Unfortunately, this isn't new. Read actual history as opposed to what they teach in elementary/high school. Trumps voters are a resurgence of the Know-Nothings. It's claimed that this is due to an intentional conspiracy of powerful people, but the only real evidence that this is truer than usual is that he was elected...and that could be reasonably laid at the foot of continued economic problems, just as in 1930's Germany. Much of the rhetoric seems to have been swiped from the Know-nothings, but I suspect (due to reports that Trump idolizes Hitler) that it has a more recent vintage.
Expect things to get worse. Automation is increasing to the point that Chinese workers are being priced out of jobs. China is reported to be intending to compete on the international market by using increasing amounts of automation, aspiring to become the most roboticised country in the world. (Currently that's South Korea. The US is reportedly 7th...and prices of robots are dropping, and their capabilities are increasing.)
These tensions are a part of the lead-up to the Technological Singularity. May we survive it. I suspect that this is a major constituent of "The Great Filter". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The problem is, the alternatives appear worse.
Lyx is only better for a small minority of users. Sorry. I could learn to use it if I had to (There was a while when there wasn't any decent competition for my needs...which are pretty simple.) , but I could never get my wife to either use it or understand it, even if the only alternative was writing it out by hand and then coercing me into entering it. But the times when a word processor won't do what I want I need to use either a text editor or scribus. Lyx could handle the cases where I need to use scribus, but with a lot more effort, and scribus is easier to remember when I don't use it for a few months.
Google's datacenter is, indeed, likely far less "hackable", but it's also a much larger target. Not sure which is safer against data being copied. Local backups, though, can be a pain. But you could encrypt the data and store the encrypted data to the cloud. Then all you need to protect access to is your password. (And I'd want to maintain local backups anyway, though not necessarily as frequently as the automated backups to the cloud.
Now if you're large enough, that's still a good approach, but you could maintain your own cloud.
You shouldn't be comparing against OpenOffice, but rather against LibreOffice. They are two different products. That said, I don't use Calc for anything fancy, so I can't judge it's adequacy. But reports are that OpenOffice has nearly stopped development.
The interesting thing is, it also is fundamentally a right to steal business information, but businesses still sign up for it. Do they not read the EULAs or do they think they don't apply to business computers. A couple of decades ago I asked the company lawyer why they were willing to accept the EULA, and was told "Just let them try to enforce it in court.". He didn't seem to understand that they wouldn't depend on the court to enforce it, but only to defend them after they took actions based on it.
That's a quite unlikely interpretation of the history. That there was a population crash is evident, but I know of no plausible argument that cannibalism maintained the level of population. It *is* true that when levels of protein in the diet are very low, people tend to become cannibalistic. I've also heard it claimed that this is true if the only protein is fish, though I doubt this.
More likely there was a short period of extreme protein starvation where groups that developed a cultural set in favor of cannibalism (of other groups) were favored, and the cultural set continued even after the population had stabilized. People can have a hard time shaking a cultural pattern, even when it's no longer adaptive.
An air-gapped system only solves part of the problem Where's your fine electronic system when the power goes out? You say you've got battery blackup power...did you read about how that worked out for Note7 owners?
I'm not convinced that electronic locks on hotel room doors are a good idea. I know it's convenient, and avoids certain failure modes (customers making a copy of the key and then sneaking back later for some nefarious deed), and sometimes cheaper, but that doesn't immediately translate into better. Electronic systems have their own failure modes.
How about "There should be no external write access."?
I don't think I can read over a set of specs and decide that it will be secure under all circumstances unless it's trivially simple. This particular failure mode is only one case where electronic locks are a bad idea. What effect would a power outage have? A close lightning strike on the power lines? An EMP? Etc.
Traditional key and lock has a lot going for it, but I can see the attraction also of a system that's easily changed. But I think that could be done mechanically with a plastic key. (Sorry, those keys wouldn't be reusable, since they would be mechanically shaped.) And a variable combination lock is a well worked-out technology. With a ten position lock 4 or five digits would be plenty for this use. And have an easy way to leave the room in a hurry.
Closed networks solve SOME of the problems inherent in an electronic solution. They sure don't solve all of them. This sounds like a power outage would also have locked everyone in their rooms, e.g.
OTOH, I disagree that nuclear power is the safest. You need to measure the length of time there's a problem, not just the number of people directly killed. It's still a lot safer than coal, however.
Libertarian is a weird way to describe the Cato institute. I agree that they also aren't conservative, i.e. wanting to retain, i.e., conserve, parts of the current system. (Well, they are to an extent, but that isn't how they differ from the mean viewpoint.)
A later poster challenged that this particular order was modeled after one of Hitler's orders, so it's just the general tenor of the order that matches those of Hitler. This is only of a much lower degree of concern. It's still worse than ethically dubious, and probably won't be carefully fact-checked, which makes it worse.
This publication is on the level of a speech calling for increased vigilante activity against those who are defenseless. Calling it ethically dubious is over-praising it. But it isn't *quite* as bad as the ggp post indicated.
Yes. It is painting a virulently incorrect portrait of a small minority group mainly because they are powerless.
But that he's modeling his administrative orders on those of Hitler should, in and of itself, be worrying, even if there were nothing wrong about one of the particular orders.
No. Japan was never a serious threat to the US. Actually, neither was Germany, but it was a lot more reasonable. Germany *was* a serious threat to Britain, as Japan was to China, Australia, etc.
At that time the oceans were actually a pretty effective moat, but Germany could have taken over some South or Central American countries and used them as a staging ground. I don't think Japan could have done that. They *did* threaten Hawaii, but at the time that was a possession or territory, not a real part of the US.
Look, pop-science journalists usually don't understand what they're reporting on, so the frequently garble it. They also insert unwarranted hype. This doesn't say ANYTHING about the report they base their story on. (If you want details, look at their source.)
I think we're just using different values for "good insulation". The problem is you can't have both good insulation and decent air circulation, and at some point the air circulation becomes more important. But good insulation can make you leave your house because it's too hot, even in Antarctica. (So nobody builds with insulation THAT good.) But think of the insulating qualities of 6 inches of Styrofoam. Now move it a few steps towards being an aerogel, and use a foot of it. That would probably more than good enough (though it wouldn't have any strength). If nothing else you could use dewar flask style insulation.
The real problem is that you need to put in good insulation when you build (or remodel) the house, and it adds to the cost. Also you can't have much in the way of windows, not even double or triple pane windows. (Perhaps this isn't totally true. I can imagine a quad pane window with vacuum between the inner two panes and surfacing that would eliminate radiant transmission of heat, but not of light or UV. But I've never seen any real example.)
I've seen lots of "citations", but evidence would be desirable. (I don't really think, outside of the hyperbole, that it's necessarily incorrect, as we treat our schools like shit, but evidence would be useful.)
And the people who have been out of work for 6 months or a year, how are they tracked? What's that number doing?
FWIW, the unemployment numbers have been "fixed" so many times that I have no trust at all in them. One way the "part-time unemployed" numbers are reduced is by stopping counting them.
That said, just expect this to get worse. Robots are increasingly cheaper to use than humans for an increasing number of jobs. It's not a steady trend, but it rarely reverses.
It would be a greenhouse gas problem even without the methane leaks. The methane leaks just mean it's a lot worse than the estimate, and we don't even know how much worse.
Actually, wind driven ships with electronically controlled wind-masts aren't that unreasonable. It's been seriously considered several times over the last few decades. Perhaps with advanced technology it will become practical. They won't look like clipper ships, and they won't be fast, but you don't use ships for fast.
I wish that things were as optimistic as your forecast, but the truth is we are ALREADY committed to an extensive change of large, but unknown, magnitude. What we can do now is more along the lines of limiting the damage. Unfortunately, due to lags in the system the results of the current actions don't really show up for a decade or so. And the IPC reports are politically edited to be be too distressing. (AFAIKT they don't actually lie, they merely omit the more extreme projections when calculating their model averages.)
I believe that there actually are ways to use coal that don't significantly pollute. Unfortunately, they also raise the cost considerably. (One of them involves converting the stack gases into limestone. It is claimed that in certain rock formations this can be some simply by pumping them under an "impermeable" layer of rock, but that doesn't really convince me, as too many times there have been too many unreported leaks.)
While everything *does* have its costs, the land use required by solar and wind is not exclusive use of the land. Solar panels often sit on top of roofs, e.g., and wind towers are often located in pastures. Additionally Solar on rooftops doesn't require any extra cabling, and maintenance is generally trivial. The problem is it's not a base load.
An additional problem with ANY distributed solution is that the power grids are designed to transmit power in *one* direction. When the distributed source gets above around 20% of use this causes problems (given the current design).
P.S.: Wind often also doesn't require much additional cabling, as the power lines often go through exactly the same site as the wind flows. But it does require designing and implementing to allow local power input. (Ugh!)
Then there's the problem of line maintenance. The company that maintains the system generally earns it's money by selling electricity. This means that those who aren't purchasing from them aren't paying for maintenance...but somebody needs to.
So you're right, there are lots of details that need solving, and it's not simple, but you're misidentifying the real problems.
I think what he was saying depended on which speech you listened to.
OTOH, I don't believe that he ever said he would increase coal production, merely (things to be understood as) that he would increase the coal mining jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, this isn't new. Read actual history as opposed to what they teach in elementary/high school. Trumps voters are a resurgence of the Know-Nothings. It's claimed that this is due to an intentional conspiracy of powerful people, but the only real evidence that this is truer than usual is that he was elected...and that could be reasonably laid at the foot of continued economic problems, just as in 1930's Germany. Much of the rhetoric seems to have been swiped from the Know-nothings, but I suspect (due to reports that Trump idolizes Hitler) that it has a more recent vintage.
Expect things to get worse. Automation is increasing to the point that Chinese workers are being priced out of jobs. China is reported to be intending to compete on the international market by using increasing amounts of automation, aspiring to become the most roboticised country in the world. (Currently that's South Korea. The US is reportedly 7th...and prices of robots are dropping, and their capabilities are increasing.)
These tensions are a part of the lead-up to the Technological Singularity. May we survive it. I suspect that this is a major constituent of "The Great Filter". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The problem is, the alternatives appear worse.
That they didn't understand what was important was made blatantly obvious when they axed Thunderbird.
Lyx is only better for a small minority of users. Sorry. I could learn to use it if I had to (There was a while when there wasn't any decent competition for my needs...which are pretty simple.) , but I could never get my wife to either use it or understand it, even if the only alternative was writing it out by hand and then coercing me into entering it. But the times when a word processor won't do what I want I need to use either a text editor or scribus. Lyx could handle the cases where I need to use scribus, but with a lot more effort, and scribus is easier to remember when I don't use it for a few months.
Google's datacenter is, indeed, likely far less "hackable", but it's also a much larger target. Not sure which is safer against data being copied. Local backups, though, can be a pain. But you could encrypt the data and store the encrypted data to the cloud. Then all you need to protect access to is your password. (And I'd want to maintain local backups anyway, though not necessarily as frequently as the automated backups to the cloud.
Now if you're large enough, that's still a good approach, but you could maintain your own cloud.
You shouldn't be comparing against OpenOffice, but rather against LibreOffice. They are two different products. That said, I don't use Calc for anything fancy, so I can't judge it's adequacy. But reports are that OpenOffice has nearly stopped development.
The interesting thing is, it also is fundamentally a right to steal business information, but businesses still sign up for it. Do they not read the EULAs or do they think they don't apply to business computers. A couple of decades ago I asked the company lawyer why they were willing to accept the EULA, and was told "Just let them try to enforce it in court.". He didn't seem to understand that they wouldn't depend on the court to enforce it, but only to defend them after they took actions based on it.
That's a quite unlikely interpretation of the history. That there was a population crash is evident, but I know of no plausible argument that cannibalism maintained the level of population. It *is* true that when levels of protein in the diet are very low, people tend to become cannibalistic. I've also heard it claimed that this is true if the only protein is fish, though I doubt this.
More likely there was a short period of extreme protein starvation where groups that developed a cultural set in favor of cannibalism (of other groups) were favored, and the cultural set continued even after the population had stabilized. People can have a hard time shaking a cultural pattern, even when it's no longer adaptive.
An air-gapped system only solves part of the problem Where's your fine electronic system when the power goes out? You say you've got battery blackup power...did you read about how that worked out for Note7 owners?
I'm not convinced that electronic locks on hotel room doors are a good idea. I know it's convenient, and avoids certain failure modes (customers making a copy of the key and then sneaking back later for some nefarious deed), and sometimes cheaper, but that doesn't immediately translate into better. Electronic systems have their own failure modes.
How about "There should be no external write access."?
I don't think I can read over a set of specs and decide that it will be secure under all circumstances unless it's trivially simple. This particular failure mode is only one case where electronic locks are a bad idea. What effect would a power outage have? A close lightning strike on the power lines? An EMP? Etc.
Traditional key and lock has a lot going for it, but I can see the attraction also of a system that's easily changed. But I think that could be done mechanically with a plastic key. (Sorry, those keys wouldn't be reusable, since they would be mechanically shaped.) And a variable combination lock is a well worked-out technology. With a ten position lock 4 or five digits would be plenty for this use. And have an easy way to leave the room in a hurry.
Closed networks solve SOME of the problems inherent in an electronic solution. They sure don't solve all of them. This sounds like a power outage would also have locked everyone in their rooms, e.g.
Both. It's a feedback relationship.
OTOH, I disagree that nuclear power is the safest. You need to measure the length of time there's a problem, not just the number of people directly killed. It's still a lot safer than coal, however.
Libertarian is a weird way to describe the Cato institute. I agree that they also aren't conservative, i.e. wanting to retain, i.e., conserve, parts of the current system. (Well, they are to an extent, but that isn't how they differ from the mean viewpoint.)
A later poster challenged that this particular order was modeled after one of Hitler's orders, so it's just the general tenor of the order that matches those of Hitler. This is only of a much lower degree of concern. It's still worse than ethically dubious, and probably won't be carefully fact-checked, which makes it worse.
This publication is on the level of a speech calling for increased vigilante activity against those who are defenseless. Calling it ethically dubious is over-praising it. But it isn't *quite* as bad as the ggp post indicated.
Yes. It is painting a virulently incorrect portrait of a small minority group mainly because they are powerless.
But that he's modeling his administrative orders on those of Hitler should, in and of itself, be worrying, even if there were nothing wrong about one of the particular orders.
No. Japan was never a serious threat to the US. Actually, neither was Germany, but it was a lot more reasonable. Germany *was* a serious threat to Britain, as Japan was to China, Australia, etc.
At that time the oceans were actually a pretty effective moat, but Germany could have taken over some South or Central American countries and used them as a staging ground. I don't think Japan could have done that. They *did* threaten Hawaii, but at the time that was a possession or territory, not a real part of the US.
Look, pop-science journalists usually don't understand what they're reporting on, so the frequently garble it. They also insert unwarranted hype. This doesn't say ANYTHING about the report they base their story on. (If you want details, look at their source.)
I think we're just using different values for "good insulation". The problem is you can't have both good insulation and decent air circulation, and at some point the air circulation becomes more important. But good insulation can make you leave your house because it's too hot, even in Antarctica. (So nobody builds with insulation THAT good.) But think of the insulating qualities of 6 inches of Styrofoam. Now move it a few steps towards being an aerogel, and use a foot of it. That would probably more than good enough (though it wouldn't have any strength). If nothing else you could use dewar flask style insulation.
The real problem is that you need to put in good insulation when you build (or remodel) the house, and it adds to the cost. Also you can't have much in the way of windows, not even double or triple pane windows. (Perhaps this isn't totally true. I can imagine a quad pane window with vacuum between the inner two panes and surfacing that would eliminate radiant transmission of heat, but not of light or UV. But I've never seen any real example.)
I've seen lots of "citations", but evidence would be desirable. (I don't really think, outside of the hyperbole, that it's necessarily incorrect, as we treat our schools like shit, but evidence would be useful.)
And the people who have been out of work for 6 months or a year, how are they tracked? What's that number doing?
FWIW, the unemployment numbers have been "fixed" so many times that I have no trust at all in them. One way the "part-time unemployed" numbers are reduced is by stopping counting them.
That said, just expect this to get worse. Robots are increasingly cheaper to use than humans for an increasing number of jobs. It's not a steady trend, but it rarely reverses.
It would be a greenhouse gas problem even without the methane leaks. The methane leaks just mean it's a lot worse than the estimate, and we don't even know how much worse.
Actually, wind driven ships with electronically controlled wind-masts aren't that unreasonable. It's been seriously considered several times over the last few decades. Perhaps with advanced technology it will become practical. They won't look like clipper ships, and they won't be fast, but you don't use ships for fast.
I wish that things were as optimistic as your forecast, but the truth is we are ALREADY committed to an extensive change of large, but unknown, magnitude. What we can do now is more along the lines of limiting the damage. Unfortunately, due to lags in the system the results of the current actions don't really show up for a decade or so. And the IPC reports are politically edited to be be too distressing. (AFAIKT they don't actually lie, they merely omit the more extreme projections when calculating their model averages.)
I believe that there actually are ways to use coal that don't significantly pollute. Unfortunately, they also raise the cost considerably. (One of them involves converting the stack gases into limestone. It is claimed that in certain rock formations this can be some simply by pumping them under an "impermeable" layer of rock, but that doesn't really convince me, as too many times there have been too many unreported leaks.)
While everything *does* have its costs, the land use required by solar and wind is not exclusive use of the land. Solar panels often sit on top of roofs, e.g., and wind towers are often located in pastures. Additionally Solar on rooftops doesn't require any extra cabling, and maintenance is generally trivial. The problem is it's not a base load.
An additional problem with ANY distributed solution is that the power grids are designed to transmit power in *one* direction. When the distributed source gets above around 20% of use this causes problems (given the current design).
P.S.: Wind often also doesn't require much additional cabling, as the power lines often go through exactly the same site as the wind flows. But it does require designing and implementing to allow local power input. (Ugh!)
Then there's the problem of line maintenance. The company that maintains the system generally earns it's money by selling electricity. This means that those who aren't purchasing from them aren't paying for maintenance...but somebody needs to.
So you're right, there are lots of details that need solving, and it's not simple, but you're misidentifying the real problems.
I think what he was saying depended on which speech you listened to.
OTOH, I don't believe that he ever said he would increase coal production, merely (things to be understood as) that he would increase the coal mining jobs.