I can not imagine any problems that can't be prepared for in some way.
You lack imagination.
In fact, I've personally spoken with many hundreds of people over the past 5 years or so, and heard of some real doozies,
Hundreds ? Do you work in the insurance industry by any chance ?
I've made preparations that will cover me if those same problems should happen to me.
A simple question: How would you (yes, you) prepare for anything that happens to you before you're, say, 10 years old ? (Sorry, "Try to be lucky." isn't an answer, and "Hope that your parents do that for you." isn't anything that you can influence.)
No, I don't always believe that bad things come of bad decisions, but they do come from bad planning.
Which is basically the same. "Bad things only happen to bad/stupid/careless people." and "If something bad happens to you, then you must have done something bad."
If you earn $250k per year, and a car accident could ruin your future, PLAN FOR IT. Buy insurance.
What if you're "uninsurable" ?
Why should you FORCE people to get auto insurance?
Because, well, you're responsible for your own fuckups. If you break peoples stuff or damage their health, then you're responsible to compensate them for it. It's pretty much impossible to insure yourself against everything that any person may do to you by stupidity, negligence or malice. What if it's not an automobile accident, but your redneck next-door neighbor who manages to put a bullet in your spine while he was just cleaning guns ?
Instead, give others the chance to protect themselves against the possibility of an uninsured motorist.
The premiums for this type of insurance would pretty much skyrocket if liability insurance was optional. And people would probably care a lot less about damaging other peoples property and health if they'd get away without having to pay for it.
In every case where people say "I never saw it coming,"
Can you see bad genes coming ? Childhood diseases ?
Disability? Get good disability insurance
And here's the problem: In your libertarian dreamland, people like me don't exist. I'm one of these uninsurable anomalies, because every time I put three certain words in the "pre-existing conditions" field, the insurance agent looks at me as if I've just placed a live tarantula on the desk. Can you explain to me how I should have prepared for a disease that probably developed before I was one year old ? How I should prepare for disability now ? And, sorry, "buy a gun and put a bullet in your head when things get too bad" isn't really my idea of preparation. Neither is "Try to be lucky, it worked for me.", even though that's what I'm basically doint right now, due to lack of alternatives.
(one friend of mine bought a $10k a year policy that would pay $1.5 million. When he went blind 6 years later, he thanked me for the idea)
Hum. These things are about $150 a month where I live, provided that you're actually accepted (being young, healthy and male helps a lot here). $10k a year is ripoff. Unless your friend had some pre-existing conditions.
Illness? High deductible medical emergency insurance, with your regular visits paid at the cash-on-the-barrel discount rate (as much as 80% off with minimal negotiations).
Can't get any health insurance, at least not from any for-profit company. See above why.
So, what am I to do ? Get out of your nice dream and don't bother you anymore ?
Sorry, ALL problems are unique to the individual at the time they happen, but MOST problems can be prepared for.
Since the list of all possible problems is pretty much infinitely long, being able to prepare for MOST problems still leaves a very long list of problems that cannot be prepared for.
I want a system where people are responsible for their decisions, and should learn from them.
What about problems that don't stem from the person who has them making a bad decision ? Or do you follow the "You've got problems, so you must have made a bad decision." line of thinking ?
I've made HUGE mistakes, costing me 6 figures, and I learned from them.
6 figures doesn't really require HUGE mistakes. Some car accidents will be right in that range (especially when people are injured). You just don't realize that you've been lucky so far.
Both China and Cuba are communist countries ruled by an oppressive government, they both had or have the firepower and capabilities (direct as in Cuba or with subs, boats or airplanes as China) at some point to reach the US with nuclear weapons.
Cuba had as much capability to reach the US with nuclear weapons as Germany (or Turkey, for that matter) had to reach the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons - none. Any nuclear weapons on these nations territory were not under the control of their respective leaders, but firmly under the control of the superpower that stationed them there. And any attempt at gaining control of these weapons would, quite likely, have led to them being used on that nation.
Sorry. Superpowers don't hand out nukes to their allies, with maybe, just maybe, one exception (though the country in question has probably developed its own nukes by now. Yes, it's one of those countries that "probably" has nukes. I'll leave it up to you to guess which one it is.)
We use x-rays and other tools to force mutations in fruit flies. So far, we have not been able to force a beneficial mutation of fruit flies. I realize that is extremely simplified, but it stands that we see far too few beneficial mutations to explain the evolution from algae all the way to the common house cats in a few hundred million years.
We've been working on a negligible population of fruit flies (negligible as in "compared to the fruit fly population of the whole planet"), for a negligible period of time (negligible as in "compared to a few hundred million years"). Heck. Do you have any idea just how long a fscking million years is ? If you wanted to write down the term for any of your relatives living in a million years, you would first have to put about two-thousand five-hundred lines of
In Germany, you can flash your high beams at the car ahead of you and they will kindly move over to let you pass. If you do that in Los Angeles, you'll get the finger or possibly shot!
No no no, you completely misunderstood the procedure in Germany. Flashing your lights at the car in front of you (especially from a distance) means: "There's gonna be a collision with a delta v in excess of 100 km/h in less than four seconds if you don't move over, you slowpoke.".
Then again, it could also just mean "Turn off that damn rear foglight, you idiot. The fog's long gone."
1. First car decelerates.
2. Due to reaction time, the second car has to decelerate at a higher rate in order to maintain a safe distance from first car.
3. Due to most drivers only looking at the car in front of them (instead of also checking whether the cars farther ahead are braking), repeat #2 for the following cars - each of them has to decelerate at a higher rate than the car in front of them (-> positive feedback, which is usually a bad thing in systems theory. At least if you want a stable system).
4. Eventually, you'll get to the point where one car has to stop. Traffic jam ensues.
Solution: Use computer to eliminate/reduce the influences in bold print above. No traffic jam.
So they managed to re-create a phenomenon under controlled conditions that anyone who has ever driven on a crowded highway can readily observe ? Whoop-de-doo.
Then again, I remember seeing stuff like that back at the university, where they were trying to combine traffic models with a Kalman filter to achieve better traffic jam prediction. That was, uh, over five years ago.
Reasonably speaking, parents are limited these days in the kind of discipline they can deliver in public out of a very real fear that the government would take their kids away due to abuse and for every person annoyed about their kids behavior, there are two ready to see child abuse.
And how exactly would you discipline 4 month-olds ? Tape their mouths shut ? Put a pillow on their face until they stop screaming ?
To put it another way: the economy and governmental support system has a built-in assumption that some people will choose to have children, and some will choose not to. The system works just fine consisting of both of these types.
No. The economy works because people have children. It can pull some along that don't, as long as there's enough children to at least cancel the natural decline of the population. If everyone suddenly stopped reproducing, you'd end up with a whole bunch of 80 year-olds at some point, who aren't very economically active. And 20 or so years later, you'd end up with no people (and no economy) at all.
Would someone please explain to me how having a no screaming section is different than having a no smoking section?
Because kids being, you know, kids (and not adults), lack a few of the traits that adults have (like being able to cope with stress without screaming), and also cannot be considered fully responsible for their actions (unlike adults).
If you're such a genius and figure out how to stop a colicky 7 month-old from screaming (big bonus points for not using a gag, soundproof box, or duct tape), then you should write a book about it. I'm sure it would make you rich enough to be able to charter your own, kid-free flights for the rest of your life in just a couple of weeks.
Are you seriously complaining that people complain about things that are noisy and obnoxious?
Yes. If their complaining is just going to make the situation worse than it acutally is, then they're just being assholes that want to vent. Maybe if they'd just shut the hell up then the kid will go to sleep ?
As in, you know they paid $800 for this ticket and they get to spend 8 hours a row away from a human car alarm and they should just shut up?
Yeah, and I might have paid 2 x $800 for the tickets for my kids (plus my kids are a lot lighter and cost the airline less to transport).
If everyone is staring at you because your screaming child is giving them tiny aneurysms,
If they've never learned anger management and when it's sensible to complain and when not, they can feel free to have their aneurysms rupture in mid-flight. Humanity is better of without these jerks.
What you're saying is that they should stop bitching because it upsets you?
They should stop bitching if it just makes the situation worse. How about they bring some earplugs next time ? I never travel without.
Aha! This is actually the first valid criticism so far in this thread of the "encourage children so that there is a future workforce" policy that society has chosen.
No, it's not. It's just another way of saying "I want to reap the benefits of other people having kids, but don't want to have kids growing up around me or bothering me in any other way by them being kids".
You'd better make sure and strap parachutes on them if you plan on doing that on my plane.
Hm, who do you think is going to get tackled and squished to death by the rest of the passengers - the annoying kid or the terrorist suspect who attempted to open the cabin door in mid-flight ?
Staying awake with the kids is my number one issue....basically I have to stay awake longer than them and basically get up with them.
This gets exacerbated if one of your kids is a real early bird (would like to get up at 5:30 am), and the other one is a night owl (goes to sleep at 11 pm, but wakes up at 9 am).
These physical properties are dependent on temperature as well as any fuel contamination. Designing a machine which is fragile is just daft, especially one which is expensive and fragile.
Erm, that's not how engineering works. There are standards that Diesel fuel needs to conform to, and the engine will work with a fuel that conforms to these standards (if it doesn't, then it's a warranty issue). Biodiesel has some fairly significant differences (different boiling point, inferior chemical stability, different lubricative properties), and if the manual explicitly states "Do not use biodiesel", there's going to be some reason for it.
You read the manual and stick to it. If you want to try to run your gasoline engine with sugar water, or your diesel engine with gasoline, try at your own risk. Especially when the manual says "Don't do that".
The "trick" of adding gasoline to diesel works because you are adding more "solvent" hydrocarbons which means that the temperature has to be lower before the solution becomes supersaturated. In both diesel and jet fuel something like half the fuel is actually disolved solids.
I know why it works (in older diesel engines), I also know why it kills the injection systems of newer ones. If you failed to rtfm on your car and fsck up the engine that way, well, that's your problem.
What they need is a strictly "business class" and "no-kids" airline. One carry on bag. It gets measured in the terminal. If it doesn't fit... it gets checked. NO EXCEPTIONS. No strollers. No children. No families of 5. No fat people. No wheelchairs. No old people. No trying to pack your guitar in the overhead bin. No first time fliers. No tourists.
Yeah, and you'd probably want them to have regular flights to all sorts of places, right ? What are you on again, and where can I get some ?
If you're too poor to charter a flight or have your own airplane, that's your problem. That "business class, no-kids" airline you suggest isn't going to "take off", in a business sense.
You, as a single guy, presumably not educated in child psychology,
You don't really need much of an education in child psychology. Usually, you just need to know the signs of kids being tired, and what to do then.
Last year, we (my wife, my son, I) flew from Europe to the States. Junior was tired and started kicking the sear in front of him. Lady in front of us told us off and to make him stop. So we did ! We held down his legs. No kicking anymore. Of course, then he proceeded to scream at the top of his lungs for the next four hours (figures, being forcibly restrained and very, very tired). Well, if the lady had just ignored him for 15 minutes he would have probably gone to sleep (kids flail/kick when they're really really really tired).
From then on, we're trying to book the seats in front of our kids for us, though.
You forgot the third: A change of underwear and some basic toiletries, in case the rest of your luggage ends up in Novosibirsk, Siberia, instead of your intended destination, and you have to wait two days for it to get back to you.
What the fuck are you talking about? there will be no such thing as a pension when i retire, hence why i pay into super annuation and fund my own retirement. I also have private health, and have been paying into it since i started work so you can STFU about medicare because not only do i pay for my own health cover, i also pay a medicare levy out of my income tax to support everyone else.
It's people like me that subsidize your brats, and you have the cheek to claim i owe you?
So you've got the money you need for your retirement and healthcare - but do you really want to be served by, cared for and looked after by people who will be your age then (i.e. a bunch of old farts)? Or would you rather have a doctor who's still young enough to be able to hold a scalped without jittering and sees well enough to cut the right parts ? Do you want that plane you'll be flying on then to be piloted by some old geezer who takes regular naps ?
See ? You will depend on todays kids when you're old, even if you have saves up all the fscking money in the world for your retirement. Unless you plan to put a bullet through your skull while you're still able to pull a trigger.
It would be quite an achievement to build an engine which would cope with bad/contaminated petrodiesel whilst being potentially destroyed by biodiesel.
The modern ones will be destroyed by bad/contaminated petrodiesel. For example, the old trick of mixing diesel with a little bit of gasoline during the winter (which worked fairly well for not-so-modern Diesel engines) will result in the aforementioned four-digit repair bill. As mentioned, it's more a matter of modern injection systems (common-rail, pump-nozzle) that rely on certain properties of the fuel (lubrication, cooling, chemical stability, boiling point), than of the engine itself.
"Less" being relative, since diesel fuel contains more energy per volume than gasoline. Apples and oranges, except this is a car analogy.
Nope, it's not relative. Higher energy content of diesel fuel aside, they diesel cycle allows for higher efficiency than the otto cycles since it has a higher compression ratio.
Slashdot Mirror
You lack imagination.
In fact, I've personally spoken with many hundreds of people over the past 5 years or so, and heard of some real doozies,
Hundreds ? Do you work in the insurance industry by any chance ?
I've made preparations that will cover me if those same problems should happen to me.
A simple question: How would you (yes, you) prepare for anything that happens to you before you're, say, 10 years old ? (Sorry, "Try to be lucky." isn't an answer, and "Hope that your parents do that for you." isn't anything that you can influence.)
No, I don't always believe that bad things come of bad decisions, but they do come from bad planning.
Which is basically the same. "Bad things only happen to bad/stupid/careless people." and "If something bad happens to you, then you must have done something bad."
If you earn $250k per year, and a car accident could ruin your future, PLAN FOR IT. Buy insurance.
What if you're "uninsurable" ?
Why should you FORCE people to get auto insurance?
Because, well, you're responsible for your own fuckups. If you break peoples stuff or damage their health, then you're responsible to compensate them for it. It's pretty much impossible to insure yourself against everything that any person may do to you by stupidity, negligence or malice. What if it's not an automobile accident, but your redneck next-door neighbor who manages to put a bullet in your spine while he was just cleaning guns ?
Instead, give others the chance to protect themselves against the possibility of an uninsured motorist.
The premiums for this type of insurance would pretty much skyrocket if liability insurance was optional. And people would probably care a lot less about damaging other peoples property and health if they'd get away without having to pay for it.
In every case where people say "I never saw it coming,"
Can you see bad genes coming ? Childhood diseases ?
Disability? Get good disability insurance
And here's the problem: In your libertarian dreamland, people like me don't exist. I'm one of these uninsurable anomalies, because every time I put three certain words in the "pre-existing conditions" field, the insurance agent looks at me as if I've just placed a live tarantula on the desk. Can you explain to me how I should have prepared for a disease that probably developed before I was one year old ? How I should prepare for disability now ? And, sorry, "buy a gun and put a bullet in your head when things get too bad" isn't really my idea of preparation. Neither is "Try to be lucky, it worked for me.", even though that's what I'm basically doint right now, due to lack of alternatives.
(one friend of mine bought a $10k a year policy that would pay $1.5 million. When he went blind 6 years later, he thanked me for the idea)
Hum. These things are about $150 a month where I live, provided that you're actually accepted (being young, healthy and male helps a lot here). $10k a year is ripoff. Unless your friend had some pre-existing conditions.
Illness? High deductible medical emergency insurance, with your regular visits paid at the cash-on-the-barrel discount rate (as much as 80% off with minimal negotiations).
Can't get any health insurance, at least not from any for-profit company. See above why.
So, what am I to do ? Get out of your nice dream and don't bother you anymore ?
Since the list of all possible problems is pretty much infinitely long, being able to prepare for MOST problems still leaves a very long list of problems that cannot be prepared for.
I want a system where people are responsible for their decisions, and should learn from them.
What about problems that don't stem from the person who has them making a bad decision ? Or do you follow the "You've got problems, so you must have made a bad decision." line of thinking ?
I've made HUGE mistakes, costing me 6 figures, and I learned from them.
6 figures doesn't really require HUGE mistakes. Some car accidents will be right in that range (especially when people are injured). You just don't realize that you've been lucky so far.
Cuba had as much capability to reach the US with nuclear weapons as Germany (or Turkey, for that matter) had to reach the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons - none. Any nuclear weapons on these nations territory were not under the control of their respective leaders, but firmly under the control of the superpower that stationed them there. And any attempt at gaining control of these weapons would, quite likely, have led to them being used on that nation.
Sorry. Superpowers don't hand out nukes to their allies, with maybe, just maybe, one exception (though the country in question has probably developed its own nukes by now. Yes, it's one of those countries that "probably" has nukes. I'll leave it up to you to guess which one it is.)
We've been working on a negligible population of fruit flies (negligible as in "compared to the fruit fly population of the whole planet"), for a negligible period of time (negligible as in "compared to a few hundred million years"). Heck. Do you have any idea just how long a fscking million years is ? If you wanted to write down the term for any of your relatives living in a million years, you would first have to put about two-thousand five-hundred lines of
"great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-"
in front your actual relationship with them (assuming that a human generation stays at about
30 years).
No no no, you completely misunderstood the procedure in Germany. Flashing your lights at the car in front of you (especially from a distance) means: "There's gonna be a collision with a delta v in excess of 100 km/h in less than four seconds if you don't move over, you slowpoke.".
Then again, it could also just mean "Turn off that damn rear foglight, you idiot. The fog's long gone."
These must be the most impressive pictures taken by the Mars orbiters so far.
2. Due to reaction time, the second car has to decelerate at a higher rate in order to maintain a safe distance from first car.
3. Due to most drivers only looking at the car in front of them (instead of also checking whether the cars farther ahead are braking), repeat #2 for the following cars - each of them has to decelerate at a higher rate than the car in front of them (-> positive feedback, which is usually a bad thing in systems theory. At least if you want a stable system).
4. Eventually, you'll get to the point where one car has to stop. Traffic jam ensues.
Solution: Use computer to eliminate/reduce the influences in bold print above. No traffic jam.
Then again, I remember seeing stuff like that back at the university, where they were trying to combine traffic models with a Kalman filter to achieve better traffic jam prediction. That was, uh, over five years ago.
And how exactly would you discipline 4 month-olds ? Tape their mouths shut ? Put a pillow on their face until they stop screaming ?
No. The economy works because people have children. It can pull some along that don't, as long as there's enough children to at least cancel the natural decline of the population. If everyone suddenly stopped reproducing, you'd end up with a whole bunch of 80 year-olds at some point, who aren't very economically active. And 20 or so years later, you'd end up with no people (and no economy) at all.
Because kids being, you know, kids (and not adults), lack a few of the traits that adults have (like being able to cope with stress without screaming), and also cannot be considered fully responsible for their actions (unlike adults).
If you're such a genius and figure out how to stop a colicky 7 month-old from screaming (big bonus points for not using a gag, soundproof box, or duct tape), then you should write a book about it. I'm sure it would make you rich enough to be able to charter your own, kid-free flights for the rest of your life in just a couple of weeks.
Yes. If their complaining is just going to make the situation worse than it acutally is, then they're just being assholes that want to vent. Maybe if they'd just shut the hell up then the kid will go to sleep ?
As in, you know they paid $800 for this ticket and they get to spend 8 hours a row away from a human car alarm and they should just shut up?
Yeah, and I might have paid 2 x $800 for the tickets for my kids (plus my kids are a lot lighter and cost the airline less to transport).
If everyone is staring at you because your screaming child is giving them tiny aneurysms,
If they've never learned anger management and when it's sensible to complain and when not, they can feel free to have their aneurysms rupture in mid-flight. Humanity is better of without these jerks.
What you're saying is that they should stop bitching because it upsets you?
They should stop bitching if it just makes the situation worse. How about they bring some earplugs next time ? I never travel without.
No, it's not. It's just another way of saying "I want to reap the benefits of other people having kids, but don't want to have kids growing up around me or bothering me in any other way by them being kids".
You must have missed the lounge, then.
Hm, who do you think is going to get tackled and squished to death by the rest of the passengers - the annoying kid or the terrorist suspect who attempted to open the cabin door in mid-flight ?
This gets exacerbated if one of your kids is a real early bird (would like to get up at 5:30 am), and the other one is a night owl (goes to sleep at 11 pm, but wakes up at 9 am).
I've got good news for you: Something like that already exists. It's been around for decades, even. They call it a "charter flight".
What ? Don't want to pay that much ? Tough luck.
Erm, that's not how engineering works. There are standards that Diesel fuel needs to conform to, and the engine will work with a fuel that conforms to these standards (if it doesn't, then it's a warranty issue). Biodiesel has some fairly significant differences (different boiling point, inferior chemical stability, different lubricative properties), and if the manual explicitly states "Do not use biodiesel", there's going to be some reason for it.
You read the manual and stick to it. If you want to try to run your gasoline engine with sugar water, or your diesel engine with gasoline, try at your own risk. Especially when the manual says "Don't do that".
The "trick" of adding gasoline to diesel works because you are adding more "solvent" hydrocarbons which means that the temperature has to be lower before the solution becomes supersaturated. In both diesel and jet fuel something like half the fuel is actually disolved solids.
I know why it works (in older diesel engines), I also know why it kills the injection systems of newer ones. If you failed to rtfm on your car and fsck up the engine that way, well, that's your problem.
Yeah, and you'd probably want them to have regular flights to all sorts of places, right ? What are you on again, and where can I get some ?
If you're too poor to charter a flight or have your own airplane, that's your problem. That "business class, no-kids" airline you suggest isn't going to "take off", in a business sense.
You don't really need much of an education in child psychology. Usually, you just need to know the signs of kids being tired, and what to do then.
Last year, we (my wife, my son, I) flew from Europe to the States. Junior was tired and started kicking the sear in front of him. Lady in front of us told us off and to make him stop. So we did ! We held down his legs. No kicking anymore. Of course, then he proceeded to scream at the top of his lungs for the next four hours (figures, being forcibly restrained and very, very tired). Well, if the lady had just ignored him for 15 minutes he would have probably gone to sleep (kids flail/kick when they're really really really tired).
From then on, we're trying to book the seats in front of our kids for us, though.
You forgot the third: A change of underwear and some basic toiletries, in case the rest of your luggage ends up in Novosibirsk, Siberia, instead of your intended destination, and you have to wait two days for it to get back to you.
It's people like me that subsidize your brats, and you have the cheek to claim i owe you?
So you've got the money you need for your retirement and healthcare - but do you really want to be served by, cared for and looked after by people who will be your age then (i.e. a bunch of old farts)? Or would you rather have a doctor who's still young enough to be able to hold a scalped without jittering and sees well enough to cut the right parts ? Do you want that plane you'll be flying on then to be piloted by some old geezer who takes regular naps ?
See ? You will depend on todays kids when you're old, even if you have saves up all the fscking money in the world for your retirement. Unless you plan to put a bullet through your skull while you're still able to pull a trigger.
Make a race track along the border and make it explicitly clear that no speed limit whatsoever applies. That should be mobile enough.
"Less" being relative, since diesel fuel contains more energy per volume than gasoline. Apples and oranges, except this is a car analogy. Nope, it's not relative. Higher energy content of diesel fuel aside, they diesel cycle allows for higher efficiency than the otto cycles since it has a higher compression ratio.