Re: Hidden costs/benefits

I was going to mention health insurance, but I assume that's less of an issue in the UK, and this seemed like a pretty thoroughly UK-centric article. It can be a major obstacle to going freelance in the US, unless you have a spouse with a steady job with good health insurance.

Pensions aren't really an issue in the US, in that no one gets them anymore, anyway, except civil servants.

On the plus side, tax law here is a lot simpler -- although probably only because we've only had a couple hundred years to muddy it up. ;)

Re: @Alan Esworthy Betting against the MAN

I have no doubt that some of my peaceful, orderly neighbors would happily steal me blind if they believed there was no entity that could punish them for it. One doesn't have to look far to realize this; even highly civilized places quickly revert to violence and looting if there's a temporary absence of government-enforced law and order. You don't have to look as far as Somalia to see that; just look at the looting and violence that happened after Hurricane Katrina, or during the 1977 blackout in NYC.

Throughout human history, power and wealth have always gone to whoever could most convincingly threaten violence against other people. It's the natural state of humanity. This is why revolutions almost always end as military dictatorships (our own revolution in the US was a fortunate exception.)

As I see it, government is an exercise in giving the biggest guns to an entity that we have some amount of control over, instead of leaving the choice of our rulers up to chance and violence. Given that I couldn't even hire a mall cop for what I pay in taxes, much less my own private police force, I'm going to stick with it.

Re: Warnings from History: Wikileaks... Cyprus....

The Cyprus haircut was about as quiet and unexpected as a 4th of July parade. *I* heard it was coming weeks ahead, and I don't even follow financial news very closely. The fact is, in spite of all their outrage, the foreign investors who had money in Cyprus banks knew exactly what they were getting into. In the current economic climate, banks don't promise 9% APR on savings accounts unless they're on the verge of collapse.

Re: Betting against the MAN

Because Somalia is what a state without a strong central government becomes.

Let's say, in your imaginary governmentless state, you buy your own police and military services. But so do your competitors. Guess what happens if they want you shut down? Now you're a warlord, trying to defend your territory against a rival warlord. Except you have a sign on your door that says "CEO." Well done.

Time to switch to another imaginary currency. I suggest Linden Dollars.

Re: Can't pull it off

I used to work for a bank that insisted everyone wear a suit and tie at all times. It was fun trying to install cards in desktops while simultaneously trying to keep my tie from falling into the dusty guts.

Harder to ignite...

...is a bit of an understatement. Once, while using diesel fuel to light a fire, I dropped a match into a puddle of it. It put out the match.

Re: Owners of rival devices will disagree, but the sales say it all.

It depends on what you want out of a car. Toyota has a reputation for reliability. Frankly, all most people really want out of a car is a transportation appliance that doesn't give them trouble. A Corolla delivers that admirably.

Mind you, I'm more of a Honda type myself, but I can see why Toyotas sell like they do.

Re: Orion

I don't find the "setting them off" part scary, but I am wary of the "putting thousands of pounds of plutonium on top of a rocket and boosting it through the atmosphere" part. If the rocket explodes in flight you've just made the world's largest dirty bomb.

Heating fuel

That reminds me that about ten years ago corn was so cheap in the US, thanks to subsidies, that people were burning dried corn as heating fuel in specially-designed stoves.

Safe place...

I think this is why I've almost never bought a used car and gotten the original keys...just copies of copies that barely work. The previous owner probably put the original in a "safe place" and then forgot where that was. ;)

The one exception was, oddly, a 40-year-old Saab 95, which still had the original key. Unfortunately it didn't have most of the original LOCKS. ;)

Inflation isn't likely to be an issue

...at least not for the reason you state.

The algorithm is designed so each new coin takes more and more processing power to create, so the rate of inflation should be controlled to a fairly low level. (This means the people who got in on the ground floor, when the coins were "cheap" to create, made out handsomely. Rather clever, really; the person who designed it designed it to give himself and his friends an automatic head start in wealth. Not *quite* a pyramid scheme, but it sorta looks like one if you squint just right.)

That doesn't mean it can't collapse relative to other currencies, of course, as it appears to have done.

Re: not to be a dick

Of course, that's useful information in itself, just doesn't make for headlines that are as interesting.

Re: Swings and Roundabouts

Your post is mostly true, except that health care for the unemployed is now nearly impossible to get. Most states have eliminated those programs due to lack of funding, or instituted quotas that require long waiting lists for coverage. Standards for receiving disability benefits have also been tightened. It's true that if you're a child, or a senior with no assets, you can still usually get care, though.

Re: Indoctrinated

No hospital is allowed to discharge patients - no matter their financial condition - if doing so would endanger their life...

While that's true for emergency care, it doesn't do much for people with life-threatening chronic conditions. A friend of mine who has insulin-dependent diabetes and some mental health issues is facing losing his medical disability benefits, and I honestly don't know what he's going to do. Even if he somehow scrapes together the money for the insulin, the last time he was off his psych meds he tried to kill himself twice.

Ironically, what disqualified him for disability was finding a full-time job, which he worked for three months before illness forced him to quit again (He has some other long-term medical problems that cause him extreme fatigue due to lack of vitamin absorbtion...which could be helped by injections, which he can't afford.)

IMAP + multiple machines = headache

Unlikely. Industrial control systems are highly implementation-specific, even if they're running the same hardware.

Maintenance, maybe.

I suspect these are high-maintenance vehicles. When I visited a Marine base I got the impression that maintaining the vehicles used for training there was a full-time job for a significant number of people; military gear like this is often built with the assumption that it won't travel a huge number of miles in its lifetime before being either destroyed by enemy action or written off in a mishap on rugged terrain, so being used day in and day out for training tends to consume spares rapidly.

Re: I was hoping

While DC arcs aren't self-extinguishing, they will extinguish when the power is cut off. ;) I'm guessing an interlock will cut off the high voltage power the instant the handshake pin disconnects -- and if they follow good connector design guidelines, the DC pins will be longer and make first/break last. As a backup I would expect either a high-voltage DC breaker or a fast-acting silver-sand fuse.

It's cooled via radiation

On clear nights the ground loses heat to space via infrared radiation, actually becoming colder than the air temperature. This is why a car parked in the open will get frost on the windshield and one parked under a roof won't -- the roof blocks the car from radiating heat to space. The cold ground then cools the lowest layer of air, which is what causes inversion layers at night.

Re: How are they getting a separate stream?

Stormwater runoff is kept separate in newer systems, but is combined in some older ones. (The reason it's kept separate now is the sudden influx of water during a heavy storm can exceed the plant capacity and cause a sewage overflow, which is generally frowned on these days.)

Re: What's all this then?

I suggest you fly there immediately and tell them the tides that they're seeing reach their villages are actually a hoax created by the international scientific community.

Either that, or put your money where your mouth is -- buy up the land that's about to become cheaply available, and if you're right you can turn it into a private resort and make a bundle when it *doesn't* slip below the sea. ;)

Re: Strange, then,

That's a valid point. But it's also not as if, if the market could bear $2000, they would be paying the workers any more than they do now.

Re: in general

It's a failing of the US defense community in general -- they always try to fix problems with technology instead of investing in human capital.

Re: Strange, then,

Would it matter if they were? The additional profit would all go to the top 1% anyway. The workers on the ground haven't shared in corporate profit increases for many years now.

Well, it used to be...

These days it's mostly the government that ends up holding the risk, thanks to the influence of nearly unlimited corporate cash on politics. The thing to remember about corporations is they're essentially machines for privatizing profit and socializing risk.