And what would that gain them? Reading the old stuffy "classics" doesn't necessarily buy them anything that a zombie lit course doesn't. The goal of these general-level English/lit courses is to help you develop (or learn, if necessary) your writing, analysis, and critical thinking skills. These skills are more likely to be retained if the students learn them by applying them to something they find interesting rather than the same old boring stuff.
I've taken both kinds of classes at the college level. The class with the old material was excruciatingly dull and had a lot of memorization of dead British guys and the books they wrote, and analysis of things almost irrelevant to anyone. The other class regarding cyborgs and science fiction (we were ahead of yesterday's article by a few years) was actually interesting, and people (gasp) paid attention. It even led to thought-provoking discussions on contemporary ethical and legal issues.
Can you guess which one has had more relevance in my life and has hopefully helped me become a better person and citizen by making me think about things I was previously ignorant about? I'll give you a hint--it wasn't the one with the "classics" and dead British guys.
Whether the drivers should know better or not isn't the issue. The fact is, it happens. The system should account for what actually happens, not what should happen.
In this case, shortening yellow times results in accidents partly because people are following too closely. We all know people shouldn't follow that closely, and in a perfect world, they wouldn't. But in reality, they do, so we should design the system so that it works even if people are being bad drivers.
You can buy a small benchtop CNC mill for well under $10k. If you don't mind Chinese-made Harbor Freight and similar products (which are actually pretty decent machines for cheap Chinese-made tools, though they take a bit of work), you can get a conversion kit and have a 3-axis CNC mill for about $3k. Of course, then you'll need tooling, cutters, and software, but that's not all that expensive either.
These machines are really only useful for hobby work or little projects. You won't find major manufacturers using them.
I never really liked the Windows Explorer as a file manager. Hundreds of different windows, folder settings now following you around but different folders showing differently
I've used 3.1, 95, 98, NT, XP, and 7... in none of those did I run into the problem you're describing. I don't have hundreds of different windows or unique folder view settings in each one, and I have a directory tree on the left side. Yes, it requires changing a couple settings, but it holds after that. The general interface is basically the same as it has been since 3.1.
Uh, GP didn't say "for a chance to watch a guy walk on the moon", he said "for a chance to walk on the moon", implying that he would be the one doing the walking.
I'd trade cellphones off too, if it meant I got to go to the moon.
What's sad is that we had that moon capability and were inching our way towards a truly reliable space access system (lots of hypersonics progress and such) and then threw all of that away.
Wifi uses less battery power when you're actually sending data. The problem comes when you leave wifi on and you aren't in range of a wifi station (say, driving around or in a place without wifi) the phone keeps trying to look and search for wifi connections, and it eats up the battery while doing so. I only turn wifi on when I need a data connection and I know one is available, otherwise it eats the battery (just like being somewhere with little or no signal kills battery with your normal data connection).
Many people consider me to be on the "political right", and though I'd argue I'm somewhere off at a right angle to that spectrum, I'll try to put forth an idea or two.
Manufacturing in the US was healthiest when labor unions were healthiest
I'd argue it the other way--unions were strongest at the time when manufacturing was strong, because of a lack of competition. The auto industry was king 40+ years ago because it had no outside competition. When strong competition from the Japanese (and later Korean) auto manufacturers arose, the unions refused to adapt, insisting on keeping the same inefficient practices versus new automated methods because the latter would eliminate some (union-held) jobs.
I work at a US company that manufactures big expensive things. We are the best in our field and make products known and used worldwide. I'm sure you've heard of us. There are no unions on site, and no real interest among the employees (blue or white collar) in organizing. Everyone I've asked, from junior guys on the assembly line to master machinists to senior engineers, opposes the idea. Many have worked in union shops before and decided they want no part of it. And for the record, neither do I.
Unions can be a good thing when faced with truly horrible or dangerous working conditions like those seen 100+ years ago. Today, they're still pushing for safety innovations that management resists due to a "bottom-line only" mentality. But you also see a whole bunch of stupidity coming out of them, too.
Take Chicago, for instance. Union presence there is so strong that people participating in a trade convention are not allowed to move or plug in their own equipment. That's right, any suitcases, boxes, tables, displays, etc. that you are using in your display booth must be carried/carted in by a union worker. You can't do it yourself. Need something plugged into the wall? Gotta get a union electrician to do it. We're not talking major wiring changes in the building here, but rather the simple act of putting a regular plug into a standard AC outlet--a skill that pretty much everyone past the age of 5 has mastered. Failing to abide by this can get you fined or kicked out from the convention center and/or "accidental" damage to your equipment.
Heavy unionization can also lead to "not-my-job-itis", where an entire worksite comes to a screeching halt because a simple mindless task needs to be done, but it's not the stated job of anyone present. I've seen an entire machine shop sit idle for two hours because the material was sitting in the back of a truck, but the guy whose job it was to get the pallet jack and move the material thirty feet to the work area was out. I've known engineering departments to be held up because the printer jammed and only the unionized repair guy was allowed to open the cover and remove the offending piece of paper.
Sometimes, unions can be so shortsighted and narrow-minded that they drive themselves right out of a job. Some of them would rather refuse a relatively small paycut now and wind up unemployed in a year, than take a cut and still be employed in five years. Or, they'll back themselves into a corner and have to give up a lot of pay to keep a job, when they could have saved a lot of trouble had they taken a little cut earlier. (to be fair, there's a lot to be said for a management team that cuts everyone else's pay and then awards themselves bonuses, and very little of it is nice)
Unions are also known to be very politically active, often supporting candidates that many of their members oppose on issues outside labor.
And finally, though it's rational from the union's point of view, the treatment of "scabs" really bothers me. When a union workforce goes on strike, they're essentially saying "I don't want to work under those conditions, so I'm not going to". Someone else, maybe with some kids to feed and with very little left in his bank account, will come along and decide "well, I think that's a good d
I still think its a slippery slope. If specific rights are enumerated that leaves the door open to restrict everything else.
It can also sometimes lead to a "you have those rights only because 'we' were nice enough and generous enough to give them to you", or a "rights are only granted by the government and not an inherent property of people" kind of mentality. Both carry the unstated implication of "we can take them away if we want".
But then, if you don't list them at all, what safety net do you have to help protect them?
I've never scratched a matte screen, but the glossy ones I've had show every little fleck of stuff that gets on them. It's like driving a black car; everything shows up.
And besides, I don't want equipment that has to be treated with kid gloves. I'd rather use something a little older or less fancy/powerful that can survive being dropped on the driveway or stuck in my pocket with my keys or sprayed with a bit of water. That's why I don't buy new cars, fancy handcraft firearms, or ultra-small-micro-fancy electronics. Give me the boring, clunky, ugly, cheaper, rugged ones.
Unfortunately, that's the very reason so many dislike the space program. There are some people out there with an innate self-loathing, who see all forms of progress, exceptionalism, and success as something to be ashamed of. We have many such people here, and the very success of our space program is, to them, reason enough to kill it. Much like those successful schools in poor areas that manage to do well and actually get the students motivated only to be dragged down and canceled for being different, or the scorn heaped on those kids who are smart and do well in school, there's some social element here that seems determined to snatch defeat from the stomach of victory.
My only complaint is that drivers for my old Spaceball 4000 serial 3D mouse aren't available for Win 7/64. I had to drop $120 on a newer model that isn't as comfortable to me.
VHF Rabbit ears plus UHF loop. These used to be good for analog television, but now for digital television they are all-but-worthless. You really need to get one of the larger antennas
They work just fine for us. Of course, we live about two miles from most of the broadcast towers (I can see them from the couch), and the other two are within ten miles. And really, we rarely pull in OTA television anyway; all we've watched on it has been five minutes of the world cup, and a couple minutes of local weather coverage during a storm. Otherwise, it's all netflix.
in the same way folks who cancel their cable TV can afford a Netflix subscription and a substantial number of downloads from iTunes or Amazon and still end up money ahead (and see exactly what they want to see when they want to see it).
That's what we did. Wife and I canceled satellite and got smartphones, netflix, and a set of rabbit ears. We pay less per month and get a lot more use out of it. And not nearly as many ads, either.
I know I've lost mine. Used to have bad runny nose, sneezing, watery eyes, etc. Then I lived with a cat, and then two cats. It went away. I still keep the "no cats in the bedroom" rule despite my wife's protests, but that's personal preference--I don't want them in my bed, I don't want their shed hair in my bed, and I don't want them walking on/poking/laying on me while I'm sleeping--that tends to wake me up in a loud and violent manner.
More cats don't bother me; the in-laws have six and I don't have a problem with those.
Most HDHP plans negotiate highly discounted rates. You'd be paying what the insurance companies pay, not what you as a private cash customer might pay in most cases.
And that's part of the problem. 20 different people with different "insurance" plans will be charged 20 different prices for the exact same procedure (before "insurance" payments, copays, etc). And they wonder why medical billing is such a huge overhead cost.
I would mandate fixed pricing. That is, you may charge whatever you like for a given procedure--it's a free market. But, everyone has to be charged that price, no matter if they have Medicare, private "insurance", or pay cash. How it breaks down from there is none of your concern; we just won't see cash patient paying $99, Medicare being billed $62, UHC billed $78, CBCA $69, etc. Your prices would be required to be available to everyone (so you can easily shop around) and you would be required to keep printed copies in the lobby.
Don't they ban fully automatic rifles for civilian use in the USA?
No. Class III weapons (short-barreled rifles and shotguns, full auto/select-fire weapons, suppressors) are legal to own, at least at the federal level. Some states may have further restrictions. Short version is, you need to get federal approval (long and lots of paperwork, but not hard if you have a clean record) and pay a $200 transfer tax. Other posters give more details about this.
The trick with full-auto/select-fire weapons (all grouped by BATFE as "machine guns") is that manufacture of new ones for private civilian use was prohibited in 1986. Anything made before that is legal, anything made after that can only be for government agencies (police, military, other law enforcement) or as dealer samples. Restricting supply like this naturally raises prices; a full-auto M16 can set you back about $20k or more, where the semiauto clone (AR-15) will run $700-1200.
I work in an R&D department for an aircraft manufacturer. Our (the R&D group's) job is to design and support fabrication of facilities and equipment to support ground testing of aircraft and their subsystems. Many of our tasks are short-notice, very-high-priority jobs--it has to be done yesterday, for pocket change and a clump of lint, because the problem is keeping a customer's airplane on the ground. We may often up reusing or modifying our products later on, but we pretty much never build more than one (or rarely two).
In this kind of environment, being able to tweak and perfect something and optimize the production process to minimize repeated waste is almost useless. We're much more interested in someone who knows (or can learn very quickly) how a given system works, be able to visualize the problem, and come up with a working, cheap, fast solution--then communicate that to others and help get it built.
We're problem-solvers specializing in quick-and-dirty, need-it-yesterday applications. It's still engineering; we just work under a different set of constraints.
You give the students an opportunity to work hands-on learning about the real, physical world around them. You give them proper resources and competent instruction in something the kids can relate to, and you wind up with students who want to learn.
You don't get this by just hiring more generic teachers, or paying poorly-performing teachers more money. Yes, you will have to pay teachers more in order to get good ones, but that also means you have to be willing to fire the bad ones and the useless parts of the administration.
You don't get this by just buying computers or random "technology" for students and simply expecting that jsut "doing it on a computer" will suddenly make hard topics easy. Used properly, computers and other advanced tech can greatly improve understanding and retention of material by presenting it in ways students can better understand (with animations, visuals, interactivity, etc), but simply throwing text onto a screen instead of a piece of paper doesn't do it.
You don't get this by social promotion and concern over feelings and self-esteem above all else. The real outside world isn't nearly so nice. That's not to say you need to be a cold, uncaring brute (especially to younger kids), but there need to be gradually-increasing responsibilities and expectations as they get older, and they should be treated more and more like adults as they grow. They need to be challenged, not coddled.
When it becomes a real problem, we deal with it. Let's not put the cart before the horse, or try to cross a bridge we haven't arrived at yet. You know, the tires on your car will be bald someday. Why aren't you buying new tires now?
Your car analogy doesn't work. I'm not buying tires right now because I know that they will be readily available in the future at the time I need them. All I need to do is reserve an hour or two of my time, walk into the store, and pay a couple hundred bucks. I don't need to sit and do basic, fundamental research and make a bunch of test models and do rigorous service testing in advance; that work is already done. At best, it requires that I save up a little money in advance.
Your bridge analogy doesn't quite work, either. For one thing, the bridge already exists, and if it didn't, we'd have to be working on designing and building it long before we showed up at the riverbank with truckloads of stuff that needs to get to the other side. And if we had something particularly heavy or unusual that needed to cross, we'd need to start planning the actual bridge crossing well in advance.
The thing is, overpopulation and/or extinction-level events (very large asteroids, pandemics, biowarfare, etc) are a little bit harder to solve than "oh, I need new tires". Viable solutions (and particularly space-based ones) aren't something we can just head over to the store or local contractor and get a solution for in a short time. They take years--if not decades--of research, development, and testing to get something truly practical and usable. If we wait until we hit a population crisis that's taking every dollar we have to try and control, not only will we not have a solution ready to go, we won't even have the money to start building one. The time to be working on solutions to these problems is now, while we have the extra resources to spare, not sixty years in the future when we're staring the problem in the face from an inch away.
We're seeing the same thing with oil today. We know that at some point it will become too expensive to recover usable oil. That point may be fifty years in the future, but right now we're speeding along at 95mph and only watching about two feet in front of our bumper, with half of us saying "hey, we have enough for today and tomorrow, so let's not worry!" and the other half saying "Cut! Tax! Restrict!" in hopes that doing so will make the impending problem magically go away.
You don't wait until your house is burning to set up a local fire department or buy a fire extinguisher. You don't wait until a hurricane is two days out to come up with evacuation plans and put flood and storm protection in place. So why do we insist on doing that with big problems for which we dont at least have a standard formula or big body of knowledge for?
You can get a life like that in the US, too. I'm a mid-20s engineer in the southeast US. I work 0600-1630 Monday-Thursday, and live ~15-20 minutes from work. Overtime is cyclical, but usually consists of working a partial day Friday (if we want it), and I am paid for it. I get 3 weeks vacation every year, but then, I have every Friday off. After work, I go to the gym and still have time to spend with my wife in the evening. I "own" a nice house, two paid-off cars, and some nice toys, and we save/invest about 30% of our combined pre-tax income, with our only debt payment being the mortgage.
Oh, but you can. I drink a gallon a day, at least--more if I'm working out hard or doing stuff outside in the summer. You'll go through sweetener/sugar withdrawals for a little while, but give it time and your sugar tolerance will drop quite a bit. And you'll lose weight, too.
Or get unsweet tea and put just a little sweetener in it, instead of the popular sugar-saturated-water-with-a-bit-of-tea-flavor drink that's popular down here.
Caffeine doesn't really affect me except in large doses (think a couple of 32oz diet cokes). I drink coffee in the morning for the taste, and because it stimulates the bowels.
Drizzle a little coconut milk over the top. Had this at a local Thai place, and now I want to make it myself. Just have to figure out how they got the mango to be a bit less sour...
Trays and seats "upright and locked" is so that they're out of the way if you have to evacuate. Not talking during the demo is so others (who may not be frequent fliers) can hear. Window shades open for taxi, takeoff, and landing is so that the flight attendants can see what's going on outside if there's an emergency, and can decide whether or not to evacuate (or which side to evac on in case of fire, bad terrain, etc). Lights off at night is for the same reason; you want your night vision intact if you have to evacuate.
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And what would that gain them? Reading the old stuffy "classics" doesn't necessarily buy them anything that a zombie lit course doesn't. The goal of these general-level English/lit courses is to help you develop (or learn, if necessary) your writing, analysis, and critical thinking skills. These skills are more likely to be retained if the students learn them by applying them to something they find interesting rather than the same old boring stuff.
I've taken both kinds of classes at the college level. The class with the old material was excruciatingly dull and had a lot of memorization of dead British guys and the books they wrote, and analysis of things almost irrelevant to anyone. The other class regarding cyborgs and science fiction (we were ahead of yesterday's article by a few years) was actually interesting, and people (gasp) paid attention. It even led to thought-provoking discussions on contemporary ethical and legal issues.
Can you guess which one has had more relevance in my life and has hopefully helped me become a better person and citizen by making me think about things I was previously ignorant about? I'll give you a hint--it wasn't the one with the "classics" and dead British guys.
Whether the drivers should know better or not isn't the issue. The fact is, it happens. The system should account for what actually happens, not what should happen.
In this case, shortening yellow times results in accidents partly because people are following too closely. We all know people shouldn't follow that closely, and in a perfect world, they wouldn't. But in reality, they do, so we should design the system so that it works even if people are being bad drivers.
You can buy a small benchtop CNC mill for well under $10k. If you don't mind Chinese-made Harbor Freight and similar products (which are actually pretty decent machines for cheap Chinese-made tools, though they take a bit of work), you can get a conversion kit and have a 3-axis CNC mill for about $3k. Of course, then you'll need tooling, cutters, and software, but that's not all that expensive either.
These machines are really only useful for hobby work or little projects. You won't find major manufacturers using them.
I never really liked the Windows Explorer as a file manager. Hundreds of different windows, folder settings now following you around but different folders showing differently
I've used 3.1, 95, 98, NT, XP, and 7... in none of those did I run into the problem you're describing. I don't have hundreds of different windows or unique folder view settings in each one, and I have a directory tree on the left side. Yes, it requires changing a couple settings, but it holds after that. The general interface is basically the same as it has been since 3.1.
Unless I'm misunderstanding you?
Most people that are "smart" move further south, to places where you don't have to worry about snow tires because it never snows. :D
(disclaimer for mods: this post intended as a joke)
Uh, GP didn't say "for a chance to watch a guy walk on the moon", he said "for a chance to walk on the moon", implying that he would be the one doing the walking.
I'd trade cellphones off too, if it meant I got to go to the moon.
What's sad is that we had that moon capability and were inching our way towards a truly reliable space access system (lots of hypersonics progress and such) and then threw all of that away.
Hell, it'd be one of the few claims of authority under the IC clause that's actually legit.
Wifi uses less battery power when you're actually sending data. The problem comes when you leave wifi on and you aren't in range of a wifi station (say, driving around or in a place without wifi) the phone keeps trying to look and search for wifi connections, and it eats up the battery while doing so. I only turn wifi on when I need a data connection and I know one is available, otherwise it eats the battery (just like being somewhere with little or no signal kills battery with your normal data connection).
Many people consider me to be on the "political right", and though I'd argue I'm somewhere off at a right angle to that spectrum, I'll try to put forth an idea or two.
Manufacturing in the US was healthiest when labor unions were healthiest
I'd argue it the other way--unions were strongest at the time when manufacturing was strong, because of a lack of competition. The auto industry was king 40+ years ago because it had no outside competition. When strong competition from the Japanese (and later Korean) auto manufacturers arose, the unions refused to adapt, insisting on keeping the same inefficient practices versus new automated methods because the latter would eliminate some (union-held) jobs.
I work at a US company that manufactures big expensive things. We are the best in our field and make products known and used worldwide. I'm sure you've heard of us. There are no unions on site, and no real interest among the employees (blue or white collar) in organizing. Everyone I've asked, from junior guys on the assembly line to master machinists to senior engineers, opposes the idea. Many have worked in union shops before and decided they want no part of it. And for the record, neither do I.
Unions can be a good thing when faced with truly horrible or dangerous working conditions like those seen 100+ years ago. Today, they're still pushing for safety innovations that management resists due to a "bottom-line only" mentality. But you also see a whole bunch of stupidity coming out of them, too.
Take Chicago, for instance. Union presence there is so strong that people participating in a trade convention are not allowed to move or plug in their own equipment. That's right, any suitcases, boxes, tables, displays, etc. that you are using in your display booth must be carried/carted in by a union worker. You can't do it yourself. Need something plugged into the wall? Gotta get a union electrician to do it. We're not talking major wiring changes in the building here, but rather the simple act of putting a regular plug into a standard AC outlet--a skill that pretty much everyone past the age of 5 has mastered. Failing to abide by this can get you fined or kicked out from the convention center and/or "accidental" damage to your equipment.
Heavy unionization can also lead to "not-my-job-itis", where an entire worksite comes to a screeching halt because a simple mindless task needs to be done, but it's not the stated job of anyone present. I've seen an entire machine shop sit idle for two hours because the material was sitting in the back of a truck, but the guy whose job it was to get the pallet jack and move the material thirty feet to the work area was out. I've known engineering departments to be held up because the printer jammed and only the unionized repair guy was allowed to open the cover and remove the offending piece of paper.
Sometimes, unions can be so shortsighted and narrow-minded that they drive themselves right out of a job. Some of them would rather refuse a relatively small paycut now and wind up unemployed in a year, than take a cut and still be employed in five years. Or, they'll back themselves into a corner and have to give up a lot of pay to keep a job, when they could have saved a lot of trouble had they taken a little cut earlier. (to be fair, there's a lot to be said for a management team that cuts everyone else's pay and then awards themselves bonuses, and very little of it is nice)
Unions are also known to be very politically active, often supporting candidates that many of their members oppose on issues outside labor.
And finally, though it's rational from the union's point of view, the treatment of "scabs" really bothers me. When a union workforce goes on strike, they're essentially saying "I don't want to work under those conditions, so I'm not going to". Someone else, maybe with some kids to feed and with very little left in his bank account, will come along and decide "well, I think that's a good d
I still think its a slippery slope. If specific rights are enumerated that leaves the door open to restrict everything else.
It can also sometimes lead to a "you have those rights only because 'we' were nice enough and generous enough to give them to you", or a "rights are only granted by the government and not an inherent property of people" kind of mentality. Both carry the unstated implication of "we can take them away if we want".
But then, if you don't list them at all, what safety net do you have to help protect them?
Damned if you do, damned if you don't, I guess.
I've never scratched a matte screen, but the glossy ones I've had show every little fleck of stuff that gets on them. It's like driving a black car; everything shows up.
And besides, I don't want equipment that has to be treated with kid gloves. I'd rather use something a little older or less fancy/powerful that can survive being dropped on the driveway or stuck in my pocket with my keys or sprayed with a bit of water. That's why I don't buy new cars, fancy handcraft firearms, or ultra-small-micro-fancy electronics. Give me the boring, clunky, ugly, cheaper, rugged ones.
Unfortunately, that's the very reason so many dislike the space program. There are some people out there with an innate self-loathing, who see all forms of progress, exceptionalism, and success as something to be ashamed of. We have many such people here, and the very success of our space program is, to them, reason enough to kill it. Much like those successful schools in poor areas that manage to do well and actually get the students motivated only to be dragged down and canceled for being different, or the scorn heaped on those kids who are smart and do well in school, there's some social element here that seems determined to snatch defeat from the stomach of victory.
My only complaint is that drivers for my old Spaceball 4000 serial 3D mouse aren't available for Win 7/64. I had to drop $120 on a newer model that isn't as comfortable to me.
VHF Rabbit ears plus UHF loop. These used to be good for analog television, but now for digital television they are all-but-worthless. You really need to get one of the larger antennas
They work just fine for us. Of course, we live about two miles from most of the broadcast towers (I can see them from the couch), and the other two are within ten miles. And really, we rarely pull in OTA television anyway; all we've watched on it has been five minutes of the world cup, and a couple minutes of local weather coverage during a storm. Otherwise, it's all netflix.
in the same way folks who cancel their cable TV can afford a Netflix subscription and a substantial number of downloads from iTunes or Amazon and still end up money ahead (and see exactly what they want to see when they want to see it).
That's what we did. Wife and I canceled satellite and got smartphones, netflix, and a set of rabbit ears. We pay less per month and get a lot more use out of it. And not nearly as many ads, either.
I know I've lost mine. Used to have bad runny nose, sneezing, watery eyes, etc. Then I lived with a cat, and then two cats. It went away. I still keep the "no cats in the bedroom" rule despite my wife's protests, but that's personal preference--I don't want them in my bed, I don't want their shed hair in my bed, and I don't want them walking on/poking/laying on me while I'm sleeping--that tends to wake me up in a loud and violent manner.
More cats don't bother me; the in-laws have six and I don't have a problem with those.
Most HDHP plans negotiate highly discounted rates. You'd be paying what the insurance companies pay, not what you as a private cash customer might pay in most cases.
And that's part of the problem. 20 different people with different "insurance" plans will be charged 20 different prices for the exact same procedure (before "insurance" payments, copays, etc). And they wonder why medical billing is such a huge overhead cost.
I would mandate fixed pricing. That is, you may charge whatever you like for a given procedure--it's a free market. But, everyone has to be charged that price, no matter if they have Medicare, private "insurance", or pay cash. How it breaks down from there is none of your concern; we just won't see cash patient paying $99, Medicare being billed $62, UHC billed $78, CBCA $69, etc. Your prices would be required to be available to everyone (so you can easily shop around) and you would be required to keep printed copies in the lobby.
Don't they ban fully automatic rifles for civilian use in the USA?
No. Class III weapons (short-barreled rifles and shotguns, full auto/select-fire weapons, suppressors) are legal to own, at least at the federal level. Some states may have further restrictions. Short version is, you need to get federal approval (long and lots of paperwork, but not hard if you have a clean record) and pay a $200 transfer tax. Other posters give more details about this.
The trick with full-auto/select-fire weapons (all grouped by BATFE as "machine guns") is that manufacture of new ones for private civilian use was prohibited in 1986. Anything made before that is legal, anything made after that can only be for government agencies (police, military, other law enforcement) or as dealer samples. Restricting supply like this naturally raises prices; a full-auto M16 can set you back about $20k or more, where the semiauto clone (AR-15) will run $700-1200.
Not everything needs to be built more than once.
I work in an R&D department for an aircraft manufacturer. Our (the R&D group's) job is to design and support fabrication of facilities and equipment to support ground testing of aircraft and their subsystems. Many of our tasks are short-notice, very-high-priority jobs--it has to be done yesterday, for pocket change and a clump of lint, because the problem is keeping a customer's airplane on the ground. We may often up reusing or modifying our products later on, but we pretty much never build more than one (or rarely two).
In this kind of environment, being able to tweak and perfect something and optimize the production process to minimize repeated waste is almost useless. We're much more interested in someone who knows (or can learn very quickly) how a given system works, be able to visualize the problem, and come up with a working, cheap, fast solution--then communicate that to others and help get it built.
We're problem-solvers specializing in quick-and-dirty, need-it-yesterday applications. It's still engineering; we just work under a different set of constraints.
You give the students an opportunity to work hands-on learning about the real, physical world around them. You give them proper resources and competent instruction in something the kids can relate to, and you wind up with students who want to learn.
You don't get this by just hiring more generic teachers, or paying poorly-performing teachers more money. Yes, you will have to pay teachers more in order to get good ones, but that also means you have to be willing to fire the bad ones and the useless parts of the administration.
You don't get this by just buying computers or random "technology" for students and simply expecting that jsut "doing it on a computer" will suddenly make hard topics easy. Used properly, computers and other advanced tech can greatly improve understanding and retention of material by presenting it in ways students can better understand (with animations, visuals, interactivity, etc), but simply throwing text onto a screen instead of a piece of paper doesn't do it.
You don't get this by social promotion and concern over feelings and self-esteem above all else. The real outside world isn't nearly so nice. That's not to say you need to be a cold, uncaring brute (especially to younger kids), but there need to be gradually-increasing responsibilities and expectations as they get older, and they should be treated more and more like adults as they grow. They need to be challenged, not coddled.
When it becomes a real problem, we deal with it. Let's not put the cart before the horse, or try to cross a bridge we haven't arrived at yet. You know, the tires on your car will be bald someday. Why aren't you buying new tires now?
Your car analogy doesn't work. I'm not buying tires right now because I know that they will be readily available in the future at the time I need them. All I need to do is reserve an hour or two of my time, walk into the store, and pay a couple hundred bucks. I don't need to sit and do basic, fundamental research and make a bunch of test models and do rigorous service testing in advance; that work is already done. At best, it requires that I save up a little money in advance.
Your bridge analogy doesn't quite work, either. For one thing, the bridge already exists, and if it didn't, we'd have to be working on designing and building it long before we showed up at the riverbank with truckloads of stuff that needs to get to the other side. And if we had something particularly heavy or unusual that needed to cross, we'd need to start planning the actual bridge crossing well in advance.
The thing is, overpopulation and/or extinction-level events (very large asteroids, pandemics, biowarfare, etc) are a little bit harder to solve than "oh, I need new tires". Viable solutions (and particularly space-based ones) aren't something we can just head over to the store or local contractor and get a solution for in a short time. They take years--if not decades--of research, development, and testing to get something truly practical and usable. If we wait until we hit a population crisis that's taking every dollar we have to try and control, not only will we not have a solution ready to go, we won't even have the money to start building one. The time to be working on solutions to these problems is now, while we have the extra resources to spare, not sixty years in the future when we're staring the problem in the face from an inch away.
We're seeing the same thing with oil today. We know that at some point it will become too expensive to recover usable oil. That point may be fifty years in the future, but right now we're speeding along at 95mph and only watching about two feet in front of our bumper, with half of us saying "hey, we have enough for today and tomorrow, so let's not worry!" and the other half saying "Cut! Tax! Restrict!" in hopes that doing so will make the impending problem magically go away.
You don't wait until your house is burning to set up a local fire department or buy a fire extinguisher. You don't wait until a hurricane is two days out to come up with evacuation plans and put flood and storm protection in place. So why do we insist on doing that with big problems for which we dont at least have a standard formula or big body of knowledge for?
You can get a life like that in the US, too. I'm a mid-20s engineer in the southeast US. I work 0600-1630 Monday-Thursday, and live ~15-20 minutes from work. Overtime is cyclical, but usually consists of working a partial day Friday (if we want it), and I am paid for it. I get 3 weeks vacation every year, but then, I have every Friday off. After work, I go to the gym and still have time to spend with my wife in the evening. I "own" a nice house, two paid-off cars, and some nice toys, and we save/invest about 30% of our combined pre-tax income, with our only debt payment being the mortgage.
Oh, but you can. I drink a gallon a day, at least--more if I'm working out hard or doing stuff outside in the summer. You'll go through sweetener/sugar withdrawals for a little while, but give it time and your sugar tolerance will drop quite a bit. And you'll lose weight, too.
Or get unsweet tea and put just a little sweetener in it, instead of the popular sugar-saturated-water-with-a-bit-of-tea-flavor drink that's popular down here.
Caffeine doesn't really affect me except in large doses (think a couple of 32oz diet cokes). I drink coffee in the morning for the taste, and because it stimulates the bowels.
Drizzle a little coconut milk over the top. Had this at a local Thai place, and now I want to make it myself. Just have to figure out how they got the mango to be a bit less sour...
Trays and seats "upright and locked" is so that they're out of the way if you have to evacuate.
Not talking during the demo is so others (who may not be frequent fliers) can hear.
Window shades open for taxi, takeoff, and landing is so that the flight attendants can see what's going on outside if there's an emergency, and can decide whether or not to evacuate (or which side to evac on in case of fire, bad terrain, etc).
Lights off at night is for the same reason; you want your night vision intact if you have to evacuate.