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Comment Re:Yes. (Score 1) 1216

No. We're not talking about limiting what you can make off this business.

We're talking about limiting what you make relative to those who will be doing all the work that earns the company the money you want to keep all for yourself.
Sure the CEO makes all the "big decisions" and guides the corporate system toward a goal, but they don't DO anything. Thousands of people toil 8-12 hours a day doing the actual things that make the "big picture" actually happen. They don't take vacations, they are constantly at risk of being laid off at a moments notice and they work in very crowded conditions.

If a CEO needs half an office floor and $5M a year to do good work, how is it possible that the people who produce the income for the company can do it in 15 square feet of cubicle for $25,000a year? How is thinking that much harder than doing?

That sort of thinking falls flat in every other aspect of reality; it it easier to imagine a tall building, to engineer/design the building or to actually build the thing? The imagining is the easy part but pays the best. The designing/engineering is tougher and pays less. The actual shooting nails, pouring concrete and hammering rivets 800 feet in the air is the hardest part but pays the least.
Fine... the "thinker" had an education and that costs money. Fine, the rivet banger is a high school dropout but puts life and limb literally on the line.
Why does the thinker deserve 200x the pay of the riveter? Without either the building doesn't exist.

We're talking about sharing a reasonable amount of wealth with those who produce the wealth in the first place.

Comment re-fueling / re-charging (Score 1) 810

Whatever you want to call it, with pure electric vehicles it takes too long. The ratio of charge time to miles driven is off kilter.

I drive a VW Golf TDI. I can run it on #2 diesel, #2 heating oil, soybean oil, used fryer oil, basically any medium oil from any source as long as I can filter it and get in the tank spout.
The longest a re-fill takes me (from 6gal carry tanks) is about 10 minutes. At an average station pump fueling takes about 3 minutes.
On a full tank I can travel 720 miles of regular (non-babying) driving and up to 800 miles if I am very conservative.
That means about 13 hours of driving for every 3 minutes of fueling (assuming 55mph average speed between highway/city)
My car can carry 1000lbs of people or cargo
My car tows 1200lbs on a small trailer (at freeway speeds)
My car has killer air-conditioning so I can tolerate the 120F days here in Phoenix, AZ

When electric cars get an infrastructure that allows me to pull in to a refueling station and get a full charge in less that 5 minutes, I'll consider it. The stations need to be ubiquitous so I don't have to plan special stops or routes.
I don't care if the charging and battery technology improve to meet my charge rate requirements or if the entire battery pack is swapped out by a robot, charged then swapped in to someone else's car later that day.

My next vehicle will be either pure diesel or a diesel/electric hybrid and that will continue to be the case until an all-electric vehicle gets even close to those operational parameters above. And yes, I know my use profile is atypical. EVs make perfect sense for a person who commutes a regular route every day and has no other needs for a car and who has an employer adjacent compatible charging station.

Ring, ring. Hi honey, can you stop by the butcher and pick up some steaks for dinner?
Sorry, the car only has 30 miles of charge left, going to the butcher would take 42 miles to get there and home. We'll have to make another trip.
Get home... charge car for 2 hours, drive to butcher, drive home, charge car for 2 hours.

Yea, none of that sounds appealing to me.

Comment Re:Why subsidize? (Score 1) 1030

Where in the Constitution is there any mention of the number of parties there should be?
We have a two party system in the US because there seems to be an inherent human affection for the "us-them" duopoly style confrontation of a diametrically opposed pair. Funny thing is that in most such cases, the two opponents share more in common that they have differences but we focus and accentuate the differences instead of the commonalities. We like to feel important and better than others (greed, avarice) and so we fight for our arbitrary choices.

Comment Re:Fucking rednecks (Score 5, Insightful) 1030

Solar needs lots of space to produce large amounts of power, sure. But we have lots of wasted space in our urban and suburban centers. Every rooftop that doesn't have solar panels is a target for panels. In a single family home, not only do you generate electricity, the panels shade the structure and keep it cooler in the summer months.

Germany is hardly what anyone would call a bastion of sunshine, but they seem to be making quite a go of solar.

As for the subsidies for solar and other renewables: only fair. The US subsidizes oil with tax breaks, incentives and let's not even get started on the military adventures we've been on to control/protect our oil interests in the middle-east.

Comment reality check (Score 4, Informative) 382

From their own web site, the "...NSF's FY 2014 budget request is $7.626 billion"

$0,007.6 billon NSF budget. The Federal budget for 2014 is about $3.77 trillion (wikipedia) To put that on the same scale:
$3,770.0 billion total US budget. So the NSF budget is (I think I did the math correctly) 0.2% of the total budget. Less than 1/4 of one percent!

$3 billion is what the Navy is spending on a singe new Zumwalt destroyer (the next 4 in that fleet will cost $2.5B each) to fight nonexistent maritime enemies. That's two NSF budgets for ships that will do nothing but cost money to operate for the next 20 years.

I think this is the religious right pushing to get the US Government to stop funding science that disproves their church teachings and bible scripture.

Comment Not safer (Score 1) 210

Inevitably the cause of unsafe conditions in a high speed chase is the run-away driver/suspect. Unless you start training the general population on high-speed driving techniques (and I'm not saying that is a bad idea) these bullets don't increase safety.

Comment Re:Simple reason ... (Score 1) 559

"because there's no market for it."
at the current rates, there will be over a million 4k TVs in homes buy the end of next year.

First: where's your citation. You shouldn't just make up numbers to support your argument.

If I understand you: they started selling 4K sets earlier this year. By the end of next year (1.5 years at least) they will have sold 1 million 4K TVs and you call that a market? Nielsen estimates there are about 115 million TVs in the US alone, NationMaster estimates over 1.5 billion TVs worldwide.

one million 4K sets is less than 1% of all US TVs and .07% of the worldwide TVs. In what fantasy world is that a viable market? Sure maybe the TVs themselves would be profitable for the manufacturer, but how does 1% or less market penetration drive content providers to support 4K? Unless and until you get high quality porn on a 4K set (or sports), that market segment is going to remain a joke.

Now lets compare that with some known success stories: Apple's iPhone 5s: sold 9 million units in 3 days and probably 500 million iOS devices in total sold.
xBox 360: 77 million sold by April 2013 (reported by Gamespot), PS2: 157M, Wii 100M (all from some quick Googles).

Those are numbers for a product or technology that consumers want and 3rd parties can make money selling to. Sure a small market can be profitable when a perceived value is achieve for the premium price (Bently, Rolls Royce, Aston Martin), etc. and the product does not depend on 3rd party products for popularity.

Comment Re:Police and Judges. (Score 1) 871

"You can't legally make yourself guilty through silence, but you can certainly make yourself a suspect."
The police don't tend to waste their time talking to non-involved people; they talk to those they suspect are witnesses or perpetrators; hence they only talk to suspects. If a police officer is questioning you then you are very definitely a suspect in some sense.

Comment Re:You can't (Score 1) 375

Since it depends upon the willingness of the woman to take the drug I don't consider that a technological solution. And I don't think I consider pregnancy a social problem. A personal problem if anything.

You could argue that pregnancy in under-educated, poverty stricken or unfit parent situations is a social problem, but if those were solved by pregnancy control drugs then why are the problems still around?

Comment You can't (Score 1) 375

You can never solve a social problem with technological solutions. Social problems need social controls.

Hack your iPad: 1 week detention. Second time: 1 week suspension. Do it again: expulsion.

There is no way to keep kids from writing on the walls (prohibit markers?), drawing profanity on white boards (lock them behind glass?) or any sort of vandalism. Pass the rules, publicize the first few detentions, suspensions or expulsions and the problem will all but go away in two weeks. Sure there will be sporadic incidents but not district-wide bypasses as the article speaks to,

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