I had a neutered male cat who from about 9 months old spent all day, every day, killing gophers. Within a few months he'd completely exterminated them within about half a mile of my house. He only ate part of the first gopher of the day, far as I ever saw.

Most predators kill for fun as well as for food and for training their young; it's not at all unusual. -- That's the real problem with wolves vs domestic sheep; it's so much fun to shoot fish in a barrel that they wind up killing a whole flock just for jollies.

That, and the other question I had -- are these metabolites *unique* to cocaine? Cuz if not, cue the false positives.

I don't, but I use music to "fill up the cracks in my brain" that would otherwise be full of distractions.

Indeed. Talk to me in 15 years (that is, if I'm still around).

I don't doubt that the industry has such contingency plans, but I wonder just how effective they will be. Business history is rife with cases of large companies that failed to move as rapidly as their industries, and disappeared as a result. See Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma for a bookload of examples.

The problem is that the companies are built on a certain premise of customer wants and needs and, due to their installed asset base, organizational structure, and culture, can't react fast enough to supply products emphasizing the new customer wants and needs. By the time the company is willing to invest the capital needed to meet the needs of the new customers, they are so far behind their smaller, innovative competitors that they cannot compete. Whether they buy one of their upstart competitors or try to compete with their own new division, the corporate mass and culture almost inevitably dooms the venture.

Suppose the automotive market did change, to one in which customers didn't care about fuel mileage, or number of seats, or whatever it is they do now, and instead cared only about what OS the car was running. How many decades do you think it would take to remove all the car- and engine-geeks from the company and replace them with digital-geeks?

Kodak was aware of the digital photo revolution (it invented the digital camera, and its Board of Directors hired George Fisher from Motorola as CEO back in 1993), but a fat lot of good it did them. They had too many chemists, dye specialists, and high-performance camera designers, and an organization and profit structure built around discrete cameras and physical camera film. It was never clear how Kodak could maintain its market dominance in the digital camera world -- and it didn't.

I think a good working definition of "the threshold of getting old" is the age when overexertion causes more pain in the joints than in the muscles.

As a young person, running an unusually long distance or lifting a weight an unusually large number of times causes sore muscles. As a not-young person, running an unusually long distance or lifting a weight an unusually large number of times causes sore joints -- and, unfortunately, it takes a lot longer to recover from sore joints.

But here's no outrage activism available if it's due to a fungus and virus. How can you have a good outrage if the cause is something natural and not *gasp* the fault of man??

I've pointed out that same research IDing the fungi/virus cause multiple times here, and been pooh-pooh'd every time. This last time, I was informed that neonics had to be the cause even when the nearest use of same is hundreds or thousands of miles away, because, ya know, pesticide.

No-fault is about taking money away from lawyers, who used to litigate each and every auto accident as a lawsuit in court before the insurers would pay. Eventually the insurers decided that they spent more on lawyers than accident payments, and they had no reason to do so.

If you want to go back to the way things were, you are welcome to spend lots of time and money in court for trivial things, and see how you like it. I will provide you with expert witness testimony for $7.50/minute plus expenses. The lawyers charge more.

In general your insurer can figure out for themselves if you were at fault or not, and AAA insurance usually tells me when they think I was, or wasn't, when they set rates.

If we don't have more than two children per couple, the human race would've died out a long time ago.

I think the proper way to state that is "If we didn't in the past", not "If we don't". If we were to have 2 children per couple (approximately, the real value is enough children to replace each individual but not more) from this day on, it would not be necessary to adjust the number upward to avoid a population bottleneck for tens of thousands of years.

The Northern California Amtrak is actually pretty good for commuting from Sacramento to the Bay Area and back because the right of way is 4 tracks wide in critical places and it has priority over other trains for much of the time.

Acela in the Boston/NY/DC corridor is also good, because the right of way is 4 tracks or more for most of the way, and it has a track to itself along a lot of the route. Other railroads run on parallel tracks.

For the most part, though, Amtrak suffers from not having exclusive track. It runs on freight lines that host cars so heavy that the rail bends an inch when the wheels are on top of it (I've seen this first hand).

And Germany is a nation the size of New Mexico with an economy the 5th largest in the world. Starting pretty much from zero 70 years ago.

Maybe having good trains is part of that.

No. If anything, I assert that good trains are a hallmark of the set of good economic policies that lead to the general well-being of the citizenship.

Poor people are poor because they can't get jobs. One of the reasons is that they can't get to jobs. Can't afford a reliable car and insurance and gas in the US? Can't work! Too often, that's the equation.

The other reasons they are poor are that we were equally bad in investing in other things we should have spent more upon publicly, like good primary education. This is caused by more wealthy folks not wanting to pay the necessary taxes.

I have a lawn and there are turkeys and quail in the front yard today and we can hear the coyotes howling some nights (that's on the edge of Berkeley where it meets Contra Costa county). If I want to be in San Francisco, I have to get to the train station, which is a mile away (convenient, by the way, to lower income homes). And then it's all train from there, under the Bay, out again in the middle of the city.

In two more years, I will be able to get to San Jose that way. Right now, that is an hour and twenty minute drive if I start at 6 AM, and two hours if I start later. It will be a shorter time on the train, more relaxing, a hell of a lot safer, and will allow me to work on the way.

This is what railroad transportation can mean for people with lawns.

Well, I am not convinced by the auto ownership report that failed to include the purchase price (really!)

I think there's a lot about European behavior you're not taking into account - like the kind of car they actually buy (really small compared to ours) and what they use it for (often, just getting to the railroad station), and the clear indication that car ownership was because of their larger middle class which is itself an indication of better economic policies - like having good mass transit.

I think you have the tax picture wrong, and it's still the better-off people who are contributing the most to mass transit through their taxes.

Regarding the bus, I'm not convinced. The biggest problems are that it can't be connected to electricity efficiently (San Francisco's catenary busses can't exceed 40 MPH while on the wire, and rarely approach that speed because they share the route with cars), it is labor intensive compared to rail, and it has the traffic and safety issues of an automobile. And too often light rail is little better than a bus. It's only when there's an exclusive right-of-way that you get efficiency.

And ultimately there may still be people who vote against mass transit, but they are shooting themselves in the foot.