Robotics competition in Taiwan.

Teaching them to take our cheese-searching jerbs!

Well, that looked like a gold medal performance in any competition.

Ha! Came to reply to you, only to find this was actually my long forgotten post! Thanks for the double promote.

In the competition, I say if we're going to fuck it up, go all in and shoot for Venus level warming.

$200 Billion per year is roughly what McKesson generates in revenues from the sell of opioids they produce.

$6 Billion per year is roughly what Private Prisons and Correctional Facilities in the US generate from imprisoning predominantly black and Brown people.

Legalizing drugs introduce competition to the market thus lowering profits.

Legalizing drugs will reduce future prison populations thus lowering profits.

Legalizing drugs will make drug abuse a health crisis and not a crime. The government can handle a health crisis. This would force people like me to shift a sizable portion of my investments out of the very lucrative sectors that profit from the current regime running the country.

We called it "drum and bugle corps" when I did it (Santa Clara Vanguard, DCI '98). Basically a military-discipline civilian marching band competition tour across the US.

I love that they are trying and have admirable goals.

I'm somewhat skeptical about the effectiveness. Presumably some of the data that they are going to collect will include retention rates -- if pieces of plastic of various sizes *enter* the C-shaped area, what percentage of them *stay* there until they can be intentionally removed? Also, how often will they become "full" to an extent requiring a tow to shore and offload operation?

The devices themselves seem like they'd actually be quite cheap to produce. Towing and offloading operations will be expensive, particularly in man-hours. Recycling the collected debris crap into plastic products for resale will be low-yield and unsustainable from a purely capitalistic pricing standpoint -- people will only buy that "merch" as a form of contributing to the project; not because the stuff they make will be competitively priced.

However, none of that makes their endeavor not worth doing/trying. Hopefully their retention rates are good enough (not much plastic or any particular size bracket escapes around / under the devices), and they can make enough through selling merch to fund the offload costs and deploy enough devices to meet their goals!

This is all fine, why not. IMHO Formula 1 is basically approaching this from the other shore most of the time.

Racing cars used to be about adrenalin, taming a beast, surviving unlikely odds and so on, an adventure for gentlemen.

In the last 40 years it has become a competition in pushing buttons, mostly.

If racing cars can have ABS, automatic gearboxes, power steering and all, why not an electric motor?

I still think it is sad and I am glad I saw F1 in the 70s.

*promote some *quality K9 surfing. I think he was at the dog surf competition I saw in Baja last summer, possibly the winner. Keep hanging 8, buddy.

I understand how you've come to your conclusion, but let me clear it up:

The word 'vegan' in medicine is exchangeable with plant-based diet. If you look at the PCRM.org they recommend a whole-foods plant-based diet. They simply call it vegan, as that's what other organisations know it as, such as the British/American Dietetics Association. Clearly not recommending vegan icecream and hotdogs :-)

When it comes to prevention of cruelty to animals, the PCRM do it from a medical training/testing stand point. They're not saying don't eat animals because it's cruel, they're saying don't test drugs on animals when there are computer models and lab work that yield more accurate results (although animals costs less....). They're also against surgeons performing vivisection as part of their training. E.g. when my cousin did her training she had to put a perfectly healthy dog to sleep, chop of some of it's legs and re-attach them, as well as causing massive internal wounds to simulate gunshots.... it's messed up, but it's hard for young doctors to say anything because they've trained for a decade at that point, and they're not going to throw it away (and the next person will come along and do it anyway, since it's such a highly competitive industry). This where the PCRM come in, they lobby medical institutions to stop this kind of stuff.


If you're still thinking that they have some kind of vegan agenda / bias, the PCRM is an organisation of 12,000 doctors. If it was just one or two quacks preaching veganism, I'd be suspicious too, but that's clearly not the case here.

Everything they do is based on data. And they're also not the only medical organisation to do it. The Australian Medical Association is also urging hospitals to give patients plant-based diets because of how much faster they recover (and don't return). The President of the American College of Cardiology is 'vegan', and is know for his phrase "Meat kills, processed meat kills you quicker". The World Cancer Research Fund, recommends beans with every meal, no processed meat, and maximum of 350g of red meat a week. That's basically a plant-based diet.

There are now something like 400 studies being published every single year showing how bad animal products are for us. There's a nice graph here actually showing how much more evidence is coming out all the time: https://youtu.be/C5qRXPDNw1E?t=4190 (nevermind the tacky channel, the speakers at this conference are all legitimate medical professionals)

So yes, your doctors are right, eat your fruit and veg, but also whole grains, beans, nuts and seeds. Bean burrito is a perfect combination of these, followed by a banana and berry smoothie

You also have to consider the amount of financial loss various food and pharmacological industries would suffer if most people ate plant-based. So when you look for opinions about the PCRM people are very quick to make PCRM appear as a bunch of hippies in order to protect their earnings. America spends something like 50 billion dollars a year on statins, and 35 billion on stent surgeries, which would pretty much go away overnight if everyone ate plant-based diets. They're not going to let that money go without a fight, which is why there's a lot of opinions about PCRM around. Needless to say though, they don't have any good evidence to back their reasoning, which makes it quite easy to see which ones are likely opinions funded by certain industries.

Oh man, I remember watching this on VHS in the 80s.

Were cars really cheap in the 80s in the US? 'cos every movie I remember from back then seemed to be in a competition to trash the most.

He knows what to do when the competition arrives ....

@newtboy,
"Yeah, that's honest, move to a profession where one single specific type of performance is the entire job..."

Take any highly competitive field and you've got similar professional grading based upon excellence in the field. Legal, Medical, Engineering, the same kind of professionals can be found hunting for top tier talent in any of these, no different than the NBA. Their criteria can be every bit as colour blind and there is strong economic incentives to do so to boot.

"Side note: there have been some who suggested affirmative action in sports, requiring a certain number of white players on teams. Indeed, there were white leagues that fought tooth and nail to not let even the most talented non whites participate. Just sayin...."
And that would be racist, and it was wrong, and it's something we should be glad to be rid of.

Just sayin....

"Race is considered, period."
Reasonable, non-racist people are going to disagree with you. They are going to, correctly, call your policy racist.

Can you really not see the other side that thinks fighting racism with racism is the wrong approach?

Yeah, neat idea, but I'm not seeing the applications outside of (maybe) high end competitive racing where a few percent efficiency (that isn't offset by losses elsewhere, like weight) is worth it. In that case the aluminum would be okay because you'd just replace it after every event. For the likes of e-bikes and such, on the other hand, if you're going to use a shaft drive, why not just put the transmission entirely on the drive sprocket (maybe with a CVT like Netwboy suggets). This thing, as a whole, strikes me as too much out-of-the-box engineering without actually leaving the box. Of course, all that said, I'm always in favor of trying new engineering ideas so I approve.

Charter schools get EQUAL resources, not EXTRA resources. One could argue they even get a bit less than equal. These children need extra. People keep confusing open competition and the free market being good with being perfect.
Now, if you mean that the charter school concept would help break the white-flight economic resegregation of our public school system that generates these at-risk schools to begin with, then maybe.

You have to believe that competition with charter schools would not allow this situation to continue year after year. I can't believe this is a middle school, not high school. Ultimately though, it's nearly impossible for teachers to do the job that parents should be doing.