There are people in Congress that I admire and who I think are doing a good job. As it happens, my Representative and Senators are among those right now.
"Soldier", as a job, is going to be extremely hard to automate. A job is relatively easy to automate if it involves a known environment and restricted possible actions, and if the machine can be nice and predictable. That's the exact opposite of a battlefield, which is not a known environment (act like it is and the enemy will use that assumption against you), there are a very large number of possible actions, and being predictable can quickly turn into being dead.
Exactly what do you mean by "dependence"? It would be depressing to have to constantly worry if some bureaucrat's decision was going to mess up my life if I did something a little bit wrong or unexpected. Having an assured income from any source would be much less of a problem. I know some people who are on Social Security disability and it doesn't control their lives or make them depressed. The same is true of the people on Social Security old age pensions: they know what's coming in, and it doesn't bother them.
The US welfare system is designed to kick people off welfare when given an excuse, so most people on it are insecure. (It also provides medical coverage that vanishes when someone leaves the system, meaning that many single parents simply can't afford to go from welfare to a low-paying job.) A UBI with medical coverage would be secure, and I don't think people would be depressed on it.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by total helplessness in the face of a major devastating hurricane. That's the sort of thing that we have government for.
I don't understand a lot of what goes on in my car as it is. I drive it anyway. If I get into an accident because the car's got a manufacturing defect, my insurance company will doubtless hit up the manufacturer.
What happens, in my experience, is that I report the accident to my insurance company, and they handle it from there. I don' t need to worry about manufacturer vs. other guy's vs. my liability. The actual legal mechanics aren't visible to me.
Insurance companies aren't liable for accidents in any case. If I cause an accident, I'm liable. It's my legal responsibility to pay what is required. It happens that I pay my insurance company a certain amount of money each month, and they will take care of the actual costs of the accident, but that's an arrangement I have with them. (I'm required to have such an arrangement, to guarantee that I can pay for a certain amount of damage I may be liable for.)
Insurance companies serve one main purpose: they accept financial risk on your behalf. They don't accept liability for you, but rather pay out to cover your liability. They can be useful in other ways: they can give you a good idea of what the expected cost of whatever risks you're running is, and they can handle all the details of who pays what.
What happens when the 80-year-old lady wants to go somewhere in bad weather or under other unfavorable driving conditions? Does the car simply refuse to move? Or will it head out with an increased risk of accident? If the inclement weather causes an accident, who should then be at fault?
This holds in a highly competitive commodity business, but not elsewhere. Elsewhere, costs can come out of profit margins, and eventually from the shareholders.
Slow down. Suppose you do an experiment and get certain results. You describe things in detail, but there's limits on how much detail you can get into. Now, it turns out that someone else follows your protocol meticulously and gets different results. There's some difference between your lab and the other guy's lab that neither of you thought important but which is. Suddenly, you've got something to investigate, and it's only because you published. There's nothing wrong with your original experiment or paper, since it described in detail what you did and what you observed. It's science, not science fiction, and it has that exciting "that's funny" air to it. You aren't yourself responsible for talking someone else into going through your protocol and reporting results.
"If X says it's so, then I agree" is just documenting assumptions. "X reports that the coefficient is 2.0 +/- 0.1 [X, 2013]" (which is the sort of formulation you find) shows the assumption and where it comes from. The paper can then go on assuming that that's what the coefficient is. If further experiments get unexpected results, and it looks in retrospect like a coefficient of 2.2 works better, then people are going to look at [X, 2013] more carefully.
In a hypothetical case, it turns out that X ran a good experiment and wrote it up well, but there was something that X didn't account for that may be obscure. If your experiment relies on X's work, you're testing a prediction based on X's claim, which is basically how science works.
About 520 atmospheric nuclear tests have taken place. You're proposing to exceed that with one launch to orbit. Are you sure you're not missing some problems here? EMP? Destroying satellites? Putting stuff we don't want into various layers of the atmosphere?
Not to mention that this involves producing standardized nuclear devices in very, very large numbers, and each and every one has to be guarded and accounted for. If terrorists get their hand on some kerosene and liquid oxygen from a modern launch, that isn't a major problem. If terrorists get their hands on a little Orion propellant, we do have a major problem.
Most of the work on Orion was done during the search for peaceful nuke uses, which turned out to be really disappointing. We know more and we understand more problems now.
You don't seem to get the idea of "less". Take two phone designs, differing only in that one has an internal battery and one has a replaceable one. The one with the internal battery will have X joules. The one without will have Y joules. X will be a bigger number than Y. This matters in all cases where people don't think Y is big enough, and I've never heard anyone say, "Damn. I'd buy the phone but the battery life is just too long."
The phone will get obsolescent. The software will typically go first, followed by the battery. Do you like to profile your code and optimize the second slowest part as a general rule?
I assume you shoplift your batteries, since you're so insistent about no charge. If not, then you're acknowledging that some expense is reasonable. What you probably want to do with your iPhone, assuming it needs a new battery while it's still worth having as a modern smartphone. The battery is more expensive than the nine-volt in your smoke detector, but that is to be expected, and there are Youtube videos on how to change them yourself. I didn't look for all versions, but there's videos for the 7 and 7 plus, and I'd assume for earlier models. If it's your phone, then I don't care whether you do it yourself or take it into the Apple store or find someone else (there were people other than Apple offering you change your battery if you didn't want to do it yourself).
Now, it's all right to want easily replaceable batteries. It's fine to only buy phones with such batteries. It isn't a moral point. How easy it is to replace the battery is a tradeoff, and different people like different tradeoffs.
Writing templates and getting them right is hard. Using what's in the standard library is a lot easier. There's no need to use "templates, custom allocation, classes, data hiding, etc etc" when it's there right in the standard library.
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You can get a very large quantity of excellent novels from Project Gutenberg free. Why would anyone buy one at a bookstore?
Depends on the corporation. In mine, the walk over and ask routine works pretty well.
Actually, other things being equal, a big SUV is safer than a small car.
There are people in Congress that I admire and who I think are doing a good job. As it happens, my Representative and Senators are among those right now.
"Soldier", as a job, is going to be extremely hard to automate. A job is relatively easy to automate if it involves a known environment and restricted possible actions, and if the machine can be nice and predictable. That's the exact opposite of a battlefield, which is not a known environment (act like it is and the enemy will use that assumption against you), there are a very large number of possible actions, and being predictable can quickly turn into being dead.
Such an argument. There can be no legitimate reasons to disagree with you?
Exactly what do you mean by "dependence"? It would be depressing to have to constantly worry if some bureaucrat's decision was going to mess up my life if I did something a little bit wrong or unexpected. Having an assured income from any source would be much less of a problem. I know some people who are on Social Security disability and it doesn't control their lives or make them depressed. The same is true of the people on Social Security old age pensions: they know what's coming in, and it doesn't bother them.
The US welfare system is designed to kick people off welfare when given an excuse, so most people on it are insecure. (It also provides medical coverage that vanishes when someone leaves the system, meaning that many single parents simply can't afford to go from welfare to a low-paying job.) A UBI with medical coverage would be secure, and I don't think people would be depressed on it.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by total helplessness in the face of a major devastating hurricane. That's the sort of thing that we have government for.
I don't understand a lot of what goes on in my car as it is. I drive it anyway. If I get into an accident because the car's got a manufacturing defect, my insurance company will doubtless hit up the manufacturer.
What happens, in my experience, is that I report the accident to my insurance company, and they handle it from there. I don' t need to worry about manufacturer vs. other guy's vs. my liability. The actual legal mechanics aren't visible to me.
Insurance companies aren't liable for accidents in any case. If I cause an accident, I'm liable. It's my legal responsibility to pay what is required. It happens that I pay my insurance company a certain amount of money each month, and they will take care of the actual costs of the accident, but that's an arrangement I have with them. (I'm required to have such an arrangement, to guarantee that I can pay for a certain amount of damage I may be liable for.)
Insurance companies serve one main purpose: they accept financial risk on your behalf. They don't accept liability for you, but rather pay out to cover your liability. They can be useful in other ways: they can give you a good idea of what the expected cost of whatever risks you're running is, and they can handle all the details of who pays what.
What happens when the 80-year-old lady wants to go somewhere in bad weather or under other unfavorable driving conditions? Does the car simply refuse to move? Or will it head out with an increased risk of accident? If the inclement weather causes an accident, who should then be at fault?
This holds in a highly competitive commodity business, but not elsewhere. Elsewhere, costs can come out of profit margins, and eventually from the shareholders.
How are you supposed to know if the causation is too complex if you don't go looking for it in the first place?
Slow down. Suppose you do an experiment and get certain results. You describe things in detail, but there's limits on how much detail you can get into. Now, it turns out that someone else follows your protocol meticulously and gets different results. There's some difference between your lab and the other guy's lab that neither of you thought important but which is. Suddenly, you've got something to investigate, and it's only because you published. There's nothing wrong with your original experiment or paper, since it described in detail what you did and what you observed. It's science, not science fiction, and it has that exciting "that's funny" air to it. You aren't yourself responsible for talking someone else into going through your protocol and reporting results.
"If X says it's so, then I agree" is just documenting assumptions. "X reports that the coefficient is 2.0 +/- 0.1 [X, 2013]" (which is the sort of formulation you find) shows the assumption and where it comes from. The paper can then go on assuming that that's what the coefficient is. If further experiments get unexpected results, and it looks in retrospect like a coefficient of 2.2 works better, then people are going to look at [X, 2013] more carefully.
In a hypothetical case, it turns out that X ran a good experiment and wrote it up well, but there was something that X didn't account for that may be obscure. If your experiment relies on X's work, you're testing a prediction based on X's claim, which is basically how science works.
I'd love to see that actually done.
Okay, are supernovas fake or astronomers sloppy?
Carbon credits or carbon taxes are a way to use the free market to reduce carbon dioxide emissions efficiently.
Fortunately for you, burning straw men is carbon-neutral.
About 520 atmospheric nuclear tests have taken place. You're proposing to exceed that with one launch to orbit. Are you sure you're not missing some problems here? EMP? Destroying satellites? Putting stuff we don't want into various layers of the atmosphere?
Not to mention that this involves producing standardized nuclear devices in very, very large numbers, and each and every one has to be guarded and accounted for. If terrorists get their hand on some kerosene and liquid oxygen from a modern launch, that isn't a major problem. If terrorists get their hands on a little Orion propellant, we do have a major problem.
Most of the work on Orion was done during the search for peaceful nuke uses, which turned out to be really disappointing. We know more and we understand more problems now.
Yep, gotta stop those hordes of Mexican Muslims coming in.
We have airplanes that can drive, which isn't quite the same thing.
Maybe we could define a COmmon Business-Oriented Language to do this in.
You don't seem to get the idea of "less". Take two phone designs, differing only in that one has an internal battery and one has a replaceable one. The one with the internal battery will have X joules. The one without will have Y joules. X will be a bigger number than Y. This matters in all cases where people don't think Y is big enough, and I've never heard anyone say, "Damn. I'd buy the phone but the battery life is just too long."
The phone will get obsolescent. The software will typically go first, followed by the battery. Do you like to profile your code and optimize the second slowest part as a general rule?
I assume you shoplift your batteries, since you're so insistent about no charge. If not, then you're acknowledging that some expense is reasonable. What you probably want to do with your iPhone, assuming it needs a new battery while it's still worth having as a modern smartphone. The battery is more expensive than the nine-volt in your smoke detector, but that is to be expected, and there are Youtube videos on how to change them yourself. I didn't look for all versions, but there's videos for the 7 and 7 plus, and I'd assume for earlier models. If it's your phone, then I don't care whether you do it yourself or take it into the Apple store or find someone else (there were people other than Apple offering you change your battery if you didn't want to do it yourself).
Now, it's all right to want easily replaceable batteries. It's fine to only buy phones with such batteries. It isn't a moral point. How easy it is to replace the battery is a tradeoff, and different people like different tradeoffs.
Writing templates and getting them right is hard. Using what's in the standard library is a lot easier. There's no need to use "templates, custom allocation, classes, data hiding, etc etc" when it's there right in the standard library.