You joke; but the substance was historically used in food-processing applications(solvent extractions of various things, decaffeination, etc.) and as an inhalation anaesthetic...
Luckily, cigarettes were still good for you at that time, and helped to suppress the more serious tumors.
So the disposal method was, let it evaporate? Then instead of evaporating it in a metal pan, they poured it on the ground?
WTF!?!
If I were an embittered cynic, I might be inclined to suggest that workers, under time and/or budget and/or managerial pressure, were really concerned with making the problem go away as quickly as possible, rather than making sure that the problem specifically evaporated away... Evaporation isn't all that fast, compared to absorption into a porous medium, and evaporation out of an impermeable vessel makes it really easy to see how much hasn't evaporated yet, while absorption makes it comparatively difficult to measure how much hasn't evaporated unless somebody specifically budgets for a bunch of test wells...
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 1
I don't give the tea party any intellectual credit(though the assorted 'consultants' and PR flacks who handle them have done a fairly impressive job). The "starve the beast" concept has been around since long before they came up, the phrase occurs among certain Reagan staffers, if not earlier.
As for the fact that debts cannot be run forever: this is definitely true, and I agree. The problem, though, is that (as with calling an economic bubble an economic bubble) everybody knows that the party cannot go on forever; but nobody wants to be the sucker who gets caught holding the bag. As long as credit is available, it is going to be massively unpopular to stop taking advantage of the fact that, in the short to medium term, the government can get whatever it wants at a significant discount(who exactly gets the benefits of this is a different question; but everybody has a constituency that wants something...) In addition, though, the "starve the beast" strategists see driving the state toward financial ruin as an end in itself.
I'm sure that, whatever the arrangement ends up being, it will carefully preserve the upward flow of wealth, though the details remain murky.
Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
on
Debt Deal Reached
·
· Score: 2
The additional "elephant in the room"(strictly speaking, only part of the elephant actually stands for it; but enough to factor in) is the "starve the beast" bloc.
These people see running unsustainable deficits as a deliberate long-term strategy to force the state into a financial crisis where it simply cannot avoid radically shrinking. What I have never been able to figure out, though, is how many of these are truly far more radical than they let on, and how many are just stupid. Allow me to explain:
For so long as the state is able to borrow money at favorable rates, and even borrow to repay debts and interest, deficit spending is, essentially, free money. Yeah, there are scary long term costs and moralizing lectures based on home finance; but the situation in the near to mid-term is functionally identical to free money. Thus, running large deficits is basically equivalent to getting a discount on all government services that you don't get on private sector stuff. If the state borrows 20 cents of every dollar it spends, you can get a buck worth of government cheese for only 80 cents! Ironically, then, 'starve-the-beast'-ers actually encourage the growth of state activity vs. private sector activity in the near to mid term. As long as the credit holds out, government services are substantially discounted. Thus, anybody who believes that running a deficit, then moralizing, is going to cut spending is an idiot.
The less pleasant alternative is that the 'starve-the-beast'-ers are truly radical, and(while they know that there will be a near-mid term expansion) are simply awaiting the day that the credit crunches, and the system collapses, potentially come down really, really hard, with state activities(that have ballooned in size because they've been heavily discounted for decades) suddenly grinding to a halt all across the economy.
The "offtopic" is hardly fair, RF-energy harvesting(conveniently combining the signal and the power) found its first major application in early AM radio setups. TFA, though, focuses on advances in antenna design and fabrication that allow much more compact, and far broader-spectrum energy harvesting. The AM antennas of yore, particularly in designs without any amplifiers available, were often not exactly monuments to compactness...
Because it seems like if you want to power these things, they need to use power from a radio source. Which doesn't make them green at all.
They do, indeed, consume some energy from the RF broadcast(in principle, if you really chaffed the place with them, the reduction in SNR might actually be noticeable by devices trying to communicate...) However, there are two other considerations:
1. Particularly in classic broadcasting(less your fancy 802.11-draft-whatever-with-beamforming-and-a-line-of-sight-yadda-yadda smart antenna nonsense) a substantial amount of broadcast power just floats away into the aether, never to be snagged by any receiver. So long as you are(by making receivers super cheap) just burning through some of this formerly wasted power, the energy counts as "free". Not until your piggybacking requires the towers to start cranking it up is their a cost.
2. If the deployment of some distributed-sensor net widgetry is an inevitability(there are legimitate grounds for question at this point; but we generally don't take advantage of them) it has to be powered somehow. The major contenders are A. Lithium primary cells: unless somebody plans on cleaning the whole thing up a decade from now, the delightsome battery goo is going straight into the environment. B. Photovoltaics(in suitably sunlit locations that are OK with sporadic power): the energy generation itself is clean, the manufacturing and some of the components are rather less so. C. Piezoelectrics: not all of the suitable candidates contain lead; but a lot of the common ones really ought to be collected after use.
In our brutally entropic universe, nothing is truly "green"; but it is quite possible that RF harvesting will prove to be green-er and/or more convenient in some applications.
Depends on what the market wants. Compared to the cost/unit of a high volume injection molding setup, the cost of a plastic laser sintered part is going to be downright sickening(the manufacturer doesn't list prices; but that typically means you don't want to know. 2x 50watt lasers, precision optics, control widgetry, etc. isn't going to be inexpensive, and such devices are not all that fast. Fast if you just count time from CAD to first part? Definitely. Fast per part? Not at all...) However, if the air force just has to have 15% more loiter time or whatever, they might be willing to put up with it.
Especially for something like UAVs, though, where small size and autonomous cheapness are usually the selling points, "20% better, 20x the price!" is going to have some trouble competing with "almost as good, and you can order spares by the container-load for barely more than the cost of plastics and just saturate the area!"
Being at the top of the areal density pile will make your nice, long, continuous reads or writes run like a bat out of hell; but it isn't nearly as useful if you are dealing with highly scattered reads and/or writes. If the area you need has passed the head, you just need to wait until it comes around again.
Long run, high-RPM drives are probably on their way out, since high-density, lower-RPM ones do impressive linear performance and absurdly low cost, while decent solid state gear kicks out the I/OPs better than an entire shelf of 15k screamers; but you can certainly construct tests, not entirely artificial, where RPM matters more than density, within reason.
Help me out here. I chose not to link to the wikipedia page on economic mobility; because it doesn't have particularly good information presentation. Their table for indices of economic inequality is quite handy. Their page on economic mobility gives a splodge of text(which, incidentally, does indicate that US upward mobility has been comparatively limited in the past 30 years) and then notes that there is some debate as to whether the US is worse than or about the same as western Europe in that regard.
Since my argument was that US economic mobility was fairly low, the possibility that it is on par with western Europe(even if that side of the controversy turns out to be overwhelmingly true) is orthogonal to my argument, which was that the US has high economic inequality, both absolutely and comparatively, and relatively low economic mobility.
Whether you answer my question is up to you; but it remains: how accurate do 'pessimistic' assessments have to be before people stop using 'pessimist' as a slur and start admitting that the empirical state might not be so rosy?
While it isn't false that users in repressive regimes have an obvious interest in privacy, the notion that the feds are your primary concern is so hopelessly naive that I almost find it hard to believe that it isn't purposefully deceptive.
So, let's look at the social-networking life of your average resident of a Not-Repressive(tm) contemporary society: The secret police aren't going to be bashing down the door for saying the wrong thing, so nothing to worry about, eh? Well, yeah, not exactly...
How many schools(for the under-21s in the crowd) will treat a picture of you with a red plastic cup as presumptive evidence of illegal drinking? How many companies will skip you for being a touch controversial online? How about that canadian case of an insurance company deciding that a picture of the patient smiling was evidence that they were not depressed, and further support could be cut? Heck, to ignore organizations entirely, how about the 'timmy thinks he might be of the homosexual persuasion, doesn't really want ma and pa bible-belt to find out' use case?
While repressive regimes do suck, and anybody who runs one should definitely trip and hit their head on a bullet, the notion that the state is your primary concern(among people who have plenty of leisure internet and broadly unfettered access) is openly absurd. It's the private sector: schools, colleges, corporations, parents, etc. who you really need to watch out for.
The nice thing about the new wave of those little atom boxes is how homogeneous they are. You pretty much get the intel reference board one, or the Nvidio ion2 one, and that about rounds out the set of variables.
My problem with doing best-buy-best-buys in enterprise settings isn't that The Enterprise Needs Real Serious Workstations(it doesn't, generally); but that you can swiftly end up with a horrible profusion of similar or identically labeled machines with somewhat different hardware inside. At work, virtually everything we buy contains the lowest-end processor configs the OEM will sell while still assuring us that the guts will be the same on every instance of the same model...
Yeah, I have no doubt that they either can't manage their contractors or that they have an incentive to mismanage them. Getting shafted on commodities is a bad sign.
I think that I'm mostly just annoyed because I had to have the "Yes, there is a reason that isn't 'waste and my incompetence' why a gigabyte of space on the versioned, offsite-replicated, battery-backed, redundant-PSUed, tape-backuped, SAN costs rather more than a gigabyte of space on your USB external hard drive..." chat with somebody the other day...
It seems like peoples' non-understanding falls into one of two categories: Either their eyes glaze over when the salesweasel tells them that this computer is no mere computer; but a 'managed enterprise computer with industry-leading TCO' and they sign on the dotted line, or they fall into the "a computer's a computer, how did you spend more than $ON_SALE_AT_BEST_BUY?"
While I have no doubt that some departments are letting themselves get raked over the coals(or taking kickbacks, better check on that), and that someonebody has been seriously drinking the kool-aid when it comes to the 'efficiency' of contracting everything, I am annoyed by the example being cherry picked:
A £200 computer is, what, the low-end consumer model on the shelf at limey-Best-Buy? Oh, that'll make perfect sense as part of an enterprise IT system, once we've quadrupled the RAM, upgraded the OS to something that will bind to AD, factored in the cost of Office and whatever horrid application specific cruftware holds the department together, and doubled up on screwdriver monkeys because the hardware that gets thrown into that model changes only slightly less often than the serial number does...
How relatively low on comparative indices of economic mobility and relatively high on comparative indices of economic inequality do we have to be before "pessimistic bastards" get to be "empiricists"?
There is are a couple of unfortunate wrinkles in what would otherwise be true:
If you don't have money, it scarcely matters what the price of goods is. You are still fucked. For virtually everybody this impecunious, having money = having a job, not selling some bonds or re-allocating your portfolio in the direction of a higher-dividend asset assortment. Given the er... not exactly small... number of people who have fallen off this particular bus(with the additional fun that periods of joblessness do wonders for one's future prospects of being re-hired...) "jobs" as something close to an end in itself does represent a net gain for a substantial number of people.
Secondly, you say that "Ideally you would want a world where you have unlimited energy that required no money (ie jobs). This is true If and Only If the gains from increased efficiency are allocated in a manner that gives you a slice of the expanding pie. If, however, the pie is expanding; but your share of it is shrinking even faster(because whatever you do is an "inefficiency", you are quickly sliding toward point #1.
Empirically, a great many people have reason to be concerned, and to have no particular room to hope that even steady encheapening of goods will allow them to do better than tread water, since labor is definitely one of the goods being encheapened. As this cheery little J.P. Morgan report notes, in a discussion of the improvement of corporate margins: "There are a lot of moving parts in the margin equation, but as shown in the second chart, reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins. This trend has continued; as we have shown several times over the last two years, US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP (see EoTM April 26, 2011)."
Improvements in efficiency do you absolutely no good if somebody with more market power than you have is capturing them. This would appear to be the case. Under such conditions, the people with less market power(ie. about the bottom 95%) don't have a rational interest in efficiency; because they won't capture the gains from it. While(from the perspective of people's actual state of knowledge) the fascination with "jobs" might be largely sentimental populism, it is arguably not economically irrational. If essentially all gains from efficiency(which includes reduction in human resources costs) are being captured by people who aren't you, it is very much in your interest to demand greater inefficiency and attempt to roll back the reduction in demand for you.
Only in a society where everybody has a boat is the fact that the 'rising tide lifts all boats' a comforting one. If a substantial portion of the population is stuck in the mud, the rising tide is not a welcome development...
When you are a $3.5 million proof-of-concept, and also an adorable microbeagle, you are probably OK.
The concept-proven successors working on the "because there are 268 illnesses that humans and dogs have in common, creating dogs that artificially show such symptoms could aid treatment methods for diseases that afflict humans" part of the project are likely to be a bit more pitiable.
On the plus side, the required level of embedded computational power should be enough for manufacturers to cryptographically lock-out aftermarket replacements, and the car's stereo/video system to freak out and stop working when it decides that your new window isn't HDCP compliant...
I suspect that it is a managerial/cultural matter: "Risk management"(in the finance sense, not the engineering sense) is extremely popular and consists largely of attempting to quantify the costs of various risks and then construct a wide assortment of various financial instruments(insurance contracts among them; but by no means limited to insurance) in order to minimize your risk exposure number.
Little people obtain insurance to deal with the potential for low-probability catastrophes; but if you bring the finance guys into it, insurance is just another financial instrument to be fiddled with in the service of perceived optimization(also, once you bring the finance guys into it, not insuring something starts to look a lot like self-insuring something, at which point the question of whether to buy insurance or not really just comes down to whether to do something in-house or contract it...
Not that bad things are happening to Sony, who deserves it; but that even giant bloodsucking multinationals with legions of attack lawyers can't keep insurance companies in line(arguably, if you count CDOs, neither can nation states. Why don't we shoot these people again?). Makes me feel a whole lot better about the inevitable hassles that will arise from my next claim form...
It's a sad story. After successfully inventing the thing, and scoring some sweet IP blocks, we've been sticking our fingers in our ears and pretending that our telecommunications oligopoly-with-local-monopoly-characteristics is a vibrant free market, with predictably tepid results.
If you assumed the use of materials commensurate with the general tech-level of the setting, probably pretty good: outer layer of rigid trauma plates, inner layer and joints some sort of fiber weave(I'm assuming that, even in a setting with blasters, fragments would still be a major concern among designers, since there are plenty of explosions and some references to grenades and other explosive weapons). Armor piercing rounds might be exotic enough that no effort would be made to defend against them; but pellets and more modest bullets would likely be fairly well resisted.
If you extrapolate from performance against ewoks, it would appear that(in addition to offering no protection against blaster fire), stormtrooper armor contains an active-narrative-wounding system which amplifies kinetic damage to the wearer and would(along with the Star Wars convention of all ranged engagements taking place more or less at spitting distance) render stormtroopers utterly helpless against a bunch of Cub Scouts with.22s...
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You joke; but the substance was historically used in food-processing applications(solvent extractions of various things, decaffeination, etc.) and as an inhalation anaesthetic...
Luckily, cigarettes were still good for you at that time, and helped to suppress the more serious tumors.
So the disposal method was, let it evaporate? Then instead of evaporating it in a metal pan, they poured it on the ground? WTF!?!
If I were an embittered cynic, I might be inclined to suggest that workers, under time and/or budget and/or managerial pressure, were really concerned with making the problem go away as quickly as possible, rather than making sure that the problem specifically evaporated away... Evaporation isn't all that fast, compared to absorption into a porous medium, and evaporation out of an impermeable vessel makes it really easy to see how much hasn't evaporated yet, while absorption makes it comparatively difficult to measure how much hasn't evaporated unless somebody specifically budgets for a bunch of test wells...
I don't give the tea party any intellectual credit(though the assorted 'consultants' and PR flacks who handle them have done a fairly impressive job). The "starve the beast" concept has been around since long before they came up, the phrase occurs among certain Reagan staffers, if not earlier.
As for the fact that debts cannot be run forever: this is definitely true, and I agree. The problem, though, is that (as with calling an economic bubble an economic bubble) everybody knows that the party cannot go on forever; but nobody wants to be the sucker who gets caught holding the bag. As long as credit is available, it is going to be massively unpopular to stop taking advantage of the fact that, in the short to medium term, the government can get whatever it wants at a significant discount(who exactly gets the benefits of this is a different question; but everybody has a constituency that wants something...) In addition, though, the "starve the beast" strategists see driving the state toward financial ruin as an end in itself.
I'm sure that, whatever the arrangement ends up being, it will carefully preserve the upward flow of wealth, though the details remain murky.
The additional "elephant in the room"(strictly speaking, only part of the elephant actually stands for it; but enough to factor in) is the "starve the beast" bloc.
These people see running unsustainable deficits as a deliberate long-term strategy to force the state into a financial crisis where it simply cannot avoid radically shrinking. What I have never been able to figure out, though, is how many of these are truly far more radical than they let on, and how many are just stupid. Allow me to explain:
For so long as the state is able to borrow money at favorable rates, and even borrow to repay debts and interest, deficit spending is, essentially, free money. Yeah, there are scary long term costs and moralizing lectures based on home finance; but the situation in the near to mid-term is functionally identical to free money. Thus, running large deficits is basically equivalent to getting a discount on all government services that you don't get on private sector stuff. If the state borrows 20 cents of every dollar it spends, you can get a buck worth of government cheese for only 80 cents! Ironically, then, 'starve-the-beast'-ers actually encourage the growth of state activity vs. private sector activity in the near to mid term. As long as the credit holds out, government services are substantially discounted. Thus, anybody who believes that running a deficit, then moralizing, is going to cut spending is an idiot.
The less pleasant alternative is that the 'starve-the-beast'-ers are truly radical, and(while they know that there will be a near-mid term expansion) are simply awaiting the day that the credit crunches, and the system collapses, potentially come down really, really hard, with state activities(that have ballooned in size because they've been heavily discounted for decades) suddenly grinding to a halt all across the economy.
It's called a crystal radio.
A diode does it too.
The "offtopic" is hardly fair, RF-energy harvesting(conveniently combining the signal and the power) found its first major application in early AM radio setups. TFA, though, focuses on advances in antenna design and fabrication that allow much more compact, and far broader-spectrum energy harvesting. The AM antennas of yore, particularly in designs without any amplifiers available, were often not exactly monuments to compactness...
Because it seems like if you want to power these things, they need to use power from a radio source. Which doesn't make them green at all.
They do, indeed, consume some energy from the RF broadcast(in principle, if you really chaffed the place with them, the reduction in SNR might actually be noticeable by devices trying to communicate...) However, there are two other considerations:
1. Particularly in classic broadcasting(less your fancy 802.11-draft-whatever-with-beamforming-and-a-line-of-sight-yadda-yadda smart antenna nonsense) a substantial amount of broadcast power just floats away into the aether, never to be snagged by any receiver. So long as you are(by making receivers super cheap) just burning through some of this formerly wasted power, the energy counts as "free". Not until your piggybacking requires the towers to start cranking it up is their a cost.
2. If the deployment of some distributed-sensor net widgetry is an inevitability(there are legimitate grounds for question at this point; but we generally don't take advantage of them) it has to be powered somehow. The major contenders are A. Lithium primary cells: unless somebody plans on cleaning the whole thing up a decade from now, the delightsome battery goo is going straight into the environment. B. Photovoltaics(in suitably sunlit locations that are OK with sporadic power): the energy generation itself is clean, the manufacturing and some of the components are rather less so. C. Piezoelectrics: not all of the suitable candidates contain lead; but a lot of the common ones really ought to be collected after use.
In our brutally entropic universe, nothing is truly "green"; but it is quite possible that RF harvesting will prove to be green-er and/or more convenient in some applications.
Depends on what the market wants. Compared to the cost/unit of a high volume injection molding setup, the cost of a plastic laser sintered part is going to be downright sickening(the manufacturer doesn't list prices; but that typically means you don't want to know. 2x 50watt lasers, precision optics, control widgetry, etc. isn't going to be inexpensive, and such devices are not all that fast. Fast if you just count time from CAD to first part? Definitely. Fast per part? Not at all...) However, if the air force just has to have 15% more loiter time or whatever, they might be willing to put up with it.
Especially for something like UAVs, though, where small size and autonomous cheapness are usually the selling points, "20% better, 20x the price!" is going to have some trouble competing with "almost as good, and you can order spares by the container-load for barely more than the cost of plastics and just saturate the area!"
It depends somewhat on your workload:
Being at the top of the areal density pile will make your nice, long, continuous reads or writes run like a bat out of hell; but it isn't nearly as useful if you are dealing with highly scattered reads and/or writes. If the area you need has passed the head, you just need to wait until it comes around again.
Long run, high-RPM drives are probably on their way out, since high-density, lower-RPM ones do impressive linear performance and absurdly low cost, while decent solid state gear kicks out the I/OPs better than an entire shelf of 15k screamers; but you can certainly construct tests, not entirely artificial, where RPM matters more than density, within reason.
Help me out here. I chose not to link to the wikipedia page on economic mobility; because it doesn't have particularly good information presentation. Their table for indices of economic inequality is quite handy. Their page on economic mobility gives a splodge of text(which, incidentally, does indicate that US upward mobility has been comparatively limited in the past 30 years) and then notes that there is some debate as to whether the US is worse than or about the same as western Europe in that regard.
Since my argument was that US economic mobility was fairly low, the possibility that it is on par with western Europe(even if that side of the controversy turns out to be overwhelmingly true) is orthogonal to my argument, which was that the US has high economic inequality, both absolutely and comparatively, and relatively low economic mobility.
Whether you answer my question is up to you; but it remains: how accurate do 'pessimistic' assessments have to be before people stop using 'pessimist' as a slur and start admitting that the empirical state might not be so rosy?
While it isn't false that users in repressive regimes have an obvious interest in privacy, the notion that the feds are your primary concern is so hopelessly naive that I almost find it hard to believe that it isn't purposefully deceptive.
So, let's look at the social-networking life of your average resident of a Not-Repressive(tm) contemporary society: The secret police aren't going to be bashing down the door for saying the wrong thing, so nothing to worry about, eh? Well, yeah, not exactly...
How many schools(for the under-21s in the crowd) will treat a picture of you with a red plastic cup as presumptive evidence of illegal drinking? How many companies will skip you for being a touch controversial online? How about that canadian case of an insurance company deciding that a picture of the patient smiling was evidence that they were not depressed, and further support could be cut? Heck, to ignore organizations entirely, how about the 'timmy thinks he might be of the homosexual persuasion, doesn't really want ma and pa bible-belt to find out' use case?
While repressive regimes do suck, and anybody who runs one should definitely trip and hit their head on a bullet, the notion that the state is your primary concern(among people who have plenty of leisure internet and broadly unfettered access) is openly absurd. It's the private sector: schools, colleges, corporations, parents, etc. who you really need to watch out for.
The nice thing about the new wave of those little atom boxes is how homogeneous they are. You pretty much get the intel reference board one, or the Nvidio ion2 one, and that about rounds out the set of variables.
My problem with doing best-buy-best-buys in enterprise settings isn't that The Enterprise Needs Real Serious Workstations(it doesn't, generally); but that you can swiftly end up with a horrible profusion of similar or identically labeled machines with somewhat different hardware inside. At work, virtually everything we buy contains the lowest-end processor configs the OEM will sell while still assuring us that the guts will be the same on every instance of the same model...
Yeah, I have no doubt that they either can't manage their contractors or that they have an incentive to mismanage them. Getting shafted on commodities is a bad sign.
I think that I'm mostly just annoyed because I had to have the "Yes, there is a reason that isn't 'waste and my incompetence' why a gigabyte of space on the versioned, offsite-replicated, battery-backed, redundant-PSUed, tape-backuped, SAN costs rather more than a gigabyte of space on your USB external hard drive..." chat with somebody the other day...
It seems like peoples' non-understanding falls into one of two categories: Either their eyes glaze over when the salesweasel tells them that this computer is no mere computer; but a 'managed enterprise computer with industry-leading TCO' and they sign on the dotted line, or they fall into the "a computer's a computer, how did you spend more than $ON_SALE_AT_BEST_BUY?"
While I have no doubt that some departments are letting themselves get raked over the coals(or taking kickbacks, better check on that), and that someonebody has been seriously drinking the kool-aid when it comes to the 'efficiency' of contracting everything, I am annoyed by the example being cherry picked:
A £200 computer is, what, the low-end consumer model on the shelf at limey-Best-Buy? Oh, that'll make perfect sense as part of an enterprise IT system, once we've quadrupled the RAM, upgraded the OS to something that will bind to AD, factored in the cost of Office and whatever horrid application specific cruftware holds the department together, and doubled up on screwdriver monkeys because the hardware that gets thrown into that model changes only slightly less often than the serial number does...
How relatively low on comparative indices of economic mobility and relatively high on comparative indices of economic inequality do we have to be before "pessimistic bastards" get to be "empiricists"?
Could you be any less specific?
There is are a couple of unfortunate wrinkles in what would otherwise be true:
If you don't have money, it scarcely matters what the price of goods is. You are still fucked. For virtually everybody this impecunious, having money = having a job, not selling some bonds or re-allocating your portfolio in the direction of a higher-dividend asset assortment. Given the er... not exactly small... number of people who have fallen off this particular bus(with the additional fun that periods of joblessness do wonders for one's future prospects of being re-hired...) "jobs" as something close to an end in itself does represent a net gain for a substantial number of people.
Secondly, you say that "Ideally you would want a world where you have unlimited energy that required no money (ie jobs). This is true If and Only If the gains from increased efficiency are allocated in a manner that gives you a slice of the expanding pie. If, however, the pie is expanding; but your share of it is shrinking even faster(because whatever you do is an "inefficiency", you are quickly sliding toward point #1.
Empirically, a great many people have reason to be concerned, and to have no particular room to hope that even steady encheapening of goods will allow them to do better than tread water, since labor is definitely one of the goods being encheapened. As this cheery little J.P. Morgan report notes, in a discussion of the improvement of corporate margins: "There are a lot of moving parts in the margin equation, but as shown in the second chart, reductions in wages and benefits explain the majority of the net improvement in margins. This trend has continued; as we have shown several times over the last two years, US labor compensation is now at a 50-year low relative to both company sales and US GDP (see EoTM April 26, 2011)."
Improvements in efficiency do you absolutely no good if somebody with more market power than you have is capturing them. This would appear to be the case. Under such conditions, the people with less market power(ie. about the bottom 95%) don't have a rational interest in efficiency; because they won't capture the gains from it. While(from the perspective of people's actual state of knowledge) the fascination with "jobs" might be largely sentimental populism, it is arguably not economically irrational. If essentially all gains from efficiency(which includes reduction in human resources costs) are being captured by people who aren't you, it is very much in your interest to demand greater inefficiency and attempt to roll back the reduction in demand for you.
Only in a society where everybody has a boat is the fact that the 'rising tide lifts all boats' a comforting one. If a substantial portion of the population is stuck in the mud, the rising tide is not a welcome development...
Why grass? Wouldn't DEA agents who involuntarily produce illicit compounds metabolically be much more amusing?
When you are a $3.5 million proof-of-concept, and also an adorable microbeagle, you are probably OK.
The concept-proven successors working on the "because there are 268 illnesses that humans and dogs have in common, creating dogs that artificially show such symptoms could aid treatment methods for diseases that afflict humans" part of the project are likely to be a bit more pitiable.
On the plus side, the required level of embedded computational power should be enough for manufacturers to cryptographically lock-out aftermarket replacements, and the car's stereo/video system to freak out and stop working when it decides that your new window isn't HDCP compliant...
This, my friends, is Progress.
I suspect that it is a managerial/cultural matter: "Risk management"(in the finance sense, not the engineering sense) is extremely popular and consists largely of attempting to quantify the costs of various risks and then construct a wide assortment of various financial instruments(insurance contracts among them; but by no means limited to insurance) in order to minimize your risk exposure number.
Little people obtain insurance to deal with the potential for low-probability catastrophes; but if you bring the finance guys into it, insurance is just another financial instrument to be fiddled with in the service of perceived optimization(also, once you bring the finance guys into it, not insuring something starts to look a lot like self-insuring something, at which point the question of whether to buy insurance or not really just comes down to whether to do something in-house or contract it...
I think that the Lulz Boat is arguably already a form of of 'Sony Online Entertainment', albeit not of the kind that Sony intends to publish...
Not that bad things are happening to Sony, who deserves it; but that even giant bloodsucking multinationals with legions of attack lawyers can't keep insurance companies in line(arguably, if you count CDOs, neither can nation states. Why don't we shoot these people again?). Makes me feel a whole lot better about the inevitable hassles that will arise from my next claim form...
It's a sad story. After successfully inventing the thing, and scoring some sweet IP blocks, we've been sticking our fingers in our ears and pretending that our telecommunications oligopoly-with-local-monopoly-characteristics is a vibrant free market, with predictably tepid results.
If you assumed the use of materials commensurate with the general tech-level of the setting, probably pretty good: outer layer of rigid trauma plates, inner layer and joints some sort of fiber weave(I'm assuming that, even in a setting with blasters, fragments would still be a major concern among designers, since there are plenty of explosions and some references to grenades and other explosive weapons). Armor piercing rounds might be exotic enough that no effort would be made to defend against them; but pellets and more modest bullets would likely be fairly well resisted.
.22s...
If you extrapolate from performance against ewoks, it would appear that(in addition to offering no protection against blaster fire), stormtrooper armor contains an active-narrative-wounding system which amplifies kinetic damage to the wearer and would(along with the Star Wars convention of all ranged engagements taking place more or less at spitting distance) render stormtroopers utterly helpless against a bunch of Cub Scouts with
The United States developed a... somewhat similar service during the cold war.