> Note that previous stable versions will not be suggested. The package will be completely ignored if its latest published version is within the cooldown period.
I could see it being a good feature. If there have been two versions published within the last week or two, then there are reasonable odds that the previous one had a bug.
>Over the last two years, the state transportation agency has spent more than $62,000 on repairs related to guardrail theft in the region.
If the full cost of replacement is ~$31k/yr, the scrap value of the stolen guardrails is surely far less. Seems like there wouldn't be enough for even a single thief to make a living.
Cost to repair correctly is almost always a lot higher than the fence value of the material, but more importantly, repair cost is always higher than the labor/tool cost to steal the material. Dunno how long it takes to cut off a 12 foot section of guard rail, but the fence value of that rail only has to be more than $15/hr over the time it takes to find and remove the rail to make it profitable.
Its the same thing with catalytic converters. The crackhead stealing a catalytic converter from a 2011 prius is interested in the $150-$350 of platinum in the catalytic converter, not the $2200+labor replacement cost of the thing. Considering that its ~20 minutes looking, and ~2 minutes sawing to steal the thing, we should all be so lucky as to make $150-$350 for less than 30 minutes' work.
Is that really how cat theft works- thief gets a couple hundred and it’s smuggled offshore and broken up for raw materials to make new cats? Why can’t the thief sell to a local shop for $1000, to repair maybe the very car it was stolen from? Are cats serialized and tracked?
When I was in Central America people would steal windshields from cars left outside at night. New replacements were very expensive because of import taxes but you could just go to the nearest shady shop and what do you know, they just happen to have a used one for your car in stock!
> Why can’t the thief sell to a local shop for $1000, to repair
Because there are federal laws against selling for re-use and installing used emissions parts[1] and there are federal laws that make the remanufacturing operation you'd need to make "new cats" less profitable than shipping the used stuff overseas and doing it there.
When my cat was stolen, I was living in California, where only state-certified exhausts will pass emissions testing. And to date, the state has only certified OEM exhausts for Priuses.
So in my case, it was especially egregious (seriously, people have been petitioning Toyota for decades to recall Priuses to make the cat harder to steal), but in general, if you’ve got the OK to sell exhausts in California, you’re not going to endanger it by coming anywhere close to an illegal platinum/palladium fencing operation.
Portable electric power tools, which are likely stolen themselves, can make quick work of almost anything. Only thing that stops even more theft is the tools themselves will get pawned for drug money quick enough.
i don't understand how a stolen iphone is worth anything, do they part it out? I thought apple explicitly had coded/serialized parts, and i thought that would prevent someone from installing a stolen screen onto a different phone.
or, is it just because apple is a jerk and wants all repairs to be done by apple?
What happens sometimes is they get trafficked outside of the country, then they start sending messages to the original owner trying to manipulate them in various ways to remove the activation lock. Including lying that it's necessary to wipe the sensitive photos off the phone, lying that they're poor and got scammed by a seller who sold them a stolen phone, and sometimes harassing the owner with really graphic texts cursing their family members or threatening their lives until the phone is unlocked: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/iphone-theft-sto...
It's not like the users are really losing anything by wiping and removing activation lock, the phone is already stolen, so it often works
People willing and able to do this probably have a few things going on at a time. Plus they're not necessarily at the high end of living expenses. A couple grand haul for a couple hours work is pretty good.
But does the water reach 27°C during Australian summers, or just the air? Water will remain cooler than air for a long time, as anyone who's jumped into a swimming pool in summer knows. It was the sustained water temperature of 27°C that was the deadly issue for Winston the platypus.
Aerospace programs can have extremely long timelines in the private sector, too. Variants of the Boeing 737 have been produced since 1966. While the recent MAX versions were flawed and Boeing has some real quality issues, you can still get service parts for the original airframe.
Two different international coalitions are now trying to design 6th-generation fighters that will be available for export, but the earliest they could possibly be available is 2035. So, for at least another decade the F-35 will be the only survivable 5th-generation fighter available for purchase in US-aligned countries.
There are still a few other 4th-generation fighters in production, some with modernized systems, but at this point they're only suitable for a limited set of defensive or low-intensity missions. Russia and China supposedly also have operational 5th-generation fighters now but it's unclear whether those actually work, and they can't build enough to even supply their own forces let alone exports.
China has more than 200+ J-20s and growing. The J-31 is there too, but likely in smaller numbers for carriers?
Your point on how effective they really are or not is on point though. Ukraine has shown a lot of Russian wunderwaffe aircraft performing less than spectacularly.
Cost per flight hour is still much higher than its slightly less capable competitors.
I don't know what the argument is for that. Maybe that sim training will be a larger percentage of training in the future, and therefore operating costs don't matter so much? Take whatever jet has the best capabilities, period?
I think what that misses is that maintenance of real aircraft will atrophy without constant pilot feedback. Of course mechanics can follow the maintenance guidelines, but so much of that, historically, is guided, modified, and improved by experience from wear and tear from actual use.
I guess it depends on how much one values stealth. I'm just an armchair-most-things, but it seems to me that there are many situations stealth doesn't matter as much as effective robot range, turn-around time and ease of logistics.
If rumors are to be believed, without reflectors on, the F-35 should have a radar cross section smaller than a quarter (which is a bit larger than a 1 Euro coin). On top of that, its radar is purported to outrange Russian and Chinese radars by almost 2:1. Just looking at it for air supremacy missions, the thing is basically invisible (to radar), and can launch a missile at an enemy jet before they could even detect it, if it wasn't basically invisible.
I mean, even if it had a larger cross section it could probably pick off Russian fighters before those could do anything in return. But with the stealth it has, it could creep up on them and they wouldn't even know what happened until it was too late.
Basically, but also looking like increasingly transient victory through attrition that's going to backfire on US alliance in long term.
TLDR - Convince western bloc to burden share development cost of joint program, burn partners by retaining near exclusive control over deployment and development. See drama that US has control over mission data files, that can only be generated at Eglin AFB, aka non US operators have essentially no sovereign control over their F35s. In the meantime, partners stuck on F35 platform because multi generational gamble commitment killed their own aero industry and there's no alternative short/medium term.
There's a reason almost every non-US F35 operator that can, is developing their own fighter, or partnering up in programs to to develop non US associated fighters (history US joint programs tech sharing drama entirely different shitshow) - actual long term operators of F35 have come to realize getting captured by F35 US/Lockmart SAAS is highly problematic. Borderline treasonous if we're being honest.
US can probably fix this by openning up program, or wait for other programs to fail technically/economically. Seeing how US can barely wrest F35 from Lockheed contracts, and how behind other western programs are, the latter probably more likely.
I'm most interested in what the unit economics here are. Inefficiencies in Western manufacturing are seem like they could be significant since the big threat in the short term seems to be a WWI style blow up by UN security council countries.
The US is basically broke and seems to be struggling industrially. It won't be able to ignore economics if it has to conduct a war against an industrial power.
It’s always amazing to consider what people think about the economy vs how it’s actually doing.
Japan has a Debt to GDP ratio of 255%, relatively few natural resources, and a rapidly aging population, yet it is still doing reasonably well. America by comparison is in a vastly better position economically.
That's a stupid metric, I don't know why they keep bringing it up. Japan is a good debtor and it's probably cheap for them to finance their debts so they could end up paying less for them than a bad debtor would for a debt worth 50% of their GDP.
Money spent on the economy stimulates growth even if it comes from loans.
I'm not an economist but probably I would probably define the ideal amount of debt a country should have is when the amount of economic growth coming from the extra money is equalled by the costs of financing said debt.
Being a net creator means foreign investors are less interested in investing inside your country than your own population is interested in investing outside of it. In many ways it’s advantageous, but also a sign something negative is going on.
> Japan has a Debt to GDP ratio of 255% ... yet it is still doing reasonably well
and
> Being a net creator ... [is] a sign something negative is going on.
How do you synthasize these? Would the Japanese be economically better off if they just forgave the debts of all the people who owe them money? That seems suspicious to me. As far as I can tell the argument is that the US is doing better than Japan, Japan is different to the US and therefore the US is not broke.
I don't think that is a strong argument. If the US engaged in heavy war spending, they'd have to print like madmen and don't think their economy would cope well. Let alone where they'd get the money to prepare for a conflict without focusing on manufacturing efficiency; it isn't easy to outspend people from this starting position because they seem to be finding the limit of what they can borrow. The people they owe money to aren't going to get it back in real terms either, seems safe to say.
Reasonably well doesn’t mean everything is great, just that the country is continuing to function. Japan’s GDP growth rate (total and per capita) has been terrible for years, but they are a long way from becoming a failed state.
In many ways Japan’s economy actually fits people’s perception of the US economy.
It's about looking at supply vs demand. Electrical devices are often labeled by the minimum voltage they require to operate. 110 V is commonly used because the device can operate reliably on a 120 V distribution system.
For what it's worth, the Oxford English Dictionary gives two citations for the phrase, one from January 1996 and one from May 2005. It's not obvious to me from the quoted text whether the 1996 citation actually has quite the same meaning as we're talking about here.
It's from something in PR Newswire, and it says: "As an industry consultant Bob has been a leader in developing business strategies and cooperative relationships in the area of digital rights management and content distribution."
And what's not clear to me is whether that's "digital (rights management)" -- i.e., using computer technology to enforce copyright etc., the usual present-day use of the term -- or "(digital rights) management" -- i.e., everything to do with handling copyright etc. in the specific context of digital data.
> Note that previous stable versions will not be suggested. The package will be completely ignored if its latest published version is within the cooldown period.
Seems like a big drawback to this approach.