Not anymore. A LOT of those minimum wage assembly line gigs are done by machine. If it can't or isn't done by machine these days, it's not near minimum wage. Then again, my experience is in aerospace factory jobs. We built hundred million dollar helicopters on a regular basis.
Even the lowest line worker made decent bank. And could rapidly move up if they were bright, have attention to detail and have motivation. Attention to detail being the most important, as you could easily kill folks with minor mistakes.
I wish I had that much time on my hands. I make decent money, but not exceptionally great. But more than enough to keep me occupied. Couple ideas.
Start your own company. It's not expensive and you can do contract work. Unpacking computers for imaging for corporations. PC maintenance for small to mid sized organization. Wash cars (think company fleets or car sales places). Learn to do programming. Make web sites. etc. Do one, do all.
Join the military. Or the Peace Corps. See if Alaskan oil fields are hiring. Or natural gas fields in northern PA. Basically, just keep trying different things until you find something to make enough to live comfortably on.
I went a different way. Joined the Army at 18, and learned the heck out of everything I could get my hands on. Found any training I could and begged or borrowed equipment. Went into government, then defense contracting, then Fortune 500 world. Now I'm working for a very small company doing IT and project management. Less pay than the Fortune 500, but lower stress and more than enough pay to live well. I also want to get my degree, because traditional senior management like degrees. Wasn't a huge speed bump, my last gig was an IT Director and currently I'm an IT manager (moreso combination of sysadmin, project manager and directing two guys under me).
Only other advice I can give is get into a GOOD routine and keep with it. Example: Wake up at 7 or whatnot, work out at 8, work from 9 to 6, eat at 6:30, chill until 10, go to sleep by 11. I've only been unemployed for a few months in my entire life (outside of that one incident, I've been unemployed for less than 15 minutes since), but keeping to a schedule kept my sanity. Keep up socializing and networking. That's how a lot of folks land a job or career.
Good luck. Keep up the confidence and never give up. Your life is what you make of it. At any second of any day, you can change the direction of your entire life. Sounds trite or corny, but it's as true as you want it to be.
I concur. SysAdmins should know how to write a script. I certainly ask any sysadmin I hire what programming or scripting languages they know. If they don't, I assign them tasks to learn VBS and Linux shell scripts, as a start. If a sysadmin is running web servers, they need to know decent amount of HTML and PHP. Enough to see how it is interacting with the infrastructure.
They don't have to be "professional programmers". Minimum is enough to understand what's going on. Code and scripts run on logic. If a sysadmin can't work out logic problems, I don't want them touching my infrastructure.
Most folks focused on the whole sex scandal part. Some folks focused on the operational security and the fact that the FBI tanked Petraeus with no charges filed. Some of those folks may control Google Apps for Government and choose alternative providers, in case it may be a point of failure in future bureaucratic turf wars. Sadly, yes, this sort of thing does happen.
Alan Cox has done some very amazing things over the years. He deserves a chance to get away from tech for a bit. Hopefully he rests up, spends some time with his family, goes on a couple vacations, etc.
Within some interval, he'll likely be back doing something. It's hard to stay retired for someone that good.
While I think the US has too many carrier groups (they don't tend to go places by themselves), the US Navy does protect shipping routes. Piracy used to be a global issue. Now? Not so much outside of southeast Asia and Somalia, which the US Navy cannot completely suppress for political reasons. If not for (valid, btw) political reasons, the US Navy could wipe out global piracy within a few weeks. Just because a solution is very effective (perhaps too effective?) does not mean the original problem isn't valid.
I personally agree that we can do a better job of addressing poverty in America. But it isn't by a lack of government agencies or programs to address it. We ARE spending extremely large amounts of cash on poverty as well as carrier groups. We're just doing a bad job of it. Between Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and private/public food banks... Starvation is mostly addressed for even the poorest of Americans. It could probably be done better. Mostly is not "completely".
Wait, what? Please tell me this is sarcasm. If you consider yourself a victim because an employer wanted a cert, a 5 day work schedule and being on call every six weekends, I'd say you need to get out more.
If you want concessions, you could try asking for them. When I was younger, I really liked meeting up with my friends at Defcon. At varying jobs, I've gotten everything from "free extra vacation days" (called professional development or whatnot) to full paid trip. I always did a writeup, or a number of whitepages. I always learned something, and presented it to my manager. It was a win for both parties. Defcon is a very cheap conference, compared to a lot of other conferences I've attended. The knowledge gained was an excellent value. So were contacts. I learned more in the bars than I did from any of the presentations, but most of my more knowledgeable managers understood a beer at the right time can buy you tens of thousands of dollars of consulting advice.
Re on-call, did you ask if there are any metrics for the numbers of calls made, or incidents responded to? If the place is properly run, it should be infrequent to have to run in. I've fixed a lot of "on-call" incidents from my couch if the infrastructure was properly set up.
In every interview, I always remember I'm interviewing them as much as they are interviewing me. I tell them I can bring a lot to the table, and ask what they bring to the table besides a paycheck. Is their work interesting to me? Will I grow my own skills? Not (much) ego on my side. I just prefer not to work boring repeative tasks as the majority of my work.
I've worked in secret and TS rated US government datacenters. Giant concrete cube, surrounded by blast shields and folks with lots of guns. As in, a security false alarm usually involves Bradley APCs or Abrams tanks sitting outside the datacenter.
The main staff worked in the "fish bowl". Yep. The lighting was kept low, we had a large number of giant screens with moving data, we had overhead monitors, etc. 95% of it was not useful. The clock with a dozen time zones was useful for quick glances. The giant screen with the node map was pretty AND functional. The list of COBOL program end codes (for the mainframes) was very rarely useful, but was VERY useful when it was needed. Rest was meh. The low light sucked and messed with your mind if you're working 12 hour shifts for weeks on end. Concrete cube, no windows. It was like living on a submarine, only worse. Subs try to vary the light to reflect day/night schedule. The side by side bench style arrangement "desks" sucked if you were on the phone.
It was kept there in case the brass came by. Which they rarely did, unless things were hopping.
Some of us do pay attention. Some corporations suck. Others are pretty decent. My local power company (PPL) has been going gangbusters on infrastructure upgrades. They've poured a lot of cash into improving their power stations, more crews for faster response, a new ops center, etc.
During Hurricane Sandy, they did everything except have folks show up at my door giving me information, status updates, etc. With a shiny web portal, I can put in outage notes, see status updates, trending for my power bills, whatever. Plus an app to do the same thing. Plus I can get alerts by text, or email, or voice. All configurable. When I stopped by Walmart (ugh, only store that was open at 3am) to buy salt, I noticed a sign near all the lightbulbs. High efficiency bulbs with a sigh offering discounts, provided by PPL.
I've lived in Eastern Europe. I've seen state-owned industry. Some was surprisingly good. Others were horrific on a scale you cannot imagine without seeing first. Think of the worst one-off excesses of environmental abuses you can imagine. Now imagine them being SOP. For decades. I've been quietly told the PRC is still operating the same way these days. Don't get me wrong, I think we need to overhaul oversight in the US (and probably most Western countries). But I don't buy nationalization or state-owned industry as a magic cure-all.
Minor issues. If you nationalize energy production, things will get interesting. Power? Every hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, coal, NG generator? Does that include coal mining, NG drilling, offshore oil? That's a couple hundred billion that will disappear out of folks' 401K and pension plans. Folks may not like that. Same with banks. Another couple hundred billion. I'm sure folks would love being told their life savings have been taken at gunpoint, and they can scrape by on social security. Yep, that won't cause interesting things during the next election.
Even if you DO nationalize all those industries... who will be running them? Unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats? Political committees? Will they have blanket immunity? The ability to use their power for personal or political purposes?
A quite famous local example would be Harrisburg, PA and their incinerator. $340+ million unpayable debt, pollution issues, etc. Never assume government control will be better. Some government projects go well, some go horribly wrong. With proper governance (sigh, I know, I know), if a company screws up, they are on the hook. Worst case, it's wiped out by bankruptcy. With the government on the hook, everyone is responsible for mistakes made. Psychopathic parasites exist everywhere, in both the market and government. There is no magic solution, because that is part of the human condition.
Users will have to enter that they are in the US or not. If so, state and zip. Done. Streams from a list of specified "emergency broadcast" servers if anything comes up.
You should see the stuff they can do with SMS alerts. Quite nice. I got a few for flash flooding, which came in handy.
My electric company is starting to do the same thing for power outages. You can tell it to give you a play by play, or tell it to shut up for X hours. "Your power is out. - Crew on location. Should be up in an hour or so. - Power restored." Granted, it's opt in and only one provider. But I talked with some of the geeks. It was not that hard or expensive to implement.
I've been a firearms instructor for a good number of years. This includes everything from training military units (NATO and non-NATO), UN police, local or national police from multiple countries, etc. Yes, some regular gun owners scare the hell out of me. Visit a state public range in America. Some VERY shady people with no gun handling skills or training. OTOH, private ranges typically had better safety records than military ranges. Police and negligent discharges are a constant problem.
So, no. There is no simple "trained, licensed, regulated guys with guns" wearing a shiny badge that actually makes them firearm experts. If they were LEO, I'd say they'd probably be less likely to kill you by accident. If they were a security guard? Yea... Most of these folks make often $10-15 USD per hour. It's a 40 hour course in my state, with minimal training and cost.
I suspect that is the case in most countries. Security guards are rarely elite soldiers, and either "very low paid" or off-duty cops.
Xenon in atmosphere is 1 part per 11.5 million, and our atmosphere is about 5×10^18 kg.
So rough guess is about 400,000,000,000 kg of xenon is left. Which is only about 240 million units of that amount of propellant. Happy news is that it's quite plentiful on Jupiter.
Wanting to buy locally is racist? Crud. Here I've been buying produce and food from local growers and farmers. The Amish around here have a good reputation when it comes to quality food. PRC food products, not so much. I wasn't aware I was being racist, considering quality was my sole concern and not genetic superiority or inferiority. I'm just not fond of melamine in my milk. On the other hand, I'd don't buy electronics from the Amish and do buy Made in PRC electronics.
I like buying locally when I can because I've had better success at contacting and communicating with the the folks that made the product. One theoretically could prefer to buy American, because there is less statistical chance of an ethnically Chinese person would be making or assembling the product. That would be oddly specifically racist, but indeed racist.
Basically, he has. COTS when possible, simplify and standardize when not. It's econ 101, but there's little incentive for that when you're doing certain government contracts. If all the major players say they'll do it for half a billion per launch, that's what it costs. Free market can also have collusion, but it can get tricky when someone like SpaceX comes along. Not that it's collusion, per se. Just all the major defense contractors operate in the same way, which is conservative and bulky. They can't go light and lean unless they run a Skunkworks.
VH-71 Kestrel was the worst I've seen. $13b for 28 helicopters. The entire time, Sikorsky had the S-92 which could have done the job at probably $200m per unit, tops. They have already made S-92's for the heads of several countries.
Disclosure: I used to run the information security team at the plant that manufactures the S-92.
Reprocessing nuclear waste back into nuclear fuel is not cost effective with today's current technology. Entirely possible, and not that much more expensive. It's simply cheaper to dig up with conventional means. Reprocessing also comes with risks you don't have when you dig it out of the ground. On the flip side, you accumulate large amounts of waste. France has been doing this since the beginning of their nuclear program. Commercially, no one is going to invest billions into a net-loss technology that solely exists to clean up our spent fuel stockpile, that may be banned at any time. As President Carter said, commercial and national economic (toss in environmental) interests came second to nuclear proliferation. Rather than try to handle it, ban it and let everything sit. You'd basically have to add a few cents per KWH of nuclear energy for a disposal fee, exactly what is done for decommissioning fees.
It hasn't been perfect, there have been cost overruns and issues with reprocessing. But all and all, they have to deal with a lot less highly radioactive waste. Reprocessing does generate a fair amount of low radioactive waste, but that'd be a fraction of the radioactive medical waste which is routinely handled. Again, this is hardly state of the art tech, as France has been implementing it for decades. It's more expensive, but reduces the amount of waste. Incidentally, the US military uses reprocessing to get plutonium for its nuclear weapons.
The best argument against reprocessing is "Uh, that's a LOT of weapons grade plutonium". Which is correct, and a concern. One that can be handled. Best argument there would be to have a couple highly trusted parties handle the reprocessing. Yes, you would have to either built reactors that burn plutonium, or stockpile it. It still drastically reduces (or closes) the fuel cycle.
The only alternative is what we do now. Let it sit and built up at each and every reactor site. Yucca had its own engineering issues, mostly dealing with water, and cost overruns. But NIMBY was probably the issue that actually got it canceled. Which will happen ANYWHERE you try to build a repository. Since it's the government, there will be engineering issues and it'll go over budget. But two Senators deeply driving an issue will usually trump 98 Senators that don't really care. That makes central repository politically impossible. For the moment, that leaves us two options. Stockpile the waste or reprocessing.
I'm still annoyed at President Carter. On 7 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel. Brilliant. Because it's better to have huge stockpiles of nuclear waste instead of huge stockpiles of nuclear fuel. Between burner and breeder reactors, we could solve that in short order. There is enough nuclear waste in the US to fuel our country for 20-25 at current growth patterns.
In fairness, uranium is pretty cheap. Reprocessing it is more expensive (at the moment) than digging up more. If we switched over entirely to uranium based nuclear power for the entire planet, we'd have enough uranium in our oceans (using today's technology) to last us a couple hundred thousand years.
Naturally, the wikipedia article isn't complete. It misses the obvious "more uranium is washed into the ocean every year from erosion."
So with conventional tech, we have known energy reserves to last us a couple hundred thousand years. This ignores thorium, which tacks on another couple hundred thousand years (possibly a couple million, depends). If we can't get fusion or other far-out energy production working within the next million years.. Then yes, we're facing a serious energy crisis. Well, assuming we can't figure out how to economically mine asteroids or whatnot.
I can't even count the number of Site to Site VPNs I've set up. Plenty of the routine internet traffic IS constantly encrypted. Sure, it's breakable. But you have a hard time guessing which is two employees emailing LOLcat pictures and which is Super Important Corporate documents.
Just like corporate networks. While yes, security is not as great as I'd or any sane person would prefer... It's getting slowly better. Virtually every executive I have spoken to understands that "security stuff" is a requirement, like lights or water. They don't understand the particulars, but they get the general purpose and understand the need to do more than the bare minimum. Security devices are generally becoming more friendly to use, easier to configure and occasionally lower in price. Operating systems are getting better as well.
With the huge diversity of environments, good luck trying to control them all. And good luck shutting them down.
Except the young'uns historically are not an exceedingly key voting demographic. The elderly ARE a very cohesive voting block. AARP has approximately 40 million folks. Not something politicians take lightly. Social Security and Medicare will be the last programs to ever be cut. FY 2013 has Social Security at $820 billion, Medicare at $523 billion, Medicaid at $283 billion.
I don't doubt the elderly will be squeezed on benefits. If you told me that the average person lost money on Social Security, I wouldn't be surprised either. I do know this. I'm 30. I believe folks my age will be lucky to see pennies on the dollar for Social Security and Medicare. Whether it is true or not, this is virtually a universally held belief for folks under 40.
I don't believe anyone wants to hold the elderly as a slave class, nor do I believe that will happen due to demographics. The young are statistically more likely the ones to become the economic slave class unless they basically refuse to pay for other folks' promises. Therein lays the interesting issue.
I always had an issue with philosophical and extremely popular notion of passing debt onto the next generation. Thankfully under most circumstances, for individuals, debts are null and void when an estate is settled. But not for governments. Tax revenue shortfalls have been solved by inflating the money supply and borrowing. We have a huge debt that will eventually come due. The last handful of generations have known this and done very little to do with it. I wouldn't be screaming "the young are trying to screw over my generation" when the young are looking at bleak economics, overpriced education, poor job market and several trillion dollars of debt.
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Not anymore. A LOT of those minimum wage assembly line gigs are done by machine. If it can't or isn't done by machine these days, it's not near minimum wage. Then again, my experience is in aerospace factory jobs. We built hundred million dollar helicopters on a regular basis.
Even the lowest line worker made decent bank. And could rapidly move up if they were bright, have attention to detail and have motivation. Attention to detail being the most important, as you could easily kill folks with minor mistakes.
There can be significant health risks involved with welding. Proper safety equipment really really matters when welding.
I wish I had that much time on my hands. I make decent money, but not exceptionally great. But more than enough to keep me occupied. Couple ideas.
Start your own company. It's not expensive and you can do contract work. Unpacking computers for imaging for corporations. PC maintenance for small to mid sized organization. Wash cars (think company fleets or car sales places). Learn to do programming. Make web sites. etc. Do one, do all.
Join the military. Or the Peace Corps. See if Alaskan oil fields are hiring. Or natural gas fields in northern PA. Basically, just keep trying different things until you find something to make enough to live comfortably on.
I went a different way. Joined the Army at 18, and learned the heck out of everything I could get my hands on. Found any training I could and begged or borrowed equipment. Went into government, then defense contracting, then Fortune 500 world. Now I'm working for a very small company doing IT and project management. Less pay than the Fortune 500, but lower stress and more than enough pay to live well. I also want to get my degree, because traditional senior management like degrees. Wasn't a huge speed bump, my last gig was an IT Director and currently I'm an IT manager (moreso combination of sysadmin, project manager and directing two guys under me).
Only other advice I can give is get into a GOOD routine and keep with it. Example: Wake up at 7 or whatnot, work out at 8, work from 9 to 6, eat at 6:30, chill until 10, go to sleep by 11. I've only been unemployed for a few months in my entire life (outside of that one incident, I've been unemployed for less than 15 minutes since), but keeping to a schedule kept my sanity. Keep up socializing and networking. That's how a lot of folks land a job or career.
Good luck. Keep up the confidence and never give up. Your life is what you make of it. At any second of any day, you can change the direction of your entire life. Sounds trite or corny, but it's as true as you want it to be.
I concur. SysAdmins should know how to write a script. I certainly ask any sysadmin I hire what programming or scripting languages they know. If they don't, I assign them tasks to learn VBS and Linux shell scripts, as a start. If a sysadmin is running web servers, they need to know decent amount of HTML and PHP. Enough to see how it is interacting with the infrastructure.
They don't have to be "professional programmers". Minimum is enough to understand what's going on. Code and scripts run on logic. If a sysadmin can't work out logic problems, I don't want them touching my infrastructure.
Most folks focused on the whole sex scandal part. Some folks focused on the operational security and the fact that the FBI tanked Petraeus with no charges filed. Some of those folks may control Google Apps for Government and choose alternative providers, in case it may be a point of failure in future bureaucratic turf wars. Sadly, yes, this sort of thing does happen.
Alan Cox has done some very amazing things over the years. He deserves a chance to get away from tech for a bit. Hopefully he rests up, spends some time with his family, goes on a couple vacations, etc.
Within some interval, he'll likely be back doing something. It's hard to stay retired for someone that good.
Humanity has long since been quite inventive in oppression. Admittedly, that's quite sad when Java usage is kept a feared, shameful secret.
Now if he said "javascript", completely understandable.
While I think the US has too many carrier groups (they don't tend to go places by themselves), the US Navy does protect shipping routes. Piracy used to be a global issue. Now? Not so much outside of southeast Asia and Somalia, which the US Navy cannot completely suppress for political reasons. If not for (valid, btw) political reasons, the US Navy could wipe out global piracy within a few weeks. Just because a solution is very effective (perhaps too effective?) does not mean the original problem isn't valid.
I personally agree that we can do a better job of addressing poverty in America. But it isn't by a lack of government agencies or programs to address it. We ARE spending extremely large amounts of cash on poverty as well as carrier groups. We're just doing a bad job of it. Between Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and private/public food banks... Starvation is mostly addressed for even the poorest of Americans. It could probably be done better. Mostly is not "completely".
Okey. So you don't like capitalism. What exactly do you wish it to be replaced with? No one has yet to answer that question realistically.
Wait, what? Please tell me this is sarcasm. If you consider yourself a victim because an employer wanted a cert, a 5 day work schedule and being on call every six weekends, I'd say you need to get out more.
If you want concessions, you could try asking for them. When I was younger, I really liked meeting up with my friends at Defcon. At varying jobs, I've gotten everything from "free extra vacation days" (called professional development or whatnot) to full paid trip. I always did a writeup, or a number of whitepages. I always learned something, and presented it to my manager. It was a win for both parties. Defcon is a very cheap conference, compared to a lot of other conferences I've attended. The knowledge gained was an excellent value. So were contacts. I learned more in the bars than I did from any of the presentations, but most of my more knowledgeable managers understood a beer at the right time can buy you tens of thousands of dollars of consulting advice.
Re on-call, did you ask if there are any metrics for the numbers of calls made, or incidents responded to? If the place is properly run, it should be infrequent to have to run in. I've fixed a lot of "on-call" incidents from my couch if the infrastructure was properly set up.
In every interview, I always remember I'm interviewing them as much as they are interviewing me. I tell them I can bring a lot to the table, and ask what they bring to the table besides a paycheck. Is their work interesting to me? Will I grow my own skills? Not (much) ego on my side. I just prefer not to work boring repeative tasks as the majority of my work.
I've worked in secret and TS rated US government datacenters. Giant concrete cube, surrounded by blast shields and folks with lots of guns. As in, a security false alarm usually involves Bradley APCs or Abrams tanks sitting outside the datacenter.
The main staff worked in the "fish bowl". Yep. The lighting was kept low, we had a large number of giant screens with moving data, we had overhead monitors, etc. 95% of it was not useful. The clock with a dozen time zones was useful for quick glances. The giant screen with the node map was pretty AND functional. The list of COBOL program end codes (for the mainframes) was very rarely useful, but was VERY useful when it was needed. Rest was meh. The low light sucked and messed with your mind if you're working 12 hour shifts for weeks on end. Concrete cube, no windows. It was like living on a submarine, only worse. Subs try to vary the light to reflect day/night schedule. The side by side bench style arrangement "desks" sucked if you were on the phone.
It was kept there in case the brass came by. Which they rarely did, unless things were hopping.
Some of us do pay attention. Some corporations suck. Others are pretty decent. My local power company (PPL) has been going gangbusters on infrastructure upgrades. They've poured a lot of cash into improving their power stations, more crews for faster response, a new ops center, etc.
During Hurricane Sandy, they did everything except have folks show up at my door giving me information, status updates, etc. With a shiny web portal, I can put in outage notes, see status updates, trending for my power bills, whatever. Plus an app to do the same thing. Plus I can get alerts by text, or email, or voice. All configurable. When I stopped by Walmart (ugh, only store that was open at 3am) to buy salt, I noticed a sign near all the lightbulbs. High efficiency bulbs with a sigh offering discounts, provided by PPL.
I've lived in Eastern Europe. I've seen state-owned industry. Some was surprisingly good. Others were horrific on a scale you cannot imagine without seeing first. Think of the worst one-off excesses of environmental abuses you can imagine. Now imagine them being SOP. For decades. I've been quietly told the PRC is still operating the same way these days. Don't get me wrong, I think we need to overhaul oversight in the US (and probably most Western countries). But I don't buy nationalization or state-owned industry as a magic cure-all.
Minor issues. If you nationalize energy production, things will get interesting. Power? Every hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, coal, NG generator? Does that include coal mining, NG drilling, offshore oil? That's a couple hundred billion that will disappear out of folks' 401K and pension plans. Folks may not like that. Same with banks. Another couple hundred billion. I'm sure folks would love being told their life savings have been taken at gunpoint, and they can scrape by on social security. Yep, that won't cause interesting things during the next election. Even if you DO nationalize all those industries... who will be running them? Unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats? Political committees? Will they have blanket immunity? The ability to use their power for personal or political purposes? A quite famous local example would be Harrisburg, PA and their incinerator. $340+ million unpayable debt, pollution issues, etc. Never assume government control will be better. Some government projects go well, some go horribly wrong. With proper governance (sigh, I know, I know), if a company screws up, they are on the hook. Worst case, it's wiped out by bankruptcy. With the government on the hook, everyone is responsible for mistakes made. Psychopathic parasites exist everywhere, in both the market and government. There is no magic solution, because that is part of the human condition.
No wonder they lost.
Users will have to enter that they are in the US or not. If so, state and zip. Done. Streams from a list of specified "emergency broadcast" servers if anything comes up.
You should see the stuff they can do with SMS alerts. Quite nice. I got a few for flash flooding, which came in handy.
My electric company is starting to do the same thing for power outages. You can tell it to give you a play by play, or tell it to shut up for X hours. "Your power is out. - Crew on location. Should be up in an hour or so. - Power restored." Granted, it's opt in and only one provider. But I talked with some of the geeks. It was not that hard or expensive to implement.
I've been a firearms instructor for a good number of years. This includes everything from training military units (NATO and non-NATO), UN police, local or national police from multiple countries, etc. Yes, some regular gun owners scare the hell out of me. Visit a state public range in America. Some VERY shady people with no gun handling skills or training. OTOH, private ranges typically had better safety records than military ranges. Police and negligent discharges are a constant problem.
So, no. There is no simple "trained, licensed, regulated guys with guns" wearing a shiny badge that actually makes them firearm experts. If they were LEO, I'd say they'd probably be less likely to kill you by accident. If they were a security guard? Yea... Most of these folks make often $10-15 USD per hour. It's a 40 hour course in my state, with minimal training and cost.
I suspect that is the case in most countries. Security guards are rarely elite soldiers, and either "very low paid" or off-duty cops.
520 million units, rather. Friggin English/metric. Sorry about that. Again, very rough estimated.
Xenon in atmosphere is 1 part per 11.5 million, and our atmosphere is about 5×10^18 kg. So rough guess is about 400,000,000,000 kg of xenon is left. Which is only about 240 million units of that amount of propellant. Happy news is that it's quite plentiful on Jupiter.
Wanting to buy locally is racist? Crud. Here I've been buying produce and food from local growers and farmers. The Amish around here have a good reputation when it comes to quality food. PRC food products, not so much. I wasn't aware I was being racist, considering quality was my sole concern and not genetic superiority or inferiority. I'm just not fond of melamine in my milk. On the other hand, I'd don't buy electronics from the Amish and do buy Made in PRC electronics.
I like buying locally when I can because I've had better success at contacting and communicating with the the folks that made the product. One theoretically could prefer to buy American, because there is less statistical chance of an ethnically Chinese person would be making or assembling the product. That would be oddly specifically racist, but indeed racist.
Basically, he has. COTS when possible, simplify and standardize when not. It's econ 101, but there's little incentive for that when you're doing certain government contracts. If all the major players say they'll do it for half a billion per launch, that's what it costs. Free market can also have collusion, but it can get tricky when someone like SpaceX comes along. Not that it's collusion, per se. Just all the major defense contractors operate in the same way, which is conservative and bulky. They can't go light and lean unless they run a Skunkworks.
VH-71 Kestrel was the worst I've seen. $13b for 28 helicopters. The entire time, Sikorsky had the S-92 which could have done the job at probably $200m per unit, tops. They have already made S-92's for the heads of several countries.
Disclosure: I used to run the information security team at the plant that manufactures the S-92.
Reprocessing nuclear waste back into nuclear fuel is not cost effective with today's current technology. Entirely possible, and not that much more expensive. It's simply cheaper to dig up with conventional means. Reprocessing also comes with risks you don't have when you dig it out of the ground. On the flip side, you accumulate large amounts of waste. France has been doing this since the beginning of their nuclear program. Commercially, no one is going to invest billions into a net-loss technology that solely exists to clean up our spent fuel stockpile, that may be banned at any time. As President Carter said, commercial and national economic (toss in environmental) interests came second to nuclear proliferation. Rather than try to handle it, ban it and let everything sit. You'd basically have to add a few cents per KWH of nuclear energy for a disposal fee, exactly what is done for decommissioning fees.
It hasn't been perfect, there have been cost overruns and issues with reprocessing. But all and all, they have to deal with a lot less highly radioactive waste. Reprocessing does generate a fair amount of low radioactive waste, but that'd be a fraction of the radioactive medical waste which is routinely handled. Again, this is hardly state of the art tech, as France has been implementing it for decades. It's more expensive, but reduces the amount of waste. Incidentally, the US military uses reprocessing to get plutonium for its nuclear weapons.
The best argument against reprocessing is "Uh, that's a LOT of weapons grade plutonium". Which is correct, and a concern. One that can be handled. Best argument there would be to have a couple highly trusted parties handle the reprocessing. Yes, you would have to either built reactors that burn plutonium, or stockpile it. It still drastically reduces (or closes) the fuel cycle.
The only alternative is what we do now. Let it sit and built up at each and every reactor site. Yucca had its own engineering issues, mostly dealing with water, and cost overruns. But NIMBY was probably the issue that actually got it canceled. Which will happen ANYWHERE you try to build a repository. Since it's the government, there will be engineering issues and it'll go over budget. But two Senators deeply driving an issue will usually trump 98 Senators that don't really care. That makes central repository politically impossible. For the moment, that leaves us two options. Stockpile the waste or reprocessing.
I'm still annoyed at President Carter. On 7 April 1977, President Jimmy Carter banned the reprocessing of commercial reactor spent nuclear fuel. Brilliant. Because it's better to have huge stockpiles of nuclear waste instead of huge stockpiles of nuclear fuel. Between burner and breeder reactors, we could solve that in short order. There is enough nuclear waste in the US to fuel our country for 20-25 at current growth patterns.
In fairness, uranium is pretty cheap. Reprocessing it is more expensive (at the moment) than digging up more. If we switched over entirely to uranium based nuclear power for the entire planet, we'd have enough uranium in our oceans (using today's technology) to last us a couple hundred thousand years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium#Seawater
Naturally, the wikipedia article isn't complete. It misses the obvious "more uranium is washed into the ocean every year from erosion."
So with conventional tech, we have known energy reserves to last us a couple hundred thousand years. This ignores thorium, which tacks on another couple hundred thousand years (possibly a couple million, depends). If we can't get fusion or other far-out energy production working within the next million years.. Then yes, we're facing a serious energy crisis. Well, assuming we can't figure out how to economically mine asteroids or whatnot.
I can't even count the number of Site to Site VPNs I've set up. Plenty of the routine internet traffic IS constantly encrypted. Sure, it's breakable. But you have a hard time guessing which is two employees emailing LOLcat pictures and which is Super Important Corporate documents.
Just like corporate networks. While yes, security is not as great as I'd or any sane person would prefer... It's getting slowly better. Virtually every executive I have spoken to understands that "security stuff" is a requirement, like lights or water. They don't understand the particulars, but they get the general purpose and understand the need to do more than the bare minimum. Security devices are generally becoming more friendly to use, easier to configure and occasionally lower in price. Operating systems are getting better as well.
With the huge diversity of environments, good luck trying to control them all. And good luck shutting them down.
Except the young'uns historically are not an exceedingly key voting demographic. The elderly ARE a very cohesive voting block. AARP has approximately 40 million folks. Not something politicians take lightly. Social Security and Medicare will be the last programs to ever be cut. FY 2013 has Social Security at $820 billion, Medicare at $523 billion, Medicaid at $283 billion.
I don't doubt the elderly will be squeezed on benefits. If you told me that the average person lost money on Social Security, I wouldn't be surprised either. I do know this. I'm 30. I believe folks my age will be lucky to see pennies on the dollar for Social Security and Medicare. Whether it is true or not, this is virtually a universally held belief for folks under 40.
I don't believe anyone wants to hold the elderly as a slave class, nor do I believe that will happen due to demographics. The young are statistically more likely the ones to become the economic slave class unless they basically refuse to pay for other folks' promises. Therein lays the interesting issue.
I always had an issue with philosophical and extremely popular notion of passing debt onto the next generation. Thankfully under most circumstances, for individuals, debts are null and void when an estate is settled. But not for governments. Tax revenue shortfalls have been solved by inflating the money supply and borrowing. We have a huge debt that will eventually come due. The last handful of generations have known this and done very little to do with it. I wouldn't be screaming "the young are trying to screw over my generation" when the young are looking at bleak economics, overpriced education, poor job market and several trillion dollars of debt.