Some people complain that they make the skyline ugly, but most people I've talked to think they make rather serene vistas along the tops of the valleys.
I've seen windmills in various places in California, and here's my take on the aesthetics. Of course everybody is different. When the mills are close and near a town, they actually look kind of cool. I think I saw this near Pittsburg, in the East Bay. Something about the buildings and the mills seemed to fit.
I actually think they look worse from far way. You're looking out at a vast landscape of rolling hills, mostly natural green and you see... all these flipping windmills.
Now I haven't seen this personally; but the real windmill nightmare is to have one between you and the Sun. You get strobe effects with the shadows. I'd be absolutely furious if somebody did that to me. Ditto if I were actually close enough to hear them too.
FWIW, I'd rather see all the available commercial rooftops leased out for solar before we even think about erecting a single windmill. Nobody looks at the top of a tarred flat-top roof. You look out at most cities in California from a hi-rise and there is still a lot of empty roof. It's a no-brainer to put energy production there since it's already a built area and there is virtually no aesthetic issue at all.
I'd also point out that even if you treat the designs of these plants as typical (which they aren't, nor are they anything approaching the design of a plant that would be built today)
Typical? Does 23/104 23/104 plants in the US count as typical? Perhaps you are right to say that such a design wouldn't be built today though. At least, I hope that's right.
Very roughly, the
net real rate of return = (nominal risk-free interest rate - Inflation) - (unearned income tax, dividend tax, and other capital-gains taxes).
If this rate is positive then owners of capital (George Orwell's "dividend-drawing class") will get richer if they neither produce or consume but simply "leave their money in the bank." It is under this condition (positive net return to capital) that widespread wealth condensation is most likely. (Wealth condensation would be inevitable in the long run in this case, unless the unearned income were consumed more rapidly than it was accumulated.)
Note also that I said, they kind of do. Dividend-earning investments are not exactly the same as having pile of gold coins that just sits there. The cartoons, being just that, were never explicit on Scrooge loaning out the gold in the form of certificates, being willing to surrender some if there were a claim, engaging in fractional reserve lending based on his pool, or using options or other financial engineering to maintain the pool and earn an income with it. He's a Scrooge though, and no dummy; so I bet he was smart enough to not only have the pool but manage it with some sophistication. In the immortal words of Peter Griffen, "Aaaaargh! It's not a liquid, it's a sold mass!". Anyway, I digress... the point, ummm... LOL, bloody Family Guy... what was the point. Oh, I said "kind of". Some rich guy reinvesting the dividends he earns from oil companies isn't actually providing much to the lower tiers, is he? That's the point.
So why not raise it [the wage for a fast-food worker] to $100 and make everyone rich?
That's somewhat of a straw-man. The previous poster probably understands that if you raise it too far you'd get wage-price spiral inflation. At least, I hope they do. I think the best way to look at this is that there's an optimal pay for the economy to function well, and that a lot of people think the working class is now earning less than that optimum.
In essence, the upper tier has cornered the dollar market, which would explain why the dollar is falling--whenever somebody corners the market in something, it inevitably results in that something crashing. Just look at the infamous Hunt Brother's episode in silver, and the gold corner in the late 1800s. Rational? No. It's human nature to pile on, get roaring drunk, and then deal with a hangover.
It's my understanding that it wasn't particularly burdensome to inventors at the time. It was a burden on the patent office because they were running out of space to store the models. Can you imagine what would happen if they had to do that now? There'd be entire warehouses filled with nothing but abdominal muscle workout machines.
Tesla's superchargers are what make it truly revolutionary. Pony up the bucks and get viable road-trip capability with no charge at the charger. Ummm... let me rephrase that... ummm... without spending any money at the point of charging. Yes, the car itself is expensive; but you have to factor that in.
Unless GM is also planning a supercharger infrastructure of its own, or partnering with Tesla to allow their vehicle to pull up and charge, it's hobbled right out of the gate.
Yeah fine, you go 200 miles then... GM has no answer. Tesla does.
They're not working on it. They're just re-inventing it. It used to be that it wasn't that uncommon for local markets to deliver, for customers that wanted to pay for delivery. This was probably even more common when there was one car per family and only the husband drove it. They're just working on a more efficient, less personal version of picking up the phone and asking Sam the Butcher if his boy can deliver some beef. Remember It's a Wonderful Life? Yeah, it's a movie; but the boy delivering drugs was probably a pretty realistic scenario. Oh, and remember milk men? So. Amazon et. al., will re-invent all of that in some newer form if the economics are there. With times being tough, we might see more one-car families and/or extended families where you have somebody at home to accept deliveries. If anything will make delivery more common, it's those kinds of demographic shifts back towards something that doesn't require everybody to be really busy away from home and/or to have their own personal auto.
Are smokers likely to go in for more teeth cleaning and/or whitening treatments to remedy ugly teeth? Do they brush more to get rid of stains? That might explain the whole thing.
No, there's data on that, and it was submitted in the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education. The southerners claimed that their schools were "separate but equal," so the lawyers proved they weren't
Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say that Black and White schools were equal during segregation. I said it was possible that Blacks attending segregated schools before WW2 were getting a better education than Blacks attending dysfunctinoal inner-city schools today.
...increase in test scores in math and...
So you're on the record that test scores are the measure to use? I'm sure some people would argue against that, but that's beside the point. I'm assuming it's the chart at the bottom of that page you wanted me to look at. It only goes back to 1982. It shows Black scores consistently lower than White--a pattern virtually unchanged from 1982 to 2008, which isn't even the comparison I was discussing in the first place.
I tried finding data for the relevant period, and it's hard to come by. To reiterate--there's no getting around the fact that Black schools in the South were underfunded, in run-down buildings, with old texts and worse teachers. The question is, is that any better than today's schools in the cities that are also underfunded, run-down, with iPads, tenured mediocrity, students whose parents are drug users vs. oppressed field workers, etc.?
A real answer to that question seems hard to come by. You're going to get anecdotes at best. I think the opportunities for Blacks are definitely better today than they were then; but if it were possible to chose a Georgia segregated school in 1935, or a Detroit inner-city public school in 2013, which would you pick? That's the question.
How was education in black and minority communities pre-WWII?
The first thought that occurred to me was that education in pre-WW2 segregated schools might actually have been better than education in today's "integrated" inner-city schools.
That's not an argument that segregation was good. It's an argument that today's system is that bad. It's de facto segregated due to White flight. It's also part of a system that cares more about the Democratic Party machine and re-electing politicians than it does educating.
Pros who aren't super-famous *restored* the "music industry" for me, assuming that what you mean is "got me to pay for music". On more occasions than I can count, I have visited coffee shops or the San Gregorio General Store and flipped some money into the tip jar.
Prior to that, I just didn't pay for stuff because radio was good enough, or I had Yahoo music subscription and they ruined it. So yeah, RIAA got ruined by pros who aren't famous, but these guys get money directly from me without going through you and I help to support interesting local music. In other words, so long RIAA. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
"What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?"
Sigh... if only we had a man like Zapp. We'd send in 100,000 of our best men. They'd all die horribly and we wouldn't fix the problem. They'd all be heroes.
Reduce the work week, and then ultimately make work like jury duty:
"Hey Ralph, I almost had to take a patrol last week, but when I checked in they said there were enough officers".
"Yeah, I went in to maintain my quals for extra pay last week, but they said it'd be unlikely I'd be called in for code review or bug-fixing anytime soon".
"Pass me another one of those worms, I think the fish ate it off the hook again".
I'm pretty sure at *some* point in my childhood I drew a picture of somebody I didn't like with a knife through their head or something. This was standard fare when I was growing up. Either that or you drew farts coming out of their butt. If you wanted to shoot somebody, you used your finger.
The absolute *worst* thing that could happen is going to the principal's office. That'd be if you actually said something like, "I'm going to kill you" more than once or started a real fight with punches and stuff.
Getting this kid involved with the juvenile justice system? Absofuckinglutely insane. They'll victimize him an order of magnitude more than the school bullies were bothering him. This kid should have had a private chat with a guidance counselor. I'm absolutely ashamed to be middle-aged now; because the twats that are damaging this kid are probably a part of my generation.
So the FBI had a treasure trove of evidence that would lead to the prevention of actual children being abused, and instead of tracking down all those leads they decided to prosecute the people who provided them that treasure trove.
There. FTFY.
Were I director of the FBI, I'd be obtaining warrants based on this info left and right. That would be perfectly legitimate; but NooooO. They have to go after the network instead. Why? Is it possible that they actually depend on pedos? Kinda like the DEA--make drugs a public health issue rather than a law enforcement issue, and they're out of a job. Get the actual kiddie porn producers off the street, and a lot of FBI agents might be out of jobs too.
Everybody knows that when set to kill the phaser emits high energy polarized tachyons that send most of the mass into other dimensions. From the PoV of the infinite other universes a harmless burst of neutrinos occurs at several random locations. The matter that doesn't get transferred by the tachyons may remain as a dusty residue, but that's only if the phase correlator is poorly adjusted. Properly maintained phasers set to kill won't do that.
And yes, I just made all that up, and some of it is mumbo-jumbo. That's how Star Trek technology works. Dammit Jim, I'm a Slashdot poster, not a phaser technician. Why do I have to explain this?
If only there were someplace where (perhaps for a modest fee) you could upload your stuff without having to go through a company. Like, a site of your very own. You could even come up with some simple scripts to put on the site if you wanted a "social" feel. Maybe a small database for your friends. Since it's on the Internet, it'd be World wide. There must be some open source for this, somewhere. We just need to get people to upload there. Once it takes off, it would be very social. It'd be a virtual web of social activity, world wide. I'm not sure what we'd call that. Once it's established we could further advance the quality and subtlety of communication. We might even be able to convey sarcasm there. Nah, perhaps I'm being a bit too ambitious.
We've probably all read accounts of primitive cultures contacted by moderns. The primitives suffer in various ways because they aren't prepared to handle what moderns have. Aside from the microbes, they can't handle the technology sometimes. If you've read those accounts smugly, quit it. The West is not immune. The difference is that we introduced the new things to ourselves. The bad news is that these authors may be right on some level even though it sounds like they themselves are engaging in hysterics. The good news is that we will eventually learn to deal with new things. We'll probably fare much better than primitives because the new things aren't part of a narrative of conquest and exploitation. Well, not so much conquest anyway.
Hey, whatever happened to nuclear apocalypse--radiation/nuclear winter/etc.? Anyone remember that one back in the 80's? Man, I'm old.
The parachute pants and narrow ties didn't disappear. The Russians and the USA still have huge stockpiles, and it should still concern you. You should also be worried about their nuclear weapons.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people complain that they make the skyline ugly, but most people I've talked to think they make rather serene vistas along the tops of the valleys.
I've seen windmills in various places in California, and here's my take on the aesthetics. Of course everybody is different. When the mills are close and near a town, they actually look kind of cool. I think I saw this near Pittsburg, in the East Bay. Something about the buildings and the mills seemed to fit.
I actually think they look worse from far way. You're looking out at a vast landscape of rolling hills, mostly natural green and you see... all these flipping windmills.
Now I haven't seen this personally; but the real windmill nightmare is to have one between you and the Sun. You get strobe effects with the shadows. I'd be absolutely furious if somebody did that to me. Ditto if I were actually close enough to hear them too.
FWIW, I'd rather see all the available commercial rooftops leased out for solar before we even think about erecting a single windmill. Nobody looks at the top of a tarred flat-top roof. You look out at most cities in California from a hi-rise and there is still a lot of empty roof. It's a no-brainer to put energy production there since it's already a built area and there is virtually no aesthetic issue at all.
Typical? Does 23/104 23/104 plants in the US count as typical? Perhaps you are right to say that such a design wouldn't be built today though. At least, I hope that's right.
From the article:
Note also that I said, they kind of do. Dividend-earning investments are not exactly the same as having pile of gold coins that just sits there. The cartoons, being just that, were never explicit on Scrooge loaning out the gold in the form of certificates, being willing to surrender some if there were a claim, engaging in fractional reserve lending based on his pool, or using options or other financial engineering to maintain the pool and earn an income with it. He's a Scrooge though, and no dummy; so I bet he was smart enough to not only have the pool but manage it with some sophistication. In the immortal words of Peter Griffen, "Aaaaargh! It's not a liquid, it's a sold mass!". Anyway, I digress... the point, ummm... LOL, bloody Family Guy... what was the point. Oh, I said "kind of". Some rich guy reinvesting the dividends he earns from oil companies isn't actually providing much to the lower tiers, is he? That's the point.
rich people don't 'sit on their money' like Scrooge McDuck in your comic books
Actually they kind of do.
So why not raise it [the wage for a fast-food worker] to $100 and make everyone rich?
That's somewhat of a straw-man. The previous poster probably understands that if you raise it too far you'd get wage-price spiral inflation. At least, I hope they do. I think the best way to look at this is that there's an optimal pay for the economy to function well, and that a lot of people think the working class is now earning less than that optimum.
In essence, the upper tier has cornered the dollar market, which would explain why the dollar is falling--whenever somebody corners the market in something, it inevitably results in that something crashing. Just look at the infamous Hunt Brother's episode in silver, and the gold corner in the late 1800s. Rational? No. It's human nature to pile on, get roaring drunk, and then deal with a hangover.
informative? Is this a meta joke?
Yes, since 1997 according to timecube.com. I thought this was old, but not that old. Wow. Yes I would have modded it Funny.
I really wish people would quit lying about the Volt
The Volt isn't the topic here. The topic is GM's new all-electric.
It's my understanding that it wasn't particularly burdensome to inventors at the time. It was a burden on the patent office because they were running out of space to store the models. Can you imagine what would happen if they had to do that now? There'd be entire warehouses filled with nothing but abdominal muscle workout machines.
Tesla's superchargers are what make it truly revolutionary. Pony up the bucks and get viable road-trip capability with no charge at the charger. Ummm... let me rephrase that... ummm... without spending any money at the point of charging. Yes, the car itself is expensive; but you have to factor that in.
Unless GM is also planning a supercharger infrastructure of its own, or partnering with Tesla to allow their vehicle to pull up and charge, it's hobbled right out of the gate.
Yeah fine, you go 200 miles then... GM has no answer. Tesla does.
They're not working on it. They're just re-inventing it. It used to be that it wasn't that uncommon for local markets to deliver, for customers that wanted to pay for delivery. This was probably even more common when there was one car per family and only the husband drove it. They're just working on a more efficient, less personal version of picking up the phone and asking Sam the Butcher if his boy can deliver some beef. Remember It's a Wonderful Life? Yeah, it's a movie; but the boy delivering drugs was probably a pretty realistic scenario. Oh, and remember milk men? So. Amazon et. al., will re-invent all of that in some newer form if the economics are there. With times being tough, we might see more one-car families and/or extended families where you have somebody at home to accept deliveries. If anything will make delivery more common, it's those kinds of demographic shifts back towards something that doesn't require everybody to be really busy away from home and/or to have their own personal auto.
Are smokers likely to go in for more teeth cleaning and/or whitening treatments to remedy ugly teeth? Do they brush more to get rid of stains? That might explain the whole thing.
No, there's data on that, and it was submitted in the Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education. The southerners claimed that their schools were "separate but equal," so the lawyers proved they weren't
Re-read what I wrote. I didn't say that Black and White schools were equal during segregation. I said it was possible that Blacks attending segregated schools before WW2 were getting a better education than Blacks attending dysfunctinoal inner-city schools today.
So you're on the record that test scores are the measure to use? I'm sure some people would argue against that, but that's beside the point. I'm assuming it's the chart at the bottom of that page you wanted me to look at. It only goes back to 1982. It shows Black scores consistently lower than White--a pattern virtually unchanged from 1982 to 2008, which isn't even the comparison I was discussing in the first place.
I tried finding data for the relevant period, and it's hard to come by. To reiterate--there's no getting around the fact that Black schools in the South were underfunded, in run-down buildings, with old texts and worse teachers. The question is, is that any better than today's schools in the cities that are also underfunded, run-down, with iPads, tenured mediocrity, students whose parents are drug users vs. oppressed field workers, etc.?
A real answer to that question seems hard to come by. You're going to get anecdotes at best. I think the opportunities for Blacks are definitely better today than they were then; but if it were possible to chose a Georgia segregated school in 1935, or a Detroit inner-city public school in 2013, which would you pick? That's the question.
How was education in black and minority communities pre-WWII?
The first thought that occurred to me was that education in pre-WW2 segregated schools might actually have been better than education in today's "integrated" inner-city schools.
That's not an argument that segregation was good. It's an argument that today's system is that bad. It's de facto segregated due to White flight. It's also part of a system that cares more about the Democratic Party machine and re-electing politicians than it does educating.
The more links, the better the story. Just like more technology makes for better educational outcomes.
That would be the joke, which apparently isn't that funny. Sometimes you get the hole-in-one. Other times you bogey.
What's their point? There's not a singular thing I can see there.
Pros who aren't super-famous *restored* the "music industry" for me, assuming that what you mean is "got me to pay for music". On more occasions than I can count, I have visited coffee shops or the San Gregorio General Store and flipped some money into the tip jar.
Prior to that, I just didn't pay for stuff because radio was good enough, or I had Yahoo music subscription and they ruined it. So yeah, RIAA got ruined by pros who aren't famous, but these guys get money directly from me without going through you and I help to support interesting local music. In other words, so long RIAA. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
"What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?"
Sigh... if only we had a man like Zapp. We'd send in 100,000 of our best men. They'd all die horribly and we wouldn't fix the problem. They'd all be heroes.
Reduce the work week, and then ultimately make work like jury duty:
"Hey Ralph, I almost had to take a patrol last week, but when I checked in they said there were enough officers".
"Yeah, I went in to maintain my quals for extra pay last week, but they said it'd be unlikely I'd be called in for code review or bug-fixing anytime soon".
"Pass me another one of those worms, I think the fish ate it off the hook again".
I'm pretty sure at *some* point in my childhood I drew a picture of somebody I didn't like with a knife through their head or something. This was standard fare when I was growing up. Either that or you drew farts coming out of their butt. If you wanted to shoot somebody, you used your finger.
The absolute *worst* thing that could happen is going to the principal's office. That'd be if you actually said something like, "I'm going to kill you" more than once or started a real fight with punches and stuff.
Getting this kid involved with the juvenile justice system? Absofuckinglutely insane. They'll victimize him an order of magnitude more than the school bullies were bothering him. This kid should have had a private chat with a guidance counselor. I'm absolutely ashamed to be middle-aged now; because the twats that are damaging this kid are probably a part of my generation.
So the FBI had a treasure trove of evidence that would lead to the prevention of actual children being abused, and instead of tracking down all those leads they decided to prosecute the people who provided them that treasure trove.
There. FTFY.
Were I director of the FBI, I'd be obtaining warrants based on this info left and right. That would be perfectly legitimate; but NooooO. They have to go after the network instead. Why? Is it possible that they actually depend on pedos? Kinda like the DEA--make drugs a public health issue rather than a law enforcement issue, and they're out of a job. Get the actual kiddie porn producers off the street, and a lot of FBI agents might be out of jobs too.
Everybody knows that when set to kill the phaser emits high energy polarized tachyons that send most of the mass into other dimensions. From the PoV of the infinite other universes a harmless burst of neutrinos occurs at several random locations. The matter that doesn't get transferred by the tachyons may remain as a dusty residue, but that's only if the phase correlator is poorly adjusted. Properly maintained phasers set to kill won't do that.
And yes, I just made all that up, and some of it is mumbo-jumbo. That's how Star Trek technology works. Dammit Jim, I'm a Slashdot poster, not a phaser technician. Why do I have to explain this?
And while scanning the SMART data is a nice start... you aren't going to get an e-mail when a branch office's first floor is under five feet of water
Ummm... in that case I think you'd get a phone call from a human.
If only there were someplace where (perhaps for a modest fee) you could upload your stuff without having to go through a company. Like, a site of your very own. You could even come up with some simple scripts to put on the site if you wanted a "social" feel. Maybe a small database for your friends. Since it's on the Internet, it'd be World wide. There must be some open source for this, somewhere. We just need to get people to upload there. Once it takes off, it would be very social. It'd be a virtual web of social activity, world wide. I'm not sure what we'd call that. Once it's established we could further advance the quality and subtlety of communication. We might even be able to convey sarcasm there. Nah, perhaps I'm being a bit too ambitious.
We've probably all read accounts of primitive cultures contacted by moderns. The primitives suffer in various ways because they aren't prepared to handle what moderns have. Aside from the microbes, they can't handle the technology sometimes. If you've read those accounts smugly, quit it. The West is not immune. The difference is that we introduced the new things to ourselves. The bad news is that these authors may be right on some level even though it sounds like they themselves are engaging in hysterics. The good news is that we will eventually learn to deal with new things. We'll probably fare much better than primitives because the new things aren't part of a narrative of conquest and exploitation. Well, not so much conquest anyway.
Hey, whatever happened to nuclear apocalypse--radiation/nuclear winter/etc.? Anyone remember that one back in the 80's? Man, I'm old.
The parachute pants and narrow ties didn't disappear. The Russians and the USA still have huge stockpiles, and it should still concern you. You should also be worried about their nuclear weapons.