I think before you ask that it would be worth knowing what portion of demand could be handled without batteries. Assuming generation in an environment where the ground gets bright sunshine pretty reliably every day and a power grid capable of redistributing that power continent-wide, what portion of demand could be met by such a system. Is peak power demand during the day or at night? What portion of total power demand occurs during daylight hours? Can solar farms on the east coast supply the west coast before dawn on the west coast? Can solar farms on the west coast supply the east coast after sunset on the east coast?
Seems to me that telecommuting ought to earn companies some large greenhouse gas emission credits which are worth actual cash to the company. I see that as a big push for telecommuting that hasn't even begun to be felt.
How many people use Thunderbird, Outlook, Mail.app etc. for mail compared to webmail? I'd venture that the former outnumber the latter by a significant multiple. If your experience is different I'd say the people you know are atypical in some way. For 99% of my mail I'm either on a desktop system or my laptop and either way I'm using an application not a web interface. And 99% of the remaining 1% is mail I receive on my phone. For me a mail application coupled with the ability to potentially fall back to a web interface is the ideal solution.
Owning? Owning???? Who said anything about owning? My dog and I are equal partners... in fact, considering that I pick up his poop and I had to type his posting, I may be a junior partner. I'll have to ask him.
It may very well be as you describe - I certainly think it would be worth knowing if that's the case. Which is perhaps part of what troubled me about the study being reported - it's asking too limited a question. I also kind of wonder if, when someone with cancer gets so depressed that they kill themself, is the death attributed to cancer or depression? If simply the latter then is anyone even questioning whether "think positively" programs for cancer patients would have saved those lives? What if they simply feel there is no point in fighting it any more and cease treatment? Would they have done that if there had been a "think positively" program in place? Not because the program actually affects the bodily response to the cancer but because the belief that it will do that helps people carry on?
I was once diagnosed with a systemic and chronic disease and the doctor played the opposite game - he overemphasized the negatives and how careful I had to be just to retard the onset. But being educated after the initial diagnosis I had gone and read the research so I new some of what he was saying was BS and that there was actually some reason to believe it was not what he was concluding. In the end he said "you know too much for your own good" and ordered a different test which gave different results. But it may now turn out that the first diagnosis was right, that in this case he was right about my "knowing too much" for my own good and that I would have been much better off being scared by his original comments - a case of creating an overly negative attitude, not supported by the facts, being life preserving/extending.
This seems like a very important question reaching well beyond cancer. We know psychological state affects physiological state, e.g. reaction to stress, immune system response etc. so it seems like it would be worthwhile to investigate just what is the optimum state of mind to deal with disease, what can mental attitude accomplish etc. Or the flip side, is shortened lifespan for those suffering from depression only a result of suicide? Does it also include mental impairment causing one to neglect health routines (seems likely), or does the mental state itself impair other aspects of the the body's functioning, e.g. immune system response?
Just what affect our mind can have on our body seems like it would be one of the most fascinating research problems out there.
Of course depression has physiological etc. impacts - it's an illness of the brain. I don't confuse it with pessimism although they are not unconnected. And AFAIK while depression can result from a purely physiological event the vast majority of cases result from psychological events which lead to physiological (is there another kind?) changes to the brain, i.e. psychological state affects physiological state. Which was my point. Well, one of them.
However the misconceptions about depression are so widespread it is always worth emphasizing the points in your post.
It's not just contact sports either. Scuba diving creates very tiny lesions on the brain. The more time diving and the deeper you dive the more lesions. And it happens in as little as 30' of water.
Every once in a while I think about the things we did as kids and frankly I'm surprised we didn't die. Aside from the errr, more explosive, things we did I remember one of my favorite things in a fight was to just bash the other guy's skull with my forehead. Then in my 20's I got to handle an actual skull - kids should be shown just how fragile a human skull is and how easy it is to break or fracture.
I've read something similar to what you are quoting and while I don't particularly disbelieve it I do wonder how the "positive thinking doesn't help" idea fits in with the observed lowered life expectancy for people with depression. In fact just getting health insurance after being diagnosed with depression can be very difficult.
Subsidize them with food stamps if they can't make it on the wages.
Just a small point but if you have to subsidize employees with food stamps because the wages are so low then the subsidy is really going to the employer.
I'm not sure how the H1B visas work but I'm guessing it is similar to a program Canada has for letting companies hire foreign workers if there are no Canadian residents who can do the job. Leaving aside the fact that the requirements are laughably low and that unavailability really means "not available at a price we want to pay" the fact is that in theory foreign workers are only supposed to be hired for jobs that would otherwise go unfilled because of a lack of domestic labor. Doesn't it then make some sense that if domestic workers do become available that the foreign workers be replaced on the basis that they would never have been hired if those domestic workers had originally been available?
Another way of looking at this is that there used to be the idea of companies being "good corporate citizens" in the community. Society is always a balancing act between rights and responsibilities. Individuals are expected to not behave in ways that are destructive to their society as a whole. When the level of destructiveness of a given behavior reaches a certain point then individuals are penalized for engaging in that behavior. Why should our expectations of companies be any lower?
It's interesting but I bet if an entire country was placing an order (which IIRC is what was being suggested) Dell would be prepared to make a custom model available.
"Hello Dell? We want to order 100,000 netbooks but with Linux instead of Windows. What's your best price?"
That's a shame. If they negotiated with Acer, LG, Asus etc. they might get very good bulk pricing on some of their Linux based netbooks. But I suppose you're right - why risk negotiating prices with multiple vendors that market and/or maintain the types of systems you have decided you want.
One other method of intimidation is the mass photographing of protectors by the Police Forward Intelligence Team
Unfortunately that was going on before 1984 in the city where I live. There used to be an annual "peace march" which was fully authorized and had city permits. It went over a bridge to the city core and the police would be up on the roof of a building beside the bridge trying to videotape every single face in the crowd (over 100,000 people one year).
Those skills should very definitely be taught. What should also be taught - and almost never is - is how to use those skills to understand what question one is trying to answer. This is one of the biggest failures I see in students coming from high school into university - you ask them a question, or set them a problem, and they do not stop and think and analyze to determine what it is they are really being asked. Instead they make a guess or an assumption and end up either answering the wrong question, a different question or take ten times as long as should be necessary to find an answer to the question being asked.
AFAIK whether or not the information is somehow invisibly stored with the entangled entities and so travels with them as they are separated at V = C is an open question.
I got the Brother 9840CDW for pretty much the same reasons and am happy with that decision. But the inkjet still has it's place. Al you do is wait for one to go on sale, like the Brother MFC 465CN which was on sale here for less than the price of the ink cartridges that it contained. Then sell the ink cartridges - now the net cost of printer/scanner/etc. is $0 and for that you get a great collection of servos, gears, stepper motors, scan sensors, rubber rollers etc. - all FREE!
Well I could answer that question but first let's see... you aren't really saying the ends justify the means are you? Schools do still teach the problem with that kind of morality don't they? I mean your justification for paying very low wages to food workers isn't just that it means you get cheaper food right?
Now as for doubling the wages of farm workers and its subsequent effect on the price of food... the price of food will rise. But it certainly won't double. Aside from direct wages for laborers the price of produce includes costs for seed, fertilizer, spraying, transporting to market etc. As well as the amortized cost of the farm equipment. The wages are only a small part of the cost of producing food.
It seems to me that a lot of the real wealth that is "lost" is actually still sitting there in the form of empty houses.
I think of all the villains in this piece the least villainous are the people who bought houses they couldn't afford. Sure some of them knew that they couldn't afford what the payments would be when the low interest period ended and they were counting on building up equity in a rising market before that happened. It's greed just like the greed of the big players who created the problem in the first place. But it's a tiny greed. And I find it hard to get too worked up against someone who mostly just wanted to be able to own a home. And for many they probably didn't know what they were going into... fast talking salesmen, mortgage sellers etc. convinced them they could handle the debt. All they wanted was to own a home and now they are (likely) homeless/renters with a big debt to pay off or a bankruptcy on their credit records - and a personal bankruptcy will cause far more pain than a business bankruptcy - one way or another they'll be paying for that mistake for many years.
I've seen the pictures of block after block of abandoned/foreclosed homes. Who does it benefit to just leave those homes empty and decaying? It seems to me part of recovery could be to get some of the people who lost their homes back into these places, with the people who got them there in the first place forced to help make the finances work.
I don't know if it is true since I haven't been following the details of the US mortgage market lately but I"m told that there is a second wave of balloon type mortgages to come due soon. Is it going to help anybody to let that wave of people lose their homes too?
It's funny in a sad way because in Canada people are convinced the real-estate market is going the same way as the US market. But when you take out Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver real estate prices in the rest of the country are doing fine. Those three went up fast so of course they came down fast but even then it wasn't because of the same kind of thing as in the US - the lending practices are much stricter here and mortgage insurance is required for anything less than 20% down. I don't know why Toronto went up. Calgary went up because of a huge booming oil economy so its market is going to stay down until oil recovers. Vancouver went up because of a persistent net migration from other parts of the country, persistent migration from pacific rim countries, because it is bounded geographically on three sides and because it is routinely ranked as one of the best places in the world to live with, for example, prices about 1/3rd of New York or San Francisco and actual cheap urban waterfront housing. Vancouver will be interesting to watch.
If rational decisions governed things it should recover quickly but since the market doesn't work that way it could continue to be a big bargain place for years to come - it will be interesting to see which actually happens. Similarly I look at oil and think that something selling for about 20% of its previous price is an amazing bargain - given that there is a finite supply and that the demand is never going to go away permanently. To buy now and have it regain its previous value would be a 400% profit. The stock market historically returns about 10% per year. With compounding it would take about 15 years to return a 400% profit - does anybody really think it will take oil anywhere close to 15 years to recover to $150/barrel? Oil and real-estate seem like fantastic investment opportunities.
Likewise, decreasing supply will raise price, so you'll get Americans demanding $10/hr to tend fields.
I'm sorry, you says that like paying someone a whole $10/hr to work hard is ridiculous. A whole $400/week to live on seems pretty damn skimpy to me.
My objection is that we are supposedly living in a capitalist society/economy which businesses all like and support. But when supply and demand starts meaning that they have to increase wages they want special visa programs and so on to flood the labor market and artificially raise supply in order to force down prices (Wages). Those same companies would (and do) have a fit if consumers decided the products made were too expensive and that the government should tailor make laws to deliberately increase foreign competition against domestic companies.
Despite the disagreement you are getting to this position I think you are right. I had disappointments with wifi throughput and concerns about wifi encryption vulnerabilities. So since I was installing new baseboards everywhere anyhow I bought a couple of hundred bucks worth of cable, connectors and wall plates and wired every room for gigE with at least one outlet (3 in living room) and connected them all to a gigabit switch. File copying etc. all scream and I don't have to worry about security problems from anyone unless they are willing to physically penetrate the walls or have deep pockets. MOre than one of us can stream video from the server without any problems. Better performance and better security - what's not to like?
My observation is that the usage is not as you describe. And even if the car were stationary, for example if you pulled over to take a break, you just might want to make use of the: cigarette lighters (for smokes or for DC power), the fog lamps, the rear defogger etc. and you might want to not have one cup drip on you because the *other* cup leaked and you might not want to have the whole assembly suddenly fall 45 degrees forward because a minor amount of weight is put on it. But if that's all fine with you then you then GM will love you. I think most of us would rather that things were designed properly.
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I think before you ask that it would be worth knowing what portion of demand could be handled without batteries. Assuming generation in an environment where the ground gets bright sunshine pretty reliably every day and a power grid capable of redistributing that power continent-wide, what portion of demand could be met by such a system. Is peak power demand during the day or at night? What portion of total power demand occurs during daylight hours? Can solar farms on the east coast supply the west coast before dawn on the west coast? Can solar farms on the west coast supply the east coast after sunset on the east coast?
Seems to me that telecommuting ought to earn companies some large greenhouse gas emission credits which are worth actual cash to the company. I see that as a big push for telecommuting that hasn't even begun to be felt.
How many people use Thunderbird, Outlook, Mail.app etc. for mail compared to webmail? I'd venture that the former outnumber the latter by a significant multiple. If your experience is different I'd say the people you know are atypical in some way. For 99% of my mail I'm either on a desktop system or my laptop and either way I'm using an application not a web interface. And 99% of the remaining 1% is mail I receive on my phone. For me a mail application coupled with the ability to potentially fall back to a web interface is the ideal solution.
Owning? Owning???? Who said anything about owning? My dog and I are equal partners... in fact, considering that I pick up his poop and I had to type his posting, I may be a junior partner. I'll have to ask him.
My dog wants you to know that he takes exception to your blatant species-ism!!!
OK, I would like to see some support for that statement because I have been told the opposite by practitioners.
It may very well be as you describe - I certainly think it would be worth knowing if that's the case. Which is perhaps part of what troubled me about the study being reported - it's asking too limited a question. I also kind of wonder if, when someone with cancer gets so depressed that they kill themself, is the death attributed to cancer or depression? If simply the latter then is anyone even questioning whether "think positively" programs for cancer patients would have saved those lives? What if they simply feel there is no point in fighting it any more and cease treatment? Would they have done that if there had been a "think positively" program in place? Not because the program actually affects the bodily response to the cancer but because the belief that it will do that helps people carry on?
I was once diagnosed with a systemic and chronic disease and the doctor played the opposite game - he overemphasized the negatives and how careful I had to be just to retard the onset. But being educated after the initial diagnosis I had gone and read the research so I new some of what he was saying was BS and that there was actually some reason to believe it was not what he was concluding. In the end he said "you know too much for your own good" and ordered a different test which gave different results. But it may now turn out that the first diagnosis was right, that in this case he was right about my "knowing too much" for my own good and that I would have been much better off being scared by his original comments - a case of creating an overly negative attitude, not supported by the facts, being life preserving/extending.
This seems like a very important question reaching well beyond cancer. We know psychological state affects physiological state, e.g. reaction to stress, immune system response etc. so it seems like it would be worthwhile to investigate just what is the optimum state of mind to deal with disease, what can mental attitude accomplish etc. Or the flip side, is shortened lifespan for those suffering from depression only a result of suicide? Does it also include mental impairment causing one to neglect health routines (seems likely), or does the mental state itself impair other aspects of the the body's functioning, e.g. immune system response?
Just what affect our mind can have on our body seems like it would be one of the most fascinating research problems out there.
Of course depression has physiological etc. impacts - it's an illness of the brain. I don't confuse it with pessimism although they are not unconnected. And AFAIK while depression can result from a purely physiological event the vast majority of cases result from psychological events which lead to physiological (is there another kind?) changes to the brain, i.e. psychological state affects physiological state. Which was my point. Well, one of them.
However the misconceptions about depression are so widespread it is always worth emphasizing the points in your post.
It's not just contact sports either. Scuba diving creates very tiny lesions on the brain. The more time diving and the deeper you dive the more lesions. And it happens in as little as 30' of water.
Every once in a while I think about the things we did as kids and frankly I'm surprised we didn't die. Aside from the errr, more explosive, things we did I remember one of my favorite things in a fight was to just bash the other guy's skull with my forehead. Then in my 20's I got to handle an actual skull - kids should be shown just how fragile a human skull is and how easy it is to break or fracture.
I've read something similar to what you are quoting and while I don't particularly disbelieve it I do wonder how the "positive thinking doesn't help" idea fits in with the observed lowered life expectancy for people with depression. In fact just getting health insurance after being diagnosed with depression can be very difficult.
like disposable toilet paper
Ummm, there's another kind of toilet paper?
Subsidize them with food stamps if they can't make it on the wages.
Just a small point but if you have to subsidize employees with food stamps because the wages are so low then the subsidy is really going to the employer.
I'm not sure how the H1B visas work but I'm guessing it is similar to a program Canada has for letting companies hire foreign workers if there are no Canadian residents who can do the job. Leaving aside the fact that the requirements are laughably low and that unavailability really means "not available at a price we want to pay" the fact is that in theory foreign workers are only supposed to be hired for jobs that would otherwise go unfilled because of a lack of domestic labor. Doesn't it then make some sense that if domestic workers do become available that the foreign workers be replaced on the basis that they would never have been hired if those domestic workers had originally been available?
Another way of looking at this is that there used to be the idea of companies being "good corporate citizens" in the community. Society is always a balancing act between rights and responsibilities. Individuals are expected to not behave in ways that are destructive to their society as a whole. When the level of destructiveness of a given behavior reaches a certain point then individuals are penalized for engaging in that behavior. Why should our expectations of companies be any lower?
It's interesting but I bet if an entire country was placing an order (which IIRC is what was being suggested) Dell would be prepared to make a custom model available.
"Hello Dell? We want to order 100,000 netbooks but with Linux instead of Windows. What's your best price?"
That's a shame. If they negotiated with Acer, LG, Asus etc. they might get very good bulk pricing on some of their Linux based netbooks. But I suppose you're right - why risk negotiating prices with multiple vendors that market and/or maintain the types of systems you have decided you want.
One other method of intimidation is the mass photographing of protectors by the Police Forward Intelligence Team
Unfortunately that was going on before 1984 in the city where I live. There used to be an annual "peace march" which was fully authorized and had city permits. It went over a bridge to the city core and the police would be up on the roof of a building beside the bridge trying to videotape every single face in the crowd (over 100,000 people one year).
Those skills should very definitely be taught. What should also be taught - and almost never is - is how to use those skills to understand what question one is trying to answer. This is one of the biggest failures I see in students coming from high school into university - you ask them a question, or set them a problem, and they do not stop and think and analyze to determine what it is they are really being asked. Instead they make a guess or an assumption and end up either answering the wrong question, a different question or take ten times as long as should be necessary to find an answer to the question being asked.
AFAIK whether or not the information is somehow invisibly stored with the entangled entities and so travels with them as they are separated at V = C is an open question.
I got the Brother 9840CDW for pretty much the same reasons and am happy with that decision. But the inkjet still has it's place. Al you do is wait for one to go on sale, like the Brother MFC 465CN which was on sale here for less than the price of the ink cartridges that it contained. Then sell the ink cartridges - now the net cost of printer/scanner/etc. is $0 and for that you get a great collection of servos, gears, stepper motors, scan sensors, rubber rollers etc. - all FREE!
Well I could answer that question but first let's see... you aren't really saying the ends justify the means are you? Schools do still teach the problem with that kind of morality don't they? I mean your justification for paying very low wages to food workers isn't just that it means you get cheaper food right?
Now as for doubling the wages of farm workers and its subsequent effect on the price of food... the price of food will rise. But it certainly won't double. Aside from direct wages for laborers the price of produce includes costs for seed, fertilizer, spraying, transporting to market etc. As well as the amortized cost of the farm equipment. The wages are only a small part of the cost of producing food.
It seems to me that a lot of the real wealth that is "lost" is actually still sitting there in the form of empty houses.
I think of all the villains in this piece the least villainous are the people who bought houses they couldn't afford. Sure some of them knew that they couldn't afford what the payments would be when the low interest period ended and they were counting on building up equity in a rising market before that happened. It's greed just like the greed of the big players who created the problem in the first place. But it's a tiny greed. And I find it hard to get too worked up against someone who mostly just wanted to be able to own a home. And for many they probably didn't know what they were going into... fast talking salesmen, mortgage sellers etc. convinced them they could handle the debt. All they wanted was to own a home and now they are (likely) homeless/renters with a big debt to pay off or a bankruptcy on their credit records - and a personal bankruptcy will cause far more pain than a business bankruptcy - one way or another they'll be paying for that mistake for many years.
I've seen the pictures of block after block of abandoned/foreclosed homes. Who does it benefit to just leave those homes empty and decaying? It seems to me part of recovery could be to get some of the people who lost their homes back into these places, with the people who got them there in the first place forced to help make the finances work.
I don't know if it is true since I haven't been following the details of the US mortgage market lately but I"m told that there is a second wave of balloon type mortgages to come due soon. Is it going to help anybody to let that wave of people lose their homes too?
It's funny in a sad way because in Canada people are convinced the real-estate market is going the same way as the US market. But when you take out Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver real estate prices in the rest of the country are doing fine. Those three went up fast so of course they came down fast but even then it wasn't because of the same kind of thing as in the US - the lending practices are much stricter here and mortgage insurance is required for anything less than 20% down. I don't know why Toronto went up. Calgary went up because of a huge booming oil economy so its market is going to stay down until oil recovers. Vancouver went up because of a persistent net migration from other parts of the country, persistent migration from pacific rim countries, because it is bounded geographically on three sides and because it is routinely ranked as one of the best places in the world to live with, for example, prices about 1/3rd of New York or San Francisco and actual cheap urban waterfront housing. Vancouver will be interesting to watch.
If rational decisions governed things it should recover quickly but since the market doesn't work that way it could continue to be a big bargain place for years to come - it will be interesting to see which actually happens. Similarly I look at oil and think that something selling for about 20% of its previous price is an amazing bargain - given that there is a finite supply and that the demand is never going to go away permanently. To buy now and have it regain its previous value would be a 400% profit. The stock market historically returns about 10% per year. With compounding it would take about 15 years to return a 400% profit - does anybody really think it will take oil anywhere close to 15 years to recover to $150/barrel? Oil and real-estate seem like fantastic investment opportunities.
Likewise, decreasing supply will raise price, so you'll get Americans demanding $10/hr to tend fields.
I'm sorry, you says that like paying someone a whole $10/hr to work hard is ridiculous. A whole $400/week to live on seems pretty damn skimpy to me.
My objection is that we are supposedly living in a capitalist society/economy which businesses all like and support. But when supply and demand starts meaning that they have to increase wages they want special visa programs and so on to flood the labor market and artificially raise supply in order to force down prices (Wages). Those same companies would (and do) have a fit if consumers decided the products made were too expensive and that the government should tailor make laws to deliberately increase foreign competition against domestic companies.
Despite the disagreement you are getting to this position I think you are right. I had disappointments with wifi throughput and concerns about wifi encryption vulnerabilities. So since I was installing new baseboards everywhere anyhow I bought a couple of hundred bucks worth of cable, connectors and wall plates and wired every room for gigE with at least one outlet (3 in living room) and connected them all to a gigabit switch. File copying etc. all scream and I don't have to worry about security problems from anyone unless they are willing to physically penetrate the walls or have deep pockets. MOre than one of us can stream video from the server without any problems. Better performance and better security - what's not to like?
My observation is that the usage is not as you describe. And even if the car were stationary, for example if you pulled over to take a break, you just might want to make use of the: cigarette lighters (for smokes or for DC power), the fog lamps, the rear defogger etc. and you might want to not have one cup drip on you because the *other* cup leaked and you might not want to have the whole assembly suddenly fall 45 degrees forward because a minor amount of weight is put on it. But if that's all fine with you then you then GM will love you. I think most of us would rather that things were designed properly.