Comment Re:Hyperloop misses the forest for the trees (Score 1) 153
Wish I had mod points - you are explaining reality well.
Wish I had mod points - you are explaining reality well.
Actually, the MTA subway does run on a fixed schedule. Nobody cares, though, because a 1 minute wait during peak hours and 5 minutes or so during off-peak means we just show up and wait (well, in Manhattan, anyway.)
The problem is that Tesla needs to transition from a niche player to a production automaker, meanwhile they are trying to finance themselves like a software company. Cars don't scale like software:
One serious design flaw that starts surfacing three years from now could kill them (and they're already betting the farm here - they think their tooling is production ready and are budgeting accordingly, normal automakers would still be using lower cost, beta quality machinery while they work the kinks out.)
They haven't turned a profit to date, and best technology in the world won't make a $35K car 5x cheaper to produce.
Scaling up requires a capital investment that is basically linear with the scaling factor. 500K Model 3s is going to need a ton of capital, and that capital is betting on one model.
Tesla seems like all of Musk's current plans: a cool technology solution to one part of the 10 parts that have to come together to build a viable company; negative cashflow; rosy predictions. Maybe he wins, but his plan doesn't seem to align with reality.
You missed the point of Sun Tzu you referenced and moved the goal post.
When you talk about cohesive fighting force you are talking about combat effectiveness i.e. the lethality of the military..
The only one moving goalposts is you: nice try telling me I said "cohesive fighting force" and thus meant "lethality of the military." Actually, you are just picking up the ball and moving it to where you would like it to be.
Your facts are wrong, your logic is broken, and you probably should reread your Sun Tzu.
Everything the military does is in service to killing the enemy.
"The mission of the Department of Defense is to provide the military forces needed to deter war and to protect the security of our country. The department's headquarters is at the Pentagon."
Luckily, our DOD's understanding of their own role is a bit more sophisticated than that of a first grader.
That's why my answer had two parts and I said the first part was a start. Sorry, there wasn't a free, complete, online analysis that exactly provided everything a homophobic chickenhawk civilian might ask for.
http://www.rand.org/pubs/resea... would be a good start.
If you want a complete analysis of the effectiveness of armies with high equality versus those with non-mission aligned structures, that's the domain of military history. Reading about the French army before and after the revolution would be a good place to start, or try the Vietnam, or try the Israelis.
The military doesn't need to be at the forefront of social change. There is nothing wrong with the military lagging, and by doing so in minimizes internal disruption. Heck, greater society is still fighting bathroom policy, the military has other stuff to occupy its time.
It may not need to be at the forefront of social change, but it needs to be at the forefront of equality: it's not a coincidence that "moral" and "morale" are basically the same word. Sun Tzu lists "moral law" as one of his five constants of war: align your army with your stated aims and you have a cohesive fighting force that will do their utmost; add a bunch of random rules that have no effect on the mission, and you have a less effective, more cynical, less motivated force.
don't tell the government to go fuck themselves.
I hate their subservience
I think they did: "[we, Facebook] appreciate the important work law enforcement does, and we understand the need to carry out investigations. That's why we already have a protocol in place to respond to any requests we can." That's lawyer talk for "you look butt-hurt and stupid. Please fuck off."
The liberals were the fascists in the Nazi party (Nazi meaning new socialist), they supported the fascists in Communist regimes around the world who for the last 70 years have murdered hundreds of millions of innocents, and the liberals are the fascists today, who cannot tolerate any other viewpoints or questioning of their theories (socialism/communism/atheisim/progressiveism/multiculturalism/diversity/evolution/AGW/...) and the list goes on.
Word salad of people who don't live in your trailer park kills 200,000,000+ people since 1947? I somehow missed that.
This supreme court would probably agreed with you. In 2002, they struck down a ban of virtual child porn (from the NYT:)
"Affirming that free speech principles apply with full force in the computer age, the Supreme Court today struck down provisions of a federal law that made it a crime to create, distribute or possess ''virtual'' child pornography that used computer images or young adults rather than actual children.
The law, the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, ''prohibits speech that records no crime and creates no victims by its production,'' Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority in the court's latest decision upholding First Amendment protections online."
I'm sure your credit union would have no trouble with this physical check, then:
That is quite elegant.
I had originally thought of picking the numbers with a tied UBI (like % of GDP) and a median-based percentage: it keeps the system voter-neutral under somewhat idealistic assumptions. Mean-based does seem to have some nicer features.
No, it must be that people at the top of the income scale are taxed (in a sliding proportion up the scale of course) to pay for the people at the bottom of the scale who aren't making any income that can be taxed? The guy making $1M at the top of society gets taxed 50% to fund 16 people at the bottom who get the basic income and don't have income to be taxed. The 2nd guy making $900k gets taxed 40% to pay for 12 people earning the basic income, etc. etc. and down the scale.
How else would it work?
One other way it could work is to not even have the sliding scale: everyone gets $30,000 and pays a flat X% tax on all additional income. Set X to the number of your choice, e.g. at 40%, the person earning $75K/yr is at the neutral point, everyone earning less sees some benefit, everyone earning more funds the program to some extent. It's actually not a terrible tax system: it's just two numbers, the BI and X%, and a dollar earned is worth the same to everyone in terms of money kept.
Well, you could read Anthony Courtney's Yampa Arcade paper: it describes the implementation of an arcade game in a functional system.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
