You've cited the Wasington Post, hardly an unbiased source. That article is fairly clever, slightly changing the subject in the answer to each question.
In 1970, a student could pay for tuition, room, and board at the most expensive US universities by working a full time entry level job. This is no longer possible, by a factor of 2.
Put another way, the ratio of the cost of a year at an expensive college to the cost of a loaf of white bread was 17,000 in 1970. It's now about 50,000.
The ACA has roughly doubled medical insurance costs in 6 years and it isn't over yet.
FDA restrictions and bribes and other corrupt deals are adding to the medical cost explosion. Between that and school system featherbedding the general economy is in significant danger.
Oil pipelines are relatively easy to repair, and spare parts are stockpiled. Stupid choice. Pumping stations make more sense and still aren't a good choice.
The very obvious weak point is the electrical grid. Alert people have been pointing to its weaknesses for over a decade (EMP is the large scale issue, but a host of small attacks could do similar damage.) The global production capacity to replace blown transformers is about 5%/year for just the US. (Although I believe new production could come online quickly and rebuilding is an option to replacing.)
Once terrorism becomes obvious, large scale, and frequent, only morons and villains like Obama and H. Clinton would fail to recognize a state of war. A full US war against terrorist nations (not the piddly efforts we've engaged in so far) would leave terrorist nations incapable of any activity whatsoever.
The dollar in 2016 is worth about 7% of the dollar in the late 1960s, perhaps less. The actual cost of fuel hasn't changed much.
The electrical system in parts of the US is already strained to its limits and is within 10% of catastrophe. There is no room for a substantial electric car population.
You do understand that the air in a tunnel full of cars, without expensive motorized ventilation, becomes unpleasant very quickly and deadly before long?
I don't think WalMart would accept as a greeter the sort of person who worked for the TSA. "Take off your shoes or go to jail" is not how you get happy customers.
Automobiles reached the level of small but regular production in 1895. By 1925, maybe half of all families in the US had a car. That's 30 years, not 10.
The laws of physics apply to SDCs also, and they aren't going to be doing 100 mph on roads designed for 60 mph. Although they'll have better reaction time, braking distance and centrifugal force won't change.
SDCs will probably tailgate safely regardless of the type of car ahead, making car density on highways substantially greater. People are less likely to want extreme speeds in SDCs, since they can do something enjoyable during a trip and not suffer the frustrations of trying to beat the next guy or dealing with rude drivers. Almost nobody complains about airplanes not trying to go faster, or long distance buses either. Same will be true of SDCs.
It doesn't happen immediately. Old cars will stay on the road as long as they're economically feasible, which generally means until they rust out. That's 20 years downwind of oceans and where roads are salted in the winter, longer elsewhere. Government isn't going to be able to force human-driven vehicles off the road until far more than half the voting populace owns nothing but automated cars.
The main builder of roads is private developers. A developer builds a bunch of houses in an area and the roads connecting them, and builds the roads to the existing road network. When the development is done, the roads are turned over to the government and (effectively) the property tax revenue on the new homes (or fuel taxes) pays for the maintenance of the new roads.
Major roads - Interstates and numbered state highways - are usually built by governments. Improvements to roads such as widening and the addition of safety features are done by the government.
That's a nice book you just finished after 10 years of constant work. Too bad for you I'm going to provide copies to all at cost. You'll never make a penny.
Libraries would be empty without copyright law.
You have used an untrue initial assumption, that a country should be "run". Free countries are not run. The government in a free country may be run, but the government is not the country. In a free country people run their own lives, and the job of the government is to protect people so that they can continue to run their own lives -- no more, no less.
More difficult than symbolic multivariable integration by parts, where you have to keep guessing the form of the ultimate answer (assuming one exists) until you find one that works?
I also like the idea that lawyers must be permanently prohibited from being legislators, and vice-versa. There is an inherent conflict of interest involving legislators making the law complex and incomprehensible, so that only lawyers can decode it.
Much humor comes from surprise. The surprise here is changing the context from the expected (genetics) to the unexpected (math) while still providing a sensible answer.
For an explanation that reaches the most people, call the API a language. Signs reading "ALTO" and signs reading "STOP" are instructions from 2 APIs commanding a temporary end of motion.
Sadly and more importantly, the attitude of young people toward politics is the same. They vote for the people who offer shiny stuff and make them feel virtuous, with no thought to whose efforts are needed to make the shiny stuff.
Rights come from the responsibility of an individual to support himself, and from the type of beings that we are (who use our rational faculty to consciously direct our lives.) There is also an element of rights that identifies rights-holders as "being on our team", i.e. not destroying humans and not being utterly alien. (We can deal with the Jell-o creatures from Zorblatz-7 some other time, that's not the issue here.)
Your vegetarian bias is just silly.
I've read that the reason most people aren't 7 feet tall is that when a person that tall slips and hits his head, he gets brain damage. It is an evolutionary disadvantage in most circumstances.
...earliest possible puberty, and maximize the utility of the person. The design goals are obvious enough.
You'd make a really poor god and a very bad dictator.
We already have enough problems caused by puberty coming before emotional maturity.
Utility --- UTILITY!!! Utility to whom? To you, the big boss, who decides how people should be? A person's sole reason for existence is his own well-being, not utility. Go hold Jeremy Bentham's hand on the way to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
You've cited the Wasington Post, hardly an unbiased source. That article is fairly clever, slightly changing the subject in the answer to each question.
In 1970, a student could pay for tuition, room, and board at the most expensive US universities by working a full time entry level job. This is no longer possible, by a factor of 2.
Put another way, the ratio of the cost of a year at an expensive college to the cost of a loaf of white bread was 17,000 in 1970. It's now about 50,000.
The ACA has roughly doubled medical insurance costs in 6 years and it isn't over yet.
FDA restrictions and bribes and other corrupt deals are adding to the medical cost explosion. Between that and school system featherbedding the general economy is in significant danger.
Oil pipelines are relatively easy to repair, and spare parts are stockpiled. Stupid choice. Pumping stations make more sense and still aren't a good choice.
The very obvious weak point is the electrical grid. Alert people have been pointing to its weaknesses for over a decade (EMP is the large scale issue, but a host of small attacks could do similar damage.) The global production capacity to replace blown transformers is about 5%/year for just the US. (Although I believe new production could come online quickly and rebuilding is an option to replacing.)
Once terrorism becomes obvious, large scale, and frequent, only morons and villains like Obama and H. Clinton would fail to recognize a state of war. A full US war against terrorist nations (not the piddly efforts we've engaged in so far) would leave terrorist nations incapable of any activity whatsoever.
What do you think gasoline taxes are?
The dollar in 2016 is worth about 7% of the dollar in the late 1960s, perhaps less. The actual cost of fuel hasn't changed much.
The electrical system in parts of the US is already strained to its limits and is within 10% of catastrophe. There is no room for a substantial electric car population.
You do understand that the air in a tunnel full of cars, without expensive motorized ventilation, becomes unpleasant very quickly and deadly before long?
I don't think WalMart would accept as a greeter the sort of person who worked for the TSA. "Take off your shoes or go to jail" is not how you get happy customers.
Automobiles reached the level of small but regular production in 1895. By 1925, maybe half of all families in the US had a car. That's 30 years, not 10.
The laws of physics apply to SDCs also, and they aren't going to be doing 100 mph on roads designed for 60 mph. Although they'll have better reaction time, braking distance and centrifugal force won't change.
SDCs will probably tailgate safely regardless of the type of car ahead, making car density on highways substantially greater. People are less likely to want extreme speeds in SDCs, since they can do something enjoyable during a trip and not suffer the frustrations of trying to beat the next guy or dealing with rude drivers. Almost nobody complains about airplanes not trying to go faster, or long distance buses either. Same will be true of SDCs.
It doesn't happen immediately. Old cars will stay on the road as long as they're economically feasible, which generally means until they rust out. That's 20 years downwind of oceans and where roads are salted in the winter, longer elsewhere. Government isn't going to be able to force human-driven vehicles off the road until far more than half the voting populace owns nothing but automated cars.
The main builder of roads is private developers. A developer builds a bunch of houses in an area and the roads connecting them, and builds the roads to the existing road network. When the development is done, the roads are turned over to the government and (effectively) the property tax revenue on the new homes (or fuel taxes) pays for the maintenance of the new roads.
Major roads - Interstates and numbered state highways - are usually built by governments. Improvements to roads such as widening and the addition of safety features are done by the government.
That's a nice book you just finished after 10 years of constant work. Too bad for you I'm going to provide copies to all at cost. You'll never make a penny.
Libraries would be empty without copyright law.
You have used an untrue initial assumption, that a country should be "run". Free countries are not run. The government in a free country may be run, but the government is not the country. In a free country people run their own lives, and the job of the government is to protect people so that they can continue to run their own lives -- no more, no less.
There's a backwards version of cat called tac.
More difficult than symbolic multivariable integration by parts, where you have to keep guessing the form of the ultimate answer (assuming one exists) until you find one that works?
I also like the idea that lawyers must be permanently prohibited from being legislators, and vice-versa. There is an inherent conflict of interest involving legislators making the law complex and incomprehensible, so that only lawyers can decode it.
Much humor comes from surprise. The surprise here is changing the context from the expected (genetics) to the unexpected (math) while still providing a sensible answer.
For an explanation that reaches the most people, call the API a language. Signs reading "ALTO" and signs reading "STOP" are instructions from 2 APIs commanding a temporary end of motion.
Sadly and more importantly, the attitude of young people toward politics is the same. They vote for the people who offer shiny stuff and make them feel virtuous, with no thought to whose efforts are needed to make the shiny stuff.
Human 2.0 will have a corporate trademark glowing on the forehead. Trademarks don't expire.
Rights come from the responsibility of an individual to support himself, and from the type of beings that we are (who use our rational faculty to consciously direct our lives.) There is also an element of rights that identifies rights-holders as "being on our team", i.e. not destroying humans and not being utterly alien. (We can deal with the Jell-o creatures from Zorblatz-7 some other time, that's not the issue here.)
Your vegetarian bias is just silly.
I've read that the reason most people aren't 7 feet tall is that when a person that tall slips and hits his head, he gets brain damage. It is an evolutionary disadvantage in most circumstances.
The primary UV blocking element of the eye is the lens. Some people who have had their lenses replaced (due to cataracts) with a plastic that doesn't block UV suddenly are able to see in the UV range http://petapixel.com/2012/04/17/the-human-eye-can-see-in-ultraviolet-when-the-lens-is-removed/.
The lens cuts off at about 350 nm (although that varies a great deal with age). The cornea cuts off at about 280 nm.
Near UV (350-400 nm) for normal people is sensed as violet, and it's hard to focus.
You'd make a really poor god and a very bad dictator.
We already have enough problems caused by puberty coming before emotional maturity.
Utility --- UTILITY!!! Utility to whom? To you, the big boss, who decides how people should be? A person's sole reason for existence is his own well-being, not utility. Go hold Jeremy Bentham's hand on the way to hell.
Genetic manipulation, among other things.