Interestingly enough the article mentions iGPS. I saw a good number of their pallets (they have branding on them) at Costco the other day.

While am no fan of Hugh Pickens, I do love pallets and logistics in general, and like this article.

As my dad is a truck driver, as a kid I would go with him on trips and see the inner workings of the industry that literally keeps the country rolling. Most trucks would take on empty pallets in exchange for full ones they offloaded. But the trucks did not always go back to the same location that they made the pickup at. I asked him once what happens to all the extra pallets that end up at the receiving end? He told me that eventually some truck would come by and pick the old pallets all up to try to load balance. The pallet truck was always this old beat up truck that looked like it was on the verge of dying.

But I asked him where new pallets come from, and he just smiled and said "obviously it is the pallet fairys."

As an adult I once saw a truck filled with brand new wooden pallets while driving on the highway. Even the truck looked brand new.

But now with the hard plastic GPS tracking pallets, I can imagine that the pallets themselves have some value and have to be tracked even when empty. Lucky for them they have GPS, I suppose.

You stramanned first. (Is it ok if I verb that noun?)

What I was trying to say is that police powers are not arbitrary. So there is no point in asking if a citizen could go and do things a officer could not. To address the original point that "My liberty should ALWAYS exceed the police's" that was made earlier in the thread: There are lots of things an officer can do that citizens can not, and thus they should be held to a higher standard.

The police do not have this liberty either. They are not permitted to drive around and arresting anyone they please.

Does this mean anyone that deals in bitcoins in any way can now be sent to jail for drug trafficing?

Exactly. Automation has allowed us to have a 40 hour work week and modern luxuries that people could not dream of 20 years ago, much less at the beginning of the industrial revolution.. A potential result of this might be that consumer goods for basic living will become so cheap that the average person will only need to work 20 or 10 hours a week.

America will become a wasteland... just like it did when we sent most of our manufacturing jobs to China.

Wait, that did not happen? Sure, things are more unstable now, but it wasn't the end of history.

I assume he was making a joke about "hollywood accounting" where people cook the books to make movies look like they do not make a profit, in order to cheat actors dumb enough to get paid out of the profits.

Certainly all government contracts in the US have the same kind of funny accounting going on. I had been thinking of SpaceX, who is quite up front about the real costs of their flights. But India might very well be like SLS in that there is no way to tell how many untold billions are blown on the thing. Obviously the $25M stated did not include development costs.

Slightly more successful than this.

if they can really put this thing in orbit for $25M that would be one heck of a good deal. Wikipedia says the payload is 10,000kg to LEO, which would make it half the cost of a Falcon 9 with about 3/4ths of the payload. And even if this is understated, it still looks to be a pretty good $/kg rate.

So... yes?

Huh, growing crops in a desert is not such a great idea, isn't it?

Agreed, "those that do not study history..."

But really, a Liberal Arts degree is useless. Liberal Arts classes can be quite useful.

But perhaps our AC friend should not not be in any higher education at all. It sounds like he can't (or couldn't) make the cut.

Reminds me of the late 90's when I graduated. Got my first real job, pre-bubble, and the amount I was making wasn't really all that impressive, but a full time salary is a full time salary. My uncle exclaimed "You make THAT much? Man, how do I get into that industry?"

My reply was, and still is, "If you ask that question, you can't."

This isn't sunken cost as much as pork barrel. Someone promised a Senator from Mississippi that hey would get 300+ million dollars from NASA and by god he was going to get it regardless of how much of a waste of money it is.

Also not surprising that this was from the South where they are against big government, but pro pork barrel.