Printed novels dry out my fingers, are exceedingly heavy (even one weighs twice as much as 1000+ ebooks, and we're talking about flying which has weight limits), inaccessible for many readers (no audio narration, large-print editions have to be bought separately and are even heavier), hard to read in the dark...
And, yet, a number of airlines (such as United) are introducing entertainment systems whereby they stream content to your own device.
More fundamentally, do you suggest that people travel without tablets or laptops? Never going to happen. And it's better to have the batteries in the cabin than in the hold.
Presumably the reaction to an in-cabin fire will be quicker than to that of a fire in the hold.
Do these batteries provide their own oxidizer somehow (in that would flooding the hold with CO2 or something actually extinguish one on fire)?
I don't know how fire protection currently is within an airplane hold but surely this is a solveable problem. Maybe airlines are asking that people not put these batteries in the hold is because fire protection systems haven't yet been adapted to this risk.
> Do these batteries provide their own oxidizer somehow
Yes - the metal oxides in one of the electrodes decompose at high temperatures. CO2 will stop it setting other things on fire but the battery will continue to burn like a thermite reaction until it runs out of fuel.
No it's probably not anything new but when you muck about with commercial airplanes things get expensive and take a lot of time (regulatory issues). It's one thing to modify something with your car, for example, but when you change something about a commercial airliner it's not so simple.
Cargo holds are typically pressurized. Pressurizing forward of the aft pressure bulkhead doesn't really add significantly to the structural requirements of an aircraft as I understand it. Furthermore (in addition to pets) you'd probably see lots of leaking and otherwise damaged contents of luggage/cargo if the hold were unpressurized.
More than that, the most efficient pressure vessel is a circular section (tension only). Making the floor of the passenger cabin the pressure vessel would be very heavy, as it would have to carry the load in bending.
I think it's worth noting that these people were not 'losing their fundamental right to water'; the government was not going to put the military around every super market or water source and deny people who hadn't paid their bills.
These people are losing a service they're no longer paying for, which is water delivered directly to their home.
I don't think that the facts you point to are lost on anyone here, though certainly some have a different interpretation.
I sometimes agree with this interpretation of 'positive human rights.' But I'd encourage you, in this case, to think about what has happened in Detroit.
The bottom fell out from under that city. There were a lot of dumb decisions made in the development, especially in how much they focused on horizontal-only growth. But it seems unlikely that the citizens could recognize it. Have you/would you check on the long-term finances of a municipality before you moved there? Inspect the grants they've received, conduct traffic studies to see if the infrastructure is justified and supported, and inspect their costs and funding means of infrastructure maintenance? Those are deeply-hidden systemic problems; not intentionally hidden, but completely obscured from the public eye nonetheless. If you bought into Detroit a couple decades ago, you probably couldn't see those underlying issues; all you saw was a lot of high-speed roads that let you get a big place for cheap out on the edge of town.
Now, decades later, your city has collapsed under the weight of its own largesse, and the main industry has shrunken enormously. Granted, you don't have to be an economist to figure that unions will push large industry away, and that putting all your eggs in one basket is hugely risky, but it can be hard to be so pessimistic in what seems either far in the distant future, or maybe even unlikely to really happen.
Anyway, you moved into a city that made implicit guarantees of service, and that crumbled. You moved into a city with economic activity, and that's gone. There are a lot of people who got burnt doing exactly that, and it makes a lot of sense to help those people out. Even if there are some people who move in to take advantage, it still makes our society work better if we try to help out.
Detroit wasn't special except in that they were ahead of the times. As more and more municipalities in this country move from soft to hard defaults, we're going to have a lot of people on the hook for bills they were unlikely to see coming, and in the face of economic slumps they never could have imagined. Whether we disingenuously call it a human right, or if we prefer to acknowledge it as community assistance, we're going to need a lot more of it in the coming decades.
It's demonstrably not a fact, and it doesn't add to the discussion. Add constructively to the discussion and contrary opinions are not only tolerated, but engaged.
> UK is being watched by a
> network of 1.85m CCTV cameras.
It's not a network - the comment was not factually correct. I was answering the question and explaining my understanding of a likely cause for the downvotes - I personally did not downvote it.
A family member of mine works for DHS as a paralegal, more or less, and their department deals with illegal immigration into the US. They often tell tales of how illegal immigrants will commit heinous acts (rape, murder) or somewhat more pedestrian crimes (heroin possession, for instance).
Anyways, the most striking part about this is that it seems a lot of the judges who handle these cases simply don't care. Because these people are often deported and then come back a week later, not a lot seems to be done. Some of the criminals won't be charged, and it seems a lot of people on the in the system will just turn a blind eye. I'm not sure if it's apathy, or if the system is so inundated that they're just unable to keep up, but have you experienced anything like this?
