It doesn't matter who pays the tax. It's the end user in all cases. Whether Apple sells it's phone $1000 and pays the govt $150 or sells its phone $850 and the user pays the govt $150 makes no difference other than semantically.
You are talking about tax incidence. But you forgot about an important detail. Companies cannot always simply pass on any taxes. Just because the government assigns a particular tax rate to my company doesn't necessarily mean I can raise prices to compensate. The reasons for this vary but usually it is because of competitive pressures. So in many cases the company ends up eating some percentage of the cost and their profits are lower. It's unclear if this would apply in Apple's case but it is clear that Apple cannot simply charge any amount they want. At some point the price gets high enough that people will seek out alternatives which is why Android has huge market share despite modest profits. In the long run (years) all prices are variable but for shorter periods of time there often are constraints on pricing power.
But if a company can manage to (legally) dodge all taxes that can be a huge competitive advantage in pricing power. It allows them to sell a product for less money than would otherwise be possible, even if it is a premium product with a fat margin.
It doesn't help that the government has huge amounts of waste, runs an international health service, and pisses away of tax money in "foreign aid" at a time when there is a budgetary deficit in our own country.
Spare me. The US government spends approximately $600 billion per year on a grossly oversized military and coincidentally in 2016 also borrowed about $600 billion to pay for it. Less than 1% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid versus around 16% to the military. The US is among the smallest donors of foreign aid as a percent of GDP among wealthy countries. You're arguing that we "piss away money on foreign aid" when in fact what we are pissing away money on is weapons to defend against mostly non-existent threats. Your "facts" are wrong and I suggest you take some time to discover the real ones.
Why the generic descriptor? Say the name of the company - Columbia in this case. It's not as if no one has ever heard of them or they need their identity protected. Plus the company is named in the article.
Your comment, and the attitude it exhibits, is a perfect example of the reasons why so many Americans chose to vote for President Trump.
Almost all of those people would have voted for Trump or whatever the republican candidate was if he was running against Hitler reincarnated. Hillary lost because of two reasons - 1) gerrymandering and 2) the fact that she wasn't especially charismatic so not enough of her base turned out. She actually won the popular vote but that didn't matter because of gerrymandering.
Republicans aren't "anti-science".
How many democrats do you see trying to teach creationism in the science classroom? It's true that not all republicans are anti-science but a HUGE number of them very much are, particularly those who are religiously motivated or have economic self interest incompatible with scientific evidence. Now to be fair the democrats have their share of anti-science loonies too (different topics but still wrong) but let's not pretend that republicans over the last 20 years have been even remotely pro-science. Ironically many of our best science accomplishments came under republican administrations - prior to the Reagan administration and the rise of the religious right.
What they are upset about is poorly done science that's driven by biased politics and ideology instead of the objective and impartial scientific method. Climate "science" is a good example of this, with data that's "corrected"/"massaged" and predictions that prove to be wildly inaccurate, decade after decade. Republicans don't like "science" like that.
Science didn't bring the politics to that debate. Republicans with an economic self interest did that. The climate science work stands on its own. It is apolitical. The republicans aren't arguing against it with facts and evidence because they don't have facts or evidence to support their position. They are employing a "god of the gaps" strategy claiming that the evidence isn't conclusive (even when it is) and that we need to keep studying it. They are trying to defund government research of the problem. They have fossil fuel energy companies funding "studies" to prove that dumping carbon into the atmosphere isn't having an effect. The science isn't "wildly inaccurate" despite your claims and there is a mountain of credible evidence. The problem is that dealing with climate change goes against the economic self interest of a good portion of the republican party base and so they have turned objective facts into a political debate.
As for religion, many Republicans aren't religious at all. Yes, there are some Republicans who are Christians. In fact, there are Republicans who practice Islam. There are Republicans who practice Hinduism. There are Republicans who practice Buddhism. It's absurd for you to label all Republicans as Bible-thumping idiots, when that just isn't the case.
Sure there are some aethiest republicans. Are you seriously arguing that the vast majority of the republican party isn't christian or that the the evangelical christian religious right isn't a very powerful force within the party? You can find examples of any minority you want within the party but I'm not about to pretend that it isn't primarily a party controlled by white christians or that christian sects don't lean strongly republican. There is a reason over 90% of black people vote democrat. There is a reason most minorities do not vote republican. You'll find that most christian religious groups tend to vote republican unless they are a minority and most everybody else tends to vote democrat. Atheist, agnostics, hindus, muslims, jews, etc all vote overwhelmingly democrat. Some like the catholic church reflect approximately the same composition as the overall voting population.
There are a significant number of Republicans who support fiscal restraint.
Bullshit. There isn't a single republican seriously asking for cutting the military budget or medicare which are by far the two biggest line items on the federal budget along with social security. Any discussion about "fiscal restraint" that does not involve cutting the military or medicare is a bogus argument. The republican's don't give a shit about fiscal restraint. They care about getting elected and promising to cut people's taxes (while ignoring the consequences of doing so) is a good way to do that. In reality we need to RAISE taxes to cover the entitlements we so clearly are unwilling to do without.
I have no problem cutting programs which are peripheral to core government. But I want that to be accompanied with tax cuts, which allows those who wish to support specific programs to "vote with their dollars."
Again, you are studiously ignoring the elephant in the room. Tax cuts? We aren't even paying for the government services we use. The federal deficit last year was right around $600B. You would have to cut basically every single program in the government except for the military, social security, medicare/medicaid, and interest on the debt to make up for the missing taxes. We basically fund almost the entire budget of our military (coincidentally around $600B) by borrowing it. Tax cuts? Taxes have to go up to pay for the stuff we already refuse to cut. Pay for what we buy before you talk to me about tax cuts. Otherwise you are just loading up your children and grandchildren with debt.
He stopped bothering because once one realizes one is arguing with either a troll or a fool the best path is to stop trying to be reasonable.
The difference may be that I am an actual scientist, while you confuse science and religion.
I very much doubt that you are an actual scientist given your demonstrated lack of understanding of what science actually is. If you are an actual scientist I recommend considering a change of careers. Rapidly.
You do not and cannot know whether that is all. It is highly unscientific to claim it.
You claimed that "it is unknown whether it is a physical mechanism or not". This is both a preposterous (intentional?) misunderstanding of what a scientific claim is and simultaneously a bunch of pseudo-scientific malarkey. Basically you invoked magic in your argument - unrooted in any physics or observed phenomena we are aware of. You asked us to prove a negative and to ignore what we actually do know. That's not science, that's just the sort of mental masturbation you get from first year college students who took their first philosophy class and haven't understood the material.
It turns out we know quite a lot about consciousness, and how the brain does it.
No we really do not. We know some about it but consciousness but our understanding is rather superficial. We don't even have a widely agreed upon definition of what it is so to claim we know a lot about something we can't even clearly define is something of a preposterous declaration. The community studying it has sort of a gestalt ("I know it when I see it") working definition that is useful but hardly definitive.
I can't help but reflect on the irony of someone like you calling someone like Kurzweil, who has two degrees and several inventions under his belt, an idiot.
I hold two degrees and have several inventions to my name, though admittedly mine are less impressive than Mr Kurzweil's. Kurzweil isn't an idiot but that doesn't mean he isn't saying something stupid or wrong. And just because he has done some good work and said some smart things it doesn't follow that everything he does is good work or everything he says is correct.
The actual challenge here isn't to figure out how much he's wrong. The challenge is to figure out how much he's right.
That's the challenge with anybody who makes predictions about the future and not unique to him. People have been doing this for millennia and if you throw enough vaguely plausible sounding BS out there, some of it is probably going to be right. With a smart guy the batting average might be a bit higher but it's still not going to be anywhere near perfect. You'll note that he doesn't bring up the stuff he was wrong about later on. With many of them (see "psychics" and clergy) they are simply making shit up to make a buck on the back of the credulous. Kurzweil is pretty good at talking about plausible sounding techno-BS but lazy people are giving him WAY more credit than he really deserves. To me he's treading dangerously close to snake-oil salesman territory.
I've listened to the guy and he has some stuff nailed (he is actually smart and knows certain subjects very well) but there doesn't seem to be anybody willing to check him when he gets out of pocket. He acts like everything that comes out of his mouth is the gospel truth when in fact it sometimes is naive extrapolation, sometimes on subjects he's not really adequately informed about. He gives ridiculously precise dates (usually alarmingly soon) for technological events that sound good to someone unwilling to give the matter significant consideration but are absurd to those actually informed on the subject. There also is the fact that he's got books to sell so there is a verifiable conflict of interest he conveniently doesn't address.
Yep. Pretty much anyone who goes on about the Singularity is a loon. Not because it's necessarily a fundamentally loony concept, but because it attracts loons like moths to a flame.
Kurzweil is (obviously) a smart guy but I think he isn't quite as smart as he seems to think he is. He is the master of over enthusiastic extrapolation. I've listened to several interviews with him. He'll take some current technology that resembles some bit of sci-fi tech and use that as evidence that we are already doing whatever the sci-fi tech is supposed to accomplish as if he can predict the future. The singularity is an interesting concept but he treats it like it's some sort of mathematical inevitability when it is not at all clear that it is anything of the sort. It definitely is not high on my list of things that I'm going to worry about largely due to its plausibility.
I grew up during the Cold War with all sorts of Armageddon scenarios being paraded in front of us (thermonuclear war, nuclear winter, acid rain, Malthusian population growth, greenhouse effects, planet killing asteroids, alien invaders, bio weapons etc) some of which were plausible and others not so much. I see little evidence that the singularity concept falls strongly on the plausible side of that list. It's fear of automation run amok. There are things to be concerned bout with automation but they largely are more economic concerns than existential ones. I agree that it is a sexy idea to a certain demographic but I think the predictions about it are largely unsupported hokum from smart people overly enamored with an idea.
Yes, but what was your motivation for "just pointing out" the blatantly obvious?
You and I might think it is blatantly obvious but there is evidence to suggest that many people do not find it obvious at all. Others simply don't care for various reasons - most of the economic in origin. No offense was intended if it was already clear to you. But I think it's important to keep the issues regarding the waste streams front and center because they matter to all of us sooner or later.
So you are shifting the goalposts away from cadmium?
Not remotely. Just pointing out that the argument that just because the toxic stuff doesn't end up in the primary product (hydrogen here) it isn't the end of the discussion. You still have to deal with the waste streams and whatever they contain, whether it be cadmium, carbon, or something else.
So it's up to you as to what you want to do with them after that - industrial feedstocks, reaction and sequestration, or even simple exhaustion as CO2, with the knowledge that at least it's a closed fuel cycle (CO2 taken in during growth being released back to the air).
It's probably NOT a closed fuel cycle. You're not considering the entire fuel cycle. Most industrial scale biomass is really a conversion of diesel fuel to the biomass. Farmers use tractors and fertilizers which get their energy from oil pumped from the ground. Sure there is some photosynthesis in there too but the oil derived hydrocarbons are a non-trivial percent of the total carbon footprint. So the fuel cycle isn't closed because the carbon doesn't go back into the ground.
Most biomass is either trash destined for a landfill, a byproduct of growing food, or the end product of sewage treatment. Converting it into a clean fuel to generate electricity is a win-win.
In principle yes but it's not so easy in practice, primarily for economic reasons. Details matter when it comes to this stuff. This isn't our first rodeo with this waste stream energy reclamation or supposedly miracle bio-fuels. I wouldn't dismiss any of it out of hand but I'm not going to get excited without a LOT more details.
From that example you should know that toxic catalysts don't always end up in the end product - especially since here the end product is a gas.
Umm you are aware that there will be waste and byproducts from the reaction, right? Not the least of which will be the carbon from the biomass. Just because the toxic stuff doesn't end up in the finished product doesn't mean it isn't a problem or can be ignored.
Article is very short on details. How much hydrogen can they extract per ton of biomass? What's the cost of the active ingredients?
Not only that, what do they do with the carbon that is left over after the reaction? Biomass tends to be rather heavy in carbon and it has to go somewhere.
The new method, published in Nature Energy, offers a relatively cheap fuel alternative that researchers are looking to scale up to meet consumer demands at the industrial level.
Whether it is cheap or not depends on how expensive it was to create the biomass. Since most biomass used commercially is basically a conversion of diesel fuel to biomass, it's not immediately clear whether or not this technology would actually be cheap. Perhaps as a means of using excess/surplus biomass that would otherwise be wasted it could be useful but even then it's not entirely clear. WAY too much glossing over details and naively optimistic future projections in the article.
I would also be curious what they do with the carbon in the biomass since that is a nontrivial component of any biomass. Conveniently they do not mention that little detail
How do you know it was a non-scientific (or, more precisely, non-representative) sample?
Because they didn't indicate any details about what the population was composed of or how it was carefully chosen to eliminate any selection biases or other problems. There is no reason to hide this information and without it any conclusions from the study are suspect. Maybe by some miracle it is a useful data set but I very strongly doubt that. I used to do statistical analysis for a living many moons ago and after doing that for a while you get a nose for BS "studies". Give me 50 of anything to measure and don't make me reveal my sampling methods and I can "prove" almost anything you want me to.
In this case, the sample size makes the margin of error a little larger than we usually use, but not uselessly so.
Maybe not useless in principle but in reality it almost certainly is. The margin of error is not independent of the sample selection. If they cannot show that their sample is reasonably likely to representative of the population they are modeling then the whole thing is useless. The fact that they can get a p-value with significance doesn't even remotely begin to make the study valid.
If you can accept a 14% margin of error, you can "scientifically" poll a population of any size, on any boolean-valued question, with an unbiased sample of only 49. So there's nothing wrong with a sample size of 50.
It's only a 14% margin of error if the population sample was selected properly. If it wasn't then the actual margin of error is far larger.
The sample size is not a problem. The p-value for there being a delta between the homes is
The sample size absolutely is a problem if you want to draw any broad conclusions about the population at large. There is more to a study than merely the ability to have a p-value. There is a reason most political polls have population sample sizes of 1000 or more. You need a sample size that large to have a useful confidence interval. And even if you have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions, you still need the right data - data that accurately reflects the population being measured.
Now, the sampling may have not been scientific or random, but you haven't shown that at all.
It is a fairly safe assumption that anyone who fails to reveal their testing methodology probably isn't taking great pains to model the population at large, especially with a small sample size. Maybe they did some awesome work but I very much doubt it. Unless they are will to show in detail how their model might be reasonably reflective of a larger population I'm going to remain highly skeptical and you should be too. This "study" looks to me to be nothing more than lazy click bait.
Really? Which ones? I have a tendency to prefer SMS for most things.
I've had good luck with several voice mail services with SMS (Google Voice, YouMail, etc - not recommending any specifically but SMS worked fine for me through them). I like using these because it gives an abstraction layer to my actual cell phone and provides a means to screen communications I don't want and I can direct the calls to a different phone if my cell phone isn't the most appropriate at a given time. For example it was useful to point the number to my mother's house when I visited her because she was in a cell phone dead zone.
I drop things as trivially as I can adopt them, so it's not really a big deal for me.
Same here though many people find Facebook and Twitter (and some others) to be rather sticky if a lot of their friends or family are using them. Network effects and all that.
Twitter works fine with SMS, this should be fine within your scope of accessibility.
No argument but I regard twitter as an optional extra. No use to me personally but I get how others find it useful and I'm aware of it's compatibility with SMS. Other services work well with SMS too but I think tying yourself to them without very good reasons to be problematic.
I maintain contact with everyone I need to maintain contact with via email, phone, and SMS. Pretty much everyone can receive at least one of those three options and it's easy to keep track of them. I route my SMS messages through a voicemail service so I can respond to them on my desktop computer if I care to. Same service transcribes my voicemails when I get them and gets them to me via email and SMS. If you can't be reached effectively with email, phone or text messaging then we don't have a relationship that is deep enough for me to worry about you. Sorry.
I cannot be bothered with Facebook or Twitter but those are common enough that I can see some people adding those to the list of options but I consider them optional and to a large degree superfluous. I don't see any IM apps that provide any meaningful benefit in my work or personal life so I don't really use any.
Instead of having a new messaging app, just have a contact app that remembers what app you use to get in touch with everyone.
Oh hells no. If you want to use some off the wall messaging app knock yourself out. I'm not going to be bothered to try to keep track of everyone's preferred app on top of the rest of the mountain of data I deal with in my life. If you need an app to track everyone's communication preferences you are making the problem worse, not better. If you have special needs (hard of hearing, etc) I'll make a special accommodation but otherwise you're just being a pain in the ass.
I use email and phone and text messaging because I can reach everyone I need to reach through those. If I can't reach you through those, we don't have a relationship worth worrying about.
Nowadays, some people install up to seven instant messengers to be able to keep up with various circles of people. How do you see this situation being resolved?
I see them dropping some of those circles of people or more likely those people will over time converge to towards one platform. Also remember Zawinski's Law.
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It doesn't matter who pays the tax. It's the end user in all cases. Whether Apple sells it's phone $1000 and pays the govt $150 or sells its phone $850 and the user pays the govt $150 makes no difference other than semantically.
You are talking about tax incidence. But you forgot about an important detail. Companies cannot always simply pass on any taxes. Just because the government assigns a particular tax rate to my company doesn't necessarily mean I can raise prices to compensate. The reasons for this vary but usually it is because of competitive pressures. So in many cases the company ends up eating some percentage of the cost and their profits are lower. It's unclear if this would apply in Apple's case but it is clear that Apple cannot simply charge any amount they want. At some point the price gets high enough that people will seek out alternatives which is why Android has huge market share despite modest profits. In the long run (years) all prices are variable but for shorter periods of time there often are constraints on pricing power.
But if a company can manage to (legally) dodge all taxes that can be a huge competitive advantage in pricing power. It allows them to sell a product for less money than would otherwise be possible, even if it is a premium product with a fat margin.
It doesn't help that the government has huge amounts of waste, runs an international health service, and pisses away of tax money in "foreign aid" at a time when there is a budgetary deficit in our own country.
Spare me. The US government spends approximately $600 billion per year on a grossly oversized military and coincidentally in 2016 also borrowed about $600 billion to pay for it. Less than 1% of the federal budget goes to foreign aid versus around 16% to the military. The US is among the smallest donors of foreign aid as a percent of GDP among wealthy countries. You're arguing that we "piss away money on foreign aid" when in fact what we are pissing away money on is weapons to defend against mostly non-existent threats. Your "facts" are wrong and I suggest you take some time to discover the real ones.
An Oregon sportswear company...
Why the generic descriptor? Say the name of the company - Columbia in this case. It's not as if no one has ever heard of them or they need their identity protected. Plus the company is named in the article.
Your comment, and the attitude it exhibits, is a perfect example of the reasons why so many Americans chose to vote for President Trump.
Almost all of those people would have voted for Trump or whatever the republican candidate was if he was running against Hitler reincarnated. Hillary lost because of two reasons - 1) gerrymandering and 2) the fact that she wasn't especially charismatic so not enough of her base turned out. She actually won the popular vote but that didn't matter because of gerrymandering.
Republicans aren't "anti-science".
How many democrats do you see trying to teach creationism in the science classroom? It's true that not all republicans are anti-science but a HUGE number of them very much are, particularly those who are religiously motivated or have economic self interest incompatible with scientific evidence. Now to be fair the democrats have their share of anti-science loonies too (different topics but still wrong) but let's not pretend that republicans over the last 20 years have been even remotely pro-science. Ironically many of our best science accomplishments came under republican administrations - prior to the Reagan administration and the rise of the religious right.
What they are upset about is poorly done science that's driven by biased politics and ideology instead of the objective and impartial scientific method. Climate "science" is a good example of this, with data that's "corrected"/"massaged" and predictions that prove to be wildly inaccurate, decade after decade. Republicans don't like "science" like that.
Science didn't bring the politics to that debate. Republicans with an economic self interest did that. The climate science work stands on its own. It is apolitical. The republicans aren't arguing against it with facts and evidence because they don't have facts or evidence to support their position. They are employing a "god of the gaps" strategy claiming that the evidence isn't conclusive (even when it is) and that we need to keep studying it. They are trying to defund government research of the problem. They have fossil fuel energy companies funding "studies" to prove that dumping carbon into the atmosphere isn't having an effect. The science isn't "wildly inaccurate" despite your claims and there is a mountain of credible evidence. The problem is that dealing with climate change goes against the economic self interest of a good portion of the republican party base and so they have turned objective facts into a political debate.
As for religion, many Republicans aren't religious at all. Yes, there are some Republicans who are Christians. In fact, there are Republicans who practice Islam. There are Republicans who practice Hinduism. There are Republicans who practice Buddhism. It's absurd for you to label all Republicans as Bible-thumping idiots, when that just isn't the case.
Sure there are some aethiest republicans. Are you seriously arguing that the vast majority of the republican party isn't christian or that the the evangelical christian religious right isn't a very powerful force within the party? You can find examples of any minority you want within the party but I'm not about to pretend that it isn't primarily a party controlled by white christians or that christian sects don't lean strongly republican. There is a reason over 90% of black people vote democrat. There is a reason most minorities do not vote republican. You'll find that most christian religious groups tend to vote republican unless they are a minority and most everybody else tends to vote democrat. Atheist, agnostics, hindus, muslims, jews, etc all vote overwhelmingly democrat. Some like the catholic church reflect approximately the same composition as the overall voting population.
There are a significant number of Republicans who support fiscal restraint.
Bullshit. There isn't a single republican seriously asking for cutting the military budget or medicare which are by far the two biggest line items on the federal budget along with social security. Any discussion about "fiscal restraint" that does not involve cutting the military or medicare is a bogus argument. The republican's don't give a shit about fiscal restraint. They care about getting elected and promising to cut people's taxes (while ignoring the consequences of doing so) is a good way to do that. In reality we need to RAISE taxes to cover the entitlements we so clearly are unwilling to do without.
I have no problem cutting programs which are peripheral to core government. But I want that to be accompanied with tax cuts, which allows those who wish to support specific programs to "vote with their dollars."
Again, you are studiously ignoring the elephant in the room. Tax cuts? We aren't even paying for the government services we use. The federal deficit last year was right around $600B. You would have to cut basically every single program in the government except for the military, social security, medicare/medicaid, and interest on the debt to make up for the missing taxes. We basically fund almost the entire budget of our military (coincidentally around $600B) by borrowing it. Tax cuts? Taxes have to go up to pay for the stuff we already refuse to cut. Pay for what we buy before you talk to me about tax cuts. Otherwise you are just loading up your children and grandchildren with debt.
Funny. You seem to have run out of arguments.
He stopped bothering because once one realizes one is arguing with either a troll or a fool the best path is to stop trying to be reasonable.
The difference may be that I am an actual scientist, while you confuse science and religion.
I very much doubt that you are an actual scientist given your demonstrated lack of understanding of what science actually is. If you are an actual scientist I recommend considering a change of careers. Rapidly.
You do not and cannot know whether that is all. It is highly unscientific to claim it.
You claimed that "it is unknown whether it is a physical mechanism or not". This is both a preposterous (intentional?) misunderstanding of what a scientific claim is and simultaneously a bunch of pseudo-scientific malarkey. Basically you invoked magic in your argument - unrooted in any physics or observed phenomena we are aware of. You asked us to prove a negative and to ignore what we actually do know. That's not science, that's just the sort of mental masturbation you get from first year college students who took their first philosophy class and haven't understood the material.
It turns out we know quite a lot about consciousness, and how the brain does it.
No we really do not. We know some about it but consciousness but our understanding is rather superficial. We don't even have a widely agreed upon definition of what it is so to claim we know a lot about something we can't even clearly define is something of a preposterous declaration. The community studying it has sort of a gestalt ("I know it when I see it") working definition that is useful but hardly definitive.
I can't help but reflect on the irony of someone like you calling someone like Kurzweil, who has two degrees and several inventions under his belt, an idiot.
I hold two degrees and have several inventions to my name, though admittedly mine are less impressive than Mr Kurzweil's. Kurzweil isn't an idiot but that doesn't mean he isn't saying something stupid or wrong. And just because he has done some good work and said some smart things it doesn't follow that everything he does is good work or everything he says is correct.
The actual challenge here isn't to figure out how much he's wrong. The challenge is to figure out how much he's right.
That's the challenge with anybody who makes predictions about the future and not unique to him. People have been doing this for millennia and if you throw enough vaguely plausible sounding BS out there, some of it is probably going to be right. With a smart guy the batting average might be a bit higher but it's still not going to be anywhere near perfect. You'll note that he doesn't bring up the stuff he was wrong about later on. With many of them (see "psychics" and clergy) they are simply making shit up to make a buck on the back of the credulous. Kurzweil is pretty good at talking about plausible sounding techno-BS but lazy people are giving him WAY more credit than he really deserves. To me he's treading dangerously close to snake-oil salesman territory.
I've listened to the guy and he has some stuff nailed (he is actually smart and knows certain subjects very well) but there doesn't seem to be anybody willing to check him when he gets out of pocket. He acts like everything that comes out of his mouth is the gospel truth when in fact it sometimes is naive extrapolation, sometimes on subjects he's not really adequately informed about. He gives ridiculously precise dates (usually alarmingly soon) for technological events that sound good to someone unwilling to give the matter significant consideration but are absurd to those actually informed on the subject. There also is the fact that he's got books to sell so there is a verifiable conflict of interest he conveniently doesn't address.
Yep. Pretty much anyone who goes on about the Singularity is a loon. Not because it's necessarily a fundamentally loony concept, but because it attracts loons like moths to a flame.
Kurzweil is (obviously) a smart guy but I think he isn't quite as smart as he seems to think he is. He is the master of over enthusiastic extrapolation. I've listened to several interviews with him. He'll take some current technology that resembles some bit of sci-fi tech and use that as evidence that we are already doing whatever the sci-fi tech is supposed to accomplish as if he can predict the future. The singularity is an interesting concept but he treats it like it's some sort of mathematical inevitability when it is not at all clear that it is anything of the sort. It definitely is not high on my list of things that I'm going to worry about largely due to its plausibility.
I grew up during the Cold War with all sorts of Armageddon scenarios being paraded in front of us (thermonuclear war, nuclear winter, acid rain, Malthusian population growth, greenhouse effects, planet killing asteroids, alien invaders, bio weapons etc) some of which were plausible and others not so much. I see little evidence that the singularity concept falls strongly on the plausible side of that list. It's fear of automation run amok. There are things to be concerned bout with automation but they largely are more economic concerns than existential ones. I agree that it is a sexy idea to a certain demographic but I think the predictions about it are largely unsupported hokum from smart people overly enamored with an idea.
Yes, but what was your motivation for "just pointing out" the blatantly obvious?
You and I might think it is blatantly obvious but there is evidence to suggest that many people do not find it obvious at all. Others simply don't care for various reasons - most of the economic in origin. No offense was intended if it was already clear to you. But I think it's important to keep the issues regarding the waste streams front and center because they matter to all of us sooner or later.
So you are shifting the goalposts away from cadmium?
Not remotely. Just pointing out that the argument that just because the toxic stuff doesn't end up in the primary product (hydrogen here) it isn't the end of the discussion. You still have to deal with the waste streams and whatever they contain, whether it be cadmium, carbon, or something else.
So it's up to you as to what you want to do with them after that - industrial feedstocks, reaction and sequestration, or even simple exhaustion as CO2, with the knowledge that at least it's a closed fuel cycle (CO2 taken in during growth being released back to the air).
It's probably NOT a closed fuel cycle. You're not considering the entire fuel cycle. Most industrial scale biomass is really a conversion of diesel fuel to the biomass. Farmers use tractors and fertilizers which get their energy from oil pumped from the ground. Sure there is some photosynthesis in there too but the oil derived hydrocarbons are a non-trivial percent of the total carbon footprint. So the fuel cycle isn't closed because the carbon doesn't go back into the ground.
Most biomass is either trash destined for a landfill, a byproduct of growing food, or the end product of sewage treatment. Converting it into a clean fuel to generate electricity is a win-win.
In principle yes but it's not so easy in practice, primarily for economic reasons. Details matter when it comes to this stuff. This isn't our first rodeo with this waste stream energy reclamation or supposedly miracle bio-fuels. I wouldn't dismiss any of it out of hand but I'm not going to get excited without a LOT more details.
From that example you should know that toxic catalysts don't always end up in the end product - especially since here the end product is a gas.
Umm you are aware that there will be waste and byproducts from the reaction, right? Not the least of which will be the carbon from the biomass. Just because the toxic stuff doesn't end up in the finished product doesn't mean it isn't a problem or can be ignored.
Article is very short on details. How much hydrogen can they extract per ton of biomass? What's the cost of the active ingredients?
Not only that, what do they do with the carbon that is left over after the reaction? Biomass tends to be rather heavy in carbon and it has to go somewhere.
The new method, published in Nature Energy, offers a relatively cheap fuel alternative that researchers are looking to scale up to meet consumer demands at the industrial level.
Whether it is cheap or not depends on how expensive it was to create the biomass. Since most biomass used commercially is basically a conversion of diesel fuel to biomass, it's not immediately clear whether or not this technology would actually be cheap. Perhaps as a means of using excess/surplus biomass that would otherwise be wasted it could be useful but even then it's not entirely clear. WAY too much glossing over details and naively optimistic future projections in the article.
I would also be curious what they do with the carbon in the biomass since that is a nontrivial component of any biomass. Conveniently they do not mention that little detail
How do you know it was a non-scientific (or, more precisely, non-representative) sample?
Because they didn't indicate any details about what the population was composed of or how it was carefully chosen to eliminate any selection biases or other problems. There is no reason to hide this information and without it any conclusions from the study are suspect. Maybe by some miracle it is a useful data set but I very strongly doubt that. I used to do statistical analysis for a living many moons ago and after doing that for a while you get a nose for BS "studies". Give me 50 of anything to measure and don't make me reveal my sampling methods and I can "prove" almost anything you want me to.
In this case, the sample size makes the margin of error a little larger than we usually use, but not uselessly so.
Maybe not useless in principle but in reality it almost certainly is. The margin of error is not independent of the sample selection. If they cannot show that their sample is reasonably likely to representative of the population they are modeling then the whole thing is useless. The fact that they can get a p-value with significance doesn't even remotely begin to make the study valid.
If you can accept a 14% margin of error, you can "scientifically" poll a population of any size, on any boolean-valued question, with an unbiased sample of only 49. So there's nothing wrong with a sample size of 50.
It's only a 14% margin of error if the population sample was selected properly. If it wasn't then the actual margin of error is far larger.
The sample size is not a problem. The p-value for there being a delta between the homes is
The sample size absolutely is a problem if you want to draw any broad conclusions about the population at large. There is more to a study than merely the ability to have a p-value. There is a reason most political polls have population sample sizes of 1000 or more. You need a sample size that large to have a useful confidence interval. And even if you have enough data to draw meaningful conclusions, you still need the right data - data that accurately reflects the population being measured.
Now, the sampling may have not been scientific or random, but you haven't shown that at all.
It is a fairly safe assumption that anyone who fails to reveal their testing methodology probably isn't taking great pains to model the population at large, especially with a small sample size. Maybe they did some awesome work but I very much doubt it. Unless they are will to show in detail how their model might be reasonably reflective of a larger population I'm going to remain highly skeptical and you should be too. This "study" looks to me to be nothing more than lazy click bait.
We surveyed 100 parents (50 Netflix-only homes, 50 normal television homes),
So an incredibly non-scientific tiny sample size, not at all representative of the population at large.
38% of kids in regular television homes don't know what commercials are.
I call bullshit on this one. There is no way you can actually watch cable TV and not know what a commercial is. Even with a DVR you'll still see them.
Really? Which ones? I have a tendency to prefer SMS for most things.
I've had good luck with several voice mail services with SMS (Google Voice, YouMail, etc - not recommending any specifically but SMS worked fine for me through them). I like using these because it gives an abstraction layer to my actual cell phone and provides a means to screen communications I don't want and I can direct the calls to a different phone if my cell phone isn't the most appropriate at a given time. For example it was useful to point the number to my mother's house when I visited her because she was in a cell phone dead zone.
I drop things as trivially as I can adopt them, so it's not really a big deal for me.
Same here though many people find Facebook and Twitter (and some others) to be rather sticky if a lot of their friends or family are using them. Network effects and all that.
Twitter works fine with SMS, this should be fine within your scope of accessibility.
No argument but I regard twitter as an optional extra. No use to me personally but I get how others find it useful and I'm aware of it's compatibility with SMS. Other services work well with SMS too but I think tying yourself to them without very good reasons to be problematic.
I maintain contact with everyone I need to maintain contact with via email, phone, and SMS. Pretty much everyone can receive at least one of those three options and it's easy to keep track of them. I route my SMS messages through a voicemail service so I can respond to them on my desktop computer if I care to. Same service transcribes my voicemails when I get them and gets them to me via email and SMS. If you can't be reached effectively with email, phone or text messaging then we don't have a relationship that is deep enough for me to worry about you. Sorry.
I cannot be bothered with Facebook or Twitter but those are common enough that I can see some people adding those to the list of options but I consider them optional and to a large degree superfluous. I don't see any IM apps that provide any meaningful benefit in my work or personal life so I don't really use any.
Instead of having a new messaging app, just have a contact app that remembers what app you use to get in touch with everyone.
Oh hells no. If you want to use some off the wall messaging app knock yourself out. I'm not going to be bothered to try to keep track of everyone's preferred app on top of the rest of the mountain of data I deal with in my life. If you need an app to track everyone's communication preferences you are making the problem worse, not better. If you have special needs (hard of hearing, etc) I'll make a special accommodation but otherwise you're just being a pain in the ass.
I use email and phone and text messaging because I can reach everyone I need to reach through those. If I can't reach you through those, we don't have a relationship worth worrying about.
Nowadays, some people install up to seven instant messengers to be able to keep up with various circles of people. How do you see this situation being resolved?
I see them dropping some of those circles of people or more likely those people will over time converge to towards one platform. Also remember Zawinski's Law.