A few years ago there was a Japanese children's show with a character called Mr. Puri Puri, which apparently translates to "turd". He'd pop up out of random toilet bowls and spout non-sequitur but very profound sounding wisdoms. John Dillermand reminded me of that somehow.
There is a lot of stupidity in that article, e.g. the mention of the fact that the buses' schedules are withheld from the public.
Yeah, so what? We also don't publish the schedules of our corporate shuttles, or our internal IP addressing schemes, or whatnot. Why should we?
And I love the idea that there was never a society with different socioeconomic tiers in it. That cozy egalitarian middle-class wonderland from the 1970s that he describes ignores the fact that there was plenty of poverty and shitty schools elsewhere in the US.
Hey man, Catullus 16 is one of the classics.
Misleading headline aside, Shakespeare is hilarious.
Violence, sex, creative insults galore, betrayal, incest, murder, sword fights, pork sword fights, ghosts, and more invented words than you can shake a pork sword at.
It is awesome and even suggesting that the short attention span squad deserves being pandered to is borderline criminal.
Otherwise I could say that, say, volcanic rocks are a form of currency and could go on exchanging rocks with other people as if it were currency... which needless to say, wouldn't be a good thing.
Out of curiosity, why not?
This is nothing more than barter.
Most American mainstream media is shit.
RT is shit and propaganda.
They are not mutually exclusive.
And also, if you were to use a secret code to make sure nobody could read it, it would mean you're probably a traitor and we should read it anyway.
And yet, the UK has one of the world's highest densities of CCTV cameras, a capital police force that is one of the most aggressive in Western countries when it comes to hounding photographers, government-mandated Internet filtering, and is no slouch when it comes to excessive surveillance and implementing the worst the Americans could come up with.
Sanctimony from the British is pretty misplaced.
Senior IT manager here. It's not just in America.
The problem is that most managers don't give a shit. They are under enormous cost pressure, and standing up for principles and employees costs time and energy, especially when you're being given a hard time by your upper management.
Most of the time, they're not around for long enough to suffer the long-term consequences of creating a million monkey club.
Even worse, usually it's based on false cost models - the same sort of crap that leads you to hire (more expensive) external people rather than salaried staff because they're "variable cost". Budgeting for external suppliers often does not include additional costs for facilities, travel, management overhead, training, etc., as well as the intangible aspects of a body shop simply providing you with the cheapest shittiest junior guy they can get away with - and then refusing to do anything but the work that's exactly laid out in the contract (and badly at that).
I've run into this situation myself a number of times and it is morale-crushing.
You can just go Yelena your Mizulina, you filthy Vitaly Milonov.
Mass drivers do not propose to shoot a bullet into space - they are conceived as a launch assist mechanism. You still need propellant, just a whole lot less of it.
This is similar to the idea of using catapults to launch civilian aircraft (sorry for treehugger link, original Economist article is down).
Actually the whole idea behind Volkswagen was that it was "der Volkswagen", or "the people's car", i.e. the original beetle. It was the Nazis' plan to provide a car to everyone who saved 5 Reichsmark per week but in the end, only 630 were built before and during WWII and went to either Nazi functionaries or the German armed forces. Also known as the "KdF-Wagen", for "Kraft durch Freude", the Nazi fun-and-games social program.
Hardly a people's car.
Out of curiosity, why aren't mass drivers feasible for this sort of thing? You could build one up a mountainside near the equator - something like Mt. Chimborazo (6200+ meters) and drastically reduce the amount of fuel needed to get anything into space. By making the thing several kilometers long, you'd also massively lower the material strains on any craft (you probably still couldn't send humans up, but you'd have far less limits on how sensitive your cargo could be.)
The slingshot sounds like an extremely limited tool - you'd still need a high degree of complexity for things like guidance systems and engines, because of drag you probably couldn't launch anything right into space without at least a partial boost. A mass driver would only get your cargo up to equivalent speeds once it got to the "muzzle", which would ideally be located at very high altitudes with thin air...
The issue most people have is not with the idea of consolidated mail boxes in principle (although there are legitimate logistical issues - vandalism, distance, weather, and mobility of certain mail recipients for example.)
The outrage stems from the fact that the USPS should be capable of continuing home delivery, but is not able to due to incompetent funding restrictions placed on it by Congress.
The disks are getting full; purge a file today.
