Now they need to stop the truck. They have to get ahead of it and set up an ambush.
Here's where it gets completely implausible.
Because now they have to move their guys to a position ahead of the truck, in some isolated spot in the middle of nowere, rehearse the mission, then wait for the truck to get there.
And if the truck takes a different route (maybe a truck full of gravel spills and closes the interstate they were planning on taking - yes, that happens, I was delayed getting home the other day for something just that stupid - gravel on the road due to a dumptruck spill), they have to move their guys to another spot, and rehearse again...
Remember, it's impossible to plan the attack more than a few hours ahead, what with the possibility that you're wrong about the exact route (or the driver stops for a quickie at a truckstop). Coupled with the need to move your guys into position after you know the route, it's not quite so easy as one might think....
so the focus shifted to ICBMs. Even if they were not nuclear tipped there would still have been little anyone could do to stop one taking out important buildings with conventional explosives.
ICBMs without nukes would have just been incredibly expensive V2s - a complete waste of funding, since they were never accurate enough to drop an HE bomb where it would do any good.
As to long and bitter winters, it should be noted that we have Montana, Minnesota, Alaska, and Green Bay.
If we can handle going bare-chested and wearing a cheese on our heads to a football game in the snow, I'm pretty sure we could deal with Russian winters;-)
I can't recall the last time my phone registered "no signal", even in the most desolate of places.
I can. I was in northern Arizona, about halfway between Nowhere and Noplace - nothing but desert and mountains for a hundred miles in any direction.
On the other hand, the farm my father grew up on, which is way back in the hills of MS, has decent cell service, last time I drove out to the old place.
They got their lawyers to agree to a decent one-time payment plus a share of the final payout in exchange for sticking with the case till all the appeals are done.
In other words, their lawyers are stuck working for free till the last appeal is over and done...
When my grandfather was young (early 1930's), a typical worker earned $2/day. That worker today earns $160-200/day.
Note that most of that increase is due to an increase in the money supply relative to the goods available to be purchased - in other words, inflation.
Just remember, if you can't balance your budget, inflation is your friend (it'll make it possible to pay back your debts with increasingly worthless dollars/euros/whatever).
On the other hand, if you live within your means, inflation is your enemy....
Sorry buddy, you lost this argument 230 years ago. America would not be the #1 world power without the strong federal government. That's why we have the Constitution instead of the Articles of Confederation.
Two things: he lost the argument 150 years ago, when the Civil War was fought.
And we didn't actually create a strong Federal government in order to become the #1 world power. We created it because the Articles of Confederation were essentially non-functional.
Note that the Constitution creates a severely limited form of Federal government, basically preventing the individual States from acting like they were separate countries - the (nearly) all-powerful Federal government of today was never dreamed of by the Founders (well, maybe Hamilton was hoping we'd go that way - he thought we should have a King)....
How realistically feasible is it to dismantle a federal agency, or any other unpleasant government function for that matter ?
It's basically impossible. Last time I can recall it happening was just post-WW2 with the disestablishment of the OSS.
Which was replaced by the CIA three months later, using many of the former OSS personnel.
And please, pardon my cynicism... it's become an unvoluntary reflex.
That's not cynicism, it's realism....
Face it, governments have never been about surrendering power once they have it. Which is why everyone should be fighting tooth and nail to keep any government from claiming any more than the absolute minimum power required to maintain a functioning society....
The 99.999% percentile though will probably not make it past 100. Supercenturions are fairly rare...
Hmm, 99.999% not making it past 100 implies about 65000 centenarians in the world today.
A quick wikipedia check shows 70,000+ in the USA alone. And as estimated 450,000+ worldwide.
Given that these are people born on or before 1912, it's very likely that a much larger fraction of the, ahh, more recently born will live to 100+.
Note that I don't expect to myself. Cancer really reduces the chances of living to 100. But I wouldn't be surprised if my daughter made it to 100. Assuming, of course, that she doesn't get what I have (there is a hereditary component to my flavour of cancer)....
You are, perhaps, unaware that the budget is a Congressional thing, not a Presidential thing...
Ultimately, the President can send suggestions to Congress, but, for all practical purposes, any Presidential "budget" is "Dead on Arrival" (a phrase used a lot when Reagan was President) once it's sent to Congress.
So, look carefully over the budgets for the last 50 years or so. Then look at the Party controlling Congress over those same 50 years...
Note, for reference, that, Constitutionally, only the House can initiate a spending bill. For practical reasons, historically both House and Senate do budgets in parallel, and then they compromise.
till the Jr. Bush administration, the US Treasury and Government was on target for a ZERO debit, in fact the issues was so alarming that countless research was done on how to handle it ( it's rather interesting thinking that Bush Senior and Clinton were on the track to reduce the federal debit ) http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/ [factcheck.org]
It's also interesting to visit the US Treasury website, and discover that the US National Debt increased every single year of the Clinton Presidency.
Hard to see how we're headed toward zero debt when debt is constantly increasing.
For the record, the last time the Debt decreased was during the Eisenhower Presidency, before I was born.
One actually doesn't want law enforcement agencies to be in the business of deciding the morality of laws - we just want them enforcing them.
Keep in mind that if they get to be selective about enforcement, that they can be selective in ways that you disapprove as well as in ways that you approve.
Obama has pushed hard to increase the NASA budget. It is the house republicans that have been gutting it.
If you call a five year freeze "pushing hard to increase the NASA budget", then, I guess Obama has pushed hard to increase the NASA budget.
Alas, I'm not sure how one can see "freeze it at 2010 levels until I'm out of Office" as an "increase".
It should also be noted that since Obama got into office (and well before the Republicans got control of the House), NASA's budget has declined as a fraction of the total Federal Budget....
I take it your point is that 20% of total subsidies for 20% of all electricity is bad, whereas 6% of all subsidies for Or are you perhaps saying that nuclear gets lots more subsidies (1% per 1% of electricity produced) than solar (6% per Face it, solar gets more subsidies than nuclear. The only reason it's not larger in absolute dollar terms is that solar has so little uptake in the USA that a 48 MW plant is considered "large" by solar standards (while being minute by the standards of any other major power source we use)...
Now, it should be noted for completeness that I'm considering a solar installation on my house. I won't put one in now, since I'd have to cut down trees that shade my roof to do so, but the biggest culprit (an old oak tree) is getting on in years, and will have to be taken down soon. As soon as it's gone, I'll look at solar to offset the increase in my air-conditioning usage resulting from my house no longer being in the shade during the hottest part of the day.
But the only reason I'm even considering solar is that the subsidies are so high that I'd effectively be getting my neighbors to pay for more of my solar installlation than I'd have to pay....
They were planning on doing this but 9/11 happened and they realized that relying on everyone to tell you where they are is a bad idea, this is why they still use radar and will always use it.
First off, they're not expecting verbal position reports from everyone, they're expecting automagic ones from the planes' computers.
Secondly, I gather you haven't read the rule? Yes, they're planning on moving away from radar - there are a bunch of changes in the way things are done that won't work if radar is the primary means of determining the location of aircraft in traffic control areas.
That is for 2006 only. 20% of all Federal energy subsidies went to Nuclear.
Those are some moderately misleading numbers...
~20% of our electricity comes from nuclear power.
That 20% or so consumes a billion or so in subsidies.
Solar, on the other hand, gets ~$400 million in subsidies, and supplies what, exactly? Less than 1% of our electricity? MUCH less than 1%?
A much better way of looking at subsidies is "bang for the buck" - and nuclear seems to actually be producing sommething worth subsidizing to the tune of a billion a year. Which is chump-change compared to the amount of electricity produced.
Whereas solar...just doesn't seem to be getting results, for all that is spent on it....
I can't imagine the headache this will cause for air traffic controllers. They'll have these little blips on their radar... and if it's a small airport these things could make it less safe for local air traffic.
They're not planning on using radar anymore.
Part of this bill is the phasing out of radar as a traffic-control tool and its replacement with gps/satnav/computer coordination of aircraft positions and related information.
Basically, everything will be reporting its position/velocity/etc, and that information will be automagically relayed to everything else.
What effect do these "surface irregularities" have on drag, and therefore on fuel use?
It would be great to cut down on dust damage, but not at the expense of making every flight more costly...
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 0
So they said in the 16th that they could tax income from "whatever source derived." so there's no question the income tax was legal before, just that it wasn't applicable to all sources of income.
Actually, the zinger in the 16th was this part:
without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Which was expressly forbidden in the original Constitution, and which was the part that prevented income taxes.
What the 16th basically did was declare that income taxes weren't covered by "No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken".
Note that this was "clarified" by the 16th to mean the exact opposite of what was originally written....
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
The whine is that people with wealth have access to deductions that people without wealth don't have.
My economic thought experiment ponders. Given there are 1000 units of value and 10 people. If one person owns 900 of those units and the remaining 9 people share the other 100 does each unit become more valuable?
No.
What happens is that the guy who own 900 shares lowers the value of the other people's shares whenever he is forced to sell some of his shares due to increase in stock price.
Which means that the tax hurts the small investor possibly even more than the large one.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's where it gets completely implausible.
Because now they have to move their guys to a position ahead of the truck, in some isolated spot in the middle of nowere, rehearse the mission, then wait for the truck to get there.
And if the truck takes a different route (maybe a truck full of gravel spills and closes the interstate they were planning on taking - yes, that happens, I was delayed getting home the other day for something just that stupid - gravel on the road due to a dumptruck spill), they have to move their guys to another spot, and rehearse again...
Remember, it's impossible to plan the attack more than a few hours ahead, what with the possibility that you're wrong about the exact route (or the driver stops for a quickie at a truckstop). Coupled with the need to move your guys into position after you know the route, it's not quite so easy as one might think....
Or a Tranformers(tm) cartoon.
It should be noted that they did this a while back on Transformers(tm).
ICBMs without nukes would have just been incredibly expensive V2s - a complete waste of funding, since they were never accurate enough to drop an HE bomb where it would do any good.
As to long and bitter winters, it should be noted that we have Montana, Minnesota, Alaska, and Green Bay.
If we can handle going bare-chested and wearing a cheese on our heads to a football game in the snow, I'm pretty sure we could deal with Russian winters ;-)
I can. I was in northern Arizona, about halfway between Nowhere and Noplace - nothing but desert and mountains for a hundred miles in any direction.
On the other hand, the farm my father grew up on, which is way back in the hills of MS, has decent cell service, last time I drove out to the old place.
They got their lawyers to agree to a decent one-time payment plus a share of the final payout in exchange for sticking with the case till all the appeals are done.
In other words, their lawyers are stuck working for free till the last appeal is over and done...
Note that most of that increase is due to an increase in the money supply relative to the goods available to be purchased - in other words, inflation.
Just remember, if you can't balance your budget, inflation is your friend (it'll make it possible to pay back your debts with increasingly worthless dollars/euros/whatever).
On the other hand, if you live within your means, inflation is your enemy....
Two things: he lost the argument 150 years ago, when the Civil War was fought.
And we didn't actually create a strong Federal government in order to become the #1 world power. We created it because the Articles of Confederation were essentially non-functional.
Note that the Constitution creates a severely limited form of Federal government, basically preventing the individual States from acting like they were separate countries - the (nearly) all-powerful Federal government of today was never dreamed of by the Founders (well, maybe Hamilton was hoping we'd go that way - he thought we should have a King)....
It should be noted that before the Civil War, "United States" was plural - "these United States". Afterwards, it was singular - "the United States".
Haven't known many horses, have you?
They're very delicate animals - they can die from drinking water that humans are perfectly fine with, as an example.
Plus there's the whole "so dumb they can be run to death", unlike, say, a mule, which won't put up with crap like that from their rider.
It's basically impossible. Last time I can recall it happening was just post-WW2 with the disestablishment of the OSS.
Which was replaced by the CIA three months later, using many of the former OSS personnel.
That's not cynicism, it's realism....
Face it, governments have never been about surrendering power once they have it. Which is why everyone should be fighting tooth and nail to keep any government from claiming any more than the absolute minimum power required to maintain a functioning society....
Hmm, 99.999% not making it past 100 implies about 65000 centenarians in the world today.
A quick wikipedia check shows 70,000+ in the USA alone. And as estimated 450,000+ worldwide.
Given that these are people born on or before 1912, it's very likely that a much larger fraction of the, ahh, more recently born will live to 100+.
Note that I don't expect to myself. Cancer really reduces the chances of living to 100. But I wouldn't be surprised if my daughter made it to 100. Assuming, of course, that she doesn't get what I have (there is a hereditary component to my flavour of cancer)....
You are, perhaps, unaware that the budget is a Congressional thing, not a Presidential thing...
Ultimately, the President can send suggestions to Congress, but, for all practical purposes, any Presidential "budget" is "Dead on Arrival" (a phrase used a lot when Reagan was President) once it's sent to Congress.
So, look carefully over the budgets for the last 50 years or so. Then look at the Party controlling Congress over those same 50 years...
Note, for reference, that, Constitutionally, only the House can initiate a spending bill. For practical reasons, historically both House and Senate do budgets in parallel, and then they compromise.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
It's also interesting to visit the US Treasury website, and discover that the US National Debt increased every single year of the Clinton Presidency.
Hard to see how we're headed toward zero debt when debt is constantly increasing.
For the record, the last time the Debt decreased was during the Eisenhower Presidency, before I was born.
One actually doesn't want law enforcement agencies to be in the business of deciding the morality of laws - we just want them enforcing them.
Keep in mind that if they get to be selective about enforcement, that they can be selective in ways that you disapprove as well as in ways that you approve.
If you call a five year freeze "pushing hard to increase the NASA budget", then, I guess Obama has pushed hard to increase the NASA budget.
Alas, I'm not sure how one can see "freeze it at 2010 levels until I'm out of Office" as an "increase".
It should also be noted that since Obama got into office (and well before the Republicans got control of the House), NASA's budget has declined as a fraction of the total Federal Budget....
Oh?
I take it your point is that 20% of total subsidies for 20% of all electricity is bad, whereas 6% of all subsidies for Or are you perhaps saying that nuclear gets lots more subsidies (1% per 1% of electricity produced) than solar (6% per Face it, solar gets more subsidies than nuclear. The only reason it's not larger in absolute dollar terms is that solar has so little uptake in the USA that a 48 MW plant is considered "large" by solar standards (while being minute by the standards of any other major power source we use)...
Now, it should be noted for completeness that I'm considering a solar installation on my house. I won't put one in now, since I'd have to cut down trees that shade my roof to do so, but the biggest culprit (an old oak tree) is getting on in years, and will have to be taken down soon. As soon as it's gone, I'll look at solar to offset the increase in my air-conditioning usage resulting from my house no longer being in the shade during the hottest part of the day.
But the only reason I'm even considering solar is that the subsidies are so high that I'd effectively be getting my neighbors to pay for more of my solar installlation than I'd have to pay....
First off, they're not expecting verbal position reports from everyone, they're expecting automagic ones from the planes' computers.
Secondly, I gather you haven't read the rule? Yes, they're planning on moving away from radar - there are a bunch of changes in the way things are done that won't work if radar is the primary means of determining the location of aircraft in traffic control areas.
Those are some moderately misleading numbers...
~20% of our electricity comes from nuclear power.
That 20% or so consumes a billion or so in subsidies.
Solar, on the other hand, gets ~$400 million in subsidies, and supplies what, exactly? Less than 1% of our electricity? MUCH less than 1%?
A much better way of looking at subsidies is "bang for the buck" - and nuclear seems to actually be producing sommething worth subsidizing to the tune of a billion a year. Which is chump-change compared to the amount of electricity produced.
Whereas solar...just doesn't seem to be getting results, for all that is spent on it....
They're not planning on using radar anymore.
Part of this bill is the phasing out of radar as a traffic-control tool and its replacement with gps/satnav/computer coordination of aircraft positions and related information.
Basically, everything will be reporting its position/velocity/etc, and that information will be automagically relayed to everything else.
What could possibly go wrong?
So, who decides what is "needed"?
And how much will it cost to bribe him/her/it to make my chosen career "needed"?
Or, for that matter to make my (hypothetical) ex-wife's career not "needed"?
What effect do these "surface irregularities" have on drag, and therefore on fuel use?
It would be great to cut down on dust damage, but not at the expense of making every flight more costly...
Actually, the zinger in the 16th was this part:
Which was expressly forbidden in the original Constitution, and which was the part that prevented income taxes.
What the 16th basically did was declare that income taxes weren't covered by "No capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken".
Note that this was "clarified" by the 16th to mean the exact opposite of what was originally written....
Such as?
No.
What happens is that the guy who own 900 shares lowers the value of the other people's shares whenever he is forced to sell some of his shares due to increase in stock price.
Which means that the tax hurts the small investor possibly even more than the large one.