Union workers are, in general, less productive, less attentive, and less trust worthy than non union labor. Deliberate destruction of equipment, shoddy workmanship, and an attitude that they know more or better than the owners of the company, or anyone else for that matter.
I believe you're confusing cause and effect.
The cause is shoddy poor management. The effect is lower productivity, lower attention (whatever that is), lack of trust, deliberate sabotage, shoddy work, and, yes, union organization / formation. Writing a union charter does not magically create bad feelings on both sides. Those bad feelings were there for very good reasons.
Aside from government intervention situations, both union and non-union plants are successful, and that is proof there is little difference other than management quality. Is not management responsible for their actions and decisions? And the decisions of incompetents leads to unionization? Thus poor management is the cause of unionization? The non-union plants would seem to have better leadership at all levels and the union shops would seem to have the incompetent leaders. If they were any good, trust me that 99.9% of the workers would rather watch american idol instead of union organizing in their spare time.
Think about your lifetime work experiences and your friends and coworkers experiences... I've never worked in, nor directly heard about, a union workplace that didn't desperately need the union due to completely dysfunctional management, and the opposite is also true that I've no experience, direct or heresay, in a non-union scenario where I've felt a union would be much of an improvement.
I'm one of the locked out workers. We have been reaching out to the national media outlets since June. If it weren't for sites like the HuffPost, and this one, we would just be forgotten about.
I'm sorry dude, best of luck.
So, in the opinion of a guy whom works there, that being you, is the safety record of the plant as bad as I've heard, or is it the usual mix of political stuff mixed with scary words to improve ratings? Also everyone with an industrial background knows theres safety problems because of management, and theres safety problems because of workers, and theres safety problems because of bad luck/inherent issues of the job (is there any place that works with HF that is not "scary"?), and being anonymous you can probably honestly answer here what ratios apply for each source of the safety problems. Of course being anonymous we'll also never know if you're working for management and/or lying, but I'm sure it'll be an interesting answer regardless.
After then complete their IT training / become a video game developer in 24 hours certificate, as per the radio commercials promising $75/yr, the kids can walk across the parking lot to the unemployment office
You can't collect unemployment insurance payments unless you have worked for at least a year.
"gallows humor" does not achieve its fame because of its accuracy. Its still funny, even if not true.
I am told that for decades the advice at the unemployment office was "go to the tech school and get a new career", hence the move to their parking lot, but now that ALL fields are imploding, I'm not sure that an unemployed and experienced carpenter will necessarily be better off as an unemployed and inexperienced welder. Although, I suppose its something to do, rather than watch Oprah all day.
Doesn't take a conspiracy to notice that its "only" 200 temporarily locked out, in an era of multi-thousand permanent downsizings everywhere else.
Except maybe the tiny fact that these 230 workers are being locked out of a nuclear plant with a less than stellar safety record. Who's monitoring the radioactive materials during this lockout?
You fell for the advertising. Sorry. Don't feel bad, a lot of people are paid a lot of money to trick people like you.
This plant just converts semi-refined ore into refined fuel. Before its cooked in the reactor, reactor fuel is about as radioactive and harmful as granite. The Co-60 and Sr-90 and other nasties come from fission, not a fuel for fission. There is no serious radioactive danger from the plant, at least compared to other substances in the plant, such as HF.
The biggest problem they have is containment of hydrofluoric acid. Apparently they have a quite an astounding safety violation history. F-ing bucket chemists. However, that stuff doesn't just leap out of the carboy like a caged animal and burrow into your groundwater, it requires a tech at the lab bench to screw up. Whom by definition is not there during a lockout.
We're not talking about locking the workers out of three mile island during the meltdown. Some of the (paid) clowns in the media trying to rile things up, they might be talking about that, or as close as they can get without libel / slander suits, but that does not by any means make it true.
Another good argument is on a large scale statistical basis, the more of a monopoly a company is, the lower the quality of management. It seems intuitively obvious, folks whom can compete and win, will take leadership roles in competitive industries where their skills will be rewarded, those whom compete and lose will need to find a place where they can't lose because there is no competition. So there's a continuous sweeping of the bottom of the leadership pool into monopolies, government, hyper-regulated industries, etc.
Food store / one man shops = either great management skills or they rapidly go out of business.
Regional public utility / local government / bank = pretty iffy
Sole supplier in a hyper regulated industry / fedgov = those guys must be awful, can't lead starving dogs to raw meat class of ability.
If they statistically have poor management, a factor of that known incompetence probably includes lack of safety focus. If the union has any safety focus at all, even if nothing more than wanting to keep their contributing members alive to continue to contribute, well, sadly that might be the only safety focus that exists at the plant...
It would be interesting to see the safety figures from, say, small CNC machine shops, for union vs non-union. My guess is there would be little difference as thats a pretty competitive = well managed industry.
Locked out since June? This seems newsworthy to me, where is the lame stream media on this story?
Doesn't take a conspiracy to notice that its "only" 200 temporarily locked out, in an era of multi-thousand permanent downsizings everywhere else.
In 2006, two hundred out of work may have made the news. In 2010, two hundred out of work is called the local unemployment line "dept of workforce development" or whatever they're called.
There was a lot of gallows humor locally when the local unemployment office put itself in the parking lot of the local tech/trade school. "theres a reason they're planning on needing thousands of parking spaces", "After then complete their IT training / become a video game developer in 24 hours certificate, as per the radio commercials promising $75/yr, the kids can walk across the parking lot to the unemployment office", etc.
So, when will microchips replace bacteria as the most successful lifeform?
Six billion Microchip Inc PIC processors shipped is a recent news release. Six billion bacteria is the toilet seat in the bathroom here at work. Got a lot of catching up to do before the 10F222 surpasses e. coli.
It's a twist on the old "Transistor radio" bit. Most of em only needed the one transistor (or two on the "modern" designs) but they had 7 or 8 for advertising purposes. The upshot for the geeky customer was they could desaughter the transistors and use em for hobby work.
I don't think you're going to fit a whole superheterodyne in 2 transistors. Maybe, just maybe, a TRF but they haven't manufactured those in at least 80 years, have they? I have a 1930s tube type superhet console in my house, a nice looking piece of furniture that actually works. Anyway, you're gonna need an RF stage amp, an oscillator, at least one IF stage amp, and at least two for a simple class AB audio amp. Plus some diodes for mixers and product detectors and AGC voltage control. You can make a superior mixer / product detector / AGC system out of transistors rather than diodes... Still the story stands, even if its more like 5 absolute minimum.
I don't expect banks to be the first to jump on this like others have speculated because the banks are not responsible for a customers loss when they connect to an untrusted 3rd, the customer is.
The first to jump will be the online merchants, because they don't want their trademarks diluted by crooks spoofing them. Pretty much any service where you give them money to make your account password do something. Pay pr0n websites, probably, they're always the first with every other technology.
Finally, DNSSEC is not free. It takes at least a bit of work to implement it, so I really don't think that you will see people signing DNS for the page with the family pictures.
You mean that facebook thingy that I don't use anymore? I'm not sure, but I think they can afford it.
Also the load on the DNS server increases. Not to spectacular levels, no. But you'll probably have to fool around with your vmware / xen / whatever virtualization software if you've cranked your DNS server back to 25 MHz equivalent cpu cycles and 8 megs of ram (which actually would have been a pretty decent server in the early 90s when I was starting out). And you'll need a wee bit more network traffic, again, something you'll notice in a graph but in an absolute sense is probably a rounding error...
So, what exactly are the downsides to deploying DNSSEC today? If I could wave a magic wand and have it up and running on my server 5 minutes from now, what would break or otherwise be worse than what I have right now?
No downsides, and nothing.
The article is a couple hundred word rant on the topic of, if you screw up, it won't work.
Standard slashdot car analogy: If I screw up while changing the oil in my car the wrong way, perhaps by using a cutting torch to remove the drain plug rather than using a socket wrench, or by turning the car upside down to drain the oil out the fill port, like I do with my lawnmower, then, possibly, something might break.
Also a bit of a rant about the "sorcerers apprentice / Case of Charles Dexter Ward" failure pattern, which should frankly not be new to... anyone? Isn't it always the case that the skill level to "do something" is always way the heck underneath the skill level required to "fix something"?
(Charles Dexter Ward is the HP Lovecraft story most famously known for the "don't call up what you can't put down" line, w/ regards to necromancy.)
However, what most experts would define as "Computer Sciences" are not taught in computer science classes.
It would be very much like advertising "biology 1" as "medical school" because medical school is pretty cool, and knowing which end of microscope to look thru, could be a handy skill for doctors, so its close enough.
Or advertising "rocks 4 jocks" aka "earth science" as "petroleum engineering" because petroleum engineering is profitable and PE do need to know the difference between sedimentary and igneous rocks so its all close enough.
How bout taking a "how to use a shovel to dig a hole" class and calling it "civil engineering class"? Don't civil engineers know about digging holes, and drainage and stuff? Most major civil engineering projects seem to involve digging a big hole in the ground, at some point.
Frankly no one believes this number, as there is no explanation for how this astonishing reduction from a stubborn persistent phenomenon that has persisted throughout all of Twentieth Century combat was achieved.
police action vs mass warfare? If most are killed by IEDs in convoy duty, and the nearest friendly convoy is out of rifle range, a friendly fire incident is pretty rare.
This is honestly a freaking *great* idea. Do you know how most messages pass around in a deployed environment now? They send someone- a "runner" from one end of the post to another. It is the most ludicrous thing I've ever seen. We spent all this money developing the encryption infrastructure that civilians use at the drop of a dime(literally!) and we can't take advantage of that for passing messages around a post? Especially time-sensitive information? It's past time that we put some of the star-trek technology we've developed to use.
Civilians don't have eavesdroppers paying attention to traffic timing patterns. ("For the previous ten incidents, five encrypted undecodable messages are transmitted precisely 45 minutes before the generals humvee leaves the compound. We just monitored five encrypted messages. Prepare the ambush, troops")
They let you take cellphones out of live fire exercises?
On the explosives range they were prohibited outright, paranoia about electrically detonated fuses. On regular ole rifle range, etc, on the firing line you must focus 100% on what is going on. There is no point in trying to qualify while talking on the phone, anyway. Back by the bathrooms, back by the cattlecars/busses/trucks parking lot, no big deal. At the safety RSO tower, they were required, as in you shall carry a cell at all times so you have both a radio and a cell to call for medics if necessary, etc. (Most medical problems were dehydration / heatstroke related rather than projectile related)
How many people in first-world countries have children at 22-25 now?
I think you missed the whole point, that the cultural belief / idealized goal does not match the results in the US Census bureau data.
The guy is doing a fluffy P.R. "culture hit" against the ideals of "go to college, get a corporate job and mortgage, then start a family" not creating a Census department news release.
Not everyone is a partygoer and people have different goals in life.
Having experienced both lifestyles, they are not as unrelated as you seem to think. Both are extraordinarily expensive "hobbies" and involve sleepless nights, pointless arguments, and dealing with vomit. And no matter how things end up, they always start out right at the very beginning with fun.
Sure, I'll just pull out my $21,000.00 mill... oh...
I've paid about a third less for a production CNC machine, used. But a new one often starts at twice your figure if it's any good.
I was going to buy a cox industries single cylinder 0.049 cc airplane engine for my latest balsa wood RC model plane, but then someone told me a Boeing 777 airplane engine costs millions, so I guess I wont be able to afford one of them "airplane engine" things and will have to build a RC glider instead of an RC airplane.
Similarly, there exists at least one intel CPU sold by tiger direct that costs four figures, so I guess buying a tube of those "PIC microcontroller CPU" things is simply out of my budget.
There are perfectly good DHS compatible "you should be scared" messages like CEM, EVI, BHW, DEW, etc
You'll find the market for notification devices has not been as big as you expect, but it keeps some manufacturers in business, so I guess its not too small.
It is, of course, completely cryptologically insecure so you occasionally read news stories in the back pages about the occasionally goofball transmitting spoofed alerts over a small area (blizzard alerts in Hawaii, etc).
Other won't apply at all and just consider his opinion to validate their own, and drop-out for a very high-risk attempt.
Am I correct in thinking you based your opinion on the (proven inaccurate) theory that paying decades of salary for a degree is not a financially high-risk attempt?
If you are in school for a field where you'll probably end up unemployed due to ageism at 30, after training your replacement in China/India, the greatest financial risk is probably not with the "drop out of school" plan. Don't throw good money after bad.
I mean seriously WTF is up with that? Just because I'm over 20 years of age means I don't have the ability to innovate?
The cultural belief is you're supposed to go to university right out of high school for 4 years, and then graduate into a great job with no debt. On a percentage basis, no one actually does this, which is why its called a belief not logic or evidence.
So, lets say you're 25 and you want to drop out and innovate... wait a sec, you graduated at 22 and have had the job of your dreams and 2.5 kids over the past 3 years, right?
I think it would be a wee bit short sighted to drop out one semester before you graduate, etc, so it seems pointless to run above 20.
The other problem is at this moment, culturally there is no such thing as an education that is too expensive, just like before the bubble there was no such thing as a house that was too expensive, or the shares of a.com always go up, or medical services . Since you will literally pay any sum of money, no matter how much, for those products, suspiciously that is exactly what they will charge. So, if the relatively no-name private engineering college two blocks from my workplace charges over $50K per year when counting all costs (I checked) there is little to no point of "funding" people whom are 21 and owe about $150K if you're only giving them $100K.
All of our top fuel race cars are burning ethanol.
Almost none of them, you mean?
Real Race Cars like F-1 run plain ole gasoline, although a rather highly purified grade.
"top fuel dragsters", which I believe is a trademark of NHRA, run a mix of nitromethane with a splash of methanol, both way too toxic for the average moron to handle in bulk.
The only "race car ethanol" I'm aware of is the Indycar group has started to use ethanol in recent years, I believe there's a sponsorship thing going on there.
That being said, I think the powers that be recognize
I think you're giving them way too much credit here. The clowns don't even know that a diesel compatible oil is shockingly easy, its just that American growing technology requires about 2 gallons of diesel equivalent to grow 1 gallon of biodiesel equivalent. On the other hand, "growing your own gasoline" is a huge problem. Purified toluene and benzene are not really biocompatible, you're not going to grow that stuff and refine it at any reasonable efficiency.
From a chemistry / energy perspective I wonder if it would be cheaper to replace every gas burner with a bio-diesel burner rather than trying to make a gasoline compatible replacement to put in gas cars. Its probably about the same level of effort.
Slashdot Mirror
Union workers are, in general, less productive, less attentive, and less trust worthy than non union labor. Deliberate destruction of equipment, shoddy workmanship, and an attitude that they know more or better than the owners of the company, or anyone else for that matter.
I believe you're confusing cause and effect.
The cause is shoddy poor management. The effect is lower productivity, lower attention (whatever that is), lack of trust, deliberate sabotage, shoddy work, and, yes, union organization / formation. Writing a union charter does not magically create bad feelings on both sides. Those bad feelings were there for very good reasons.
Aside from government intervention situations, both union and non-union plants are successful, and that is proof there is little difference other than management quality. Is not management responsible for their actions and decisions? And the decisions of incompetents leads to unionization? Thus poor management is the cause of unionization? The non-union plants would seem to have better leadership at all levels and the union shops would seem to have the incompetent leaders. If they were any good, trust me that 99.9% of the workers would rather watch american idol instead of union organizing in their spare time.
Think about your lifetime work experiences and your friends and coworkers experiences... I've never worked in, nor directly heard about, a union workplace that didn't desperately need the union due to completely dysfunctional management, and the opposite is also true that I've no experience, direct or heresay, in a non-union scenario where I've felt a union would be much of an improvement.
I'm one of the locked out workers. We have been reaching out to the national media outlets since June. If it weren't for sites like the HuffPost, and this one, we would just be forgotten about.
I'm sorry dude, best of luck.
So, in the opinion of a guy whom works there, that being you, is the safety record of the plant as bad as I've heard, or is it the usual mix of political stuff mixed with scary words to improve ratings? Also everyone with an industrial background knows theres safety problems because of management, and theres safety problems because of workers, and theres safety problems because of bad luck/inherent issues of the job (is there any place that works with HF that is not "scary"?), and being anonymous you can probably honestly answer here what ratios apply for each source of the safety problems. Of course being anonymous we'll also never know if you're working for management and/or lying, but I'm sure it'll be an interesting answer regardless.
After then complete their IT training / become a video game developer in 24 hours certificate, as per the radio commercials promising $75/yr, the kids can walk across the parking lot to the unemployment office
You can't collect unemployment insurance payments unless you have worked for at least a year.
"gallows humor" does not achieve its fame because of its accuracy. Its still funny, even if not true.
I am told that for decades the advice at the unemployment office was "go to the tech school and get a new career", hence the move to their parking lot, but now that ALL fields are imploding, I'm not sure that an unemployed and experienced carpenter will necessarily be better off as an unemployed and inexperienced welder. Although, I suppose its something to do, rather than watch Oprah all day.
Except maybe the tiny fact that these 230 workers are being locked out of a nuclear plant with a less than stellar safety record. Who's monitoring the radioactive materials during this lockout?
You fell for the advertising. Sorry. Don't feel bad, a lot of people are paid a lot of money to trick people like you.
This plant just converts semi-refined ore into refined fuel. Before its cooked in the reactor, reactor fuel is about as radioactive and harmful as granite. The Co-60 and Sr-90 and other nasties come from fission, not a fuel for fission. There is no serious radioactive danger from the plant, at least compared to other substances in the plant, such as HF.
The biggest problem they have is containment of hydrofluoric acid. Apparently they have a quite an astounding safety violation history. F-ing bucket chemists. However, that stuff doesn't just leap out of the carboy like a caged animal and burrow into your groundwater, it requires a tech at the lab bench to screw up. Whom by definition is not there during a lockout.
We're not talking about locking the workers out of three mile island during the meltdown. Some of the (paid) clowns in the media trying to rile things up, they might be talking about that, or as close as they can get without libel / slander suits, but that does not by any means make it true.
Another good argument is on a large scale statistical basis, the more of a monopoly a company is, the lower the quality of management. It seems intuitively obvious, folks whom can compete and win, will take leadership roles in competitive industries where their skills will be rewarded, those whom compete and lose will need to find a place where they can't lose because there is no competition. So there's a continuous sweeping of the bottom of the leadership pool into monopolies, government, hyper-regulated industries, etc.
Food store / one man shops = either great management skills or they rapidly go out of business.
Regional public utility / local government / bank = pretty iffy
Sole supplier in a hyper regulated industry / fedgov = those guys must be awful, can't lead starving dogs to raw meat class of ability.
If they statistically have poor management, a factor of that known incompetence probably includes lack of safety focus. If the union has any safety focus at all, even if nothing more than wanting to keep their contributing members alive to continue to contribute, well, sadly that might be the only safety focus that exists at the plant...
It would be interesting to see the safety figures from, say, small CNC machine shops, for union vs non-union. My guess is there would be little difference as thats a pretty competitive = well managed industry.
Locked out since June? This seems newsworthy to me, where is the lame stream media on this story?
Doesn't take a conspiracy to notice that its "only" 200 temporarily locked out, in an era of multi-thousand permanent downsizings everywhere else.
In 2006, two hundred out of work may have made the news. In 2010, two hundred out of work is called the local unemployment line "dept of workforce development" or whatever they're called.
There was a lot of gallows humor locally when the local unemployment office put itself in the parking lot of the local tech/trade school. "theres a reason they're planning on needing thousands of parking spaces", "After then complete their IT training / become a video game developer in 24 hours certificate, as per the radio commercials promising $75/yr, the kids can walk across the parking lot to the unemployment office", etc.
Can't wait until the same heros are in charge of my healthcare. Oh wait, they already are...
So, when will microchips replace bacteria as the most successful lifeform?
Six billion Microchip Inc PIC processors shipped is a recent news release. Six billion bacteria is the toilet seat in the bathroom here at work. Got a lot of catching up to do before the 10F222 surpasses e. coli.
Next week, bring on the gasoline.
That's the only one you really need, that and a match and a taco bell bag to plant as fake evidence.
It's a twist on the old "Transistor radio" bit. Most of em only needed the one transistor (or two on the "modern" designs) but they had 7 or 8 for advertising purposes. The upshot for the geeky customer was they could desaughter the transistors and use em for hobby work.
I don't think you're going to fit a whole superheterodyne in 2 transistors. Maybe, just maybe, a TRF but they haven't manufactured those in at least 80 years, have they? I have a 1930s tube type superhet console in my house, a nice looking piece of furniture that actually works. Anyway, you're gonna need an RF stage amp, an oscillator, at least one IF stage amp, and at least two for a simple class AB audio amp. Plus some diodes for mixers and product detectors and AGC voltage control. You can make a superior mixer / product detector / AGC system out of transistors rather than diodes... Still the story stands, even if its more like 5 absolute minimum.
I don't expect banks to be the first to jump on this like others have speculated because the banks are not responsible for a customers loss when they connect to an untrusted 3rd, the customer is.
The first to jump will be the online merchants, because they don't want their trademarks diluted by crooks spoofing them. Pretty much any service where you give them money to make your account password do something. Pay pr0n websites, probably, they're always the first with every other technology.
Finally, DNSSEC is not free. It takes at least a bit of work to implement it, so I really don't think that you will see people signing DNS for the page with the family pictures.
You mean that facebook thingy that I don't use anymore? I'm not sure, but I think they can afford it.
Also the load on the DNS server increases. Not to spectacular levels, no. But you'll probably have to fool around with your vmware / xen / whatever virtualization software if you've cranked your DNS server back to 25 MHz equivalent cpu cycles and 8 megs of ram (which actually would have been a pretty decent server in the early 90s when I was starting out). And you'll need a wee bit more network traffic, again, something you'll notice in a graph but in an absolute sense is probably a rounding error...
So, what exactly are the downsides to deploying DNSSEC today? If I could wave a magic wand and have it up and running on my server 5 minutes from now, what would break or otherwise be worse than what I have right now?
No downsides, and nothing.
The article is a couple hundred word rant on the topic of, if you screw up, it won't work.
Standard slashdot car analogy: If I screw up while changing the oil in my car the wrong way, perhaps by using a cutting torch to remove the drain plug rather than using a socket wrench, or by turning the car upside down to drain the oil out the fill port, like I do with my lawnmower, then, possibly, something might break.
Also a bit of a rant about the "sorcerers apprentice / Case of Charles Dexter Ward" failure pattern, which should frankly not be new to ... anyone? Isn't it always the case that the skill level to "do something" is always way the heck underneath the skill level required to "fix something"?
(Charles Dexter Ward is the HP Lovecraft story most famously known for the "don't call up what you can't put down" line, w/ regards to necromancy.)
However, what most experts would define as "Computer Sciences" are not taught in computer science classes.
It would be very much like advertising "biology 1" as "medical school" because medical school is pretty cool, and knowing which end of microscope to look thru, could be a handy skill for doctors, so its close enough.
Or advertising "rocks 4 jocks" aka "earth science" as "petroleum engineering" because petroleum engineering is profitable and PE do need to know the difference between sedimentary and igneous rocks so its all close enough.
How bout taking a "how to use a shovel to dig a hole" class and calling it "civil engineering class"? Don't civil engineers know about digging holes, and drainage and stuff? Most major civil engineering projects seem to involve digging a big hole in the ground, at some point.
Frankly no one believes this number, as there is no explanation for how this astonishing reduction from a stubborn persistent phenomenon that has persisted throughout all of Twentieth Century combat was achieved.
police action vs mass warfare? If most are killed by IEDs in convoy duty, and the nearest friendly convoy is out of rifle range, a friendly fire incident is pretty rare.
This is honestly a freaking *great* idea. Do you know how most messages pass around in a deployed environment now? They send someone- a "runner" from one end of the post to another. It is the most ludicrous thing I've ever seen. We spent all this money developing the encryption infrastructure that civilians use at the drop of a dime(literally!) and we can't take advantage of that for passing messages around a post? Especially time-sensitive information? It's past time that we put some of the star-trek technology we've developed to use.
Civilians don't have eavesdroppers paying attention to traffic timing patterns. ("For the previous ten incidents, five encrypted undecodable messages are transmitted precisely 45 minutes before the generals humvee leaves the compound. We just monitored five encrypted messages. Prepare the ambush, troops")
They let you take cellphones out of live fire exercises?
On the explosives range they were prohibited outright, paranoia about electrically detonated fuses.
On regular ole rifle range, etc, on the firing line you must focus 100% on what is going on. There is no point in trying to qualify while talking on the phone, anyway.
Back by the bathrooms, back by the cattlecars/busses/trucks parking lot, no big deal.
At the safety RSO tower, they were required, as in you shall carry a cell at all times so you have both a radio and a cell to call for medics if necessary, etc. (Most medical problems were dehydration / heatstroke related rather than projectile related)
How many people in first-world countries have children at 22-25 now?
I think you missed the whole point, that the cultural belief / idealized goal does not match the results in the US Census bureau data.
The guy is doing a fluffy P.R. "culture hit" against the ideals of "go to college, get a corporate job and mortgage, then start a family" not creating a Census department news release.
Not everyone is a partygoer and people have different goals in life.
Having experienced both lifestyles, they are not as unrelated as you seem to think. Both are extraordinarily expensive "hobbies" and involve sleepless nights, pointless arguments, and dealing with vomit. And no matter how things end up, they always start out right at the very beginning with fun.
Sure, I'll just pull out my $21,000.00 mill... oh...
I've paid about a third less for a production CNC machine, used. But a new one often starts at twice your figure if it's any good.
I was going to buy a cox industries single cylinder 0.049 cc airplane engine for my latest balsa wood RC model plane, but then someone told me a Boeing 777 airplane engine costs millions, so I guess I wont be able to afford one of them "airplane engine" things and will have to build a RC glider instead of an RC airplane.
Similarly, there exists at least one intel CPU sold by tiger direct that costs four figures, so I guess buying a tube of those "PIC microcontroller CPU" things is simply out of my budget.
The CNC mill market works about the same way.
Grats on reinventing the NWS weather alert SAME system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_Area_Message_Encoding
There are perfectly good DHS compatible "you should be scared" messages like CEM, EVI, BHW, DEW, etc
You'll find the market for notification devices has not been as big as you expect, but it keeps some manufacturers in business, so I guess its not too small.
It is, of course, completely cryptologically insecure so you occasionally read news stories in the back pages about the occasionally goofball transmitting spoofed alerts over a small area (blizzard alerts in Hawaii, etc).
Other won't apply at all and just consider his opinion to validate their own, and drop-out for a very high-risk attempt.
Am I correct in thinking you based your opinion on the (proven inaccurate) theory that paying decades of salary for a degree is not a financially high-risk attempt?
If you are in school for a field where you'll probably end up unemployed due to ageism at 30, after training your replacement in China/India, the greatest financial risk is probably not with the "drop out of school" plan. Don't throw good money after bad.
I mean seriously WTF is up with that? Just because I'm over 20 years of age means I don't have the ability to innovate?
The cultural belief is you're supposed to go to university right out of high school for 4 years, and then graduate into a great job with no debt. On a percentage basis, no one actually does this, which is why its called a belief not logic or evidence.
So, lets say you're 25 and you want to drop out and innovate... wait a sec, you graduated at 22 and have had the job of your dreams and 2.5 kids over the past 3 years, right?
I think it would be a wee bit short sighted to drop out one semester before you graduate, etc, so it seems pointless to run above 20.
The other problem is at this moment, culturally there is no such thing as an education that is too expensive, just like before the bubble there was no such thing as a house that was too expensive, or the shares of a .com always go up, or medical services . Since you will literally pay any sum of money, no matter how much, for those products, suspiciously that is exactly what they will charge. So, if the relatively no-name private engineering college two blocks from my workplace charges over $50K per year when counting all costs (I checked) there is little to no point of "funding" people whom are 21 and owe about $150K if you're only giving them $100K.
All of our top fuel race cars are burning ethanol.
Almost none of them, you mean?
Real Race Cars like F-1 run plain ole gasoline, although a rather highly purified grade.
"top fuel dragsters", which I believe is a trademark of NHRA, run a mix of nitromethane with a splash of methanol, both way too toxic for the average moron to handle in bulk.
The only "race car ethanol" I'm aware of is the Indycar group has started to use ethanol in recent years, I believe there's a sponsorship thing going on there.
That being said, I think the powers that be recognize
I think you're giving them way too much credit here. The clowns don't even know that a diesel compatible oil is shockingly easy, its just that American growing technology requires about 2 gallons of diesel equivalent to grow 1 gallon of biodiesel equivalent. On the other hand, "growing your own gasoline" is a huge problem. Purified toluene and benzene are not really biocompatible, you're not going to grow that stuff and refine it at any reasonable efficiency.
From a chemistry / energy perspective I wonder if it would be cheaper to replace every gas burner with a bio-diesel burner rather than trying to make a gasoline compatible replacement to put in gas cars. Its probably about the same level of effort.