One of the perks of working for an auto company is the ability to lease a car at a drastically reduced rate. And once you reach a certain salary level, the auto company "pays" the lease so the car is effectively free.
There are controls - Chrysler, for example, wouldn't give employees Vipers or Prowlers - but there was a pretty broad selection of cars to choose from.
Except for a period in the late 90s/early oughts where the only GM company car was the Pontiac Aztek.
I'd drive past their plants/offices in Detroit and the employee parking lot was solid Azteks.
...that when you consider your cannon (assuming 155mm, most common field artillery size in Western armies) has a lethal burst radius of 100m... sometimes "close enough" really IS close enough.
Every day in Afghanistan (and there were some shitty ones) was still way better than every day spent trying to help spoiled rich kids drive faster.
Not that everybody I encountered racing was a spoiled rich kid; far from it. But enough of them were that it was a real soul crusher. Far better that I spend the rest of my life accomplishing something meaningful.
There were two different types of customer for the $3000/corner parts:
1. Real Racers who understood the value-add the top line components brought to the table and who would sell their mothers to get that functionality; and
2. Rich posers who were all about being EXTREEEEM and who were buying the name to impress other rich posers.
Neither of these markets are very big - but they would spend the money.
The very, very much larger "budget racer/street driver" market was all about price.
For a while I was selling race car / high performance street car suspension systems.
I had discovered that 90% of the aftermarket shocks being sold as performance upgrades were actually crap. The customer is really not qualified to properly evaluate a shock valving and so it is very difficult for them to differentiate between a proper performance shock and a juiced-up pogo stick.
I started putting shocks on a device called a "shock dyno" (which measures the forces produced by the shock at different shaft speeds) and discovered an absolute parade of horror. Details can be read at http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets6.html
To get the good stuff you needed to be paying upwards of $3000 per corner (so $12000 per car) which is far, far out of the price range of most customers.
So I was building packages based on a brand of shock that was pretty decent and much cheaper. Even though the base design was solid, it still suffered from manufacturing variations. To get around this, I would buy batches and then dyno the lot. Shocks that were close to each other became matched sets, and I'd tweak the adjusters on the shock to ensure each pair was as closely matched as possible. On top of that, I designed some hardware to resolve some other tricky problems typical of the off-the-shelf aftermarket designs, and only used the best bang for the buck components to build them.
When done, I provided a race-quality suspension system, dyno-matched (and it came with the data sheets to prove it) that was very nearly the equal of the $3000/corner systems, for about $500/corner. I say "nearly" the equal because the adjusters on my shocks worked nowhere near as well as the adjusters on the expensive shocks, but in terms of absolute performance, they were effectively identical.
There was almost no markup in these parts; I was hoping to make it up on volume and I knew the customer base was price-sensitive.
These suspensions were INCREDIBLE deals. There was nothing else like it anywhere for anything less than 5 times the price, and unlike all the cheaper stuff, I could prove that it worked. What's more, I could run the cheaper stuff on my dyno and prove that it DIDN'T work; that it was categorically JUNK.
I sold almost none of them, and the universal complaint was "too expensive".
Even when I opened up the books, showed what I was paying for the components, explained why *this* part instead of *that* part, explained every single design decision and proved why it could not be made any cheaper without compromising the functionality, over and over again potential customers would choose to buy non-functional (but shiny) JUNK over functional parts based solely on price.
It was mind-boggling, and eventually I just said to hell with it and found something else to do.
The chip manufacturers are right on the ball here. If I were them, I'd be encouraging the creation of these kinds of motherboards and rather than down-rating the high end parts to make mid/low end, I'd be cherry-picking the best ones for the high end and defaulting the output of my fab runs right to the mid/low end SKUs. In fact, I'd be tempted to DESTROY any chip with a bad core and ensure that all the low-end chips were fully functional - specifically to build a reputation for being "overclocker-friendly".
You can't make money off what you DON'T sell. Believe me, I know.
Interesting that you chose to "foe" me because my assessment of the video does not match yours.
I say "interesting" because it makes you guilty of the same sort of behaviour you decry in the video.
The gunner, once satisfied he has correctly IDed the targets as "insurgents" is predisposed to see all actions on the ground as the actions of insurgents. Anything that fits the pattern of "insurgent activity" - no matter how tenuous - serves to further reinforce the initial (and tragically, mistaken) first assessment and further compounds the error.
You, my friend, (and you are not alone) are clearly predisposed to assess the actions taken in the video as the actions of "imperial stormtroopers" in the midst of a "war crime". You call the gunner "disturbed" without considering that the gunner considers the targets to be the kinds of men who blow up crowded marketplaces and who throw acid in the faces of young schoolgirls.
And when someone comes in with an assessment that differs from your comfortable and pat worldview, you spit some invective, chant some slogans, and change the channel via your self-moderating.
Buddy, the real world is neither comfortable or pat. It doesn't fit into your convenient political pigeon-holing system.
There are very, very bad men out there. We call upon men to do very bad things to the bad men in order to advance the greater good. And sometimes our men mistakenly do bad things to good people.
That is undeniably tragic. There is not a single player in this tragedy who doesn't wish events had played out differently. I imagine this video will be studied by generations of future soldiers in order to teach them the importance of correctly determining threat and PID, and I imagine that the consequences of seeking to cover it up will also be studied by future politicians and decision-makers as further example of the need to be open and truthful about our own mistakes.
I wonder, perhaps, if you will be so open. I wonder if you will consider the idea that not every opinion and action is politically motivated. I wonder if you are capable of listening to a contradictory idea and learning from it - maybe not all of it, but at least considering the alternative interpretation. And I wonder if you are capable of moving beyond the juvenile "my team is always right, and anybody not on my team is always wrong" attitude that substitutes for rational discourse in the modern age.
By the laws of war, an ambulance is supposed to be clearly marked with a Red Cross or Red Crescent. Lacking those markings, the vehicle cannot be assumed to be an ambulance.
And a getaway vehicle that polices up the wounded and the weapons immediately following an engagement is an established insurgent practice. It happens all the time.
I agree that, again, from our safe and comfortable computers, that no weapons are seen coming out of the van, nor does anybody clearly pick up a weapon. I think it is entirely possible that the gunner, having engaged a group of "insurgents", was seeing what he was expecting to see, rather than what was actually going on, and that the opportunity to eliminate even more bad guys in an environment where it could be done so safely - normally the opposite to what happens - was just too good to pass up.
It underscores the absolute necessity to establish PID before engaging, and how hard it can be to really see what is going on in a combat situation.
Would I like to have seen a better attempt at PID before the van was engaged? Yes. Do I understand WHY the van was engaged? Yes. Do I think this is a case of a tragic mistake? Yes.
My best guess is that once it was discovered that the incident was a blue-on-green... it's not easy to be the guy who pulled the trigger on the wrong people. And there is a strong sense of duty amongst commanders to protect their soldiers, not in the sense of sweeping something shameful under the rug (although that does happen) but in the sense of shielding them from the pain that comes from knowing you killed a bunch of the wrong people.
There are other potential assessments that are less noble, and they might be right too.
But I'm in complete agreement with you that notwithstanding how hard a road it is to walk, and no matter how bad it might look to an uniformed eye, it is ALWAYS better to admit your own mistakes than to try and hide them, as the act of trying to hide them looks like culpability.
Plus, now they have allowed someone else to control the narrative. Instead of this being a tragic accident, it is now "Collateral Murder". Instead of an example of why properly establishing PID is so important, it's now a story of malfeasance.
So yes, I do think that attempting to suppress this video was a very bad idea.
Typical insurgent tactics include a getaway vehicle. Their job is to remain in sight of the ambush (often filming it for recruiting purposes) and once the ambush is triggered, they move in to help the ambushers get away.
If the ambush goes poorly, they attempt to recover weapons and bodies.
While tragically mistaken, the arrival of that van fits the usual pattern of activity post-ambush.
Yes, the effects of that weapon on people are horrific and not easy to watch, but don't let your horror override your reason.
Those gunships were flying top cover for a ground patrol. (This is all direct from the voice traffic on the video) The ground patrol said they saw people with weapons up ahead, and they asked the air element to have a look.
The air element saw a group of people - not a "crowd" by any means; that's just sensationalism - and saw weapons in the group. According to their ROE, they are allowed to engage armed persons who appear to be a threat (in this case, to the ground patrol) and they did so.
This engagement, as far as I can see, was conducted correctly. They held fire until they were clear of the building and when they IDed that one of the targets was wounded but unarmed, they held fire - exactly as required to by their ROE. The gunner is very keen to have the wounded target pick up a weapon, because that would allow him to open fire again, but he holds fire as required to.
The tragedy here is that the group does not appear to have been an ambush in the making, and that camera equipment was mistaken for weapons. I'm pretty sure I saw at least one AK-47 at one point... but I also saw the camera guy with his camera slung over his shoulder and at that point, it sure looked like a slung weapon.
In other frames, it is more clearly a camera - but I also have the benefit of *knowing* that it *is* a camera. I'm not in a gunship orbiting what I think is an ambush in the making with my buddies' lives in the balance.
From the POV of the ground forces and the gunship, they were seeing an ambush. Based on the activity in the area at the time, which almost certainly had included other, actual ambushes, they were probably pre-disposed to interpret what they saw as an ambush.
So what we have is a tragic case of mistaken identity.
That's terrible, but it happens. It is one of the consequences of guerrilla warfare - when friend and foe look alike, mistakes will be made.
I note too that when the area is deemed secure and the ground patrol shows up, they apply first aid to the wounded and evacuate them. There is a brief question as to where to evacuate them, but there's nothing sinister in that, and it seems like the decision was made to send them to a closer, local hospital rather than wait to get them to an American treatment facility.
This is what war is like. It's not at all pretty, or clean. And when your tools are high-powered weapons, the consequences of mistakes are high and that sucks for all involved. We can, safe behind our computers, armchair-quarterback the decisions made on the ground until the cows come home, but that won't remove the necessity of applying lethal force to the enemies of civilization, nor will it bring back to life those killed in error when mistakes are made.
There's a bug that makes reboots hang until the SATA devices reset that's been there for 3 versions that doesn't seem to get any attention, but they sure spend a lot of time arguing over window manager controls....
What about the other morality issue?
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The morality issue that the health insurance industry is set up to rape its "customers" at the cost of their health?
There's a reason why every other civilized nation has publicly funded, universal health care - the government of a state, no matter how inept it may be, is in place to serve the needs of its citizens.
Private health care, no matter how competent, is in place to generate profit for the private corporation operating it.
The primary lever operating on a public-run system is voter outrage. This tends to apply pressure on the government to improve the system for the benefit of customers.
The primary lever operating on a private system is the generation of profit. This tends to apply pressure towards raising costs and reducing services.
The current American system is defective by design and is ruining the health of your citizens. And the shills of the insurance companies have convinced a large portion of you that it is immoral to try and fix the system. THAT is what you should be outraged about - that you have been successfully PSYOPed into believing that universal public healthcare is somehow immoral and wrong.
Oh man... I misread your nick as "knuth" not "kurth", and the thought of Don Knuth doing a Futurama/Professor Farnsworth reference had coffee coming out of my nose.
A traditional "helicopter toilet" is a problem; it's shit stored in a non-degradable bag. Separating the shit from the bag to make fertilizer is non-viable (for a number of reasons) So it is hazardous waste.
But a load in this bag is quite literally a unit of fertilizer. Not immediately (there is processing time involved) but eventually that bag of shit is going to have a value.
Work out that value, subtract the cost of the bag, storage and handling costs, etc - and then give away the bags and pay people for full ones.
Not only do you encourage the use of the bags (a net benefit to hygiene) you inject money into the local economy and you make a profit - while helping improve the food supply.
Put another way:
1. Give away bags
2. Buy full bags
3. Store full bags until they become viable fertilizer
My military has a tiny fraction of that budget and of those personnel. Hell, Chrysler has (had?) more employees than we have in our entire armed forces.
And yet we do leadership just fine. Better, I would argue, than the Americans.
I'm not buying your argument - and I've seen it first hand in multiple places. Empire building, sleeping the way to the top, screw the competent people in order to promote the interests of your incompetant friends... it's friggin' "Gorillas in the Mist" in civvie life.
And the stockade is very, very, very rarely used. When it is, it is usually for offenses that would result in immediate termination in a civvie business. It's not an advantage, save that we attempt to rehabilitate our problem children instead of just punting them.
Investment theory models treat corporations as if they were mathematical or perhaps physical entities - a mechanism, if you will.
That is not the case.
A corporation is a SOCIAL entity, because most of the moving parts are PEOPLE.
That means that there are second and third and umpty-ordinal effects of the model-driven first order effects because the model cannot predict how the employees will feel and react to decisions made in the company.
Any military commander will tell you that the most precious attribute of a unit is *morale*. You can give a man the best weapons, the best equipment, outnumber the enemy by a significant margin - but if the troops won't fight, you're going to lose.
Morale is built from human relationships and human contact. It is constructed from trust and experience. It is a very touchy-feely, nebulous concept that does not model well. It can be simulated, somewhat, and many wargames attempt to build in some approximation of it because it is so important. Do your investment models take it into account?
I have been in companies with both low and high morale. The difference is night and day. And a company with low morale is both a horrid place to work and and underperformer.
Slashdot Mirror
You should see one in pea green....
A puke-green Aztek is pretty much the perfect storm of automobile ugly.
DG
One of the perks of working for an auto company is the ability to lease a car at a drastically reduced rate. And once you reach a certain salary level, the auto company "pays" the lease so the car is effectively free.
There are controls - Chrysler, for example, wouldn't give employees Vipers or Prowlers - but there was a pretty broad selection of cars to choose from.
Except for a period in the late 90s/early oughts where the only GM company car was the Pontiac Aztek.
I'd drive past their plants/offices in Detroit and the employee parking lot was solid Azteks.
<NELSON>Ha-ha!</NELSON>
DG
Dammit, you beat me to it.
Well played sir, well played.
DG
If slit trenches count... then yes. Thousands.
DG
...you're doing it wrong.
Let me guess - you don't use library functions either? Write every program from scratch?
DG
That's really... very funny.
Funnier even that I can't tell which of the two is being mocked...
DG
...that when you consider your cannon (assuming 155mm, most common field artillery size in Western armies) has a lethal burst radius of 100m... sometimes "close enough" really IS close enough.
DG
I dunno, that 789 guy seems pretty cool too.
DG
I went back to the Army.
Every day in Afghanistan (and there were some shitty ones) was still way better than every day spent trying to help spoiled rich kids drive faster.
Not that everybody I encountered racing was a spoiled rich kid; far from it. But enough of them were that it was a real soul crusher. Far better that I spend the rest of my life accomplishing something meaningful.
In the meantime, I opened up my specs for those suspensions: http://farnorthracing.com/autocross/konis.html
DG
There were two different types of customer for the $3000/corner parts:
1. Real Racers who understood the value-add the top line components brought to the table and who would sell their mothers to get that functionality; and
2. Rich posers who were all about being EXTREEEEM and who were buying the name to impress other rich posers.
Neither of these markets are very big - but they would spend the money.
The very, very much larger "budget racer/street driver" market was all about price.
DG
For a while I was selling race car / high performance street car suspension systems.
I had discovered that 90% of the aftermarket shocks being sold as performance upgrades were actually crap. The customer is really not qualified to properly evaluate a shock valving and so it is very difficult for them to differentiate between a proper performance shock and a juiced-up pogo stick.
I started putting shocks on a device called a "shock dyno" (which measures the forces produced by the shock at different shaft speeds) and discovered an absolute parade of horror. Details can be read at http://farnorthracing.com/autocross_secrets6.html
To get the good stuff you needed to be paying upwards of $3000 per corner (so $12000 per car) which is far, far out of the price range of most customers.
So I was building packages based on a brand of shock that was pretty decent and much cheaper. Even though the base design was solid, it still suffered from manufacturing variations. To get around this, I would buy batches and then dyno the lot. Shocks that were close to each other became matched sets, and I'd tweak the adjusters on the shock to ensure each pair was as closely matched as possible. On top of that, I designed some hardware to resolve some other tricky problems typical of the off-the-shelf aftermarket designs, and only used the best bang for the buck components to build them.
When done, I provided a race-quality suspension system, dyno-matched (and it came with the data sheets to prove it) that was very nearly the equal of the $3000/corner systems, for about $500/corner. I say "nearly" the equal because the adjusters on my shocks worked nowhere near as well as the adjusters on the expensive shocks, but in terms of absolute performance, they were effectively identical.
There was almost no markup in these parts; I was hoping to make it up on volume and I knew the customer base was price-sensitive.
These suspensions were INCREDIBLE deals. There was nothing else like it anywhere for anything less than 5 times the price, and unlike all the cheaper stuff, I could prove that it worked. What's more, I could run the cheaper stuff on my dyno and prove that it DIDN'T work; that it was categorically JUNK.
I sold almost none of them, and the universal complaint was "too expensive".
Even when I opened up the books, showed what I was paying for the components, explained why *this* part instead of *that* part, explained every single design decision and proved why it could not be made any cheaper without compromising the functionality, over and over again potential customers would choose to buy non-functional (but shiny) JUNK over functional parts based solely on price.
It was mind-boggling, and eventually I just said to hell with it and found something else to do.
The chip manufacturers are right on the ball here. If I were them, I'd be encouraging the creation of these kinds of motherboards and rather than down-rating the high end parts to make mid/low end, I'd be cherry-picking the best ones for the high end and defaulting the output of my fab runs right to the mid/low end SKUs. In fact, I'd be tempted to DESTROY any chip with a bad core and ensure that all the low-end chips were fully functional - specifically to build a reputation for being "overclocker-friendly".
You can't make money off what you DON'T sell. Believe me, I know.
DG
Interesting that you chose to "foe" me because my assessment of the video does not match yours.
I say "interesting" because it makes you guilty of the same sort of behaviour you decry in the video.
The gunner, once satisfied he has correctly IDed the targets as "insurgents" is predisposed to see all actions on the ground as the actions of insurgents. Anything that fits the pattern of "insurgent activity" - no matter how tenuous - serves to further reinforce the initial (and tragically, mistaken) first assessment and further compounds the error.
You, my friend, (and you are not alone) are clearly predisposed to assess the actions taken in the video as the actions of "imperial stormtroopers" in the midst of a "war crime". You call the gunner "disturbed" without considering that the gunner considers the targets to be the kinds of men who blow up crowded marketplaces and who throw acid in the faces of young schoolgirls.
And when someone comes in with an assessment that differs from your comfortable and pat worldview, you spit some invective, chant some slogans, and change the channel via your self-moderating.
Buddy, the real world is neither comfortable or pat. It doesn't fit into your convenient political pigeon-holing system.
There are very, very bad men out there. We call upon men to do very bad things to the bad men in order to advance the greater good. And sometimes our men mistakenly do bad things to good people.
That is undeniably tragic. There is not a single player in this tragedy who doesn't wish events had played out differently. I imagine this video will be studied by generations of future soldiers in order to teach them the importance of correctly determining threat and PID, and I imagine that the consequences of seeking to cover it up will also be studied by future politicians and decision-makers as further example of the need to be open and truthful about our own mistakes.
I wonder, perhaps, if you will be so open. I wonder if you will consider the idea that not every opinion and action is politically motivated. I wonder if you are capable of listening to a contradictory idea and learning from it - maybe not all of it, but at least considering the alternative interpretation. And I wonder if you are capable of moving beyond the juvenile "my team is always right, and anybody not on my team is always wrong" attitude that substitutes for rational discourse in the modern age.
Good day.
DG
By the laws of war, an ambulance is supposed to be clearly marked with a Red Cross or Red Crescent. Lacking those markings, the vehicle cannot be assumed to be an ambulance.
And a getaway vehicle that polices up the wounded and the weapons immediately following an engagement is an established insurgent practice. It happens all the time.
I agree that, again, from our safe and comfortable computers, that no weapons are seen coming out of the van, nor does anybody clearly pick up a weapon. I think it is entirely possible that the gunner, having engaged a group of "insurgents", was seeing what he was expecting to see, rather than what was actually going on, and that the opportunity to eliminate even more bad guys in an environment where it could be done so safely - normally the opposite to what happens - was just too good to pass up.
It underscores the absolute necessity to establish PID before engaging, and how hard it can be to really see what is going on in a combat situation.
Would I like to have seen a better attempt at PID before the van was engaged? Yes. Do I understand WHY the van was engaged? Yes. Do I think this is a case of a tragic mistake? Yes.
DG
All I can do is speculate.
My best guess is that once it was discovered that the incident was a blue-on-green... it's not easy to be the guy who pulled the trigger on the wrong people. And there is a strong sense of duty amongst commanders to protect their soldiers, not in the sense of sweeping something shameful under the rug (although that does happen) but in the sense of shielding them from the pain that comes from knowing you killed a bunch of the wrong people.
There are other potential assessments that are less noble, and they might be right too.
But I'm in complete agreement with you that notwithstanding how hard a road it is to walk, and no matter how bad it might look to an uniformed eye, it is ALWAYS better to admit your own mistakes than to try and hide them, as the act of trying to hide them looks like culpability.
Plus, now they have allowed someone else to control the narrative. Instead of this being a tragic accident, it is now "Collateral Murder". Instead of an example of why properly establishing PID is so important, it's now a story of malfeasance.
So yes, I do think that attempting to suppress this video was a very bad idea.
DG
Typical insurgent tactics include a getaway vehicle. Their job is to remain in sight of the ambush (often filming it for recruiting purposes) and once the ambush is triggered, they move in to help the ambushers get away.
If the ambush goes poorly, they attempt to recover weapons and bodies.
While tragically mistaken, the arrival of that van fits the usual pattern of activity post-ambush.
DG
I've seen the video.
Yes, the effects of that weapon on people are horrific and not easy to watch, but don't let your horror override your reason.
Those gunships were flying top cover for a ground patrol. (This is all direct from the voice traffic on the video) The ground patrol said they saw people with weapons up ahead, and they asked the air element to have a look.
The air element saw a group of people - not a "crowd" by any means; that's just sensationalism - and saw weapons in the group. According to their ROE, they are allowed to engage armed persons who appear to be a threat (in this case, to the ground patrol) and they did so.
This engagement, as far as I can see, was conducted correctly. They held fire until they were clear of the building and when they IDed that one of the targets was wounded but unarmed, they held fire - exactly as required to by their ROE. The gunner is very keen to have the wounded target pick up a weapon, because that would allow him to open fire again, but he holds fire as required to.
The tragedy here is that the group does not appear to have been an ambush in the making, and that camera equipment was mistaken for weapons. I'm pretty sure I saw at least one AK-47 at one point... but I also saw the camera guy with his camera slung over his shoulder and at that point, it sure looked like a slung weapon.
In other frames, it is more clearly a camera - but I also have the benefit of *knowing* that it *is* a camera. I'm not in a gunship orbiting what I think is an ambush in the making with my buddies' lives in the balance.
From the POV of the ground forces and the gunship, they were seeing an ambush. Based on the activity in the area at the time, which almost certainly had included other, actual ambushes, they were probably pre-disposed to interpret what they saw as an ambush.
So what we have is a tragic case of mistaken identity.
That's terrible, but it happens. It is one of the consequences of guerrilla warfare - when friend and foe look alike, mistakes will be made.
I note too that when the area is deemed secure and the ground patrol shows up, they apply first aid to the wounded and evacuate them. There is a brief question as to where to evacuate them, but there's nothing sinister in that, and it seems like the decision was made to send them to a closer, local hospital rather than wait to get them to an American treatment facility.
This is what war is like. It's not at all pretty, or clean. And when your tools are high-powered weapons, the consequences of mistakes are high and that sucks for all involved. We can, safe behind our computers, armchair-quarterback the decisions made on the ground until the cows come home, but that won't remove the necessity of applying lethal force to the enemies of civilization, nor will it bring back to life those killed in error when mistakes are made.
A tragedy no matter how you slice it.
DG
Seriously.
There's a bug that makes reboots hang until the SATA devices reset that's been there for 3 versions that doesn't seem to get any attention, but they sure spend a lot of time arguing over window manager controls....
I may just go back to Fedora.
DG
Quiet Sonny.
Now get off my lawn.
DG
My current stats for March on http://farnorthracing.com/
Firefox: 50%
IE: 32%
Chrome:9%
Safari: 8%
Opera: 2%
Numbers accurate to 1% due to rounding.
DG
The morality issue that the health insurance industry is set up to rape its "customers" at the cost of their health?
There's a reason why every other civilized nation has publicly funded, universal health care - the government of a state, no matter how inept it may be, is in place to serve the needs of its citizens.
Private health care, no matter how competent, is in place to generate profit for the private corporation operating it.
The primary lever operating on a public-run system is voter outrage. This tends to apply pressure on the government to improve the system for the benefit of customers.
The primary lever operating on a private system is the generation of profit. This tends to apply pressure towards raising costs and reducing services.
The current American system is defective by design and is ruining the health of your citizens. And the shills of the insurance companies have convinced a large portion of you that it is immoral to try and fix the system. THAT is what you should be outraged about - that you have been successfully PSYOPed into believing that universal public healthcare is somehow immoral and wrong.
DG
Oh man... I misread your nick as "knuth" not "kurth", and the thought of Don Knuth doing a Futurama/Professor Farnsworth reference had coffee coming out of my nose.
Funny AND painful.
DG
The problem with this model is that success is dependent on owning/renting cropland, to which the average slum dweller does not have access.
Shit collection, however, anybody can do.
DG
There's a business opportunity here.
A traditional "helicopter toilet" is a problem; it's shit stored in a non-degradable bag. Separating the shit from the bag to make fertilizer is non-viable (for a number of reasons) So it is hazardous waste.
But a load in this bag is quite literally a unit of fertilizer. Not immediately (there is processing time involved) but eventually that bag of shit is going to have a value.
Work out that value, subtract the cost of the bag, storage and handling costs, etc - and then give away the bags and pay people for full ones.
Not only do you encourage the use of the bags (a net benefit to hygiene) you inject money into the local economy and you make a profit - while helping improve the food supply.
Put another way:
1. Give away bags
2. Buy full bags
3. Store full bags until they become viable fertilizer
4. Sell fertilizer
5. Profit!!!
DG
Who says I'm American?
My military has a tiny fraction of that budget and of those personnel. Hell, Chrysler has (had?) more employees than we have in our entire armed forces.
And yet we do leadership just fine. Better, I would argue, than the Americans.
I'm not buying your argument - and I've seen it first hand in multiple places. Empire building, sleeping the way to the top, screw the competent people in order to promote the interests of your incompetant friends... it's friggin' "Gorillas in the Mist" in civvie life.
And the stockade is very, very, very rarely used. When it is, it is usually for offenses that would result in immediate termination in a civvie business. It's not an advantage, save that we attempt to rehabilitate our problem children instead of just punting them.
DG
Investment theory models treat corporations as if they were mathematical or perhaps physical entities - a mechanism, if you will.
That is not the case.
A corporation is a SOCIAL entity, because most of the moving parts are PEOPLE.
That means that there are second and third and umpty-ordinal effects of the model-driven first order effects because the model cannot predict how the employees will feel and react to decisions made in the company.
Any military commander will tell you that the most precious attribute of a unit is *morale*. You can give a man the best weapons, the best equipment, outnumber the enemy by a significant margin - but if the troops won't fight, you're going to lose.
Morale is built from human relationships and human contact. It is constructed from trust and experience. It is a very touchy-feely, nebulous concept that does not model well. It can be simulated, somewhat, and many wargames attempt to build in some approximation of it because it is so important. Do your investment models take it into account?
I have been in companies with both low and high morale. The difference is night and day. And a company with low morale is both a horrid place to work and and underperformer.
Leadership, not management, build winners.
DG