So what magical new technologist do you mysteriously think it requires?

Can we build pylons? Check, we build bridges quite some distance.

Can we build metal tubes? Subways systems say check.

Can we build air turbines? Why, yes we can.

What exactly do you feel is the technologically implausible part of this proposal?

Indeed. It's just damn high-speed rail, except in the air and put in a tube. Anyone who thinks we can't do that seems unaware we build bridges and subway tunnels, and it's not exactly rocket science to put a subway tunnel on a bridge.

Seems to me like it would be more expensive than HSR, but there do appear to be a lot of savings to offset the added costs. (I.e., being in a tube allows it to be propelled in a novel manner with a lot less air friction.)

And anyone who thinks this is somehow more at risk of earthquakes is an idiot. It's a tube. We can cheaply put sensors on it to detect damage...unlike HSR, where stuff could fall on the track and not be noticed. And putting structures in the air makes them more resistant to earthquakes, assuming they aren't built by idiots. It's the stuff directly on the ground that gets thrown around during an earthquake.

The only actual objection would be something like 'Musk can't do it that cheaply', and t would be more expensive in the long run. Maybe that's valid, maybe not, I don't know...but all other objections are stupid.

God in all his almighty powers and omnipresence and so probably just created the world some 6000 years ago, together with the whole universe and its history, making us believe it's much older than it really is.

No, he created it next Thursday, and once created, it will only _look like_ it's existed for billions of years.

I think the actual fact is God is up there laughing his ass off at idiots who have been wandering around claiming that a two random creation stories that ended up in the Bible are true. He's like "Guys, I was there, I set off this multi-billion year explosion thing, although I wasn't really paying attention for most of it because I had invented Angry Birds. Then I found a planet with some life on it, started screwing around, made people. (I made dinosaurs first, but couldn't figure out how to get them smart enough to talk to me, so I killed them and started over with the smartest creature, little lemur things.) The creation story things is just because all cultures had one, and whenever people asked me, I didn't want to confuse them so I was a little vague. I never expected anyone to write it down, much less write down _two_ versions of it, and then assert they are true over scientific evidence."

Actually, there's an even better example of 'all the world' as a problem. It's when Satan tempts Jesus by taking him to a mountain and Jesus can see 'all the nations of the world' below.

Now, that does say 'nations', not 'people' or 'land', so it can be argued Jesus doesn't need to see everywhere. But the Mayans, for example, had a perfectly functional 'nation' at the time, as did the Chinese, and there is nowhere on the planet or even in space that you can see Central America, China, and Israel at the same time.

And you think that God wrote the Bible because you've only be exposed to loud-mouth idiots on TV claiming to speak for Christians and idiotically claiming that everything in there is the literal truth.

Not only is that not the only opinion, it's not actually even the majority Christian opinion.

To seriously answer the question: God did not filled his book with logic traps to trick the people who want to believe in him because God did not write the Bible.

Human beings wrote the Bible, managing various degrees of accuracy for the stuff intended to be factual. Along with a lot of stuff that at no point was actually intended to be taken seriously. (Like the creation stories, or the Flood.) And, in fact, some stuff that is an outright fraud, like 1 Timothy.

They have no reason to be here... perhaps they where on exercise or got sent to the wrong address.

The police have no reason to be where? All I've seen a picture of police. An actual photograph, taken from human height not security camera height, not any sort of security camera still. Please note that during this raid they claim to have been asleep, so who the fuck was out there taking pictures?

Ah, yes, there was a 'reporter'. It's interesting how the only picture that the reporter got was a completely context-less photograph instead of them attempting to take down the door. And God only knows how CyberBunker is supposed to have gotten hold of this picture.

Incidentally, armed police do not sneak onto someone's property without a warrant, especially not by breaking through fences. And police officers with warrants do not just randomly walk away when they cannot get in.

If there aren't enough players to warrant a game, they close that table and send the dealer off to deal blackjack.

Except businesses don't work that way. Either that blackjack table should have _already_ been open, and hence having that dealer run poker instead is costing the casino money, or that blackjack table doesn't need to be open, and hence paying a dealer for _it_ is costing money.

There's no business that has magical total-staff demands where if the staff is needed in one place, they aren't needed in some other place. And if there's demand in both places, blackjack makes a _lot_ more than poker, because blackjack has morons who come in and blow $200 in five minutes. It makes _no_ sense to operate poker tables if there's a single person who wishes to play blackjack, or craps, or any of the dozen other games that the house can actually make real money off of stupid people.

Now, this system could make sense in reverse...if the blackjack tables or whatever are dead, and people want to play poker...sure, send one of the dealers over to do poker. The problem is, of course, that poker doesn't really operate unscheduled like the other games.

Poker rooms can (and do) make money for the house, since they take what would otherwise be an inconvenient storage room, pretty up the carpet and lights a little, and turn it from a "making no money" space into a "making a little money" space - plus the fact that many poker players will go and spend time playing blackjack until their seat is ready at a poker table.

Of course, actually _setting up the space_ costs money, as does using the space, as does the logistics of scheduling the room. A corporation that makes a half a million dollars a day would actually find it kinda stupid to spend time and effort setting up a room to add another $600 a day. It's sorta like asking why your lawyer doesn't have his assistant sell pencils off his desk. I mean, he's got plenty of space, _and_ he has pencils.

Casinos that do poker tables usually have entirely different motives than 'making money off poker'. They're in it to attract tourny players (And tournaments do make money), or because they have whales that come in and want to play poker in addition to dropping 40 thousand at blackjack, or they just rent the tables and dealer for an assload of money to private parties, or any combination of those things. They're not thinking 'Oh, wow, a tiny trickle of money! Let's get in on that!'

Well, let's do some basic math. First of all, the dealer himself need paying, so that's $10 a hour, minimum.

And let's assume a poker area of, let's say, four tables. And _you_ want it in some secluded places, which essentially means dedicated wait staff. So another $10 an hour, and is another area to monitor from security, so let's call that $15 an hour, $10 for a real security guy, and $5 worth of monitoring. And another let's say half a person for cleaning, so another $5 an hour.

Let's say that, for example, it has two tables playing, one with six people and one with three.

So that's between $90 and $120 dollars an hour. And we have the $20 of dealers, and the $10 waiter, and $15 security, and $5 cleaning, so that's $50 an hour that area is costing.

But wait. That's at good times. What happens when there are only four people there? Hey, look, money is possibly lost. Still need everything (Yes, they even need two dealers. Employees don't magically disappear off payroll during the day when work is slack.)

And note I'm _just_ talking payroll.

The problem with your thinking is that you think the casino operates on a slim margin, that it operates on the 'house advantage'. It does _not_. If a casino was full of people who came in and played perfect blackjack (Even without counting) and perfect craps, and even perfect roulette, they would, indeed, 'make money'...and _immediately_ go out of business, because you can't operate a fucking business exchanging paying staff to stand there and exchange $1.00 for $1.05 every five minutes and actually have _a payroll_ and _a building_.

Operating poker is asking them to do that.

In actuality, casinos operate because _everyone is horrifically bad at math_. Casinos con't care about people who pull out $100 and walk away with $90 left. Those people _cost_ them money, because they actually used more than $10 in casino resources! They're only nice to those people because everyone _thinks_ they're those people. They actually care about the vast majority of people who walk in with $100 and essentially hand it all immediately to the casino.

And the nice thing about it is you don't have to gamble, and yet can get all the amenities anyway. I often tell people that Vegas is a great vacation spot if you don't gamble...lots of shows, and even a lot of interesting places that are completely free.

Almost everything in Vegas is...well. not a 'loss leader', but not quite making as much money as it could be, because it's all designed as a big neon sign to suck people into a casino and hopefully gamble there. If half the people who go to see Blue Man Group stop in the casino on the way out and spend $50, they can reduce the ticket prices by $25. (And actually do reduce them by $15.) That's the reason that so many conventions are held there...they are charging less for convention centers and rooms than other equivalent places, on the correct assumption that the gamblers will make up the profits. And a lot of stuff actually is free.

The shops are expensive, but that's what you'd expect in a tourist town. Basically, the rule is that anything that might get people from the outside of the casino to the inside is cheaper, and other stuff, like restaurants, is just the normal level of tourist expensive, and then there's a 'super' layer of idiotically expensive stuff aimed at 'whales' who come in with a few million to blow.

So if you _don't_ gamble, Vegas rocks. I have never been to a casino outside of Vegas, though, so I don't know if other casinos are doing the same thing to pull people in. I think a lot of that is due to competition with other casinos.

Something I find a lot more ethically dubious than casinos are state-run lotteries. A casino, everyone seems to know they're going to be ripped off if they gamble. The lottery? Not so much. I think part of that is how how lotteries 'roll over' if no one wins, which is stupid logic, but there you go. But possibly it's just because where I live you have to drive two hours to get to a casino, but the lottery is everywhere.

So your solution is...to undo the laws that stop us from throwing toxic chemicals in landfills and allow us to do that? What are you talking about?

You do realize, that, under the law, all companies that sell stuff forbidden from landfills have to accept that stuff back for them to dispose of, right? We don't have to figure out where to dispose of batteries, because Duracell is required _by law_ to accept used Duracell batteries back and _they_ are in charge of what to do with them at that point.

The problem is _no one does that_. Because people are complete and utter morons who think it's more important keeping glass out of landfills than batteries, and setup entire government-operate infrastructure to do _that_. While _not_ setting up any sort of system to hand back the toxic stuff the companies required by law to accept it.

It's like if a community decided to try to keep people healthy, so decided to operate a task force dedicated to stopping people from being struck by lightning. With a nice big building and a trauma team that would show up to help after a lightning strike and a construction crew that runs around putting lightning rods on every tree and power pole and teaching all kids to stay inside during thunderstorms.

I'm like, uh, okay, technically that _is_ a health concern, and I have no actual objection to that. But, um, with all that funding, we could, you know, run a goddamn free clinic instead, and actually treat real health problems, instead of something that is not actually a problem in any meaningful sense.

Government resources are not infinite. The amount of environmental stuff you can make people care about is not infinite. The amount of hassle you can subject people to is not infinite.

We have wasted those on recycling completely harmless things instead, I dunno, _not poisoning the planet_.

Segregation has never actually been supported by the majority of the US population. It was just supported by a majority of the people that were allowed to vote. Or perhaps not even that.

More to the point, I didn't take issue with having unpopular political positions. That's the great question of representative government...are elected people supposed to do what they want, are they supposed to average what the people who voted for them want, or possibly are they supposed to average what everyone who they represent (Even people who voted against them) want? I have no objection to politicians falling anywhere on that line.

What I took issue with was the Republicans (and it's pretty much entirely the Republicans, with some conservative Democrats) having unpopular political positions so they then _lie about things_ to make those positions more popular. I.e., stuff like 'Death panels'. And the current nonsense about how the deficit is a huge problem, which even Democrats have bought into. (Fact: The deficit is actually dropping very rapidly, and without any changes at all, we'd probably have a balanced budget as soon as the recession goes away, especially since we're ending our wars and ending some tax cuts.)

It's one thing to stand up and say, despite the political climate, 'We should not have segregation because it is wrong'. It's another to stand up and say 'We should not have segregation because the Soviet Union can exploit the separation between the races to spread deadly genetically-engineered diseases.' or other crazy nonsense.

And, yes, I complain when Democrats do it also. I.e., during the debt ceiling crisis, when the Democrats kept talking about defaulting on our loans. I kept pointing out that, in actual fact, that's probably what we'd do _last_. We'd keep paying those, it's just the _rest_ of the stuff that would stop. (This wouldn't actually make the disaster any better, and in fact pointing out we'd end up repaying bonds held by the Chinese while letting our elderly starve to death actually sounds a good deal worse than 'defaulting on our loans'. So I don't know why Democrats kept saying it wrongly.)

The thing is, though, the Democrat's positions are vastly more popular, in almost every sense, than the Republican's. If voters are just asked their positions, or presented with positions without the context of what the parties are, they support Democratic policies something like 75% of the time. So even if both parties are equally willing to lie (I really don't know, and won't argue it.), the Republicans end up doing it more.

And often the lies are patently, almost surreally, stupid. Because the right has an echo chamber where lies get amplified, and then the lies escape, and everyone is like 'WTF?' and other Republicans are like 'It's true!' and they all look even stupider. (Like the whole 'rape rarely results in pregnancy' nonsense that keeps popping up, which is grounded in literally _nothing_. Nothing. No basis at all for the statement.)

See this post for what I think about landfills.

In the _current_ world, the environmental movement's complete and utter apathy about stopping toxins from being put in landfill (As opposed to stopping paper from getting put in landfills, at which they've become very successfully.) is basically the reason that putting thing in landfills is even expensive at all.

Landfills should be often, they should be large, and they should be local. And they should be full of completely non-toxic stuff because the environmental movement should have been spending the last four decades teaching children to sort out toxic material for special pickup, instead of teaching them to sort out fucking glass and paper. Instead of little green and blue bins for recycling, we should all have yellow bins or whatever for 'crap that can't go in the landfill' and a day the trucks come by for that. We should have kids nagging parents about 'You can't throw that away, it has a battery in it and the chemicals will leak into the groundwater' instead of 'You can't throw that away, they'll have to grow a tiny fraction of a tree again to make more paper!'

But like I said, I have no objection to recycling anything. It's just a completely goddamn absurd priority, especially when there is actually something that it would be _much more useful_ to spend the time and effort keeping out of landfills.

But, then again, 'Completely goddamn absurd priorities' is the environmental movement's motto.

Yes, recycling paper saves a lot of energy and water due to the fact it doesn't have to be pulped again. (At least, not much.)

I will point out that, despite what people seem to think, the amount of _ bleaching_ is the same. Yes, this can be done in an environmentally responsible manner, or an environmentally irresponsible manner, but that has nothing to do with whether it's new or old. That's something you constantly hear about recycling that has no link to recycling at all.

And the air pollution thing is nonsense. Yes, if you have a piece of paper, and recycle it, it will produce less air pollution than if you did not.However, that completely ignores the fact that if you did not recycle it, you would have had to grow another tree, which would counter that air pollution. (And the inane comparison of carbon to methane. Yes, methane is worse, but _much much_ less of it is produced.)

The entire paper process is pulling carbon out of the air, moving it around, and then burying it, where slowly some of it escapes. The more you use recycling, the _less_ times you do of that process, and hence the _more_ carbon in the air.

I mean, seriously, it's like basic logic escapes people. Making trees out of CO2, killing the trees, and storing the dead trees is the literally the _opposite_ of releasing CO2 into the air. Even if the dead trees rot, that still only releases a tiny fraction back. (As can be easily demonstrated by the fact we have topsoil full of carbon from long dead trees.)

Recycling glass saves about 30% of the energy used to make it.

I have no idea how much of that is counteracted by the fact that someone has to drive a truck around picking up the glass, then put it in another truck and drive it to the glass making place. (Whereas the factories are usually located near a source of sand in the first place.)

I do know, however, that recycling glass is not actually _cost_ efficient. It only exists because it is subsided by local governments. While I have no problem with local government subsidizing environmental stuff, that somewhat indicates to me that the energy costs of recycled vs. new are somewhat comparable. (It could be that energy costs are slightly less but that's countered with more manpower costs or something.)

I don't really have an objection to glass recycling, however. I just have an objection to the completely pointless focus on all forms of recycling. It's a question of where we should be expending time, money, and social capital in environmentalism. There are _loads_ better things we could be doing instead of recycling glass.

Although, interestingly, this is becoming more of a moot point, and was more of a complaint back twenty years ago. More and more communities have dropped glass recycling, or at least glass pickup, for the reason that no one is willing to pay them for glass. (Whereas people will pay for aluminum and paper.)