While I generally agree with the gist of your post, one thing is simply not true - rich people don't hold a significant portion of their wealth in a bank account, but buy real estate, stocks and bonds.
You have no idea what Shkreli did and why (hint - he didn't get any money from the drug price increase). You need to be more careful before jumping to conclusions.
You would have to prove intent, a state of his mind. He might have indeed intended to murder him, but if he didn't adress any threats to him or talk to other witnesses about it, it would be unprovable...
Depends on what elections you are talking about. When talking about seizing the Chancellor position through the Federal Elections, he was just as successful as Angela Merkel was in the last couple of elections.
You could say people who voted for him are victims, like most of the people who voted for Hitler.
I don't buy it.
You know what life was like in the Weimar Republic? The currency was worthless (the mark depreciated by a factor of 10^12 in five years), unemployment was by 25%, streets were not safe (the reason why the government residen in Weimar rather than Berlin) and when the government defaulted on war reparations due to the terrible state of the economy, the belgian and the french force moved into and occupied Ruhr, the most industrially advanced part of the country... The situation comparable to today's Venezuela.
In other words, the people there really *were* victims regardles of Hitler. He did not quite manufacture that situation just took advantage of it. Still, he got only 33% of the votes in the last free elections.
There is no way you can compare that situation to what's going on in the US now. There were starving people roaming the streets begging for food; here the lowest classes are a generation of morbidly obese... I can see how people overlooked the warmongering and hate speech when Hitler also promised order and food. On the other hand the americans are overlooking the use torture and atomic weapons for the promise of getting rid of the immigrants.
Incidentally, for those looking for someone to blame here, look no further than the DNC:
- and the GOP, who have been tearing themselves apart and letting the people down. And the God Mongers, who have always been part of the establishment; and the media, whose only interest has ever been to line their own pockets and wouldn't let facts get in the way. And so on.
Why not just blame people who voted for him? We talk about failure of the institutions, failure of the intellectual elites, failure of the politicians...
F*@! that! I'm calling this the failure of the masses!
And if you think it's snobbish to say so, you are wrong - I'm the one acknowledging their agency, that their decisions matter! Now they voted for a guy who wants to use the nuclear bomb. There's no excuses for that. That's not just 'locker room talk', that's not 'complicated economic policy', that's not 'showing the top 1% the finger' - that's just pure evil!
And the worst part is that this is happening all over the world. The Phillipinos voted for a loud mouthed buffoon as well. And the Polish have got a right wing isolationist president as well, ironically all the while the British isolationists claim they need to leave the EU because the Poles are getting all the gravy to the detriment of UK! All over europe extreme right is on the rise! There are elections comming in France and Germany next year and FN and AFD are hoping for a surprise as well!
The whole housing market bubble that had crashed the economy has been created this way - mortgage providers were incentivized to hand out mortgages to anyone (no income no assets) then funnel them to securities providers making them someone else's problem.
The problem is that most companies don't (can't) measure the impact of outsourcing. They don't have statistics on errors/kloc or time spent developing a functional point. Very often they don't even have good statistics for their help desk tickets - the operators quickly learn how to game them.
All this means that there is usually no good basis to measure the success or the failure of outsourcing. Well, other than business success - which is why I think it's fair for private companies to outsource - they'll suffer the consequences privately if outsourcing is bad. With state run institutions it will be the public to pay the bill.
Let's not go overboard with this. They became popular and rich by creating content people enjoyed. It was not groundbreaking and they did some shady competition take-downs, they are no Shkrelis. They did create something I myself find well produced and entertaining (at times). They just got too greedy.
Let's just hope the internet learned the real lesson here - be vigilant. Next time somebody tries to usurp a big portion of youtube to themselves, they might do it covertly without blabering about it to the whole world like these two dumb asses did.
Sure, that's a legit concern. I could say that you should not put the solar roofs over major highways, just over smaller roads, but I'm not here to advocate highway solar roofs because I don't believe in that idea either. I'm just saying that even that would be better than the original solar highways idea.
Just a correction - the 400-500W is the sustained peak value, not the average. An olympic winner track cyclist can get to 700 Watts for about 2 minutes (and be completely exhausted afterwards) - that's about the highest output any human can do. Averaged over the whole Tour de France the champion does maybe 150 Watts.
Cycling is the best payed endurance sport in the world. By far. A lot of money means more motivation for cheating and also more sophisticated means. The problem is that in contrast to other high doping sports (like Baseball) you need to be doped up during the race, not just during training and regeneration. This increases the likelyhood of discovery.
1) They'll scratch up: first off scratches can reduce light transmission but solar panels don't require good "optical quality", only transmission; the light is free to scatter on its way in. It's the same thing that applies to greenhouses - you may have noticed that many greenhouses use "fogged" plastic that you can't see through, yet still lets the vast majority of the light in (in that case, the scattering is actually seen as advantageous). Beyond that, in the case of roadways, I'd think it a given that they'd coat them with a an anti-scratch coat (aka harder than Mohs 7 / quartz sand, the hardest common natural material))
2) Traction: Traction glass exists - it's just surface texturing. They use it for semi-transparent flooring, it's nothing special.
A thin flat clean surface is the most efficient cover for the cells. Any deviation will decrease the efficiency. You are suggesting a rough thick 'milky' material with scratches on it. It will scatter a lot of the light away from the cells. Greenhouses are not a good counterexample as they are not built for *maximum* throughput, just for one that delivers a stable 90F atmosphere inside.
3) "Glass would break and then shred tires": It's easy to make glass bear purely compressive loads (solid objects on both sides of it) without fracture - that's what it's best at. It's shear and tensile loads that glass is bad at, but these aren't applicable when it's flat on a hard surface. And lamination, like in windshields, prevents dangerous shards from coming off in the event of a fracture. This is not an actual limitation.
But the glass will not bear purely compressive loads. There will be impact forces of heavy objects falling on it at high speed, cars driving over hard pointy objects lying on the road (stones) and ice expanding within the grooves between the tiles and underneath them (this is the greatest nemesis of the asphalt road).
3) Shadowing: Go to Google Maps satellite view and look up random roads. The overwhelming majority of road surface is completely unshadowed at any point in time. Even in-city roads are overwhelmingly unshadowed. Shadows are practically irrelevant in the countryside except in wooded areas.
Fair enough.
4) Costs: The costs of the materials for a road are a minority of the costs of the project, and continue to be a minority of the cost of the project under any realistic pricing for large-scale production of paving panels. A key driver for affordability, however, would be scale: this means large scale production (so road panels are similarly priced to rooftop panels plus the extra glass costs) and continuous paving systems. Anything smaller scale would have elevated costs.
Two problems - complexity and maintenance. A solar road is orders of magnitude more complex than a regular road - first it will drive up the cost because it's not as simple as pressing a malleable material onto a rocky surface. You will need to connect the panels and lead wiring, construct maintenance access points, test the functionality. Maintenance will be a major pain in the ass. And for all of this you will have to hire more expensive technicians than what you need for regular roads. Scale does not help too much either. Regular solar panels are already mass produced and are orders of magnitude more expensive than asphalt. Even if you cut the price in half somehow, it will remain orders of magnitude higher than regular road surface.
5) "They'd be better on roofs": the main problem with roof installations is there is no way to do mass-scale continuous install (the sort of possibility that paving gives). Each roof has to be handled on its own, with its own engineering issues, with its own project overhead, its own inverters, etc. The key issue to cost reduction these days is getting rid of the overhead; panel production costs themselves have gotten quite low and keep going
The box in front of the oxes. *Both* are explanations for observed phenomenons
No. Dark energy is just a "name" for the phenomenon, it does not add anything. Aether on the other hand added something on top of the observation - a proposed medium that we should look for empirically.
You observe that measured matter doesn't sum up measured gravity an propose dark matter/energy. By its very definition dark energy can NOT be observed, or else it wouldn't be dark
The fact that you write this shows me that you don't know anything about the problems you are discussing here. Dark energy and dark matter are two phenomena that as far as we know are not related. I was only talking about dark energy in my post for the sake of brevity. Generally in a lot of cases you don't "observe energy", you observe the source and the effect of a kind of energy. In the case of dark energy we just see the effect without any apparent cause.
As for now, either current theories are correct and there is some kind of dark matter/energy compatible with our current knowledge, or they aren't and what it's deem dark matter/energy ends up being something completely different. *EXACTLY* as what the case on newtonian dynamics and michelson-morley experiment before 1905.
The universe is expanding in an accelerating manner (and we call this effect "the dark energy") - this is a very thoroughly verified fact. It is NOT a theory. We don't have a theory for it. There is no way that the universe expanding might turn out not to be universe expanding. It's like talking about a "theory of ellipsoid shaped Earth" and how it might turn out to be wrong in the future...
Seriously, read up on the stuff you are trying to discuss here.
"I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something."
Or is it you?
No, it is you.
Dark Energy is an observed phenomenon for which we have no explanation. Aether was an explanation proposed for an observed phenomenon. In the first case, we observed that the universe is expanding and that the expansion is accelerating. We can even calculate ho much energy would be needed to cause such an acceleration. But because we don't know anything else about it, we call it "dark" energy. In the second case, we have observed that electromagnetic radiation behaves like waves (interference etc.). How is it possible that radiation has wave-like properties without an apparent medium was unknown - aether was a theoretical construct proposed as an explanation. Turned out to be incosistent with the data pretty much from the get-go.
Getting rid of IS should be the top priority - they are the most direct threat to the US and their allies out of these groups. Boots on the ground is not a good idea, but the good news is those are probably not necessary - you can undermine IS using good old intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement methods:
- shut down their online propaganda machines
- find and shut down their recruitment
- destroy their logistical centers
- disconnect their international support (money, weapons)
- stamp down on their oil business
With the above, you can weaken the enough that the other groups would annihilate them. Other than that it's hard to support any other groups in the fight against Assad - this would effectively be a proxy war with Russia and you know how those go...
So what happens if the backdoor leads to a different criminal offence - such as leaking of the medical records of millions of citizens? Will the company be allowed to disclose that the vulnerability has been introduced to comply with another law? Can the company be held liable for the consequences?
Slashdot Mirror
He's not complainign about subsidies. He's complaining that Toyota and GM are getting subsidies. That's very, very different.
No, he *is* complaining about subsidies - he would rather work in an environment without any subsidies!
For instance, he pleas with the US government to stop giving him subsidies
While I generally agree with the gist of your post, one thing is simply not true - rich people don't hold a significant portion of their wealth in a bank account, but buy real estate, stocks and bonds.
You have no idea what Shkreli did and why (hint - he didn't get any money from the drug price increase). You need to be more careful before jumping to conclusions.
You would have to prove intent, a state of his mind. He might have indeed intended to murder him, but if he didn't adress any threats to him or talk to other witnesses about it, it would be unprovable...
It seems pretty unlikely that less than 0.1% of the total installations would be used at any given point in time.
0.1% would still be 15 times the amout of licenses they had purchased.
Depends on what elections you are talking about. When talking about seizing the Chancellor position through the Federal Elections, he was just as successful as Angela Merkel was in the last couple of elections.
I did. A guy with those properties just got elected POTUS.
Well, a bigots seem to be extremely popular in the US now given the outcome of the elections, so thanks for the compliment, I guess...
You could say people who voted for him are victims, like most of the people who voted for Hitler.
I don't buy it.
You know what life was like in the Weimar Republic? The currency was worthless (the mark depreciated by a factor of 10^12 in five years), unemployment was by 25%, streets were not safe (the reason why the government residen in Weimar rather than Berlin) and when the government defaulted on war reparations due to the terrible state of the economy, the belgian and the french force moved into and occupied Ruhr, the most industrially advanced part of the country... The situation comparable to today's Venezuela.
In other words, the people there really *were* victims regardles of Hitler. He did not quite manufacture that situation just took advantage of it. Still, he got only 33% of the votes in the last free elections.
There is no way you can compare that situation to what's going on in the US now. There were starving people roaming the streets begging for food; here the lowest classes are a generation of morbidly obese... I can see how people overlooked the warmongering and hate speech when Hitler also promised order and food. On the other hand the americans are overlooking the use torture and atomic weapons for the promise of getting rid of the immigrants.
Sorry, I'm not sympathizing with that!
Incidentally, for those looking for someone to blame here, look no further than the DNC:
- and the GOP, who have been tearing themselves apart and letting the people down. And the God Mongers, who have always been part of the establishment; and the media, whose only interest has ever been to line their own pockets and wouldn't let facts get in the way. And so on.
Why not just blame people who voted for him? We talk about failure of the institutions, failure of the intellectual elites, failure of the politicians...
F*@! that! I'm calling this the failure of the masses!
And if you think it's snobbish to say so, you are wrong - I'm the one acknowledging their agency, that their decisions matter! Now they voted for a guy who wants to use the nuclear bomb. There's no excuses for that. That's not just 'locker room talk', that's not 'complicated economic policy', that's not 'showing the top 1% the finger' - that's just pure evil!
And the worst part is that this is happening all over the world. The Phillipinos voted for a loud mouthed buffoon as well. And the Polish have got a right wing isolationist president as well, ironically all the while the British isolationists claim they need to leave the EU because the Poles are getting all the gravy to the detriment of UK! All over europe extreme right is on the rise! There are elections comming in France and Germany next year and FN and AFD are hoping for a surprise as well!
W.T.F. people!
The whole housing market bubble that had crashed the economy has been created this way - mortgage providers were incentivized to hand out mortgages to anyone (no income no assets) then funnel them to securities providers making them someone else's problem.
Wow, that's exactly what has happened to me some 10 years ago, only I was the developer that had to deal with this mess!
The problem is that most companies don't (can't) measure the impact of outsourcing. They don't have statistics on errors/kloc or time spent developing a functional point. Very often they don't even have good statistics for their help desk tickets - the operators quickly learn how to game them.
All this means that there is usually no good basis to measure the success or the failure of outsourcing. Well, other than business success - which is why I think it's fair for private companies to outsource - they'll suffer the consequences privately if outsourcing is bad. With state run institutions it will be the public to pay the bill.
Except that it can turn and fight and run.
Let's not go overboard with this. They became popular and rich by creating content people enjoyed. It was not groundbreaking and they did some shady competition take-downs, they are no Shkrelis. They did create something I myself find well produced and entertaining (at times). They just got too greedy.
Let's just hope the internet learned the real lesson here - be vigilant. Next time somebody tries to usurp a big portion of youtube to themselves, they might do it covertly without blabering about it to the whole world like these two dumb asses did.
Sure, that's a legit concern. I could say that you should not put the solar roofs over major highways, just over smaller roads, but I'm not here to advocate highway solar roofs because I don't believe in that idea either. I'm just saying that even that would be better than the original solar highways idea.
Just a correction - the 400-500W is the sustained peak value, not the average. An olympic winner track cyclist can get to 700 Watts for about 2 minutes (and be completely exhausted afterwards) - that's about the highest output any human can do. Averaged over the whole Tour de France the champion does maybe 150 Watts.
Cycling is the best payed endurance sport in the world. By far. A lot of money means more motivation for cheating and also more sophisticated means. The problem is that in contrast to other high doping sports (like Baseball) you need to be doped up during the race, not just during training and regeneration. This increases the likelyhood of discovery.
1) They'll scratch up: first off scratches can reduce light transmission but solar panels don't require good "optical quality", only transmission; the light is free to scatter on its way in. It's the same thing that applies to greenhouses - you may have noticed that many greenhouses use "fogged" plastic that you can't see through, yet still lets the vast majority of the light in (in that case, the scattering is actually seen as advantageous). Beyond that, in the case of roadways, I'd think it a given that they'd coat them with a an anti-scratch coat (aka harder than Mohs 7 / quartz sand, the hardest common natural material))
2) Traction: Traction glass exists - it's just surface texturing. They use it for semi-transparent flooring, it's nothing special.
A thin flat clean surface is the most efficient cover for the cells. Any deviation will decrease the efficiency. You are suggesting a rough thick 'milky' material with scratches on it. It will scatter a lot of the light away from the cells. Greenhouses are not a good counterexample as they are not built for *maximum* throughput, just for one that delivers a stable 90F atmosphere inside.
3) "Glass would break and then shred tires": It's easy to make glass bear purely compressive loads (solid objects on both sides of it) without fracture - that's what it's best at. It's shear and tensile loads that glass is bad at, but these aren't applicable when it's flat on a hard surface. And lamination, like in windshields, prevents dangerous shards from coming off in the event of a fracture. This is not an actual limitation.
But the glass will not bear purely compressive loads. There will be impact forces of heavy objects falling on it at high speed, cars driving over hard pointy objects lying on the road (stones) and ice expanding within the grooves between the tiles and underneath them (this is the greatest nemesis of the asphalt road).
3) Shadowing: Go to Google Maps satellite view and look up random roads. The overwhelming majority of road surface is completely unshadowed at any point in time. Even in-city roads are overwhelmingly unshadowed. Shadows are practically irrelevant in the countryside except in wooded areas.
Fair enough.
4) Costs: The costs of the materials for a road are a minority of the costs of the project, and continue to be a minority of the cost of the project under any realistic pricing for large-scale production of paving panels. A key driver for affordability, however, would be scale: this means large scale production (so road panels are similarly priced to rooftop panels plus the extra glass costs) and continuous paving systems. Anything smaller scale would have elevated costs.
Two problems - complexity and maintenance. A solar road is orders of magnitude more complex than a regular road - first it will drive up the cost because it's not as simple as pressing a malleable material onto a rocky surface. You will need to connect the panels and lead wiring, construct maintenance access points, test the functionality. Maintenance will be a major pain in the ass. And for all of this you will have to hire more expensive technicians than what you need for regular roads. Scale does not help too much either. Regular solar panels are already mass produced and are orders of magnitude more expensive than asphalt. Even if you cut the price in half somehow, it will remain orders of magnitude higher than regular road surface.
5) "They'd be better on roofs": the main problem with roof installations is there is no way to do mass-scale continuous install (the sort of possibility that paving gives). Each roof has to be handled on its own, with its own engineering issues, with its own project overhead, its own inverters, etc. The key issue to cost reduction these days is getting rid of the overhead; panel production costs themselves have gotten quite low and keep going
The box in front of the oxes. *Both* are explanations for observed phenomenons
No. Dark energy is just a "name" for the phenomenon, it does not add anything. Aether on the other hand added something on top of the observation - a proposed medium that we should look for empirically.
You observe that measured matter doesn't sum up measured gravity an propose dark matter/energy. By its very definition dark energy can NOT be observed, or else it wouldn't be dark
The fact that you write this shows me that you don't know anything about the problems you are discussing here. Dark energy and dark matter are two phenomena that as far as we know are not related. I was only talking about dark energy in my post for the sake of brevity. Generally in a lot of cases you don't "observe energy", you observe the source and the effect of a kind of energy. In the case of dark energy we just see the effect without any apparent cause.
As for now, either current theories are correct and there is some kind of dark matter/energy compatible with our current knowledge, or they aren't and what it's deem dark matter/energy ends up being something completely different. *EXACTLY* as what the case on newtonian dynamics and michelson-morley experiment before 1905.
The universe is expanding in an accelerating manner (and we call this effect "the dark energy") - this is a very thoroughly verified fact. It is NOT a theory. We don't have a theory for it. There is no way that the universe expanding might turn out not to be universe expanding. It's like talking about a "theory of ellipsoid shaped Earth" and how it might turn out to be wrong in the future...
Seriously, read up on the stuff you are trying to discuss here.
"I believe you are confused about what it means to "observe" something."
Or is it you?
No, it is you.
Dark Energy is an observed phenomenon for which we have no explanation. Aether was an explanation proposed for an observed phenomenon. In the first case, we observed that the universe is expanding and that the expansion is accelerating. We can even calculate ho much energy would be needed to cause such an acceleration. But because we don't know anything else about it, we call it "dark" energy. In the second case, we have observed that electromagnetic radiation behaves like waves (interference etc.). How is it possible that radiation has wave-like properties without an apparent medium was unknown - aether was a theoretical construct proposed as an explanation. Turned out to be incosistent with the data pretty much from the get-go.
How you can compare those two is beyond me...
You gotta start somewhere. Intelligent design is a philosophy, so is creationism.
I believe those two are actually phobosophies
My 5 cents
Getting rid of IS should be the top priority - they are the most direct threat to the US and their allies out of these groups. Boots on the ground is not a good idea, but the good news is those are probably not necessary - you can undermine IS using good old intelligence, diplomatic and law enforcement methods:
- shut down their online propaganda machines
- find and shut down their recruitment
- destroy their logistical centers
- disconnect their international support (money, weapons)
- stamp down on their oil business
With the above, you can weaken the enough that the other groups would annihilate them. Other than that it's hard to support any other groups in the fight against Assad - this would effectively be a proxy war with Russia and you know how those go...
So what happens if the backdoor leads to a different criminal offence - such as leaking of the medical records of millions of citizens? Will the company be allowed to disclose that the vulnerability has been introduced to comply with another law? Can the company be held liable for the consequences?