When I lived in the bay area, at the height of the dotcom boom, housing and gas was expensive but most everything else was pretty normally priced. There were choices for food everywhere that were affordable. If you're being billed $30 for a grilled cheese and coke, you're either down playing the food or failing to mention you're eating it at the kind of restaurant where you're paying to be seen.
As you say the cost of food is usually the main issue when it comes to importing food. The question is whether or not it is cheaper to pay for infrastructure and grow food in country, or neglect infrastructure and import most of the food.
Of course even if importing ends up being the cheaper option what happens in times of emergency or changes in the political landscape. What if relations with food importers sour and they refuse to sell us food, are you going to suddenly restart the agriculture industry that was killed off and rebuild all that infrastructure? What about natural disasters where you need to have the transportation capacity and throughput to flood an area with supplies on very short notice?
The sulfur dioxide idea interests me, I'll have to go read more about that.
I would avoid the lighter than air beads unless they are biodegradable. My concern there is that even if the beads are not toxic themselves they could absorb toxins over time and perhaps find their way back down to the lower atmosphere somehow. Basically if we can accomplish the same thing using chemicals that are already naturally produced and part of the system, I don't see the advantage in creating a technological solution that could introduce more risks we don't understand.
Buses are good candidates for conversion to purely battery electric for a few obvious reasons I can think of.
1. Buses travel a predetermined route constantly with little to no deviation. Which means you don't need to worry about range anxiety. Battery charging during the day can be planned ahead of time and done during driver breaks.
2. Buses start and stop constantly, which means more opportunity for regenerative breaking recovering some of your energy.
3. Buses usually travel at lower speeds, which is why they traditionally are so box shaped, as aerodynamics is not a serious energy concern. This shape, and size affords plenty of room for batteries.
With a car the owner might leave it parked for an entire weekend or want to drive it a thousand miles. The driver will undoubtedly want to drive it faster than a bus making for less efficient use of energy. A personal car is a lot smaller than a bus with considerably less space for battery storage.
I would agree that it is likely a better use of money than those things you list. I was unaware that the Utah Datacenter was costing us $1.5 Trillion, that seems a bit excessive even for our government. Are you sure you read the article summary properly?
My hesitation with that possible solution is that what kind of unforeseen consequences we might encounter as it would be an untried technique. With the pumping to create more ice, we at least know what the previous extent and thickness was like. Which means we have very measurable targets we can aim for and know what kind of consequences to expect for the most part. My concerns with the pumping though are not non-existent, however I think it would be a safer and better understood process.
When you sign up you have the choice of MGIB, loan repayment, or neither. I don't know how much they'll repay for you, or what enlistment terms apply for it specifically, but yes, loan repayment is a real option.
It is possible that they just wanted to pursue the same goal in a different manner than what Google was doing. Since they already had enough money to be set for life they quit and get to be their own boss. Not everyone is driven by a need to accumulate all the wealth they can. I know a man who quit a job earning a princely salary because he didn't want to work for an adulterer, then went home and pursued his hobbies for 4 years before returning to the work force again.
I'm not sure about that. I think Boston Dynamics is likely very close to being able to build a robot that could jump up on stage and snatch a microphone from a human while bleating out a drunken rant about who should have earned an award.
That said I agree that there will always be people who will pay extra to have another human do something for them instead of a robot.
The way the current system works taking that job won't necessarily mean losing all of the welfare benefits so it can actually improve quality of life a lot. And most people on welfare aren't the mythical welfare queen and will actually try pretty hard to get off welfare.
I can honestly see the wage thing going both ways, possibly even at the same time. For a crazy example say the basic income was crazy high, such that it could support my family in our middle class lifestyle without me having to work. You can be damned sure I'd stay home all day and pursue my leisure entertainment hobbies. At that point it would take a pretty significant salary offer to get me out of my house and being responsible for some work load. However I have coworkers right now that would probably still jump at the opportunity to keep working even for only a small salary because they have higher aspirations for what they want to achieve so far as lifestyle. If I was single and childless again I'd likely be happy to live out life as a couch potato if the BI was even as high as $18,000 a year.
Basically I would expect that we'd see pay scales become more extreme in their variation. Employers might have to offer a significantly higher proportional wage to bring in workers for work that people hate doing, whether it is low skill or not.
Classified information isn't really all that well protected from insider threats. The security around it is largely based on trusting the people handling the data. That data is supposed to reside on an air gaped network but there are plenty of other ways for stuff to leak, such as printers, writable and removable media like CD's, DVD's, and usb sticks. Basically there is too much classified information and too many people who need access on a regular basis for it to be well and properly secured. No doubt we could engineer and enforce better protocols to increase security but the cost would be astronomical, and do you really want to spend more money increasing the size of the bureaucracy and it's ability to keep secrets. I think a better solution would be to just keep fewer secrets and realize that our national security isn't really threatened by what is regularly classified as secret.
I couldn't find a link for that Portsmouth guy in a quick google search but I did find this one for someone in California. Mishandling classified information is definitely something that gets prosecuted even just for negligence.
I did try repairing a set once but the beak was in that part of the wire where it enters the headset and it was bonded to the bit that was meant to prevent it from bending too sharply.
I've still got my old g930 set and plan to take it apart and see if I can fix it sometime, I just haven't gotten to it. It seems like the break though is in part of the headband which will mean fishing the wires back through once repaired. Additionally I don't have wire with which to repair it so if there isn't sufficient extra length then I've gotta buy more. By the time I consider all the time put into that, and still having to buy more materials I just decided to get a new pair seeing as how I got 3 years of good use out of them and they are regularly available for under $80.
I have to disagree. I've frequently had problems with the wiring for headphones. I went through probably half a dozen wired headset/mic combos in the course of a few years when I got married and could no longer get away with speakers all the time for my computer. I tried to always be careful of the cord and hang the headphones so there wasn't pressure on it. But inevitably the wire always developed a short inside of a year of use, with one pair shorting out at 3 months. I became a convert to wireless headphones when I found a cheapo IR pair for $40 and they lasted more than 2 years before the battery was mostly shot. Now I'm on my second set of a Logitec g930's, the first lasted 3 years before, you guessed it a wiring short inside of the headset cut off sound to the right hand side. I've heard complaints of these sets being fragile or having poor battery performance but I've experienced neither problem. Right up to the wiring short I was getting 8 hours of use between charges, and I could easily use them for an entire day of gaming if I plugged them in when I took breaks to do chores and eat meals.
In the end I would wager that wires represent the most likely cause of failure in headphones. Reducing the amount of wiring drastically reduces the chance of a wiring failure. That said I don't support Apples decision to eliminate the headphone jack, especially when their motive seems to be entirely driven by selling $150 ear buds, when $10 cheapo wired earbuds should be just fine.
I was just reading an article that seemed to show that California is a net contributor to the federal budget. So your plan would backfire here in that they would be better off keeping the money and either reducing their taxes or increasing the amount they can spend. The additional danger of your suggestion is that it could result in individual states sorting themselves out and taking the additional steps to secede from the union. I mean if you've already cut them out of the union fiscally how do you expect to retain their loyalty?
Making the glass shatter doesn't take that much force provided you have a proper tool for it. You want something with a fine point made of very hard steel. You can buy little spring loaded tools for this that look like a fat ball point pen. The front windscreen is a bad candidate for emergency egress because the glass even once shattered is held in place by that layer of plastic and is glued in place all around the edges. The side windows even if made of the same sandwich construction are only attached along the bottom edge and can be pushed out more readily.
I watched the bullet video a few days ago and it's pretty entertaining stuff. I also saw a video where some guy put a small drop in a hydraulic press and it took about 20 tons of force to make it pop. The drop actually left relatively deep indentations in both the steel plate and cylinder used in the video.
I heard something about this somewhere months ago. If irc they were planning on only using gorilla glass for the outside layer of glass. They needed the interior layer to still be the standard soda glass to keep the glass from deforming under air pressure. So the way it fractures might not be as much of an issue as the glass which is likely to be exposed to the passengers in an accident is the same as ever.
The cost of the limited amount of content is what is killing it for me. The TV and disc player both came with 3D as ubiquitous features on devices I was already buying. I've got a few movies in 3D but they were $30 each, which is way beyond what I would ordinarily consider paying for content. The only reason I ponied up in this case was that they were movies that I had really wanted to see but couldn't get to the theater to watch and I wanted to have anyways.
Yeah, the passive glasses weren't or aren't an issue at my house. The two hangups I've found are:
1. Movies that aren't animated have a dfinite point of focus in each frame. Everything else outside of that focus is blurry, which gives you a headache or eyestrain if you try and look at it for too long. This doesn't bother me so much, but my wife is apparently always looking at the back and foregrounds instead of whatever is the focus of the frame. Consequently she gets a headache 20 minutes into a movie and wants to switch to the conventional format.
2. 3D content for your home is/was ridiculously expensive for adding a very minor fluff feature. $30 for a movie that is five plus years old? On top of that the 3D content just didn't seem to be that common, which is probably a knock on affect of the price.
Troll is troll, such is life on the internet with anything someone likes.
I'm pretty sure I had more than 1k hours into the game before they even introduced the End, and another 1k since then. And I've still never found a fortress and gone to the End. I've also never installed any mods to alter game play, I've only every used lighting mods.
From a brief google search it looks like since august of 2014 they've sold about 8 million more copies on PC alone. So yes, a majority of the sales were made before the Microsoft acquisition. That said they've still sold a very significant number of copies since then, and it isn't like the profits from each sale prior to that were extracted immediately as dividends or whatever. And I see more and more Minecraft merchandise for sale all the time, that is an IP that is going to be paying dividends with minimal input for another decade or two.
Some years ago I had a customer passed to me that wanted to know what kind of hoops they needed to jump through to get a Mongo DB approved for our network. No one I knew had ever even heard of it and after about 45 minutes of googling we had to just tell them it would likely never get approved. Getting a big name RDBMS that is actually engineered towards being secure approved is enough of a headache once the developers have had their way with it, Mongo was basically out of the question.
I offered no insult to the designers of our power grids. I just said it'd be dumb not to use power grids where they exist. You seemed to be saying that a part of the country having cloud cover for a short period would spell doom and gloom. Such is not the case, you can shunt power from other areas, whether it is efficient or not, or you can build in power storage that is spread out among the regional grids, or do both. Our current system has very little in the way of power storage that can actually replace base load, and the grids aren't designed to transfer power from one to another very well.
Slashdot Mirror
When I lived in the bay area, at the height of the dotcom boom, housing and gas was expensive but most everything else was pretty normally priced. There were choices for food everywhere that were affordable. If you're being billed $30 for a grilled cheese and coke, you're either down playing the food or failing to mention you're eating it at the kind of restaurant where you're paying to be seen.
As you say the cost of food is usually the main issue when it comes to importing food. The question is whether or not it is cheaper to pay for infrastructure and grow food in country, or neglect infrastructure and import most of the food.
Of course even if importing ends up being the cheaper option what happens in times of emergency or changes in the political landscape. What if relations with food importers sour and they refuse to sell us food, are you going to suddenly restart the agriculture industry that was killed off and rebuild all that infrastructure? What about natural disasters where you need to have the transportation capacity and throughput to flood an area with supplies on very short notice?
The sulfur dioxide idea interests me, I'll have to go read more about that.
I would avoid the lighter than air beads unless they are biodegradable. My concern there is that even if the beads are not toxic themselves they could absorb toxins over time and perhaps find their way back down to the lower atmosphere somehow. Basically if we can accomplish the same thing using chemicals that are already naturally produced and part of the system, I don't see the advantage in creating a technological solution that could introduce more risks we don't understand.
Buses are good candidates for conversion to purely battery electric for a few obvious reasons I can think of.
1. Buses travel a predetermined route constantly with little to no deviation. Which means you don't need to worry about range anxiety. Battery charging during the day can be planned ahead of time and done during driver breaks.
2. Buses start and stop constantly, which means more opportunity for regenerative breaking recovering some of your energy.
3. Buses usually travel at lower speeds, which is why they traditionally are so box shaped, as aerodynamics is not a serious energy concern. This shape, and size affords plenty of room for batteries.
With a car the owner might leave it parked for an entire weekend or want to drive it a thousand miles. The driver will undoubtedly want to drive it faster than a bus making for less efficient use of energy. A personal car is a lot smaller than a bus with considerably less space for battery storage.
I would agree that it is likely a better use of money than those things you list. I was unaware that the Utah Datacenter was costing us $1.5 Trillion, that seems a bit excessive even for our government. Are you sure you read the article summary properly?
My hesitation with that possible solution is that what kind of unforeseen consequences we might encounter as it would be an untried technique. With the pumping to create more ice, we at least know what the previous extent and thickness was like. Which means we have very measurable targets we can aim for and know what kind of consequences to expect for the most part. My concerns with the pumping though are not non-existent, however I think it would be a safer and better understood process.
When you sign up you have the choice of MGIB, loan repayment, or neither. I don't know how much they'll repay for you, or what enlistment terms apply for it specifically, but yes, loan repayment is a real option.
It is possible that they just wanted to pursue the same goal in a different manner than what Google was doing. Since they already had enough money to be set for life they quit and get to be their own boss. Not everyone is driven by a need to accumulate all the wealth they can. I know a man who quit a job earning a princely salary because he didn't want to work for an adulterer, then went home and pursued his hobbies for 4 years before returning to the work force again.
I'm not sure about that. I think Boston Dynamics is likely very close to being able to build a robot that could jump up on stage and snatch a microphone from a human while bleating out a drunken rant about who should have earned an award.
That said I agree that there will always be people who will pay extra to have another human do something for them instead of a robot.
The way the current system works taking that job won't necessarily mean losing all of the welfare benefits so it can actually improve quality of life a lot. And most people on welfare aren't the mythical welfare queen and will actually try pretty hard to get off welfare.
I can honestly see the wage thing going both ways, possibly even at the same time. For a crazy example say the basic income was crazy high, such that it could support my family in our middle class lifestyle without me having to work. You can be damned sure I'd stay home all day and pursue my leisure entertainment hobbies. At that point it would take a pretty significant salary offer to get me out of my house and being responsible for some work load. However I have coworkers right now that would probably still jump at the opportunity to keep working even for only a small salary because they have higher aspirations for what they want to achieve so far as lifestyle. If I was single and childless again I'd likely be happy to live out life as a couch potato if the BI was even as high as $18,000 a year.
Basically I would expect that we'd see pay scales become more extreme in their variation. Employers might have to offer a significantly higher proportional wage to bring in workers for work that people hate doing, whether it is low skill or not.
Classified information isn't really all that well protected from insider threats. The security around it is largely based on trusting the people handling the data. That data is supposed to reside on an air gaped network but there are plenty of other ways for stuff to leak, such as printers, writable and removable media like CD's, DVD's, and usb sticks. Basically there is too much classified information and too many people who need access on a regular basis for it to be well and properly secured. No doubt we could engineer and enforce better protocols to increase security but the cost would be astronomical, and do you really want to spend more money increasing the size of the bureaucracy and it's ability to keep secrets. I think a better solution would be to just keep fewer secrets and realize that our national security isn't really threatened by what is regularly classified as secret.
I couldn't find a link for that Portsmouth guy in a quick google search but I did find this one for someone in California. Mishandling classified information is definitely something that gets prosecuted even just for negligence.
That would qualify as a social safety net, though obviously isn't a cash handout.
I did try repairing a set once but the beak was in that part of the wire where it enters the headset and it was bonded to the bit that was meant to prevent it from bending too sharply.
I've still got my old g930 set and plan to take it apart and see if I can fix it sometime, I just haven't gotten to it. It seems like the break though is in part of the headband which will mean fishing the wires back through once repaired. Additionally I don't have wire with which to repair it so if there isn't sufficient extra length then I've gotta buy more. By the time I consider all the time put into that, and still having to buy more materials I just decided to get a new pair seeing as how I got 3 years of good use out of them and they are regularly available for under $80.
I have to disagree. I've frequently had problems with the wiring for headphones. I went through probably half a dozen wired headset/mic combos in the course of a few years when I got married and could no longer get away with speakers all the time for my computer. I tried to always be careful of the cord and hang the headphones so there wasn't pressure on it. But inevitably the wire always developed a short inside of a year of use, with one pair shorting out at 3 months. I became a convert to wireless headphones when I found a cheapo IR pair for $40 and they lasted more than 2 years before the battery was mostly shot. Now I'm on my second set of a Logitec g930's, the first lasted 3 years before, you guessed it a wiring short inside of the headset cut off sound to the right hand side. I've heard complaints of these sets being fragile or having poor battery performance but I've experienced neither problem. Right up to the wiring short I was getting 8 hours of use between charges, and I could easily use them for an entire day of gaming if I plugged them in when I took breaks to do chores and eat meals.
In the end I would wager that wires represent the most likely cause of failure in headphones. Reducing the amount of wiring drastically reduces the chance of a wiring failure. That said I don't support Apples decision to eliminate the headphone jack, especially when their motive seems to be entirely driven by selling $150 ear buds, when $10 cheapo wired earbuds should be just fine.
I was just reading an article that seemed to show that California is a net contributor to the federal budget. So your plan would backfire here in that they would be better off keeping the money and either reducing their taxes or increasing the amount they can spend. The additional danger of your suggestion is that it could result in individual states sorting themselves out and taking the additional steps to secede from the union. I mean if you've already cut them out of the union fiscally how do you expect to retain their loyalty?
Making the glass shatter doesn't take that much force provided you have a proper tool for it. You want something with a fine point made of very hard steel. You can buy little spring loaded tools for this that look like a fat ball point pen. The front windscreen is a bad candidate for emergency egress because the glass even once shattered is held in place by that layer of plastic and is glued in place all around the edges. The side windows even if made of the same sandwich construction are only attached along the bottom edge and can be pushed out more readily.
I watched the bullet video a few days ago and it's pretty entertaining stuff. I also saw a video where some guy put a small drop in a hydraulic press and it took about 20 tons of force to make it pop. The drop actually left relatively deep indentations in both the steel plate and cylinder used in the video.
I heard something about this somewhere months ago. If irc they were planning on only using gorilla glass for the outside layer of glass. They needed the interior layer to still be the standard soda glass to keep the glass from deforming under air pressure. So the way it fractures might not be as much of an issue as the glass which is likely to be exposed to the passengers in an accident is the same as ever.
The cost of the limited amount of content is what is killing it for me. The TV and disc player both came with 3D as ubiquitous features on devices I was already buying. I've got a few movies in 3D but they were $30 each, which is way beyond what I would ordinarily consider paying for content. The only reason I ponied up in this case was that they were movies that I had really wanted to see but couldn't get to the theater to watch and I wanted to have anyways.
Yeah, the passive glasses weren't or aren't an issue at my house. The two hangups I've found are:
1. Movies that aren't animated have a dfinite point of focus in each frame. Everything else outside of that focus is blurry, which gives you a headache or eyestrain if you try and look at it for too long. This doesn't bother me so much, but my wife is apparently always looking at the back and foregrounds instead of whatever is the focus of the frame. Consequently she gets a headache 20 minutes into a movie and wants to switch to the conventional format.
2. 3D content for your home is/was ridiculously expensive for adding a very minor fluff feature. $30 for a movie that is five plus years old? On top of that the 3D content just didn't seem to be that common, which is probably a knock on affect of the price.
Troll is troll, such is life on the internet with anything someone likes.
I'm pretty sure I had more than 1k hours into the game before they even introduced the End, and another 1k since then. And I've still never found a fortress and gone to the End. I've also never installed any mods to alter game play, I've only every used lighting mods.
From a brief google search it looks like since august of 2014 they've sold about 8 million more copies on PC alone. So yes, a majority of the sales were made before the Microsoft acquisition. That said they've still sold a very significant number of copies since then, and it isn't like the profits from each sale prior to that were extracted immediately as dividends or whatever. And I see more and more Minecraft merchandise for sale all the time, that is an IP that is going to be paying dividends with minimal input for another decade or two.
Some years ago I had a customer passed to me that wanted to know what kind of hoops they needed to jump through to get a Mongo DB approved for our network. No one I knew had ever even heard of it and after about 45 minutes of googling we had to just tell them it would likely never get approved. Getting a big name RDBMS that is actually engineered towards being secure approved is enough of a headache once the developers have had their way with it, Mongo was basically out of the question.
I offered no insult to the designers of our power grids. I just said it'd be dumb not to use power grids where they exist. You seemed to be saying that a part of the country having cloud cover for a short period would spell doom and gloom. Such is not the case, you can shunt power from other areas, whether it is efficient or not, or you can build in power storage that is spread out among the regional grids, or do both. Our current system has very little in the way of power storage that can actually replace base load, and the grids aren't designed to transfer power from one to another very well.