SpaceX isn't breaking ground or going new places. Were they the first ones to build an orbital launch vehicle, I'd concede the point. But that's not the case.
Mankind has been launching rockets (in some form) for several centuries. Modern launch vehicles are descended from military weapons (V-2, Atlas, Titan, R-7, etc), and later government-funded vehicles designed made to government specifications (Saturn V, Proton, etc). We (collectively) already know how to build rockets in a general sense.
Further, the market for space exploration started from government programs like warhead-lobbing and political one-upmanship. Only after space access was possible did commercial entities begin developing uses for it, as the cost was previously too high.
It's only within the last few years that the technology and market have both been in reach of a private company.
SpaceX is the first company to build an original, successful launch vehicle entirely from private funds. Everything they're doing has already been done, they're just doing it cheaper and on their own checkbook.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge government fan. But let's not kid ourselves thinking that the private sector will just step in and get us off earth as soon. Barring interruption, it will happen eventually. But I'm not sure we can afford to wait.
Space. As in, there is only a finite amount of room available on earth. As the population goes up, and we get cooler stuff, it all needs to go somewhere. People tend to get antsy and rather irritable when packed in with many other people in a small space; a really overcrowded planet seems to be asking for trouble.
You can delay the problem somewhat if you get really good at miniaturization of machinery and people. Maybe start selectively breeding midgets to carry on the human race?
Most of the matter might still be there, but if it's not in a usable form, it won't do you much good.
Private enterprise will never spark the initial push to interplanetary/interstellar colonization, at least not for a very long time. The required fiscal and temporal commitment is staggering, and it will take many, many years to break even, much less turn a regular profit. No venture capitalist or stockholder will invest in a company that might not even give returns to his great-grandchildren.
I would love it if such things could be privately done. But I think if we're going to have any hope of seeing such a program even begin within our lifetimes, it will have to be funded by governments, as only they have enough resources to do so. Call it a jobs program, if you must--it'll boost the economy and math/science education:)
PS: An interesting novel on the subject is Firestar, I believe by Michael Flynn.
I've long said that the only things which have a chance of truly spurring a push for space exploration among the general public are the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life, or an impending "planet-killer" asteroid. And even then, you'll have those evolutionary aberrations* that would demand we lay down and let said aliens roll over us to punish us for some imagined wrong, or the religious nutcases that claim it to be "$diety's will" that we be smashed to bits for our sins.
*These are often the same ones that declare the use of any force (even in self-defense) to be wrong, but then scream bloody murder demanding protection from the police--aka asking someone else to use force on their behalf.
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin.
Nobody said anything about "ruining" earth. Destruction of earth's biosphere is not a necessary condition for space colonization--in fact, environmental preservation and space expansion can complement each other. The technologies you use to achieve the first can feed back into the second, and vice-versa.
Those of us who support pushing out into space in terms of survival aren't talking about "let's strip-mine the earth" or "oh, it's too ruined now, let's go trash something else". We're talking about off-site backups from global threats like large asteroids, virulent pandemics, biological warfare, etc., as well as providing room for expansion.
Also, it's really annoying when something else in my pocket hits the camera button on the phone, and it starts taking pictures of the pocket lining. Back when I had a different phone whose sound you couldn't disable, this led to downright embarassing moments in class, when the phone would start taking pictures. Everyone starts looking around going "WTF is that noise?"
Got away from that carrier as soon as the contract ran out, and dropped the phone from something very high. I'm never buying a samsung product again after that POS.
Re:Why people watch movies..
on
Daemon
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· Score: 1
Showing something on the screen that makes no sense to someone who knows what you're talking about... is just ignorance for ignorance's sake.
Aviation and space scenes are just as bad. I've seen airplanes change shape/size repeatedly during flight, drop like a stone after an engine failure, be terribly mishandled by some idiot playing a pilot, etc. I've also seen people explode/dessicate within seconds of exposure to vacuum, spaceships that stop as soon as the engines are cut (or maneuver as if in atmosphere), and sounds being transmitted through vacuum.
I've seen characters experience incredible decelerations that would leave them in a crushed puddle, yet walk away unharmed.
Similarly terrible are gun scenes where the actors ignore every single safety rule in the book, have limitless magazines, hhit anything while shooting from the hip, cock hammers on guns without them, repeatedly rack the slide/pump the action for dramatic effect, hear perfectly fine after blasting away in small rooms, use suppressors that make pew sounds (or that muffle revolvers), and blatantly violate safety rules.
I'd love to be an aviation and general physics consultant to hollywood, as long as I could work from home and didn't have to go to California.
"That's what happens when your emperor takes the bait and tries standing up for his own people living on American soil."
WTFBBQ? Go read a reputable history book, dude. Japan's involvement in WWII had absolutely zero to do with the internment camps (which didn't even start until after Pearl Harbor), and everything to do with grabbing resources for an empire. Hirohito was bullied by his own military staff, and Japan was fighting on the mainland and on several islands long before it got the US involved. It was fighting a war of aggression, and hit Pearl in a preemptive strike to try and get the US out of the way (at least for a while).
That's true, unless this algorithm only searches through papers linked before the cooresponding announcement--which is what my first thought was on seeing the sumamry. I did not RTFA, though.
A concrete subterranean bunker would be an awesome house! I've been dreaming about one of them for years. They have several advantages over traditional wood-frame-and-siding-with -lots-of-windows houses:
-Better insulation, so less energy leakage and lower electric bills
-Better disaster resistance (though flooding might be a concern). Your house won't get blown away in a hurricane or tornado, and you don't have to worry about the roof collapsing under heavy snow.
-Impervious to termites
-More resistant to burglars and vandals, and easier to defend against home invasions
-Possibly more fire survivability (structurally, at least). Assuming you get out, you might lose some possessions, but the structure will not contribute to the fire and will still be there after it's over. Done right, you could even seal it and let the fire suffocate itself, assuming that doesn't pose a problem to evacuation.
Unfortunately, my wife wants a traditional house. Something about appearance being more important than functionality...
Nuclear subs can generate fresh water (desalination) and oxygen (electrolysis) pretty much at-will. Spacecraft will need recycling systems, for one thing.
Or, you can go the homebuilt route. Costs vary between 15k for a real basic one, to 100k or more for a big one with all sorts of fancy interiors, glass panels, etc. Something like a Sonex will run $25k or so; an RV-7 or -8 maybe $40k over a few years, plus build time. You do have to put in the effort to build it. It's not particularly hard, you just have to be willing to put in the time and have the necessary attention to detail.
The biggest advantages of homebuilts are that you can get better performance (speed, maneuverability, and/or efficiency) from a given size/cost of airplane, and you can do your own maintenance/annual inspections. You can make your own parts in many cases, and you don't have to pay a mechanic's labor fee. After all, you built it, and therefore know that airplane better than anyone else.
Owning and flying an airplane of any kind might take a few sacrifices, but it's nothing terribly hard. It just means you keep driving your old car instead of buying a new one every three years, or you stick with your old TV instead of buying the newest big flat-panel one.
Indeed. Same thing happens with government budgets; if this year's spending increase is less than the previous year's, it's apparently a "budget cut", even though total expenditures are still greater.
Any economic system which relies on continuous growth is unsustainable. Prices of gasoline and housing cannot monotonically increase out of proportion to the rest of the market. To believe otherwise is stupidity.
Yep... I think that it was published in Asimov's science fiction magazine; July 1969 seems to ring a bell. I remember the cover distinctly; it was sitting on my nightstand for a while recently.
And yep... a few minutes searching finds it to be July 1968. The story is "Hawk Among the Sparrows" by Dean McLaughlin. Cover image here: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?ANLGJUL68
And no, I'm not that old... we bought a whole collection of them at a bookstore in Chattanooga a couple years ago.
To clarify, "flyaway" cost is that it would theoretically cost if you walked up to Lockmart and ordered a new airplane right now. It doesn't include R&D costs that have already been paid, only the material cost plus labor and a reasonable profit margin.
Using the amortized cost is good when you're trying to justify canceling the program, which is part of what happened to the F-22. "Oh, it's expensive! We don't want to buy as many!" So they cut the purchase. Well, the R&D (much of which was already paid) was then rolled back into the new amortized cost... "hey, the price went up again! Buy less of them!" And so on.
The monetary benefit doesn't go away, but at some point it's just not worth it to work that extra hour. Where that point is depends entirely on the person doing the work, and how much they want that extra money.
Most graduated tax systems don't work that way. In your example, the money you make from working X hours would be taxed at 20%. Working X+1 hours doesn't mean that your whole income gets taxed at 40%; rather, the 40% rate is only applied to the additional money earned through the +1 hour.
In other words, your returns diminish from working extra, but they never go negative. A plot of take-home vs. earned income would start out at a 1:1 slope, then gradually decrease to a lower (but still positive) slope, but it would never go negative.
A little goes a long way... and the food coloring may be the difference (psychologically) in making the food edible. The couple extra pounds might be worth it.
That "your gun is more likely to be used against you" line only holds true if you include suicides.
Suicides make up more than half of the firearm-related deaths in the US. Most of the remaining homicides are related to street violence, and are committed by people who have no regard for the law in the first place. Many are convicted felons, prohibited from owning firearms at all, who obtain their (often stolen) weapons in illegal street transactions. These people are willing to commit murder, assault, rape... why will a little gun law stop them? The people that will follow any such gun laws are the ones that will not go committing those crimes in the first place.
If you really want to cut the murder rate, you need to hit the problem at the root. You need to figure out what makes people want to commit those crimes, and fix it there. There seems to be a strong correlation between violent crimes and poverty, (lack of) education, unemployment, etc., and I would hazard a guess that most street crime happens when people get desparate. Maybe they need money to feed themselves or their kids, but can't find any other way to get it, so they mug someone or rob a store (or start selling drugs as a way to quick cash--more on that in a moment). Maybe they need a sense of belonging, some kind of organization to fit into and be appreciated; when they can't find it at home or school and perceive no viable alternative, they go join a gang. Or maybe they see no escape from everything, and turn to drugs as a way out; the resulting addiction is so powerful that it drives them to commit crimes to feed the habit. I don't know.
How do we fix it, then? We help these people. Get them a better education; give them something to be hopeful about. Give them a real opportunity, not just a handout to string them along and keep them dependent on the system. Give them better role models than glorified entertainers who promote crime and violence, and inflate hopes of million-dollar athletic contracts to the detriment of actual learning. Show them that people of all backgrounds and colors can make a positive impact on their communities.
On the other side, violent criminals need to be taken off the streets, and kept that way. Far too many are released only to go on and hurt someone else. Sexual predators (the real ones, not teenagers caught fooling around or drunk guys peeing in public), murderers, rapists... so many of them are released back into society after a few years in jail. We don't trust them completely, so we ban them from posessing firearms and (in some cases) track where they live and set up places they can't go. Yet they've already shown their disregard for such laws; we don't trust them not to commit crimes but we trust them to follow the restrictions placed on them? It just doesn't follow. If you can't trust someone to live a normal life outside of prison, if the chance of him committing another crime is so great... why was he released in the first place? Keep these criminals in jail, and make jail unpleasant enough that it's a deterrent. I'm not talking torture and abuse, but they don't need fancy meals, satellite TV, or ice cream. Take a clue from that sherriff in Arizona, with the pink jumpsuits and lowest repeat-offender rate in the country. There should be no excuse for someone with 22 felony convictions out walking the streets with a gun; he should have been locked in jail permanently after the second one at most. And yes, that actually happened in Atlanta a little while ago; the guy was arrested for something, whereupon his record was discovered. Thankfully, I think he's been put away for life now.
Nonviolent drug offenders need treatment and help, not jail. Save that for the bad ones, not the meth addict or pothead.
Yeah, cause the gun sat there saying "come on, buddy, pick me up! Kill your mom!" And he was just an innocent little kid deceived and tricked by the evil dastardly gun, which forced its way into his hand and squeezed its own trigger.
Heh... based on the most recent enrollment statistics on the school's website, the Ratio is currently under 30% for undergrads. That's dropped a bit, I think.
The company I work for runs 4x10 as the "regular" workweek for most of engineering and production. Friday (the usual day off) counts as an overtime day. Non-exempt people get time and a half, and even the salaried people get straight time for that day.
I usually come in for a half day every Friday and pick up a few extra hours (business needs permitting, of course), though sometimes I'll sleep in an hour or two first--I usually show up around 615 the rest of the week. It still gives me an afternoon off to get stuff done around the house, run errands, or go to the range before my wife gets home. If we need to travel for the weekend, I can either use the day to pack and get ready, or we can leave early if she takes a day off.
Sounds a little like Georgia Tech... at the beginning of my freshman year, they got all of us together for "convocation". At some point during the speech, they said "look at the person to your left, and to your right. One of the three of you will not graduate."
My graduating class was the first one to hit 70% after five years.
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SpaceX isn't breaking ground or going new places. Were they the first ones to build an orbital launch vehicle, I'd concede the point. But that's not the case.
Mankind has been launching rockets (in some form) for several centuries. Modern launch vehicles are descended from military weapons (V-2, Atlas, Titan, R-7, etc), and later government-funded vehicles designed made to government specifications (Saturn V, Proton, etc). We (collectively) already know how to build rockets in a general sense.
Further, the market for space exploration started from government programs like warhead-lobbing and political one-upmanship. Only after space access was possible did commercial entities begin developing uses for it, as the cost was previously too high.
It's only within the last few years that the technology and market have both been in reach of a private company.
SpaceX is the first company to build an original, successful launch vehicle entirely from private funds. Everything they're doing has already been done, they're just doing it cheaper and on their own checkbook.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge government fan. But let's not kid ourselves thinking that the private sector will just step in and get us off earth as soon. Barring interruption, it will happen eventually. But I'm not sure we can afford to wait.
What resources do you think we need?
Space. As in, there is only a finite amount of room available on earth. As the population goes up, and we get cooler stuff, it all needs to go somewhere. People tend to get antsy and rather irritable when packed in with many other people in a small space; a really overcrowded planet seems to be asking for trouble.
You can delay the problem somewhat if you get really good at miniaturization of machinery and people. Maybe start selectively breeding midgets to carry on the human race?
Most of the matter might still be there, but if it's not in a usable form, it won't do you much good.
Private enterprise will never spark the initial push to interplanetary/interstellar colonization, at least not for a very long time. The required fiscal and temporal commitment is staggering, and it will take many, many years to break even, much less turn a regular profit. No venture capitalist or stockholder will invest in a company that might not even give returns to his great-grandchildren.
I would love it if such things could be privately done. But I think if we're going to have any hope of seeing such a program even begin within our lifetimes, it will have to be funded by governments, as only they have enough resources to do so. Call it a jobs program, if you must--it'll boost the economy and math/science education :)
PS: An interesting novel on the subject is Firestar, I believe by Michael Flynn.
I've long said that the only things which have a chance of truly spurring a push for space exploration among the general public are the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life, or an impending "planet-killer" asteroid. And even then, you'll have those evolutionary aberrations* that would demand we lay down and let said aliens roll over us to punish us for some imagined wrong, or the religious nutcases that claim it to be "$diety's will" that we be smashed to bits for our sins.
*These are often the same ones that declare the use of any force (even in self-defense) to be wrong, but then scream bloody murder demanding protection from the police--aka asking someone else to use force on their behalf.
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin.
Nobody said anything about "ruining" earth. Destruction of earth's biosphere is not a necessary condition for space colonization--in fact, environmental preservation and space expansion can complement each other. The technologies you use to achieve the first can feed back into the second, and vice-versa.
Those of us who support pushing out into space in terms of survival aren't talking about "let's strip-mine the earth" or "oh, it's too ruined now, let's go trash something else". We're talking about off-site backups from global threats like large asteroids, virulent pandemics, biological warfare, etc., as well as providing room for expansion.
This.
Also, it's really annoying when something else in my pocket hits the camera button on the phone, and it starts taking pictures of the pocket lining. Back when I had a different phone whose sound you couldn't disable, this led to downright embarassing moments in class, when the phone would start taking pictures. Everyone starts looking around going "WTF is that noise?"
Got away from that carrier as soon as the contract ran out, and dropped the phone from something very high. I'm never buying a samsung product again after that POS.
Showing something on the screen that makes no sense to someone who knows what you're talking about... is just ignorance for ignorance's sake.
Aviation and space scenes are just as bad. I've seen airplanes change shape/size repeatedly during flight, drop like a stone after an engine failure, be terribly mishandled by some idiot playing a pilot, etc. I've also seen people explode/dessicate within seconds of exposure to vacuum, spaceships that stop as soon as the engines are cut (or maneuver as if in atmosphere), and sounds being transmitted through vacuum.
I've seen characters experience incredible decelerations that would leave them in a crushed puddle, yet walk away unharmed.
Similarly terrible are gun scenes where the actors ignore every single safety rule in the book, have limitless magazines, hhit anything while shooting from the hip, cock hammers on guns without them, repeatedly rack the slide/pump the action for dramatic effect, hear perfectly fine after blasting away in small rooms, use suppressors that make pew sounds (or that muffle revolvers), and blatantly violate safety rules.
I'd love to be an aviation and general physics consultant to hollywood, as long as I could work from home and didn't have to go to California.
"That's what happens when your emperor takes the bait and tries standing up for his own people living on American soil."
WTFBBQ? Go read a reputable history book, dude. Japan's involvement in WWII had absolutely zero to do with the internment camps (which didn't even start until after Pearl Harbor), and everything to do with grabbing resources for an empire. Hirohito was bullied by his own military staff, and Japan was fighting on the mainland and on several islands long before it got the US involved. It was fighting a war of aggression, and hit Pearl in a preemptive strike to try and get the US out of the way (at least for a while).
That's true, unless this algorithm only searches through papers linked before the cooresponding announcement--which is what my first thought was on seeing the sumamry. I did not RTFA, though.
I've seen those before; the walls go together like legos.
But back to the point, I don't want a normal-looking house... I want a bunker. The mostly-submerged low profile is part of the point.
A concrete subterranean bunker would be an awesome house! I've been dreaming about one of them for years. They have several advantages over traditional wood-frame-and-siding-with -lots-of-windows houses:
-Better insulation, so less energy leakage and lower electric bills
-Better disaster resistance (though flooding might be a concern). Your house won't get blown away in a hurricane or tornado, and you don't have to worry about the roof collapsing under heavy snow.
-Impervious to termites
-More resistant to burglars and vandals, and easier to defend against home invasions
-Possibly more fire survivability (structurally, at least). Assuming you get out, you might lose some possessions, but the structure will not contribute to the fire and will still be there after it's over. Done right, you could even seal it and let the fire suffocate itself, assuming that doesn't pose a problem to evacuation.
Unfortunately, my wife wants a traditional house. Something about appearance being more important than functionality...
And who would that be? That minister post has not existed since 2003.
That is no whooshing sound you're hearing far above your head... it's just an Imperialist lie!
Nuclear subs can generate fresh water (desalination) and oxygen (electrolysis) pretty much at-will. Spacecraft will need recycling systems, for one thing.
Or, you can go the homebuilt route. Costs vary between 15k for a real basic one, to 100k or more for a big one with all sorts of fancy interiors, glass panels, etc. Something like a Sonex will run $25k or so; an RV-7 or -8 maybe $40k over a few years, plus build time. You do have to put in the effort to build it. It's not particularly hard, you just have to be willing to put in the time and have the necessary attention to detail.
The biggest advantages of homebuilts are that you can get better performance (speed, maneuverability, and/or efficiency) from a given size/cost of airplane, and you can do your own maintenance/annual inspections. You can make your own parts in many cases, and you don't have to pay a mechanic's labor fee. After all, you built it, and therefore know that airplane better than anyone else.
Owning and flying an airplane of any kind might take a few sacrifices, but it's nothing terribly hard. It just means you keep driving your old car instead of buying a new one every three years, or you stick with your old TV instead of buying the newest big flat-panel one.
Indeed. Same thing happens with government budgets; if this year's spending increase is less than the previous year's, it's apparently a "budget cut", even though total expenditures are still greater.
Any economic system which relies on continuous growth is unsustainable. Prices of gasoline and housing cannot monotonically increase out of proportion to the rest of the market. To believe otherwise is stupidity.
Yep... I think that it was published in Asimov's science fiction magazine; July 1969 seems to ring a bell. I remember the cover distinctly; it was sitting on my nightstand for a while recently.
And yep... a few minutes searching finds it to be July 1968. The story is "Hawk Among the Sparrows" by Dean McLaughlin. Cover image here: http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?ANLGJUL68
And no, I'm not that old... we bought a whole collection of them at a bookstore in Chattanooga a couple years ago.
To clarify, "flyaway" cost is that it would theoretically cost if you walked up to Lockmart and ordered a new airplane right now. It doesn't include R&D costs that have already been paid, only the material cost plus labor and a reasonable profit margin.
Using the amortized cost is good when you're trying to justify canceling the program, which is part of what happened to the F-22. "Oh, it's expensive! We don't want to buy as many!" So they cut the purchase. Well, the R&D (much of which was already paid) was then rolled back into the new amortized cost... "hey, the price went up again! Buy less of them!" And so on.
The monetary benefit doesn't go away, but at some point it's just not worth it to work that extra hour. Where that point is depends entirely on the person doing the work, and how much they want that extra money.
Most graduated tax systems don't work that way. In your example, the money you make from working X hours would be taxed at 20%. Working X+1 hours doesn't mean that your whole income gets taxed at 40%; rather, the 40% rate is only applied to the additional money earned through the +1 hour.
In other words, your returns diminish from working extra, but they never go negative. A plot of take-home vs. earned income would start out at a 1:1 slope, then gradually decrease to a lower (but still positive) slope, but it would never go negative.
A little goes a long way... and the food coloring may be the difference (psychologically) in making the food edible. The couple extra pounds might be worth it.
That "your gun is more likely to be used against you" line only holds true if you include suicides.
Suicides make up more than half of the firearm-related deaths in the US. Most of the remaining homicides are related to street violence, and are committed by people who have no regard for the law in the first place. Many are convicted felons, prohibited from owning firearms at all, who obtain their (often stolen) weapons in illegal street transactions. These people are willing to commit murder, assault, rape... why will a little gun law stop them? The people that will follow any such gun laws are the ones that will not go committing those crimes in the first place.
If you really want to cut the murder rate, you need to hit the problem at the root. You need to figure out what makes people want to commit those crimes, and fix it there. There seems to be a strong correlation between violent crimes and poverty, (lack of) education, unemployment, etc., and I would hazard a guess that most street crime happens when people get desparate. Maybe they need money to feed themselves or their kids, but can't find any other way to get it, so they mug someone or rob a store (or start selling drugs as a way to quick cash--more on that in a moment). Maybe they need a sense of belonging, some kind of organization to fit into and be appreciated; when they can't find it at home or school and perceive no viable alternative, they go join a gang. Or maybe they see no escape from everything, and turn to drugs as a way out; the resulting addiction is so powerful that it drives them to commit crimes to feed the habit. I don't know.
How do we fix it, then? We help these people. Get them a better education; give them something to be hopeful about. Give them a real opportunity, not just a handout to string them along and keep them dependent on the system. Give them better role models than glorified entertainers who promote crime and violence, and inflate hopes of million-dollar athletic contracts to the detriment of actual learning. Show them that people of all backgrounds and colors can make a positive impact on their communities.
On the other side, violent criminals need to be taken off the streets, and kept that way. Far too many are released only to go on and hurt someone else. Sexual predators (the real ones, not teenagers caught fooling around or drunk guys peeing in public), murderers, rapists... so many of them are released back into society after a few years in jail. We don't trust them completely, so we ban them from posessing firearms and (in some cases) track where they live and set up places they can't go. Yet they've already shown their disregard for such laws; we don't trust them not to commit crimes but we trust them to follow the restrictions placed on them? It just doesn't follow. If you can't trust someone to live a normal life outside of prison, if the chance of him committing another crime is so great... why was he released in the first place? Keep these criminals in jail, and make jail unpleasant enough that it's a deterrent. I'm not talking torture and abuse, but they don't need fancy meals, satellite TV, or ice cream. Take a clue from that sherriff in Arizona, with the pink jumpsuits and lowest repeat-offender rate in the country. There should be no excuse for someone with 22 felony convictions out walking the streets with a gun; he should have been locked in jail permanently after the second one at most. And yes, that actually happened in Atlanta a little while ago; the guy was arrested for something, whereupon his record was discovered. Thankfully, I think he's been put away for life now.
Nonviolent drug offenders need treatment and help, not jail. Save that for the bad ones, not the meth addict or pothead.
Ok, rant over for now... got other things to do
Yeah, cause the gun sat there saying "come on, buddy, pick me up! Kill your mom!" And he was just an innocent little kid deceived and tricked by the evil dastardly gun, which forced its way into his hand and squeezed its own trigger.
Heh... based on the most recent enrollment statistics on the school's website, the Ratio is currently under 30% for undergrads. That's dropped a bit, I think.
The company I work for runs 4x10 as the "regular" workweek for most of engineering and production. Friday (the usual day off) counts as an overtime day. Non-exempt people get time and a half, and even the salaried people get straight time for that day.
I usually come in for a half day every Friday and pick up a few extra hours (business needs permitting, of course), though sometimes I'll sleep in an hour or two first--I usually show up around 615 the rest of the week. It still gives me an afternoon off to get stuff done around the house, run errands, or go to the range before my wife gets home. If we need to travel for the weekend, I can either use the day to pack and get ready, or we can leave early if she takes a day off.
If you find a company that offers this, take it.
Sounds a little like Georgia Tech... at the beginning of my freshman year, they got all of us together for "convocation". At some point during the speech, they said "look at the person to your left, and to your right. One of the three of you will not graduate."
My graduating class was the first one to hit 70% after five years.