Barret after sales support is somewhat legendary. There was one occasion where they gave phone support to a US soldier in a firefight in Iraq or something. Call center guy got the workshop on the phone and the soldier was able to clear his jam and unfuck his springs or whatever. Pew Pew resumed.
Most small government departments don't have the budget or the access to high quality, specialist gunsmiths to service, repair and upgrade their gear. Being able to send it back to the manufacturer's workshop is a significant advantage. Taking that away causes the government department to re-think their service and maintenance procedures or to shelve the weapons until they do.
What is it? 50% of Black Women have Herpes? The gift that keeps on giving.
A big part of the story is that Puss is deeply flawed ... and it turns out that Kitty is just as bad.
Puss is self centered and egotistical ... but mostly because he is really that good and is compensating for a need for external validation.
Kitty is a strong independent woman who absolutely, totally doesn't need Puss, not even a little bit ... but she does, and she can't admit it because she has been deeply hurt in the past and has major trust issues.
Don't worry. Most of them were men.
While you are correct, I suspect that you are deliberately missing the point.
Changes in T were positively correlated with aggression (r = 0.108, 95% CIs [0.041, 0.174])
Or how about:
The researchers found that those with relatively high testosterone and cortisol were more likely to have engaged in impulsive and violent crime.
From Testosterone and cortisol levels are linked to criminal behavior, according to new research
While research does not suggest that testosterone levels are a causal link, they do suggest that changes in testosterone levels, especially when associated with high stress, lead to an increase in impulsive behavior and criminal behavior.
I would not jump to any conclusions, because mass shooters are displaying vanishingly rare (in the scale of the population) aberrant behavior. That said, not for a moment do I think that giving suicidal people huge doses of male hormones is a good idea. Not for men, and not for women either. I am sure that there is a link; Just like high testosterone women (mostly lesbians) are the most violent within relationships.
You really don't think that taking huge doses of testosterone has anything to do with urges to violence or violent acts?
Cute.
Enjoy paying that tax. Women don't pay net tax over their lifetimes.
Did you even read the Wikipedia article? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
The most basic version of the dilemma, known as "Bystander at the Switch" or "Switch", goes:
There is a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks, there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, you notice that there is one person on the side track. You have two (and only two) options:
Do nothing, in which case the trolley will kill the five people on the main track. Pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. Which is the more ethical option? Or, more simply: What is the right thing to do?
You will notice right away that in the definition of they hypothetical problem the trolley is a "runaway trolley"; that is there is no conductor or driver on board. Shouting at it won't help, as there is no one there to hear you. You will also notice that the bystander doesn't have a magical "Trolley Breaks Turn On" Switch to pull. Just the one that will divert the trolley.
The point is to construct a series of situations involving morality and personal responsibility and then discuss the ethics of each course of action.
There is a large body of thought that has come from this set of thought experiments.
Did you know that Albert Einstein constructed thought experiments? The Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment is actually making a point about the interaction between quantum scale interactions and Newtonian scale objects, like a cat.
Refusing to interact with the hypothetical thought experiment just means you don't actually understand what it is for, or you don't like what it tells you about yourself.
Yes, there are false dichotomies. Yes, it is a strict logical fallacy to present on in an argument. Yes, people who argue in bad faith do this all the time. No a hypothetical situation as the basis of a thought experiment isn't one of those.
The original hypothetical is from the point of view of a bystander standing next to a switch.
The only control they have over the trolley is to either pull the switch or not pull the switch. We can go on to assume that the trolley is unmanned, so shouting won't help. Perhaps the trolley operator is running along behind after the trolley ran off down the hill.
I spent ten years working in mental health in a non-medical role.
They look exactly like the self cutting scars I have seen. Upper arms and upper thighs were the most common. Usually on the left arm, so they can use the right (dominant) hand to cut.
Scars like that are from cutting through the skin layers to the fat layer underneath, then healing without stitches. That is why they are wider in the middle than at the ends.
Because your school district is either now, or in the very near future, run by university educated, divorced or single white women. University educated, single white women are the shock-troops of the Neo-Marxist movement within educational institutions.
One Neo-Marxist useful idiot will get promoted to principal and from that day forward they will only hire other neo-Marxists. At that point it doesn't matter what your school curriculum says, they will engage is "Praxis"; which is the teaching of Marxist principles.
"Four little black boys are playing in the street. The evil police officer shoots one. How many little black boys are left?"
When you confront your teacher, they will go directly to DARVO. Unless you were actually in the classroom when the lesson took place, you won't have any evidence. The school principal will run cover for them. Now what?
This is more or less what happened to Oakland. It was initially an industrial center with access to a major port. There were shipyards and Chrysler had their biggest west coast factory there.
With improvements to the transportation system the town basically got bypassed. Without jobs, rents went down. The poor underclass moved in and it became a ghetto and a major hub of crime activity with at least two major gangs operating out of Oakland. Notably the Hell's Angels paid a chemical engineer to invent an efficent process to make amphetamines.
eventually had enough introspection to say things like "whites aren't inherently evil."
Want to estimate his lifespan beyond that point?
Gizortnik,
Right here you conflate skills with industry. Then you go on to make astounding proclamations that totally miss the point.
You can buy a buggy whip today. I am sure about seven people in the USA sell them. As for the industry, it has gone the way of the dodo.
As for Watchmakers, the craft, it is today basically recreational. A person that design, machine the parts then assemble them into a working watch is more or less a unicorn. There are a few factories that make watch movements, but they don't do a real lot of design work, as they use mostly tried-and-true standard designs. Unless a company (like Omega) is very high end, they use standard watch movements which they buy by the thousands to assemble into watches.
There was a revolutionary watch movement design in the 1980s. The Swatch movement made use of self lubricating polymer parts. They were developed in response to the "quartz crisis"; which was the availability of inexpensive, reliable quartz crystal movements. The swatch movements required no bi-annual disassembly and maintenance, nor did they need batteries. They were "accurate enough" for daily use, and they were priced to compete with digital watches.
In general the efforts failed. While Swatch made enormous strides as a fashion brand, mechanical watches are more or less an anachronism, and they have gone the way of the pocket watch. Yes they maintain cachet as a luxury item, but they are worn as a status symbol to show that the owner can afford to waste money to own them and keep them in good working order. As an industry watch manufacturing still exists, but the craft of the watchmaker has vanished, replaced by standardized electronic components. The watch movements have been, in general, subsumed by the electronics manufacturing industry.
As for transferable skills between the electric motor industry, which is also being subsumed by the electronics manufacturing industry ... well there are not many skills in common. If you want a blow by blow breakdown as to why, I'd be happy to explain.
The point is that this is a revolutionary change. A mechanical engineer who has a second specialty in mass production and building production lines isn't going to find much work in an electronics factory unless they can retrain to program, understand and service robotic pick-and-place machines.
Just as the vacuum tube and all of the specialist glass manufacture basically vanished at the advent of the transistor, so too is happening to the brushed electric motor.
The modern synchronous brushless motor has more in common with a precision servo drive than it does to the venerable universal motor; and more to the point it is cheaper in the long run.
Yes, people will retrain. Good. Yes skilled professionals will have transferable skills. Great!
A revolutionary change will have repercussions far and wide. It is what the Boston Consulting Group calls a "Shake Out" of the market.
Except how you don't.
Are you saying that it isn't possible to measure and then simulate a robot doing sophisticated manufacturing work?
Here is a video of a robot following a program that was created by algorithm and then tested in simulation, before manufacturing a real, usable product.
You will notice that it is fourteen years old.
Autodesk makes Fusion 360 a product specifically designed and built to run CNC machines, which includes accurate simulators. There are tens of thousands of videos of both the simulation and then the actual cutting of parts. Go and look!
Now why do you think that this process can't be used to grade Neural Network output?
Is it that you don't know that CNC tools are robots? Or that you think that the same techniques can't be applied to a six axis robot arm with a tool? Is that your issue?
Here is a three year old video of a robot arm using cold spray additive manufacturing to print a solid copper rocket nozzle bell housing. The tool paths were generated by algorithm and then simulated before the print.
Where do you think I said that robots would be able to repair themselves? Can you highlight that for me?
Why would replacing technicians that do repairs on equipment be more important than actually NN tools to reduce the cost of the design, manufacturing and assembly of parts?
It really seems like you are responding to an argument I didn't make.
I can't quite fathom the confusion of thinking that would cause you to make this comment.
It is exactly like pointing to the steam train and saying "Well, it doesn't do naval transport!."
So what?
If you can build a knowable robotics assembly cell. That is, a cell with a robot tool in it, for which the calibration, control systems, physical distances etc are known. Then you can put that information into a simulator and then use it to grade the responses of Deep Learning Neural Networks.
Yeah, some robotics tools will be better than others, and some will be more capable than others. You can simulate that too! Now you have the potential to test a million robotic work cells, and do it all before you spend your first dollar on physical robots. You can even optimize designing robots to build other, better robots and bootstrap a tool chain.
Suddenly assembling the parts of a robot bunny becomes a software problem. It is scalable and measurable. You can recruit computer network arrays to simulate the work and grade it, then give that feedback to the NN.
Now complex problems of robot manufacturing can be approached with exactly the same tools that is having Deep Learning Neural Networks paint like Rembrandt or write novels like Joke Rowling.
Look, it does not matter if you believe me or not. It is coming down the pipe. Just sit back and relax.
I genuinely promise you that high resolution physics engines exist right now to simulate robots. You feed them movement code and they simulate the operations of the robot in extraordinary detail. This is used to test code without running a real robot manufacturing process.
Using software like this would give high quality feedback to train a Deep Learning Neural Network.
If someone isn't doing it today, they will be by the end of the year.
You are misunderstanding me.
Electric Motor Manufacturing, for more than a hundred years, has been primarily concerned with bending iron and copper into the correct shapes, then piecing them together into a functional motor. A good example of this would be the Universal Motor, which is a very old design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_motor
There are no electronic parts in one of these.
Another example would be the brushed motor.
https://www.linquip.com/blog/brushed-dc-motor/
Again, no electronic parts required.
These are being replaced by smaller, more efficent brushless motors which have electronic controllers that are both very sophisticated and cost more than the (now smaller) physical motor.
The Electric Motor industry is being transformed into a small, auxiliary industry which services the electronics manufacturer.
Brushless motors with sophisticated electronic speed control are fundamentally different to the motors of old, and they offer vast advantages. More to the point, they are less expensive when considering Total Cost of Ownership.
Simulation. Specifically a high resolution simulation in a physics engine.
On one hand I agree with every point.
On the other hand, entire industries will go the way of the dodo, just like the watchmaker and buggy-whip manufacturer.
People who are skilled with tools or (gasp) design will have transferable skills can easily retrain, but not all of them.
For example the advent of synchronous, variable torque, variable speed eclectic motors has turned electric motor manufacture from something involving a hundred dollars of bent bits of iron and copper to sixty dollars of electronics and forty dollars of iron and copper. Before it was all mechanical processes and a hundred year old designs. Now it is an electronic manufacturer who also does a little bit of coil winding.
You are literally watching the electrical motor industry vanish.
I know a team that can literally solve this problem. They are currently working on other things, but they exist as a team working in the robotics field.
There is an intermediary step which can turn robotics applications into a purely software product. Once you can do that, you can close the loop and have AI write then test robotics applications. After that it is just a matter of clever neural networks and iteration.
You are going to have to break down robotics operations into smaller, more specific parts for the AI to do; but this has been a concept in software engineering since day 1. The above post just did that with micro-services for his app.
This technology will give a workshop worth 1/2 a million dollars access to the same economies of scale as a million dollar production line. The workshop will be able to apply those manufacturing force multipliers to a hundred products, not one single product rolling off the million dollar production line.
If it plays out the way I imagine, it will be a manufacturing revolution which will shift productivity and the gains of that value down the food chain from billionaires to millionaires. Twelve motivated twenty year olds could design and launch a product that has hardware literally better than the flagship iPhone. They could manufacture hundreds of units for the same unit prices that apple is manufacturing tens of thousands. We could see a market place with a thousand models of flagship phones.
The biggest drain, especially in cases like California, is illegal aliens. They are given the same emergency care as citizens; which is also paid for by the state if the alien can't pay.
So you have huge communities of undocumented illegal aliens who may or may not speak English (they mostly don't), who probably are not paying tax (because they work for cash) and can't afford insurance. They get really sick too. I know this because one of my brother's groomsmen is living in LA and attempting to organize state run health programs for them; because it is vastly cheaper than not running health programs. Personally I think it would be cheaper still to kick them all out ... but California.
In Australia if an alien just makes up a SSN (Australians have a "Tax File Number" but it is the same) then the tax contribution are paid for by the employer and they never get a tax refund. They are also not entitled to any government services that are paid for by tax. So the Single Payer Government Insurance Scheme (Medicare) which pays for all of an Aussie's medical costs is not available to them. If they go to a government hospital (almost all of them are) then they must pay for the costs of their own treatment.
Don't get me wrong, the treatment is affordable compared to the USA. A night in hospital with a high level of care is something like AU$1000. In the USA it would be a miracle to pay less than US$15,000 and pay US$40 each for a paracetamol tablet.
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO is the Aussie IRS) won't look to kick out working aliens; because they pay a lot of tax that they don't spend. Hospitals won't report aliens, because doing so would stop people from seeking care, which results in ambulances and emergency care, which costs 5X. Mostly the small number of illegal aliens here are from English speaking countries like the USA and the UK. The first time they are arrested for anything they get deported.
I think the biggest hurdle to sorting out the USA's health care system is that illegal immigration really has to be solved first.
The UK has bulk, legal immigration, and as a result the UK National Health Service is buckling under the strain. People arrive from overseas with (comparatively) poor health, later in life (30 or whatever) and require a lot of care, all in London. It doesn't matter how much money the UK government dumps into the NHS, it is never enough.
As for Canada, I am sure that there are minority populations that require disproportionate health spending. For example Native Canadian communities have high unemployment and low health. They don't pay much tax and they do require a lot of care.
In general a WELL RUN Government, Single Payer Health Insurance plan is more efficent and delivers a better service ... but how you get there from where the USA is now is impossible. It just can't be done. Even if it was done, I don't think that the controlling factions of US politics would have any interest in running it well.
Or that some Gingers have curly hair. Red, curly hair is a thing.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=natural%20red%20curly%20hair&first=1
You are correct that exact figures are not available. You are right, taxes don't work that way. They are not directly earmarked for use on collection, rather they go into general revenue.
However efforts have been made to study the population wide effects of smoking. Smoking remains the #1 cause of preventable major illness.
From a public health perspective, it is cut and dried. Non smokers can work longer and be more productive, pay more tax and do more volunteer work. Raising taxes and preventing cheap imports forces smokers to pay closer to the actual costs of their addiction. In accounting terms they are required to internalize the costs of their decisions, rather than externalizing the costs to society as a whole.
Here is an article from 2019.
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/professional/smoking-costs-australia-close-to-137-billion
Also stopping or disabling vehicles.