Except that's not how it would work in reality. Here's a much more accurate version of your thought experiment:
101 people voting for president. 51 are "liberal" and 50 are "conservative" (both in the American sense). Here are the results of the two party system:
21 people voting in State: 10 Dem, 11 Rep. State's 5 Electoral Votes go to Rep. 17 people voting in Statesylvania: 11 Dem, 6 Rep. Statesylvania's 3 Electoral Votes are split proportionally, 2 Dem and 1 Rep. 28 people voting in Statefornia: 14 Dem, 13 Rep, 1 Ind. Statefornia's 5 Electoral Votes go to Dem. 20 people voting in Statessissippi: 8 Dem, 12 Rep. Statessissippi's 5 Electorial Votes go to Rep. 15 people voting in Statesachussetts: 7 Dem, 7 Rep, 1 Ind. There is an immediate recount and media frenzy. People fly into Statesachussetts from all over the country to support the recount effort and stand in front of cameras and make stupid statements about finding the truth. The first recount results in 6 Dem, 7 Rep, and 2 votes misplaced. The second recount results in 8 Dem, 8 Rep, and 2 Buchannan. The Election Board throws up their hands, a lawsuit is filed, and the Supreme Court decides that since the first recount showed a total for the Republicans, that they should get the state's 3 Electoral Votes should all go to the Republicans.
This leaves an Electoral College result of 10 Dem, 11 Rep. The Republicans take office.
And your vote for the independent candidate in Statesfornia? It didn't even make a blip on the radar. Statistical noise.
And while having a computer identify objects in photographs is hard, having a computer identify highly similar images is pretty easy. That's true, and admittedly not something I thought of when I first suggested the puppy pictures. But thinking about it more, all it means is that each image needs to be created on the fly, different enough from the last time the image was used that a simple hash or outline recognition would not be sufficient to match the image with a previous image, but still easily recognizable as a puppy for a human.
So I propose the following: instead of using photographs of actual puppies or kittens, let's model one in 3D, in a program like Blender. Then write some scripts that give the modeled character a number of poses, and an infinite variation between the poses with adjustable values. Then add in a few more adjustable characteristics (size of eyes/ears/mouth, color of fur, background image, etc.) and make sure the model is simple enough to be rendered very quickly. When the user requests a captcha, the computer renders a number of images with randomized values of those variable characteristics, and sends them to the user for identification. These renders will be small in size, and the models will be simple enough, that this should not take very long on a reasonably beefy webserver (you could outsource the actual rendering to a small renderfarm, too, if your operation can afford it). That way, the images are different every time they're generated, but they're not distorted text that's impossible to read--they are easily recognizable as "choose the turtle from this set of pictures of hubcaps", for example. Obviously, the more models you have in the database and the more adjustable those models' characteristics are, the better this service will be.
Captchas are far from human-readable (the good ones at least)... Yeah, that's why they suck.
Some forums, I have to try *four* times to get past the captcha, just to post a message about how libsomething won't compile.
If they really wanted good captchas, they need to start using problems that are very easy for humans to solve, but very hard for computers to solve. For example, picking the one photo of a puppy out of a matrix of photos of full-grown dogs.
Computers are currently really bad at recognizing images in photos, but they do a decent job of recognizing text with commercial OCR programs (that ability will only increase when there are some hardcore OSS versions available, such as Google's project). So why are we spending our time mangling the text so that neither computers nor humans can read it, and not focusing on something computers actually are bad at, like recognizing a puppy?
As others have pointed out, 1080p isn't even supported by the HD broadcast standard. True, to a point.
The broadcast standard is 1080i at 60Hz, but content filmed in 1080p at 24Hz (as most professionally created content is) can be losslessly converted to 1080i60 and back again using 3:2 pulldown techniques. Standard DVDs use this technique now; applying it to HD only means higher frame resolutions.
As far as I know, NBC and CBS both broadcast at 1080i60, with content recorded at 1080p24 and encoded with 3:2 pulldown. A TV that properly supports full 1080p should be able to reconstruct the 1080p stream from the 3:2 1080i60 data. And yes, it will look better than a TV that simply shows that 3:2 1080i60 data raw, since it will be doubling every fifth field.
Let's face it, Britney's audience WILL NOT NOTICE that you used the nifty ribbon mikes from 1956 or that you spent $10,000 in studio time just to perfect the accoustics. They sure will. Without all that equipment, Britney sounds like a banshee in a blender.
They spend all that money on equipment for exactly one reason: to manufacture talent. The record companies are no longer scouting for good bands who will make music people want to hear; that's been relegated to the indy labels. Instead, the RIAA chooses some jailbait pretty face who knows how to shake their hips and expose just the right bits of skin on camera, and then feeds them through all that fancy equipment to sample, clip, modulate, adjust, downmix, blur, airbrush, and edit them into a product. Then they mass market this product to the segment of the population that, while having the most disposable income and highest impulsive purchase rate, also is the most likely to pirate music: teenagers.
The member companies of the RIAA are not distributors; they are factories. Of course, there are always a few artists who emerge unscathed and with their artistic integrity intact, but they are the special ones.
The irony of all this is that if the RIAA companies simply did what we all expected them to do, i.e., scout and discover actual, honest-to-goodness good bands and help them sell records the market wants to buy in a way the market wants to buy them, they would be making more money than they know what to do with. But that's not "the way we've always done it," so first they are going to fight inevitability.
...New Mexico State University. A very large state school and a pretty good engineering school. I went there. I don't believe you. Anyone who's lived in the desert knows how to spell it.
Of course if you ever had actually seen a car comerical, they clearly say something to the effect of "DRAMATIZATION DO NOT ATTEMPT". And PROFESSIONAL DRIVER ON CLOSED COURSE DO NOT ATTEMPT. Of course I've seen that fine print. How is that any different than Microsoft publishing minimum system specs for running Windows Vista, and having those specs only able to run the basic version? The computers with the stickers DO meet those minimum specifications, and therefore will run Vista. The fine print is there, right on the box.
Essentially, what I think you're saying is that Microsoft will be completely in the clear if they add some fine print to all their advertisements that says "WARNING: the features shown here will only run on überslick gaming machines with liquid nitrogen cooling systems and their own power grid. Your $300 Dell will have trouble with the Vista version of Notepad." That will make this whole thing go away, right?
This is by far the stupidest post I've read all day.. jesus christ. You must have had a short day.
I'm all for making Microsoft follow the rules, but at what point does this cross the line from "buyer beware" to "deceptive advertising"?
Car analogy time!
Car companies use phrases like "starting at $22,900" all the time in their commercials, when we know damn well that if you want power windows, A/C, a CD player, and a decent sized engine, you will be paying significantly more than that price. The "starting at" price is always the most basic model. I don't see any difference between this and advertising "Windows Vista Capable" and only being able to run basic version of Windows Vista. The computer is, in fact, capable of running Windows Vista.
"But wait!" TFA exclaims. "It can't run ALL of Vista, at least not all the features that Microsoft advertised as being in Vista!"
So? That same car commercial has the car making hairpin mountain pass turns at 65 miles an hour, probably with custom tires, a beefy engine, and a specially trained driver. Do those things come with the $22,900 car? Certainly not. Why then are these same people not filing suits about the Ford Edge not being able to climb buildings and park on walls?
I can't see this suit going anywhere. There is a fine line between letting a company advertise their products and forcing them to tell everyone how shitty their stuff is, and this suit crosses it.
...said Glenn Cushing of Northern Arizona University, who first spotted the black areas in the photographs. "Uh oh, looks like someone smudged the photo."
space shot in handcam style - everything in BSG's external shots is Firefly derivative. Of course, much of that deriviative nature can be due to the fact that the same company did the special effects for both. Zoic Studios
Also, Zoe is wicked hotter, 'cause she could kick your ass.
That video should be required watching for Microsoft marketers/engineers/etc. Why? The video was created by Microsoft marketers/engineers/etc. It was an instruction manual on how NOT to sell a music player.
I guess it worked. The packaging is definitely not crowded.
Apparently, someone missed the day in class when they discussed intrinsic value. If you have someone that's experienced and good at what they do, they are very likely worth more because they know how to be more productive at what they do. That's right, and I know Circuit City said in TFA that it was "not based on job performance", but let's look at this from the workers' perspective.
Circuit City is a dying company. Their stock has been in decline for years, and they seem to be at a loss on how to compete properly with online retailers and even other brick & mortar retailers. Any employee of Circuit City that didn't know this has had their head stuck in the sand, so this kind of drastic measure should not be a surprise.
Now, even though Circuit City is taking drastic measures, and have effectively shot themselves in the foot, this isn't all bad. Let's say hypothetically, that of the people fired, 20% are "valuable" to Circuit City: by valuable, I mean that the money they earn for the store outweighs the extra money they are being paid. These people are clearly very good salespeople, and will very quickly go on to find other jobs in other sales positions (perhaps not retail, maybe as direct sales vendors or something) because they can easily show a mastery of the material and methods. The other hypothetical 80%, however, were losing money for the company, and were being paid more than they were worth. They can either come back to the same company for less money (thus "correcting" the salary imbalance that existed) or they can get another lower-paying job elsewhere. Yes, it sucks when you take a cut in pay, but how can you possibly blame the company when you were being overpaid? Be worth your salary, and you will have no trouble maintaining or increasing it.
I'm pretty sure the company looked at the sales figures of the people they were firing. If a signifiant percentage of those people were valuable to the company, they would not have made this kind of decision. All the talk about having nothing to do with job performance is likely PR fluff. No company ever tells laid off employees that they were laid off because they sucked at what they do.
I'm not defending Circuit City's decison here; I think it's a desparate move made by desparate managers. But I don't think that it's an "evil" decision, nor was it made without considering the reprecussions.
I'm sure the truth is, most of these salespeople were overpaid. But no one wants the truth. They just want to continue to be overpaid. Wouldn't you?
If you want to control your own life, you have to make careful financial decisions, forego status symbols, avoid debt, and invest in yourself. A paid-off trailer is a castle, a McMansion with a mortgage is the bank's. You're absolutely right about careful financial decisions, and I agree with you completely on the materialistic nature of the American Dream, but I take exception with the last zinger.
<rant type="financial_misunderstanding">
When you say that a "McMansion with a mortgage is the bank's" you're not taking into account the value of the house itself, which is yours. Yes, you need to avoid debt, but a mortgage is not necessarily considered a net debt.
Someone said to me once that the difference between rich people and poor people has nothing to do with the amount of money each has. The difference is: rich people use their money to obtain assets, and poor people use their money to pay for liabilities that they *think* are assets. Rent is a liability; money flows out, but you don't own anything (it feels like an asset, because it's your own apartment/house/whatever). Cars are a liability; the moment you buy it, the value drops, so the amount you owe is greater than the amount you own, and the value will never increase: it's a net debt (but again, it's *your* car, so it feels like an asset). Houses, on the other hand, usually increase in value over time (not universally true, but stay with me here). Thus, when you pay $X for a house, you mortgage $(X+Y), with Y being the interest. Except that over time, the value of the house increases, but X remains constant, hopefully eventually exceeding X+Y. At any time during the mortgage, you could sell the house and move, and the sales price you get would be used to instantly pay off the mortgage. If you time things right and choose your real estate intelligently, you can usually make money on the sale of the house that way, even with interest on the mortgage. Thus, because your assets (the market value of the house) typically outweigh your liabilities (the remaining debt on your mortgage), it's not a net debt. It's a net asset. Once the value of your mortgage(s) is greater than the market value of your house, then you can consider it a net debt. Choosing houses in neighborhoods that are increasing in value, and then taking proper care of the house during ownership, will help avoid the net debt situation.
That being said, I agree with your statement about responsible financial planning and avoiding debt. But when that debt is giving returns higher than the initial investment (such as the proverbial "McMansion," in a well-chosen neighborhood, whose value is increasing faster than the interest on the mortgage), then that's called leveraging your debt, and it's actually very smart from a financial perspective. Well-run companies do this all the time: they will get loans from the bank that they then invest in operations, and the profit from those operations outstrips the interest on the debt, thus creating net gains. There's a limit to how much you can do this, of course, but don't scoff at the "McMansion" simply because it has a mortgage. It may actually be making more money than the paid-off trailer you mentioned.
Consumer credit cards (not business credit cards), car payments, cash loans, home equity loans, etc.: all these things are true debt, and falling prey to them (instead of balancing them with other assets) is a great way to end up poor. A McMansion with a mortgage is not on that list.
We could even get to the point where we could economically use LEO for quick trips to places halfway around the world. I agree with your whole comment, but as a space geek I have to take exception at this statement.
LEO will never be economical for trips between two points on the Earth's surface. The energies involved in getting to that speed are ridiculously high for that short of a distance (relatively speaking, of course). LEO brings a whole host of problems with it, including high reentry temperatures (due to the high velocity needed to attain LEO to begin with) and ridiculous amounts of fuel needed to reach it.
To put things in perspective: Burt Rutan and crew basically recreated the very first manned Mercury launch (the one with Al Shephard aboard). It was a sub-orbital launch that placed the rocket on a parabolic trajectory... pretty much the same as if you could throw a ball in the air high enough to just barely leave the atmosphere, and then let it fall back to Earth. Since the velocity of the projectile (or spacecraft) is very small when it reenters the atmosphere, no heat shielding is needed.
On the other hand, to get a vehicle to low Earth orbit requires balancing the force of gravity exactly with forward velocity to create a stable system. This requires velocities in excess of 17,000 mph, which is why spacecraft reentering from orbit need all kinds of heat shielding to protect the craft from the friction of the atmosphere.
It would be much more economical for a craft to launch at an angle (or start out in flight at high altitudes, with airbreathing jet engines), and gain just enough energy to leave the atmosphere on a parabolic path that would cross much of the trip in the vacuum of space. Reentering would not need much heat shielding, because the velocities would not be as high as an orbital flight, which would make the trip much safer. Such systems using combinations of airbreathing engines and rockets could be very fuel effecient.
The space shuttle, just after Main Engine Cutoff, is on a parabolic flight path that will have it reenter and land in the Indian Ocean (if it stayed ballistic; the shuttle also has control surfaces and can steer). During missions, it has to fire the engines several more times after MECO to elevate this orbit and attain LEO.
Traveling between points on the Earth's surface will almost always be suborbital. However, that being said, finding economical ways to get to LEO in the first place is the first step to economical travel to places like the Moon and beyond.
Chicago O'Hare is a government airport. Possible deployed for use by commercial airplanes but it should be billed corrected as a government facility. Yet another shining example of your tax dollars at work. I am glad I don't live in that state/county but I fully expect that when a tornado or hurricane wipes it out I will have to foot the FEMA bill for it.
I'm not against airports. But if United Airlines wants a facility then United Airlines should foot the bill for it.
Not sure I see the distinction here. Governments build facilities and then charge fees to commercial interests (in the form of runway fees for an airport, maybe launchpad fees for a spaceport) to use them. It spurs commercial investment, creates jobs, and allows more travel options for the residents of the area. Seems good to me.
While I don't condone misuse of letterhead or Internet links, abusing the responsibility of respecting the way links are supposed to work (e.g., same-named links are supposed to always have the same general content) is just asking to have the freedom to choose your links taken away. Wait, what?
No.
My server, my link, my copyrighted content, full stop. I can put whatever the hell I want in a link named http://www.domain.com/picture_for_mccains_website. jpg and change it as often as I like to anything I like.
Any lawyer (or senator) who tries to say differently will get a resounding "fuck off" from the Judicial Branch.
Nobody is saying that judges are stupid and cannot apply the law properly. The convictions are sound. The criminals are guilty. The law is the law. But it isn't always reasonable. You shouldn't trust a court of law to give a sensible judgement in a computer-related case. But this is precisely why we have the appeals system we do.
If you are convicted based on a law that is unfair (the word "unfair" in this context is pronounced "unconstitutional"), then you can appeal the ruling all the way up the court system until you finally get to a court that can do something about it (SCOTUS).
Which is, of course, why we need these types of "convictions based on ridiculous laws" to make it all the way to a court ruling; this will help us clean out the legislative knee jerks and keep the law sane. The checks and balances in the system are there for a reason.
That's probably a good idea. This is whole reason the BBB exists: to police the business practices of companies in the US and protect the customers.
If you still know people working there and they have seen the same offenses you have, ask them to start documenting the incident: date, time, people present, short description, opinion of what was wrong about the encounter. When they have documented a sufficient number of incidents (I leave it to you do determine how many is enough) bring it to the BBB. They will investigate for you.
Another track would be to try and elevate the problem to people higher up the food chain than the manager. Talk to the branch manager/owner, or call corporate. Sometimes the higher ups are not aware of the abuses of their policies that go on, and since they are more directly responsible to the shareholders, they are more likely to do something about it.
If you're willing to be a whistle-blower, it will be good for the customers, the employees, and ultimately the shareholders, who will see a larger long-term return from an honest company than they will from a dishonest one. It probably won't be so good for your manager, but, as you so aptly said in your anecdote, fuck 'im.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Except that's not how it would work in reality. Here's a much more accurate version of your thought experiment:
101 people voting for president. 51 are "liberal" and 50 are "conservative" (both in the American sense). Here are the results of the two party system:
21 people voting in State: 10 Dem, 11 Rep. State's 5 Electoral Votes go to Rep.
17 people voting in Statesylvania: 11 Dem, 6 Rep. Statesylvania's 3 Electoral Votes are split proportionally, 2 Dem and 1 Rep.
28 people voting in Statefornia: 14 Dem, 13 Rep, 1 Ind. Statefornia's 5 Electoral Votes go to Dem.
20 people voting in Statessissippi: 8 Dem, 12 Rep. Statessissippi's 5 Electorial Votes go to Rep.
15 people voting in Statesachussetts: 7 Dem, 7 Rep, 1 Ind. There is an immediate recount and media frenzy. People fly into Statesachussetts from all over the country to support the recount effort and stand in front of cameras and make stupid statements about finding the truth. The first recount results in 6 Dem, 7 Rep, and 2 votes misplaced. The second recount results in 8 Dem, 8 Rep, and 2 Buchannan. The Election Board throws up their hands, a lawsuit is filed, and the Supreme Court decides that since the first recount showed a total for the Republicans, that they should get the state's 3 Electoral Votes should all go to the Republicans.
This leaves an Electoral College result of 10 Dem, 11 Rep. The Republicans take office.
And your vote for the independent candidate in Statesfornia? It didn't even make a blip on the radar. Statistical noise.
So I propose the following: instead of using photographs of actual puppies or kittens, let's model one in 3D, in a program like Blender. Then write some scripts that give the modeled character a number of poses, and an infinite variation between the poses with adjustable values. Then add in a few more adjustable characteristics (size of eyes/ears/mouth, color of fur, background image, etc.) and make sure the model is simple enough to be rendered very quickly. When the user requests a captcha, the computer renders a number of images with randomized values of those variable characteristics, and sends them to the user for identification. These renders will be small in size, and the models will be simple enough, that this should not take very long on a reasonably beefy webserver (you could outsource the actual rendering to a small renderfarm, too, if your operation can afford it). That way, the images are different every time they're generated, but they're not distorted text that's impossible to read--they are easily recognizable as "choose the turtle from this set of pictures of hubcaps", for example. Obviously, the more models you have in the database and the more adjustable those models' characteristics are, the better this service will be.
Some forums, I have to try *four* times to get past the captcha, just to post a message about how libsomething won't compile.
If they really wanted good captchas, they need to start using problems that are very easy for humans to solve, but very hard for computers to solve. For example, picking the one photo of a puppy out of a matrix of photos of full-grown dogs.
Computers are currently really bad at recognizing images in photos, but they do a decent job of recognizing text with commercial OCR programs (that ability will only increase when there are some hardcore OSS versions available, such as Google's project). So why are we spending our time mangling the text so that neither computers nor humans can read it, and not focusing on something computers actually are bad at, like recognizing a puppy?
The broadcast standard is 1080i at 60Hz, but content filmed in 1080p at 24Hz (as most professionally created content is) can be losslessly converted to 1080i60 and back again using 3:2 pulldown techniques. Standard DVDs use this technique now; applying it to HD only means higher frame resolutions.
As far as I know, NBC and CBS both broadcast at 1080i60, with content recorded at 1080p24 and encoded with 3:2 pulldown. A TV that properly supports full 1080p should be able to reconstruct the 1080p stream from the 3:2 1080i60 data. And yes, it will look better than a TV that simply shows that 3:2 1080i60 data raw, since it will be doubling every fifth field.
They spend all that money on equipment for exactly one reason: to manufacture talent. The record companies are no longer scouting for good bands who will make music people want to hear; that's been relegated to the indy labels. Instead, the RIAA chooses some jailbait pretty face who knows how to shake their hips and expose just the right bits of skin on camera, and then feeds them through all that fancy equipment to sample, clip, modulate, adjust, downmix, blur, airbrush, and edit them into a product. Then they mass market this product to the segment of the population that, while having the most disposable income and highest impulsive purchase rate, also is the most likely to pirate music: teenagers.
The member companies of the RIAA are not distributors; they are factories. Of course, there are always a few artists who emerge unscathed and with their artistic integrity intact, but they are the special ones.
The irony of all this is that if the RIAA companies simply did what we all expected them to do, i.e., scout and discover actual, honest-to-goodness good bands and help them sell records the market wants to buy in a way the market wants to buy them, they would be making more money than they know what to do with. But that's not "the way we've always done it," so first they are going to fight inevitability.
...New Mexico State University. A very large state school and a pretty good engineering school. I went there. I don't believe you. Anyone who's lived in the desert knows how to spell it.Essentially, what I think you're saying is that Microsoft will be completely in the clear if they add some fine print to all their advertisements that says "WARNING: the features shown here will only run on überslick gaming machines with liquid nitrogen cooling systems and their own power grid. Your $300 Dell will have trouble with the Vista version of Notepad." That will make this whole thing go away, right? This is by far the stupidest post I've read all day.. jesus christ. You must have had a short day.
I'm all for making Microsoft follow the rules, but at what point does this cross the line from "buyer beware" to "deceptive advertising"?
Car analogy time!
Car companies use phrases like "starting at $22,900" all the time in their commercials, when we know damn well that if you want power windows, A/C, a CD player, and a decent sized engine, you will be paying significantly more than that price. The "starting at" price is always the most basic model. I don't see any difference between this and advertising "Windows Vista Capable" and only being able to run basic version of Windows Vista. The computer is, in fact, capable of running Windows Vista.
"But wait!" TFA exclaims. "It can't run ALL of Vista, at least not all the features that Microsoft advertised as being in Vista!"
So? That same car commercial has the car making hairpin mountain pass turns at 65 miles an hour, probably with custom tires, a beefy engine, and a specially trained driver. Do those things come with the $22,900 car? Certainly not. Why then are these same people not filing suits about the Ford Edge not being able to climb buildings and park on walls?
I can't see this suit going anywhere. There is a fine line between letting a company advertise their products and forcing them to tell everyone how shitty their stuff is, and this suit crosses it.
Good God, how long are these flights?
My senses go to eleven.
...said Glenn Cushing of Northern Arizona University, who first spotted the black areas in the photographs. "Uh oh, looks like someone smudged the photo."*rubs finger on photo*
"Hmm. Guess they're caves, then."
Also, Zoe is wicked hotter, 'cause she could kick your ass.
Damn yokels can't even tell a transport freighter ain't got no guns on it.
I guess it worked. The packaging is definitely not crowded.
Circuit City is a dying company. Their stock has been in decline for years, and they seem to be at a loss on how to compete properly with online retailers and even other brick & mortar retailers. Any employee of Circuit City that didn't know this has had their head stuck in the sand, so this kind of drastic measure should not be a surprise.
Now, even though Circuit City is taking drastic measures, and have effectively shot themselves in the foot, this isn't all bad. Let's say hypothetically, that of the people fired, 20% are "valuable" to Circuit City: by valuable, I mean that the money they earn for the store outweighs the extra money they are being paid. These people are clearly very good salespeople, and will very quickly go on to find other jobs in other sales positions (perhaps not retail, maybe as direct sales vendors or something) because they can easily show a mastery of the material and methods. The other hypothetical 80%, however, were losing money for the company, and were being paid more than they were worth. They can either come back to the same company for less money (thus "correcting" the salary imbalance that existed) or they can get another lower-paying job elsewhere. Yes, it sucks when you take a cut in pay, but how can you possibly blame the company when you were being overpaid? Be worth your salary, and you will have no trouble maintaining or increasing it.
I'm pretty sure the company looked at the sales figures of the people they were firing. If a signifiant percentage of those people were valuable to the company, they would not have made this kind of decision. All the talk about having nothing to do with job performance is likely PR fluff. No company ever tells laid off employees that they were laid off because they sucked at what they do.
I'm not defending Circuit City's decison here; I think it's a desparate move made by desparate managers. But I don't think that it's an "evil" decision, nor was it made without considering the reprecussions.
I'm sure the truth is, most of these salespeople were overpaid. But no one wants the truth. They just want to continue to be overpaid. Wouldn't you?
<rant type="financial_misunderstanding">
When you say that a "McMansion with a mortgage is the bank's" you're not taking into account the value of the house itself, which is yours. Yes, you need to avoid debt, but a mortgage is not necessarily considered a net debt.
Someone said to me once that the difference between rich people and poor people has nothing to do with the amount of money each has. The difference is: rich people use their money to obtain assets, and poor people use their money to pay for liabilities that they *think* are assets. Rent is a liability; money flows out, but you don't own anything (it feels like an asset, because it's your own apartment/house/whatever). Cars are a liability; the moment you buy it, the value drops, so the amount you owe is greater than the amount you own, and the value will never increase: it's a net debt (but again, it's *your* car, so it feels like an asset). Houses, on the other hand, usually increase in value over time (not universally true, but stay with me here). Thus, when you pay $X for a house, you mortgage $(X+Y), with Y being the interest. Except that over time, the value of the house increases, but X remains constant, hopefully eventually exceeding X+Y. At any time during the mortgage, you could sell the house and move, and the sales price you get would be used to instantly pay off the mortgage. If you time things right and choose your real estate intelligently, you can usually make money on the sale of the house that way, even with interest on the mortgage. Thus, because your assets (the market value of the house) typically outweigh your liabilities (the remaining debt on your mortgage), it's not a net debt. It's a net asset. Once the value of your mortgage(s) is greater than the market value of your house, then you can consider it a net debt. Choosing houses in neighborhoods that are increasing in value, and then taking proper care of the house during ownership, will help avoid the net debt situation.
That being said, I agree with your statement about responsible financial planning and avoiding debt. But when that debt is giving returns higher than the initial investment (such as the proverbial "McMansion," in a well-chosen neighborhood, whose value is increasing faster than the interest on the mortgage), then that's called leveraging your debt, and it's actually very smart from a financial perspective. Well-run companies do this all the time: they will get loans from the bank that they then invest in operations, and the profit from those operations outstrips the interest on the debt, thus creating net gains. There's a limit to how much you can do this, of course, but don't scoff at the "McMansion" simply because it has a mortgage. It may actually be making more money than the paid-off trailer you mentioned.
Consumer credit cards (not business credit cards), car payments, cash loans, home equity loans, etc.: all these things are true debt, and falling prey to them (instead of balancing them with other assets) is a great way to end up poor. A McMansion with a mortgage is not on that list.
</rant>
Otherwise, bravo on the comment.
This is a good one too
LEO will never be economical for trips between two points on the Earth's surface. The energies involved in getting to that speed are ridiculously high for that short of a distance (relatively speaking, of course). LEO brings a whole host of problems with it, including high reentry temperatures (due to the high velocity needed to attain LEO to begin with) and ridiculous amounts of fuel needed to reach it.
To put things in perspective: Burt Rutan and crew basically recreated the very first manned Mercury launch (the one with Al Shephard aboard). It was a sub-orbital launch that placed the rocket on a parabolic trajectory... pretty much the same as if you could throw a ball in the air high enough to just barely leave the atmosphere, and then let it fall back to Earth. Since the velocity of the projectile (or spacecraft) is very small when it reenters the atmosphere, no heat shielding is needed.
On the other hand, to get a vehicle to low Earth orbit requires balancing the force of gravity exactly with forward velocity to create a stable system. This requires velocities in excess of 17,000 mph, which is why spacecraft reentering from orbit need all kinds of heat shielding to protect the craft from the friction of the atmosphere.
It would be much more economical for a craft to launch at an angle (or start out in flight at high altitudes, with airbreathing jet engines), and gain just enough energy to leave the atmosphere on a parabolic path that would cross much of the trip in the vacuum of space. Reentering would not need much heat shielding, because the velocities would not be as high as an orbital flight, which would make the trip much safer. Such systems using combinations of airbreathing engines and rockets could be very fuel effecient.
The space shuttle, just after Main Engine Cutoff, is on a parabolic flight path that will have it reenter and land in the Indian Ocean (if it stayed ballistic; the shuttle also has control surfaces and can steer). During missions, it has to fire the engines several more times after MECO to elevate this orbit and attain LEO.
Traveling between points on the Earth's surface will almost always be suborbital. However, that being said, finding economical ways to get to LEO in the first place is the first step to economical travel to places like the Moon and beyond.
Chicago O'Hare is a government airport. Possible deployed for use by commercial airplanes but it should be billed corrected as a government facility. Yet another shining example of your tax dollars at work. I am glad I don't live in that state/county but I fully expect that when a tornado or hurricane wipes it out I will have to foot the FEMA bill for it.
I'm not against airports. But if United Airlines wants a facility then United Airlines should foot the bill for it.
Not sure I see the distinction here. Governments build facilities and then charge fees to commercial interests (in the form of runway fees for an airport, maybe launchpad fees for a spaceport) to use them. It spurs commercial investment, creates jobs, and allows more travel options for the residents of the area. Seems good to me.
No.
My server, my link, my copyrighted content, full stop. I can put whatever the hell I want in a link named http://www.domain.com/picture_for_mccains_website
Any lawyer (or senator) who tries to say differently will get a resounding "fuck off" from the Judicial Branch.
If you are convicted based on a law that is unfair (the word "unfair" in this context is pronounced "unconstitutional"), then you can appeal the ruling all the way up the court system until you finally get to a court that can do something about it (SCOTUS).
Which is, of course, why we need these types of "convictions based on ridiculous laws" to make it all the way to a court ruling; this will help us clean out the legislative knee jerks and keep the law sane. The checks and balances in the system are there for a reason.
A missle...
FROM SPACE!
Nope, there's no way for me to tell what timezone he's in. But it was funny. Laugh.
And enjoy your drink.
Washington's questionable, too, east of the Cascade mountains.
That's probably a good idea. This is whole reason the BBB exists: to police the business practices of companies in the US and protect the customers.
:-)
If you still know people working there and they have seen the same offenses you have, ask them to start documenting the incident: date, time, people present, short description, opinion of what was wrong about the encounter. When they have documented a sufficient number of incidents (I leave it to you do determine how many is enough) bring it to the BBB. They will investigate for you.
Another track would be to try and elevate the problem to people higher up the food chain than the manager. Talk to the branch manager/owner, or call corporate. Sometimes the higher ups are not aware of the abuses of their policies that go on, and since they are more directly responsible to the shareholders, they are more likely to do something about it.
If you're willing to be a whistle-blower, it will be good for the customers, the employees, and ultimately the shareholders, who will see a larger long-term return from an honest company than they will from a dishonest one. It probably won't be so good for your manager, but, as you so aptly said in your anecdote, fuck 'im.