In real life, as opposed to in your head, evidence suggests that to the contrary, what is better for everyone is a rather expansive state.

To wit, in most indicators, including wealth, large state countries such as western Europe, Canada and Japan are at least comparable and often better than the USA, while small state countries such as Somalia or Haiti are much below.

So what you say might sound very logic and obvious to you, but is contrary to the facts. I.e. the quintessential definition of truthiness: it ought to be right because it sounds right, facts be damned.

Not if it is accompanied with tax cuts. Pay attention.

Spending cuts and tax cuts worked well? Sorry but you are wrong. Spending cuts and minor tax increases have outperformed the former every where.

Except that it hasn't worked anywhere, anyplace. But yeah, aside from that it works.

Apologies for that link to the graphic that doesn't work. It works fine when it was linked from the google search results, but otherwise seems to require a paid account to see it. I hate crap websites that game google that way

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

"In December 2012, Tesla employed almost 3,000 full-time employees.[3][26] By January 2014, this number had grown to 6,000 employees."
"Number of employees - 10,000 (Nov 2014)"

3000 to 6000 to 10000. Nope, that certainly doesn't sound like growth. But just in case any of those words were too big for you, here's a graphic:
http://www.statista.com/statis...

" In August 2014 the company announced it, in conjunction with Panasonic, would establish a "gigafactory" battery manufacturing plant in the Southwest or Western United States by 2020. The US$5 billion plant would employ 6,500 people, and reduce Tesla's battery costs by 30 percent."

So in additional to however many other employees they add over the next 5 years, they will then add another 60+% of today's employee count, and in doing so be able to greatly decrease the cost for the most expensive part of their car...the one part that is MOST responsible for pushing Tesla cars out of the price range of the average person. But I'm sure that won't result in any growth, either.

This scheme will work for one branch in Lesser Nowhere, Sechwan Province, with a finite and small set of pictures, and a small number of crooks. Once the number of faces increases, the probability of a false positive explodes, roughly as (N 2) (select every two out of N), where N is the size of the pools of pictures + the person being scanned.

The well-known example is the "birthday paradox", in which twenty-three people at a party increases the probability of two of them having the same birthday to fifty-fifty. That particular case was because the actual probability was multiplied by (25 2) = 25! / ((25-2)! * 2!) = 6900 comparisons being made, times 1/365 chances of a hit.

The German federal security service considered using one of my then employer's recognizers for airports to catch terrorists, but ended up facing the problem of accusing grandma of being part of the Bader-Meinhoff gang (;-)) No matter how accurate we were, a few more people in the pool would give us false positives. We'd need roughly an accuracy of 99.9 followed by roughly as many decimal places of 9s as there were powers of ten of people.

--dave

Most of the other clean tax subsidies are given to the clients (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla) not to Musk's companies directly.

On the contrary - SolarCity retains the tax breaks and the subsidies. They even counsel against the "buy it outright" option because "you'll need an accountant specializing in energy credits and taxes". (Read "our business model is based on being an unregulated utility and utterly depends on monthly cashflow from leases".)

They forgot the benefit that it gets us out of the Middle East. That sandtrap is a massive waste of resources that I hate is being subsidized.

If only the Middle East were our main source of oil... it isn't.* And even with the shift to electric vehicles and solar power, petrochemicals are still vitally important industrial feedstocks, and thus a stable Middle East is still of prime economic interest to the West.

A police bullpen or typing pool may be fine in a big open area. The same goes for sales and marketing types. However, if you're talking about any work which requires stretches of concentrated effort then it's just a Bad Idea. Engineers? No. Programmers? No. Accountants? No. Any kind of researcher? No.

Have you ever seen a picture of an engineering/drafting office from say... anywhere between the late 1800's and the mid/late 1980's (when draftsmen started to be replaced by computers and the size of said offices began to shrink dramatically)? Big ass open plan offices - sometimes thousands of square feet of big ass open plan offices. The same goes for accounting departments. One of Frank Lloyd Wright's most celebrated designs (from 1936) had a big ass open plan office as it's centerpiece.
 
We went to the bloody moon in vehicles designed in big ass open plan offices.
 
Somewhere in my book collection, I have a book intended for professional engineers and engineering managers from the 1950's... which devotes three whole chapters to the knotty problem of laying out (invariably open plan) engineering offices and drafting rooms - mapping a 3d object onto a 2d arrangement of desks and drafting tables.
 

This is the only real reason they're pushing this model. It's a clear terminus of the erosion that's led us from offices, to cubicles, to the little half walls, to just acres of desks.

I don't know where this idea came from that "everyone had a private office until Evil Management latched onto the open plan" comes from, but it's complete bull. Private offices have long been the exception, proof that one was senior enough to rate one and to have Made It, not the rule.

"Because that's where the money is."

Duh....

I can certainly see why he runs as a Republican- the current fight is between the libertarian side of the party and the remnants of the Moral Majority faction and the establishment power base. The unfortunate fact is that libertarian party candidates don't get elected to the presidency and the senate, republicans do. He therefore can accomplish a lot more by getting elected as a Republican than he could by losing a Libertarian. President Reagan largely redefined the republican party in his own image, so there's no reason Rand Paul couldn't do the same.

Of course Reagan also developed an alliance with the Moral Majority crowd in order to get elected, and that alliance affected the party platform. Moral Majority officially shut down many years ago and people are fed up with the establishment power base, so the party is ripe to be redefined again.

Wow. He had real mail. And I bet they weren't Cabela's catalogs.