Sorry. Didn't notice this being released over the sound of all my friends playing Dungeon Crawl.
(No, really, I haven't seen my wife in the past week. All I hear is rumblings from the basement about a naga grappler. And every time I see these two other guys it's just a constant stream of how much permadeath sucks and how they need to get back to their wizard or KoBe)
If you take a taxi everywhere, the taxi-service still pays an auto insurance bill, gas bill, and repair bill. Using YOUR payments. Those costs don't magically go away because you outsourced it.
If the price of gasoline skyrockets, taxi-services take it in the pants just as much, possibly more, than the concept of the personal car. With a personal electric car, I can let it charge for hours at a time as I do my thing. A taxi has to run constantly to make a buck.
Uh.... why? I think you failed to explain that bit. I mean, sure, it's another component. Possibly a lot of components. But they still sell cars with AM radios and manual transmissions. Also, the electronics parts and aren't that expensive when you compare it to the price of a car. The sheer amount of engineering that goes into it will need to be paid by someone, but really, it'll be a luxury item at first, and latter everyone will have it. Duh. If you think that progress is inherently more expensive, and so only the rich will be able to afford it, you're that's just displaying an amazingly pessimistic view of the future.
Come on Mr. McSadPants, put on a smile, the future is bright!
. It would also mean that someone other than you would ultimately determine where you could go
That only works if there's no manual override. Who would be crazy enough to buy a car without one? Especially if there are places you want to go but aren't on your map.
I could say the free market will solve it, but honestly this is just common sense. The only way these issues would be even remotely possible is if someone had god-like power to try and enforce a dystopian future.
It hits me sometimes to realize that we live in an age of heroes. The people that forged the way that we take for granted today are still alive and kicking. Physicists, chemists, artists, the bulk of their founders and heroes are in the dirt. Geeks? Most of ours are still around. We've witnessed, if not the birth of our field, at least it's explosion into the lime-light.
Don't get me wrong, we have a few ghosts. Ada, Turing, Babbage, Grace Hopper, and now Ritchie. But there have been monumental shifts within our lifetime and people who made those shifts possible. People that have moved metaphorical mountains.
And I'm probably going to outlive them. One day they're going to be gone from this world and it'll be up to us to forge the way and the keep those fires lit. That hits me like a mule kick to the chest.
The logistics only work out that way because America has shipped so much of their manufacturing to China already. They're becoming locked in. If they're using that as an excuse for why they have to continue to manufacture in China, then be prepared for a delay between the point that manufacturing in America makes financial sense, and the point where they actually bring manufacturing back to America. (If it ever happens).
That's good news. It's good to see a corporation spend a little more to ensure that it's workers are living good lives.
If only they had decided to spend a little more to ensure that local workers were living good lives.
Sadly, it'll face constant harassment by the Counter-Yelling Language Obscuring Nodes. Chat bots that yell obnoxiously at people using Frankenstein mash-ups of language colloquialisms. Of course this is slashdot, so it'll be hard to tell them apart from humans.
Pax Romana. Sure it eventually ended, but times were good for a century or two. Pax Americana. Post-WWII Japan. We conquered them, forbid them from having a military (which they slowly ignored), and they haven't had a war since. None that they really needed to be part of. 70 years and counting. Pax Britannica, at sea at least. They largely put a stop to piracy and made Europe more or less peaceful. The wars Britain fought had zero chance of threatening their homeland and where essentially for profit. Fuck you very much British East India Company. And that's the sort of threat that I'm arguing against. We don't really need to do this. A few assholes can go get even richer at the expense of others, but it's not needed for our security. I'm saying that we don't need to spend that much.
But there are periods of peace, and there are times of war. Right now is a peace-time. Or at least it could be if we stopped being dicks.
Do you care to give some modern examples of nations that failed to spend enough on their military?
If you think Iran would waste perfectly good uranium in a weapon, you're wrong. They wouldn't.
Ok sure, but the parent didn't specifically call out uranium weapons, he's concerned about nuclear weapons.
They would use that uranium to breed Plutonium-239 and use *that* in a weapon.
Doesn't that mean he's right?
I mean, I'm all for insightful posts about the technical uses for differing fissionable material... But you're talking out of both sides of your head. Either Iran is lying about not making nukes and the anti-nuclear activists have a point, or Iran isn't or can't make nukes and the anti-nuclear activists should get out of the way of medical needs.
Performance, weight, cost, and space.
OBOGS will generate a nigh infinite amount of O2 for you, which means you can keep flying longer. The device is smaller and lighter than canisters of oxygen, which makes the plane overall better. Also, working with liquid oxygen, LOX, apparently had an expensive logistical to it on base.
All thanks to the magic of zeolite. Yeah, we call it kitty-litter in the industry too.
Also, when the OBOGS stops working, the pilot can manually switch on emergency bottled air. Duh.
As a software engineer working on on-board oxygen generating systems (OBOGS) like the one in the F-22 that's having problems (made by a competitor, btw), I have to call bullshit. OBOGS isn't anything new. It's been around for decades, and is in a laundry list of planes.
That said, this particular OBOGS in the F-22 appears to have some issues. But the pilots aren't refusing to fly because of OBOGS in general.
So, where did this value come from? I mean, I highly doubt that it's genesising value. It's a free service. The product IS the users. That's marketing. Targeting advertising is what facebook's entire revenue stream is hinged on, right?
I know economics isn't a zero-sum game, but facebook isn't generating wealth here. Where did it come from?
Well yes, I think you've got a point when it comes to the effects of climate change. The end-of-the-world types are nuts, even when they're professors.
climate change seems a staggeringly massive system that we are only starting to understand
True. And this applies to almost all systems. Even seemingly basic things like how a block slides down ramp. Friction has some crazy nuances to it. But that's no reason to throw your hands in the air and declare that we know nothing about the system. There is always room for improvement. Always, because perfection is impossible.
there is every reason to try to be more efficient at energy production, distribution, and eliminating waste regardless of global warming
Well duh. Was this up for debate? Was someone arguing FOR waste? Did I miss that somewhere?
the histrionics of the AGW folks scare me badly.
Meh, there are crazy half-baked ideas whenever you have really big problems. Consider it brainstorming. Everyone laughed at the concept of a space elevator, but that's going to happen eventually. Cap&Trade, as a system of ecological indulgences, is perfectly fine, as long as we use those funds to counter the negative impact. You can chop down trees if you plant new ones.
What I see is yet another wave of mostly-white first-world conservatives who are ignoring the externalities of their businesses and don't want to be held accountable for fucking shit up for the rest of us. They're pushing an anti-intellectual agenda, buying corrupt science papers, and spinning whatever PR they can.
And you're certainly not the person to listen to on the matter. You've admitted that you no longer accept input and have officially put your head in the sand. Good luck with that.
Riiiight. An operation with a really bad decision that the president wasn't aware of. Upon becoming aware of what was happening, he promised that it would be investigated and the people responsible held accountable. So far a handful of people have been fired. Which, honestly, is about the right punishment. It's not like they pulled the trigger.
Now, yes, Obama is at the top of that org chart and he's ultimately responsible for this clusterfuck. But his responsibility was performed, he brought out the axe when people stepped out of line.
I'm really interested in hearing the solutions from people who think that modern civilization can survive these changes
Well, ok.
How do we feed people when we can't create the fertilizers necessary to support massive crops?
First off, it's possible to farm without fertilizers at all. It just increases yield. Wikipedia says that fertilizers are responsible for ~50% of our yield, which is, you know sizable. But you have to remember that we have PLENTY of food. Maybe I'm biased because I'm in Iowa, but we have so much food that we feed our food food just so it tastes a little better. Iowa grows mostly feed corn you know. People don't eat that. Cattle eats that. Primarily in feed lots. It's perfectly valid to graze cows until they're ready for slaughter, but it takes longer, and they don't get as fat. (or so delicious).
And when you think about the price of food, you don't think about it in terms of calories. It's usually a matter of how fancy it is. Whether you get it served to you in a restaurant, or if you get the off-brand surgur water. Nobody (in first world nations) really needs to starve. Calories are dirt cheap.
Also, there are alternatives to the inorganic fertilizers. Namely, organic fertilizers. Compost, manure, and the like. It's not quite as effective and a bit more expensive, but it's an alternative. And we've got this awesome thing called engineering that works really hard at efficiencies and cost.
Plastics, composite materials and rubber are all created from oil, how do we replace those modern materials that are pretty much made from long carbon chains without living like the damn Flintstones?
Metal, wood, glass, ceramics, paper/cardboard, and you know... actual rubber. As far as making stuff, there are plenty of alternatives. It's not living like the Flintstones, it's more like any age prior to the 19050's. But with computers. That's right this entire post is a build-up to announcing that Victorian steam-punk is the future.
There will always be some oil industry, it's not like it's going to be completely barred. It's just going to peter out. And we can melt down and recycle plastic you know.
Simply put, there are alternatives. Currently they're more expensive. It's going to take some engineering to help with that. And in the end, yeah, all this stuff might be more expensive. But it's not going to bring civilization to it's knees.
Yeah, healthcare lets you live longer. It doesn't help you make babies, humans are pretty well equiped for that already.
In fact, smart and wealthy people usually don't skimp on birth control.
Why would anyone who knows anything about evolution think that it stops with all the variability?
Because with sufficient outbreeding we keep the baseline genetic structure and the oddities that crop our are bred out. Crocodiles and nautiluses are more or less the same as they were millions of years ago. Maybe smaller. And turtles have had their design down pat forever. Older than even reptiles. Yeah, think about that.
Anyway, the effects of evolution are never going to be absent, but they can certainly be diminished. The rate of change can be slowed.
I think you vastly underestimate the "restraint" that is being happy, and BOY OH BOY does science and technology make life better. Content people don't decide to burn down all of their ancestral rivals from across the river because of what their great-grand-pappy said about your great-grand-pappy. That's just not it goes down. Turns out we're social creatures.
You're looking at it from two sides at war. And yeah, technological advances in offense have outpaced defense. It's a MAD world out there. But if you step back from that and take a broader view. Technology removes the REASONS that people would wage war. Life is better.
However, it is downright scary when all it would take is one idiot. Or ~50% of the populace being idiots. But that's leaders. As for the common folk, you don't have to monitor them, you just need to monitor the fissionable material, the super-virus labs. A perfect example of an open field where individuals could thwart the higher powers is the Internet. There have been viruses, botnets, and hackers a plenty, but the Internet lives on.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. Didn't notice this being released over the sound of all my friends playing Dungeon Crawl.
(No, really, I haven't seen my wife in the past week. All I hear is rumblings from the basement about a naga grappler. And every time I see these two other guys it's just a constant stream of how much permadeath sucks and how they need to get back to their wizard or KoBe)
Yeah, This.
Flipping on the autopilot doesn't instantly improve the pilot's skills.
If you take a taxi everywhere, the taxi-service still pays an auto insurance bill, gas bill, and repair bill. Using YOUR payments. Those costs don't magically go away because you outsourced it.
If the price of gasoline skyrockets, taxi-services take it in the pants just as much, possibly more, than the concept of the personal car. With a personal electric car, I can let it charge for hours at a time as I do my thing. A taxi has to run constantly to make a buck.
it will raise the price of cars
Uh.... why? I think you failed to explain that bit. I mean, sure, it's another component. Possibly a lot of components. But they still sell cars with AM radios and manual transmissions. Also, the electronics parts and aren't that expensive when you compare it to the price of a car. The sheer amount of engineering that goes into it will need to be paid by someone, but really, it'll be a luxury item at first, and latter everyone will have it. Duh. If you think that progress is inherently more expensive, and so only the rich will be able to afford it, you're that's just displaying an amazingly pessimistic view of the future.
Come on Mr. McSadPants, put on a smile, the future is bright!
. It would also mean that someone other than you would ultimately determine where you could go
That only works if there's no manual override. Who would be crazy enough to buy a car without one? Especially if there are places you want to go but aren't on your map.
I could say the free market will solve it, but honestly this is just common sense. The only way these issues would be even remotely possible is if someone had god-like power to try and enforce a dystopian future.
Well sometimes you just have to stop and smell the flowers.
It hits me sometimes to realize that we live in an age of heroes. The people that forged the way that we take for granted today are still alive and kicking. Physicists, chemists, artists, the bulk of their founders and heroes are in the dirt. Geeks? Most of ours are still around. We've witnessed, if not the birth of our field, at least it's explosion into the lime-light.
Don't get me wrong, we have a few ghosts. Ada, Turing, Babbage, Grace Hopper, and now Ritchie. But there have been monumental shifts within our lifetime and people who made those shifts possible. People that have moved metaphorical mountains.
And I'm probably going to outlive them. One day they're going to be gone from this world and it'll be up to us to forge the way and the keep those fires lit. That hits me like a mule kick to the chest.
Yeah, mortality sucks.
The logistics only work out that way because America has shipped so much of their manufacturing to China already. They're becoming locked in. If they're using that as an excuse for why they have to continue to manufacture in China, then be prepared for a delay between the point that manufacturing in America makes financial sense, and the point where they actually bring manufacturing back to America. (If it ever happens).
That's good news. It's good to see a corporation spend a little more to ensure that it's workers are living good lives.
If only they had decided to spend a little more to ensure that local workers were living good lives.
Well, he's a lumberjack. And he's ok.
FUND IT!
Sadly, it'll face constant harassment by the Counter-Yelling Language Obscuring Nodes. Chat bots that yell obnoxiously at people using Frankenstein mash-ups of language colloquialisms. Of course this is slashdot, so it'll be hard to tell them apart from humans.
Pax Romana. Sure it eventually ended, but times were good for a century or two.
Pax Americana. Post-WWII Japan. We conquered them, forbid them from having a military (which they slowly ignored), and they haven't had a war since. None that they really needed to be part of. 70 years and counting.
Pax Britannica, at sea at least. They largely put a stop to piracy and made Europe more or less peaceful. The wars Britain fought had zero chance of threatening their homeland and where essentially for profit. Fuck you very much British East India Company. And that's the sort of threat that I'm arguing against. We don't really need to do this. A few assholes can go get even richer at the expense of others, but it's not needed for our security. I'm saying that we don't need to spend that much.
But there are periods of peace, and there are times of war. Right now is a peace-time. Or at least it could be if we stopped being dicks.
Do you care to give some modern examples of nations that failed to spend enough on their military?
If you think Iran would waste perfectly good uranium in a weapon, you're wrong. They wouldn't.
Ok sure, but the parent didn't specifically call out uranium weapons, he's concerned about nuclear weapons.
They would use that uranium to breed Plutonium-239 and use *that* in a weapon.
Doesn't that mean he's right?
I mean, I'm all for insightful posts about the technical uses for differing fissionable material... But you're talking out of both sides of your head. Either Iran is lying about not making nukes and the anti-nuclear activists have a point, or Iran isn't or can't make nukes and the anti-nuclear activists should get out of the way of medical needs.
Corporations are not people, and they are not reasonable.
Care to give some modern day examples of nations that have failed to spend enough on their military?
Performance, weight, cost, and space.
OBOGS will generate a nigh infinite amount of O2 for you, which means you can keep flying longer. The device is smaller and lighter than canisters of oxygen, which makes the plane overall better. Also, working with liquid oxygen, LOX, apparently had an expensive logistical to it on base.
All thanks to the magic of zeolite. Yeah, we call it kitty-litter in the industry too.
Also, when the OBOGS stops working, the pilot can manually switch on emergency bottled air. Duh.
As a software engineer working on on-board oxygen generating systems (OBOGS) like the one in the F-22 that's having problems (made by a competitor, btw), I have to call bullshit. OBOGS isn't anything new. It's been around for decades, and is in a laundry list of planes.
That said, this particular OBOGS in the F-22 appears to have some issues. But the pilots aren't refusing to fly because of OBOGS in general.
OMG! Facebook is offering new services not encrusted into their website!? Where?
So, where did this value come from? I mean, I highly doubt that it's genesising value. It's a free service. The product IS the users. That's marketing. Targeting advertising is what facebook's entire revenue stream is hinged on, right?
I know economics isn't a zero-sum game, but facebook isn't generating wealth here. Where did it come from?
climate change seems a staggeringly massive system that we are only starting to understand
True. And this applies to almost all systems. Even seemingly basic things like how a block slides down ramp. Friction has some crazy nuances to it. But that's no reason to throw your hands in the air and declare that we know nothing about the system. There is always room for improvement. Always, because perfection is impossible.
there is every reason to try to be more efficient at energy production, distribution, and eliminating waste regardless of global warming
Well duh. Was this up for debate? Was someone arguing FOR waste? Did I miss that somewhere?
the histrionics of the AGW folks scare me badly.
Meh, there are crazy half-baked ideas whenever you have really big problems. Consider it brainstorming. Everyone laughed at the concept of a space elevator, but that's going to happen eventually. Cap&Trade, as a system of ecological indulgences, is perfectly fine, as long as we use those funds to counter the negative impact. You can chop down trees if you plant new ones.
What I see is yet another wave of mostly-white first-world conservatives who are ignoring the externalities of their businesses and don't want to be held accountable for fucking shit up for the rest of us. They're pushing an anti-intellectual agenda, buying corrupt science papers, and spinning whatever PR they can.
And you're certainly not the person to listen to on the matter. You've admitted that you no longer accept input and have officially put your head in the sand. Good luck with that.
Riiiight. An operation with a really bad decision that the president wasn't aware of. Upon becoming aware of what was happening, he promised that it would be investigated and the people responsible held accountable. So far a handful of people have been fired. Which, honestly, is about the right punishment. It's not like they pulled the trigger.
Now, yes, Obama is at the top of that org chart and he's ultimately responsible for this clusterfuck. But his responsibility was performed, he brought out the axe when people stepped out of line.
Do you blame Obama when your milk sours?
I'm really interested in hearing the solutions from people who think that modern civilization can survive these changes
Well, ok.
How do we feed people when we can't create the fertilizers necessary to support massive crops?
First off, it's possible to farm without fertilizers at all. It just increases yield. Wikipedia says that fertilizers are responsible for ~50% of our yield, which is, you know sizable. But you have to remember that we have PLENTY of food. Maybe I'm biased because I'm in Iowa, but we have so much food that we feed our food food just so it tastes a little better. Iowa grows mostly feed corn you know. People don't eat that. Cattle eats that. Primarily in feed lots. It's perfectly valid to graze cows until they're ready for slaughter, but it takes longer, and they don't get as fat. (or so delicious).
And when you think about the price of food, you don't think about it in terms of calories. It's usually a matter of how fancy it is. Whether you get it served to you in a restaurant, or if you get the off-brand surgur water. Nobody (in first world nations) really needs to starve. Calories are dirt cheap.
Also, there are alternatives to the inorganic fertilizers. Namely, organic fertilizers. Compost, manure, and the like. It's not quite as effective and a bit more expensive, but it's an alternative. And we've got this awesome thing called engineering that works really hard at efficiencies and cost.
Plastics, composite materials and rubber are all created from oil, how do we replace those modern materials that are pretty much made from long carbon chains without living like the damn Flintstones?
Metal, wood, glass, ceramics, paper/cardboard, and you know... actual rubber. As far as making stuff, there are plenty of alternatives. It's not living like the Flintstones, it's more like any age prior to the 19050's. But with computers. That's right this entire post is a build-up to announcing that Victorian steam-punk is the future.
There will always be some oil industry, it's not like it's going to be completely barred. It's just going to peter out. And we can melt down and recycle plastic you know.
Simply put, there are alternatives. Currently they're more expensive. It's going to take some engineering to help with that. And in the end, yeah, all this stuff might be more expensive. But it's not going to bring civilization to it's knees.
Evolving presupposes changing into a more advanced creature.
Nope.
...Although politicians are a pretty good arguing point for it.
And there is no such thing as "devolving".
Yeah, healthcare lets you live longer. It doesn't help you make babies, humans are pretty well equiped for that already. In fact, smart and wealthy people usually don't skimp on birth control.
Why would anyone who knows anything about evolution think that it stops with all the variability?
Because with sufficient outbreeding we keep the baseline genetic structure and the oddities that crop our are bred out. Crocodiles and nautiluses are more or less the same as they were millions of years ago. Maybe smaller. And turtles have had their design down pat forever. Older than even reptiles. Yeah, think about that.
Anyway, the effects of evolution are never going to be absent, but they can certainly be diminished. The rate of change can be slowed.
I think you vastly underestimate the "restraint" that is being happy, and BOY OH BOY does science and technology make life better. Content people don't decide to burn down all of their ancestral rivals from across the river because of what their great-grand-pappy said about your great-grand-pappy. That's just not it goes down. Turns out we're social creatures.
You're looking at it from two sides at war. And yeah, technological advances in offense have outpaced defense. It's a MAD world out there. But if you step back from that and take a broader view. Technology removes the REASONS that people would wage war. Life is better.
However, it is downright scary when all it would take is one idiot. Or ~50% of the populace being idiots. But that's leaders. As for the common folk, you don't have to monitor them, you just need to monitor the fissionable material, the super-virus labs. A perfect example of an open field where individuals could thwart the higher powers is the Internet. There have been viruses, botnets, and hackers a plenty, but the Internet lives on.