Perhaps the biggest advantages of wind and solar are that you can build them at whatever pace you like (solar even more than wind, of course). Companies don't have to take on so much risk or come up with all the money at once, they can adjust to market conditions and changing tech.
With nuclear, you have to invest a fortune now and pray that that you've correctly predicted what will be needed when it comes online in 5 or 10 years and that it will remain profitable long enough to pay for decommissioning. That's a hard sell when nobody knows what the future holds. By the time that nuclear fission plant is about to recoup all the up front costs and start to turn a profit, fusion power might undercut it.
The difference is that these wonderful biometrics allow you to enjoy ADA lawsuits from people whose hands were amputated, or never grew due to a birth defect. (For retinal scanners, likewise with people whose eyes have been poked out.)
The problem with climate change is some people like to believe it isn't true, because it means they are in some way special and "in the know".
But they are idiots.
Most of them aren't idiots: they're old people. It's a perfectly rational decision for them to pretend climate change doesn't exist, because fixing it will cost them money while bringing them none of the benefits. Who cares if it bankrupts their children or grandchildren? It's the same approach they've taken to national budgeting: cut taxes today, let the next generation pay for the debt after we're dead.
If you think Pluto is interesting, then you think the Kuiper Belt is more interesting -- because it contains thousands of Plutoids. And if you think Pluto is a planet, then out of the thousands of planets in the solar system it's odd that you'd say that a measly 8 of them are more interesting than all the thousands of others. It's almost like you want to identify the interesting 8 in a different way and maybe demote the rest to dwarf planets, but I know you'd never do such a thing.
Maybe humans are not sufficiently careful to have nuclear facilities. Errors in thinking often occur.
The problem is, coal has been killing millions of people a year by spewing out radiation and other pollution. And yet human psychology says it's better to kill millions intentionally with coal rather than risk killing thousands by accident with nuclear. Accidents scare us more because we assign fault to them, perhaps. We can accept any number of routine matter-of-course cost-of-doing-business deaths, but we cannot abide a single dramatic accidental death.
Catastrophic health insurance simply results in more catastrophic health problems. When a checkup costs a huge chunk of money out of pocket, human psychology causes people to put it off until they're certain they're sick. Instead of catching that cancer early when there's no symptoms, they catch it in a late stage. That's bad for the individual, bad for health care costs when early treatments are usually cheaper, and bad for any civilized society that wants to increase life expectancy.
And yes, I had catastrophic-only health insurance for a long time. Never went in about anything because while I could technically afford it I didn't want to get a bill for thousands.
Failing to buy gasoline actually greatly decreases your chances of being in an expensive accident that insurance will have to pay for (since you won't be able to drive far). Failing to buy routine medical checkups and routine necessary meds, on the other hand, greatly increases the expensive emergency coverage the insurance has to pay for later. Take a look at the costs of ambulances for the homeless, for example. It's in the interests of the health insurance companies to pay for the cheaper routine stuff to limit the expensive stuff.
Actually, Zimbabwe has their own pseudo currency again now. They're notes theoretically exchangeable for US$ but they haven't had enough US$ to exchange for quite a while so the value of the notes has been plummeting.
Much like free software, where people invest their time and resources to make software that ends up being used by Google and IBM? Remember when that killed the software industry and it became impossible to get a job?
The take away from this? Don't build too long escalators.
So, only build escalators where stairs would've done just fine for anyone not disabled? Why not just stairs for the healthy and elevators for the disabled since some of them will need them anyway? Escalators can only be useful if they're long enough that taking the stairs would be too exhausting.
The reason to leave the other side open is simply that the kind of person who walks or runs up an escalator will do so regardless. They're already knowingly doing something unsafe, so they're not going to try to be safe about it. It's safer for you if they do it without you in their way so that you don't get knocked down. Essentially the rule is safe people on the right, and that makes the hurrying types end up on the left automatically because they see a quicker route there when it's empty.
Shakespeare isn't abandonware either. His plays are actively performed around the world. It's past time we put them back under copyright by whoever does the most productions of Shakespeare plays, so that they can be better exploited. The millions of derivative works produced every year must start paying royalties too.
Makes exactly as much sense as Disney having a monopoly on Steamboat Willie when nobody in the entire corporation today was involved in the production of it. Nobody in today's Disney created Mickey Mouse, they only exploited it. All their works of exploitation will remain under copyright, but there's no sane reason to prevent others from exploiting it in non-trademark-violating ways -- the same as modern writers exploit the characters of Shakespeare.
Microsoft made no allegations against google whatsoever. A former intern of no importance out of their hundreds of thousands of current and former employees made an off-hand frustrated remark that was probably a joke, and of course the media ran with it to invent newsworthy controversy.
Bluetooth ear buds aren't exactly expensive. Got mine for $10 a few years ago. I've actually saved money compared to wired, because I always ended up damaging wired headphones by accidentally yanking the cord within the first year.
The one thing America is extremely bipartisan about is terrorism. Conservatives are actually even worse about it than liberals though, constantly pushing for bigger "defense" budgets and larger scale wars and being more rabidly for the PATRIOT act and the like. Pretending it's a liberal phenomenon is absurd. Censorship advocates publish this terrorist scare in the Huff Post this week but they'll post the same thing on Breitbart next week.
Are you implying that you need more protection from an anti-terrorist group than from terrorists who would cheerfully murder you and your children?
Yes, we do. Unless you're in Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq or another county suffering from the USA's war on terror, terrorists are laughably unlikely to murder you. Granted the war on terror has made them more likely to murder you than before, but it's still absurdly unlikely. You're far, far more likely to be killed by an insect.
On the other hand, anti-terrorist groups have already robbed us of much of our liberty and are constantly probing for more ways to use the terrorist bogeyman to silence us. Like in this article, trying to further abolish content-neutral services and entrench censors where they can do whatever their masters desire.
Individuals making $27,000 a year (the approximate current limit) can afford to pay $10-$15 a month for a basic phone plan. Reduce the maximum income to $20,000, or to whatever it takes to fit within the program's funds. Or if you must, make it be for homeless people only -- they're the ones whose lives it makes the most difference in (connecting them to services and making it more possible to find work).
Incidentally, this same approach could help California's affordable housing crisis. Stop making families with $60K+ incomes eligible for subsidized apartments and suddenly those 2 year waiting lists will evaporate and the needy will get housing.
A sufficiently resilient material to hold that kind of pressure on a macro-sized object would probably end up looking a lot like a planet. Perhaps we can enhance some of Jupiter's surplus moons to achieve the requirements and bring those into earth orbit to play around with.
Weird how communist countries turned into the libertarian ideal where everyone is free to choose if they want to work without any regulations or if they don't want to eat.
Not weird. That's what those countries were already like before communism, which is exactly why they had communist revolutions. The communism of course doesn't change much, it just means you're slaving for the government instead of a corporation... and then as communist nations move to market economies you get to slave for a corporation again while still enjoying the totalitarian government.
Seriously, you wouldn't take a year of being paid to not work -- or doubling your pay if you take another job? As a liberal pro-worker socialist, I can't comprehend how anyone can think Verizon is evil for this. They should be applauded for choosing to reduce their workforce by showering buckets of money on employees instead of by layoffs.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the biggest advantages of wind and solar are that you can build them at whatever pace you like (solar even more than wind, of course). Companies don't have to take on so much risk or come up with all the money at once, they can adjust to market conditions and changing tech.
With nuclear, you have to invest a fortune now and pray that that you've correctly predicted what will be needed when it comes online in 5 or 10 years and that it will remain profitable long enough to pay for decommissioning. That's a hard sell when nobody knows what the future holds. By the time that nuclear fission plant is about to recoup all the up front costs and start to turn a profit, fusion power might undercut it.
The difference is that these wonderful biometrics allow you to enjoy ADA lawsuits from people whose hands were amputated, or never grew due to a birth defect. (For retinal scanners, likewise with people whose eyes have been poked out.)
Most of them aren't idiots: they're old people. It's a perfectly rational decision for them to pretend climate change doesn't exist, because fixing it will cost them money while bringing them none of the benefits. Who cares if it bankrupts their children or grandchildren? It's the same approach they've taken to national budgeting: cut taxes today, let the next generation pay for the debt after we're dead.
If you think Pluto is interesting, then you think the Kuiper Belt is more interesting -- because it contains thousands of Plutoids. And if you think Pluto is a planet, then out of the thousands of planets in the solar system it's odd that you'd say that a measly 8 of them are more interesting than all the thousands of others. It's almost like you want to identify the interesting 8 in a different way and maybe demote the rest to dwarf planets, but I know you'd never do such a thing.
The problem is, coal has been killing millions of people a year by spewing out radiation and other pollution. And yet human psychology says it's better to kill millions intentionally with coal rather than risk killing thousands by accident with nuclear. Accidents scare us more because we assign fault to them, perhaps. We can accept any number of routine matter-of-course cost-of-doing-business deaths, but we cannot abide a single dramatic accidental death.
Could be worse. With a bit of Y2K-bugged javascript it could say © 1997 - 118.
Okay. I live in a place not prone to drought, flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, mudslides or earthquakes.
Alas, it's extremely prone to forest fires so I'm still doomed.
Catastrophic health insurance simply results in more catastrophic health problems. When a checkup costs a huge chunk of money out of pocket, human psychology causes people to put it off until they're certain they're sick. Instead of catching that cancer early when there's no symptoms, they catch it in a late stage. That's bad for the individual, bad for health care costs when early treatments are usually cheaper, and bad for any civilized society that wants to increase life expectancy.
And yes, I had catastrophic-only health insurance for a long time. Never went in about anything because while I could technically afford it I didn't want to get a bill for thousands.
Failing to buy gasoline actually greatly decreases your chances of being in an expensive accident that insurance will have to pay for (since you won't be able to drive far). Failing to buy routine medical checkups and routine necessary meds, on the other hand, greatly increases the expensive emergency coverage the insurance has to pay for later. Take a look at the costs of ambulances for the homeless, for example. It's in the interests of the health insurance companies to pay for the cheaper routine stuff to limit the expensive stuff.
$5000 doesn't help as much when you have to navigate the maze of US rules against doing things in Cuba.
Actually, Zimbabwe has their own pseudo currency again now. They're notes theoretically exchangeable for US$ but they haven't had enough US$ to exchange for quite a while so the value of the notes has been plummeting.
Much like free software, where people invest their time and resources to make software that ends up being used by Google and IBM? Remember when that killed the software industry and it became impossible to get a job?
So, only build escalators where stairs would've done just fine for anyone not disabled? Why not just stairs for the healthy and elevators for the disabled since some of them will need them anyway? Escalators can only be useful if they're long enough that taking the stairs would be too exhausting.
The reason to leave the other side open is simply that the kind of person who walks or runs up an escalator will do so regardless. They're already knowingly doing something unsafe, so they're not going to try to be safe about it. It's safer for you if they do it without you in their way so that you don't get knocked down. Essentially the rule is safe people on the right, and that makes the hurrying types end up on the left automatically because they see a quicker route there when it's empty.
Shakespeare isn't abandonware either. His plays are actively performed around the world. It's past time we put them back under copyright by whoever does the most productions of Shakespeare plays, so that they can be better exploited. The millions of derivative works produced every year must start paying royalties too.
Makes exactly as much sense as Disney having a monopoly on Steamboat Willie when nobody in the entire corporation today was involved in the production of it. Nobody in today's Disney created Mickey Mouse, they only exploited it. All their works of exploitation will remain under copyright, but there's no sane reason to prevent others from exploiting it in non-trademark-violating ways -- the same as modern writers exploit the characters of Shakespeare.
Microsoft made no allegations against google whatsoever. A former intern of no importance out of their hundreds of thousands of current and former employees made an off-hand frustrated remark that was probably a joke, and of course the media ran with it to invent newsworthy controversy.
Bluetooth ear buds aren't exactly expensive. Got mine for $10 a few years ago. I've actually saved money compared to wired, because I always ended up damaging wired headphones by accidentally yanking the cord within the first year.
We have numerous free software smartphone OSes. What we apparently lack is people who care to use them.
The one thing America is extremely bipartisan about is terrorism. Conservatives are actually even worse about it than liberals though, constantly pushing for bigger "defense" budgets and larger scale wars and being more rabidly for the PATRIOT act and the like. Pretending it's a liberal phenomenon is absurd. Censorship advocates publish this terrorist scare in the Huff Post this week but they'll post the same thing on Breitbart next week.
Yes, we do. Unless you're in Syria or Afghanistan or Iraq or another county suffering from the USA's war on terror, terrorists are laughably unlikely to murder you. Granted the war on terror has made them more likely to murder you than before, but it's still absurdly unlikely. You're far, far more likely to be killed by an insect.
On the other hand, anti-terrorist groups have already robbed us of much of our liberty and are constantly probing for more ways to use the terrorist bogeyman to silence us. Like in this article, trying to further abolish content-neutral services and entrench censors where they can do whatever their masters desire.
With this type of crime, there's no country in the world that wants to harbor the terrorist. If not extradited, they'll be punished locally.
Individuals making $27,000 a year (the approximate current limit) can afford to pay $10-$15 a month for a basic phone plan. Reduce the maximum income to $20,000, or to whatever it takes to fit within the program's funds. Or if you must, make it be for homeless people only -- they're the ones whose lives it makes the most difference in (connecting them to services and making it more possible to find work).
Incidentally, this same approach could help California's affordable housing crisis. Stop making families with $60K+ incomes eligible for subsidized apartments and suddenly those 2 year waiting lists will evaporate and the needy will get housing.
A sufficiently resilient material to hold that kind of pressure on a macro-sized object would probably end up looking a lot like a planet. Perhaps we can enhance some of Jupiter's surplus moons to achieve the requirements and bring those into earth orbit to play around with.
Not weird. That's what those countries were already like before communism, which is exactly why they had communist revolutions. The communism of course doesn't change much, it just means you're slaving for the government instead of a corporation... and then as communist nations move to market economies you get to slave for a corporation again while still enjoying the totalitarian government.
Seriously, you wouldn't take a year of being paid to not work -- or doubling your pay if you take another job? As a liberal pro-worker socialist, I can't comprehend how anyone can think Verizon is evil for this. They should be applauded for choosing to reduce their workforce by showering buckets of money on employees instead of by layoffs.