Moving vast amounts of gold around might cause some (Texas...they are creating their own Fort Knox for...you know...should the worst happen and the state turn Democrat) to consider mechanizing the transfer with computers and networks. Then it might be very efficient. Soon some bright sparks will figure out the underlying gold is merely getting in the way and merely the digits make sense.
So they'll recreate the modern financial systems, and declare victory.
You would hope. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that the total amount of gold ever mined doesn't compare money wise to the economy of the world.
My guess is that if we were foolish enough to attempt o go to a gold standard again, immediately Gold would be worth trillions od dolars per ounce. And most commerce would come to a dead stop.
No we use REAL money - gold because it has intrinsic value.
Um huh. Tell us more, Gold standard person. Even gold has a value that is only value because some folks decided it has value, it is rare enough, and it is transportable. It's a gorgeous, pretty yellow shiny metal. But people got together a log time ago, long before any of it's practical uses, and decided "Yeah, this is what we will base our wealth upon.
And there just isn't enough of it to run an economy off of today. Back to the bunker with you.
All other paradigm shifts in working environment that have displaced people opened up new opportunities. Farm hands that got obsolete when farming was automated were needed by the emerging industries in the towns.
Inspiring, but what will these opportunities be? The main objectt of automation is the elimination of jobs in order to realize increased profit. Any job created by automation is a ripe target for automation itself.
The problem this time around is that AI (let's use the term in the colloquial sense here, yes, I know it's just algorithms, but... let's humor the markedroids for now) is at a level where all low qualification jobs are being replaced. And then some of higher qualification, too. Soon middle management is going to be eliminated. It's no longer just the no-qualification "you want fries with that" student jobs that get replaced with automation.
And that leaves a lot of people unemployed and, worse, unemployable. Competing with a machine that never sleeps, never gets sick and wants no wage is something you can only do with slaves. And even there only if you work them to death, throw them away and plug the next one in.
All other paradigm shifts in working environment that have displaced people opened up new opportunities. Farm hands that got obsolete when farming was automated were needed by the emerging industries in the towns. When these jobs got hit with automation, the developing service industry needed those now free workers.
The future is interesting for certain. The difficulty in figuring that out, is will humans themselves become redundant? If there is no need for the majority of humanity, why should the majority of humanity exist?
People put permanently out of work and permanently unemployable will be a useless drag on the economy. So are they allowed to slowly expire, or will a more active termination process be in order?
It won't be a garden of eden for manufacturers either. If you eliminate most of your customers, you will eliminate most of your widget sales as well. The workerless paradise won't be as busy as originally envisioned once there aren't many people capable of purchasing your widgets.
So anyhow, exactly how is a message in Russian going to be presented? I bet there is a very good chance that it will be Cyrillic. It's like the Alphabet that at least a few Russians have been know to use.
The main reason is to give the Germans a remider of the last beatdown that they so richly deserved. You know, from the Alphabet of the language of one of the countries that administerd that beatdown?
This action on their part does shed some light on how they get themselves into those predicaments where the rest of the world is forced to give them a beatdown.
I just don't understand how these politicians don't have like, a reminder card on their desk or something, which says "if this sounds like something Hitler did, it's time to think about it twice". Except, you know, probably not in English.
I think your statement in German, then below it in English and Cyrillic: "Remember what happened the last couple times you tried this crap?"
What we have a problem with is stupid spending on infrastructure (spending money on a high speed train - with no defined path - when we have crumbling bridges, roads and dams)
But if I might note, here in soggy Pennsylvania, we have gone on a big spree of road infrastructure repair. They are doing a darn good job as well. That's the good part. But in one of those weird twists of reality, it took a tax increase on fuel to do it. It wasn't the so called liberals who didn't understand that it takes money to do things.
and letting people live their lives on the safety net - which is supposed to be there to catch people who occasionally slip.
I hate and loathe lazy people. That fact out of the way, what is the path forward? If you are working a minimum wage job, you are still eligible for government benefits. So whatever the abuser of the government does, they are still abusing the government unless they get a relatively high paying job.
Our problem is that we don't have a path forward. For as much fun as it is to blame the poor for their poorness, unskilled jobs are disappearing.
I worked my life several steps up the social ladder. While proof that it can be done, it was pretty difficult. I can assure you that most people who are born on a much higher rung don't have the drive to do what I did.
And the slightly insane idea that anyone can be anything they want to be simply cannot make a person who is doing well to get their shoes tied into a Programmer or rocket scientist. Ain't happening. Both conservatives and liberals fall into that trap. Liberals because it is sooooo mean to point out that some folks aren't all that smart, and conservatives because it doesn't fit the narrative of poor people being 100 percent responsible for their poverty, and that all anyone has to do is apply themselves, and they can be President. Just a little bit of work, and you're rollin' in gold.
So what do the poor do to bootstrap themselves out of their self induced situation? Eat cake?
"Freedom of speech ends where the criminal law begins."
Apparently, Freedom of Speech ends where German law begins. You know, Germans, last time you cracked down on free speech, you then went on to try to kill all the Jews. Maybe that's not the best plan.
This action on their part does shed some light on how they get themselves into those predicaments where the rest of the world is forced to give them a beatdown.
From what I've been told, those lines will give you one. A local some time ago, saw one of the dancing downed lines, and waled toward it to get a close look. He claimed it jumped and nailed him. Just that momentary contact burned his arm and leg to the point that he had to have them removed. 120 VAC isn't a huge deal in most cases, but at 240, its getting serious, and above 400 can be nasty indeed. I think this guy was nailed with something like 2400 VAC. Amazing that he lived.
The above ground ones have the issues we all know about, the below ground ones are susceptable[sic] to lightning.
Below ground lines are considerably less susceptible to lightning than above ground lines. Lightning can strike above ground lines literally anywhere along their length, while it can only reach below ground lines where they surface. The more lines that are buried, the less susceptible the grid is.
And the kiosks are a helluva lot less ugly than a stinking utility pole stuck in the ground every dozen yards.
Too bad we don't have photos in here. In the neighborhood near me, they have kiosks, One for Power, ont for electric, and one for phone. And if you get lucky, you get a 4 by 4 box in your front yard with a transformer. The boxes are rusting, not plumb - they lean, and the people hate all of them. They plant flower gardens around them, which of course get dug up if there is any work. After the work, they put the old rusty boxes back. Some people put fake foam boulders over the transformer boxes - probably not a good idea.
Meanwhile, the power lines go up an easement behind my house, and are almost invisible.
If your powerboxes are as stunningly beautiful as you describe, perhaps people will put them in their yards as decorations to beautify the neighborhood?
If you're suffering a lot of transformer explosions that aren't induced by lightning, you should start buying better transformers that don't leak their oil.
there is another solution, but the utilities refuse to do it except in areas of new construction or where regulations require it, which is put the lines underground.
Each system has advantages and disadvantages. The above ground ones have the issues we all know about, the below ground ones are susceptable to lightning. I have a cool piece of metal in my office that I found from a lightning strike on an underground cable. Very similar to a "fulgurite", though those are usually made out of quartz. Melted that sucka into something that looks like a dragon's claw. Another issue with the underground stuff is a transformer explosion takes the excitement to a pretty high level. And the kiosks are ugly. Instead of seeing the ugly when you look up, it is right there at ground level.
Once every house etc has its own battery storage and an EV and they are all linked into a microgrid, you then have huge distributed storage capacity on tap. Centralisation is a "all eggs in one basket" risk.
Exactly. While I like the off grid approach, one interesting feature of microgrids is they are self-healing, and can route around problems.
There's something terribly wrong if your grid is so unreliable that your self-maintaned system is better.
You aren't wrong. But we can't do much about that maintenance. Or the weather.
Where I live, whenever there's a power outage lasting longer than a fraction of a second it's in the news. Those blips happen once or twice a year at most, and then often only in part of the territory. Bigger outages are usually limited to a building or two.
What we have had in my area, mountainous and largely wooded, is over the last couple decades, the weather has been really uncooperative. While overall, much warmer than in previous decades, there have been some seriously early winter weather type events, like heavy snowstorms while the leaves are still green on the trees. Can't do much about that damage unless we clear-cut the area around every house, and within a hundred plus feet around every power pole.. If you live in an area where the evening news mentions a blip in power, consider yourself quite lucky.
Will it go "FOOOM!" if you put enough volts through it?
No, it will go RRRRRMMMMMM but but WMMMMMMMMM BRT BRT MWAP.
Rinse and repeat until a breaker blows.
I had a HV power line go down about a hundred feet away from me when I was a kid. Quite exciting, with the sort of noise noted above, and lots of bright blue and sometimes reddish pink light. Line bouncing around and grass catching on fire too
That power = money and unless you have money you have no power. The ones with the money are the ones that would want it to be illegal.
Yeah, like that isn't going to happen. They can take my solar panels when they pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.
What is it about this topic that has Dale Gribble and his compadres coming out of the woodwork.
I've said for years that a tipping point will come when it doesn't make sense for average people to stay connected to the power grid. My electrical hotel load right now would support it except for the hot tub.
But let's say that somehow, while the rest of the world is gravitating to a disconnected power source, while we here i in the US manage to mandate the present grid system.
One of the first things to happen is the large expense of maintaining the old system. Inefficiencies like that ar ea drag on the economy.
But the thing that I'm surprised about is that the Gribbles of the world do not get that a highly centralized system like the grid is a huge strategic problem.
Which is all to say, I would like my enemy to have as few, and as large energy generation facilities as possible. This would maximise the damage I could do to my enemy. Imagine the overall damage you could do with a few well aimed cruise missiles!
With a no-grid power delivery scheme, or at least one with many, many mini suppliers, we've taken away one vulnerability.
I think the first "that" is in error. The structure is "find X to be Y" (i.e. think that X is Y), where in this case X = "a man that doesn't sit like they like" and Y = "a rapist".
Where that first "like" means "how"; "sit how they like". (And "they" is the person passing the judgement, not the person sitting).
Actually, it means that when sitting with your legs too far apart on public transit, you are often guilty of a crime, and many third wave feminists consider you as part of rape culture. See above links.
i dont believe that the fbi has the intelligence to interview kaspersky at kasperskys level.
Which, by the way, is a darn good indicator of likely hacking, when it is so easy, glad we agree. If harming your adversary is easy, it most certainly will be done.
If you're going to be snarky, at least be accurate. The Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) was second-wave.
Oh heavens no! I'm talking about the third wavers, the women who scream at men, and find that a man that doesn't sit like they like to be a rapist, and that plowing roads is symbolic of rape culture. Man these women want men dead. SCUM was mostly parody. These women are deadly serious.
And over time, and as the third wave feminists entrenched their privilege, I avoided touchy ladies. I was friends with this woman before men were all evil, so with her it wasn't a big deal. Women I didn't know already were LWA.
Slashdot Mirror
Moving vast amounts of gold around might cause some (Texas...they are creating their own Fort Knox for...you know...should the worst happen and the state turn Democrat) to consider mechanizing the transfer with computers and networks. Then it might be very efficient. Soon some bright sparks will figure out the underlying gold is merely getting in the way and merely the digits make sense.
So they'll recreate the modern financial systems, and declare victory.
You would hope. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that the total amount of gold ever mined doesn't compare money wise to the economy of the world.
My guess is that if we were foolish enough to attempt o go to a gold standard again, immediately Gold would be worth trillions od dolars per ounce. And most commerce would come to a dead stop.
If apostrophes were made of gold, would you misuse them as much? it's means it is
If, you, had, any, mental ability, you, wouldn't, have, to, be, a, grammer, nazi, It's, its, it,s it:s.
But, Thanks, for, The,wEll, Thnougt, out; re-Butt,al.
No we use REAL money - gold because it has intrinsic value.
Um huh. Tell us more, Gold standard person. Even gold has a value that is only value because some folks decided it has value, it is rare enough, and it is transportable. It's a gorgeous, pretty yellow shiny metal. But people got together a log time ago, long before any of it's practical uses, and decided "Yeah, this is what we will base our wealth upon.
And there just isn't enough of it to run an economy off of today. Back to the bunker with you.
All other paradigm shifts in working environment that have displaced people opened up new opportunities. Farm hands that got obsolete when farming was automated were needed by the emerging industries in the towns.
Inspiring, but what will these opportunities be? The main objectt of automation is the elimination of jobs in order to realize increased profit. Any job created by automation is a ripe target for automation itself.
The problem this time around is that AI (let's use the term in the colloquial sense here, yes, I know it's just algorithms, but ... let's humor the markedroids for now) is at a level where all low qualification jobs are being replaced. And then some of higher qualification, too. Soon middle management is going to be eliminated. It's no longer just the no-qualification "you want fries with that" student jobs that get replaced with automation.
And that leaves a lot of people unemployed and, worse, unemployable. Competing with a machine that never sleeps, never gets sick and wants no wage is something you can only do with slaves. And even there only if you work them to death, throw them away and plug the next one in.
All other paradigm shifts in working environment that have displaced people opened up new opportunities. Farm hands that got obsolete when farming was automated were needed by the emerging industries in the towns. When these jobs got hit with automation, the developing service industry needed those now free workers.
The future is interesting for certain. The difficulty in figuring that out, is will humans themselves become redundant? If there is no need for the majority of humanity, why should the majority of humanity exist?
People put permanently out of work and permanently unemployable will be a useless drag on the economy. So are they allowed to slowly expire, or will a more active termination process be in order?
It won't be a garden of eden for manufacturers either. If you eliminate most of your customers, you will eliminate most of your widget sales as well. The workerless paradise won't be as busy as originally envisioned once there aren't many people capable of purchasing your widgets.
Cyrillic is not a language, it is an alphabet.
So anyhow, exactly how is a message in Russian going to be presented? I bet there is a very good chance that it will be Cyrillic. It's like the Alphabet that at least a few Russians have been know to use.
The main reason is to give the Germans a remider of the last beatdown that they so richly deserved. You know, from the Alphabet of the language of one of the countries that administerd that beatdown?
This action on their part does shed some light on how they get themselves into those predicaments where the rest of the world is forced to give them a beatdown.
I just don't understand how these politicians don't have like, a reminder card on their desk or something, which says "if this sounds like something Hitler did, it's time to think about it twice". Except, you know, probably not in English.
I think your statement in German, then below it in English and Cyrillic: "Remember what happened the last couple times you tried this crap?"
There are just holes too deep for many Americans to dig themselves out of, and the system is seemingly not geared to help them.
Just be rich. Its so simple, I don't know why those lazy poor people can't figure it out.
What we have a problem with is stupid spending on infrastructure (spending money on a high speed train - with no defined path - when we have crumbling bridges, roads and dams)
But if I might note, here in soggy Pennsylvania, we have gone on a big spree of road infrastructure repair. They are doing a darn good job as well. That's the good part. But in one of those weird twists of reality, it took a tax increase on fuel to do it. It wasn't the so called liberals who didn't understand that it takes money to do things.
and letting people live their lives on the safety net - which is supposed to be there to catch people who occasionally slip.
I hate and loathe lazy people. That fact out of the way, what is the path forward? If you are working a minimum wage job, you are still eligible for government benefits. So whatever the abuser of the government does, they are still abusing the government unless they get a relatively high paying job.
Our problem is that we don't have a path forward. For as much fun as it is to blame the poor for their poorness, unskilled jobs are disappearing.
I worked my life several steps up the social ladder. While proof that it can be done, it was pretty difficult. I can assure you that most people who are born on a much higher rung don't have the drive to do what I did.
And the slightly insane idea that anyone can be anything they want to be simply cannot make a person who is doing well to get their shoes tied into a Programmer or rocket scientist. Ain't happening. Both conservatives and liberals fall into that trap. Liberals because it is sooooo mean to point out that some folks aren't all that smart, and conservatives because it doesn't fit the narrative of poor people being 100 percent responsible for their poverty, and that all anyone has to do is apply themselves, and they can be President. Just a little bit of work, and you're rollin' in gold.
So what do the poor do to bootstrap themselves out of their self induced situation? Eat cake?
oh, some other country has sent probes to every planet? footed the bill for more than a third of the costs of the ISS?
But we're done with that now. We have our hats to sell to each other.
"Freedom of speech ends where the criminal law begins."
Apparently, Freedom of Speech ends where German law begins. You know, Germans, last time you cracked down on free speech, you then went on to try to kill all the Jews. Maybe that's not the best plan.
This action on their part does shed some light on how they get themselves into those predicaments where the rest of the world is forced to give them a beatdown.
Who wants a body massage?
From what I've been told, those lines will give you one. A local some time ago, saw one of the dancing downed lines, and waled toward it to get a close look. He claimed it jumped and nailed him. Just that momentary contact burned his arm and leg to the point that he had to have them removed. 120 VAC isn't a huge deal in most cases, but at 240, its getting serious, and above 400 can be nasty indeed. I think this guy was nailed with something like 2400 VAC. Amazing that he lived.
The above ground ones have the issues we all know about, the below ground ones are susceptable[sic] to lightning.
Below ground lines are considerably less susceptible to lightning than above ground lines. Lightning can strike above ground lines literally anywhere along their length, while it can only reach below ground lines where they surface. The more lines that are buried, the less susceptible the grid is.
And the kiosks are a helluva lot less ugly than a stinking utility pole stuck in the ground every dozen yards.
Too bad we don't have photos in here. In the neighborhood near me, they have kiosks, One for Power, ont for electric, and one for phone. And if you get lucky, you get a 4 by 4 box in your front yard with a transformer. The boxes are rusting, not plumb - they lean, and the people hate all of them. They plant flower gardens around them, which of course get dug up if there is any work. After the work, they put the old rusty boxes back. Some people put fake foam boulders over the transformer boxes - probably not a good idea.
Meanwhile, the power lines go up an easement behind my house, and are almost invisible.
If your powerboxes are as stunningly beautiful as you describe, perhaps people will put them in their yards as decorations to beautify the neighborhood?
If you're suffering a lot of transformer explosions that aren't induced by lightning, you should start buying better transformers that don't leak their oil.
You think I'm the Public Utility? 8^)
there is another solution, but the utilities refuse to do it except in areas of new construction or where regulations require it, which is put the lines underground.
Each system has advantages and disadvantages. The above ground ones have the issues we all know about, the below ground ones are susceptable to lightning. I have a cool piece of metal in my office that I found from a lightning strike on an underground cable. Very similar to a "fulgurite", though those are usually made out of quartz. Melted that sucka into something that looks like a dragon's claw. Another issue with the underground stuff is a transformer explosion takes the excitement to a pretty high level. And the kiosks are ugly. Instead of seeing the ugly when you look up, it is right there at ground level.
That's why most of the world uses underground cables where possible.
You do know that underground cables are vulnerable to a lot of problems as well, don't you?
Once every house etc has its own battery storage and an EV and they are all linked into a microgrid, you then have huge distributed storage capacity on tap. Centralisation is a "all eggs in one basket" risk.
Exactly. While I like the off grid approach, one interesting feature of microgrids is they are self-healing, and can route around problems.
There's something terribly wrong if your grid is so unreliable that your self-maintaned system is better.
You aren't wrong. But we can't do much about that maintenance. Or the weather.
Where I live, whenever there's a power outage lasting longer than a fraction of a second it's in the news. Those blips happen once or twice a year at most, and then often only in part of the territory. Bigger outages are usually limited to a building or two.
What we have had in my area, mountainous and largely wooded, is over the last couple decades, the weather has been really uncooperative. While overall, much warmer than in previous decades, there have been some seriously early winter weather type events, like heavy snowstorms while the leaves are still green on the trees. Can't do much about that damage unless we clear-cut the area around every house, and within a hundred plus feet around every power pole.. If you live in an area where the evening news mentions a blip in power, consider yourself quite lucky.
Will it go "FOOOM!" if you put enough volts through it?
No, it will go RRRRRMMMMMM but but WMMMMMMMMM BRT BRT MWAP.
Rinse and repeat until a breaker blows.
I had a HV power line go down about a hundred feet away from me when I was a kid. Quite exciting, with the sort of noise noted above, and lots of bright blue and sometimes reddish pink light. Line bouncing around and grass catching on fire too
Obligatory DO NOT APPROACH! caveat.
Perhaps you can explain what I'm missing here?
That power = money and unless you have money you have no power. The ones with the money are the ones that would want it to be illegal.
Yeah, like that isn't going to happen. They can take my solar panels when they pry them out of my cold, dead fingers.
What is it about this topic that has Dale Gribble and his compadres coming out of the woodwork.
I've said for years that a tipping point will come when it doesn't make sense for average people to stay connected to the power grid. My electrical hotel load right now would support it except for the hot tub.
But let's say that somehow, while the rest of the world is gravitating to a disconnected power source, while we here i in the US manage to mandate the present grid system.
One of the first things to happen is the large expense of maintaining the old system. Inefficiencies like that ar ea drag on the economy.
But the thing that I'm surprised about is that the Gribbles of the world do not get that a highly centralized system like the grid is a huge strategic problem.
Which is all to say, I would like my enemy to have as few, and as large energy generation facilities as possible. This would maximise the damage I could do to my enemy. Imagine the overall damage you could do with a few well aimed cruise missiles!
With a no-grid power delivery scheme, or at least one with many, many mini suppliers, we've taken away one vulnerability.
I think the first "that" is in error. The structure is "find X to be Y" (i.e. think that X is Y), where in this case X = "a man that doesn't sit like they like" and Y = "a rapist".
Where that first "like" means "how"; "sit how they like". (And "they" is the person passing the judgement, not the person sitting).
Actually, it means that when sitting with your legs too far apart on public transit, you are often guilty of a crime, and many third wave feminists consider you as part of rape culture. See above links.
Yes, if you sit with your legs too far apart, you are part of rape culture.
In New York, manspreading is a crime. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men...
In madrid Spain as well. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Anyhow, it's an interesting DDGo search. I can't get some people to look this stuff up, but the links are there, and there are more of them.
i dont believe that the fbi has the intelligence to interview kaspersky at kasperskys level.
Which, by the way, is a darn good indicator of likely hacking, when it is so easy, glad we agree. If harming your adversary is easy, it most certainly will be done.
Trump says somthing it's true. You can take it to the bank.
The fact that it is just
So
Damn
easy
To screw with people's computers, is so tempting, and is so undermining - no one would ever ever do such a thing.
the smoke around here is getting rather thick, yes no?
Popcorn and tequila for all!
If you're going to be snarky, at least be accurate. The Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) was second-wave.
Oh heavens no! I'm talking about the third wavers, the women who scream at men, and find that a man that doesn't sit like they like to be a rapist, and that plowing roads is symbolic of rape culture. Man these women want men dead. SCUM was mostly parody. These women are deadly serious.
LWA? ...Living with Autism...?
Leave Well Alone.
Although your's was pretty good too!