The "hidden" cost they're talking about is NOT reflected in the price.
Anyone who's ever read Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" should know: externalities apart, some way, somehow any extra environmental burden (read: resource usage) will be worked into the price...
To the GP's point, the article is about environmental externalities.
I think that they're completely wrong and that learning to program is so much easier today than at any point in history.
I agree that programming is drastically easier to learn today, but I think the article may also have a good point. Most computer users these days will never have an obvious incentive to program, whereas most of us did 20+ years ago.
I learned operating systems because I had to understand them to do anything when I started with computers. I never started with the intent of "I want to program", I started with the intent of "I want to get these things done on this computer". To do that, I had to use the command line and write scripts. To do more things I had to learn to program.
Of course that turned into writing scripts for Trade Wars 2002, IRC chat bots, etc. and eventually led me to my current career path. But I don't think that would have happened if I just started playing games and reading articles on an iPad.
OK, 50 olympic pools of mercury sounds pretty dangerous. If someone dropped 50 pools of mercury somewhere, this definitly would be dangerous. But then again: How did it get there? Why concentrated in the arctic? I'm pretty sure no one disposed the worlds obsolete mercury thermometers there, so... coal burning? How many coal was burned in the arctic? Probably not much compared to past and modern industrial centers.
So I'm setting up this hypothesis: If coal burning is the main source of mercury, the arctic received much less of mercury than any other part of the world. Only due to the climatic situation there, it was trapped in the ice. But then, even tose 50 pools can only be a fraction of mercury pollution compared to the rest of the world.
If wood floats, witches float, ice floats, and witches are made out of wood, clearly witches put mercury in the arctic. Why are you blaming this all on thermometers and coal when witches are out terrorizing the world?
Why does everyone need to have their own "theory" for how these sorts of systems work? If you care enough to post a theory, why not read the actual paper?
Engine braking is also good for dealing with tailgaters. A couple of rounds of slowing down without using the brakes, first just by taking your foot off the accelerator, then if they continue to tailgate, changing down to decelerate faster usually gives them enough doubt about your brake lights working that most of them will drop back for their own safety.
Alternatively, you could move out of the left lane and let them pass you.
I don't tailgate often, but when passing on the right isn't safe, but a vehicle is obstructing traffic on the left, I will get close to let them know I would like to pass. The drivers who slow down even further and get all self-righteous in their zeal to slow traffic should really have their licenses zapped.
Why start a petty battle, further increasing the danger of the situation, instead of simply letting drivers who want to pass pass?
I'm not seriously proposing the "glass beads scattered over the desert solution", though. I'm just using it as an example of the kind of lateral thinking that can find far more effective and cheaper solutions than trying to undo, by brute force, all the burning of fossil carbon since the discovery of coal and peat.
It's also worth noting that those "solutions":
- don't help with ocean acidification or any other negative effects of elevated CO2 levels
- don't create cleaner new power sources
- impose substantial new risks (too much cooling, etc.)
- are equally difficult or impossible to undo
Sure, there are lots of insane and ridiculously expensive things we can do to bring down global average temperatures... but how in the hell can that be a better idea than building cleaner new power sources, increasing energy efficiency, and improving our transportation story?
A public profile is more like a item in a display window, if you display things in the windows of the store for people walking outside too see then it should be available to everyone, someone might go outside taking notes or images of what you have displayed to the outside.
No, a display window has no marginal cost per viewer, whereas a service like LinkedIn does. Crowds in front of display windows likely cause more people to come want to view the displays. Crawlers cause much higher loads on all sorts of backend systems compared to normal users. Each crawler has a real monetary cost to LinkedIn, and their usage may have a chilling effect on LinkedIn members.
Further, the aggregate of openly available data is often much more valuable than what it simply visible on a profile. In this particular example, changes in a LinkedIn member's profile, new connections, and other indicators over time. In a way that is only really possible by scraping repeatedly and comparing changes (profile history is not publicly available). At best they will tip off an employer that their employee is on the way out (and should therefore not be promoted, given a raise, given major new projects, etc.) before the employee is able to put in notice. At worst, the algorithms are wrong and the employer may find a replacement.
I'll grant that there are some possible positive outcomes as well as other possible negatives. But this makes it more risky for LinkedIn members to use LinkedIn to find their next job.
If this were an operational flight, more likly the plane would be down at McChord Field, where I work. We do have the 22 Special Forces here at McChord, but spy planes, usually the big 135 mods, fly in and out of here all the time. Sometimes they stay a few days, who knows what they are up to.
Yes, perhaps you can help us learn more. Can you share more about their flight schedules and post pics (inside and outside if possible)? If posting online is too difficult, I'll mark the sidewalk with chalk so you know where to leave the info.
But while home *buying* prices have exploded, the rent costs are pretty much sticking to inflation. You don't HAVE to bet your future on that particular investment.
What the hell are you talking about? Junior one-bedroom apartments go for $3500/month on average in SF.
The truth is that solar panels or wind mills aren't all that profitable long term and except for very small, direct use installations aren't yet profitable. There are many other solar designs that are way better at collecting and storing the suns energy.
I'm all for using renewables but at this point we have no economic model that makes sense without massive government cash injections.
Let's be fair here. Last I checked, no modern electricity generation was profitable without a subsidy of some sort.
Coal and natural gas would be prohibitively expensive if they were not allowed to externalize most of their costs (pollution and health impacts, environmental impacts, land giveaways).
Nuclear is barely even profitable when given a massive subsidy in the form of legal limits on liability. Nuclear would be much more expensive if operators had to pay for insurance beyond their current liability caps. And that's even after the federal government paid most nuclear R&D costs.
Wind actually might be profitable now, I'm not sure on the current state of things.
Oil has the double whammy: externalized costs like coal plus massive federal expenditures to keep the prices stable (defense plus the Strategic Petroleum Reserve).
I would advocate removing all these subsidies and letting the market sort it out, but I really don't want to tank the economy.
They haven't prevented a lot of acts of aggression, small wars, etc. The threat of nuclear war keeps other countries from interfering, such as sitting back and chewing on fingernails while Russia invades Georgia and Ukraine.
That is largely regarded as the point. Intervention in those smaller conflicts by other major powers could lead to World War III, which would dwarf World War II even if nukes were not used.
Conventional weapons have progressed rapidly, as has manufacturing. I'm afraid to know how a conventional modern World War would play out.
And Presidents don't plan raids and other tactical operations. At most they get advised that a raid is planned and ready to be executed on their approval, but the planning is all much lower. Any failures in the planning are at the tactical unit level and maybe as high as JSOC but not above that.
Moreover, I agree with AC's "the buck stops over there" comment. Let's be honest, if Hillary was president during this raid the GOP would be holding hearings and accusing her of intentionally killing SEALs.
DTS, The alligators don't like it when you drain the swamp.
Trump is the swamp. More importantly, Trump never liked that term. His cabinet appointments indicate his primary concern is building a wall around the swamp and filling it with sewage. If he cared about draining the swamp, he would start with his own conflicts of interest and he would stop taking money from foreign governments in violation of the emoluments clause. If the GOP cared, they would be attacking him for this instead of lying for him.
I'm so tired of liberals that don't know what a fascist is. They're on the left, not the right...Never mind it's the Nationals SOCIALIST party.
That's because you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. If you were capable of thinking about politics with nuance instead of "socialist is in the name so it must be left derp derp" broad strokes, you would understand that the National Socialist party had a platform of both extreme left and right policies, but most of their leftist campaign promises were empty. Most did not actually care about helping the working man. The primary focus was on nationalism. If you care to understand the term, I suggest you start on wikipedia.
A party platform that isn't a whole lot different than the Democratic party of today.
This is one of the scariest lies in modern times. First, you are playing the "I am rubber you are glue" game, hoping to completely neutralize the term and its meaning. The party of the neo-nazis is now calling extremely moderate left-wingers nazis constantly in an effort to numb everyone to the effects of being called a nazi.
Hitler may have been a vegetarian animal rights supporter, but he did not believe in the rights of homosexuals or minorities (strong features of Democratic policies), equal rights for all, ease of voting, etc. Only one major party in the US has the support of prominent neo-Nazis and KKK leaders: Trump's GOP.
The truly sad part is that your blind partisanship is leading you to support a man who spouts a populist message to gain support, but openly wants to subvert the judiciary and media, get rid of non-white non-Christian Americans, and control the world with his tiny little hands. He is even starting out with an unstable alliance with Russia for fuck's sake.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Crimea, Ukraine, Turkey... Yes, a stunning list of foreign policy victories by that crew in the last several Administrations! By all means let's keep that crew...
I am not saying they were perfect, but can we at least make sure everyone on the new crew knows where Crimea is?
...And not just because they served there under Putin.
Representative Zoe Lofgren (from a district in Silicon Valley) is arguing that the university "is training software engineers at the same time they're outsourcing their own software engineers. What message are they sending their own students?"
Same message as the law schools: "We're happy to take your money. If you can't find a job after you graduate, tough shit. You should have thought carefully about your major's future potential before taking on $100K in student loans."
To be really clear, though, this is only UCSF, not the entire UC system. UCSF does not train software engineers--UCSF is a medical school. They only trains doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and dentists.
A great way to test somebody's intelligence is to ask them what they think about the terms "UFO" and "conspiracy theory".
That sounds more like a great way to test for empathy. I expect those on the autism spectrum to do far better on your test.
Highly intelligent people will know what UFO stands for, but also understand that the vast majority of the people use the term to refer to aliens. It isn't unreasonable to interpret "do you believe in UFOs?" as "do you believe in aliens?". I usually just try to clarify and ask which definition they are using, but when I'm lazy I'll just go the peanut gallery route.
The question then will be, will society do the right thing?
To me, the interesting question is "how will the grey area around the right thing influence our relationships with robots?"
For example, if sentient robots ultimately secure human rights, corporations will not be able to purchase them. The natural next step would be for manufacturers to produce robots as intelligent and capable as possible without being sentient. What would that look like? How will the arguments around that change our definitions of sentience? Surely we will need something more advanced than the Turing Test.
If that is not possible, will there be a political struggle over requiring employers to pay robots a minimum wage? If so, are humans or robots more likely to argue for the minimum wage?
But thanks to our steadfast refusal to address climate change
We (as in both private parties and governments alike) are addressing it-- it's just that we're not really addressing it enough. This bullshit trolling causing the fences-sitters to jump over to the true deniers and dig in.
Isn't that a bit like saying Chamberlain and addressed Hitler's aggressions?
Current policies on climate change are, at best, a token gesture. It is not fair to say the problem is being addressed in any meaningful way.
I worked as DevOps, I DevOps... no idea what you are doing with DevOps... that you claim such nonsense.
You worked as a sysadmin in an organization that did not understand DevOps and gave you a glorified job title. It's a shame, because DevOps was so promising, and it has been watered down so quickly.
See What is DevOps? written in 2010. I would also encourage you to check out some of the early Devopsdays videos.
Of course, as soon as the enterprise market got wind of it, they said "CI and CD sound really useful. We should have people who do that." Some hired consultants to teach them how to be devopsy and revamp their development and operations processes. Others hired people who knew puppet, chef, or cfengine, stuck them on a "devops team", and had them do some of the things associated with DevOps. But what they are doing is not "DevOps".
In all my years developing apps, I only had one live bug and it was basically due to uploading the wrong version to production. Some of my apps are over 50k lines of code! Yet, I can't find anyone hiring a software engineer. Its rough to know your stuff, and hr to not be able to tell you know how to code properly.
Either your apps never had any serious use, they never met QA or any serious testing, you developed incredibly simple things (while somehow still bloating to 50k?), or you are lying so blatantly even HR can see it.
I do a lot of phone interviews/screenings. Your claim would be a giant red flag to me.
Slashdot Mirror
The "hidden" cost they're talking about is NOT reflected in the price.
Anyone who's ever read Friedrich Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" should know: externalities apart, some way, somehow any extra environmental burden (read: resource usage) will be worked into the price...
To the GP's point, the article is about environmental externalities.
Imagine five or ten of these in America.
It'd be a real infrastructure project that would benefit people.
Oh wait, not under this Congress.
There are few if any places on the US grid where they have the stability problems that the Australian battery is being used to manage.
Honest question: what about Puerto Rico?
Python requests library on a Mac, apparently.
I think that they're completely wrong and that learning to program is so much easier today than at any point in history.
I agree that programming is drastically easier to learn today, but I think the article may also have a good point. Most computer users these days will never have an obvious incentive to program, whereas most of us did 20+ years ago.
I learned operating systems because I had to understand them to do anything when I started with computers. I never started with the intent of "I want to program", I started with the intent of "I want to get these things done on this computer". To do that, I had to use the command line and write scripts. To do more things I had to learn to program.
Of course that turned into writing scripts for Trade Wars 2002, IRC chat bots, etc. and eventually led me to my current career path. But I don't think that would have happened if I just started playing games and reading articles on an iPad.
OK, 50 olympic pools of mercury sounds pretty dangerous. If someone dropped 50 pools of mercury somewhere, this definitly would be dangerous. But then again: How did it get there? Why concentrated in the arctic? I'm pretty sure no one disposed the worlds obsolete mercury thermometers there, so... coal burning? How many coal was burned in the arctic? Probably not much compared to past and modern industrial centers.
So I'm setting up this hypothesis: If coal burning is the main source of mercury, the arctic received much less of mercury than any other part of the world. Only due to the climatic situation there, it was trapped in the ice. But then, even tose 50 pools can only be a fraction of mercury pollution compared to the rest of the world.
If wood floats, witches float, ice floats, and witches are made out of wood, clearly witches put mercury in the arctic. Why are you blaming this all on thermometers and coal when witches are out terrorizing the world?
Why does everyone need to have their own "theory" for how these sorts of systems work? If you care enough to post a theory, why not read the actual paper?
Engine braking is also good for dealing with tailgaters. A couple of rounds of slowing down without using the brakes, first just by taking your foot off the accelerator, then if they continue to tailgate, changing down to decelerate faster usually gives them enough doubt about your brake lights working that most of them will drop back for their own safety.
Alternatively, you could move out of the left lane and let them pass you.
I don't tailgate often, but when passing on the right isn't safe, but a vehicle is obstructing traffic on the left, I will get close to let them know I would like to pass. The drivers who slow down even further and get all self-righteous in their zeal to slow traffic should really have their licenses zapped.
Why start a petty battle, further increasing the danger of the situation, instead of simply letting drivers who want to pass pass?
Everyone living on land is a descendant of immigrants. The only natives are in the ocean.
Unless transpermiation is correct....
I'm not seriously proposing the "glass beads scattered over the desert solution", though. I'm just using it as an example of the kind of lateral thinking that can find far more effective and cheaper solutions than trying to undo, by brute force, all the burning of fossil carbon since the discovery of coal and peat.
It's also worth noting that those "solutions":
Sure, there are lots of insane and ridiculously expensive things we can do to bring down global average temperatures... but how in the hell can that be a better idea than building cleaner new power sources, increasing energy efficiency, and improving our transportation story?
A public profile is more like a item in a display window, if you display things in the windows of the store for people walking outside too see then it should be available to everyone, someone might go outside taking notes or images of what you have displayed to the outside.
No, a display window has no marginal cost per viewer, whereas a service like LinkedIn does. Crowds in front of display windows likely cause more people to come want to view the displays. Crawlers cause much higher loads on all sorts of backend systems compared to normal users. Each crawler has a real monetary cost to LinkedIn, and their usage may have a chilling effect on LinkedIn members.
Further, the aggregate of openly available data is often much more valuable than what it simply visible on a profile. In this particular example, changes in a LinkedIn member's profile, new connections, and other indicators over time. In a way that is only really possible by scraping repeatedly and comparing changes (profile history is not publicly available). At best they will tip off an employer that their employee is on the way out (and should therefore not be promoted, given a raise, given major new projects, etc.) before the employee is able to put in notice. At worst, the algorithms are wrong and the employer may find a replacement.
I'll grant that there are some possible positive outcomes as well as other possible negatives. But this makes it more risky for LinkedIn members to use LinkedIn to find their next job.
If this were an operational flight, more likly the plane would be down at McChord Field, where I work. We do have the 22 Special Forces here at McChord, but spy planes, usually the big 135 mods, fly in and out of here all the time. Sometimes they stay a few days, who knows what they are up to.
Yes, perhaps you can help us learn more. Can you share more about their flight schedules and post pics (inside and outside if possible)? If posting online is too difficult, I'll mark the sidewalk with chalk so you know where to leave the info.
But while home *buying* prices have exploded, the rent costs are pretty much sticking to inflation. You don't HAVE to bet your future on that particular investment.
What the hell are you talking about? Junior one-bedroom apartments go for $3500/month on average in SF.
The truth is that solar panels or wind mills aren't all that profitable long term and except for very small, direct use installations aren't yet profitable. There are many other solar designs that are way better at collecting and storing the suns energy.
I'm all for using renewables but at this point we have no economic model that makes sense without massive government cash injections.
Let's be fair here. Last I checked, no modern electricity generation was profitable without a subsidy of some sort.
Coal and natural gas would be prohibitively expensive if they were not allowed to externalize most of their costs (pollution and health impacts, environmental impacts, land giveaways).
Nuclear is barely even profitable when given a massive subsidy in the form of legal limits on liability. Nuclear would be much more expensive if operators had to pay for insurance beyond their current liability caps. And that's even after the federal government paid most nuclear R&D costs.
Wind actually might be profitable now, I'm not sure on the current state of things.
Oil has the double whammy: externalized costs like coal plus massive federal expenditures to keep the prices stable (defense plus the Strategic Petroleum Reserve).
I would advocate removing all these subsidies and letting the market sort it out, but I really don't want to tank the economy.
If you're a diversity candidate, you get the benefit of the doubt - even if you experience the inconvenience of the courts.
If you're a conservative or undesirable, you're considered Fair Game for anything.
Sigh. You do realize the Hoover Institution is at Stanford, right?
They haven't prevented a lot of acts of aggression, small wars, etc. The threat of nuclear war keeps other countries from interfering, such as sitting back and chewing on fingernails while Russia invades Georgia and Ukraine.
That is largely regarded as the point. Intervention in those smaller conflicts by other major powers could lead to World War III, which would dwarf World War II even if nukes were not used.
Conventional weapons have progressed rapidly, as has manufacturing. I'm afraid to know how a conventional modern World War would play out.
And Presidents don't plan raids and other tactical operations. At most they get advised that a raid is planned and ready to be executed on their approval, but the planning is all much lower. Any failures in the planning are at the tactical unit level and maybe as high as JSOC but not above that.
Unfortunately (and sometimes fortunately), presidents do sometimes get involved at the tactical level.
Moreover, I agree with AC's "the buck stops over there" comment. Let's be honest, if Hillary was president during this raid the GOP would be holding hearings and accusing her of intentionally killing SEALs.
DTS, The alligators don't like it when you drain the swamp.
Trump is the swamp. More importantly, Trump never liked that term. His cabinet appointments indicate his primary concern is building a wall around the swamp and filling it with sewage. If he cared about draining the swamp, he would start with his own conflicts of interest and he would stop taking money from foreign governments in violation of the emoluments clause. If the GOP cared, they would be attacking him for this instead of lying for him.
I'm so tired of liberals that don't know what a fascist is. They're on the left, not the right...Never mind it's the Nationals SOCIALIST party.
That's because you don't know what the fuck you are talking about. If you were capable of thinking about politics with nuance instead of "socialist is in the name so it must be left derp derp" broad strokes, you would understand that the National Socialist party had a platform of both extreme left and right policies, but most of their leftist campaign promises were empty. Most did not actually care about helping the working man. The primary focus was on nationalism. If you care to understand the term, I suggest you start on wikipedia.
A party platform that isn't a whole lot different than the Democratic party of today.
This is one of the scariest lies in modern times. First, you are playing the "I am rubber you are glue" game, hoping to completely neutralize the term and its meaning. The party of the neo-nazis is now calling extremely moderate left-wingers nazis constantly in an effort to numb everyone to the effects of being called a nazi.
Hitler may have been a vegetarian animal rights supporter, but he did not believe in the rights of homosexuals or minorities (strong features of Democratic policies), equal rights for all, ease of voting, etc. Only one major party in the US has the support of prominent neo-Nazis and KKK leaders: Trump's GOP.
The truly sad part is that your blind partisanship is leading you to support a man who spouts a populist message to gain support, but openly wants to subvert the judiciary and media, get rid of non-white non-Christian Americans, and control the world with his tiny little hands. He is even starting out with an unstable alliance with Russia for fuck's sake.
Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Crimea, Ukraine, Turkey... Yes, a stunning list of foreign policy victories by that crew in the last several Administrations! By all means let's keep that crew...
I am not saying they were perfect, but can we at least make sure everyone on the new crew knows where Crimea is?
...And not just because they served there under Putin.
Representative Zoe Lofgren (from a district in Silicon Valley) is arguing that the university "is training software engineers at the same time they're outsourcing their own software engineers. What message are they sending their own students?"
Same message as the law schools: "We're happy to take your money. If you can't find a job after you graduate, tough shit. You should have thought carefully about your major's future potential before taking on $100K in student loans."
To be really clear, though, this is only UCSF, not the entire UC system. UCSF does not train software engineers--UCSF is a medical school. They only trains doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and dentists.
A great way to test somebody's intelligence is to ask them what they think about the terms "UFO" and "conspiracy theory".
That sounds more like a great way to test for empathy. I expect those on the autism spectrum to do far better on your test.
Highly intelligent people will know what UFO stands for, but also understand that the vast majority of the people use the term to refer to aliens. It isn't unreasonable to interpret "do you believe in UFOs?" as "do you believe in aliens?". I usually just try to clarify and ask which definition they are using, but when I'm lazy I'll just go the peanut gallery route.
The beaners never owned 'California'. The Spanish claimed S Cal. Russia had a colony at Ft. Bragg.
Not sure why I am attempting dialog with someone who calls them "beaners", but you should check out a map of the territory Mexico lost to the United States
The question then will be, will society do the right thing?
To me, the interesting question is "how will the grey area around the right thing influence our relationships with robots?"
For example, if sentient robots ultimately secure human rights, corporations will not be able to purchase them. The natural next step would be for manufacturers to produce robots as intelligent and capable as possible without being sentient. What would that look like? How will the arguments around that change our definitions of sentience? Surely we will need something more advanced than the Turing Test.
If that is not possible, will there be a political struggle over requiring employers to pay robots a minimum wage? If so, are humans or robots more likely to argue for the minimum wage?
Will robots sue for reparations?
And this gem:
We (as in both private parties and governments alike) are addressing it-- it's just that we're not really addressing it enough. This bullshit trolling causing the fences-sitters to jump over to the true deniers and dig in.
Isn't that a bit like saying Chamberlain and addressed Hitler's aggressions?
Current policies on climate change are, at best, a token gesture. It is not fair to say the problem is being addressed in any meaningful way.
Though if selling imaginary world things for real world cash isn't fraud, I have a great vacation home in middle earth to offer you!
If online currency and items have real-world cash value, I'd like to see EA defend the illegal gambling in most of their games.
I worked as DevOps, I DevOps ... no idea what you are doing with DevOps ... that you claim such nonsense.
You worked as a sysadmin in an organization that did not understand DevOps and gave you a glorified job title. It's a shame, because DevOps was so promising, and it has been watered down so quickly.
See What is DevOps? written in 2010. I would also encourage you to check out some of the early Devopsdays videos.
Of course, as soon as the enterprise market got wind of it, they said "CI and CD sound really useful. We should have people who do that." Some hired consultants to teach them how to be devopsy and revamp their development and operations processes. Others hired people who knew puppet, chef, or cfengine, stuck them on a "devops team", and had them do some of the things associated with DevOps. But what they are doing is not "DevOps".
In all my years developing apps, I only had one live bug and it was basically due to uploading the wrong version to production. Some of my apps are over 50k lines of code! Yet, I can't find anyone hiring a software engineer. Its rough to know your stuff, and hr to not be able to tell you know how to code properly.
Either your apps never had any serious use, they never met QA or any serious testing, you developed incredibly simple things (while somehow still bloating to 50k?), or you are lying so blatantly even HR can see it.
I do a lot of phone interviews/screenings. Your claim would be a giant red flag to me.