But instead of paying those taxes, I'd rather pay a bit more in goods and services to cover the costs of reducing carbon emissions to reduce the rate of global warming and slow the sea level rise.
That's rather... optimistic. Maybe that could work. Maybe it's already too late. Maybe China will talk a good game while quietly doubling their CO2 output. Maybe it's all solar activity and Antarctica is gone regardless of human activity. When it comes to important things, it's best to plan for more than the optimistic case, especially for years-long efforts.
There's plenty of land. There will also be plenty of useful farmland - it just might not be the same land that makes good farmland today.
The problem isn't really an overall resource shortage, it's that which land is valuable will change. Wars have certainly started over just that. People will need to move, likely across current borders. How will that end up?
No need for some flood of refugees, though. This is a slow change, by human measure. Plenty of time to work on moving, perhaps emigrating, to where you want to be. It can take years to relocate, but we have years. Make good use of them if you believe in all this.
If your worried about a flood of refugees ruining your home area even though you found a good place, promptly, well, join the club.
On the flip side, if Climate Change is your religion, and yet you live in low-lying coast land, you're kind of an idiot at this point. If you Believe, then topographical maps are free and you should be taking care of yourself and your family - live and work where it will remain safe, and make the move now, not after everything goes crazy. Heck, buy a bunch of safe property while you're at it, great money to be made when the waters rise!
It's the people who insist that other people need to change everything they do because Climate Change, but aren't taking the threat seriously in their own life, who piss me off right up there with the hypocritical televangelists.
Not just OVH, any second rate hosting company does it. DreamHost does as well, 1and1. They're a pain in the neck to work with because any update breaks everything and you're stuck with old versions of Apache, nginx and PHP because of it. Sure it helps them because they can deduplicate the shit out of the memory and storage but it's broken.
If you're paying less than $20/mo for a VPS, you're shafted.
For that price range, you can just get a small AWS server and not have these problems (especially if you can pay for 3 years up front).
Money is extremely powerful and important right up until the point when it's not. Money is associated with power, but shouldn't be confused with power.
There have certainly been times and places in history when mercenary armies were common, and so money was directly power, but it's not the norm.
Using this definition, Google is very successful advertising company.
How else would you describe Google? They've only ever made non-trivial money selling ads. Like Facebook, most of their technology is around user data (harvesting, deducing demographics, etc) so that they can convince marketing drones that targeted ads are totally worth the money.
Exactly wrong. It's not the device-side that's selling out your privacy at all.
Oh, the devices do it too. If you have a smart TV connected to the internet, it's sending screen shot hashes back to the mothership regularly so that your viewing habits can be sold. Seems naive to assume that Roku et al aren't doing the same.
It's rare that elements are named after people, though there are a few examples. Places just seem less controversial. There's a gentleman's agreement that Element 137 should be Feynmanium, and I will be gravely disappointed if he doesn't eventually get that honor. (For those who don't know, "137", referring to the fine structure constant, is to physicists what "42" is to geek culture - chances are good it's the combination to a physicist's briefcase, for example.)
Anonymity prevents that sort of thing fairly well all on its own.
But the use cases matter! For sub-dollar purchases, an alternative to change in the pocket, fine, whatever. For an alternative to travelers' checks, again, repudiation is the point of the exercise. Those are both good use cases for something like this.
It's the more mainstream use of cash, like paying for a taxi, where it's problematic. You can see this in China today: everything is tied to your government-issued ID, so without one it's very hard to move around. Control is obviously the point there, and the system works well for the government.
True electronic cash is hard, perhaps impossible, but there are two easy special cases: electronic coins, and electronic traveler's checks.
* Coins are easy because the fraud threat is much reduced for sub-dollar purchases, as is the concern for anonymity. * Traveler's checks.are non-anonymous by design, as part of support for repudiation. A similar electronic system, where I trade anonymity for repudiation is my wallet is stolen, would also be useful.
But neither is an acceptable replacement for cash. Sadly, cash isn't all that anonymous these days, as the serial numbers are all scanned on any large deposit or withdrawal.
Any failure to add leap days and leap seconds will result in long term violation of these two "truths" and the calendar system becomes meaningless.
Leap days are important. We managed without leap seconds until quite recently, and we could keep on managing. There are already plenty of places where the sun isn't "reasonably close" to the zenith at noon, and we survive. Aside from DST, timezone gerrymandering has produced some timezones that stretch across quite a bit of longitude. Heck, even within a normal-sized timezone, you can be off by 30 minutes if you're near the edge. Compare that error to the 27 leap seconds added over the past 45 years.
"Sun overhead at noon" is a perfectly arbitrary convention. If 1000 years from now it's "Sun overhead at eleven", that will just the the way it's been your whole life - or, heck, by then who knows how many planets Mankind will have spread across, the whole thing will likely be a joke. I think leap seconds mostly appeal to the kind of pedantic nerd who likes to start all his sentences with "actually..." - the more complicated the basic things in life are, the more smug he gets to feel.
If we had any sense we'd redefine the second or the meter to make the speed of light exactly 3x10^8 m/s anyhow.
Anything Slashdot mods find offensive, or even just disagree with at an emotional level, gets modded troll or flamebait. However, the ability to mod up usually keeps posts visisble on both sides of any political question, unless the post leans too far into personal attacks. It's not perfect, but it works OK as long as mods browse at -1.
Once a post has been modded down so it is not seen except by those who go looking for such things it is unlikely to come back into view.
Happens to my posts on political stories fairly often, actually. I'll see stuff drop quickly, then gradually come back up, often accumulating a dozen or so mod points as it becomes a point of mod contention. And offensive/abusive posts tend not to get any mods kicking them back up, so they tend to stay hidden. I just browse at -1 anyhow, since I got used to/. before karma, but like I said - the system tends to work OK.
The only way lgw can ever get what he wants is on a forum moderated by a single benevolent god administrator, and that works until the admin gets tired of everyone else's bullshit and turns on the brimstone spigot.
Actually, I've seen it work with a small cadre of mods picked by the site owner. Slashdot takes a different approach entirely, of not removing any (well, hardly any) posts, but letting you filter out the more trolly/offensive stuff if you want to. But perhaps that only works because Slashdot isn't a political site, and so you get mods from both sides of most issues here.
Facebook is deciding what's offensive when it comes to material that appears on their site.
That seems reasonable to me.
Legal? Sure. Desirable? No.
Welcome to the daily/. "reasons not to use Facebook" story.
No one seems interested in running a site that moderates rude conversation, yet allows spirited political and religious debate. Someplace where you can say "I don't think American needs any more [insert group here]" as long as you don't pile personal abuse on other commenters. All our choices are "speech I disagree with is threats and hate speech" or "anything goes, until the FBI seizes the servers". Somewhere in between would be nice.
Slashdot moderation works great for this, BTW, because you can just ignore it. But less politics on Slashdot would be better. A political debate version of Slashdot could be neat.though.
Leap seconds: even less desirable than Daylight Saving Time.
Seriously, why do we put up with this shit. The precise details of the Earth's rotation just aren't that important, except to a few hundred professional telescope operators, who have a history of keeping time their own way anyhow.
Deliberately choosing a Christian bakery as a political stunt: also a conscious choice. Why do you think it is they never choose an Islamic bakery for their political stunts?
A Unicef Clearasil Gibberish and drivel O Mennen mylar muriel With a hey derry tum gardol O Yuban necco glamorene Ended nytol, Vaseline! Sing hey nonny nembulat.
Except that Obama is perhaps the least corrupt individual to hold the Presidency since Jimmy Carter.
You meant most corrupt, right? The bank bailouts were the largest transfer of money from the treasury to donors in the history of America. (Sure, Bush started the ball rolling, but the payout while he was in office was small in comparison.)
He certainly had the support of just about every racist you can find,
Slashdot Mirror
But instead of paying those taxes, I'd rather pay a bit more in goods and services to cover the costs of reducing carbon emissions to reduce the rate of global warming and slow the sea level rise.
That's rather ... optimistic. Maybe that could work. Maybe it's already too late. Maybe China will talk a good game while quietly doubling their CO2 output. Maybe it's all solar activity and Antarctica is gone regardless of human activity. When it comes to important things, it's best to plan for more than the optimistic case, especially for years-long efforts.
There's plenty of land. There will also be plenty of useful farmland - it just might not be the same land that makes good farmland today.
The problem isn't really an overall resource shortage, it's that which land is valuable will change. Wars have certainly started over just that. People will need to move, likely across current borders. How will that end up?
No need for some flood of refugees, though. This is a slow change, by human measure. Plenty of time to work on moving, perhaps emigrating, to where you want to be. It can take years to relocate, but we have years. Make good use of them if you believe in all this.
If your worried about a flood of refugees ruining your home area even though you found a good place, promptly, well, join the club.
On the flip side, if Climate Change is your religion, and yet you live in low-lying coast land, you're kind of an idiot at this point. If you Believe, then topographical maps are free and you should be taking care of yourself and your family - live and work where it will remain safe, and make the move now, not after everything goes crazy. Heck, buy a bunch of safe property while you're at it, great money to be made when the waters rise!
It's the people who insist that other people need to change everything they do because Climate Change, but aren't taking the threat seriously in their own life, who piss me off right up there with the hypocritical televangelists.
Not just OVH, any second rate hosting company does it. DreamHost does as well, 1and1. They're a pain in the neck to work with because any update breaks everything and you're stuck with old versions of Apache, nginx and PHP because of it. Sure it helps them because they can deduplicate the shit out of the memory and storage but it's broken.
If you're paying less than $20/mo for a VPS, you're shafted.
For that price range, you can just get a small AWS server and not have these problems (especially if you can pay for 3 years up front).
Money is extremely powerful and important right up until the point when it's not. Money is associated with power, but shouldn't be confused with power.
There have certainly been times and places in history when mercenary armies were common, and so money was directly power, but it's not the norm.
Using this definition, Google is very successful advertising company.
How else would you describe Google? They've only ever made non-trivial money selling ads. Like Facebook, most of their technology is around user data (harvesting, deducing demographics, etc) so that they can convince marketing drones that targeted ads are totally worth the money.
Exactly wrong. It's not the device-side that's selling out your privacy at all.
Oh, the devices do it too. If you have a smart TV connected to the internet, it's sending screen shot hashes back to the mothership regularly so that your viewing habits can be sold. Seems naive to assume that Roku et al aren't doing the same.
Oh, if it's an internet poll I'd be campaigning hard to get the next element named "Hydrogen". If you're gonna troll, troll as hard as you can.
It's rare that elements are named after people, though there are a few examples. Places just seem less controversial. There's a gentleman's agreement that Element 137 should be Feynmanium, and I will be gravely disappointed if he doesn't eventually get that honor. (For those who don't know, "137", referring to the fine structure constant, is to physicists what "42" is to geek culture - chances are good it's the combination to a physicist's briefcase, for example.)
Anonymity prevents that sort of thing fairly well all on its own.
But the use cases matter! For sub-dollar purchases, an alternative to change in the pocket, fine, whatever. For an alternative to travelers' checks, again, repudiation is the point of the exercise. Those are both good use cases for something like this.
It's the more mainstream use of cash, like paying for a taxi, where it's problematic. You can see this in China today: everything is tied to your government-issued ID, so without one it's very hard to move around. Control is obviously the point there, and the system works well for the government.
If you think we're going anywhere within the next few thousand years you are grossly mistaken. The physics doesn't allow it.
Mars and Venus are both easy, by the "centuries from now" standard. Neither will have a 24-hour day.
Do we apply nanoseconds every few weeks? Or minutes every 30-100 years? Or something in between?
I stand by "never" as the preferable choice. The timing solution is not "required", heck, it's barely even "useful".
True electronic cash is hard, perhaps impossible, but there are two easy special cases: electronic coins, and electronic traveler's checks.
* Coins are easy because the fraud threat is much reduced for sub-dollar purchases, as is the concern for anonymity.
* Traveler's checks.are non-anonymous by design, as part of support for repudiation. A similar electronic system, where I trade anonymity for repudiation is my wallet is stolen, would also be useful.
But neither is an acceptable replacement for cash. Sadly, cash isn't all that anonymous these days, as the serial numbers are all scanned on any large deposit or withdrawal.
Any failure to add leap days and leap seconds will result in long term violation of these two "truths" and the calendar system becomes meaningless.
Leap days are important. We managed without leap seconds until quite recently, and we could keep on managing. There are already plenty of places where the sun isn't "reasonably close" to the zenith at noon, and we survive. Aside from DST, timezone gerrymandering has produced some timezones that stretch across quite a bit of longitude. Heck, even within a normal-sized timezone, you can be off by 30 minutes if you're near the edge. Compare that error to the 27 leap seconds added over the past 45 years.
"Sun overhead at noon" is a perfectly arbitrary convention. If 1000 years from now it's "Sun overhead at eleven", that will just the the way it's been your whole life - or, heck, by then who knows how many planets Mankind will have spread across, the whole thing will likely be a joke. I think leap seconds mostly appeal to the kind of pedantic nerd who likes to start all his sentences with "actually ..." - the more complicated the basic things in life are, the more smug he gets to feel.
If we had any sense we'd redefine the second or the meter to make the speed of light exactly 3x10^8 m/s anyhow.
Anything Slashdot mods find offensive, or even just disagree with at an emotional level, gets modded troll or flamebait. However, the ability to mod up usually keeps posts visisble on both sides of any political question, unless the post leans too far into personal attacks. It's not perfect, but it works OK as long as mods browse at -1.
Once a post has been modded down so it is not seen except by those who go looking for such things it is unlikely to come back into view.
Happens to my posts on political stories fairly often, actually. I'll see stuff drop quickly, then gradually come back up, often accumulating a dozen or so mod points as it becomes a point of mod contention. And offensive/abusive posts tend not to get any mods kicking them back up, so they tend to stay hidden. I just browse at -1 anyhow, since I got used to /. before karma, but like I said - the system tends to work OK.
The only way lgw can ever get what he wants is on a forum moderated by a single benevolent god administrator, and that works until the admin gets tired of everyone else's bullshit and turns on the brimstone spigot.
Actually, I've seen it work with a small cadre of mods picked by the site owner. Slashdot takes a different approach entirely, of not removing any (well, hardly any) posts, but letting you filter out the more trolly/offensive stuff if you want to. But perhaps that only works because Slashdot isn't a political site, and so you get mods from both sides of most issues here.
Facebook is deciding what's offensive when it comes to material that appears on their site.
That seems reasonable to me.
Legal? Sure. Desirable? No.
Welcome to the daily /. "reasons not to use Facebook" story.
No one seems interested in running a site that moderates rude conversation, yet allows spirited political and religious debate. Someplace where you can say "I don't think American needs any more [insert group here]" as long as you don't pile personal abuse on other commenters. All our choices are "speech I disagree with is threats and hate speech" or "anything goes, until the FBI seizes the servers". Somewhere in between would be nice.
Slashdot moderation works great for this, BTW, because you can just ignore it. But less politics on Slashdot would be better. A political debate version of Slashdot could be neat.though.
Leap seconds: even less desirable than Daylight Saving Time.
Seriously, why do we put up with this shit. The precise details of the Earth's rotation just aren't that important, except to a few hundred professional telescope operators, who have a history of keeping time their own way anyhow.
Nope, "racist
Thank you for conceding the argument.
Deliberately choosing a Christian bakery as a political stunt: also a conscious choice. Why do you think it is they never choose an Islamic bakery for their political stunts?
Now where will they go with their sexism, racism
Thank you for conceding the argument.
It might be a problem, but it's not my problem, and I don't need a text message about it.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
A Unicef Clearasil
Gibberish and drivel
O Mennen mylar muriel
With a hey derry tum gardol
O Yuban necco glamorene
Ended nytol, Vaseline!
Sing hey nonny nembulat.
Your custody battle remains not my problem, sorry.
Except that Obama is perhaps the least corrupt individual to hold the Presidency since Jimmy Carter.
You meant most corrupt, right? The bank bailouts were the largest transfer of money from the treasury to donors in the history of America. (Sure, Bush started the ball rolling, but the payout while he was in office was small in comparison.)
He certainly had the support of just about every racist you can find,
Oh, the BLM crowd voted for him, did they?
What does this have to do with Trump.
They should change this site to trumpdot.org!
Hey, that's not fair. Only half the stories are Trump-bashing. The other half are Facebook or Reddit bashing.