Right now HIV can't attack cells that are missing that gene, and people with that mutation are rare enough that it isn't advantageous/necessary for HIV to develop another mechanism. However if you inject cells with this mutation into someone that doesn't normally have it, and they don't manage to clean out all the HIV from the person's system, then the combination of both of those cells in proximity is about as good as possible an environment for HIV to develop a mutation that can provide a new method of attack.
Reservoir of HIV-infected cells - check.
Depleted immune system that is subject to other viral infections that could cross contaminate with HIV - check.
Small group of immune resistant T-Cells that might be incapable of wiping out well-settled-in, drug resistant HIV - check
These guys theoretically could wind up spurring the evolution of a new strain of HIV that attacks the few people that are currently resistant. The bright side to this is that the T-Cells should die off naturally with no replacement. So if it doesn't work and they don't try to prolong the experiment with extended and repeated treatments, the window of risk is relatively short.
Statistics are only valid if the sample has a distribution that is similar to the population. However it's strongly arguable that the relevant population in this case - papers that would predict or disprove the end of all life on the planet as a result of a particular activity/action - is much smaller and more specific than their sample and that their chosen sample is not relevant.
Now it's not possible to derive any meaning from the actual relevant population, and so instead they've chosen a sample which is implicitly not representative of the relevant population. So the paper is fundamentally flawed and useless because the probability of an error is in fact somewhere between their estimate and 0, and could be much less than the probability of a critical error ascribed by the original LHC paper.
Hmm. Well, the paper's argument is like saying that, if the average number of bugs (across all software and methodologies) in N lines of code is X, then somebody's claim that they have written a piece of software with M bugs in Y lines of code, where M/Y << N/X is bogus.
This is patently ridiculous. If I write a relatively small piece of software where I have carried out a formal mathematical proof of the algorithms used in that software, I should obtain a much better bug ratio than the industry average, which includes work done by code monkeys working 90 hour work weeks.
Put another way, it's not clear to me that the statistical results for papers where an error might mean a measured loss of academic status are relevant to papers where the analysis regards the possible destruction of the Earth. So far the sample size on the latter is pretty small but the ones that have predicted the absence of global life-ending catastrophe have been 100% accurate. Of course they would have to be or we wouldn't be around to speculate about it, so we can't really make a conclusion from that either. But the point is that the foundation of this paper's statistical argument is itself invalid.
So according to you, the Bush government, that was pretty clearly anti-Global Warming in its policy agenda, completely suppressed any pro-Global Warming research in the USA. In fact, Bush political apparatchiks did try to control reports on studies performed by US government climate scientists, but there was still a lot of research funded and conducted that contradicted the government's ideological position, in spite of the political influence. So you're wrong twice: about which way the political influence affected Global Warming research in the USA, and about the extent to which opinions contradictory to the politically-preferred scenario were suppressed.
Well, technically that's true. But it could also be said that capitalism naturally decays into corporatism, with a half-life of under a hundred years. Energetic interactions with other societies (such as wars) can accelerate the decay.
Well, there should have been a lot more questioning of what Paulson wanted to do, that's for certain. Paulson basically said "You need to trust me and sign a really big blank check". He then handed the money to banks without any strings, and they went ahead and mainly used it in ways that were self serving and did nothing to ease the crisis.
My impression is that Obama and the Democrats have been much more specific about what they want to spend it on and the Republicans just don't agree. As far as I'm concerned though, most Republicans basically no longer have any more credibility on the issue. Their unimaginative record is stuck on the usual song and dance of tax breaks to individuals or corporations (the usual Republican supply-side bullshit). Corporations will just collect the profits and pay down debt, but they won't invest in growth if there's no market for their products. Individuals were part of the problem by getting themselves into bad debt situations in the first place and they, like the corporations, would just concentrate on finally paying down that debt instead of actually spending the tax windfall. While paying down those debts are a good idea, that isn't going to help ease the contraction of the economy. It may help some individuals get out of debt slightly faster but, at an average of $40,000 in family credit card debt, that's going to take a few years and the size of tax breaks Republicans talk about aren't going to help much. In the meantime it's going to do nothing to stop or slow a deflationary spiral and unemployment.
If the money is spent on infrastructure however, it will stimulate the economy directly and through multiplier effects, and it will also help decrease the bleeding from lost jobs until consumer spending can recover. So economically, the Democratic approach makes a heck of a lot more sense. It will take a little longer to show progress, but it will also significantly soften the blow in the meantime by keeping more people working and prepare the country to be more competitive when consumer confidence finally returns.
But fundamentally the economy won't recover to what it used to be. With fewer high paying jobs in US manufacturing and high-tech due to greater competition from globalization, and credit availability being more restricted for the foreseeable future, the demand side is going to have shrunk a lot and some of that change will be permanent. Once people realize that the rules have changed, I expect there will be much more widespread pressure for more progressive taxation policies to help redistribute wealth and income more equitably and boost consumer demand. It's going to take quite a few years before enough of the electorate finally grabs a clue, though.
a) Set up some honeypot addresses, like aardvark@yourdomain.com and zzyxyzark@yourdomain.com, that will not be used for any legitimate purposes. b) if you have some old unused e-mail addresses (i.e. people no longer with a company), monitor them to make sure that they only receive spam and notify legitimate correspondents that they are obsolete and, once they've only received spam for 6 months or so, then start using them as honeypot addresses as well c) seed the honeypot addresses into various locations where spammer automated address collectors will be likely to pick them up (web pages, news groups, replying to obvious address trollers, etc.) - try to get it into as many spammer lists as possible. d) take any e-mails that come in to those addresses and feed them into the learning mode of
i) a hash signature-based recognizer if it's graphical spam
ii) a bayesian recognizer if it's text or HTML spam. e) use the resulting trained recognizers to filter out the same spam messages from your legitimate mail addresses.
A bit the same idea as noise-cancelling headphones.
Yep, that's more the direction I was getting at. Generally I think it's going to come down to an ability to develop a minimal level of self-discipline and pragmatism/connection with reality. Discipline in making sure that your space suit is well maintained, that you always do pre-EVA check lists, that things are put away so that you know where they are in case of sudden acceleration or decompression. Pragmatism because if you don't have realistic expectations of what's possible, the mistakes you make are more likely to get you killed.
I think that currently, in addition to the rigorous physical testing you hear about, a certain amount of psychological aptitude testing is done by NASA and other national space programs for astronauts/cosmonauts. Because launching mass into space is so expensive, right now countries try to maximize that expense by choosing astronauts that are among the brightest and most capable people on Earth (but that unfortunately doesn't rule out bigotry). For mankind to truly be space faring, that price will need to drop enough so that it will be in reach of not just developed nations but average citizens of developed nations. But at that point, the rigours of living in a space environment will take over the selection process. Colonies that accept members that don't have those qualities necessary for individual survival in space will be placing the whole colony at risk, not just those unqualified individuals.
For instance, what about people who think that a literal reading of 1000 or 2000+ year old cultural guides developed for mostly tribal nomadic desert peoples is going to apply to a space-faring civilization, where survival is based on the collective capabilities of millions of people? That's most of the fundamentalist followers of Abrahamaic religions, although fundamentalist followers of caste-based religions would also pose a significant risk. Personally, I would avoid living in colonies that accepted a large number of people with those types of beliefs because I think they would pose significant long-term survival risks to the colony.
If Apple's disclosures were an attempt to influence stock prices, then it would matter. The SEC just seems to be watching for fraud like stock manipulation. That is their job, after all.
I would take that more seriously if they hadn't sat on their thumbs for the years that Darl was spouting his garbage about the SCO-IBM case.
Not necessarily. The problem is the "unthinking" masses of humanity. We have it really easy on Earth compared to the artificial environments that we would need to sustain ourselves in space. First we'll have to figure out a long-term approach for how to reliably protect our reproductive organs from ambient high-energy radiation once away from the Earth's magnetic field so that independent colonies don't get overwhelmed by birth defects. Eventually though, living in space would apply a whole new set of evolutionary pressures for survival and human space-farers would have to adapt. If we survive long enough to permanently colonize space, it would probably transform that part of humanity that would make it into space by making it much more aware of risk evaluation and risk taking, and general incompetence will get weeded out fairly quickly and ruthlessly by the ambient dangers of space.
It might take a few failed colonies at first, but eventually a society would evolve a way to ensure that happens. Perhaps mandatory civil service that involves external colony maintenance as a requirement for political office? Or maybe even the same for obtaining the voting franchise - a sort of Starship Troopers lite.
In fact, if you were a space-going race you probably wouldn't want to establish contact with a species that hadn't already gone through that winnowing out process. I would even go so far as to say that that difference might eventually lead to true divergence of humans into two species: the earth-bound and the space-faring.
If "we" get out there, the people that colonize another planet probably won't be the same "people" that are messing up Earth right now because those people wouldn't survive long enough to make it that far. Yeah, it's kind of an elitist view, but evolution is the ultimate meritocracy and, in very harsh environments, the people that forget that don't stay in the gene pool long.
Yeah, and that's worked really well so far hasn't it? The courts have pretty well let the administration avoid judicial and congressional challenge with either of two excuses a) National Security b) no standing to challenge.
As for FISA, they pretty well rubber stamped a newsprint roll warrant with a Liebherr TI 274 truck tire. Reviews indicated multiple violations with hardly a wrist-slap as consequence. Maybe that lets you sleep at night but it's good to see not everyone is that gullible.
If you'd like to argue other Presidents have had as little respect for the Constitution as this one, you've got a tough sell.
I think that some of Richard Nixon's comments and actions show a significant disregard for the US constitution, quite possibly comparable to George Bush's. The difference is that, 30 years later, George Bush was backed by a Congress, with similar disregard for the constitution, that gave him much more free rein to exercise that attitude than Nixon ever got. I don't know enough about Presidents prior to the mid-20th Century to say if the same also applied to any of them.
LED Street lights should help a lot with this. LED illumination is a lot more directional and therefore there should have a lot less wasted photons/energy. As a bonus it saves money for the same level of illumination. Pilot projects are already under way.
Actually, the elevator works fine from a suspension point of view. You just need a balancing mass past geosync altitude (which could be just more cable with a balancing mass and moving vibration dampers). There are questions about how to deal with tangential Coriolis forces from cars going up the elevator. Maybe you might be able to partially balance it with giving the elevator cars a really big charge and a really good capacitance skin so that electrical force from travelling through the Earth's magnetic field balance out the Coriolis force on average?
Because our primate relatives without religion and minimal culture who share much of our genetic makeup behave just as you say. They fuck each other in public whenever... Oh, wait!
Just why exactly isn't it illegal to breastfeed in public when it's illegal to have sex in public?
Because one is an intimate act between two individuals; the other is just a normal feeding activity and the real reason why breasts exist. That some people have a problem with bare breasts because they've been overly sexualized by media and some religions is not the breastfeeding mother's (or hungry baby's) fault.
Yeah, they invented the Y2K problem hundreds of years before North American programmers. On Dec 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar will stop working. We need to apply patches to all that Mayan hardware that lying arou... Never mind.
Not exactly. My understanding is that the legislation was that location could not be used as a criteria for evaluating debt risk and that a certain portion of loans had to be provided to people living in areas that, on average, had worse debt ratings. It would have still been possible to meet the regulatory constraints while limiting risk exposure and a number of banks did that. What happened is that this legislative change was used as an opening by banks and other lenders to accept risky loans from everywhere, not just the historically underserved locations, once they figured out they could make lots of money by handing the problem to somebody else through packaging it in over-rated securities. Without both parts of the equation, the damage would have been much less. The Democrats are primarily responsible for one part, and the Republicans are primarily responsible for the other.
Which, as you point out, really is doing it wrong. CFLs work well in narrowly-defined environments -- they're not a replacement for every bulb in the house. The general public doesn't appear to realize this, and the retailers are in no hurry to correct their misunderstanding.
Agreed. The general public also doesn't seem to be the only ones when you hear about legislators considering legally phasing out incandescent bulb production and sales over the next N years. That may be more feasible if LED lighting can start working in the situations where incandescent lighting stumbles.
It's possible that his local electric company has been raising his rates every year, just like mine has, in order to compensate. I've had to replace at least two CFLs in 4 years.
If he lives in California, that's a fairly high probability, although it's not about compensating for him, it's due to the rising demand for power from everyone else. Maybe he's also bought other home electronics with higher consumption over the same time period (wide screen TV maybe?).
CFLs also have more active components that may be more sensitive to crappy power. Power fluctuations affect incandescents as well, since they will be subject to a resulting thermal stress but CFL ballasts may be even more sensitive. On the other hand, with low consumption devices, if you don't need to power cycle them as often and just leave them on more, that could lengthen their lifespan. If the MTBF estimates assume that and you still frequently turn lights on and off as you move in and out of rooms, that could be a factor too.
For something more compact and less wet (a consideration around compact electrical devices): a diffraction grating. Add a glass frosting on top of a couple of layered diffraction gratings to make the light more evenly diffuse.
If your car is more fuel efficient than 20 miles/gallon, then you're better off with the gas tax. So high-polluting SUV owners get a tax break and hybrid owners get the shaft. Since it's the hybrid owners who aren't consuming enough gas due to high fuel efficiency, how is the government going to prevent them from just ripping out the GPS computers (or buying vehicles out of state where the gadget isn't included)? They should be encouraging the replacement of high consumption vehicles with lower consumption vehicles, not the other way around. I thought Oregon was supposed to have a lot of tree-hugging environmentalists. Why aren't they screaming about this?
As somebody else said, some combination of a mileage tax and a gas tax that everybody pays and is adjusted to stay balanced and revenue-neutral as fuel consumption drops would make sense, but this is ridiculous.
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Cancer's one possibility.
Right now HIV can't attack cells that are missing that gene, and people with that mutation are rare enough that it isn't advantageous/necessary for HIV to develop another mechanism. However if you inject cells with this mutation into someone that doesn't normally have it, and they don't manage to clean out all the HIV from the person's system, then the combination of both of those cells in proximity is about as good as possible an environment for HIV to develop a mutation that can provide a new method of attack.
Reservoir of HIV-infected cells - check.
Depleted immune system that is subject to other viral infections that could cross contaminate with HIV - check.
Small group of immune resistant T-Cells that might be incapable of wiping out well-settled-in, drug resistant HIV - check
These guys theoretically could wind up spurring the evolution of a new strain of HIV that attacks the few people that are currently resistant. The bright side to this is that the T-Cells should die off naturally with no replacement. So if it doesn't work and they don't try to prolong the experiment with extended and repeated treatments, the window of risk is relatively short.
I wasn't replying to goombah. I was replying to the AC.
Statistics are only valid if the sample has a distribution that is similar to the population. However it's strongly arguable that the relevant population in this case - papers that would predict or disprove the end of all life on the planet as a result of a particular activity/action - is much smaller and more specific than their sample and that their chosen sample is not relevant.
Now it's not possible to derive any meaning from the actual relevant population, and so instead they've chosen a sample which is implicitly not representative of the relevant population. So the paper is fundamentally flawed and useless because the probability of an error is in fact somewhere between their estimate and 0, and could be much less than the probability of a critical error ascribed by the original LHC paper.
Hmm. Well, the paper's argument is like saying that, if the average number of bugs (across all software and methodologies) in N lines of code is X, then somebody's claim that they have written a piece of software with M bugs in Y lines of code, where M/Y << N/X is bogus.
This is patently ridiculous. If I write a relatively small piece of software where I have carried out a formal mathematical proof of the algorithms used in that software, I should obtain a much better bug ratio than the industry average, which includes work done by code monkeys working 90 hour work weeks.
Put another way, it's not clear to me that the statistical results for papers where an error might mean a measured loss of academic status are relevant to papers where the analysis regards the possible destruction of the Earth. So far the sample size on the latter is pretty small but the ones that have predicted the absence of global life-ending catastrophe have been 100% accurate. Of course they would have to be or we wouldn't be around to speculate about it, so we can't really make a conclusion from that either. But the point is that the foundation of this paper's statistical argument is itself invalid.
So according to you, the Bush government, that was pretty clearly anti-Global Warming in its policy agenda, completely suppressed any pro-Global Warming research in the USA. In fact, Bush political apparatchiks did try to control reports on studies performed by US government climate scientists, but there was still a lot of research funded and conducted that contradicted the government's ideological position, in spite of the political influence. So you're wrong twice: about which way the political influence affected Global Warming research in the USA, and about the extent to which opinions contradictory to the politically-preferred scenario were suppressed.
As opposed to living in the Star Wars Empire where the Sith Amendment is much less beneficial.
You know,... the Sith Amendment: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
Well, technically that's true. But it could also be said that capitalism naturally decays into corporatism, with a half-life of under a hundred years. Energetic interactions with other societies (such as wars) can accelerate the decay.
Well, there should have been a lot more questioning of what Paulson wanted to do, that's for certain. Paulson basically said "You need to trust me and sign a really big blank check". He then handed the money to banks without any strings, and they went ahead and mainly used it in ways that were self serving and did nothing to ease the crisis.
My impression is that Obama and the Democrats have been much more specific about what they want to spend it on and the Republicans just don't agree. As far as I'm concerned though, most Republicans basically no longer have any more credibility on the issue. Their unimaginative record is stuck on the usual song and dance of tax breaks to individuals or corporations (the usual Republican supply-side bullshit). Corporations will just collect the profits and pay down debt, but they won't invest in growth if there's no market for their products. Individuals were part of the problem by getting themselves into bad debt situations in the first place and they, like the corporations, would just concentrate on finally paying down that debt instead of actually spending the tax windfall. While paying down those debts are a good idea, that isn't going to help ease the contraction of the economy. It may help some individuals get out of debt slightly faster but, at an average of $40,000 in family credit card debt, that's going to take a few years and the size of tax breaks Republicans talk about aren't going to help much. In the meantime it's going to do nothing to stop or slow a deflationary spiral and unemployment.
If the money is spent on infrastructure however, it will stimulate the economy directly and through multiplier effects, and it will also help decrease the bleeding from lost jobs until consumer spending can recover. So economically, the Democratic approach makes a heck of a lot more sense. It will take a little longer to show progress, but it will also significantly soften the blow in the meantime by keeping more people working and prepare the country to be more competitive when consumer confidence finally returns.
But fundamentally the economy won't recover to what it used to be. With fewer high paying jobs in US manufacturing and high-tech due to greater competition from globalization, and credit availability being more restricted for the foreseeable future, the demand side is going to have shrunk a lot and some of that change will be permanent. Once people realize that the rules have changed, I expect there will be much more widespread pressure for more progressive taxation policies to help redistribute wealth and income more equitably and boost consumer demand. It's going to take quite a few years before enough of the electorate finally grabs a clue, though.
In addition to your suggestions,
a) Set up some honeypot addresses, like aardvark@yourdomain.com and zzyxyzark@yourdomain.com, that will not be used for any legitimate purposes.
b) if you have some old unused e-mail addresses (i.e. people no longer with a company), monitor them to make sure that they only receive spam and notify legitimate correspondents that they are obsolete and, once they've only received spam for 6 months or so, then start using them as honeypot addresses as well
c) seed the honeypot addresses into various locations where spammer automated address collectors will be likely to pick them up (web pages, news groups, replying to obvious address trollers, etc.) - try to get it into as many spammer lists as possible.
d) take any e-mails that come in to those addresses and feed them into the learning mode of
i) a hash signature-based recognizer if it's graphical spam
ii) a bayesian recognizer if it's text or HTML spam.
e) use the resulting trained recognizers to filter out the same spam messages from your legitimate mail addresses.
A bit the same idea as noise-cancelling headphones.
Yep, that's more the direction I was getting at. Generally I think it's going to come down to an ability to develop a minimal level of self-discipline and pragmatism/connection with reality. Discipline in making sure that your space suit is well maintained, that you always do pre-EVA check lists, that things are put away so that you know where they are in case of sudden acceleration or decompression. Pragmatism because if you don't have realistic expectations of what's possible, the mistakes you make are more likely to get you killed.
I think that currently, in addition to the rigorous physical testing you hear about, a certain amount of psychological aptitude testing is done by NASA and other national space programs for astronauts/cosmonauts. Because launching mass into space is so expensive, right now countries try to maximize that expense by choosing astronauts that are among the brightest and most capable people on Earth (but that unfortunately doesn't rule out bigotry). For mankind to truly be space faring, that price will need to drop enough so that it will be in reach of not just developed nations but average citizens of developed nations. But at that point, the rigours of living in a space environment will take over the selection process. Colonies that accept members that don't have those qualities necessary for individual survival in space will be placing the whole colony at risk, not just those unqualified individuals.
For instance, what about people who think that a literal reading of 1000 or 2000+ year old cultural guides developed for mostly tribal nomadic desert peoples is going to apply to a space-faring civilization, where survival is based on the collective capabilities of millions of people? That's most of the fundamentalist followers of Abrahamaic religions, although fundamentalist followers of caste-based religions would also pose a significant risk. Personally, I would avoid living in colonies that accepted a large number of people with those types of beliefs because I think they would pose significant long-term survival risks to the colony.
I would take that more seriously if they hadn't sat on their thumbs for the years that Darl was spouting his garbage about the SCO-IBM case.
Not necessarily. The problem is the "unthinking" masses of humanity. We have it really easy on Earth compared to the artificial environments that we would need to sustain ourselves in space. First we'll have to figure out a long-term approach for how to reliably protect our reproductive organs from ambient high-energy radiation once away from the Earth's magnetic field so that independent colonies don't get overwhelmed by birth defects. Eventually though, living in space would apply a whole new set of evolutionary pressures for survival and human space-farers would have to adapt. If we survive long enough to permanently colonize space, it would probably transform that part of humanity that would make it into space by making it much more aware of risk evaluation and risk taking, and general incompetence will get weeded out fairly quickly and ruthlessly by the ambient dangers of space.
It might take a few failed colonies at first, but eventually a society would evolve a way to ensure that happens. Perhaps mandatory civil service that involves external colony maintenance as a requirement for political office? Or maybe even the same for obtaining the voting franchise - a sort of Starship Troopers lite.
In fact, if you were a space-going race you probably wouldn't want to establish contact with a species that hadn't already gone through that winnowing out process. I would even go so far as to say that that difference might eventually lead to true divergence of humans into two species: the earth-bound and the space-faring.
If "we" get out there, the people that colonize another planet probably won't be the same "people" that are messing up Earth right now because those people wouldn't survive long enough to make it that far. Yeah, it's kind of an elitist view, but evolution is the ultimate meritocracy and, in very harsh environments, the people that forget that don't stay in the gene pool long.
Yeah, and that's worked really well so far hasn't it? The courts have pretty well let the administration avoid judicial and congressional challenge with either of two excuses a) National Security b) no standing to challenge. As for FISA, they pretty well rubber stamped a newsprint roll warrant with a Liebherr TI 274 truck tire. Reviews indicated multiple violations with hardly a wrist-slap as consequence. Maybe that lets you sleep at night but it's good to see not everyone is that gullible.
I think that some of Richard Nixon's comments and actions show a significant disregard for the US constitution, quite possibly comparable to George Bush's. The difference is that, 30 years later, George Bush was backed by a Congress, with similar disregard for the constitution, that gave him much more free rein to exercise that attitude than Nixon ever got. I don't know enough about Presidents prior to the mid-20th Century to say if the same also applied to any of them.
Didn't they make a pirate movie call "The curse of the Black Perl"? Presumably it's about particularly obfuscated legacy code.
LED Street lights should help a lot with this. LED illumination is a lot more directional and therefore there should have a lot less wasted photons/energy. As a bonus it saves money for the same level of illumination. Pilot projects are already under way.
Actually, the elevator works fine from a suspension point of view. You just need a balancing mass past geosync altitude (which could be just more cable with a balancing mass and moving vibration dampers). There are questions about how to deal with tangential Coriolis forces from cars going up the elevator. Maybe you might be able to partially balance it with giving the elevator cars a really big charge and a really good capacitance skin so that electrical force from travelling through the Earth's magnetic field balance out the Coriolis force on average?
Because our primate relatives without religion and minimal culture who share much of our genetic makeup behave just as you say. They fuck each other in public whenever... Oh, wait!
Because one is an intimate act between two individuals; the other is just a normal feeding activity and the real reason why breasts exist. That some people have a problem with bare breasts because they've been overly sexualized by media and some religions is not the breastfeeding mother's (or hungry baby's) fault.
Yeah, they invented the Y2K problem hundreds of years before North American programmers. On Dec 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar will stop working. We need to apply patches to all that Mayan hardware that lying arou... Never mind.
Not exactly. My understanding is that the legislation was that location could not be used as a criteria for evaluating debt risk and that a certain portion of loans had to be provided to people living in areas that, on average, had worse debt ratings. It would have still been possible to meet the regulatory constraints while limiting risk exposure and a number of banks did that. What happened is that this legislative change was used as an opening by banks and other lenders to accept risky loans from everywhere, not just the historically underserved locations, once they figured out they could make lots of money by handing the problem to somebody else through packaging it in over-rated securities. Without both parts of the equation, the damage would have been much less. The Democrats are primarily responsible for one part, and the Republicans are primarily responsible for the other.
Agreed. The general public also doesn't seem to be the only ones when you hear about legislators considering legally phasing out incandescent bulb production and sales over the next N years. That may be more feasible if LED lighting can start working in the situations where incandescent lighting stumbles.
If he lives in California, that's a fairly high probability, although it's not about compensating for him, it's due to the rising demand for power from everyone else. Maybe he's also bought other home electronics with higher consumption over the same time period (wide screen TV maybe?).
CFLs also have more active components that may be more sensitive to crappy power. Power fluctuations affect incandescents as well, since they will be subject to a resulting thermal stress but CFL ballasts may be even more sensitive. On the other hand, with low consumption devices, if you don't need to power cycle them as often and just leave them on more, that could lengthen their lifespan. If the MTBF estimates assume that and you still frequently turn lights on and off as you move in and out of rooms, that could be a factor too.
For something more compact and less wet (a consideration around compact electrical devices): a diffraction grating. Add a glass frosting on top of a couple of layered diffraction gratings to make the light more evenly diffuse.
If your car is more fuel efficient than 20 miles/gallon, then you're better off with the gas tax. So high-polluting SUV owners get a tax break and hybrid owners get the shaft. Since it's the hybrid owners who aren't consuming enough gas due to high fuel efficiency, how is the government going to prevent them from just ripping out the GPS computers (or buying vehicles out of state where the gadget isn't included)? They should be encouraging the replacement of high consumption vehicles with lower consumption vehicles, not the other way around. I thought Oregon was supposed to have a lot of tree-hugging environmentalists. Why aren't they screaming about this? As somebody else said, some combination of a mileage tax and a gas tax that everybody pays and is adjusted to stay balanced and revenue-neutral as fuel consumption drops would make sense, but this is ridiculous.