Possession, sale etc of marijuana is a Federal crime.
Driving 56 MPH back when the "national speed limit" was 55MPH was not a Federal crime - as you point out, the Feds just used their role as a middleman in highway funding scheme to coerce most states to enact state level 55 MPH speed limit laws.
The Feds mostly don't bother to enforce many Federal marijuana laws involving small amounts of the evil weed because the state/local governments took care of that via state laws and enforcement. When California legalizes some possession of marijuana in the upcoming election (hopefully), the Feds may become more active in enforcing Federal laws in this arena.
Note that the Federal laws regarding marijuana possession are much more severe than current California laws. I believe, for example, that possession of any amount of marijuana is punishable under Federal law by up to a one year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine on a first conviction and a minimum of a couple weeks in prison for subsequent convictions. In theory, I believe selling 0.5 ounces to a friend could lead to a $250,000 fine and five years in prison under Federal law for the first offense.
Fortunately, the Feds probably usually have better things to do than track down folks with a couple plants in their back yard.
This argument wouldn't last long in court. The fact that something can be taxed doesn't make it legal IFF it is taxed.
Suppose Montana passed a law making it legal to assassinate IRS auditors but imposed a one cent tax on each such assassination. Would you still think your argument makes sense applied to that case?
From reliable sources, I understand this acre of land will be used to build part of the reality distortion field around the data center.
Seems like a lot of money just to hide a data center though. It would have been cheaper for Steve to have just declared that anyone claiming there was a data center there was using their eyes wrong.
If roof maintenance or replacement required removing them, replacing them would have been an additional cost (albeit, partially offset by delaying the cost of storing, salvaging, or discarding them rather than storing them back on the roof).
There's exemptions for such bulbs. The authoritative source, Wikipedia, explains it:
Under the law, incandescent bulbs that produce 310–2600 lumens of light are effectively phased out between 2012 and 2014. Bulbs outside this range (roughly, light bulbs currently less than 40 watts or more than 150 watts) are exempt from the ban. Also exempt are several classes of speciality lights, including appliance lamps, "rough service" bulbs, 3-way, colored lamps, and plant lights.
So, I imagine there may be quite a market for bulbs over about 150 watts - and plenty of fires as people put them in fixtures not designed for such high wattage.
I am forming a negative opinion about the critical thinking skills of people who disbelieve all scientific evidence which overwhelmingly supports that humans (and other life forms) on Earth arrived at their current state via an evolutionary process (vs. appearing a few thousand years ago via divine intervention for example).
Generally, as I said, I think burning symbols of anything is an inarticulate and ineffective way of getting a message across or of convincing others that your opinion is correct. However, I don't think substantially less of the person just because they use such a method.
No matter how strong an emotional attachment I have to any idea or opinion, I am not offended by someone expressing their disagreement with my point of view. If they choose a form of expression that is substantially disruptive to me or others somehow - for example blocking traffic or occupying a government office and preventing business from being done - I am "offended", even if I agree with the opinion being expressed. I'm also sometimes "offended" when someone tries to impose on me, through government action, their "opinion". However in the case of the "Quran-Burning Church", they are not engaging in any action that crosses my "offended" boundary (and, even if they were burning effigies of me, I would feel the same way as long as they were not willfully inciting people to actually attack me).
All that said, I really don't know why this "congregation" is planning on burning the Quran and I really don't care. Since I don't know why they are planning on doing this and I have no idea what their message is, I guess it's not a very effective or compelling form of communication.
If a Mosque decided they want to make a public display of burning some bibles I bet we would all agree that's hate speech.
You would lose that bet. I would consider that no more hate speech than burning the US (or pick a country of your choice) flag. Or than most of the stereotyping of [ Republicans | Democrats ] that occurs on [ DailyKos | Free Republic ]. In other words, it's just an inarticulate and not very compelling expression of some benign opinion.
Although I dislike the use of the vague term "hate speech", I can see it applied to speech that calls for harming others. Such examples include speech by white supremacy groups calling for inflicting harms on "non-whites" and by Islamic fundamentalists calling for the destruction of the "west".
As far as I know (and, honestly, I've not been following it closely as all sides seem rather childish in this debate - why would I care what some small group of people want to burn in Florida or wherever it is), this "congregation" hasn't called for the destruction of followers of Islam or issued any other threats.
Burning wood or cloth fibers that you own isn't hateful. It may be stupid, it may be meaningless, it may be a waste of time, but for all I care you can burn an entire pallet full of On the Origin of Species - it won't change my belief in how life developed to its current form on Earth, I won't be insulted, I just don't care (except to the extent that presumably whoever is doing this as an expression of opinion is lacking some serious logical skills and I hope they recognize their disability and don't consider themselves qualified to vote, run for office, or serve on juries).
I think that the fact that Apple "stole" most everything from Xerox (Alto et al) and successfully packaged it into a consumer product line pretty much captures what Apple's strength was and is.
Their products are rarely technically innovative although they are very good at developing incremental technical improvements that target "gee wow" aesthetics.
Apple is, however, an innovative marketer who successfully created a avant-garde brand name in a product area that was not traditionally very susceptible to such a strategy.
I'm always amused when I see Macs used by so many open source developers who extol the virtues of open source. Apple has traditionally been the antithesis of "open". They strive for proprietary customer lock-in first and foremost. They eschew transparency in favor of deploying a reality distortion field. Maybe there's an analogy here between this and the various sex scandals involving "moral majority" (which are neither) types.
Humans, unfortunately, are not very good at evolving - esp. in modern societies.
Biologically we are not very good at evolving...
We breed rather late in life and we spend a lot of energy on each offspring - probably necessary as humans have so few multiple births. This means there are not that many "experiments" so the opportunity for mutations, both favorable and unfavorable to current or future conditions, are limited. Effective evolution relies on many experiments.
Human's have relatively long gestation periods - this limits the number of "experiments" even further.
Then we go and make human evolution even harder with social and "moral" constraints...
The more advanced the society, generally the fewer offspring each female has (i.e., less experiments per breeding cycle - with opportunity for both "good" and "bad" outcomes) and the later in life they breed (i.e., fewer breeding cycles per unit time). These factors conspire to further reduce the number of experiments and stymie evolution yet more.
Even worse, we interfere with "natural selection" and actually actively try to eliminate it. The more "advanced" the human society, the more likely we are to keep premature babies alive, mask over various genetic weaknesses with medications and treatments. This results in increasing weakness in each generation as these who avoided the brutal effectiveness of natural selection live to generate yet another even weaker generation.
In advanced societies, we also favor technological solutions over natural selection - if the climate gets colder and colder, we would build buildings and communities with thicker and thicker walls and more and more powerful fusion reactors to keep us warm rather than strongly favoring, via survival, those in each generation those who are most adapted to the cooling environment (by tending to grow fur for example). Societies whose survival is based on heavy infrastructure will eventually be unable to build enough new infrastructure to keep ahead of the environmental changes but they will probably die off due to political mismanagement before then (the Bureau of Fusion will fail to maintain the reactors because the Secretary of Fusion, reporting to some dictator in some 30 year period, will spend all the money on babes, booze, and partying instead on reactor maintenance and the reactors will eventually all fail leaving everyone in the community dead -- albeit, the dictator's favs will be the last to go as they huddle around the last working reactor - killing anyone who tries to shoehorn in on them).
The brutal truth... The cockroaches and ants (or their direct descendants) will be happily infesting the Earth long after all human lineages have become extinct on Earth and will be almost completely unaffected by natural and human induced environmental changes that wiped out all humans millions of years earlier.
I think pensions are safe regardless of why you were fired. They are already earned - sort of like vacation in many/most states, they still have to pay you for your accrued vacation no matter why you leave.
Then find out what languages/tools are commonly used in that sector. The goal of "update... skills for Windows, iOS, or Android" is a little broad. Just deciding "Windows" isn't sufficient -- what sort of problems do you want to solve commercially on Windows - server class? End user GUI tools?
Also, there's been quite a bit of change from the 1980's in how most software is developed. Before the mid 80s(?) one was likely to write something that either stood alone on top of an OS or interfaced to a particular proprietary application/system with a fairly limited API. Now, it's much more likely that you will interface with several "black boxes" - most of the time your program/function is executing, the computer won't be running in your code but buried in nested library calls or in other subsystems you call. There are exceptions of course.
Also, the priorities have changed a lot in most development in the last 25 years. Most software development now doesn't need to worry nearly as much about CPU path-lengths and memory footprints as 25 years ago -- the trend of "People are expensive, machines are cheap" continues and has changed the balance a lot. Of course, algorithmic complexity still matters a lot - Moore's Law hasn't yet allowed us to get away with O(n^n) for large n. Internalizing this could be as hard as learning a new language.
Fortunately, the HR dopes often just do keyword matches (and that's only on the good days when they do anything vaguely useful). If someone has learned, for example, C++ on their own, they should just put it on their resume. Of course, the hiring manger/interview team will probably ask some C++ questions and one should be able to answer them.
However, "learning" a language is a lot more than just learning the syntax and semantics. There are often styles, idioms, and design patterns that are commonly used when programming commercially in a particular language but they aren't "part of the language" - just commonly used in that language. Language tutorials and books often don't cover these (or at least not well). Consider for example RAII in C++ -- very commonly used, but a language tutorial may not mention it. So, one has to dig deeper - perhaps by looking, in detail, at FOSS code (if the language of interest is used much in FOSS - C++ for example is not all that common in FOSS as compared to C or Java) and reading up on style/tips sources (such as, for C++, Effective C++ and More Effective C++).
But, bottom line, you gotta write and debug real programs/systems, not just toy two page examples, to learn the language. Failure to do so will almost certainly doom one to failure in an interview.
Such people that I've known would carpool without the incentive -- their goal is almost always to save labor and money, not to get to use the carpool lane.
Just make the penalty very high and mostly only check when a car is pulled over for some other reason. I'd agree that the "related" one is hard to enforce - perhaps the law should simply be that members of the same household don't count towards the carpool numbers. Since only licensed drivers would count, the officer can check the addresses on the 2 or 3 people who want to "count" and make sure there are no shared addresses.
But, the HOV lanes are underutilized by "real" carpools - another outcome of failed social engineering. We might as well use that concrete for something.
If that results in too much congestion, just change the HOV rules to require that a "carpool" automobile be a non-commercial vehicle not currently in commercial use containing at least 2 (or 3) LICENSED drivers who are not directly related (spouses, parent/child). That would get rid of many of the cars that currently use the lanes and free up even more space to use the HOV lanes for other social engineering purposes like promoting environmental causes. A mother driving her kids to school is going to "carpool" anyway. Most spouses driving together will do it without the HOV lane incentive.
Maybe you were right about government being stupid or maybe you're right that they do stupid things just to ruin us.
However, the idiots ultimately responsible for the HSR fiasco in California are the voters who passed passed Prop 1A which provides almost $10B (via bonds) to jumpstart the program. Without passage of Prop 1A, HSR probably would have stalled or died.
Fortunately for Californians, it's pretty easy for those who actually pay taxes to leave the state as it flushes itself down the crapper.
When I've seen this sort of thing (nothing of this magnitude fortunately) in corporations, large and small, it turns out that the big boss puts a focus on "cost containment".
Middle managers implement policies to try to effect this and these policies include explicit and implicit budgetary and cultural incentives for lower management to cut costs and raise revenues.
Individual contributors then feel pressure when they threaten to screw up their manager's or manager's^2 bonus by spending money to address what seems like, but is not provably so in isolation, a risky situation.
A few individual contributors will complain - sometimes for moral reasons, sometimes because they fear being scapegoated if the risky situation blows up (or, perhaps, in the case of an oil rig, they fear dying!). However, most individual contributors give up pretty quickly - or they risk being un/underemployed. Many individual contributors are that because they either are not good at presenting effective business arguments or just don't want to so their messages don't get through as well as they could.
Unfortunately, much of the griping about "we should do this" or "we must do this" or "we shouldn't do this" from individual contributors is, frankly, ill-informed because it doesn't take into account the full cost/benefit analysis or overlooks critical considerations. The problem is the management chain needs to sort these out effectively to identify the real valid warnings. The din of the invalid warnings makes it easy to miss the valid ones -- or just get callous to all complaints. Of course, in the glare of retrospect, we see the single email that warned of the thing that DID happen but we don't see the other 100 emails with either invalid warnings or warning of risks whose costs are manageable, understood, and already accepted that had to be filtered through to find the one that did matter.
A middle manager may be aware there's a small risk of complete disaster and may even understand that would be the end of her job and possibly her chosen career -- but they also may believe that the odds of a disaster is quite tiny. They also realize that if they fight to fix every such problem, once it's fixed it's impossible to prove that it "saved the day" (so they get little credit for it) but they are dinged (including possibly relieved of their job in the next round of layoffs but more likely just never promoted and subject to crappy raises forever) for the cost of the fix just because it came out of their budget.
As well, sometimes managers/individual contributors do make a decision to save money at a small increase in risk -- and in isolation, the decision is actually a sound decision because there are plenty of backup systems/safeguards in place that will prevent the cost cutting from actually creating a problem if things do go wrong. The problem occurs when the managers of all those backup systems/safeguards make decisions here and there that are also, independently, valid but collectively result in a cascading failure.
In software, I've seen this sort of thing happen in simple release cycles. One group is responsible for development and turning over a quality product to the Feature Test Team. The Feature Test Team is responsible for testing the feature and then hands it off to the Release Test Team. The Release Test Team then is responsible for testing the system and certifying it for release. Unfortunately the exact responsibilities for quality become a bit fuzzy so the Developers, Developers, Developers [jump up and down, sweat, and pump fists here] cut unit testing short because, after all, the Feature Test Team is responsible for testing the entire feature. The Feature Test Team, under time [i.e., cost] pressure, doesn't thoroughly test some of the interactions of the feature with existing features on the theory that the Release Test Team will take care of that anyway (after all, the new feature IS part of the "Release" as are the pre-existing features - and in the
You think we are stupid enough to buy this BS? If there was an option with this many upsides and so few downsides, we would be using it - it would just make engineering sense and political sense to get rid of coal plants (in particular) and replace them with (alleged) IFRs. And, to top it off, you expect us to believe that the US would waste resources growing corn for fuel instead of growing food crops if growing corn for fuel wasn't the most efficient use of resources -- balderdash I say - so inconceivable to be unbelievable.
Your claims are not unlike absurd claims that we should stop using paper tape for data storage and transport because fantastical concepts like "networks", "hard drives", and "flash memory" could be built and would work better. If it was true, we would be using "networks", "hard drives", and "flash memory" instead of paper tape for our data storage and transport needs. Oh... wait... never mind... now I'm very confused...
If we got rid of corporations, most big stuff wouldn't be possible, so to some extent, I agree.
However, imagine if every well in the GOM was drilled by a different bunch of investors. That would much harder to regulate (if, for some reason, MMS suddenly decided to actually regulate). If a rag tag bunch of investors had scraped together $90M to drill the well and it went BOOM, where would the $10 billion to clean this mess up come from? One can't get blood from a stone and individuals will risk their entire fortune in hopes of a windfall.
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Possession, sale etc of marijuana is a Federal crime.
Driving 56 MPH back when the "national speed limit" was 55MPH was not a Federal crime - as you point out, the Feds just used their role as a middleman in highway funding scheme to coerce most states to enact state level 55 MPH speed limit laws.
The Feds mostly don't bother to enforce many Federal marijuana laws involving small amounts of the evil weed because the state/local governments took care of that via state laws and enforcement. When California legalizes some possession of marijuana in the upcoming election (hopefully), the Feds may become more active in enforcing Federal laws in this arena.
Note that the Federal laws regarding marijuana possession are much more severe than current California laws. I believe, for example, that possession of any amount of marijuana is punishable under Federal law by up to a one year prison sentence and a $1,000 fine on a first conviction and a minimum of a couple weeks in prison for subsequent convictions. In theory, I believe selling 0.5 ounces to a friend could lead to a $250,000 fine and five years in prison under Federal law for the first offense.
Fortunately, the Feds probably usually have better things to do than track down folks with a couple plants in their back yard.
This argument wouldn't last long in court. The fact that something can be taxed doesn't make it legal IFF it is taxed.
Suppose Montana passed a law making it legal to assassinate IRS auditors but imposed a one cent tax on each such assassination. Would you still think your argument makes sense applied to that case?
From reliable sources, I understand this acre of land will be used to build part of the reality distortion field around the data center.
Seems like a lot of money just to hide a data center though. It would have been cheaper for Steve to have just declared that anyone claiming there was a data center there was using their eyes wrong.
If roof maintenance or replacement required removing them, replacing them would have been an additional cost (albeit, partially offset by delaying the cost of storing, salvaging, or discarding them rather than storing them back on the roof).
Luckily I got them with a grant from the Australian government and it was all pretty much free!
At least to you - well, unless you are a taxpayer or buy goods made in Australia.
When you buy a new computer, they don't have to dig a new trench from the manufacturer to your house to deliver it.
So, I imagine there may be quite a market for bulbs over about 150 watts - and plenty of fires as people put them in fixtures not designed for such high wattage.
I am forming a negative opinion about the critical thinking skills of people who disbelieve all scientific evidence which overwhelmingly supports that humans (and other life forms) on Earth arrived at their current state via an evolutionary process (vs. appearing a few thousand years ago via divine intervention for example).
Generally, as I said, I think burning symbols of anything is an inarticulate and ineffective way of getting a message across or of convincing others that your opinion is correct. However, I don't think substantially less of the person just because they use such a method.
No matter how strong an emotional attachment I have to any idea or opinion, I am not offended by someone expressing their disagreement with my point of view. If they choose a form of expression that is substantially disruptive to me or others somehow - for example blocking traffic or occupying a government office and preventing business from being done - I am "offended", even if I agree with the opinion being expressed. I'm also sometimes "offended" when someone tries to impose on me, through government action, their "opinion". However in the case of the "Quran-Burning Church", they are not engaging in any action that crosses my "offended" boundary (and, even if they were burning effigies of me, I would feel the same way as long as they were not willfully inciting people to actually attack me).
All that said, I really don't know why this "congregation" is planning on burning the Quran and I really don't care. Since I don't know why they are planning on doing this and I have no idea what their message is, I guess it's not a very effective or compelling form of communication.
You would lose that bet. I would consider that no more hate speech than burning the US (or pick a country of your choice) flag. Or than most of the stereotyping of [ Republicans | Democrats ] that occurs on [ DailyKos | Free Republic ] . In other words, it's just an inarticulate and not very compelling expression of some benign opinion.
Although I dislike the use of the vague term "hate speech", I can see it applied to speech that calls for harming others. Such examples include speech by white supremacy groups calling for inflicting harms on "non-whites" and by Islamic fundamentalists calling for the destruction of the "west".
As far as I know (and, honestly, I've not been following it closely as all sides seem rather childish in this debate - why would I care what some small group of people want to burn in Florida or wherever it is), this "congregation" hasn't called for the destruction of followers of Islam or issued any other threats.
Burning wood or cloth fibers that you own isn't hateful. It may be stupid, it may be meaningless, it may be a waste of time, but for all I care you can burn an entire pallet full of On the Origin of Species - it won't change my belief in how life developed to its current form on Earth, I won't be insulted, I just don't care (except to the extent that presumably whoever is doing this as an expression of opinion is lacking some serious logical skills and I hope they recognize their disability and don't consider themselves qualified to vote, run for office, or serve on juries).
I think that the fact that Apple "stole" most everything from Xerox (Alto et al) and successfully packaged it into a consumer product line pretty much captures what Apple's strength was and is.
Their products are rarely technically innovative although they are very good at developing incremental technical improvements that target "gee wow" aesthetics.
Apple is, however, an innovative marketer who successfully created a avant-garde brand name in a product area that was not traditionally very susceptible to such a strategy.
I'm always amused when I see Macs used by so many open source developers who extol the virtues of open source. Apple has traditionally been the antithesis of "open". They strive for proprietary customer lock-in first and foremost. They eschew transparency in favor of deploying a reality distortion field. Maybe there's an analogy here between this and the various sex scandals involving "moral majority" (which are neither) types.
Perhaps the genetic material that got into the wild qualifies as having been legally abandoned by Monsanto and they now have no claim to it?
Humans, unfortunately, are not very good at evolving - esp. in modern societies.
Biologically we are not very good at evolving...
We breed rather late in life and we spend a lot of energy on each offspring - probably necessary as humans have so few multiple births. This means there are not that many "experiments" so the opportunity for mutations, both favorable and unfavorable to current or future conditions, are limited. Effective evolution relies on many experiments.
Human's have relatively long gestation periods - this limits the number of "experiments" even further.
Then we go and make human evolution even harder with social and "moral" constraints...
The more advanced the society, generally the fewer offspring each female has (i.e., less experiments per breeding cycle - with opportunity for both "good" and "bad" outcomes) and the later in life they breed (i.e., fewer breeding cycles per unit time). These factors conspire to further reduce the number of experiments and stymie evolution yet more.
Even worse, we interfere with "natural selection" and actually actively try to eliminate it. The more "advanced" the human society, the more likely we are to keep premature babies alive, mask over various genetic weaknesses with medications and treatments. This results in increasing weakness in each generation as these who avoided the brutal effectiveness of natural selection live to generate yet another even weaker generation.
In advanced societies, we also favor technological solutions over natural selection - if the climate gets colder and colder, we would build buildings and communities with thicker and thicker walls and more and more powerful fusion reactors to keep us warm rather than strongly favoring, via survival, those in each generation those who are most adapted to the cooling environment (by tending to grow fur for example). Societies whose survival is based on heavy infrastructure will eventually be unable to build enough new infrastructure to keep ahead of the environmental changes but they will probably die off due to political mismanagement before then (the Bureau of Fusion will fail to maintain the reactors because the Secretary of Fusion, reporting to some dictator in some 30 year period, will spend all the money on babes, booze, and partying instead on reactor maintenance and the reactors will eventually all fail leaving everyone in the community dead -- albeit, the dictator's favs will be the last to go as they huddle around the last working reactor - killing anyone who tries to shoehorn in on them).
The brutal truth... The cockroaches and ants (or their direct descendants) will be happily infesting the Earth long after all human lineages have become extinct on Earth and will be almost completely unaffected by natural and human induced environmental changes that wiped out all humans millions of years earlier.
I think pensions are safe regardless of why you were fired. They are already earned - sort of like vacation in many/most states, they still have to pay you for your accrued vacation no matter why you leave.
Then find out what languages/tools are commonly used in that sector. The goal of "update ... skills for Windows, iOS, or Android" is a little broad. Just deciding "Windows" isn't sufficient -- what sort of problems do you want to solve commercially on Windows - server class? End user GUI tools?
Also, there's been quite a bit of change from the 1980's in how most software is developed. Before the mid 80s(?) one was likely to write something that either stood alone on top of an OS or interfaced to a particular proprietary application/system with a fairly limited API. Now, it's much more likely that you will interface with several "black boxes" - most of the time your program/function is executing, the computer won't be running in your code but buried in nested library calls or in other subsystems you call. There are exceptions of course.
Also, the priorities have changed a lot in most development in the last 25 years. Most software development now doesn't need to worry nearly as much about CPU path-lengths and memory footprints as 25 years ago -- the trend of "People are expensive, machines are cheap" continues and has changed the balance a lot. Of course, algorithmic complexity still matters a lot - Moore's Law hasn't yet allowed us to get away with O(n^n) for large n. Internalizing this could be as hard as learning a new language.
Fortunately, the HR dopes often just do keyword matches (and that's only on the good days when they do anything vaguely useful). If someone has learned, for example, C++ on their own, they should just put it on their resume. Of course, the hiring manger/interview team will probably ask some C++ questions and one should be able to answer them.
However, "learning" a language is a lot more than just learning the syntax and semantics. There are often styles, idioms, and design patterns that are commonly used when programming commercially in a particular language but they aren't "part of the language" - just commonly used in that language. Language tutorials and books often don't cover these (or at least not well). Consider for example RAII in C++ -- very commonly used, but a language tutorial may not mention it. So, one has to dig deeper - perhaps by looking, in detail, at FOSS code (if the language of interest is used much in FOSS - C++ for example is not all that common in FOSS as compared to C or Java) and reading up on style/tips sources (such as, for C++, Effective C++ and More Effective C++).
But, bottom line, you gotta write and debug real programs/systems, not just toy two page examples, to learn the language. Failure to do so will almost certainly doom one to failure in an interview.
Such people that I've known would carpool without the incentive -- their goal is almost always to save labor and money, not to get to use the carpool lane.
Just make the penalty very high and mostly only check when a car is pulled over for some other reason. I'd agree that the "related" one is hard to enforce - perhaps the law should simply be that members of the same household don't count towards the carpool numbers. Since only licensed drivers would count, the officer can check the addresses on the 2 or 3 people who want to "count" and make sure there are no shared addresses.
But, the HOV lanes are underutilized by "real" carpools - another outcome of failed social engineering. We might as well use that concrete for something.
If that results in too much congestion, just change the HOV rules to require that a "carpool" automobile be a non-commercial vehicle not currently in commercial use containing at least 2 (or 3) LICENSED drivers who are not directly related (spouses, parent/child). That would get rid of many of the cars that currently use the lanes and free up even more space to use the HOV lanes for other social engineering purposes like promoting environmental causes. A mother driving her kids to school is going to "carpool" anyway. Most spouses driving together will do it without the HOV lane incentive.
Maybe you were right about government being stupid or maybe you're right that they do stupid things just to ruin us.
However, the idiots ultimately responsible for the HSR fiasco in California are the voters who passed passed Prop 1A which provides almost $10B (via bonds) to jumpstart the program. Without passage of Prop 1A, HSR probably would have stalled or died.
Fortunately for Californians, it's pretty easy for those who actually pay taxes to leave the state as it flushes itself down the crapper.
When I've seen this sort of thing (nothing of this magnitude fortunately) in corporations, large and small, it turns out that the big boss puts a focus on "cost containment".
Middle managers implement policies to try to effect this and these policies include explicit and implicit budgetary and cultural incentives for lower management to cut costs and raise revenues.
Individual contributors then feel pressure when they threaten to screw up their manager's or manager's^2 bonus by spending money to address what seems like, but is not provably so in isolation, a risky situation.
A few individual contributors will complain - sometimes for moral reasons, sometimes because they fear being scapegoated if the risky situation blows up (or, perhaps, in the case of an oil rig, they fear dying!). However, most individual contributors give up pretty quickly - or they risk being un/underemployed. Many individual contributors are that because they either are not good at presenting effective business arguments or just don't want to so their messages don't get through as well as they could.
Unfortunately, much of the griping about "we should do this" or "we must do this" or "we shouldn't do this" from individual contributors is, frankly, ill-informed because it doesn't take into account the full cost/benefit analysis or overlooks critical considerations. The problem is the management chain needs to sort these out effectively to identify the real valid warnings. The din of the invalid warnings makes it easy to miss the valid ones -- or just get callous to all complaints. Of course, in the glare of retrospect, we see the single email that warned of the thing that DID happen but we don't see the other 100 emails with either invalid warnings or warning of risks whose costs are manageable, understood, and already accepted that had to be filtered through to find the one that did matter.
A middle manager may be aware there's a small risk of complete disaster and may even understand that would be the end of her job and possibly her chosen career -- but they also may believe that the odds of a disaster is quite tiny. They also realize that if they fight to fix every such problem, once it's fixed it's impossible to prove that it "saved the day" (so they get little credit for it) but they are dinged (including possibly relieved of their job in the next round of layoffs but more likely just never promoted and subject to crappy raises forever) for the cost of the fix just because it came out of their budget.
As well, sometimes managers/individual contributors do make a decision to save money at a small increase in risk -- and in isolation, the decision is actually a sound decision because there are plenty of backup systems/safeguards in place that will prevent the cost cutting from actually creating a problem if things do go wrong. The problem occurs when the managers of all those backup systems/safeguards make decisions here and there that are also, independently, valid but collectively result in a cascading failure.
In software, I've seen this sort of thing happen in simple release cycles. One group is responsible for development and turning over a quality product to the Feature Test Team. The Feature Test Team is responsible for testing the feature and then hands it off to the Release Test Team. The Release Test Team then is responsible for testing the system and certifying it for release. Unfortunately the exact responsibilities for quality become a bit fuzzy so the Developers, Developers, Developers [jump up and down, sweat, and pump fists here] cut unit testing short because, after all, the Feature Test Team is responsible for testing the entire feature. The Feature Test Team, under time [i.e., cost] pressure, doesn't thoroughly test some of the interactions of the feature with existing features on the theory that the Release Test Team will take care of that anyway (after all, the new feature IS part of the "Release" as are the pre-existing features - and in the
Of course, government isn't blameless on the other side - spending money seemingly without regard for the fact that it's real money.
This "GOVERNMENT" you speak of. Is that the one responsible for regulating the Deepwater Horizon. You know, the one MMS is part of?
Whoosh?
(Okay, so my humor is sometimes a bit dry.)
(Yep, I'm very much old enough to vote!)
Nice troll.
You think we are stupid enough to buy this BS? If there was an option with this many upsides and so few downsides, we would be using it - it would just make engineering sense and political sense to get rid of coal plants (in particular) and replace them with (alleged) IFRs. And, to top it off, you expect us to believe that the US would waste resources growing corn for fuel instead of growing food crops if growing corn for fuel wasn't the most efficient use of resources -- balderdash I say - so inconceivable to be unbelievable.
Your claims are not unlike absurd claims that we should stop using paper tape for data storage and transport because fantastical concepts like "networks", "hard drives", and "flash memory" could be built and would work better. If it was true, we would be using "networks", "hard drives", and "flash memory" instead of paper tape for our data storage and transport needs. Oh... wait... never mind... now I'm very confused...
If we got rid of corporations, most big stuff wouldn't be possible, so to some extent, I agree.
However, imagine if every well in the GOM was drilled by a different bunch of investors. That would much harder to regulate (if, for some reason, MMS suddenly decided to actually regulate). If a rag tag bunch of investors had scraped together $90M to drill the well and it went BOOM, where would the $10 billion to clean this mess up come from? One can't get blood from a stone and individuals will risk their entire fortune in hopes of a windfall.