No, you're the one who isn't getting it. The whole point of my post was commercial spy sats doexist and produce imagery for the DEA or, in fact, anyone with money, something you could have learned from google in less time than it took to compose your ignorant post. You can get black and white imagery of one meter resolution from EUSI's IKONOS if you're willing to pony up the cash. One meter is pretty good even for a military bird and certainly up to the task of keeping tabs on drug smugglers.
In terms of maneuverability and availability... well, you have a basic misunderstanding of how these sorts of things work. You don't maneuver spy sats - it takes way too much fuel, which will drastically cut operational life. Typically they're lofted into a polar orbit just out of the atmosphere (130 miles up or so). They circle the globe many times (18 or so) per day, taking pictures of what's under them in each pass. At the end of the day you put all the strips together for a composite image of the earth's surface. Commercial satellite companies don't sell "availability", they sell pictures.
If you need to coordinate ground operations you don't use satellites. You use aircraft.
I understand where the sense of urgency and frustration are coming from. If they're right, there are no minimal interventions likely to make much of a difference. Large, economy-killing interventions would have to be made at the earliest possible time. Thus the steamroller. Of course, that increased sense of urgency doesn't increase the likelihood they're actually right. It all has a sort of Pascal's Wager feel to it.
Personally I'd be much more willing to take AGW seriously if its proponents acted like it was serious and not a tribe signifier. In this age of digital communication, is it really necessary to have repeated international climate change conferences, where all sorts of scientists, government ministers, and their toadies fly to the same spot and make speeches to each other? The air travel for every one of these conferences generates as much CO2 as a small city. Whether or not the science is sound (I have my doubts - I know a media snowjob when I see one), the outward manifestations of the "science is settled!" crowd are characteristic of a religion.
There's a pretty easy way around Posse Comitatus. Remember during the second gulf war the Pentagon was running around buying up commercial sat data because they didn't want Saddam to just buy his intelligence? Well, those commercial satellites are still out there, and they have adequate resolution for this task. All the DEA has to do is buy imagery from a commercial or foreign source.
In fact, reading the article, it's not at all clear to me that isn't what's happening already. They're pretty vague on exactly where the data is coming from..
I'm on first name basis with my sleep doctor. And why not? I put his kids through college. According to him, REM sleep is pretty much garbage sleep - you don't need it at all. In fact there are some drugs that suppress that stage of sleep, and they seem to have no effect on overall well being. Sleep doctors have quantified four different stages of sleep based on EEG readouts, and it turns out what you must have is a few hours of stage 4 sleep, though what that means beyond being the deepest kind of sleep I'm not sure. I can tell you from personal experience lack of stage 4 sleep causes all sorts of problems, from hypertension to memory loss to anxiety attacks.
It's a bit off topic, but if you're suffering from anxiety attacks make sure you get a sleep study done before you go on an SSRI. You could save yourself a whole lot of heartache.
This is insightful? The entire American workforce is about 140 million people. If they were "all American jobs" that means unemployment in the US should be around 70% instead of the 15% it actually is. And that's just India - are all the new jobs in China also American jobs? Because at that point you've exceeded the size of the entire American workforce.
And even if those newly middle class people are doing something that used to be done in the US, what of it? Do you somehow think you're entitled to your job even if there's someone else willing to do it at 20% of the price?
It would be silly for the government to require you under penalty of law to serve as a juror, but not provide you a way to get there.
Welcome to California. Well, actually I think it's done by county. In my county we get five bucks a day intended to defray parking costs, which have since risen to $12. I'm not sure what a bus would cost, since you can't get there from where I live. I assume you could probably get more if you can show some kind of hardship, but that's just an assumption.
There's a huge advantage cars have in this area. In the US the highway system is paid for entirely by gas taxes, and because they don't show the tax on the receipt at the gas station people don't realize how much they're paying in taxes as opposed to the gas itself. Even though a train ride might be cheaper, if you charged what it actually costs to build and maintain the system the reaction would be "OMFG what a ripoff!" and ridership would plumett. Which in turn would mandate a fare increase.
For that reason the vast majority of public transportation systems don't pay for themselves entirely through fares - they're subsidized from general tax revenue at some government level. People who don't use the system end up paying for it, and they don't like that very much.
"Jury duty" was, of course, meant as a placeholder for "every time I need to go somewhere that isn't work or the grocery store". Besides, 3 years? Luxury! Where I live it's every 12 months. Most trials are two or three days, but you can get unlucky and end up on one that lasts six weeks. Oh, yeah, and here they give you five bucks a day for expenses. I don't know what a taxi costs to the courthouse, but I'll bet five bucks would just about cover the tip.
The problem with these sorts of studies is they lump in the fixed and variable costs for car ownership. The only way you get rid of the fixed costs (like insurance and registration) is to get rid of the car altogether, and there aren't too many areas in the US where that's a feasible option. Where I live public transportation to most of the places I go simply doesn't exist. I can take the train to work (though I'd have to ride my bike to the train station), but if I get called up for jury duty, say, without my car I'm taking a taxi for as long as the trial lasts.
So when I take public transportation I'm reducing variable costs - depreciation, gas, maintenance. But there's no way I can come out ahead this way, since I'm still paying insurance and registration on the car that's sitting at home.
I'm pretty sure that won't continue. It costs money for a news organization to find out what's going on, so either they make it pay somehow or they go out of business. The reason we're in the "it's all out there for free" situation today is the industry is clinging to a model that no longer works. When people had to buy physical newspapers, it made a lot of sense for publishers to just print the wire stories, because without the web the only reasonable place to get them was the local paper. But that's no longer true - a newspaper (dead tree or online) that just reprints wire stories is adding absolutely no value and doesn't really have any reason to exist. Many of them are in the process of ceasing to exist, in fact.
I suspect AP and Reuters are not long for this world, and news organizations will start to differentiate themselves with their ability to gather information. When they write up a story they won't sell it to everyone else, and that exclusivity will entice people to buy a subscription.
The only time I ever heard a conservative or Repblican say something like that was in response to someone actively undermining the war effort (Harry Reid, I'm looking at you). That's the one case it's warranted, in my opinion, and I'd say that to someone trying to undermine our troops in Afghanistan now that Obama is CinC. I never heard anyone questioning somebody else's patriotism for criticizing Bush, though. It was more for people who kept pronouncing the the war in Iraq "lost" or "impossible to win" even as our soldiers were winning it pretty decisively.
What most people on the left may not realize is Bush was pretty unpopular with conservatives even before the 2004 election. The US is pretty evenly split in ideological terms, so nobody gets a 22% approval rating without pissing off his erstwhile supporters. If, in 2004, the Democrats had put up someone determined to win the war (and in that kind of war determination = victory), Bush would have been crushed.
The most common way for a company to avoid taxes is to use offset pricing to show expenses in one country and profits in another. Jeffrey Sachs had an excellent presentation on this to, I think, the Commonwealth Club. Let's say you produce widgets in the US. And further let's say the production of a widget requires a whatsit. The idea is you buy whatsits from a foreign company under your multinational umbrella at inflated prices. So your manufacturing company in the US (or UK or Germany) is just barely breaking even, and your foreign sister-company is making all the profit. Now, this sort of thing is already illegal, at least in the US. But it's difficult to the point of being impossible to actually prove it's happening, because you have to look at everything every company buys from a foreign supplier, you have to know what everything ought to cost, and when you find a company paying too much for something you have to untangle a web of businesses in another country to figure out where the money is actually going. And you're not going to get anything but the most grudging cooperation from that other country.
Regulators in first world countries have been trying to put a stop to it for years. Decades, in fact. But notice one of the two countries involved is actually benefitting from the operation, so good luck in getting cooperation from the country showing profits. The only realistic way to stop it is high tariffs. Go ahead, make your whatsits in Mozambique, but we'll recover all those lost taxes at the border when you ship them here. But once that starts happening you've opened up a big can of worms, since as soon as you slap a tariff on an incoming whatsit, the other country is liable to raise the tariffs on the doohickies you've been selling in their country.
So we're not talking about countries like Cayman Islands. We're talking about countries like China who have a large import market and substantial international influence. We're also talking about something that happens between first-world countries, since lots of countries give certain industries special breaks that can be exploited by multinationals.
The discussion of countries like Switzerland is a bit of a red herring, since they're more about sheltering money for individuals than companies. There's a limited payoff from going after wealthy individuals. If you raise taxes they move their money to this year's tax haven. If you manage to prevent them from doing that they either reduces their taxable income (by buying double-tax-free munis, for instance), or they just leave and go to another country with lower taxes. Apparently there's been quite an exodus of wealthy Brits in recent years, though I'm not sure where they're all going.
That wasn't my point. The point is the response I'm getting from supporters. If you want to defend your guy on the facts I'm okay with it. But what I'm hearing from Obama supporters, and not public figures, either, isn't a spirited defense of Obama's policies. It's either "shut up" or "Bush was worse". Of course I don't expect Obama to make good on all his campaign promises - no president does, though most of them make some effort. But the response from his supporters to anything that looks like it may contain a hint of criticism is, shall we say, underwhelming.
Yep, that's the response I'm getting used to from Obama supporters: Shut up. It's almost like you guys don't have any actual support for your position.
I ask Obama supporters "Hey, didn't Obama plan to get rid of Gitmo, and didn't he promise to end the military commissions? "Shut up", they explain.
It's like this guy was born yesterday. International corporations are never going to pay much in the way of income taxes in high-tax jurisdictions because they can control where profit is realized. He can't affect that with just changes to the tax code - that would take a wholesale rewrite of international treaties and business law. A rewrite which would be followed promptly by the biggest trade war the world has ever seen. I would be my last dollar gross tax receipts from corporations don't go up one penny as the result of changes Obama is planning.
There are all sorts of programs, both government and commercial (or, more accurately, hobby-companies of wealthy people), that have proven the tail-first rocket landing approach can work reliably. The question is do you want to carry all that fuel into orbit so you can burn it on the way home. From what I understand, since fuel is the major weight component for a rocket as you start your landing burn the ship weighs almost nothing compared to launch, so it's not as big a drawback as you'd think.
That's what cracks me up about this entire conversation. The iPhone simply isn't the best phone on the market now. It's not even close. I have a friend in Japan who carries an iPhone because it's part of his "look". But he also carries a second, much more capable phone to actually use when he needs to get something done.
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No, you're the one who isn't getting it. The whole point of my post was commercial spy sats do exist and produce imagery for the DEA or, in fact, anyone with money, something you could have learned from google in less time than it took to compose your ignorant post. You can get black and white imagery of one meter resolution from EUSI's IKONOS if you're willing to pony up the cash. One meter is pretty good even for a military bird and certainly up to the task of keeping tabs on drug smugglers.
In terms of maneuverability and availability... well, you have a basic misunderstanding of how these sorts of things work. You don't maneuver spy sats - it takes way too much fuel, which will drastically cut operational life. Typically they're lofted into a polar orbit just out of the atmosphere (130 miles up or so). They circle the globe many times (18 or so) per day, taking pictures of what's under them in each pass. At the end of the day you put all the strips together for a composite image of the earth's surface. Commercial satellite companies don't sell "availability", they sell pictures.
If you need to coordinate ground operations you don't use satellites. You use aircraft.
I understand where the sense of urgency and frustration are coming from. If they're right, there are no minimal interventions likely to make much of a difference. Large, economy-killing interventions would have to be made at the earliest possible time. Thus the steamroller. Of course, that increased sense of urgency doesn't increase the likelihood they're actually right. It all has a sort of Pascal's Wager feel to it.
Personally I'd be much more willing to take AGW seriously if its proponents acted like it was serious and not a tribe signifier. In this age of digital communication, is it really necessary to have repeated international climate change conferences, where all sorts of scientists, government ministers, and their toadies fly to the same spot and make speeches to each other? The air travel for every one of these conferences generates as much CO2 as a small city. Whether or not the science is sound (I have my doubts - I know a media snowjob when I see one), the outward manifestations of the "science is settled!" crowd are characteristic of a religion.
There's a pretty easy way around Posse Comitatus. Remember during the second gulf war the Pentagon was running around buying up commercial sat data because they didn't want Saddam to just buy his intelligence? Well, those commercial satellites are still out there, and they have adequate resolution for this task. All the DEA has to do is buy imagery from a commercial or foreign source.
In fact, reading the article, it's not at all clear to me that isn't what's happening already. They're pretty vague on exactly where the data is coming from..
Oh, who to believe? A doctor who specializes in sleep disorders or some random guy on the internets? Let me think...
I'm on first name basis with my sleep doctor. And why not? I put his kids through college. According to him, REM sleep is pretty much garbage sleep - you don't need it at all. In fact there are some drugs that suppress that stage of sleep, and they seem to have no effect on overall well being. Sleep doctors have quantified four different stages of sleep based on EEG readouts, and it turns out what you must have is a few hours of stage 4 sleep, though what that means beyond being the deepest kind of sleep I'm not sure. I can tell you from personal experience lack of stage 4 sleep causes all sorts of problems, from hypertension to memory loss to anxiety attacks.
It's a bit off topic, but if you're suffering from anxiety attacks make sure you get a sleep study done before you go on an SSRI. You could save yourself a whole lot of heartache.
It's pretty weak sarcasm then. Was that you, posting as AC, or are you just making an assumption here?
This is insightful? The entire American workforce is about 140 million people. If they were "all American jobs" that means unemployment in the US should be around 70% instead of the 15% it actually is. And that's just India - are all the new jobs in China also American jobs? Because at that point you've exceeded the size of the entire American workforce.
And even if those newly middle class people are doing something that used to be done in the US, what of it? Do you somehow think you're entitled to your job even if there's someone else willing to do it at 20% of the price?
I hope that comment was supposed to be sarcastic.
$5/day for expenses. That's it.
It would be silly for the government to require you under penalty of law to serve as a juror, but not provide you a way to get there.
Welcome to California. Well, actually I think it's done by county. In my county we get five bucks a day intended to defray parking costs, which have since risen to $12. I'm not sure what a bus would cost, since you can't get there from where I live. I assume you could probably get more if you can show some kind of hardship, but that's just an assumption.
There's a huge advantage cars have in this area. In the US the highway system is paid for entirely by gas taxes, and because they don't show the tax on the receipt at the gas station people don't realize how much they're paying in taxes as opposed to the gas itself. Even though a train ride might be cheaper, if you charged what it actually costs to build and maintain the system the reaction would be "OMFG what a ripoff!" and ridership would plumett. Which in turn would mandate a fare increase.
For that reason the vast majority of public transportation systems don't pay for themselves entirely through fares - they're subsidized from general tax revenue at some government level. People who don't use the system end up paying for it, and they don't like that very much.
That's probably true. But I don't think the wife will come out very well in a cost analysis :).
Nope. Someone tried it last time I was there. Pretty much if you weren't in the hospital or nursing children you stayed in the pool.
"Jury duty" was, of course, meant as a placeholder for "every time I need to go somewhere that isn't work or the grocery store". Besides, 3 years? Luxury! Where I live it's every 12 months. Most trials are two or three days, but you can get unlucky and end up on one that lasts six weeks. Oh, yeah, and here they give you five bucks a day for expenses. I don't know what a taxi costs to the courthouse, but I'll bet five bucks would just about cover the tip.
The problem with these sorts of studies is they lump in the fixed and variable costs for car ownership. The only way you get rid of the fixed costs (like insurance and registration) is to get rid of the car altogether, and there aren't too many areas in the US where that's a feasible option. Where I live public transportation to most of the places I go simply doesn't exist. I can take the train to work (though I'd have to ride my bike to the train station), but if I get called up for jury duty, say, without my car I'm taking a taxi for as long as the trial lasts.
So when I take public transportation I'm reducing variable costs - depreciation, gas, maintenance. But there's no way I can come out ahead this way, since I'm still paying insurance and registration on the car that's sitting at home.
I'm pretty sure that won't continue. It costs money for a news organization to find out what's going on, so either they make it pay somehow or they go out of business. The reason we're in the "it's all out there for free" situation today is the industry is clinging to a model that no longer works. When people had to buy physical newspapers, it made a lot of sense for publishers to just print the wire stories, because without the web the only reasonable place to get them was the local paper. But that's no longer true - a newspaper (dead tree or online) that just reprints wire stories is adding absolutely no value and doesn't really have any reason to exist. Many of them are in the process of ceasing to exist, in fact.
I suspect AP and Reuters are not long for this world, and news organizations will start to differentiate themselves with their ability to gather information. When they write up a story they won't sell it to everyone else, and that exclusivity will entice people to buy a subscription.
Conservative spin? In newspapers? What planet are you from?
The only time I ever heard a conservative or Repblican say something like that was in response to someone actively undermining the war effort (Harry Reid, I'm looking at you). That's the one case it's warranted, in my opinion, and I'd say that to someone trying to undermine our troops in Afghanistan now that Obama is CinC. I never heard anyone questioning somebody else's patriotism for criticizing Bush, though. It was more for people who kept pronouncing the the war in Iraq "lost" or "impossible to win" even as our soldiers were winning it pretty decisively.
What most people on the left may not realize is Bush was pretty unpopular with conservatives even before the 2004 election. The US is pretty evenly split in ideological terms, so nobody gets a 22% approval rating without pissing off his erstwhile supporters. If, in 2004, the Democrats had put up someone determined to win the war (and in that kind of war determination = victory), Bush would have been crushed.
The most common way for a company to avoid taxes is to use offset pricing to show expenses in one country and profits in another. Jeffrey Sachs had an excellent presentation on this to, I think, the Commonwealth Club. Let's say you produce widgets in the US. And further let's say the production of a widget requires a whatsit. The idea is you buy whatsits from a foreign company under your multinational umbrella at inflated prices. So your manufacturing company in the US (or UK or Germany) is just barely breaking even, and your foreign sister-company is making all the profit. Now, this sort of thing is already illegal, at least in the US. But it's difficult to the point of being impossible to actually prove it's happening, because you have to look at everything every company buys from a foreign supplier, you have to know what everything ought to cost, and when you find a company paying too much for something you have to untangle a web of businesses in another country to figure out where the money is actually going. And you're not going to get anything but the most grudging cooperation from that other country.
Regulators in first world countries have been trying to put a stop to it for years. Decades, in fact. But notice one of the two countries involved is actually benefitting from the operation, so good luck in getting cooperation from the country showing profits. The only realistic way to stop it is high tariffs. Go ahead, make your whatsits in Mozambique, but we'll recover all those lost taxes at the border when you ship them here. But once that starts happening you've opened up a big can of worms, since as soon as you slap a tariff on an incoming whatsit, the other country is liable to raise the tariffs on the doohickies you've been selling in their country.
So we're not talking about countries like Cayman Islands. We're talking about countries like China who have a large import market and substantial international influence. We're also talking about something that happens between first-world countries, since lots of countries give certain industries special breaks that can be exploited by multinationals.
The discussion of countries like Switzerland is a bit of a red herring, since they're more about sheltering money for individuals than companies. There's a limited payoff from going after wealthy individuals. If you raise taxes they move their money to this year's tax haven. If you manage to prevent them from doing that they either reduces their taxable income (by buying double-tax-free munis, for instance), or they just leave and go to another country with lower taxes. Apparently there's been quite an exodus of wealthy Brits in recent years, though I'm not sure where they're all going.
That wasn't my point. The point is the response I'm getting from supporters. If you want to defend your guy on the facts I'm okay with it. But what I'm hearing from Obama supporters, and not public figures, either, isn't a spirited defense of Obama's policies. It's either "shut up" or "Bush was worse". Of course I don't expect Obama to make good on all his campaign promises - no president does, though most of them make some effort. But the response from his supporters to anything that looks like it may contain a hint of criticism is, shall we say, underwhelming.
Yep, that's the response I'm getting used to from Obama supporters: Shut up. It's almost like you guys don't have any actual support for your position.
I ask Obama supporters "Hey, didn't Obama plan to get rid of Gitmo, and didn't he promise to end the military commissions? "Shut up", they explain.
It's like this guy was born yesterday. International corporations are never going to pay much in the way of income taxes in high-tax jurisdictions because they can control where profit is realized. He can't affect that with just changes to the tax code - that would take a wholesale rewrite of international treaties and business law. A rewrite which would be followed promptly by the biggest trade war the world has ever seen. I would be my last dollar gross tax receipts from corporations don't go up one penny as the result of changes Obama is planning.
Great, so now you have six million images per second of... something. How in the world would you actually analyze that much data?
There are all sorts of programs, both government and commercial (or, more accurately, hobby-companies of wealthy people), that have proven the tail-first rocket landing approach can work reliably. The question is do you want to carry all that fuel into orbit so you can burn it on the way home. From what I understand, since fuel is the major weight component for a rocket as you start your landing burn the ship weighs almost nothing compared to launch, so it's not as big a drawback as you'd think.
Yes. And after they've added all that extra weight it will still be less than the wings chosen for some other country's retarded white space elephant.
That's what cracks me up about this entire conversation. The iPhone simply isn't the best phone on the market now. It's not even close. I have a friend in Japan who carries an iPhone because it's part of his "look". But he also carries a second, much more capable phone to actually use when he needs to get something done.