The LONGER the material is radioactive the LESS harmfull the radiation from the material is. The problem with PU isn't the radioactivity it has, it is the fact that it is a heavy metal which is very toxic much like lead. With soemthing that stays "hot" for a 100,000 years the toxicity of the material is what your concerned about not the radiation.
If your wondering, I Belive (don't ahve a refrence here) that PU shuts down the biochemical metabolic pathways in cells and kills them that way. GO ask a bio kem nerd, I'm a business Knurd.
Pu is a "natural" element. Do a google search on gabon natural nuclear reactor. or go to the link at http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gabon+natural +nuclear+reactor&btnG=G
The french when mining uranium did some lab tests and determined that they had mined some seriously weird material. THe result was a "natural" nuclear reactor had set up in geologic structures and produced nuclear waste like material. There was PU in the material. Go read, undo your ignorance and come back.
I would link to the HBS article but they arn't free... Mindshare isn't why they "tolerated" the piracy, Network effects are.
Fax machines are the simplest example of network effects. If you own the onyo fax machine in the world it is useless. If your friend owns one it's utility goes up. The more people who have fax machines the more useful each fax machine is. Fax machines were frequently sold in PAIRS when they were new bleeing edge tech to ensure the buyer would have a use for their machine.
This same idea applies to MS, their OS and office. The more people who USE that software, the more valuable that software is to all the users. They let it be pirated BECAUSE that drove their software to becoming the defacto standard across the world which they are now profiting from.
Linux could benifitr from the same effects. Each extra user makes all the other users better off, and in turn draws users but you need to get to a critical mass first (and maybe it allready is there. And yes I am a bizzness knurd!
Re:Id like to see him try to stor the elements....
on
Periodic Table Table
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· Score: 1
Depleated uranium or DU is quite safe. While working at enron I had a nice paperweight made out of the stuff. Kept those papers down REAL good. It is very similar to lead, don't lick it or eat DU dust and you'll be fine.
Actual the spream court only rules in the 1960's that movies were a form of speah. Before that in the 1910's they had rules it wasn't speak... so your WRONG 5 mod points for me!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We're doing a PISS poor job of teaching people economics. If more people understood economics then 505 of the comments here wouldn't be here, and we'd have much better elected officals. Oh well... I'm just afraid you all might VOTE!
Actually, there are TWO REALLY good reason why china won't be able to reach the leval of cconsumption that the us has.
The first is their goverment eats to much money, their goverment consumes 26% of GDP according to The Economist, the us goverment is someplace at 2%. Some of that is capital investment and good for the economy, but a HUGE chunk is salary and hence money taken away rom investments.
Second, their own economists inflate their growth numbers and some people have sugested that their economy is barely growing if at all once their outer regions (who have "funny" numbers) are considred. They don't even know how fast their growing but their "stated" numbers are wrong and I read recently about how even newspapers INSIDE cina have been saying this.
People have been saying for 200 years, wouldn't be great if you could sell everyone in china one X. Well it hasn't happened yet, and it might take a much longer time before it happens. China dosn't have a healthy economy, and that might hopefully produce major changes within their country.
Your product has an unknown value and usabilty to customers, they don't know how it works and how it performs. If you make it hard to download (waiting for a emailed password IS HARD) THEY WILL EXTRAPOLATE that your software is similar to the download process. If you wnat people to try something, price isn't the only factor time and convience is also a big deal. Just let them download the software directly, and let that be that.
Re:hmm. not sure about this...
on
Rare Earth
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· Score: 1
Yes you can have liquid water in many places besides the surface. The problem is going to be energy. I am not a science guy just an energy trader from enron but.... Life needs to be self replicating to "count" if there is only one that cant' reproduce itself then I wouldn't count it. Lifeforms reorder chemicals (their lil bioreactors) and need energy to do that. Underground your stuck with heat energy or naturally existing chemicals. Without an energy input the who system will burn itself out. My guess is that life that "makes it" for any point of time will be based on a renewable resource the most likely probably being light which is what OUR whole ecosystem is based off. Short, life underground could happen but most last long unless it can use heat or magnetic fields as energy sources.
Media in the US exists to make money, given that yes a great many things focus on that BIG fat middle of the curve. Go into an american bookstore and walk around, they will be a LOT of people there reading things besides the latest star wars novel or romance book. Look throught the magazine racks and you'll find titles such as "foreign policy". America has the tails of the curve but they arn't going to be seen from 3,000 miles away.
I think you've confused profits and revenue. If you make no profit your revenue equals expense, if you lose money your expense is greater than revenue.... Thus if you spend 1000 and have 0 profits you got 1000 in revenue and have no tax deduction.
Soros didn't destablize the pound, he was able to see that it would HAVE to fall becausethe bank of england was buying every pound in sight to keep the price up and he did his reasearch and saw that they were going to run out of money to buy pounds soon and moved in a BIG way. The bank of england would have run out of dollars soon enough, he just brought it to everyones atention and profited from it.
Takeaway, one "rich" person was able to via the free market to get the bank of england to stop a policy that was going to fail anyway earlier than otherwise.
A global minimum wage isn't going to occur because every country's labor pool has a diffrent degree of labor efficency leading to a diffrent cost per unit of output.
Some place (i.e. the US) the workers are able to create MORE over the same period of time than in other places, if companies had a global min wage countries/people would compete on efficency instead of price and less efficent countries wouldn't get any work which they are now because they price themselves much lower.
Less efficent countries ARE the ones gettign work in "sweatshops" right now, however without sweatshops they would have few if any jobs beyond substance farming.
NSA will just go NUTS over this
on
Stopping Light
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· Score: 1
Since fiber optics are much "harder" to listen in on I bet the NSA is going to eat this invention up left and right.
To get a job you need id to prove you are you and something to prove you have citizzenship. Some documents (like passports) do both and for everything else you can use any of several documents the I-9 form tells you what can be used. If your wife has photo id and something else she most likely will be fine.
As one who WORKED on the east power trading desk for enron, yes a "dummy" trading floor was set up but that was because the traders didn't want the investors distracting them and pitcking up insider info on their trades. Like in a footballgame traders HATE it when the other team knows what play their going to do.
Make channels like TV! Messages, can be tied to space but there can be a "lonely planet channel" a "zaget channel" a "p0rn" channel a "advertizing" channel. I think you could have as many of these as you want, and if you want a type of information you go to that channel.
Each channel could be owned or run like a TV or radio station and your fine. You could never use channels, or you could and it gets rid of the grafiti problem "unless you want a grafiti channel". Even a history channel for self guided tours! Was that even hard? Problem solved.
A well rounded person isn't being tought to "learn" they are learning a broad very thin base of knowlege for them to use for the rest of their life.
What is important is, "KNOWING WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW". You don't have to know it you can look it up, ask a friend, rent the knowlege (hire a consultant), or hire someone who does know. But before you do that, you need to know that you don't know it. Well rounded people understand there are issues, that a focused peson ever sees.
A great technician can create anything. A great inventor creates something people NEED and/or want. There is a great diffrence between the two. A bad programer can make a program that people love because it does something they want which will be far better than a well written program that doesn't do something useful.
Social interaction is going to be the key to if when and how you would be allowed to do your job as a telecommuter. Social interaction, feedback, and the "brainstorming" that happens ust by having people all in the same building is a BIG deal. If your offsite you and the company lose the benifits of dealing with other people.
You won't make contacts in other departments, and honestly out of sight is out of mind and you'll hurt your career in that regard with your manager. I personally would be afraid of being replaced if I could do what I do offsite. If you can do your job from home, some guy in russia or india can do your job and most likely a good deal cheaper too.
If you work out fine, then you've just proven basically your nothing more than a machine that does output at their direction, no matter how technical or creative you are. Once your a machine, your a commodity and the only thing they will care about is the price they pay you.
The web devolpers and database guys I manage could do their work at home, but the most efficent way for us to colabrate is to all get together. If you have a great boss thsi will be his objection, if not his gut will tell him it isn't good but he won't know exactly why. We just don't brainstorm over the phone or with IM or anthing else in the same way as in person.
Two points: People wouldn't buy the bonds; this should be equity not debit
First, Investors as a whole are reasonably rational. Even if you can find a few suckers to by this type of stuff, they're going to have huge problems selling these bonds. The problem with this is that, the returns would have to be quite high given the risks of financing these projects. The software business is much like the movie business, a few great productions make a lot of money and lot more whimper off to die and be forgotten. There are a lot of "direct to video" equivalents in the software world.
To understand what I'm saying about risk think about this; if two investments both offered the same return but one was riskier, people (assuming the recognize the higher risk) aren't going to buy the riskier investment ever! Software projects are quite risky, sometimes they work sometimes they don't. Investors would expect to be compensated for this, and they would demand higher returns, they normally get those because the price drops and the return goes up.
Since I've been an investment banker selling junk bonds, I would say that that these bonds would in all likelihood be unsellable at any price. Only a very select few people will buy bonds at the risk levels that software projects would offer, and they wouldn't be interested in more than a handful of these issues.
Given the risks, and the potential for a "star wars" to continue the movie metaphor, people want equity. For the risks that investors take, if you give them part of the upside of the project then they start to get comfortable taking a piece of the action. Equity, and venture capitalists make more sense. The vc's are very good at picking what makes money, and also building portfolios of companies lowering the risk of putting your money with them. A VC only needs to fund one star wars for every 20 Polly shore movies to make a significant amount of money. The VC model works a lot better. IF there is real money to be made, they will find it. If you can make a decent about of money off a project, people have to be buying it, and you must be doing something productive for society. That's my rant. Take what you will.
Weapons grade plutonium refers to a purity of plutonium. And to quickly answer your question, weapons grade material remains so for a VERY long time. It is other materials that pose te problem.
You need to understand what weapons grade material is first to understand this, P 239 is perfect for making a weapon, however p 240 in any signifigant quanities (and other substances like xeon 135) will retard the reaction and create a smallish explosion called a "fizzle" by bomb makers. I just doesn't break up under neutron bombardment like p- 239 and a very small amount will slow down a fast reacion (i.e bomb) so that it's power output will be much much lower. Comercial power reactors create far to much p 240 very quickly in their fuel, which is hard to seperate, and hence don't create weapons grade material. MOX, or mixed oxide fuel which uses plutonium in power plants has a good measure of p-240 in it which means that it doesn't represent a huge bomb risk.
To get weapons grade material you need to build a special reator, and operate it very carefuly. Uranium is in the reactor for only a SHORT while, and then is removed to have the plutonium removed. Leave it in too long you get p 240 which is very very hard to seperate from p 239 and you get useless material.
What really kills bombs, as someone else pointed out, are the OTHER nuclear materials in the device. Tritrium not only decays, but the decay materials will actualy slow down the reaction so much that you will get only a smallish pop destroying a few blocks as opposed to a a whole city. Replacing that in bombs is the big issue these days, not the plutonium.
Personally I think that is how tactical, and some of the lower yield nuclear weapons operate. The reaction is actualy retarded so the bomb isn't too big. I've never seen anything saying this, it just makes sense given some of the low yield bombs that have/used to be around.
Don't worry america's nukes are ok, we will have to get more tritrium sometime in the next decade or two, but the TVA might be able to help us all out with that since we have no current production facilities for that material.
I got a kenwood 1090 vr... and oh MAN is that sweet. I paid between 2 and 3 hundred at onsale.com, and it has the best quality for the price. I saw one about a month ago at a stock clearence sale for 150 and was mightly tempted. 1090 vr if you can find one has the performance of a 1000+ system on the cheap.
I've got a kenwood1090 vr I got at onsale.com (now egghead.com) and I still see some now and again. Cost about 200-300 dollars, incredible specs. Every feature bell connector you can think of. Ture it is 1997 tech, and lacks DTS but ohhhh man did it rock. Plus you can aford decent speakers when your all said and done.
I don't know the technical name for it, but I've heard the idea punted around a bit.
Let one canadate run as the nominie for more than one party. Under this system, gw could be the guns and ammo and republican party canadate. And gore could be the stick it to the man and democratic party canadate.
The basic idea would be that, george, gore, nader, they don't know WHY you voted for them. But by voting for a major party canadate via a 3rd party platform, the informational content of you vote gets to them. It needs a bot of work, but it gives someone both a mandate and good reason to do something if they want to get re elected.
A good example of this today would be with the green party. If say gore was selected as their canadate people could send the message we're supporting you as being better than bush, BUT we've got some diffrences so listen to us.
Any thoughts as to this?
Slashdot Mirror
The LONGER the material is radioactive the LESS harmfull the radiation from the material is. The problem with PU isn't the radioactivity it has, it is the fact that it is a heavy metal which is very toxic much like lead. With soemthing that stays "hot" for a 100,000 years the toxicity of the material is what your concerned about not the radiation.
If your wondering, I Belive (don't ahve a refrence here) that PU shuts down the biochemical metabolic pathways in cells and kills them that way. GO ask a bio kem nerd, I'm a business Knurd.
Pu is a "natural" element. Do a google search on gabon natural nuclear reactor. or go to the link at http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gabon+natural +nuclear+reactor&btnG=G
The french when mining uranium did some lab tests and determined that they had mined some seriously weird material. THe result was a "natural" nuclear reactor had set up in geologic structures and produced nuclear waste like material. There was PU in the material. Go read, undo your ignorance and come back.
I would link to the HBS article but they arn't free... Mindshare isn't why they "tolerated" the piracy, Network effects are.
Fax machines are the simplest example of network effects. If you own the onyo fax machine in the world it is useless. If your friend owns one it's utility goes up. The more people who have fax machines the more useful each fax machine is. Fax machines were frequently sold in PAIRS when they were new bleeing edge tech to ensure the buyer would have a use for their machine.
This same idea applies to MS, their OS and office. The more people who USE that software, the more valuable that software is to all the users. They let it be pirated BECAUSE that drove their software to becoming the defacto standard across the world which they are now profiting from.
Linux could benifitr from the same effects. Each extra user makes all the other users better off, and in turn draws users but you need to get to a critical mass first (and maybe it allready is there. And yes I am a bizzness knurd!
Depleated uranium or DU is quite safe. While working at enron I had a nice paperweight made out of the stuff. Kept those papers down REAL good. It is very similar to lead, don't lick it or eat DU dust and you'll be fine.
Actual the spream court only rules in the 1960's that movies were a form of speah. Before that in the 1910's they had rules it wasn't speak... so your WRONG 5 mod points for me!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We're doing a PISS poor job of teaching people economics. If more people understood economics then 505 of the comments here wouldn't be here, and we'd have much better elected officals. Oh well... I'm just afraid you all might VOTE!
Actually, there are TWO REALLY good reason why china won't be able to reach the leval of cconsumption that the us has.
The first is their goverment eats to much money, their goverment consumes 26% of GDP according to The Economist, the us goverment is someplace at 2%. Some of that is capital investment and good for the economy, but a HUGE chunk is salary and hence money taken away rom investments.
Second, their own economists inflate their growth numbers and some people have sugested that their economy is barely growing if at all once their outer regions (who have "funny" numbers) are considred. They don't even know how fast their growing but their "stated" numbers are wrong and I read recently about how even newspapers INSIDE cina have been saying this.
People have been saying for 200 years, wouldn't be great if you could sell everyone in china one X. Well it hasn't happened yet, and it might take a much longer time before it happens. China dosn't have a healthy economy, and that might hopefully produce major changes within their country.
Your product has an unknown value and usabilty to customers, they don't know how it works and how it performs. If you make it hard to download (waiting for a emailed password IS HARD) THEY WILL EXTRAPOLATE that your software is similar to the download process. If you wnat people to try something, price isn't the only factor time and convience is also a big deal. Just let them download the software directly, and let that be that.
Yes you can have liquid water in many places besides the surface. The problem is going to be energy. I am not a science guy just an energy trader from enron but.... Life needs to be self replicating to "count" if there is only one that cant' reproduce itself then I wouldn't count it. Lifeforms reorder chemicals (their lil bioreactors) and need energy to do that. Underground your stuck with heat energy or naturally existing chemicals. Without an energy input the who system will burn itself out. My guess is that life that "makes it" for any point of time will be based on a renewable resource the most likely probably being light which is what OUR whole ecosystem is based off. Short, life underground could happen but most last long unless it can use heat or magnetic fields as energy sources.
Media in the US exists to make money, given that yes a great many things focus on that BIG fat middle of the curve. Go into an american bookstore and walk around, they will be a LOT of people there reading things besides the latest star wars novel or romance book. Look throught the magazine racks and you'll find titles such as "foreign policy". America has the tails of the curve but they arn't going to be seen from 3,000 miles away.
I think you've confused profits and revenue. If you make no profit your revenue equals expense, if you lose money your expense is greater than revenue.... Thus if you spend 1000 and have 0 profits you got 1000 in revenue and have no tax deduction.
Soros didn't destablize the pound, he was able to see that it would HAVE to fall becausethe bank of england was buying every pound in sight to keep the price up and he did his reasearch and saw that they were going to run out of money to buy pounds soon and moved in a BIG way. The bank of england would have run out of dollars soon enough, he just brought it to everyones atention and profited from it.
Takeaway, one "rich" person was able to via the free market to get the bank of england to stop a policy that was going to fail anyway earlier than otherwise.
A global minimum wage isn't going to occur because every country's labor pool has a diffrent degree of labor efficency leading to a diffrent cost per unit of output.
Some place (i.e. the US) the workers are able to create MORE over the same period of time than in other places, if companies had a global min wage countries/people would compete on efficency instead of price and less efficent countries wouldn't get any work which they are now because they price themselves much lower.
Less efficent countries ARE the ones gettign work in "sweatshops" right now, however without sweatshops they would have few if any jobs beyond substance farming.
Since fiber optics are much "harder" to listen in on I bet the NSA is going to eat this invention up left and right.
To get a job you need id to prove you are you and something to prove you have citizzenship. Some documents (like passports) do both and for everything else you can use any of several documents the I-9 form tells you what can be used. If your wife has photo id and something else she most likely will be fine.
As one who WORKED on the east power trading desk for enron, yes a "dummy" trading floor was set up but that was because the traders didn't want the investors distracting them and pitcking up insider info on their trades. Like in a footballgame traders HATE it when the other team knows what play their going to do.
Pharmacies, the local drugist is regulated to prevent him from having his warez stolen.
Make channels like TV! Messages, can be tied to space but there can be a "lonely planet channel" a "zaget channel" a "p0rn" channel a "advertizing" channel. I think you could have as many of these as you want, and if you want a type of information you go to that channel.
Each channel could be owned or run like a TV or radio station and your fine. You could never use channels, or you could and it gets rid of the grafiti problem "unless you want a grafiti channel". Even a history channel for self guided tours! Was that even hard? Problem solved.
A well rounded person isn't being tought to "learn" they are learning a broad very thin base of knowlege for them to use for the rest of their life.
What is important is, "KNOWING WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW". You don't have to know it you can look it up, ask a friend, rent the knowlege (hire a consultant), or hire someone who does know. But before you do that, you need to know that you don't know it. Well rounded people understand there are issues, that a focused peson ever sees.
A great technician can create anything. A great inventor creates something people NEED and/or want. There is a great diffrence between the two. A bad programer can make a program that people love because it does something they want which will be far better than a well written program that doesn't do something useful.
Social interaction is going to be the key to if when and how you would be allowed to do your job as a telecommuter. Social interaction, feedback, and the "brainstorming" that happens ust by having people all in the same building is a BIG deal. If your offsite you and the company lose the benifits of dealing with other people.
You won't make contacts in other departments, and honestly out of sight is out of mind and you'll hurt your career in that regard with your manager. I personally would be afraid of being replaced if I could do what I do offsite. If you can do your job from home, some guy in russia or india can do your job and most likely a good deal cheaper too.
If you work out fine, then you've just proven basically your nothing more than a machine that does output at their direction, no matter how technical or creative you are. Once your a machine, your a commodity and the only thing they will care about is the price they pay you.
The web devolpers and database guys I manage could do their work at home, but the most efficent way for us to colabrate is to all get together. If you have a great boss thsi will be his objection, if not his gut will tell him it isn't good but he won't know exactly why. We just don't brainstorm over the phone or with IM or anthing else in the same way as in person.
My $.02
Two points: People wouldn't buy the bonds; this should be equity not debit First, Investors as a whole are reasonably rational. Even if you can find a few suckers to by this type of stuff, they're going to have huge problems selling these bonds. The problem with this is that, the returns would have to be quite high given the risks of financing these projects. The software business is much like the movie business, a few great productions make a lot of money and lot more whimper off to die and be forgotten. There are a lot of "direct to video" equivalents in the software world. To understand what I'm saying about risk think about this; if two investments both offered the same return but one was riskier, people (assuming the recognize the higher risk) aren't going to buy the riskier investment ever! Software projects are quite risky, sometimes they work sometimes they don't. Investors would expect to be compensated for this, and they would demand higher returns, they normally get those because the price drops and the return goes up. Since I've been an investment banker selling junk bonds, I would say that that these bonds would in all likelihood be unsellable at any price. Only a very select few people will buy bonds at the risk levels that software projects would offer, and they wouldn't be interested in more than a handful of these issues. Given the risks, and the potential for a "star wars" to continue the movie metaphor, people want equity. For the risks that investors take, if you give them part of the upside of the project then they start to get comfortable taking a piece of the action. Equity, and venture capitalists make more sense. The vc's are very good at picking what makes money, and also building portfolios of companies lowering the risk of putting your money with them. A VC only needs to fund one star wars for every 20 Polly shore movies to make a significant amount of money. The VC model works a lot better. IF there is real money to be made, they will find it. If you can make a decent about of money off a project, people have to be buying it, and you must be doing something productive for society. That's my rant. Take what you will.
Weapons grade plutonium refers to a purity of plutonium. And to quickly answer your question, weapons grade material remains so for a VERY long time. It is other materials that pose te problem.
You need to understand what weapons grade material is first to understand this, P 239 is perfect for making a weapon, however p 240 in any signifigant quanities (and other substances like xeon 135) will retard the reaction and create a smallish explosion called a "fizzle" by bomb makers. I just doesn't break up under neutron bombardment like p- 239 and a very small amount will slow down a fast reacion (i.e bomb) so that it's power output will be much much lower. Comercial power reactors create far to much p 240 very quickly in their fuel, which is hard to seperate, and hence don't create weapons grade material. MOX, or mixed oxide fuel which uses plutonium in power plants has a good measure of p-240 in it which means that it doesn't represent a huge bomb risk.
To get weapons grade material you need to build a special reator, and operate it very carefuly. Uranium is in the reactor for only a SHORT while, and then is removed to have the plutonium removed. Leave it in too long you get p 240 which is very very hard to seperate from p 239 and you get useless material.
What really kills bombs, as someone else pointed out, are the OTHER nuclear materials in the device. Tritrium not only decays, but the decay materials will actualy slow down the reaction so much that you will get only a smallish pop destroying a few blocks as opposed to a a whole city. Replacing that in bombs is the big issue these days, not the plutonium.
Personally I think that is how tactical, and some of the lower yield nuclear weapons operate. The reaction is actualy retarded so the bomb isn't too big. I've never seen anything saying this, it just makes sense given some of the low yield bombs that have/used to be around.
Don't worry america's nukes are ok, we will have to get more tritrium sometime in the next decade or two, but the TVA might be able to help us all out with that since we have no current production facilities for that material.
I got a kenwood 1090 vr... and oh MAN is that sweet. I paid between 2 and 3 hundred at onsale.com, and it has the best quality for the price. I saw one about a month ago at a stock clearence sale for 150 and was mightly tempted. 1090 vr if you can find one has the performance of a 1000+ system on the cheap.
I've got a kenwood1090 vr I got at onsale.com (now egghead.com) and I still see some now and again. Cost about 200-300 dollars, incredible specs. Every feature bell connector you can think of. Ture it is 1997 tech, and lacks DTS but ohhhh man did it rock. Plus you can aford decent speakers when your all said and done.
I don't know the technical name for it, but I've heard the idea punted around a bit. Let one canadate run as the nominie for more than one party. Under this system, gw could be the guns and ammo and republican party canadate. And gore could be the stick it to the man and democratic party canadate. The basic idea would be that, george, gore, nader, they don't know WHY you voted for them. But by voting for a major party canadate via a 3rd party platform, the informational content of you vote gets to them. It needs a bot of work, but it gives someone both a mandate and good reason to do something if they want to get re elected. A good example of this today would be with the green party. If say gore was selected as their canadate people could send the message we're supporting you as being better than bush, BUT we've got some diffrences so listen to us. Any thoughts as to this?