It's getting closer all the time.
It looks like a cross between a flip-top phone and the medical scanner used by Dr McCoy in the TV series Star Trek.
The Vscan is not science fiction but a hand-held ultrasound machine with a scanning wand attached, which has been approved for use in Europe and North America.
And here it is we've been doing it wrong all these thousands of years!
Women find happy guys significantly less sexually attractive than swaggering or brooding men, according to a new University of British Columbia study that helps to explain the enduring allure of “bad boys” and other iconic gender types.
Horowitz includes the letter from MMFA CEO Matt Butler, outlining MMFA's plans to silence Fox News by going after the advertisers supporting it. It almost sounds like mob tactics from past, inducing businesses to stop doing business with someone who has fallen out of favor with the mob bosses.
Many take the position that if you do not approve of what someone’s press is publishing that it is acceptable to somehow destroy the offending press.
In the “pretend spirit” of free speech Media Matters for America (MMFA) wants to stifle the free press rights of Fox News. MMFA is not at all pleased with Fox News and has chosen to find a way to stop Fox News from publishing.
It is both sad and objectionable that MMFA objects to press freedom.
And wouldn't they scream loudly if someone were to try the same tactics against MMFA? Of course they would. But somehow only the anointed are allowed to advocate silencing dissent. And some of them would recommend using any means necessary to do so, just as has been done so many times over the past 100 years or so in places like the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, China, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, and a host of other nations around the world.
Media Matters of course can take issue with what Fox News promulgates and can publish opposing opinions of its own.
If you don’t approve of it don’t watch it, read it, or listen to it. Suggest that your friends and family might choose to do the same and that is fine.
But MMFA has crossed a line by trying to stifle a voice of which they don’t approve. They suggest, in a manner of speaking, that the public destroy the Fox presses by removing the financial support of Fox News that comes from Madison Avenue.
What a horrid position it is for MMFA to take.
We all need to support the right to publish commentators such as Glenn Beck and many others at Fox News. I personally find what they are spewing noxious. But that’s the point. As distasteful as it might be, we all need to defend speech we don’t agree with as long as it's not inciting people to riot and things of that nature.
If MMFA doesn’t like much of what is said on Fox News, they can say so, and they can say it quite LOUDLY.
But their shouting emits a foul odor when they are advocating the suppression of views expressed on Fox News along with the suppression of Fox News itself.
Another plus of laser ignition is that there can be more than a single ignition point within the cylinder, which in turn gives better control over combustion.
Engines make NOx as a byproduct of combustion. If engines ran leaner – burnt more air and less fuel – they would produce significantly smaller NOx emissions.
Spark plugs can ignite leaner fuel mixtures, but only by increasing spark energy. Unfortunately, these high voltages erode spark-plug electrodes so fast, the solution is not economical. By contrast, lasers, which ignite the air-fuel mixture with concentrated optical energy, have no electrodes and are not affected.
These lasers also improve efficiency, according to their creators. Conventional spark plugs sit on top of the cylinder and only ignite the air-fuel mixture close to them. The relatively cold metal of nearby electrodes and cylinder walls absorbs heat from the explosion, quenching the flame front just as it starts to expand.
Lasers, Taira explains, can focus their beams directly into the center of the mixture. Without quenching, the flame front expands more symmetrically and up to three times faster than those produced by spark plugs.
A lot of pro-union folks point to the “lower-paying jobs with fewer benefits” canard as if that explains everything and no further discussion is required. However, most of the 22 Right To Work states have a lower cost of living, so unless that factor is taken into account, which union supporters choose to ignore, the comparison is meaningless. As I've mentioned before, a perfect example of this factor can be seen in the battle between the NLRB and the state of South Carolina and Boeing.
HB 474 supporters say the state will see a burst of job growth if the bill becomes law, and point to other right-to-work states as proof. Critics say right-to-work brings lower-paying jobs with fewer benefits, and that it sticks the nose of government into contract talks between labor and management.
If HB 474 becomes law, New Hampshire would be the 23rd state, and the first in the Northeast, to adopt the principle.
Indeed.
...corporations don't vote but people do, so a lot of politicians, pretty much everywhere, try to promise low taxes to people but increase taxes on corporations, especially if those businesses can be smeared as economic villains. In reality, however, corporations represent jobs, economic growth and stability, and when government goes after corporations, then government is attacking jobs and GDP.
Nineteen percent seems to be a hefty levy on money donated to the college for the purpose of promoting the education of our children. How is it the administration thought they could get away with skimming that much money off of the endowment payouts without anyone noticing? I don't know about you, but if I was one of the donors I would not be pleased by any means.
Up until about a decade ago, every penny of the amount drawn off went to the purposes intended by the donor: salaries, internships, research grants, department special expenses, travel programs, etc. — in short, real educational efforts to the direct benefit of students and faculty members. However, the Wright administration could not keep its hands off that income stream, and about a decade ago it instituted “the levy.” From that time onward a percentage that gradually rose to 14% of the money paid out of restricted endowments was skimmed off to pay for various College operating expenses having no relation whatsoever to the educational endeavor for which the original gift was intended (in our example, that would be 14% of the 5.5% payout).
At some point in the last few months, unbeknownst to the faculty or its senior committees, this percentage was raised to 19%.
--snip--
Faculty only learned about the change recently, when they were apprised by the administration of the exact amount of money available to departments and programs in the coming fiscal year from their various endowments. While the stock market had risen, payouts had inexplicably dropped — and when department and program heads expressed incomprehension at their unexpectedly low budgets, they were finally told of the change. Needless to say, the conversation at this week’s meeting of the Committee of Chairs was, shall we say, animated.
On his last point, couldn't it be the cost of labor in Europe is artificially high due to government mandates and labor laws that replacing expensive humans with less expensive technology makes economic sense? When government and labor laws make it more expensive to hire people for what would otherwise be minimum wage jobs, then how can it be a surprise to anyone that businesses like McDonald's won't hire them? (It's not all that different than what we see happening here every time the Leftists in Congress beholden to the labor unions raise the minimum wage. Each time that happens, joblessness among those seeking entry level jobs goes up because small businesses have a tougher time justifying the added expense, particularly during times of economic hardship.)
In his penetrating new book The Great Stagnation, economist Tyler Cowen warns that this may have been a temporary and anomalous phenomenon. Cowen calls the period from roughly the early 19th to the mid-20th centuries the era of “low hanging fruit.” According to Cowen, technological advances in this period were relatively easy to produce and exploit, resulting in a staggering explosion of living standards.
But by around 1970, most of this low hanging fruit had been plucked and growth rates began to slow. Indeed, growth rates are “lower today than before 1973, no matter what exact numbers you settle on for the absolute living standard.” Cowen sees this fact directly tied to the innovation plateau that was reached around the same time: “The United States produced more patents in 1966 (54,600) than in 1993 (53,200),” he notes. “Meaningful innovation has become harder, and so we must spend more money to accomplish real innovations, which means a lower and declining rate of return on technology.”
--snip--
This digital depressant trickles all the way down to old fashioned companies. McDonald’s recently announced it will do away with cashiers in many of its European restaurants, replacing them with touch-screen ordering systems. This innovation may (or may not) make ordering your Big Mac a faster experience, but it will definitely eliminate countless opportunities for young and low-skilled workers.
Unfortunately or fate is in the hands of people within government who really don't like America all that much and are working as hard as they can to cripple its innovative and robust economy in an effort to make it more egalitarian (at least by their definition). Unfortunately we've seen the results of such socio-economic experiments before, and they've always turned out poorly for everyone involved...except the ruling class, of course. (And even then, some have seen their fiefdoms crumble away and leave them as destitute as the rest of their fellow countrymen.)
We are inventing more things, faster than ever before. The past innovations “destroyed jobs” — and made society wealthier and created new jobs, different jobs, to replace those that had gone before. This is nothing but the song of the Luddites.
HOWEVER…
For that process of creative destruction to work, it is necessary to ALLOW the new jobs and new industries to be created. And THAT, not some illusory “low hanging fruit”, is what has been changing over the last generation or two. The regulatory burden on new industries has climbed ever higher.
Right now, in laboratories around the U.S. people are working on fusion power, cheap space travel, synthetic fuel from algae, sensors for automated medical diagnosis, and so on, and on, and on.
And if we lived in a free country, sooner than you think, some of those would be part of our everyday lives. The decision to decline is a CHOICE — not a fate.
Indeed.
While reading it, I realized that both sides have their own reasons for going to war or intervening around the world. Since the internet, we now get a real sense of what people are going through in other countries. I know I have been riveted on twitter to tweets from Egypt, Bahrain, and Libya.
--snip--
What does this mean for us? Will we continue to war over all the world’s conflicts? Even those that do not affect us? It’s a question we need to ask.
So it all boils down to this: SarbOx costs businesses billions in compliance costs, delays up-to-date financial reporting, has squeezed out investment capital, and cost jobs (except those of accountants). Yet with all it was supposed to do it hasn't prevented much of anything that existing SEC rules and regulations already covered. It wasn't that there weren't sufficient laws on the books to deal with things like the Enron scam. It was that what laws that were already on the books weren't being properly enforced. How does piling on even more laws, rules, and regulations fix that?
A decline in IPOs (Initial Public Offerings). This is how private companies go public, offering stock to the public as a means to raise capital for expansion. Without this mechanism, many businesses can't expand as they might have planned, which means fewer jobs are created and less money can be made.
An increase in mergers and acquisitions because IPOs have fallen out of favor due to the requirements of SarbOx.
An increase in number of public companies going private. Some of this may be driven by the burden placed upon public companies by SarbOx. Going private removed much of this burden, but also made it more difficult to raise capital. Apparently they saw this as less encumbering than having to deal with SarbOx.
It slows down speedy financial disclosure, something the SEC requires. With the convoluted requirements of SarbOx, such disclosure is darn near impossible.
Costs of compliance are quite high. The SEC had estimated it would cost companies required to report under SarbOx only $91,000 per year to do so. The actual costs are closer to $7.8 million per year (this is a 2008 figure). Accounting costs have doubled due to the reporting requirements. Other than accountants and attorneys, how has this benefited anyone?
Emotion can play a large part in what we choose to believe or dis-believe. People will believe pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo because in their hearts they want it to be true.
Humans do seem to prize accuracy above all. We want our beliefs to be accurate—to align with what is really true about the world—and we know that science is a reliable guide to accuracy. But this desire to be accurate conflicts with other motives, some of them unconscious. People hold beliefs to protect important values, for example. Individuals who think of nature as sacred may perceive genetic modification as morally wrong, regardless of its safety or utility. People also hold beliefs that are rooted in their emotions. A flu pandemic that can cause widespread death among the innocent may cause feelings of fear and helplessness. One way to cope with those emotions is to belittle warnings of a pandemic as improbable.
Part of the problem is that some of the EPA's new rules overlap and contradict many existing rules, both its own and those of other governmental agencies and departments overseeing the energy industry. This leaves the power companies and oil exploration and drilling firms in a bind, making it impossible for them to be in compliance with all the rules and regulations imposed upon them. The EPA also ignores state rules and regulators rather than working with them, which only adds to the confusion.
Jeff Holmstead, who directed the EPA's air and radiation office from 2001 to 2005 during the Republican President George W. Bush's administration, told the commission the new rules will quickly change policies that have been stable for 40 years. He called the new regulations an "unprecedented" amount of change for power companies.
And once they start dredging again the PCB levels will rise dramatically and stay that way as long as they continue removing all that silt on the river bottom. That doesn't even take into account the huge amounts of energy expended or pollution generated to clean up the river. They would have been better off to leave it where it was. It wasn't going to go anywhere. Instead, they've made things worse all in the name of “Saving The Environment.” It's yet another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences coming into play. Government agencies are pretty good at invoking it.
By ordering a dredging operation along 40 miles of the Hudson, the EPA has created a disaster of governmental proportions in this quiet upstate community. For six months in 2009, floating clamshell diggers shoveled day and night, pulling sludge from the river bottom around Fort Edward and depositing it onto barges. Six days a week, 24 hours a day, these barges, containing a total of 286,000 cubic yards of sediment mixed with old PCBs, were offloaded into that massive dewatering facility. There the soggy material was treated and squeezed in giant presses. The cakes of compacted sludge were then moved by truck onto 81-car trains, parked on a new spur of the Canadian Pacific Railway extending into the site. Five of these trains were in constant rotation, circulating the 4,400-mile round trip between the facility and the final dump site in Texas.
It was a Herculean attempt at remediation but one that actually increased PCB levels in the Hudson for a time; it also wreaked havoc on locals’ lives and imposed huge costs on General Electric. And all this work was only “Phase I” of the EPA’s plans. The government is now compelling GE to spend billions of dollars on Phase II, an even larger and longer operation. Dredging will recommence this spring.
You heard it here first.
A man walks into a bar. The bartender asks him what he'll have to drink.
“A bin Laden!” he answers.
“What's a 'bin Laden?” asks the bartender.
“Two shots and a splash of water...”
Over the past four years the governor and the them Democrat majority legislature went on a spending spree, increasing state spending by over 30% over that time, using inflated revenue projections to justify the high spending levels. When revenues fell well below the overly optimistic projections, the governor and legislature failed to address the expenditure problems, instead focusing on trying to increase fees and taxes at a time when most businesses and individuals were struggling to make ends meet. Even with the increases, the state revenues failed to meet projections.
"The governor had an opportunity to use responsible and realistic revenue figures like the House budget used, but instead he chose to use numbers that were nearly $300 million higher to hide his greater spending," said Republican State Committee Chairman Jack Kimball.
This is yet another of the unintended consequences of ObamaCare affecting employment, not just here in New Hampshire, but across the nation.
At a meeting attended by about two dozen businessmen and women at the 1st District Congressman’s Manchester District Office off Lowell Street, Gary Brown of Raymond-based www.WebPageDesignUSA.com and The Image Factory said he can’t afford to hire any more staff and is fighting to keep his current 12 employees working.
“I’m at tipping point, where if I hire any more folks, I will have to pay for national health care,” Brown said.
“How an I going to survive? I’m not going to hire,” he said.
Apparently Mr. Whyman didn't understand that the SEAL mission was not a police action. It was a combat mission in a long running war against someone who had openly waged war against the US. He was given the opportunity to surrender but chose death instead. It was by no means an assassination. Bin Laden was a legitimate target and was taken down within the Rules of Engagement. That he chose to die rather than be captured was his decision, period.
"You hate to see somebody get away with something this downright evil, but two wrongs don't make a right," said Bob Whyman, of Manchester. "In a way, I was sorry to hear he was dead."
Federalism — which serves the ability of businesses to move to greener pastures — puts state and local politicians under pressure, but that is where they should be, lest they treat businesses as hostages that can be abused. According to the Tax Foundation, Illinois has not only the fourth-highest combined national-local corporate income tax in the nation but also in the industrialized world.
--snip--A study by the Illinois Policy Institute, a market-oriented think tank, concludes that between 1991 and 2009, Illinois lost more than 1.2 million residents — more than one every 10 minutes — to other states. Between 1995 and 2007, the total net income leaving Illinois was $23.5 billion.
