So long as it's reasonably accurate, I have no problem with emotional-level pieces like this. A great many people make decisions emotionally, and this is a good way to convey scientific results to them. But if you're not one of those, this isn't aimed at you; the lack of science in this article is probably deliberate - it's not even trying to justify its claims.
If you prefer actual facts and figures to back up an analysis, the IPCC reports are a great starting point. While the summaries provide only broad overviews, the chapters they reference go into much more detail and are very well-sourced with citations of the peer-reviewed papers that form the backbone of the real science here. Go directly to the source if you want to minimise emotional bias. And if you're genuinely curious about a specific point, many authors will cheerfully respond to a respectful inquiry.
If the system was static, with constant average temperatures, then random events would produce an ever-decreasing number of new records each year, both high and low. The regular smashing of numerous high records (with the occasional low as well) is characteristic of a system with increased variability on top of a rising trend.
But we already know that, not through statistics but because the science has been hammering it home since the 80s, with analysis of not only new measurements but 200 years of temperature records from all over the globe, and proxy records for the last few millennia.
You're not wrong, but in practice this is rarely an issue. Have a look at the payload masses on SpaceX's mission list - the great majority of payloads didn't come close to their maximum capacity, meaning the mass overhead of recoverability is a non-issue most of the time.
While it's true they give up a tiny percentage of customers who need slightly more than their reusable rocket can now deliver, it's more than made up for by the savings of of reuse. They've also expended a handful of boosters that didn't have enough capacity to loft their heavier payloads and still make it back, and these boosters flew without many of the recovery control surfaces like the grid fins, so their design is flexible enough to support both approaches.
The extra fuel is dirt cheap compared to the cost of the booster. Estimates vary for the cost of a booster core, maybe $20-30M, but the price of that will come down anyway now that they're finalising their F9 design with Block 5. Musk has said that the cost of refurbishing Block 4 for reflight was less than half the new cost, so still definitely worth it - and Block 5 is designed to fly with minimal refurb (as little as 24 hour turnaround) so will certainly cost a lot less than that to refly. And the added capital cost of development, reuse systems like control surfaces, and recovery ships is amortised out over dozens of launches so should be minor in the long run.
People die every day in more mundane vehicles, but that doesn't seem to deter them. Fear of a travel mode isn't often proportional to actual danger. Even Musk's proposed commercial suborbital BFR flights will look scary to many regardless of their safety record, and will likely attract only thrillseekers and those who really need the speed, unless his marketers are as good his engineers.
But the good news is that rockets are probably safer than many transport options already, at least in terms of deaths per mile traveled:-)
They *do* give a version away for free, as in beer and libre, and it comes with all the choice you want - it's called AOSP. Fully open-source, comes with zero Google spyware, has a suite of basic apps you can ignore or replace, you can take your pick of app stores (e.g F-Droid) or just sideload. And it happily runs the vast majority of Android apps - everything that doesn't specifically require a Google service. Best of all, there is a thriving community creating many dozens of variants that can be easily installed on most popular phones, or at least those that don't lock their bootloader too tightly. You can even add back in the Google services if that's what you want, and get both worlds.
As a user, you can choose not only your hardware, but your OS variant too. Nothing is forced on you. As a company, all Google requires is you make a choice between Google Android with their services, or AOSP Android - and a number of companies have freely chosen the latter, including Amazon, B&N, and most Chinese phone vendors.
Nobody's concerned about normal waves hitting coasts 2 inches higher up. What does concern them is how the rise affects the more extreme events; coastal floods from king tides and storm surges are getting worse, and more frequent - unusually high floods that only happened once a century (1% chance) are now happening once a decade (10% chance).
These floods don't just inundate streets and underground cables, they can contaminate coastal wetlands, aquifers, and farmland with salt. In flat coastal deltas, a small rise in flood levels can extend a much longer way inland, salting the ground and the water table for miles and affecting the livelihoods of many - particularly in poorer countries with large populations depending on once-fertile river deltas. This is a very real problem for many countries without the funds to relocate farms and farmers, especially those like Bangladesh.
Music services aren't social apps, and neither are mapping and search engines, in the sense of having a network of friends. It's the network that's the important part; I don't care whether my friend uses Bing or Apple Maps instead of Google - but I do care if they can't see my Facebook feed, and I can't see theirs. Twitter and Instagram are indeed social apps, but they both serve quite different audiences so they don't so much compete.
Sure users could post everything to FB2 as well as FB - but why would they? It's twice the effort, and there's nobody they know on FB2. Now if FB2 users could see FB posts, and make posts that FB users could see, then there'd be a minimal barrier to entry, the same network effect applies to both, and you might tempt new users with a nicer experience - but of course there's no way in hell that Facebook would ever allow that sort of interoperability to happen.
Sadly I think the display is one of its most dated parts - it's hardly changed from the screen on my 2013 MacBook Pro. Which was great for its day, but falls far short of modern offerings.
Other laptops offer much higher resolutions like 3200x1800 or 3840x2160, real HDR, 120Hz frame rates, smaller bezels, touch sensitivity... the Alienware 13 even has OLED. While Apple is still serving up basically the same LCD "Retina" 2880x1440 displays for years now. They still have decent colour gamuts but nothing you can't get elsewhere. Frankly, if I didn't need macOS support then I'd be all over an XPS 15 instead, personally.
Because the value is not in the product; it's in the people using it, and the people are all on Facebook. Metcalfe's Law means that it'll need something pretty damn disruptive to unseat them at this stage.
They weren'tignored. And indeed, a lot of jobs were recovered after the GFC losses. But they've been declining steadily since 1980, so that's unlikely to change much soon.
As for "having nothing to lose", we've already seen how e.g. Trump's steel tariffs can actually damage local manufacturing by dramatically raising their costs, so I very much doubt that's true. The decline in those jobs might be slowed a little, but at the cost of making other sectors less competitive - and workers in construction and auto manufacturing are major parts of Trump's base too. And that's before we get into the impact of retaliatory tariffs on completely different sectors like farming.
US manufacturing output has nearly tripled since the 70s, so China's manufacturing has taken apparently hasn't harmed the local industry much at all.
US manufacturing jobs have declined sharply, however - and this is what Trump's base is concerned about. But since the local industry is quite healthy, blaming China for killing it is misguided - blame the rise of automation instead; output per worker has risen even faster than total output.
I certainly agree that those ex-workers need help, but those unskilled manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. It's just not economically viable to mass-produce things by hand anymore - you'll get heavily undercut in the world market by developing countries with cheaper labour. It's more effective to help those affected to move to different sectors instead; service jobs (which are booming), or reskilling them to other areas.
And indeed they are - the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy has been promoting solar cookers in India since the 80s. They're fairly widely used, but have a number of disadvantages - can't cook at night, or on cloudy days (though many parts of India typically get 300 sunny days a year), smaller units have to be used outside, cooking rate is hard to control, and they're slow, often taking 2 or 3 hours to cook a meal.
But more recent developments have added thermal storage in the form of heated steam or other liquids, allowing indoor and after-dark usage along with more control and faster cooking. This usually boosts the price of course, but can be invaluable in larger-scale community kitchens.
In one year, 1.3 million lives are cut short by air pollution, preventing each of those people from producing a nominal average of $94k over the rest of their lives. The lost productivity is $123 billion, not for that year, but accumulated over the next few decades.
The next year, another 1.3 million lives are cut short - resulting in an additional $123 billion productivity loss over those same decades. And more the next year, and the next.
You're right in that the $123B isn't the loss for a single year, so perhaps comparing it to the annual GDP may be a little misleading - but it's a genuine cost that's incurred yearly, even if the impact is amortised. And when you add up the loss from all the prior years (this isn't new), then the total annual loss is probably pretty close to the $123B mark anyway.
If you want to be that cynical: the statistical value of a human life (in terms of health costs, lost productivity etc) in India was US$94,721, according to the WHO for 2004. For 1.3 million lives that's $123 billion every year - a pretty sizable chunk of their GDP.
If you read even the first paragraph of TFA you'd see that this 100 GW is on top of the already-existing 100 GW target by 2022. And of course they're adding wind, hydro, and nuclear as well.
More important than the fridge would be energy to power a cooker instead - which could save 1.3 million lives a year.
From GP's link, solar generation in '16-'17 was 12.08 GWh of solar power, which was 0.98% of their utility generation that year. This was from 12.3 GW of installed capacity, of which 45% was added in that time period, so contributed partially. That suggests 100 GW should produce somewhere between 98 and 178 GWh, or 7.9 - 14.4% of 2017's total.
And since the 100 GW described in TFA is on top of the existing target of 100 GW by 2022, you can probably double that (though of course total demand is also likely to increase as well).
There have been a large number of studies that show Antarctica has been losing ice mass overall - Cazenave et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2009; E et al., 2009; Horwath and Dietrich, 2009; Velicogna, 2009; Wu et al., 2010; Rignot et al., 2011c; Shi et al., 2011; King et al., 2012; Tanget al., 2012, Shepherd et al., 2012, Martin-Español et al., 2017 etc, and now Shepherd et al, 2018.
Yet you chose to second-guess the conclusions of a single one of those (despite lack of expertise in the field) that combines results from dozens of different papers (yes, including the NASA study - reference 74), and instead believe a single outlier study which you hadn't even read (it's here btw). On which I might add the lead author has since said:
When our paper came out, I was very careful to emphasize that this is in no way contradictory to the findings of the IPCC [2013] report or conclusions that climate change is a serious problem that we need to do something about
Can you really claim with a straight face to be concerned about the quality of the science? You're not exactly demonstrating thoroughness or unbiased evaluation yourself.
If Samsung won't come to the party, make sure your next phone supports Project Treble (should be any phone that shipped with Oreo, plus the original Pixels). That finally decouples the OS from the SoC drivers, and means any Treble phone can (theoretically) be upgraded with Google's own OS releases.
Which is why you can also get this Beta 2 release on third party phones like the Essential Phone, Nokia 7 Plus, OnePlus 6, Oppo R15 Pro, Sony Xperia XZ2, Vivo X21 & X21UD, and Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, as well as Google's own Pixel series.
Failing all that, LineageOS will work well with your Samsung.
Just like cigarettes. The customers were assured that the product had minimal downsides, so they adopted it enthusiastically, to the point where they became dependent on it. But they may well have made different choices if they'd known the full truth.
There are alternatives to fossil fuels. If the public hadn't been deliberately mislead by the industry, and if the full costs of burning fossil fuels (health as well as environmental) hadn't been systematically minimised and swept under the rug, then we could have better developed those alternatives much sooner, starting 50 years ago.
You can't claim the oil companies are blameless when they have been caught red-handed burying and buying unfavourable science, hiding the truth about their own product while spending hundreds of millions to trash the alternatives. We need lawsuits like these to establish how much of the blame falls on their shoulders. Not to mention the discovery phases should be very interesting..
As the original paper describes, they don't send the full 18 Mpix to the display - they use a foveated transport system, where the displayed image is a much lower pixel density (e.g. 1280 x 1600 pixels, upscaled to fit the display resolution) except for a small window (640 × 640) of high-density pixels located where the eye is actually looking (as determined by an eye-tracking system).
They pack the high-density image data into a few extra scanlines of the low-density image, with a little metadata to describe where it should go, then send the resulting 1280 x 1922 image to the display, where an onboard microcontroller does the bilinear upscale of the low-density image and composites the high-density window in place.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as it's reasonably accurate, I have no problem with emotional-level pieces like this. A great many people make decisions emotionally, and this is a good way to convey scientific results to them. But if you're not one of those, this isn't aimed at you; the lack of science in this article is probably deliberate - it's not even trying to justify its claims.
If you prefer actual facts and figures to back up an analysis, the IPCC reports are a great starting point. While the summaries provide only broad overviews, the chapters they reference go into much more detail and are very well-sourced with citations of the peer-reviewed papers that form the backbone of the real science here. Go directly to the source if you want to minimise emotional bias. And if you're genuinely curious about a specific point, many authors will cheerfully respond to a respectful inquiry.
If the system was static, with constant average temperatures, then random events would produce an ever-decreasing number of new records each year, both high and low. The regular smashing of numerous high records (with the occasional low as well) is characteristic of a system with increased variability on top of a rising trend.
But we already know that, not through statistics but because the science has been hammering it home since the 80s, with analysis of not only new measurements but 200 years of temperature records from all over the globe, and proxy records for the last few millennia.
You're not wrong, but in practice this is rarely an issue. Have a look at the payload masses on SpaceX's mission list - the great majority of payloads didn't come close to their maximum capacity, meaning the mass overhead of recoverability is a non-issue most of the time.
While it's true they give up a tiny percentage of customers who need slightly more than their reusable rocket can now deliver, it's more than made up for by the savings of of reuse. They've also expended a handful of boosters that didn't have enough capacity to loft their heavier payloads and still make it back, and these boosters flew without many of the recovery control surfaces like the grid fins, so their design is flexible enough to support both approaches.
The extra fuel is dirt cheap compared to the cost of the booster. Estimates vary for the cost of a booster core, maybe $20-30M, but the price of that will come down anyway now that they're finalising their F9 design with Block 5. Musk has said that the cost of refurbishing Block 4 for reflight was less than half the new cost, so still definitely worth it - and Block 5 is designed to fly with minimal refurb (as little as 24 hour turnaround) so will certainly cost a lot less than that to refly. And the added capital cost of development, reuse systems like control surfaces, and recovery ships is amortised out over dozens of launches so should be minor in the long run.
People die every day in more mundane vehicles, but that doesn't seem to deter them. Fear of a travel mode isn't often proportional to actual danger. Even Musk's proposed commercial suborbital BFR flights will look scary to many regardless of their safety record, and will likely attract only thrillseekers and those who really need the speed, unless his marketers are as good his engineers.
But the good news is that rockets are probably safer than many transport options already, at least in terms of deaths per mile traveled :-)
They *do* give a version away for free, as in beer and libre, and it comes with all the choice you want - it's called AOSP. Fully open-source, comes with zero Google spyware, has a suite of basic apps you can ignore or replace, you can take your pick of app stores (e.g F-Droid) or just sideload. And it happily runs the vast majority of Android apps - everything that doesn't specifically require a Google service. Best of all, there is a thriving community creating many dozens of variants that can be easily installed on most popular phones, or at least those that don't lock their bootloader too tightly. You can even add back in the Google services if that's what you want, and get both worlds.
As a user, you can choose not only your hardware, but your OS variant too. Nothing is forced on you. As a company, all Google requires is you make a choice between Google Android with their services, or AOSP Android - and a number of companies have freely chosen the latter, including Amazon, B&N, and most Chinese phone vendors.
Nobody's concerned about normal waves hitting coasts 2 inches higher up. What does concern them is how the rise affects the more extreme events; coastal floods from king tides and storm surges are getting worse, and more frequent - unusually high floods that only happened once a century (1% chance) are now happening once a decade (10% chance).
These floods don't just inundate streets and underground cables, they can contaminate coastal wetlands, aquifers, and farmland with salt. In flat coastal deltas, a small rise in flood levels can extend a much longer way inland, salting the ground and the water table for miles and affecting the livelihoods of many - particularly in poorer countries with large populations depending on once-fertile river deltas. This is a very real problem for many countries without the funds to relocate farms and farmers, especially those like Bangladesh.
Music services aren't social apps, and neither are mapping and search engines, in the sense of having a network of friends. It's the network that's the important part; I don't care whether my friend uses Bing or Apple Maps instead of Google - but I do care if they can't see my Facebook feed, and I can't see theirs. Twitter and Instagram are indeed social apps, but they both serve quite different audiences so they don't so much compete.
Sure users could post everything to FB2 as well as FB - but why would they? It's twice the effort, and there's nobody they know on FB2. Now if FB2 users could see FB posts, and make posts that FB users could see, then there'd be a minimal barrier to entry, the same network effect applies to both, and you might tempt new users with a nicer experience - but of course there's no way in hell that Facebook would ever allow that sort of interoperability to happen.
Sadly I think the display is one of its most dated parts - it's hardly changed from the screen on my 2013 MacBook Pro. Which was great for its day, but falls far short of modern offerings.
Other laptops offer much higher resolutions like 3200x1800 or 3840x2160, real HDR, 120Hz frame rates, smaller bezels, touch sensitivity... the Alienware 13 even has OLED. While Apple is still serving up basically the same LCD "Retina" 2880x1440 displays for years now. They still have decent colour gamuts but nothing you can't get elsewhere. Frankly, if I didn't need macOS support then I'd be all over an XPS 15 instead, personally.
Because the value is not in the product; it's in the people using it, and the people are all on Facebook. Metcalfe's Law means that it'll need something pretty damn disruptive to unseat them at this stage.
They weren't ignored. And indeed, a lot of jobs were recovered after the GFC losses. But they've been declining steadily since 1980, so that's unlikely to change much soon.
As for "having nothing to lose", we've already seen how e.g. Trump's steel tariffs can actually damage local manufacturing by dramatically raising their costs, so I very much doubt that's true. The decline in those jobs might be slowed a little, but at the cost of making other sectors less competitive - and workers in construction and auto manufacturing are major parts of Trump's base too. And that's before we get into the impact of retaliatory tariffs on completely different sectors like farming.
US manufacturing output has nearly tripled since the 70s, so China's manufacturing has taken apparently hasn't harmed the local industry much at all.
US manufacturing jobs have declined sharply, however - and this is what Trump's base is concerned about. But since the local industry is quite healthy, blaming China for killing it is misguided - blame the rise of automation instead; output per worker has risen even faster than total output.
I certainly agree that those ex-workers need help, but those unskilled manufacturing jobs aren't coming back. It's just not economically viable to mass-produce things by hand anymore - you'll get heavily undercut in the world market by developing countries with cheaper labour. It's more effective to help those affected to move to different sectors instead; service jobs (which are booming), or reskilling them to other areas.
And indeed they are - the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy has been promoting solar cookers in India since the 80s. They're fairly widely used, but have a number of disadvantages - can't cook at night, or on cloudy days (though many parts of India typically get 300 sunny days a year), smaller units have to be used outside, cooking rate is hard to control, and they're slow, often taking 2 or 3 hours to cook a meal.
But more recent developments have added thermal storage in the form of heated steam or other liquids, allowing indoor and after-dark usage along with more control and faster cooking. This usually boosts the price of course, but can be invaluable in larger-scale community kitchens.
In one year, 1.3 million lives are cut short by air pollution, preventing each of those people from producing a nominal average of $94k over the rest of their lives. The lost productivity is $123 billion, not for that year, but accumulated over the next few decades.
The next year, another 1.3 million lives are cut short - resulting in an additional $123 billion productivity loss over those same decades. And more the next year, and the next.
You're right in that the $123B isn't the loss for a single year, so perhaps comparing it to the annual GDP may be a little misleading - but it's a genuine cost that's incurred yearly, even if the impact is amortised. And when you add up the loss from all the prior years (this isn't new), then the total annual loss is probably pretty close to the $123B mark anyway.
If you want to be that cynical: the statistical value of a human life (in terms of health costs, lost productivity etc) in India was US$94,721, according to the WHO for 2004. For 1.3 million lives that's $123 billion every year - a pretty sizable chunk of their GDP.
If you read even the first paragraph of TFA you'd see that this 100 GW is on top of the already-existing 100 GW target by 2022. And of course they're adding wind, hydro, and nuclear as well.
More important than the fridge would be energy to power a cooker instead - which could save 1.3 million lives a year.
From GP's link, solar generation in '16-'17 was 12.08 GWh of solar power, which was 0.98% of their utility generation that year. This was from 12.3 GW of installed capacity, of which 45% was added in that time period, so contributed partially. That suggests 100 GW should produce somewhere between 98 and 178 GWh, or 7.9 - 14.4% of 2017's total.
And since the 100 GW described in TFA is on top of the existing target of 100 GW by 2022, you can probably double that (though of course total demand is also likely to increase as well).
There have been a large number of studies that show Antarctica has been losing ice mass overall - Cazenave et al., 2009; Chen et al., 2009; E et al., 2009; Horwath and Dietrich, 2009; Velicogna, 2009; Wu et al., 2010; Rignot et al., 2011c; Shi et al., 2011; King et al., 2012; Tanget al., 2012, Shepherd et al., 2012, Martin-Español et al., 2017 etc, and now Shepherd et al, 2018.
Yet you chose to second-guess the conclusions of a single one of those (despite lack of expertise in the field) that combines results from dozens of different papers (yes, including the NASA study - reference 74), and instead believe a single outlier study which you hadn't even read (it's here btw). On which I might add the lead author has since said:
When our paper came out, I was very careful to emphasize that this is in no way contradictory to the findings of the IPCC [2013] report or conclusions that climate change is a serious problem that we need to do something about
Can you really claim with a straight face to be concerned about the quality of the science? You're not exactly demonstrating thoroughness or unbiased evaluation yourself.
We do have superconducting power lines, trials have been operating for years, they work well and pay for themselves. Just need to extend them further.
You can check it yourself by looking at the build.prop. There's also this reasonably up-to-date list.
If Samsung won't come to the party, make sure your next phone supports Project Treble (should be any phone that shipped with Oreo, plus the original Pixels). That finally decouples the OS from the SoC drivers, and means any Treble phone can (theoretically) be upgraded with Google's own OS releases.
Which is why you can also get this Beta 2 release on third party phones like the Essential Phone, Nokia 7 Plus, OnePlus 6, Oppo R15 Pro, Sony Xperia XZ2, Vivo X21 & X21UD, and Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S, as well as Google's own Pixel series.
Failing all that, LineageOS will work well with your Samsung.
Just like cigarettes. The customers were assured that the product had minimal downsides, so they adopted it enthusiastically, to the point where they became dependent on it. But they may well have made different choices if they'd known the full truth.
There are alternatives to fossil fuels. If the public hadn't been deliberately mislead by the industry, and if the full costs of burning fossil fuels (health as well as environmental) hadn't been systematically minimised and swept under the rug, then we could have better developed those alternatives much sooner, starting 50 years ago.
You can't claim the oil companies are blameless when they have been caught red-handed burying and buying unfavourable science, hiding the truth about their own product while spending hundreds of millions to trash the alternatives. We need lawsuits like these to establish how much of the blame falls on their shoulders. Not to mention the discovery phases should be very interesting..
As the original paper describes, they don't send the full 18 Mpix to the display - they use a foveated transport system, where the displayed image is a much lower pixel density (e.g. 1280 x 1600 pixels, upscaled to fit the display resolution) except for a small window (640 × 640) of high-density pixels located where the eye is actually looking (as determined by an eye-tracking system).
They pack the high-density image data into a few extra scanlines of the low-density image, with a little metadata to describe where it should go, then send the resulting 1280 x 1922 image to the display, where an onboard microcontroller does the bilinear upscale of the low-density image and composites the high-density window in place.
Link.
Karma whoring like I just don't care.
Ironically your link was just updated. Guess what it now says?
Total cars: 25,506
Per week: 2,473