I suppose ideally you'd want a dirigible or something that can stay in the air for extended periods without producing much heat that missiles would pick up on.
Modern missiles use imaging-based terminal guidance, not heat seeking. The imagers often work into the infrared spectrum, but that is primarily to give better all-weather performance. If they can pick up your dirigible on radar, they can put a missile in your area that can find you.
Jailing the employers of illegal immigrants is a pretty ignorant and useless "remedy" for the problem of illegal immigration. Nobody is hiring "illegal immigrants", they are hiring legal immigrants insofar as the employer is obligated to determine such things. In all the environs I have been in where there were illegal immigrants working, they always had papers sufficient to satisfy the obligation of the employer in determination of their eligibility to work. The employer may strongly suspect they are illegal, but the employer has no legal proof of that fact.
If the employer is presented government documents that show eligibility to work by an illegal immigrant, that is a failure of government process and law. Or are you suggesting that we give the employer an obligation to arbitrarily discriminate against employees on the basis that they do not believe the government documents presented are valid without any evidence to support that opinion?
The employers may benefit, but they are not at fault. Their choice is to assume the government documents are valid in the absence of contrary evidence or to be sued for employment discrimination.
Pharmaceutical and other medical research companies in the US semi-routinely engage in questionable behavior, obviously a bad thing that is enabled by the existence of the Byzantine private healthcare market of the United States. Simultaneously, the vast majority of global medical research, 60-70%, is done in the US and is significantly enabled by the fact that you can recoup costs because the healthcare market is more competitive (albeit perversely) due to the semi-private nature of the market. It is one of the reasons many new medical treatments and diagnostics are available in the US first.
So here is the problem: on one hand the US healthcare market is a byzantine mess where a lot of questionable practices can occur, but on the other hand this same mess also enables most of the world's medical innovation to occur. Much of the rest of the industrialized world is a free rider on the ugly mess that is US healthcare when it comes to innovation and R&D investment. It might be nice to adopt, say, European-style healthcare systems in theory, but can we afford it at the price of relative technological stagnation because all the profit motive has been removed from the development of that technology since the US is the last major market where a legitimate profit can be extracted?
Profit motive is a double-edged sword, and in healthcare is no exception. But I think far too many people, particularly people used to socialized medicine, abhor the ugly side of such things while failing to recognize that they also benefit mightily from it. Even Americans benefit from it in some significant ways despite the unacceptably high costs, such as having the highest cancer survival rates in the world, markedly higher than many western industrialized countries. There needs to be a way to get the benefits without throwing out the innovation baby with the bathwater, which strictly socializing US medicine would do by all empirical evidence. The stark differences in the level of investment in medical advancements by various countries is hard to ignore, and I generally consider such investment to be a good thing.
My first thought was that because the city owns the entire network, much of the reason for the low cost is self-explanatory. But then I imagined if a similar arrangement were formed in the US, I would be extremely surprised if the same prices were attained. Local governments would likely see this as a source of income and either charge a similar rate to competitors, or possibly undercut their neighbors by a narrow margin in order to appear generous and possibly gain a few extra votes for the incumbents.
This is exactly what happens in the places I am familiar with where the city owns the fiber network. At first it is leased out as a low-cost non-profit utility for anyone that wants to use the fiber but over time they begin to view it as a profit center, jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with to put more money in the government's coffers. The finale is when the city decides to compete with the companies who are leasing the fiber to capture even more revenue. Eventually you end up with the rough equivalent of a telco monopoly in both services and prices.
In my experience with a couple municipal-owned fiber networks, it is about providing a low-cost public utility in the same way speeding tickets are about public safety. It becomes a revenue source to the de facto exclusion of the nominal purpose, but with the power of government to prevent outside competitors. Naturally, these all started out as noble forward-thinking projects.
Gandhi threw the British out of India using active, aggressive, non-violent resistance.
That strategy worked because the opponent was the British and Gandhi understood how to exploit the culture he was fighting. It would have been a foolish strategy if it had been, say, the Soviets.
The majority of the "23,000 nukes" have essentially been deactivated and are only counted because they have not been fully disassembled yet. The link itself says only 8,000 are operational globally. On the other hand, if you count plutonium cores, trigger assemblies, and miscellaneous spare parts lying around that could be engineered into a functional weapon if required there are significantly greater than 23,000 potential nukes.
What does or does not constitute a nuclear weapon for accounting purposes does not necessarily match common sense understanding.
COBOL is a perfect example of an "adequate" language, like most programming languages that are in common use. Adequate languages linger forever if there is a tool chain to support them because there is little in the way of economic rationale for replacing them.
The reason adequate languages proliferate over the long term is that only inadequate languages get replaced, and "ideal" languages become hopelessly politicized by purists and ideologues, leaving the adequate, practical, boring languages as the sound business choice. It is a real-world example of perfect being the enemy of good enough, but for economic reasons good enough always wins.
On what planet was the financial system deregulated? This occurred in one of the most extremely regulated and least free industries we have. It makes other "heavily regulated" industries look positively libertine.
The problem was not with "deregulation", but with pervasively *bad* regulation that was designed more for political expediency than robust markets (e.g. FASB 157). The market will always find the equilibrium tacitly created by the government, but the government never takes responsibility for the unintended consequences of its regulatory actions even when the potential consequences were well understood at the time the regulations were implemented. The problem was not deregulation, it was too much bad regulation.
Compounding this was a lack of enforcement of regulations, due in large part to regulatory capture. I would point out, for example, that Obama appointed Mary Schapiro to be the head of the SEC, the very same person responsible for ignoring or stonewalling whistleblowers in a number of high-profile fraud cases, including the Madoff case. When a person so obviously incompetent at enforcing regulations or policing fraud gets promoted to the top enforcement position, it strongly suggests that regulations are not about regulating.
While I am sure that it did not hurt Halliburton to have Cheney as Vice President, your argument is defective because Halliburton has been getting no-bid contracts for a very long time, including plenty of lucrative no-bid contracts under the Clinton administration. If Halliburton's contracting largesse is the result of malfeasance, then you will have to paint both Democrats and Republicans with that brush, as they both freely participated in that behavior in their respective administrations.
In fairness to Halliburton, one of the reasons they get these types of no-bid contracts from dozens of governments around the world is that there are very, very few companies that actually do what they are doing for these governments on the scale they do it, and Halliburton has specialized in filling that particular demand. Realistically, for some of the contracts that Halliburton gets there are no legitimate competitors and everyone knows it, making a bidding process a bit of waste, particularly if the matter is urgent. On the upside, there are now a couple different other companies trying to move in on Halliburton's business.
I have never understood the obsession with painting Halliburton as the ultimate Republican evil instead of a much more accurate shade of gray that both Democrat and Republican administrations shovel money to that sometimes gets these contracts because there really is no reasonable alternative under the constraints. We can't fix the world if we are in denial about the reality of it, and Halliburton is just another big government contractor like numerous others that was well positioned for the kind of contracting work that resulted from the nominal War on Terror.
I was not dismissing the CO2 output of personal transportation, just pointing out that it is a relatively small source of CO2, and we are comparing modest changes in efficiency in a smaller case to total elimination in another much larger case. This makes the net change in CO2 between the two cases vary by almost an order of magnitude. You were simply very sloppy in your analysis and reading comprehension.
And while the majority of CO2 from transportation is personal automobiles, transportation is far from the only significant source of CO2 from petroleum -- you are conflating CO2 from petroleum with CO2 from transportation. This is where your counter-argument fails, you based it on inferences that are not actually valid. If you look at the percentage of total CO2 that is *actually* from personal automobiles and compute the CO2 reduction implied by changing current average fuel economy to that of a Prius, the total percentage reduction is kind of disappointing.
The #1 way to reduce CO2 production is to stop burning fossil fuels to generate power. A distant #2 is to eliminate personal automobiles. And way back in the noise with many other possibilities is to improve the average fuel efficiency of vehicles. The best argument for fuel efficiency is to reduce petroleum dependency, not to reduce CO2.
Apparently you did not bother to actually understand what you posted. Approximately 60% of CO2 comes from non-petroleum sources, most of which goes to power generation. Of the remaining 40% that is petroleum, about half is related to transportation in the broadest possible sense. Of that portion that is transportation, only a fraction has any relation to Joe SixPack's automobile. In fact, if you actually do the math on the fraction of total CO2 that has anything at all to do with your car, you would find that replacing every single car in the US with a Prius would decrease the total CO2 production by something like 5%, which barely offsets the CO2 output *growth*. At some point, you will realize that your car is not the only significant consumer of petroleum in the US, and definitely not a significant producer of CO2. If everyone stopped driving their car tomorrow, it would barely make a dent. If we are going to come up with constructive solutions, let's attempt to stay in the ballpark of reality.
On the other hand, if you replace fossil fuel power generation with something else, you cut CO2 production in half. 50% versus 5%. One of these is below the noise floor, and the other is not. And it would would not be surprising to find out that it cost more to replace everyone's car with a Prius than replace power production.
I want constructive, efficient solutions, not pleasing solutions that stroke your preconceived notions and accomplish nothing. The numbers very obviously say that vehicle fuel efficiency has no meaningful impact on CO2 output, whereas power generation has an enormous impact. Vehicle fuel efficiency *does* have a meaningful impact on petroleum imports, but you are apparently too confused to discern the difference and that is a very different issue. It is like the people that confuse global warming with the ozone layer hole.
There would not be billions of tons of CO2 at stake if we were not generating electricity with coal. Inefficient electrical devices are almost irrelevant to that problem, and pretty much miss the point. Energy efficiency and CO2 production are only weakly related, much like the case with cars, and it is kind of irritating that people so often conflate the two. If everybody in the US switched to commuting in a Prius tomorrow, it would have a negligible impact on total CO2 production (the vast majority of CO2 comes from electricity generation), but it is often sold in those terms. If you get your electricity from nuclear or some other type of green power, there is negligible CO2 impact from having slightly less efficient electrical devices.
If you want to reduce oil consumption you might buy a Prius, and if you were actually serious you would move to a high-density urban area or lobby cities to allow them to be built.
If you want to reduce CO2 production you might buy more efficient "green" electrical devices, and if you were actually serious you would lobby for nuclear (and other non-CO2) power plants.
Part of the reason many environmental policies accomplish so little is that they are largely about symbolism over substance (see: Kyoto). Most people, including many nominal environmentalists, care more about looking like they care than actually solving the problem, particularly if the solution forces them to materially change their lifestyle or preconceptions. It is a cheap and mostly symbolic way to get social approval without actually having to be responsible for enacting useful changes that would actually make a difference. Everyone is so busy trying to prove how green they are that almost no one is actually, well, making the world green.
CO to me usually means toxic and dangerous, not fuel source.
Then you will be pleased to discover that carbon monoxide is not only an ubiquitous industrial chemical used for more things than you are likely to imagine, but that it has been used as automotive fuel in times past, a bit like how compressed natural gas is used in some vehicles today. Yes it is toxic, but then so are most industrial chemicals and commonly used gases. This is actually pretty retro fuel technology, used when petroleum distillates were in short supply since you can produce it from damn near any organic matter (wood waste was a popular source). It says something about educational systems that you do not know that carbon monoxide has a long history as a fuel, since that was its primary application for a long time, usually by converting a carbon rich source into "water gas", a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. We have long since replaced water gas with natural gas and short-chain hydrocarbon gases from mined sources, which is far more cost effective in bulk.
I am not really directing this at you, but we need to get past the "gosh, it might be toxic!" over-reaction to some really basic chemistry. We have used "water gas" and carbon monoxide systems for a very long time as chemistry goes, and long before anyone really properly characterized its asphyxiating properties. If they could use it in the 19th century without killing everybody, then we can certainly use it in the 21st century without killing everybody. There is more truly nasty chemistry waiting to happen in your average household than any normal person likely imagines, and yet we somehow survive as a society.
Chemical toxicity is becoming like "nuclear" and "radioactive", bogeymen perceived as ineffable evils that will kill us all. It betrays a deep disconnect with the reality of the situation that, if allowed to drive political decisions, really will kill us all even if indirectly in a carefully designed hypo-allergenic padded cell. Fortunately, biology evolved in environments filled with radioactive, toxic crap, and is pretty good at mitigating the damage except in the most extreme cases that only a human could engineer. Yes, carbon monoxide is toxic, but it is also easily managed with some fairly primitive engineering.
It'll be like those HARM systems... That got defeated by people who'd stick a fork into a microwave's door interlock and then turn it on and point it up. $280,000 missile blows up $15 microwave. Very economical!
HARM systems do not work that way. You are making assumptions about the design of those weapons that betrays a gross ignorance of the capabilities of the technology.
As a rule of thumb, it should seem reasonable that state-of-the-art classified weapon systems work neither according to how Hollywood depicts them nor by the mechanisms assumed by a poorly informed lay-person such as yourself. It is akin to an accountant with a crackpot theory wagging their finger at a PhD physicist on the topic of quantum mechanics. Accept that many very bright people with extreme expertise designed these weapons with an understanding you will never gain by reading your local news rag.
This is as bad as the idiots in the media and elsewhere who (still) think the US has GPS guided weaponry, completely misunderstanding the technology they are looking at (so-called "GPS-guided" weapons are actually guided by ultra-precise optical interferometers -- the GPS units are used to cheaply tighten the error bars on the interferometers, not guide them).
Interestingly, when St. Helens erupted, the majority of the ash fell in a relatively small agricultural region. I know, I lived right in the middle of that farm country at the time. When it happened, everyone assumed a total loss for the year, since the ground was caked in inches of the ash cement. The region looked like a wasteland, and mobility was very limited.
But the agricultural disaster never happened. The crops bounced back with a vengeance and produced spectacular record yields. Not just for that year, but for several years thereafter. It turns out that the several inches of ash acted as incredible fertilizer and helped the soil retain moisture, and the crops poked their way through the ash after a couple good rains. Most of the US would get that kind of dusting of ash across its agricultural belt, and while there might be some cooling it will likely be offset in part by a massive agricultural rebound that compensates for a significant part of it. We expected the worst when St. Helens erupted, but the reality was far less than that in terms of food production.
I suppose you'd say that money to build roads is also "pork". Like fixing that bridge that fell down in Minnesota a few years ago because of attitudes like yours.
The reason people like you have no credibility is that you have no clue what you are talking about. The Minnesota bridge failed due to an undetected design flaw per the NTSB, not some conspiratorial absence of funding. Furthermore, the Federal government only rarely implements infrastructure projects, being almost exclusively the domain of the individual States, such as the bridge in question. It should be embarrassing for the Slashdot community that the post was even modded up.
People like you are the problem, ranting about non-existent failures of government and demanding that non-existent authorities fix them. Did it ever occur to you that the government might accomplish more if it did not have to cater to the demands of millions of people who have no bloody idea what they are talking about?
Consumer electronics and automobile manufacturing have very little to do with R&D. They were, however, enabled by technology R&D that was largely funded in the US. Countless billions of dollars were invested in semiconductor R&D, almost entirely in the US, so that slivers of silicon could be wrapped in plastic overseas and sold to the masses. Modern medical technology is another example of an industry where well over half of the global R&D is funded by the American private sector, with the American public sector funding a significant portion of the remaining minority fraction. You can access all of this technology anywhere in the world, but the actual funding of the underlying R&D that made it possible is largely American and mostly private. You seem to be conflating technology R&D with trinket manufacturing that exploits the R&D.
As for profit, no one should care. What they should care about is results for the amount of money invested. R&D is not a ritual of essential purity that we do for its own sake, we do it because we are looking for advancements in capability. If profit produces more advances for a given amount of investment, and by every metric it does, then that is the best way to do research. The only real contrary argument is for areas like pure science research where there is no plausible profit and so inefficient non-profit research may be better than no research at all, but even that is increasingly being done by private non-profit foundations.
Which, of course is a big hole in capitalism- hard for a technology to progress if it can't find funding for research. Historically, of course, that hole has been filled by government funded war research, but what do you do if your war machine is already so technically advanced that the enemies aren't there to push technology further?
In 1950, the US government spent slightly more on R&D than private organizations. Half a century later, that gap has grown so that privately funded R&D completely dwarfs government funded R&D. The US government does fund some basic science (and military) research that would not likely get done by the private sector, but even that research is being increasingly funded by private foundations with deep pockets. You might want to revisit your model of how most research gets funded. The US government invests a lot in research relative to places like the EU, but that research investment is a small fraction of a total research funding pie that is completely dominated by the US private sector.
A topic of discussion in the EU is that due to their dependency on the private American research industry, research topics related to things local to Europe are relatively underfunded and European governments have shown little interest in making the required investment. We do not really need the US doing more research so much as we need the rest of the industrialized world doing as much productive research as the US.
The reason US Companies didn't choose to manufacture this technology domestically is because Wall Street only cares about projects that turn a profit in 4 months.
Utter rubbish that can be easily disproven by the very numbers that Wall Street uses. The market prices on Wall Street, for example, are priced with a mathematical horizon that ranges from a couple years to a couple decades depending on the company we are talking about. And most derivatives and other financial contracts also have explicit performance horizons measured in much, much longer terms than "4 months". Obviously, Wall Street cares about and considers profitability explicitly on a much longer time horizon than you assert by their very actions when they have to actually put their money on the line.
Or better yet, add a 5% consumption tax on all stock transactions to fund Japanese style industry research cooperatives.
Apparently you are blissfully unaware that the productivity of investments in those Japanese research cooperatives have markedly underperformed American private R&D, so what you are recommending is spending a lot more money to produce far fewer results. The problem with the government picking One True Research Project is that, like with all research, the odds are very high that they will actually be researching the wrong thing, and without a messy, uncoordinated, and diverse research ecosystem like you get with decentralized private R&D, progress tends to stall as what (in hindsight) is the correct research path becomes almost entirely ignored and defunded in favor of politically expedient or favored research topics. This ignores the issue that when you look at modern countries, in many important fields like medicine the majority of the world's research is private American R&D funding.
The germane point that you are furiously trying to remain ignorant of is that American private sector R&D is atypically productive in terms of producing useful advances, largely because they try so many different things and prune low-quality research paths so quickly. Government directed R&D projects, while producing some very important results on occasion, have a long history of relatively low productivity for the money spent no matter which government we are talking about. This is further complicated by the fact that governments only make the investments when convenient since they have no particular political motivation to do more research beyond grandstanding. I would like an explanation, for example, as to why the total R&D investment in the EU is a tiny fraction of American R&D despite having a larger economy and population, and how that oft-replicated result would be avoided this time.
At the end of the day, I do not want to pay for research, I want to pay for productive results. There is nothing intrinsically good or worth funding about "research theater" if it is not producing results we can actually use with all due haste. Fast, results-oriented government research seems to require a palpable imminent threat to life and limb that the population at large recognizes, and battery manufacturing technology does not qualify.
And I don't have to even worry about the missiles, as I have no heat signature and don't show up on radar, so they'll be able to get really close, and never actually hit me.
Modern infrared spectrum missiles of the last twenty years or so are not attracted to heat signatures, Hollywood notwithstanding. They lock onto specific aircraft based on an image profile. In essence, the missiles have sufficient discrimination to chase a specific aircraft from all aspects after such aircraft have been designated as target by whoever launched the weapon using very advanced image processing techniques. Heat signatures are almost entirely irrelevant, only broad-spectrum imaging matters. This is among the reasons that the current generation of anti-aircraft missiles are generally considered impervious to passive counter-measures. If someone with a vaguely modern anti-aircraft weapon wanted to hit whatever it is you might be flying in, it is a trivial matter for the most part. The only defense would be to look like something entirely different than whatever it was the weapon was launched at.
The counter attack there being the "not obvious" leg of patentablity. Using a tool for it's intended purpose is considered obvious, and therefore not patentable. Since running algorithms is what computers do, by definition, it's a short step to an "obvious, therefore not patentable" attack.
Basically, the argument is if you have a nail that isn't patentable and a hammer that was specifically designed to hit nails with then hitting the nail with the hammer is obvious and not patentable.
The problem is that you could trivially extend this line of reasoning to any patent or machinery. Patents are not about using something contrary to its nature, indeed that would be nonsensical, but about significant new configurations of something that exploit its nature. After all, mechanical devices are based on nothing more than exploiting the obvious "gear-like" nature of gears, "lever-like" nature of levers, and so one. Just like an algorithm exploits the obvious "bit-manipulation-like" nature of computers.
Of course, this is skirting around the basic fact that makes these types of arguments stupid to begin with: All Patents Are Algorithms. I thought this was a site for computer nerds, which presumably suggests some familiarity with computational information theory. That is the elephant in the room that everyone is trying really hard not to notice, which suggests more of an emotional than rational reaction to the topic.
A big part of the existing problem is that the definitions are neither rigorous nor consistent, so intentionally pretending that a difference exists where none theoretically does is just license for gaming and shenanigans, never mind unintended consequences. I have yet to hear a single explanation of why an algorithm implemented with molecules (e.g. chemical process patent) is peachy goodness while an algorithm implemented with bits (e.g. software process patent) is Teh Evil. Every single argument -- every single one -- against algorithm patents apply to chemical process patents, but in practice no one ever makes that case against chemical process patents, which at a minimum raises a lot of questions about the integrity of the position.
And I am not even necessarily a proponent of patents per se, just a proponent of consistent and rigorous treatment that acknowledges some semblance of reality. Otherwise, the same people will be whining a few years later when the next set of gross discrepancies are exploited. Picking and choosing which parts of reality we like and pretending the rest do not exist is part of what created the current mess in the first place, so I see no reason to continue that exercise. Maybe patents are good, maybe patents are bad, but let's not focus the discussion on politically convenient distinctions that do not meaningfully exist.
There is a very specific, narrow, and old exclusion in the English common law for drafting members of the militia in times of national emergency. The militia is legally defined as adult, able-bodied males (10 USC 311 has the specific definition). Per plenty of well-established judicial precedent stretching back forever, drafting the militia can only be done for purposes in their capacity as militia, and cannot be extended to general military service in the absence of a specific need nor any kind of non-military service. The courts have long upheld the very narrow scope of the common law doctrine and disallowed its expansion.
In short, our English common law system allows involuntary servitude for criminal punishment and drafting militias into military service in times of national emergency. Drafting militias does not count as "involuntary servitude" for the same reason criminal punishment does not. Most other kinds of involuntary servitude are illegal and unconstitutional.
Drafting the militia, of which all able-bodied males of appropriate age are a member (see 10 USC 311 for the legal definition), is a narrow exclusion to the prohibition on involuntary servitude and has been a well-reviewed part of the English common law since long before the United States was a country. This is the legal mechanism by which the draft becomes permissible, for better or worse. The common law allowance for drafting the militia for war has an extremely limited scope, and courts have reliably curtailed expansions of the traditional scope.
Involuntary civil servitude cannot be legally conflated with the military draft, as the common law and judicial precedent would require every participant to be a member of the militia, and activation of the militia would require both an imminent national emergency and that the service be in the capacity of fulfilling the role of militia qua militia. Since it would be very hard to argue (1) that school children are legitimate members of a military force, (2) that there is an imminent national emergency that requires said children to be impressed, and (3) that community volunteer work is within the scope of militia activation, any argument on the basis of nominal equivalence to the military draft is not going to fly. Never mind that this would exclude women from service as well.
In short, involuntary civil servitude is very illegal and unconstitutional in the United States, with only a couple very old exceptions in the common law for drafting militias and criminal punishment. And mandatory community service is just a bad (bordering on stupid) idea anyway on a number of levels, for even more reasons than the military draft is.
At no point in your incoherent rant did you actually string together a reasonable objection, and so I will take it to mean that you really do not have one. You also prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are one of those people that really does not understand the structure of the US government. Ironically, it was State governments that gave women and non-whites franchise *long* before the Federal government did, some since before there was a United States, but if we did things your way we would have taken the vote away from women and blacks, sacrificed on the altar of Federal power. Maybe that was your desire.
As a practical matter, I would point out that State governments are more accountable than the Federal ones, and that many States have *lost* a considerable amount of freedom and sane policy because they were over-ruled by idiots at the Federal level. The protection State power (nominally) provides is that it is a firewall from political stupidity, allowing a diversity of policy that allows people to escape foolishness that offends them. Centralization of power seems like a good idea at the Federal level until morons seize control of it for a while, which seems to be a frequent occurrence. One would have to be grossly inadequate in one's history education to think strong central power will not eventually fall into the hands of less than savory folk. And it is at those times that you wish the firewall of State power had not been eroded by idealistic ninnies such as yourself.
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Modern missiles use imaging-based terminal guidance, not heat seeking. The imagers often work into the infrared spectrum, but that is primarily to give better all-weather performance. If they can pick up your dirigible on radar, they can put a missile in your area that can find you.
Jailing the employers of illegal immigrants is a pretty ignorant and useless "remedy" for the problem of illegal immigration. Nobody is hiring "illegal immigrants", they are hiring legal immigrants insofar as the employer is obligated to determine such things. In all the environs I have been in where there were illegal immigrants working, they always had papers sufficient to satisfy the obligation of the employer in determination of their eligibility to work. The employer may strongly suspect they are illegal, but the employer has no legal proof of that fact.
If the employer is presented government documents that show eligibility to work by an illegal immigrant, that is a failure of government process and law. Or are you suggesting that we give the employer an obligation to arbitrarily discriminate against employees on the basis that they do not believe the government documents presented are valid without any evidence to support that opinion?
The employers may benefit, but they are not at fault. Their choice is to assume the government documents are valid in the absence of contrary evidence or to be sued for employment discrimination.
Here is the conundrum:
Pharmaceutical and other medical research companies in the US semi-routinely engage in questionable behavior, obviously a bad thing that is enabled by the existence of the Byzantine private healthcare market of the United States. Simultaneously, the vast majority of global medical research, 60-70%, is done in the US and is significantly enabled by the fact that you can recoup costs because the healthcare market is more competitive (albeit perversely) due to the semi-private nature of the market. It is one of the reasons many new medical treatments and diagnostics are available in the US first.
So here is the problem: on one hand the US healthcare market is a byzantine mess where a lot of questionable practices can occur, but on the other hand this same mess also enables most of the world's medical innovation to occur. Much of the rest of the industrialized world is a free rider on the ugly mess that is US healthcare when it comes to innovation and R&D investment. It might be nice to adopt, say, European-style healthcare systems in theory, but can we afford it at the price of relative technological stagnation because all the profit motive has been removed from the development of that technology since the US is the last major market where a legitimate profit can be extracted?
Profit motive is a double-edged sword, and in healthcare is no exception. But I think far too many people, particularly people used to socialized medicine, abhor the ugly side of such things while failing to recognize that they also benefit mightily from it. Even Americans benefit from it in some significant ways despite the unacceptably high costs, such as having the highest cancer survival rates in the world, markedly higher than many western industrialized countries. There needs to be a way to get the benefits without throwing out the innovation baby with the bathwater, which strictly socializing US medicine would do by all empirical evidence. The stark differences in the level of investment in medical advancements by various countries is hard to ignore, and I generally consider such investment to be a good thing.
This is exactly what happens in the places I am familiar with where the city owns the fiber network. At first it is leased out as a low-cost non-profit utility for anyone that wants to use the fiber but over time they begin to view it as a profit center, jacking up the prices as much as they can get away with to put more money in the government's coffers. The finale is when the city decides to compete with the companies who are leasing the fiber to capture even more revenue. Eventually you end up with the rough equivalent of a telco monopoly in both services and prices.
In my experience with a couple municipal-owned fiber networks, it is about providing a low-cost public utility in the same way speeding tickets are about public safety. It becomes a revenue source to the de facto exclusion of the nominal purpose, but with the power of government to prevent outside competitors. Naturally, these all started out as noble forward-thinking projects.
That strategy worked because the opponent was the British and Gandhi understood how to exploit the culture he was fighting. It would have been a foolish strategy if it had been, say, the Soviets.
The majority of the "23,000 nukes" have essentially been deactivated and are only counted because they have not been fully disassembled yet. The link itself says only 8,000 are operational globally. On the other hand, if you count plutonium cores, trigger assemblies, and miscellaneous spare parts lying around that could be engineered into a functional weapon if required there are significantly greater than 23,000 potential nukes.
What does or does not constitute a nuclear weapon for accounting purposes does not necessarily match common sense understanding.
COBOL is a perfect example of an "adequate" language, like most programming languages that are in common use. Adequate languages linger forever if there is a tool chain to support them because there is little in the way of economic rationale for replacing them.
The reason adequate languages proliferate over the long term is that only inadequate languages get replaced, and "ideal" languages become hopelessly politicized by purists and ideologues, leaving the adequate, practical, boring languages as the sound business choice. It is a real-world example of perfect being the enemy of good enough, but for economic reasons good enough always wins.
On what planet was the financial system deregulated? This occurred in one of the most extremely regulated and least free industries we have. It makes other "heavily regulated" industries look positively libertine.
The problem was not with "deregulation", but with pervasively *bad* regulation that was designed more for political expediency than robust markets (e.g. FASB 157). The market will always find the equilibrium tacitly created by the government, but the government never takes responsibility for the unintended consequences of its regulatory actions even when the potential consequences were well understood at the time the regulations were implemented. The problem was not deregulation, it was too much bad regulation.
Compounding this was a lack of enforcement of regulations, due in large part to regulatory capture. I would point out, for example, that Obama appointed Mary Schapiro to be the head of the SEC, the very same person responsible for ignoring or stonewalling whistleblowers in a number of high-profile fraud cases, including the Madoff case. When a person so obviously incompetent at enforcing regulations or policing fraud gets promoted to the top enforcement position, it strongly suggests that regulations are not about regulating.
While I am sure that it did not hurt Halliburton to have Cheney as Vice President, your argument is defective because Halliburton has been getting no-bid contracts for a very long time, including plenty of lucrative no-bid contracts under the Clinton administration. If Halliburton's contracting largesse is the result of malfeasance, then you will have to paint both Democrats and Republicans with that brush, as they both freely participated in that behavior in their respective administrations.
In fairness to Halliburton, one of the reasons they get these types of no-bid contracts from dozens of governments around the world is that there are very, very few companies that actually do what they are doing for these governments on the scale they do it, and Halliburton has specialized in filling that particular demand. Realistically, for some of the contracts that Halliburton gets there are no legitimate competitors and everyone knows it, making a bidding process a bit of waste, particularly if the matter is urgent. On the upside, there are now a couple different other companies trying to move in on Halliburton's business.
I have never understood the obsession with painting Halliburton as the ultimate Republican evil instead of a much more accurate shade of gray that both Democrat and Republican administrations shovel money to that sometimes gets these contracts because there really is no reasonable alternative under the constraints. We can't fix the world if we are in denial about the reality of it, and Halliburton is just another big government contractor like numerous others that was well positioned for the kind of contracting work that resulted from the nominal War on Terror.
Your link backs up my claim. Are you asserting that it does not show that half of CO2 production is related to power generation?
I was not dismissing the CO2 output of personal transportation, just pointing out that it is a relatively small source of CO2, and we are comparing modest changes in efficiency in a smaller case to total elimination in another much larger case. This makes the net change in CO2 between the two cases vary by almost an order of magnitude. You were simply very sloppy in your analysis and reading comprehension.
And while the majority of CO2 from transportation is personal automobiles, transportation is far from the only significant source of CO2 from petroleum -- you are conflating CO2 from petroleum with CO2 from transportation. This is where your counter-argument fails, you based it on inferences that are not actually valid. If you look at the percentage of total CO2 that is *actually* from personal automobiles and compute the CO2 reduction implied by changing current average fuel economy to that of a Prius, the total percentage reduction is kind of disappointing.
The #1 way to reduce CO2 production is to stop burning fossil fuels to generate power. A distant #2 is to eliminate personal automobiles. And way back in the noise with many other possibilities is to improve the average fuel efficiency of vehicles. The best argument for fuel efficiency is to reduce petroleum dependency, not to reduce CO2.
Apparently you did not bother to actually understand what you posted. Approximately 60% of CO2 comes from non-petroleum sources, most of which goes to power generation. Of the remaining 40% that is petroleum, about half is related to transportation in the broadest possible sense. Of that portion that is transportation, only a fraction has any relation to Joe SixPack's automobile. In fact, if you actually do the math on the fraction of total CO2 that has anything at all to do with your car, you would find that replacing every single car in the US with a Prius would decrease the total CO2 production by something like 5%, which barely offsets the CO2 output *growth*. At some point, you will realize that your car is not the only significant consumer of petroleum in the US, and definitely not a significant producer of CO2. If everyone stopped driving their car tomorrow, it would barely make a dent. If we are going to come up with constructive solutions, let's attempt to stay in the ballpark of reality.
On the other hand, if you replace fossil fuel power generation with something else, you cut CO2 production in half. 50% versus 5%. One of these is below the noise floor, and the other is not. And it would would not be surprising to find out that it cost more to replace everyone's car with a Prius than replace power production.
I want constructive, efficient solutions, not pleasing solutions that stroke your preconceived notions and accomplish nothing. The numbers very obviously say that vehicle fuel efficiency has no meaningful impact on CO2 output, whereas power generation has an enormous impact. Vehicle fuel efficiency *does* have a meaningful impact on petroleum imports, but you are apparently too confused to discern the difference and that is a very different issue. It is like the people that confuse global warming with the ozone layer hole.
There would not be billions of tons of CO2 at stake if we were not generating electricity with coal. Inefficient electrical devices are almost irrelevant to that problem, and pretty much miss the point. Energy efficiency and CO2 production are only weakly related, much like the case with cars, and it is kind of irritating that people so often conflate the two. If everybody in the US switched to commuting in a Prius tomorrow, it would have a negligible impact on total CO2 production (the vast majority of CO2 comes from electricity generation), but it is often sold in those terms. If you get your electricity from nuclear or some other type of green power, there is negligible CO2 impact from having slightly less efficient electrical devices.
If you want to reduce oil consumption you might buy a Prius, and if you were actually serious you would move to a high-density urban area or lobby cities to allow them to be built.
If you want to reduce CO2 production you might buy more efficient "green" electrical devices, and if you were actually serious you would lobby for nuclear (and other non-CO2) power plants.
Part of the reason many environmental policies accomplish so little is that they are largely about symbolism over substance (see: Kyoto). Most people, including many nominal environmentalists, care more about looking like they care than actually solving the problem, particularly if the solution forces them to materially change their lifestyle or preconceptions. It is a cheap and mostly symbolic way to get social approval without actually having to be responsible for enacting useful changes that would actually make a difference. Everyone is so busy trying to prove how green they are that almost no one is actually, well, making the world green.
Then you will be pleased to discover that carbon monoxide is not only an ubiquitous industrial chemical used for more things than you are likely to imagine, but that it has been used as automotive fuel in times past, a bit like how compressed natural gas is used in some vehicles today. Yes it is toxic, but then so are most industrial chemicals and commonly used gases. This is actually pretty retro fuel technology, used when petroleum distillates were in short supply since you can produce it from damn near any organic matter (wood waste was a popular source). It says something about educational systems that you do not know that carbon monoxide has a long history as a fuel, since that was its primary application for a long time, usually by converting a carbon rich source into "water gas", a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. We have long since replaced water gas with natural gas and short-chain hydrocarbon gases from mined sources, which is far more cost effective in bulk.
I am not really directing this at you, but we need to get past the "gosh, it might be toxic!" over-reaction to some really basic chemistry. We have used "water gas" and carbon monoxide systems for a very long time as chemistry goes, and long before anyone really properly characterized its asphyxiating properties. If they could use it in the 19th century without killing everybody, then we can certainly use it in the 21st century without killing everybody. There is more truly nasty chemistry waiting to happen in your average household than any normal person likely imagines, and yet we somehow survive as a society.
Chemical toxicity is becoming like "nuclear" and "radioactive", bogeymen perceived as ineffable evils that will kill us all. It betrays a deep disconnect with the reality of the situation that, if allowed to drive political decisions, really will kill us all even if indirectly in a carefully designed hypo-allergenic padded cell. Fortunately, biology evolved in environments filled with radioactive, toxic crap, and is pretty good at mitigating the damage except in the most extreme cases that only a human could engineer. Yes, carbon monoxide is toxic, but it is also easily managed with some fairly primitive engineering.
HARM systems do not work that way. You are making assumptions about the design of those weapons that betrays a gross ignorance of the capabilities of the technology.
As a rule of thumb, it should seem reasonable that state-of-the-art classified weapon systems work neither according to how Hollywood depicts them nor by the mechanisms assumed by a poorly informed lay-person such as yourself. It is akin to an accountant with a crackpot theory wagging their finger at a PhD physicist on the topic of quantum mechanics. Accept that many very bright people with extreme expertise designed these weapons with an understanding you will never gain by reading your local news rag.
This is as bad as the idiots in the media and elsewhere who (still) think the US has GPS guided weaponry, completely misunderstanding the technology they are looking at (so-called "GPS-guided" weapons are actually guided by ultra-precise optical interferometers -- the GPS units are used to cheaply tighten the error bars on the interferometers, not guide them).
Interestingly, when St. Helens erupted, the majority of the ash fell in a relatively small agricultural region. I know, I lived right in the middle of that farm country at the time. When it happened, everyone assumed a total loss for the year, since the ground was caked in inches of the ash cement. The region looked like a wasteland, and mobility was very limited.
But the agricultural disaster never happened. The crops bounced back with a vengeance and produced spectacular record yields. Not just for that year, but for several years thereafter. It turns out that the several inches of ash acted as incredible fertilizer and helped the soil retain moisture, and the crops poked their way through the ash after a couple good rains. Most of the US would get that kind of dusting of ash across its agricultural belt, and while there might be some cooling it will likely be offset in part by a massive agricultural rebound that compensates for a significant part of it. We expected the worst when St. Helens erupted, but the reality was far less than that in terms of food production.
The reason people like you have no credibility is that you have no clue what you are talking about. The Minnesota bridge failed due to an undetected design flaw per the NTSB, not some conspiratorial absence of funding. Furthermore, the Federal government only rarely implements infrastructure projects, being almost exclusively the domain of the individual States, such as the bridge in question. It should be embarrassing for the Slashdot community that the post was even modded up.
People like you are the problem, ranting about non-existent failures of government and demanding that non-existent authorities fix them. Did it ever occur to you that the government might accomplish more if it did not have to cater to the demands of millions of people who have no bloody idea what they are talking about?
Consumer electronics and automobile manufacturing have very little to do with R&D. They were, however, enabled by technology R&D that was largely funded in the US. Countless billions of dollars were invested in semiconductor R&D, almost entirely in the US, so that slivers of silicon could be wrapped in plastic overseas and sold to the masses. Modern medical technology is another example of an industry where well over half of the global R&D is funded by the American private sector, with the American public sector funding a significant portion of the remaining minority fraction. You can access all of this technology anywhere in the world, but the actual funding of the underlying R&D that made it possible is largely American and mostly private. You seem to be conflating technology R&D with trinket manufacturing that exploits the R&D.
As for profit, no one should care. What they should care about is results for the amount of money invested. R&D is not a ritual of essential purity that we do for its own sake, we do it because we are looking for advancements in capability. If profit produces more advances for a given amount of investment, and by every metric it does, then that is the best way to do research. The only real contrary argument is for areas like pure science research where there is no plausible profit and so inefficient non-profit research may be better than no research at all, but even that is increasingly being done by private non-profit foundations.
In 1950, the US government spent slightly more on R&D than private organizations. Half a century later, that gap has grown so that privately funded R&D completely dwarfs government funded R&D. The US government does fund some basic science (and military) research that would not likely get done by the private sector, but even that research is being increasingly funded by private foundations with deep pockets. You might want to revisit your model of how most research gets funded. The US government invests a lot in research relative to places like the EU, but that research investment is a small fraction of a total research funding pie that is completely dominated by the US private sector.
A topic of discussion in the EU is that due to their dependency on the private American research industry, research topics related to things local to Europe are relatively underfunded and European governments have shown little interest in making the required investment. We do not really need the US doing more research so much as we need the rest of the industrialized world doing as much productive research as the US.
Utter rubbish that can be easily disproven by the very numbers that Wall Street uses. The market prices on Wall Street, for example, are priced with a mathematical horizon that ranges from a couple years to a couple decades depending on the company we are talking about. And most derivatives and other financial contracts also have explicit performance horizons measured in much, much longer terms than "4 months". Obviously, Wall Street cares about and considers profitability explicitly on a much longer time horizon than you assert by their very actions when they have to actually put their money on the line.
Apparently you are blissfully unaware that the productivity of investments in those Japanese research cooperatives have markedly underperformed American private R&D, so what you are recommending is spending a lot more money to produce far fewer results. The problem with the government picking One True Research Project is that, like with all research, the odds are very high that they will actually be researching the wrong thing, and without a messy, uncoordinated, and diverse research ecosystem like you get with decentralized private R&D, progress tends to stall as what (in hindsight) is the correct research path becomes almost entirely ignored and defunded in favor of politically expedient or favored research topics. This ignores the issue that when you look at modern countries, in many important fields like medicine the majority of the world's research is private American R&D funding.
The germane point that you are furiously trying to remain ignorant of is that American private sector R&D is atypically productive in terms of producing useful advances, largely because they try so many different things and prune low-quality research paths so quickly. Government directed R&D projects, while producing some very important results on occasion, have a long history of relatively low productivity for the money spent no matter which government we are talking about. This is further complicated by the fact that governments only make the investments when convenient since they have no particular political motivation to do more research beyond grandstanding. I would like an explanation, for example, as to why the total R&D investment in the EU is a tiny fraction of American R&D despite having a larger economy and population, and how that oft-replicated result would be avoided this time.
At the end of the day, I do not want to pay for research, I want to pay for productive results. There is nothing intrinsically good or worth funding about "research theater" if it is not producing results we can actually use with all due haste. Fast, results-oriented government research seems to require a palpable imminent threat to life and limb that the population at large recognizes, and battery manufacturing technology does not qualify.
Modern infrared spectrum missiles of the last twenty years or so are not attracted to heat signatures, Hollywood notwithstanding. They lock onto specific aircraft based on an image profile. In essence, the missiles have sufficient discrimination to chase a specific aircraft from all aspects after such aircraft have been designated as target by whoever launched the weapon using very advanced image processing techniques. Heat signatures are almost entirely irrelevant, only broad-spectrum imaging matters. This is among the reasons that the current generation of anti-aircraft missiles are generally considered impervious to passive counter-measures. If someone with a vaguely modern anti-aircraft weapon wanted to hit whatever it is you might be flying in, it is a trivial matter for the most part. The only defense would be to look like something entirely different than whatever it was the weapon was launched at.
The problem is that you could trivially extend this line of reasoning to any patent or machinery. Patents are not about using something contrary to its nature, indeed that would be nonsensical, but about significant new configurations of something that exploit its nature. After all, mechanical devices are based on nothing more than exploiting the obvious "gear-like" nature of gears, "lever-like" nature of levers, and so one. Just like an algorithm exploits the obvious "bit-manipulation-like" nature of computers.
Of course, this is skirting around the basic fact that makes these types of arguments stupid to begin with: All Patents Are Algorithms. I thought this was a site for computer nerds, which presumably suggests some familiarity with computational information theory. That is the elephant in the room that everyone is trying really hard not to notice, which suggests more of an emotional than rational reaction to the topic.
A big part of the existing problem is that the definitions are neither rigorous nor consistent, so intentionally pretending that a difference exists where none theoretically does is just license for gaming and shenanigans, never mind unintended consequences. I have yet to hear a single explanation of why an algorithm implemented with molecules (e.g. chemical process patent) is peachy goodness while an algorithm implemented with bits (e.g. software process patent) is Teh Evil. Every single argument -- every single one -- against algorithm patents apply to chemical process patents, but in practice no one ever makes that case against chemical process patents, which at a minimum raises a lot of questions about the integrity of the position.
And I am not even necessarily a proponent of patents per se, just a proponent of consistent and rigorous treatment that acknowledges some semblance of reality. Otherwise, the same people will be whining a few years later when the next set of gross discrepancies are exploited. Picking and choosing which parts of reality we like and pretending the rest do not exist is part of what created the current mess in the first place, so I see no reason to continue that exercise. Maybe patents are good, maybe patents are bad, but let's not focus the discussion on politically convenient distinctions that do not meaningfully exist.
There is a very specific, narrow, and old exclusion in the English common law for drafting members of the militia in times of national emergency. The militia is legally defined as adult, able-bodied males (10 USC 311 has the specific definition). Per plenty of well-established judicial precedent stretching back forever, drafting the militia can only be done for purposes in their capacity as militia, and cannot be extended to general military service in the absence of a specific need nor any kind of non-military service. The courts have long upheld the very narrow scope of the common law doctrine and disallowed its expansion.
In short, our English common law system allows involuntary servitude for criminal punishment and drafting militias into military service in times of national emergency. Drafting militias does not count as "involuntary servitude" for the same reason criminal punishment does not. Most other kinds of involuntary servitude are illegal and unconstitutional.
Drafting the militia, of which all able-bodied males of appropriate age are a member (see 10 USC 311 for the legal definition), is a narrow exclusion to the prohibition on involuntary servitude and has been a well-reviewed part of the English common law since long before the United States was a country. This is the legal mechanism by which the draft becomes permissible, for better or worse. The common law allowance for drafting the militia for war has an extremely limited scope, and courts have reliably curtailed expansions of the traditional scope.
Involuntary civil servitude cannot be legally conflated with the military draft, as the common law and judicial precedent would require every participant to be a member of the militia, and activation of the militia would require both an imminent national emergency and that the service be in the capacity of fulfilling the role of militia qua militia. Since it would be very hard to argue (1) that school children are legitimate members of a military force, (2) that there is an imminent national emergency that requires said children to be impressed, and (3) that community volunteer work is within the scope of militia activation, any argument on the basis of nominal equivalence to the military draft is not going to fly. Never mind that this would exclude women from service as well.
In short, involuntary civil servitude is very illegal and unconstitutional in the United States, with only a couple very old exceptions in the common law for drafting militias and criminal punishment. And mandatory community service is just a bad (bordering on stupid) idea anyway on a number of levels, for even more reasons than the military draft is.
At no point in your incoherent rant did you actually string together a reasonable objection, and so I will take it to mean that you really do not have one. You also prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are one of those people that really does not understand the structure of the US government. Ironically, it was State governments that gave women and non-whites franchise *long* before the Federal government did, some since before there was a United States, but if we did things your way we would have taken the vote away from women and blacks, sacrificed on the altar of Federal power. Maybe that was your desire.
As a practical matter, I would point out that State governments are more accountable than the Federal ones, and that many States have *lost* a considerable amount of freedom and sane policy because they were over-ruled by idiots at the Federal level. The protection State power (nominally) provides is that it is a firewall from political stupidity, allowing a diversity of policy that allows people to escape foolishness that offends them. Centralization of power seems like a good idea at the Federal level until morons seize control of it for a while, which seems to be a frequent occurrence. One would have to be grossly inadequate in one's history education to think strong central power will not eventually fall into the hands of less than savory folk. And it is at those times that you wish the firewall of State power had not been eroded by idealistic ninnies such as yourself.