Shipping containers make terrible homes. You're going to want windows, so you cut holes. That ruins their structural integrity, so you're doing all sorts of modification to reinforce them. Then there's the issue that they're just corrugated metal, so boiling hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. So you need to insulate them. If you do it inside, the already-questionable dimensions become absolutely unfit for any reasonable human space. Do it on the outside... and you've just built a building.
Add to this that the containers are often treated with some pretty harsh chemicals to resist ocean environments and repel pests, so they need a deep clean and repainting.
At the end of the day you're better off not trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Shipping containers are very good at what they're designed for, and what they are designed for is not housing people/
That's a dangerously definitive statement. I suspect there are situations where hydrogen does make sense as an energy medium. For example, perhaps a company will decide to set up massive wind farms far from human habitation (to avoid all the complaints), and transport the energy to market in the form of hydrogen instead of building a high-voltage grid to the middle of nowhere. I agree that hydrogen probably does not make sense as the backbone of our coming energy storage revolution (or cars, as you point out), but one should not assume a single technology (e.g. batteries) is the best for all use cases.
Assume a driver costs $40k per year. That's $960,000,000 per year for 24k drivers. Which means that this would pay for itself in a little over a year. Ok, this is a bit simplistic, but I doubt the real number is far off... Almost certainly not more than a two year break even point. With this point declining for the next batch.
And it's not just the monetary cost of paying the drivers. It's also the hassle of dealing with HR. Fewer (or no) drivers equals fewer headaches with unionization drives, sexual harassment of passengers, etc. etc.
Honestly, why worry about any of this at all? Let your son tell you what he wants and let him figure out all this stuff. Maybe give him a brief talking about web security and maybe do something to isolate him from infecting other devices on your home network, but other than that step back and let the kid do his thing. Will he screw up and get viruses? Sure. Will he have to figure out drivers and such? Sure. Will he need to figure out what programs he wants and doesn't want? Sure. That's how he learns.
In other words, think back: how did you become I savvy computer user? I know for me, my parents knew jack all about computers and I was the one learning these things by trial and error.
I know it can be painful to step back and watch people make mistakes when you now have the knowledge to avoid them, but mistakes are an amazing way for people to learn.
The risk of a dropped dish or torn shirt is much more tolerable than a car crash at highway speeds.
But the rewards are also so much lower.
The potential rewards of autonomous driving are HUGE. I won't pay more than a couple hundred bucks to have my dryer fold laundry. But I would pay a lot to not have have society ever have to face drunk drivers again. To give old people the freedom to get out and about. To have cars that can precision park themselves, thereby taking up way less parking area (no door opening space needed). And so on.
And what happens when a deer decides to bolt out from the woods in front of your vehicle? Are you going to trust that the car can detect a deer?
I'm going to trust the car to detect the deer a lot more than I trust myself to detect a deer. I only have two eyes and I can only focus them on one point at a time. They also only see in the visible spectrum. My car could conceivably have 360 degree, multi-spectrum "vision".
A fucking eReader is the easy solution for a power budget. Probably consumes less power than a device shitting out 1,000 pages every month. The only thing there are "lots of" right now is piles and piles of pointless shit laying around in paper form, taking up valuable real estate.
Because I'm sure NASA hasn't done the math on this tradeoff.../sarcasm
... unless you're a plumber, electrician. I.e., any job that requires your physical presence and is not easy to automate.
I suspect even those could eventually be automated by changing the way we do buildings. Instead of having site-built homes that get renovated over time, homes might eventually be treated like cell phones. Build them in an automated factory, ship to site, and when they break or become obsolete remove them, recycle them, and replace them with a new factory-built module.
And, I like the reliability of having two engines and two fuel supplies.
But you're also getting the complexity and maintenance issues of having two engines and two fuel supplies. Imagine never having to replace another muffler, or have another oil change, or buy new spark plugs, or have a squealing timing belt.
All I want is a large-format (letter size or close to it) Kindle. My 3rd-gen Kindle is still going strong, and none of the new Kindle models have convinced me to upgrade. But large-format? I'd buy that the day it came out.
A few other brands have started to come out with large-format e-readers, but as of yet all of the reviews show that they still have a lot of annoying shortcomings. I trust Amazon would do it right, and would do it for a reasonable price.
One of the reasons Netflix streaming sucks is that if you search for a movie and it isn't available there is NO way to provide feedback along the lines:
* Add it to my favorites!
* [x] Notify me when it becomes available!
Instead they show some bullshit "Titles related to _x_" instead...
Just because they don't have an active option for you to do that doesn't mean they're not collecting the data to inform their catalogue development plans.
Here's a pro bono tip for you, avoid sprinkling semicolons around if you don't know how to use them. Yes I know you do it in an attempt to look smarter, but it ends up having the opposite effect.
Mmmmmm nope. American AC used them correctly; semi-colons can be used to closely join two independent clauses to connect closely related ideas.
How is this legal? Shouldn't WTO or trade agreements make this kind of government subsidy impossible these days?
WTF should the WTO or external to the US body have anything to say about what business happens within a country's borders? They have nothing to stay about what happens within a US state and a private entity.
Except its effects go beyond state borders and the private entity. When you make a deal with a corporation like this, you are subsidizing them, which alters their competitiveness with other companies in countries with whom you have trade agreements. And many trade agreements frown upon this.
In my province the regulated power utility cut a deal with the pulp mill to sell them cut-rate power, because the utility knew discounting their power was better than them going bankrupt and losing them as a customer altogether. Mills in Maine complained to the NAFTA tribunal. Now there's a big tariff on products from that pulp mill.
To me, science fiction is fiction that explores the implications of technology and human society. ST et al are just fantasy.
I always felt that way about BSG. I absolutely love the updated series, and talk it up to everyone. I invariably get the comment, "Oh, I don't like scifi." And my response is always, "It's not scifi. It's a human drama in a space setting." For example, they have warping ability, but literally all the viewers know about it is that you need coordinates, it's called "FTL", and it has a fancy key to turn it on. The focus isn't on the "sci" at all.
I've managed to convince many non-nerds to get deeply engrossed in the show.
Common wisdom sais not to trust any machine, especially not moving ones. Factories have red emergency buttons everywhere for a reason. Machines can and will fail.
Of course they will. But so do people. With disturbing frequency.
You're either in control of the vehicle that your safety and life depends on, or you are NOT, and if you're not in control, you can't cope with that -- and when you can't reason with, or even communicate in a meaningful way (i.e., talk to/have a conversation with) the machine that your life depends on?
I am not in control of the airplane I'm flying in, and for all intents and purposes I have no meaningful way of communicating with the person who is. Yet millions of people ride airplanes every day.
I've always hated these "Inevitablity" arguments, assuming the future case is exactly like past cases.
For example:
People ate plants, then raw meat, then they ate cooked meat and plants, then processed plants. Obviously, the next stop is eating polystyrene. How can you hold back the future?
That's a bit of a straw-man argument. No, the obvious next step is eating synthetic meat.
Anyhow, I think that we're arguing over semantics while agreeing on the underlying issue. Automation is unlikely to ever be able to handle getting into these remote areas.
Which makes me wonder, perhaps people are looking at things the wrong way. A lot of the resistance I see to self-driving cars is "but they'll never work on the rough gravel roads, so they'll never happen." But maybe the way we should realistically be thinking about it is "rough gravel roads will never work in a world of self-driving cars."
Let's face it. Self-driving cars are happening. The economics are too good for it not to happen. And so they're not going to be stopped just because they don't work for extremely rural areas. The fact that we can't economically run high-speed internet--fundamental infrastructure in the modern economy--to these areas didn't stop the internet from becoming a central aspect of the world today.
I suspect self-driving cars will further push the decline of rural areas. Sure, people will hang on for a while by fixing up old non-automated cars. But over time this will become less and less viable and the divide between extreme rural and the rest of the world will grow.
Slashdot Mirror
Shipping containers make terrible homes. You're going to want windows, so you cut holes. That ruins their structural integrity, so you're doing all sorts of modification to reinforce them. Then there's the issue that they're just corrugated metal, so boiling hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. So you need to insulate them. If you do it inside, the already-questionable dimensions become absolutely unfit for any reasonable human space. Do it on the outside... and you've just built a building.
Add to this that the containers are often treated with some pretty harsh chemicals to resist ocean environments and repel pests, so they need a deep clean and repainting.
At the end of the day you're better off not trying to force a square peg into a round hole. Shipping containers are very good at what they're designed for, and what they are designed for is not housing people/
So don't use it in places that experience drought?
Hydrogen makes no sense.
That's a dangerously definitive statement. I suspect there are situations where hydrogen does make sense as an energy medium. For example, perhaps a company will decide to set up massive wind farms far from human habitation (to avoid all the complaints), and transport the energy to market in the form of hydrogen instead of building a high-voltage grid to the middle of nowhere. I agree that hydrogen probably does not make sense as the backbone of our coming energy storage revolution (or cars, as you point out), but one should not assume a single technology (e.g. batteries) is the best for all use cases.
Assume a driver costs $40k per year. That's $960,000,000 per year for 24k drivers. Which means that this would pay for itself in a little over a year. Ok, this is a bit simplistic, but I doubt the real number is far off... Almost certainly not more than a two year break even point. With this point declining for the next batch.
And it's not just the monetary cost of paying the drivers. It's also the hassle of dealing with HR. Fewer (or no) drivers equals fewer headaches with unionization drives, sexual harassment of passengers, etc. etc.
There are just to many too many streaming platforms out there.
It's almost like we need one platform to rule them all...
Honestly, why worry about any of this at all? Let your son tell you what he wants and let him figure out all this stuff. Maybe give him a brief talking about web security and maybe do something to isolate him from infecting other devices on your home network, but other than that step back and let the kid do his thing. Will he screw up and get viruses? Sure. Will he have to figure out drivers and such? Sure. Will he need to figure out what programs he wants and doesn't want? Sure. That's how he learns.
In other words, think back: how did you become I savvy computer user? I know for me, my parents knew jack all about computers and I was the one learning these things by trial and error.
I know it can be painful to step back and watch people make mistakes when you now have the knowledge to avoid them, but mistakes are an amazing way for people to learn.
The risk of a dropped dish or torn shirt is much more tolerable than a car crash at highway speeds.
But the rewards are also so much lower.
The potential rewards of autonomous driving are HUGE. I won't pay more than a couple hundred bucks to have my dryer fold laundry. But I would pay a lot to not have have society ever have to face drunk drivers again. To give old people the freedom to get out and about. To have cars that can precision park themselves, thereby taking up way less parking area (no door opening space needed). And so on.
And what happens when a deer decides to bolt out from the woods in front of your vehicle? Are you going to trust that the car can detect a deer?
I'm going to trust the car to detect the deer a lot more than I trust myself to detect a deer. I only have two eyes and I can only focus them on one point at a time. They also only see in the visible spectrum. My car could conceivably have 360 degree, multi-spectrum "vision".
Are they really comparing the energy cost of driving a nail?
Wood has a place but IMO if you want a durable structure use reinforced concrete. Maybe this wave of construction is only expected to stand for 30yrs?
My (small) multi-unit in Canada is built with wood timbers and is 218 years old. As long as you keep it dry, wood can be very durable.
Uh, a space station has a finite amount of space.
A fucking eReader is the easy solution for a power budget. Probably consumes less power than a device shitting out 1,000 pages every month. The only thing there are "lots of" right now is piles and piles of pointless shit laying around in paper form, taking up valuable real estate.
Because I'm sure NASA hasn't done the math on this tradeoff... /sarcasm
"said Pettit who also told me that, with the advent of tablets and laptops, astronauts don't print now as much as they used to."
Yup that really helps create new technology.
Someone has to pay for that new technology.
They do? I'm pretty sure everyone is happy with PIN based logins. Does anyone even use Touch ID?
Ah yes, the classic, "this is the way I experience things, ergo I'm sure that's how everyone else does too."
I use the fingerprint reader on my Android and find it wayyyyyyy superior to using a PIN.
... unless you're a plumber, electrician. I.e., any job that requires your physical presence and is not easy to automate.
I suspect even those could eventually be automated by changing the way we do buildings. Instead of having site-built homes that get renovated over time, homes might eventually be treated like cell phones. Build them in an automated factory, ship to site, and when they break or become obsolete remove them, recycle them, and replace them with a new factory-built module.
And, I like the reliability of having two engines and two fuel supplies.
But you're also getting the complexity and maintenance issues of having two engines and two fuel supplies. Imagine never having to replace another muffler, or have another oil change, or buy new spark plugs, or have a squealing timing belt.
All I want is a large-format (letter size or close to it) Kindle. My 3rd-gen Kindle is still going strong, and none of the new Kindle models have convinced me to upgrade. But large-format? I'd buy that the day it came out.
A few other brands have started to come out with large-format e-readers, but as of yet all of the reviews show that they still have a lot of annoying shortcomings. I trust Amazon would do it right, and would do it for a reasonable price.
Indeed.
One of the reasons Netflix streaming sucks is that if you search for a movie and it isn't available there is NO way to provide feedback along the lines:
* Add it to my favorites! * [x] Notify me when it becomes available!
Instead they show some bullshit "Titles related to _x_" instead ...
Just because they don't have an active option for you to do that doesn't mean they're not collecting the data to inform their catalogue development plans.
Here's a pro bono tip for you, avoid sprinkling semicolons around if you don't know how to use them. Yes I know you do it in an attempt to look smarter, but it ends up having the opposite effect.
Mmmmmm nope. American AC used them correctly; semi-colons can be used to closely join two independent clauses to connect closely related ideas.
This light-eating prowess is due to the planet's unique capability to trap at least 94 percent of the visible starlight falling into its atmosphere.
"This light-eating prowess is due to the planet's unique capability to eat light."
Thank you for that useful information... /grumpyoldman
WTF should the WTO or external to the US body have anything to say about what business happens within a country's borders? They have nothing to stay about what happens within a US state and a private entity.
Except its effects go beyond state borders and the private entity. When you make a deal with a corporation like this, you are subsidizing them, which alters their competitiveness with other companies in countries with whom you have trade agreements. And many trade agreements frown upon this.
In my province the regulated power utility cut a deal with the pulp mill to sell them cut-rate power, because the utility knew discounting their power was better than them going bankrupt and losing them as a customer altogether. Mills in Maine complained to the NAFTA tribunal. Now there's a big tariff on products from that pulp mill.
To me, science fiction is fiction that explores the implications of technology and human society. ST et al are just fantasy.
I always felt that way about BSG. I absolutely love the updated series, and talk it up to everyone. I invariably get the comment, "Oh, I don't like scifi." And my response is always, "It's not scifi. It's a human drama in a space setting." For example, they have warping ability, but literally all the viewers know about it is that you need coordinates, it's called "FTL", and it has a fancy key to turn it on. The focus isn't on the "sci" at all.
I've managed to convince many non-nerds to get deeply engrossed in the show.
Common wisdom sais not to trust any machine, especially not moving ones. Factories have red emergency buttons everywhere for a reason. Machines can and will fail.
Of course they will. But so do people. With disturbing frequency.
You're either in control of the vehicle that your safety and life depends on, or you are NOT, and if you're not in control, you can't cope with that -- and when you can't reason with, or even communicate in a meaningful way (i.e., talk to/have a conversation with) the machine that your life depends on?
I am not in control of the airplane I'm flying in, and for all intents and purposes I have no meaningful way of communicating with the person who is. Yet millions of people ride airplanes every day.
I've always hated these "Inevitablity" arguments, assuming the future case is exactly like past cases. For example: People ate plants, then raw meat, then they ate cooked meat and plants, then processed plants. Obviously, the next stop is eating polystyrene. How can you hold back the future?
That's a bit of a straw-man argument. No, the obvious next step is eating synthetic meat.
Anyhow, I think that we're arguing over semantics while agreeing on the underlying issue. Automation is unlikely to ever be able to handle getting into these remote areas.
Which makes me wonder, perhaps people are looking at things the wrong way. A lot of the resistance I see to self-driving cars is "but they'll never work on the rough gravel roads, so they'll never happen." But maybe the way we should realistically be thinking about it is "rough gravel roads will never work in a world of self-driving cars."
Let's face it. Self-driving cars are happening. The economics are too good for it not to happen. And so they're not going to be stopped just because they don't work for extremely rural areas. The fact that we can't economically run high-speed internet--fundamental infrastructure in the modern economy--to these areas didn't stop the internet from becoming a central aspect of the world today.
I suspect self-driving cars will further push the decline of rural areas. Sure, people will hang on for a while by fixing up old non-automated cars. But over time this will become less and less viable and the divide between extreme rural and the rest of the world will grow.