Who said anything about foolish extrapolations? Our energy use will almost certainly continue to increase until it rather precipitously drops to either zero or something close to it. As long as our society holds together we should expect our energy use to increase. If energy use actually falls significantly it probably means something very bad has happened to the human race.
I don't really care, because I'm tailoring my electrical use, and the more that grid power goes up, the sooner I'll be saving money off grid.
Hey I'm all for distributed power generation. If you can do what you need without the grid that is awesome. I look forward to the day when most houses and businesses generate the majority of their own power from solar and/or wind (+batteries of course) and just use the grid to supplement. And yes I think that is long term realistic.
Honestly, the party is split on this. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, among others
The only differences are whether they think the government should step on your neck or whether private industry should serve that role. The old school republicans tend to be in the former camp while the so-called libertarian wing tends to be in the later but there isn't a bright line between the camps. Both of them are perfectly happy to sacrifice your privacy and civil rights any time they think they can gain political power and frankly it's kind of a distinction without a difference since they tend to vote in lock-step anyway.
But the new administration would rather support oil and coal. In fact, our new President actively fought a wind farm not long ago.
Sure. Many key players in the current administration have their financial bread buttered by the fossil fuel industry. So do many members of their political base. Republican administrations tend to be ludicrously sympathetic to the fossil fuel industry and like to pretend that science only matters when it supports their ideology.
Practically speaking, fracking isn't currently necessary for our energy needs and West Virginia already sucks up more Federal taxes than it sends in
It might not be strictly necessary but the currently viable replacements aren't clearly any better. If you don't do fracking and you aren't willing to install more nuclear (we clearly aren't) then the only near term alternative today is coal. Solar and wind are coming on strong but they aren't quite at the tipping point economically. Fracking is driving the price of natural gas cheap and making coal plants economically less competitive. Eliminate fracking and a lot of that capacity in the near term would go back to coal at least for the near future.
BTW you are aware that Wyoming is a FAR bigger producer of coal than West Virginia, right?
we ought to just abandon coal
Not going to happen. The USA is to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. We have vast amounts of it. We mine about 20 quadrillion BTUs of coal annually. It's going to be nigh impossible to get this country to leave all that coal in the ground even if it is a good idea to do so.
Some protests take the form of a riot. Not all riots are protests and not all protests are riots. Rioting is not peaceful protesting but it absolutely sometimes is a form of protest. Riots are not organized but they are often in response to some perceived grievance or out of dissent.
No matter how many people use literally to mean figuratively, no matter how many dictionaries take note of the inverse usage, it is still wrong, and anyone trying to avoid looking like a moron would be wise to steer clear of incorrect uses.
The only people that look like morons are those who continue to argue something long after the battle has been lost. Historically you are correct. Good for you. In modern usage the term "begging the question" now means something different than its original use because it is widely understood to mean something different now. That's how living languages work. How it is used and understood is all that really matters. Pointlessly clinging to an old definition when the rest of the world has moved on makes you look rather foolish and out of touch. Nobody likes the pedantic guy who tries to tell everyone they are wrong about the language. Don't be the guy at the party who says "well technically Frankenstein isn't the name of the monster". Nobody cares and you look like an ass when you point it out.
Uhhhh, the entire purpose of email is to send it to other people. Perhaps hundreds of other people. How do you retrain [sic] possession of something you must distribute to others for it to be of any value?
True but perhaps the wrong question. The important question to my mind is how do you secure the message (legally and/or technologically) against intrusive snooping by the government and perhaps others? Both in transit and in storage. Not an easy question to answer and I think the legal piece of it is very important and somewhat behind the technology.
Let me illustrate by example of how Gmail could work. There could be an option to store the email on our own computers. Generous as the google is with their storage allocation, I have way more than that in my OWN physical possession and I could, if allowed, possess my own email there.
There IS an option to store your email on your own computer. There always has been. That option didn't go away just because Gmail came along. Gmail is a choice, not a requirement.
If the google actually valued my privacy, they could throw in an option to encrypt the email end-to-end, even while it is on their servers.
Expecting an advertising company to value your privacy is an idiotic thing to do. Nobody is going to value your privacy more than you do. If it matters to you then take measures to secure it. The tools exist and have for a long time. If you use Gmail that is a tacit admission that you don't care so much about the privacy of whatever is sent through that email account.
Yeah, somehow busts the myth that Republicans are against privacy and for an intrusive law enforcement all in the name of security
What myth? That's not even a debate. They ARE against privacy and support intrusive law enforcement. Many democrats are as well. That has a lot more to do with people in power wanting to retain that power than it does with any given political persuasion. Republicans have zero concern for your privacy if money can be made from it or political power (including policing) can be derived from stepping on it. Democrats have somewhat different motivations and tactics but the effect on your privacy tends to be similar in the end.
The only thing really protecting your privacy and keeping police away is that the two parties cannot agree on the details. When they do agree on the details we get idiotic outcomes like the TSA or the Department of Homeland Security.
Trump, by by cozying up to Big Coal and Big Oil, has thrown China a glaring opportunity to get well ahead in the race to a post-fossil-fuel-future.
That's what happens when you elect "conservatives" who never want things to change. Conservative by definition means "holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion". Those aren't generally the people you expect to lead the charge into a bright new future.
At least they're working toward solving the problem, unlike Australia and USA, who would rather bury their head in the sand, deny there is a problem or spread FUD on renewables.
That's an awfully broad brush you are painting with there. I cannot speak with any authority about Australia but there are literally millions of people here in the US who are very strong proponents of renewable energy and are working very hard to make it a reality. The fight against renewables is largely coming from the fossil fuel industry and those whose livelihoods and bribes depend on it. That's a powerful and wealthy industry that employs a lot of people (around 2 million directly and many times that indirectly) so it makes the fight harder in a democracy. We also have a political right wing whose members tend to regard anything good for the environment (or helpful to others for that matter) as suspicious and "socialist".
In China they also have the problem of VERY bad and obviously present pollution from their dependence on coal and other dirty sources of energy. It's a lot harder to argue against clean energy when you can visibly see the pollution and the problems it causes. In most places in the US the pollution problem is far more subtle so it's easier to brush under the rug and ignore for those inclined to do so.
So despite all ad blocking efforts from the user, this API provides a great pathway to do some digital fingerprinting and establish a cross-site identity.
You are aware that Google is an advertising company right? People tend to forget this fact and how it will tend to incentivize them as an organization. Your privacy is really of no concern to them unless it creates a PR problem.
Jobs didn't leave the US simply because of high labor rates but also taxation.
That's mostly nonsense. The tax burden on a US based manufacturing company making products for US consumption or for export is minimal at best. And large scale manufacturing concerns get substantial tax breaks on their CapEx and plant investments as a general rule. Taxation is a real issue but it has little to do with why jobs leave the US in most cases. It might be the cherry on top but it isn't the big issue in most cases.
Jobs that leave the US typically do so for 1 of 2 reasons. Labor costs or comparative advantage. Labor costs are generally the big one here. Labor rates for the work are too high compared to those available elsewhere. If you have a labor intensive production process that work is going to migrate to where the labor is cheap sooner or later. It's like osmosis. The converse is true for people seeking work - they will migrate to where pay is comparatively high. If the people so hell bent on building a wall on the Mexican border had a brain they would spend their effort improving the Mexican economy instead of wasting money on a pointless racist boondoggle that won't solve the actual problem. People come to the US for jobs because they can't find them at home. Help them get work at home and they'll stay home if one is so worried about that. As for comparative advantage, work tends to be cheapest where the supply chain is most favorable.
Example in some places you need to have signs approved by a board that meets once a month.
Signs to do what? And what does that have to do with manufacturing or jobs leaving the US? If you are talking about local stores, those aren't moving overseas. I have family (father and wife) that sits on two zoning board of appeals so I'm quite familiar with them. The regulatory burden they impose is generally quite modest and the zoning rules typically exist for good reasons. A good tip to remember when considering tearing down a figurative wall is to leave it in place until you fully understand why it was built in the first place.
In the meantime, Common F. Sense is eagerly waiting for someone to justify why factory workers suddenly need a college degree.
They don't but they do need more than a high school diploma. Manufacturing these days isn't the same as it was 20 years ago and even less so than 40 years ago. You don't need a college degree for every job in manufacturing but for any job that pays better than minimum wage you probably do need at least some post high school training, vocational education, certifications, and in some cases an associates degree. Modern manufacturing isn't some place to dump uneducated workers with no skills or training. Not the sort done in the US anyway.
Now that said, the US has a real problem in that we have under-invested in vocational programs and skilled trades for a long time now and it's a real problem for manufacturing companies. We've also actively discouraged millions of young people from the skilled trades by telling them that college is the only good option if they want to make a decent living even though that is demonstrably not true. We've also done a masterful job of denigrating vocational education and manufacturing as dead ends with no future. Germany is a good example of a country that has done a good job encouraging the skilled trades and they have good results to show for it.
Fuck the greedy institutions who feel burying students in college debt for a decade or two is somehow the "right" answer.
The "greedy institutions" you speak of are the legislatures that have cut school funding at every level for decades now. When I was college age, going to a state school was reasonably affordable. Now not so much. The cost of a college degree has risen MUCH faster than inflation. Instead of treating education as a public good, our idiotic obsession with self sufficiency has resulted in a lot of young people with way more debt than is reasonable and college degrees that many of them won't make full use of. This is almost 100% the fault of the perverse incentives put in place by our state and federal governments.
You do not need a college degree to operate a CAM process.
A "CAM process"? Sounds like you don't work in manufacturing because that's not a term of art used by anyone actually in the industry. And yes you do need either substantial experience or a certification if you want to get a job working on machines where CAM is relevant. Nobody is going to hire you with nothing more than a high school diploma to do that sort of work these days under normal circumstances.
The NYTimes is flat out pushing an agenda. Manufacturers can not afford to pay some one 30,000$ per year and also pay $25,000 for their family health insurance.
I'm not aware of any manufacturing company that does pay "$25K for family health insurance" per employee. Not sure where you pulled those BS numbers from.
They refuse to discuss the cost of Health Care as being totally out of line.
What are you babbling about. The NYT has discussed the cost of health care ad-nauseum. The only people being unwilling to discuss it or do anything about it are the republicans in congress who are all too eager to take away people's health insurance but have yet to propose any plans of their own to make sure everyone is covered.
Manufacturing jobs are returning to the US because labor is getting too expensive in China,
Not as a general proposition they are not. The labor intensive work is simply moving to other countries with lower labor rates. Sure you might see a little here or there make it's way back to the US but in the big picture labor intensive manufacturing will move to wherever labor rates are low. That is not the USA. I've been all over southeast Asia. A lot of work that was in China is moving to places like Vietnam or India or other places with lower labor rates than China. Though rising, China's labor rates are still pretty low and will remain low for some time to come just because they have so many people (supple & demand). If China's labor rates achieve parity with the US, China will have FAR surpassed the US as the worlds leading economy.
But the new factories in the US require fewer workers and those workers must possess a college degree, eliminating the vast majority of Trump voters who are eagerly waiting for the 1980's manufacturing jobs to return.
You don't necessarily need a college degree but you certainly will need more training than you will get from high school. Used to be you could leave high school, march down the figurative street to the local assembly plant and get a pretty good paying job. Now things are more complicated than that. We still need machinists and welders and all sorts of skilled labor. We even need unskilled labor but it isn't going to pay very well. Basically if you didn't have to get a certification or degree to do it, chances are it's going to be low paying work. Nobody is going to let you put together a jumbo jet with nothing more than a high school diploma unless you already have a lot of experience you can point to. That's not the world we live in anymore.
People have this idea that manufacturing is a great way for people without much education to make a good living. I've worked in manufacturing since the early 1990s and I can tell you from personal experience that nothing could be further from the truth. Manufacturing of the sort done in the US requires substantial education and skill. Manufacturing companies aren't looking for bodies, they are looking for people with specific skills and experience.
thus, if such a tchnology works, you could replace "laying in bed for 1 week" by "working from home for a couple of days" (a lot better quality of time)
Some companies can allow that. Many more cannot. Good luck assembling products or working in a restaurant while "working" at home. Hard for a nurse to take care of patients or for a construction worker to build a road from home. For many people (esp hourly people) missing work is not really a viable option even when sick.
Few employers provide enough paid sick leave to mitigate this problem. At my place of work people have to be considering a hospital visit before they will stay away. Why? Because they can't afford to lose the pay and the company can't afford to pay them to not work. Happens at my company all the time. We have a lot of unskilled assembly workers and the wages they get are low, commensurate with their ability level. Many of them live paycheck to paycheck so unpaid time off hurts them badly.
Don't forget that there are lots of malingerers out there too. I have one employee who calls in sick with considerable regularity but curiously it is almost always on a Friday or a Monday. Genuinely sick? Yeah, not so much. There are lots of people who will use any excuse they can find to not work.
Jobs are good, but these trends in employment resonate on target with those who say we are the first generation in a long time who will not leave a better life for our children.
Well that's what Trump wants. He wants to "bring back manufacturing jobs" to the US. Never mind that the factory jobs that left the US did so because of high labor rates and the only way to get them back and keep them is to pay people competitive wages... for China. So if you're good with paying people $2/hour then we can bring back all kinds of jobs. But they won't be ones with good wages. The ones with good wages aren't for slapping together happy meal toys.
Now if you want high paying jobs then you have to invest in education, research, infrastructure, etc and train people to do jobs that are worth more than unskilled assembly work will ever justify.
On what planet? Certainly not this one. Baring some miracle technological breakthrough not in my lifetime either.
Batteries are a slow to recharge, fragile, volatile, resource-hungry, ridiculously expensive stop-gap, no matter how much you mix units and confuse the summary.
And fuel cells utterly lack a fueling infrastructure, have no standardized fuel type, are not currently commercially viable on a large scale. The only people who think fuel cells are "the future" are geeks who aren't looking at the big picture. Fuel cells are useful but they have some show stopper problems relating to fuel that prevent them from becoming a replacement for either gas/diesel engines or battery powered electric cars.
You claim that batteries are "slow to recharge, fragile, volatile, resource hungry and ridiculously expensive"? I could say almost exactly the same about gasoline/diesel and fuel cells. Slow to recharge I'll grant you - for now at least. "Fragile" is complete nonsense unsupported by facts. Batteries are not meaningfully more fragile than the alternatives. Gasoline and hydrogen are both quite volatile last I checked. If you think fossil fuels aren't resource hungry then you are utterly clueless. Have you actually seen a drilling operation? Or a refinery? Resource hungry is a gross understatement. As for ridiculously expensive, do you think the other options are cheap? The only reason gasoline is cheap is because we allow it to heavily pollute and don't require payment for the cleanup. Fuel cells are FAR more expensive than either gasoline or batteries currently and show no sign of changing that calculus any time soon.
Let me count the ways... How about we cover the most basic reasons he is relevant? He's president of one of the largest energy producing and energy consuming countries in the world. He has stated point blank that he thinks climate change is a hoax and that he wants to roll back regulations on fossil fuel emissions. He has significant personal investments in the oil and gas companies. Fossil fuel companies have a direct interest in preventing electric vehicles (and renewable energy) from becoming a thing because it hurts them economically.
So we have a president with a clear and obvious conflict of interest due to investments in oil and gas companies who has every reason (philosophic and economic) to oppose further development of electric vehicles and related technologies if they hurt the fossil fuel industry.
It's starting to look as if electric cars and clean energy may actually be manage to kill off the fossil fuel industry in the foreseeable future
I suppose that depends on what your definition of "foreseeable" is. Quite frankly I don't see it happening during my lifetime and according to actuarial tables I probably have around another 30-40 years left.
Here is what I I do see as possibilities/likelihoods within the next 40 years. Politics could obviously interfere with any/all of this 1) Hybrid and electric cars take major amounts of market share. They won't eliminate internal combustion engines but they will substantially mitigate their impact. If charge times can be made less than 10-15 minutes, electric vehicles will dominate market share in passenger vehicles. Luxury cars will mostly be hybrids within 10-15 years and the technology will trickle down from there. 2) Solar roofs will become a thing on high end houses and many commercial buildings. (added benefit of greater system reliability) 3) Wind farms and industrial scale solar become an increasingly important part of our energy portfolio. Probably not the majority but 30%+ is realistic. 50%+ is possible. 4) Batteries and power storage systems will improve significantly and solar/wind as well as transport will benefit in proportion. 5) Coal will remain expensive as long as natural gas is plentiful from fracking but coal will remain a large % of the US and Chinese energy portfolios due to the abundant amounts available in those two countries. 6) Oil and gas based fuels will continue to play a dominant role in our energy portfolios for at least another 30-40 years. Exact percent unclear but big number without question.
Things that could accelerate matters? Widespread adoption of carbon taxes. Removal of subsidies from fossil fuel industry. Appropriate levels of taxation on diesel/gasoline fuels commensurate with their environmental impact. Subsidies of renewable energy technology development. Continued increases in requirements to filter fossil fuel emissions and increased fuel economy standards. I wouldn't necessarily expect any of these but any or all of them would help.
The big obstacle? Politics. The fossil fuel industry has almost endless piles of money and politicians in their pockets. That's going to continue to be a real problem.
I'm fairly sure that both FedEx and UPS would be more than happy to build out their respective fleet if they knew that Amazon would not leave them hanging, as Amazon apparently is doing.
I'm sure they would. Problem is that they necessarily have to make a profit and Amazon would rather keep that money for themselves if they can. This margin leakage is why companies sometimes find it valuable to vertically integrate. Unless the supplier can provide the service at a substantially lower cost then there is no reason to outsource the work. Most companies don't find if worthwhile to build their own delivery networks but for companies like Amazon or Walmart it can make very real fiscal sense. You need a certain minimum scale for it to be economically worthwhile but the savings can be substantial.
Honestly I'd expect Amazon to continue to vertically integrate their delivery and logistics systems as they continue to grow. It will make it harder and harder for anyone to compete with them because they can move product cheaper than anyone else. Walmart has used basically the same tactic for decades now. They invested in their logistics while their competitors ignored it until Walmart had an almost insurmountable price advantage over most of them.
The problem is that every company other than Microsoft has a built in conflict of interest. The AV software companies profit motives are not aligned with providing a good user experience. A good anti-virus system should be nearly invisible. Hard to convince customers to pony up a lot of money for security software unless you are always in their face and an anti-malware system that does this inherently results a bad product. Worse they have to keep tacking on extra "features" and products to convince customers their product is better than the next guys. Their business model is based on scaring customers so they buy their product based on perceptions rather than actually keeping them safe.
No we cannot. Sooner or later the credit worthiness of the country will come into question and the cost of borrowing will rise beyond what is manageable. Eventually the interest payments swamp all other spending and the government no longer has money to function. Eventually inflation takes over and the economy goes into the shitter in a very bad way.
Sovereign national debt is not like individual debt
Nobody is claiming that it is. But that doesn't mean we can borrow endlessly and never pay any of it back. Debt isn't magically different just because a country is doing the borrowing. Countries routinely get themselves in dire financial straights when it becomes clear they cannot repay their debts or even the interest on their debts.
We have been running deficits for nearly a century, with just a few blips.
Prior to 1980 we were running MANAGEABLE deficits as a percent of GDP. That is fine - borrowing is actually very useful to a government and all major economies do it. After 1980 we have been dealing with this absurd fiction that lowering taxes will result in enough economic growth to cover the borrowing and then some despite there not being a spec of actual evidence of this working in the real world. Owing more money than your GDP is not a good or necessary situation to be in. Not even for the mighty USA.
It did this with debt. In fact, the US has pretty much had a continuous debt since at least the Civil War.
The US has only had a surplus once in its history during the Andrew Jackson's administration in the 1830s. The last time the budget was balanced was during the Clinton administration. But that misses the point. A little bit of debt is not only fine it is quite useful. But we've gone well beyond just a little debt and for no practical reason other than ideological infighting and selfishness.
Prior to the Reagan administration debt as a percent of GDP had been falling steadily for decades. Since then the debt has only fallen as a percent of GDP under the Clinton administration and the total debt has skyrocketed to the highest levels since WWII despite no major war or other catastrophe. We have made a choice as a society that we want to have an expensive military and state run medical care for older people (Medicare) but we have been unwilling since 1980 to fully fund these programs nor have we been willing to cut them. Currently we borrow around $600B per year and ironically the US military budget is also around $600B per year. So we basically borrow the entire cost of our military every year and are showing no hint that we plan to pay that money back any time soon. That's idiotic and unnecessary.
Slashdot Mirror
So when do you figure we'll be at infinity?
Who said anything about foolish extrapolations? Our energy use will almost certainly continue to increase until it rather precipitously drops to either zero or something close to it. As long as our society holds together we should expect our energy use to increase. If energy use actually falls significantly it probably means something very bad has happened to the human race.
I don't really care, because I'm tailoring my electrical use, and the more that grid power goes up, the sooner I'll be saving money off grid.
Hey I'm all for distributed power generation. If you can do what you need without the grid that is awesome. I look forward to the day when most houses and businesses generate the majority of their own power from solar and/or wind (+batteries of course) and just use the grid to supplement. And yes I think that is long term realistic.
Honestly, the party is split on this. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, among others
The only differences are whether they think the government should step on your neck or whether private industry should serve that role. The old school republicans tend to be in the former camp while the so-called libertarian wing tends to be in the later but there isn't a bright line between the camps. Both of them are perfectly happy to sacrifice your privacy and civil rights any time they think they can gain political power and frankly it's kind of a distinction without a difference since they tend to vote in lock-step anyway.
But the new administration would rather support oil and coal. In fact, our new President actively fought a wind farm not long ago.
Sure. Many key players in the current administration have their financial bread buttered by the fossil fuel industry. So do many members of their political base. Republican administrations tend to be ludicrously sympathetic to the fossil fuel industry and like to pretend that science only matters when it supports their ideology.
Practically speaking, fracking isn't currently necessary for our energy needs and West Virginia already sucks up more Federal taxes than it sends in
It might not be strictly necessary but the currently viable replacements aren't clearly any better. If you don't do fracking and you aren't willing to install more nuclear (we clearly aren't) then the only near term alternative today is coal. Solar and wind are coming on strong but they aren't quite at the tipping point economically. Fracking is driving the price of natural gas cheap and making coal plants economically less competitive. Eliminate fracking and a lot of that capacity in the near term would go back to coal at least for the near future.
BTW you are aware that Wyoming is a FAR bigger producer of coal than West Virginia, right?
we ought to just abandon coal
Not going to happen. The USA is to coal what Saudi Arabia is to oil. We have vast amounts of it. We mine about 20 quadrillion BTUs of coal annually. It's going to be nigh impossible to get this country to leave all that coal in the ground even if it is a good idea to do so.
Rioting is not protesting.
Some protests take the form of a riot. Not all riots are protests and not all protests are riots. Rioting is not peaceful protesting but it absolutely sometimes is a form of protest. Riots are not organized but they are often in response to some perceived grievance or out of dissent.
No matter how many people use literally to mean figuratively, no matter how many dictionaries take note of the inverse usage, it is still wrong, and anyone trying to avoid looking like a moron would be wise to steer clear of incorrect uses.
The only people that look like morons are those who continue to argue something long after the battle has been lost. Historically you are correct. Good for you. In modern usage the term "begging the question" now means something different than its original use because it is widely understood to mean something different now. That's how living languages work. How it is used and understood is all that really matters. Pointlessly clinging to an old definition when the rest of the world has moved on makes you look rather foolish and out of touch. Nobody likes the pedantic guy who tries to tell everyone they are wrong about the language. Don't be the guy at the party who says "well technically Frankenstein isn't the name of the monster". Nobody cares and you look like an ass when you point it out.
Uhhhh, the entire purpose of email is to send it to other people. Perhaps hundreds of other people. How do you retrain [sic] possession of something you must distribute to others for it to be of any value?
True but perhaps the wrong question. The important question to my mind is how do you secure the message (legally and/or technologically) against intrusive snooping by the government and perhaps others? Both in transit and in storage. Not an easy question to answer and I think the legal piece of it is very important and somewhat behind the technology.
Let me illustrate by example of how Gmail could work. There could be an option to store the email on our own computers. Generous as the google is with their storage allocation, I have way more than that in my OWN physical possession and I could, if allowed, possess my own email there.
There IS an option to store your email on your own computer. There always has been. That option didn't go away just because Gmail came along. Gmail is a choice, not a requirement.
If the google actually valued my privacy, they could throw in an option to encrypt the email end-to-end, even while it is on their servers.
Expecting an advertising company to value your privacy is an idiotic thing to do. Nobody is going to value your privacy more than you do. If it matters to you then take measures to secure it. The tools exist and have for a long time. If you use Gmail that is a tacit admission that you don't care so much about the privacy of whatever is sent through that email account.
Yeah, somehow busts the myth that Republicans are against privacy and for an intrusive law enforcement all in the name of security
What myth? That's not even a debate. They ARE against privacy and support intrusive law enforcement. Many democrats are as well. That has a lot more to do with people in power wanting to retain that power than it does with any given political persuasion. Republicans have zero concern for your privacy if money can be made from it or political power (including policing) can be derived from stepping on it. Democrats have somewhat different motivations and tactics but the effect on your privacy tends to be similar in the end.
The only thing really protecting your privacy and keeping police away is that the two parties cannot agree on the details. When they do agree on the details we get idiotic outcomes like the TSA or the Department of Homeland Security.
We won't always use more and more power.
There is little evidence available to support that assertion. In fact there has been considerable empirical evidence suggesting exactly the opposite.
Trump, by by cozying up to Big Coal and Big Oil, has thrown China a glaring opportunity to get well ahead in the race to a post-fossil-fuel-future.
That's what happens when you elect "conservatives" who never want things to change. Conservative by definition means "holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion". Those aren't generally the people you expect to lead the charge into a bright new future.
At least they're working toward solving the problem, unlike Australia and USA, who would rather bury their head in the sand, deny there is a problem or spread FUD on renewables.
That's an awfully broad brush you are painting with there. I cannot speak with any authority about Australia but there are literally millions of people here in the US who are very strong proponents of renewable energy and are working very hard to make it a reality. The fight against renewables is largely coming from the fossil fuel industry and those whose livelihoods and bribes depend on it. That's a powerful and wealthy industry that employs a lot of people (around 2 million directly and many times that indirectly) so it makes the fight harder in a democracy. We also have a political right wing whose members tend to regard anything good for the environment (or helpful to others for that matter) as suspicious and "socialist".
In China they also have the problem of VERY bad and obviously present pollution from their dependence on coal and other dirty sources of energy. It's a lot harder to argue against clean energy when you can visibly see the pollution and the problems it causes. In most places in the US the pollution problem is far more subtle so it's easier to brush under the rug and ignore for those inclined to do so.
So despite all ad blocking efforts from the user, this API provides a great pathway to do some digital fingerprinting and establish a cross-site identity.
You are aware that Google is an advertising company right? People tend to forget this fact and how it will tend to incentivize them as an organization. Your privacy is really of no concern to them unless it creates a PR problem.
Jobs didn't leave the US simply because of high labor rates but also taxation.
That's mostly nonsense. The tax burden on a US based manufacturing company making products for US consumption or for export is minimal at best. And large scale manufacturing concerns get substantial tax breaks on their CapEx and plant investments as a general rule. Taxation is a real issue but it has little to do with why jobs leave the US in most cases. It might be the cherry on top but it isn't the big issue in most cases.
Jobs that leave the US typically do so for 1 of 2 reasons. Labor costs or comparative advantage. Labor costs are generally the big one here. Labor rates for the work are too high compared to those available elsewhere. If you have a labor intensive production process that work is going to migrate to where the labor is cheap sooner or later. It's like osmosis. The converse is true for people seeking work - they will migrate to where pay is comparatively high. If the people so hell bent on building a wall on the Mexican border had a brain they would spend their effort improving the Mexican economy instead of wasting money on a pointless racist boondoggle that won't solve the actual problem. People come to the US for jobs because they can't find them at home. Help them get work at home and they'll stay home if one is so worried about that. As for comparative advantage, work tends to be cheapest where the supply chain is most favorable.
Example in some places you need to have signs approved by a board that meets once a month.
Signs to do what? And what does that have to do with manufacturing or jobs leaving the US? If you are talking about local stores, those aren't moving overseas. I have family (father and wife) that sits on two zoning board of appeals so I'm quite familiar with them. The regulatory burden they impose is generally quite modest and the zoning rules typically exist for good reasons. A good tip to remember when considering tearing down a figurative wall is to leave it in place until you fully understand why it was built in the first place.
In the meantime, Common F. Sense is eagerly waiting for someone to justify why factory workers suddenly need a college degree.
They don't but they do need more than a high school diploma. Manufacturing these days isn't the same as it was 20 years ago and even less so than 40 years ago. You don't need a college degree for every job in manufacturing but for any job that pays better than minimum wage you probably do need at least some post high school training, vocational education, certifications, and in some cases an associates degree. Modern manufacturing isn't some place to dump uneducated workers with no skills or training. Not the sort done in the US anyway.
Now that said, the US has a real problem in that we have under-invested in vocational programs and skilled trades for a long time now and it's a real problem for manufacturing companies. We've also actively discouraged millions of young people from the skilled trades by telling them that college is the only good option if they want to make a decent living even though that is demonstrably not true. We've also done a masterful job of denigrating vocational education and manufacturing as dead ends with no future. Germany is a good example of a country that has done a good job encouraging the skilled trades and they have good results to show for it.
Fuck the greedy institutions who feel burying students in college debt for a decade or two is somehow the "right" answer.
The "greedy institutions" you speak of are the legislatures that have cut school funding at every level for decades now. When I was college age, going to a state school was reasonably affordable. Now not so much. The cost of a college degree has risen MUCH faster than inflation. Instead of treating education as a public good, our idiotic obsession with self sufficiency has resulted in a lot of young people with way more debt than is reasonable and college degrees that many of them won't make full use of. This is almost 100% the fault of the perverse incentives put in place by our state and federal governments.
You do not need a college degree to operate a CAM process.
A "CAM process"? Sounds like you don't work in manufacturing because that's not a term of art used by anyone actually in the industry. And yes you do need either substantial experience or a certification if you want to get a job working on machines where CAM is relevant. Nobody is going to hire you with nothing more than a high school diploma to do that sort of work these days under normal circumstances.
The NYTimes is flat out pushing an agenda. Manufacturers can not afford to pay some one 30,000$ per year and also pay $25,000 for their family health insurance.
I'm not aware of any manufacturing company that does pay "$25K for family health insurance" per employee. Not sure where you pulled those BS numbers from.
They refuse to discuss the cost of Health Care as being totally out of line.
What are you babbling about. The NYT has discussed the cost of health care ad-nauseum. The only people being unwilling to discuss it or do anything about it are the republicans in congress who are all too eager to take away people's health insurance but have yet to propose any plans of their own to make sure everyone is covered.
Manufacturing jobs are returning to the US because labor is getting too expensive in China,
Not as a general proposition they are not. The labor intensive work is simply moving to other countries with lower labor rates. Sure you might see a little here or there make it's way back to the US but in the big picture labor intensive manufacturing will move to wherever labor rates are low. That is not the USA. I've been all over southeast Asia. A lot of work that was in China is moving to places like Vietnam or India or other places with lower labor rates than China. Though rising, China's labor rates are still pretty low and will remain low for some time to come just because they have so many people (supple & demand). If China's labor rates achieve parity with the US, China will have FAR surpassed the US as the worlds leading economy.
But the new factories in the US require fewer workers and those workers must possess a college degree, eliminating the vast majority of Trump voters who are eagerly waiting for the 1980's manufacturing jobs to return.
You don't necessarily need a college degree but you certainly will need more training than you will get from high school. Used to be you could leave high school, march down the figurative street to the local assembly plant and get a pretty good paying job. Now things are more complicated than that. We still need machinists and welders and all sorts of skilled labor. We even need unskilled labor but it isn't going to pay very well. Basically if you didn't have to get a certification or degree to do it, chances are it's going to be low paying work. Nobody is going to let you put together a jumbo jet with nothing more than a high school diploma unless you already have a lot of experience you can point to. That's not the world we live in anymore.
People have this idea that manufacturing is a great way for people without much education to make a good living. I've worked in manufacturing since the early 1990s and I can tell you from personal experience that nothing could be further from the truth. Manufacturing of the sort done in the US requires substantial education and skill. Manufacturing companies aren't looking for bodies, they are looking for people with specific skills and experience.
thus, if such a tchnology works, you could replace "laying in bed for 1 week" by "working from home for a couple of days" (a lot better quality of time)
Some companies can allow that. Many more cannot. Good luck assembling products or working in a restaurant while "working" at home. Hard for a nurse to take care of patients or for a construction worker to build a road from home. For many people (esp hourly people) missing work is not really a viable option even when sick.
Few employers provide enough paid sick leave to mitigate this problem. At my place of work people have to be considering a hospital visit before they will stay away. Why? Because they can't afford to lose the pay and the company can't afford to pay them to not work. Happens at my company all the time. We have a lot of unskilled assembly workers and the wages they get are low, commensurate with their ability level. Many of them live paycheck to paycheck so unpaid time off hurts them badly.
Don't forget that there are lots of malingerers out there too. I have one employee who calls in sick with considerable regularity but curiously it is almost always on a Friday or a Monday. Genuinely sick? Yeah, not so much. There are lots of people who will use any excuse they can find to not work.
Jobs are good, but these trends in employment resonate on target with those who say we are the first generation in a long time who will not leave a better life for our children.
Well that's what Trump wants. He wants to "bring back manufacturing jobs" to the US. Never mind that the factory jobs that left the US did so because of high labor rates and the only way to get them back and keep them is to pay people competitive wages... for China. So if you're good with paying people $2/hour then we can bring back all kinds of jobs. But they won't be ones with good wages. The ones with good wages aren't for slapping together happy meal toys.
Now if you want high paying jobs then you have to invest in education, research, infrastructure, etc and train people to do jobs that are worth more than unskilled assembly work will ever justify.
Besides, fuel cells are the future
On what planet? Certainly not this one. Baring some miracle technological breakthrough not in my lifetime either.
Batteries are a slow to recharge, fragile, volatile, resource-hungry, ridiculously expensive stop-gap, no matter how much you mix units and confuse the summary.
And fuel cells utterly lack a fueling infrastructure, have no standardized fuel type, are not currently commercially viable on a large scale. The only people who think fuel cells are "the future" are geeks who aren't looking at the big picture. Fuel cells are useful but they have some show stopper problems relating to fuel that prevent them from becoming a replacement for either gas/diesel engines or battery powered electric cars.
You claim that batteries are "slow to recharge, fragile, volatile, resource hungry and ridiculously expensive"? I could say almost exactly the same about gasoline/diesel and fuel cells. Slow to recharge I'll grant you - for now at least. "Fragile" is complete nonsense unsupported by facts. Batteries are not meaningfully more fragile than the alternatives. Gasoline and hydrogen are both quite volatile last I checked. If you think fossil fuels aren't resource hungry then you are utterly clueless. Have you actually seen a drilling operation? Or a refinery? Resource hungry is a gross understatement. As for ridiculously expensive, do you think the other options are cheap? The only reason gasoline is cheap is because we allow it to heavily pollute and don't require payment for the cleanup. Fuel cells are FAR more expensive than either gasoline or batteries currently and show no sign of changing that calculus any time soon.
Wtf Trump has to do with this?
Let me count the ways... How about we cover the most basic reasons he is relevant? He's president of one of the largest energy producing and energy consuming countries in the world. He has stated point blank that he thinks climate change is a hoax and that he wants to roll back regulations on fossil fuel emissions. He has significant personal investments in the oil and gas companies. Fossil fuel companies have a direct interest in preventing electric vehicles (and renewable energy) from becoming a thing because it hurts them economically.
So we have a president with a clear and obvious conflict of interest due to investments in oil and gas companies who has every reason (philosophic and economic) to oppose further development of electric vehicles and related technologies if they hurt the fossil fuel industry.
It's starting to look as if electric cars and clean energy may actually be manage to kill off the fossil fuel industry in the foreseeable future
I suppose that depends on what your definition of "foreseeable" is. Quite frankly I don't see it happening during my lifetime and according to actuarial tables I probably have around another 30-40 years left.
Here is what I I do see as possibilities/likelihoods within the next 40 years. Politics could obviously interfere with any/all of this
1) Hybrid and electric cars take major amounts of market share. They won't eliminate internal combustion engines but they will substantially mitigate their impact. If charge times can be made less than 10-15 minutes, electric vehicles will dominate market share in passenger vehicles. Luxury cars will mostly be hybrids within 10-15 years and the technology will trickle down from there.
2) Solar roofs will become a thing on high end houses and many commercial buildings. (added benefit of greater system reliability)
3) Wind farms and industrial scale solar become an increasingly important part of our energy portfolio. Probably not the majority but 30%+ is realistic. 50%+ is possible.
4) Batteries and power storage systems will improve significantly and solar/wind as well as transport will benefit in proportion.
5) Coal will remain expensive as long as natural gas is plentiful from fracking but coal will remain a large % of the US and Chinese energy portfolios due to the abundant amounts available in those two countries.
6) Oil and gas based fuels will continue to play a dominant role in our energy portfolios for at least another 30-40 years. Exact percent unclear but big number without question.
Things that could accelerate matters? Widespread adoption of carbon taxes. Removal of subsidies from fossil fuel industry. Appropriate levels of taxation on diesel/gasoline fuels commensurate with their environmental impact. Subsidies of renewable energy technology development. Continued increases in requirements to filter fossil fuel emissions and increased fuel economy standards. I wouldn't necessarily expect any of these but any or all of them would help.
The big obstacle? Politics. The fossil fuel industry has almost endless piles of money and politicians in their pockets. That's going to continue to be a real problem.
I'm fairly sure that both FedEx and UPS would be more than happy to build out their respective fleet if they knew that Amazon would not leave them hanging, as Amazon apparently is doing.
I'm sure they would. Problem is that they necessarily have to make a profit and Amazon would rather keep that money for themselves if they can. This margin leakage is why companies sometimes find it valuable to vertically integrate. Unless the supplier can provide the service at a substantially lower cost then there is no reason to outsource the work. Most companies don't find if worthwhile to build their own delivery networks but for companies like Amazon or Walmart it can make very real fiscal sense. You need a certain minimum scale for it to be economically worthwhile but the savings can be substantial.
Honestly I'd expect Amazon to continue to vertically integrate their delivery and logistics systems as they continue to grow. It will make it harder and harder for anyone to compete with them because they can move product cheaper than anyone else. Walmart has used basically the same tactic for decades now. They invested in their logistics while their competitors ignored it until Walmart had an almost insurmountable price advantage over most of them.
The problem is that every company other than Microsoft has a built in conflict of interest. The AV software companies profit motives are not aligned with providing a good user experience. A good anti-virus system should be nearly invisible. Hard to convince customers to pony up a lot of money for security software unless you are always in their face and an anti-malware system that does this inherently results a bad product. Worse they have to keep tacking on extra "features" and products to convince customers their product is better than the next guys. Their business model is based on scaring customers so they buy their product based on perceptions rather than actually keeping them safe.
We CAN borrow endlessly.
No we cannot. Sooner or later the credit worthiness of the country will come into question and the cost of borrowing will rise beyond what is manageable. Eventually the interest payments swamp all other spending and the government no longer has money to function. Eventually inflation takes over and the economy goes into the shitter in a very bad way.
Sovereign national debt is not like individual debt
Nobody is claiming that it is. But that doesn't mean we can borrow endlessly and never pay any of it back. Debt isn't magically different just because a country is doing the borrowing. Countries routinely get themselves in dire financial straights when it becomes clear they cannot repay their debts or even the interest on their debts.
We have been running deficits for nearly a century, with just a few blips.
Prior to 1980 we were running MANAGEABLE deficits as a percent of GDP. That is fine - borrowing is actually very useful to a government and all major economies do it. After 1980 we have been dealing with this absurd fiction that lowering taxes will result in enough economic growth to cover the borrowing and then some despite there not being a spec of actual evidence of this working in the real world. Owing more money than your GDP is not a good or necessary situation to be in. Not even for the mighty USA.
It did this with debt. In fact, the US has pretty much had a continuous debt since at least the Civil War.
The US has only had a surplus once in its history during the Andrew Jackson's administration in the 1830s. The last time the budget was balanced was during the Clinton administration. But that misses the point. A little bit of debt is not only fine it is quite useful. But we've gone well beyond just a little debt and for no practical reason other than ideological infighting and selfishness.
Prior to the Reagan administration debt as a percent of GDP had been falling steadily for decades. Since then the debt has only fallen as a percent of GDP under the Clinton administration and the total debt has skyrocketed to the highest levels since WWII despite no major war or other catastrophe. We have made a choice as a society that we want to have an expensive military and state run medical care for older people (Medicare) but we have been unwilling since 1980 to fully fund these programs nor have we been willing to cut them. Currently we borrow around $600B per year and ironically the US military budget is also around $600B per year. So we basically borrow the entire cost of our military every year and are showing no hint that we plan to pay that money back any time soon. That's idiotic and unnecessary.