The agent's theory that this was done to keep the price of bitcoins high doesn't make sense. There's more money to be made in arbitrage by having the price fluctuate wildly, especially if you're the one controlling when bitcoins that are taken off the market (MtGox trades them for real money) are converted to other currencies.. A small float leaves it open to greater manipulation, same as penny stocks.
Arbitrage is only useful for something for which there is an established market.
A simultaneous purchase and sale of bitcoins will only work if you have, simultaneously, both a buyer and a seller, and you are the middleman. Mt. Gox was indeed the middleman, and could, indeed, attract sellers (miners), but in order to have buyers, bitcoins would have to have utility.
Mt Gox was more in the position of what's called a "Market Maker", and made money not through Arbitrage, but by providing liquidity in the market for bitcoins. As such, they acted more in the role of a currency exchange.
As such, it would have been of incredible value to them to have people wanting to buy bitcoins for whatever reason, and Silk Road was one of these reasons (one might argue: the primary reason). So it's not entirely beyond the pale that they would, in order to create a buy-demand for bitcoins, establish a means of converting bitcoins into something desirable, and difficult to obtain through means other than bitcoins... such as Silk Road provided.
You frequently see this type of behaviour in the stock market, where, for example, the bridge loan for a company doing an IPO is provided by the investment bank which is acting as a Market Maker for the stock being offered within the IPO.
So, if they understood economics sufficiently well, I definitely wouldn't put it past them, and, as theories go, it *does* make a lot of sense, from that perspective.
It took hundreds of years for Christians to let go of blasphemophobia. It may take as long for Muslims to let go of theirs.
They've *had* hundreds of years. What makes you think another hundred years will change anything?
Christians started tolerating "blaphemy" after they rose to power, and after they got their story straight to the point where they could face academic introspection, and after secular authority was predominantly in charge of the society in which they lived.
The 25,000 that Microsoft laid off were largely *not* Americans, they were (mostly) Nokia people who had been involved in building the Nokia phones that were not selling, and were very low margin, and mostly desired only in the third world, as Nokia tanked enough that Microsoft could buy them (very cheaply, in fact).
Those numbers are from the U.S. Department of Labor, which obtained them from the IRS. And they are comparable, or higher than what an American worker would get for the same job.
I personally interviewed some of the Apple and Google H1-B's.
If there really is a labor shortage than we should pay a premium in salary to recruit and retain these workers. Instead what is happening is that we're paying less salary for these workers on average.
This is false. Here are average tarting salaries for H1-B workers for some companies:
We should require all public school students, unless they have a doctor's note, to attend mandatory education at a forest for some amount of time. I'm thinking 1 week.
What constitutes a forest might be complicated in the UK.
Naw, all they have to do is hang around in Dunsinane till great Birnam wood remove to it... The UK kids tend to eat that stuff up.
Missions in preparation for going to Mars, what a waste. We aren't going to Mars in this century.
Besides, what does Mars have that the moon doesn't?
A couple of moons to build bases and way-stations on for asteroid mining, and whose escape velocity is so close to nothing that a spring-loaded catapult would be enough to launch spacecraft without burning a lot of expensive reaction mass.
no money for a lander. That's why Moon is off limits (human landings that is). Until NASA is given money for a lander, the moon is simply not discussed. Mars is discussed even though no money for lander or habitat module while getting there, but that's far off into the future (much like fusion power plants, flying cars, etc.).
Too bad they don't just go ahead with the original DC-X plans; then they'd have a launch vehicle, an orbital transfer vehicle, a fuel tanker, and a lunar lander.
Oh, that's right; Boeing *ATE* McDonnell Douglas and cancelled it.
Well, they could have always finished off the National Aerospace Plane (the X-30), and separately developed a lander.
Oh, that's right, Boeing *ATE* Rockwell and cancelled it.
I don't think "good grades" means what he thinks it means.
If you've got actual good grades, this program is unnecessary, because you're already getting a scholarship. If you aren't already getting an academic scholarship, then your grades aren't actually "good", they are some amount less than that.
I didn't see in any of the articles covering this story exactly what the president believes constitute "good grades", but I'd wager they're at about the level that might get you the switch, out behind the woodshed, in a number of Southern red states, should you come home with them on your report card.
I'm not opposed to the idea, but I really see this as no different than "another two years of high school so you can put off working and making a decision about your future for another two years", unless there's going to be a requirement that they pursue an associates degree of some kind. An associates degree will largely transfer towards a bachelors degree - and will completely transfer, if it's the right one, and the local 4 year college has a matriculation agreement with the community college for that field of study. Four years of dinking around, however, will get you at best 6 moths to a year of your general studies requirements out of the way.
Technically, you can pretty much come out of high school with high scores on 4 or 5 AP tests, and then CLEP for 3-12 credits per $80 exam for one of 5 subject areas covered by 33 tests, and pretty much have an associates degree the day you enter college, if you are willing to test out locally of a small additional number of additional general subjects.
It think that in this case, he's probably referring to "C+ and above students".
I see that as an additional tasking, not a change in direction.
And why not? We've got satellites and probes looking out into space, a nifty new launch/return capsule, and little robots on Mars. Having some devices looking back on the planet is a fine thing.
Let NOAA do that; it's *their* job. It's *not* NASAs job.
Note that one of those articles I linked to had the NOAA administrator pissed off that NASA instruments were taking up space on his orbital platforms, and disrupting his people's ability to do their job, which, among other things, includes monitoring climate and climate change.
Please tell me that these include being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!
They are going to need a BIG fan too.. Maybe a can of freeze spray for the times you just need another few seconds of top speed...
OR.. Just get a desktop and remote in to the test environment... That only requires a modest network with low latency...
Laptop day See you there Turbo boost Turboing
Want to say Why a game machine But I'm just Mumbling
With my freeze spray I will stop the heat
With my freeze spray I will install a CPU A much too big CPU
Tell you how Jam it in Make it work A laptop case
Like a fool Kind of sick Special needs Anyways
With my freeze spray I will stop the heat It's not some heat paste or a big fan That's all Ars Technica
I just think you need time to know That I just want a gaming machine I'm finally going to come clean I'll say what I actually mean Play games on a company machine
That's the plan Halo 2 You and me Any day
Why a game machine ("What?") "No I . . I, uh . . . compiling's... keen" Anyway
"The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the "9/11 Commission") investigated these rumors and found that although some unusual (and initially seemingly suspicious) trading activity did occur in the days prior to September 11, it was all coincidentally innocuous and not the result of insider trading by parties with foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks."
We aren't debating whether the puts occurred, we are merely debating the reason for the puts. See also:
Under the auspices of the White House OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy), the NTSC (National Science and Technology Council) created CENRS (Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability) as a response to a presidential mandate in 1989 (in case you were wondering, this was under president George H.W. Bush).
The CENRS created as part of itself the SGCR (Subcommittee on Global Change Research), which is the steering committee for the USGCRP (U.S. Global Change Research Program), which consists of 13 organizations:
- Department of Health and Human Services - U.S. Agency for International Development - Department of the Interior - Department of Commerce - Department of Defense (Acting) - Smithsonian Institution - Department of Agriculture - National Aeronautics and Space Administration http://www.globalchange.gov/ab... From their web site.
As part of this, as a result of a presidential budgetary mandate by President Obama that an additional $1.8B (for a total of $2.4B) be earmarked for the Earth Observation Satellites (effectively canceling the asteroid capture mission - this i a redirection of existing budget, not an increase of funds):
"We will increase Earth-based observation to improve our understanding of our climate and our world -- science that will garner tangible benefits, helping us to protect our environment for future generations."
"NASA’s about to lend a heavier hand in the fight against climate change. The news that President Obama would be rearranging NASA’s budget to focus more on what can be done to stop global warming was met with some opposition, but we’re elated that he’s bringing some of that cash down to Earth."
Meanwhile, actual NASA budgets have remained flat, so these monies have come from actual space and aeronautics programs, rather than new budget:
http://www.behindmyback.org/20... "NASA’s investment in the 13-AGENCY CCSP is 58% of the total amount of the President’s 2009 Budget Request for CCSP." = most of the money is coming from NASA.
See also this report, which indicates that 37% of the 2014 NASA budget went to the Earth science program, supporting climate change research - and NOT space or aeronautics research: http://www.law.umaryland.edu/m...
But you know... feel free to argue with the congressional record, newspapers, NASA itself, and President Obama's speech at Kennedy.
Actually very few areas in the US have HOAs. It's just that they are the more rich, white areas, which are more desirable. I've never lived in a place with an HOA, and only a handful of people I know live in such areas. They are often more expensive, as you are paying for the "privileged" of having someone boss you around. There must be lots of people into that. Though my current house is in an HOA area, but the HOA wasn't strong enough, so I bought the house from people who didn't sign the HOA paperwork (no idea how many owners before them didn't), so I own a non HOA house in an HOA neighborhood. Or maybe only the homes that have a plot at the local airstrip have to join the HOA.
Inaccurate. My sister's condo in a not fantastic area of Salt Lake City, Utah, has an HOA, and typical unit price is ~$80-$100K, which will buy you... nothing... in most richer areas.
Typically, an HOA is a corporation the developer creates to market and sell lots and houses in a subdivision (or units in a condo complex). After that, membership becomes part of the restrictive covenants on the deeds of the properties sold within the development boundaries, and after a certain number of units have been sold, the ownership and responsibility is passed off to the owners within the development.
HOAs cover about 25 million houses in the U.S., and close to 60 million people, which i to say, 20% of the U.S. population.
Last time I checked, not even 20% of the U.S. population count as "wealthy" (i.e. not having to work unless they choose to do so).
Even if a city or two is eventually hit by a terrorist nuclear weapon (likely), it's NOTHING like was was being nearly expected at the time.
I have to say, you really think that would happen? Considering the most successful attack done by terrorists so far still had many things go wrong, I just don't see that sort of group being able to pull off a nuclear detonation, nevermind that ground-level nukes are extremely limited in yield and impact versus airborne ones. Plus, if terrorists manage to trigger one, the only chance they'll have at a second one is within the few days after, because the entire planet is going to mobilize to get their sorry asses to Allah or whoever else is the extremist religion of choice at that time.
While in general, terrorists have been largely incompetent, they by and large haven't had real goals that would be achieved by the attacks they have staged. For example, the 9/11 attacks didn't really state a goal, they didn't really have a clear result from which we could infer a goal, and credit was never actually claimed by a group with a preexisting set of stated goals.
I expect that eventually, we will have to face a "Heavy Weather" [Bruce Sterling] style terrorist scenario, in which the emergent goals would be readily apparent by the fact that they are obvious after the event. Alternately, there will be an obvious goal, such as "crash western economies", and they will target an attack which could actually be effective in achieving it (e.g. blowing holes in the clean areas of 11 chip fabs on the same day, and that sort of thing, where it would take at least months to get semiconductor production back on line).
I also think that if terrorists obtain a nuclear weapon, they are unlikely to actually utilize it on a population center. In particular, I find it much more likely that ecoterrorists (or even non-eco terrorists) would stage an "Energized" [Edward Lerner] style terrorist scenario in order to contaminate a resource region for a particularly necessary region (e.g. in "Energized", the Middle East oil fields were rendered contaminated by radiation within the oil itself by deeply buried bombs).
I also think you are thinking very much inside the box, when you are talking ground vs. high altitude nuclear bursts (assuming the desired outcome if the EMP, rather than the explosion itself). Frankly, there was no need for the commercial aircraft hijack in the 9/11 attacks, other than to manipulate airline stock price (and airline stocks of the airlines involved in the attack *were* shorted via Germany leading up to the attack, so someone made a lot of money on it), since you could just load rented or purchased private aircraft with available explosives, and accomplish the same goal. This was, in fact, the premise of "Executive Orders" [Tom Clancy], written well before the 9/11 attacks.
So it's really rather lame to say what terrorists *could* do, just because the ones we've had so far have been pretty darn incompetent.
If this is the only way to get the sites maintained and cleaned up, that's one solution to lack of funding for the Superfund. As for the rest, it's a rant at the national park service for things outside its mandate. They're not some sort of historical society or museum.
You mean like the current executive mandate for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to focus on issues surrounding climate change, rather than, say, Aeronautics and maybe Space?
Personally, I'm quite looking forward to the Department of Energy operations to fix potholes, and the Internal Revenue Service solar farms. What bothers me though, is that the Department of Agriculture is going to want to grow the amount of income tax they collect.
I mean *who wouldn't* want to be buried in a "tomb from space"!?!?!
This lends total credence to the story the other day that India has interplanetary aircraft flying in the interplanetary air! This must be *how* Genghis Khan *got* hi tomb from space!
I TOTALLY agree that we should be looking for Genghis Khan's frickin' *tomb from space*!!!!!!
The only people who could pay for a space mission are governments and bored billionaires, it's nearly impossible to make a profit in space.
I once did some quick calculations to show that you couldn't send a human to profitably collect watermelon-sized diamonds from the surface of Mars, I wish I could find the post about it now.
Unless you are a bored billionaire, and your quick calculations are what propelled you into being a bored billionaire, please forgive my skepticism about *your* calculations, compared to the calculations being made by those with a demonstrated track record of making profits.
The Iraq war was basically a subsidy for the oil and gas industry. No, you don't get to phrase the argument so that only your position can win by claiming it has to be a direct subsidy, while indirect don't count.
No, it wasn't.
The Iraq war was basically to prevent Iraq setting up a Euro-baed petroleum exchange, thereby undermining the commodity-baed dollar and turning it back into a fiat currency, which would have been disastrous to the U.S., since the price of the dollar is pinned to the price of oil by the fact that almost all oil sales of any note are done in dollars.
It was also a bailout for Europe, which gets most of their oil from the Middle East. What oil the U.S. gets from the Middle East does not end up shipped to the U.S., it's used by the U.S. military overseas, which, given active operations, consumes bout 24% of the total of all U.S. petroleum consumption. The U.S. gets almost all its oil from local or hemisphere local sources.
The variability in U.S. pump prices has everything to do with the futures market, and self-restraint on refining by the petroleum companies in order to control the supply of refined oil, and almost nothing to do with the availability of top sweet crude.
How deep of a search do you imagine at an airport screening though?
Depends on who is searching. Depends on the on site equipment they have to conduct the search. There are a lot of factors.
For example, if I wanted to see most recent documents, and I had appropriate workstations available, in about 10-15 minutes, if I though you were worthy of a deep search, by looking at date stamps and sector sparing tables for las sectors pared, and which files they are attributed to, I could likely find everything that changed on the disk from 5 days before you booked the ticket, up to now.
Even if things are encrypted, that's information, and there are exposed timestamps that could tell me if I should copy/confiscate for further examination, and/or find something incriminating to hold you personally on, or hold you on the suspicion of having done.
Slashdot Mirror
The agent's theory that this was done to keep the price of bitcoins high doesn't make sense. There's more money to be made in arbitrage by having the price fluctuate wildly, especially if you're the one controlling when bitcoins that are taken off the market (MtGox trades them for real money) are converted to other currencies.. A small float leaves it open to greater manipulation, same as penny stocks.
Arbitrage is only useful for something for which there is an established market.
A simultaneous purchase and sale of bitcoins will only work if you have, simultaneously, both a buyer and a seller, and you are the middleman. Mt. Gox was indeed the middleman, and could, indeed, attract sellers (miners), but in order to have buyers, bitcoins would have to have utility.
Mt Gox was more in the position of what's called a "Market Maker", and made money not through Arbitrage, but by providing liquidity in the market for bitcoins. As such, they acted more in the role of a currency exchange.
As such, it would have been of incredible value to them to have people wanting to buy bitcoins for whatever reason, and Silk Road was one of these reasons (one might argue: the primary reason). So it's not entirely beyond the pale that they would, in order to create a buy-demand for bitcoins, establish a means of converting bitcoins into something desirable, and difficult to obtain through means other than bitcoins... such as Silk Road provided.
You frequently see this type of behaviour in the stock market, where, for example, the bridge loan for a company doing an IPO is provided by the investment bank which is acting as a Market Maker for the stock being offered within the IPO.
So, if they understood economics sufficiently well, I definitely wouldn't put it past them, and, as theories go, it *does* make a lot of sense, from that perspective.
It took hundreds of years for Christians to let go of blasphemophobia. It may take as long for Muslims to let go of theirs.
They've *had* hundreds of years. What makes you think another hundred years will change anything?
Christians started tolerating "blaphemy" after they rose to power, and after they got their story straight to the point where they could face academic introspection, and after secular authority was predominantly in charge of the society in which they lived.
“How would a Beowulf Cluster of Bennet handle this”
OK, you made me snort. This is really quite funny.
In order to have a comparison you have to have two sets of data. You've provided only one set.
I provided the hard to get set.
Look up the non H1-B yourself here:
http://www.glassdoor.com/
Won't someone PLEASE, THINK OF THE CHILDREN?!?
Oh wait. I can spell. Miner != minor. There are no minors under pressure here.
Never mind.
Back to your regularly scheduled Bitcoin rants to benefit the Winklevi...
PS: The other benefit to the 6 month break is that contractors don't get reclassified as employees by the IRS.
Sources, which you could have found yourself by picking 3 of the numbers and "H1B" and putting them into Google:
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Repo...
The 25,000 that Microsoft laid off were largely *not* Americans, they were (mostly) Nokia people who had been involved in building the Nokia phones that were not selling, and were very low margin, and mostly desired only in the third world, as Nokia tanked enough that Microsoft could buy them (very cheaply, in fact).
Those numbers are from the U.S. Department of Labor, which obtained them from the IRS. And they are comparable, or higher than what an American worker would get for the same job.
I personally interviewed some of the Apple and Google H1-B's.
If there really is a labor shortage than we should pay a premium in salary to recruit and retain these workers. Instead what is happening is that we're paying less salary for these workers on average.
This is false. Here are average tarting salaries for H1-B workers for some companies:
Amazon: $109,440
Apple: $130,690
Google: $126,565
Microsoft: $113,408
Qualcomm: $105,169
Intel: $102,883
Oracle: $113,065
JP Morgan Chase: $105,751
NTT Data: $100,889
CVS RX Services: $120,435
Goldman Sachs: $107,429
BofA: $105,173
Citibank: $109,327
EMC: $103,245
Capgemini: $114,785
EBay: $119,224
Randstad: $103,303
Facebook: $123,142
Walmart: $113,238
Tell me again how they are underpaid?
We should require all public school students, unless they have a doctor's note, to attend mandatory education at a forest for some amount of time. I'm thinking 1 week.
What constitutes a forest might be complicated in the UK.
Naw, all they have to do is hang around in Dunsinane till great Birnam wood remove to it... The UK kids tend to eat that stuff up.
Missions in preparation for going to Mars, what a waste. We aren't going to Mars in this century.
Besides, what does Mars have that the moon doesn't?
A couple of moons to build bases and way-stations on for asteroid mining, and whose escape velocity is so close to nothing that a spring-loaded catapult would be enough to launch spacecraft without burning a lot of expensive reaction mass.
WTF is the problem?
no money for a lander. That's why Moon is off limits (human landings that is). Until NASA is given money for a lander, the moon is simply not discussed. Mars is discussed even though no money for lander or habitat module while getting there, but that's far off into the future (much like fusion power plants, flying cars, etc.).
Too bad they don't just go ahead with the original DC-X plans; then they'd have a launch vehicle, an orbital transfer vehicle, a fuel tanker, and a lunar lander.
Oh, that's right; Boeing *ATE* McDonnell Douglas and cancelled it.
Well, they could have always finished off the National Aerospace Plane (the X-30), and separately developed a lander.
Oh, that's right, Boeing *ATE* Rockwell and cancelled it.
...I'm sensing a pattern here...
I don't think "good grades" means what he thinks it means.
If you've got actual good grades, this program is unnecessary, because you're already getting a scholarship. If you aren't already getting an academic scholarship, then your grades aren't actually "good", they are some amount less than that.
I didn't see in any of the articles covering this story exactly what the president believes constitute "good grades", but I'd wager they're at about the level that might get you the switch, out behind the woodshed, in a number of Southern red states, should you come home with them on your report card.
I'm not opposed to the idea, but I really see this as no different than "another two years of high school so you can put off working and making a decision about your future for another two years", unless there's going to be a requirement that they pursue an associates degree of some kind. An associates degree will largely transfer towards a bachelors degree - and will completely transfer, if it's the right one, and the local 4 year college has a matriculation agreement with the community college for that field of study. Four years of dinking around, however, will get you at best 6 moths to a year of your general studies requirements out of the way.
Technically, you can pretty much come out of high school with high scores on 4 or 5 AP tests, and then CLEP for 3-12 credits per $80 exam for one of 5 subject areas covered by 33 tests, and pretty much have an associates degree the day you enter college, if you are willing to test out locally of a small additional number of additional general subjects.
It think that in this case, he's probably referring to "C+ and above students".
I see that as an additional tasking, not a change in direction.
And why not? We've got satellites and probes looking out into space, a nifty new launch/return capsule, and little robots on Mars. Having some devices looking back on the planet is a fine thing.
Let NOAA do that; it's *their* job. It's *not* NASAs job.
Note that one of those articles I linked to had the NOAA administrator pissed off that NASA instruments were taking up space on his orbital platforms, and disrupting his people's ability to do their job, which, among other things, includes monitoring climate and climate change.
Please tell me that these include being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!
They are going to need a BIG fan too.. Maybe a can of freeze spray for the times you just need another few seconds of top speed...
OR.. Just get a desktop and remote in to the test environment... That only requires a modest network with low latency...
Laptop day
See you there
Turbo boost
Turboing
Want to say
Why a game machine
But I'm just
Mumbling
With my freeze spray
I will stop the heat
With my freeze spray
I will install a CPU
A much too big CPU
Tell you how
Jam it in
Make it work
A laptop case
Like a fool
Kind of sick
Special needs
Anyways
With my freeze spray
I will stop the heat
It's not some heat paste or a big fan
That's all Ars Technica
I just think you need time to know
That I just want a gaming machine
I'm finally going to come clean
I'll say what I actually mean
Play games on a company machine
That's the plan
Halo 2
You and me
Any day
Why a game machine ... keen"
("What?")
"No I . . I, uh . . . compiling's
Anyway
With my freeze spray I will stop ?
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/putcall.asp
No airline stock was shorted prior to 9/11.
Per the Snopes Article:
"The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (also known as the "9/11 Commission") investigated these rumors and found that although some unusual (and initially seemingly suspicious) trading activity did occur in the days prior to September 11, it was all coincidentally innocuous and not the result of insider trading by parties with foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks."
We aren't debating whether the puts occurred, we are merely debating the reason for the puts. See also:
http://www.sfgate.com/business...
Yes, I can document NASA's task change.
Under the auspices of the White House OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy), the NTSC (National Science and Technology Council) created CENRS (Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability) as a response to a presidential mandate in 1989 (in case you were wondering, this was under president George H.W. Bush).
The CENRS created as part of itself the SGCR (Subcommittee on Global Change Research), which is the steering committee for the USGCRP (U.S. Global Change Research Program), which consists of 13 organizations:
- Department of Health and Human Services
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Department of the Interior
- Department of Commerce
- Department of Defense (Acting)
- Smithsonian Institution
- Department of Agriculture
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration http://www.globalchange.gov/ab...
From their web site.
As part of this, as a result of a presidential budgetary mandate by President Obama that an additional $1.8B (for a total of $2.4B) be earmarked for the Earth Observation Satellites (effectively canceling the asteroid capture mission - this i a redirection of existing budget, not an increase of funds):
http://www.nasa.gov/about/obam...
Obama's April 15th 2010 speech at Kennedy:
"We will increase Earth-based observation to improve our understanding of our climate and our world -- science that will garner tangible benefits, helping us to protect our environment for future generations."
http://inhabitat.com/obama-giv...
"NASA’s about to lend a heavier hand in the fight against climate change. The news that President Obama would be rearranging NASA’s budget to focus more on what can be done to stop global warming was met with some opposition, but we’re elated that he’s bringing some of that cash down to Earth."
See also:
http://inhabitat.com/obama-giv...
http://spectator.org/blog/5978...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-...
http://inhabitat.com/new-nasa-...
Meanwhile, actual NASA budgets have remained flat, so these monies have come from actual space and aeronautics programs, rather than new budget:
http://www.behindmyback.org/20...
"NASA’s investment in the 13-AGENCY CCSP is 58% of the total amount of the President’s 2009 Budget Request for CCSP."
= most of the money is coming from NASA.
See also this report, which indicates that 37% of the 2014 NASA budget went to the Earth science program, supporting climate change research - and NOT space or aeronautics research:
http://www.law.umaryland.edu/m...
But you know... feel free to argue with the congressional record, newspapers, NASA itself, and President Obama's speech at Kennedy.
Actually very few areas in the US have HOAs. It's just that they are the more rich, white areas, which are more desirable. I've never lived in a place with an HOA, and only a handful of people I know live in such areas. They are often more expensive, as you are paying for the "privileged" of having someone boss you around. There must be lots of people into that. Though my current house is in an HOA area, but the HOA wasn't strong enough, so I bought the house from people who didn't sign the HOA paperwork (no idea how many owners before them didn't), so I own a non HOA house in an HOA neighborhood. Or maybe only the homes that have a plot at the local airstrip have to join the HOA.
Inaccurate. My sister's condo in a not fantastic area of Salt Lake City, Utah, has an HOA, and typical unit price is ~$80-$100K, which will buy you ... nothing ... in most richer areas.
Typically, an HOA is a corporation the developer creates to market and sell lots and houses in a subdivision (or units in a condo complex). After that, membership becomes part of the restrictive covenants on the deeds of the properties sold within the development boundaries, and after a certain number of units have been sold, the ownership and responsibility is passed off to the owners within the development.
HOAs cover about 25 million houses in the U.S., and close to 60 million people, which i to say, 20% of the U.S. population.
Last time I checked, not even 20% of the U.S. population count as "wealthy" (i.e. not having to work unless they choose to do so).
Even if a city or two is eventually hit by a terrorist nuclear weapon (likely), it's NOTHING like was was being nearly expected at the time.
I have to say, you really think that would happen? Considering the most successful attack done by terrorists so far still had many things go wrong, I just don't see that sort of group being able to pull off a nuclear detonation, nevermind that ground-level nukes are extremely limited in yield and impact versus airborne ones. Plus, if terrorists manage to trigger one, the only chance they'll have at a second one is within the few days after, because the entire planet is going to mobilize to get their sorry asses to Allah or whoever else is the extremist religion of choice at that time.
While in general, terrorists have been largely incompetent, they by and large haven't had real goals that would be achieved by the attacks they have staged. For example, the 9/11 attacks didn't really state a goal, they didn't really have a clear result from which we could infer a goal, and credit was never actually claimed by a group with a preexisting set of stated goals.
I expect that eventually, we will have to face a "Heavy Weather" [Bruce Sterling] style terrorist scenario, in which the emergent goals would be readily apparent by the fact that they are obvious after the event. Alternately, there will be an obvious goal, such as "crash western economies", and they will target an attack which could actually be effective in achieving it (e.g. blowing holes in the clean areas of 11 chip fabs on the same day, and that sort of thing, where it would take at least months to get semiconductor production back on line).
I also think that if terrorists obtain a nuclear weapon, they are unlikely to actually utilize it on a population center. In particular, I find it much more likely that ecoterrorists (or even non-eco terrorists) would stage an "Energized" [Edward Lerner] style terrorist scenario in order to contaminate a resource region for a particularly necessary region (e.g. in "Energized", the Middle East oil fields were rendered contaminated by radiation within the oil itself by deeply buried bombs).
I also think you are thinking very much inside the box, when you are talking ground vs. high altitude nuclear bursts (assuming the desired outcome if the EMP, rather than the explosion itself). Frankly, there was no need for the commercial aircraft hijack in the 9/11 attacks, other than to manipulate airline stock price (and airline stocks of the airlines involved in the attack *were* shorted via Germany leading up to the attack, so someone made a lot of money on it), since you could just load rented or purchased private aircraft with available explosives, and accomplish the same goal. This was, in fact, the premise of "Executive Orders" [Tom Clancy], written well before the 9/11 attacks.
So it's really rather lame to say what terrorists *could* do, just because the ones we've had so far have been pretty darn incompetent.
If this is the only way to get the sites maintained and cleaned up, that's one solution to lack of funding for the Superfund. As for the rest, it's a rant at the national park service for things outside its mandate. They're not some sort of historical society or museum.
You mean like the current executive mandate for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to focus on issues surrounding climate change, rather than, say, Aeronautics and maybe Space?
Personally, I'm quite looking forward to the Department of Energy operations to fix potholes, and the Internal Revenue Service solar farms. What bothers me though, is that the Department of Agriculture is going to want to grow the amount of income tax they collect.
THIS IS FRICKIN' AMAZING!
I mean *who wouldn't* want to be buried in a "tomb from space"!?!?!
This lends total credence to the story the other day that India has interplanetary aircraft flying in the interplanetary air! This must be *how* Genghis Khan *got* hi tomb from space!
I TOTALLY agree that we should be looking for Genghis Khan's frickin' *tomb from space*!!!!!!
The only people who could pay for a space mission are governments and bored billionaires, it's nearly impossible to make a profit in space.
I once did some quick calculations to show that you couldn't send a human to profitably collect watermelon-sized diamonds from the surface of Mars, I wish I could find the post about it now.
Unless you are a bored billionaire, and your quick calculations are what propelled you into being a bored billionaire, please forgive my skepticism about *your* calculations, compared to the calculations being made by those with a demonstrated track record of making profits.
The Iraq war was basically a subsidy for the oil and gas industry. No, you don't get to phrase the argument so that only your position can win by claiming it has to be a direct subsidy, while indirect don't count.
No, it wasn't.
The Iraq war was basically to prevent Iraq setting up a Euro-baed petroleum exchange, thereby undermining the commodity-baed dollar and turning it back into a fiat currency, which would have been disastrous to the U.S., since the price of the dollar is pinned to the price of oil by the fact that almost all oil sales of any note are done in dollars.
It was also a bailout for Europe, which gets most of their oil from the Middle East. What oil the U.S. gets from the Middle East does not end up shipped to the U.S., it's used by the U.S. military overseas, which, given active operations, consumes bout 24% of the total of all U.S. petroleum consumption. The U.S. gets almost all its oil from local or hemisphere local sources.
The variability in U.S. pump prices has everything to do with the futures market, and self-restraint on refining by the petroleum companies in order to control the supply of refined oil, and almost nothing to do with the availability of top sweet crude.
It's about economics, not resources.
Hell, even exchanging a broken lightbulb can pose major problems.
That's because LEDs do not have an E26 screw base...
How deep of a search do you imagine at an airport screening though?
Depends on who is searching. Depends on the on site equipment they have to conduct the search. There are a lot of factors.
For example, if I wanted to see most recent documents, and I had appropriate workstations available, in about 10-15 minutes, if I though you were worthy of a deep search, by looking at date stamps and sector sparing tables for las sectors pared, and which files they are attributed to, I could likely find everything that changed on the disk from 5 days before you booked the ticket, up to now.
Even if things are encrypted, that's information, and there are exposed timestamps that could tell me if I should copy/confiscate for further examination, and/or find something incriminating to hold you personally on, or hold you on the suspicion of having done.