Tsunami's tend to only be bad where they hit coasts or shallow water. In the open ocean and deep water they move very fast but wave height is usually never more than a meter.
So what did Unions, OSHA, Workmens Comp and the EPA accomplish in the long run?
They made the U.S. a horrible place to engage in any business that could easily be outsourced to another country with a lower regulatory burden, taxes and wages. The worker's paradise angle worked until the economy globalized, now it doesn't.
So increasingly there are no low skilled jobs in the U.S. Automation is also a union and job killer because its better to spend a lot of money on a machine than deal with employees. Wage rates are dropping, the U.S. runs massive trade deficits and government is massively in the red because its spending more than its shrinking tax base will support (tax cuts for the rich under Bush certainly helped, as did over promising on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and squandering on the defense-intelligence complex.
Wonder why healthy unions in the U.S. tend to only be fire, police, teaching, government, truck driving. Because those are the jobs that can't be outsourced.
There was a sweet spot in there, maybe around 1950 where unions and government regulation hit a sweet spot, they'd wiped out all the massive abuses of workers earlier in the century and built a big middle class, and then they over rotated and made the U.S. a horrible place to do business. If you don't have business you tend to not have jobs, then you have a lot of people living on food stamps and Medicaid.
Pinnacle of PVP shooters was and still is BF2 Karkand Infantry only. They want the perfect game just fix:
- Squad bug - C4 jumping - Team switching and balance - Tone down nade spamming a little, not a lot - Botting, glitching and assorted other hacks ⦠ship
Overdone graphics add nothing to game play, they just increase game expense and hardware requirements. They are marketing, they don't make games fun.
Endless fur balls shooting at each other like COD are just boring. Strategy and tactics is what makes PVP interesting, and being a better team than your opponents.
Air and armor just aren't that much fun. Its really hard to maintain balance between players with that wide a gamut of capabilites. Infantry only is a blast because everyone is relatively equal and its ability that makes the difference.
Karkand is a great map because it compels confrontation, has some room to manuever but not too much. Big maps like in PS3 result in endless running around trying to find a battle and when you find one the team are almost NEVER balanced so the play just sucks.
Balanced team of evenly matched players in a properly sized map for the number of players is the secret to PVP success. Don't know why gaming companies have so much troublt figuring this out. The excitement and challenge is playing against other players not against gimmicky vehicls or weapons and not gawking at overdone graphics.
Oh, and MY GOD DON'T PUT HEAD BOB IN YOUR GAME. IT IS JUST NAUSEA INDUCING INNER EAR TORTURE AND ADDS NOTHING TO YOUR GAME.
Didn't RTFA but there is nothing stopping them from building a massively parallel, electronic, analog machine composed of a large number of heavily interconnected pattern recognizers with the ability to self modify.
Then the only challenge is for it to learn how to learn and then to actually learn.
Some of the mechanisms evolution developed to create the human brain may well not be optimal so humans probably can do better once they understand how the basic mechanisms works which they increasingly do.
AAPL was elevated to stratospheric heights because of a bubble in their stock. Every hedge fund on the planet was buying it because the price was going up and the price was going up because every hedge fund on the planet was buying it. Its not really useful to compare to a time its stock was at stratospheric heights due to speculators.
On the other hand since Jobs died they do seem to be completely sucking. Hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe was the most vivid illustration of that I can think of. I wager Jobs would have instantly fired anyone dumb enough to hire that guy.
Its probably an interesting question if those same hedge funds are pushing GOOG to heights greater than it deserves. Android is doing well but its a has a weird business model.
Japan has been using unmanned helicopters to spray crops for decades. Yamaha makes them, though they are a little expensive. They are extremely good at it, the down wash from the rotor helps spread the spray all through the plants.
UC Davis, if memory serves, has started trials on them in the U.S. recently but the restrictive drone regulatory climate needs to relax a little
Politicians would generally be clueless enough to not grasp that rapidly evolving technology has eliminated the need for human involvment in the analysis part most of the time. A crafty bureaucrat would let them restrict his human staff and point to this as proof for how our civil liberties are being protected.
Meanwhile in the server room the AI's are raping us.
Actually one of the Bush's started that, Obama is just continuing and expanding it. All of the other people I listed would have kept it too. Its probably the only tool that can attack Al Qaeda affiliates around the globe without the quagmires involved in invading countries to root them out.
I don't think drone wars are the worst thing happening right now, they are the least bad alternative to fighting Al Qaeda affiliates. The two down sides are A) killing innocent bystanders which radicalizes all their friends and family B) it can be over used to kill people who probably shouldn't be killed. Since its such an easy way to fight a war chances are everyone will be doing it soon and it things are going to get really messy. Read Suarez, Kill Decision
You think Romney or Hillary Clinton or any of the Bushes would have done anything different? Only candidates that would would try to put an end to the corruption and abuse of power in the American system these days would be Ron or Rand Paul. They will never get elected because all the powers that be fear and hate them. If, by some fluke, they did get elected by the actual American voters, inspite of the negative media bombardment aimed at them, they would be assassinated in months.
As far recording goes within their respective countries it sound like the NSA and China are probably on par. China is censoring much more heavily and probably acting on the traffic with a heavier hand than the NSA.
NSA almost certainly dwarfs China in recording global fiber optic traffic. First a lot of it flows through the U.S. and second the NSA has cuts deals with governments and telecoms all over the world to get more access. China is probably trying to play catch especially through Huawei, and subsidizing telecom in places like Africa, but I wager they are far behind the NSA.
Not sure why the world trusted the U.S. government, tech and telecom companies with so much, while they feared China, since the NSA's voracious appetite for information has been no secret for a long time. Maybe it was just the U.S. pioneered the Internet and it was so cool, so everyone forgot you can't trust the U.S. with your comm traffic.
On the role of the FISA court in controlling the NSA:
"It's like a cardboard steering wheel in the cockpit of a Predator drone"
Most people don't realize the FISA court is appointed entirely by one person, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts. Its a bizarre anomaly, a critical protector of the American Constitution completely controlled by a single person. If he or one of his successors goes bad, the Constitution can be eviscerated overnight and since its completely secret we probably wouldn't even know it.
In the "Jungle" animals are pretty much born on a level playing field. Only thing you have going for you is if you are born or raised to be stronger, smarter, faster or to work harder.
It was the creation of political structures, money and inheritence that led to the massive inequality endemic in and unique to the human race. This allows clearly inferior individuals to triumph over their superiors because they "were born with it" or actually inherited their wealth and power from their ancestors or caste.
Trust fund babies would most probably die a horrible death if they were actually living in the "Jungle".
Their might be some concept of inheritence in the animal kingdom, I'm thinking among insects who are builders like ants and bees, but its just really not very common.
The CEO of Aetna was on CNBC recently. He insisted medical insurance would be a buyer's market under Obamacare. For some reason he didn't explain, it was just going to be really expensive to buy.
Yes everybody does it but the NSA has taken it to a level completely unprecedented thanks to the vast troves of information flowing through the worlds fiber optics now and the fact they have tapped nearly all of it.
The real problems start when governments start spying on its own citizens, with no limits, and with modern technology. Its now possible to spy on just about everything everyone does, email, phone, social networks, credit card purchases, what books you read, how much electricity you use, where you go and to keep that information indefinitely. Its quite possible they can use the now ubiquitous camera's and microphones we all carry all the time to listen to and watch everything targetted people are doing.
It is now possible to use this information along with machine learning to automatically spot people who have almost any kind of interest, habit, bias or political leaning. You just need to compose the right query.
When does it get really bad. When the NSA, or someone with access to the NSA firehose, starts spying on the all the politicians, journalists and judges that form the government that is supposed to oversee them. Once you have dirt on all of them you control them. Once you control them the checks and balances essential to a democracy are completely gone.
You will quickly find yourself in a totalitarian state, something the U.S. and U.K. have been rushing towards at breakneck speed since 9/11. Only thing stopping it is if the people with all this power engage in self restraint. Chances are some of the powers that be, have been and will be haven't and wont.
Its pretty simple, individuals should be able to contribute to the candidates of their choice with caps. Elections should be running on small money, not big money.
If people are part of a larger organization encouraging them to contribute in a certain way that is no ones business as long as its the individual making the contribution and not the organization.
If an organization is collecting funds via dues, corporate profits or anything else and spending that money in a coordinated fashion to buy political influence it shouldn't be allowed. Nor should organizations be allowed to spend unlimited funds running ads on TV's designed to influence policy, candidates and elections.
Public funding of campaigns could fix the problem in some respects but how you decide gets funded and who doesn't and giving money to crackpots who have no popular support, and will never acquires it, isn't a good idea.
Of course the bigger issue is we need to have people running for office who don't suck and that appears to be increasingly problematic these days.
The thing you are trying to accomplish is for everyone to have a reasonably even chance of influencing the democratic process. When a tiny affluent minority, whatever their agenda, can buy disproportionate influece your democracy is, for all practical purposes, gone. This is pretty much where the U.S. sits today.
That is an extremely convenient cop out. NASA simply hasn't delivered on anything worth funding for a really long time. Success would breed support.
Ares was a deeply flawed in concept, design and construction and it cost a fortune to accomplish next to nothing. Why would anyone continue that farce when SpaceX and Falcon are developing far better launchers and capsules far faster and for much less money.
NASA simply can't do anything without squandering money. They sent a team to SpaceX to study how they were accomplishing so much with so little. The fact that NASA would send a team out to study this is disturbing in itself. One answer is stop using theirh entrenched contractors, (i.e. Lockheed and Boeing) who are milking every contract for every dollar they can.
NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are probably delighted when when one program is cancelled and replaced with another because they never have to deliver anything that works and the pay is the same.
What a crock. The NASA manned space program has been squandering money to no good end since Apollo was cancelled. If all the money squandered on the shuttle and ISS, to no good end, had been spent wisely and efficiently we would be on Mars now.
Danger isn't the important thing. What matters is if you are accomplishing something worth the risk and the money. NASA simply hasn't accomplished anything in manned space flight for 40 years.
Rovers and orbiters are built by JPL. JPL is NASA in name only. It was created in1936, long before NASA.
After giving JPL well deserved tribute for their planetary missions, they also deserve tribute for surviving, staying relevent and doing great work in spite of NASA.
Hubble was OK after a disasterous start. NASA does deserve priase for it along with the other great observatories.
Those programs don't really explain away the fact that the centerpeice of the organization and the one that sucks up most of the money, manned space exploration, is a complete disaster. At some point you need to ask, "What have you done lately"?
Its been a long time since NASA explored any frontiers with their manned space program. Shuttles carrying people in to LEO wasn't anything close to exploring a frontier.
Only if it actually works. If it doesn't or it breaks down immediately its only value will be if it compells NASA to develop the manned or robotic capability to go fix it.
It worked really well up until the point corruption went wild, they had a massive real estate bubble, followed by one going on two lost decades where they've propped up their economy with massive public works projects and piles of debt. Of course lately they are printing money at a furious place to try to break the deflationary spiral they've been in for like 20 years.
They also have a demographic time bomb because young people have stopped having jobs, hope or babies so they can't support their rapidly exploding senior population.
Hey NASA, you heard of this place called JPL out by Cal Tech. They've been landing rovers on Mars for a while now which is WAY harder than landing one on the moon. Why don't you give them a call and stop being clueless and pathetic.
P.S.
Elon, please launch Falcon Heavy so we can shut NASA down and put the money in to your actual space program instead of the empty shell that is NASA these days
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Tsunami's tend to only be bad where they hit coasts or shallow water. In the open ocean and deep water they move very fast but wave height is usually never more than a meter.
So what did Unions, OSHA, Workmens Comp and the EPA accomplish in the long run?
They made the U.S. a horrible place to engage in any business that could easily be outsourced to another country with a lower regulatory burden, taxes and wages. The worker's paradise angle worked until the economy globalized, now it doesn't.
So increasingly there are no low skilled jobs in the U.S. Automation is also a union and job killer because its better to spend a lot of money on a machine than deal with employees. Wage rates are dropping, the U.S. runs massive trade deficits and government is massively in the red because its spending more than its shrinking tax base will support (tax cuts for the rich under Bush certainly helped, as did over promising on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and squandering on the defense-intelligence complex.
Wonder why healthy unions in the U.S. tend to only be fire, police, teaching, government, truck driving. Because those are the jobs that can't be outsourced.
There was a sweet spot in there, maybe around 1950 where unions and government regulation hit a sweet spot, they'd wiped out all the massive abuses of workers earlier in the century and built a big middle class, and then they over rotated and made the U.S. a horrible place to do business. If you don't have business you tend to not have jobs, then you have a lot of people living on food stamps and Medicaid.
Pinnacle of PVP shooters was and still is BF2 Karkand Infantry only. They want the perfect game just fix:
- Squad bug
- C4 jumping
- Team switching and balance
- Tone down nade spamming a little, not a lot
- Botting, glitching and assorted other hacks
⦠ship
Overdone graphics add nothing to game play, they just increase game expense and hardware requirements. They are marketing, they don't make games fun.
Endless fur balls shooting at each other like COD are just boring. Strategy and tactics is what makes PVP interesting, and being a better team than your opponents.
Air and armor just aren't that much fun. Its really hard to maintain balance between players with that wide a gamut of capabilites. Infantry only is a blast because everyone is relatively equal and its ability that makes the difference.
Karkand is a great map because it compels confrontation, has some room to manuever but not too much. Big maps like in PS3 result in endless running around trying to find a battle and when you find one the team are almost NEVER balanced so the play just sucks.
Balanced team of evenly matched players in a properly sized map for the number of players is the secret to PVP success. Don't know why gaming companies have so much troublt figuring this out. The excitement and challenge is playing against other players not against gimmicky vehicls or weapons and not gawking at overdone graphics.
Oh, and MY GOD DON'T PUT HEAD BOB IN YOUR GAME. IT IS JUST NAUSEA INDUCING INNER EAR TORTURE AND ADDS NOTHING TO YOUR GAME.
Didn't RTFA but there is nothing stopping them from building a massively parallel, electronic, analog machine composed of a large number of heavily interconnected pattern recognizers with the ability to self modify.
Then the only challenge is for it to learn how to learn and then to actually learn.
Some of the mechanisms evolution developed to create the human brain may well not be optimal so humans probably can do better once they understand how the basic mechanisms works which they increasingly do.
AAPL was elevated to stratospheric heights because of a bubble in their stock. Every hedge fund on the planet was buying it because the price was going up and the price was going up because every hedge fund on the planet was buying it. Its not really useful to compare to a time its stock was at stratospheric heights due to speculators.
On the other hand since Jobs died they do seem to be completely sucking. Hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe was the most vivid illustration of that I can think of. I wager Jobs would have instantly fired anyone dumb enough to hire that guy.
Its probably an interesting question if those same hedge funds are pushing GOOG to heights greater than it deserves. Android is doing well but its a has a weird business model.
Japan has been using unmanned helicopters to spray crops for decades. Yamaha makes them, though they are a little expensive. They are extremely good at it, the down wash from the rotor helps spread the spray all through the plants.
UC Davis, if memory serves, has started trials on them in the U.S. recently but the restrictive drone regulatory climate needs to relax a little
Politicians would generally be clueless enough to not grasp that rapidly evolving technology has eliminated the need for human involvment in the analysis part most of the time. A crafty bureaucrat would let them restrict his human staff and point to this as proof for how our civil liberties are being protected.
Meanwhile in the server room the AI's are raping us.
Unless AC's are using Tor or a public computer, the NSA knows who you are.
Someday soon there will be no anonymity on the Internet.
I've been wondering, maybe the NSA's analysts are constrained from spying on American's but are there loopholes allowing AI's to spy on them instead?
Actually one of the Bush's started that, Obama is just continuing and expanding it. All of the other people I listed would have kept it too. Its probably the only tool that can attack Al Qaeda affiliates around the globe without the quagmires involved in invading countries to root them out.
I don't think drone wars are the worst thing happening right now, they are the least bad alternative to fighting Al Qaeda affiliates. The two down sides are A) killing innocent bystanders which radicalizes all their friends and family B) it can be over used to kill people who probably shouldn't be killed. Since its such an easy way to fight a war chances are everyone will be doing it soon and it things are going to get really messy. Read Suarez, Kill Decision
You think Romney or Hillary Clinton or any of the Bushes would have done anything different? Only candidates that would would try to put an end to the corruption and abuse of power in the American system these days would be Ron or Rand Paul. They will never get elected because all the powers that be fear and hate them. If, by some fluke, they did get elected by the actual American voters, inspite of the negative media bombardment aimed at them, they would be assassinated in months.
It is a correct sentence though isn't it :)
Pedants this is your chance to strike.
As far recording goes within their respective countries it sound like the NSA and China are probably on par. China is censoring much more heavily and probably acting on the traffic with a heavier hand than the NSA.
NSA almost certainly dwarfs China in recording global fiber optic traffic. First a lot of it flows through the U.S. and second the NSA has cuts deals with governments and telecoms all over the world to get more access. China is probably trying to play catch especially through Huawei, and subsidizing telecom in places like Africa, but I wager they are far behind the NSA.
Not sure why the world trusted the U.S. government, tech and telecom companies with so much, while they feared China, since the NSA's voracious appetite for information has been no secret for a long time. Maybe it was just the U.S. pioneered the Internet and it was so cool, so everyone forgot you can't trust the U.S. with your comm traffic.
Bruce Sterling had some great lines in his recent piece The Ecuadorian Library
On the role of the FISA court in controlling the NSA:
"It's like a cardboard steering wheel in the cockpit of a Predator drone"
Most people don't realize the FISA court is appointed entirely by one person, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts. Its a bizarre anomaly, a critical protector of the American Constitution completely controlled by a single person. If he or one of his successors goes bad, the Constitution can be eviscerated overnight and since its completely secret we probably wouldn't even know it.
Hogwash.
In the "Jungle" animals are pretty much born on a level playing field. Only thing you have going for you is if you are born or raised to be stronger, smarter, faster or to work harder.
It was the creation of political structures, money and inheritence that led to the massive inequality endemic in and unique to the human race. This allows clearly inferior individuals to triumph over their superiors because they "were born with it" or actually inherited their wealth and power from their ancestors or caste.
Trust fund babies would most probably die a horrible death if they were actually living in the "Jungle".
Their might be some concept of inheritence in the animal kingdom, I'm thinking among insects who are builders like ants and bees, but its just really not very common.
The CEO of Aetna was on CNBC recently. He insisted medical insurance would be a buyer's market under Obamacare. For some reason he didn't explain, it was just going to be really expensive to buy.
Yes everybody does it but the NSA has taken it to a level completely unprecedented thanks to the vast troves of information flowing through the worlds fiber optics now and the fact they have tapped nearly all of it.
The real problems start when governments start spying on its own citizens, with no limits, and with modern technology. Its now possible to spy on just about everything everyone does, email, phone, social networks, credit card purchases, what books you read, how much electricity you use, where you go and to keep that information indefinitely. Its quite possible they can use the now ubiquitous camera's and microphones we all carry all the time to listen to and watch everything targetted people are doing.
It is now possible to use this information along with machine learning to automatically spot people who have almost any kind of interest, habit, bias or political leaning. You just need to compose the right query.
When does it get really bad. When the NSA, or someone with access to the NSA firehose, starts spying on the all the politicians, journalists and judges that form the government that is supposed to oversee them. Once you have dirt on all of them you control them. Once you control them the checks and balances essential to a democracy are completely gone.
You will quickly find yourself in a totalitarian state, something the U.S. and U.K. have been rushing towards at breakneck speed since 9/11. Only thing stopping it is if the people with all this power engage in self restraint. Chances are some of the powers that be, have been and will be haven't and wont.
Its pretty simple, individuals should be able to contribute to the candidates of their choice with caps. Elections should be running on small money, not big money.
If people are part of a larger organization encouraging them to contribute in a certain way that is no ones business as long as its the individual making the contribution and not the organization.
If an organization is collecting funds via dues, corporate profits or anything else and spending that money in a coordinated fashion to buy political influence it shouldn't be allowed. Nor should organizations be allowed to spend unlimited funds running ads on TV's designed to influence policy, candidates and elections.
Public funding of campaigns could fix the problem in some respects but how you decide gets funded and who doesn't and giving money to crackpots who have no popular support, and will never acquires it, isn't a good idea.
Of course the bigger issue is we need to have people running for office who don't suck and that appears to be increasingly problematic these days.
The thing you are trying to accomplish is for everyone to have a reasonably even chance of influencing the democratic process. When a tiny affluent minority, whatever their agenda, can buy disproportionate influece your democracy is, for all practical purposes, gone. This is pretty much where the U.S. sits today.
That is an extremely convenient cop out. NASA simply hasn't delivered on anything worth funding for a really long time. Success would breed support.
Ares was a deeply flawed in concept, design and construction and it cost a fortune to accomplish next to nothing. Why would anyone continue that farce when SpaceX and Falcon are developing far better launchers and capsules far faster and for much less money.
NASA simply can't do anything without squandering money. They sent a team to SpaceX to study how they were accomplishing so much with so little. The fact that NASA would send a team out to study this is disturbing in itself. One answer is stop using theirh entrenched contractors, (i.e. Lockheed and Boeing) who are milking every contract for every dollar they can.
NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are probably delighted when when one program is cancelled and replaced with another because they never have to deliver anything that works and the pay is the same.
What a crock. The NASA manned space program has been squandering money to no good end since Apollo was cancelled. If all the money squandered on the shuttle and ISS, to no good end, had been spent wisely and efficiently we would be on Mars now.
Danger isn't the important thing. What matters is if you are accomplishing something worth the risk and the money. NASA simply hasn't accomplished anything in manned space flight for 40 years.
Do you even believe this stuff you are shoveling?
Rovers and orbiters are built by JPL. JPL is NASA in name only. It was created in1936, long before NASA.
After giving JPL well deserved tribute for their planetary missions, they also deserve tribute for surviving, staying relevent and doing great work in spite of NASA.
Hubble was OK after a disasterous start. NASA does deserve priase for it along with the other great observatories.
Those programs don't really explain away the fact that the centerpeice of the organization and the one that sucks up most of the money, manned space exploration, is a complete disaster. At some point you need to ask, "What have you done lately"?
Its been a long time since NASA explored any frontiers with their manned space program. Shuttles carrying people in to LEO wasn't anything close to exploring a frontier.
Only if it actually works. If it doesn't or it breaks down immediately its only value will be if it compells NASA to develop the manned or robotic capability to go fix it.
It worked really well up until the point corruption went wild, they had a massive real estate bubble, followed by one going on two lost decades where they've propped up their economy with massive public works projects and piles of debt. Of course lately they are printing money at a furious place to try to break the deflationary spiral they've been in for like 20 years.
They also have a demographic time bomb because young people have stopped having jobs, hope or babies so they can't support their rapidly exploding senior population.
Uh, I thought they all have, with the possible exception of Russia and China and a few smaller ones like Cuba, Venezuala and Ecuador?
Hey NASA, you heard of this place called JPL out by Cal Tech. They've been landing rovers on Mars for a while now which is WAY harder than landing one on the moon. Why don't you give them a call and stop being clueless and pathetic.
P.S.
Elon, please launch Falcon Heavy so we can shut NASA down and put the money in to your actual space program instead of the empty shell that is NASA these days