And then they wonder why there's a rise in nationalists and so on.
The strength of populist/nationalist movements is basically proportionate to amount of truth and reality the political system is deliberately choosing to suppress or ignore.
If the political system acknowledged a handful of realities Trump would have been a one-line joke that fizzled last August. But because they continue to deny them, it props him up and lends credibility to the other incredulous things he says.
So no, I don't think it's quite correct to say "nobody has ever changed anyone's mind about anything ever". It happens all the time... in sales.
My critique of this statement would be that much of the time in "sales" you're dealing with people who are motivated to purchase a product, often one of your specific products, and all "sales" people are doing is either convincing them to buy a configuration of that model you already have on hand and which might deviate trivially from their up front choice or convincing them to buy (usually) a more expensive model. The minor switch or the upsell.
In that case you're not really changing anyone's mind. If Scott Adams in your example had bought a truck with a slightly different feature set, his mind wouldn't have been completely changed -- he wanted a truck, but he may have just bought one with a slightly different feature set.
I think where I have true fear and respect for "sales" is when they convince someone to buy something they didn't even want and they're happy about doing it (I'm specifically excluding outright fraud here, sham products or tricks).
Where I work we have this debate about our sales staff. We think they do far too much "order taking" -- agreeing to sell the customer pretty much exactly what they want, not convincing them to buy what we're actively looking to sell, which would do what they want in as good or better a way than what they say they want *and* would have people who have an excellent working knowledge of the product to help them implement it.
Instead, they sell more or less exactly what the customer says they want, which often leads to slapstick levels of problems when it turns out the customers really didn't know what they *needed* and what they bought doesn't actually satisfy their needs. I have this vision of the sales people telling them "you know, that's a genius idea and it's always a pleasure to work with a customer who has so well identified their needs" -- using the customer's ego and ignorance against them.
And no, I'm not talking about climate change, I'm talking about deliberately holding back technologies that can solve climate change, such as nuclear energy and GMO, which they oppose at any cost, even when there's overwhelming evidence in favor of these technologies.
Their solution to every problem is to have everyone cold and hungry, huddling in the dark.
And it does solve all the problems, except for the ones involving being cold and hungry and in the dark.
Some of it reminds me of a guy who designed an aircraft for the average man only discover there were no average men.
Describing automobile use in terms of average trips driven average miles on average days seems to fall into that same trap. You discover that there are a lot of non-average use cases.
I do agree with your renting an ICE car logic. My complaint would be about the random vehicle factor of car rental.
I once made a week long trip to North Dakota over the holidays. We were carrying three people, a dog, luggage and Christmas gifts and I wanted to rent a Chevy Suburban; based on where we were going and bringing, there was no other vehicle which would meet our needs.
The rental car company, despite me making a reservation a month in advance, would not guarantee a specific vehicle make and model, only a vehicle they considered "in the same class" which included several smaller SUVs which would not have met my needs. We only ended up with the Suburban because my wife knew a regional executive with the rental car company and the friend pulled some strings and we ended up with a brand-new Suburban with about 500 miles on the odometer.
If I'm going to have to rent a vehicle for a specific purpose, I don't want to end up with a random vehicle that mostly just satisfies their fleet logistics and profit margin. Then you end up with a shitty fleet model that degrades from the trip. This may be fine for small one-time use of hauling plywood from Home Depot 6 miles, but not for a 1200 mile trip.
Yeah, we generate 4000 TWh per year because we consume 4000 TWh per year.
600 GWh per year for EV charging still represents 600 GWh of new consumption which also needs generation.
A bigger question is whether the 4000 TWh of generation represents so little slack at peak output that the additional load can't be met without additional capacity. And then there's regional distribution -- if 450 GWh is concentrated in the Boston-DC corridor, that may be a bigger problem than if it was evenly distributed.
An acquaintance who is a manager once told me that he can manage anything because, well, managing is managing.
I think successful managers have an esoteric skill set that can transcend their own lack of technical or industry specific knowledge, but the greater the deviation from their specific knowledge the more dependent they are on experts in the organization to interpret technical knowledge (wither it's IT technical knowledge or just specialist knowledge).
However, I think there's a corollary there where managers who have the technical knowledge can manage poorly because they lack esoteric skills, and they're prone to getting caught up in details and not delegating because they believe their technical knowledge is greater and/or don't believe they can efficiently share their knowledge.
I do think that managers who claim they can manage anything are basically just making a claim to membership in an organizational aristocracy -- they can manage anything because they are managers and thus can manage. It becomes an appeal to class, not quantifiable skills.
In reality, most management positions in most organizations are filled by people with experience in their field of management. You would never see a baseball team hire a factory manager to run a baseball team, nor would a factory hire a baseball manager to build widgets.
Usually the "because I'm a manager" types wind up not "managing" but merely standing in as a totem of authority in groups that are largely self-managing or perform a well-defined task against an external workflow. These managers do well when they limit their role to maintaining basic order, mediating disputes and organizational overhead, but they are prone to fail when they attempt to manage too deep, outside their expertise, without respecting experts.
I'm imagining an alternate history where Eisenhower was never able to build the Interstate highway system because a bunch of powerful monopolies already had a bunch of bumpy dirt roads with exorbitant toll booths.
That would make for an interesting alternate history story.
Say, Theodore Roosevelt fails to break the Hill/Morgan trusts controlling railroads. The rail companies, fearing the newfangled automobile will threaten their railroad monopolies, use their financial clout to influence automobile and truck development, successfully limiting automotive developments associated with anything other than inner city travel. Further, they boost investment in commuter rail and urban transit rail systems to both reduce the interest in automobile ownership and funnel riders into their rail networks. Cities who gain their transit investments are pressured to pass laws restricting the use of automobiles, leaving them only viable for the very wealthy or government uses.
By the time of Eisenhower's presidency, his push for a national road network fails, as critics cite the highly integrated and widespread transit, commuter and national networks as being a war asset and enabling American industry to more easily meet the needs of the military and reduce the consumption of petroleum fuels.
By the 1960s, automobile ownership is still hampered by restrictions and an anemic road network. LA to NYC is 18 hours by train, but takes 5 days in an automobile due to the chaotic road system.
Americans who have been to Europe heap praise on their extensive system of highways and easy freedom of movement. Renegade capitalist Henry Ford II challenges the rail monopolies by convincing Kansas City to go along with his "Ford to the Home" plan, providing cheap and high speed automobiles and bypassing traditional restrictions on automobile use. Eager citizens in other cities, still slave to the rail networks eagerly await to hear whether their town will be the next "Ford City".
I don't know, but do Google Fiber's terms of service indicate whether they can snoop your data or even just your metadata? Some of this could easily be categorized as not even snooping, but operational data that any ISP would be able to collect in the course of running a network operation.
It wouldn't surprise me if the newly-realized "cost" problem isn't really a "cost" problem but a revenue/business intelligence shortfall. Google Fiber was dreamed up pre-Snowden and a renewed push to encrypt a lot more traffic.
There's still valuable metadata there even if you can't see the contents, but probably more if you can sniff the contents. Plus if you have a very high speed fiber connection it would make it less painful to run all your traffic through a VPN.
Not sure I'd make that specific trip again -- the Canadian side was awesome, but Northern Michigan was a snooze.
I'm kind of curious what the border patrol psychology is on motorcyclists.
On one hand, if you were a stereotypical "outlaw Harley" type I could see where you would be under great suspicion due to the association with outlaw bikers and drugs.
On the other hand, what kind of drug volume can you expect to hide on a motorcycle and where are you going to hide it? Besides personal use quantities, there's no decent place to hide anything. Most fuel tanks aren't even big enough to hide much and the rest of a bike is either easily searched (saddlebags and other compartments) or unlikely to yield much storage (frame tubing or other sealed assemblies). I suppose there's the flat out getting away with a couple of kilos of highly refined powder which could be superficially hidden from obvious sight, but still.
I rode my motorcycle around Lake Superior 20 years ago and didn't get any trouble crossing into Canada at the Grand Portage, MN crossing, other than some questions about whether I had any weapons.
But when I ran into the duty free pickup office, I saw some really unhappy looking college age kids.
They were in a parking lot with a Chevy Suburban completely opened up and what looked like an entire week's worth of camping equipment and supplies COMPLETELY spread out in the parking lot. They were sitting on the pavement about 20 feet from their car and stuff while Canadian border agents went through everything. I wasn't sure if the Canucks found something they didn't like, or just thought it looked like fun to detail their packing job.
Ironically, getting back into the US at Sault St. Marie involved more questioning about my US status than I would have been expected. The guy didn't care about my excess duty free smokes or liquor (although how much extra can you have on a motorcycle?), but boy he was sure interested to make sure I was an American.
At the end of the day, Twitter as a service is a firehose of short public messages.
But in order to be offended, you have to make some effort to be offended -- searching for specific hashtags and actually reading the messages or going so far as to follow people who either directly offend you or make sure you see offensive tweets you might be offended by.
Maybe Twitter users so worked up about being trolled or offended could just put less work into finding something to be offended by? Stop following vulgar boors like Donald Trump. Stop following ideological firebrands looking to stir up legions of offended people.
I've got news for you -- no amount of speech suppression is going to make unpopular ideas go away. You can't curate intelligence and sensibility into being among the unwashed masses, despite this being the goal of progressives since the turn of the last century.
I'm surprised that the New Zealand government would even *care* about a Fijian expat's rants about Frank "Bananarama" Bainimarama or his banana republic dictatorship. Hell, it was Australia that sent special forces in to quell the natives after the 2000 coup. What exactly is New Zealand interested in? It can't be lucrative trade given Fiji's tiny economy, and it's not like a tidal wave of refugees is going to cross 1,000 miles of open ocean.
Fiji is a typical colonial shit show, with non-indigenous Indians running business and agriculture off land owned by indigenous Fijian groups. George "not the country music star George Straight" Speight's attempted coup d'etat against the Chaudhry government demonstrated that Fiji was more interested in ethnic infighting and score-settling than anything else.
That's a great concise summary of the Trump phenomenon.
I do disagree that voting is futile... but it only works with an educated, engaged populace.
Ultimately that's one of the dark attractions of authoritarianism, it allows you to remove the uneducated and disengaged populace from the franchise. Then you can have elections that matter.
With a warrant and the ability (the keys), cloud vendors would probably have to decrypt it.
The rubber hits the road when it comes to "without a warrant" -- that tests how flexible their morality is. Are they willing to turn down only the requests where a legitimate court order wasn't present?
It seems obvious to me that if you want encrypted data, you probably want to encrypt it yourself. The cloud is just storage, you can create your own trust model for encrypted data that doesn't include them.
That being said, there may be practical advantages to cloud-provider managed encryption where the risk:reward makes provider encryption worthwhile. What would be nice would be an encryption system with an access log of some kind to verify key usage. This would allow for a canary in the coal mine warning that your data had been decrypted by someone else. It's imperfect, but it's better than just silent loss of access control.
Were the airlines really in that tough a shape for that long of a period of time?
If they have only recently returned to profitability and actually experienced extended times of economic uncertainty, how do you explain Boeing outperforming the S&P 500 and gaining 8000% in value since 1978? Overseas sales explain some of it, but not all of it and an extended depression in American airline business you would associate with some decline in Boeing's business, but it's been continuous growth.
And airports and crowds? Airports I've flown through for 20 years are only bigger and busier than they ever were. I don't remember a time when I thought the airport was too big or empty, either, it's been steady if not increasingly busier and more crowded. Airports all seem to expand, not contract.
Overall, the aviation sector seems to have done nothing but grown. So how is it exactly that the airlines were truly losing money? I don't doubt they reported low stock prices or reported lower profits on paper, I just don't know that the industry truly shrank and lost money.
I also remember schemes where airlines went through leveraged buy-outs and the new owners sold off air fleets and then leased them back to the airlines and had them make huge payments to consulting companies owned by the new buyers. I think the airlines got bled dry and then had to fight acquire less parasitic management focused on the business rather than just sucking the capital out of them.
I think the darker problem is that even if we cut timelines significantly, energy abundance isn't the only thing we're running out of. We're also exhausting the political stability necessary for developing new energy technologies and deploying them.
I'd worry that we're possibly on the cusp of a new flavor of poverty, energy poverty where the ability to marshal and consume significant energy for any purpose.
I thought the deal with lightning accessories, including the 30 pin-lightning adapter was the magic Apple chip inside the adapter containing some cryptographic signature that let Apple validate it was "Made for iPhone" and allowed them to collect their licensing fee.
When the lightning port was added to iPhones, it was MONTHS before there were many third party accessories, even charging-only accessories. Maybe the Chinese figured out how to make charging-only cables or how to fake the chip to make the phone accept something not made by Apple.
But I would expect an audio accessory that depends on more than a low voltage DC handshake to activate charging and likely has to have more intelligence will be harder to fake and harder to avoid sending 25% to Apple for each one.
The world coal association claims "There are an estimated 892 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide. This means that there is enough coal to last us around 110 years at current rates of production".
Notice that important stipulation at the bottom there? at current rates of production? Do you know what happens to that when you add a modest year on year increase in consumption? Please do explain how we can continue to sustain growing energy needs using fossil fuels.
Then we are truly fucked if even coal will run out in the lifetime of people currently living.
Let's say some group had a press release *today* announcing they had managed sustained fusion reactions with net positive energies.
You're talking something like 2 years to outfit a lab to verify the results, another maybe 10 years to get a useful demonstration-size plant designed, sited and built, and probably another 10-15 after it goes online to build an actual utility-scale operational plant running. And that'd be one plant. Maybe if it all went 100% perfect, you'd get people bold enough to build multiple plants simultaneously after a couple of years of operation of the first utility scale plant.
But honestly, you're looking at a 30 year lead time before any kind of significant energy generation from fusion takes place, and that's if somebody comes up with all the answers *tomorrow*. Assuming they don't, we could theoretically run out of coal before we could get another long-term baseload power generation source built.
If time timeline for coal exhaustion is under 100 years, I don't think there's any way we could get by on solar and wind alone in that timeframe.
The problem for Facebook is that if they make the ads look just like any other newsfeed posting, people will just scroll past them like they do 98% of feed content.
A big part of the reason so many ads are so annoying is they have to be to get people to notice them and process the content. Indistinguishable content won't please advertisers.
I've seen people with huge feeds (the kind that follow every clickbait page imaginable and/or have hundreds of friends) scroll Facebook so fast you wonder why they bother. I think there are a lot of people like this, basically programmed to scroll at a relentless pace. How can advertisers be satisfied with this kind of user just scrolling past their ads?
If Facebook is forced to do something with ads to make them stand out, then it will probably be enough of an identifier to block the ads.
I just don't see how Facebook wins this one without devaluing ads enough to influence revenue.
Maybe I'm crazy, but weren't the great public speakers of the past capable of speaking extemporaneously? Perhaps they may have been written at some point or they may have had notes, but by and large they spoke freely and weren't just reciting line for line a speech as if it was a script.
And I think the best were capable of speaking truly extemporaneously with no notes or written prep? I suppose these were a different kind of speaking that wasn't as dependent on the relentless recitation of "facts" that could be be tallied and checked, or the need to present new "talking points" or hammer away at a polling-derived message.
That's over 5 trillion a year, a third of the US GDP, which is about 15 trillion. Global GDP is 75 trillion. That makes US GDP about 20% of global GDP, which would mean that the US is providing 1 trillion a year in subsidies, or 7% of GDP in fossil fuel subsidies.
I wonder how that figure is calculated and what counts as "subsidy".
It's the scale of abuse that would be the issue. It's not that someone, somewhere would be cheating, it's that the amount of abuse would just be unsustainable.
Pretty much everyone normal has had a phase in their life where they had unexpected expenses combined with an income shortfall and not enough assets to raise any cash (human or financial assets).
I think in many cases, especially when you're young, and if its a short-term issue we all manage to squeak by, somehow without becoming homeless or destitute. But I know I can remember a couple of occasions where it was obvious to me that if one more thing happened, I would be fucked.
The problem with bailing everyone out is that it's impossible to prevent abuse and for some people getting bailed out becomes a habit. And if you never had to worry about being bailed out, why you'd generally be less risk averse.
That being said, I'm sure there are huge payoffs to bailing people out in terms of reduced ancillary costs. But why not just cut through the moralizing and call it basic income and be done with it? It's going to be a political issue eventually, might as well deal with it on the front end rather than the back end.
I have to agree - I dislike Trump on both a personal and ideological level, but so much of what is said about him is bafflingly untrue. And that just makes his supporters more rabid, because now they have evidence that what he's saying - the media is a collusion, they're covering things up, he's an outsider who will change things - is true. And the more that, in their heads, he's right about one thing, the more likely they think he is to be right about other things.
Part of me thinks I should really dislike him on so many levels, but I've just seen so many instances where the media just wildly misquotes or misinterprets what he says in the most negative way possible that it gets hard to trust why I don't like him, without feeling like I'm falling for a propaganda technique.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is pretty much spot on.
And then they wonder why there's a rise in nationalists and so on.
The strength of populist/nationalist movements is basically proportionate to amount of truth and reality the political system is deliberately choosing to suppress or ignore.
If the political system acknowledged a handful of realities Trump would have been a one-line joke that fizzled last August. But because they continue to deny them, it props him up and lends credibility to the other incredulous things he says.
So no, I don't think it's quite correct to say "nobody has ever changed anyone's mind about anything ever". It happens all the time... in sales.
My critique of this statement would be that much of the time in "sales" you're dealing with people who are motivated to purchase a product, often one of your specific products, and all "sales" people are doing is either convincing them to buy a configuration of that model you already have on hand and which might deviate trivially from their up front choice or convincing them to buy (usually) a more expensive model. The minor switch or the upsell.
In that case you're not really changing anyone's mind. If Scott Adams in your example had bought a truck with a slightly different feature set, his mind wouldn't have been completely changed -- he wanted a truck, but he may have just bought one with a slightly different feature set.
I think where I have true fear and respect for "sales" is when they convince someone to buy something they didn't even want and they're happy about doing it (I'm specifically excluding outright fraud here, sham products or tricks).
Where I work we have this debate about our sales staff. We think they do far too much "order taking" -- agreeing to sell the customer pretty much exactly what they want, not convincing them to buy what we're actively looking to sell, which would do what they want in as good or better a way than what they say they want *and* would have people who have an excellent working knowledge of the product to help them implement it.
Instead, they sell more or less exactly what the customer says they want, which often leads to slapstick levels of problems when it turns out the customers really didn't know what they *needed* and what they bought doesn't actually satisfy their needs. I have this vision of the sales people telling them "you know, that's a genius idea and it's always a pleasure to work with a customer who has so well identified their needs" -- using the customer's ego and ignorance against them.
And no, I'm not talking about climate change, I'm talking about deliberately holding back technologies that can solve climate change, such as nuclear energy and GMO, which they oppose at any cost, even when there's overwhelming evidence in favor of these technologies.
Their solution to every problem is to have everyone cold and hungry, huddling in the dark.
And it does solve all the problems, except for the ones involving being cold and hungry and in the dark.
Some of it reminds me of a guy who designed an aircraft for the average man only discover there were no average men.
Describing automobile use in terms of average trips driven average miles on average days seems to fall into that same trap. You discover that there are a lot of non-average use cases.
I do agree with your renting an ICE car logic. My complaint would be about the random vehicle factor of car rental.
I once made a week long trip to North Dakota over the holidays. We were carrying three people, a dog, luggage and Christmas gifts and I wanted to rent a Chevy Suburban; based on where we were going and bringing, there was no other vehicle which would meet our needs.
The rental car company, despite me making a reservation a month in advance, would not guarantee a specific vehicle make and model, only a vehicle they considered "in the same class" which included several smaller SUVs which would not have met my needs. We only ended up with the Suburban because my wife knew a regional executive with the rental car company and the friend pulled some strings and we ended up with a brand-new Suburban with about 500 miles on the odometer.
If I'm going to have to rent a vehicle for a specific purpose, I don't want to end up with a random vehicle that mostly just satisfies their fleet logistics and profit margin. Then you end up with a shitty fleet model that degrades from the trip. This may be fine for small one-time use of hauling plywood from Home Depot 6 miles, but not for a 1200 mile trip.
Yeah, we generate 4000 TWh per year because we consume 4000 TWh per year.
600 GWh per year for EV charging still represents 600 GWh of new consumption which also needs generation.
A bigger question is whether the 4000 TWh of generation represents so little slack at peak output that the additional load can't be met without additional capacity. And then there's regional distribution -- if 450 GWh is concentrated in the Boston-DC corridor, that may be a bigger problem than if it was evenly distributed.
An acquaintance who is a manager once told me that he can manage anything because, well, managing is managing.
I think successful managers have an esoteric skill set that can transcend their own lack of technical or industry specific knowledge, but the greater the deviation from their specific knowledge the more dependent they are on experts in the organization to interpret technical knowledge (wither it's IT technical knowledge or just specialist knowledge).
However, I think there's a corollary there where managers who have the technical knowledge can manage poorly because they lack esoteric skills, and they're prone to getting caught up in details and not delegating because they believe their technical knowledge is greater and/or don't believe they can efficiently share their knowledge.
I do think that managers who claim they can manage anything are basically just making a claim to membership in an organizational aristocracy -- they can manage anything because they are managers and thus can manage. It becomes an appeal to class, not quantifiable skills.
In reality, most management positions in most organizations are filled by people with experience in their field of management. You would never see a baseball team hire a factory manager to run a baseball team, nor would a factory hire a baseball manager to build widgets.
Usually the "because I'm a manager" types wind up not "managing" but merely standing in as a totem of authority in groups that are largely self-managing or perform a well-defined task against an external workflow. These managers do well when they limit their role to maintaining basic order, mediating disputes and organizational overhead, but they are prone to fail when they attempt to manage too deep, outside their expertise, without respecting experts.
Fuck, who has the bladder to go 7 hours non-stop?
The way I drink coffee or diet Coke when I drive, I have to piss every couple of hours.
I'm imagining an alternate history where Eisenhower was never able to build the Interstate highway system because a bunch of powerful monopolies already had a bunch of bumpy dirt roads with exorbitant toll booths.
That would make for an interesting alternate history story.
Say, Theodore Roosevelt fails to break the Hill/Morgan trusts controlling railroads. The rail companies, fearing the newfangled automobile will threaten their railroad monopolies, use their financial clout to influence automobile and truck development, successfully limiting automotive developments associated with anything other than inner city travel. Further, they boost investment in commuter rail and urban transit rail systems to both reduce the interest in automobile ownership and funnel riders into their rail networks. Cities who gain their transit investments are pressured to pass laws restricting the use of automobiles, leaving them only viable for the very wealthy or government uses.
By the time of Eisenhower's presidency, his push for a national road network fails, as critics cite the highly integrated and widespread transit, commuter and national networks as being a war asset and enabling American industry to more easily meet the needs of the military and reduce the consumption of petroleum fuels.
By the 1960s, automobile ownership is still hampered by restrictions and an anemic road network. LA to NYC is 18 hours by train, but takes 5 days in an automobile due to the chaotic road system.
Americans who have been to Europe heap praise on their extensive system of highways and easy freedom of movement. Renegade capitalist Henry Ford II challenges the rail monopolies by convincing Kansas City to go along with his "Ford to the Home" plan, providing cheap and high speed automobiles and bypassing traditional restrictions on automobile use. Eager citizens in other cities, still slave to the rail networks eagerly await to hear whether their town will be the next "Ford City".
I don't know, but do Google Fiber's terms of service indicate whether they can snoop your data or even just your metadata? Some of this could easily be categorized as not even snooping, but operational data that any ISP would be able to collect in the course of running a network operation.
It wouldn't surprise me if the newly-realized "cost" problem isn't really a "cost" problem but a revenue/business intelligence shortfall. Google Fiber was dreamed up pre-Snowden and a renewed push to encrypt a lot more traffic.
There's still valuable metadata there even if you can't see the contents, but probably more if you can sniff the contents. Plus if you have a very high speed fiber connection it would make it less painful to run all your traffic through a VPN.
Not sure I'd make that specific trip again -- the Canadian side was awesome, but Northern Michigan was a snooze.
I'm kind of curious what the border patrol psychology is on motorcyclists.
On one hand, if you were a stereotypical "outlaw Harley" type I could see where you would be under great suspicion due to the association with outlaw bikers and drugs.
On the other hand, what kind of drug volume can you expect to hide on a motorcycle and where are you going to hide it? Besides personal use quantities, there's no decent place to hide anything. Most fuel tanks aren't even big enough to hide much and the rest of a bike is either easily searched (saddlebags and other compartments) or unlikely to yield much storage (frame tubing or other sealed assemblies). I suppose there's the flat out getting away with a couple of kilos of highly refined powder which could be superficially hidden from obvious sight, but still.
I rode my motorcycle around Lake Superior 20 years ago and didn't get any trouble crossing into Canada at the Grand Portage, MN crossing, other than some questions about whether I had any weapons.
But when I ran into the duty free pickup office, I saw some really unhappy looking college age kids.
They were in a parking lot with a Chevy Suburban completely opened up and what looked like an entire week's worth of camping equipment and supplies COMPLETELY spread out in the parking lot. They were sitting on the pavement about 20 feet from their car and stuff while Canadian border agents went through everything. I wasn't sure if the Canucks found something they didn't like, or just thought it looked like fun to detail their packing job.
Ironically, getting back into the US at Sault St. Marie involved more questioning about my US status than I would have been expected. The guy didn't care about my excess duty free smokes or liquor (although how much extra can you have on a motorcycle?), but boy he was sure interested to make sure I was an American.
At the end of the day, Twitter as a service is a firehose of short public messages.
But in order to be offended, you have to make some effort to be offended -- searching for specific hashtags and actually reading the messages or going so far as to follow people who either directly offend you or make sure you see offensive tweets you might be offended by.
Maybe Twitter users so worked up about being trolled or offended could just put less work into finding something to be offended by? Stop following vulgar boors like Donald Trump. Stop following ideological firebrands looking to stir up legions of offended people.
I've got news for you -- no amount of speech suppression is going to make unpopular ideas go away. You can't curate intelligence and sensibility into being among the unwashed masses, despite this being the goal of progressives since the turn of the last century.
I'm surprised that the New Zealand government would even *care* about a Fijian expat's rants about Frank "Bananarama" Bainimarama or his banana republic dictatorship. Hell, it was Australia that sent special forces in to quell the natives after the 2000 coup. What exactly is New Zealand interested in? It can't be lucrative trade given Fiji's tiny economy, and it's not like a tidal wave of refugees is going to cross 1,000 miles of open ocean.
Fiji is a typical colonial shit show, with non-indigenous Indians running business and agriculture off land owned by indigenous Fijian groups. George "not the country music star George Straight" Speight's attempted coup d'etat against the Chaudhry government demonstrated that Fiji was more interested in ethnic infighting and score-settling than anything else.
That's a great concise summary of the Trump phenomenon.
I do disagree that voting is futile... but it only works with an educated, engaged populace.
Ultimately that's one of the dark attractions of authoritarianism, it allows you to remove the uneducated and disengaged populace from the franchise. Then you can have elections that matter.
With a warrant and the ability (the keys), cloud vendors would probably have to decrypt it.
The rubber hits the road when it comes to "without a warrant" -- that tests how flexible their morality is. Are they willing to turn down only the requests where a legitimate court order wasn't present?
It seems obvious to me that if you want encrypted data, you probably want to encrypt it yourself. The cloud is just storage, you can create your own trust model for encrypted data that doesn't include them.
That being said, there may be practical advantages to cloud-provider managed encryption where the risk:reward makes provider encryption worthwhile. What would be nice would be an encryption system with an access log of some kind to verify key usage. This would allow for a canary in the coal mine warning that your data had been decrypted by someone else. It's imperfect, but it's better than just silent loss of access control.
Were the airlines really in that tough a shape for that long of a period of time?
If they have only recently returned to profitability and actually experienced extended times of economic uncertainty, how do you explain Boeing outperforming the S&P 500 and gaining 8000% in value since 1978? Overseas sales explain some of it, but not all of it and an extended depression in American airline business you would associate with some decline in Boeing's business, but it's been continuous growth.
And airports and crowds? Airports I've flown through for 20 years are only bigger and busier than they ever were. I don't remember a time when I thought the airport was too big or empty, either, it's been steady if not increasingly busier and more crowded. Airports all seem to expand, not contract.
Overall, the aviation sector seems to have done nothing but grown. So how is it exactly that the airlines were truly losing money? I don't doubt they reported low stock prices or reported lower profits on paper, I just don't know that the industry truly shrank and lost money.
I also remember schemes where airlines went through leveraged buy-outs and the new owners sold off air fleets and then leased them back to the airlines and had them make huge payments to consulting companies owned by the new buyers. I think the airlines got bled dry and then had to fight acquire less parasitic management focused on the business rather than just sucking the capital out of them.
I think the darker problem is that even if we cut timelines significantly, energy abundance isn't the only thing we're running out of. We're also exhausting the political stability necessary for developing new energy technologies and deploying them.
I'd worry that we're possibly on the cusp of a new flavor of poverty, energy poverty where the ability to marshal and consume significant energy for any purpose.
I thought the deal with lightning accessories, including the 30 pin-lightning adapter was the magic Apple chip inside the adapter containing some cryptographic signature that let Apple validate it was "Made for iPhone" and allowed them to collect their licensing fee.
When the lightning port was added to iPhones, it was MONTHS before there were many third party accessories, even charging-only accessories. Maybe the Chinese figured out how to make charging-only cables or how to fake the chip to make the phone accept something not made by Apple.
But I would expect an audio accessory that depends on more than a low voltage DC handshake to activate charging and likely has to have more intelligence will be harder to fake and harder to avoid sending 25% to Apple for each one.
The world coal association claims "There are an estimated 892 billion tonnes of proven coal reserves worldwide. This means that there is enough coal to last us around 110 years at current rates of production".
Notice that important stipulation at the bottom there? at current rates of production? Do you know what happens to that when you add a modest year on year increase in consumption? Please do explain how we can continue to sustain growing energy needs using fossil fuels.
Then we are truly fucked if even coal will run out in the lifetime of people currently living.
Let's say some group had a press release *today* announcing they had managed sustained fusion reactions with net positive energies.
You're talking something like 2 years to outfit a lab to verify the results, another maybe 10 years to get a useful demonstration-size plant designed, sited and built, and probably another 10-15 after it goes online to build an actual utility-scale operational plant running. And that'd be one plant. Maybe if it all went 100% perfect, you'd get people bold enough to build multiple plants simultaneously after a couple of years of operation of the first utility scale plant.
But honestly, you're looking at a 30 year lead time before any kind of significant energy generation from fusion takes place, and that's if somebody comes up with all the answers *tomorrow*. Assuming they don't, we could theoretically run out of coal before we could get another long-term baseload power generation source built.
If time timeline for coal exhaustion is under 100 years, I don't think there's any way we could get by on solar and wind alone in that timeframe.
The problem for Facebook is that if they make the ads look just like any other newsfeed posting, people will just scroll past them like they do 98% of feed content.
A big part of the reason so many ads are so annoying is they have to be to get people to notice them and process the content. Indistinguishable content won't please advertisers.
I've seen people with huge feeds (the kind that follow every clickbait page imaginable and/or have hundreds of friends) scroll Facebook so fast you wonder why they bother. I think there are a lot of people like this, basically programmed to scroll at a relentless pace. How can advertisers be satisfied with this kind of user just scrolling past their ads?
If Facebook is forced to do something with ads to make them stand out, then it will probably be enough of an identifier to block the ads.
I just don't see how Facebook wins this one without devaluing ads enough to influence revenue.
Maybe I'm crazy, but weren't the great public speakers of the past capable of speaking extemporaneously? Perhaps they may have been written at some point or they may have had notes, but by and large they spoke freely and weren't just reciting line for line a speech as if it was a script.
And I think the best were capable of speaking truly extemporaneously with no notes or written prep? I suppose these were a different kind of speaking that wasn't as dependent on the relentless recitation of "facts" that could be be tallied and checked, or the need to present new "talking points" or hammer away at a polling-derived message.
That's over 5 trillion a year, a third of the US GDP, which is about 15 trillion. Global GDP is 75 trillion. That makes US GDP about 20% of global GDP, which would mean that the US is providing 1 trillion a year in subsidies, or 7% of GDP in fossil fuel subsidies.
I wonder how that figure is calculated and what counts as "subsidy".
It's the scale of abuse that would be the issue. It's not that someone, somewhere would be cheating, it's that the amount of abuse would just be unsustainable.
Pretty much everyone normal has had a phase in their life where they had unexpected expenses combined with an income shortfall and not enough assets to raise any cash (human or financial assets).
I think in many cases, especially when you're young, and if its a short-term issue we all manage to squeak by, somehow without becoming homeless or destitute. But I know I can remember a couple of occasions where it was obvious to me that if one more thing happened, I would be fucked.
The problem with bailing everyone out is that it's impossible to prevent abuse and for some people getting bailed out becomes a habit. And if you never had to worry about being bailed out, why you'd generally be less risk averse.
That being said, I'm sure there are huge payoffs to bailing people out in terms of reduced ancillary costs. But why not just cut through the moralizing and call it basic income and be done with it? It's going to be a political issue eventually, might as well deal with it on the front end rather than the back end.
I have to agree - I dislike Trump on both a personal and ideological level, but so much of what is said about him is bafflingly untrue. And that just makes his supporters more rabid, because now they have evidence that what he's saying - the media is a collusion, they're covering things up, he's an outsider who will change things - is true. And the more that, in their heads, he's right about one thing, the more likely they think he is to be right about other things.
Part of me thinks I should really dislike him on so many levels, but I've just seen so many instances where the media just wildly misquotes or misinterprets what he says in the most negative way possible that it gets hard to trust why I don't like him, without feeling like I'm falling for a propaganda technique.