On all complex PDFs I tried worded refused to import them at all. It said it was over the 1.5MB or so limit for what it would import.
I also have no idea why but with Office 2013 some of my documents ended up corrupted. Word would refuse to save the document the the hard drive, network, flash drive etc. I had the same thing happen with Excel.
I ended up going back to Office 2010. I think there is something wrong with Office 2013 and the way it tries to keep updating. It seems that every time I launched Word or Excel it spent about 3-5 seconds downloading something even though they where supposed to be installed entirely to my hard drive.
I was using the Office 2013 demo for university students.
Some of the new features in excel are very cool. But corrupting documents is NOT cool.
What if we side with the replicators instead of those squishy human things?
I fully support the construction of replicators and all of the cool things that can be done with that. It would be pretty sweet if we could make self assembling cities. We could build entirely new cities that are VASTLY more efficient than the kinds of cities we use now. I would love to see the human race move to using arcologies.
Or we could use modern technology and fix the whole dieing part. Given how good our neural interfaces are getting for things like artificial arms, legs etc it is pretty realistic that in another 10 years we will be able to make synthetic body parts better than human. The first step would be to take your brain out of your body and put it in a robot body. The next step would be to replace your brain cells with artificial counterparts. If you can get both of those done then death will be a far less serious issue to deal with.
I fully intend to make myself a robot and explore the universe. We are already machines, we are just poorly made chemical machines, it is time for an upgrade!
I know it sounds pretty harsh but I would find it uncomfortable to be around someone recording at all times. Over time I would find more and more reasons just not to come by and eventually would not see you at all anymore.
I don't really like the idea of being watched all the time and I don't like sharing personal information that I don't have to share. I don't do facebook, twitter, or any other social networks and being around someone that was recording constantly would just be way too invasive.
If my family did this I would probably only talk to them over the phone or email.
Some problems take a lot of mental effort to even begin on working on. If you have very good hearing being in a large group like that means you will just never get any work done.
If I worked somewhere with constant interruptions and people asking me questions while in the middle of designing a system I would leave if a solution could not be found. After working for myself for 10 years and returning to school to have a change I am aware of how important communication is but it can also be excessive.
If I am designing a complex system and you interrupt you for a 15 minute conversation you could easily have blown several hours of work. From other technical people I have found that they will listen to "not right now" but for some reason marketers, managers, sales etc people don't seem to understand that. They will usually continue to push the issue about talking to them right then until you lose your train of thought.
I work best when I can work in silence. We can go over stuff as designated times but if you want a separation process to work, or organism to be engineered correctly or a simulation to work right then interruptions are going to seriously set back the time it takes to do that.
Some problems can take an hour just to fit them in your head to begin working on them. If someone interrupts you then you have to start over pretty much. If someone sends you an IM you can respond when you are available, if someone walks into your office and interrupts you then you lose it all while they ask talk to you.
Asking not to be disturbed usually does not work if the other person is not some kind of technical person. Most other people don't seem to identify with the idea that some problems take a very long time just to get to where you can work on them.
Try debugging a complex database issue or designing a distillation column with multiple feeds and outlet streams and both are going to take a significant mental effort just to untangle before you can even begin to figure it out. This is why all technical people should have offices with doors!
Doesn't that make it trivially easy to circumvent? I can just buy a gun from a dealer and then sell it to someone that could never pass a background check. If I did it it enough volume I could probably even get a discount from the dealer.
That sounds like it would be completely legal since it would be a private sale. If that is legal then the laws about background checks really do have loopholes that need to be closed since this is a trivial bypass. This is like a kid standing outside a liquor store and asking someone to buy the alcohol for them,
For the big banks I think you mean are doing it again not will do it again. All the evidence I have seen is they are doing even more gambling now.
They got away with tanking the world economy. Not only was it decided that they are too big to fail but they are also too big to jail. They have learned that they are completely outside the law. If they destroy everything we have no choice but to bail them out and no matter how illegal their activities none of them will be prosecuted.
Academia is weird as hell. The students and teachers are mostly extremely divorced from reality. They do tend to have a kind of strange liberal slant but it is not the same kind of practical liberal I have seen in other areas of society. It is kind of a reality in a bubble liberal viewpoint. You can see it in the way they do things. Universities say they are against cheating but they still mostly do memorization based exams which encourage the behavior. The classes that do entirely practical exams and are open book, notes, etc have FAR less cheating because it doesn't work in those classes but still universities as a whole don't change.
I will have a BS in Chemical and Biological Engineering so definitely not on the CS side. I have been a professional programmer for a while but I have not fit in as well with that group as I have with regular engineers. What I do is definitely governed strictly by physics. When doing genetic engineering reality can be pretty harsh with the rules but I enjoy it.
I have run into problems with academics for why things are done by hand instead of having students learn to write computer models to solve the problems. Many problems solved have so many assumptions to make them human solveable they are massively inaccurate. I think that when you start in engineering you should have some basic classes in programming and then as you progress through your classes your simulations will get increasingly complex and accurate as you learn how to model more forces.
So you start with material balances, then move on to fluids, heat, thermo, kinetics, separations etc. Every class would heavily build on the previous ones and by the end you would understand how things work better, why and could solve problems accurately that no amount of pen and paper figuring will ever give you. You would also have a very valuable skill for the real world. Too many people graduate with engineering degrees but can't solve real problems without a lot of additional training.
The problem is private people can make these magazines now with assembly devices. While I don't think these magazines should really exist for regular people there is no actual way to stop it and passing laws that are already obsoleted by technology is just a way to waste time and money instead of finding better ways of dealing with problems at hand.
I mostly agree with your point but it is too late to take them away. Our technology has progressed to the point where they can be directly made assembly machines. These machines are also getting cheaper, better and more affordable.
All technology has the potential for abuse and people will abuse these machines also. Overall they are positive for our society but people will use them to make guns. They will trade plans for making those guns online no matter how much you would try to stomp it out. Trying to stomp it out though would have serious impact on those that abide by the laws and use the machines for constructive purposes.
At this point we need to figure out another way to deal with gun violence that does not involve making fewer guns available. What we need is to figure out why people do it and how we can prevent it. There are reasons why Canada has similar levels of gun ownership but about 1% or so the rate of gun violence that the USA has. These need to be investigated.
We have universal licenses required for driving, fishing, hunting, and a huge number of other activities. We also have registration required for most normal people when purchasing guns. I don't see a slippery slope or any attempt to take the guns by requiring universal registration.
I don't see how guns should be any different than cars. They should be registered and tracked so if used in a crime they can be traced back to the point of sale.
I don't think we should be bailing out industries. They are dieing for a reason and artificially keeping them around has a very high cost to the society. The problem is we have a system that requires basically everyone to have a job and most people are no longer qualified for the jobs that are available.
So I don't want government to bail out industries but I do want a better system in place for retraining people. I would prefer that we set up some kind of structure for apprenticeships so that people can be placed in jobs that are needed and train to do them.
I would also like to see a national focus on online learning systems so that anyone could take courses online, get credit for it and improve themselves without the HUGE costs of college. I think if done right it would be a partnership between various levels of government and private companies.
In my engineering classes I see a lot of pointless things done for historical reasons that employers don't care about and technology has completely obsoleted. Worse is what I see in other types of classes where memorization is still dominant. The educational system we have today is too expensive and not what we need as a society to move forward. I do think we need government involvement to make a better system but I also think a better system would be a tiny fraction of the size and cost than what we have now.
That I definitely agree with. I was trying to make the point, probably not very well, that the USA system was bad even within itself.
I had read some FBI crime statistics and crime related to health care (parents doing stuff to get money to care for children, spouses etc) cost more than the health care would have cost by a lot. So even though we have pretty much the most expensive health care system on the planet it has a lot of additional costs that other systems don't have on top of that.
What about those of us that want a universal health care system because the system we have now costs society more in things like crime, lower productivity and inefficiency that a universal system would?
It has nothing to do with fear, it is just practicality. The profit motive for medicine is not really working and it leading to pretty poor health outcomes. Based on various recent studies our computer systems give about 40% better patient outcomes at about 50% of the cost.
I think the medical system is due for a massive overhaul to make it work better and cheaper but I don't see that happening with the corporate system we have now and I also doubt that the kind of universal health care system we can get in this country would get us there either but it would still be better than what we have now.
For global warming the way I see the problem is companies are allowed to damage private and communal property without paying for it. If companies that damaged underground aquifers by fracking had to actually play the FULL COST to clean up the damage they would do it safely or stop pretty quickly. The entire reason that companies can do all this polluting is they are externalizing the costs to the taxpayer and future generations in return for profits for them right now. Look at BP, the fine they got for polluting the gulf of mexico is insignificant compared to the costs of the cleanup. So long as that remains true they are going to keep doing it because that is the way the incentive structure is setup. You get the behavior you incentivize for, not the behavior you claim to support.
For guns I just want universal background checks. I don't care about the clip sizes or the types of weapons very much. Especially given that pistols are the most common weapon used to kill people not rifle type weapons.
I do like government protection against unemployment. Mostly because I like that more than desperate people doing whatever they can to get food for themselves and their family which costs a lot more to the society than just helping them. However I don't think we help people effectively. If you lose your job it would be nice if your skills could be evaluated and training offered for indemand positions. So a welding company that can't fill a position could basically tell a government jobs program about the position and a person could be offered to be trained for that position.
Sometimes social programs are just the cheapest way to solve a given problem. It is a nice idea to say that everyone needs to stand on their own and deal with their own problems. However humans are also pretty violent when pushed into a corner and if someone has no other way to get food they will tend to just take it which is more expensive for all of us.
I don't see them favoring the rights of women very much or gays. That is the major reason that I just can not support them.
It doesn't matter what my views on abortion are. I don't have the right to impose them on someone else.
My views are the same on gay marriage. It is not something I will do but that does not change that others want to do it and they should have that option.
The republicans say they are the party of small government and getting government out of peoples lives but they don't act like it. Also I will say the democrats are just as bad but on different issues.
If the republicans would actually accept these social issues and actually be the party of smaller government it would be much easier to support them. However their history indicates this is just a talking point and not an actual action they take when given power.
I don't like the democrats either but they have tended to be far more accepting of other lifestyles and choices over the last 20 years or so and do more to push technology. Right now most people still don't realize that many of the jobs are gone and will never be coming back and our society is not really trained for the kinds of work that is needed now.
I am not saying that everyone needs a college education but there are good jobs that do need trained technicians that we should be teaching people to do and it doesn't matter if you are a democrat or republican. If you can find a program that costs $x and pays back >$x in tax revenue it is a good idea to do it since it puts more people to work and makes them productive citizens.
It is so tiring to hear ideas painted with liberal or conservative and then automatically thrown out. In many areas we need welders, electricians, etc but the funding is not there to get people out of poverty to train for those jobs and end the cycle. We also have a pretty decaying infrastructure in this company and are losing a LOT of jobs to places like germany with better infrastructure.
Most of the liberals I know like guns, explosives and all kinds of interesting things. Although it does help that most of the liberals I know are also engineers so I don't know what we qualify as. Although I do know some strange liberals since they also like creating custom lifeforms to do interesting things like bacteria to clean up environmental damage, make medications etc.
Most see magazine limits as pretty stupid since you can print your own. Most I know are also completely okay with universal background checks since from what myself and others have read most of the weapons used in illegal crimes are coming from legal dealers that are selling without the checks or they come from gun shows where the checks are not required.
I don't see how universal background checks are at the expense of freedoms anymore than a driver's license, fishing license, hunting license etc is.
Often I wonder what engineers really qualify as. Most I know end up with the same end results as liberals on many issues but for radically different reasons. They also agree with conservatives on many issues but for radically different reasons. It seems to be more about practically and what works for the given situation. If the situation changes so does the solution but it doesn't matter if someone slaps a liberal or conservative sticker on an idea, So long as the idea is the best we have for the given problem under the given circumstances that is all that matters.
That is probably correct. I would just not immediately go with that unless I did the actual math and figured out it made more sense. It might turn out that if we started building a lot of standard reactors that out of the way areas would be better served by a few reactor modules instead of many for larger areas.
We probably want to spread out the load as much as possible since that solves a bunch of problem so if we standardize on lots of small reactors they would work well for small towns also.
We would also have to evaluate if the material and energy costs of producing a wind turbine or solar panel justified the costs compared to another nuclear reactor. If it turns out we get 5x power back on renewable but 10x back on nuclear then it would not make any real sense to do renewable.
The current system is pretty corrupt and many things are the way they are because of people doing things for personal reasons. If a new system is going to truly be better that has got to stop. I don't want renewables just to feel better about something, I want them if they make the most sense at the time. For base load power generation though I fully expect that nuclear works out FAR better than anything we use now.
We can even build nuclear reactors that can burn FAR more to completion than the current ones do. I read something about the mining companies lobbying congress to make it illegal to burn beyond a certain point though so that the reactors would require more fuel.
We can even build reactors that will run off the current waste we have now and power the country for about a thousand years. The waste we have now is not an intrinsic part of nuclear power generation, it is a part of our corrupt system.
I think we need a combination of nuclear, wind and solar power. Some areas of the country, like along the front range of the rocky mountains, have a LOT of wind. Tapping that makes sense. I am not talking about putting up renewable power where it does not make actual sense, that would be idiotic, but in some places it is a completely reasonable thing to do.
Solar power would be a good idea for the cooling spikes in the summer in places like California, Arizona, Texas etc. During the hottest periods is also when the sun is doing a very good job of putting out a lot of energy into the area. So use that energy to help with the cooling.
Now it might turn out that nuclear reactors do such a good job that there is no reason to use renewables at all and that would be fine with me. I just don't want to write them off without doing a total cost on them very the output.
It is hard to do better with nuclear power when you have the fossil fuel industries paying off officials to keep nuclear out and running pretty impressive fear campaigns. We have developed solutions for a lot of the current problems. That is not the problem at all the problem is that we can;t use the solutions because some of those with a LOT of money oppose change.
Even if we finally came up with a very good, safe and cheap form of fusion tomorrow that could power our entire society it would not matter because fossil fuel companies would pay for it to be regulated to hell so that they could keep doing what they are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
On all complex PDFs I tried worded refused to import them at all. It said it was over the 1.5MB or so limit for what it would import.
I also have no idea why but with Office 2013 some of my documents ended up corrupted. Word would refuse to save the document the the hard drive, network, flash drive etc. I had the same thing happen with Excel.
I ended up going back to Office 2010. I think there is something wrong with Office 2013 and the way it tries to keep updating. It seems that every time I launched Word or Excel it spent about 3-5 seconds downloading something even though they where supposed to be installed entirely to my hard drive.
I was using the Office 2013 demo for university students.
Some of the new features in excel are very cool. But corrupting documents is NOT cool.
If it says that I will hand it a beer. Have to keep those power cells charged. :)
We are borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. You will be assimilated.
I actually like the idea of the borg collective. :)
What if we side with the replicators instead of those squishy human things?
I fully support the construction of replicators and all of the cool things that can be done with that. It would be pretty sweet if we could make self assembling cities. We could build entirely new cities that are VASTLY more efficient than the kinds of cities we use now. I would love to see the human race move to using arcologies.
Thankfully I am much better at engineering than I am at spelling otherwise this would be a very large problem. :)
It is strange though, I will forget simple words sometimes but remember complex fluid dynamics equations. :)
Or we could use modern technology and fix the whole dieing part. Given how good our neural interfaces are getting for things like artificial arms, legs etc it is pretty realistic that in another 10 years we will be able to make synthetic body parts better than human. The first step would be to take your brain out of your body and put it in a robot body. The next step would be to replace your brain cells with artificial counterparts. If you can get both of those done then death will be a far less serious issue to deal with.
I fully intend to make myself a robot and explore the universe. We are already machines, we are just poorly made chemical machines, it is time for an upgrade!
I know it sounds pretty harsh but I would find it uncomfortable to be around someone recording at all times. Over time I would find more and more reasons just not to come by and eventually would not see you at all anymore.
I don't really like the idea of being watched all the time and I don't like sharing personal information that I don't have to share. I don't do facebook, twitter, or any other social networks and being around someone that was recording constantly would just be way too invasive.
If my family did this I would probably only talk to them over the phone or email.
Some problems take a lot of mental effort to even begin on working on. If you have very good hearing being in a large group like that means you will just never get any work done.
If I worked somewhere with constant interruptions and people asking me questions while in the middle of designing a system I would leave if a solution could not be found. After working for myself for 10 years and returning to school to have a change I am aware of how important communication is but it can also be excessive.
If I am designing a complex system and you interrupt you for a 15 minute conversation you could easily have blown several hours of work. From other technical people I have found that they will listen to "not right now" but for some reason marketers, managers, sales etc people don't seem to understand that. They will usually continue to push the issue about talking to them right then until you lose your train of thought.
I work best when I can work in silence. We can go over stuff as designated times but if you want a separation process to work, or organism to be engineered correctly or a simulation to work right then interruptions are going to seriously set back the time it takes to do that.
I don't see any problem with this at all.
Some problems can take an hour just to fit them in your head to begin working on them. If someone interrupts you then you have to start over pretty much. If someone sends you an IM you can respond when you are available, if someone walks into your office and interrupts you then you lose it all while they ask talk to you.
Asking not to be disturbed usually does not work if the other person is not some kind of technical person. Most other people don't seem to identify with the idea that some problems take a very long time just to get to where you can work on them.
Try debugging a complex database issue or designing a distillation column with multiple feeds and outlet streams and both are going to take a significant mental effort just to untangle before you can even begin to figure it out. This is why all technical people should have offices with doors!
Doesn't that make it trivially easy to circumvent? I can just buy a gun from a dealer and then sell it to someone that could never pass a background check. If I did it it enough volume I could probably even get a discount from the dealer.
That sounds like it would be completely legal since it would be a private sale. If that is legal then the laws about background checks really do have loopholes that need to be closed since this is a trivial bypass. This is like a kid standing outside a liquor store and asking someone to buy the alcohol for them,
Aren't most of the domestic threats to the USA running mega corporations, banks, and elected offices?
It always seems strange to me that we go after small time criminals but anyone that does serious damage is just let off.
For the big banks I think you mean are doing it again not will do it again. All the evidence I have seen is they are doing even more gambling now.
They got away with tanking the world economy. Not only was it decided that they are too big to fail but they are also too big to jail. They have learned that they are completely outside the law. If they destroy everything we have no choice but to bail them out and no matter how illegal their activities none of them will be prosecuted.
Academia is weird as hell. The students and teachers are mostly extremely divorced from reality. They do tend to have a kind of strange liberal slant but it is not the same kind of practical liberal I have seen in other areas of society. It is kind of a reality in a bubble liberal viewpoint. You can see it in the way they do things. Universities say they are against cheating but they still mostly do memorization based exams which encourage the behavior. The classes that do entirely practical exams and are open book, notes, etc have FAR less cheating because it doesn't work in those classes but still universities as a whole don't change.
I will have a BS in Chemical and Biological Engineering so definitely not on the CS side. I have been a professional programmer for a while but I have not fit in as well with that group as I have with regular engineers. What I do is definitely governed strictly by physics. When doing genetic engineering reality can be pretty harsh with the rules but I enjoy it.
I have run into problems with academics for why things are done by hand instead of having students learn to write computer models to solve the problems. Many problems solved have so many assumptions to make them human solveable they are massively inaccurate. I think that when you start in engineering you should have some basic classes in programming and then as you progress through your classes your simulations will get increasingly complex and accurate as you learn how to model more forces.
So you start with material balances, then move on to fluids, heat, thermo, kinetics, separations etc. Every class would heavily build on the previous ones and by the end you would understand how things work better, why and could solve problems accurately that no amount of pen and paper figuring will ever give you. You would also have a very valuable skill for the real world. Too many people graduate with engineering degrees but can't solve real problems without a lot of additional training.
Most I know are chemical engineers. What type of engineer do you think invents and makes the explosives?
What type of engineer do you think work on nanotech/biotech medications, modern pharmaceuticals etc?
These are actual engineers, not the software kind, that like these things and they are good at what they do.
The problem is private people can make these magazines now with assembly devices. While I don't think these magazines should really exist for regular people there is no actual way to stop it and passing laws that are already obsoleted by technology is just a way to waste time and money instead of finding better ways of dealing with problems at hand.
I mostly agree with your point but it is too late to take them away. Our technology has progressed to the point where they can be directly made assembly machines. These machines are also getting cheaper, better and more affordable.
All technology has the potential for abuse and people will abuse these machines also. Overall they are positive for our society but people will use them to make guns. They will trade plans for making those guns online no matter how much you would try to stomp it out. Trying to stomp it out though would have serious impact on those that abide by the laws and use the machines for constructive purposes.
At this point we need to figure out another way to deal with gun violence that does not involve making fewer guns available. What we need is to figure out why people do it and how we can prevent it. There are reasons why Canada has similar levels of gun ownership but about 1% or so the rate of gun violence that the USA has. These need to be investigated.
We have universal licenses required for driving, fishing, hunting, and a huge number of other activities. We also have registration required for most normal people when purchasing guns. I don't see a slippery slope or any attempt to take the guns by requiring universal registration.
I don't see how guns should be any different than cars. They should be registered and tracked so if used in a crime they can be traced back to the point of sale.
I don't think we should be bailing out industries. They are dieing for a reason and artificially keeping them around has a very high cost to the society. The problem is we have a system that requires basically everyone to have a job and most people are no longer qualified for the jobs that are available.
So I don't want government to bail out industries but I do want a better system in place for retraining people. I would prefer that we set up some kind of structure for apprenticeships so that people can be placed in jobs that are needed and train to do them.
I would also like to see a national focus on online learning systems so that anyone could take courses online, get credit for it and improve themselves without the HUGE costs of college. I think if done right it would be a partnership between various levels of government and private companies.
In my engineering classes I see a lot of pointless things done for historical reasons that employers don't care about and technology has completely obsoleted. Worse is what I see in other types of classes where memorization is still dominant. The educational system we have today is too expensive and not what we need as a society to move forward. I do think we need government involvement to make a better system but I also think a better system would be a tiny fraction of the size and cost than what we have now.
That I definitely agree with. I was trying to make the point, probably not very well, that the USA system was bad even within itself.
I had read some FBI crime statistics and crime related to health care (parents doing stuff to get money to care for children, spouses etc) cost more than the health care would have cost by a lot. So even though we have pretty much the most expensive health care system on the planet it has a lot of additional costs that other systems don't have on top of that.
What about those of us that want a universal health care system because the system we have now costs society more in things like crime, lower productivity and inefficiency that a universal system would?
It has nothing to do with fear, it is just practicality. The profit motive for medicine is not really working and it leading to pretty poor health outcomes. Based on various recent studies our computer systems give about 40% better patient outcomes at about 50% of the cost.
I think the medical system is due for a massive overhaul to make it work better and cheaper but I don't see that happening with the corporate system we have now and I also doubt that the kind of universal health care system we can get in this country would get us there either but it would still be better than what we have now.
For global warming the way I see the problem is companies are allowed to damage private and communal property without paying for it. If companies that damaged underground aquifers by fracking had to actually play the FULL COST to clean up the damage they would do it safely or stop pretty quickly. The entire reason that companies can do all this polluting is they are externalizing the costs to the taxpayer and future generations in return for profits for them right now. Look at BP, the fine they got for polluting the gulf of mexico is insignificant compared to the costs of the cleanup. So long as that remains true they are going to keep doing it because that is the way the incentive structure is setup. You get the behavior you incentivize for, not the behavior you claim to support.
For guns I just want universal background checks. I don't care about the clip sizes or the types of weapons very much. Especially given that pistols are the most common weapon used to kill people not rifle type weapons.
I do like government protection against unemployment. Mostly because I like that more than desperate people doing whatever they can to get food for themselves and their family which costs a lot more to the society than just helping them. However I don't think we help people effectively. If you lose your job it would be nice if your skills could be evaluated and training offered for indemand positions. So a welding company that can't fill a position could basically tell a government jobs program about the position and a person could be offered to be trained for that position.
Sometimes social programs are just the cheapest way to solve a given problem. It is a nice idea to say that everyone needs to stand on their own and deal with their own problems. However humans are also pretty violent when pushed into a corner and if someone has no other way to get food they will tend to just take it which is more expensive for all of us.
I don't see them favoring the rights of women very much or gays. That is the major reason that I just can not support them.
It doesn't matter what my views on abortion are. I don't have the right to impose them on someone else.
My views are the same on gay marriage. It is not something I will do but that does not change that others want to do it and they should have that option.
The republicans say they are the party of small government and getting government out of peoples lives but they don't act like it. Also I will say the democrats are just as bad but on different issues.
If the republicans would actually accept these social issues and actually be the party of smaller government it would be much easier to support them. However their history indicates this is just a talking point and not an actual action they take when given power.
I don't like the democrats either but they have tended to be far more accepting of other lifestyles and choices over the last 20 years or so and do more to push technology. Right now most people still don't realize that many of the jobs are gone and will never be coming back and our society is not really trained for the kinds of work that is needed now.
I am not saying that everyone needs a college education but there are good jobs that do need trained technicians that we should be teaching people to do and it doesn't matter if you are a democrat or republican. If you can find a program that costs $x and pays back >$x in tax revenue it is a good idea to do it since it puts more people to work and makes them productive citizens.
It is so tiring to hear ideas painted with liberal or conservative and then automatically thrown out. In many areas we need welders, electricians, etc but the funding is not there to get people out of poverty to train for those jobs and end the cycle. We also have a pretty decaying infrastructure in this company and are losing a LOT of jobs to places like germany with better infrastructure.
Most of the liberals I know like guns, explosives and all kinds of interesting things. Although it does help that most of the liberals I know are also engineers so I don't know what we qualify as. Although I do know some strange liberals since they also like creating custom lifeforms to do interesting things like bacteria to clean up environmental damage, make medications etc.
Most see magazine limits as pretty stupid since you can print your own. Most I know are also completely okay with universal background checks since from what myself and others have read most of the weapons used in illegal crimes are coming from legal dealers that are selling without the checks or they come from gun shows where the checks are not required.
I don't see how universal background checks are at the expense of freedoms anymore than a driver's license, fishing license, hunting license etc is.
Often I wonder what engineers really qualify as. Most I know end up with the same end results as liberals on many issues but for radically different reasons. They also agree with conservatives on many issues but for radically different reasons. It seems to be more about practically and what works for the given situation. If the situation changes so does the solution but it doesn't matter if someone slaps a liberal or conservative sticker on an idea, So long as the idea is the best we have for the given problem under the given circumstances that is all that matters.
That is probably correct. I would just not immediately go with that unless I did the actual math and figured out it made more sense. It might turn out that if we started building a lot of standard reactors that out of the way areas would be better served by a few reactor modules instead of many for larger areas.
We probably want to spread out the load as much as possible since that solves a bunch of problem so if we standardize on lots of small reactors they would work well for small towns also.
We would also have to evaluate if the material and energy costs of producing a wind turbine or solar panel justified the costs compared to another nuclear reactor. If it turns out we get 5x power back on renewable but 10x back on nuclear then it would not make any real sense to do renewable.
The current system is pretty corrupt and many things are the way they are because of people doing things for personal reasons. If a new system is going to truly be better that has got to stop. I don't want renewables just to feel better about something, I want them if they make the most sense at the time. For base load power generation though I fully expect that nuclear works out FAR better than anything we use now.
We can even build nuclear reactors that can burn FAR more to completion than the current ones do. I read something about the mining companies lobbying congress to make it illegal to burn beyond a certain point though so that the reactors would require more fuel.
We can even build reactors that will run off the current waste we have now and power the country for about a thousand years. The waste we have now is not an intrinsic part of nuclear power generation, it is a part of our corrupt system.
I think we need a combination of nuclear, wind and solar power. Some areas of the country, like along the front range of the rocky mountains, have a LOT of wind. Tapping that makes sense. I am not talking about putting up renewable power where it does not make actual sense, that would be idiotic, but in some places it is a completely reasonable thing to do.
Solar power would be a good idea for the cooling spikes in the summer in places like California, Arizona, Texas etc. During the hottest periods is also when the sun is doing a very good job of putting out a lot of energy into the area. So use that energy to help with the cooling.
Now it might turn out that nuclear reactors do such a good job that there is no reason to use renewables at all and that would be fine with me. I just don't want to write them off without doing a total cost on them very the output.
It is hard to do better with nuclear power when you have the fossil fuel industries paying off officials to keep nuclear out and running pretty impressive fear campaigns. We have developed solutions for a lot of the current problems. That is not the problem at all the problem is that we can;t use the solutions because some of those with a LOT of money oppose change.
Even if we finally came up with a very good, safe and cheap form of fusion tomorrow that could power our entire society it would not matter because fossil fuel companies would pay for it to be regulated to hell so that they could keep doing what they are doing.