To continue to be pedantic, yes, we haven't faced any significant invasion since the War of 1812, the most damaging attack being on September 11, 2001. The US military has been, when it had to be, extremely successful for the last century. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise. While the Navy had considered attacks on Pearl Harbor, and had done two in Fleet Problems, they thought those attacks would be when the Fleet was at sea. Roosevelt wanted an excuse to enter the war against Germany, and had been half-heartedly trying to avoid a war with Japan.
I'm basing what I'm saying about race on observation and reading. I was around when it was made illegal for private businesses to discriminate. You're spouting your own ideology. While there was government discrimination (although the military was integrating before the 1960s) the primary discrimination was private. If you were black, you wouldn't be allowed into various business places. You couldn't get a loan to buy a house in a white neighborhood. You were very restricted in the number of colleges that would take you, no matter what your qualifications. You would not be eligible for certain jobs. These are not things you could get around by strength of character, because they were determined by your skin color. This is entirely aside from the social rejection and death threats you'd get if you tried doing some things, or being seen as a black (in those days, Negro or colored person). Blacks who were successful would be seen as "a credit to their race" and expected to act as such.
There was perhaps some progress, but it was slow. The Civil Rights Act essentially forced people to deal with blacks as individuals on a daily basis, if they were going to do business. The opened things up. It's been rough going ever since, but there has been improvement.
And, of course, you come along and say that your favorite solution would have worked best and it's never been tried. The empirical evidence suggests that it would not have worked, because in areas where there was no government intervention it wasn't working. Society is complicated and does not conform to ideologies.
As far as carbon taxes go, the market is a wonderful economic structure. It works superbly when all costs are accounted for. However, it leads to bad things when this isn't the case. If I'm running a business, I have to balance costs against profits. If I pay all the costs associated with what I'm doing, then I'll tailor my business to them, and the market will ensure a good outcome for the economy as a whole. If I pay only some of the costs for something, and someone else pays the rest of the costs, then in the search of maximum profit (normally a good thing) I'm going to do a lot of whatever it is that pushes costs onto other people, and the economy will suffer.
In this case, releasing carbon dioxide from sequestered carbon is hurting things. It imposes costs on people who don't make the decisions, so I'm going to burn more fossil fuels because it's economical for me. The market is completely incapable of adjusting to this, because the additional costs don't go into any market-based calculations. If there is a tax on burning fossil fuels, then I make decisions according to the direct costs and the tax. Assuming the tax fairly represents the costs other people are paying, I shift my fossil fuel use to what produces the most profit for everyone.
To deal with global warming, we have to reduce carbon emissions somehow. Right now, global warming is an economic externality. One of the important roles of the government in the market is imposing penalties on externalities so that the market can sort things out.
The extreme racial disparities of the pre-1960s society were at least somewhat ameliorated by government intervention. It was a stable system of racial oppression. I'm not at all convinced that what was appropriate then is appropriate now, particularly since people have had decades to learn to game the system, but restricting freedom of association was very useful then.
As a general rule, I'm not interested in defending freedom to be an asshole per se. I support free speech, which enables some people to be real assholes, because of its benefits. I don't consider free association to be all that important in running a public business, compared to the freedom it gives business types to be assholes.
We can measure the health of the economy in terms of what is produced or how well-off people in general are. Corporations, as a rule, don't act as if they care about the general welfare, and the general welfare is not always served by what they do. A corporation that wants to make money by making a better product cheaper is, by doing that, helping the general welfare. A corporation that makes large profits that go almost exclusively to the 1% isn't. There's also a lot of money to be made by being a successful parasite on the economy.
If jobs leave the country, and we've got a lot of unemployed people with useful skills, some people and corporations will see that as an opportunity.
Workers as a whole have been screwed for decades now, sharing little or nothing of the growth of the economy, but I really don't think Trump is the answer. The workers need some help from the government, whether it's more direct assistance or more support of unions, and I don't expect Trump to do that.
To overgeneralize greatly, the problem with lower-class white males right now is that they're losing power as demographics change, they're economically screwed, and they're blaming the wrong people.
To be fair, both candidates campaigned to win states for the Electoral College, not to win the popular vote. We don't know that the result would have been the same with different campaigns.
The idea behind the luminiferous aether was that, if light was a wave, it had to be a wave in something. It wasn't a particularly good explanation even back then, since it hypothesized an ultra-rigid material that suffused all space and had no effect on the motion of planets. As far as I can tell, it existed only to explain light being a wave.
Dark matter, on the other hand, explains several things reasonably well. It started as a way to explain galactic rotation curves, but we also see gravitational lensing where there appears to be no or insufficient matter. There's other things it explains that I don't understand as well. At this point, we've observed it (by gravitational lensing) and it is a fairly useful hypothesis.
However, since you mentioned the expansion of the Universe, you are likely referring to dark energy, which is a less-supported hypothesis.
From your summary, it sounds like the paper attempts to explain galactic rotation curves. Does it have anything to say about gravitational lensing where there's no apparent matter?
As it happens, there's ice on land, particularly Greenland and Antarctica. If that melts, there's more water in the oceans. If land ice slides into the sea, sea levels go up.
It seems to me that something that relates quotations that are allegedly from one person and returns "never said that on the public record" or "said that in this context" could be useful and potentially doable.
Trayvon Martin decided to physically engage and later assault George Zimmerman.
Okay, picture this. You're on an innocent snack run, and a guy with a gun starts following you, intentions unknown but probably unfriendly and potentially downright hostile and murderous. What do you do?
If, in that encounter, Martin had killed Zimmerman, he could have claimed Zimmerman threatened him with the gun and he had to defend himself, and he should have been acquitted for the exact same reason Zimmerman was, that the State couldn't prove it wasn't self-defense.
If it looked like a suitcase bomb, his English teacher needs to be fired and blacklisted. If something might be a bomb, you call the office and do an orderly evacuation. You do NOT put it in your desk drawer and continue teaching.
Solar time doesn't work well with standard clocks, as due to the shape of the Earth's orbit the time between one noon and the rest is usually not 24 hours exactly. Could we compromise with local mean time?
Technically, the US is on the metric system; we just don't use the units directly. An inch is legally defined as 25.4mm, for example. The military and scientific communities use metric directly. I wish engineering and manufacturing did also, because I'm tired of having to remember when to switch between internal display/input measurements.
Where I live, near the winter solstice I can't leave for work and come back home with the sun out both times. My workday and commute together are too long. Jimmying with time zones isn't going to help (heck, I set my own schedule, so I don't need to pay attention anyway.)
A liter split 8 ways is 125 ml each. Now, tell me how long it takes to split a gallon 10 ways.
Most people prefer to express temperature in a slight variant of Kelvin, where 0 is the freezing point of water, and that works fine. I can't tell the difference if it warms up 1F or 1K. 0F is an arbitrary number, basically the lowest temperature that Fahrenheit guy could get in his lab. 0C is a meaningful temperature. In the winter, it's useful to know whether the temperature is positive or negative Celsius, whereas the difference between 2F and -2F is pretty minor and insignificant.
The cup-to-gallon conversion is easy. No problem. Now, how much does a cubic foot of water weigh? I know how much a cubic meter of water weighs: one metric ton. (Actually, it's a unit of mass, not weight, but as long as we're in a 1G field it doesn't really matter.) Unfortunately, a ml is not exactly a cc, for historical reasons.
Which means that the private armies would be inferior to the public ones. Keeping an advanced military force requires building cutting-edge weapons, and not all of those are going to turn out useful.
Slashdot Mirror
To continue to be pedantic, yes, we haven't faced any significant invasion since the War of 1812, the most damaging attack being on September 11, 2001. The US military has been, when it had to be, extremely successful for the last century. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise. While the Navy had considered attacks on Pearl Harbor, and had done two in Fleet Problems, they thought those attacks would be when the Fleet was at sea. Roosevelt wanted an excuse to enter the war against Germany, and had been half-heartedly trying to avoid a war with Japan.
I'm basing what I'm saying about race on observation and reading. I was around when it was made illegal for private businesses to discriminate. You're spouting your own ideology. While there was government discrimination (although the military was integrating before the 1960s) the primary discrimination was private. If you were black, you wouldn't be allowed into various business places. You couldn't get a loan to buy a house in a white neighborhood. You were very restricted in the number of colleges that would take you, no matter what your qualifications. You would not be eligible for certain jobs. These are not things you could get around by strength of character, because they were determined by your skin color. This is entirely aside from the social rejection and death threats you'd get if you tried doing some things, or being seen as a black (in those days, Negro or colored person). Blacks who were successful would be seen as "a credit to their race" and expected to act as such.
There was perhaps some progress, but it was slow. The Civil Rights Act essentially forced people to deal with blacks as individuals on a daily basis, if they were going to do business. The opened things up. It's been rough going ever since, but there has been improvement.
And, of course, you come along and say that your favorite solution would have worked best and it's never been tried. The empirical evidence suggests that it would not have worked, because in areas where there was no government intervention it wasn't working. Society is complicated and does not conform to ideologies.
As far as carbon taxes go, the market is a wonderful economic structure. It works superbly when all costs are accounted for. However, it leads to bad things when this isn't the case. If I'm running a business, I have to balance costs against profits. If I pay all the costs associated with what I'm doing, then I'll tailor my business to them, and the market will ensure a good outcome for the economy as a whole. If I pay only some of the costs for something, and someone else pays the rest of the costs, then in the search of maximum profit (normally a good thing) I'm going to do a lot of whatever it is that pushes costs onto other people, and the economy will suffer.
In this case, releasing carbon dioxide from sequestered carbon is hurting things. It imposes costs on people who don't make the decisions, so I'm going to burn more fossil fuels because it's economical for me. The market is completely incapable of adjusting to this, because the additional costs don't go into any market-based calculations. If there is a tax on burning fossil fuels, then I make decisions according to the direct costs and the tax. Assuming the tax fairly represents the costs other people are paying, I shift my fossil fuel use to what produces the most profit for everyone.
To deal with global warming, we have to reduce carbon emissions somehow. Right now, global warming is an economic externality. One of the important roles of the government in the market is imposing penalties on externalities so that the market can sort things out.
The extreme racial disparities of the pre-1960s society were at least somewhat ameliorated by government intervention. It was a stable system of racial oppression. I'm not at all convinced that what was appropriate then is appropriate now, particularly since people have had decades to learn to game the system, but restricting freedom of association was very useful then.
As a general rule, I'm not interested in defending freedom to be an asshole per se. I support free speech, which enables some people to be real assholes, because of its benefits. I don't consider free association to be all that important in running a public business, compared to the freedom it gives business types to be assholes.
We can measure the health of the economy in terms of what is produced or how well-off people in general are. Corporations, as a rule, don't act as if they care about the general welfare, and the general welfare is not always served by what they do. A corporation that wants to make money by making a better product cheaper is, by doing that, helping the general welfare. A corporation that makes large profits that go almost exclusively to the 1% isn't. There's also a lot of money to be made by being a successful parasite on the economy.
If jobs leave the country, and we've got a lot of unemployed people with useful skills, some people and corporations will see that as an opportunity.
Workers as a whole have been screwed for decades now, sharing little or nothing of the growth of the economy, but I really don't think Trump is the answer. The workers need some help from the government, whether it's more direct assistance or more support of unions, and I don't expect Trump to do that.
To overgeneralize greatly, the problem with lower-class white males right now is that they're losing power as demographics change, they're economically screwed, and they're blaming the wrong people.
I'm hoping that he'll turn out to be as truthful about some of those claims as in lots of others he made.
Trump is a big corporation. I don't see this as an improvement.
To be fair, both candidates campaigned to win states for the Electoral College, not to win the popular vote. We don't know that the result would have been the same with different campaigns.
The idea behind the luminiferous aether was that, if light was a wave, it had to be a wave in something. It wasn't a particularly good explanation even back then, since it hypothesized an ultra-rigid material that suffused all space and had no effect on the motion of planets. As far as I can tell, it existed only to explain light being a wave.
Dark matter, on the other hand, explains several things reasonably well. It started as a way to explain galactic rotation curves, but we also see gravitational lensing where there appears to be no or insufficient matter. There's other things it explains that I don't understand as well. At this point, we've observed it (by gravitational lensing) and it is a fairly useful hypothesis.
However, since you mentioned the expansion of the Universe, you are likely referring to dark energy, which is a less-supported hypothesis.
From your summary, it sounds like the paper attempts to explain galactic rotation curves. Does it have anything to say about gravitational lensing where there's no apparent matter?
As it happens, there's ice on land, particularly Greenland and Antarctica. If that melts, there's more water in the oceans. If land ice slides into the sea, sea levels go up.
The UN has no teeth (which is probably good), and treaties are of use only insofar as all the major CO2 producers sign on and meet their commitments.
It seems to me that something that relates quotations that are allegedly from one person and returns "never said that on the public record" or "said that in this context" could be useful and potentially doable.
Given a fact-checker like that, I'd run a lot of pro-gun and anti-gun rhetoric through it and watch the fireworks.
Okay, picture this. You're on an innocent snack run, and a guy with a gun starts following you, intentions unknown but probably unfriendly and potentially downright hostile and murderous. What do you do?
If, in that encounter, Martin had killed Zimmerman, he could have claimed Zimmerman threatened him with the gun and he had to defend himself, and he should have been acquitted for the exact same reason Zimmerman was, that the State couldn't prove it wasn't self-defense.
If it looked like a suitcase bomb, his English teacher needs to be fired and blacklisted. If something might be a bomb, you call the office and do an orderly evacuation. You do NOT put it in your desk drawer and continue teaching.
Spacefaring adventures are going to cause problems. The Martian day is (IIRC) a little longer than the Earth day, for example.
Solar time doesn't work well with standard clocks, as due to the shape of the Earth's orbit the time between one noon and the rest is usually not 24 hours exactly. Could we compromise with local mean time?
Technically, the US is on the metric system; we just don't use the units directly. An inch is legally defined as 25.4mm, for example. The military and scientific communities use metric directly. I wish engineering and manufacturing did also, because I'm tired of having to remember when to switch between internal display/input measurements.
I once tried looking at people writing for or against DST and noting their latitude and longitude. It does affect things.
An Aussie once told me that Christmas is a great time for a barby on the beach.
Where I live, near the winter solstice I can't leave for work and come back home with the sun out both times. My workday and commute together are too long. Jimmying with time zones isn't going to help (heck, I set my own schedule, so I don't need to pay attention anyway.)
A liter split 8 ways is 125 ml each. Now, tell me how long it takes to split a gallon 10 ways.
Most people prefer to express temperature in a slight variant of Kelvin, where 0 is the freezing point of water, and that works fine. I can't tell the difference if it warms up 1F or 1K. 0F is an arbitrary number, basically the lowest temperature that Fahrenheit guy could get in his lab. 0C is a meaningful temperature. In the winter, it's useful to know whether the temperature is positive or negative Celsius, whereas the difference between 2F and -2F is pretty minor and insignificant.
The cup-to-gallon conversion is easy. No problem. Now, how much does a cubic foot of water weigh? I know how much a cubic meter of water weighs: one metric ton. (Actually, it's a unit of mass, not weight, but as long as we're in a 1G field it doesn't really matter.) Unfortunately, a ml is not exactly a cc, for historical reasons.
Which means that the private armies would be inferior to the public ones. Keeping an advanced military force requires building cutting-edge weapons, and not all of those are going to turn out useful.