In addition, there are parents in the U.S. who do not want their kids vaccinated against an STD, papillomavirus (HPV), for "religious" reasons, not necessarily part of the Anti-Vaccers wing-nuts.
This is true. This is a different brand of wing-nuts with different, though equally harmful reasoning regarding vaccines.
Apparently, allowing your kid to get cancer because of this virus is for a "religious" reason, as if rape and incest doesn't occur.
Who needs rape or incest? You just need a partner who previously slept with someone else already infected. Approximately 80% of people are infected with some strain of the virus during their lifetime. Evidently their "logic" is that they think horny teenagers will be scared off from having sex because of the modest risk of contracting cancer someday in the distant future and that if they provide the vaccine they are somehow condoning having unapproved sex. These are the same morons by and large that think teaching abstinence will somehow be an effective means to convince young people to not have sex.
Yeah but I think transparency is really all that is needed.
I disagree. There has to be legal consequences or else nothing will change. I don't think any amount of transparency will matter unless it either results in legal consequences or actually affects election outcomes. Currently neither of those occur as far as I can tell because we have a delusional Supreme Court which seems to be hallucinating that having more money should entitle one to more free speech and a proportionately bigger voice in elections.
If there is anything the 2016 election in the US taught us it is that political ads... aren't all that relevant.
I presume you are talking about the presidential race. That was a highly unusual election with two highly unusual candidates - both extremely well known and polarizing. Political ads very much matter in most elections. If they didn't have a measurable effect then they would be doing something else. Political ads have been proven to work (including social media ads), particularly attack ads.
We live in a networked society now and it is our circles of peers and the information we share between us that influences us most.
That has always been the case but it's demonstrably a fact that political ads do influence elections at the margins. A lot of elections are fights for just a few percent of the voters who haven't already been swayed one way or the other. A card carrying democrat or republican probably isn't going to vote for the other guy so the ads aren't really for them.
I think this sort of information is desperately needed. Unfortunately almost nobody who votes actually gives a shit about any of this data nor does it change minds. All it does is tell us who the puppet masters are that are feeding the current political propaganda. Unless this somehow translates into actual restrictions on how and where the money is spent it is purely an academic exercise.
As long as Congress continues to require the populace to pay enough in taxes to cover the obligations owed then it is self sustaining. There is no reasonable likelihood of this ceasing to be the case because people who collect social security rarely fail to vote and politicians who suggest cutting their benefits don't remain in office for long.
SS is not people putting money away, and then getting that money. There's no "account" of what you've paid in. SS is a shell game where today's workers pay for today's retirees.
Yes today's workers pay for the retirees. That is true. But unless you think that collectively today's retirees are going to forget to vote, no politician is going to fuck with social security. The inflows exceed the outflows and it's a fairly trivial matter to correct them if/when they do not. (raise taxes, raise retirement age, etc) Social Security does not affect the federal budget deficit or debt.
But it's tendentious and mendacious to suggest that defense spending is anywhere near the first priority to have some fat trimmed
Wow could you be more condescending or wrong? Defense is the clear and unambiguous first thing that should be cut. It's not even a question. It's not the only thing that needs to be changed but it's the screamingly obvious first thing. The US military is clearly and enormously larger than any demonstrable need - current or projected. To argue otherwise is to say that we should be spending more on defense than then next 7 largest military budgets combined and to do so at the direct expense of our elderly and poor. Not to mention the opportunity cost to our economy by trying up literally trillions of dollars in pointless weapons systems and unneeded military assets our of sheer paranoia. The US military is to a substantial degree a wasteful jobs program and corporate welfare for companies that make weapons systems.
the biggest savings are going to be in marginal improvements in the biggest PRORAMS: entitlement and social spending.
First off I reject your framing of the debate. The US military IS social spending and entitlement - it's really nothing more than a jobs program and corporate subsidies for a big chuck of what it does. There is no credible argument that we need a military as large as the one we have. Second, "marginal improvements" to medicare and medicaid (the only two programs that matter here) cannot be and will not be cut sufficiently make up for the fact that we are not taxing enough to pay for them. "Marginal improvements" literally cannot be enough without major changes to our entire payment system giving far more power to those programs. Cuts to the degree you propose are politically impossible even if they would work. The ONLY and correct answer is to raise taxes to pay for the programs that our society clearly wants and is unwilling to do away with. Pretending that we can indefinitely borrow money to pay for programs we are unwilling to cut or even to substantially change is idiotic.
If you want to change the health care system to make our spending more efficient then you are de-facto arguing to change it to some form of a government controlled system like the rest of the civilized world and to actually INCREASE public spending on health care in total (not per-capita). You also are de-facto arguing the need to raise taxes to cover those costs. The US is the largest per-capita spender on health care (for worse results ironically) but that's because our entire health care payment system is just bananas. Marginal changes won't fix the problem no matter what anyone tells you.
The important thing is the entire point of bitcoin was it was supposed to be free of middle men.
Being free of a middle man isn't always a good thing for the parties involved. While they should be removed whenever practical, sometimes they actually serve valuable purposes. For example some companies I deal with literally cannot make a profit unless you do a substantial amount of business with them. If you don't meet their minimum volumes they force you to use distributors (middle me) who are better organized to deal with smaller product volumes. In some sense virtually all businesses are middle men to some degree or another and that's not always a bad thing.
Anyone who pretends they know the answer to this is a liar and/or a fraud. Go ahead and gamble your money if it amuses you but no one knows what the value of bitcoin or any other crypto currency will be tomorrow, next week, or next year. It's an almost pure game of Who's the Greater Fool?.
Or are we seeing the death throes of Crypto coin as an investment option and a return to just being used in the underground.
It doesn't matter. It's never been an investment - just gambling and arguably a pyramid scheme. It provides no cost advantage over existing currencies outside of a few rare corner cases but it is a wet dream for criminals and scam artists hoping to sucker credulous fools.
Considering defense is barely 16% of Fed spending, and social programs (SS, medicare, etc) is around 57%, I think I know where we should really start cutting.
Yep, Defense.
Oh you meant we should take away health care from our elderly and poor to fund a needlessly oversized military? That's weapons grade stupid. Cutting military spending is the biggest no brainer ever. We could cut the deficit in half tomorrow and still spend more on our military than every other country on earth. Social security is self sustaining and does not affect the federal deficit. We need to cut defense spending to more reasonable levels and raise taxes to cover the rest. No this would not result in fiscal Armageddon. The only other option is to cut medicare and medicaid and cutting that would be stupid and hurt a lot of people needlessly. The rest of the federal budget is inconsequential as far as the deficit goes so any debate about the deficit that doesn't involve some combination of raising taxes, cutting the military and/or cutting medicare/medicaid is a waste of time.
President Donald Trump on Monday signed a $716 billion defense policy bill
For perspective please note that the defecit in 2017 was $665 billion. So for all practical purpose we are borrowing the entire defense budget and in the process spending more money than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan COMBINED. Call me crazy but I'm pretty sure we could put a good chunk of that money to better use.
Noted how quickly that bug got reopened after this hit/.
You actually think anyone involved with this gives a shit about a slashdot posting? Slashdot hasn't had any meaningful influence in well over a decade and it's usually several days behind the curve on anything newsworthy. A few thousand people are regulars here and most of the well known people who used to hang out left quite some time ago. I have a hard time recalling the last time I read a posting here that I hadn't read elsewhere at least 24+ hours previous. The only reason most of us are still here is that we are weirdos who like to argue with each other and sometimes there is some interesting discussion about topics we care about.
Given that one has to run lights 24 hours a day underground and solar panels are day time only power, isn't it going to take some batteries to supply one's electric needs?
Umm, yes... This is not a revelation.
Also, there is the question of wiring lengths. 24V DC needs some pretty large conductors to get very far carrying usable current levels.
This is not a serious issue. The issue is digging the hole for the wire, not the gauge of the wire. The cost differential between a big fat wire and a more modest one is extremely modest compared with the cost of solar panels, the battery, and the trenching/digging to get the cables where they are needed.
Not to mention the toxic nature of battery chemistry, marking the need to keep them away from living spaces and providing adequate ventilation.
Just because the people are underground doesn't mean the batteries would need to be. And even if they were that is a well understood problem with well understood solutions. Batteries are used in pretty much every mine on the planet.
One doesn't need lead acid batteries underground, nor are LiIon options necessarily safe.
There are many battery chemistries available and I'm rather confident at least one of them would work just fine.
Sometimes though not always. And you can't hide the fact that the doctor isn't there talking to them.
They can spend the time they would normally use to do so doing something else productive if the computer does it.
I guess I'm not making my point clear. The opportunity for time savings isn't generally in diagnosis. That's rather efficient in quite a lot of cases. It's on the administrative side of things that is where the real time burden is and where the opportunity for automation really stands out. Digital medical records, more efficient billing, reducing the need for office staff, etc. If we can improve treatment for reasonable costs by all means but we're not really saving doctor's time by making a diagnosis that used to take 2 minutes take 1. What would really help is to help them eliminate the time they spend on paperwork which is often several multiples of the time they spend actively taking care of patients (including diagnosis).
Otherwise, life is pretty similar to what other 18-year-olds in the city experience.
Ummm, no it isn't. It isn't much like life in any city. Not saying it's better or worse but it definitely isn't what I'd call similar. For one thing I'm pretty confident the dating scene isn't exactly a target rich environment. And 24/7 access to electricity and places to go use it is not a trivial difference.
we could probably automate 50% of the medical industry and still have a shortage of doctors.
That's a nice little made up statistic you have there. First off a lot of potential automation is refused by patients. They WANT a person to come in and talk to them about what they are experiencing and there is no way to automate this. Second, automation is only cheaper if you can do it in volume. Small medical practices don't have the money for expensive test equipment. There is a reason hospitals have the MRI machine and not your family doctor. This is neither good nor bad but just a reality of automation. Third, the cost overruns in the US medical industry have very little to do with automation and have a LOT to do with our ludicrous payment and management system. Fourth, the US medical system is actually relatively advanced when it comes to automation because there is money to be had by automating. If anything we have cost overruns because we have too much automation when we don't actually need it. Too much automation adds cost just like not enough does.
Every time we can move a diagnostic test from requiring 30 minutes of a doctor's time to 30 seconds of a computer's time, that is huge savings.
While it is true that any time savings is likely a cost savings, I think you may not appreciate how short a time doctors usually spend on a single case. My wife is a pathologist so I see some of this up close. I've seen pathologist go through 100 to as many as 300 cases in a single 8-12 hour shift. And for non-routine cases a computer likely wouldn't help shorten things very much. The actual diagnosis time is actually quite short - usually seconds to minutes. A lot of lab work is already highly automated. It's the gathering and compiling of all the data to do the tests and render diagnosis that usually takes the majority of the time and cost and labor. In my wife's job cases have to be accessioned, go through gross dissection, tissue preparation, histology and then finally looked at by the doctor. The doctor's percent of the time spent might be 5-10% of the total time spent. (I'm not even talking about the clinical time to take the tissue sample, transport it to the lab, and the paperwork and billing) Each of those steps has a person involved. The costs aren't the doctor's time but the legion of support staff needed to manage the equipment and paperwork.
These stories are often spun as computers taking over a doctor's job, when they really should be thought of as productivity enhancements.
You know who isn't worried about them? Doctors. You are quite right that they aren't and likely cannot be replacements for doctors. Much like the PC on your desk they are just tools to make them better at their job. And that's a good thing if we use them right.
I hate to break it to you: but all mobile phones are tracked minute by minute anyway.
Apples to oranges. The phone company has a legitimate reason to know your phone's location when on - namely that it doesn't work if they don't. They also have legitimate reasons to record some of this data for billing purposes and service provision. Precise contents of what you are doing at that minute not so much in most circumstances and isn't recorded. They aren't (or rather shouldn't be) tracked minute by minute by rando third parties without explicit permission from you.
A bottle of wine from 1900 which has never been opened and has not turned to vinegar is still not "new."
Sure it is. It absolutely is a new product for purposes of sale. The fact that it was made a long time ago doesn't change that fact. There is no bright line difference between a product made 1 minute ago and one made 1 century ago in this matter.
You can argue either way as to whether it'd deceptive or not to call it "new"; personally I'm on the fence about that.
If it is in factory original packaging and is unopened and unspoiled then it is "new". This isn't a difficult question to anyone with a functioning brain. If the vendor of the product doesn't want to honor warranties through non-authorized distributors then that's their call but it doesn't change the fact that the product is new. I have a hard time fathoming why they would actually care. If they cannot verify the package hasn't been opened and isn't their factory packaging then they are clueless morons and their packaging sucks. I understand being worried about counterfeits but this isn't going to solve that problem for them.
However, I'm far from being convinced that it concerns anyone other than the buyer and the seller.
That's because it doesn't concern anyone else. As long as the product is a legitimate copy and represented accurately as unopened and unused it is none of the manufacturer's business.
Note that every store worth a damn has a shrink-wrap setup in the back. Being 'in the wrap' means nothing.
Yes well that's why they don't have the equipment to replicate the labels that get attached to the shrink wrap. I've never seen a shrink wrap job done by a store where it wasn't screamingly obvious that it wasn't done by the factory. But just in case someone isn't clear that's why companies put fancy holographic labels on the outside that are hard to replicate.
As for not impressive, I beg to differ. The "legacy" rocket guys got us the Saturn V.
Not to diminish the Saturn V as a technical accomplishment but you are comparing apples to oranges. The Saturn V was a one-time only crash program with an effectively unlimited budget (by comparison) to make a handful of rockets that would never be (and should never be) repeated. From an economic standpoint the Saturn V was hugely wasteful, unrepeatable, and we don't use it or any direct successor in any rocket today for that fact alone. We learned a lot from the Saturn V but let's not pretend that comparing its perceived impressiveness to the Falcon 9/Heavy is a useful exercise.
And... keep in mind Saturn and its engines were pretty-much hand-crafted, hand-fitted, designed with slipsticks and paper and pencil. Now, which one seems more impressive?
The Saturn V was no doubt an astonishing technical achievement and we learned many lessons from it but we aren't flying Saturn V direct successor rockets today. Why? We don't make things the same way today for very good reasons. The Saturn V was built the way it was out of necessity, not because that is the best way to build rockets. No thought or effort was given to making a reliable, repeatable, economic design. Each one was unique and hand crafted which might be great for decorative jewelry or supercars but it's not a good thing for reliable transportation. You want rockets that are made as simply and identically as possible and the Saturn V was neither as you point out.
Just because we can make something more complex doesn't make it a good idea to do so. (See the Space Shuttle) It actually diminishes the technical achievement to some small degree if anything. As an engineer I'm rarely blown away by the guy who designs a system that works well once with a huge amount of engineers massaging it, not matter how complicated the system. It's kind of like the fact that it's much easier to design a pretty supercar that runs well for a few hundred miles versus designing a family sedan that has to run well for hundreds of thousands of miles and sell orders of magnitude more units for far less money per unit. I assure you it's a LOT easier to do make a small number of high priced supercars than the reliable and economic mass produced sedan. That doesn't mean we can't appreciate the supercar for what it is and what it does but it's not really what you want at the end of the day unless you are blowing money for grins and giggles.
The orbit adjustments (via Venus fly-bys) will take about 7 years.
This is one of those interesting facts about orbital dynamics. Turns out it's actually really hard to hit the sun or even get close to it. It's actually easier to leave the solar system altogether than it is to send a probe to the Sun from Earth. MinutePhysics did a very good explanation why this is the case.
We also know (I've been fucking saying this for almost a decade, now, when I was doing global horticultural lighting design) that grow lighting is triggering macular degeneration in younger healthier population.
Are you seriously trying to claim that all the 20 somethings that want to get "medical" marijuana are not making shit up and are actually suffering from macular degeneration? (people growing pot are almost the only people who would give a shit about grow lights in their 20s) Either cite reputable medical studies (note the plural) or I'm calling bullshit.
One of those requirements is that any personally identifying information that is at rest must be encrypted.
That gets routinely and roundly ignored. I've worked in hospital systems and my wife is a doctor. And in most cases nothing really ever comes of it and there are minimal to zero consequences to the organizations that fail to maintain adequate infosec. Plus just because something is encrypted to comply with a statute doesn't mean it is actually secure. That is why you need to have legal consequences with actual teeth to ensure an adequate level of effort is expended to keep data secure and to incentivize companies to not store data that isn't truly critical.
Walk in, get verified, mark ballot by filling in the ovals, feed ballot into machine, machine scans and counts, and the paper ballots are there in case you need a recount. Why don't all polling places use this method?
Because it isn't perfect. People (no kidding) do things like fill in every single bubble for all candidates, they write personally identifying info on the ballot, they don't fill in the boxes adequately, etc. I'm not arguing that any other particular method is better but I'm not convinced the method you describe is necessarily the best possible. (and my district uses the same process as yours)
My precinct takes a slightly more efficient approach. Rather than using a machine to capture the vote and print it out, the voter marks their vote directly on the paper.
There are problems with that too. People fill out ballots incorrectly with some regularity. A lady in my office administrates the ballot counting process in our town and she has told me some of the stupid things people do like literally filling in every bubble for every candidate (think like voting for both Clinton and Trump on the same ballot). Computers at least have the ability to restrict people from making invalid choices and ensuring their paper copy prints correctly. There is no perfect system and stupid people tend to find a way to be stupid no matter what you do.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, there are parents in the U.S. who do not want their kids vaccinated against an STD, papillomavirus (HPV), for "religious" reasons, not necessarily part of the Anti-Vaccers wing-nuts.
This is true. This is a different brand of wing-nuts with different, though equally harmful reasoning regarding vaccines.
Apparently, allowing your kid to get cancer because of this virus is for a "religious" reason, as if rape and incest doesn't occur.
Who needs rape or incest? You just need a partner who previously slept with someone else already infected. Approximately 80% of people are infected with some strain of the virus during their lifetime. Evidently their "logic" is that they think horny teenagers will be scared off from having sex because of the modest risk of contracting cancer someday in the distant future and that if they provide the vaccine they are somehow condoning having unapproved sex. These are the same morons by and large that think teaching abstinence will somehow be an effective means to convince young people to not have sex.
Canadian children have massive opportunity to enter water ... more freshwater than any country on earth
Canada does not have the most freshwater resources. They are 4th on the list behind Brazil, Russia and (just barely) the USA.
Yeah but I think transparency is really all that is needed.
I disagree. There has to be legal consequences or else nothing will change. I don't think any amount of transparency will matter unless it either results in legal consequences or actually affects election outcomes. Currently neither of those occur as far as I can tell because we have a delusional Supreme Court which seems to be hallucinating that having more money should entitle one to more free speech and a proportionately bigger voice in elections.
If there is anything the 2016 election in the US taught us it is that political ads... aren't all that relevant.
I presume you are talking about the presidential race. That was a highly unusual election with two highly unusual candidates - both extremely well known and polarizing. Political ads very much matter in most elections. If they didn't have a measurable effect then they would be doing something else. Political ads have been proven to work (including social media ads), particularly attack ads.
We live in a networked society now and it is our circles of peers and the information we share between us that influences us most.
That has always been the case but it's demonstrably a fact that political ads do influence elections at the margins. A lot of elections are fights for just a few percent of the voters who haven't already been swayed one way or the other. A card carrying democrat or republican probably isn't going to vote for the other guy so the ads aren't really for them.
I think this sort of information is desperately needed. Unfortunately almost nobody who votes actually gives a shit about any of this data nor does it change minds. All it does is tell us who the puppet masters are that are feeding the current political propaganda. Unless this somehow translates into actual restrictions on how and where the money is spent it is purely an academic exercise.
No, SS is not self sufficient, that is a lie.
As long as Congress continues to require the populace to pay enough in taxes to cover the obligations owed then it is self sustaining. There is no reasonable likelihood of this ceasing to be the case because people who collect social security rarely fail to vote and politicians who suggest cutting their benefits don't remain in office for long.
SS is not people putting money away, and then getting that money. There's no "account" of what you've paid in. SS is a shell game where today's workers pay for today's retirees.
Yes today's workers pay for the retirees. That is true. But unless you think that collectively today's retirees are going to forget to vote, no politician is going to fuck with social security. The inflows exceed the outflows and it's a fairly trivial matter to correct them if/when they do not. (raise taxes, raise retirement age, etc) Social Security does not affect the federal budget deficit or debt.
But it's tendentious and mendacious to suggest that defense spending is anywhere near the first priority to have some fat trimmed
Wow could you be more condescending or wrong? Defense is the clear and unambiguous first thing that should be cut. It's not even a question. It's not the only thing that needs to be changed but it's the screamingly obvious first thing. The US military is clearly and enormously larger than any demonstrable need - current or projected. To argue otherwise is to say that we should be spending more on defense than then next 7 largest military budgets combined and to do so at the direct expense of our elderly and poor. Not to mention the opportunity cost to our economy by trying up literally trillions of dollars in pointless weapons systems and unneeded military assets our of sheer paranoia. The US military is to a substantial degree a wasteful jobs program and corporate welfare for companies that make weapons systems.
the biggest savings are going to be in marginal improvements in the biggest PRORAMS: entitlement and social spending.
First off I reject your framing of the debate. The US military IS social spending and entitlement - it's really nothing more than a jobs program and corporate subsidies for a big chuck of what it does. There is no credible argument that we need a military as large as the one we have. Second, "marginal improvements" to medicare and medicaid (the only two programs that matter here) cannot be and will not be cut sufficiently make up for the fact that we are not taxing enough to pay for them. "Marginal improvements" literally cannot be enough without major changes to our entire payment system giving far more power to those programs. Cuts to the degree you propose are politically impossible even if they would work. The ONLY and correct answer is to raise taxes to pay for the programs that our society clearly wants and is unwilling to do away with. Pretending that we can indefinitely borrow money to pay for programs we are unwilling to cut or even to substantially change is idiotic.
If you want to change the health care system to make our spending more efficient then you are de-facto arguing to change it to some form of a government controlled system like the rest of the civilized world and to actually INCREASE public spending on health care in total (not per-capita). You also are de-facto arguing the need to raise taxes to cover those costs. The US is the largest per-capita spender on health care (for worse results ironically) but that's because our entire health care payment system is just bananas. Marginal changes won't fix the problem no matter what anyone tells you.
We raised a generation of idiots.
If you raised them and screwed it up then YOU are the idiot, not them.
And apparently we didn't teach them history, like how many in the past died due to socialism
You seriously think capitalism hasn't resulted in anyone dying? Evidently you didn't learn much history yourself.
The important thing is the entire point of bitcoin was it was supposed to be free of middle men.
Being free of a middle man isn't always a good thing for the parties involved. While they should be removed whenever practical, sometimes they actually serve valuable purposes. For example some companies I deal with literally cannot make a profit unless you do a substantial amount of business with them. If you don't meet their minimum volumes they force you to use distributors (middle me) who are better organized to deal with smaller product volumes. In some sense virtually all businesses are middle men to some degree or another and that's not always a bad thing.
OK speculators... now the time to buy?
Anyone who pretends they know the answer to this is a liar and/or a fraud. Go ahead and gamble your money if it amuses you but no one knows what the value of bitcoin or any other crypto currency will be tomorrow, next week, or next year. It's an almost pure game of Who's the Greater Fool?.
Or are we seeing the death throes of Crypto coin as an investment option and a return to just being used in the underground.
It doesn't matter. It's never been an investment - just gambling and arguably a pyramid scheme. It provides no cost advantage over existing currencies outside of a few rare corner cases but it is a wet dream for criminals and scam artists hoping to sucker credulous fools.
Considering defense is barely 16% of Fed spending, and social programs (SS, medicare, etc) is around 57%, I think I know where we should really start cutting.
Yep, Defense.
Oh you meant we should take away health care from our elderly and poor to fund a needlessly oversized military? That's weapons grade stupid. Cutting military spending is the biggest no brainer ever. We could cut the deficit in half tomorrow and still spend more on our military than every other country on earth. Social security is self sustaining and does not affect the federal deficit. We need to cut defense spending to more reasonable levels and raise taxes to cover the rest. No this would not result in fiscal Armageddon. The only other option is to cut medicare and medicaid and cutting that would be stupid and hurt a lot of people needlessly. The rest of the federal budget is inconsequential as far as the deficit goes so any debate about the deficit that doesn't involve some combination of raising taxes, cutting the military and/or cutting medicare/medicaid is a waste of time.
President Donald Trump on Monday signed a $716 billion defense policy bill
For perspective please note that the defecit in 2017 was $665 billion. So for all practical purpose we are borrowing the entire defense budget and in the process spending more money than China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, France, the UK, and Japan COMBINED. Call me crazy but I'm pretty sure we could put a good chunk of that money to better use.
Noted how quickly that bug got reopened after this hit /.
You actually think anyone involved with this gives a shit about a slashdot posting? Slashdot hasn't had any meaningful influence in well over a decade and it's usually several days behind the curve on anything newsworthy. A few thousand people are regulars here and most of the well known people who used to hang out left quite some time ago. I have a hard time recalling the last time I read a posting here that I hadn't read elsewhere at least 24+ hours previous. The only reason most of us are still here is that we are weirdos who like to argue with each other and sometimes there is some interesting discussion about topics we care about.
Given that one has to run lights 24 hours a day underground and solar panels are day time only power, isn't it going to take some batteries to supply one's electric needs?
Umm, yes... This is not a revelation.
Also, there is the question of wiring lengths. 24V DC needs some pretty large conductors to get very far carrying usable current levels.
This is not a serious issue. The issue is digging the hole for the wire, not the gauge of the wire. The cost differential between a big fat wire and a more modest one is extremely modest compared with the cost of solar panels, the battery, and the trenching/digging to get the cables where they are needed.
Not to mention the toxic nature of battery chemistry, marking the need to keep them away from living spaces and providing adequate ventilation.
Just because the people are underground doesn't mean the batteries would need to be. And even if they were that is a well understood problem with well understood solutions. Batteries are used in pretty much every mine on the planet.
One doesn't need lead acid batteries underground, nor are LiIon options necessarily safe.
There are many battery chemistries available and I'm rather confident at least one of them would work just fine.
You can hide the automation from the patient.
Sometimes though not always. And you can't hide the fact that the doctor isn't there talking to them.
They can spend the time they would normally use to do so doing something else productive if the computer does it.
I guess I'm not making my point clear. The opportunity for time savings isn't generally in diagnosis. That's rather efficient in quite a lot of cases. It's on the administrative side of things that is where the real time burden is and where the opportunity for automation really stands out. Digital medical records, more efficient billing, reducing the need for office staff, etc. If we can improve treatment for reasonable costs by all means but we're not really saving doctor's time by making a diagnosis that used to take 2 minutes take 1. What would really help is to help them eliminate the time they spend on paperwork which is often several multiples of the time they spend actively taking care of patients (including diagnosis).
Otherwise, life is pretty similar to what other 18-year-olds in the city experience.
Ummm, no it isn't. It isn't much like life in any city. Not saying it's better or worse but it definitely isn't what I'd call similar. For one thing I'm pretty confident the dating scene isn't exactly a target rich environment. And 24/7 access to electricity and places to go use it is not a trivial difference.
we could probably automate 50% of the medical industry and still have a shortage of doctors.
That's a nice little made up statistic you have there. First off a lot of potential automation is refused by patients. They WANT a person to come in and talk to them about what they are experiencing and there is no way to automate this. Second, automation is only cheaper if you can do it in volume. Small medical practices don't have the money for expensive test equipment. There is a reason hospitals have the MRI machine and not your family doctor. This is neither good nor bad but just a reality of automation. Third, the cost overruns in the US medical industry have very little to do with automation and have a LOT to do with our ludicrous payment and management system. Fourth, the US medical system is actually relatively advanced when it comes to automation because there is money to be had by automating. If anything we have cost overruns because we have too much automation when we don't actually need it. Too much automation adds cost just like not enough does.
Every time we can move a diagnostic test from requiring 30 minutes of a doctor's time to 30 seconds of a computer's time, that is huge savings.
While it is true that any time savings is likely a cost savings, I think you may not appreciate how short a time doctors usually spend on a single case. My wife is a pathologist so I see some of this up close. I've seen pathologist go through 100 to as many as 300 cases in a single 8-12 hour shift. And for non-routine cases a computer likely wouldn't help shorten things very much. The actual diagnosis time is actually quite short - usually seconds to minutes. A lot of lab work is already highly automated. It's the gathering and compiling of all the data to do the tests and render diagnosis that usually takes the majority of the time and cost and labor. In my wife's job cases have to be accessioned, go through gross dissection, tissue preparation, histology and then finally looked at by the doctor. The doctor's percent of the time spent might be 5-10% of the total time spent. (I'm not even talking about the clinical time to take the tissue sample, transport it to the lab, and the paperwork and billing) Each of those steps has a person involved. The costs aren't the doctor's time but the legion of support staff needed to manage the equipment and paperwork.
These stories are often spun as computers taking over a doctor's job, when they really should be thought of as productivity enhancements.
You know who isn't worried about them? Doctors. You are quite right that they aren't and likely cannot be replacements for doctors. Much like the PC on your desk they are just tools to make them better at their job. And that's a good thing if we use them right.
I hate to break it to you: but all mobile phones are tracked minute by minute anyway.
Apples to oranges. The phone company has a legitimate reason to know your phone's location when on - namely that it doesn't work if they don't. They also have legitimate reasons to record some of this data for billing purposes and service provision. Precise contents of what you are doing at that minute not so much in most circumstances and isn't recorded. They aren't (or rather shouldn't be) tracked minute by minute by rando third parties without explicit permission from you.
A bottle of wine from 1900 which has never been opened and has not turned to vinegar is still not "new."
Sure it is. It absolutely is a new product for purposes of sale. The fact that it was made a long time ago doesn't change that fact. There is no bright line difference between a product made 1 minute ago and one made 1 century ago in this matter.
You can argue either way as to whether it'd deceptive or not to call it "new"; personally I'm on the fence about that.
If it is in factory original packaging and is unopened and unspoiled then it is "new". This isn't a difficult question to anyone with a functioning brain. If the vendor of the product doesn't want to honor warranties through non-authorized distributors then that's their call but it doesn't change the fact that the product is new. I have a hard time fathoming why they would actually care. If they cannot verify the package hasn't been opened and isn't their factory packaging then they are clueless morons and their packaging sucks. I understand being worried about counterfeits but this isn't going to solve that problem for them.
However, I'm far from being convinced that it concerns anyone other than the buyer and the seller.
That's because it doesn't concern anyone else. As long as the product is a legitimate copy and represented accurately as unopened and unused it is none of the manufacturer's business.
Note that every store worth a damn has a shrink-wrap setup in the back. Being 'in the wrap' means nothing.
Yes well that's why they don't have the equipment to replicate the labels that get attached to the shrink wrap. I've never seen a shrink wrap job done by a store where it wasn't screamingly obvious that it wasn't done by the factory. But just in case someone isn't clear that's why companies put fancy holographic labels on the outside that are hard to replicate.
As for not impressive, I beg to differ. The "legacy" rocket guys got us the Saturn V.
Not to diminish the Saturn V as a technical accomplishment but you are comparing apples to oranges. The Saturn V was a one-time only crash program with an effectively unlimited budget (by comparison) to make a handful of rockets that would never be (and should never be) repeated. From an economic standpoint the Saturn V was hugely wasteful, unrepeatable, and we don't use it or any direct successor in any rocket today for that fact alone. We learned a lot from the Saturn V but let's not pretend that comparing its perceived impressiveness to the Falcon 9/Heavy is a useful exercise.
And... keep in mind Saturn and its engines were pretty-much hand-crafted, hand-fitted, designed with slipsticks and paper and pencil. Now, which one seems more impressive?
The Saturn V was no doubt an astonishing technical achievement and we learned many lessons from it but we aren't flying Saturn V direct successor rockets today. Why? We don't make things the same way today for very good reasons. The Saturn V was built the way it was out of necessity, not because that is the best way to build rockets. No thought or effort was given to making a reliable, repeatable, economic design. Each one was unique and hand crafted which might be great for decorative jewelry or supercars but it's not a good thing for reliable transportation. You want rockets that are made as simply and identically as possible and the Saturn V was neither as you point out.
Just because we can make something more complex doesn't make it a good idea to do so. (See the Space Shuttle) It actually diminishes the technical achievement to some small degree if anything. As an engineer I'm rarely blown away by the guy who designs a system that works well once with a huge amount of engineers massaging it, not matter how complicated the system. It's kind of like the fact that it's much easier to design a pretty supercar that runs well for a few hundred miles versus designing a family sedan that has to run well for hundreds of thousands of miles and sell orders of magnitude more units for far less money per unit. I assure you it's a LOT easier to do make a small number of high priced supercars than the reliable and economic mass produced sedan. That doesn't mean we can't appreciate the supercar for what it is and what it does but it's not really what you want at the end of the day unless you are blowing money for grins and giggles.
The orbit adjustments (via Venus fly-bys) will take about 7 years.
This is one of those interesting facts about orbital dynamics. Turns out it's actually really hard to hit the sun or even get close to it. It's actually easier to leave the solar system altogether than it is to send a probe to the Sun from Earth. MinutePhysics did a very good explanation why this is the case.
We also know (I've been fucking saying this for almost a decade, now, when I was doing global horticultural lighting design) that grow lighting is triggering macular degeneration in younger healthier population.
Are you seriously trying to claim that all the 20 somethings that want to get "medical" marijuana are not making shit up and are actually suffering from macular degeneration? (people growing pot are almost the only people who would give a shit about grow lights in their 20s) Either cite reputable medical studies (note the plural) or I'm calling bullshit.
One of those requirements is that any personally identifying information that is at rest must be encrypted.
That gets routinely and roundly ignored. I've worked in hospital systems and my wife is a doctor. And in most cases nothing really ever comes of it and there are minimal to zero consequences to the organizations that fail to maintain adequate infosec. Plus just because something is encrypted to comply with a statute doesn't mean it is actually secure. That is why you need to have legal consequences with actual teeth to ensure an adequate level of effort is expended to keep data secure and to incentivize companies to not store data that isn't truly critical.
Walk in, get verified, mark ballot by filling in the ovals, feed ballot into machine, machine scans and counts, and the paper ballots are there in case you need a recount. Why don't all polling places use this method?
Because it isn't perfect. People (no kidding) do things like fill in every single bubble for all candidates, they write personally identifying info on the ballot, they don't fill in the boxes adequately, etc. I'm not arguing that any other particular method is better but I'm not convinced the method you describe is necessarily the best possible. (and my district uses the same process as yours)
My precinct takes a slightly more efficient approach. Rather than using a machine to capture the vote and print it out, the voter marks their vote directly on the paper.
There are problems with that too. People fill out ballots incorrectly with some regularity. A lady in my office administrates the ballot counting process in our town and she has told me some of the stupid things people do like literally filling in every bubble for every candidate (think like voting for both Clinton and Trump on the same ballot). Computers at least have the ability to restrict people from making invalid choices and ensuring their paper copy prints correctly. There is no perfect system and stupid people tend to find a way to be stupid no matter what you do.