But that hardware isn't to fight the government. Like any good criminal organization they're not interested in fighting battles against an army. When the army shows up they hide their guns and act like normal people.
It doesn't work like that. A complex mission profile adds complexity at every step. The Russians have been putting things in Earth orbit for a long time as well.
Exactly right. Heck, even if you're discussing illegal activities, what's going to happen? Why would the Chinese government care if you're going to your dealer's house to pick up a bag of pot?
You're assuming you don't know anything they want to know. Well, maybe you don't. But there are a lot of people with access to sensitive information who also have secrets that could be used to blackmail them.
Who's paying these guys? It isn't the government. They're getting paid by the shareholders, who ought to be able to give money to anyone they wish.
Nope, the real problem here is the way banks are both too large and too interconnected. Instead of stupid bonus rules let's address the root of the problem and a) limit the size of any one bank as well as b) stop them from owing each other money so much money they all fall like dominoes when something goes wrong. Then when a bank is in trouble... let it fail, and let the shareholders try to claw back any bonuses. It will be something the rest of us can eat popcorn and watch without getting involved.
Limiting bonuses isn't going to keep bankers from making stupid decisions. And anyway didn't the bank bailout cost us less than the GM bailout? Why don't we end bonuses for auto execs?
You have the actors mixed up, but I think you have the sense of it. By publicly trashing Netanyahu they're preparing the media battle space for a "rogue" Israeli attack on Iran. One story that didn't get wide distribution last week was the delivery of US bunker busters to Israel after years of holdup. Couple that with the latest UN report on the Iranian weapons program and all the pieces are in place for an attack.
This could be a big deal for biofuels. Biofuel companies already have organisms that produce fuels, but are having trouble scaling up the process because all the bugs die if anything is the slightest bit off.
Well, I'm sure industry would love to flood the market with newly minted scientists and engineers. But it's not like there are tons of open positions. If they succeed it will simply mean salaries and the older guys will need to change careers to support their families.
I used to be frustrated that government and academia buy into this BS, but the reality is they want to buy into it. The government would love to be able do draw on an army of unemployed technical people who were born in the US and can easily get security clearances. The colleges just want money to support their bloated bureaucracies. Everyone's happy except the guys who sweated through four years of science classes only to make less money than people who partied through school and got a 4.0 in BusEcon.
I doubt it. The provision for different levels of service on a per-connection basis is baked into LTE. It's the only way you can do VOIP on a congested network without getting unacceptably crappy sound quality.
That said, I don't have a big problem with this. Bandwidth isn't an unlimited resource, and people who simply must stream HD movies to their mobile can pay a bit more.
I think your estimation of the costs here is a few orders of magnitude too low. Mining space asteroids just isn't economical and never will be, unless the goal is to use the materials for construction in space. But then we're back to the question of what we intend to do there. It doesn't make sense to mine asteroids so we can build a habitat so we can mine asteroids unless the end result is cheaper minerals back on earth. But there isn't any material worth that kind of expense,
Why don't we mine the 3/4 of the earth that's covered with ocean? Because it's too expensive. But that would still be orders of magnitude cheaper than mining asteroids.
To be honest with you guys, the U.S. won't be able to seriously compete with China in the next-gen space race
Uh huh. Maybe you can explain what we would be racing to. Mars? Are we going to spend a few trillion dollars to plant a flag on Mars? Why?
The problem is outside of things we already do pretty well (spy sats, communications) and the odd science mission there isn't a hell of a lot to do up there. I mean, something that makes sense to do from an economic standpoint. I'm all for making sure we stay ahead on the military side, to the extent one exists, but putting people in space is a big waste of money. China is welcome to win that race.
Screening test are not as important as we thought. WRONG. If anything this points to MORE FREQUENT screening of assorted cancers.
Assuming, of course, that your test will detect cancer before its too late. I remember reading a study on mammograms which concluded they were a waste of time because cancers that were going to metastasize had already done so by the time you can detect them on a mammogram. More screening is then just a waste of time, and in fact is counterproductive because repeatedly bombarding tissue with x-rays will cause some amount of cancer that wouldn't otherwise have occurred.
I worked as a contractor with the navy for awhile. On the civil service side there was a guy who they'd been trying to fire for three or four years, and they weren't making any progress. And he was just the tallest nail - there were half a dozen that would never have survived as contractors. Your boss must have had some mad skillz at working the bureaucracy, because our organization couldn't get rid of a guy who showed up to work drunk every single day.
There was a sort of legend about a guy getting fired years before I worked there, but everyone agreed it was only because he didn't show up for his disciplinary hearing.
If a tax system is unfair because it taxes poor people proportionally higher than rich people (like the current one) then a new proposed tax system that raises the taxes on poor people and lowers the tax on rich people is less fair.
No it doesn't, unless you're including payroll taxes, which are not supposed to be income taxes.
It has an objective meaning, i.e. one you can observe, measure, and verify. The objective meaning of "fair" is "treat all participants by the same standard". The Fair Tax does this. So does a flat (income) tax with no credits for anyone. Progressive and regressive tax systems fail this definition because there are multiple standards called tax brackets.
How is that fair? Why should I have to pay more just because I make more money? Shouldn't we all pay the same dollar amount?
It is feasible if you have the right subset of the population on your side. Woman, children, and old people don't matter. Really the question is how much of the 16-30 year old males who could and would fight are on our side vs those of the opposition. If the "young" people in our military stood up something could happen. It just so happens this is the same group who is most likely to support these changes.
Which changes? Obama has two solid voting blocks: Black people and educated single women. Military people tend to be from the South and they tend Republican. Men, in general, vote Republican. You're not going to get a violent revolution pulling the country leftward.
In terms of policies "change" is politically meaningless. A fascist dictatorship would be change. So would European-style nanny socialism. So would Randian libertarianism. People who voted for Obama (still only 52%, remember) may have been unanimous in what they don't want, but they are far from unanimous in what they do want.
Debt is not the problem - debt is a symptom of the problem. The real problem is young people are being hit by a one-two double whammy:
1) If they don't get a college degree they'll be mostly relegated to retail and manual labor, meaning they'll be stuck at somewhere around ten or twelve bucks an hour. Far, far too many employers require a college degree for jobs that could be done by high school graduates. There are a few reasons for this, and we could deal with the causes, but we won't because too many people are benefitting. As a recent high school graduate you basically have three choices: go to college, go into the military, or spend your career making lattes. Recently I'm hearing the problem is getting worse - in an effort to stand out graduates have been going back for advanced degrees, which just means employers can demand graduate degrees for jobs that used to require only a bachelor's degree.
2) College is a rip off. An absolute, bend me over forget the Vaseline reaming. Colleges in the US have some advantages no other industry has. For one thing they have perfect pricing. Can you imagine going to the local car dealer and hearing "Well, this baby will set you back $150k, but hardly anyone pays that. Just give us your family's financial records and we'll figure out how much you can borrow." That would be against the law, but that's exactly what happens when you get accepted to a four year college in the US.
The other big advantage they have is the student loan program is pumping essentially unlimited amounts of money into the sector. You don't want to pay that much? No problem. Any kid can pay pretty much any tuition as long as he's willing to sign away his future income. You have no market power under those circumstances. Millions of people are signing up for mountains of debt because that's what everyone else is doing.
And there's no way colleges can justify tuition based on their own costs. Adjusted for inflation college is more than twice as expensive as it was when I went in the '80s, and if anything the students are getting less than I did for their money.
how much proof do we need that they do not care about our needs or wants or even justice??
If there aren't enough people to vote for change, why do you think a revolution could succeed, or even start? This revolution talk I keep hearing from the left is laughably silly - there won't be a revolution because not many people agree with you. If they did, you'd get the change you want.
Of course it's not "fair". The word has a 100% subjective meaning. The current system isn't fair; no tax system is fair. So yeah, "fair tax" isn't fair either.
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But that hardware isn't to fight the government. Like any good criminal organization they're not interested in fighting battles against an army. When the army shows up they hide their guns and act like normal people.
The hardware is for the other gangs.
The arms market is worldwide. We won't have any more success keeping guns away from the cartels than we have keeping drugs out of the US.
Though I suppose it wouldn't hurt for the US government to stop forcing gun dealers in the US to sell to the cartels.
It doesn't have to be chummy. It's business. These are the people they're already buying heroin from, after all, so they have contacts.
It doesn't work like that. A complex mission profile adds complexity at every step. The Russians have been putting things in Earth orbit for a long time as well.
In other news, it turns out sending probes to other planets is hard.
Exactly right. Heck, even if you're discussing illegal activities, what's going to happen? Why would the Chinese government care if you're going to your dealer's house to pick up a bag of pot?
You're assuming you don't know anything they want to know. Well, maybe you don't. But there are a lot of people with access to sensitive information who also have secrets that could be used to blackmail them.
Who's paying these guys? It isn't the government. They're getting paid by the shareholders, who ought to be able to give money to anyone they wish.
Nope, the real problem here is the way banks are both too large and too interconnected. Instead of stupid bonus rules let's address the root of the problem and a) limit the size of any one bank as well as b) stop them from owing each other money so much money they all fall like dominoes when something goes wrong. Then when a bank is in trouble... let it fail, and let the shareholders try to claw back any bonuses. It will be something the rest of us can eat popcorn and watch without getting involved.
Limiting bonuses isn't going to keep bankers from making stupid decisions. And anyway didn't the bank bailout cost us less than the GM bailout? Why don't we end bonuses for auto execs?
You have the actors mixed up, but I think you have the sense of it. By publicly trashing Netanyahu they're preparing the media battle space for a "rogue" Israeli attack on Iran. One story that didn't get wide distribution last week was the delivery of US bunker busters to Israel after years of holdup. Couple that with the latest UN report on the Iranian weapons program and all the pieces are in place for an attack.
This could be a big deal for biofuels. Biofuel companies already have organisms that produce fuels, but are having trouble scaling up the process because all the bugs die if anything is the slightest bit off.
It didn't used to be like that. I'm so glad I got my degree before things changed.
Well, I'm sure industry would love to flood the market with newly minted scientists and engineers. But it's not like there are tons of open positions. If they succeed it will simply mean salaries and the older guys will need to change careers to support their families.
I used to be frustrated that government and academia buy into this BS, but the reality is they want to buy into it. The government would love to be able do draw on an army of unemployed technical people who were born in the US and can easily get security clearances. The colleges just want money to support their bloated bureaucracies. Everyone's happy except the guys who sweated through four years of science classes only to make less money than people who partied through school and got a 4.0 in BusEcon.
I doubt it. The provision for different levels of service on a per-connection basis is baked into LTE. It's the only way you can do VOIP on a congested network without getting unacceptably crappy sound quality.
That said, I don't have a big problem with this. Bandwidth isn't an unlimited resource, and people who simply must stream HD movies to their mobile can pay a bit more.
I think your estimation of the costs here is a few orders of magnitude too low. Mining space asteroids just isn't economical and never will be, unless the goal is to use the materials for construction in space. But then we're back to the question of what we intend to do there. It doesn't make sense to mine asteroids so we can build a habitat so we can mine asteroids unless the end result is cheaper minerals back on earth. But there isn't any material worth that kind of expense,
Why don't we mine the 3/4 of the earth that's covered with ocean? Because it's too expensive. But that would still be orders of magnitude cheaper than mining asteroids.
To be honest with you guys, the U.S. won't be able to seriously compete with China in the next-gen space race
Uh huh. Maybe you can explain what we would be racing to. Mars? Are we going to spend a few trillion dollars to plant a flag on Mars? Why?
The problem is outside of things we already do pretty well (spy sats, communications) and the odd science mission there isn't a hell of a lot to do up there. I mean, something that makes sense to do from an economic standpoint. I'm all for making sure we stay ahead on the military side, to the extent one exists, but putting people in space is a big waste of money. China is welcome to win that race.
Screening test are not as important as we thought. WRONG. If anything this points to MORE FREQUENT screening of assorted cancers.
Assuming, of course, that your test will detect cancer before its too late. I remember reading a study on mammograms which concluded they were a waste of time because cancers that were going to metastasize had already done so by the time you can detect them on a mammogram. More screening is then just a waste of time, and in fact is counterproductive because repeatedly bombarding tissue with x-rays will cause some amount of cancer that wouldn't otherwise have occurred.
Another approach is to find an imaging technique that is cheap and harmless enough that you could image someone's whole body every week.
Assume we have a can opener...
I worked as a contractor with the navy for awhile. On the civil service side there was a guy who they'd been trying to fire for three or four years, and they weren't making any progress. And he was just the tallest nail - there were half a dozen that would never have survived as contractors. Your boss must have had some mad skillz at working the bureaucracy, because our organization couldn't get rid of a guy who showed up to work drunk every single day.
There was a sort of legend about a guy getting fired years before I worked there, but everyone agreed it was only because he didn't show up for his disciplinary hearing.
If a tax system is unfair because it taxes poor people proportionally higher than rich people (like the current one) then a new proposed tax system that raises the taxes on poor people and lowers the tax on rich people is less fair.
No it doesn't, unless you're including payroll taxes, which are not supposed to be income taxes.
It has an objective meaning, i.e. one you can observe, measure, and verify. The objective meaning of "fair" is "treat all participants by the same standard". The Fair Tax does this. So does a flat (income) tax with no credits for anyone. Progressive and regressive tax systems fail this definition because there are multiple standards called tax brackets.
How is that fair? Why should I have to pay more just because I make more money? Shouldn't we all pay the same dollar amount?
It is feasible if you have the right subset of the population on your side. Woman, children, and old people don't matter. Really the question is how much of the 16-30 year old males who could and would fight are on our side vs those of the opposition. If the "young" people in our military stood up something could happen. It just so happens this is the same group who is most likely to support these changes.
Which changes? Obama has two solid voting blocks: Black people and educated single women. Military people tend to be from the South and they tend Republican. Men, in general, vote Republican. You're not going to get a violent revolution pulling the country leftward.
In terms of policies "change" is politically meaningless. A fascist dictatorship would be change. So would European-style nanny socialism. So would Randian libertarianism. People who voted for Obama (still only 52%, remember) may have been unanimous in what they don't want, but they are far from unanimous in what they do want.
Debt is not the problem - debt is a symptom of the problem. The real problem is young people are being hit by a one-two double whammy:
1) If they don't get a college degree they'll be mostly relegated to retail and manual labor, meaning they'll be stuck at somewhere around ten or twelve bucks an hour. Far, far too many employers require a college degree for jobs that could be done by high school graduates. There are a few reasons for this, and we could deal with the causes, but we won't because too many people are benefitting. As a recent high school graduate you basically have three choices: go to college, go into the military, or spend your career making lattes. Recently I'm hearing the problem is getting worse - in an effort to stand out graduates have been going back for advanced degrees, which just means employers can demand graduate degrees for jobs that used to require only a bachelor's degree.
2) College is a rip off. An absolute, bend me over forget the Vaseline reaming. Colleges in the US have some advantages no other industry has. For one thing they have perfect pricing. Can you imagine going to the local car dealer and hearing "Well, this baby will set you back $150k, but hardly anyone pays that. Just give us your family's financial records and we'll figure out how much you can borrow." That would be against the law, but that's exactly what happens when you get accepted to a four year college in the US.
The other big advantage they have is the student loan program is pumping essentially unlimited amounts of money into the sector. You don't want to pay that much? No problem. Any kid can pay pretty much any tuition as long as he's willing to sign away his future income. You have no market power under those circumstances. Millions of people are signing up for mountains of debt because that's what everyone else is doing.
And there's no way colleges can justify tuition based on their own costs. Adjusted for inflation college is more than twice as expensive as it was when I went in the '80s, and if anything the students are getting less than I did for their money.
If there aren't enough people to vote for change, why do you think a revolution could succeed, or even start? This revolution talk I keep hearing from the left is laughably silly - there won't be a revolution because not many people agree with you. If they did, you'd get the change you want.
Of course it's not "fair". The word has a 100% subjective meaning. The current system isn't fair; no tax system is fair. So yeah, "fair tax" isn't fair either.
You just reminded me why I'll take up arms before I allow the communists to run things.