About unlicensed electricians, in some places it is required that electricians belong to the local IBEW chapter. Non-union electricians are not allowed.
A lot of such licenses are done at the state level, rather than federally, so it can be difficult to figure out if a store is licensed to sell alcoholic beverages because it may be handled at the municipality, township, county or state level. I do not believe there is any federal licensing.
Pharmaceutical sales have the issues of being regulated at the state level and also federally. The content of what they are selling is also regulated. Of course many people are sure this is simply to reinforce the hold that big pharmaceutical companies have on the market and prevent smaller startups from entering into their territory. Or to prevent the importation of stuff made in India that is much cheaper. They seem to have missed when it was legal for anyone, anywhere to sell medications previously. The creation of the FDA was intended to stop such practices and prevent the sales of things that had not been tested and proven to be effective.
Also, as far as I know, any agency that has ordered cheap Viagra or other drugs that was shipped from India have found it not to be what was being advertised at all. Various substances were in the pills, some good and some bad. Also, most of these sorts of places are advertising themselves as a "Canadian Pharmacy" because everyone knows that drugs are cheaper in Canada. The RCMP and other agencies in Canada just love that.
When I was in high school the administration was terrified of provoking black students. They could beat up on people, sell drugs in the hallways and vandalize the building with impunity. This was in 1970 in a very split community with a major university (Northwestern) in the north part of the city and the south part of the city being a white working-class area. The center was left to the black community and they knew they had no future - trash piled up everywhere, shooting in the parks, etc.
The school was right there in the middle with what was clearly percieved as a powerkeg about to be touched off. Watts and the 1968 riots were very fresh in everyone's minds. The consequences of disciplining a black student could have easily been the entire neighborhood turning out in force and burning the school down. Or at so it seemed to people at that time.
The schools today have it even worse. The teacher will not be supported by the administration. The school principal will not be supported by the school district and the school district will not be supported by the school board or the state. In many cases they know the consequences for any real creative thought, discipline or action with a student will result in a lawsuit and it will all fall on the last person that touched the ball... er... child. End result is they can only blindly enforce rules and if they have the opportunity to shift everything over to a third party it is wonderful. Everyone can stand around and point to someone else saying "He did it!!!"
Problem is, we have spent the last 30 years or so showing children through all sorts of popular culture that school is a pointless waste of time.
We have shown the young people that working hard, studying and being smart gets you... nowhere. The path to fame and riches is being lucky enough to get picked for it. You get a starring movie role at 15. You are the starting quarterback on your high school football team and the NFL wants you before you get to college. These are the ways to success.
The other path, hard work and study, result in the losers they see every day. Their parents. Other children's parents. Their teachers. None of these people are treated as successful in today's society.
Well, you reap what you sow and we have been conditioning society with music about bitches and ho's, drugs and crime for the last 30 years or so. Movies and television glorify the people that got stuff handed to them because they were in the right place at the right time, never through hard work. So life is viewed by most young people as a giant lottery - you win or you lose and it doesn't matter if you go to school or not.
You aren't going to inspire children no matter what. They are getting their inspiration from gansta rap, TV and video games. Today's children have certainly picked up on the hopelessness from the inner city in the 1960s and 1970s and made it their own.
The end result is that if you ask someone under 18 today it is almost certain they know they aren't going to go to college - too expensive. They aren't going to get a "good job" because all the good jobs are going to India and China. They listen to adults complaining so they know they will not have health care, Social Security, welfare, or anything else.
What is left to them is (a) partying, (b) crime, (c) video games and rap music, and (d) drugs.
Nobody is going to "get through to them" becaue all the adults in their life are utter and complete losers. They have the fantasitic role models of teachers that hate their job and hate the kids and athletes that got everything for free. Movie stars? Yup, they got it all handed to them also. In their world either you get everything handed to you or you are unlucky and are a loser. Nobody gets ahead by being smart and working hard - that's for losers. So if you aren't lucky you have nothing whatsoever to look forward to.
The problem is there are no examples of a 5th grade dropout begging on the street corner.
There are, however, plenty of examples of 5th graders with guns acting as drug couriers (because they only go to juvie if they are caught) and they have all the latest toys and plenty of money.
So, you can look at school which is seen as completely irrelevent to inner city kids and try to convince them they need to stay in school, pay attention and get good grades so they can go to college and be an engineer, or they can look out the window and see what drugs, guns, money and power can do for someone. They know they are never going to go to college and they have no interest in delayed gratification. They want it now.
Until you have actually had a conversation with someone about what you do and they reply with "Oh, that's brain work. Sounds hard. I don't do brain work" you have no idea how far down the American culture has pushed the value of education.
Do you really think land-line phone service is a growing market? They might be having growth in some places today, but be assured they are going down soon. How many young people are putting in land-line phones today? Where will Verizon get new markets from?
They are likely just planning for the future here, with a vast shrinking market staring them in the face.
It costs half of what the US is spending because the old people aren't part of the system. They are simply rationed out.
The US is spending 90% of all healthcare spending on the last year of people's lives. Trying (generally with little effect) to get people to live a little while longer. Other countries have a much simplier policy - you're old, you're dying, please move out of the way.
Now if you can get the old people in the US to go along with that new plan, we can have the government picking up the tab. Otherwise, it will bankrupt the country trying to spend trillions and trillions to get an extra month or two for a lot of people and maybe a couple of years for others.
Obamacare will push this out into the forefront because when all the employers figure out they can pay $10,000 a year (at least) for employee health care coverage or pay a $2000 fine (or less) if they don't cover them, they will push all the healthcare coverage onto the government completely. Today this might be around 2.5 trillion a year - in five years who knows how much it will be but it will be more. The government will have to cut off the old people or go bankrupt.
Better hope you're not old, or at least this mess gets repealed before you get old.
Problem is, the economy is contracting and a wireline provider is basically something just waiting to die, at least for young people.
What is Verizon supposed to do with needing fewer and fewer employees, having fewer and fewer customers and less and less revenue? With a union shop they can't fire people because they are no longer needed. They can't change their job descriptions. So about all they can do is cut spending per employee.
The problem with unions is that it works fine for a growing company, as long as the company is continuously growing and expanding. Have a bad year or two and you can't adjust the staffing to accomodate the changes. What we are looking at is simply a huge downturn for nearly all businesses worldwide - fewer customers, less revenue. Most companies can simply let people go and contend with the smaller market. Unionized employers can't do that.
You do understand that today drug prices in the US are making up for the discounts outside the US, right? The reason the drug companies are still taking the huge risks they are is because in the US they get to make their money back. The rest of the world is pretty much just riding along because of the profits made in the US.
Sure, the US government could mandate drug pricing as is done in most of the rest of the world. The response would be quite simple - the government would have to be in the drug business because it would be pretty unrewarding. Yes, a lot of research is today paid by the government or other public institutions, but no public institution is doing drug testing - you know, the ten years or so of trials that are needed for FDA approval. The FDA would pretty much have to take that over.
Also, a huge component of health care costs today is the cost-shifting from Medicare and Medicaid. When the government pays 15% of the going rate for care the other 85% is going to be put somewhere. It isn't just that the government gets a big discount. So expanding Medicaid to cover more and more people means more and more cost shifting. Your $1600 prescriptions might have only cost $800 a few years ago but with someone on Medicaid getting it for $25 means someone else is going to make up the difference. Easy to outlaw cost shifting, but what would happen then? Same thing that has happened with vaccine manufacturers - they all quit.
The first thing to understand about US health care is that it is all about old people, who today are mostly on cost-shifted Medicare. Yes, nearly all the money spent on health care (like 90%) is for old people. This is very different from any other country on the planet. All we need to do is stop spending 90% of the health care money on old people and there will be plenty for everyone and health care will be back to reasonable prices. But it seems nobody wants to tell the old people about that kind of a plan. Yet.
Obamacare is a complete government takeover of health care, whether they understand it or not. When every single employer understands they can pay $10,000 per employee for health insurance or they can pay a $2000 fine per employee (or less), they are going to choose to pay the fine. This puts the entire load onto the government for everyone and the plan will no longer be revenue-neutral - the cost will be in the trillions. The only way to make it affordable, even for the government, is to kick old people out of the system and stop spending 90% on old people. Bring it down to 20-30% like everywhere else and we can have government-funded health care for everyone without even raising any taxes.
But someone has to tell the old people about the new plan.
If you haven't had a credit card number "borrowed" at least once a year, you're not shopping online. And not going to restaurants either.
As long as the credit card companies keep stuffing the fraud issue back onto the merchants, it doesn't matter to me if my card number is used in a fraudulent manner. It isn't as if they are going to get anything with it that affects me - although if the merchant doesn't have insurance it sure hurts them.
With a consistent "we will not prosecute" message from the credit card companies and the merchants seemingly happy to have their losses covered by insurance, who cares? Credit card fraud today is like picking up penny candy and not paying for it - back when they had penny candy. If the shopkeeper caught you, you would get your hand slapped and told not to do it again, but otherwise it was a great way to get free candy.
The climate change deniers would certainly like there to be increased solar activity, so clearly this information has to be the product of a oil company PR department.
We can't possibly have increased solar activity, but we can have increased interference with satellites caused by carbon emissions from power plants, cars, boats and airplanes. It must be all those stray carbon atoms that are causing problems rather than the sun.
I suppose the CO2 from Earth could be reaching out to the Sun and causing it to interfere with communications, but it seems far more probable that all this is caused by Republicans creating more and more CO2.
After all, aren't we counting on the Sun to provide for our energy needs into the future? It was good enough for Man before we started burning fossil fuels, so it should be good enough for us in the future as well.
I believe a good portion of the Autobahn now has a speed limit. I was rather surprised in the area around Stuttgart in January this year.
Previously, I had been practically run off the road at 210 kph (left lane) while the right was moving at 100. Obviously, any sort of car problem (tire, suspension, etc.) would have been fatal with no place to go.
I found some unmarked areas around Stuttgart but the "default" seemed to be 100kph rather than unlimited. Very few places left without speed limits, at least in that area.
The biggest problem with an impactor might be fragmentation. If you had a nice solid rock that was certainly going to hit the Earth one of the very, very last things you would want to do is break it into lots of little pieces. Two or three (calving) wouldn't be that bad and might even be better than one big rock, but lots of little pieces would be extremely bad.
Why? Because of a little thing called atmospheric heating. Drop a rock into the Earth's atmosphere and if it is small enough it will burn up (ablative heating) in the atmosphere. The heat released into the atmosphere is negligable. However, if you drop 10,000 little rocks into the atmosphere things could get a bit uncomfortable because the heating would no longer be negligable. Drop a million fragments of a shattered comet or asteroid into the atmosphere and while there won't be an impact crater, ejecta or big tsunami but everything on Earth dies from the heat and potentially fires.
This is why all the cheering at the end of the movie Deep Impact was the cheering of uninformed people and was rather disappointing. By following the script of that movie everything on Earth would have died, probably more horribly than if there had been an impact.
So, let us emphasize this a little bit. Big rocks are bad. Fragmenting big rocks is very, very bad. Potentially fragmenting something is to be avoided at all costs.
In the 1800's plenty of people had proven that manned flight was impossible. It was, using nothing but muscle power and steam power. It took having a small, light internal combusion engine and gasoline to make it possible.
FTL within the bounds of Newtonian physics is impossible. We have pretty much proven that with quantum physics there are a lot more things about the universe than Newton would have ever expected. I believe on a small scale we have already seen FTL movement of particles through quantum entanglement.
Also, while travel on a galactic scale is probably pointless without FTL, with the right power source we could easily achieve a substantial fraction of C making a trip to Alpha Centauri possible within 8-10 years. Still too long for cable news networks but certainly possible within human limits.
There are two basic problems with what we would call private investment today.
First, there is the question of returns. OK, so we are absolutely assured of there being something that is needed out in space - we just have to find it, figure out exactly how to exploit it, and get it back here. None of these are trivial problems but neither are the rewards. Let's talk about exactly how much a big chunk of asteroid that is 50% gold and 50% platinium would bring on the open market. Or, a big chunk of "rare earth metals".
But these returns are not really certain within a given time period. Nobody can say they are going to be able to bring back 100 billion dollars in gold in two years. However, it is a dead certainity that you would be able to have that 100 billion in gold in a vault in 100 years.
That brings us to the other problem. Today, the world pretty much runs on an annual basis if not quarterly. The government talks about saving 400 billion dollars over 10 years - with the assumption that nothing will change for 10 years. Companies are comparing last year's revenue to this year;s and that is about it. The best investment you can get is one where the investor is demanding a nearly certain return in five years at at least 10 to 1.
Nobody on the planet is making investments for ten years and we are talking about requiring investments on the order of 50 or 100 years. The thinking has been that only a government can think that far ahead and make plans that far out. Well, that may have been true in 1492 to some degree but even then they were looking for gold on the table within a few years.
Today it is doubtful that any democratic government could get away with making an investment that wouldn't pay off for 100 years. The people just wouldn't stand for it. Hugo Chavez might be able to, but even he doesn't think he will be in power in 100 years. No, I don't see the human race making any long term comittments or long term plans. Not at all.
Right... it would cost more in time, money, and effort than one could make simply waiting for someone to walk up and rob with a gun.
Never forget that any sort of ATM attack is anonymous and impersonal, whereas holding up someone with a gun means you personally are standing there in front of someone with a gun in your hand.
What the Internet has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt is that ordinary people who wouldn't think of shoplifting will go to incredible lengths to steal stuff on the Internet where they are anonymous and the action is impersonal. Someone who would never break into a house in person will break into a computer with impunity, even to the point of advertising their exploits.
I would say that there are plenty of people that if they could engage in ATM skimming and know they don't have to ever confront a human throughout the whole process they would do it, even to the point of spending more money than they are likely to get in return. ATM skimming kits are pretty good sellers on the Internet, if you know where to shop, because they are a gateway to anonymous, impersonal money.
As someone that knows, you might find it interesting to understand the definition of "legally blind" vs. more functional blindness.
I lived with a blind girl for a while. She was functionally blind and could see only extremely bright and extremely high contrast objects. For the most part, she couldn't see anything and was around five years old before she realized other people could see things.
A friend of the blind girl's was "legally blind". This meant that she couldn't get a driver's license but otherwise was quite functional. She could certainly watch TV, go to movies and read large-print books.
Legally blind does not mean "can't watch a movie" in any respect.
Oh we have plenty of regulation. Been to California lately? Nearly every single commercial building is required to have a Prop 65 notice posted out in front. This basically says that there are known hazardous chemicals in the building and you could die if you go in. Now, if that was limited to places filled with doxin and dead bodies, there might be a point. But such notices are required when pencils, batteries or cleaning supplies are present. Show me a commercial establishment without cleaning supplies and you have found a homeless shelter.
We get more and more silly regulations all the time. But there isn't a lot of enforcement for things that count and no pro-active inspections.
Arizona says you can't hire illegals except we have day labor centers that cater almost exclusively to illegal immigrants. Recently a restaurant was closed for a couple of days when it was discovered that they had a large number of undocumented workers in every single one of their locations. They got in a different batch of cheap labor and opened right back up again a couple of days later. You can't run a restaurant with legal labor these days, it is just too expensive to be able to compete with the rest of the food service industry.
Of course, we all know bans against hiring undocumented (cheap) workers are just discrimination against "brown people". So, do we really want more regulation?
Do you know what a turbocharger is? We have been building high efficiency low pressure turbines for at least 30 years now. And considering some cars have two of them, they aren't all that heavy.
Except the electric car trap is going to mean a limited range. So limited that it cuts out a lot of commuters and eliminates any sort of weekend travel. Or driving around for real estate or other sales activities.
We might get better energy density out of batteries some time in the future, but I don't think it is realistic to think in terms of 400 mile range with 10 minute fill-ups. We might see 100 mile range in at some point, but I'm not sure I would even count on that.
You can say that we should just eliminate commuting, but that is going to take some big changes. Like tearing down and redesigning the cities, changing the way housing works completely in the US and building mass transit into the city instead of adding it on later. As long as we have houses that are cheaper far outside of a city and offices in the city we are going to have commuters. Having people wired to be social instead of happily sitting isolated in their far-outside-the-city houses doesn't help moving to telecommuting either.
Likely for the same reason that diesel-electric locomotives go to all the trouble of generating electricity rather than just powering the wheels from the diesel engine.
An steam engine of the piston and cylinder type - your traditional steam engine - isn't terribly efficient and requires high steam pressures. It is also difficult to recycle the water. Such engines do not have high cyclic rates but can produce quite a lot of horsepower, making it very unsuitable for something like a lightweight car. The engine would be really awful at high speeds and require a huge and very complicated transmission to operate at both low and high speeds.
Conversely, a steam turbine could operate with lower pressures but at vastly higher speeds with much less horsepower. You can't make it run very slowly at all, and like a lot of turbines the different in rotational speed between idle and max power is rather small. This would require a very complicated transmission, probably with some sort of variable-ratio component to get any speed control at all.
The end result is that it isn't just more efficient to spin the turbine at a fixed speed and use an electrical system to control the power to the wheels, it is likely the only way to do it at all that is even remotely practical. It is the fundamental reason why we don't have turbine powered cars and trucks today.
Basically to get radiation poisoning from this stuff you are going to have to grind it up and snort the stuff.
Damn, you just gave them instructions. Since the Internet is the eternal memory of the universe there's no going back now. 100 years from now people will be cursing the name Anduril1986 as the one that disclosed the procedure for using thorium to inflict radiation poisoning.
This could mean it is no longer practical to use thorium for anything.
Operation was introduced in 1965 well after the time when things were "unquestioningly fed from a 120 volt AC source". There is no question it was always battery powered. Heck, I remember wanting one when it first came out when I was like 10 or something.
How many companies make vaccines today? What companies make the chemicals used for executions?
The risk became too great and just about everyone got out of the business. The last round of vaccine production for flu required the government to provide immunity to the manufacturer before they would do it.
ValuJet got a bunch of oxygen generators loaded on a plane in spite of a strict regulatory environment. They partly adhered to the regulations and partly did not. There were no inspectors on site to verify compliance, and they took some shortcuts. No amount of regulation would have changed that unless they had on-site inspectors. The cargo handlers had a box to move and they put it on a plane to move it. They were not supposed to, they knew they were not supposed to but did it anyway.
Alaska Air did shoddy maintenance on planes, again in spite of a strict regulatory environment. One plane crashed and I believe a lot more were taken out of service because of maintenance issues relating to the elevator jackscrew.
American Airlines did shoddy maintenance on DC-10 engines and this resulted in Flight 191 crashing in spite of a strict regulatory environment. Again, the only thing that would have stopped them would have been on-site inspectors, which there were none and are none today.
Sorry, but regulation doesn't solve problems. Companies following regulations is generally a good thing, but the problem today is we have regulations like those in the wake of Prop 65 in California. Sure, putting up a sign that says "Enter here and risk your life, your children's lives and all of the rest of humanty" is really effective when it is required on nearly every business in the state. The problem is when there are too many silly regulations all regulations are going to be treated as silly and ignored - and there is no monitoring. Enforcement is great, but it is after the fact - after people have died.
Oh, so you think the solution is more monitoring and enforcement? What do you think it would take to effectively monitor, say aircraft maintenance? Shouldn't be too hard because there are only around 600 airports and maybe 100 maintenance facilities in the US. To do the job in a weak and pathetic manner it only takes a few inspectors as we have today. To do the job in a way that would eliminate cargo handlers putting the wrong box on a plane would take 7000 or more inspectors with a cost likely over a billion dollars. Just a tiny drop in the bucket, but nobody is going to spend that on inspectors today when if everyone follows the rules these inspectors are completely unnecessary.
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About unlicensed electricians, in some places it is required that electricians belong to the local IBEW chapter. Non-union electricians are not allowed.
A lot of such licenses are done at the state level, rather than federally, so it can be difficult to figure out if a store is licensed to sell alcoholic beverages because it may be handled at the municipality, township, county or state level. I do not believe there is any federal licensing.
Pharmaceutical sales have the issues of being regulated at the state level and also federally. The content of what they are selling is also regulated. Of course many people are sure this is simply to reinforce the hold that big pharmaceutical companies have on the market and prevent smaller startups from entering into their territory. Or to prevent the importation of stuff made in India that is much cheaper. They seem to have missed when it was legal for anyone, anywhere to sell medications previously. The creation of the FDA was intended to stop such practices and prevent the sales of things that had not been tested and proven to be effective.
Also, as far as I know, any agency that has ordered cheap Viagra or other drugs that was shipped from India have found it not to be what was being advertised at all. Various substances were in the pills, some good and some bad. Also, most of these sorts of places are advertising themselves as a "Canadian Pharmacy" because everyone knows that drugs are cheaper in Canada. The RCMP and other agencies in Canada just love that.
When I was in high school the administration was terrified of provoking black students. They could beat up on people, sell drugs in the hallways and vandalize the building with impunity. This was in 1970 in a very split community with a major university (Northwestern) in the north part of the city and the south part of the city being a white working-class area. The center was left to the black community and they knew they had no future - trash piled up everywhere, shooting in the parks, etc.
The school was right there in the middle with what was clearly percieved as a powerkeg about to be touched off. Watts and the 1968 riots were very fresh in everyone's minds. The consequences of disciplining a black student could have easily been the entire neighborhood turning out in force and burning the school down. Or at so it seemed to people at that time.
The schools today have it even worse. The teacher will not be supported by the administration. The school principal will not be supported by the school district and the school district will not be supported by the school board or the state. In many cases they know the consequences for any real creative thought, discipline or action with a student will result in a lawsuit and it will all fall on the last person that touched the ball ... er ... child. End result is they can only blindly enforce rules and if they have the opportunity to shift everything over to a third party it is wonderful. Everyone can stand around and point to someone else saying "He did it!!!"
Problem is, we have spent the last 30 years or so showing children through all sorts of popular culture that school is a pointless waste of time.
We have shown the young people that working hard, studying and being smart gets you ... nowhere. The path to fame and riches is being lucky enough to get picked for it. You get a starring movie role at 15. You are the starting quarterback on your high school football team and the NFL wants you before you get to college. These are the ways to success.
The other path, hard work and study, result in the losers they see every day. Their parents. Other children's parents. Their teachers. None of these people are treated as successful in today's society.
Well, you reap what you sow and we have been conditioning society with music about bitches and ho's, drugs and crime for the last 30 years or so. Movies and television glorify the people that got stuff handed to them because they were in the right place at the right time, never through hard work. So life is viewed by most young people as a giant lottery - you win or you lose and it doesn't matter if you go to school or not.
You aren't going to inspire children no matter what. They are getting their inspiration from gansta rap, TV and video games. Today's children have certainly picked up on the hopelessness from the inner city in the 1960s and 1970s and made it their own.
The end result is that if you ask someone under 18 today it is almost certain they know they aren't going to go to college - too expensive. They aren't going to get a "good job" because all the good jobs are going to India and China. They listen to adults complaining so they know they will not have health care, Social Security, welfare, or anything else.
What is left to them is (a) partying, (b) crime, (c) video games and rap music, and (d) drugs.
Nobody is going to "get through to them" becaue all the adults in their life are utter and complete losers. They have the fantasitic role models of teachers that hate their job and hate the kids and athletes that got everything for free. Movie stars? Yup, they got it all handed to them also. In their world either you get everything handed to you or you are unlucky and are a loser. Nobody gets ahead by being smart and working hard - that's for losers. So if you aren't lucky you have nothing whatsoever to look forward to.
The problem is there are no examples of a 5th grade dropout begging on the street corner.
There are, however, plenty of examples of 5th graders with guns acting as drug couriers (because they only go to juvie if they are caught) and they have all the latest toys and plenty of money.
So, you can look at school which is seen as completely irrelevent to inner city kids and try to convince them they need to stay in school, pay attention and get good grades so they can go to college and be an engineer, or they can look out the window and see what drugs, guns, money and power can do for someone. They know they are never going to go to college and they have no interest in delayed gratification. They want it now.
Until you have actually had a conversation with someone about what you do and they reply with "Oh, that's brain work. Sounds hard. I don't do brain work" you have no idea how far down the American culture has pushed the value of education.
Do you really think land-line phone service is a growing market? They might be having growth in some places today, but be assured they are going down soon. How many young people are putting in land-line phones today? Where will Verizon get new markets from?
They are likely just planning for the future here, with a vast shrinking market staring them in the face.
It costs half of what the US is spending because the old people aren't part of the system. They are simply rationed out.
The US is spending 90% of all healthcare spending on the last year of people's lives. Trying (generally with little effect) to get people to live a little while longer. Other countries have a much simplier policy - you're old, you're dying, please move out of the way.
Now if you can get the old people in the US to go along with that new plan, we can have the government picking up the tab. Otherwise, it will bankrupt the country trying to spend trillions and trillions to get an extra month or two for a lot of people and maybe a couple of years for others.
Obamacare will push this out into the forefront because when all the employers figure out they can pay $10,000 a year (at least) for employee health care coverage or pay a $2000 fine (or less) if they don't cover them, they will push all the healthcare coverage onto the government completely. Today this might be around 2.5 trillion a year - in five years who knows how much it will be but it will be more. The government will have to cut off the old people or go bankrupt.
Better hope you're not old, or at least this mess gets repealed before you get old.
Problem is, the economy is contracting and a wireline provider is basically something just waiting to die, at least for young people.
What is Verizon supposed to do with needing fewer and fewer employees, having fewer and fewer customers and less and less revenue? With a union shop they can't fire people because they are no longer needed. They can't change their job descriptions. So about all they can do is cut spending per employee.
The problem with unions is that it works fine for a growing company, as long as the company is continuously growing and expanding. Have a bad year or two and you can't adjust the staffing to accomodate the changes. What we are looking at is simply a huge downturn for nearly all businesses worldwide - fewer customers, less revenue. Most companies can simply let people go and contend with the smaller market. Unionized employers can't do that.
I guess the can just shut down and walk away.
You do understand that today drug prices in the US are making up for the discounts outside the US, right?
The reason the drug companies are still taking the huge risks they are is because in the US they get to make their money back. The rest of the world is pretty much just riding along because of the profits made in the US.
Sure, the US government could mandate drug pricing as is done in most of the rest of the world. The response would be quite simple - the government would have to be in the drug business because it would be pretty unrewarding. Yes, a lot of research is today paid by the government or other public institutions, but no public institution is doing drug testing - you know, the ten years or so of trials that are needed for FDA approval. The FDA would pretty much have to take that over.
Also, a huge component of health care costs today is the cost-shifting from Medicare and Medicaid. When the government pays 15% of the going rate for care the other 85% is going to be put somewhere. It isn't just that the government gets a big discount. So expanding Medicaid to cover more and more people means more and more cost shifting. Your $1600 prescriptions might have only cost $800 a few years ago but with someone on Medicaid getting it for $25 means someone else is going to make up the difference. Easy to outlaw cost shifting, but what would happen then? Same thing that has happened with vaccine manufacturers - they all quit.
The first thing to understand about US health care is that it is all about old people, who today are mostly on cost-shifted Medicare. Yes, nearly all the money spent on health care (like 90%) is for old people. This is very different from any other country on the planet. All we need to do is stop spending 90% of the health care money on old people and there will be plenty for everyone and health care will be back to reasonable prices. But it seems nobody wants to tell the old people about that kind of a plan. Yet.
Obamacare is a complete government takeover of health care, whether they understand it or not. When every single employer understands they can pay $10,000 per employee for health insurance or they can pay a $2000 fine per employee (or less), they are going to choose to pay the fine. This puts the entire load onto the government for everyone and the plan will no longer be revenue-neutral - the cost will be in the trillions. The only way to make it affordable, even for the government, is to kick old people out of the system and stop spending 90% on old people. Bring it down to 20-30% like everywhere else and we can have government-funded health care for everyone without even raising any taxes.
But someone has to tell the old people about the new plan.
If you haven't had a credit card number "borrowed" at least once a year, you're not shopping online. And not going to restaurants either.
As long as the credit card companies keep stuffing the fraud issue back onto the merchants, it doesn't matter to me if my card number is used in a fraudulent manner. It isn't as if they are going to get anything with it that affects me - although if the merchant doesn't have insurance it sure hurts them.
With a consistent "we will not prosecute" message from the credit card companies and the merchants seemingly happy to have their losses covered by insurance, who cares? Credit card fraud today is like picking up penny candy and not paying for it - back when they had penny candy. If the shopkeeper caught you, you would get your hand slapped and told not to do it again, but otherwise it was a great way to get free candy.
The climate change deniers would certainly like there to be increased solar activity, so clearly this information has to be the product of a oil company PR department.
We can't possibly have increased solar activity, but we can have increased interference with satellites caused by carbon emissions from power plants, cars, boats and airplanes. It must be all those stray carbon atoms that are causing problems rather than the sun.
I suppose the CO2 from Earth could be reaching out to the Sun and causing it to interfere with communications, but it seems far more probable that all this is caused by Republicans creating more and more CO2.
After all, aren't we counting on the Sun to provide for our energy needs into the future? It was good enough for Man before we started burning fossil fuels, so it should be good enough for us in the future as well.
I believe a good portion of the Autobahn now has a speed limit. I was rather surprised in the area around Stuttgart in January this year.
Previously, I had been practically run off the road at 210 kph (left lane) while the right was moving at 100. Obviously, any sort of car problem (tire, suspension, etc.) would have been fatal with no place to go.
I found some unmarked areas around Stuttgart but the "default" seemed to be 100kph rather than unlimited. Very few places left without speed limits, at least in that area.
The biggest problem with an impactor might be fragmentation. If you had a nice solid rock that was certainly going to hit the Earth one of the very, very last things you would want to do is break it into lots of little pieces. Two or three (calving) wouldn't be that bad and might even be better than one big rock, but lots of little pieces would be extremely bad.
Why? Because of a little thing called atmospheric heating. Drop a rock into the Earth's atmosphere and if it is small enough it will burn up (ablative heating) in the atmosphere. The heat released into the atmosphere is negligable. However, if you drop 10,000 little rocks into the atmosphere things could get a bit uncomfortable because the heating would no longer be negligable. Drop a million fragments of a shattered comet or asteroid into the atmosphere and while there won't be an impact crater, ejecta or big tsunami but everything on Earth dies from the heat and potentially fires.
This is why all the cheering at the end of the movie Deep Impact was the cheering of uninformed people and was rather disappointing. By following the script of that movie everything on Earth would have died, probably more horribly than if there had been an impact.
So, let us emphasize this a little bit. Big rocks are bad. Fragmenting big rocks is very, very bad. Potentially fragmenting something is to be avoided at all costs.
In the 1800's plenty of people had proven that manned flight was impossible. It was, using nothing but muscle power and steam power. It took having a small, light internal combusion engine and gasoline to make it possible.
FTL within the bounds of Newtonian physics is impossible. We have pretty much proven that with quantum physics there are a lot more things about the universe than Newton would have ever expected. I believe on a small scale we have already seen FTL movement of particles through quantum entanglement.
Also, while travel on a galactic scale is probably pointless without FTL, with the right power source we could easily achieve a substantial fraction of C making a trip to Alpha Centauri possible within 8-10 years. Still too long for cable news networks but certainly possible within human limits.
There are two basic problems with what we would call private investment today.
First, there is the question of returns. OK, so we are absolutely assured of there being something that is needed out in space - we just have to find it, figure out exactly how to exploit it, and get it back here. None of these are trivial problems but neither are the rewards. Let's talk about exactly how much a big chunk of asteroid that is 50% gold and 50% platinium would bring on the open market. Or, a big chunk of "rare earth metals".
But these returns are not really certain within a given time period. Nobody can say they are going to be able to bring back 100 billion dollars in gold in two years. However, it is a dead certainity that you would be able to have that 100 billion in gold in a vault in 100 years.
That brings us to the other problem. Today, the world pretty much runs on an annual basis if not quarterly. The government talks about saving 400 billion dollars over 10 years - with the assumption that nothing will change for 10 years. Companies are comparing last year's revenue to this year;s and that is about it. The best investment you can get is one where the investor is demanding a nearly certain return in five years at at least 10 to 1.
Nobody on the planet is making investments for ten years and we are talking about requiring investments on the order of 50 or 100 years. The thinking has been that only a government can think that far ahead and make plans that far out. Well, that may have been true in 1492 to some degree but even then they were looking for gold on the table within a few years.
Today it is doubtful that any democratic government could get away with making an investment that wouldn't pay off for 100 years. The people just wouldn't stand for it. Hugo Chavez might be able to, but even he doesn't think he will be in power in 100 years. No, I don't see the human race making any long term comittments or long term plans. Not at all.
Right... it would cost more in time, money, and effort than one could make simply waiting for someone to walk up and rob with a gun.
Never forget that any sort of ATM attack is anonymous and impersonal, whereas holding up someone with a gun means you personally are standing there in front of someone with a gun in your hand.
What the Internet has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt is that ordinary people who wouldn't think of shoplifting will go to incredible lengths to steal stuff on the Internet where they are anonymous and the action is impersonal. Someone who would never break into a house in person will break into a computer with impunity, even to the point of advertising their exploits.
I would say that there are plenty of people that if they could engage in ATM skimming and know they don't have to ever confront a human throughout the whole process they would do it, even to the point of spending more money than they are likely to get in return. ATM skimming kits are pretty good sellers on the Internet, if you know where to shop, because they are a gateway to anonymous, impersonal money.
As someone that knows, you might find it interesting to understand the definition of "legally blind" vs. more functional blindness.
I lived with a blind girl for a while. She was functionally blind and could see only extremely bright and extremely high contrast objects. For the most part, she couldn't see anything and was around five years old before she realized other people could see things.
A friend of the blind girl's was "legally blind". This meant that she couldn't get a driver's license but otherwise was quite functional. She could certainly watch TV, go to movies and read large-print books.
Legally blind does not mean "can't watch a movie" in any respect.
Oh we have plenty of regulation. Been to California lately? Nearly every single commercial building is required to have a Prop 65 notice posted out in front. This basically says that there are known hazardous chemicals in the building and you could die if you go in. Now, if that was limited to places filled with doxin and dead bodies, there might be a point. But such notices are required when pencils, batteries or cleaning supplies are present. Show me a commercial establishment without cleaning supplies and you have found a homeless shelter.
We get more and more silly regulations all the time. But there isn't a lot of enforcement for things that count and no pro-active inspections.
Arizona says you can't hire illegals except we have day labor centers that cater almost exclusively to illegal immigrants. Recently a restaurant was closed for a couple of days when it was discovered that they had a large number of undocumented workers in every single one of their locations. They got in a different batch of cheap labor and opened right back up again a couple of days later. You can't run a restaurant with legal labor these days, it is just too expensive to be able to compete with the rest of the food service industry.
Of course, we all know bans against hiring undocumented (cheap) workers are just discrimination against "brown people". So, do we really want more regulation?
Do you know what a turbocharger is? We have been building high efficiency low pressure turbines for at least 30 years now. And considering some cars have two of them, they aren't all that heavy.
Except the electric car trap is going to mean a limited range. So limited that it cuts out a lot of commuters and eliminates any sort of weekend travel. Or driving around for real estate or other sales activities.
We might get better energy density out of batteries some time in the future, but I don't think it is realistic to think in terms of 400 mile range with 10 minute fill-ups. We might see 100 mile range in at some point, but I'm not sure I would even count on that.
You can say that we should just eliminate commuting, but that is going to take some big changes. Like tearing down and redesigning the cities, changing the way housing works completely in the US and building mass transit into the city instead of adding it on later. As long as we have houses that are cheaper far outside of a city and offices in the city we are going to have commuters. Having people wired to be social instead of happily sitting isolated in their far-outside-the-city houses doesn't help moving to telecommuting either.
Likely for the same reason that diesel-electric locomotives go to all the trouble of generating electricity rather than just powering the wheels from the diesel engine.
An steam engine of the piston and cylinder type - your traditional steam engine - isn't terribly efficient and requires high steam pressures. It is also difficult to recycle the water. Such engines do not have high cyclic rates but can produce quite a lot of horsepower, making it very unsuitable for something like a lightweight car. The engine would be really awful at high speeds and require a huge and very complicated transmission to operate at both low and high speeds.
Conversely, a steam turbine could operate with lower pressures but at vastly higher speeds with much less horsepower. You can't make it run very slowly at all, and like a lot of turbines the different in rotational speed between idle and max power is rather small. This would require a very complicated transmission, probably with some sort of variable-ratio component to get any speed control at all.
The end result is that it isn't just more efficient to spin the turbine at a fixed speed and use an electrical system to control the power to the wheels, it is likely the only way to do it at all that is even remotely practical. It is the fundamental reason why we don't have turbine powered cars and trucks today.
Basically to get radiation poisoning from this stuff you are going to have to grind it up and snort the stuff.
Damn, you just gave them instructions. Since the Internet is the eternal memory of the universe there's no going back now. 100 years from now people will be cursing the name Anduril1986 as the one that disclosed the procedure for using thorium to inflict radiation poisoning.
This could mean it is no longer practical to use thorium for anything.
Operation was introduced in 1965 well after the time when things were "unquestioningly fed from a 120 volt AC source". There is no question it was always battery powered. Heck, I remember wanting one when it first came out when I was like 10 or something.
How many companies make vaccines today? What companies make the chemicals used for executions?
The risk became too great and just about everyone got out of the business. The last round of vaccine production for flu required the government to provide immunity to the manufacturer before they would do it.
ValuJet got a bunch of oxygen generators loaded on a plane in spite of a strict regulatory environment. They partly adhered to the regulations and partly did not. There were no inspectors on site to verify compliance, and they took some shortcuts. No amount of regulation would have changed that unless they had on-site inspectors. The cargo handlers had a box to move and they put it on a plane to move it. They were not supposed to, they knew they were not supposed to but did it anyway.
Alaska Air did shoddy maintenance on planes, again in spite of a strict regulatory environment. One plane crashed and I believe a lot more were taken out of service because of maintenance issues relating to the elevator jackscrew.
American Airlines did shoddy maintenance on DC-10 engines and this resulted in Flight 191 crashing in spite of a strict regulatory environment. Again, the only thing that would have stopped them would have been on-site inspectors, which there were none and are none today.
Sorry, but regulation doesn't solve problems. Companies following regulations is generally a good thing, but the problem today is we have regulations like those in the wake of Prop 65 in California. Sure, putting up a sign that says "Enter here and risk your life, your children's lives and all of the rest of humanty" is really effective when it is required on nearly every business in the state. The problem is when there are too many silly regulations all regulations are going to be treated as silly and ignored - and there is no monitoring. Enforcement is great, but it is after the fact - after people have died.
Oh, so you think the solution is more monitoring and enforcement? What do you think it would take to effectively monitor, say aircraft maintenance? Shouldn't be too hard because there are only around 600 airports and maybe 100 maintenance facilities in the US. To do the job in a weak and pathetic manner it only takes a few inspectors as we have today. To do the job in a way that would eliminate cargo handlers putting the wrong box on a plane would take 7000 or more inspectors with a cost likely over a billion dollars. Just a tiny drop in the bucket, but nobody is going to spend that on inspectors today when if everyone follows the rules these inspectors are completely unnecessary.