I live in a suburb of Providence (160K people, Pawtucket has 70K) and have a six minute car commute. In bad weather I can either work from home or hop on a bus (one every ten minutes) from my door to downtown, and then it's a five minute walk to work.
If the job scenario dries up, I can commute to Boston (40 minutes by car, an hour by rail), which I have done before.
The city has really emptied-out in the past few years, too. House prices have plummeted to where you can live where I do for cheaper than the suburbs. Two-unit homes in my neighborhood are going for about $150, and you can rent two bedroom places for $650. Walking distance to three or four small stores, several music venues and bars, and a decent choice of groceries.
I think the best thing about the city is the people, though. My friends regularly do 'house crawls' where we walk to each others' places and have a few drinks. People bring their kids and pets along for the walk. Folks get together for 'storm parties' in blizzards and hurricanes. Did I mention that the houses are all 100+ years old, so we're not too worried about them falling down in bad weather?
I don't know. I live in a very blue state with regular taxes. Our firefighting budget is $250/person/year. I could subscribe all three of my abutting neighbors for less than they hit each one of us for in property taxes.
Personally, I like the middle solution: You deliver average firefighting for average rates. I'll take the 1/2000 chance that I end up waiting an extra two minutes for you in an emergency, and I get to keep an extra $12,000 over my lifetime.
My favorite is when firefighters cry poor here: "My base pay is only $55K!", yeah. But you earned $75K on top of that in overtime last year. Forgot to mention that, eh?
I assume you don't insure your apartment, car, home, or health either?
If they billed per-fire, the cost would probably be more like $100K. It would also incentivize firefighters to become off-hours arsonists.
So if you go your whole life without paying a dime into insurance, and then you crash your car into mine, do you expect to be able to sign up for insurance on-the-spot, pay your $120 for the month, and then cancel the policy? That's hardly fair to me, the guy who's paid over $16K into car insurance and never made a claim.
Right? The diameter of our solar system (Pluto's orbit) is about 80 AU. 80 AU is 0.0012 light years. This planet is 20 LY away. That means that it's about 1600 times as far as Pluto.
Remember, you need to bring along just as much fuel to slow down as you did to speed up. This is going to be a long, expensive, boring ride.
Yeah, %0.13 of the economy. Every number has to be put into scale when you look at the massive size of a 300M person country with a 15 trillion dollar economy.
a lot of people can't get credit cards or bank loans. Yes those are sources of credit, but its on really shitty terms.
If 'terms' were an issue, then the recent financial crisis wouldn't have happened. These days, if Johnny Switchblade wants a couch, it's a lot easier to get one from Rent-a-Center and dodge payments than it is to rob people. One outcome, they takes their couch back. The other, you go to prison for five years (especially if you're on probation/parole for something already). As 'hard' as it is to get even 'bad terms', credit is still preventing crime.
Locking up first time offenders sends them to a place where they get to learn the trade from the best.
Agreed, but they're not robbing me while they're locked up. This is why longer sentences -do- work, even though I would like to see them eliminated. Locking up a petty thief for years at $50K/year doesn't make sense to me.
most of the country doesn't have that luxury.
Totally agreed, and I'm a big defender of Second Amendment rights. Just saying that the concealed or open carry laws might not be the deterrent factor they're made out to be. Even cities with tough gun control (where 'only the outlaws have guns') saw a huge drop in crime. You should be able to carry a gun because -you should be able to carry a gun-. As long as you're not hurting anyone, you could be carrying a gun, some heroin, and an open bottle of Jack for all I care.
Buying during a spike like the current one will likely result in your investment going nowhere but down
Have you met any average human beings? People are still talking about when housing is going to get 'back on track' and my $150K duplex in the (rapidly degrading) city is going to be a half-million dollar cash cow.
People's eyes bugged out when I told them I was buying GGP stock (went from 40 to 0.44, I bought at 0.60, sold at 4) or BP (went from 70 to 25, I bought at 26, still holding at 38), but I bought my girlfriend a fancy laptop and paid off my credit cards while they wondered where their money went.
Do you have any idea how many people switched their retirements from stocks to bonds after the Dow went from 14,000 to 6,100? They missed the ride back up to 10,000, and are making 2.5% on less than half their original investment now. There's no getting through to them, though. I was waving my arms screaming 'buy stocks now' when the Dow was at 6,100, urging family and friends to switch their bonds over to stocks STAT, they could have double their money.
If the machine can dispense gold, why not have it dispense pepper spray and/or handguns (where legal) while you're at it. You can allay economic -and- social fears at a one-stop station on your way to the Two Minutes Hate.
And I live in one where you can't carry a gun unless you get a letter -from- City Hall and the state AG's office. As far as I know, none have been issued in a long time.
Crime here dropped like a rock in the past few years, too. Nothing to do with guns.
1. Legal abortion and widespread subsidized contraception in the 1980s prevented the people most likely to rob me from existing in the first place. 2. Credit is still easy to get. It's easier and less risky to just 'put it on the credit card' than it is to steal. It's far less detrimental to have a bankruptcy than a felony conviction on your record. You can rack up $30k in debt before people start coming after you, try robbing people and you'll be caught in a few weeks. 3. We have a huge number of people who are already locked-up. They're not robbing me. The government is robbing me to keep them incarcerated, but that's not the point of the discussion. 4. We have more cops than ever. If I stand at the end of my street at midnight, police passes of my block average one every 4 minutes. Response time when I have called has been less than two minutes for one car to arrive, three minutes for three cars.
I'm not advocating any of those things one way or another, just pointing them out.
I use both Bank of America's online 'my portfolio' and Mint.com to track my long-term finances. Both allow you to connect to different accounts, there are built-in reports, budgeting, cool charts and graphs, and 'net worth' features.
I think BoA's service doesn't seem to reach back in time as far as Mint.
I implemented improperly, beer -can- cause DNS issues.
Just last night I was trying to get to 'a beer at the pub after work' and ended up at something called 'Swilling Karkov on the street at 1AM with a convicted felon who doesn't speak a lick of English'. The problem even propagated, this morning my boss had a '404 - Employee Not Found' error.
So far, there's no evidence that fisheries have actually been harmed in any substantial way by the spill.
Why not wait and see how next year's catch is, and if it's bad, force BP to pay the unemployed fishermen for another lost season? My guess is that a whole unfettered season of no fishing would do the fisheries as much good as the spill did in damage.
Also, if there's a year for tons of shrimp and plankton to thrive, a whole bunch of them are going to die naturally, sequestering any free oil in inert sediments at the ocean floor, right?
I don't think so. My (very limited) understanding of the deep sea off the continental shelf is that it's got plenty of organic sediments already. You need more than a food source to spark any increase in activity. Dropping a load of dead trees near a thermal vent might be a hoot, though.
The on-land areas might get exciting, though. If we aggressively started planting and irrigating areas of desert, I imagine lots of cool stuff would happen.
Look, our planet has the same amount of carbon as it did when it satrted (basically). It's a closed system. The problem isn't 'too much carbon', it's 'too much carbon int he air'. Carbon is what makes soil fertile, it's the basis of our ecosystem. We just have a nasty habit of burning it.
There's no point in shooting carbon off into space, once you have it in a form that's ready to pack into a railgun, you've already taken it our of the atmosphere and the important part of the job is done.
What we should do is work on managed forestry, where we find ways to maximize growth of plants in areas that aren't of ecological importance (or areas that could use trees, like deserts upwind of agricultural lands). Once the trees are growing slower, you cut down every-other one and plant more. A felled tree -is- sequestered carbon.
The problem isn't 'carbon in the biosphere', we're basically stuck with the same amount of carbon one way or another. It's not like we're 'making' carbon or getting rid of it in a relatively closed system like 'planet earth'. The problem (if it is a problem) is too much carbon dioxide -in the atmosphere-. The solution to that could easily be sequestration in agricultural compost heaps.
I was thinking about this recently, but with a twist. Why not bundle-up the heaped material in compressed cubes the size of shipping containers and just sink them off the continental shelf (in ecologically 'boring' areas, naturally)?
My guess is that we actually don't want to remove carbon from the soil and get rid of it (since it's a major factor in soil fertility). What we want is to use solar power (through photosynthesis) to capture atmospheric carbon and return it to the earth, where it could reduce our dependence on fossil-fuel based fertilizers.
Are there any open-source filesystems that offer deduplication?
It seems that the FS du-jour changes faster than any of the promised 'optional' features ever materialize.
Instead of working full-bore on The Next Great FS, it would be really nice to have compression, encryption, deduplication, shadow copies, and idle optimization running in EXT4.
Maybe I'm just jaded, but I've been a Linux user for 12 years now. Sometimes it feels like the names of the technologies are changing, but nothing ever gets 'finished'. Maybe the NTFS/BSD model (good core design, long intervals with only minor changes) would be wise in Linux filesystem development.
It certainly can work out well if you're willing to work off-the-books, or if you grew up in that kind of standard of living, if you have parents or a sugar-daddy willing to slip you cash, or if you take advantage of various other facilities we've put in place to keep people from being homeless or starving.
I know people who collect and also take money from their parents. I know people who collect and deal drugs on the side. I know people who collect and have 9-to-5 jobs off the books. I know people who shop around to find a doctor who will certify them as disabled, even though they're in better shape (physically and mentally) than I am. I've been to steak-and-beer barbecues thrown on food assistance stamps. I know stores where the cashiers will ring up booze and cigarettes as groceries so you can buy them with food stamps.
I understand that this sort of thing happens, that no system is perfect. What worries me is what the -children- of these people I know will turn out expecting from their government. Lord knows they're having more kids, and faster than I can afford to.
"the only way to control costs is central planning"
Not really. I have an idea:
Government guarantees for loans to patients to finance their medical care. Patients are still on the hook for the full amount of routine care, but they can spread the costs out over time, paying the government a small amount of interest to cover administrative costs of the loans (even better would be to have small banks handle the administration on the government's behalf, as a way to counter 'big bank' dominance).
Then, for costs that exceed 'routine' care, like broken limbs, cancer treatments, etc., the government heath care covers a big portion of the costs, but the end user still has to pay for a percentage, and they can finance it. Need a $200,000 cancer treatment? You'll owe $20K, but you can finance it at 1.5% and amortize the payment up to 30 years. That's 90% coverage.
Once that's done, we can tweak the portion that the government is on the hook for. Need a $200,000 cancer treatment, but you're a smoker? The government will only cover 80%, leaving you with a $40K bill instead of $20K. Did you give yourself diabetes by mowing-down cheeseburgers? The government is only going to cover 75% of your costs, you can finance the rest.
This kind of system would really cut down on costs. The system is broken right now because the insured are -covered- and the uninsured are screwed. Also, people with lousy insurance have no incentive to save money once they've passed their deductible. After you break the deductible, the sky's the limit, and both the medical system and scared patients go to town on the insurance companies.
Trust me, this would -massively- reform the system. No longer will people drop out of the workforce for years over a broken hand, nor will Grandma rack-up $500,000 in futile treatments before she kicks the bucket (because that means not passing anything down to you, that loan needs to get paid back somehow). Of course, the Left will never subscribe to this, because they insist that 'health care is a human right', and the right will never abide it because it still does have a large government involvement and involves social-engineering.
Anything that puts my disdain for Emo music at odds with my right to freedom of expression is going to make my head explode. I can definitely see moving to a hut in Montana as an option if this ever happens.
Whenever I hear groups talk about how war money could have been spent doing X, Y, or Z, I like to remind them that that money never existed in the first place. It's all debt, borrowed money from the future.
If you can barely afford to pay rent and eat, the question isn't 'should I buy a Ford or a Buick?' it's 'how can I avoid a car payment?'
The federal government is spending roughly 1/3rd more than it takes in this coming year. Even without the wars, it's tapped-out (barring massive tax increases).
Slashdot Mirror
Three cheers.
I live in a suburb of Providence (160K people, Pawtucket has 70K) and have a six minute car commute. In bad weather I can either work from home or hop on a bus (one every ten minutes) from my door to downtown, and then it's a five minute walk to work.
If the job scenario dries up, I can commute to Boston (40 minutes by car, an hour by rail), which I have done before.
The city has really emptied-out in the past few years, too. House prices have plummeted to where you can live where I do for cheaper than the suburbs. Two-unit homes in my neighborhood are going for about $150, and you can rent two bedroom places for $650. Walking distance to three or four small stores, several music venues and bars, and a decent choice of groceries.
I think the best thing about the city is the people, though. My friends regularly do 'house crawls' where we walk to each others' places and have a few drinks. People bring their kids and pets along for the walk. Folks get together for 'storm parties' in blizzards and hurricanes. Did I mention that the houses are all 100+ years old, so we're not too worried about them falling down in bad weather?
You know who else liked experiments?
Hitler!
Subscription districts suck
I don't know. I live in a very blue state with regular taxes. Our firefighting budget is $250/person/year. I could subscribe all three of my abutting neighbors for less than they hit each one of us for in property taxes.
Personally, I like the middle solution: You deliver average firefighting for average rates. I'll take the 1/2000 chance that I end up waiting an extra two minutes for you in an emergency, and I get to keep an extra $12,000 over my lifetime.
My favorite is when firefighters cry poor here: "My base pay is only $55K!", yeah. But you earned $75K on top of that in overtime last year. Forgot to mention that, eh?
I assume you don't insure your apartment, car, home, or health either?
If they billed per-fire, the cost would probably be more like $100K. It would also incentivize firefighters to become off-hours arsonists.
So if you go your whole life without paying a dime into insurance, and then you crash your car into mine, do you expect to be able to sign up for insurance on-the-spot, pay your $120 for the month, and then cancel the policy? That's hardly fair to me, the guy who's paid over $16K into car insurance and never made a claim.
It's getting hard to find 4:3 displays bigger than 19", or with higher resolutions, or with better underlying technology.
It's sad, but it seems everyone has fallen for the 'wider is better' idea.
Oops, you're right.
Here lies PoopFace. Died of starvation out past the Oort cloud.
Right? The diameter of our solar system (Pluto's orbit) is about 80 AU. 80 AU is 0.0012 light years. This planet is 20 LY away. That means that it's about 1600 times as far as Pluto.
Remember, you need to bring along just as much fuel to slow down as you did to speed up. This is going to be a long, expensive, boring ride.
Yeah, %0.13 of the economy. Every number has to be put into scale when you look at the massive size of a 300M person country with a 15 trillion dollar economy.
$2B sounds like a lot. It really isn't.
a lot of people can't get credit cards or bank loans. Yes those are sources of credit, but its on really shitty terms.
If 'terms' were an issue, then the recent financial crisis wouldn't have happened. These days, if Johnny Switchblade wants a couch, it's a lot easier to get one from Rent-a-Center and dodge payments than it is to rob people. One outcome, they takes their couch back. The other, you go to prison for five years (especially if you're on probation/parole for something already). As 'hard' as it is to get even 'bad terms', credit is still preventing crime.
Locking up first time offenders sends them to a place where they get to learn the trade from the best.
Agreed, but they're not robbing me while they're locked up. This is why longer sentences -do- work, even though I would like to see them eliminated. Locking up a petty thief for years at $50K/year doesn't make sense to me.
most of the country doesn't have that luxury.
Totally agreed, and I'm a big defender of Second Amendment rights. Just saying that the concealed or open carry laws might not be the deterrent factor they're made out to be. Even cities with tough gun control (where 'only the outlaws have guns') saw a huge drop in crime. You should be able to carry a gun because -you should be able to carry a gun-. As long as you're not hurting anyone, you could be carrying a gun, some heroin, and an open bottle of Jack for all I care.
Buying during a spike like the current one will likely result in your investment going nowhere but down
Have you met any average human beings? People are still talking about when housing is going to get 'back on track' and my $150K duplex in the (rapidly degrading) city is going to be a half-million dollar cash cow.
People's eyes bugged out when I told them I was buying GGP stock (went from 40 to 0.44, I bought at 0.60, sold at 4) or BP (went from 70 to 25, I bought at 26, still holding at 38), but I bought my girlfriend a fancy laptop and paid off my credit cards while they wondered where their money went.
Do you have any idea how many people switched their retirements from stocks to bonds after the Dow went from 14,000 to 6,100? They missed the ride back up to 10,000, and are making 2.5% on less than half their original investment now. There's no getting through to them, though. I was waving my arms screaming 'buy stocks now' when the Dow was at 6,100, urging family and friends to switch their bonds over to stocks STAT, they could have double their money.
If the machine can dispense gold, why not have it dispense pepper spray and/or handguns (where legal) while you're at it. You can allay economic -and- social fears at a one-stop station on your way to the Two Minutes Hate.
And I live in one where you can't carry a gun unless you get a letter -from- City Hall and the state AG's office. As far as I know, none have been issued in a long time.
Crime here dropped like a rock in the past few years, too. Nothing to do with guns.
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/ricrime.htm
There are three factors I think are at work:
1. Legal abortion and widespread subsidized contraception in the 1980s prevented the people most likely to rob me from existing in the first place.
2. Credit is still easy to get. It's easier and less risky to just 'put it on the credit card' than it is to steal. It's far less detrimental to have a bankruptcy than a felony conviction on your record. You can rack up $30k in debt before people start coming after you, try robbing people and you'll be caught in a few weeks.
3. We have a huge number of people who are already locked-up. They're not robbing me. The government is robbing me to keep them incarcerated, but that's not the point of the discussion.
4. We have more cops than ever. If I stand at the end of my street at midnight, police passes of my block average one every 4 minutes. Response time when I have called has been less than two minutes for one car to arrive, three minutes for three cars.
I'm not advocating any of those things one way or another, just pointing them out.
I use both Bank of America's online 'my portfolio' and Mint.com to track my long-term finances. Both allow you to connect to different accounts, there are built-in reports, budgeting, cool charts and graphs, and 'net worth' features.
I think BoA's service doesn't seem to reach back in time as far as Mint.
I implemented improperly, beer -can- cause DNS issues.
Just last night I was trying to get to 'a beer at the pub after work' and ended up at something called 'Swilling Karkov on the street at 1AM with a convicted felon who doesn't speak a lick of English'. The problem even propagated, this morning my boss had a '404 - Employee Not Found' error.
Hello, I am a strategist for the Tea Party. We are intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
I was thinking about this yesterday.
So far, there's no evidence that fisheries have actually been harmed in any substantial way by the spill.
Why not wait and see how next year's catch is, and if it's bad, force BP to pay the unemployed fishermen for another lost season? My guess is that a whole unfettered season of no fishing would do the fisheries as much good as the spill did in damage.
Also, if there's a year for tons of shrimp and plankton to thrive, a whole bunch of them are going to die naturally, sequestering any free oil in inert sediments at the ocean floor, right?
I don't think so. My (very limited) understanding of the deep sea off the continental shelf is that it's got plenty of organic sediments already. You need more than a food source to spark any increase in activity. Dropping a load of dead trees near a thermal vent might be a hoot, though.
The on-land areas might get exciting, though. If we aggressively started planting and irrigating areas of desert, I imagine lots of cool stuff would happen.
I think we could do some creative stuff to get more sequestration out of the biosphere...
What about trying to put fast-growing grasses into deserts. You mow the grass, bundle it up, and -bang- sequestered carbon! Rinse, repeat.
Look, our planet has the same amount of carbon as it did when it satrted (basically). It's a closed system. The problem isn't 'too much carbon', it's 'too much carbon int he air'. Carbon is what makes soil fertile, it's the basis of our ecosystem. We just have a nasty habit of burning it.
There's no point in shooting carbon off into space, once you have it in a form that's ready to pack into a railgun, you've already taken it our of the atmosphere and the important part of the job is done.
What we should do is work on managed forestry, where we find ways to maximize growth of plants in areas that aren't of ecological importance (or areas that could use trees, like deserts upwind of agricultural lands). Once the trees are growing slower, you cut down every-other one and plant more. A felled tree -is- sequestered carbon.
The problem isn't 'carbon in the biosphere', we're basically stuck with the same amount of carbon one way or another. It's not like we're 'making' carbon or getting rid of it in a relatively closed system like 'planet earth'. The problem (if it is a problem) is too much carbon dioxide -in the atmosphere-. The solution to that could easily be sequestration in agricultural compost heaps.
I was thinking about this recently, but with a twist. Why not bundle-up the heaped material in compressed cubes the size of shipping containers and just sink them off the continental shelf (in ecologically 'boring' areas, naturally)?
My guess is that we actually don't want to remove carbon from the soil and get rid of it (since it's a major factor in soil fertility). What we want is to use solar power (through photosynthesis) to capture atmospheric carbon and return it to the earth, where it could reduce our dependence on fossil-fuel based fertilizers.
Are there any open-source filesystems that offer deduplication?
It seems that the FS du-jour changes faster than any of the promised 'optional' features ever materialize.
Instead of working full-bore on The Next Great FS, it would be really nice to have compression, encryption, deduplication, shadow copies, and idle optimization running in EXT4.
Maybe I'm just jaded, but I've been a Linux user for 12 years now. Sometimes it feels like the names of the technologies are changing, but nothing ever gets 'finished'. Maybe the NTFS/BSD model (good core design, long intervals with only minor changes) would be wise in Linux filesystem development.
It certainly can work out well if you're willing to work off-the-books, or if you grew up in that kind of standard of living, if you have parents or a sugar-daddy willing to slip you cash, or if you take advantage of various other facilities we've put in place to keep people from being homeless or starving.
I know people who collect and also take money from their parents. I know people who collect and deal drugs on the side. I know people who collect and have 9-to-5 jobs off the books. I know people who shop around to find a doctor who will certify them as disabled, even though they're in better shape (physically and mentally) than I am. I've been to steak-and-beer barbecues thrown on food assistance stamps. I know stores where the cashiers will ring up booze and cigarettes as groceries so you can buy them with food stamps.
I understand that this sort of thing happens, that no system is perfect. What worries me is what the -children- of these people I know will turn out expecting from their government. Lord knows they're having more kids, and faster than I can afford to.
"the only way to control costs is central planning"
Not really. I have an idea:
Government guarantees for loans to patients to finance their medical care. Patients are still on the hook for the full amount of routine care, but they can spread the costs out over time, paying the government a small amount of interest to cover administrative costs of the loans (even better would be to have small banks handle the administration on the government's behalf, as a way to counter 'big bank' dominance).
Then, for costs that exceed 'routine' care, like broken limbs, cancer treatments, etc., the government heath care covers a big portion of the costs, but the end user still has to pay for a percentage, and they can finance it. Need a $200,000 cancer treatment? You'll owe $20K, but you can finance it at 1.5% and amortize the payment up to 30 years. That's 90% coverage.
Once that's done, we can tweak the portion that the government is on the hook for. Need a $200,000 cancer treatment, but you're a smoker? The government will only cover 80%, leaving you with a $40K bill instead of $20K. Did you give yourself diabetes by mowing-down cheeseburgers? The government is only going to cover 75% of your costs, you can finance the rest.
This kind of system would really cut down on costs. The system is broken right now because the insured are -covered- and the uninsured are screwed. Also, people with lousy insurance have no incentive to save money once they've passed their deductible. After you break the deductible, the sky's the limit, and both the medical system and scared patients go to town on the insurance companies.
Trust me, this would -massively- reform the system. No longer will people drop out of the workforce for years over a broken hand, nor will Grandma rack-up $500,000 in futile treatments before she kicks the bucket (because that means not passing anything down to you, that loan needs to get paid back somehow). Of course, the Left will never subscribe to this, because they insist that 'health care is a human right', and the right will never abide it because it still does have a large government involvement and involves social-engineering.
Anything that puts my disdain for Emo music at odds with my right to freedom of expression is going to make my head explode. I can definitely see moving to a hut in Montana as an option if this ever happens.
Whenever I hear groups talk about how war money could have been spent doing X, Y, or Z, I like to remind them that that money never existed in the first place. It's all debt, borrowed money from the future.
If you can barely afford to pay rent and eat, the question isn't 'should I buy a Ford or a Buick?' it's 'how can I avoid a car payment?'
The federal government is spending roughly 1/3rd more than it takes in this coming year. Even without the wars, it's tapped-out (barring massive tax increases).