I can't really disagree with what you're saying above, to be honest. I simply don't think we're getting anything like a square deal for what we pay, and that civilization isn't produced by government in general. It's produced by the people in it, and to my eyes, has been running downhill ever faster despite what puny efforts our self-defeating government tries to do, when they try at all.
Parents no longer teach their children morals, and this is about the 2-3rd generation of that. Depending on the schools for that is a joke, and in fact they are more or less against the idea of morals, religion, you name it along those lines.
Of the boxes, yeah, the ballot one is seriously broken, I'm working on the soap one, and prepared for the next as well. But I'd prefer, were it reasonable, to move to yeah, NZ or some place where the government doesn't have it's head so far into the nether regions. But we're all catching the same disease according to my correspondents there and worldwide -- just a matter of how far down the slippery slope one or another place has managed to slide so far.
Not all low or little government places turn into Somalia either. You don't see this in a lot of places where a government may as well not exist. They're a special (bad) case. Interiors of many countries may as well be un-governed except by the "old ways and old wise" people and do fine, no taxes involved.
And yes, a lot of the cooler stuff I do in science depends on other people around the world who do things I can't. On the other side of that, I've made a huge amount of gear myself that I otherwise couldn't find or afford. I've tried pretty hard to be self sufficient on my farm (not a commune, though there are a couple around the area here) and frankly, after 30 years of working on that, have failed. I couldn't feed etc myself at this point if my life depended on it, and it's kind of a big disappointment that I've not managed it so far, and probably never will, as I'm getting too old to do that much work to create enough food. Yeah, we have a big garden, and game is plentiful in the "seasonal hunting" sense, but if I wasn't the only one trying to live off that, there'd be some serious issues -- not enough game anymore as population densifies.
You'd be amazed how cheap it is to buy a congressman on an issue, and please don't ask how I know. Taxes cost more and give less per buck.
Too late, they did gun control (near elimination for all law abiding people) on the same wacky thought processes, and saw home invasions (with things like baseball bats) go way up as a result of the criminals knowing they'd never have to face armed resistance. Only the law abiding were inconvenienced. But you know, the legislators saw a problem and "did something" so they sleep fine -- and have armed guards, unlike the sheeple who put them in office.
Too bad if you're 70 yrs old and can't simply beat up a young, 300 lb thug with what they leave you with to defend yourself.
Heck, if you're in a heli, you're one of the few people who could catch those guys and really pinpoint where they are -- and follow them as they run too. Radio doesn't let you patch to phone or someone who can call cops with GPS locations?
Instrument Flight Rules. They have the ability to bring the plane almost to a perfect landing while sleeping, and they regularly fly in conditions where they might as well not be in the cockpit anyway. There's some pretty sweet avionics gear on big planes now. I'd hate to be hit in a little plane, but the ones in question often have to land in circumstance where the pilot is effectively blind anyway...
Not that it wouldn't be annoying as heck to have to do that all the time. And this kind of speaks to the inadequate geekiness of those doing it. A nice CO2 laser would shatter or hole the windscreen (at least on a car, maybe planes have better ones)...Much Mo Bettah if you want to mess up a plane. 10-20 watts output will do it at a mile.
Amen. I trade stocks for a living, and some of the right-wing-radical types get to say a lot more about this than anyone should listen to. In fact, there's where I see the main bulk of anthropogenic CC deniers. Of course, this set rejects any change at all (unless it's a massive bailout for them off our backs), and really doesn't want to think much. Business as usual is their religion, because that's how they got rich and powerful, and don't want to have to learn some new way.
Most of them have big money invested in non renewable rescources -- some not very liquid (like a stock you can just sell in milliseconds) - they own things you can't sell quick and easy, especially if at that point no one else wants them much either, so they see a direct threat in this whole idea, and to them, it's a real threat and real money at stake. And for them, buying a credible scientist amounts to less than lunch money or a trip on the corprate jet. Sad, but.
So much so, that it costs less to buy off a decent (even Nobel prize level) scientist to say what they want said, right out in public. I have found it very entertaining to "follow the money" and it's actually kind of disgusting how cheap it is to buy a fake "controversy" where none exists among scientists not paid by these guys and/or coal/oil firms.
In fact, virtually 100% of all the deniers can be traced back to payment from one or more such entities. They've not bothered covering their tracks all that well, probably because they think the "greenies" don't include any forensic accountants. Wrong, but....
These guys are running scared, and putting money into people whose mouths say what they want said....
Look for yourselves -- it's not that hard to trace funding on some study. It's only a little harder to trace money given previously to get some one to say something.
If you want some guys easy to find out, and to see the very hotbed of this kind of scam, look at Investors Business Daily -- you'll want to puke of course, but they are more "out there" than any other source of this, and the least clever about who they quote and covering their tracks. Note, it's an expensive (and otherwise good info source) paper for investors -- many hundreds of bucks a year. I stopped my sub to them because the editorials on this and other issues made me want to barf too often.
Another way to get at the truth is things like NASA data as mentioned, and just looking at what was thought before this all became so politicized and conflictinated. There really wasn't much controversy then -- when it was "safe" to ignore by the big boys in carbon generation. And it should be obvious to most we are now, finally, doing things at a large enough scale to matter -- look at pictures of the earth from space at night...
There are nice long data series on ppm of CO2 in the air as measured in HI for example.
We've tripled it. If we do so again, warming won't matter -- we'll simply suffocate - we'll be at the level where humans can't get rid of their internally generated CO2 quick enough to not pass out. We could hope for some limited cooling from a volcano, or some sort of nuclear winter as far as warming goes, but that sets a pretty hard limit.
And lets face it -- the last time all this carbon was in the air -- we had the dinosaur climate (and our midwest was under water). There's no particular reason to disbelieve that if we put things back that way, we'd have the same climate as then, is there?
Humans can adapt and move, at some cost and travail. But how about trees? We're already seeing issues there and that's just one other form of life.
I wuz just ribbing you -- you'd have to know my own situation to appreciate the humor, maybe.
I live in the far boonies, after having been born in DC where it's "civilized". Here there are more color TV's than indoor plumbing, and far more guns (for example) per capita than most places. The government is minimal -- mostly they avoid the rest of us as long as we pay them a little protection. (See my root website above the forums linked in my sig). We provide the civilization here, and it's a far piece better than anything you get at the seat of power in DC, almost too much to describe without writing a book about it all.
And yeah, I run a successful high tech business from here, and even do nuclear physics, something I probably could not do as well or as profitably in conditions most would call "civilization".
There's no plumbing in my house. That would change it from legally a "barn" into something I'd have to pay "price of a new car every year" taxes on - instead of 50 bucks. I think my/our way out here is far better. The feds don't do diddly for us, thank god, except when they came in with machine guns to warrentlessly accuse us of and search us for having a meth lab here -- when we were simply developing software product. Their idea of civilization means no one can be rich and successful without being a wage slave in some dense city situation unless they are breaking some law, and though innocent, I had to pay some thousands of bucks in "taxes" to the legal profession to make them go away because one of my guys had left a joint in an ashtray. Even though they broke more laws coming here than we ever have. And they stole the plastic syringes we used to medicate (olive oil) our cats that had ear mites. And some of my legal chemistry glassware. And stole whatever else they wanted for themselves. If that's civilization, you can keep it. Try staring down 10 or 15 people pointing loaded guns at you, shaking like they were on drugs themselves -- that's what my taxes bought me. If that's civilization, you can keep it. Or....what they let the bankers and the very rich do to the rest of us and our kids. It's that I'm merely somewhat rich that I'm not in jail now for looking wrong, despite being law-abiding.
Easy to have a somewhat different view. It isn't taxes that bought civilization or neighborhood here at all -- it's morals, and yeah, we all have guns to rival Somalia, but somehow no one gets shot. Manners and all that, which taxes or what they paid for didn't provide -- at all.
About your sig -- do you call what just happened civilization? Think you got your money's worth? Do you even track the decline of what's often called civilization over the last few decades? I've been. I think it's a rotten deal -- for a whole broad spectrum of definitions of "what just happened".
Negotiating with politicians is like negotiating with an alligator. There, fixed it for you.
Otherwise, you're on target. QE is stealth-bailout, as if the first billions weren't enough, and it's not us they are taking care of (unless you're a highly paid bank worker).
I trade for a living, since well before this mess, do well, and you bet I followed the money. I feel really good when I outmaneuver these thieves and make money off them for my research in something positive. They're not as smart as they think they are -- access to political power has made them lazy and soft. And being as large as they are, they can't be nimble. I can do a million dollar trade in milliseconds without moving the market that much. As a fraction of resources, they can't do the same, so you can spot their moves and front run them, no kidding, and I'm not talking about the silly HFT guys moving millions of just a few very liquid stocks (their algs don't work on less liquid stocks) over a penny value change here and there, but GS, mutual funds and so forth...
Beat them at their own game -- it's the only one we get to play in. Politics long ago lost any interest in the public and voters -- notice any true choice at the polls in the last few decades? I haven't. So glibly saying "vote the jerks out" doesn't work any more than it did when we voted incumbents out just now -- since most of who won was of one party, they are now claiming a "mandate" nearly zero of us had in mind -- we just wanted to lose the last batch of clowns and our only choice was another batch. Maybe when it happens again, over and over a few times, they'll get the real word instead of what they wish to believe. By then, the country will be so degraded it won't matter, however.
Bad quote alert. Unless Heinlein (an atheist) quoted CS Lewis (a pretty serious Christian) without attribution, that's a Heinlein quote.
Not that it really matters.
Yes, undersampling gives errors, basic Nyquist theorem. In this case, maybe not so bad, at least in XY grids. But what about under-ocean temperatures, the effects on currents which in turn control above ocean temperatures and distributions. The fact that radiative energy losses aren't linear with temperature?
Could it be a better measure of average temperature might be to compute what it would take to cool the top few miles of crust X degrees?
That itself would assume it's OK to oversimplify to a huge extent. For example -- take ice into account -- it takes a lotta ergs to go from ice at 0c to water at 0c, which is of course, what we're seeing, so even temperature is vastly too simple as a metric.
Too bad our science-challenged and attention span of a butterfly populace can have all this nicely put into an idiot-grade soundbite.
Wait and see, you'll see, if you live long enough to do the wait -- or as they used to say, god willin' and the creek don't rise.
At least economists exist so the weather guys aren't at the absolute bottom of prediction accuracy.
Though I admit, they have a problem I don't have. I can look at the radar or satellite, and knowing where I am on the map, predict the weather over the next few hours far more accurately than they ever can. The reason is simple -- I don't have a large listening area to predict weather over, just my 50 acres or so. When that guy says something like 50% chance of rain, what he really has to mean is "50% of you are gong to get rained like heck on, the rest, not". But he doesn't have time to break it down mile by mile for the whole listening crowd. For example, my local NPR radio station (WVTF) used to do pretty good, but as their listening area has increased, their weather predictions have become utterly ridiculous -- for me....and it's not their fault beyond expanding too large to serve their audience well.
Perhaps the one obvious case of "economies of scale" not working at all?
Yup, did a couple successful startups, now retired. As a poster above said, if making the thing a success isn't more or less your passion in every waking moment, you don't live and breath for this, it's likely not going to do well, and you shouldn't even try it. A lot of half-ass doesn't add up, any more than a lot of light taps will split a log like one good ax swing will.
This of course, will generate troubles for anyone thinking they can have a "life" outside this. There is no life outside this at that stage, or you're just wasting your time pretending. Common to just about every startup is doing something none of the big guys (who could accomplish the same a lot easier and with a fraction of their resources) thought possible at all, or they'd have done it themselves. In other words, you are attempting something acknowledged impossible or unlikely to succeed by many others expert in the field. It's pure vanity to think that only you had this really new great idea. More likely it came to many people, most of whom had more realistic assessment of it's chances of success, and dropped it without you hearing about it.
When it works, it's so glorious it's hard to describe, everyone does well (or at least, I always took real good care of the people that helped me -- loyalty is a two way thing or it's worthless), and you ride off into the sunset, finding people who are better at running/maintaining a business than the current crew, who by now are experts at starting one -- different job. When it fails, well, it's pretty ugly for all concerned.
It's a big chance to take to start one of these, or work in one and unless you understand this, you probably shouldn't be involved at all. High risk for potential reward, no guts no glory, all that.
Once I became aware of what it takes to do this and pull it off...I became so picky about what in life might be worth that level of commitment, and I don't find anything anymore that is worth that, so I quit doing it. I have the choice because the couple I did actually did succeed reasonably well, though. It did take half a decade to recover mentally, also. Maybe quicker if you're younger at the time, and like combat, this is a young person's game. No one else has the energy and intensity required to say every day "the impossible only takes a little longer".
If that doesn't include you as well as most of the rest of the team, run like hell. Becuase if it's not a happy team busting tail and complimenting one another smoothly, it's going to fail anyway.
It's OK, they are a State and can simply pay them with un-secured IOU's and then default on them. For once, someone sticking it to a carrier who can make it stick!
Legal issues have been cited on that one. Otherwise, I totally agree. Obviously, you'd not always want to have the other guy get to shoot first, if he's got an RPG, to make it "self defense"... The big, blinding searchlight idea (mine) is one I kind of like, who needs a laser anyway? You need a broad radiator, not a point source (no matter the eventual size of the beam) because a small source is easily shot out, temporarily blinding only one guy, and a monochromatic source easily filtered out.
If the bad guy has a scope, he just doesn't get the point source in his field of view, and he's fine.
I'm a CCW holder but generally carry open when I do. People don't seem to mind, but the nastier looking types tend to avoid me. My bank, and the local liquor store both asked me to please carry -- they know I'm a good guy, and they figure the bad guys will leave them alone when they see me. Small town social dynamics, it's probably different in cities.
Gawd I hate to agree, but when politics works, there's no need for it, or as John Varley said (probably quoting someone else) "the only good thing about politics is that it sometimes substitutes words for fists". Rule is maintained by force, here, and more so in most places, but make no mistake that there is anyplace where it isn't. It's not hard at all to get shot by our government officials in various capacities, and they don't get jail time. That's the sad truth -- sometimes maybe it's even justified.
I utterly reject the "just vote them out" argument. What choice did we have this last election? So we vote incumbents out, and the other batch of clowns now claims they have a "mandate". No, they don't, they were just the other batch of clowns and we effectively had zero choice at all.
Keep that stuff up long enough and it won't just be the psychopath nutbags doing things like this. What more warning should they need that all too many think the "system" is completely out of control of the voters and there's no other way? Oh I forgot, they have no brains. On either end of the gun.
Thanks for confirming what I said. Like you said, the only way you got busted is someone noticing something had changed from one observation to the next, because you knew how to be patient and move so slowly that no one ever saw you actually move -- am I right?
Real sniping ain't no video game, and anyone who has knows that.
I was a different type of cold warrior -- I worked signals, sources, stuff like that.
I won't disagree with a pro on this, you're probably right that they didn't measure what they thought -- as Feynman pointed out, even with rats, a good experiment is truly difficult to design.
On the other hand, the premise might be believable even if the experiment is flawed. Humans needed to detect motion above all else to survive earlier on in evolution, as something moving might have plans to eat one of us. We can see tiny movements where we can't see diddly staring right at the same thing motionless -- read any sniper training manual for more on that one. So the super sensitivity to motion is a well known thing, and I would suppose that would make it easy to distract one from changes in the thing moving, because for one thing, that doesn't usually happen and when something is moving, it's mostly the ac coupled edge detectors in your neural nets firing, which isn't the same stuff as what you use to see a shape so much. Probably just drowns that out a little for most observers who haven't specially trained to notice things like that -- evolution wouldn't seem to require telling if a tiger changes into a panther during a leap at your throat.
There's another important reason for alloy wheels, and it's called "unsprung weight". Lighter wheels are easier for a given suspension to keep in contact with the road for one thing, for the same comfort level, and believe it or not, the new low aspect ratio tire and wheel combos weigh lots less than back in the day, because thick rubber is heavy stuff. Also, heavy wheels actually use significant power on acceleration which is why drag racers were the early adopters. You have to accelerate them both in the linear and the angular sense. Way back, Mopar put out a paper mentioning how much it cost you in a race. If you're not racing, it costs you in fuel instead.
Spokes also satisfy this most times, they aren't so heavy either.
Amen brother. What more can I say, you said it well. I have to switch between 3 vehicles, 2 of which have this nutball "think of the children" stupidity, and one that doesn't. And the two that do, don't do it the same way, so it's a full out re-boot of my performance visualization every time, which is prone to error in a stressful moment (though just trying to be ready is more than most do).
Humans are still to stupid for trains, sadly. We insist on freedoms we can't really afford, instead like being able to go point to point on a whim. I'm guessing it will be forced on us at some point.
I like this idea, and the idea that it's power to weight and other similar factors. What I find funny is it seems all the underpowered cars are the ones going the fastest and tailgating, while the real hot rods are mostly stylin'. Nothing to prove, after all. Most hot-rodders (sadly far from all) kinda pick their place to do nutty things, as I described doing in an empty parking lot above and got called a moron for doing -- it *should* have been safe to do there, private property, no other cars, permission (encouragement) of the owner.
I'm a moron who once saved a car full of lives by changing a T bone accident into a side-to-side crash, which only lightly injured people, when a moron blew a stopsign and there was no other way to avoid a direct hit on that driver without myself being run over by a concrete truck in the other lane.
I am NOT a moron. See my sig and go learn something.
Yes, a driver who turns a wheel left expects the car to rotate leftward. One who expects it to turn at higher G's than any race car ever built, while shutting down the engine (which you may need, to avoid someone coming up fast from behind while they are texting and don't notice they're going to hit you hard -- that might be why you're trying to change path in the first place) -- now that's a moron. One who shouldn't be allowed to drive, but we let morons drive, it seems. By making it appear easy and safe, we make it more dangerous.
I think you missed it eldavojohn -- Goldman didn't do the leak, and undisclosed customer of theirs supposedly did; but perhaps at their behest, astroturfing is well within their "ethical limits". I trade for a living and watch Goldman pretty close. There's nothing they won't do, trust me -- even if it gets them a fine of a couple weeks profits like last time...on which deals they of course made far more than the fine anyway. Best law money can buy!
You have it backwards. Most of the drain in most houses is from cheap, inefficient induction motors in appliances like AC and refrigerators and washing machines. Good efficiency induction motors need more copper and iron, and GE and their ilk don't care about total cost of ownership for you. This IS changing, just not really quickly. Lower voltage makes them draw much MORE power, actually, and can even burn them up in a brownout. That is, if they're measuring power, not volt-amps, or just current.
I know this because I live off the grid on PV power, and I figured out what each milliwatt hour costs me, from each and every thing I own and use, as PV power is on the expensive side. Is it cheaper to get an efficient freezer and put it in an unheated space, compared to buying more panels and batteries -- yes, a lot. Vampire loads (you name it, what doesn't have remote-on or a clock these days) around here get put on a power strip and unplugged when not actually in use, period.
Now, with many if not most things now using moderately efficient switching power supplies, the power drain from them *does not change* with voltage, actually. More volts, they draw less current. Many supplies no longer even need a switch to go from 120v to 240v!
You have to know better than to think that the aptly named "power company" will pass on any savings to you. They'll use this as an excuse to *raise* rates at certain times when you want power, and keep the the same or still constantly rising the rest of the time.
They aren't called the power company for no reason -- they have the best laws money can buy, they have a lot more influence over your life than most realize.
Or, driver "assistance" can kill if you're not expecting it to kick in and do what it does. Dumb example: I own a nice 2010 Camao SS. It has some of this stuff in it. First thing I do with a new car is see how it does when you deliberatly toss it out of control, does it push, or does it pull, for example. They have a nice big empty lot at the dealer, so I blast down the length in first gear, then whip the wheel hard left-lock to try and spin it.
Instead of spinning like any car would (and I was still at full throttle) the computer kicked in an tried to actually do something impossible, which nearly sent me directly into the nearest stout concrete based light pole which I normally would have spun right on past without coming anywhere close to it. Yeah, that was a great outcome. Only the fact that I am a trained race driver and instantly ready for anything saved our lives (and the new car).
Look out pedestrians -- this stuff is going to get a bunch of you killed when cars don't respond as drivers expect they will. Traction control is nice to a point (without it, the thing has enough torque to light off the Pirrellis in the first three gears, and 90 mph is no time to break the back tires loose unexpectedly) but do you really trust your life to some programmer, or would it not be better to learn how to friggin drive (and insist that others do too, or can't get licenses)?
The illusion of safety can't break the laws of physics -- get real. Things have limits, and it's best when those are exceeded to have the thing act "naturally" so one can learn to use it within those limits, and how to get it back when you lose it. A predetermined response to a certain condition cannot, and never will be, the right answer to every situation.
Lucky, you can still turn most of that junk off. I'd rather let Darwin take care of those who won't learn to drive, but it is sad they take others with them. I do not believe any of this will help with the latter, however. Can't fix stupid.
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Parents no longer teach their children morals, and this is about the 2-3rd generation of that. Depending on the schools for that is a joke, and in fact they are more or less against the idea of morals, religion, you name it along those lines.
Of the boxes, yeah, the ballot one is seriously broken, I'm working on the soap one, and prepared for the next as well. But I'd prefer, were it reasonable, to move to yeah, NZ or some place where the government doesn't have it's head so far into the nether regions. But we're all catching the same disease according to my correspondents there and worldwide -- just a matter of how far down the slippery slope one or another place has managed to slide so far.
Not all low or little government places turn into Somalia either. You don't see this in a lot of places where a government may as well not exist. They're a special (bad) case. Interiors of many countries may as well be un-governed except by the "old ways and old wise" people and do fine, no taxes involved.
And yes, a lot of the cooler stuff I do in science depends on other people around the world who do things I can't. On the other side of that, I've made a huge amount of gear myself that I otherwise couldn't find or afford. I've tried pretty hard to be self sufficient on my farm (not a commune, though there are a couple around the area here) and frankly, after 30 years of working on that, have failed. I couldn't feed etc myself at this point if my life depended on it, and it's kind of a big disappointment that I've not managed it so far, and probably never will, as I'm getting too old to do that much work to create enough food. Yeah, we have a big garden, and game is plentiful in the "seasonal hunting" sense, but if I wasn't the only one trying to live off that, there'd be some serious issues -- not enough game anymore as population densifies.
You'd be amazed how cheap it is to buy a congressman on an issue, and please don't ask how I know. Taxes cost more and give less per buck.
Too bad if you're 70 yrs old and can't simply beat up a young, 300 lb thug with what they leave you with to defend yourself.
Heck, if you're in a heli, you're one of the few people who could catch those guys and really pinpoint where they are -- and follow them as they run too. Radio doesn't let you patch to phone or someone who can call cops with GPS locations?
Not that it wouldn't be annoying as heck to have to do that all the time. And this kind of speaks to the inadequate geekiness of those doing it. A nice CO2 laser would shatter or hole the windscreen (at least on a car, maybe planes have better ones)...Much Mo Bettah if you want to mess up a plane. 10-20 watts output will do it at a mile.
Most of them have big money invested in non renewable rescources -- some not very liquid (like a stock you can just sell in milliseconds) - they own things you can't sell quick and easy, especially if at that point no one else wants them much either, so they see a direct threat in this whole idea, and to them, it's a real threat and real money at stake. And for them, buying a credible scientist amounts to less than lunch money or a trip on the corprate jet. Sad, but.
So much so, that it costs less to buy off a decent (even Nobel prize level) scientist to say what they want said, right out in public. I have found it very entertaining to "follow the money" and it's actually kind of disgusting how cheap it is to buy a fake "controversy" where none exists among scientists not paid by these guys and/or coal/oil firms.
In fact, virtually 100% of all the deniers can be traced back to payment from one or more such entities. They've not bothered covering their tracks all that well, probably because they think the "greenies" don't include any forensic accountants. Wrong, but....
These guys are running scared, and putting money into people whose mouths say what they want said.... Look for yourselves -- it's not that hard to trace funding on some study. It's only a little harder to trace money given previously to get some one to say something.
If you want some guys easy to find out, and to see the very hotbed of this kind of scam, look at Investors Business Daily -- you'll want to puke of course, but they are more "out there" than any other source of this, and the least clever about who they quote and covering their tracks. Note, it's an expensive (and otherwise good info source) paper for investors -- many hundreds of bucks a year. I stopped my sub to them because the editorials on this and other issues made me want to barf too often.
Another way to get at the truth is things like NASA data as mentioned, and just looking at what was thought before this all became so politicized and conflictinated. There really wasn't much controversy then -- when it was "safe" to ignore by the big boys in carbon generation. And it should be obvious to most we are now, finally, doing things at a large enough scale to matter -- look at pictures of the earth from space at night...
There are nice long data series on ppm of CO2 in the air as measured in HI for example. We've tripled it. If we do so again, warming won't matter -- we'll simply suffocate - we'll be at the level where humans can't get rid of their internally generated CO2 quick enough to not pass out. We could hope for some limited cooling from a volcano, or some sort of nuclear winter as far as warming goes, but that sets a pretty hard limit.
And lets face it -- the last time all this carbon was in the air -- we had the dinosaur climate (and our midwest was under water). There's no particular reason to disbelieve that if we put things back that way, we'd have the same climate as then, is there?
Humans can adapt and move, at some cost and travail. But how about trees? We're already seeing issues there and that's just one other form of life.
I live in the far boonies, after having been born in DC where it's "civilized". Here there are more color TV's than indoor plumbing, and far more guns (for example) per capita than most places. The government is minimal -- mostly they avoid the rest of us as long as we pay them a little protection. (See my root website above the forums linked in my sig). We provide the civilization here, and it's a far piece better than anything you get at the seat of power in DC, almost too much to describe without writing a book about it all.
And yeah, I run a successful high tech business from here, and even do nuclear physics, something I probably could not do as well or as profitably in conditions most would call "civilization". There's no plumbing in my house. That would change it from legally a "barn" into something I'd have to pay "price of a new car every year" taxes on - instead of 50 bucks. I think my/our way out here is far better. The feds don't do diddly for us, thank god, except when they came in with machine guns to warrentlessly accuse us of and search us for having a meth lab here -- when we were simply developing software product. Their idea of civilization means no one can be rich and successful without being a wage slave in some dense city situation unless they are breaking some law, and though innocent, I had to pay some thousands of bucks in "taxes" to the legal profession to make them go away because one of my guys had left a joint in an ashtray. Even though they broke more laws coming here than we ever have. And they stole the plastic syringes we used to medicate (olive oil) our cats that had ear mites. And some of my legal chemistry glassware. And stole whatever else they wanted for themselves. If that's civilization, you can keep it. Try staring down 10 or 15 people pointing loaded guns at you, shaking like they were on drugs themselves -- that's what my taxes bought me. If that's civilization, you can keep it. Or....what they let the bankers and the very rich do to the rest of us and our kids. It's that I'm merely somewhat rich that I'm not in jail now for looking wrong, despite being law-abiding.
Easy to have a somewhat different view. It isn't taxes that bought civilization or neighborhood here at all -- it's morals, and yeah, we all have guns to rival Somalia, but somehow no one gets shot. Manners and all that, which taxes or what they paid for didn't provide -- at all.
GoodLuckWithThat.
Sorry, you're getting ripped off.
Otherwise, you're on target. QE is stealth-bailout, as if the first billions weren't enough, and it's not us they are taking care of (unless you're a highly paid bank worker).
I trade for a living, since well before this mess, do well, and you bet I followed the money. I feel really good when I outmaneuver these thieves and make money off them for my research in something positive. They're not as smart as they think they are -- access to political power has made them lazy and soft. And being as large as they are, they can't be nimble. I can do a million dollar trade in milliseconds without moving the market that much. As a fraction of resources, they can't do the same, so you can spot their moves and front run them, no kidding, and I'm not talking about the silly HFT guys moving millions of just a few very liquid stocks (their algs don't work on less liquid stocks) over a penny value change here and there, but GS, mutual funds and so forth...
Beat them at their own game -- it's the only one we get to play in. Politics long ago lost any interest in the public and voters -- notice any true choice at the polls in the last few decades? I haven't. So glibly saying "vote the jerks out" doesn't work any more than it did when we voted incumbents out just now -- since most of who won was of one party, they are now claiming a "mandate" nearly zero of us had in mind -- we just wanted to lose the last batch of clowns and our only choice was another batch. Maybe when it happens again, over and over a few times, they'll get the real word instead of what they wish to believe. By then, the country will be so degraded it won't matter, however.
Of course you've only handled the originating side of the call here - both sides need handled.
This tech solution would develop quite rapidly if we solved the social problem, first.
Yes, undersampling gives errors, basic Nyquist theorem. In this case, maybe not so bad, at least in XY grids. But what about under-ocean temperatures, the effects on currents which in turn control above ocean temperatures and distributions. The fact that radiative energy losses aren't linear with temperature?
Could it be a better measure of average temperature might be to compute what it would take to cool the top few miles of crust X degrees? That itself would assume it's OK to oversimplify to a huge extent. For example -- take ice into account -- it takes a lotta ergs to go from ice at 0c to water at 0c, which is of course, what we're seeing, so even temperature is vastly too simple as a metric.
Too bad our science-challenged and attention span of a butterfly populace can have all this nicely put into an idiot-grade soundbite. Wait and see, you'll see, if you live long enough to do the wait -- or as they used to say, god willin' and the creek don't rise.
Though I admit, they have a problem I don't have. I can look at the radar or satellite, and knowing where I am on the map, predict the weather over the next few hours far more accurately than they ever can. The reason is simple -- I don't have a large listening area to predict weather over, just my 50 acres or so. When that guy says something like 50% chance of rain, what he really has to mean is "50% of you are gong to get rained like heck on, the rest, not". But he doesn't have time to break it down mile by mile for the whole listening crowd. For example, my local NPR radio station (WVTF) used to do pretty good, but as their listening area has increased, their weather predictions have become utterly ridiculous -- for me....and it's not their fault beyond expanding too large to serve their audience well.
Perhaps the one obvious case of "economies of scale" not working at all?
This of course, will generate troubles for anyone thinking they can have a "life" outside this. There is no life outside this at that stage, or you're just wasting your time pretending. Common to just about every startup is doing something none of the big guys (who could accomplish the same a lot easier and with a fraction of their resources) thought possible at all, or they'd have done it themselves. In other words, you are attempting something acknowledged impossible or unlikely to succeed by many others expert in the field. It's pure vanity to think that only you had this really new great idea. More likely it came to many people, most of whom had more realistic assessment of it's chances of success, and dropped it without you hearing about it.
When it works, it's so glorious it's hard to describe, everyone does well (or at least, I always took real good care of the people that helped me -- loyalty is a two way thing or it's worthless), and you ride off into the sunset, finding people who are better at running/maintaining a business than the current crew, who by now are experts at starting one -- different job. When it fails, well, it's pretty ugly for all concerned.
It's a big chance to take to start one of these, or work in one and unless you understand this, you probably shouldn't be involved at all. High risk for potential reward, no guts no glory, all that.
Once I became aware of what it takes to do this and pull it off...I became so picky about what in life might be worth that level of commitment, and I don't find anything anymore that is worth that, so I quit doing it. I have the choice because the couple I did actually did succeed reasonably well, though. It did take half a decade to recover mentally, also. Maybe quicker if you're younger at the time, and like combat, this is a young person's game. No one else has the energy and intensity required to say every day "the impossible only takes a little longer".
If that doesn't include you as well as most of the rest of the team, run like hell. Becuase if it's not a happy team busting tail and complimenting one another smoothly, it's going to fail anyway.
It's OK, they are a State and can simply pay them with un-secured IOU's and then default on them. For once, someone sticking it to a carrier who can make it stick!
I'm a CCW holder but generally carry open when I do. People don't seem to mind, but the nastier looking types tend to avoid me. My bank, and the local liquor store both asked me to please carry -- they know I'm a good guy, and they figure the bad guys will leave them alone when they see me. Small town social dynamics, it's probably different in cities.
I utterly reject the "just vote them out" argument. What choice did we have this last election? So we vote incumbents out, and the other batch of clowns now claims they have a "mandate". No, they don't, they were just the other batch of clowns and we effectively had zero choice at all.
Keep that stuff up long enough and it won't just be the psychopath nutbags doing things like this. What more warning should they need that all too many think the "system" is completely out of control of the voters and there's no other way? Oh I forgot, they have no brains. On either end of the gun.
Thanks for confirming what I said. Like you said, the only way you got busted is someone noticing something had changed from one observation to the next, because you knew how to be patient and move so slowly that no one ever saw you actually move -- am I right? Real sniping ain't no video game, and anyone who has knows that. I was a different type of cold warrior -- I worked signals, sources, stuff like that.
On the other hand, the premise might be believable even if the experiment is flawed. Humans needed to detect motion above all else to survive earlier on in evolution, as something moving might have plans to eat one of us. We can see tiny movements where we can't see diddly staring right at the same thing motionless -- read any sniper training manual for more on that one. So the super sensitivity to motion is a well known thing, and I would suppose that would make it easy to distract one from changes in the thing moving, because for one thing, that doesn't usually happen and when something is moving, it's mostly the ac coupled edge detectors in your neural nets firing, which isn't the same stuff as what you use to see a shape so much. Probably just drowns that out a little for most observers who haven't specially trained to notice things like that -- evolution wouldn't seem to require telling if a tiger changes into a panther during a leap at your throat.
Spokes also satisfy this most times, they aren't so heavy either.
Humans are still to stupid for trains, sadly. We insist on freedoms we can't really afford, instead like being able to go point to point on a whim. I'm guessing it will be forced on us at some point.
I like this idea, and the idea that it's power to weight and other similar factors. What I find funny is it seems all the underpowered cars are the ones going the fastest and tailgating, while the real hot rods are mostly stylin'. Nothing to prove, after all. Most hot-rodders (sadly far from all) kinda pick their place to do nutty things, as I described doing in an empty parking lot above and got called a moron for doing -- it *should* have been safe to do there, private property, no other cars, permission (encouragement) of the owner.
I am NOT a moron. See my sig and go learn something.
Yes, a driver who turns a wheel left expects the car to rotate leftward. One who expects it to turn at higher G's than any race car ever built, while shutting down the engine (which you may need, to avoid someone coming up fast from behind while they are texting and don't notice they're going to hit you hard -- that might be why you're trying to change path in the first place) -- now that's a moron. One who shouldn't be allowed to drive, but we let morons drive, it seems. By making it appear easy and safe, we make it more dangerous.
No, I'm not a ninja, but I do martial arts.
I think you missed it eldavojohn -- Goldman didn't do the leak, and undisclosed customer of theirs supposedly did; but perhaps at their behest, astroturfing is well within their "ethical limits". I trade for a living and watch Goldman pretty close. There's nothing they won't do, trust me -- even if it gets them a fine of a couple weeks profits like last time...on which deals they of course made far more than the fine anyway. Best law money can buy!
I know this because I live off the grid on PV power, and I figured out what each milliwatt hour costs me, from each and every thing I own and use, as PV power is on the expensive side. Is it cheaper to get an efficient freezer and put it in an unheated space, compared to buying more panels and batteries -- yes, a lot. Vampire loads (you name it, what doesn't have remote-on or a clock these days) around here get put on a power strip and unplugged when not actually in use, period.
Now, with many if not most things now using moderately efficient switching power supplies, the power drain from them *does not change* with voltage, actually. More volts, they draw less current. Many supplies no longer even need a switch to go from 120v to 240v!
You have to know better than to think that the aptly named "power company" will pass on any savings to you. They'll use this as an excuse to *raise* rates at certain times when you want power, and keep the the same or still constantly rising the rest of the time. They aren't called the power company for no reason -- they have the best laws money can buy, they have a lot more influence over your life than most realize.
It's trivial to disconnect, hacks are all over the internet. No wonder you posted as coward.
Instead of spinning like any car would (and I was still at full throttle) the computer kicked in an tried to actually do something impossible, which nearly sent me directly into the nearest stout concrete based light pole which I normally would have spun right on past without coming anywhere close to it. Yeah, that was a great outcome. Only the fact that I am a trained race driver and instantly ready for anything saved our lives (and the new car).
Look out pedestrians -- this stuff is going to get a bunch of you killed when cars don't respond as drivers expect they will. Traction control is nice to a point (without it, the thing has enough torque to light off the Pirrellis in the first three gears, and 90 mph is no time to break the back tires loose unexpectedly) but do you really trust your life to some programmer, or would it not be better to learn how to friggin drive (and insist that others do too, or can't get licenses)?
The illusion of safety can't break the laws of physics -- get real. Things have limits, and it's best when those are exceeded to have the thing act "naturally" so one can learn to use it within those limits, and how to get it back when you lose it. A predetermined response to a certain condition cannot, and never will be, the right answer to every situation.
Lucky, you can still turn most of that junk off. I'd rather let Darwin take care of those who won't learn to drive, but it is sad they take others with them. I do not believe any of this will help with the latter, however. Can't fix stupid.