The solution to the problems is really simple: build more housing. How do you get more housing built? Well, for starts not having some of the most restrictive zoning laws in the country, and having people fight back at any housing that is less than ideal would be a major aspect.
Another genius arrives to lecture us about supply-and-demand:
(1) San Francisco is building shit like crazy. Do you want me to show you pictures of the cranes? A recent initiative has voters telling developers, no they can't shove whatever they want right down on the coastline-- that was it, but people who don't live around here insist on lecturing us about Supply And Demand.
(2) San Francisco is surrounded with places with far more tight zoning restrictions, but they're allowed to keep those because of the god-given right of suburbanites everywhere. It's hard to pay people to live in Silicon Valley these days, so they're busing people in from places like San Francisco hence rents are up, and the solution to that difficulty is-- we need to fix San Francisco!
What I've always wished I could do was to turn off the "smarts" in the URL bar, so it just took anything I typed in there as a URL. I'm constantly being tripped up by that.
Yes, I was just wondering about that the other day. At some
point the location window became totally broken. It used to do
fairly minimal, predictable guessing like blah => "www.blah.com",
now it does completely random crap and keeps trying to forward me
to crap_no_one_uses.yahoo.com.
Maybe you should read WHY they are changing the APIs?
Something something security. Because if you let people who
design extensions do anything, then the extensions can do bad
things, and just telling people they shouldn't install bad
extensions isn't good enough for the 5% that already aren't
switching because they like they're extensions, so they're going
to do their best to alienate that 5% by breaking all of their
extensions.
And I'm not supposed to care that they're breaking all the
extensions (again) because chrome already has great
extensions, which sounds an awful lot like an ad for chrome, and
much less like a reason to stick with firefox.
I installed a version of Firefox 57 to play with, I don't see
offhand what I'm supposed to do for a substitue for "It's All
Text"-- I know there's supposed to be one, but addons.mozilla.org
doesn't direct me to it.
(The beginning of the end for mozilla was Faarborg, and his
tabs-on-top nonsense-- "First they hate it, then they love it":
he was willing to do something to users that they hated, and they
put him in charge?)
I particularly like trying to talk about this shit on the
reddit group for firefox, where the rah-rahs mod down anyone who
dares say a discouraging word: this does not make me feel better
about the Mozilla Community.
(Yes, I do use Pale Moon, thanks for asking. The question is
whether I'm going to switch from a Pale Moon/Firefox person to a
Pale Moon/Chrome person.)
I bet these workers are so incredibly glad nuclear power is such a clean source of energy.
Try to make some minor effort to know what you're talking about.
The issues with Hanford have nothing to do with civilian power generation.
Just quoting the summary: "...radioactive particles had been
swept out of a containment zone at the plutonium finishing plant
(PFP) demolition site."; Or you could try
Hanford Site:
"The Hanford Site is a mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex"
Even if this was an incident at a nuclear power plant,
the thing thing to do would be to treat it much the way we do
plane crashes-- find out why it happened, and think about what to do
to keep it from happening again.
The fact that we treat anti-nuclear activists differently
from, say, a crazy on a street corner screaming about how planes
just aren't SAFE, this is pretty remarkable.
By the way, I just thought I'd mention that I think Brad Plummer has been
doing a super-cool job of doing intelligent, technically astute
coverage of issues related to energy and the environment. Hiring
Brad Plummer is one of the best moves the New York Times has made
of late. It almost makes up for hiring Bret Stephens. Almost.
In general the New York Times has been doing a good job of
reporting on these issues, for example about a month ago there
was an excellent take-down of Mark Z. Jacobson based on a new
National Academy of Sciences report:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
(My prediction: once Mark Z. Jacobson is discredited it will
not change the public stance of the anti-nuke/pro-rennies crowd
one iota-- they'll just quietly stop quoting him, and move on to
some other cherry-picked "expert".)
Actually, I think nuclear in the United States could easily be
poised for a renaissance once our red friend state friends
realize that building nukes can be an excellent way of pissing off liberals.
...
without accepting the more simple and realistic explanation that
the energy source they believe to be cheap...
Look: we need carbon pricing built into the energy market. If
power sources don't have to pay for the damage they do, then
letting cost drive our decisionis is always going to go in the
wrong direction.
The policy recommendations of the last IPCC report recommended
working on nuclear power. You know how our conservative friends
look so delusional when they ignore the scientific consensus?
Now try a mirror.
Dude, you should read up on the history of nuclear power. Generally marketed as cheap (initially too cheap to meter),
Listen: there is one guy who made that "too cheap to
meter" prediction. Would you like me to pick a stupid thing said
by a solar advocate? Rotten-cherry picking is a fun game we can
all play.
You should take a look at the actual history of
nuclear power some time: it has a remarkable history of
generating a large quantity of really clean electrical energy.
If the rest of the world had done what France did back in the
mid-70s we might not be up against a global warming problem
now.
As for the cost of nuclear energy: (1) it's inflated by
needing to deal with incessant legal challenges from
"environmentalists", who like to play the "burn the house down
and arrest them for vagrancy game"; (2) the entire energy market
remains a complete mess because there's no mechanism to
compensate for externalities. If the fossil fuel sources
(methane included!) had to actually pay for the damage they did,
nuclear would not be looking so expensive.
The world is in dire need of clean energy sources and you guys
persist in taking shots at one of the cleanest.
It's not unfortunate that natural gas is cheap, since it has also displaced a ton of oil and coal power. That has netted us a major reduction in carbon emissions.
It has also resulted in lots of methane leakage, which is
actually a pretty bad problem. Newsflash: "fracking" is not green.
These days, the "environmentalists" have quietly stopped talking
about the need to fix the energy market with some form of carbon
tax, because they more-or-less understand that would make nuclear
power looking really good. They're stuck on two contradictory
ideas: "global warming bad" and "nuclear power evil".
There are different ways of constructing solar panels, my expectation is the answer to "what they're made of" will vary a lot (if I remember right the "rare-earth" business has to do with the magnets in generators for wind turbines, but I could have that wrong.
The thing with nuclear power is there's a lot of energy generated compared to the amount of stuff you need to mine. Compared to something like coal power, it needs next-to-no inputs and generates next-to-no waste.
How solar stacks up I'm not entirely sure-- haven't seen a solid
study on the subject in awhile-- but because the name of the game
with solar is covering large areas to harvest diffuse energy, my
prediction is you're going to find that the material inputs for
this "renewable" energy source are pretty big, particularly when
you get into keeping massive battery packs working...
Yes, I was going to propose a solution to this terrible problem, though this may seem strangely radical: if you think an App is bloated, don't use it. In fact, you could just dump your "smart" phone, and life would go on.
You know, I've heard about these strange advanced devices with big displays and really fast input devices known as "keyboards"...
An understanding of statistics, a real understanding, should be a prerequisite...
My understanding, gleaned from the p-value debate, and other things like it is, that the trouble is you can't expect there to be a magic formula that checks for Scientific Goodness.
I used to want to understand things like p-values better, now that I do, I've concluded there's no substitute for just eyeballing the scatter. If you're worried you're fooling yourself, you could do it double-blind: hire someone who doesn't even know what the data is they're looking at, and ask them whether a graph looks like there's a correlation between variables x and y.
It's pretty impressive for a pundit to come up with this idea. Of course, "let's rewrite everything in rust!" it's already such a cliche I've seen people moderated down for posting it, but you have to expect pundits to be a little slow on these things.
The response of the postgresql folks was something like "how about we finish porting it from lisp, first?"
The point behind the McCluhan slogan "The Medium is the Message" is the idea that different media have characteristics that dominate the experience of using them, and the idea that they're something like neutral conduits of information is simply wrong.
In the present context, I might make the point that there's something about all the swiping and zooming of a mobile phone interface that seems to have an addictive appeal to the chimp brains out there; and those of us who look at the web using devices that would seem to be more capable (large screens, actual keyboards) feel like the web designers have completely lost their minds because they've catering to mobile devices. E.g. every web page now has to lead off with a big fucking picture that fills the screen and forces you to scroll down just to find out what the page is about.
People who love to declare that they're not on FB annoy me as much as the ones without TVs. Or vegans.
Not only am I not on facebook, I don't carry a cellphone, I use a
bike as my main mode of transit, and haven't touched Microsoft or
Apple software in over 15 years.
I use up all smugness in the available vicinity and leave none
available for anyone else.
No kidding: actually the title of this post has zero to do
with the study that it links to (which was published in 2013, by
the way). The article has nothing to do with fabricating fake social
media posts as a distraction: it's entirely about backing out the
Chinese government's intentions by looking at what they care
about censoring. It concludes that criticism isn't a
problem, but rather any posting on events that might spur citizens
to take action (even posts that aren't critical of the government).
Virtually no packaging can be reused, not much biodegrades and only some can be recycled through an energy intensive process of melting it all down again.
So you prefer energy-intensive alternatives, like burning a logo with a laser?
Firefox and Thunderbird return to Debian with the release of "Stretch", and replace their debranded versions Iceweasel and Icedove, which were present in the archive for more than 10 years.
Ah, where are the flame wars of yesteryear?
I guess Mozilla has moved on to new frontiers in alienating the open source community.
Slashdot Mirror
Another genius arrives to lecture us about supply-and-demand:
(1) San Francisco is building shit like crazy. Do you want me to show you pictures of the cranes? A recent initiative has voters telling developers, no they can't shove whatever they want right down on the coastline-- that was it, but people who don't live around here insist on lecturing us about Supply And Demand.
(2) San Francisco is surrounded with places with far more tight zoning restrictions, but they're allowed to keep those because of the god-given right of suburbanites everywhere. It's hard to pay people to live in Silicon Valley these days, so they're busing people in from places like San Francisco hence rents are up, and the solution to that difficulty is-- we need to fix San Francisco!
Yes, I was just wondering about that the other day. At some point the location window became totally broken. It used to do fairly minimal, predictable guessing like blah => "www.blah.com", now it does completely random crap and keeps trying to forward me to crap_no_one_uses.yahoo.com.
The status bar *always* has something to display, it lets you know which broken advertising sites is causing your hard-drive to thrash this time.
Something something security. Because if you let people who design extensions do anything, then the extensions can do bad things, and just telling people they shouldn't install bad extensions isn't good enough for the 5% that already aren't switching because they like they're extensions, so they're going to do their best to alienate that 5% by breaking all of their extensions.
And I'm not supposed to care that they're breaking all the extensions (again) because chrome already has great extensions, which sounds an awful lot like an ad for chrome, and much less like a reason to stick with firefox.
I installed a version of Firefox 57 to play with, I don't see offhand what I'm supposed to do for a substitue for "It's All Text"-- I know there's supposed to be one, but addons.mozilla.org doesn't direct me to it.
(The beginning of the end for mozilla was Faarborg, and his tabs-on-top nonsense-- "First they hate it, then they love it": he was willing to do something to users that they hated, and they put him in charge?)
I particularly like trying to talk about this shit on the reddit group for firefox, where the rah-rahs mod down anyone who dares say a discouraging word: this does not make me feel better about the Mozilla Community.
(Yes, I do use Pale Moon, thanks for asking. The question is whether I'm going to switch from a Pale Moon/Firefox person to a Pale Moon/Chrome person.)
The "fixation" is that we use a lot of it.
If the rest of the planet had done what France did back in the 70s, we wouldn't have a global warming problem.
Try to make some minor effort to know what you're talking about. The issues with Hanford have nothing to do with civilian power generation. Just quoting the summary: "...radioactive particles had been swept out of a containment zone at the plutonium finishing plant (PFP) demolition site."; Or you could try Hanford Site: "The Hanford Site is a mostly decommissioned nuclear production complex"
Even if this was an incident at a nuclear power plant, the thing thing to do would be to treat it much the way we do plane crashes-- find out why it happened, and think about what to do to keep it from happening again.
The fact that we treat anti-nuclear activists differently from, say, a crazy on a street corner screaming about how planes just aren't SAFE, this is pretty remarkable.
By the way, I just thought I'd mention that I think Brad Plummer has been doing a super-cool job of doing intelligent, technically astute coverage of issues related to energy and the environment. Hiring Brad Plummer is one of the best moves the New York Times has made of late. It almost makes up for hiring Bret Stephens. Almost.
In general the New York Times has been doing a good job of reporting on these issues, for example about a month ago there was an excellent take-down of Mark Z. Jacobson based on a new National Academy of Sciences report: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
(My prediction: once Mark Z. Jacobson is discredited it will not change the public stance of the anti-nuke/pro-rennies crowd one iota-- they'll just quietly stop quoting him, and move on to some other cherry-picked "expert".)
Actually, I think nuclear in the United States could easily be poised for a renaissance once our red friend state friends realize that building nukes can be an excellent way of pissing off liberals.
Look: we need carbon pricing built into the energy market. If power sources don't have to pay for the damage they do, then letting cost drive our decisionis is always going to go in the wrong direction.
The policy recommendations of the last IPCC report recommended working on nuclear power. You know how our conservative friends look so delusional when they ignore the scientific consensus? Now try a mirror.
Listen: there is one guy who made that "too cheap to meter" prediction. Would you like me to pick a stupid thing said by a solar advocate? Rotten-cherry picking is a fun game we can all play.
You should take a look at the actual history of nuclear power some time: it has a remarkable history of generating a large quantity of really clean electrical energy. If the rest of the world had done what France did back in the mid-70s we might not be up against a global warming problem now.
As for the cost of nuclear energy: (1) it's inflated by needing to deal with incessant legal challenges from "environmentalists", who like to play the "burn the house down and arrest them for vagrancy game"; (2) the entire energy market remains a complete mess because there's no mechanism to compensate for externalities. If the fossil fuel sources (methane included!) had to actually pay for the damage they did, nuclear would not be looking so expensive.
The world is in dire need of clean energy sources and you guys persist in taking shots at one of the cleanest.
It has also resulted in lots of methane leakage, which is actually a pretty bad problem. Newsflash: "fracking" is not green.
These days, the "environmentalists" have quietly stopped talking about the need to fix the energy market with some form of carbon tax, because they more-or-less understand that would make nuclear power looking really good. They're stuck on two contradictory ideas: "global warming bad" and "nuclear power evil".
There are different ways of constructing solar panels, my expectation is the answer to "what they're made of" will vary a lot (if I remember right the "rare-earth" business has to do with the magnets in generators for wind turbines, but I could have that wrong.
The thing with nuclear power is there's a lot of energy generated compared to the amount of stuff you need to mine. Compared to something like coal power, it needs next-to-no inputs and generates next-to-no waste.
How solar stacks up I'm not entirely sure-- haven't seen a solid study on the subject in awhile-- but because the name of the game with solar is covering large areas to harvest diffuse energy, my prediction is you're going to find that the material inputs for this "renewable" energy source are pretty big, particularly when you get into keeping massive battery packs working...
Yes, I was going to propose a solution to this terrible problem, though this may seem strangely radical: if you think an App is bloated, don't use it. In fact, you could just dump your "smart" phone, and life would go on.
You know, I've heard about these strange advanced devices with big displays and really fast input devices known as "keyboards"...
Node.js apps are a dime a dozen these days, and they're all fat slugs of things. Sad.
No, no, you are not allowed to use a Trumpism except when engaging in heavy-handed irony.
My understanding, gleaned from the p-value debate, and other things like it is, that the trouble is you can't expect there to be a magic formula that checks for Scientific Goodness.
I used to want to understand things like p-values better, now that I do, I've concluded there's no substitute for just eyeballing the scatter. If you're worried you're fooling yourself, you could do it double-blind: hire someone who doesn't even know what the data is they're looking at, and ask them whether a graph looks like there's a correlation between variables x and y.
You ASJWs really need to calm down.
It's pretty impressive for a pundit to come up with this idea. Of course, "let's rewrite everything in rust!" it's already such a cliche I've seen people moderated down for posting it, but you have to expect pundits to be a little slow on these things.
The response of the postgresql folks was something like "how about we finish porting it from lisp, first?"
The ones that care about documentation.
print "Give it an $expletive rest.\n";
The point behind the McCluhan slogan "The Medium is the Message" is the idea that different media have characteristics that dominate the experience of using them, and the idea that they're something like neutral conduits of information is simply wrong.
In the present context, I might make the point that there's something about all the swiping and zooming of a mobile phone interface that seems to have an addictive appeal to the chimp brains out there; and those of us who look at the web using devices that would seem to be more capable (large screens, actual keyboards) feel like the web designers have completely lost their minds because they've catering to mobile devices. E.g. every web page now has to lead off with a big fucking picture that fills the screen and forces you to scroll down just to find out what the page is about.
Not only am I not on facebook, I don't carry a cellphone, I use a bike as my main mode of transit, and haven't touched Microsoft or Apple software in over 15 years.
I use up all smugness in the available vicinity and leave none available for anyone else.
No kidding: actually the title of this post has zero to do with the study that it links to (which was published in 2013, by the way). The article has nothing to do with fabricating fake social media posts as a distraction: it's entirely about backing out the Chinese government's intentions by looking at what they care about censoring. It concludes that criticism isn't a problem, but rather any posting on events that might spur citizens to take action (even posts that aren't critical of the government).
There's also a follow-up publication from Science in 2014: Reverse-engineering censorship in China: Randomized experimentation and participant observation.
It's almost as though slashdot was conducting an experiment on it's users: how random can the title be without people commenting noticing?
So you prefer energy-intensive alternatives, like burning a logo with a laser?
Nary a peep about this:
Ah, where are the flame wars of yesteryear?
I guess Mozilla has moved on to new frontiers in alienating the open source community.
Eh. It went from being the one language to being one of a bunch of languages, but the news of it's death has been greatly exaggerated.