No, it's actually a smart plan. Start with biggest polluters that can be removed for the smallest cost.
Wow, where to start...
1) There is no resource constraint here necessitating a particular order of action. We have the money and manpower to address multiple waste streams at the same time. 2) There is no reason to delay mitigate a small waste stream merely because it is (relatively) small if we have the ability to mitigate it (which we do) 3) The biggest sources of plastic pollution will almost certainly take much longer to address so delaying action on the smaller ones is foolish 4) You're line of thinking is a classic false dilemma fallacy.
Not to mention banning straws is actively fucking over people without the motor-skills necessary to drink from a glass.
Nobody is banning straws. They are attempting to reduce the number of disposable plastic straws used because we don't actually need them and they cause a unnecessary waste problem. Plastic straws will still remain a product but you'll have to ask for them. Paper straws work just fine. Hell, people that need them can have metal straws if they prefer. Nobody is proposing eliminating straws but you keep arguing against stuff that isn't actually happening. Nobody who needs a straw will be "fucked over".
We must ban.03 percent of the garbage patch instead of fixing the recycling process so they can be recycled.
So we should keep polluting with plastic straws just because they aren't the biggest source of pollution? That's a rather stupid plan.
I'm more of an environmentalist than most in here, but banning plastic straws in 'Murrica is virtue signalling, and the problem being caused by "white privilege" is about as wrong as you can get.
Reducing use of plastic straws is nothing more than solving a problem that can be solved. Sure there probably is some virtue signalling and other stuff too but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem or that we shouldn't bother. Nobody who knows what they are talking about is claiming it is the biggest source of plastic pollution. It's a relatively small part of the problem but if we can mitigate that waste stream then we damn well should. Plastic straws are merely low hanging fruit so pick it while we can.
but what would they do then? Planting no wheat? So no green, no change in humidity? No change in micro climate?
Yes planting wheat in a hot desert climate where wheat doesn't grow well naturally without major ecosystem transformations is a stupid idea. There is basically no way to make wheat grow near Dubai for less money (and resource inputs) than it costs to grow it in a location where wheat grows more naturally and ship it to Dubai.
So far we don't know what it costs to ship an iceberg so far.
It doesn't really matter because we do know it would be more than building an equivalent desalination plant. Seriously, this iceberg shipping idea is at least 200 years old and it's been shown time and again to be an unworkable and foolish idea. Far more sensible to build desalination plants and ship in the wheat (or other stuff) from elsewhere.
I hoped those desert countries simply would start a long term big "terraforming" project to make the deserts at least somewhat green again.
Why do you hope that? Those regions aren't deserts simply to inconvenience humans. They became deserts because of some complex climatic systems that we should only tinker with very carefully. Just because we theoretically can make a desert green doesn't automatically make it a good idea to do so. Do you have any idea what the second and third order effects of greening a large area of desert might be?
You think Donald Trump has destroyed the planet? How?
I dislike Trump about as much as anyone you'll find but no he hasn't destroyed the planed nor is he likely to unless ($diety forbid) he finds some way to start a thermonuclear war. He has done some damage and he'll probably do more but this is one of the cases where government moving slowly actually works in our favor because it limits the amount of damage any one administration can do in 4 or 8 years.
But history suggests this is mostly just another way of extracting money from gullible investors.
This. Towing icebergs around the globe is an old snake oil idea that someone dusts off every couple decades to try to sucker some "investors" out of some cash. It's an idiotic idea if you give it any real thought and have even a passing familiarity with physics and economics. It's like flying cars. It sounds like a cool idea and seems plausible enough at first to credulous people but the reality is that it isn't practical or economic and there are better solutions already available to us.
I am quite confident there are no actual plans to do this. It's just an old scam that I've seen several times already in my life and I'll probably see again a few more before I die.
I have heard about these plans 20 years ago. I hope they are moving forward, not just rehashing some old dream.
People have been bringing this idea up for at least 200 years. It's a romantic but thoroughly impractical (bordering on idiotic) idea just like flying cars, asteroid mining, etc that people keep bringing up because it seems plausible if you don't really understand physics and economics and don't think about it too deeply.
To me they're fighting the wrong battle - they should be fighting for higher wages so that as gentrification occurs they're not pushed into ghettos but move laterally, maintaining their standard of living.
Exactly how do you plan to make that happen in a short enough time frame to actually make a difference? The primary tool for working class people to effect higher wages are unions and those have been pretty steadily declining in power with no obvious end in sight. And frankly given how fast Google has grown their work force I don't see any realistic way for wages of many professions to keep up even if there were a strong union presence. In a global economy there are limits to how high you can raise the wages of a machinist or a janitor or a teacher in comparison to a high paid tech worker.
Fossil fuels make energy when its needed for a low price.
False statement. Fossil fuels are heavily subsidized to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually (that's 6% of global GDP) and that doesn't even include the costs of dealing with the pollution (including CO2) they are permitted to just dump in the atmosphere and elsewhere. Fossil fuels only seem cheap because we subsidize the crap out of them both directly and indirectly. Fully burdened they actually are more expensive than wind in a wide variety of use cases.
Not just when the wind is blowing within set limits.
Have you ever been off shore in the ocean? I'm guessing not because for all practical purposes the wind is ALWAYS blowing in the sorts of places they put a wind farm. There is some variability but it is far less than you are supposing.
Sometimes things like seatbelts come along and a company installs them in their cars. Some industris will self regulate to keep the government out of it.
That didn't happen in the auto industry. Seatbelts were not standard equipment until they were mandated by the government. Same with airbags.
In an interesting twist, I grew up in the country. My brother got in a horrible car accident in the winter with no seatbelt. You know what. If he were buckled in, he would have probably frozen to death. Instead, he was able to exit the car and walk to a nearby house.
Assuming that story is true it is merely the exception that proves the rule. Seatbelts are proven to save lives and it is a rare accident indeed where not using one would be the safer option. There is a chance you might survive without it but the probabilities overwhelmingly do not favor that outcome. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
As an example, air bags are required by law for the driver and passenger. However, there are no laws for side air bags.
That's true but it became unnecessary because regulation mandating airbags along with other means resulted in competition among manufacturers to make the safest car.
And I'll be frank about something else growing up in snow country. RWD and AWD are not better in the snow.
Well I grew up in "snow country" and still live there and your argument is demonstrably false regarding AWD. AWD and 4WD demonstrably help accelerate a car in poor conditions. It provides no value at constant speed driving or while slowing. All other things being equal, AWD or 4WD will outperform FWD or RWD in the snow. There is a reason rally cars racing always use some form of AWD or 4WD. If it didn't work they wouldn't use it.
Ever car in the ditch is an SUV and all the FWD vehicles merrily travel by.
This is a steaming hot fabrication and probably some wishful thinking on your part.
AWD is great for getting going from a dead stop but once you hit 5 mph, you're better off with FWD because it pulls the car in the direction the vehicle is pointed.
Again a false statement. You clearly have no idea how AWD system work. (top tip - most are primarily FWD most of the time and they only engage the extra wheels when needed - which you cannot do in a FWD car) AWD helps with accelerating the car at any speed when traction is not available to some of the drive wheels. If you really need better traction in the snow however the best investment you can make is a set of snow tires or snow chains.
And there is no fish tialing if those front wheels loose traction. Real wheel loose traction and SMASH.
It is trivial to fishtail a FWD car in the snow though it is easier to do in most RWD cars. The primary reason FWD cars tend to do ok with inexperienced drivers in the snow is because the weight of the engine is over top the wheels and the cars are designed to understeer. But a good set of snow tires will make a RWD car outperform a FWD car lacking them in most cases.
Stick with Apple. Buy American, support American companies and the Americans they employ, and put your money where your mouth is.
Where do you think Apple products are made?
There are very few products that are "American made" and you can say the same thing about every other country too. Furthermore brands are useless in determining where something was made. I have a truck that is Honda branded but it was the most American made vehicle in 2017 (yes more than the Ford F150. But the content in it is from all over the globe. The concept of "American products" or "Chinese products" is largely a myth for any non trivial product. Manufacturing these days is a global enterprise and few products have all their content (including labor) from a single country.
Anyway if you want people to "buy American" then American companies need to make products people want to buy at competitive prices. I'm not going to buy something inferior and/or more expensive merely because it was made in the USA. American companies have to compete for my business just like everyone else. If my fellow Americans are as clever as we like to pretend then that shouldn't be a problem but the other 95% of the world's population has a lot of smart and hard working people too.
Yes. Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life? God knows but by the time wind and weather have wrecked them the original builders will be long gone and unaccountable to anyone.
You use this as an argument against a wind farm but in the next paragraph ignore the same problem with nuclear power which you seem to be a fan of.
The Hinkley Point C nuclear facility will produce 3.2GW for most of the time, not being dependent on weather conditions.
And it cannot be throttled up or down to match need quickly. You seem to be under the misapprehension that variability in supply is always a bad thing. Sure it carries some challenges but if you have enough variable sources they end up with baseline consistency as a group. Plus it's easy to shut off a single wind turbine which isn't true for nuclear or coal fired power stations.
Uptime for modern nuclear plants is about 80-85% or so and outages for refuelling and maintenance are usually pre-planned well in advance.
As usual the nuclear fanboys come out to play. The reality is that nuclear plants have several problems that they cannot easily mitigate. 1) They make people nervous. Even though they rarely fail, when they do they have the capacity to do so catastrophically (and have so this is not hypothetical) and no reactor design we have has entirely mitigated this possibility. So politically they are unpopular even when they make technical sense. 2) They require ridiculous amounts of regulation and oversight to be safe which makes the economically challenging to operate profitable. 3) We have no good solution for the waste they generate 4) The liability requires government backed insurance guarantees and risk pools 5) The fuel for them carries geopolitical problems (including WMD weapons proliferation in some cases) 6) The approval and construction process for them takes a very long time
Nuclear needs to be a part of the solution but nuclear has its own problems so it's simply not going to be viable to replace fossil fuels much beyond what it already has.
It's quite possible that this wind farm will end up producing as much CO2 as if they just burned natural gas in a combined cycle plant.
Some rando person's blog is hardly an authoritative source but I'm sure it feeds your confirmation bias. Plus did you even read your citation? It doesn't support your argument at all. Obviously you are a fan of nuclear and nuclear is fine but it isn't going to replace fossil fuel stations because it has its own severe problems - some political, some economic, and some technical. Nuclear carries risks that too many people are uncomfortable with. Nuclear will (and should) be a part of the solution but the real heavy lifting to reduce our need for fossil fuels is almost certainly going to come from solar and wind plus some battery tech.
Wind power is only "green" if there is access to hydro for storage.
That's is quite simply false. Particularly when you compare it to fossil fuel fired power stations it typically replaces. And hydro isn't particular eco-friendly in a lot of cases.
Maybe batteries could do just as well as hydro, or perhaps even better, but it seems we simply can't build them fast enough.
Sure we can but we've really just gotten started on building the production capacity. It's going to take a minute to get there and it's growing very fast. Not as if we are building nuclear plants left and right either so I'm not sure what you think the viable alternative might be.
So a 145 sq km deployment of almost 100 turbines is equivalent to a single small utility scale power station.
With near as makes no difference zero carbon emissions or other pollutants, free and renewable fuel, uses no arable or otherwise useful land, little/no waste products, eliminates geopolitical influence of fossil fuel producing countries, cheaper if you eliminate subsidies from fossil fuel stations, and the list goes on. Just because we've built bigger fossil fuel plants doesn't mean this wind farm is a bad idea. Furthermore the dispersed deployment has no relevance at all since 3/4 of the earth's surface is water. Exactly what are we losing by using a tiny fraction of that ocean to generate power?
While I won't deny that fossil fuel fired plants maintain some advantages in some circumstances, let's not pretend that a wind farm has no advantages over fossil fuels.
You are not seeing the difference between 1080p and 4K per se, but rather technical details of the video codec.
While I'm sure you are correct that the codec plays an important role, I'm not confused about what I'm seeing. I definitely can see the greater resolution and thanks to some digital image related jobs I had a few years back plus the fact that I do a lot of hybrid photography I know what I'm looking at better than many. One of my hobbies is wildlife photography and I could show you the same image at 1080p and 4K on the same screen and unless your vision is terrible you'd be able to see there is extra detail in the 4K image from a fair distance away. There is no one sized fits all answer to where your ability to perceive additional pixel resolution ends but it's definitely higher than 1080p from typical couch distance if you are paying attention and have reasonably good visual acuity. (which I do)
Now in fairness almost all of the time it doesn't matter. Watching The Avengers in 4K versus in 1080p doesn't really add to the experience since 1080p is more than adequate for the purpose. For most movies you'd probably never notice the difference unless you were looking very closely which kind of defeats the point of enjoying the movie itself.
4K discs generally have HDR (high dynamic range) , WCG (wide color gamut)., and 10 bits per color band (BD is 8 bit).
They also display more pixels with more information. I'm by no means arguing that pixel density is the end all be all but let's not pretend it doesn't matter at all.
To the surprise of absolutely no one given the current state of affairs in Washington.
But a lot of people locked their credit score.
So what? That's about the least interesting bit of data Equifax has about you and it does nothing to prevent mass data breaches.
I'm sure credit card companies are now asking for more information to prove your identity to open a new card.
Citation needed.
also had so many friends and family ask what they should do, which opened the door for me to introduce them to things like LastPass, Yubikey, and other security.
So you told them to use an unregulated and unaudited third party single point of failure? Great plan... You do realize that those things would do nothing to prevent a breach at Equifax right?
No kidding... my 55" TV with surround sound and my leather recliner to me are far more interesting and comfortable than going to a damned cinema.I haven't seen a movie in a theatre in years, and likely never will again.
So what you are saying is that you have no friends and rarely leave the house. You be you but I prefer to be a bit more outgoing in my social life.
Here's a tip - it's not actually about the movie or the sound. It's about time with people you care about. Don't take it so seriously.
All the shit are telling me about cinemas... from loudly talking during the movie over throwing popcorn, bright phone screens and crying babies to dirty seats... none of that is the case here in Germany, and AFAIK most of Europe. Our cinemas are squeaky-clean, well-climatized, and everybody is quiet and behaving unless it fits.
By and large people behave themselves in movies here in the US. The people that are complaining are mostly just looking for reasons to not go and are exaggerating the scale of the problems that do occur. I go to probably 5-10 movies per year at a variety of theaters and it's pretty rare (read almost never) to have another patron severely disrupt the experience. Heck lately my local theaters have been upgrading the seats and other amenities to pretty comfy options too. The few times someone has gotten out of line I've seen the movie theater workers deal with the person rather quickly.
What the complainers don't grasp is that going to a movie is a social outing as a general proposition. It's a way to spend time with people you like doing something entertaining. It doesn't really matter if the movie experience isn't absolutely perfect in every detail because it's not really about that. I go to movies with my wife and daughter or sometimes friends to be with them. The movie is as incidental to that activity as the choice of restaurant afterwards or the car we use to get there. If someone talks during the movie I'm not really going to get bent out of shape because if the movie is any good I'm probably going to see again someday anyway. It's just a movie after all. Don't take it so seriously.
4K is really sweet for programming and browsing and having multiple windows in general.
I find it nice for home movie watching too. Yes you generally can see the difference between 1080p and 4K in many cases because the limit of your ability to perceive resolution is greater than the resolution of 1080p. I have both 4K and 1080p versions of The Martian and on my 65inch TV I can see there is a difference between the two from my couch 12-15 feet away. I have to get close to see all the detail of 4K but I can tell there is a difference from further away. Details pop out enough to be noticeable.
If you want to argue that the difference between 1080p and 4K for general home movie watching is strongly into diminishing returns I would certainly concede the point in most use cases. 4K is better but it's not even close to the improvement from the old SD to 1080p. You really have to be pixel peeping to notice in many cases.
8K haven't really seen any up close, can't imagine it is much needed much currently -- but I could be wrong -- can never have enough windows:)
I could see it being useful for desktop monitors. I currently have three 28" 4K monitors on my desk and I could theoretically replace them (and then some) with a single 8K monitor of similar size which would be large. I could also see it being useful for large informational displays in public places. For home movie viewing I'm not really sure there is much value added.
The worst scam is whatever cables Monster Cable is currently selling.
Monster Cable products are overpriced and often wildly over engineered but they are generally of solid quality and do what they represent. QED they are not a scam in the legal sense of the word. They just aren't good value for money for most people. Their marketing and sales tactics tend to prey on ignorance, insecurity, and credulity of their customers but they aren't actually misrepresenting what they are. It's just that what they are provides minimal to no value added over much cheaper alternatives for those who care to look. They are a textbook case of let the buyer beware but that is not the same thing as fraud.
This also means that invoking the 25th amendment will backfire. After invoking that amendment, congress takes over.
The outcome of which depends on the composition of the cabinet and congress at the time. After the upcoming election the political calculus could become quite different than it is currently. I see zero chance of a Trump cabinet invoking the 25th given that they haven't already.
And that this point in time with elections upcoming, they will all loudly shout "I still love Trump so please vote for me!!" after which the VP and majority of the cabinet will quickly find themselves out of a job.
The Vice President cannot be fired from his job by the President. Only Congress can remove the VP from office via impeachment. The president has no power to remove elected officials from office. In any case it is a moot issue since there is zero chance of the 25th amendment being invoked by a Trump cabinet. Impeachment is FAR more likely if the democrats win a large majority this coming November.
If you think the President is unable to carry out his responsibilities, you have a duty to bring about impeachment and/or invoke the 25th Amendment.
Only very specific people have the power to impeach the president or invoke the 25th amendment. Furthermore it requires a rare consensus among those very specific people. Everyone has to use other tactics available to them most other times. There is NO difference between a member of the administration opposing a president they disagree with versus a member of congress in the opposition party. Government workers have certain legal obligations but among them is not and never has been blind obedience to the president. This is true for EVERY citizen including you and me. This is not a monarchy and Trump is not the king.
Going behind the back of and trying to undermine the Chief Executive in this fashion is unprofessional, cowardly, and unconstitutional.
Are you really so naive as to think this doesn't happen in literally every administration? There is nothing illegal or uncommon about this. First off, where exactly in the constitution does it say something about this? The constitution says nothing about it being illegal to oppose the president while working in the executive branch. Second, falling on your sword publicly is a pointless act of martyrdom that will get nothing accomplished and counter productively facilitates exactly what is being opposed. Opposing elected officials who have failed their office is a DUTY of every citizen and being a government official does not change that. Third, it isn't even remotely cowardly - quite the opposite actually. There is quite a lot of personal risk here in speaking truth to power publicly, particularly when the person in charge is a narcissistic megalomaniac. Anonymity is a useful tool and if you think professionalism is defined by falling on your sword then you on't know what professionalism actually is.
Glad to hear it. Nice to see some companies actually taking a little time to care. I would have just binned the thing and bought a new one because customer service at most companies these days is so bad as to not be worth the time and aggravation. That would have been a bad assumption by me in this case.
In Russia that's not an entirely idle question. Most probably it just means fired from their job but not with 100% certainty. I can show you unambiguous examples of people literally ending up in rivers or "having a car crash" after causing problems for those in positions of power. After the recent sports doping scandals there are numerous people who ended up dead under circumstances that can only be described as suspicious at best. I'm not implying anything terrible happened or that Russia is a terrible place but it's not even a question that terminated could have the other meaning in the right circumstances in that particular country. Just like the US, Russia has some rough edges here and there.
issued a statement warning they believe "privacy is not absolute" and tech companies must give law enforcement access to encrypted data or face "technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions.
Privacy never was absolute and it isn't absolute today. That does not mean that privacy should not exist. They can have a backdoor just as soon as they can prove two things. 1) That the government will not have the capacity to abuse said backdoor and 2) that criminals and other bad actors will have no means of accessing said back door.
Of course since both of those things are in actual fact impossible then they can fuck off and go die in a fire. There is no such thing as a secure backdoor by definition. If the cost of security is that the government has to work harder to spy on me then so much the better.
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No, it's actually a smart plan. Start with biggest polluters that can be removed for the smallest cost.
Wow, where to start...
1) There is no resource constraint here necessitating a particular order of action. We have the money and manpower to address multiple waste streams at the same time.
2) There is no reason to delay mitigate a small waste stream merely because it is (relatively) small if we have the ability to mitigate it (which we do)
3) The biggest sources of plastic pollution will almost certainly take much longer to address so delaying action on the smaller ones is foolish
4) You're line of thinking is a classic false dilemma fallacy.
Not to mention banning straws is actively fucking over people without the motor-skills necessary to drink from a glass.
Nobody is banning straws. They are attempting to reduce the number of disposable plastic straws used because we don't actually need them and they cause a unnecessary waste problem. Plastic straws will still remain a product but you'll have to ask for them. Paper straws work just fine. Hell, people that need them can have metal straws if they prefer. Nobody is proposing eliminating straws but you keep arguing against stuff that isn't actually happening. Nobody who needs a straw will be "fucked over".
We must ban .03 percent of the garbage patch instead of fixing the recycling process so they can be recycled.
So we should keep polluting with plastic straws just because they aren't the biggest source of pollution? That's a rather stupid plan.
Fucking liberals...
Retarded anonymous cowards.
I'm more of an environmentalist than most in here, but banning plastic straws in 'Murrica is virtue signalling, and the problem being caused by "white privilege" is about as wrong as you can get.
Reducing use of plastic straws is nothing more than solving a problem that can be solved. Sure there probably is some virtue signalling and other stuff too but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem or that we shouldn't bother. Nobody who knows what they are talking about is claiming it is the biggest source of plastic pollution. It's a relatively small part of the problem but if we can mitigate that waste stream then we damn well should. Plastic straws are merely low hanging fruit so pick it while we can.
but what would they do then? Planting no wheat? So no green, no change in humidity? No change in micro climate?
Yes planting wheat in a hot desert climate where wheat doesn't grow well naturally without major ecosystem transformations is a stupid idea. There is basically no way to make wheat grow near Dubai for less money (and resource inputs) than it costs to grow it in a location where wheat grows more naturally and ship it to Dubai.
So far we don't know what it costs to ship an iceberg so far.
It doesn't really matter because we do know it would be more than building an equivalent desalination plant. Seriously, this iceberg shipping idea is at least 200 years old and it's been shown time and again to be an unworkable and foolish idea. Far more sensible to build desalination plants and ship in the wheat (or other stuff) from elsewhere.
I hoped those desert countries simply would start a long term big "terraforming" project to make the deserts at least somewhat green again.
Why do you hope that? Those regions aren't deserts simply to inconvenience humans. They became deserts because of some complex climatic systems that we should only tinker with very carefully. Just because we theoretically can make a desert green doesn't automatically make it a good idea to do so. Do you have any idea what the second and third order effects of greening a large area of desert might be?
You think Donald Trump has destroyed the planet? How?
I dislike Trump about as much as anyone you'll find but no he hasn't destroyed the planed nor is he likely to unless ($diety forbid) he finds some way to start a thermonuclear war. He has done some damage and he'll probably do more but this is one of the cases where government moving slowly actually works in our favor because it limits the amount of damage any one administration can do in 4 or 8 years.
But history suggests this is mostly just another way of extracting money from gullible investors.
This. Towing icebergs around the globe is an old snake oil idea that someone dusts off every couple decades to try to sucker some "investors" out of some cash. It's an idiotic idea if you give it any real thought and have even a passing familiarity with physics and economics. It's like flying cars. It sounds like a cool idea and seems plausible enough at first to credulous people but the reality is that it isn't practical or economic and there are better solutions already available to us.
I am quite confident there are no actual plans to do this. It's just an old scam that I've seen several times already in my life and I'll probably see again a few more before I die.
I have heard about these plans 20 years ago. I hope they are moving forward, not just rehashing some old dream.
People have been bringing this idea up for at least 200 years. It's a romantic but thoroughly impractical (bordering on idiotic) idea just like flying cars, asteroid mining, etc that people keep bringing up because it seems plausible if you don't really understand physics and economics and don't think about it too deeply.
One man's gentrification is another man's urban renewal.
A rose by any other name...
To me they're fighting the wrong battle - they should be fighting for higher wages so that as gentrification occurs they're not pushed into ghettos but move laterally, maintaining their standard of living.
Exactly how do you plan to make that happen in a short enough time frame to actually make a difference? The primary tool for working class people to effect higher wages are unions and those have been pretty steadily declining in power with no obvious end in sight. And frankly given how fast Google has grown their work force I don't see any realistic way for wages of many professions to keep up even if there were a strong union presence. In a global economy there are limits to how high you can raise the wages of a machinist or a janitor or a teacher in comparison to a high paid tech worker.
Fossil fuels make energy when its needed for a low price.
False statement. Fossil fuels are heavily subsidized to the tune of about $5 Trillion annually (that's 6% of global GDP) and that doesn't even include the costs of dealing with the pollution (including CO2) they are permitted to just dump in the atmosphere and elsewhere. Fossil fuels only seem cheap because we subsidize the crap out of them both directly and indirectly. Fully burdened they actually are more expensive than wind in a wide variety of use cases.
Not just when the wind is blowing within set limits.
Have you ever been off shore in the ocean? I'm guessing not because for all practical purposes the wind is ALWAYS blowing in the sorts of places they put a wind farm. There is some variability but it is far less than you are supposing.
Sometimes things like seatbelts come along and a company installs them in their cars. Some industris will self regulate to keep the government out of it.
That didn't happen in the auto industry. Seatbelts were not standard equipment until they were mandated by the government. Same with airbags.
In an interesting twist, I grew up in the country. My brother got in a horrible car accident in the winter with no seatbelt. You know what. If he were buckled in, he would have probably frozen to death. Instead, he was able to exit the car and walk to a nearby house.
Assuming that story is true it is merely the exception that proves the rule. Seatbelts are proven to save lives and it is a rare accident indeed where not using one would be the safer option. There is a chance you might survive without it but the probabilities overwhelmingly do not favor that outcome. The evidence for this is overwhelming.
As an example, air bags are required by law for the driver and passenger. However, there are no laws for side air bags.
That's true but it became unnecessary because regulation mandating airbags along with other means resulted in competition among manufacturers to make the safest car.
And I'll be frank about something else growing up in snow country. RWD and AWD are not better in the snow.
Well I grew up in "snow country" and still live there and your argument is demonstrably false regarding AWD. AWD and 4WD demonstrably help accelerate a car in poor conditions. It provides no value at constant speed driving or while slowing. All other things being equal, AWD or 4WD will outperform FWD or RWD in the snow. There is a reason rally cars racing always use some form of AWD or 4WD. If it didn't work they wouldn't use it.
Ever car in the ditch is an SUV and all the FWD vehicles merrily travel by.
This is a steaming hot fabrication and probably some wishful thinking on your part.
AWD is great for getting going from a dead stop but once you hit 5 mph, you're better off with FWD because it pulls the car in the direction the vehicle is pointed.
Again a false statement. You clearly have no idea how AWD system work. (top tip - most are primarily FWD most of the time and they only engage the extra wheels when needed - which you cannot do in a FWD car) AWD helps with accelerating the car at any speed when traction is not available to some of the drive wheels. If you really need better traction in the snow however the best investment you can make is a set of snow tires or snow chains.
And there is no fish tialing if those front wheels loose traction. Real wheel loose traction and SMASH.
It is trivial to fishtail a FWD car in the snow though it is easier to do in most RWD cars. The primary reason FWD cars tend to do ok with inexperienced drivers in the snow is because the weight of the engine is over top the wheels and the cars are designed to understeer. But a good set of snow tires will make a RWD car outperform a FWD car lacking them in most cases.
Stick with Apple. Buy American, support American companies and the Americans they employ, and put your money where your mouth is.
Where do you think Apple products are made?
There are very few products that are "American made" and you can say the same thing about every other country too. Furthermore brands are useless in determining where something was made. I have a truck that is Honda branded but it was the most American made vehicle in 2017 (yes more than the Ford F150. But the content in it is from all over the globe. The concept of "American products" or "Chinese products" is largely a myth for any non trivial product. Manufacturing these days is a global enterprise and few products have all their content (including labor) from a single country.
Anyway if you want people to "buy American" then American companies need to make products people want to buy at competitive prices. I'm not going to buy something inferior and/or more expensive merely because it was made in the USA. American companies have to compete for my business just like everyone else. If my fellow Americans are as clever as we like to pretend then that shouldn't be a problem but the other 95% of the world's population has a lot of smart and hard working people too.
Yes. Have the wind farm operators any plans to fund the decommissioning of their offshore facility at end-of-life? God knows but by the time wind and weather have wrecked them the original builders will be long gone and unaccountable to anyone.
You use this as an argument against a wind farm but in the next paragraph ignore the same problem with nuclear power which you seem to be a fan of.
The Hinkley Point C nuclear facility will produce 3.2GW for most of the time, not being dependent on weather conditions.
And it cannot be throttled up or down to match need quickly. You seem to be under the misapprehension that variability in supply is always a bad thing. Sure it carries some challenges but if you have enough variable sources they end up with baseline consistency as a group. Plus it's easy to shut off a single wind turbine which isn't true for nuclear or coal fired power stations.
Uptime for modern nuclear plants is about 80-85% or so and outages for refuelling and maintenance are usually pre-planned well in advance.
As usual the nuclear fanboys come out to play. The reality is that nuclear plants have several problems that they cannot easily mitigate.
1) They make people nervous. Even though they rarely fail, when they do they have the capacity to do so catastrophically (and have so this is not hypothetical) and no reactor design we have has entirely mitigated this possibility. So politically they are unpopular even when they make technical sense.
2) They require ridiculous amounts of regulation and oversight to be safe which makes the economically challenging to operate profitable.
3) We have no good solution for the waste they generate
4) The liability requires government backed insurance guarantees and risk pools
5) The fuel for them carries geopolitical problems (including WMD weapons proliferation in some cases)
6) The approval and construction process for them takes a very long time
Nuclear needs to be a part of the solution but nuclear has its own problems so it's simply not going to be viable to replace fossil fuels much beyond what it already has.
It's quite possible that this wind farm will end up producing as much CO2 as if they just burned natural gas in a combined cycle plant.
Some rando person's blog is hardly an authoritative source but I'm sure it feeds your confirmation bias. Plus did you even read your citation? It doesn't support your argument at all. Obviously you are a fan of nuclear and nuclear is fine but it isn't going to replace fossil fuel stations because it has its own severe problems - some political, some economic, and some technical. Nuclear carries risks that too many people are uncomfortable with. Nuclear will (and should) be a part of the solution but the real heavy lifting to reduce our need for fossil fuels is almost certainly going to come from solar and wind plus some battery tech.
Wind power is only "green" if there is access to hydro for storage.
That's is quite simply false. Particularly when you compare it to fossil fuel fired power stations it typically replaces. And hydro isn't particular eco-friendly in a lot of cases.
Maybe batteries could do just as well as hydro, or perhaps even better, but it seems we simply can't build them fast enough.
Sure we can but we've really just gotten started on building the production capacity. It's going to take a minute to get there and it's growing very fast. Not as if we are building nuclear plants left and right either so I'm not sure what you think the viable alternative might be.
So a 145 sq km deployment of almost 100 turbines is equivalent to a single small utility scale power station.
With near as makes no difference zero carbon emissions or other pollutants, free and renewable fuel, uses no arable or otherwise useful land, little/no waste products, eliminates geopolitical influence of fossil fuel producing countries, cheaper if you eliminate subsidies from fossil fuel stations, and the list goes on. Just because we've built bigger fossil fuel plants doesn't mean this wind farm is a bad idea. Furthermore the dispersed deployment has no relevance at all since 3/4 of the earth's surface is water. Exactly what are we losing by using a tiny fraction of that ocean to generate power?
While I won't deny that fossil fuel fired plants maintain some advantages in some circumstances, let's not pretend that a wind farm has no advantages over fossil fuels.
You are not seeing the difference between 1080p and 4K per se, but rather technical details of the video codec.
While I'm sure you are correct that the codec plays an important role, I'm not confused about what I'm seeing. I definitely can see the greater resolution and thanks to some digital image related jobs I had a few years back plus the fact that I do a lot of hybrid photography I know what I'm looking at better than many. One of my hobbies is wildlife photography and I could show you the same image at 1080p and 4K on the same screen and unless your vision is terrible you'd be able to see there is extra detail in the 4K image from a fair distance away. There is no one sized fits all answer to where your ability to perceive additional pixel resolution ends but it's definitely higher than 1080p from typical couch distance if you are paying attention and have reasonably good visual acuity. (which I do)
Now in fairness almost all of the time it doesn't matter. Watching The Avengers in 4K versus in 1080p doesn't really add to the experience since 1080p is more than adequate for the purpose. For most movies you'd probably never notice the difference unless you were looking very closely which kind of defeats the point of enjoying the movie itself.
4K discs generally have HDR (high dynamic range) , WCG (wide color gamut)., and 10 bits per color band (BD is 8 bit).
They also display more pixels with more information. I'm by no means arguing that pixel density is the end all be all but let's not pretend it doesn't matter at all.
Politically, nothing happened.
To the surprise of absolutely no one given the current state of affairs in Washington.
But a lot of people locked their credit score.
So what? That's about the least interesting bit of data Equifax has about you and it does nothing to prevent mass data breaches.
I'm sure credit card companies are now asking for more information to prove your identity to open a new card.
Citation needed.
also had so many friends and family ask what they should do, which opened the door for me to introduce them to things like LastPass, Yubikey, and other security.
So you told them to use an unregulated and unaudited third party single point of failure? Great plan... You do realize that those things would do nothing to prevent a breach at Equifax right?
No kidding ... my 55" TV with surround sound and my leather recliner to me are far more interesting and comfortable than going to a damned cinema.I haven't seen a movie in a theatre in years, and likely never will again.
So what you are saying is that you have no friends and rarely leave the house. You be you but I prefer to be a bit more outgoing in my social life.
Here's a tip - it's not actually about the movie or the sound. It's about time with people you care about. Don't take it so seriously.
All the shit are telling me about cinemas... from loudly talking during the movie over throwing popcorn, bright phone screens and crying babies to dirty seats ... none of that is the case here in Germany, and AFAIK most of Europe. Our cinemas are squeaky-clean, well-climatized, and everybody is quiet and behaving unless it fits.
By and large people behave themselves in movies here in the US. The people that are complaining are mostly just looking for reasons to not go and are exaggerating the scale of the problems that do occur. I go to probably 5-10 movies per year at a variety of theaters and it's pretty rare (read almost never) to have another patron severely disrupt the experience. Heck lately my local theaters have been upgrading the seats and other amenities to pretty comfy options too. The few times someone has gotten out of line I've seen the movie theater workers deal with the person rather quickly.
What the complainers don't grasp is that going to a movie is a social outing as a general proposition. It's a way to spend time with people you like doing something entertaining. It doesn't really matter if the movie experience isn't absolutely perfect in every detail because it's not really about that. I go to movies with my wife and daughter or sometimes friends to be with them. The movie is as incidental to that activity as the choice of restaurant afterwards or the car we use to get there. If someone talks during the movie I'm not really going to get bent out of shape because if the movie is any good I'm probably going to see again someday anyway. It's just a movie after all. Don't take it so seriously.
4K is really sweet for programming and browsing and having multiple windows in general.
I find it nice for home movie watching too. Yes you generally can see the difference between 1080p and 4K in many cases because the limit of your ability to perceive resolution is greater than the resolution of 1080p. I have both 4K and 1080p versions of The Martian and on my 65inch TV I can see there is a difference between the two from my couch 12-15 feet away. I have to get close to see all the detail of 4K but I can tell there is a difference from further away. Details pop out enough to be noticeable.
If you want to argue that the difference between 1080p and 4K for general home movie watching is strongly into diminishing returns I would certainly concede the point in most use cases. 4K is better but it's not even close to the improvement from the old SD to 1080p. You really have to be pixel peeping to notice in many cases.
8K haven't really seen any up close, can't imagine it is much needed much currently -- but I could be wrong -- can never have enough windows :)
I could see it being useful for desktop monitors. I currently have three 28" 4K monitors on my desk and I could theoretically replace them (and then some) with a single 8K monitor of similar size which would be large. I could also see it being useful for large informational displays in public places. For home movie viewing I'm not really sure there is much value added.
The worst scam is whatever cables Monster Cable is currently selling.
Monster Cable products are overpriced and often wildly over engineered but they are generally of solid quality and do what they represent. QED they are not a scam in the legal sense of the word. They just aren't good value for money for most people. Their marketing and sales tactics tend to prey on ignorance, insecurity, and credulity of their customers but they aren't actually misrepresenting what they are. It's just that what they are provides minimal to no value added over much cheaper alternatives for those who care to look. They are a textbook case of let the buyer beware but that is not the same thing as fraud.
This also means that invoking the 25th amendment will backfire. After invoking that amendment, congress takes over.
The outcome of which depends on the composition of the cabinet and congress at the time. After the upcoming election the political calculus could become quite different than it is currently. I see zero chance of a Trump cabinet invoking the 25th given that they haven't already.
And that this point in time with elections upcoming, they will all loudly shout "I still love Trump so please vote for me!!" after which the VP and majority of the cabinet will quickly find themselves out of a job.
The Vice President cannot be fired from his job by the President. Only Congress can remove the VP from office via impeachment. The president has no power to remove elected officials from office. In any case it is a moot issue since there is zero chance of the 25th amendment being invoked by a Trump cabinet. Impeachment is FAR more likely if the democrats win a large majority this coming November.
If you think the President is unable to carry out his responsibilities, you have a duty to bring about impeachment and/or invoke the 25th Amendment.
Only very specific people have the power to impeach the president or invoke the 25th amendment. Furthermore it requires a rare consensus among those very specific people. Everyone has to use other tactics available to them most other times. There is NO difference between a member of the administration opposing a president they disagree with versus a member of congress in the opposition party. Government workers have certain legal obligations but among them is not and never has been blind obedience to the president. This is true for EVERY citizen including you and me. This is not a monarchy and Trump is not the king.
Going behind the back of and trying to undermine the Chief Executive in this fashion is unprofessional, cowardly, and unconstitutional.
Are you really so naive as to think this doesn't happen in literally every administration? There is nothing illegal or uncommon about this. First off, where exactly in the constitution does it say something about this? The constitution says nothing about it being illegal to oppose the president while working in the executive branch. Second, falling on your sword publicly is a pointless act of martyrdom that will get nothing accomplished and counter productively facilitates exactly what is being opposed. Opposing elected officials who have failed their office is a DUTY of every citizen and being a government official does not change that. Third, it isn't even remotely cowardly - quite the opposite actually. There is quite a lot of personal risk here in speaking truth to power publicly, particularly when the person in charge is a narcissistic megalomaniac. Anonymity is a useful tool and if you think professionalism is defined by falling on your sword then you on't know what professionalism actually is.
Contacting them was time well spent.
Glad to hear it. Nice to see some companies actually taking a little time to care. I would have just binned the thing and bought a new one because customer service at most companies these days is so bad as to not be worth the time and aggravation. That would have been a bad assumption by me in this case.
Not sure if dysphemism for "fired", or ...
In Russia that's not an entirely idle question. Most probably it just means fired from their job but not with 100% certainty. I can show you unambiguous examples of people literally ending up in rivers or "having a car crash" after causing problems for those in positions of power. After the recent sports doping scandals there are numerous people who ended up dead under circumstances that can only be described as suspicious at best. I'm not implying anything terrible happened or that Russia is a terrible place but it's not even a question that terminated could have the other meaning in the right circumstances in that particular country. Just like the US, Russia has some rough edges here and there.
issued a statement warning they believe "privacy is not absolute" and tech companies must give law enforcement access to encrypted data or face "technological, enforcement, legislative or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions.
Privacy never was absolute and it isn't absolute today. That does not mean that privacy should not exist. They can have a backdoor just as soon as they can prove two things. 1) That the government will not have the capacity to abuse said backdoor and 2) that criminals and other bad actors will have no means of accessing said back door.
Of course since both of those things are in actual fact impossible then they can fuck off and go die in a fire. There is no such thing as a secure backdoor by definition. If the cost of security is that the government has to work harder to spy on me then so much the better.