Skylab was put into orbit in one launch. Using the shuttle to lift further components is silly- all it does is justify the shuttle. The shuttle is a Honda Fit compared to the 18-wheeler Saturn 5. Letting Skylab burn up may have been a "waste" but if you can launch more than 1/3 of the current ISS volume (currently at around 837 pressurized cubic meters) with 1 Saturn 5 rocket, an orbiting space station then becomes essentially disposable. Just launch another one.

Dimples are a place for water to collect. Paint nowadays is pretty good, but any break in the paint on a dimpled car would be a big rust problem really quick. It would be a nightmare to repair after an accident. Even if you think the dimples look good, when the water evaporates it will leave water spots and look terrible.

I've been in power stations all over the US, Mexico, Canada, and some other countries. There's nothing particularly sensitive or secret about a power generation station. Anybody asking nicely for a tour can generally be accommodated. The biggest worry a plant operator has is theft of copper.

If you are ever out in the middle of Utah, Intermountain Power Plant has the nicest visitor's center I have seen anywhere. They also have one of the most amazing offices I have ever seen. Small consolation for being in the middle of Utah I suppose.

You can look up how much an H1b visa holder makes. The system isn't set up to look for a specific person, but with a small amount of intiution and some reasonable assumptions you can usually figure out which of your colleagues has which title in the system. If you find actual cases of fraud, report it. Let your H1B visa colleages know how much they should be making, and encourage them to demand that they be paid that wage. If companies actually had to pay those wages this whole business would stop pretty quick.

You can put it more simply and say that defensive technology had outpaced offensive technology. Fixed fortifications had reached their peak and offensive weapons hadn't quite caught up yet. All the new offensive weapons seen for the first time during that war, such as the military aircraft, the invention of tanks, flamethrowers, chemical weapons, etc were driven by this.

I've been to North Korea and it has communist practices which remain, but they have a lot of capitalism too. The elites sort of let the black market do its thing, because they needed the black market to get the cool toys and luxuries they wanted to have. The black market got stronger and stronger and now they are so organized that many of the black market sellers wear the same uniform. The government provides housing and a whole lot of other things, but they provide a salary too. They keep having to crack the door to capitalism more and more because the black market is becoming such a critical part of society there.

On a related note, a lot of the weird things North Korea says can be attributed to poor translation. There is an old joke of foreign languages in subtitles where a foreigner will ramble on and on and on, then the subtitles will pop up with a very simple idea. The Korean language is actually somewhat like that, using an unnecessary amount of words and leaving nothing as "subject to context" or "readily understood". Their spoken language says absolutely everything. A good translator will cut out all the cruft and get to the main point, but being so isolated from the rest of the world, maybe North Korean translators aren't as good as they ought to be.

Why stick with Comcast then? Why continue to give them your business if they just stab you behind your back? Their VOIP offerings are hilariously overpriced. Get an OBIHai or Cisco SIP gateway, sign up for any of the dozens of SIP providers, and roll your own. My SIP provider even has voice menus you can set up on their system.

This sort of argument shows a lack of business common sense. People need operating systems to run on their computers. That operating system needs to be continuously updated with security fixes. It is also nice to get new features every now and then. What Microsoft really needs to do is drop the Major Revision concept and just sell "Windows" or "Office" as a service. The OS gets updated periodically and people pay periodically.

Microsoft has pushed this before and the backlash was/has been huge because they failed to show the advantages were greater than the disadvantages. They need to go to this model though because they seem unable to handle the task of creating a new Major Revision anymore.

I think you answered your own question in a sense. When your company was small, the culture was that every employee was very valuable and getting rid of someone just wasn't an option. People were accountable because they didn't want to let the team down. They could see how important they were. It was obvious every time a coworker took a week off for vacation.

When a company gets bigger, it has to shed the notion that every person is absolutely valuable and needed. Equally important is spending effort on making people feel important and cultivating a culture of "I don't want to let down my team". If you don't do something about it, that small-company culture will erode, and it seems like that is exactly what is happening.

Not entirely true. I think you are including childhood mortality. If you made it to age 20 (working age) in 1935, the year that the Social Security Act was enacted, you could expect to live to be about 66 years old if you were a man, or 68 if you were a woman. This isn't a "small portion of the population", it is, by definition of being the average life expectancy, at least half the population.

Life expectancy has gotten longer but it has been a very gradual process and the taxes have increased over the years. The reason that the program is in trouble is because the taxes have not quite kept up, and politicians have been playing financial games with the savings for decades.

That example isn't even close to being equivalent. We're talking about the possibility that which someone can, with relative ease, wirelessly and anonymously deprive me of the use of my property without leaving much of a trace. You seem to be describing the crime of physical breaking and entering, which I would argue is none of those things.

Don't put a kill switch in my car. Kill switches will be hacked and abused. Devices will be sold and marketed to kill a car, even if they are illegal. Just like the MIRT and all the related devices. Illegal as a $7 bill but assholes still buy them.

No, it really isn't. I have been learning about this recently as part of MBA classes. All you have to do is look at your current workforce and find some common attributes among your top workers for job X. Maybe your top 5 sales guys all have above-average empathy (just one example, it could be anything). This is your basis for any legal defense later.

You then apply an aptitude test to your hiring process and reject anyone with inferior empathy. You don't need to even consider if this discriminates against a protected class. It is quite possible this DOES discriminate against men since women are usually known to be more empathetic. That doesn't matter though. All that matters is if you can demonstrate that empathy has something to do with a salesperson's success. Since you did your homework up front by looking at success and finding common attributes, anyone who challenges your process is going to lose. It is not close to a ban at all, just a legal provision that tells you what you were supposed to be doing anyway- find a good predictor of good job performance, then (and only then) find a test which tests that predictor.

I know environmentalists can sometimes see issues in only black and white, but a lot of the fossil fuel "subsidies" are programs to develop clean smockestack technology, carbon capture and storage, etc. Carbon capture and storage is, in my opinion as an industry insider, a larger technical challenge than the Manhattan project. Industry sure as heck isn't going to take on a massive engineering projects by itself. If these things were easy or cheap, they would have been done already. I want to leave a good planet to my kids too, but it can't happen overnight. Little steps. We'll get there.