This is something I've wondered about. I just got back from a trip to Europe where I did almost all of my travel by train. Why is the cost of rail travel in England so much higher than anywhere else in Europe? It makes no sense to me.
Well, that and why does good food in London cost so much more than good food anywhere else (in the world as far as I can tell--I've yet to find a city where good food is more expensive than London) but that's a question for another day...
So you want me to write a full article with references on every slashdot post?
I've worked with a Japanese company for over 8 years and have been to Japan a few times over the years. In addition I keep up on Japanese culture and news (I've studied the language as well). My roommate lived there for two years and I've talked to him about this before.
Here are links if you want: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frotteurism "Crowded trains are a favourite location for chikan and chijo, and a 2001 survey conducted in two Tokyo high-schools revealed that more than 70% of the students had been groped on them."
As for the prevalence of the school girl fetish just try looking at almost any hentai (or go to Japan sometime).
Now, don't get me wrong. I like Japan and Japanese people and like visiting Japan. But they have a long ways to go before they have anything like the gender equality here in the US (they are making progress though).
Obviously shuttle tiles are fragile but what they are attached to is fairly similar to an aircraft skin, especially this aircraft. The tiles of the shuttle are attached to a carbon-carbon composite shell that is rather strong. That piece of foam is believed to have punched a hole through both the tiles and the shell underneath and was confirmed to be possible when they blasted a piece of foam at a similar section of the Enterprise wing that is identical to Columbia's.
That's very misleading. Japanese women are in a completely different situation than other western women--they're really more in the position of women in the 50s or even more similar to women prior to WW2, where they had a predefined role to perform and certainly were not at the same level as men.
It's still a very male dominated society where women are expected to be good wives first and anything else second. And similarly to other male dominated societies women are much less likely to report abuse and rape.
They get groped all the time on trains--so often that there has been talk of making train cars available just for women. They even have a specific word to yell when they are groped (chikan--male groper). And nobody, at least not the guys, think it's that big of a deal.
There's also a huge fetish with young girls in school uniforms over there.
Low speed relative to what? The ground? Certainly not the airplane, since the airplane is moving at 500 mph.
Just look at the Columbia shuttle crash. It struck a piece of foam at a couple of hundred miles an hour which left a huge hole in the wing. It's actually fairly similar too since both the Columbia and this Airbus had shells largely consisting of composite materials.
If that jet slammed into some hail any larger than pea size it could certainly sustain a lot of damage very quickly. Large hail stones can also reach very high altitude--that's actually how they grow to be so large by cycling from low to high altitudes over and over again, growing the whole time. It's just rare for the situations needed to form large hail stones to occur.
When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding... Maybe only a few percentage points, but still- statistics are cold hard ideas, but don't account for personal decisions.
You may feel that way and sure you can make changes to your own personal odds of dying in a car crash but if you drive enough you will almost certainly run into situations that are near misses that are completely out of your control. Personally, I've been in 2 situations in which I narrowly avoided a head-on collision on the interstate (and I'm only 29). In one situation I was driving west on I-80 in Wyoming at night. A car going the opposite direction lost control, crossed the median and went into the shoulder to my right about 1 second before I passed him. If he had lost control just one second later I would have crashed right into him and there would have been nothing I could have done to avoid him (given I only had about 3 seconds to respond and it was extremely difficult to turn sharply without losing control and also difficult to determine my range to the oncoming car accurately).
In another situation I was driving in Nebraska when icing quickly formed on the interstate. It was almost like an on off switch--one second the roads were nice with no traction problems and the next they were ice. Fortunately for me traffic slowed down before I reached the ice and I found out later that night why--just about one or two minutes earlier a car had lost control and crossed the median smashing into an oncoming Ford F150. I'm sure there's nothing the driver of the F150 could have done to avoid the oncoming car and it's possible that the driver that lost control may have had little warning of the road conditions since icing had just started.
Statistics sometimes can be misleading but in this case they are not. If you want to go thousands of miles the safest way to do it is to fly it. There is an enormous difference in the safety of driving 2000 miles and flying it and there's only so much you can do to change your personal odds of dying or getting injured in a car wreck.
I think the best reply is to simply use a few recent quotes from GM executives:
"GM R&D chief Larry Burns . . . now wishes GM hadn't killed the plug-in hybrid EV1 prototype his engineers had on the road a decade ago: 'If we could turn back the hands of time,' says Burns, 'we could have had the Chevy Volt 10 years earlier.' (http://www.newsweek.com/id/36484/Page/3)
Rick Wagoner (former CEO of GM) expressed regret over canceling the EV-1 project and not continuing research on hybrid technologies (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97826113&ft=1&f=1006 about 1 minute into the audio clip)
----
The point is they should not have stopped research on fuel efficient cars just because there was no longer any political pressure on them to do so (previously they had an agreement with the Clinton administration to research fuel efficient technology in return for no increase in federal fuel economy standards and an infusion of cash to finance the research). Instead they bet the company on oil remaining relatively cheap and consumer demand for SUVs to remain high.
Not if they followed the Toyota model. Toyota initially lost money on the Prius but over time were able to lower production costs to the point that not only could they produce them at a profit but could not make them fast enough to meet demand (at least not up until the recession that hit).
You know, there are some significant differences between those two instances:
1) I can google 'kent state' and quickly find the relevant wikipedia article from work without risk of reprisal (unless my boss sees me goofing off...) even though I'm using a public, static IP address that could easily be tracked to my computer (at least it could be easily tracked if I was going through the great firewall of China). I'd love to see someone in China be able to google 'Tianamen' and be able to click on the wikipedia article from their job with as much ease and lack of danger as I can here in the US. 2) Just to get a taste of the difference between cultures, on the wikipedia article for the Kent State shootings the photographer received the biggest prize in journalism for the photo he took of the shooting (the same year the picture was taken, not years after the fact). It's impossible to imagine a Chinese photographer receiving a prestigious Chinese award back in 1989 for publishing a photo of Tianamen Square. 3) The day after the Kent State shootings (were 4 died and 9 were injured) there was a nationwide protest by millions of students that effectively closed a number of universities. After the initial shooting no further deaths and certainly no executions occurred. After Tienamen Square, captured workers were quickly executed although students were not. 4) The scale of the Kent State shootings is dwarfed by the Tienaman Square event. The official Chinese estimate of deaths in Tienamen Square was 241 dead with over 7000 injured (other estimates are in the thousands but because everything was handled very secretly by the Chinese government it is impossible for anyone to know for sure). As previously mentioned, Kent State was 4 dead with 9 injured. Also, nobody disappeared in Kent State. Whatever happened to that guy that stood in front of the tank? The last thing anyone ever saw was him being dragged away by the police. It is believed he was executed because the government was never able to produce him to quite the international criticism it was receiving. 5) Tienamen Square involved the state's army. The Kent State incident involved Ohio's National Guard which is a rather different force. It would be unheard of to use the federal army to suppress a riot or for any civil purpose. The local national guard is a very different force, used to help with natural disasters and, in rare cases, to help with crowd control in riots. One big difference is the national guard doesn't have tanks... 6) Coverage of Kent State was not suppressed in the American news at the time nor afterward. It still is unacceptable to talk about Tienamen Square on TV or newspapers in China except with great care and few words.
Of course a peaceful transition is the best way. It's also quite possible (just see Taiwan or South Korea who each made a similar transition on a much smaller scale).
It will be more difficult for China to mimic either of those countries I believe, mainly due to the enormous size of China's government and many powerful interests that will not want to let go of any of their power (especially the police).
So long as the local police have such an iron grip on local affairs I don't see how any significant change is possible in China (at least not peacefully).
A similar thing happened to me the other day. I needed to compile some code on a really old, buggy version of gcc (2.96). The compiler would segfault on certain printf() statements (of all things)--namely when using the %z parameter.
The solution? Turn off -Wall. Who needs warnings anyway.
I suppose. But this wasn't any 747. While most wouldn't recognize exactly which 747 it was, it should have been obvious that it was not a commercial 747. That in and of itself would have given some relief to me since the likelihood of a government owned 747 getting hijacked is virtually nil.
Add in the two F-16s and it should be obvious that the public was not in harm's way (since it would have been shot down before getting close to those buildings regardless of who's on board if it were hijacked).
Wow, that article is so convincing (not). It asserts over and over again that Americans tolerated piracy early on with roughly zero references to back up that assertion.
However, I do have some references that I can cite that refute that assertion:
"To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;"
If the people were so enamored by pirates why did they write a clause to explicitly give Congress the power to punish pirates?
Also, back in that period of time one source of great animosity was towards the British practice of commandeering American merchant vessels at sea and forcing their sailors to join their navy.
Kidnapping and ransoms for sailors was never tolerated in the US.
If these pirates are 'nation builders' then why do you see comments like this by other Somalies:
"It is a good start," said Yasin Mohamoud, a technician in Mogadishu. "Since the pirates arose in our seas, skyrocketing inflation has hit our country."
"It would be good if the American navy would destroy the rest of them," he added.
And when the 'nation builders' are boarding any ship regardless of how far away they are from their coast and regardless of their cargo (like the recent attempt of hijacking the US shipment of food aid to impoverished Kenya hundreds of miles from the Somali coastline) then there's really no moral leg left to stand on. They are now no more than a band of organized criminals at this point solely interested in making money (and have said that they are only interested in making money).
I wouldn't want that if, for no other reason, due to the piracy off of Somalia. It would be far too easy for them to simply steal the nuclear fuel if they were nuclear powered.
Heck, there's concern about even arming the crews because they're afraid this would just encourage pirates to steal the weapons.
Re:LED is a viable option in 40 Watt replacement
on
CFLs Causing Utility Woes
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Still, as demonstrated on the Myth Busters a while back, LED bulbs can be turned on and off many more times than other kind of bulb. This can make them last substantially longer than anything else and should be factored when considering their efficiency and cost I believe.
It looks like there's a few ways of creating white LEDs, including using separate red, green and blue LEDs (although this is rarely mass produced) and using near UV emitting LEDs in a similar fashion that you described, which results in a better color spectrum but with the risk of emitting UV light if there's a manufacturing flaw.
In addition, I learned why white LEDs get so hot--it's due to the Stokes shift which happens when the blue LED light is shifted to white via the phosphor coating.
Yes, gyroscopic effects exist. They affect keeping your bike upright the same way finding change on the street affects your income: Not enough to be mentioned in a reasonable discussion.
I wouldn't say that. Yes, under normal circumstances you don't need to rely on gyroscopic forces. However, try riding a bike on ice sometime. There's a very noticeable difference between the ease of riding a mountain bike on ice than a road bike, mainly due to the much greater gyroscopic force generated by the more massive wheels of the mountain bike. I suppose you can ask whether it's reasonable to ride a bike on ice but I do it a couple of times every year (not that that necessarily makes it reasonable, but I digress...).
You can also observe this difference by riding a mountain bike without using your hands versus riding a road bike in similar fashion.
No, Hoover tried to keep the federal budget balanced. He cut spending and raised taxes at a time of recession and let banks failed. Ron Paul would also want to balance the federal budget immediately (somehow without raising taxes in the process) and is also perfectly willing to let the banks failed.
I consider the Republican party's economic policy of the past 8 years to be about as far away from the economic policy of France and Spain as you can get and still be in the same universe of free market economies which is why I used them by name.
Namely, the SEC and FIC are the main additions from the post depression era. One key regulation that was removed occurred in 2001 that certainly would have come into play in some of the activity of the current crisis if it still existed (sorry, will have to check the Frontline episode for the specific regulation, I don't recall at this moment--I'll try to check later and reply again).
Another rule that was allowed to expire (I believe also in 2001, could have been 2002) was the provision added during Bush Sr's presidency, the 'pay as you go' provision which forced any additional spending to be matched by either a tax increase or spending cut elsewhere. The Clinton administration had to follow this rule (luckily for us) and this certainly contributed to the budget becoming balanced by the end of his presidency.
The top stock holders are typically on the board of a company and thus direct their policy.
As I said, in Richardson's case he didn't resign. He had no position to resign from, except for governor of New Mexico (you have to go through the nomination process and Congress before you have a position you can resign from). He didn't resign at all (or get fired or whatever).
Also, a 'straw man arugment' is a "misrepresentation of an opponent's position." I don't see how I'm doing that at all.
People tend to not use arguments that counter their own arguments simultaneously (the most similar I can think of would be to argue both your side and play devil's advocate simultaneously). By not playing the devil's advocate I'm not using a straw man argument. If that was true then virtually all arguments anyone ever uses is a straw man argument.
A straw man argument is considered a terrible argument because it uses a logical fallacy (by proposing a somewhat fictitious counterargument that nobody believes). In your counter example you claim that some portion of the regulations are bad. That's completely compatible with my point of view however in that it wasn't due to bad regulations that we are experiencing the current financial crisis so that is irrelevant. From everything that I've read companies like AIG and Lehman Brothers exploited a hole in the regulations in order to create securities that were completely unregulated and ended up making their companies insolvent. That (and our crisis) had nothing to do with regulations that arguably caused slower growth.
I'm not sure how you're getting that either. Everyone that knows him say he's extremely intelligent. However, his undergraduate degree was in government and Asian studies and his masters was in international economics and East Asian studies (he studied Chinese and Japanese).
The way I've seen 'quant' used was in regards to physicists that changed professions to financial analysts and investors.
I didn't say it could be pinned on a particular political party, but to an idea (basically, deregulation is good and the government is the enemy).
We put in place many regulations after the Great Depression that worked great until we weakened them over the past three decades and now we are going to strengthen them again which will surely prevent another crisis like we're facing now (until they are weakened sometime in the future by people of similar mind as the ones that weakened them recently).
These companies did not know what the heck they were doing. Giants like AIG relied on their AAA credit for their business model, not the belief that the government would rescue them if they failed (they never believed they would lose their AAA rating much less fail). The stockholders of AIG lost their shirts on this, it's nuts to think they would do this on purpose. Rather, they made some fundamentally bad assumptions (like they would always have AAA credit and that the housing market would continue to grow) and believed that even with bad assumptions they were protected by these complicated financial instruments they had devised.
You're also comparing apples to oranges. Richardson never was nominated and thus never resigned (he simply pulled his name from consideration). This has happened under previous administrations as well. You're also completely missing the differences in motivation, in the case of Bush's economic adviser he resigned since nobody was listening to him while in the case of Richardson they were trying to avoid public controversy.
Then why is France and others in far better financial shape than we are (heck, even China is in a better position)? Are they running huge deficits? Nope. Do they have massive federal debts? Nope. Do they have problems with getting everyone insurance? Nope. People living there also have about twice as many vacation days as we do in America.
Sure, they pay more in taxes but they also get a lot in return (like superior infrastructure, transit, health care, etc) and a more stable economy to boot. It's nothing like 1984 and A Brave New World (try going over there to see for yourself).
I made a statement of fact in point one, followed by two that are technically opinions but if not correct nearly so (both economic and social pressure can be more qualitative than quantitative when using 'affected most/least').
As for Bush's economic adviser I based my remarks on his own remarks on the recent Frontline episode which interviewed him.
How the heck is that a straw man argument?
You're also mistaken about Geithner--as a sibling poster mentioned he never worked for Goldman-Sachs (his previous job was being the president of the Federal Reserve bank at New York City). Geithner's pick was a very non-controversial pick (and a fairly obvious one) due to his intimate knowledge of the financial crisis and the respect he has from many financial experts.
There is no question that with more regulation of companies like AIG (who were essentially acting like banks without the regulations banks must follow) they could not have overextended themselves to the degree that they did. There is also no question that there are more financial regulations in France et. al than here.
Slashdot Mirror
This is something I've wondered about. I just got back from a trip to Europe where I did almost all of my travel by train. Why is the cost of rail travel in England so much higher than anywhere else in Europe? It makes no sense to me.
Well, that and why does good food in London cost so much more than good food anywhere else (in the world as far as I can tell--I've yet to find a city where good food is more expensive than London) but that's a question for another day...
So you want me to write a full article with references on every slashdot post?
I've worked with a Japanese company for over 8 years and have been to Japan a few times over the years. In addition I keep up on Japanese culture and news (I've studied the language as well). My roommate lived there for two years and I've talked to him about this before.
Here are links if you want:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frotteurism
"Crowded trains are a favourite location for chikan and chijo, and a 2001 survey conducted in two Tokyo high-schools revealed that more than 70% of the students had been groped on them."
As for the prevalence of the school girl fetish just try looking at almost any hentai (or go to Japan sometime).
Here's an anecdotal link (there's plenty more if you want) written by a woman of Japanese descent raised in America visiting Japan:
http://www.nwasianweekly.com/2009/28_13/pages/travel_japan.html
Now, don't get me wrong. I like Japan and Japanese people and like visiting Japan. But they have a long ways to go before they have anything like the gender equality here in the US (they are making progress though).
Obviously shuttle tiles are fragile but what they are attached to is fairly similar to an aircraft skin, especially this aircraft. The tiles of the shuttle are attached to a carbon-carbon composite shell that is rather strong. That piece of foam is believed to have punched a hole through both the tiles and the shell underneath and was confirmed to be possible when they blasted a piece of foam at a similar section of the Enterprise wing that is identical to Columbia's.
That's very misleading. Japanese women are in a completely different situation than other western women--they're really more in the position of women in the 50s or even more similar to women prior to WW2, where they had a predefined role to perform and certainly were not at the same level as men.
It's still a very male dominated society where women are expected to be good wives first and anything else second. And similarly to other male dominated societies women are much less likely to report abuse and rape.
They get groped all the time on trains--so often that there has been talk of making train cars available just for women. They even have a specific word to yell when they are groped (chikan--male groper). And nobody, at least not the guys, think it's that big of a deal.
There's also a huge fetish with young girls in school uniforms over there.
Low speed relative to what? The ground? Certainly not the airplane, since the airplane is moving at 500 mph.
Just look at the Columbia shuttle crash. It struck a piece of foam at a couple of hundred miles an hour which left a huge hole in the wing. It's actually fairly similar too since both the Columbia and this Airbus had shells largely consisting of composite materials.
If that jet slammed into some hail any larger than pea size it could certainly sustain a lot of damage very quickly. Large hail stones can also reach very high altitude--that's actually how they grow to be so large by cycling from low to high altitudes over and over again, growing the whole time. It's just rare for the situations needed to form large hail stones to occur.
When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding... Maybe only a few percentage points, but still- statistics are cold hard ideas, but don't account for personal decisions.
You may feel that way and sure you can make changes to your own personal odds of dying in a car crash but if you drive enough you will almost certainly run into situations that are near misses that are completely out of your control. Personally, I've been in 2 situations in which I narrowly avoided a head-on collision on the interstate (and I'm only 29). In one situation I was driving west on I-80 in Wyoming at night. A car going the opposite direction lost control, crossed the median and went into the shoulder to my right about 1 second before I passed him. If he had lost control just one second later I would have crashed right into him and there would have been nothing I could have done to avoid him (given I only had about 3 seconds to respond and it was extremely difficult to turn sharply without losing control and also difficult to determine my range to the oncoming car accurately).
In another situation I was driving in Nebraska when icing quickly formed on the interstate. It was almost like an on off switch--one second the roads were nice with no traction problems and the next they were ice. Fortunately for me traffic slowed down before I reached the ice and I found out later that night why--just about one or two minutes earlier a car had lost control and crossed the median smashing into an oncoming Ford F150. I'm sure there's nothing the driver of the F150 could have done to avoid the oncoming car and it's possible that the driver that lost control may have had little warning of the road conditions since icing had just started.
Statistics sometimes can be misleading but in this case they are not. If you want to go thousands of miles the safest way to do it is to fly it. There is an enormous difference in the safety of driving 2000 miles and flying it and there's only so much you can do to change your personal odds of dying or getting injured in a car wreck.
Since when are kids stashing 35,000 pirated DVDs in warehouses?
Seriously, even if I was a kid pirating DVDs this wouldn't scare me at all. Why the heck would it?
I think the best reply is to simply use a few recent quotes from GM executives:
"GM R&D chief Larry Burns . . . now wishes GM hadn't killed the plug-in hybrid EV1 prototype his engineers had on the road a decade ago: 'If we could turn back the hands of time,' says Burns, 'we could have had the Chevy Volt 10 years earlier.' (http://www.newsweek.com/id/36484/Page/3)
Rick Wagoner (former CEO of GM) expressed regret over canceling the EV-1 project and not continuing research on hybrid technologies (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=97826113&ft=1&f=1006 about 1 minute into the audio clip)
----
The point is they should not have stopped research on fuel efficient cars just because there was no longer any political pressure on them to do so (previously they had an agreement with the Clinton administration to research fuel efficient technology in return for no increase in federal fuel economy standards and an infusion of cash to finance the research). Instead they bet the company on oil remaining relatively cheap and consumer demand for SUVs to remain high.
Not if they followed the Toyota model. Toyota initially lost money on the Prius but over time were able to lower production costs to the point that not only could they produce them at a profit but could not make them fast enough to meet demand (at least not up until the recession that hit).
You know, there are some significant differences between those two instances:
1) I can google 'kent state' and quickly find the relevant wikipedia article from work without risk of reprisal (unless my boss sees me goofing off...) even though I'm using a public, static IP address that could easily be tracked to my computer (at least it could be easily tracked if I was going through the great firewall of China). I'd love to see someone in China be able to google 'Tianamen' and be able to click on the wikipedia article from their job with as much ease and lack of danger as I can here in the US.
2) Just to get a taste of the difference between cultures, on the wikipedia article for the Kent State shootings the photographer received the biggest prize in journalism for the photo he took of the shooting (the same year the picture was taken, not years after the fact). It's impossible to imagine a Chinese photographer receiving a prestigious Chinese award back in 1989 for publishing a photo of Tianamen Square.
3) The day after the Kent State shootings (were 4 died and 9 were injured) there was a nationwide protest by millions of students that effectively closed a number of universities. After the initial shooting no further deaths and certainly no executions occurred. After Tienamen Square, captured workers were quickly executed although students were not.
4) The scale of the Kent State shootings is dwarfed by the Tienaman Square event. The official Chinese estimate of deaths in Tienamen Square was 241 dead with over 7000 injured (other estimates are in the thousands but because everything was handled very secretly by the Chinese government it is impossible for anyone to know for sure). As previously mentioned, Kent State was 4 dead with 9 injured. Also, nobody disappeared in Kent State. Whatever happened to that guy that stood in front of the tank? The last thing anyone ever saw was him being dragged away by the police. It is believed he was executed because the government was never able to produce him to quite the international criticism it was receiving.
5) Tienamen Square involved the state's army. The Kent State incident involved Ohio's National Guard which is a rather different force. It would be unheard of to use the federal army to suppress a riot or for any civil purpose. The local national guard is a very different force, used to help with natural disasters and, in rare cases, to help with crowd control in riots. One big difference is the national guard doesn't have tanks...
6) Coverage of Kent State was not suppressed in the American news at the time nor afterward. It still is unacceptable to talk about Tienamen Square on TV or newspapers in China except with great care and few words.
Of course a peaceful transition is the best way. It's also quite possible (just see Taiwan or South Korea who each made a similar transition on a much smaller scale).
It will be more difficult for China to mimic either of those countries I believe, mainly due to the enormous size of China's government and many powerful interests that will not want to let go of any of their power (especially the police).
So long as the local police have such an iron grip on local affairs I don't see how any significant change is possible in China (at least not peacefully).
A similar thing happened to me the other day. I needed to compile some code on a really old, buggy version of gcc (2.96). The compiler would segfault on certain printf() statements (of all things)--namely when using the %z parameter.
The solution? Turn off -Wall. Who needs warnings anyway.
I suppose. But this wasn't any 747. While most wouldn't recognize exactly which 747 it was, it should have been obvious that it was not a commercial 747. That in and of itself would have given some relief to me since the likelihood of a government owned 747 getting hijacked is virtually nil.
Add in the two F-16s and it should be obvious that the public was not in harm's way (since it would have been shot down before getting close to those buildings regardless of who's on board if it were hijacked).
Wow, that article is so convincing (not). It asserts over and over again that Americans tolerated piracy early on with roughly zero references to back up that assertion.
However, I do have some references that I can cite that refute that assertion:
First, let's start with the US Constitution:
Article 1, Section 8, Clause 10
"To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations;"
If the people were so enamored by pirates why did they write a clause to explicitly give Congress the power to punish pirates?
Also, back in that period of time one source of great animosity was towards the British practice of commandeering American merchant vessels at sea and forcing their sailors to join their navy.
Kidnapping and ransoms for sailors was never tolerated in the US.
If these pirates are 'nation builders' then why do you see comments like this by other Somalies:
"It is a good start," said Yasin Mohamoud, a technician in Mogadishu. "Since the pirates arose in our seas, skyrocketing inflation has hit our country."
"It would be good if the American navy would destroy the rest of them," he added.
From this article.
And when the 'nation builders' are boarding any ship regardless of how far away they are from their coast and regardless of their cargo (like the recent attempt of hijacking the US shipment of food aid to impoverished Kenya hundreds of miles from the Somali coastline) then there's really no moral leg left to stand on. They are now no more than a band of organized criminals at this point solely interested in making money (and have said that they are only interested in making money).
I wouldn't want that if, for no other reason, due to the piracy off of Somalia. It would be far too easy for them to simply steal the nuclear fuel if they were nuclear powered.
Heck, there's concern about even arming the crews because they're afraid this would just encourage pirates to steal the weapons.
Still, as demonstrated on the Myth Busters a while back, LED bulbs can be turned on and off many more times than other kind of bulb. This can make them last substantially longer than anything else and should be factored when considering their efficiency and cost I believe.
It looks like there's a few ways of creating white LEDs, including using separate red, green and blue LEDs (although this is rarely mass produced) and using near UV emitting LEDs in a similar fashion that you described, which results in a better color spectrum but with the risk of emitting UV light if there's a manufacturing flaw.
I learned this from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-emitting_diode#White_light
In addition, I learned why white LEDs get so hot--it's due to the Stokes shift which happens when the blue LED light is shifted to white via the phosphor coating.
Yes, gyroscopic effects exist. They affect keeping your bike upright the same way finding change on the street affects your income: Not enough to be mentioned in a reasonable discussion.
I wouldn't say that. Yes, under normal circumstances you don't need to rely on gyroscopic forces. However, try riding a bike on ice sometime. There's a very noticeable difference between the ease of riding a mountain bike on ice than a road bike, mainly due to the much greater gyroscopic force generated by the more massive wheels of the mountain bike. I suppose you can ask whether it's reasonable to ride a bike on ice but I do it a couple of times every year (not that that necessarily makes it reasonable, but I digress...).
You can also observe this difference by riding a mountain bike without using your hands versus riding a road bike in similar fashion.
No, Hoover tried to keep the federal budget balanced. He cut spending and raised taxes at a time of recession and let banks failed. Ron Paul would also want to balance the federal budget immediately (somehow without raising taxes in the process) and is also perfectly willing to let the banks failed.
I consider the Republican party's economic policy of the past 8 years to be about as far away from the economic policy of France and Spain as you can get and still be in the same universe of free market economies which is why I used them by name.
Namely, the SEC and FIC are the main additions from the post depression era. One key regulation that was removed occurred in 2001 that certainly would have come into play in some of the activity of the current crisis if it still existed (sorry, will have to check the Frontline episode for the specific regulation, I don't recall at this moment--I'll try to check later and reply again).
Another rule that was allowed to expire (I believe also in 2001, could have been 2002) was the provision added during Bush Sr's presidency, the 'pay as you go' provision which forced any additional spending to be matched by either a tax increase or spending cut elsewhere. The Clinton administration had to follow this rule (luckily for us) and this certainly contributed to the budget becoming balanced by the end of his presidency.
The top stock holders are typically on the board of a company and thus direct their policy.
As I said, in Richardson's case he didn't resign. He had no position to resign from, except for governor of New Mexico (you have to go through the nomination process and Congress before you have a position you can resign from). He didn't resign at all (or get fired or whatever).
Also, a 'straw man arugment' is a "misrepresentation of an opponent's position." I don't see how I'm doing that at all.
People tend to not use arguments that counter their own arguments simultaneously (the most similar I can think of would be to argue both your side and play devil's advocate simultaneously). By not playing the devil's advocate I'm not using a straw man argument. If that was true then virtually all arguments anyone ever uses is a straw man argument.
A straw man argument is considered a terrible argument because it uses a logical fallacy (by proposing a somewhat fictitious counterargument that nobody believes). In your counter example you claim that some portion of the regulations are bad. That's completely compatible with my point of view however in that it wasn't due to bad regulations that we are experiencing the current financial crisis so that is irrelevant. From everything that I've read companies like AIG and Lehman Brothers exploited a hole in the regulations in order to create securities that were completely unregulated and ended up making their companies insolvent. That (and our crisis) had nothing to do with regulations that arguably caused slower growth.
Ron Paul would do exactly what Hoover would do (seriously). I do not see an improvement.
I'm not sure how you're getting that either. Everyone that knows him say he's extremely intelligent. However, his undergraduate degree was in government and Asian studies and his masters was in international economics and East Asian studies (he studied Chinese and Japanese).
The way I've seen 'quant' used was in regards to physicists that changed professions to financial analysts and investors.
I didn't say it could be pinned on a particular political party, but to an idea (basically, deregulation is good and the government is the enemy).
We put in place many regulations after the Great Depression that worked great until we weakened them over the past three decades and now we are going to strengthen them again which will surely prevent another crisis like we're facing now (until they are weakened sometime in the future by people of similar mind as the ones that weakened them recently).
These companies did not know what the heck they were doing. Giants like AIG relied on their AAA credit for their business model, not the belief that the government would rescue them if they failed (they never believed they would lose their AAA rating much less fail). The stockholders of AIG lost their shirts on this, it's nuts to think they would do this on purpose. Rather, they made some fundamentally bad assumptions (like they would always have AAA credit and that the housing market would continue to grow) and believed that even with bad assumptions they were protected by these complicated financial instruments they had devised.
You're also comparing apples to oranges. Richardson never was nominated and thus never resigned (he simply pulled his name from consideration). This has happened under previous administrations as well. You're also completely missing the differences in motivation, in the case of Bush's economic adviser he resigned since nobody was listening to him while in the case of Richardson they were trying to avoid public controversy.
Then why is France and others in far better financial shape than we are (heck, even China is in a better position)? Are they running huge deficits? Nope. Do they have massive federal debts? Nope. Do they have problems with getting everyone insurance? Nope. People living there also have about twice as many vacation days as we do in America.
Sure, they pay more in taxes but they also get a lot in return (like superior infrastructure, transit, health care, etc) and a more stable economy to boot. It's nothing like 1984 and A Brave New World (try going over there to see for yourself).
I'm also not seeing how I'm using a straw man argument (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man)
I made a statement of fact in point one, followed by two that are technically opinions but if not correct nearly so (both economic and social pressure can be more qualitative than quantitative when using 'affected most/least').
As for Bush's economic adviser I based my remarks on his own remarks on the recent Frontline episode which interviewed him.
How the heck is that a straw man argument?
You're also mistaken about Geithner--as a sibling poster mentioned he never worked for Goldman-Sachs (his previous job was being the president of the Federal Reserve bank at New York City). Geithner's pick was a very non-controversial pick (and a fairly obvious one) due to his intimate knowledge of the financial crisis and the respect he has from many financial experts.
There is no question that with more regulation of companies like AIG (who were essentially acting like banks without the regulations banks must follow) they could not have overextended themselves to the degree that they did. There is also no question that there are more financial regulations in France et. al than here.