Readit NewsThis seems like pretty human behavior. Business leaders and managers will naturally tend to align their egos with the business status quo (in some form).
Of course, anecdote, but the example they give — sounds like the guy never would have thought to gamble had there not been a slot machine on base. At the same time, he was so easily and thoroughly adsorbed into it, perhaps he was dry kindling — just waiting for any spark to come along.
That being said, without real numbers, it's super slippery to argue anything. One could argue that the on base gambling problem introduces (say) 3x the population into gambling. But then perhaps it decreases the of severe financial distress by 10x on an individual basis. That would be a net win. Then one might say that it lowers to risk of off-base unsavory behavior (getting into fights, owing money to local gangs/organized crimes, etc etc) by 1000x on an individualized basis. Perhaps that further tilts the field.
1. The classic, "people will want to gamble, we may as well control the supply". I think this is generally true. In the US, service members can go off base (when allowed) to gamble in a more or less controlled manner. This program provides the possibility of more or less uniform, controlled access across the globe, regardless of host nation.
2. Revenue funds morale, welfare and recreation activities.
I honestly think point 1 is fair enough. The corrosive element is that it's used for aspect 2 (an alternate approach might be to simply to redistribute money back to the soldiers directly... or just let it go to waste). The challenge is that once someone's funding is coupled to gambling revenue, it compromises its ability to pursue task 1 (which is basically a risk mitigation strategy).
Of course it's going to take time for different agriculture regions to get set up.
So far, climatic zone shifts are on the order of 10-100km per decade.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/redrawing-the-map-how-the-wor...
Is this broadly true? I'm not disagreeing, it's just that I do not keep up with politics, but most of the Republicans in my life want Trump to destroy Iran, which I thought seemed unsurprising, politically? Yes, they want less foreign involvement and less war, but with the gigantic exception of the case where they hate the target culture (again, I'm just talking about people in my life).
The reality is that Trump's current political coalition is composed of many parts, and has a variety of internal contradictions that Trump has been able hold together, most likely through his command of his true/core base. We might say that segment of the population is highly aggrieved, has high belief in Trump's personal ability to affect change (including negatively harming out groups), and loosely holds an isolationist stance (though perhaps this would better be casted as interventionist/internationalist skeptical).
The rest of Trump's coalition includes parties like converted hawks/neocons, who are broadly interventionist.
An actual uniting policy issue across groups is a heighten animosity towards China. Even the most isolationist groups carried significant grievance against China, and would support actions to either punish China, or actions to improve US' relative position to China.
1. Satellites are too far to fight anything on ground (Power per unit area (i.e., intensity) decreases as the square of the distance)
2. If the Satellites are relaying to things on the ground, they are also relaying their location (easy adversarial targets)
3. In a war (they mention Ukraine in the article), first thing that is toast is these satellites.
The USG military uses is attractive not as a replacement of GPS, but as a supplement/complement. If they could truly manage to use the same receivers, then this provides an extra layer of redundancy. There are 32 GPS satellites in the current constellation. Being in MEO means you need pretty beefy ASAT to take it take them down, but we could assume that China could pull it off. Xona's constellation would add redundancy (splashing 258 is just a lot more targets).
For non USG uses, I imagine Xona is making two different pitches.
a) You can achieve GPS+RTK level accuracy without needing RTK base stations.
b) Increased jamming/spoofing resiliency, intended for short of war (aka hybrid war/grey zone) situations. For example, I imagine Xona will attempt to setup a private encrypted signal which they'll sell to friendly/allied nation airliners and similar industries.
The cost and scale of disruption matters.
Why did this idea ever take off?
For the US specifically, major federal programs began during the Great Depression as a two for one combo. It solved the direct problem of... people being poor and their kids not having food/lunch, and it also provided a reasonable supply sink for the government to buy out supply from farmers to help keep things going.
Anyhow, since then for a variety of reasons, subsidized/free lunches have stuck around. Primarily because the underlying problem (food insecurity) has not been adequately solved. School lunches also tends to be amongst the more politically palatable/defensible forms of welfare in the United States, since its very structure and beneficiaries make it harder to criticize.
So while expansion of SNAP or other programs that might help tackle general food insecurity might run into headwinds, most of those arguments tend to falter when it comes to feeding children directly at school. For example, it's hard to argue that getting free lunches at school would encourage "abuse and malaise" amongst students. Similarly, since the composition of lunches tend to be under control of the supplying organization, there's reduced concern of people spending their assistance on "luxuries".
But apparently a typical bike store runs a net profit on the order of 5-10%.
Having your COGs jump 10% is pretty significant then your net profits are that slim. It would wipe out a 5% net profit for example.
https://www.bicycleretailer.com/opinion-analysis/2013/06/14/...
MCAS failures was not a failure of software per se, but a clear system engineering and management failure, and a failure of all engineers involved, including ones that actually are licensed.
If nothing else, MCAS shows the limits of regulation, particularly in the failure mode of regulatory capture (FAA delegated too much power back to Boeing).