Indeed, people are not, in fact, 100% accurate counters.
Unfortunately unless you have some way to verify the code and hardware and process you cannot claim with certainty that computers are either. All voting machines (software and hardware) should be open source and designed to be as simple and verifiable as possible. If they cannot be verified then they should not be used.
Opponents of electronic voting talk about "paper ballots" like they are some magical thing than ensures fair elections. That is nonsense.
I don't think anyone (rational) is claiming paper ballots are a cure all. But they do demonstrably help solve certain validation problems that are difficult to solve without them given the state of the art in computerized voting machines. Introducing computers into the mix does not make these issues go away and in fact makes validation of the process a fair bit harder in a lot of cases. Having a (literal) paper trail makes it easier to check and verify certain parts of the process are working as they should.
Frankly anyone who trusts a voting machine from a proprietary vendor with closed source software and undocumented hardware is an idiot. Everything about the design and construction of the machines (including source code) needs to be verifiable by the general public and the administrators of the voting system. Source code and hardware design should be open source and available to anyone interested. With paper ballots this is simple. It's harder (though arguably worthwhile) with computers but still needs to be done.
I'm not trying to imply that the SSN is a secret. I'm implying that it's UNIQUE.
Social Security Numbers are NOT unique per person. not even close. People have more than one (often for legitimate reasons) and many numbers are used for more than one person (usually for identity theft). We're talking tens of millions of people here. We tend to think of them as unique identifiers in the sense of a primary key but in reality they definitely are not reliable in that capacity and never have been.
It's far better if you never accept the linkage in the first place because, once you've given a piece of information away, you've completely lost control of it.
Better question: Why do we pretend that SSNs are "secret"?
Lot's of data is technically public that you really don't want to be made more available than necessary. Identity theft is a serious problem and given how casually SSN's are handled and how they are used for authentication (even when they shouldn't be) giving a lookup table for them is a terrible idea currently.
They are already semi-public, and generally used as a "citizenship number".
That doesn't make it a good idea or desirable. It's certainly at odds with a lot of privacy considerations.
Why not just go all the way, and make SSNs fully public?
Because you have to change a lot of other infrastructure and business practices to make that a practical idea. In principle you are right and it shouldn't matter but because of how the darn things are actually used it is a terrible idea currently.
If companies want something for authentication, they would have to use something sensible instead.
Hahahahahahaaa... Oh wait, you're serious... Umm, yeah I have ZERO faith that would happen given how poorly they handle them now.
A security flaw in the Comcast Xfinity online portal exposed social security numbers and partial home addresses of more than 26.5 million subscribers
So my beef with this isn't that a security flaw happened. I expect that to happen from time to time even though I think the consequences for it aren't nearly severe enough currently. The problem I have is that Comcast is storing Social Security Numbers in the first place. They have absolutely zero need to store this information. Yes I'm aware that lots of companies do it and for the most part they don't need it either. But let's ignore that and say they do need/want to store my SSN. Then there should be consequences with serious teeth for security failures regarding sensitive information about me. We have these leaks in part because there are effectively zero consequences for mismanagement of sensitive customer data. The companies simply don't have to care very much. Failure to keep this data secure should result in heavy fines and odious government oversight. It should be ugly enough to make them think seriously about what data they really ought to be storing and how they go about it and what best practices to use. Companies that act responsibly should be free to go about their business but those that can't or won't handle sensitive data responsibly should be very afraid.
So one has to wonder, what other stuff is going to break?
If you live in Europe you had better hope the Gulf Stream isn't one of the things that "breaks". If that happens just remember that the northern parts of the USA are roughly the latitude of Spain. The weather would get... interesting to say the least.
I never mentioned high-temperature superconductors at all.
You didn't have to. Using current low temp superconductors is economically infeasible for long distances so the only way your suggestion would work is with some as yet undeveloped high temp superconductor. The cost of cooling the lines would be greater than the savings you'd get from current transmission losses over the kinds of distances we're talking about. You think it's cheap to cool and pump hundreds of miles of lines of liquid nitrogen or similar coolants? If it made economic sense then power companies would already be doing it today and they are not. You think the power companies haven't looked into this?
With normal cables, you're talking about 4–8% loss.
It's not about the energy loss. It's about economic efficiency. But that doesn't matter because you are missing the entire point. If operating a nuclear power station is so dangerous that we need to locate it away from population centers then we shouldn't be operating it at all.
Now whether the cost of the superconducting lines would exceed the cost of those losses is another question
It is definitely NOT a separate question. If it doesn't cost less then there is no point in doing it at all. The number of cases where currently available superconductors are economically more efficient is just a few corner cases today and likely to remain so until we can get high temp superconductors.
There are several superconducting transmission cables are in active use right now.
They are short lines right next to power plants. We're talking less than a kilometer. There are no long distance superconducting power lines in service today
Solar is mostly a "feel-good" solution; capturing a significant fraction of the US energy market with solar is dubious at best.
That's demonstrably false. Germany TODAY gets about 6-7% of their energy from solar and it's clearly possible to do more. Would be much easier to do in many parts of the US which are far sunnier and further south. Hawaii currently gets close to 1/3 of it's electricity from rooftop and grid solar. If you think upwards of 10% (which is very realistic) is not a significant fraction then I don't know what to tell you.
If the US were to try to entirely use solar + batteries for power we would need to cover an area the size of West Virginia with solar panels
It would take roughly a tiny corner of Nevada to power the entire US. Less than 1% of the US landmass. You could capture a good fraction of that simply by using existing roof tops which is already utilized and wasted space anyway and has the bonus of being at point of use. If you're going to argue against solar you might try starting with actual facts instead of made up ones.
Wind is a much better option - centralized power (think MW or 10s of MW) from one turbine
Wind is a great solution in some places and solar is a better option in others. It depends entirely on the local geography. We need and will use both. Centralized power is not necessarily an advantage and in fact distributed power systems can be much more robust if done correctly. The biggest limitation to either of them is the fact that fossil fuels are not required to pay for much of the pollution they generate so economically they appear cheaper than they really are.
A realistic solution is a mix of wind, advancing nuclear, and a dash of solar for the long-term.
A realistic solution is a lot more wind, a lot more solar, keeping what nuke plants we can running for as long as practical (we aren't going to build more). Unfortunately there is no viable solution that doesn't involve substantial fossil fuel use for another half century even if politically we could agree to move on the matter. But as long as we have politicians in the pocket of big oil and coal companies that is going to be hard to do.
With superconductors, that problem is solved. Just build superconducting underground power transmission lines from the middle of nowhere to where the power is needed.
Transmission losses are not that big a deal even with superconductors. Plus you talk about high temp superconductors as if that is something we can suddenly waive into existence. We're certainly not going to use the sorts of superconductors available to us today.
After all, the United States has vast tracts of land with approximately zero people (with some small epsilon) living there, in states like Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, etc. Let's put our nuclear power plants there, so that if things go wrong, we can just bomb and bury them.
If the risk is so bad that locating them away from population centers is necessary then I think it's safe to say that using them is a bad idea. Either make it safe enough to be near to the plant or don't use it. We have other options after all.
Translation: we've spent decades demonizing and regulating nuclear to the point where it's too expensive to generate.
Well if you can figure out a way to reduce regulations on nuclear power without the cost cutting resulting in corner cutting and eventually a catastrophe then please share. Nuclear power is heavily regulated because it's really f***ing dangerous if you aren't watching it very carefully. The problem with fission reactors is that even the safest designs we know of require considerable oversight and regular expensive maintenance by very imperfect humans. While mostly they operate with good safety, when things go wrong they can go REALLY wrong. As long as there is a chance for a failure mode to occur, sooner or later it will. Not to mention the waste problem, the nuclear weapons problems, the insurance problems, etc. Nuclear has some great benefits but it has some serious problems too which cannot be easily dismissed.
We've made sure it can't be the answer.
Politics are partly to blame to be sure but in reality the flaws in the technology is what made it impossible to use as a long term solution.
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power.
Solves one problem but causes others. And it is a political non-starter. Fortunately solar and wind + batteries can take up most of the slack if we push them hard enough.
But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem
Have you solved the nuclear waste problem? Do you have a reactor design that cannot render a large area uninhabitable in a serious failure? Have you figured out how to get the cost down to competitive levels without requiring government insurance guarantees? Have you figured out how to restore areas contaminated by the occasional but inevitable containment failures (ala Chernobyl and Fukishima)? Have you proven that new reactor designs are safer/cheaper/reliable? I'm just playing devil's advocate here but there are some serious issues with nuclear power which you can't just hand wave away.
You're quite right that nuclear in theory takes care of a good chuck of the carbon emissions problems but let's not pretend nuclear power doesn't bring it's own set of scary problems to the party. I actually agree that it's probably the least worst near term option but there are some pretty serious downsides to it which render it politically impossible in most places. And it isn't just environmentalists who have a problem with nuclear plants. Nobody really wants them nearby. NIMBY is pretty strong when it comes to something that carries even a small risk of catastrophic contamination.
roll the dice on hopefully developing new and untested power sources in time to avert disaster.
??? Any nuclear reactor design that improves on existing reactors is by definition new and untested because they haven't been deployed. Nuclear power in general is pretty well understood but new (and hopefully improved) reactor designs that we would likely want to use are still just past experimental. If you are referring to wind and solar those aren't new and untested so it's not clear what you are talking about.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end-game. All we need to do is to replace our fossil fuel power plants with nuclear plants to arrest CO2 emissions and buy us more time.
Nice theory. Probably even correct. But since it won't happen what is your next option?
The upside is it will be so obvious that Republicans cannot deny it's happening.
I suppose there is a first time for everything. To date they haven't had any problem denying blatantly obvious scientific evidence and in fact routinely try to suppress evidence they find inconvenient. Not to mention doing things like trying to put creationism in the science classroom and claiming that evolution is "just a theory". Honestly if it wasn't so damaging I'd laugh at the fact that the Republicans are doing a pretty good impression of Bagdad Bob.
However, they'll probably blame it on Democrats somehow
You don't need the word probably in there. They definitely will blame it on democrats no matter how stupid they look doing so.
What the US should be doing is building nuclear power plants
Won't happen. Politically it's just a non-starter for a variety of well understood reasons. People are scared of nuclear power regardless of whether or not they should be. I think you'll only see heavy use of nuclear fission in places where political dissent can be suppressed (like China) or where it is use of nuclear fission is already dominant (like France).
Get rid of fossil fool use for transport.
I think this will happen fairly naturally actually though perhaps not fast enough. I just bought a Chevy Bolt recently and it seems obvious to me that electrification of automobiles is inevitable. Just too many advantages in it. More power, better fuel economy, less maintenance, etc. We also already know how to electrify rail as well though I think diesel locomotives will be with us for quite a while yet. Ocean freight and air travel will be harder nuts to crack but fortunately are smaller nuts too. Solar and wind are already starting to displace fossil fuels on the grid though again perhaps not fast enough. Battery tech is finally getting to the point where they can compensate for the variability of solar and wind too.
If it's not their win, how come others are not competitive?
Mostly because the competition is primarily government contractors who built their businesses around cost plus pricing or government agencies like NASA. Once you design a business model around a cost structure like that it is nearly impossible to change to adapt to severe price competition from a private company focused on cost reduction. They didn't design their rockets with cost as a primary driver and more importantly they didn't design their company cultures with cost as a primary driver. It's the same problem a lot of retailers have in competing with Walmart or Amazon. Those companies designed their entire organizations around efficient infrastructure and once you fall behind in building that it is nearly impossible to catch up unless you are willing and able to lose a LOT of money in the process.
In many cases they also had to please political entities with goals that had no relationship to cost reduction (see the Space Shuttle) which isn't their fault but it makes it impossible to do low cost rockets. Also if someone comes along with a better design than yours then it is difficult for these companies to respond quickly because building a new rocket design takes many years and big capital investments which aren't easy to do even under the best of circumstances.
Even countries with cheaper labour like Russia can't push the price down, not to mention ESA's Ariane that is directly threatened.
Russian labor isn't all that cheap, particularly for the sorts of people you need to build and launch rockets. (we're not talking sweatshop labor here) To make cheap rockets you need to do at minimum two big picture things. 1) You need to design the rockets with cost reduction as a primary goal and 2) you need to build the organization structure and culture to support designing and operating less expensive rockets. Russia knows how to make good rockets but they've taken the approach of using proven designs which work well but which have all the efficiencies already worked out. Basically they are already as cheap as they can make those designs. To make cheaper products they'll have to build new designs from scratch and at that point they really have no advantage over companies built like SpaceX.
The biggest risk to SpaceX is probably Chinese companies with substantial government subsidies. China has shown they are willing to throw the government weight behind industries they think are important and don't mind taking losses to gain market share.
According to the Americans here in Germany, whose "vlogs" I follow, this is only an American thing, and in most of Europe, people are far less materialistic.
The particular manner in which materialism manifests varies from country to country but if you need evidence that Europeans are materialistic one merely has to look at places like Versailles. They have literal freaking palaces and you're going to argue that they don't care about showing off wealth? How many of the major fashion brands are European brands? Paris and Milan are two of the major fashion centers in the world. There are plenty of people in every country on Earth who are materialistic and want to show it off. The only difference is how they go about it.
The only people I ever see act like that, in Germany, France, Belgium, Luxemburg*, Austria, Switzerland, and Spain (so the countries where I was more than a month of my life), are usually the poor immigrant / ghetto type, and even of those, only the sub-group that listens to gangsta rap featuring such "bling" in their videos.
Showing off wealth comes in many forms. Just because some Europeans use some of the less gauche ones doesn't mean they aren't doing it. If you have a yacht in the harbor in Monaco you're showing off your bling. So is buying a fancy purse or expensive shoes.
Ya know, India is one of those places where people need the stuff they buy first and foremost to accomplish something, not as a fashion statement.
While I've never spent time in India I have spent a lot of time working with people from India and in my experience they are no more or less fashion conscious than any other group of people. I've met plenty of Indians who are as vain as any westerners. I don't buy the argument that Indians aren't fashion conscious. The problem is that there are a LOT of poor people in India who don't have vast sums to spend on a luxury smartphone like the ones Apple sells. Indian's have a (probably deserved) reputation for being cheap in the sense of thrifty but that doesn't mean they don't spend money on bling or aren't interested in it.
It's kinda very "western" to have money to squander on "ohh, shiny!".
Hogwash. I've traveled all over the world and there is no culture I've ever seen where there isn't a strong faction of people who squander money on "ohh, shiny". We're just not all that different. How our materialism manifests varies from place to place but it's still omnipresent.
My step son (19) and his friends seem to spend far more time mining older music than listening to new stuff.
That's probably because the catalog of "old" stuff is a lot larger than the new stuff, plus it has already been curated for the good stuff. It's pretty easy to find a Best Of album for some awesome musicians of decades (or centuries) past. Hunting for new hits is always a tedious process and requires a high tolerance for listening to a lot of crap. Kids today have the advantage of having easy access to vast catalogs of good music that simply weren't available for reasonable amounts of money when we were younger. I grew up when vinyl and magnetic tape were your only options and I was nearly an adult before CDs became widespread. The web wasn't a thing until after I graduated college and digital music catalogs have only been a serious option for about 20 years.
I think people tend to love the music they grew up listening to. The more options they have the more likely they are to like a wider variety. Perhaps your step son has a more diverse taste in music simply because he has access to more stuff than we did growing up.
I love a lot of music, and I'll go see anything.
See I'm the opposite. I have pretty diverse musical tastes but have very little interest in most live performances and I don't enjoy the ones I go to very much. Not entirely sure why - just not my thing I guess. I find live performances to be tedious affairs in general with the quality of the performance worse than the recordings in most cases.
When you hear teenagers saying the opposite...asking why 20th century music was so much better, it's kind of odd.
Probably a bit of sampling bias (described above) combined with a small sample size (your immediate contacts) and possibly a touch of hipsterism thrown in. I don't think music from today is any better or worse but it simply hasn't had time to have the good stuff culled from the crap. We know what the hits from the 70s and 80s were so we can easily ignore the (copious) bad stuff.
Maybe you need to try a modern streaming service. Sounds like you tried Pandora in 2001 and gave up.
I have tried them from time to time just to see what is out there. In fairness I'm not a big music listener so I'm definitely not the target demographic for a lot of these services. When I listen to things it tends to be more podcasts, comedy and occasionally talk radio like NPR. I like music now and then but I'm bored or annoyed by most of it. Plus I'm a very active listener so when I listen to music I really like to listen to it like I'm sitting in a concert. I like to focus on what I'm actively doing and that includes listening to music.
You are right. If you never plan to pay for new music again in your life, it's a better to deal buy that 1 CD and listen to it over and over. For people that are actively listening to new music streaming saves them money.
I don't deny that for some people it's a great deal. I merely am pointing out that not everyone has the same needs or interests. I happen to fall into the later category and it sounds like you are in the former. For me a streaming service is a good approximation of useless because it offers almost the exact opposite of what I want. Plus I have a fairly substantial music library collected over many years so it's not as if I have a lack of options already. I could play what I have for more than a year and never hear the same thing twice - all available 24/7 without having to spend another dime on any device I care to utilize and without ever needing an internet connection.
You understand that's not true right? Streaming services allow you to mark things to keep offline.
And what happens when you stop paying for that streaming service? It disappears. And let's be honest, the real value in the service is through active streaming even though that is a nice feature now and then. If you don't have an active (and relatively fast) internet connection most of the time then streaming services aren't really going to be much value. That was my point though it seems I made it clumsily.
You aren't forced to listen by recommendation. Is that what you think? You can pick whatever you want to listen.
Of course I'm aware you don't have to use the recommendations. But what is the point of having them if they suck? If the service isn't recommending things to me that I might be interested in then I'm back to listening to random assortments of music, most of which I'm quite certain that I'm not going to care for. My choices are either to listen to a bunch of random stuff, 99%+ of which is unremarkable at best (to me) or to use recommending services which (to date) do a bad job of figuring out what I might enjoy. Sorry but I don't really care for either of those options.
To be clear, I have very little interest in spending time listening to music that I'm not likely to enjoy. Many people seem to enjoy the hunt for new favorites or simply enjoy listening to music in general more than I do and I respect that but I'm not about to spend my own money and more importantly my own time to do it. Think of it kind of like clothes shopping. Some people love the hunt for new clothes and a new looks but I find the process tedious and unrewarding. Different strokes for different folks and all that. I'm perfectly happy to buy a song or album that I hear through serendipity but I'm just not interested in actively hunting for the needle in the haystack and I'm even less interested in paying to do it. I'm grateful other people enjoy the process so I can sometimes find something I enjoy too thanks to their efforts.
You do realize that a streaming service gives you access to the music you like now
No it lets me rent access to it as long as I pay $10/month in perpetuity so long as I have an active internet connection. No thanks. If that works for you great but it isn't a good value for money to me. If I like a piece of music I'll get it in a format I can listen to whenever I want, without internet access required, and without further transactions required. If this costs a bit more per unit I'm ok with that.
new music as it's released
You hugely overestimate how much that matters to me.
and music from the past that you don't know exists but might like if you heard it.
If I run across it great but I have yet to find a recommendation algorithm that does an even slightly decent job figuring out what I'll enjoy or want to spend time on. Seriously, they are universally terrible at it. Mostly they do one of two things. Either A) they look at listening habits of other people and try to infer what I like from what they like (and fail) or B) they look at what I just listened to and try to recommend the same artist or genre that I just listened to with no clue as to my actual opinion on it. Even when I've shared detailed information about what I actually do like they still fail completely to find recommendations much better than random chance.
Movies are one thing. They are an investment in the time you need to spend to actually enjoy them, and you watch them for the story - a story it is easy to remember.
All entertainment is an investment of your time. If you choose to multitask while enjoying some media then that's fine but you still are spending time on it no matter what the form of entertainment is.
Music, on the other hand, is something you listen to while doing other thing
Maybe YOU listen to it that way but I do not. When I listen to music I really listen to it. Having it just playing as background noise I find to be terribly distracting and irritating. I'm not saying you are wrong to listen to it however you prefer but don't presume that your preferences are universal.
you can stop in the middle of a track without feeling like you've just wasted your time by not getting to the end.
I do that all the time with movies and TV shows. I'm guessing you don't have kids if you are bothered by being interrupted. Heck DVRs are a god send if you have a busy life.
Also, people like to sing along to songs they know which gives music a lot more replay value than a movie.
Hogwash. People quote movies all the time and rewatch them regularly. What do you think people do with all those bluray disks? I can probably quote you every line of the Princess Bride or Star Wars (classic of course) or Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Heck there are some fans who go every week to re-watch Rocky Horror and dress up and recite/sing along. I rewatch movies more often than I listen to any given piece of music but that's just me.
They've been saying that for longer than you've been alive and they'll be saying it long after you are dead. Cute that you think you have some sort of revelation there. My grandparents thought my parent's favorite music was utter drek too and your kids will think your music sucks. A lot of it is crap of course but the funny thing is that we can't quite agree on exactly which bits are the crap.
We have a 100% blues/jazz low power station privately funded, with ZERO commercials that I listen to 99% of the time any more.
So you have very specific tastes and think anything else must be crap. Not true of course just like it wasn't true 50 years ago and won't be true in another 50 years. I have my favorite genres and artists too but just because I don't enjoy it personally doesn't mean others can't/won't.
But now you can also listen to and discover a shit ton of different stuff without having to pay thousands of dollars a year... or, you know.
Wow, what a deal. I can listen to "shit tons of different stuff", most of which I'm almost guaranteed to not enjoy, and pay for the privilege. Maybe you enjoy wasting your time listening to (mostly) crappy music but I've got better things to do so I'll let people like you who don't value their time wade through the drek for me. Having access to a lot of crap doesn't mean that it still isn't crap. You evidently aren't familiar with Sturgeon's Law.
I'll take spotify if i want to listen to new music and not be like old people who listen to the same old stuff
I don't buy music unless it's something I will want to listen to again. Personally I don't really find much enjoyment in listening to a bunch of crap hoping to find a gem among the turds so Spotify is approximately useless to me. I'll happily pay $10 for something I know I like and can enjoy multiple times over $10 for a bunch of stuff I mostly will not like every time. Maybe you just aren't very discerning in what you spend your time listening to?
That's actually good, except people keep upgrading when their devices work fine.
The 1976 Chevy Impala I drove in high school "worked fine" but sometimes it's nice to get something that is better than what you had before.
They need a new hit, not to try to keep wringing excess profit out of a stable source of income for decades to come.
Do they really? Coca Cola has been selling the same formula for sugar water for a century and they're doing alright. And how many $100 billion ideas do you think Apple can realistically make happen? For Apple to grow just 5% next year will require generating more new business than Tesla's entire revenue in 2017. Realistically they don't actually need a hit product. What they need is for their existing products to remain relevant and in a leadership position in the market. That by itself is going to be a difficult trick to pull off. And if they really get in a pinch they have enough cash to buy Ford, GM and Tesla together and get into a completely different industry if they wanted to.
Even Microsoft is starting to learn this a little bit with Office and Windows 10 - don't ruin something people like or they won't buy it anymore.
You are aware that Microsoft is making more money on those products than ever before right?
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, people are not, in fact, 100% accurate counters.
Unfortunately unless you have some way to verify the code and hardware and process you cannot claim with certainty that computers are either. All voting machines (software and hardware) should be open source and designed to be as simple and verifiable as possible. If they cannot be verified then they should not be used.
People make mistakes, and sometimes they do it on purpose. It scales by adding more people, assuming you can find volunteers.
True but the problem with computerized voting is that it only takes one person to scale the "mistakes" and they still sometimes do it on purpose.
Opponents of electronic voting talk about "paper ballots" like they are some magical thing than ensures fair elections. That is nonsense.
I don't think anyone (rational) is claiming paper ballots are a cure all. But they do demonstrably help solve certain validation problems that are difficult to solve without them given the state of the art in computerized voting machines. Introducing computers into the mix does not make these issues go away and in fact makes validation of the process a fair bit harder in a lot of cases. Having a (literal) paper trail makes it easier to check and verify certain parts of the process are working as they should.
Frankly anyone who trusts a voting machine from a proprietary vendor with closed source software and undocumented hardware is an idiot. Everything about the design and construction of the machines (including source code) needs to be verifiable by the general public and the administrators of the voting system. Source code and hardware design should be open source and available to anyone interested. With paper ballots this is simple. It's harder (though arguably worthwhile) with computers but still needs to be done.
I'm not trying to imply that the SSN is a secret. I'm implying that it's UNIQUE.
Social Security Numbers are NOT unique per person. not even close. People have more than one (often for legitimate reasons) and many numbers are used for more than one person (usually for identity theft). We're talking tens of millions of people here. We tend to think of them as unique identifiers in the sense of a primary key but in reality they definitely are not reliable in that capacity and never have been.
It's far better if you never accept the linkage in the first place because, once you've given a piece of information away, you've completely lost control of it.
Quite so.
Better question: Why do we pretend that SSNs are "secret"?
Lot's of data is technically public that you really don't want to be made more available than necessary. Identity theft is a serious problem and given how casually SSN's are handled and how they are used for authentication (even when they shouldn't be) giving a lookup table for them is a terrible idea currently.
They are already semi-public, and generally used as a "citizenship number".
That doesn't make it a good idea or desirable. It's certainly at odds with a lot of privacy considerations.
Why not just go all the way, and make SSNs fully public?
Because you have to change a lot of other infrastructure and business practices to make that a practical idea. In principle you are right and it shouldn't matter but because of how the darn things are actually used it is a terrible idea currently.
If companies want something for authentication, they would have to use something sensible instead.
Hahahahahahaaa... Oh wait, you're serious... Umm, yeah I have ZERO faith that would happen given how poorly they handle them now.
A security flaw in the Comcast Xfinity online portal exposed social security numbers and partial home addresses of more than 26.5 million subscribers
So my beef with this isn't that a security flaw happened. I expect that to happen from time to time even though I think the consequences for it aren't nearly severe enough currently. The problem I have is that Comcast is storing Social Security Numbers in the first place. They have absolutely zero need to store this information. Yes I'm aware that lots of companies do it and for the most part they don't need it either. But let's ignore that and say they do need/want to store my SSN. Then there should be consequences with serious teeth for security failures regarding sensitive information about me. We have these leaks in part because there are effectively zero consequences for mismanagement of sensitive customer data. The companies simply don't have to care very much. Failure to keep this data secure should result in heavy fines and odious government oversight. It should be ugly enough to make them think seriously about what data they really ought to be storing and how they go about it and what best practices to use. Companies that act responsibly should be free to go about their business but those that can't or won't handle sensitive data responsibly should be very afraid.
So one has to wonder, what other stuff is going to break?
If you live in Europe you had better hope the Gulf Stream isn't one of the things that "breaks". If that happens just remember that the northern parts of the USA are roughly the latitude of Spain. The weather would get... interesting to say the least.
I never mentioned high-temperature superconductors at all.
You didn't have to. Using current low temp superconductors is economically infeasible for long distances so the only way your suggestion would work is with some as yet undeveloped high temp superconductor. The cost of cooling the lines would be greater than the savings you'd get from current transmission losses over the kinds of distances we're talking about. You think it's cheap to cool and pump hundreds of miles of lines of liquid nitrogen or similar coolants? If it made economic sense then power companies would already be doing it today and they are not. You think the power companies haven't looked into this?
With normal cables, you're talking about 4–8% loss.
It's not about the energy loss. It's about economic efficiency. But that doesn't matter because you are missing the entire point. If operating a nuclear power station is so dangerous that we need to locate it away from population centers then we shouldn't be operating it at all.
Now whether the cost of the superconducting lines would exceed the cost of those losses is another question
It is definitely NOT a separate question. If it doesn't cost less then there is no point in doing it at all. The number of cases where currently available superconductors are economically more efficient is just a few corner cases today and likely to remain so until we can get high temp superconductors.
There are several superconducting transmission cables are in active use right now.
They are short lines right next to power plants. We're talking less than a kilometer. There are no long distance superconducting power lines in service today
Solar is mostly a "feel-good" solution; capturing a significant fraction of the US energy market with solar is dubious at best.
That's demonstrably false. Germany TODAY gets about 6-7% of their energy from solar and it's clearly possible to do more. Would be much easier to do in many parts of the US which are far sunnier and further south. Hawaii currently gets close to 1/3 of it's electricity from rooftop and grid solar. If you think upwards of 10% (which is very realistic) is not a significant fraction then I don't know what to tell you.
If the US were to try to entirely use solar + batteries for power we would need to cover an area the size of West Virginia with solar panels
It would take roughly a tiny corner of Nevada to power the entire US. Less than 1% of the US landmass. You could capture a good fraction of that simply by using existing roof tops which is already utilized and wasted space anyway and has the bonus of being at point of use. If you're going to argue against solar you might try starting with actual facts instead of made up ones.
Wind is a much better option - centralized power (think MW or 10s of MW) from one turbine
Wind is a great solution in some places and solar is a better option in others. It depends entirely on the local geography. We need and will use both. Centralized power is not necessarily an advantage and in fact distributed power systems can be much more robust if done correctly. The biggest limitation to either of them is the fact that fossil fuels are not required to pay for much of the pollution they generate so economically they appear cheaper than they really are.
A realistic solution is a mix of wind, advancing nuclear, and a dash of solar for the long-term.
A realistic solution is a lot more wind, a lot more solar, keeping what nuke plants we can running for as long as practical (we aren't going to build more). Unfortunately there is no viable solution that doesn't involve substantial fossil fuel use for another half century even if politically we could agree to move on the matter. But as long as we have politicians in the pocket of big oil and coal companies that is going to be hard to do.
With superconductors, that problem is solved. Just build superconducting underground power transmission lines from the middle of nowhere to where the power is needed.
Transmission losses are not that big a deal even with superconductors. Plus you talk about high temp superconductors as if that is something we can suddenly waive into existence. We're certainly not going to use the sorts of superconductors available to us today.
After all, the United States has vast tracts of land with approximately zero people (with some small epsilon) living there, in states like Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, etc. Let's put our nuclear power plants there, so that if things go wrong, we can just bomb and bury them.
If the risk is so bad that locating them away from population centers is necessary then I think it's safe to say that using them is a bad idea. Either make it safe enough to be near to the plant or don't use it. We have other options after all.
Translation: we've spent decades demonizing and regulating nuclear to the point where it's too expensive to generate.
Well if you can figure out a way to reduce regulations on nuclear power without the cost cutting resulting in corner cutting and eventually a catastrophe then please share. Nuclear power is heavily regulated because it's really f***ing dangerous if you aren't watching it very carefully. The problem with fission reactors is that even the safest designs we know of require considerable oversight and regular expensive maintenance by very imperfect humans. While mostly they operate with good safety, when things go wrong they can go REALLY wrong. As long as there is a chance for a failure mode to occur, sooner or later it will. Not to mention the waste problem, the nuclear weapons problems, the insurance problems, etc. Nuclear has some great benefits but it has some serious problems too which cannot be easily dismissed.
We've made sure it can't be the answer.
Politics are partly to blame to be sure but in reality the flaws in the technology is what made it impossible to use as a long term solution.
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power.
Solves one problem but causes others. And it is a political non-starter. Fortunately solar and wind + batteries can take up most of the slack if we push them hard enough.
But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem
Have you solved the nuclear waste problem? Do you have a reactor design that cannot render a large area uninhabitable in a serious failure? Have you figured out how to get the cost down to competitive levels without requiring government insurance guarantees? Have you figured out how to restore areas contaminated by the occasional but inevitable containment failures (ala Chernobyl and Fukishima)? Have you proven that new reactor designs are safer/cheaper/reliable? I'm just playing devil's advocate here but there are some serious issues with nuclear power which you can't just hand wave away.
You're quite right that nuclear in theory takes care of a good chuck of the carbon emissions problems but let's not pretend nuclear power doesn't bring it's own set of scary problems to the party. I actually agree that it's probably the least worst near term option but there are some pretty serious downsides to it which render it politically impossible in most places. And it isn't just environmentalists who have a problem with nuclear plants. Nobody really wants them nearby. NIMBY is pretty strong when it comes to something that carries even a small risk of catastrophic contamination.
roll the dice on hopefully developing new and untested power sources in time to avert disaster.
??? Any nuclear reactor design that improves on existing reactors is by definition new and untested because they haven't been deployed. Nuclear power in general is pretty well understood but new (and hopefully improved) reactor designs that we would likely want to use are still just past experimental. If you are referring to wind and solar those aren't new and untested so it's not clear what you are talking about.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end-game. All we need to do is to replace our fossil fuel power plants with nuclear plants to arrest CO2 emissions and buy us more time.
Nice theory. Probably even correct. But since it won't happen what is your next option?
The upside is it will be so obvious that Republicans cannot deny it's happening.
I suppose there is a first time for everything. To date they haven't had any problem denying blatantly obvious scientific evidence and in fact routinely try to suppress evidence they find inconvenient. Not to mention doing things like trying to put creationism in the science classroom and claiming that evolution is "just a theory". Honestly if it wasn't so damaging I'd laugh at the fact that the Republicans are doing a pretty good impression of Bagdad Bob.
However, they'll probably blame it on Democrats somehow
You don't need the word probably in there. They definitely will blame it on democrats no matter how stupid they look doing so.
You think I'm joking, don't you?
Nope.
What the US should be doing is building nuclear power plants
Won't happen. Politically it's just a non-starter for a variety of well understood reasons. People are scared of nuclear power regardless of whether or not they should be. I think you'll only see heavy use of nuclear fission in places where political dissent can be suppressed (like China) or where it is use of nuclear fission is already dominant (like France).
Get rid of fossil fool use for transport.
I think this will happen fairly naturally actually though perhaps not fast enough. I just bought a Chevy Bolt recently and it seems obvious to me that electrification of automobiles is inevitable. Just too many advantages in it. More power, better fuel economy, less maintenance, etc. We also already know how to electrify rail as well though I think diesel locomotives will be with us for quite a while yet. Ocean freight and air travel will be harder nuts to crack but fortunately are smaller nuts too. Solar and wind are already starting to displace fossil fuels on the grid though again perhaps not fast enough. Battery tech is finally getting to the point where they can compensate for the variability of solar and wind too.
If it's not their win, how come others are not competitive?
Mostly because the competition is primarily government contractors who built their businesses around cost plus pricing or government agencies like NASA. Once you design a business model around a cost structure like that it is nearly impossible to change to adapt to severe price competition from a private company focused on cost reduction. They didn't design their rockets with cost as a primary driver and more importantly they didn't design their company cultures with cost as a primary driver. It's the same problem a lot of retailers have in competing with Walmart or Amazon. Those companies designed their entire organizations around efficient infrastructure and once you fall behind in building that it is nearly impossible to catch up unless you are willing and able to lose a LOT of money in the process.
In many cases they also had to please political entities with goals that had no relationship to cost reduction (see the Space Shuttle) which isn't their fault but it makes it impossible to do low cost rockets. Also if someone comes along with a better design than yours then it is difficult for these companies to respond quickly because building a new rocket design takes many years and big capital investments which aren't easy to do even under the best of circumstances.
Even countries with cheaper labour like Russia can't push the price down, not to mention ESA's Ariane that is directly threatened.
Russian labor isn't all that cheap, particularly for the sorts of people you need to build and launch rockets. (we're not talking sweatshop labor here) To make cheap rockets you need to do at minimum two big picture things. 1) You need to design the rockets with cost reduction as a primary goal and 2) you need to build the organization structure and culture to support designing and operating less expensive rockets. Russia knows how to make good rockets but they've taken the approach of using proven designs which work well but which have all the efficiencies already worked out. Basically they are already as cheap as they can make those designs. To make cheaper products they'll have to build new designs from scratch and at that point they really have no advantage over companies built like SpaceX.
The biggest risk to SpaceX is probably Chinese companies with substantial government subsidies. China has shown they are willing to throw the government weight behind industries they think are important and don't mind taking losses to gain market share.
According to the Americans here in Germany, whose "vlogs" I follow, this is only an American thing, and in most of Europe, people are far less materialistic.
The particular manner in which materialism manifests varies from country to country but if you need evidence that Europeans are materialistic one merely has to look at places like Versailles. They have literal freaking palaces and you're going to argue that they don't care about showing off wealth? How many of the major fashion brands are European brands? Paris and Milan are two of the major fashion centers in the world. There are plenty of people in every country on Earth who are materialistic and want to show it off. The only difference is how they go about it.
The only people I ever see act like that, in Germany, France, Belgium, Luxemburg*, Austria, Switzerland, and Spain (so the countries where I was more than a month of my life), are usually the poor immigrant / ghetto type, and even of those, only the sub-group that listens to gangsta rap featuring such "bling" in their videos.
Showing off wealth comes in many forms. Just because some Europeans use some of the less gauche ones doesn't mean they aren't doing it. If you have a yacht in the harbor in Monaco you're showing off your bling. So is buying a fancy purse or expensive shoes.
Ya know, India is one of those places where people need the stuff they buy first and foremost to accomplish something, not as a fashion statement.
While I've never spent time in India I have spent a lot of time working with people from India and in my experience they are no more or less fashion conscious than any other group of people. I've met plenty of Indians who are as vain as any westerners. I don't buy the argument that Indians aren't fashion conscious. The problem is that there are a LOT of poor people in India who don't have vast sums to spend on a luxury smartphone like the ones Apple sells. Indian's have a (probably deserved) reputation for being cheap in the sense of thrifty but that doesn't mean they don't spend money on bling or aren't interested in it.
It's kinda very "western" to have money to squander on "ohh, shiny!".
Hogwash. I've traveled all over the world and there is no culture I've ever seen where there isn't a strong faction of people who squander money on "ohh, shiny". We're just not all that different. How our materialism manifests varies from place to place but it's still omnipresent.
My step son (19) and his friends seem to spend far more time mining older music than listening to new stuff.
That's probably because the catalog of "old" stuff is a lot larger than the new stuff, plus it has already been curated for the good stuff. It's pretty easy to find a Best Of album for some awesome musicians of decades (or centuries) past. Hunting for new hits is always a tedious process and requires a high tolerance for listening to a lot of crap. Kids today have the advantage of having easy access to vast catalogs of good music that simply weren't available for reasonable amounts of money when we were younger. I grew up when vinyl and magnetic tape were your only options and I was nearly an adult before CDs became widespread. The web wasn't a thing until after I graduated college and digital music catalogs have only been a serious option for about 20 years.
I think people tend to love the music they grew up listening to. The more options they have the more likely they are to like a wider variety. Perhaps your step son has a more diverse taste in music simply because he has access to more stuff than we did growing up.
I love a lot of music, and I'll go see anything.
See I'm the opposite. I have pretty diverse musical tastes but have very little interest in most live performances and I don't enjoy the ones I go to very much. Not entirely sure why - just not my thing I guess. I find live performances to be tedious affairs in general with the quality of the performance worse than the recordings in most cases.
When you hear teenagers saying the opposite...asking why 20th century music was so much better, it's kind of odd.
Probably a bit of sampling bias (described above) combined with a small sample size (your immediate contacts) and possibly a touch of hipsterism thrown in. I don't think music from today is any better or worse but it simply hasn't had time to have the good stuff culled from the crap. We know what the hits from the 70s and 80s were so we can easily ignore the (copious) bad stuff.
Maybe you need to try a modern streaming service. Sounds like you tried Pandora in 2001 and gave up.
I have tried them from time to time just to see what is out there. In fairness I'm not a big music listener so I'm definitely not the target demographic for a lot of these services. When I listen to things it tends to be more podcasts, comedy and occasionally talk radio like NPR. I like music now and then but I'm bored or annoyed by most of it. Plus I'm a very active listener so when I listen to music I really like to listen to it like I'm sitting in a concert. I like to focus on what I'm actively doing and that includes listening to music.
You are right. If you never plan to pay for new music again in your life, it's a better to deal buy that 1 CD and listen to it over and over. For people that are actively listening to new music streaming saves them money.
I don't deny that for some people it's a great deal. I merely am pointing out that not everyone has the same needs or interests. I happen to fall into the later category and it sounds like you are in the former. For me a streaming service is a good approximation of useless because it offers almost the exact opposite of what I want. Plus I have a fairly substantial music library collected over many years so it's not as if I have a lack of options already. I could play what I have for more than a year and never hear the same thing twice - all available 24/7 without having to spend another dime on any device I care to utilize and without ever needing an internet connection.
You understand that's not true right? Streaming services allow you to mark things to keep offline.
And what happens when you stop paying for that streaming service? It disappears. And let's be honest, the real value in the service is through active streaming even though that is a nice feature now and then. If you don't have an active (and relatively fast) internet connection most of the time then streaming services aren't really going to be much value. That was my point though it seems I made it clumsily.
You aren't forced to listen by recommendation. Is that what you think? You can pick whatever you want to listen.
Of course I'm aware you don't have to use the recommendations. But what is the point of having them if they suck? If the service isn't recommending things to me that I might be interested in then I'm back to listening to random assortments of music, most of which I'm quite certain that I'm not going to care for. My choices are either to listen to a bunch of random stuff, 99%+ of which is unremarkable at best (to me) or to use recommending services which (to date) do a bad job of figuring out what I might enjoy. Sorry but I don't really care for either of those options.
To be clear, I have very little interest in spending time listening to music that I'm not likely to enjoy. Many people seem to enjoy the hunt for new favorites or simply enjoy listening to music in general more than I do and I respect that but I'm not about to spend my own money and more importantly my own time to do it. Think of it kind of like clothes shopping. Some people love the hunt for new clothes and a new looks but I find the process tedious and unrewarding. Different strokes for different folks and all that. I'm perfectly happy to buy a song or album that I hear through serendipity but I'm just not interested in actively hunting for the needle in the haystack and I'm even less interested in paying to do it. I'm grateful other people enjoy the process so I can sometimes find something I enjoy too thanks to their efforts.
You do realize that a streaming service gives you access to the music you like now
No it lets me rent access to it as long as I pay $10/month in perpetuity so long as I have an active internet connection. No thanks. If that works for you great but it isn't a good value for money to me. If I like a piece of music I'll get it in a format I can listen to whenever I want, without internet access required, and without further transactions required. If this costs a bit more per unit I'm ok with that.
new music as it's released
You hugely overestimate how much that matters to me.
and music from the past that you don't know exists but might like if you heard it.
If I run across it great but I have yet to find a recommendation algorithm that does an even slightly decent job figuring out what I'll enjoy or want to spend time on. Seriously, they are universally terrible at it. Mostly they do one of two things. Either A) they look at listening habits of other people and try to infer what I like from what they like (and fail) or B) they look at what I just listened to and try to recommend the same artist or genre that I just listened to with no clue as to my actual opinion on it. Even when I've shared detailed information about what I actually do like they still fail completely to find recommendations much better than random chance.
Movies are one thing. They are an investment in the time you need to spend to actually enjoy them, and you watch them for the story - a story it is easy to remember.
All entertainment is an investment of your time. If you choose to multitask while enjoying some media then that's fine but you still are spending time on it no matter what the form of entertainment is.
Music, on the other hand, is something you listen to while doing other thing
Maybe YOU listen to it that way but I do not. When I listen to music I really listen to it. Having it just playing as background noise I find to be terribly distracting and irritating. I'm not saying you are wrong to listen to it however you prefer but don't presume that your preferences are universal.
you can stop in the middle of a track without feeling like you've just wasted your time by not getting to the end.
I do that all the time with movies and TV shows. I'm guessing you don't have kids if you are bothered by being interrupted. Heck DVRs are a god send if you have a busy life.
Also, people like to sing along to songs they know which gives music a lot more replay value than a movie.
Hogwash. People quote movies all the time and rewatch them regularly. What do you think people do with all those bluray disks? I can probably quote you every line of the Princess Bride or Star Wars (classic of course) or Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Heck there are some fans who go every week to re-watch Rocky Horror and dress up and recite/sing along. I rewatch movies more often than I listen to any given piece of music but that's just me.
99% of the new music today is garbage.
They've been saying that for longer than you've been alive and they'll be saying it long after you are dead. Cute that you think you have some sort of revelation there. My grandparents thought my parent's favorite music was utter drek too and your kids will think your music sucks. A lot of it is crap of course but the funny thing is that we can't quite agree on exactly which bits are the crap.
We have a 100% blues/jazz low power station privately funded, with ZERO commercials that I listen to 99% of the time any more.
So you have very specific tastes and think anything else must be crap. Not true of course just like it wasn't true 50 years ago and won't be true in another 50 years. I have my favorite genres and artists too but just because I don't enjoy it personally doesn't mean others can't/won't.
But now you can also listen to and discover a shit ton of different stuff without having to pay thousands of dollars a year... or, you know.
Wow, what a deal. I can listen to "shit tons of different stuff", most of which I'm almost guaranteed to not enjoy, and pay for the privilege. Maybe you enjoy wasting your time listening to (mostly) crappy music but I've got better things to do so I'll let people like you who don't value their time wade through the drek for me. Having access to a lot of crap doesn't mean that it still isn't crap. You evidently aren't familiar with Sturgeon's Law.
I'll take spotify if i want to listen to new music and not be like old people who listen to the same old stuff
I don't buy music unless it's something I will want to listen to again. Personally I don't really find much enjoyment in listening to a bunch of crap hoping to find a gem among the turds so Spotify is approximately useless to me. I'll happily pay $10 for something I know I like and can enjoy multiple times over $10 for a bunch of stuff I mostly will not like every time. Maybe you just aren't very discerning in what you spend your time listening to?
That's actually good, except people keep upgrading when their devices work fine.
The 1976 Chevy Impala I drove in high school "worked fine" but sometimes it's nice to get something that is better than what you had before.
They need a new hit, not to try to keep wringing excess profit out of a stable source of income for decades to come.
Do they really? Coca Cola has been selling the same formula for sugar water for a century and they're doing alright. And how many $100 billion ideas do you think Apple can realistically make happen? For Apple to grow just 5% next year will require generating more new business than Tesla's entire revenue in 2017. Realistically they don't actually need a hit product. What they need is for their existing products to remain relevant and in a leadership position in the market. That by itself is going to be a difficult trick to pull off. And if they really get in a pinch they have enough cash to buy Ford, GM and Tesla together and get into a completely different industry if they wanted to.
Even Microsoft is starting to learn this a little bit with Office and Windows 10 - don't ruin something people like or they won't buy it anymore.
You are aware that Microsoft is making more money on those products than ever before right?