Yep, I view low voter turnout as a symptom, not a cause of our badly broken system.
Low-information voting exacerbates the problems, but is hardly the main issue either.
Problems I see: 1) 2 party system that does not do a good job representing the needs and desires of the country. Usually you have a choice between bad and worse, which is hardly a compelling motivation. Neither party seems to do much more than play high stakes chess with the other to try to stay or get in power.
2) Congressional and Presidential shenanigans that prevent enough transparency for even the well intentioned voter to cast a well informed vote. Bills get nearly untraceable amendments, or die quietly behind closed doors. Accountability comes in the form of badly belated and heavily redacted reports after years of legal wrangling. Can't vote a bum out who retired years before his deeds become public.
3) External ownership of bills. Congressmen don't write, let alone read the bills they pass. It comes out of external groups who hand over tidy packages of legislation ready to go. You can't vote ALEC, or the Koch brothers away, so why vote?
4) Gerrymandering that dramatically reduces the power of minor party voters in a given state. If your district is 90% democrat, or only 35%, your vote matters very little, by design. Why bother?
I could go on, but basically it has become very hard to argue the your vote matters that much anymore. By design our democracy has been subverted.
I tell my wife that if there are things that she really just must see to just buy them ala carte from itunes or whatever. A couple shows a year is still cheaper than the relentless ~$70 cable bill we ditched. She has only bought a couple in the first year we cut the cord, and those shows are now available streaming.
At $16 a month Netflix/Hulu works pretty well for our situation. I still REALLY wish Hulu had an ad free option, even if it was a few bucks more a month. We are never going back, period.
I see the future as more ala carte streaming options and see a good market for whatever service figures out how to offer an ad free tier for their offerings. Seriously, I HATE ads on any pay service.
I am hoping cable goes the way of AOL, and existent but increasingly irrelevant service.
I would welcome ESPN having to fend for itself, and schlock channels like TLC, QVC, etc all ending with a quick death.
In this case there is willful negligence going on by pointing a bot in a dangerous direction and pressing go, then throwing your hands up like you had no control. If I cut a horse or cow loose near a busy freeway to see what happens and someone dies I should be responsible for manslaughter and animal neglect. These guys were very intentionally reckless.
A butterfly cannot be reasonably expected to know if its wing flapping will result in a tornado, and there is a high probability that it won't (trillions of wing flaps per day, maybe hundreds of tornadoes per year, and far fewer deadly ones).
Buying stuff from the hidden bowels internet at random is pretty likely to net stolen and or illegal stuff a fair percentage of the time.
So while there is a line, these guys are clearly on one side of it, and the butterfly is quite far on the other side of it. Ignorance is not a defense for the most part.
1) You see someone in distress. 2) You grab your smartphone and wade through the plethora of apps you almost never use to find the iLifeRingDrone app. 3) Wait through a mandatory ad to load, since the service needs to fund itself, and ad supported is the only business model going these days. 4) In your panicked state you try to figure out how to tell the service where the poor victim is at, and how to discern from the dozens of other beach goers frolicking about. 5) Drone takes off, assuming it has not died from being stored for a couple years under salt spray conditions (yes, any system has to work for YEARS without annually replacing them). 6) Drone uses your crappy smartphone instructions to try and go to the correct coordinates and drop a ring.
My guess is the swimmer would be dead by step 4.
Far more lives would be saved putting the money for such a system into almost any health related application. Low tech life guards at popular beaches and good warning signs at known dangerous spots would do much better at saving lives for the same cost.
I was hoping the new year would bring some sanity to the drone conversation. Sorry but just because you think your quad-copter is really cool does not translate to it being terribly useful for everything under the sun.
I for one do not welcome out new drone overlords. It will take a few failed startups, but I expect the fad notion of these things to fade away as their utility is explored and found to be rather wanting compared to the hype.
Here in Portland our MAX light rail has a pretty good cross section of the population. I only have pause riding it during the commuting rush hour when it is overpacked.
Routes matter too. Regional carriers have a lot more short hops with smaller planes that are less efficient per mile. Certain city pairs are awful on a net mpg per passenger basis if a hub system causes a lot of out and back flying, even in the gross mpg per passenger looks better compared to a direct regional flight.
Green fanboys and fangirls often suck at math, or at least lack the critical thinking to apply it. Often it undermines their arguments, often in laughable ways. My favorite forehead slapping example is of fanboys doing "green" remodels who rip out perfectly good counter tops and back splashes so they can install something that is "sustainable" or recycled. Boggles the mind. Driving to the local farm or farmer's market to "buy local" often is self defeating when you realize the modest amount of produce at a stand was driven maybe 100 miles that morning by a pickup truck that morning. Efficiencies of scale at large operations don't look like a warm fuzzy good thing, but often they are vastly less energy intensive per veggie than your backyard garden or even your farmer's market veggie.
However, please don't assume that all those pushing for "green" solutions are unthinking green drones.
Also, please include the costs of sticking to the course on fossil fuels. Currently our middle east policies, and their war costs, are usually not included in the cost of a gallon of gas. Should we have an Isreal foreign aid surcharge on a gallon of gas? How about a despot welfare fund surcharge?
Solar is a good niche that fills a real need at a real time. Summer AC usage causes a peak in power usage in summer, in the afternoon, which lines up well (not perfectly) with solar's output. Solar looks to be a good 10-20% solution that complements new or existing power sources. Hydro is not perfect, having a lot of side impacts on the streams and rivers, but in the PNW it accounts for over half the power supply to my house. It has a huge advantage of being adjustable and can be the counter point to solar and wind, picking up the slack when the wind doesn't blow or the sun isn't shining, and saving its stored energy when those are cranking. We can also do a lot on the load side to move energy intensive activities to line up with power availability, but we need new standards and incentives to make the "smart" grid start living up to the hype.
We can do better, and I would be all for trying to doing better at capturing the externalities to all energy sources. Petroleum should foot the bill for our middle east adventures, coal should better foot the bill for their extra high C02 emissions, nuclear should better shoulder the burden of waste disposal, etc. There are many sources of energy that would be more economically viable if the true costs were imposed on each source. I don't expect a single energy source to be the one true solution (thorium fixes everything!!! Not.). I do expect that we will be better remembered by history if we try harder before things get to any more of a crisis level.
Commercial air travel runs roughly 50 mpg per passenger. It also has the advantage of flying mostly as the crow flies, so there are a few more percent advantage if include the jogs and winding nature of roadways.
Traveling solo is more "green" on a plane, while a packed mini-van can readily beat a plane on a purely mpg basis. Trains and buses should be best, but they are also the slowest option. So unless fuel prices exploded, I don't see them ever being the wave of the future.
My interest is very much peaked by Elon Musks comments about electric takeoff air travel. It doesn't seem like we are close enough in battery density to make make that happen, but perhaps in a decade or three we will be able to do a lot of regional hops on mostly battery power.
Moore's Law has always been behind the MS Word curve. no matter how fast the processor, or how many cores, Microsoft has managed to use them up and then some, making word processing for the masses slower, and slower...
Progressives are useful as a mediocre one-size-fits all solution. If you are doing a lot of computer work, get a set of glasses specifically for that. If you can get away with just reading glasses, then get a single focus lens and take the bloody things off when you don't need them.
The problem about making the movie concessions cheaper is that is where the theaters make the majority of their money. Upwards of 80% of every dollar spent at the concessions stand is profit for the theater.
Whereas, in the first week of a blockbuster, theaters keep about 10% of the ticket price.
So why isn't popcorn even pricier then? Heck, they could more than could their profit per tub by doubling the price! Your argument should be based on total profit maximization, not on profit margins. I'd argue that prices have gotten so high that they are past the optimum profit maximization point. Plenty of folks regularly wear big coats or bring in large purses to get around the price gouging. I'd love to see a good study on this.
Movie theaters had a captive audience 40 years ago when VCR's were not common. Up to ~15 years ago they had a real edge over VCR tapes, then DVD's came out. Now you can get a fairly equivalent or better experience at home depending on your home system and personal tastes with a BlueRay disc or HD streaming.
Movie theaters have not kept pace. With less advantage to offer, they should have dropped their price to stay relevant, but they haven't It feels like they have raised the prices on the remaining chumps to make up for the ones who no longer find the experience worth paying for, which has created a long term problem for themselves. High prices have permanently soured a large segment of the population on the experience and gotten them out of the habit. Going to the movies now feels like an occasional extravagance for a movie that can actually justify the costs and hassles, rather than a roughly weekly treat that it was when I was growing up. I spend less overall than I used to, and it is likely true for others as well.
We are overdue for some regulation to bring sanity back to flying. Our family actively avoids flying due to the high annoyance level that has been created.
I would really like to see: 1) Per leg pricing. Let me (or an automated service) build my trip out of the Lego pieces to achieve the trip I want, with the layovers I want, for the price I want.
2) Uniformity of pricing data. Require all carriers to present prices with all taxes and fees included, no exceptions. 1 checked bag per passenger must be included in the ticket price to get rid of the overhead bid disaster that the checked bag fees have created. None of this fuel surcharge BS either.
3) Prices to be locked in and can only be lowered. Everyone gets a partial refund if the final price is lower than they paid. No more of this gouging folks who have a last minute emergency. You can get bereavement fairs, but caregivers are SOL if you have to fly out for someone's final days.
4) 3 sigma seat sizing. Being born tall should not doom you to have to pay extra to be comfortable while flying. Airlines have proven they will race to the bottom on amenities like leg room. They should be regulated more tightly so that we can all comfortably travel.
5) Automatic penalties for delays. My time is money, any arrival delays beyond the advertised time of arrival should get an automatic 10% per half hour refund up to 100%.
Maxim and Analog both have decent little niches. I see Analog as having a steady future, no big ups or downs. They go after high end niches that few others do justice to. They also have a good retention of good talent and foster it. I don't see them being a whole lot bigger than they are today, but I doubt they will die.
Maxim is fairly toxic on the inside from all accounts, and it seems like it has been catching up with them. I expect they will be around, but a shell of their former selves in 10 years.
The better question for the semiconductor world is what comes after cell phones. The huge integration and exponential ramp up has really stirred the pot, but the market appears to be plateauing and consolidating.
Few big companies ever really completely go away. Either the name sticks around on top of another shell, or useful divisions are sold or spun off and live on.
Motorola is a good example. The name sticks around on top of a small group that bounces between owners and makes cell phones. ON Semiconductor is their old semiconductor division and appears to be stable and just motoring along. Much of the rest is long gone.
Can you say that Motorola died? Yes, and no. I expect that in 10 years IBM will be a similar story.
To really make the circle complete he needs to pipe it to a digital phosphor oscilliscope. The would be the height of irony.
Another thought would have been to output the X and Y scans on red and blue of a video card to have much higher bandwidth than the audio channels provided.
So far the best population control seems to be hope and a good education. Families with decent incomes and good access to healthcare don't have a strong desire to have 6-10 kids, but rather have 1-3 kids in a more controlled fashion. Long term it will be a lot easier to have a sustainable world with fewer people.
A chunk of forest will hold a relatively constant amount of carbon. A new tree grows while old trees rot. Unless you plant different trees that have wider trunks, or add more square miles of forests, it is a net push. Even in the long term planting an extra square mile of new forest will only sequester up to a certain mount of carbon, while burning fossil fuels will steady add C02 to the atmosphere.
It is like fixing a leak in your roof with a bucket. A steady drip cannot be indefinitely dealt with using a bucket, it eventually overflows. You have to fix the source, not run around finding new places to squirrel it away.
And we all know it's impossible for anyone who is rational to be religious too, right?
Sadly it has become that way.
However, I wonder which way it really flows. Amongst my engineering colleagues I have never seen open anti-religious sentiments per se. However, I have had a few too many bad encounters with christians who jump down my throat as soon as they find out I'm an engineer, assuming I am anti-religous (I sort of am these days, but that is besides the point). Certain religions have become anti-science, more so than most sciences have become anti-religion.
He is director of the Hayden Planetarium, a job which clearly is all about explaining things to the masses.
He has also become a pop figure who does things like the Star Talk Radio podcast, which is all about answering science questions and explaining the universe to the masses in a fun fashion.
However you want to slice it, Mr. Tyson has made it his life's work to be one of many ambassadors of science who have made it their life's work to explain science and the universe to the masses and has done a pretty good job of it in my opinion.
So It is both his literal and figurative job to explain things to the masses.
Horrendous slap in the face to many who struggle to get anything useful. It would be nice to see the big players cut back on their FUD and actually provide the services their customers need at a fair price (novel concept).
We are lucky to have gotten 30/5 Mbps for $35 a month, the price shot up for the 50 and 100 Mbps tiers. However, having a big (or huge) pipe does almost no good when the backbone is puny compared to the need and we all sloooow down in the evening...
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Yep, I view low voter turnout as a symptom, not a cause of our badly broken system.
Low-information voting exacerbates the problems, but is hardly the main issue either.
Problems I see:
1) 2 party system that does not do a good job representing the needs and desires of the country. Usually you have a choice between bad and worse, which is hardly a compelling motivation. Neither party seems to do much more than play high stakes chess with the other to try to stay or get in power.
2) Congressional and Presidential shenanigans that prevent enough transparency for even the well intentioned voter to cast a well informed vote. Bills get nearly untraceable amendments, or die quietly behind closed doors. Accountability comes in the form of badly belated and heavily redacted reports after years of legal wrangling. Can't vote a bum out who retired years before his deeds become public.
3) External ownership of bills. Congressmen don't write, let alone read the bills they pass. It comes out of external groups who hand over tidy packages of legislation ready to go. You can't vote ALEC, or the Koch brothers away, so why vote?
4) Gerrymandering that dramatically reduces the power of minor party voters in a given state. If your district is 90% democrat, or only 35%, your vote matters very little, by design. Why bother?
I could go on, but basically it has become very hard to argue the your vote matters that much anymore. By design our democracy has been subverted.
Seconded.
I tell my wife that if there are things that she really just must see to just buy them ala carte from itunes or whatever. A couple shows a year is still cheaper than the relentless ~$70 cable bill we ditched. She has only bought a couple in the first year we cut the cord, and those shows are now available streaming.
At $16 a month Netflix/Hulu works pretty well for our situation. I still REALLY wish Hulu had an ad free option, even if it was a few bucks more a month. We are never going back, period.
I see the future as more ala carte streaming options and see a good market for whatever service figures out how to offer an ad free tier for their offerings. Seriously, I HATE ads on any pay service.
I am hoping cable goes the way of AOL, and existent but increasingly irrelevant service.
I would welcome ESPN having to fend for itself, and schlock channels like TLC, QVC, etc all ending with a quick death.
Huh?
In this case there is willful negligence going on by pointing a bot in a dangerous direction and pressing go, then throwing your hands up like you had no control. If I cut a horse or cow loose near a busy freeway to see what happens and someone dies I should be responsible for manslaughter and animal neglect. These guys were very intentionally reckless.
A butterfly cannot be reasonably expected to know if its wing flapping will result in a tornado, and there is a high probability that it won't (trillions of wing flaps per day, maybe hundreds of tornadoes per year, and far fewer deadly ones).
Buying stuff from the hidden bowels internet at random is pretty likely to net stolen and or illegal stuff a fair percentage of the time.
So while there is a line, these guys are clearly on one side of it, and the butterfly is quite far on the other side of it. Ignorance is not a defense for the most part.
Simple. Imagine the scenario.
1) You see someone in distress.
2) You grab your smartphone and wade through the plethora of apps you almost never use to find the iLifeRingDrone app.
3) Wait through a mandatory ad to load, since the service needs to fund itself, and ad supported is the only business model going these days.
4) In your panicked state you try to figure out how to tell the service where the poor victim is at, and how to discern from the dozens of other beach goers frolicking about.
5) Drone takes off, assuming it has not died from being stored for a couple years under salt spray conditions (yes, any system has to work for YEARS without annually replacing them).
6) Drone uses your crappy smartphone instructions to try and go to the correct coordinates and drop a ring.
My guess is the swimmer would be dead by step 4.
Far more lives would be saved putting the money for such a system into almost any health related application. Low tech life guards at popular beaches and good warning signs at known dangerous spots would do much better at saving lives for the same cost.
I was hoping the new year would bring some sanity to the drone conversation. Sorry but just because you think your quad-copter is really cool does not translate to it being terribly useful for everything under the sun.
I for one do not welcome out new drone overlords. It will take a few failed startups, but I expect the fad notion of these things to fade away as their utility is explored and found to be rather wanting compared to the hype.
Here in Portland our MAX light rail has a pretty good cross section of the population. I only have pause riding it during the commuting rush hour when it is overpacked.
Routes matter too. Regional carriers have a lot more short hops with smaller planes that are less efficient per mile. Certain city pairs are awful on a net mpg per passenger basis if a hub system causes a lot of out and back flying, even in the gross mpg per passenger looks better compared to a direct regional flight.
Green fanboys and fangirls often suck at math, or at least lack the critical thinking to apply it. Often it undermines their arguments, often in laughable ways. My favorite forehead slapping example is of fanboys doing "green" remodels who rip out perfectly good counter tops and back splashes so they can install something that is "sustainable" or recycled. Boggles the mind. Driving to the local farm or farmer's market to "buy local" often is self defeating when you realize the modest amount of produce at a stand was driven maybe 100 miles that morning by a pickup truck that morning. Efficiencies of scale at large operations don't look like a warm fuzzy good thing, but often they are vastly less energy intensive per veggie than your backyard garden or even your farmer's market veggie.
However, please don't assume that all those pushing for "green" solutions are unthinking green drones.
Also, please include the costs of sticking to the course on fossil fuels. Currently our middle east policies, and their war costs, are usually not included in the cost of a gallon of gas. Should we have an Isreal foreign aid surcharge on a gallon of gas? How about a despot welfare fund surcharge?
Solar is a good niche that fills a real need at a real time. Summer AC usage causes a peak in power usage in summer, in the afternoon, which lines up well (not perfectly) with solar's output. Solar looks to be a good 10-20% solution that complements new or existing power sources. Hydro is not perfect, having a lot of side impacts on the streams and rivers, but in the PNW it accounts for over half the power supply to my house. It has a huge advantage of being adjustable and can be the counter point to solar and wind, picking up the slack when the wind doesn't blow or the sun isn't shining, and saving its stored energy when those are cranking. We can also do a lot on the load side to move energy intensive activities to line up with power availability, but we need new standards and incentives to make the "smart" grid start living up to the hype.
We can do better, and I would be all for trying to doing better at capturing the externalities to all energy sources. Petroleum should foot the bill for our middle east adventures, coal should better foot the bill for their extra high C02 emissions, nuclear should better shoulder the burden of waste disposal, etc. There are many sources of energy that would be more economically viable if the true costs were imposed on each source. I don't expect a single energy source to be the one true solution (thorium fixes everything!!! Not.). I do expect that we will be better remembered by history if we try harder before things get to any more of a crisis level.
Commercial air travel runs roughly 50 mpg per passenger. It also has the advantage of flying mostly as the crow flies, so there are a few more percent advantage if include the jogs and winding nature of roadways.
Traveling solo is more "green" on a plane, while a packed mini-van can readily beat a plane on a purely mpg basis. Trains and buses should be best, but they are also the slowest option. So unless fuel prices exploded, I don't see them ever being the wave of the future.
My interest is very much peaked by Elon Musks comments about electric takeoff air travel. It doesn't seem like we are close enough in battery density to make make that happen, but perhaps in a decade or three we will be able to do a lot of regional hops on mostly battery power.
Moore's Law has always been behind the MS Word curve. no matter how fast the processor, or how many cores, Microsoft has managed to use them up and then some, making word processing for the masses slower, and slower...
Progressives are useful as a mediocre one-size-fits all solution. If you are doing a lot of computer work, get a set of glasses specifically for that. If you can get away with just reading glasses, then get a single focus lens and take the bloody things off when you don't need them.
The problem about making the movie concessions cheaper is that is where the theaters make the majority of their money. Upwards of 80% of every dollar spent at the concessions stand is profit for the theater.
Whereas, in the first week of a blockbuster, theaters keep about 10% of the ticket price.
So why isn't popcorn even pricier then? Heck, they could more than could their profit per tub by doubling the price! Your argument should be based on total profit maximization, not on profit margins. I'd argue that prices have gotten so high that they are past the optimum profit maximization point. Plenty of folks regularly wear big coats or bring in large purses to get around the price gouging. I'd love to see a good study on this.
Movie theaters had a captive audience 40 years ago when VCR's were not common. Up to ~15 years ago they had a real edge over VCR tapes, then DVD's came out. Now you can get a fairly equivalent or better experience at home depending on your home system and personal tastes with a BlueRay disc or HD streaming.
Movie theaters have not kept pace. With less advantage to offer, they should have dropped their price to stay relevant, but they haven't It feels like they have raised the prices on the remaining chumps to make up for the ones who no longer find the experience worth paying for, which has created a long term problem for themselves. High prices have permanently soured a large segment of the population on the experience and gotten them out of the habit. Going to the movies now feels like an occasional extravagance for a movie that can actually justify the costs and hassles, rather than a roughly weekly treat that it was when I was growing up. I spend less overall than I used to, and it is likely true for others as well.
Curious if adding a bit of no-wash flux to the problem area would yield a better reflowed joint and give a longer term fix?
Pay no attention to the torture, er I mean Enhance Interrogation Technique, er I mean EITs, yeah EIT's sounds better. Look UFO's!
Never mind that we cruelly froze an innocent guy to death, UFO's!!!
We are overdue for some regulation to bring sanity back to flying. Our family actively avoids flying due to the high annoyance level that has been created.
I would really like to see:
1) Per leg pricing. Let me (or an automated service) build my trip out of the Lego pieces to achieve the trip I want, with the layovers I want, for the price I want.
2) Uniformity of pricing data. Require all carriers to present prices with all taxes and fees included, no exceptions. 1 checked bag per passenger must be included in the ticket price to get rid of the overhead bid disaster that the checked bag fees have created. None of this fuel surcharge BS either.
3) Prices to be locked in and can only be lowered. Everyone gets a partial refund if the final price is lower than they paid. No more of this gouging folks who have a last minute emergency. You can get bereavement fairs, but caregivers are SOL if you have to fly out for someone's final days.
4) 3 sigma seat sizing. Being born tall should not doom you to have to pay extra to be comfortable while flying. Airlines have proven they will race to the bottom on amenities like leg room. They should be regulated more tightly so that we can all comfortably travel.
5) Automatic penalties for delays. My time is money, any arrival delays beyond the advertised time of arrival should get an automatic 10% per half hour refund up to 100%.
I'm sure that about a dozen companies have rights to my first born based on all the EULA's I have clicked through. We need to end that crap.
Maxim and Analog both have decent little niches. I see Analog as having a steady future, no big ups or downs. They go after high end niches that few others do justice to. They also have a good retention of good talent and foster it. I don't see them being a whole lot bigger than they are today, but I doubt they will die.
Maxim is fairly toxic on the inside from all accounts, and it seems like it has been catching up with them. I expect they will be around, but a shell of their former selves in 10 years.
The better question for the semiconductor world is what comes after cell phones. The huge integration and exponential ramp up has really stirred the pot, but the market appears to be plateauing and consolidating.
Few big companies ever really completely go away. Either the name sticks around on top of another shell, or useful divisions are sold or spun off and live on.
Motorola is a good example. The name sticks around on top of a small group that bounces between owners and makes cell phones. ON Semiconductor is their old semiconductor division and appears to be stable and just motoring along. Much of the rest is long gone.
Can you say that Motorola died? Yes, and no. I expect that in 10 years IBM will be a similar story.
To really make the circle complete he needs to pipe it to a digital phosphor oscilliscope. The would be the height of irony.
Another thought would have been to output the X and Y scans on red and blue of a video card to have much higher bandwidth than the audio channels provided.
In short, where the hell is my Geekport?!
Vasectomies are "green".
So far the best population control seems to be hope and a good education. Families with decent incomes and good access to healthcare don't have a strong desire to have 6-10 kids, but rather have 1-3 kids in a more controlled fashion. Long term it will be a lot easier to have a sustainable world with fewer people.
Nope, missed it. Please explain.
A chunk of forest will hold a relatively constant amount of carbon. A new tree grows while old trees rot. Unless you plant different trees that have wider trunks, or add more square miles of forests, it is a net push. Even in the long term planting an extra square mile of new forest will only sequester up to a certain mount of carbon, while burning fossil fuels will steady add C02 to the atmosphere.
It is like fixing a leak in your roof with a bucket. A steady drip cannot be indefinitely dealt with using a bucket, it eventually overflows. You have to fix the source, not run around finding new places to squirrel it away.
And we all know it's impossible for anyone who is rational to be religious too, right?
Sadly it has become that way.
However, I wonder which way it really flows. Amongst my engineering colleagues I have never seen open anti-religious sentiments per se. However, I have had a few too many bad encounters with christians who jump down my throat as soon as they find out I'm an engineer, assuming I am anti-religous (I sort of am these days, but that is besides the point). Certain religions have become anti-science, more so than most sciences have become anti-religion.
He is director of the Hayden Planetarium, a job which clearly is all about explaining things to the masses.
He has also become a pop figure who does things like the Star Talk Radio podcast, which is all about answering science questions and explaining the universe to the masses in a fun fashion.
However you want to slice it, Mr. Tyson has made it his life's work to be one of many ambassadors of science who have made it their life's work to explain science and the universe to the masses and has done a pretty good job of it in my opinion.
So It is both his literal and figurative job to explain things to the masses.
Horrendous slap in the face to many who struggle to get anything useful. It would be nice to see the big players cut back on their FUD and actually provide the services their customers need at a fair price (novel concept).
We are lucky to have gotten 30/5 Mbps for $35 a month, the price shot up for the 50 and 100 Mbps tiers. However, having a big (or huge) pipe does almost no good when the backbone is puny compared to the need and we all sloooow down in the evening...