Historically, the one form of government that seems to get the most good things done is "Benevolent Dictator".
"Good" is a question of perspective. There is really no such thing as a benevolent dictator. The term itself is an oxymoron. Never has been and probably never will be one. Just because a dictator gets a lot done that is good from the perspective of some does not mean it is a net benefit to all or even most.
Unless you can come up with a way to maintain a party system akin to the Roman Senate at its peak
I suspect you may be hugely overestimating the integrity of the Roman Senate due to a lack of data. We tend to have a very idealized notion of the Roman Senate being this perfectly functioning system when the reality was far from that. History tends to suffer from a lot of survivorship bias in the telling of what happened. It's why people tend to think things were better "back in the old days" even when they objectively weren't.
Besides, even if you've got a one party system, there are still going to be factions within that party, just as today's parties have their Tea Parties, Brexiteers, Hardliners, Reformists, or whatever other name they might want to go by. It might be "The Party", but it's still going to be multiple parties in practice.
Coalitions within a party are not even remotely the same thing as multiple parties. Coalitions might shape the party doctrine to a greater or lesser degree but at the end of the day they generally lack the power to oppose the party without outside help. That difference is not insignificant.
I think the real difference is people who enjoy music vs people who listen to it. If you just listen you don't care what the song is or who its by as long as there's another one after.
In which case there is no point in caring about ripping CDs. Just subscribe to a streaming service and be done with it or just listen to the radio.
Speaking of data loss though, how long is streaming service x going to be available and what happens when it shuts down?
Who cares? If one dies then switch to another. There will always be another. That's like asking how long a radio station is going to keep playing. You don't subscribe to that sort of service because you expect them to be around forever. Nice if it does but don't have unrealistic expectations.
I prefer to buy and rip, as no Internet connection is required to play an mp3, and I have full playlist control.
You don't need an internet connection to play a song purchased online either. Even streaming services will let you purchase and/or download some songs for offline listening.
The downsides of ripping CDs being 1) You cannot just buy the tracks you want from a given album 2) It takes substantially more time to rip the track than to download it 3) You accumulate discs on your shelf which gather dust for the rest of eternity 4) Takes more time to acquire the album 5) It wastes physical resources given that you are planning to copy it anyway
The only real upside I can see is that it gives you a modicum of better control over your collection and a backup in case or data loss (albeit with a ton of work to restore).
And garage sales/used music stores are your best friends price-wise.
Only if they actually have something you want to listen to. Personally the thought of spending hours combing through someone else's used music collection hoping their is something good there to buy on the cheap sounds like a horrendous waste of my time. You be you but I've got better things to do.
I'm sure that 131 degrees Fahrenheit is not hot enough to kill the wee beasties found in a human body.
Doesn't have to. That's not how composting works. You are thinking in terms of cooking which is not what is going on. Composting relies on various thermophilic organisms to consume the decaying matter and they generate heat as a by-product. In fact it doesn't work if it gets too hot and kills the microorganisms. That heat is what is generated by them doing their work. When they have digested the matter the compost cools down again.
We don't use human feces as fertilizer for much the same reasons
No the reason we don't use human feces as fertilizer is something quite different. Compost is quite safe to use and carries no meaningful risk of transmission of harmful pathogens. It's a completely different process with completely different risk profiles.
Could you imagine what soil that contains dead mammals would smell like?
Don't have to. Step outside and take a sniff of the nearest patch of dirt. Smell that? That's soil containing dead mammals. Now that wasn't so scary was it?
As usual it's not clear if you are an idiot or a troll or some novel combination of both.
"Special When Lit: A Pinball Documentary (2009)" Note the date range (1950-1970). There was no home market for movies at this point, thus box office was the total.
There absolutely was a home market for movies during that era. Granted it wasn't anywhere close to what it is today but it certainly existed. TV syndication was a thing even back then and popular movies were often periodically re-released in theaters. Anyway, you cited a documentary which evidently makes the (seemingly unsupported) claim. That's insufficient evidence. I'm not saying your claim is necessarily false but I'll need more than that to believe it to be factual.
If I offered you all the revenue from Professional golf (advertising, tv rights) or the revenue from recreational golf (equipment sales, green fees, etc), which would you choose?
If I'm running a business the answer is easily pro golf (far better profits which is what really matters - do you really want to try to manage 15000 golf courses?) but I'll admit that's a pretty good rebuttal regarding interactive versus spectating. I think the economy around golf is something in the neighborhood of $70 billion and the PGA is something like $2-3 billion annually. So good example. On the other hand golf is probably an outlier in that regard because it's a rare sport played primarily by adults. Baseball for example has no where near as large an economy at the sub-pro levels. Football (either kind) has huge spectating revenues but almost nobody plays it as an adult. Same with hockey. The only sports I can think of that are heavily played by amateur adults and have a good sized economy to them are tennis, cycling, running, & triathlon. Might be missing a few but most sports see a heavy drop off in participation after high school graduation and thus the economy around them after that is build on spectating.
The NFL (one of the most profitable professional leagues) makes about $8 billion a year. A single sports equipment company (Nike), made $34 billion last year.
Nike is a clothing company that is only incidentally related to any given sport. Only a modest percentage of Nike's revenues come from football merch sales or any other single sport for that matter. Much of Nike's sales have nothing at all to do with any sporting activity - I wore some Nike apparel at work today. If you are going to spread the definition that wide you may as well include Amazon for shipping you the clothing and Apple for telling you the game scores on your phone. I'm exaggerating of course but it comes back to my point that defining the markets for interactive versus non-interactive isn't as easy as it seems at first glance.
If you want to talk non-existent, I went to college in rural Alabama and the only buses there were Greyhounds.
That describes most of the US outside of major cities and not very far outside those cities either. The nearest regular bus service to where I currently live is about 15-20 miles away in a local college town. It's actually just as far for me to reach the nearest Amtrak station. It's not like I live out in the Styx either. I can be in my local Nordstroms at an upscale shopping mall in under 20 minutes door to door. It's just that once you leave the major cities the population density drops precipitously so bus service (not to mention trains) rapidly become too expensive to justify.
I UBER most places now, which does little to help with traffic congestion.
Not an affordable option for me - you must not travel a huge amount. I drive 30-40K miles per year. Uber is a reasonable option if you don't travel huge distance or are in need of an occasional taxi ride but I drive so much that the cost of the car per mile is easily cheaper to own a car. In my case I now use an EV for most commuting which has saved me a small fortune in gas and maintenance. (probably ~$1500 in the last 6 months)
From 1950 to 1970, the pinball industry made more money than Hollywood.
Citation needed.
Interactive entertainment has always been more profitable, despite being mostly ignored by the so-called cultural critics.
Define what you mean by interactive entertainment. I realize that sounds obvious but I think it's less obvious than it seems. Professional sports spectating isn't really interactive but it's one of the biggest pieces of the entertainment market - far bigger revenues than the market for actually playing sports. Movies aren't interactive but they are enormous once you include all the revenues and not just the box office. Books aren't interactive but that's a huge industry. Streaming video isn't interactive but is huge. Porn is mostly not interactive and that market is enormous - probably bigger than the above markets combined. So what do you mean exactly by "interactive entertainment"? Video games are indeed a big market but you'll need more than that.
The reason we have cable monopolies is because local governments awarded monopoly service contracts.
That's part of the reason but only a part. A bigger reason is simply that it is economically inefficient for networks to be small - literally network effects. Last mile ISPs are a classic example of a natural monopoly.
You identified part of the problem which is the last mile monopoly/oligopoly. This could be ameliorated by prohibiting companies that deal in content from also owning the lines (or towers) to deliver that content. Then there is minimal conflict of interest and no real reason to charge Netflix more (or less) than anyone else. They should either be in the content delivery business or the content creation business but not both.
The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market in UK, according to new figures. From a report: The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) said the gaming market's value rose to $4.85bn,
That's only true if you take a ridiculously narrow definition of the "entertainment market". The English Premier League is unquestionably a form of entertainment and that league alone had revenues of $6.4 billion last year. And that's just one sport in the UK. Add in all the other lower tier leagues, other sports, etc and it's pretty easy to show that video games are just a piece of the overall pie. I'm not even getting into forms of "entertainment" like drinking and other adult recreation which undoubtedly are far larger.
I have an iPhone with Apples face reader. Compared to the fingerprint reader is is six on one side and half a dozen on the other.
In my experience sometimes FaceID is preferable and sometimes TouchID is preferable depending on the use case. There are a lot of times where having to have the phone looking right at you is rather awkward. Using ApplePay is a good example - for that the fingerprint ID is usually preferable in my experience, especially for things like going through a drive through. I'd say 80-90% of the time I prefer FaceID but that other 10-20% I really prefer TouchID.
3) Webmail has to die. There simply is no alternative.
Webmail won't die and you need to get over it. Millions of people find it hugely useful primarily because of the portability of it. It's also very easy to administer which makes it appealing to management.
How often does someone log in to a full computer that doesn't belong to him or her instead of just checking their phone to read e-mail?
Speaking for myself, literally every day at work. I don't own my computer at work and I check both personal and work emails there. (yes my employer is fine with that but doesn't want to store my emails on their machines nor do I want to store my email on their machines) A web client is the most practical solution for us. I have about a half dozen email accounts and webmail makes it much easier to manage them. Many emails I compose would be very awkward and/or slow to compose on a phone.. Maybe you like typing long emails on your phone but I don't. When I was in college I was routinely using university computers to log into my accounts since carrying a laptop everywhere is awkward and sometimes I needed a real keyboard and full sized monitor. I also routinely use my wife's computer to check emails and she doesn't need a bunch of software installed for my crap on her machine.
Maybe YOU don't need to use computers you don't own but lots of us do.
The OS could do more to facilitate proper key management.
Yes the OS can help to a point but there are limits. Not the least of which is that the people you communicate with have to be on board with generating and exchanging keys for it to have any value at all. Good luck with that. Literally nobody I communicate with would be willing to go to the bother even if it were trivial to do. They would perceive it as an unnecessary and pointless hoop to jump through even if they understand the purpose conceptually. They perceive very little of their communication as sensitive enough to justify the overhead. If people cannot be bothered to maintain strong passwords do you seriously think they are going to do any better with the more complicated endeavor of key management? Not likely...
What we really need is for the major webmail platforms to implement GPG in a way that is basically transparent to users.
Several problems with that statement. 1) GPG like most other end-to-end public key encryption requires substantial maintenance and knowledge on the parts of the end users to be properly effective. Good luck explaining proper public/private key maintenance to my technologically impaired mother. 2) There appears to be no way to reconcile ease of use with security to a degree acceptable to a non-paranoid non-technical user 3) Using GPG on a webmail system pretty much defeats the entire point of such encryption since you have to trust the message in plain text at some point to a third party of unknown trustworthiness. (do you REALLY trust Google/Apple/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc that much?) 4) The overhead of using GPG (or similar) in a properly secure way is well beyond the capabilities or interest level of most users. 5) Both the sender and recipient need to be willing and able to participate and deal with the overhead of encryption AND know how to generate/handle keys securely.
None of these problems are unique to GPG so I'm not bashing that product. It's good at what it does but any other public/private key encryption will have more or less the same issues.
Doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing and off those of us who do want perfection the opportunity to use a really secure dedicated client.
If it isn't perfect, it isn't secure. And while I agree with your sentiments there appears to be no practical way to resolve the challenges above such that it would become accessible/useful to all but the most tech savvy of users.
And infinitely better than Google's horrible, completely unusable GMail "UI".
That's a matter of personal preference. I've been a long time user of both and while I don't love the Gmail UI, I generally find it more practical than I do the Thunderbird UI most of the time. Plus it has the HUGE advantage of being the same and available from any computer anywhere. This may or may not matter to you but it is a big benefit to me.
I've always wanted Thunderbird to give me a compelling reason to use it more than I do but it's just stagnated for so long I moved on for most of my workflow. I still have it installed and I fire it up now and then but for me at least, GMail's web client works just as well if not better most of the time and requires less overhead to manage. Hell they don't even have a 64 bit version released yet except on the daily channel for testers. If they provide better integration with GMail (and other services) that could improve things. The UI on Thunderbird is pretty clumsy and hasn't really improved much in the last 10 years.
The LA metro system is well functioning (I use it to commute to work, and I use it any time I go downtown - I would never drive there any more).
You must be one of the lucky 5 people who actually lives near a station. Doesn't apply to most people in LA as evidenced by their continued overwhelming utilization of automobiles. Approximately 7% of people commute by public transit in LA. Any number greater than zero is good but let's not pretend that it's a hugely significant factor for most of the population. Compare with NYC having around 2/3 of all commuting happening via public transportation.
And by definition when people from the suburbs take the metro they aren't driving. So, yeah, it does cause a reduction in the number of cars on the freeways and surface streets.
Curious then that ridership is falling dramatically in the last 5 years and that Seriously, LA's mass transit is barely more than a bus system that nobody rides if they don't have to. The infrastructure was designed around cars and remains so to this day. Changing that is going to cost VAST sums of money and take a long time to take effect in a substantial way because it will require convincing a LOT of people to relocate.
I know, I know. You'll be now be setting new, higher bars you demand to be cleared for your satisfaction.
Not at all. You will need to clear the old ones first before I worry about moving any goal posts. The evidence doesn't support your thesis.
I rode the bus when I lived in Hawaii and it was cheap and convenient.
Terrible example. I've spent lots of time in Hawaii. There is only one large city in the state and the geography elsewhere generally forces people to live close together where buses can actually make some sense. Plus owning and driving a car is crazy expensive there (just like most other things).
When I moved to Pennsylvania it was less cheap and less convenient, but still did the job fairly well.
I'm guessing you lived in one of the bigger cities if that was the case. I've lived in PA and in most of it bus service is either inconvenient or non-existent. I went to college in Eastern PA and aside from the busses around campus there was very limited bus service around the rest of the metro area (Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton) You basically had to own a car to get anywhere useful in a reasonable amount of time.
Now maybe it's my own fault for not fully realizing that the bus doesn't stop in my part of town, but it's that inconvenience that causes me to just jump on the interstate and park in my building's parking lot, even though I hate the traffic.
The problem is that where you live wasn't designed with bus service or any other public transit in mind. Bus service is almost always just an afterthought which works ok but not great in most cities which were designed with cars as primary transport. It doesn't require rails or other fixed infrastructure like trains or trolleys and it can be re-routed relatively easily. Honestly I've never lived in a place where bus transportation was a practical option.
So you have pushed the problem upstream to the power generation plants.
You say that like its a bad thing. Power generation plants are far more efficient right out of the gate than even the best car engine.
And I'm ignoring the fact that you can put solar panels out and cut the power plant out of the loop altogether.
(solar power doesn't have the efficiency yet to drive cars around full power on solar cells).
What are you talking about? There already are people powering EVs with 100% solar power. That's not even a question. A typical large roof can provide more than enough energy to power an EV for typical driving needs. Larger solar farms can do even better.
The power plants currently generate lots of waste heat
Power plants are FAR more efficient than the engines in cars. It's not even close. Yes they generate waste heat which can be recaptured but what do you think is easier or more sensible? Capturing waste heat from millions of inefficient cars or capturing waste heat from a few thousand already more efficient power plants?
Both Power generation and trucking are highly competitive with low profit margins and anything they can do to improve their bottom line will be done.
You think power generation is a low margin business? You might want to look closer because their margins are pretty solid on average. Gross margins of around 60% and Operating margins of around 10-15% on average. In the US most power generation is a regulated monopoly. Not software company margins but I wouldn't describe them as a low margin business either. And again, most trucking would benefit FAR more from utilization of EVs (or hybrids) than some marginal gains in thermal recapture from inefficient ICEs. You're proposing stepping over a dollar to pick up a few pennies.
In for all the "I have a car so public transportation does nothing for me" comments.
You have it backwards. It's not that I have a car - it's that public transportation was NOT DESIGNED for me. It's that most cities (including mine) were simply not designed with mass transit in mind and most of them lack the population density to retrofit it now. I live in a suburban area about 20 miles from where I work. There is no economically realistic way to get mass transit from where I live to where I work or to pretty much anywhere else I need to go. The infrastructure was designed for cars and only cars. It was bad planning but we are kind of stuck with it now, at least for the next 50 years. Any plan that would fix this state of affairs is going to cost huge sums and take many decades to implement.
The Los Angeles area, the ultimate car-centric region with its sprawling freeways, approved a sweeping $120 billion plan to build new train routes and upgrade its buses.
Ok so they approved a plan. Wake me when they actually have a well functioning mass transit system that actually causes a reduction in the number of cars needed. I'll be especially impressed if they actually do it on time and under budget.
Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service -- a feat that seems unimaginable in New York, where subway riders regularly simmer with rage on stalled trains.
Seattle's system is still new. Really new. Sound Transit was commissioned in 1996. Link Light Rail began service in 2009. Etc. I'm sure their system works great compared with mass transit systems many decades older. Maintenance is a harsh mistress. Most transport networks work fairly well when new.
Automotive industry: There is a continuing push to improve overall mileage of a car. If waste heat can be captured as electrical power, It will get adopted.
A far better solution is to use EVs which don't generate anywhere near the amount of waste heat in the first place and already get vastly better fuel economy. It is almost always a better idea to not generate the waste in the first place than to generate it and try to recapture the waste. Instead of trying to reclaim a few extra percent waste heat, work on fast charging for EVs which has a FAR greater long term ROI.
And then Ford or Chevy or Subaru will come out with a car that doesn't have an alternator in it.
Don't need an alternator in an EV so that's already done.
Arsenic is often used for semiconductor doping (for GaAs junctions) because of its electron properties.
Of course. Lots of toxic chemicals are used for very practical purposes. And this can be fine as long as they are handled responsibly. Problem is that they very often are not handled responsibly and no care is taken for the proper disposal of the end product. I'm not worried about getting arsenic poisoning from my smartphone but there are serious issues when we talk about manufacturing and disposal and recycling.
Lead is used for soldering, which you'll find, surprise surprise, in pretty much all electronic and electric devices.
That once was true but far less so today. A vast and increasing amount of electronics now are ROHS compliant which means they don't use lead, mercury, cadmium and an assortment of other toxic substances including in solder. My company basically has stopped using leaded solder altogether. The lead has some practical benefits for some use cases but the toxicity problems it causes means that it really shouldn't be used and doesn't need to be used for the majority of soldering applications.
But the (un)scientificamerican article is about the same kind of stupid like people claiming that flu vaccines contain Thiomersal which contains mercury and will lead to authism.
Sigh... I picked one article from a recognized source. There are thousands of other sources saying exactly the same thing if you don't like that one and your analogy to vaccines is wildly wrong. There is a difference between falsified psuedo-science and the proven fact that there are toxic chemicals used and released by manufacture, use, and disposal of electronics. We inappropriately dispose of millions of tons of electronics each year and the environmental effects of this are a proven fact. You don't have to take my word for it - plenty of credible evidence available with a single simple google search.
Suffice to say that this arsenic is in pretty solid from inside of the semiconductors. It won't escape them easily.
You are making it out to be far simpler than it really is. Arsenic is a problem in various parts of the supply chain, not just the finished product.
Unless you grind those LEDs up and then spread them around in the environment
You are aware that lots of electronics are ground up as well as spread around the environment in a variety of ways, right?
To be pedantic, LEDs themselves fail remarkably close to never.
Yeah well we're not buying or using a single LED are we? You aren't being pedantic because you are talking about something completely different and frankly irrelevant. LED light bulbs and LED light fixtures do fail. It doesn't matter if the actually lighting element still functions if some other part of the device fails too.
Anyway I've seen plenty of LEDs fail for all sorts of reasons (usually voltage/current fluctuations and/or heat problems) but then my day job is manufacturing wire harnesses and electronics so I see more of them than most people do. The reason you don't see more of them fail is partly because they are pretty simple and reliable but more often because they are typically attached to circuit boards that are for various reasons less reliable than the LEDs. You don't see individual resistors fail much either for the same reasons.
However, the cheap electronics that they use to convert household current to low-voltage DC fail pretty frequently
Certainly. Remember these are devices that are generally made in bulk and every penny spent on making the electronics more robust is a penny straight off the bottom line of the company making the light. So even the expensive branded electronics have a built in incentive to cheap out on the hardware whenever they can. As a result, some percent of them are going to fail.
Zero-emissions generation facilities (e.g. solar, hydro, wind) are slow to start up and slow down, making them poorly suited for peak/transient loads.
No idea what you are talking about. Solar panels and wind turbines can be turned on/off extremely quickly provided you have spare capacity. When combined with an appropriately large bank of batteries their response time to load changes is effectively instant and FAR faster than an fossil fuel source.
You also are ignoring the fact that solar as a general proposition tends to work best precisely when the sun is shining the brightest which is super helpful for use cases like air conditioning that correlate strongly with how bright the sun shines on a given day. For places with lots of refrigeration or cooling needs (like a grocery store) solar is a great idea to mitigate peak demand.
Coal, natural gas, and diesel are far more responsive.
Your facts are incorrect. Coal plants are not quick at all to respond to changes in demand. They have significant lag time. Diesel is faster but isn't particularly efficient in a lot of cases. Natural gas is rather quick - FAR quicker than coal which has a lot to do with its current popularity.
For example, our politicians are trying to convince the public that driving a 2500kg electric car is `greener` than driving a small and efficient 800kg gasoline car.
That's because in many cases the EV actually IS the greener option. There is no such thing as an "efficient" internal combustion engine, at least in https://www.quora.com/How-ener...">comparison to electric motors. My Chevy Bolt EV has a fuel economy better than any remotely similar sized vehicle with an ICE you can buy. It's not even close. Furthermore it generates less waste to operate too. I don't have to change ANY fluids aside from wiper fluid for the first 150,000 miles of operation. I've driven mine around 8000 miles since purchase which means I haven't burned approximately 400 gallons of gasoline. Because of the electric option I purchase from the power company my power mostly comes from green sources too (solar, etc) so I don't burn much in the way of fossil fuels at the power station either. Hell I can charge it from the local nuke plant in theory.
They promote solar panels but fail to properly insulate old houses.
So because they haven't solved every problem, they shouldn't bother solving any problem? Insulating old houses well generally is FAR more expensive than installing solar panels on either new or old construction. Of course it's a good idea to insulate better but how do you propose to finance that on old homes on a large scale? That's an important long term project but the bigger problem is the pollution from generation using fossil fuels. We can solve or at least mitigate that problem in a few decades. Insulating every old house doesn't solve the pollution problems AND it will take a lot longer and cost more to accomplish. Solve the problems you can solve today.
Capitalism is not going green until it is profitable.
As a general proposition going green already IS profitable. Waste disposal costs money and the cheapest way to reduce that cost is to not make the waste in the first place. Energy consumption costs money so technology that minimizes energy consumption improves profits. "Going green" very routinely is a very easy path to improving profits and companies are well aware of this. Not to mention the economic benefit that comes with technology development and deployment of green energy sources.
Generally speaking the only time "going green" actually reduces profits is when we create perverse incentives for people to dump their waste improperly or to burn fuel unnecessarily. Fossil fuels only seem cheap because we heavily subsidize them (to the tune of around $5 trillion globally per year) and don't require them to pay the full cost of the pollution they generate. Fully burdened they are already FAR more expensive than many "green" options. Coal that has to pay for all the particulates and carbon it emits can't begin to compete with solar or wind or hydro or even nuclear.
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Historically, the one form of government that seems to get the most good things done is "Benevolent Dictator".
"Good" is a question of perspective. There is really no such thing as a benevolent dictator. The term itself is an oxymoron. Never has been and probably never will be one. Just because a dictator gets a lot done that is good from the perspective of some does not mean it is a net benefit to all or even most.
Unless you can come up with a way to maintain a party system akin to the Roman Senate at its peak
I suspect you may be hugely overestimating the integrity of the Roman Senate due to a lack of data. We tend to have a very idealized notion of the Roman Senate being this perfectly functioning system when the reality was far from that. History tends to suffer from a lot of survivorship bias in the telling of what happened. It's why people tend to think things were better "back in the old days" even when they objectively weren't.
Besides, even if you've got a one party system, there are still going to be factions within that party, just as today's parties have their Tea Parties, Brexiteers, Hardliners, Reformists, or whatever other name they might want to go by. It might be "The Party", but it's still going to be multiple parties in practice.
Coalitions within a party are not even remotely the same thing as multiple parties. Coalitions might shape the party doctrine to a greater or lesser degree but at the end of the day they generally lack the power to oppose the party without outside help. That difference is not insignificant.
I think the real difference is people who enjoy music vs people who listen to it. If you just listen you don't care what the song is or who its by as long as there's another one after.
In which case there is no point in caring about ripping CDs. Just subscribe to a streaming service and be done with it or just listen to the radio.
Speaking of data loss though, how long is streaming service x going to be available and what happens when it shuts down?
Who cares? If one dies then switch to another. There will always be another. That's like asking how long a radio station is going to keep playing. You don't subscribe to that sort of service because you expect them to be around forever. Nice if it does but don't have unrealistic expectations.
I prefer to buy and rip, as no Internet connection is required to play an mp3, and I have full playlist control.
You don't need an internet connection to play a song purchased online either. Even streaming services will let you purchase and/or download some songs for offline listening.
The downsides of ripping CDs being
1) You cannot just buy the tracks you want from a given album
2) It takes substantially more time to rip the track than to download it
3) You accumulate discs on your shelf which gather dust for the rest of eternity
4) Takes more time to acquire the album
5) It wastes physical resources given that you are planning to copy it anyway
The only real upside I can see is that it gives you a modicum of better control over your collection and a backup in case or data loss (albeit with a ton of work to restore).
And garage sales/used music stores are your best friends price-wise.
Only if they actually have something you want to listen to. Personally the thought of spending hours combing through someone else's used music collection hoping their is something good there to buy on the cheap sounds like a horrendous waste of my time. You be you but I've got better things to do.
I'm sure that 131 degrees Fahrenheit is not hot enough to kill the wee beasties found in a human body.
Doesn't have to. That's not how composting works. You are thinking in terms of cooking which is not what is going on. Composting relies on various thermophilic organisms to consume the decaying matter and they generate heat as a by-product. In fact it doesn't work if it gets too hot and kills the microorganisms. That heat is what is generated by them doing their work. When they have digested the matter the compost cools down again.
We don't use human feces as fertilizer for much the same reasons
No the reason we don't use human feces as fertilizer is something quite different. Compost is quite safe to use and carries no meaningful risk of transmission of harmful pathogens. It's a completely different process with completely different risk profiles.
Could you imagine what soil that contains dead mammals would smell like?
Don't have to. Step outside and take a sniff of the nearest patch of dirt. Smell that? That's soil containing dead mammals. Now that wasn't so scary was it?
As usual it's not clear if you are an idiot or a troll or some novel combination of both.
"Special When Lit: A Pinball Documentary (2009)" Note the date range (1950-1970). There was no home market for movies at this point, thus box office was the total.
There absolutely was a home market for movies during that era. Granted it wasn't anywhere close to what it is today but it certainly existed. TV syndication was a thing even back then and popular movies were often periodically re-released in theaters. Anyway, you cited a documentary which evidently makes the (seemingly unsupported) claim. That's insufficient evidence. I'm not saying your claim is necessarily false but I'll need more than that to believe it to be factual.
If I offered you all the revenue from Professional golf (advertising, tv rights) or the revenue from recreational golf (equipment sales, green fees, etc), which would you choose?
If I'm running a business the answer is easily pro golf (far better profits which is what really matters - do you really want to try to manage 15000 golf courses?) but I'll admit that's a pretty good rebuttal regarding interactive versus spectating. I think the economy around golf is something in the neighborhood of $70 billion and the PGA is something like $2-3 billion annually. So good example. On the other hand golf is probably an outlier in that regard because it's a rare sport played primarily by adults. Baseball for example has no where near as large an economy at the sub-pro levels. Football (either kind) has huge spectating revenues but almost nobody plays it as an adult. Same with hockey. The only sports I can think of that are heavily played by amateur adults and have a good sized economy to them are tennis, cycling, running, & triathlon. Might be missing a few but most sports see a heavy drop off in participation after high school graduation and thus the economy around them after that is build on spectating.
The NFL (one of the most profitable professional leagues) makes about $8 billion a year. A single sports equipment company (Nike), made $34 billion last year.
Nike is a clothing company that is only incidentally related to any given sport. Only a modest percentage of Nike's revenues come from football merch sales or any other single sport for that matter. Much of Nike's sales have nothing at all to do with any sporting activity - I wore some Nike apparel at work today. If you are going to spread the definition that wide you may as well include Amazon for shipping you the clothing and Apple for telling you the game scores on your phone. I'm exaggerating of course but it comes back to my point that defining the markets for interactive versus non-interactive isn't as easy as it seems at first glance.
If you want to talk non-existent, I went to college in rural Alabama and the only buses there were Greyhounds.
That describes most of the US outside of major cities and not very far outside those cities either. The nearest regular bus service to where I currently live is about 15-20 miles away in a local college town. It's actually just as far for me to reach the nearest Amtrak station. It's not like I live out in the Styx either. I can be in my local Nordstroms at an upscale shopping mall in under 20 minutes door to door. It's just that once you leave the major cities the population density drops precipitously so bus service (not to mention trains) rapidly become too expensive to justify.
I UBER most places now, which does little to help with traffic congestion.
Not an affordable option for me - you must not travel a huge amount. I drive 30-40K miles per year. Uber is a reasonable option if you don't travel huge distance or are in need of an occasional taxi ride but I drive so much that the cost of the car per mile is easily cheaper to own a car. In my case I now use an EV for most commuting which has saved me a small fortune in gas and maintenance. (probably ~$1500 in the last 6 months)
From 1950 to 1970, the pinball industry made more money than Hollywood.
Citation needed.
Interactive entertainment has always been more profitable, despite being mostly ignored by the so-called cultural critics.
Define what you mean by interactive entertainment. I realize that sounds obvious but I think it's less obvious than it seems. Professional sports spectating isn't really interactive but it's one of the biggest pieces of the entertainment market - far bigger revenues than the market for actually playing sports. Movies aren't interactive but they are enormous once you include all the revenues and not just the box office. Books aren't interactive but that's a huge industry. Streaming video isn't interactive but is huge. Porn is mostly not interactive and that market is enormous - probably bigger than the above markets combined. So what do you mean exactly by "interactive entertainment"? Video games are indeed a big market but you'll need more than that.
The reason we have cable monopolies is because local governments awarded monopoly service contracts.
That's part of the reason but only a part. A bigger reason is simply that it is economically inefficient for networks to be small - literally network effects. Last mile ISPs are a classic example of a natural monopoly.
You identified part of the problem which is the last mile monopoly/oligopoly. This could be ameliorated by prohibiting companies that deal in content from also owning the lines (or towers) to deliver that content. Then there is minimal conflict of interest and no real reason to charge Netflix more (or less) than anyone else. They should either be in the content delivery business or the content creation business but not both.
The video games sector now accounts for more than half of the entertainment market in UK, according to new figures. From a report: The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) said the gaming market's value rose to $4.85bn,
That's only true if you take a ridiculously narrow definition of the "entertainment market". The English Premier League is unquestionably a form of entertainment and that league alone had revenues of $6.4 billion last year. And that's just one sport in the UK. Add in all the other lower tier leagues, other sports, etc and it's pretty easy to show that video games are just a piece of the overall pie. I'm not even getting into forms of "entertainment" like drinking and other adult recreation which undoubtedly are far larger.
I have an iPhone with Apples face reader. Compared to the fingerprint reader is is six on one side and half a dozen on the other.
In my experience sometimes FaceID is preferable and sometimes TouchID is preferable depending on the use case. There are a lot of times where having to have the phone looking right at you is rather awkward. Using ApplePay is a good example - for that the fingerprint ID is usually preferable in my experience, especially for things like going through a drive through. I'd say 80-90% of the time I prefer FaceID but that other 10-20% I really prefer TouchID.
3) Webmail has to die. There simply is no alternative.
Webmail won't die and you need to get over it. Millions of people find it hugely useful primarily because of the portability of it. It's also very easy to administer which makes it appealing to management.
How often does someone log in to a full computer that doesn't belong to him or her instead of just checking their phone to read e-mail?
Speaking for myself, literally every day at work. I don't own my computer at work and I check both personal and work emails there. (yes my employer is fine with that but doesn't want to store my emails on their machines nor do I want to store my email on their machines) A web client is the most practical solution for us. I have about a half dozen email accounts and webmail makes it much easier to manage them. Many emails I compose would be very awkward and/or slow to compose on a phone.. Maybe you like typing long emails on your phone but I don't. When I was in college I was routinely using university computers to log into my accounts since carrying a laptop everywhere is awkward and sometimes I needed a real keyboard and full sized monitor. I also routinely use my wife's computer to check emails and she doesn't need a bunch of software installed for my crap on her machine.
Maybe YOU don't need to use computers you don't own but lots of us do.
The OS could do more to facilitate proper key management.
Yes the OS can help to a point but there are limits. Not the least of which is that the people you communicate with have to be on board with generating and exchanging keys for it to have any value at all. Good luck with that. Literally nobody I communicate with would be willing to go to the bother even if it were trivial to do. They would perceive it as an unnecessary and pointless hoop to jump through even if they understand the purpose conceptually. They perceive very little of their communication as sensitive enough to justify the overhead. If people cannot be bothered to maintain strong passwords do you seriously think they are going to do any better with the more complicated endeavor of key management? Not likely...
What we really need is for the major webmail platforms to implement GPG in a way that is basically transparent to users.
Several problems with that statement.
1) GPG like most other end-to-end public key encryption requires substantial maintenance and knowledge on the parts of the end users to be properly effective. Good luck explaining proper public/private key maintenance to my technologically impaired mother.
2) There appears to be no way to reconcile ease of use with security to a degree acceptable to a non-paranoid non-technical user
3) Using GPG on a webmail system pretty much defeats the entire point of such encryption since you have to trust the message in plain text at some point to a third party of unknown trustworthiness. (do you REALLY trust Google/Apple/Microsoft/Yahoo/etc that much?)
4) The overhead of using GPG (or similar) in a properly secure way is well beyond the capabilities or interest level of most users.
5) Both the sender and recipient need to be willing and able to participate and deal with the overhead of encryption AND know how to generate/handle keys securely.
None of these problems are unique to GPG so I'm not bashing that product. It's good at what it does but any other public/private key encryption will have more or less the same issues.
Doesn't have to be perfect, just better than nothing and off those of us who do want perfection the opportunity to use a really secure dedicated client.
If it isn't perfect, it isn't secure. And while I agree with your sentiments there appears to be no practical way to resolve the challenges above such that it would become accessible/useful to all but the most tech savvy of users.
And infinitely better than Google's horrible, completely unusable GMail "UI".
That's a matter of personal preference. I've been a long time user of both and while I don't love the Gmail UI, I generally find it more practical than I do the Thunderbird UI most of the time. Plus it has the HUGE advantage of being the same and available from any computer anywhere. This may or may not matter to you but it is a big benefit to me.
I've always wanted Thunderbird to give me a compelling reason to use it more than I do but it's just stagnated for so long I moved on for most of my workflow. I still have it installed and I fire it up now and then but for me at least, GMail's web client works just as well if not better most of the time and requires less overhead to manage. Hell they don't even have a 64 bit version released yet except on the daily channel for testers. If they provide better integration with GMail (and other services) that could improve things. The UI on Thunderbird is pretty clumsy and hasn't really improved much in the last 10 years.
The LA metro system is well functioning (I use it to commute to work, and I use it any time I go downtown - I would never drive there any more).
You must be one of the lucky 5 people who actually lives near a station. Doesn't apply to most people in LA as evidenced by their continued overwhelming utilization of automobiles. Approximately 7% of people commute by public transit in LA. Any number greater than zero is good but let's not pretend that it's a hugely significant factor for most of the population. Compare with NYC having around 2/3 of all commuting happening via public transportation.
And by definition when people from the suburbs take the metro they aren't driving. So, yeah, it does cause a reduction in the number of cars on the freeways and surface streets.
Curious then that ridership is falling dramatically in the last 5 years and that Seriously, LA's mass transit is barely more than a bus system that nobody rides if they don't have to. The infrastructure was designed around cars and remains so to this day. Changing that is going to cost VAST sums of money and take a long time to take effect in a substantial way because it will require convincing a LOT of people to relocate.
I know, I know. You'll be now be setting new, higher bars you demand to be cleared for your satisfaction.
Not at all. You will need to clear the old ones first before I worry about moving any goal posts. The evidence doesn't support your thesis.
I rode the bus when I lived in Hawaii and it was cheap and convenient.
Terrible example. I've spent lots of time in Hawaii. There is only one large city in the state and the geography elsewhere generally forces people to live close together where buses can actually make some sense. Plus owning and driving a car is crazy expensive there (just like most other things).
When I moved to Pennsylvania it was less cheap and less convenient, but still did the job fairly well.
I'm guessing you lived in one of the bigger cities if that was the case. I've lived in PA and in most of it bus service is either inconvenient or non-existent. I went to college in Eastern PA and aside from the busses around campus there was very limited bus service around the rest of the metro area (Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton) You basically had to own a car to get anywhere useful in a reasonable amount of time.
Now maybe it's my own fault for not fully realizing that the bus doesn't stop in my part of town, but it's that inconvenience that causes me to just jump on the interstate and park in my building's parking lot, even though I hate the traffic.
The problem is that where you live wasn't designed with bus service or any other public transit in mind. Bus service is almost always just an afterthought which works ok but not great in most cities which were designed with cars as primary transport. It doesn't require rails or other fixed infrastructure like trains or trolleys and it can be re-routed relatively easily. Honestly I've never lived in a place where bus transportation was a practical option.
So you have pushed the problem upstream to the power generation plants.
You say that like its a bad thing. Power generation plants are far more efficient right out of the gate than even the best car engine.
And I'm ignoring the fact that you can put solar panels out and cut the power plant out of the loop altogether.
(solar power doesn't have the efficiency yet to drive cars around full power on solar cells).
What are you talking about? There already are people powering EVs with 100% solar power. That's not even a question. A typical large roof can provide more than enough energy to power an EV for typical driving needs. Larger solar farms can do even better.
The power plants currently generate lots of waste heat
Power plants are FAR more efficient than the engines in cars. It's not even close. Yes they generate waste heat which can be recaptured but what do you think is easier or more sensible? Capturing waste heat from millions of inefficient cars or capturing waste heat from a few thousand already more efficient power plants?
Both Power generation and trucking are highly competitive with low profit margins and anything they can do to improve their bottom line will be done.
You think power generation is a low margin business? You might want to look closer because their margins are pretty solid on average. Gross margins of around 60% and Operating margins of around 10-15% on average. In the US most power generation is a regulated monopoly. Not software company margins but I wouldn't describe them as a low margin business either. And again, most trucking would benefit FAR more from utilization of EVs (or hybrids) than some marginal gains in thermal recapture from inefficient ICEs. You're proposing stepping over a dollar to pick up a few pennies.
In for all the "I have a car so public transportation does nothing for me" comments.
You have it backwards. It's not that I have a car - it's that public transportation was NOT DESIGNED for me. It's that most cities (including mine) were simply not designed with mass transit in mind and most of them lack the population density to retrofit it now. I live in a suburban area about 20 miles from where I work. There is no economically realistic way to get mass transit from where I live to where I work or to pretty much anywhere else I need to go. The infrastructure was designed for cars and only cars. It was bad planning but we are kind of stuck with it now, at least for the next 50 years. Any plan that would fix this state of affairs is going to cost huge sums and take many decades to implement.
The Los Angeles area, the ultimate car-centric region with its sprawling freeways, approved a sweeping $120 billion plan to build new train routes and upgrade its buses.
Ok so they approved a plan. Wake me when they actually have a well functioning mass transit system that actually causes a reduction in the number of cars needed. I'll be especially impressed if they actually do it on time and under budget.
Seattle has won accolades for its transit system, where 93 percent of riders report being happy with service -- a feat that seems unimaginable in New York, where subway riders regularly simmer with rage on stalled trains.
Seattle's system is still new. Really new. Sound Transit was commissioned in 1996. Link Light Rail began service in 2009. Etc. I'm sure their system works great compared with mass transit systems many decades older. Maintenance is a harsh mistress. Most transport networks work fairly well when new.
Automotive industry: There is a continuing push to improve overall mileage of a car. If waste heat can be captured as electrical power, It will get adopted.
A far better solution is to use EVs which don't generate anywhere near the amount of waste heat in the first place and already get vastly better fuel economy. It is almost always a better idea to not generate the waste in the first place than to generate it and try to recapture the waste. Instead of trying to reclaim a few extra percent waste heat, work on fast charging for EVs which has a FAR greater long term ROI.
And then Ford or Chevy or Subaru will come out with a car that doesn't have an alternator in it.
Don't need an alternator in an EV so that's already done.
Arsenic is often used for semiconductor doping (for GaAs junctions) because of its electron properties.
Of course. Lots of toxic chemicals are used for very practical purposes. And this can be fine as long as they are handled responsibly. Problem is that they very often are not handled responsibly and no care is taken for the proper disposal of the end product. I'm not worried about getting arsenic poisoning from my smartphone but there are serious issues when we talk about manufacturing and disposal and recycling.
Lead is used for soldering, which you'll find, surprise surprise, in pretty much all electronic and electric devices.
That once was true but far less so today. A vast and increasing amount of electronics now are ROHS compliant which means they don't use lead, mercury, cadmium and an assortment of other toxic substances including in solder. My company basically has stopped using leaded solder altogether. The lead has some practical benefits for some use cases but the toxicity problems it causes means that it really shouldn't be used and doesn't need to be used for the majority of soldering applications.
But the (un)scientificamerican article is about the same kind of stupid like people claiming that flu vaccines contain Thiomersal which contains mercury and will lead to authism.
Sigh... I picked one article from a recognized source. There are thousands of other sources saying exactly the same thing if you don't like that one and your analogy to vaccines is wildly wrong. There is a difference between falsified psuedo-science and the proven fact that there are toxic chemicals used and released by manufacture, use, and disposal of electronics. We inappropriately dispose of millions of tons of electronics each year and the environmental effects of this are a proven fact. You don't have to take my word for it - plenty of credible evidence available with a single simple google search.
Suffice to say that this arsenic is in pretty solid from inside of the semiconductors. It won't escape them easily.
You are making it out to be far simpler than it really is. Arsenic is a problem in various parts of the supply chain, not just the finished product.
Unless you grind those LEDs up and then spread them around in the environment
You are aware that lots of electronics are ground up as well as spread around the environment in a variety of ways, right?
To be pedantic, LEDs themselves fail remarkably close to never.
Yeah well we're not buying or using a single LED are we? You aren't being pedantic because you are talking about something completely different and frankly irrelevant. LED light bulbs and LED light fixtures do fail. It doesn't matter if the actually lighting element still functions if some other part of the device fails too.
Anyway I've seen plenty of LEDs fail for all sorts of reasons (usually voltage/current fluctuations and/or heat problems) but then my day job is manufacturing wire harnesses and electronics so I see more of them than most people do. The reason you don't see more of them fail is partly because they are pretty simple and reliable but more often because they are typically attached to circuit boards that are for various reasons less reliable than the LEDs. You don't see individual resistors fail much either for the same reasons.
However, the cheap electronics that they use to convert household current to low-voltage DC fail pretty frequently
Certainly. Remember these are devices that are generally made in bulk and every penny spent on making the electronics more robust is a penny straight off the bottom line of the company making the light. So even the expensive branded electronics have a built in incentive to cheap out on the hardware whenever they can. As a result, some percent of them are going to fail.
Zero-emissions generation facilities (e.g. solar, hydro, wind) are slow to start up and slow down, making them poorly suited for peak/transient loads.
No idea what you are talking about. Solar panels and wind turbines can be turned on/off extremely quickly provided you have spare capacity. When combined with an appropriately large bank of batteries their response time to load changes is effectively instant and FAR faster than an fossil fuel source.
You also are ignoring the fact that solar as a general proposition tends to work best precisely when the sun is shining the brightest which is super helpful for use cases like air conditioning that correlate strongly with how bright the sun shines on a given day. For places with lots of refrigeration or cooling needs (like a grocery store) solar is a great idea to mitigate peak demand.
Coal, natural gas, and diesel are far more responsive.
Your facts are incorrect. Coal plants are not quick at all to respond to changes in demand. They have significant lag time. Diesel is faster but isn't particularly efficient in a lot of cases. Natural gas is rather quick - FAR quicker than coal which has a lot to do with its current popularity.
For example, our politicians are trying to convince the public that driving a 2500kg electric car is `greener` than driving a small and efficient 800kg gasoline car.
That's because in many cases the EV actually IS the greener option. There is no such thing as an "efficient" internal combustion engine, at least in https://www.quora.com/How-ener...">comparison to electric motors. My Chevy Bolt EV has a fuel economy better than any remotely similar sized vehicle with an ICE you can buy. It's not even close. Furthermore it generates less waste to operate too. I don't have to change ANY fluids aside from wiper fluid for the first 150,000 miles of operation. I've driven mine around 8000 miles since purchase which means I haven't burned approximately 400 gallons of gasoline. Because of the electric option I purchase from the power company my power mostly comes from green sources too (solar, etc) so I don't burn much in the way of fossil fuels at the power station either. Hell I can charge it from the local nuke plant in theory.
They promote solar panels but fail to properly insulate old houses.
So because they haven't solved every problem, they shouldn't bother solving any problem? Insulating old houses well generally is FAR more expensive than installing solar panels on either new or old construction. Of course it's a good idea to insulate better but how do you propose to finance that on old homes on a large scale? That's an important long term project but the bigger problem is the pollution from generation using fossil fuels. We can solve or at least mitigate that problem in a few decades. Insulating every old house doesn't solve the pollution problems AND it will take a lot longer and cost more to accomplish. Solve the problems you can solve today.
Capitalism is not going green until it is profitable.
As a general proposition going green already IS profitable. Waste disposal costs money and the cheapest way to reduce that cost is to not make the waste in the first place. Energy consumption costs money so technology that minimizes energy consumption improves profits. "Going green" very routinely is a very easy path to improving profits and companies are well aware of this. Not to mention the economic benefit that comes with technology development and deployment of green energy sources.
Generally speaking the only time "going green" actually reduces profits is when we create perverse incentives for people to dump their waste improperly or to burn fuel unnecessarily. Fossil fuels only seem cheap because we heavily subsidize them (to the tune of around $5 trillion globally per year) and don't require them to pay the full cost of the pollution they generate. Fully burdened they are already FAR more expensive than many "green" options. Coal that has to pay for all the particulates and carbon it emits can't begin to compete with solar or wind or hydro or even nuclear.