Posted a new series of photos in Flickr showing a jumping spider killing a damselfly.
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Author: Phil (Page 27 of 51)
Hello. I'm a retired electronic hardware, software & mechanical engineer. My hobby is making metal art. My interests range across writing, economics, politics, history, photography, fountain pens, languages, ham radio, and music. I've been writing software since 1968.
The Paradox of Tolerance: If a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. --Karl Popper
Some articles about President Obama’s relaxed restriction on travel to Cuba say “Cuban-Americans”, others say “Americans”, others refer to both in the same article. Which is it?
And if it’s Cuban-Americans only, I have another question: since when can the government discriminate between the rights of certain Americans versus other Americans? An American citizen is an American citizen, and it’s illegal to discriminate between groups, whether along ethnic lines, race, color, religion, or any other parameter.
Why is this not mentioned in the news?
Pedro Guzman has been an American citizen all his life. Yet in 2007, the 31-year-old Los Angeles native — in jail for a misdemeanor, mentally ill and never able to read or write — signed a waiver agreeing to leave the country without a hearing and was deported to Mexico as an illegal immigrant.
“The more the system becomes confused, the more U.S. citizens will be wrongfully detained and wrongfully removed,” said Bruce Einhorn, a retired immigration judge who now teaches at Pepperdine Law School. “They are the symptom of a larger problem in the detention system. … Nothing could be more regrettable than the removal of our fellow citizens.”
It’s impossible to know exactly how many citizens have been detained or deported because nobody keeps track. Kara Hartzler, an attorney at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, testified at a U.S. House hearing last year that her group alone sees 40 to 50 jailings a month of people with potentially valid claims to citizenship. “These cases are surprisingly, painfully common,” she said.
Electric vehicles are the wave of the future. Bio-diesel (algae, bacteria), and electric, and combinations of the two are where the future lies. But the U.S. is going to blow it.
For most of the 20th century, the U.S. was the world leader in car manufacturing. This is no longer the case and it looks like the mammoth dinosaur corporations that make up “Detroit” are so hidebound they’re unable to cope with the coming changes. Now it’s looking like the whole thing is going to go bankrupt in the U.S.
But, cars are not dead. In fact, there will be more car sales in the 21st century than in the 20th century as the billion people in China, and the billion people in India reach a level of income that enables them to have cars. The U.S. car industry could be there, ready for the market, but it won’t be.
In order to change this, just about everything from the past must be dropped and new procedures put in place, from corporate governance down to the lowest position in the company. Design cycles must be vastly accelerated. It’s no longer possible to spend five years taking a car from concept to production. In five years, all of the technology changes, and any product that passes through the standard Detroit design cycle will be obsolete before it hits the streets. Consider the Chevy Volt. How long have we been hearing about it? Years. And it’s still years from introduction. That’s ridiculous.
Will it get fixed? I doubt it. But there’s a tremendous opportunity sitting there. The U.S. could again become the leading car maker in the world with the latest technology and best value. But I fear it will not happen. By the time things change in the U.S., if they change, market leadership will have already moved to Asia where the problem is understood and companies move much more quickly to adapt to technology and changing markets.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/business/global/02electric.html?th&emc=th
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