Is that one of the ones that's going bankrupt? I wouldn't say there is evidence that he can plan a policy quite well, though it's possible, but I would say there is evidence that he can occasionally delegate that job to people who can do it.
No. See my other reply. I thought the post needed dividing into two threads.
But do note that most people aren't paying college tuition. Medical care is a very different consideration, however...but hard to figure. In the early 1960's I was a military dependent, so medical care was free. That got cut in a quite unfair way, however. It didn't affect me as by that time I was an adult, but people who had devoted their lives on the promise of a particular benefit (among others) found the "contract" renegotiated unilaterally after they had paid their commitment. Sort of like a more extreme form of the recent retroactive cancellation of signup bonuses. But this makes it difficult for me to compare current medical costs with historic values. (For that matter, if the product delivered were the same as was delivered in 1960, my wife would have died over a decade ago. [She needed heart surgery that would once have been too dangerous.]) So I have a hard time comparing medical bills. Of course, I'm also aware that there is a huge amount of money being extracted by the insurance companies, so calling that inflation is a bit weird...I feel more comfortable calling it corruption. There *is* a real increase in cost, but the product isn't the same. And theft isn't the same as inflation.
IOW, inflation can't be used to describe things that are necessary, and whose price is controlled by and effective monopoly. So I prefer to consider things like books and bread.
Now I haven't studied educational prices recently, but a cursory consideration calls me to believe that the prices are controlled by governmental policy. That's effectively monopoly control, so it can't really be said to reflect inflation. Governmental policy used to be to decrease the price of education, but over the last few decades it seems to have been to limit access and raise prices. The price of education seems to be independent of other commodities, so I really doubt that it represents inflation. Oligarchy control, yes, but that's a different consideration.
A better argument for your point would be housing costs, which have risen sharply since about 1985, at least in this area. That *has* risen enough to match the price of gasoline...but as other non-controlled prices haven't risen similarly, I don't think that even that is actually inflation...I suspect it of more reflecting tax policy.
If I consider the price of a loaf of bread, in the early 1960's it was around $1.00... a bit less, but not a whole bunch. If I buy a loaf of bread now it's about $5.00. (I don't, but bread that's white and mainly air, and I didn't then. These days the bread is likely to be actual whole grain bread with lots of seeds. Then it was often Roman Meal...but also often Rainbow...which is (was?) white bread, but not mainly air.. So that's an increase of a factor of 5. 5 * 0.35 is about $1.75, which is a lot less than $3.00, so gas prices have gone up significantly more than inflation of bread prices.
(See my other response for why this isn't a good argument, but briefly, you need a much larger range of items being compared.)
You've only mentioned a couple of things wrong with the CPI. Which is why I tend to try to tie it to actual things I buy. The problem is that different parts go up (and down) by different amounts. This is a problem which the actual CPI has also, so a part of the inaccuracy is the difficulty (impossibility) in figuring the inflation in matching what every individual experiences. So there *is* no possible valid metric, only metrics that are valid for particular people. But an overriding problem is that it is periodically adjusted for political reasons to make those in office look good, and occasionally to make those not currently in office look bad. In this way it's like the money supply, or the employment numbers.
Well, I live in the same area I did when gas was $0.35/gallon, and now it's well over $3.00/gallon...though it does vary a lot. There was a period when it was around $5.00/gallon a few years ago, and it frequently varies by over $1.00/gallon within a year.
Well, also fracking gets mainly gas, not oil. That doesn't need much (any?) cracking, refining, etc.
And the price at the pump isn't what it was in the 1960-80's. I don't know about most of the period as I only drove for a short time. It certainly isn't what it was in the early 1960's...$0.35/gallon at the pump. Of course, there's also been a lot of inflation, so if you factor that in the price rise hasn't been very much. (A gallon of gas used to cost the same amount as an Ace double novel, but what do you compare that to these days? An e-book download? A trade paperback?)
P.S.: I do not trust the government values reported for inflation. They are calculated in a way to make inflation look low. But I wasn't renting an apartment in the early 1960's so I can't really compare based on that.
As they haven't yet built the pilot plant yet, I doubt they could give a decent answer to that. If you got one it would be from the marketing department.
Geothermal and solar are possibilities, but a better guess is that they get the heat by burning some of their output. Geothermal would be too expensive, and solar would require a stable source of sunlight. OK for a desert, but not for someplace that often cloudy. 300 C isn't intensely hot, but maintaining it can be a problem if you depend on sunlight, and the shit doesn't stop coming. (And though it does slow down at times, those aren't necessarily the times when the sun is out of the sky, or when it's really cloudy.) While I believe the problems with using solar for this could be overcome, I doubt that it would be cheap.
You've left out the factor of cost. As the price increases, fields that were too poor to consider as sources become worth considering. If we were still paying the prices of 20 years ago, most modern fields wouldn't pay for themselves. We HAVE run out of oil recoverable at the prices of 20 years ago. And if the price keeps increasing without limit, we'll find that we have lots of other sources of oil. You can turn coal into oil with enough work.
What this process does is get rid of waste while simultaneously providing a small but continuous stream of oil at low cost. Perhaps it will work, but many things fail at the pilot plant stage. Still, if it's got that far I give it a better than 50% chance of panning out.
Actually, I suspect that heavy metals would be easy to extract from "your biocrude". At least after it had been cracked into volatiles. This would mean that the residue would be rich in heavy metals, quite possibly rich enough to compete with ores. The problem with heavy metals in sludge is that the grade of the ore is too poor, but if you take, say, 75% of the non-heavy metals away you've improved the ore remarkably. (And even if the ore is still unprofitably poor, at least you've decreased the volume you need to deal with by a LOT.)
Does the phrase "October Surprise" mean anything to you?
For that matter, the FBI policy is not to comment upon investigations in progress unless compelled to by Congress...even court orders are often stonewalled...and sometimes Congress is lied to.
I am told that the legal agreement at the time of the vote WRT separation is binding, and requires the concurrency of the Scottish Parliament before withdrawal from the EU. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm certainly no British lawyer, but I doubt that you are either.
Whatever, it seems likely that this is at least likely to need to be directly addressed in court. A court might well decide that the argument was not valid, but a simple statement that it isn't doesn't really convince me.
Yes, but I don't think *this* court decision addressed the point that BREXIT is/may be illegal to impose on Scotland without the concurrence of the Scottish Parliament. I don't think that Northern Ireland has a similar legal protection in place, though I could be wrong, but they also seem to have a strong sentiment in favor of remain. And if Northern Ireland were to leave the EU it would seem to require re-imposing a strong border between Ireland and Northern Ireland to prevent smuggling, which would likely re-ignite the troubles.
They HAVE peeked at the results. Lots of them. They don't look good for any of the major choices, but BREXIT is worse than most. It was a very narrow victory at the polls achieved by lots of lying, and excluding the voters who would be most directly affected. And it's quite clear that many of the voters were just saying "fuck you" to the ruling party rather than actually requesting that particular change. How many is a rather large question, but not answerable from the data I have. What *IS* clear is that the people are already unhappy with their government.
I don't think Trump is loyal to anyone or anything but Trump. There is, however, some inconclusive evidence that Putin has some blackmail info (of some nature) on him. That's all pretty murky, and I wouldn't put much credence on it, but it would explain some statements he's made.
That said, I wouldn't support him anyway. And now I can't even vote Green.
If the argument is made about what is enforced, I agree with you completely. If the argument is about what is legal, I disagree.
I do understand that different people will have different opinions, and that society depends upon a certain consensus of behavior, but while I may obey laws that I consider illegal, I don't respect them. And others are less obedient.
A decent society depends on decent laws. When the enforced laws are so blatantly illegal it inspires widespread disrespect for the laws, and obedience only based on fear, which means only when you think you might get caught. This is extremely bad for society. It means that the ruling group has lost the trust in their rightness, and this tends to inspire widespread turbulence and general disrespect for even the necessary laws. (And people are such that some laws are necessary, and we live more comfortably in a *loosely* hierarchical social structure.)
The US Constitution is an excellent framework around which to build a society. It's not perfect, and needs some repair before it can work well in a strong-federal/weak-state environment, particularly with rapid transportation and communication. It needs to be a bit easier to amend, and there needs to be a built-in mechanism to allow for both emergency action and recovery from the emergency. This "reinterpreting it so we can easily deal with the current situation" is not an acceptable mechanism, partially because the interpretation is not only temporary. I'm also uncertain that even the basic design is suited for as large a country as the US has become. The higher levels of government are now too distant from the people they are supposed to represent. It would be better for the larger states to be subdivided, and the the federal government to only be able to regulate the states. Perhaps the state governments should also appoint the senators, as was the earlier practice.
The above, though, is all in the "not going to happen" scenario. What *is* going to happen isn't clear, but will probably involve increasingly automated interfaces between the people and the government. This could be either good or bad, depending on design and implementation.
It is my opinion that the current copyright law is in violation of the US Constitution. The Supreme Court disagrees with me, but that doesn't change my mind, because their reasoning was faulty. Therefore the current copyright law is invalid. My obedience to it is mainly because it doesn't interfere with what I choose to do, and occasionally because of fear. I and if a work is in print and has existed for less than 20 years I feel that the FORMER copyright law (prior to the Walt Disney extensions) should be respected. Not the current one.
Binary? Yes, sort of. But also not. A magnetic field will suppress superconduction, but the further the superconductor is below (i.e., away from) the critical temperature the stronger a field is required to suppress it. There are other similar effects with other properties...one of which is pressure (perhaps depending on the material.)
P.S.: I'm no physicist either, nor a materials engineer. But I read a lot. To explain superconducting magnets would require a real expert rather than me.
That's not proof that he had an account there, or even much in the way of evidence. It is peculiar, and the pattern is quite strange, but that's a different matter. I don't feel there's sufficient evidence to draw any real conclusions...certainly not in the summary. Just enough for speculations.
It's not "an indictment of modern society", it's and indictment of human nature and the way it responds to easy communication. When communication is difficult, and costs a whole nickel (6 cents airmail) then cons like this are relatively few. When it's cheap they rise. When long distance calls cost a bit, I never got spam calls, now I get 5 or 6 per day, even though we've never bought anything from any of them.
There are bad things about modern society, and about past society, and they aren't all the same. But this isn't one of them.
As a blanket statement, *I* think it's "ignorant to think older people have less of a grasp on computers and technology", but then I've been a programmer to one degree or another since 1963.
That said, I have less grasp of modern web usage than most, preferring static HTML, and my C++ is antique...I haven't used it since around 2000. And I sometimes find modern GUIs opaque. (Recently a 16 year old showed me how to adjust the tone produced by an electronic metronome.) So there are definite *areas* where I have less grasp of technology. But the blanket statement is either bigoted or thoughtless.
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Is that one of the ones that's going bankrupt? I wouldn't say there is evidence that he can plan a policy quite well, though it's possible, but I would say there is evidence that he can occasionally delegate that job to people who can do it.
No. See my other reply. I thought the post needed dividing into two threads.
But do note that most people aren't paying college tuition. Medical care is a very different consideration, however...but hard to figure. In the early 1960's I was a military dependent, so medical care was free. That got cut in a quite unfair way, however. It didn't affect me as by that time I was an adult, but people who had devoted their lives on the promise of a particular benefit (among others) found the "contract" renegotiated unilaterally after they had paid their commitment. Sort of like a more extreme form of the recent retroactive cancellation of signup bonuses. But this makes it difficult for me to compare current medical costs with historic values. (For that matter, if the product delivered were the same as was delivered in 1960, my wife would have died over a decade ago. [She needed heart surgery that would once have been too dangerous.]) So I have a hard time comparing medical bills. Of course, I'm also aware that there is a huge amount of money being extracted by the insurance companies, so calling that inflation is a bit weird...I feel more comfortable calling it corruption. There *is* a real increase in cost, but the product isn't the same. And theft isn't the same as inflation.
IOW, inflation can't be used to describe things that are necessary, and whose price is controlled by and effective monopoly. So I prefer to consider things like books and bread.
Now I haven't studied educational prices recently, but a cursory consideration calls me to believe that the prices are controlled by governmental policy. That's effectively monopoly control, so it can't really be said to reflect inflation. Governmental policy used to be to decrease the price of education, but over the last few decades it seems to have been to limit access and raise prices. The price of education seems to be independent of other commodities, so I really doubt that it represents inflation. Oligarchy control, yes, but that's a different consideration.
A better argument for your point would be housing costs, which have risen sharply since about 1985, at least in this area. That *has* risen enough to match the price of gasoline...but as other non-controlled prices haven't risen similarly, I don't think that even that is actually inflation...I suspect it of more reflecting tax policy.
If I consider the price of a loaf of bread, in the early 1960's it was around $1.00 ... a bit less, but not a whole bunch. If I buy a loaf of bread now it's about $5.00. (I don't, but bread that's white and mainly air, and I didn't then. These days the bread is likely to be actual whole grain bread with lots of seeds. Then it was often Roman Meal...but also often Rainbow...which is (was?) white bread, but not mainly air.. So that's an increase of a factor of 5. 5 * 0.35 is about $1.75, which is a lot less than $3.00, so gas prices have gone up significantly more than inflation of bread prices.
(See my other response for why this isn't a good argument, but briefly, you need a much larger range of items being compared.)
You've only mentioned a couple of things wrong with the CPI. Which is why I tend to try to tie it to actual things I buy. The problem is that different parts go up (and down) by different amounts. This is a problem which the actual CPI has also, so a part of the inaccuracy is the difficulty (impossibility) in figuring the inflation in matching what every individual experiences. So there *is* no possible valid metric, only metrics that are valid for particular people. But an overriding problem is that it is periodically adjusted for political reasons to make those in office look good, and occasionally to make those not currently in office look bad. In this way it's like the money supply, or the employment numbers.
Well, I live in the same area I did when gas was $0.35/gallon, and now it's well over $3.00/gallon...though it does vary a lot. There was a period when it was around $5.00/gallon a few years ago, and it frequently varies by over $1.00/gallon within a year.
Well, also fracking gets mainly gas, not oil. That doesn't need much (any?) cracking, refining, etc.
And the price at the pump isn't what it was in the 1960-80's. I don't know about most of the period as I only drove for a short time. It certainly isn't what it was in the early 1960's...$0.35/gallon at the pump. Of course, there's also been a lot of inflation, so if you factor that in the price rise hasn't been very much. (A gallon of gas used to cost the same amount as an Ace double novel, but what do you compare that to these days? An e-book download? A trade paperback?)
P.S.: I do not trust the government values reported for inflation. They are calculated in a way to make inflation look low. But I wasn't renting an apartment in the early 1960's so I can't really compare based on that.
As they haven't yet built the pilot plant yet, I doubt they could give a decent answer to that. If you got one it would be from the marketing department.
Geothermal and solar are possibilities, but a better guess is that they get the heat by burning some of their output. Geothermal would be too expensive, and solar would require a stable source of sunlight. OK for a desert, but not for someplace that often cloudy. 300 C isn't intensely hot, but maintaining it can be a problem if you depend on sunlight, and the shit doesn't stop coming. (And though it does slow down at times, those aren't necessarily the times when the sun is out of the sky, or when it's really cloudy.) While I believe the problems with using solar for this could be overcome, I doubt that it would be cheap.
You've left out the factor of cost. As the price increases, fields that were too poor to consider as sources become worth considering. If we were still paying the prices of 20 years ago, most modern fields wouldn't pay for themselves. We HAVE run out of oil recoverable at the prices of 20 years ago. And if the price keeps increasing without limit, we'll find that we have lots of other sources of oil. You can turn coal into oil with enough work.
What this process does is get rid of waste while simultaneously providing a small but continuous stream of oil at low cost. Perhaps it will work, but many things fail at the pilot plant stage. Still, if it's got that far I give it a better than 50% chance of panning out.
Actually, I suspect that heavy metals would be easy to extract from "your biocrude". At least after it had been cracked into volatiles. This would mean that the residue would be rich in heavy metals, quite possibly rich enough to compete with ores. The problem with heavy metals in sludge is that the grade of the ore is too poor, but if you take, say, 75% of the non-heavy metals away you've improved the ore remarkably. (And even if the ore is still unprofitably poor, at least you've decreased the volume you need to deal with by a LOT.)
It's not that simple. Weight of glasses is a big problem...enough so that it's the reason my optometrist always recommends plastic lenses over glass.
Does the phrase "October Surprise" mean anything to you?
For that matter, the FBI policy is not to comment upon investigations in progress unless compelled to by Congress...even court orders are often stonewalled...and sometimes Congress is lied to.
I am told that the legal agreement at the time of the vote WRT separation is binding, and requires the concurrency of the Scottish Parliament before withdrawal from the EU. I'm not a lawyer, and I'm certainly no British lawyer, but I doubt that you are either.
Whatever, it seems likely that this is at least likely to need to be directly addressed in court. A court might well decide that the argument was not valid, but a simple statement that it isn't doesn't really convince me.
Yes, but I don't think *this* court decision addressed the point that BREXIT is/may be illegal to impose on Scotland without the concurrence of the Scottish Parliament. I don't think that Northern Ireland has a similar legal protection in place, though I could be wrong, but they also seem to have a strong sentiment in favor of remain. And if Northern Ireland were to leave the EU it would seem to require re-imposing a strong border between Ireland and Northern Ireland to prevent smuggling, which would likely re-ignite the troubles.
They HAVE peeked at the results. Lots of them. They don't look good for any of the major choices, but BREXIT is worse than most. It was a very narrow victory at the polls achieved by lots of lying, and excluding the voters who would be most directly affected. And it's quite clear that many of the voters were just saying "fuck you" to the ruling party rather than actually requesting that particular change. How many is a rather large question, but not answerable from the data I have. What *IS* clear is that the people are already unhappy with their government.
The story on the bank had some reasonably technical matters...though very poorly explained. This one...
Well, it's only 7 days until the election.
I don't think Trump is loyal to anyone or anything but Trump. There is, however, some inconclusive evidence that Putin has some blackmail info (of some nature) on him. That's all pretty murky, and I wouldn't put much credence on it, but it would explain some statements he's made.
That said, I wouldn't support him anyway. And now I can't even vote Green.
If the argument is made about what is enforced, I agree with you completely. If the argument is about what is legal, I disagree.
I do understand that different people will have different opinions, and that society depends upon a certain consensus of behavior, but while I may obey laws that I consider illegal, I don't respect them. And others are less obedient.
A decent society depends on decent laws. When the enforced laws are so blatantly illegal it inspires widespread disrespect for the laws, and obedience only based on fear, which means only when you think you might get caught. This is extremely bad for society. It means that the ruling group has lost the trust in their rightness, and this tends to inspire widespread turbulence and general disrespect for even the necessary laws. (And people are such that some laws are necessary, and we live more comfortably in a *loosely* hierarchical social structure.)
The US Constitution is an excellent framework around which to build a society. It's not perfect, and needs some repair before it can work well in a strong-federal/weak-state environment, particularly with rapid transportation and communication. It needs to be a bit easier to amend, and there needs to be a built-in mechanism to allow for both emergency action and recovery from the emergency. This "reinterpreting it so we can easily deal with the current situation" is not an acceptable mechanism, partially because the interpretation is not only temporary. I'm also uncertain that even the basic design is suited for as large a country as the US has become. The higher levels of government are now too distant from the people they are supposed to represent. It would be better for the larger states to be subdivided, and the the federal government to only be able to regulate the states. Perhaps the state governments should also appoint the senators, as was the earlier practice.
The above, though, is all in the "not going to happen" scenario. What *is* going to happen isn't clear, but will probably involve increasingly automated interfaces between the people and the government. This could be either good or bad, depending on design and implementation.
It is my opinion that the current copyright law is in violation of the US Constitution. The Supreme Court disagrees with me, but that doesn't change my mind, because their reasoning was faulty. Therefore the current copyright law is invalid. My obedience to it is mainly because it doesn't interfere with what I choose to do, and occasionally because of fear. I and if a work is in print and has existed for less than 20 years I feel that the FORMER copyright law (prior to the Walt Disney extensions) should be respected. Not the current one.
You don't have ANY idea how Elsevier works, do you? ...
Or did I miss a joke?
Even solar power uses fuel, it's just that the fuel supply is located a bit away from us. (About 8 minutes at lightspeed.)
Binary? Yes, sort of. But also not. A magnetic field will suppress superconduction, but the further the superconductor is below (i.e., away from) the critical temperature the stronger a field is required to suppress it. There are other similar effects with other properties...one of which is pressure (perhaps depending on the material.)
P.S.: I'm no physicist either, nor a materials engineer. But I read a lot. To explain superconducting magnets would require a real expert rather than me.
That's not proof that he had an account there, or even much in the way of evidence. It is peculiar, and the pattern is quite strange, but that's a different matter. I don't feel there's sufficient evidence to draw any real conclusions...certainly not in the summary. Just enough for speculations.
It's not "an indictment of modern society", it's and indictment of human nature and the way it responds to easy communication. When communication is difficult, and costs a whole nickel (6 cents airmail) then cons like this are relatively few. When it's cheap they rise. When long distance calls cost a bit, I never got spam calls, now I get 5 or 6 per day, even though we've never bought anything from any of them.
There are bad things about modern society, and about past society, and they aren't all the same. But this isn't one of them.
As a blanket statement, *I* think it's "ignorant to think older people have less of a grasp on computers and technology", but then I've been a programmer to one degree or another since 1963.
That said, I have less grasp of modern web usage than most, preferring static HTML, and my C++ is antique...I haven't used it since around 2000. And I sometimes find modern GUIs opaque. (Recently a 16 year old showed me how to adjust the tone produced by an electronic metronome.) So there are definite *areas* where I have less grasp of technology. But the blanket statement is either bigoted or thoughtless.