarkable aspect of US public spending. Where else can you burn $1100 or so per person for over three hundred million people and be happy that you got an overpriced and under-performing jet plane?
Another example of this were the loan guarantees for solar thermal and other renewable energy projects. The official story is that the US was expecting to lose 30% of investment. But that ignores that the US made no investment (it's private bankers who did that) and can only lose money by putting out these loan guarantees.
It also ignores that nobody puts hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money into projects with an expected 30% failure rate. But this is touted as the US funding the programs that private industry can't (even though private industry has plenty of money for this sort of thing, they just aren't stupid).
If he had been a regular cab driver, he might have done the same, and an official taxi would have been even better camouflage. If he had been a stock trader, he might have continued to do trades. If he was selling crap on Ebay, he might have continued doing that too. How is his driving for Uber at all relevant?
It sounds like he was trying to fashion an alibi. It'll be interesting, should this come to trial, whether this attempt is what damned him. The police may be able to show that he wasn't taking rides when the various people were killed. Such gaps would be very suspicious.
Clearly the only safe way to do it is by eliminating all regulations and then via government mandate of lowest bidder privately run monopoly rules. Vote Trump! See also Walker in Wisconsin where the entire Civil Service has been turned into a Governor run patronage brothel.
If you say so, but last I looked UL was doing a good job.
I am told that, if it has the anticipated numbers built, it will be cheaper than many other options that were/would be available at the current levels of tech and engineering.
One can say the same of any military airplane. Volume allows costs to go down. The F-22 was supposed to have even better economies of scale.
Most procurements are looked at in a TCO valuation.
UL is a private company. If you believe that companies would compromise safety in the name of profit if they could get away with it, why don't you think that UL (a company) would compromise safety in the name of profit?
Circular logic. Why wouldn't a government agency do it too? After all, they're owned by businesses, right?
Being the best has absolutely nothing to do with the F-35.
If we ignore the corruption that's the real driver of the program and just take the plane at face value, then it had better be the best at what it does, given the money spent on it.
"physicists have successfully simulated what would happen to black holes in a five-dimensional world,"
That's all the further you have to read the article. The universe has either 4 or 10 dimensions if I remember the two theories correctly. It does not have 5 dimensions. This is science fiction/science fantasy.
The point of the five dimensional black hole is that it might represent an actual thing combining normal general relativity and electromagnetism. The idea is that the fifth dimension becomes when approximated by our near-Newtonian world, the symmetry of electromagnetism.
As I understand it, a key problem is that as a result of the model, one gets a scalar (number valued) field left over which we haven't observed yet (though at one time, it was thought that the Pioneer spacecraft anomalies might be an indication of the field).
Why don't you name some of the people that went directly to Congress? Off the top of my head I can think of maybe one, and it is acknowledged in his case he was mistreated, but that isn't enough to make a rule, is it? It is also not so simple in that case as I recall the media was involved at points.
So it's not whistleblowing, protected by law, if they use proper channels other than reporting to Congress? There are several people who've been screwed by US intelligence who didn't go to the press. I find it interesting how you're spinning this narrative years after Snowden even though as you note, the person who properly followed the channel you deem correct was punished.
You're probably thinking of people that went to the media, and yes, that will end badly in many cases.
The thing is we don't actually have criminal activity by anyone. There's no point to demanding people get charged in the absence of criminal activity with which to charge people.
But it hasn't had significant tourism for most of that period. I think the earliest mass tourism was when Paris was part of the European Grand Tour starting from about the mid-17th century.
Sometimes you have to move their cheese, and sometimes you have to let "this kind of stuff" happen.
This isn't one of those cases. The irony here is that the owners knew that the cheese had been moved and probably some of them bought that Cherokee because of the novelty. In other words, there probably was a bit of demand from car owners for this very change. That makes this discussion of "moving the cheese" a bit of a red herring. Instead, I see it as a straightforward UI design issue.
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I just find it amusing how it seems corporations will naturally move towards efficient & effective service to stay competitive, except when they're lying, money-hungry bastards that are only in it for themselves, and the sole criteria for which it will be today is whether their conclusions agree with your own.
The resolution to this apparent conundrum is that businesses are rather efficient and effective at pursuing their interests, but not at doing anything that isn't relevant (or made relevant, such as via customer or regulatory action) to those interests. For example, spending taxpayer money efficiently usually runs counter to the business's interests since it usually means less revenue for themselves.
In the case of the insurance company example, an officious document supporting the climate change propaganda, which incidentally costs peanuts, allows them access to a huge amount of funds allegedly assigned to "climate change" and related activities - both directly via the private profit, public risk mechanisms of shoving costs and liabilities onto the public, but also via the government creating and supporting risk-free profit opportunities (all insurers are investment companies, let us remember).
What I find particularly bizarre is your insistence that somehow businesses are being inefficient/ineffective to the pursuit of their interests completely counter to real world observation. Lockheed Martin scores $400 billion in revenue, but that somehow can be ignored because they have a lot of revenue and maybe could have done better, if they had sold something low tech and less complicated? What low tech item are they going to get $400 billion for that someone won't undercut? Ball point pens? It's time for you to start thinking here.
In our times I would most certainly expect that steps are accurate to *1* millimeter.
Considering that everything involved are industrial made parts
Then expect to be disappointed. First, everything involved is not industrially made parts. Second, a lot of it is put together by hand. Third, nobody is checking for those tolerances except in unusual cases. And fourth, a lot of stuff is put together by unrelated contractors.
milking from government teat is no more efficient or effective as government is efficient or effective.
Maybe you should think about that. The business is not the government. Lockheed Martin was quite efficient at acquiring $400 billion for the F-35 contract while the US government was not similarly efficient at getting a world-class fighter jet for the money spent.
For example, it takes money to maintain all that public hysteria, and money to lobby government to let you milk its teat. Isn't that your other complaint about climate change? That so much money is spent on "research" that keeps people scared?
It's not the insurance company's money. And coming up with hysterical studies that just so happen to coincide with the interests and ideologies of the power-builders in government is cheap lobbying.
It's also worth noting here that people's steps don't clear a step by a couple of millimeters nor do carpenters make steps that precise. There's a lot here that's foolish once one considers the statement in question.
In Tracy Kidder's book House, he interviews a carpenter who talks about stairs. The carpenter claims that if you were to play a slow motion film of people walking up stairs you'd see that the soles of their feet clear the top of each stair tread by a couple of millimeters. They take the first step and then instinctively lift each foot by no more than they absolutely have to clear each step. That's why it's critically important to get the height of the first step right; if it's just a little bit off the stairway will forever after be tripping people up, but they won't know why because the difference is imperceptible.
I heard this before, It's bullshit. There are plenty of examples of stairs which are grossly uneven and off by far more than a couple of millimeters and people don't have trouble climbing them. Classic examples are outdoor stairs which go up hills and mountains (like Mount Fuji in Japan).
There's something like that when it comes to buying land in a floodplain. The past performance of flood control structures is like that first step on the stairway; it sets peoples' expectations to future performance. But those structures introduce a discontinuity into a gradually increasing water level. The water may have come within an inch of the seawall top a half dozen times in the last year, but an inch is as good as a mile. But if the sea level rises an inch, well that doesn't sound like much but a lot of people will notice.
A floodplain is a river feature. A seawall is an ocean-based structure. You're thinking of a levee which is the corresponding river-based structure to a seawall.
And for a well built seawall, overlapping the wall is not all or nothing. The seawall still reduces flooding and the damaging effects of wave action on whatever is behind the wall even when the wall is overlapped.
A wise man once told me, any idea that can be dealt with in a nutshell, belongs in one.
Exactly. And my one liners address many such ideas and how broken they are.
As well, your circular arguments are not convincing anyone but yourself.
Circular argument implies I'm assuming something and then proving what I just assumed. You need to learn what fallacies mean. And it's worth noting here that when you've come to an erroneous conclusion, it's not circular logic to figure out what errors of reasoning led to that conclusion.
Do you? At least actuaries are accountable for their claims, and have well-sourced science and statistics to back them up.
Reading the abstract of that paper is quite educational:
One view of the potential impact of climate change on insurance is that the industry would be able to absorb any increase in catastrophe costs through gradual increases in premium. Referring to the latest IPCC report, the Actuaries Institute submission to the Senate Inquiry, as well as analysis conducted by a number of climatologists on the potential impact of climate change on catastrophe modelling, we examine the potential impact of climate change on various natural perils. We consider the latest climate science in each case, and the uncertainties inherent both in the science and also the impact on catastrophe forecasts and home insurance pricing and affordability. Lastly, we consider the potential for abrupt changes in climate, and the role of the actuary.
In other words, the projection though no doubt well-sourced is no more accurate than the models that it is based off. And we have reason to believe that IPCC models of extreme weather are deeply broken.
I just find it amusing how it seems corporations will naturally move towards efficient & effective service to stay competitive, except when they're lying, money-hungry bastards that are only in it for themselves, and the sole criteria for which it will be today is whether their conclusions agree with your own.
Then you don't understand my position. Here, the efficient and effective service is milking the public teat and exploiting public hysteria over climate change.
I love discussing things with shallow. He can invalidate an entire scientific issue with one sentence.
When something is so painfully wrong that it can be defeated with one sentence, then why use two?
More supported, or less, than your own?
Exactly. Now do you have something relevant to add?
Care to debunk the insurance companies numbers?
What is there to debunk? It's a bunch of unsupported claims.
But it's the free market right?
No. They're angling for government swag. After all, if I can blame climate change for my poor business choices, then maybe I can get a piece of the several hundred billion dollars of public funds being spent over the next few years.
If I'm reading you correctly, that's the root of all your problems. You don't appear to understand the objectives, limitations, complexities, methods, or environment. Like most things, it's complicated. The F-35 is a good example. The F-35 was never meant to be, and will never be, what you're expecting. Being the best has absolutely nothing to do with the F-35. It was never a design goal, that's an impossible design goal. Once you get past that, you'll probably see where some of your other problems originate.
For the money that was actually spent ($400 billion last I checked), the US should have gotten the best fighter jet of the time (no matter what diminished expectations were stated of the project then or now). In reality, it got yet another vehicle (in a different sense of the word) for transferring public money to private hands.
Low expectations are a remarkable aspect of US public spending. Where else can you burn $1100 or so per person for over three hundred million people and be happy that you got an overpriced and under-performing jet plane? Another example of this were the loan guarantees for solar thermal and other renewable energy projects. The official story is that the US was expecting to lose 30% of investment. But that ignores that the US made no investment (it's private bankers who did that) and can only lose money by putting out these loan guarantees.
It also ignores that nobody puts hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money into projects with an expected 30% failure rate. But this is touted as the US funding the programs that private industry can't (even though private industry has plenty of money for this sort of thing, they just aren't stupid).
If he had been a regular cab driver, he might have done the same, and an official taxi would have been even better camouflage. If he had been a stock trader, he might have continued to do trades. If he was selling crap on Ebay, he might have continued doing that too. How is his driving for Uber at all relevant?
It sounds like he was trying to fashion an alibi. It'll be interesting, should this come to trial, whether this attempt is what damned him. The police may be able to show that he wasn't taking rides when the various people were killed. Such gaps would be very suspicious.
Clearly the only safe way to do it is by eliminating all regulations and then via government mandate of lowest bidder privately run monopoly rules. Vote Trump! See also Walker in Wisconsin where the entire Civil Service has been turned into a Governor run patronage brothel.
If you say so, but last I looked UL was doing a good job.
I am told that, if it has the anticipated numbers built, it will be cheaper than many other options that were/would be available at the current levels of tech and engineering.
One can say the same of any military airplane. Volume allows costs to go down. The F-22 was supposed to have even better economies of scale.
Most procurements are looked at in a TCO valuation.
So what explains the consistent cost overruns?
UL is a private company. If you believe that companies would compromise safety in the name of profit if they could get away with it, why don't you think that UL (a company) would compromise safety in the name of profit?
Circular logic. Why wouldn't a government agency do it too? After all, they're owned by businesses, right?
Being the best has absolutely nothing to do with the F-35.
If we ignore the corruption that's the real driver of the program and just take the plane at face value, then it had better be the best at what it does, given the money spent on it.
"physicists have successfully simulated what would happen to black holes in a five-dimensional world," That's all the further you have to read the article. The universe has either 4 or 10 dimensions if I remember the two theories correctly. It does not have 5 dimensions. This is science fiction/science fantasy.
The point of the five dimensional black hole is that it might represent an actual thing combining normal general relativity and electromagnetism. The idea is that the fifth dimension becomes when approximated by our near-Newtonian world, the symmetry of electromagnetism.
As I understand it, a key problem is that as a result of the model, one gets a scalar (number valued) field left over which we haven't observed yet (though at one time, it was thought that the Pioneer spacecraft anomalies might be an indication of the field).
It's not about Awlaki, it's about not having a trial.
He was an enemy combatant caught in the act. You won't get a trial in that case.
That's not what this is about, it's about the executive branch making the decision to kill people.
It's the president's job as head of the US military to do just that.
Who Awlaki was, or what he did, is completely irrelevant.
Which is quite wrong.
Why don't you name some of the people that went directly to Congress? Off the top of my head I can think of maybe one, and it is acknowledged in his case he was mistreated, but that isn't enough to make a rule, is it? It is also not so simple in that case as I recall the media was involved at points.
So it's not whistleblowing, protected by law, if they use proper channels other than reporting to Congress? There are several people who've been screwed by US intelligence who didn't go to the press. I find it interesting how you're spinning this narrative years after Snowden even though as you note, the person who properly followed the channel you deem correct was punished.
You're probably thinking of people that went to the media, and yes, that will end badly in many cases.
But at least, they'll be heard.
The thing is we don't actually have criminal activity by anyone. There's no point to demanding people get charged in the absence of criminal activity with which to charge people.
But it hasn't had significant tourism for most of that period. I think the earliest mass tourism was when Paris was part of the European Grand Tour starting from about the mid-17th century.
Cities rise and fall based on their usefulness at the time, not your nostalgic feelings about them.
I bet Paris has profited considerably from nostalgic feelings over the last couple of centuries.
I have to roll my eyes at this post. We can have all this trouble or we can do the "nutter" approach and recycle the valuable stuff.
Sometimes you have to move their cheese, and sometimes you have to let "this kind of stuff" happen.
This isn't one of those cases. The irony here is that the owners knew that the cheese had been moved and probably some of them bought that Cherokee because of the novelty. In other words, there probably was a bit of demand from car owners for this very change. That makes this discussion of "moving the cheese" a bit of a red herring. Instead, I see it as a straightforward UI design issue.