Australian Aborigines have an accurate oral history that goes back over 10,000 years.
They might have an oral history with some verifiable facts but you'd have to be pretty generous with your definition of "accurate" to use the word meaningfully. There might be some evidence in the information but it's deeply unlikely that any such stories passed down through that many generations survived without substantial alterations and errors. Not to mention that there is no means to go back and actually check what the stories originally said for most types of facts.
Oral histories and eyewitness testimony are terrible forms of evidence. Not to mention once religions get involved, objective evidence tends to go MIA almost immediately.
I think if it was only 12,000 years ago, we'd have known about it.
It would be shocking if we knew anything about it. It's in a remote and barely inhabited part of the world, far from any sizeable human settlement at the time, thousands of years before there were any written records we know of outside of a few cave drawings.
Physical evidence, written evidence (it would be in the precursor texts to the old testament or something).
Physical evidence outside of the geologic record would be extremely sketchy. The oldest written records we have are from about 4-5000 years ago so there would be nothing reliable in even our oldest texts about an event that happened at least 7 thousand years before our earliest written records.
That's quite the range of ages: two orders of magnitude. Not an impressive estimate.
They just discovered the thing and it's buried under a huge amount ice. It's going to take a minute to find the evidence to more precisely pinpoint the impact date. Furthermore, when you are talking about geologic time, a million years is barely a blink of an eye.
From TFA:
“It is correct that the crater is not well dated but there’s good evidence that it is geologically young, that is, it formed within the last 2 to 3 million years, and most likely it is as young as the last Ice Age [which ended around 12,000 years ago],” Larsen explained to Gizmodo. “We are currently trying to come up with ideas on how to date the impact. One idea is to drill through the ice and get bedrock samples that can be used for numerical dating.”
Not needing a car is a HUGE increase in independence for YOUR KIDS, who can't drive, though.
It really isn't. Where I live children can walk to their friends houses, quite a few can walk to school, they can walk most areas of our town, the movie theater, and they can easily get rides places even if I'm not there to provide them. I'm not really sure how you think they are being limited without the sort of public transit available in NYC. Sure they need cars sometimes too but this is hardly some huge crimp on their lifestyle. I went to college on the east coast not far from NYC and I've spent lots of time in other cities like Chicago with good public transit so I've seen it all first hand. Good public transit is great but it really wouldn't be a game changer with regard to lifestyle for my daughter.
They can walk themselves to school after age 10 or so, take public transit to/from high school and after-school events.
It's absolutely routine for children to carpool where I live and in many cases they can walk where they need to go. School buses transfer them to/from home. I think you are making it out to be more of an advantage than it really is and I speak from first hand experience.
As far as parkland, if you're talking about a 10-15 miles radius of NYC, we probably do have 16,000 acres of parkland.
No you most certainly do not and most of what you do have is scattered about and barely would qualify as a park in the sense of what I'm talking about. Literally a quarter mile from my door I have a 4000 acre park (central park is 840 acres for comparison) with a nature center, 18 hole golf course, discgolf course, two beaches, a water park, an 8 mile multipurpose trail, 30 miles of hiking an equestrian trails, a working farm park, boat rentals, camping, cross country skiing, ice skating in winter, dozens of pavilions, picnic areas, fitness courses, animal rehabilitation center, a toboggan/sledding hill, horseback riding, boat docks, fishing, and more. Plus this 4000 acre park is contiguous with 2 other similar sized parks via trails and roads. There is nothing even remotely similar within 20 miles of Manhattan.
Now to be fair, I don't have much in the way of restaurants open 24/7, I have shitty public transit options when they exist at all, I do have to drive quite a lot, getting stuff delivered is a pain, and there are certain conveniences of living in a dense urban area. Nothing is perfect in every way. We have better parks but worse conveniences. We have bigger/nicer homes for much less money but have to go further to get where we want to go. Tradeoffs...
Of course it does. That many people don't live there by accident.
(a) culture, theater, etc
You think these things don't exist elsewhere? NYC has great options to be sure but so do pretty much every other large city in the US. Folks from NYC like to imagine they have options nobody else has which simply isn't true. I live in the midwest and can be in a world class art museum within 60 minutes of leaving my house. My metro area has opera, playhouses, excellent museums, major universities, outstanding restaurants,
(b) public university is cheap, like cheaper than the UC system and great. Many of the CUNY schools have affiliations with research institutions, so it's easy for undergrads to do research
There are public universities that are reasonably affordable in most states. CUNY is a pretty good deal though.
(c) you can walk or take public transit most places. Your kids can be independent, not dependent on a car or having someone to pick them up
Needing a car sometimes to get around does not preclude independence. If you are being fair, having to depend on public transit to get around has some pretty serious limitations too, especially in the US. I live in a small town with a walkable downtown, restaurants, shopping and parks. I also have 16,000 acres of public park within a 10 mile radius of my house with every outdoor activity you can imagine and which NYC residents could only dream of. People from NYC like to think Central Park is something special but compared to what I have access to here in the Midwest it's a sad ugly joke. They only think it's amazing because Manhattan is so disgusting otherwise. Don't get me wrong, NYC can be a great place but living elsewhere is definitely not limiting.
(d) a lot of really interesting people -- diversity is a good thing.
True and I like the diversity too but having a lot of people (quantity) is both a positive and a negative. Personally I like living somewhere a little less over crowded and quieter. Your mileage may vary of course. I live near a major college town which gets the same benefits of diversity without the massive overcrowding.
Also, Northern Virginia and Long Island are nearly 300 miles apart. They are not both going to be hit by one storm.
Not true. Hurricanes are routinely wide enough to hit both locations at the same time. Average diameter of a hurricane is around 300 miles. And it would be quite possible for a storm to hit DC and then move north to NYC.
The ACA claims Comcast has a uniquely powerful hold on the U.S. cable industry because it controls a large chunk of "must have" programming like NBC's regional sports channels.
"Must have"? Seriously? I am heavily involved in sports (coaching) but they are the very definition of optional. Yeah I know people get worked up if they cannot share the latest victories of their local sports franchise but so what? If they won't give me access to watch my sport of choice on terms I'm willing to live with then I have other things I can do with my life. If you go into withdrawal because you cannot see a basketball game live I don't have a lot of sympathy.
The problem I have with companies like Comcast is that I think that companies that sell content should be prohibited from owning the wires that deliver the content. You can have one or the other but not both. Otherwise we have a built in conflict of interest where the company that owns the pipes has an incentive to prioritize their content over anyone elses. (this is the root of the whole net neutrality fight) That wouldn't be a problem if there was adequate competition among companies delivering services to my house but in much of the country you have just one or if you are lucky two options. (Comcast is the only serious option for a land line to my house for example) I have wireless options but those aren't ideal either for a variety of reasons slashdot users are adequately familiar with.
Voice interfaces have been adopted faster than nearly any other technology in history.
Really? I find that curious because I almost never see anyone actually using them. Seriously, I just never see anyone using Siri or any of the others and I'm around people using smartphones and tablets constantly. Once it while I see someone do a search on their iPhone or dictate a text message. But if I see it happen more than once a week that's a lot.
I don't have any problem with the idea of them but in my experience they don't generally work very well outside of a few niche applications. It's almost always faster for me to type what I'm searching for because they screw up the transcription most of the time. (I have the most generic US midwestern accent you can imagine and no speech problems either) I also cannot imagine any practical use for something like Alexa in my house. Your mileage may vary of course but I don't really see the appeal. I have an iPhone and I find Siri nearly useless to the point of it actually being a hindrance at times. I've never used Cortana on any Windows 10 machine and see no point to it. I haven't played with the Google versions much but similarly I don't see much value in it. I also don't like the idea of announcing what I'm searching for in public even when it isn't anything sensitive.
No they will not. No amount of tariffs are going to move more than marginal amounts of the electronics supply chains away from China. Worse even if the tariffs did cause damage to China's electronics industry they will cause MORE damage to our economy in the process and STILL will not result in those electronics being made in the US. Tariffs are a blunt instrument that invariably cause collateral far great damage to the broader economy. Seriously, this stuff is economics 101. Do not make the mistake of thinking that tariffs will result in the outcome you favor.
No. It's because I don't want to end up living in the same economic, social, and environmental squalor that 95% of chinese apparently think is a-ok.
I've actually been to China and clearly you haven't. Your idea of what China is actually like has no relationship to reality.
Only because any tariff that might otherwise be sufficient to accomplish it would only result in a domestic black market being created to meet the demand.
Incorrect. The problems with tariffs is that they are a blunt instrument and they almost always have unintended consequences. You raise prices on steel and it raises prices on everything made with steel which is a far larger industry than just the steel industry. You protect a few jobs at the cost of far more. Take an economics 101 course and you'll learn how tariffs almost invariably result in a net loss to the economy of both countries individually and collectively. They almost never actually accomplish the intended goal without substantial collateral damage to the broader economy.
You seemingly don't realize that increased cost will reduce demand AND create a market advantage to production of these items in the US.
Speaking as someone who actually makes products like this for a living including electronics that go into metal boxes, you could not be more wrong. If it reduces demand, it doesn't matter if the box is made in the US or China. The China+tariffs vs US made at the same price will not benefit US consumers. It means we are costing taxpayers a huge amount of money to support a tiny little industry with a handful of jobs. Explain to me the logic of making literally every PC purchased more expensive in order to gain a few hundred jobs in a niche industry? Tariffs are almost never a good idea and this is no exception.
Raise the price of steel to support the roughly 80k steel workers in the US and you raise the price of every car made which hurts 2 million auto workers + everyone who buys a car. You are robbing the many to benefit a few.
Sounds like a business opportunity to make PC cases in the US so Americans aren't 'forced' to buy Chinese shit.
Go ahead and try since you think it is so easy. We can talk about how it went after your bankruptcy.
Here's a little clue for you though. The reason we don't make PC cases in the US has NOTHING to do with our technical ability to make such cases and has everything to do with the cost of labor and to a lesser extent cost of materials. We know how to make them but we cannot do it as cheaply as they can in China. No amount of tariffs will change that fact nor will they cause the supply chains for goods made in China to shift to the US in any substantial way.
Meanwhile Trump's tax cut wasn't as big as folks think.
It was plenty big for certain people with several commas in their annual income. That isn't the real problem though. The real problem is that they cut taxes without cutting either Medicare/Medicaid or the defense budget or social security which together account for around 3/4 of federal spending. So we continue to accrue debt at a rate of nearly a $trillion per year with no end in sight which our children are going to have to pay off sooner or later. In 2017 we basically borrowed the entire defense department budget. ALL of it.
So enjoy the party while it lasts. Sooner or later the bills will come due and your children will "thank" you for it.
Concern over hardware with a long supply chain like cpu's, mobo's, ram etc is one thing.. but something as stupidly simple to produce as a fucking metal box? come on.
Sure, we know how to make cheap metal boxes in the US. That's never been a problem. The problem is the percentage of labor content that goes into producing cheap metal boxes and the cost of labor. Cheap metal boxes tend to be labor intensive to make unless you make those boxes in HUGE volumes. It's more economical to have them made in a country with cheap labor. China has cheap labor and the US does not. QED they get made in China and not the US.
Goods that are capital intensive are made in countries with high labor costs but access to cheap capital. The US has the cheapest cost of capital in the world so goods that have low labor content tend to be made here. Stuff like jumbo jets, earth moving equipment, cars, CPUs, chemicals, etc. The US has a manufacturing sector worth about $3 TRILLION annually which makes one of the 5 largest economies in the world - roughly the same size as the entire GDP of the UK or Germany. We make lots of stuff but we can't compete on cheap metal boxes just like China can't (currently) compete with the US on jumbo jets.
Any time you see an idiot politician (like Trump) promising to "bring back manufacturing jobs" to the US they are promising the impossible. The only way those "cheap metal boxes" will get produced here in the US is if we experience a massive reduction in wages to bring us close to those paid in China. No amount of tariffs will change that economic reality. I'm pretty sure you don't actually want such a fall in wages to happen. The good news is that as China becomes more prosperous their wages will rise and labor intensive production will leave China for other places with still cheaper labor. Already happens in some industries.
There is no law of god or men that says all electronics should come from China.
Laws of economics do dictate where electronics come from. The overwhelming majority of the supply chain for electronics depends heavily on China because that's where the companies are located and it's been trending that way for decades. If you can find a way to shift the supply chains away from China have at it but you'll find that near impossible.
Order a quality motherboard from Japan. A GPU from Singapore. A CPU from Mexico. A PSU from Canada, and so on.
Good luck with that. You'll find the components on that motherboard, power supply, graphics card, etc are made in China even if the assembly was put together elsewhere. If you want something made with just local content be prepared to spend a fortune on it. Companies like Apple and the rest don't source from China because they like China. They do it because there are no practical alternatives.
If you are human and care about human things, you should already be boycotting China.
Why? Because you think your country is owed something and shouldn't have to compete? Because you have a jingoistic view of China and it's people? You think 20% of the world's population should just sit on the sidelines economically because it's inconvenient for Americans or Europeans?
Sure they do. They also do some amount of Build To Stock. Doing one does not preclude doing the other, even with the same product going down the same assembly line. My company does some similar things. We mostly BTO but when we have good reason to suspect a customer will order more of a specific product we often will BTS some extras units so we can save money on setup costs and buy materials in bulk. We are taking a calculated risk by doing so but it usually works out in our favor. Tesla if they are smart is doing the same thing. If they have a model configuration that is popular they can save some money by building a few extras of that model when they are going down the line.
Which is basically what this is. No matter how you slice this, the ground based path will be physically shorter and thus has a latency advantage, even with LEO satellites in the mix.
A) Unless you are talking about some specific use case, ground based paths are NOT always physically shorter because they are not all point to point connections. B) Ground based routing of any significant distance routinely has to go through more devices and at slower speeds through fiber/copper. C) Latency is not just a function of distance
But my point here is that if you are looking at latency, the shortest route unusually wins and LEO orbits add quite a bit of distance.
Not when you are talking about distances the size of a continent. It's 4500km from NYC to LA across the earth's surface assuming a relatively straight line connection (which probably won't happen but let's say it does for sake of argument). The difference in distance going to LEO across 1 satellite is only marginally longer if you calculate the sides of the triangle. Let's do some over simplified math. Simplify to an isoceles triangle with hypotenuse of 4500km and height of 1200km and you are at ~5100km for the trip. You've added 600km but can send the signal at 2X the speed. So the signal going into space will arrive faster than the one going on the ground.
Or more like building the technological infrastructure needed for a Mars colony, step by step.
Maybe but a lot of those problems are the same problems we have here on earth. We need electric powered vehicles to reduce oil dependence. We need low cost to orbit rockets. We need solar powered homes. We need cheaper/better tunnel making. We need more ubiquitous internet access globally. Whether you like Musk or not, you have to admit he's working on solving serious and important problems. (and if you don't think those are serious problems then you don't understand the problems) The fact that there is a lot of overlap with problems we'd face colonizing Mars is just a cherry on top of the sundae.
Problem is, fiber on the ground is faster as the distance is shorter.
Only true in general for relatively short trips with fixed destinations.
Unless you live in some remote place that depends on geo-stationary satellites for internet, you are better off going along the ground, at least where latency is concerned.
A) These are not geo-stationary satellites SpaceX is proposing. Geostationary orbit is about 35,700km away versus the 1200km being proposed here. That difference is very significant. B) Ground is only faster in some use cases but not all and the longer the transmission the less advantage it has.
And in any case, it's often not a crime, it's a civil employment issue.
It also very often IS a crime in many circumstances. For example the moment anyone is denied benefits, promotions, punitively fired, given an adverse decision, interfere with their work, intimidate, etc, then it can very easily become a crime. And even in cases where it is not a crime it is certainly not decent behavior.
Because "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't satisfy the mob.
Innocent until proven guilty ONLY applies to criminal court cases brought by the government. It has NOTHING to do with internal HR actions of a private company unless it deals directly with actions regarding a protected class of individuals. Even then "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply unless the parties involved are standing in a courtroom. With some restrictions a company has wide discretion in how it treats the people working for it and they absolutely can treat you as guilty until proven innocent if they want.
Not saying it's a good idea to do that but that is the way it works.
It's exactly the same thing as freedom on speech as protected by the first amendment. Legally it only applies in relation to the government.
There are better chip technologies than Si for various uses. Yet everyone is on silicon, because economies of scale left everything else behind on old slow processes.
Better is too vague a term to be useful because you have to define how it is better. Cheaper? Performance? Manufacturability? Supply? Yes Gallium Arsenide chips (for example) have better performance characteristics but has worse economics (silicon is cheap) and is harder to manufacture (read expensive).
Also be careful about making analogies like that. There already are pretty substantial economies of scale on other battery chemistries AND there is evidence that other chemistries could become dominant in the future. Lead Acid batteries are used in every car on the planet (ironically even my Chevy Bolt EV) so they are being produced at large scale and it wouldn't be super hard to scale that up even further. (not saying they should - just an example) You are correct that silicon is the dominant chemistry for making chips and is likely to remain so but it doesn't automatically follow that the same economic model will be true for batteries. The manufacturing process and supply chain characteristics are quite different. If a new and better performing battery chemistry comes along (which seems probable) which makes big gains in performance, then it is very likely that they will be replaced in due course. If Tesla could double their range or cut their recharge time in half with a Li-Air battery, they are going to have to look hard at doing just that. We have a pretty good idea what the theoretical limits of various battery chemistries are and Li-Ion isn't at the top of the list
A SmartMeter and SmartCharger from Siemens, obviously you need an internet connection, and a power company involved in using your SmartMeter/SmartCharger.
Siemens makes chargers for powering your EV at home. If they sell a device that let's you power your home from an EV they are doing a good job of hiding it from the internet. There literally is no mechanism in most EVs for running power out of the EV and into your home. The software in the cars doesn't support power going out from the charge port. Only in the last year or so has that changed for a handful of cars. My Chevy Bolt EV cannot do it in stock form no matter what I plug into it and that's true in Europe as well. I don't believe any Tesla can do it either and only recently in a few places can you do it with a Nissan Leaf or any other mass market EV.
If it was a 1000 cars around 2005, then most certainly there are far more now.
Citation needed. There weren't very many EVs made circa 2005 with a battery pack large enough to power a home for any meaningful amount of time. So again you are making claims without evidence.
Either we have no power outages (Europe) Either we have no power outages (Europe), or if there is one: you are in much deeper shit than just having no power (Asia).
No power outages in Europe, huh? You do know that we can check your bogus "facts" right? Power is reliable in Europe but let's not pretend blackouts are never a thing there.
There is also a difference in the cost of fuel stocks. $0 for renewables versus $HUGE for fossil plants. You seem to be missing the point. The only number that matters at the end of the day is the total cost. (including externalities of pollution that fossil fuel plants never are forced to fully pay for) It doesn't matter if wind costs more to maintain if the cost of a watt delivered is similar or less. You're trying to imply that wind power has these huge maintenance costs but the fact is that the accounting has been done and it doesn't matter because cost of maintenance is only one item among many in the cost of the system.
Offshore wind needs basically continual maintenance due to the large number of machines- once you finish all of them you need to go back to the first one.
Even if true, so what? Just requiring maintenance is insufficient data to tell us anything useful. Fossil fuel plants require maintenance too as well as fuel and lots of other costs. The profile of these costs will be different but that's not important. What matters is how much it costs to deliver a watt. So offshore wind has higher maintenance costs? It has lower fuel costs, lower emissions control costs, isn't subject to geopolitical fluctuation in fuel prices, doesn't have a single point of failure if one turbine fails, and doesn't dump massive amounts of particulates and CO2 that never get cleaned up.
Slashdot Mirror
Australian Aborigines have an accurate oral history that goes back over 10,000 years.
They might have an oral history with some verifiable facts but you'd have to be pretty generous with your definition of "accurate" to use the word meaningfully. There might be some evidence in the information but it's deeply unlikely that any such stories passed down through that many generations survived without substantial alterations and errors. Not to mention that there is no means to go back and actually check what the stories originally said for most types of facts.
Oral histories and eyewitness testimony are terrible forms of evidence. Not to mention once religions get involved, objective evidence tends to go MIA almost immediately.
I think if it was only 12,000 years ago, we'd have known about it.
It would be shocking if we knew anything about it. It's in a remote and barely inhabited part of the world, far from any sizeable human settlement at the time, thousands of years before there were any written records we know of outside of a few cave drawings.
Physical evidence, written evidence (it would be in the precursor texts to the old testament or something).
Physical evidence outside of the geologic record would be extremely sketchy. The oldest written records we have are from about 4-5000 years ago so there would be nothing reliable in even our oldest texts about an event that happened at least 7 thousand years before our earliest written records.
That's quite the range of ages: two orders of magnitude. Not an impressive estimate.
They just discovered the thing and it's buried under a huge amount ice. It's going to take a minute to find the evidence to more precisely pinpoint the impact date. Furthermore, when you are talking about geologic time, a million years is barely a blink of an eye.
From TFA:
“It is correct that the crater is not well dated but there’s good evidence that it is geologically young, that is, it formed within the last 2 to 3 million years, and most likely it is as young as the last Ice Age [which ended around 12,000 years ago],” Larsen explained to Gizmodo. “We are currently trying to come up with ideas on how to date the impact. One idea is to drill through the ice and get bedrock samples that can be used for numerical dating.”
Not needing a car is a HUGE increase in independence for YOUR KIDS, who can't drive, though.
It really isn't. Where I live children can walk to their friends houses, quite a few can walk to school, they can walk most areas of our town, the movie theater, and they can easily get rides places even if I'm not there to provide them. I'm not really sure how you think they are being limited without the sort of public transit available in NYC. Sure they need cars sometimes too but this is hardly some huge crimp on their lifestyle. I went to college on the east coast not far from NYC and I've spent lots of time in other cities like Chicago with good public transit so I've seen it all first hand. Good public transit is great but it really wouldn't be a game changer with regard to lifestyle for my daughter.
They can walk themselves to school after age 10 or so, take public transit to/from high school and after-school events.
It's absolutely routine for children to carpool where I live and in many cases they can walk where they need to go. School buses transfer them to/from home. I think you are making it out to be more of an advantage than it really is and I speak from first hand experience.
As far as parkland, if you're talking about a 10-15 miles radius of NYC, we probably do have 16,000 acres of parkland.
No you most certainly do not and most of what you do have is scattered about and barely would qualify as a park in the sense of what I'm talking about. Literally a quarter mile from my door I have a 4000 acre park (central park is 840 acres for comparison) with a nature center, 18 hole golf course, discgolf course, two beaches, a water park, an 8 mile multipurpose trail, 30 miles of hiking an equestrian trails, a working farm park, boat rentals, camping, cross country skiing, ice skating in winter, dozens of pavilions, picnic areas, fitness courses, animal rehabilitation center, a toboggan/sledding hill, horseback riding, boat docks, fishing, and more. Plus this 4000 acre park is contiguous with 2 other similar sized parks via trails and roads. There is nothing even remotely similar within 20 miles of Manhattan.
Now to be fair, I don't have much in the way of restaurants open 24/7, I have shitty public transit options when they exist at all, I do have to drive quite a lot, getting stuff delivered is a pain, and there are certain conveniences of living in a dense urban area. Nothing is perfect in every way. We have better parks but worse conveniences. We have bigger/nicer homes for much less money but have to go further to get where we want to go. Tradeoffs...
It sounds like New York City and Crystal City actively worked to impress Amazon.
They accomplished this by being within a few miles of where Jeff Bezos already had purchased homes apparently.
NYC has its advantages...
Of course it does. That many people don't live there by accident.
(a) culture, theater, etc
You think these things don't exist elsewhere? NYC has great options to be sure but so do pretty much every other large city in the US. Folks from NYC like to imagine they have options nobody else has which simply isn't true. I live in the midwest and can be in a world class art museum within 60 minutes of leaving my house. My metro area has opera, playhouses, excellent museums, major universities, outstanding restaurants,
(b) public university is cheap, like cheaper than the UC system and great. Many of the CUNY schools have affiliations with research institutions, so it's easy for undergrads to do research
There are public universities that are reasonably affordable in most states. CUNY is a pretty good deal though.
(c) you can walk or take public transit most places. Your kids can be independent, not dependent on a car or having someone to pick them up
Needing a car sometimes to get around does not preclude independence. If you are being fair, having to depend on public transit to get around has some pretty serious limitations too, especially in the US. I live in a small town with a walkable downtown, restaurants, shopping and parks. I also have 16,000 acres of public park within a 10 mile radius of my house with every outdoor activity you can imagine and which NYC residents could only dream of. People from NYC like to think Central Park is something special but compared to what I have access to here in the Midwest it's a sad ugly joke. They only think it's amazing because Manhattan is so disgusting otherwise. Don't get me wrong, NYC can be a great place but living elsewhere is definitely not limiting.
(d) a lot of really interesting people -- diversity is a good thing.
True and I like the diversity too but having a lot of people (quantity) is both a positive and a negative. Personally I like living somewhere a little less over crowded and quieter. Your mileage may vary of course. I live near a major college town which gets the same benefits of diversity without the massive overcrowding.
Also, Northern Virginia and Long Island are nearly 300 miles apart. They are not both going to be hit by one storm.
Not true. Hurricanes are routinely wide enough to hit both locations at the same time. Average diameter of a hurricane is around 300 miles. And it would be quite possible for a storm to hit DC and then move north to NYC.
The ACA claims Comcast has a uniquely powerful hold on the U.S. cable industry because it controls a large chunk of "must have" programming like NBC's regional sports channels.
"Must have"? Seriously? I am heavily involved in sports (coaching) but they are the very definition of optional. Yeah I know people get worked up if they cannot share the latest victories of their local sports franchise but so what? If they won't give me access to watch my sport of choice on terms I'm willing to live with then I have other things I can do with my life. If you go into withdrawal because you cannot see a basketball game live I don't have a lot of sympathy.
The problem I have with companies like Comcast is that I think that companies that sell content should be prohibited from owning the wires that deliver the content. You can have one or the other but not both. Otherwise we have a built in conflict of interest where the company that owns the pipes has an incentive to prioritize their content over anyone elses. (this is the root of the whole net neutrality fight) That wouldn't be a problem if there was adequate competition among companies delivering services to my house but in much of the country you have just one or if you are lucky two options. (Comcast is the only serious option for a land line to my house for example) I have wireless options but those aren't ideal either for a variety of reasons slashdot users are adequately familiar with.
Voice interfaces have been adopted faster than nearly any other technology in history.
Really? I find that curious because I almost never see anyone actually using them. Seriously, I just never see anyone using Siri or any of the others and I'm around people using smartphones and tablets constantly. Once it while I see someone do a search on their iPhone or dictate a text message. But if I see it happen more than once a week that's a lot.
I don't have any problem with the idea of them but in my experience they don't generally work very well outside of a few niche applications. It's almost always faster for me to type what I'm searching for because they screw up the transcription most of the time. (I have the most generic US midwestern accent you can imagine and no speech problems either) I also cannot imagine any practical use for something like Alexa in my house. Your mileage may vary of course but I don't really see the appeal. I have an iPhone and I find Siri nearly useless to the point of it actually being a hindrance at times. I've never used Cortana on any Windows 10 machine and see no point to it. I haven't played with the Google versions much but similarly I don't see much value in it. I also don't like the idea of announcing what I'm searching for in public even when it isn't anything sensitive.
That's what the tariffs might help do.
No they will not. No amount of tariffs are going to move more than marginal amounts of the electronics supply chains away from China. Worse even if the tariffs did cause damage to China's electronics industry they will cause MORE damage to our economy in the process and STILL will not result in those electronics being made in the US. Tariffs are a blunt instrument that invariably cause collateral far great damage to the broader economy. Seriously, this stuff is economics 101. Do not make the mistake of thinking that tariffs will result in the outcome you favor.
No. It's because I don't want to end up living in the same economic, social, and environmental squalor that 95% of chinese apparently think is a-ok.
I've actually been to China and clearly you haven't. Your idea of what China is actually like has no relationship to reality.
Only because any tariff that might otherwise be sufficient to accomplish it would only result in a domestic black market being created to meet the demand.
Incorrect. The problems with tariffs is that they are a blunt instrument and they almost always have unintended consequences. You raise prices on steel and it raises prices on everything made with steel which is a far larger industry than just the steel industry. You protect a few jobs at the cost of far more. Take an economics 101 course and you'll learn how tariffs almost invariably result in a net loss to the economy of both countries individually and collectively. They almost never actually accomplish the intended goal without substantial collateral damage to the broader economy.
You seemingly don't realize that increased cost will reduce demand AND create a market advantage to production of these items in the US.
Speaking as someone who actually makes products like this for a living including electronics that go into metal boxes, you could not be more wrong. If it reduces demand, it doesn't matter if the box is made in the US or China. The China+tariffs vs US made at the same price will not benefit US consumers. It means we are costing taxpayers a huge amount of money to support a tiny little industry with a handful of jobs. Explain to me the logic of making literally every PC purchased more expensive in order to gain a few hundred jobs in a niche industry? Tariffs are almost never a good idea and this is no exception.
Raise the price of steel to support the roughly 80k steel workers in the US and you raise the price of every car made which hurts 2 million auto workers + everyone who buys a car. You are robbing the many to benefit a few.
Sounds like a business opportunity to make PC cases in the US so Americans aren't 'forced' to buy Chinese shit.
Go ahead and try since you think it is so easy. We can talk about how it went after your bankruptcy.
Here's a little clue for you though. The reason we don't make PC cases in the US has NOTHING to do with our technical ability to make such cases and has everything to do with the cost of labor and to a lesser extent cost of materials. We know how to make them but we cannot do it as cheaply as they can in China. No amount of tariffs will change that fact nor will they cause the supply chains for goods made in China to shift to the US in any substantial way.
Meanwhile Trump's tax cut wasn't as big as folks think.
It was plenty big for certain people with several commas in their annual income. That isn't the real problem though. The real problem is that they cut taxes without cutting either Medicare/Medicaid or the defense budget or social security which together account for around 3/4 of federal spending. So we continue to accrue debt at a rate of nearly a $trillion per year with no end in sight which our children are going to have to pay off sooner or later. In 2017 we basically borrowed the entire defense department budget. ALL of it.
So enjoy the party while it lasts. Sooner or later the bills will come due and your children will "thank" you for it.
Concern over hardware with a long supply chain like cpu's, mobo's, ram etc is one thing.. but something as stupidly simple to produce as a fucking metal box? come on.
Sure, we know how to make cheap metal boxes in the US. That's never been a problem. The problem is the percentage of labor content that goes into producing cheap metal boxes and the cost of labor. Cheap metal boxes tend to be labor intensive to make unless you make those boxes in HUGE volumes. It's more economical to have them made in a country with cheap labor. China has cheap labor and the US does not. QED they get made in China and not the US.
Goods that are capital intensive are made in countries with high labor costs but access to cheap capital. The US has the cheapest cost of capital in the world so goods that have low labor content tend to be made here. Stuff like jumbo jets, earth moving equipment, cars, CPUs, chemicals, etc. The US has a manufacturing sector worth about $3 TRILLION annually which makes one of the 5 largest economies in the world - roughly the same size as the entire GDP of the UK or Germany. We make lots of stuff but we can't compete on cheap metal boxes just like China can't (currently) compete with the US on jumbo jets.
Any time you see an idiot politician (like Trump) promising to "bring back manufacturing jobs" to the US they are promising the impossible. The only way those "cheap metal boxes" will get produced here in the US is if we experience a massive reduction in wages to bring us close to those paid in China. No amount of tariffs will change that economic reality. I'm pretty sure you don't actually want such a fall in wages to happen. The good news is that as China becomes more prosperous their wages will rise and labor intensive production will leave China for other places with still cheaper labor. Already happens in some industries.
There is no law of god or men that says all electronics should come from China.
Laws of economics do dictate where electronics come from. The overwhelming majority of the supply chain for electronics depends heavily on China because that's where the companies are located and it's been trending that way for decades. If you can find a way to shift the supply chains away from China have at it but you'll find that near impossible.
Order a quality motherboard from Japan. A GPU from Singapore. A CPU from Mexico. A PSU from Canada, and so on.
Good luck with that. You'll find the components on that motherboard, power supply, graphics card, etc are made in China even if the assembly was put together elsewhere. If you want something made with just local content be prepared to spend a fortune on it. Companies like Apple and the rest don't source from China because they like China. They do it because there are no practical alternatives.
If you are human and care about human things, you should already be boycotting China.
Why? Because you think your country is owed something and shouldn't have to compete? Because you have a jingoistic view of China and it's people? You think 20% of the world's population should just sit on the sidelines economically because it's inconvenient for Americans or Europeans?
No, Tesla does not build to order.
Sure they do. They also do some amount of Build To Stock. Doing one does not preclude doing the other, even with the same product going down the same assembly line. My company does some similar things. We mostly BTO but when we have good reason to suspect a customer will order more of a specific product we often will BTS some extras units so we can save money on setup costs and buy materials in bulk. We are taking a calculated risk by doing so but it usually works out in our favor. Tesla if they are smart is doing the same thing. If they have a model configuration that is popular they can save some money by building a few extras of that model when they are going down the line.
Which is basically what this is. No matter how you slice this, the ground based path will be physically shorter and thus has a latency advantage, even with LEO satellites in the mix.
A) Unless you are talking about some specific use case, ground based paths are NOT always physically shorter because they are not all point to point connections. B) Ground based routing of any significant distance routinely has to go through more devices and at slower speeds through fiber/copper. C) Latency is not just a function of distance
But my point here is that if you are looking at latency, the shortest route unusually wins and LEO orbits add quite a bit of distance.
Not when you are talking about distances the size of a continent. It's 4500km from NYC to LA across the earth's surface assuming a relatively straight line connection (which probably won't happen but let's say it does for sake of argument). The difference in distance going to LEO across 1 satellite is only marginally longer if you calculate the sides of the triangle. Let's do some over simplified math. Simplify to an isoceles triangle with hypotenuse of 4500km and height of 1200km and you are at ~5100km for the trip. You've added 600km but can send the signal at 2X the speed. So the signal going into space will arrive faster than the one going on the ground.
Or more like building the technological infrastructure needed for a Mars colony, step by step.
Maybe but a lot of those problems are the same problems we have here on earth. We need electric powered vehicles to reduce oil dependence. We need low cost to orbit rockets. We need solar powered homes. We need cheaper/better tunnel making. We need more ubiquitous internet access globally. Whether you like Musk or not, you have to admit he's working on solving serious and important problems. (and if you don't think those are serious problems then you don't understand the problems) The fact that there is a lot of overlap with problems we'd face colonizing Mars is just a cherry on top of the sundae.
Problem is, fiber on the ground is faster as the distance is shorter.
Only true in general for relatively short trips with fixed destinations.
Unless you live in some remote place that depends on geo-stationary satellites for internet, you are better off going along the ground, at least where latency is concerned.
A) These are not geo-stationary satellites SpaceX is proposing. Geostationary orbit is about 35,700km away versus the 1200km being proposed here. That difference is very significant. B) Ground is only faster in some use cases but not all and the longer the transmission the less advantage it has.
And in any case, it's often not a crime, it's a civil employment issue.
It also very often IS a crime in many circumstances. For example the moment anyone is denied benefits, promotions, punitively fired, given an adverse decision, interfere with their work, intimidate, etc, then it can very easily become a crime. And even in cases where it is not a crime it is certainly not decent behavior.
Because "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't satisfy the mob.
Innocent until proven guilty ONLY applies to criminal court cases brought by the government. It has NOTHING to do with internal HR actions of a private company unless it deals directly with actions regarding a protected class of individuals. Even then "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply unless the parties involved are standing in a courtroom. With some restrictions a company has wide discretion in how it treats the people working for it and they absolutely can treat you as guilty until proven innocent if they want.
Not saying it's a good idea to do that but that is the way it works.
It's exactly the same thing as freedom on speech as protected by the first amendment. Legally it only applies in relation to the government.
There are better chip technologies than Si for various uses. Yet everyone is on silicon, because economies of scale left everything else behind on old slow processes.
Better is too vague a term to be useful because you have to define how it is better. Cheaper? Performance? Manufacturability? Supply? Yes Gallium Arsenide chips (for example) have better performance characteristics but has worse economics (silicon is cheap) and is harder to manufacture (read expensive).
Also be careful about making analogies like that. There already are pretty substantial economies of scale on other battery chemistries AND there is evidence that other chemistries could become dominant in the future. Lead Acid batteries are used in every car on the planet (ironically even my Chevy Bolt EV) so they are being produced at large scale and it wouldn't be super hard to scale that up even further. (not saying they should - just an example) You are correct that silicon is the dominant chemistry for making chips and is likely to remain so but it doesn't automatically follow that the same economic model will be true for batteries. The manufacturing process and supply chain characteristics are quite different. If a new and better performing battery chemistry comes along (which seems probable) which makes big gains in performance, then it is very likely that they will be replaced in due course. If Tesla could double their range or cut their recharge time in half with a Li-Air battery, they are going to have to look hard at doing just that. We have a pretty good idea what the theoretical limits of various battery chemistries are and Li-Ion isn't at the top of the list
A SmartMeter and SmartCharger from Siemens, obviously you need an internet connection, and a power company involved in using your SmartMeter/SmartCharger.
Siemens makes chargers for powering your EV at home. If they sell a device that let's you power your home from an EV they are doing a good job of hiding it from the internet. There literally is no mechanism in most EVs for running power out of the EV and into your home. The software in the cars doesn't support power going out from the charge port. Only in the last year or so has that changed for a handful of cars. My Chevy Bolt EV cannot do it in stock form no matter what I plug into it and that's true in Europe as well. I don't believe any Tesla can do it either and only recently in a few places can you do it with a Nissan Leaf or any other mass market EV.
If it was a 1000 cars around 2005, then most certainly there are far more now.
Citation needed. There weren't very many EVs made circa 2005 with a battery pack large enough to power a home for any meaningful amount of time. So again you are making claims without evidence.
Either we have no power outages (Europe) Either we have no power outages (Europe), or if there is one: you are in much deeper shit than just having no power (Asia).
No power outages in Europe, huh? You do know that we can check your bogus "facts" right? Power is reliable in Europe but let's not pretend blackouts are never a thing there.
There's an enormous difference in maintenance.
There is also a difference in the cost of fuel stocks. $0 for renewables versus $HUGE for fossil plants. You seem to be missing the point. The only number that matters at the end of the day is the total cost. (including externalities of pollution that fossil fuel plants never are forced to fully pay for) It doesn't matter if wind costs more to maintain if the cost of a watt delivered is similar or less. You're trying to imply that wind power has these huge maintenance costs but the fact is that the accounting has been done and it doesn't matter because cost of maintenance is only one item among many in the cost of the system.
Offshore wind needs basically continual maintenance due to the large number of machines- once you finish all of them you need to go back to the first one.
Even if true, so what? Just requiring maintenance is insufficient data to tell us anything useful. Fossil fuel plants require maintenance too as well as fuel and lots of other costs. The profile of these costs will be different but that's not important. What matters is how much it costs to deliver a watt. So offshore wind has higher maintenance costs? It has lower fuel costs, lower emissions control costs, isn't subject to geopolitical fluctuation in fuel prices, doesn't have a single point of failure if one turbine fails, and doesn't dump massive amounts of particulates and CO2 that never get cleaned up.