Not necessarily. Hypothetically speaking, if the federal government becomes more efficient, i.e., it produces the same services for less money, the FED could stimulate the economy with low interest rates, so that the private market employs the people released from the federal government and we will have higher production and higher GDP.
Practically, speaking if you just fire a bunch of federal employees and close departments randomly, you are not making the government more efficient you are just making it less productive. Then if, at the same time, you put in a bunch of sudden arbitrary tariffs that cause inflation across the board, then you tie the hands of the FED and the FED cannot lower rates to preserve employment. So in that case, yes GDP will decrease.
Yes you can. Of course if your crypto is a security you have to treat it as a security, you have to register it file a prospectus, etc., but it is doable.
This article is flat out wrong. The study they cite does not state the things the article says it states. And the study they cite certainly does not compare the harm from brakes to the harm from exhaust.
The study simply says that brake dust can cause asthma and hay fever in children. There is no comparison made to the harm from exhaust.
Exhaust is certainly more harmful than brakedust in the quantities one may encounter in the real world. Exhaust contains many chemicals that are actual poisons. Iron is not poisonous and copper can only be poisonous in large amounts. It is true that they can cause sensitivity and autoimmune diseases in the lungs especially in children, but this is much more remote harm than the actual poison in exhaust.
Nobody kills themselves by sniffing brakes but many people have done it by closing themselves in a garage with a running car engine. (They say that is harder now with catalytic converters but it still happens).
Anecdote related to last paragraph...20 or so years ago I drove a then 20 year old truck some guy had cobbled together. It was a real hunk o junk, rusty, the speedometer didn't work, etc. But it did have a new engine and carb, but it had no cat. It had several exhaust leaks (judging by noise). I was lucky it even had mufflers.
Went through a taco bell drive thru one night that had a weird tunnel portion. It was a slow line, and even sitting in that tunnel a couple minutes, my friend and I got lightheaded and a bit teary eyed. It's scary we didn't even realize it til we got through the tunnel.
That was the moment for me of realizing how awful these things are for the environment. If we have to be enclosed with our own emissions it will literally kill us, but we just blow it away in the open air as 'not my problem anymore.'
I'm glad emissions are better now, and that electric has a viable path forward. Shame we weren't at this point a few decades ago.
Atlas Shrugged should be read the same way as Mein Kampf should be read. As a cautious tale about what evil people believe in. It should be read as a way to get into their disturbed heads see what they are thinking to better protect yourself from them.
Otherwise it is a quite boring book complete devoid of artistic merit.
If you are going to read Atlas Shrugged do not buy it new. I like to rummage around used bookshops and atlas shrugged is by far the most plentiful book there. That is no doubt because a lot of people buy the book because of the hype and then sell it because they are bored out of their skulls after twenty pages. So you can always get a pristine used copy for half price.
>Atlas Shrugged should be read the same way as Mein Kampf should be read.
my thinking is pretty close. For me Atlas Shrugged is the processing of the Ayn Rand's own PTSD resulting from coming of age during Russian Revolution and the following civil war with the bolsheviks coming into full power as a result. Add to that the shock of immigration immediately after that into completely different country/society (and I see similar to Ayn Rand's thinking in many USSR/Russian immigrants, at least in their first 10-20 years here) And so it is boring like a psychologist patient's notes would be.
I see your point, but comparing Mein Kampf to Atlas Shrugged feels misplaced. Mein Kampf is not fiction: it’s a manifesto tied to genocide and historical atrocities. While both provoke strong reactions, the moral and historical weight of Mein Kampf is incomparable, given the real-world consequences it inspired.
You are absolutely right about electric cars and how fun it is to drive them. I just want to make the obligatory statement that street racing is very dangerous for innocent people and nobody should do it or encourage it.
What a scumbag. Make sure to read to the end of the article to read about things that he undoubtedly stole. Good job by the New Yorker journalist getting to the bottom of things and not being charmed by this psychopath. Very good article overall.
It is very depressing to see large public and non profit institutions be snowed in by his showmanship and spending millions of their funds on this glorified celebrity worship. It is good for museums to have letters of famous writers and their notes and such but it is an absolute waste for them to pay millions when they can pay hundreds of thousands. For most of these archives it seems that most and all bidders would be public or non profit institutions. Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money? In many cases it seems like there was no competitive bidding at all, horowitz merely came in with a crazy high price and they agreed to it. If they had a bit of a back bone they could have done the deals for much less.
But it was quite hilarious to read how he convinced other thieves to buy his overpriced collections. I can imagine his sales pitch “you will be so respected if you become an antique books and manuscripts collector! You will be the cream of society. They will forget about your business dealings.”
> Why would they outbid each other to waste more public or non profit money?
Because like it or not, even public and non-profit institutions are in competition with one another. Maybe not for money specifically, but prestige, notoriety and having access to single “one-of-a-kind” items. All of those bring more attention, publicity and funding.
If you want to see or review the original drafts of an author, you can only do that at the single location that has those papers and documentation. Every one of these things is worth exactly as much as they will bring in in additional funding and notoriety. If these institutions are being snowed it is because of their own hubris and overestimation of the value of the artifacts in question.
But my (limited) understanding is this sort of arbitrary pricing, valuations and “just this side of legal/ethical if you don’t ask too many questions” is par for the course in any museum/artifact business. History once it passes out of memory is all about stories. And the value of any given item is how good of a story it can be made to tell, and how that story will bring in audiences. The skeleton of a crocodile might be interesting, but not worth much. The skeleton of a crocodile that was estimated to have been alive at the end of the age of dinosaurs is a story to sell, even if to someone viewing the bones there’s no difference.
He was a market maker where there was very little liquidity. Given that, all valuations in this world are subjective at best. He just made more liquidity than most, so the process of spitballing valuations became more focused on one individual doing it. Him. He just sprinkled in a little sociopathy to make it more beneficial to him.
It is very suspicious that the companies bidding are NASA contractors. This may be a case of corruption. I.E., NASA sells the moon rover for 85 M and then pays 200 M for the moon rover to do something for them for future NASA missions.
"It's petty suspicious that the only companies trying to buy this mining equipment are other mining companies." Did you expect Walmart to make a bid on it?
However, in this case, I don't think there is anything weird going on, at least not with the information we have. I've never worked at one of these contractors who service NASA, but in the past I worked for a large defense contractor who in part provided some pretty high-tech stuff to the Air Force among others.
One of the things I worked on specifically was the communications computer for the Predator drone. It was the piece of equipment that received all command and control from the ground station, and sent the video back from the drone camera. The actual plane itself was made by a separate company who was more specialized in that aspect.
We were very proud to work on Predator, and we absolutely would have loved to have bid on something like that. Even though we made part of it, we didn't have a complete unit. Had we have won a bid to get one, it would have gone into a glass case in our visitor area, where we would proudly display it like a trophy. I would not be surprised in the least if that is what these bidders have in mind.
Consider how much fun it would be if you are showing up for a job interview and you see in a glass case in the lobby an actual brand new moon Rover! I know that would be pretty cool for me. I do tend to love museums though, so maybe I'm not the best test case.
Stipulations include performing the science mission and releasing the data. While there the cool factor would be orders of magnitude greater, there are also considerable commitments and risk involved. So the question is: what other benefits would be involved? I'm sure there would be many, particularly if you could prove that you could launch and operate such missions, but I doubt that having a museum piece would be one of them. (And you would only have that museum piece if there is a twin that remains on Earth, which seems to be common for NASA missions.)
Everyone who has the capability to land this on the moon is a NASA contractor or a competing space agency. And I don't know how congress would feel about selling this to Roskosmos, the Chinese CNSA or Indian ISRO. Maybe ESA.
Of course somebody else could buy it and pay somebody to put it on the moon. But that seems unlikely given the provision that findings have to be shared. For companies that sell moon landings it's good marketing, for anyone else there wouldn't be much upside
Does anyone know weather this is actually being used in machining now. It seems that while lasers are being widely used in metal fabrication, they are the simpler heat ablation lasers.
If it is being used in practice what are the advantages/disadvantages vis a vis edm?
Yes, although it's a very specialised process. Femtosecond lasers are ubiquitous in semiconductor and thin-film electronics manufacturing, where the dross produced by conventional laser machining is unacceptable. Beyond that, cardiovascular stents are probably the most widespread example - they're made of extremely thin-walled tube that is highly prone to thermal distortion and they require very good edge quality. Femtosecond lasers are increasingly commonly used in the laser texturing of injection mold tools because of the higher surface quality.
You can search for 'femtosecond micromachining' for an idea of the applications where this is being used. Most of the applications are still in high margin markets (aerospace, medical, semiconductor), but there are starting to be consumer applications in particular in the display industry. For example, cutting gorilla glass cleanly is most often done with femtosecond lasers these days.
Popularity is increasing rapidly as the cost for femtosecond lasers has been coming down. Wile you are not going to find a press release from Apple saying that they are installing a particular manufacturing technology on their iphone line, the sales numbers speak for themselves: there is a sizable fraction of 1B/year in sales of femtosecond systems which are being used to build _something_
The working mechanism of femtosecond (and picosecond for that matter) micromachining is the same as the coulomb explosion being discussed here. In the industry it is usually referred to 'athermal' or 'cold' to differentiate from the older system which rely on thermally heating the material to ionize it.
In fact it is mentioned explicitly in the wikipedia article:
>Coulomb explosions for industrial machining are made with ultra-short (picosecond or femtoseconds) laser pulses...Coulomb explosion etching can be used in any material to bore holes, remove surface layers, and texture and microstructure surfaces
It sounds like you're familiar with the field, so I'll accept that you're probably correct here, but the wikipedia article doesn't say what you're claiming.
It says coulom explosions are made with ultra short lasers, not that all ultra short laser pulses result in coulomb explosions, so for someone that doesn't know otherwise, you can't infer that whenever someone says ultra short laser cutting that it happens via coulomb explosions.
What country/state are you from, what country state is your client from and how much money are we talking about? In the US there is a fairly straightforward process to sue someone in small claims court without a lawyer and with fairly small fees. But small claims courts are limited to small awards.
I have not worked as a freelance programmer nor hired any, but a friend really likes to hire freelancers for various projects and often asks me for advice and tells me about his travails. I think practically speaking, it is not that hard for a freelancer to get paid because software always needs upkeep for bugfixes or updates to work with other software or to add new features. And it is far far far more expensive to have a second freelancer look at the first freelancers code and do the updates.
Some people say it takes more time to read code than to write it. I am not sure if that is true but very often if you ask a second freelancer to do minor updates on another freelancers code, the second guy will just say that the code is so awful the whole thing has to be rewritten from scratch. So you have a big advantage just by having written the stuff and having the code in your head and written in your style. You are the best man to fix it and update it by far.
My friend always pays his bills but he is a very tough negotiator, and often gets comparatively good bargains for freelance work. However, all the benefits of his bargains disappear when he needs the software to be changed a bit in six months or so. Then the freelancer is in the drivers seat and my friend completely drops his tough negotiator stance and becomes super nice and friendly towards the freelancer.
So if you do not want to pay for lawyers and small claims court is not suitable for some reason, you may just send a demand letter saying that you are charging a 20% penalty for non-payment and interest will accrue in the future, and just wait for your client to need some update and then you demand that all previous invoices be satisfied before discussion for new work even begins.
IANAL, this is not legal advice. If the sum is a large amount, it would probably be best to consult a lawyer.
Practically, speaking if you just fire a bunch of federal employees and close departments randomly, you are not making the government more efficient you are just making it less productive. Then if, at the same time, you put in a bunch of sudden arbitrary tariffs that cause inflation across the board, then you tie the hands of the FED and the FED cannot lower rates to preserve employment. So in that case, yes GDP will decrease.