The big "dump" took place after the first announcement in China. At this point however the currency is maintaining its stable value. I don't see any major changes in the near future outside of the value increasing.
That's because you obviously have not done too much thinking on how money laundering via bitcoin in China works. The best way of getting caught red-handed as someone trying to move money out of country with BC would have been to immediately start cashing out everything you have. That would've caused a large dent in the value of BC and it'd have also meant that it's more likely for your operation to be spotted (don't be naive and think the Chinese are only monitoring exchanges inside their borders).
The Chinese own a significant portion of all BC currently in circulation. This means if they all decide to cash out and stop using BC the price can come down a lot, but it won't happen overnight because that'd just be a bad move for the investors that want their money out. If the chinese government cannot be persuaded into reversing their policies, it's likely that the Chinese BC investors will start slowly liquidating their BC over the next year(s) which would have a notable impact on the demand of BC globally, thereby affecting its value negatively.
The fact that no immediate crash was seen after the announcement is not proof that the value will remain stable.
Aside from that: "Twitter said about 75 percent of the blocked accounts this year were spotted before a single tweet was sent."
So basically, thought crimes.
No, basically IP based bans and automated spam filtering.
I don't use twitter, but they run the platform so they set the rules. If they state you cannot post X, Y or Z and you do and get autobanned for it and the tweet doesn't go through and you're prevented from creating more accounts to try to spam the same message again, that's not a thought crime, that's you not using the service correctly.
You may freely disagree with some (or even all) of their rules and policies, but that still doesn't change the fact that free speech does not translate to 'third parties must always publish my opinion on their platform.'
Worst case scenario is everyone dies, which isn't much different than a plane crash.
There's a notable difference to plane crashes though: failures of the tube or even a singular capsule will halt all traffic on the route, potentially for an extended period of time if pressurisation of tube tube fails due to the tube itself being damaged.
What's the point of having measurable goals if there's obligation to meet any of them.
You think the US wants obligations in these treaties? You think the US, especially now under this new Trumpian-mercantilist/nationalist approach, would ever agree to any pact that for example allows other countries to place sanctions on the US unilaterally if it fails to meet its goals?
This whole line of 'the Paris accord is useless because it's not bidning' is BS and a rhetorical red herring when it's quite clear that the largest economies in the world will never agree to binding pacts with sanctions. Therefore, the Paris accords represent the best possible outcome where we all agree to reduce emissions and to periodically review emission goals.
IIf the Paris accords were binding, I can guarantee you that Trump & Co would have withdrawn even faster, making a big scene out of how the US 'will not bow to these globalist overlords and their fake news of the climate warming that's just an excuse by the Chinese to make the US less competitive-"
The Paris Accord won't actually accomplish anything beyond being some feel-good self-masturbatory act that serves as a good photo op.
More bullshit. You know, we're all in the same boat with the climate. Rational people understand that fucking up the climate will fuck up everyone. Countries want to reduce emissions because they want to stabilize their own future. China is dealing with unforeseen amounts of pollution causing the air condition in some of its major cities to be so bad that breathing the air is equivalent to smoking a pack or 2 of cigarettes every day. They understand this, and they understand that reducing emissions not only has benefits for all of the planet but for themselves and their citizens and economy directly.
The fact that this is so hard to get for many Americans is astounding to me. There's no 'winners' and losers here. Either we all win and the the pace of the warming is slowed down enough that we can actually prepare for it and save critical ecosystems, or we all lose and end up with migratory movements of hundreds of millions or even billions of people as ocean surface rise and loss of arable land forces people to move at record numbers and increased extreme weather (think Harvey except even bigger) wreaks havoc to infrastructure causing hundreds of billions of damage.
The boat is taking in water, and we're sinking. And while the rest of us are trying our best to figure out a way to pluck the whole, the commander-in-orange and the so called """leader""" of the free world pouts in the corner crying over 'well, we're not going to do anything unless you force us to" and is attempting to poke MORE holes to the hull by increasing fossil fuel use, which is literally a self-destructive move. The level of psychosis of the Trump administration on this one is beyond measure.
So please, pretty please, on behalf of the rest of the world: Get your shit together on this one. Once the damage is done, it's irreversible, and I for one do not want to have to explain to my grand kids that the reason hundreds of millions of people are starving and there's a gigantic refugee crisis that makes the current migratory movement out of Syria/middle-east look like a field trip is because once upon a time the most powerful economy in the world was lead by a guy with a toddler's level of scientific understanding.
Comparing them to non-depressed people is like saying "People who didn't need heart surgery twice as likely to die when we cut them open than people who do". It's not medically all that useful as you just try not to do that anyway.
Absolutely, I agree with this 100 % which is why I said that more studies need to be done.
I mean, it's clear that there some depressed people who find anti-depressants very useful. But my understanding based on very cursory reading on the topic as well as some people I know who've been on them is that many don't like the state of mind they put you in precisely because it cuts out not just all the negative emotions, but also the positive ones which would be the ones an individual most likely needs to start experiencing to start making their way out of depression.
I mean obviously for the people who suffer from severe depression the meds are usually required before therapy can even be started. However, the real question in my opinion is whether or not anti-depressants are needlessly prescribed to individuals discharged from clinical care in a way that actually hampers their recovery and prolongs depression, or even worsens it?
That's the question I think more and better studies should aim to answer to.
The tittle had me excited because I thought they'd been studying the suicide risk of depressed people on anti-depressants vs. depressed people not on anti-depressants. There have been studies done, such as this one (open access, published in the journal of the Royal Society of Medicine) found that when selective serotonin and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors are given to adult healthy volunteers with no signs of a mental disorder, the suicide risk is doubled. Whether this doubling also occurs in depressed individuals is the real question, but this is hard to study ethically.
Anti-depressants are far more controversial than most people seem to think, and the medical field has slowly begun to admit it. Note that I'm not saying the study I mentioned or this study prove that their usage should be stopped, but at the very least they're clear indicators that more research is needed into their efficacy and potential alternatives.
That is 110 places a month that need to get replaced. If you never have them go bad out of sequence it is possible I guess if you start at one end and go down doing replacements methodically and were able to isolate from the rest of the system, pressurize, remove and install 20 normal sections and 8 expansion joints, re do the vacuum and open to the rest of the system once a week, every week and get it done between 11 PM and 6 AM so as to not kill service too badly... If you could do great, get the best maintenance, the seals and expansion joints work wonders and last for LONG times. If you could do all that.
It would still be a clusterfuck.
This is so true.
The problem with the hyperloop is that it lacks a solid economic foundation. This is the reason why the original Hyperloop Whitepaper makes no mention of maintenance costs whatsoever, and is very very slim on the details of their construction cost estimates. I mean honestly, it's practically impossible to start building anything anywhere unless you have a grasp on the lifetime costs of the system, but Hyperloop knows if they start to release estimates for the costs, it'll kill the project. Factoring in the maintenance required and the fact that their estimated building costs are very likely way too small, it's not going to be a cost-efficient competitor for other forms of travel, even if you get the technology to work which is not a given.
I've for long wondered why Musk desires to keep it alive for as long as he has, he must be aware of the cost factors, but it maybe that they're hoping to extract some further data from the Hyperloop tests that could be useful for their future endeavors, or it maybe just a marketing thing.
Yup, globalists. Just as bad as socialists, and worse for the American workforce.
Cognitive dissonance much? Who do you think started global trade and marketed it for everybody as the way forward, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Hint: it's not the Chinese.
It's rather hilarious to see the West panic about this now. Globalization has been going on since the age of sail, and has thus far only benefited the advanced economies. The massive fortunes of the US and Europe rest on the foundations of global trade and extracting resources (both human and raw materials) from underdeveloped economies at ridiculously cheap prices.
But now that the benefits of global trade start to affect Asia and Africa moreso than the west, now this thing that has brought the west its current fortunes is suddenly a thing of the devil and we must all somehow magically revert back to 1500s mercantilism where each nation somehow cuts itself of from the global networks of trade and logistics and start producing everything by and for itself, which is an absurd idea.
First we (=the west, not just the US) go around telling everyone how great this global marketplace really is, and how everyone really should start to do business with us because it's for the good of everyone, and then a few decades pass and we start to blame these countries for doing exactly what we told them to do and from which we've also ourselves benefited,
This is the economy at work: people want lower prices but also high pay, you can't have both if you only manufacture domestically unless you automate, in which case the prices stay low but you won't get a lot of jobs.
The fact of the matter is that full-time employment will cease to be the norm within this century for most westerners. You can be in denial about it, but you can't stop the technological progress that's taking us there. Machines will simply become more efficient at doing most jobs than humans, so if you want to maintain your domestic demand and make sure people sustain their standard of living, I suggest you get out of the cold war mindset and start doing some reading about the socialism (hint nr. 2: free market and socialism are not incompatible, we've had both in northern/western Europe for long) that you so dread and concepts like basic income, because the solutions to the problems caused by the market itself acting as it should cannot be solved by the market.
Looking at meteorological data [ilmatieteenlaitos.fi] for Helsinki in the 2000s 13 years have been warmer than the average, while the remaining 3 have been extremely cold,
I should clarify that the numbers I used were for winters only. If you look at averages for the entire year, the change is slightly less but still extremely noticeable considering the timeframe: 0,37 degrees warmer than the average.
The same? What the fuck man? Are you living in a basement? I'm 27 years old living in southern Finland, and the climate most definitely is not 'the same' as it used to be when I was a kid. Winters start a lot later in general. It's normal to have a winter here or there that's warmer and gets less snow, but in since the weather is more unstable now and each year tends to be on average hotter than the last, with nearly every year in the 2000s breaking records, the snow doesn't stay on the ground but melts, which obviously in the long term is doing damage to plants and wildlife whose natural cycle has evolved to deal with proper winter. Looking at meteorological data for Helsinki in the 2000s 13 years have been warmer than the average, while the remaining 3 have been extremely cold, several times colder than the average. Because of those 3 extremely cold winters the average temp has 'only' gone up by 0,5 celsius here in Helsinki but that's an absurdly high figure for less than 2 decades. This essentially means there are no 'normal' winters anymore, where we get a steady amount of snow throughout the winter, It's either bleakishly warm moist and dark, with little or no snow, or extremely fucking cold with 10s of centimeters of snow fucking up all transit and traffic.
This is what climate science has predicted all along: increase in extreme weather on both ends of the scale, and it is most certainly seen - and felt. here. The meteorologists predict that if this keeps going, by the time I'm in my 50s southern Finland may see very little if any snowfall at all during the winter months, which is a dramatic shift for the environment as well as for the mental well being of people (snow coverage reflects light which offsets the darkness of the northern wintertime when we get nearly no sunlight. Without any snow, most of the daytime is essentially black as night during winter months, which leads to increased fatigue and depression).
At the same time globally there are more storms, more flooding and in certain regions increased droughts.
Like damn, it really takes a record amount of stupidity to look at the climate data now and proclaim the climate 'is the same', when people my age can already spot the difference with their own eyes.
Last I checked, it's still a Schedule-I narcotic which makes it unobtainable even with a prescription. What more does our anti-drug leaders need? It's a confession made free and clear in a news article. That should be more than sufficient grounds for a search warrant for house, car, and office.
Actually, I'd argue the exact opposite. Sure they could probably use the article as a grounds for arresting these people, but they'd be weakening their own position on the matter. You see, the only reason drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, have remained such a taboo and illegal for so long is that once people realized the 'reefer madness' -level claims about weed were BS, the same arguments were moved to psychedelics. To those who haven't tried it or haven't done any reading about it, which I'd say constitutes most people outside the psychedelic community, mind altering substances are still mythical in nature.
This has fed into the drug-war propaganda and fears that people have. It's created this dichotomy in which people are divided into 2 categories of 'proper hard working people' and 'druggies', and the claim in the propaganda is that there is exactly no overlap. Because of this, people who actually use these substances responsibly, for personal gain or just for pleasure, have not typically come forth about it as they're afraid of losing face and being labeled lunatics. This allows for maintaining the control. If people - even the people who never have and have no desire for ever trying these things by themselves (which I can understand) - would understand how many of the 'decent' people they know and rely on have experimented with stuff other than alcohol, their image of the entire spectrum of drug use and drug users would start to change to a less black and white direction.
Any drug, alcohol included, can lead to a person becoming a problem user or inflicting damage on themselves or their psyche. Think about if we only judged those of use who drink alcohol on the merits and state of alcoholics. I mean if you take someone and you give them the idea that 'alcohol use' is synonymous with, and will always lead to. alcoholism, then they'd obviously be likely to oppose the substance altogether, which is how prohibition was justified in many western countries back in the past. The culture of secrecy/silence allows for the continuation of this myth that all psychedelics-users are out of their mind raving eraserheads that've had their mind melted by a psychosis, and that while it remains okay and acceptable to inhibit/alter your neurons with ethanol doing permanent physical damage to them or now cannabis in many places, temporarily altering their action with other kinds of mechanisms is somehow heretical and must be kept illegal.
What makes this all the more absurd when you get right down to it is that everyone, even those of us who use no substances whatsoever, are used to having experiences of a psychedelic nature every night while we sleep. Dreams are not obviously identical to the way psychedelics work, but they most certainly are an altered state of mind.
Compare these 2 scenarios, a person has some kind of a problem, personal or work-related, and they do one of these: A) they think about it for a while and go to sleep. In their dream, they come up with a new way of approaching the problem as their unconscious mind develops an angle on it that they did not consciously see before. They wake up and proclaim to have solved the issue. Someone asks how they did it and they say they had a dream where they saw the solution. B) the same person takes a tab of LSD or some mushrooms and has a similar outcome for similar reasons. Someone asks how they solved it and they reply that they took some psychedelics.
A) Will not cause any sort of uproar. There are quite many prominent scientists who've said openly that solutions sometimes 'appear' to them while sleeping and it's more or less generally accepted that sleep can have a positive effect on problem solving,
There are no goalkeepers in football, only soccer.
You seem to be confusing football, you know, the sport in which the foot is used to move a ball around a field, and what the Americans erroneously call football, even though in it mostly hands are used to carry an object which is not a ball but a spheroid prolate, meaning the more apt name for the sport would be 'handegg'.
I've nothing against american football, in fact I even prefer watching it to actual football, as an ice hockey man football is way too slow and not a contact sport, but seriously if there was a competition of 'come up with the most misleading name for a sport', american football would win it hands-down, followed by cricket, which has absolutely nothing to do with grasshoppers but seems to be an excuse to gather in a field to drink tea.
Yeah, those fucking hippy liberal cultural marxist with their absurd desires to drink pure water! What a bunch of losers and whiners. Real men drink their water with as much contaminants as humanly possible, because real men are not pussies!
Unfortunately the tap water here in liberal leftist Finland is ruined by the same liberals, it's way too pure for my levels of masculinity, so I carry a bag of ground plastics with me that I can then mix into my drinking water. My co-workers were confused by this and asked what I was doing, I told them I'm making Finland great again!
Lucky you,with Trump and his awesome stance of 'fuck the environment' your tap water will likely become 'ugely better still. If you're really lucky you'll get a whole bunch of awesome and delicious additives á la Flint like lead. I'm so envious.
Germany, France and the UK (in that order) are the 3 largest economies in the Union by far, but combined their GDP currently makes up around 51,2 % of that of the whole union. The UK by itself represents around 14,4 % of the total economy, France is 16 % and Germany is 20 %.
The remaining 24 countries are miniscule in size compared to these 3, but in total are roughly as big as these three. After the UK leaves, the shares will change so that Germany will grow to be around 24 % of the whole economy, while France's share goes up to around 19. This means that the other remaining EU countries together actually dwarf Germany and France in size.
Secondly, there are currently 10 member states that pay into the union more than they take out of it. In addition to Germany, France and the UK these include the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Italy and Ireland (granted Ireland and Italy pretty much break even so their contribution is not major). Spain (5th largest economy in the union after Italy) also pretty much breaks even although they still currently receive slightly more than they pay in.
The instant one of them leaves, the EU is dead, and Europe will go back to doing what it does best - warring with itself.
What? The EU, for all its numerous flaws is still a succesful economic zone with a total GDP second only to the US once the UK leaves, so thinking that France or Germany would want to leave/shatter the union when it has benefited them the most as the biggest economies in the zone, or that 1 of them leaving would automatically trigger the collapse of the whole union and/or massive war is misguided. Especially now with the situation of Russia being what it is, there are very few leaders on a national level that would even want to leave, because reverting back to a bunch of solitary nation states is both economically damaging and is also essentially equal to surrending massive amounts of influence and control over to Russia, US and China, which from a purely game theory point of view of (geo)politics is a dumb as fuck move (for both the smaller states who will then be at the mercy of these larger players, as well as the big economies like France and Germany whose global influence/power would be greatly diminished if the Union stopped existing). This is something that both France and Germany understand well.
Think of it is this way: after the UK goes, the choice faced by Germany and France will be the following: they can either continue as the 2 major rulers of the 2nd largest economy in the world 7 times the size of Russia, or they can choose to return to a situation in which they control only their own economies that are roughly equal to that of Russia and are massive dwarfed by the US and China thereby essentially sidelining themselves from the big league of the world economies,
There are many options. It does have to get paid for, but copyright may not be the best way to do it--in fact, we know it isn't, because it restrict access to information that is literally there to advance human knowledge. Perhaps schools and individuals who wish to publish could subscribe to publishing cooperatives, for example.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we need 'Sciflix' wherein anyone can choose a number of fields they want to follow and subscribe to the service at a small monthly cost (per field for example)..
I'm not a scientist or a researcher, but I'd happily pay say 10-20 euros a month to have access to certain fields just out of pure interest as well as keeping up with new discoveries that may affect my work.. You could even make it so that individuals could pay more if they wanted to, with the extra amount being used to support research in said fields etc.
And this would obviously be for private use: institutions and universities could obviously still be charged more for their access.
As long as the current model continues to reign the publishers will only keep losing because like Obi-wan, if Sci-hub is struck down it will become even more powerful. Not necessarily under the same name but we've seen this happen: they take trackers down, new trackers are set up and DNS-blocking is circumvented. The demand for cheap article/data access will remain, and as long as the demand remains high and the prices remain as high as they are, piracy will be the only viable option for many people especially in poorer regions of the globe to gain access to information. Hell, even the god damn record companies and movie studios eventually did the math and realized that they cannot win the fight against piracy unless they start providing cheaply priced alternatives to it with equal or better quality. If they had enough brains to figure this out, the scientific publishers have no excuse.
'B-b-but it's so expensive'. It sure is. So's making movies and TV-series and that's being funded now with people paying 10 euros a month. Economies of scale people, economies of scale.
And no, properly designed vacuum tubes 1) are not particularly prone to accidents (you want to try to make an "accidental" hole in inch-thick steel?)
Firstly, not particularly prone is still miles away from being good enough for a transit system that will be paralyzed by vacuum failure. Secondly, we don't have vacuum tubes of the size and scope proposed by Hyperloop & al in existence, anywhere, let alone above ground or with actual high speed traffic going through them on an hourly basis, so there is in fact no way of knowing the exact failure rate of such tubes. I remind everyone that the test track built by Hyperloop for their pod-design competition earlier this year was less than a mile long and still managed to be the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in existence after NASA's.
Secondly, even if it is true that the failure rate of such tubes is almost nil, that does not account for the fact that it's still possible for anyone with malicious intent to disable the system at any times with ease. As long as it's above ground it won't take much thinking from someone to find a way to puncture the tube, so security-wise it's a nightmare. Even if it's designed safely enough (as one would hope) that vacuum failure will not cause life-threatening danger to passengers, it will certainly cripple the entire route for an extended period of time.
2) do not suffer any form of "propagation" from accidents.
Even so that does not address the other issues. Some of the stuff Hyperloop has currently no answers or numbers for:
1) What is the estimated failure rate? 2) How much does the maintenance of the system cost? (the white paper on Hyperloop by SpaceX includes no maintenance cost estimates whatsoever and the actual building cost estimates themselves are pretty overly optimistic to put it mildly and are lacking on any hard data to back them up). 3) How will physical security of both the tube and the capsules be arranged?
When you consider the fact that without any kind of security the whole system is easily crippled by a single malicious actor, and that with security costs go up as does the travel time, the purported advantages when compared to flying don't seem too good.
I've quoted this article from 2 years ago before on/. when it comes to Hyperloop, but it is still relevant:
The biggest issues are speed and scale. The Hyperloop was pitched as faster and cheaper than alternatives like cars and trains, but even small shifts in those numbers can dramatically change how it stacks up. It's easy to imagine safety concerns limiting Hyperloop speeds to just a fraction of its theoretical top speed or right-of-way issues keeping stations far from urban centers. Would we still be excited about the Hyperloop if a 30-minute trek became a three-hour one? What if it cost $60 billion instead the promised $6 billion? After enough setbacks, it might not be worth developing the technology at all. Those deployment details are life-or-death issues for the Hyperloop, but as long as the tests are focused on small-scale loops, it's not clear we'll ever get answers to them.
SpaceX's latest round of tests doesn't seem likely to change that. The test track is only 5 miles, nowhere near the distance it would take to reach 700 miles per hour. Another test track built by Hyperloop Test Technologies will have the same problem, aiming at a 200mph top speed. For the same reason, these test tracks can’t address the unique safety issues that come with near-supersonic travel. The result is just a tube-powered version of conventional transportation tech like maglev and rail. That doesn't mean that useful work can't be done on this round of test tracks, but it means the central question of the
The IRS scares me. They will stop at nothing to get every last penny in taxes owed by everyone.
It scares you that officials seek to do their job effectively? What?
That's what tax officials do. They collect taxes that people owe. Some people, especially wealthier people and large corporations seek to use different mechanisms to avoid paying taxes that they legally owe. If tax officials allow this to happen, they're basically saying that tax evasion is fine at which point everyone with the money to hire a tax advisor/set up a shell company will stop paying taxes, and the entire tax burden will be left on those too poor to be able to use trickery to dodge taxes, which would be destructive to the entire society. There are those who argue this is in fact already at least partially the case seeing how little taxes many megacorporations pay to their respective countries, and seeing how abundant different sorts of tax-havens like Panama and the Caymans are.
Unless you yourself happen to be trying to use Bitcoin to dodge taxes, you should be in favor of this, because the more sucessfully people avoid taxes, the more the pool of tax paying citizens shrinks because tax-evasion, the more taxes you will pay.
Their basically tax-Nazis.
No. Wanting to catch people who break laws does not make anyone a nazi. This is just as stupid as calling the police "the crime-Nazis" for wanting to apprehend criminals. Now you may disagree with certain laws and argue that said laws or said taxes should not be collected, but for that to happen you need to change the law, not point the finger the whoever is enforcing said law and break Godwin's law without clearly having even a modicum of understanding of what the word you're throwing as an insult means.
Anything which shortens people's expected life span reduces healthcare costs.
I was not talking about solely about end-of-life care costs, although I could have worded it better, I was talking about the total aggregate cost to the societies. While more people dying sooner will reduce end-of-life care costs, increased pollution also affects working age people, which causes you to lose tax-revenue by losing workers, and generally is a negative for the entire economy.
Looking at this from solely the angle of health care cost leaves a massive amount of alternative costs hidden and gives a totally skewed picture of the situation. You might as well argue that as a cost saving measure it's sensible to stop all form of health care because that way a lot of money is saved, but again, the net effect on the entire economy would be negative.
It seems more reasonable to assume that most of the people dying from air pollution are sick or elderly So keeping them alive would be a cost not a savings.
No, not really. You see, elderly people who're most at risk of dying due to the increased pollution are those with pre-existing respitory conditions that by themselves are already expensive to treat.. What do yu think is one of the driving factors of causing those people to have said conditions? Pollution. So by cutting down pollution, you reduce the amount of elderly people in need of care, thereby decreasing costs. And it's not as if only young people fall to these illnesses. They're at a heightened risk obviously, but inhaling pollutants does increase mortality risk in all age-groups.
Take London during the industrialization for example with its massive amounts of coal-smoke. There too, the vast majority of people outside factory and mine-workers that suffered and died of smog-induced illnesses were older people. By your logic it should have been fine to leave London covered in smog, because 'nah, it really just kills older folks they're going to die anyway'.
Or look at modern day Chinese megacities with pollution so bad, that in certain areas just going outside to breathe the air is equivalent to smoking 1-2 packs of cigarettes a day.. You think the chinese are interested in cutting down pollution en masse just because they wanna appear green, or because they've done that math and figured out that having an explosion of respitory illnesses will cost them a metric fuckton in lost years of employment as well as treatment costs?
Having local access to the car, hitting it with an ordinary rock can cause all kinds of systems to malfunction. It's far more effective exploit than CAN denial of service.
It depends on what the goal of the attacker is. If your goal is simply to destroy the vehicle or make it immobile, then sure a sledgehammer and a knife will do a better and faster job if you have physical access to the car.
If your goal is to for example assassinate someone and make it look like an accident, then it may be a different story. Plus the main troublesome thing about this is not the local access variety, but the fact that it's possible in theory to exploit this remotely if the car is connected to the internet.
Sure I agree, chances are slim that this will happen to anyone, but the fact that we have a hypothetical vector for disabling say, brakes and/or the airbag remotely if the software on the car is buggy or just badly written is a point of concern. Not panic, or a reason to swtich back to horses, but something the industry should look to seriously fix.
I generally liked Finnish food (like blueberry soup, kotikalja, Karelian pies, Tupla, egg butter and omg the cloudberry, the cloudberry)
Thank you, you have a fine taste, herr Falke.
when I worked there for a year or so, but I never really got the coffee obsession.
Well, it's not exactly clear to us either why it's become as prominent as it has, but seriously the aforementioned bans from the age of Swedish rule affected it greatly. You see, even though we were loyal subjects of the kingdom for close to 8 centuries, the language barrier created a sort of caste-system of those who could speak Swedish, and therefore be able to rise into positions of power and/or nobility, and the 'lower caste' of Finnish speaking working class and peasants who really didn't have all that much power or representation in matters of policy but they were however still taxed and made to fight in wars when the king so required. So needless to say, among a big chunk of the population, the royalty/the elites in Stockholm were not all that popular among the Finnish speaking crowd.
So during the eras of bans, drinking coffee became and easy way to practice sort of civil disobedience, a caffeinated way of giving the middle finger to elites.
Tea was also harder to get so far as I know, because Russia was and is a huge consumer of tea. I don't have figures to back this up but my estimate is that the traders of Hansa & al who provided the majority of exotic imports such as coffee and tobacco got a better price per kilo of tea by selling it to Russia or to mainland Sweden instead of to the relatively poor Finland (or Österland, 'the east land' as we were then known), so the availability of coffee probably also played into why it became such a big thing here over the centuries. It's even become a sort of 'coming of age ritual', in the sense that I still vividly remember the first time my grandmother allowed me to sit with them for a cup of coffee at our old summer cottage up north. I mean, I sat with them anyway most of the time but I wasn't given any coffee until about the age of 7ish, and that felt like such a big thing because 'coffee time' much like afternoon tea for the Britts, was like a grownup thing.
People who use stimulants are likely to use stimulants.
Where do I apply for money for such studies? I'm asking for a friend...
My thoughts exactly.
What's interesting to me is that in so far as I can tell they did not do any kind of comparison with regular old coffee, you know, the age old stimulant that's even more potent in caffeine than some energy drinks. As a curiosity this sort of panic over 'energy drinks' such as coffee is not new
Coffee first arrived in Sweden around 1674, but was little used until the turn of the 18th century when it became fashionable among the wealthy. In 1746, a royal edict was issued against coffee and tea due to "the misuse and excesses of tea and coffee drinking". Heavy taxes were levied on consumption, and failure to pay the tax on the substance resulted in fines and confiscation of cups and dishes. Later, coffee was banned completely; despite the ban, consumption continued.
Gustav III, who viewed coffee consumption as a threat to the public health and was determined to prove its negative health effects, ordered a scientific experiment to be carried out.
The king ordered the experiment to be conducted using two identical twins. Both of the twins had been tried for the crimes they had committed and condemned to death. Their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment on the condition that one of the twins drank three pots of coffee, and the other drank the same amount of tea, every day for the rest of their lives.
Two physicians were appointed to supervise the experiment and report its finding to the king. Unfortunately, both doctors died, presumably of natural causes, before the experiment was completed. Gustav III, who was assassinated in 1792, also died before seeing the final results. Of the twins, the tea drinker was the first to die, at age 83; the date of death of the surviving coffee drinker is unknown.
In 1794, the government once again tried to impose a ban on coffee. The ban, which was renewed multiple times until the 1820s, was never successful in stamping out coffee-drinking. Once the ban was lifted, coffee became a dominant beverage in Sweden, which since has been one of the countries with the highest coffee consumption per capita in the world.
The experiment has jokingly been called "the first Swedish clinical trial"
The arguments raised then were pretty much exactly the same as they're now with energy drinks, namely that 'oh the youth of today does nothing but sit at cafes sipping this brown liquid, it's going to make them decadent idiots and losers!"
As a Finn I do have to point out as the centuries long neighborhood 'feud' between us and the Old Kingdom necessitates that we've got the nr. 1 place in coffee consumption. Filthy casuals.;)
I've got to go now, my IV drip of Ecuadorian dark roast is running empty and the typing speed is falling to below 500 words a minute.
I just worry about the fate of people that come after us, and since there'll be so many more of them than there are living now, I think their fate is more important than ours.
As do I.
If our intelligence is just a part of us - and we are just a part of nature - why is it so distasteful to you for us to employ our higher brain functions to prevent greater suffering in the future? Why be so selfish and only demand that we employ our intelligence to improve our current living standards? That is the distinction that I see between yours and my attitudes.
I never said or implied it's distasteful to me. Why do you think I explicitly said I've changed my diet to something that - on a personal level - is less pleasurable to me abecause my intelligence tells me based on the data I have access to that it's the less harmful choice for the ecosystem overall and that I think the smart thing to do is to control out rate of population expansion by not having too many kids if I would not think that? We're on the same page with this one, completely.
Where did I say I was against progress?
You didn't, this one's on me. I got the impression that you overall thought of agricultural progress/increase in food output as a negative thing and drew this conclusion based on that. My bad, and I apologize.
You've put humans in a special category by assuming that even though we're overpopulated, we shouldn't be culled or have our population controlled somehow, when we see it necessary to do the same for animals in their own best interest.
This is false. Like I said, I told you I'm planning to have 2 or less kids, or none at all, precisely for this reason, I think the smart choice to control our rate of population growth is not to force people via laws or such to have less kids, as that tends not to work, but to keep increasing the standard of living especially in the poorer regions of the planet as that's where it provably has the largest effect on the amount of childtren, but also for us in the west to voluntarily, knowing all the facts and what's at stake, to have less kids.
I'm more interested in the survival of the human race than the survival of the planet, but this is our spaceship; if we destroy it, we all die.
Again, 110 % agreed.
You wrote a really well thought out and eloquent reply to my post, but I'm not the gaia-loving mankind-hating boogieman you imagine. I don't want people to suffer or die starving just to save the pandas & whales, I'm just worried about our future, and it's not because of morals, it's pragmatism.
Fair enough and thanks for your reply. I misjudged your moral position on the matter based on my previous encouters with similar replies on the topic, which is entirely on me.
We're not in disagreement on the matter in any way that bears further arguing, and I thank you for correcting my false impressions about your position(s). I have bad habit of extrapolating too much based on too little information, maybe as a consequence of spending too much time engaged in online debates, or maybe it's just my ego, but based on this exchange I'll gladly consider myself corrected when it comes to you.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on other matters here on/.!
The Green Revolution only shifted the catastrophe from mankind to plants & animals.
Last I checked homo sapiens sapiens was part of the animal world too, no?
It's enabled us to unwittingly explode in population - for what?
For our own benefit, what else?
Does a person who was never born suffer for never having existed?
I presume the implication here is that had we never had the green revolution no unborn humans would've been harmed as the population would've simply never grown to its current size and therefore the green revolution is an evil thing that shouldn't jave happened. But that's simply not true. The green revolution happened out of necessity, it happened because people were starving and we had the means to develop ways to get more food to there's people to reduce starvation and reduce human suffering.
I'm acutely aware of the environmental issues caused agriculture, which is why, for the past couple months I've cut out all meat and roughly 90 % of all dairy. And I intend to maintain this diet, despite the fact that fucking love bacon, it's just that at this point I think someone with as much access to information as I do and living in the west, reducing meat and other animal products intake is while still not starving to death and eating food that tastes alright is both possible and economically feasible, and for someone in my position it's the single biggest consumer choice that I can do to try to control the ecological impact we're having on the biosphere.
However at the same time I'm always frustrated as hell to see people make this bland black and white argument of 'man bad, nature good!" as if we're not a part of nature (and conversely, as if moral judgements themselves are not a man made idea but somehow universal truths) and acting according to our genes just as much as the bees and all the rest. We're doing what we've been the best at doing on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, which is surviving at all costs. Yes, that has over the millenia meant that we've hunted many a species to extinction destroyed numerous others unwittingly, because despite being the smartest force on the planet we're still just very advanced apes and not omniscient, but what makes the position of the eco-misanthropes so unbearable to me is that they seem to assume we are. Like, do you seriously think men of science, human beings with intelligence and compassion for their fellow man, should've looked at the starving masses of people in the early parts of the last century and gone: "well, I think we have some ideas of how we could grow more food for all these people, but since it might lead to unknown consequences let's just let them die horrific deaths' Such an attitude is essentially genocidal.
More to the point: Population growth provably decreases with a rising standard of living. People have less children in developed countries because they don't need to have 13 of them to make sure that even as 4 of them die in childhood, they still have enough labor to make sure someone farms their land and provides for them at their old age. The number of children globally per couple is coming down fast because advancements in the quality of life and technology are allowing people to not rely so much on manual labor and their own offspring as a sustaining force for their own old age. People in the west have access to an excess of food that would be unimaginable to anyone living in the past, or in the developed world today I can go out today and buy a delicious, ready cooked lunch with a fraction of my day's income without having to even exert any effort into preparing it myself. This used to be the luxury of kings and queens, and for us it's a common activity. yet the people in the west are having the least kids on the globe. I'm not sure I'll ever have biological kids, but if I do the maximum amount is 2, more likely
Slashdot Mirror
That's because you obviously have not done too much thinking on how money laundering via bitcoin in China works. The best way of getting caught red-handed as someone trying to move money out of country with BC would have been to immediately start cashing out everything you have. That would've caused a large dent in the value of BC and it'd have also meant that it's more likely for your operation to be spotted (don't be naive and think the Chinese are only monitoring exchanges inside their borders).
The Chinese own a significant portion of all BC currently in circulation. This means if they all decide to cash out and stop using BC the price can come down a lot, but it won't happen overnight because that'd just be a bad move for the investors that want their money out. If the chinese government cannot be persuaded into reversing their policies, it's likely that the Chinese BC investors will start slowly liquidating their BC over the next year(s) which would have a notable impact on the demand of BC globally, thereby affecting its value negatively.
The fact that no immediate crash was seen after the announcement is not proof that the value will remain stable.
No, basically IP based bans and automated spam filtering.
I don't use twitter, but they run the platform so they set the rules. If they state you cannot post X, Y or Z and you do and get autobanned for it and the tweet doesn't go through and you're prevented from creating more accounts to try to spam the same message again, that's not a thought crime, that's you not using the service correctly.
You may freely disagree with some (or even all) of their rules and policies, but that still doesn't change the fact that free speech does not translate to 'third parties must always publish my opinion on their platform.'
There's a notable difference to plane crashes though: failures of the tube or even a singular capsule will halt all traffic on the route, potentially for an extended period of time if pressurisation of tube tube fails due to the tube itself being damaged.
You think the US wants obligations in these treaties? You think the US, especially now under this new Trumpian-mercantilist/nationalist approach, would ever agree to any pact that for example allows other countries to place sanctions on the US unilaterally if it fails to meet its goals?
This whole line of 'the Paris accord is useless because it's not bidning' is BS and a rhetorical red herring when it's quite clear that the largest economies in the world will never agree to binding pacts with sanctions. Therefore, the Paris accords represent the best possible outcome where we all agree to reduce emissions and to periodically review emission goals.
IIf the Paris accords were binding, I can guarantee you that Trump & Co would have withdrawn even faster, making a big scene out of how the US 'will not bow to these globalist overlords and their fake news of the climate warming that's just an excuse by the Chinese to make the US less competitive-"
More bullshit. You know, we're all in the same boat with the climate. Rational people understand that fucking up the climate will fuck up everyone. Countries want to reduce emissions because they want to stabilize their own future. China is dealing with unforeseen amounts of pollution causing the air condition in some of its major cities to be so bad that breathing the air is equivalent to smoking a pack or 2 of cigarettes every day. They understand this, and they understand that reducing emissions not only has benefits for all of the planet but for themselves and their citizens and economy directly.
The fact that this is so hard to get for many Americans is astounding to me. There's no 'winners' and losers here. Either we all win and the the pace of the warming is slowed down enough that we can actually prepare for it and save critical ecosystems, or we all lose and end up with migratory movements of hundreds of millions or even billions of people as ocean surface rise and loss of arable land forces people to move at record numbers and increased extreme weather (think Harvey except even bigger) wreaks havoc to infrastructure causing hundreds of billions of damage.
The boat is taking in water, and we're sinking. And while the rest of us are trying our best to figure out a way to pluck the whole, the commander-in-orange and the so called """leader""" of the free world pouts in the corner crying over 'well, we're not going to do anything unless you force us to" and is attempting to poke MORE holes to the hull by increasing fossil fuel use, which is literally a self-destructive move. The level of psychosis of the Trump administration on this one is beyond measure.
So please, pretty please, on behalf of the rest of the world: Get your shit together on this one. Once the damage is done, it's irreversible, and I for one do not want to have to explain to my grand kids that the reason hundreds of millions of people are starving and there's a gigantic refugee crisis that makes the current migratory movement out of Syria/middle-east look like a field trip is because once upon a time the most powerful economy in the world was lead by a guy with a toddler's level of scientific understanding.
Absolutely, I agree with this 100 % which is why I said that more studies need to be done.
I mean, it's clear that there some depressed people who find anti-depressants very useful. But my understanding based on very cursory reading on the topic as well as some people I know who've been on them is that many don't like the state of mind they put you in precisely because it cuts out not just all the negative emotions, but also the positive ones which would be the ones an individual most likely needs to start experiencing to start making their way out of depression.
I mean obviously for the people who suffer from severe depression the meds are usually required before therapy can even be started. However, the real question in my opinion is whether or not anti-depressants are needlessly prescribed to individuals discharged from clinical care in a way that actually hampers their recovery and prolongs depression, or even worsens it?
That's the question I think more and better studies should aim to answer to.
The tittle had me excited because I thought they'd been studying the suicide risk of depressed people on anti-depressants vs. depressed people not on anti-depressants. There have been studies done, such as this one (open access, published in the journal of the Royal Society of Medicine) found that when selective serotonin and serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors are given to adult healthy volunteers with no signs of a mental disorder, the suicide risk is doubled. Whether this doubling also occurs in depressed individuals is the real question, but this is hard to study ethically.
Anti-depressants are far more controversial than most people seem to think, and the medical field has slowly begun to admit it. Note that I'm not saying the study I mentioned or this study prove that their usage should be stopped, but at the very least they're clear indicators that more research is needed into their efficacy and potential alternatives.
This is so true.
The problem with the hyperloop is that it lacks a solid economic foundation. This is the reason why the original Hyperloop Whitepaper makes no mention of maintenance costs whatsoever, and is very very slim on the details of their construction cost estimates. I mean honestly, it's practically impossible to start building anything anywhere unless you have a grasp on the lifetime costs of the system, but Hyperloop knows if they start to release estimates for the costs, it'll kill the project. Factoring in the maintenance required and the fact that their estimated building costs are very likely way too small, it's not going to be a cost-efficient competitor for other forms of travel, even if you get the technology to work which is not a given.
I've for long wondered why Musk desires to keep it alive for as long as he has, he must be aware of the cost factors, but it maybe that they're hoping to extract some further data from the Hyperloop tests that could be useful for their future endeavors, or it maybe just a marketing thing.
Cognitive dissonance much? Who do you think started global trade and marketed it for everybody as the way forward, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Hint: it's not the Chinese.
It's rather hilarious to see the West panic about this now. Globalization has been going on since the age of sail, and has thus far only benefited the advanced economies. The massive fortunes of the US and Europe rest on the foundations of global trade and extracting resources (both human and raw materials) from underdeveloped economies at ridiculously cheap prices.
But now that the benefits of global trade start to affect Asia and Africa moreso than the west, now this thing that has brought the west its current fortunes is suddenly a thing of the devil and we must all somehow magically revert back to 1500s mercantilism where each nation somehow cuts itself of from the global networks of trade and logistics and start producing everything by and for itself, which is an absurd idea.
First we (=the west, not just the US) go around telling everyone how great this global marketplace really is, and how everyone really should start to do business with us because it's for the good of everyone, and then a few decades pass and we start to blame these countries for doing exactly what we told them to do and from which we've also ourselves benefited,
This is the economy at work: people want lower prices but also high pay, you can't have both if you only manufacture domestically unless you automate, in which case the prices stay low but you won't get a lot of jobs.
The fact of the matter is that full-time employment will cease to be the norm within this century for most westerners. You can be in denial about it, but you can't stop the technological progress that's taking us there. Machines will simply become more efficient at doing most jobs than humans, so if you want to maintain your domestic demand and make sure people sustain their standard of living, I suggest you get out of the cold war mindset and start doing some reading about the socialism (hint nr. 2: free market and socialism are not incompatible, we've had both in northern/western Europe for long) that you so dread and concepts like basic income, because the solutions to the problems caused by the market itself acting as it should cannot be solved by the market.
I should clarify that the numbers I used were for winters only. If you look at averages for the entire year, the change is slightly less but still extremely noticeable considering the timeframe: 0,37 degrees warmer than the average.
The same? What the fuck man? Are you living in a basement? I'm 27 years old living in southern Finland, and the climate most definitely is not 'the same' as it used to be when I was a kid. Winters start a lot later in general. It's normal to have a winter here or there that's warmer and gets less snow, but in since the weather is more unstable now and each year tends to be on average hotter than the last, with nearly every year in the 2000s breaking records, the snow doesn't stay on the ground but melts, which obviously in the long term is doing damage to plants and wildlife whose natural cycle has evolved to deal with proper winter. Looking at meteorological data for Helsinki in the 2000s 13 years have been warmer than the average, while the remaining 3 have been extremely cold, several times colder than the average. Because of those 3 extremely cold winters the average temp has 'only' gone up by 0,5 celsius here in Helsinki but that's an absurdly high figure for less than 2 decades. This essentially means there are no 'normal' winters anymore, where we get a steady amount of snow throughout the winter, It's either bleakishly warm moist and dark, with little or no snow, or extremely fucking cold with 10s of centimeters of snow fucking up all transit and traffic.
This is what climate science has predicted all along: increase in extreme weather on both ends of the scale, and it is most certainly seen - and felt. here. The meteorologists predict that if this keeps going, by the time I'm in my 50s southern Finland may see very little if any snowfall at all during the winter months, which is a dramatic shift for the environment as well as for the mental well being of people (snow coverage reflects light which offsets the darkness of the northern wintertime when we get nearly no sunlight. Without any snow, most of the daytime is essentially black as night during winter months, which leads to increased fatigue and depression).
At the same time globally there are more storms, more flooding and in certain regions increased droughts.
Like damn, it really takes a record amount of stupidity to look at the climate data now and proclaim the climate 'is the same', when people my age can already spot the difference with their own eyes.
Actually, I'd argue the exact opposite. Sure they could probably use the article as a grounds for arresting these people, but they'd be weakening their own position on the matter. You see, the only reason drugs, especially psychedelic drugs, have remained such a taboo and illegal for so long is that once people realized the 'reefer madness' -level claims about weed were BS, the same arguments were moved to psychedelics. To those who haven't tried it or haven't done any reading about it, which I'd say constitutes most people outside the psychedelic community, mind altering substances are still mythical in nature.
This has fed into the drug-war propaganda and fears that people have. It's created this dichotomy in which people are divided into 2 categories of 'proper hard working people' and 'druggies', and the claim in the propaganda is that there is exactly no overlap. Because of this, people who actually use these substances responsibly, for personal gain or just for pleasure, have not typically come forth about it as they're afraid of losing face and being labeled lunatics. This allows for maintaining the control. If people - even the people who never have and have no desire for ever trying these things by themselves (which I can understand) - would understand how many of the 'decent' people they know and rely on have experimented with stuff other than alcohol, their image of the entire spectrum of drug use and drug users would start to change to a less black and white direction.
Any drug, alcohol included, can lead to a person becoming a problem user or inflicting damage on themselves or their psyche. Think about if we only judged those of use who drink alcohol on the merits and state of alcoholics. I mean if you take someone and you give them the idea that 'alcohol use' is synonymous with, and will always lead to. alcoholism, then they'd obviously be likely to oppose the substance altogether, which is how prohibition was justified in many western countries back in the past. The culture of secrecy/silence allows for the continuation of this myth that all psychedelics-users are out of their mind raving eraserheads that've had their mind melted by a psychosis, and that while it remains okay and acceptable to inhibit/alter your neurons with ethanol doing permanent physical damage to them or now cannabis in many places, temporarily altering their action with other kinds of mechanisms is somehow heretical and must be kept illegal.
What makes this all the more absurd when you get right down to it is that everyone, even those of us who use no substances whatsoever, are used to having experiences of a psychedelic nature every night while we sleep. Dreams are not obviously identical to the way psychedelics work, but they most certainly are an altered state of mind.
Compare these 2 scenarios, a person has some kind of a problem, personal or work-related, and they do one of these:
A) they think about it for a while and go to sleep. In their dream, they come up with a new way of approaching the problem as their unconscious mind develops an angle on it that they did not consciously see before. They wake up and proclaim to have solved the issue. Someone asks how they did it and they say they had a dream where they saw the solution.
B) the same person takes a tab of LSD or some mushrooms and has a similar outcome for similar reasons. Someone asks how they solved it and they reply that they took some psychedelics.
A) Will not cause any sort of uproar. There are quite many prominent scientists who've said openly that solutions sometimes 'appear' to them while sleeping and it's more or less generally accepted that sleep can have a positive effect on problem solving,
You seem to be confusing football, you know, the sport in which the foot is used to move a ball around a field, and what the Americans erroneously call football, even though in it mostly hands are used to carry an object which is not a ball but a spheroid prolate, meaning the more apt name for the sport would be 'handegg'.
I've nothing against american football, in fact I even prefer watching it to actual football, as an ice hockey man football is way too slow and not a contact sport, but seriously if there was a competition of 'come up with the most misleading name for a sport', american football would win it hands-down, followed by cricket, which has absolutely nothing to do with grasshoppers but seems to be an excuse to gather in a field to drink tea.
Yeah, those fucking hippy liberal cultural marxist with their absurd desires to drink pure water! What a bunch of losers and whiners. Real men drink their water with as much contaminants as humanly possible, because real men are not pussies!
Unfortunately the tap water here in liberal leftist Finland is ruined by the same liberals, it's way too pure for my levels of masculinity, so I carry a bag of ground plastics with me that I can then mix into my drinking water. My co-workers were confused by this and asked what I was doing, I told them I'm making Finland great again!
Lucky you,with Trump and his awesome stance of 'fuck the environment' your tap water will likely become 'ugely better still. If you're really lucky you'll get a whole bunch of awesome and delicious additives á la Flint like lead. I'm so envious.
Eh, no. And no again
Germany, France and the UK (in that order) are the 3 largest economies in the Union by far, but combined their GDP currently makes up around 51,2 % of that of the whole union. The UK by itself represents around 14,4 % of the total economy, France is 16 % and Germany is 20 %.
The remaining 24 countries are miniscule in size compared to these 3, but in total are roughly as big as these three. After the UK leaves, the shares will change so that Germany will grow to be around 24 % of the whole economy, while France's share goes up to around 19. This means that the other remaining EU countries together actually dwarf Germany and France in size.
Secondly, there are currently 10 member states that pay into the union more than they take out of it. In addition to Germany, France and the UK these include the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Austria, Italy and Ireland (granted Ireland and Italy pretty much break even so their contribution is not major). Spain (5th largest economy in the union after Italy) also pretty much breaks even although they still currently receive slightly more than they pay in.
What? The EU, for all its numerous flaws is still a succesful economic zone with a total GDP second only to the US once the UK leaves, so thinking that France or Germany would want to leave/shatter the union when it has benefited them the most as the biggest economies in the zone, or that 1 of them leaving would automatically trigger the collapse of the whole union and/or massive war is misguided. Especially now with the situation of Russia being what it is, there are very few leaders on a national level that would even want to leave, because reverting back to a bunch of solitary nation states is both economically damaging and is also essentially equal to surrending massive amounts of influence and control over to Russia, US and China, which from a purely game theory point of view of (geo)politics is a dumb as fuck move (for both the smaller states who will then be at the mercy of these larger players, as well as the big economies like France and Germany whose global influence/power would be greatly diminished if the Union stopped existing). This is something that both France and Germany understand well.
Think of it is this way: after the UK goes, the choice faced by Germany and France will be the following: they can either continue as the 2 major rulers of the 2nd largest economy in the world 7 times the size of Russia, or they can choose to return to a situation in which they control only their own economies that are roughly equal to that of Russia and are massive dwarfed by the US and China thereby essentially sidelining themselves from the big league of the world economies,
I've said it before and I'll say it again: we need 'Sciflix' wherein anyone can choose a number of fields they want to follow and subscribe to the service at a small monthly cost (per field for example)..
I'm not a scientist or a researcher, but I'd happily pay say 10-20 euros a month to have access to certain fields just out of pure interest as well as keeping up with new discoveries that may affect my work.. You could even make it so that individuals could pay more if they wanted to, with the extra amount being used to support research in said fields etc.
And this would obviously be for private use: institutions and universities could obviously still be charged more for their access.
As long as the current model continues to reign the publishers will only keep losing because like Obi-wan, if Sci-hub is struck down it will become even more powerful. Not necessarily under the same name but we've seen this happen: they take trackers down, new trackers are set up and DNS-blocking is circumvented. The demand for cheap article/data access will remain, and as long as the demand remains high and the prices remain as high as they are, piracy will be the only viable option for many people especially in poorer regions of the globe to gain access to information. Hell, even the god damn record companies and movie studios eventually did the math and realized that they cannot win the fight against piracy unless they start providing cheaply priced alternatives to it with equal or better quality. If they had enough brains to figure this out, the scientific publishers have no excuse.
'B-b-but it's so expensive'. It sure is. So's making movies and TV-series and that's being funded now with people paying 10 euros a month. Economies of scale people, economies of scale.
Firstly, not particularly prone is still miles away from being good enough for a transit system that will be paralyzed by vacuum failure. Secondly, we don't have vacuum tubes of the size and scope proposed by Hyperloop & al in existence, anywhere, let alone above ground or with actual high speed traffic going through them on an hourly basis, so there is in fact no way of knowing the exact failure rate of such tubes. I remind everyone that the test track built by Hyperloop for their pod-design competition earlier this year was less than a mile long and still managed to be the 2nd largest vacuum chamber in existence after NASA's.
Secondly, even if it is true that the failure rate of such tubes is almost nil, that does not account for the fact that it's still possible for anyone with malicious intent to disable the system at any times with ease. As long as it's above ground it won't take much thinking from someone to find a way to puncture the tube, so security-wise it's a nightmare. Even if it's designed safely enough (as one would hope) that vacuum failure will not cause life-threatening danger to passengers, it will certainly cripple the entire route for an extended period of time.
Even so that does not address the other issues. Some of the stuff Hyperloop has currently no answers or numbers for:
1) What is the estimated failure rate?
2) How much does the maintenance of the system cost? (the white paper on Hyperloop by SpaceX includes no maintenance cost estimates whatsoever and the actual building cost estimates themselves are pretty overly optimistic to put it mildly and are lacking on any hard data to back them up).
3) How will physical security of both the tube and the capsules be arranged?
When you consider the fact that without any kind of security the whole system is easily crippled by a single malicious actor, and that with security costs go up as does the travel time, the purported advantages when compared to flying don't seem too good.
I've quoted this article from 2 years ago before on /. when it comes to Hyperloop, but it is still relevant:
It scares you that officials seek to do their job effectively? What?
That's what tax officials do. They collect taxes that people owe. Some people, especially wealthier people and large corporations seek to use different mechanisms to avoid paying taxes that they legally owe. If tax officials allow this to happen, they're basically saying that tax evasion is fine at which point everyone with the money to hire a tax advisor/set up a shell company will stop paying taxes, and the entire tax burden will be left on those too poor to be able to use trickery to dodge taxes, which would be destructive to the entire society. There are those who argue this is in fact already at least partially the case seeing how little taxes many megacorporations pay to their respective countries, and seeing how abundant different sorts of tax-havens like Panama and the Caymans are.
Unless you yourself happen to be trying to use Bitcoin to dodge taxes, you should be in favor of this, because the more sucessfully people avoid taxes, the more the pool of tax paying citizens shrinks because tax-evasion, the more taxes you will pay.
No. Wanting to catch people who break laws does not make anyone a nazi. This is just as stupid as calling the police "the crime-Nazis" for wanting to apprehend criminals. Now you may disagree with certain laws and argue that said laws or said taxes should not be collected, but for that to happen you need to change the law, not point the finger the whoever is enforcing said law and break Godwin's law without clearly having even a modicum of understanding of what the word you're throwing as an insult means.
I was not talking about solely about end-of-life care costs, although I could have worded it better, I was talking about the total aggregate cost to the societies. While more people dying sooner will reduce end-of-life care costs, increased pollution also affects working age people, which causes you to lose tax-revenue by losing workers, and generally is a negative for the entire economy.
Looking at this from solely the angle of health care cost leaves a massive amount of alternative costs hidden and gives a totally skewed picture of the situation. You might as well argue that as a cost saving measure it's sensible to stop all form of health care because that way a lot of money is saved, but again, the net effect on the entire economy would be negative.
Woops, meant to say 'old' there.
No, not really. You see, elderly people who're most at risk of dying due to the increased pollution are those with pre-existing respitory conditions that by themselves are already expensive to treat.. What do yu think is one of the driving factors of causing those people to have said conditions? Pollution. So by cutting down pollution, you reduce the amount of elderly people in need of care, thereby decreasing costs. And it's not as if only young people fall to these illnesses. They're at a heightened risk obviously, but inhaling pollutants does increase mortality risk in all age-groups.
Take London during the industrialization for example with its massive amounts of coal-smoke. There too, the vast majority of people outside factory and mine-workers that suffered and died of smog-induced illnesses were older people. By your logic it should have been fine to leave London covered in smog, because 'nah, it really just kills older folks they're going to die anyway'.
Or look at modern day Chinese megacities with pollution so bad, that in certain areas just going outside to breathe the air is equivalent to smoking 1-2 packs of cigarettes a day.. You think the chinese are interested in cutting down pollution en masse just because they wanna appear green, or because they've done that math and figured out that having an explosion of respitory illnesses will cost them a metric fuckton in lost years of employment as well as treatment costs?
It depends on what the goal of the attacker is. If your goal is simply to destroy the vehicle or make it immobile, then sure a sledgehammer and a knife will do a better and faster job if you have physical access to the car.
If your goal is to for example assassinate someone and make it look like an accident, then it may be a different story. Plus the main troublesome thing about this is not the local access variety, but the fact that it's possible in theory to exploit this remotely if the car is connected to the internet.
Sure I agree, chances are slim that this will happen to anyone, but the fact that we have a hypothetical vector for disabling say, brakes and/or the airbag remotely if the software on the car is buggy or just badly written is a point of concern. Not panic, or a reason to swtich back to horses, but something the industry should look to seriously fix.
Thank you, you have a fine taste, herr Falke.
Well, it's not exactly clear to us either why it's become as prominent as it has, but seriously the aforementioned bans from the age of Swedish rule affected it greatly. You see, even though we were loyal subjects of the kingdom for close to 8 centuries, the language barrier created a sort of caste-system of those who could speak Swedish, and therefore be able to rise into positions of power and/or nobility, and the 'lower caste' of Finnish speaking working class and peasants who really didn't have all that much power or representation in matters of policy but they were however still taxed and made to fight in wars when the king so required. So needless to say, among a big chunk of the population, the royalty/the elites in Stockholm were not all that popular among the Finnish speaking crowd.
So during the eras of bans, drinking coffee became and easy way to practice sort of civil disobedience, a caffeinated way of giving the middle finger to elites.
Tea was also harder to get so far as I know, because Russia was and is a huge consumer of tea. I don't have figures to back this up but my estimate is that the traders of Hansa & al who provided the majority of exotic imports such as coffee and tobacco got a better price per kilo of tea by selling it to Russia or to mainland Sweden instead of to the relatively poor Finland (or Österland, 'the east land' as we were then known), so the availability of coffee probably also played into why it became such a big thing here over the centuries. It's even become a sort of 'coming of age ritual', in the sense that I still vividly remember the first time my grandmother allowed me to sit with them for a cup of coffee at our old summer cottage up north. I mean, I sat with them anyway most of the time but I wasn't given any coffee until about the age of 7ish, and that felt like such a big thing because 'coffee time' much like afternoon tea for the Britts, was like a grownup thing.
My thoughts exactly.
What's interesting to me is that in so far as I can tell they did not do any kind of comparison with regular old coffee, you know, the age old stimulant that's even more potent in caffeine than some energy drinks. As a curiosity this sort of panic over 'energy drinks' such as coffee is not new
The arguments raised then were pretty much exactly the same as they're now with energy drinks, namely that 'oh the youth of today does nothing but sit at cafes sipping this brown liquid, it's going to make them decadent idiots and losers!"
As a Finn I do have to point out as the centuries long neighborhood 'feud' between us and the Old Kingdom necessitates that we've got the nr. 1 place in coffee consumption. Filthy casuals. ;)
I've got to go now, my IV drip of Ecuadorian dark roast is running empty and the typing speed is falling to below 500 words a minute.
As do I.
I never said or implied it's distasteful to me. Why do you think I explicitly said I've changed my diet to something that - on a personal level - is less pleasurable to me abecause my intelligence tells me based on the data I have access to that it's the less harmful choice for the ecosystem overall and that I think the smart thing to do is to control out rate of population expansion by not having too many kids if I would not think that? We're on the same page with this one, completely.
You didn't, this one's on me. I got the impression that you overall thought of agricultural progress/increase in food output as a negative thing and drew this conclusion based on that. My bad, and I apologize.
This is false. Like I said, I told you I'm planning to have 2 or less kids, or none at all, precisely for this reason, I think the smart choice to control our rate of population growth is not to force people via laws or such to have less kids, as that tends not to work, but to keep increasing the standard of living especially in the poorer regions of the planet as that's where it provably has the largest effect on the amount of childtren, but also for us in the west to voluntarily, knowing all the facts and what's at stake, to have less kids.
Again, 110 % agreed.
Fair enough and thanks for your reply. I misjudged your moral position on the matter based on my previous encouters with similar replies on the topic, which is entirely on me.
We're not in disagreement on the matter in any way that bears further arguing, and I thank you for correcting my false impressions about your position(s). I have bad habit of extrapolating too much based on too little information, maybe as a consequence of spending too much time engaged in online debates, or maybe it's just my ego, but based on this exchange I'll gladly consider myself corrected when it comes to you.
I look forward to hearing your thoughts on other matters here on /.!
Last I checked homo sapiens sapiens was part of the animal world too, no?
For our own benefit, what else?
I presume the implication here is that had we never had the green revolution no unborn humans would've been harmed as the population would've simply never grown to its current size and therefore the green revolution is an evil thing that shouldn't jave happened. But that's simply not true. The green revolution happened out of necessity, it happened because people were starving and we had the means to develop ways to get more food to there's people to reduce starvation and reduce human suffering.
I'm acutely aware of the environmental issues caused agriculture, which is why, for the past couple months I've cut out all meat and roughly 90 % of all dairy. And I intend to maintain this diet, despite the fact that fucking love bacon, it's just that at this point I think someone with as much access to information as I do and living in the west, reducing meat and other animal products intake is while still not starving to death and eating food that tastes alright is both possible and economically feasible, and for someone in my position it's the single biggest consumer choice that I can do to try to control the ecological impact we're having on the biosphere.
However at the same time I'm always frustrated as hell to see people make this bland black and white argument of 'man bad, nature good!" as if we're not a part of nature (and conversely, as if moral judgements themselves are not a man made idea but somehow universal truths) and acting according to our genes just as much as the bees and all the rest. We're doing what we've been the best at doing on the planet for hundreds of thousands of years, which is surviving at all costs. Yes, that has over the millenia meant that we've hunted many a species to extinction destroyed numerous others unwittingly, because despite being the smartest force on the planet we're still just very advanced apes and not omniscient, but what makes the position of the eco-misanthropes so unbearable to me is that they seem to assume we are. Like, do you seriously think men of science, human beings with intelligence and compassion for their fellow man, should've looked at the starving masses of people in the early parts of the last century and gone: "well, I think we have some ideas of how we could grow more food for all these people, but since it might lead to unknown consequences let's just let them die horrific deaths' Such an attitude is essentially genocidal.
More to the point: Population growth provably decreases with a rising standard of living. People have less children in developed countries because they don't need to have 13 of them to make sure that even as 4 of them die in childhood, they still have enough labor to make sure someone farms their land and provides for them at their old age. The number of children globally per couple is coming down fast because advancements in the quality of life and technology are allowing people to not rely so much on manual labor and their own offspring as a sustaining force for their own old age. People in the west have access to an excess of food that would be unimaginable to anyone living in the past, or in the developed world today I can go out today and buy a delicious, ready cooked lunch with a fraction of my day's income without having to even exert any effort into preparing it myself. This used to be the luxury of kings and queens, and for us it's a common activity. yet the people in the west are having the least kids on the globe. I'm not sure I'll ever have biological kids, but if I do the maximum amount is 2, more likely