Because that sure would be handy when I'm coming up to an intersection or within range of a known traffic camera so that my plate can toggle to the governor's personal license plate number or that guy from accounting I don't like.
That's why it's important to use wind maps (average wind speed where you are) and insolation (average number of daily hours of maximum solar production where you are) to determine if you should do wind/solar and how much. Energy storage (batteries, hydrogen, gravity, etc) help with temporal buffering and smoothing, as in, my solar array produced more than I needed yesterday but not as much as I need today. Micro-grids provide lateral buffering, as in, a tree branch took out my neighbor's wind turbine but he can still function because I and the neighbors are still producing.
Of course it's also worth pointing out that even on cloudy days solar panels still produce electricity, just not as much as on full sunny days. It's also worth pointing out that the house up the bend and slightly lower than me can have a different local wind speed; and if you live anywhere near an ocean or large body of water, there is almost never *no* wind.
So if ConEdison were to struggle to supply Jackson Heights and the swathes of Queens that always experience brownouts every summer and those areas were to have micro-grids in place, then they could continue to function no matter the problems ConEdison might have. That is the definition and benefit of "decentralization."
A gust of wind does not produce equal power even within the same neighborhood. And energy usage among households is not uniform even at time t1. What if I'm not home, not using the electricity generated from my wind turbine, but you are? What if we both have battery packs to store unused power generated, that smooth out availability between changes in windspeed? What if we store excess power as hydrogen that gets run back through a fuel cell when we need more power? Or, what if we sell back excess to the larger grid and have them cut us a check? You see, load balancing in a micro grid gives you all that flexibility and resilience.
These are all things that exist now, that people do. It's simply not widespread yet. But it will be.
Here's where venture capitalists play a deleterious role in the process. They don't care about ground-breaking ideas or real vision or even solid business plans with solid revenue models. They care about whether they can turn around their investment in 6 months to a year for some multiple. That's it. That's all they care about. So if right now they feel reasonable certainty that they can unload a photo-sharing site on 2nd round sucke...er, investors, they'll invest. They don't care that there are 100 other such sites out there. They don't care that the founders are 22 years old. They don't care that the business plan is written on a napkin. They care about the flip.
The problem is no one else in the early-stage game understands VCs have that motivation, and only that motivation. They think that when a VC plows money into something that that something must have something going for it. They think it makes the invested-in company real. A million stories about 22-year old founders turning around with that money and blowing it on coke and hookers does not dissuade them of that.
So a lot of the good money that could flow into real entrepreneurs, that is, real people trying to really solve real problems, does not because of the smoke screen thrown up by the VCs and their PR firms. And a great deal of social progress stifles because of it. The real entrepreneurs usually have to literally weave whole cloth out of thin air on what they can beg, borrow, or steal because no capital flows their way.
Once in a blue moon those guys make it through that Dantean hell and produce something world-changing like Apple or Google. But imagine a world where an Apple or Google emerged every 4-6 months. Think of the undiscovered possibilities. Think of the rapidly expanding markets. Think of the jobs, jobs, jobs, that would generate. Think of the benefit to humanity.
It does not make sense in your situation as a renter, but when you own it does, even with where installation costs and everything else are now. The average American family uses 940kwh/month.
Let's take the case of a house in NYC, which has both some of the highest labor costs (pertinent to installation costs of solar panels) and electricity costs ($0.35/kwh from ConEdison). You need 26 290W panels to produce the electricity you need. The cost of panels plus installation totals $48.5K. After just the federal incentive it comes down to $32K. The ConEdison-provided electricity costs $4K/yr, so that's a break-even time of 8 years. Most people own their homes longer than 8 years.
When you factor in the New York State solar incentive of 25% the break-even drops to 5 years. When you consider that ConEdison's price per kwh has increased more than 10% every year for the past 10 years, that break-even time drops to 4-4.5 years.
If the upfront cost of $22K is still a barrier when you buy that house, you can shop around for energy efficient mortgages. They lend to you at an advantageous rate so you can afford to upgrade the home's energy efficiency, as in they knock of a couple basis points. The savings over a 30-yr mortgage are huge, on top of what you save on the electricity (most solar panels are rated for that long).
In short, it already makes financial sense to do this stuff, and since the cost of going solar dropped 80% between 2008-2012 it's only going to get easier.
The answer to this problem, and also to the problem of grid failure due to extreme weather, is to decentralize power production. Individual homes can often produce as much power as they need with solar and micro-wind turbines. If they tie in to a micro-grid--essentially a neighborhood-level grid--they can load balance against their neighbors.
Decentralizing power production yields many other benefits, too. Individuals save tons of money on power bills (the cost of solar, for example, has been dropping dramatically), the country produces less CO2, and everyone has a lot more money in their pockets they can boost the economy with.
Sports is certainly the last hold-out for live pay TV, but nightly news isn't. I can already watch Tagesschau on my Roku with a mere several hours' delay, if I don't happen to catch it live. Anything more actual than that people will go to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube to see the real-time reports and videos that people upload from their phones. "Real" news is mostly spin and BS anyhow--it has lost all value.
Sports shouldn't get too comfortable, though, because in the era of Google Glass and drones the chance for real-time broadcasts sourced from those who haven't paid the NFL millions for air rights is quickly coming about.
The upshot of all of this is none of us has the luxury of resting on our laurels anymore. We all have to use our brains constantly to make a living.
The NSA, Congress, Executive, and Judiciary represent a clear and present danger to the People and Constitution of the United States of America. They are violating our god-given rights on a daily basis, lying to us about it, and there is no branch of government that is checking that overreach. If there was, we'd be seeing top officials at the NSA perp-walked to supermax cells and the President of the USA would have been impeached by a unanimous vote weeks ago when he admitted knowing about it and doing nothing about it.
So, dear friends, it is the duty of every patriotic American who still loves freedom to resist the government in every way they can, large and small. If you run a business, refuse to serve anyone from the Congress, Judiciary, or Executive branches. Don't let your kids play with their kids. Ostracize them. If you know how to design systems that resist surveillance, do so and then send them off to live autonomously so no one can compel to you compromise them. If you have the know-how, track & publish the whereabouts of every government agent who thinks spying only goes one-way; send everyone in the Starbucks a text alert every time one of those goons enters the establishment, so you know just who to 'accidentally' spill hot coffee on.
If those kinds of actions are too small fry for you, do something else. Knock yourself out. Do what you can, do what you feel comfortable doing, but don't do nothing. Being quiet about this stuff, letting them get away with it, is the very worst you can do if you don't want to see this country slide completely off the cliff into totalitarianism.
This is why when in the past I worked for others I always surfed via my own personal hotspot, not the corporate network. Yes, it does not help you with the NSA, but it at least avoids the entire issue of corporate IT.
I cannot think of one single Microsoft product, hardware or software, that I've wanted to purchase in the last 15 years, whether as a consumer or head of tech departments with big budgets to spend. Lackluster products, poor user-acceptance testing, poor debugging prior to release, poor security, miserable customer support (on contract or per incident), awful product design, and on and on. The last thing I took momentary note of was Kinect, but I have become so disenchanted with Microsoft across the board that I was sure it would be crap too and dismissed the thought.
About 7-8 years ago a colleague showed me his new install of Vista and I felt so bad for him I unclipped the Ubuntu Live thumbdrive I had on my keychain and gave it to him as a gift. Last month my poor brother-in-law begged me to help him with his brand-new Windows 8 machine, struggling and wheezing under the weight of its operating system, freezing and slowing to a crawl to launch basic apps. I put Ubuntu on as a dual boot and I've never seen a happier human being. He's gaming on Steam now and not casting a single look back at MS.
So when all the marketing hype around the Surface hit, it didn't even cause a ripple on my consciousness. These sales figures confirm it hasn't done so for anyone else, either.
I do wonder how long it's going to take for MS to implode. They have failed to innovate or protect their lock-in for more than a decade now. Users and businesses have moved on with their use patterns. MS's then-and-still cash cow, Office, has been satisfyingly re-created by Google and Open/LibreOffice for many years now, so eventually even stodgy IT Managers (Baby Boomers, I'm looking at you) will get religion.
When I was raised we called America, "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave." Calling ourselves something that echoed "Fatherland," or "Motherland" would have met revulsion. Those were appellations for Nazis and Communists. We despised the KGM, Stasi, and SS for their total surveillance. Being stopped to show your papers on a public road was THE test for whether you lived in a totalitarian state. Now we have the NSA violating the highest law of our land at will, and the TSA making random stops on our highways demanding drivers submit to searches and checks of their papers. Americans are still quite heavily armed for a civlian population, and we still do have means to information that circumvent government and official media. We will see if Americans still have enough moxy, enough self-awareness as a free people to rise up and re-assert their freedom, or if they will submit to tyranny and take the whole world down with them. But either way, it will not happen without a great deal of blood.
I spent an hour transitioning my brother-in-law from Windows 8 to Ubuntu on Sunday. His non-functioning, brand-new desktop went to lightening fast like that. Suddenly he could play all the games Windows 8 couldn't. He could use Steam, and interact with the OS and not have it hang for a minute with every click. I have never encountered such a grateful human in a like situation in 15 years.
Microsoft has stumbled very, very badly, and it is the moment for those of us who champion FOSS to pounce. If you know FOSS, do what you can now to liberate all those in your life who still beat on the ramparts of the Walled Garden. It might be the most significant thing you can do to advance the cause of freedom in your life.
I second this. I spend a good portion of graduate school in Beijing and Manchuria, and you hit the nail on the head. The only people who will pay the price for pollution are the dumb schmucks whose guanxi is not powerful enough to shield them from scapegoating.
Another poster pointed out that access to a robust talent pool is a key reason why you'd want to locate a startup in NYC. There is another reason, too. It's not just the tech talent pool that factors into the success of your venture, it's the talent pool in other, closely related industries like design. In New York there's a lot of cross-over that leads to surprising and creative solutions. In every discipline you have the best professionals in the world pushing the envelope, and that both drives and inspires you beyond what you'd be capable of in a sparser, thinner environment. New York has an energy that I have never felt in any other world city, not in Paris, not in Tokyo, not in Shanghai.
But with public transportation, you're really limited in what you can carry. Any kind of office outing requires renting an expensive bus to shuttle everyone to or from the event, too. And if the subway has a problem, you may as well shut the place down until they get things fixed. Additionally, your employees who might otherwise be happy to work late or odd hours to finish some project are constrained by the hours the bus or metro runs. So you lose some potential productivity there too.
Or you could have to drive, only to find that some idiot cut off some other idiot and caused a massive accident that has the expressway backed up for miles, and you have to wait around for hours until they clear the accident. Constrained by the hours the bus or metro runs? Do you have any idea how many public transportation options there are in NYC? There are 24 subway lines that run all night. There's the Metro North, Long Island Railroad, New Jersey PATH trains, New Jersey Light Rail, and Amtrak if you don't like the subway. There are scores and scores of bus lines, dozens of express buses from Staten Island and the like, and those are just the MTA buses; and they run all night. There's Greyhound, Trailways, and about 30 other lines that go into Port Authority on 42nd. There are ferries and water taxis. There are yellow cabs, car services, gypsy cabs, and peddle-cabs. There's a freaking gondola if you live on Roosevelt Island. Or you could rent a bike with CitiBike or ride your own around the extensive network of protected bike lanes.
In short, transportation without owning a car is not even remotely a problem in this town. It's also why you want to locate your startup here instead of somewhere else where the options are limited.
Gladly, coward. They can show up in all the black SUVs they want. The cameras I have mounted streaming that activity will evoke no reaction at all, I bet.
The NSA needs to be flooded with false positives. They need to have so many false positives generated that their illegal, unconstitutional spying is rendered moot.
On the other side, we need to surveille every member of Congress and the Executive and have their every move published on a publicly available site. After all, if they have nothing to hide then they shouldn't worry, right?
In a perfect world the President and every member of Congress who signed off on this unconstitutional behavior would be impeached. But I know this is not a perfect world. So instead I will advocate a world where we turn the panopticon on itself and make them suffer three times for what they make us suffer.
Tyrants must always be hoisted on their own petards.
If we simply man up and burn Washington D.C. and the NSA sites to the ground to send an unequivocal message about how we feel about their assaults on our Constitutional rights. I acknowledge that many polled in these shores would happily bend over for an anal probe. They are not my countrymen. The rest of us must reclaim our liberties from Washington or we will have to pay many more times in blood down the road to do so when more of the apathetic wake up.
Note: this is not a Left vs. Right issue. Both parties have been complicit in this. They are not our friends. They must both be cleansed.
Why would you eat something as repulsive as insects when you can eat spirulina? It's a perfect food. You could eat nothing but spirulina for the rest of your life and have all your nutritional needs satisfied. It's an easy additive to smoothies, puddings, soups, and anything else. It doesn't taste like much on its own, so it blends well with other ingredients. So it's a much lower bar than eating a worm, grasshopper, or any other insect.
The government has been running a full-court press on the media and everyone else to get them to shut up and get in line. Yesterday there was a poll saying the exact opposite, like 59% saying the opposite across the partisan divide, and now magically it's the other way. I've been monitoring the blogs Left & Right and even Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are tamping down since calling it a "coup d'etat" last week.
The government is scared at how nonpartisan the outrage has been. The Whitehouse and Congress are complicit in this all-out assault on the Constitution and the American Republic. They know that if they can cow the American people into swallowing this that they will then have carte blanche. But whether the people do swallow this or not, things go rapidly downhill from here.
And note, which party is in office is totally irrelevant here. The Republicans and Democrats have both been in on it.
I hug my family very close these days, because it's about to get very ugly and we all could lose everything.
Anyone who serves as apologist for the NSA, the Whitehouse, and Congress on this proves himself an enemy of the Constitution and the American people. There is no justification for this. There is no gentle dismantling of the Constitution. It stands above this or any government in Washington, D.C. Anyone in Washington D.C. who assaults it like this means the destruction of our Republic and the subjugation of its people.
Obama must be impeached. The Congressmen and Senators who support his actions must be impeached. The courts who OK this must be removed. Washington D.C. must be burned to the ground and rebuilt if there are none there who will honor their oaths to defend and uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The NSA, Congress, and the Whitehouse represent an existential threat to the freedom of the American people, the most dire in the history of the country. The Constitution is the law of the land, not just some "damned piece of paper." If the government, in all its organs, branches, and bodies, conspires to violate that Constitution then the American people have the right and duty to take up arms to defend it. As the oath goes, defend it against "all enemies, foreign or domestic." And this is a domestic enemy of the Constitution.
Let's set aside this Left vs. Right bullshit and take our country back, Americans.
I'm a progressive. Not in the rebranded liberal sense, but in the T. Roosevelt, get your government and big business out of my business or I'll kick your ass sense. I don't oppose Obama because I'm a reflexive Tea Party guy who ridiculously, famously, calls him a muslim and radical Christian, socialist and fascist, at the same time.
But the US government is beyond out of control. Elections don't matter. Courts don't matter. The press is as much the problem, as the problem itself. Every peaceful avenue for reform and redress has been shut off or co-opted. Meanwhile, the thieving classes, meaning the 1%, are doubling down on their behavior thinking that no one in the 99% will ever hold them to account.
That means the clock is ticking for an American Spring. We are not hapless, disarmed Libyans. We are heavily armed Americans who have been raised from birth to believe we have a God-given right to be free. Those in the army are our brothers, sisters, and cousins. They are us. So if the 1% truly believe that they'll simply follow orders and drop napalm on the neighborhoods where their friends and family live, then they are due for an extremely rude awakening.
Go ahead, 1%'ers, move all your wealth to the British Virgin Islands and secrete yourselves there. Much good it will do you. Justice is coming, it's coming very soon, and you have a giant target painted on your ass.
The corporate culture does need to be shaken up, as does the federal government, as do the big banks. They feel their control eroding by the day, which is why they're squeezing as hard as they can now. So good luck getting them to hand out startup capital to millenials. And the people making the decision where to allocate capital are MBAs who by definition defend the status quo; they want to stifle innovation if they can, or control it if they can't. The result is we all get a world that continues to Suck while our very serious problems mount quickly.
We are on the cusp of a global revolution (if you like that word) or a paradigm shift (if you don't) that requires we bypass the gatekeepers of capital. That's part of what the crowdfunding movement is about. But what we really need to do is relearn or invent anew a more fundamental skill: how to make something from nothing, using nothing but our wits, our will, our heart, and the strength of our own two hands.
It's very hard. But unless you can walk through that test of fire, acid, and darkness you are nothing more than another wannabe driven by callow greed.
I do wonder if the presence of foreign teachers in Japan for 20 years has contributed to the decline of whale meat consumption among the young. On the J.E.T. program all of us teachers discouraged whaling and eating the meat every chance we got.
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Because that sure would be handy when I'm coming up to an intersection or within range of a known traffic camera so that my plate can toggle to the governor's personal license plate number or that guy from accounting I don't like.
That's why it's important to use wind maps (average wind speed where you are) and insolation (average number of daily hours of maximum solar production where you are) to determine if you should do wind/solar and how much. Energy storage (batteries, hydrogen, gravity, etc) help with temporal buffering and smoothing, as in, my solar array produced more than I needed yesterday but not as much as I need today. Micro-grids provide lateral buffering, as in, a tree branch took out my neighbor's wind turbine but he can still function because I and the neighbors are still producing.
Of course it's also worth pointing out that even on cloudy days solar panels still produce electricity, just not as much as on full sunny days. It's also worth pointing out that the house up the bend and slightly lower than me can have a different local wind speed; and if you live anywhere near an ocean or large body of water, there is almost never *no* wind.
So if ConEdison were to struggle to supply Jackson Heights and the swathes of Queens that always experience brownouts every summer and those areas were to have micro-grids in place, then they could continue to function no matter the problems ConEdison might have. That is the definition and benefit of "decentralization."
A gust of wind does not produce equal power even within the same neighborhood. And energy usage among households is not uniform even at time t1. What if I'm not home, not using the electricity generated from my wind turbine, but you are? What if we both have battery packs to store unused power generated, that smooth out availability between changes in windspeed? What if we store excess power as hydrogen that gets run back through a fuel cell when we need more power? Or, what if we sell back excess to the larger grid and have them cut us a check? You see, load balancing in a micro grid gives you all that flexibility and resilience.
These are all things that exist now, that people do. It's simply not widespread yet. But it will be.
Here's where venture capitalists play a deleterious role in the process. They don't care about ground-breaking ideas or real vision or even solid business plans with solid revenue models. They care about whether they can turn around their investment in 6 months to a year for some multiple. That's it. That's all they care about. So if right now they feel reasonable certainty that they can unload a photo-sharing site on 2nd round sucke...er, investors, they'll invest. They don't care that there are 100 other such sites out there. They don't care that the founders are 22 years old. They don't care that the business plan is written on a napkin. They care about the flip.
The problem is no one else in the early-stage game understands VCs have that motivation, and only that motivation. They think that when a VC plows money into something that that something must have something going for it. They think it makes the invested-in company real. A million stories about 22-year old founders turning around with that money and blowing it on coke and hookers does not dissuade them of that.
So a lot of the good money that could flow into real entrepreneurs, that is, real people trying to really solve real problems, does not because of the smoke screen thrown up by the VCs and their PR firms. And a great deal of social progress stifles because of it. The real entrepreneurs usually have to literally weave whole cloth out of thin air on what they can beg, borrow, or steal because no capital flows their way.
Once in a blue moon those guys make it through that Dantean hell and produce something world-changing like Apple or Google. But imagine a world where an Apple or Google emerged every 4-6 months. Think of the undiscovered possibilities. Think of the rapidly expanding markets. Think of the jobs, jobs, jobs, that would generate. Think of the benefit to humanity.
I would love to live in that world, wouldn't you?
It does not make sense in your situation as a renter, but when you own it does, even with where installation costs and everything else are now. The average American family uses 940kwh/month.
Let's take the case of a house in NYC, which has both some of the highest labor costs (pertinent to installation costs of solar panels) and electricity costs ($0.35/kwh from ConEdison). You need 26 290W panels to produce the electricity you need. The cost of panels plus installation totals $48.5K. After just the federal incentive it comes down to $32K. The ConEdison-provided electricity costs $4K/yr, so that's a break-even time of 8 years. Most people own their homes longer than 8 years.
When you factor in the New York State solar incentive of 25% the break-even drops to 5 years. When you consider that ConEdison's price per kwh has increased more than 10% every year for the past 10 years, that break-even time drops to 4-4.5 years.
If the upfront cost of $22K is still a barrier when you buy that house, you can shop around for energy efficient mortgages. They lend to you at an advantageous rate so you can afford to upgrade the home's energy efficiency, as in they knock of a couple basis points. The savings over a 30-yr mortgage are huge, on top of what you save on the electricity (most solar panels are rated for that long).
In short, it already makes financial sense to do this stuff, and since the cost of going solar dropped 80% between 2008-2012 it's only going to get easier.
The answer to this problem, and also to the problem of grid failure due to extreme weather, is to decentralize power production. Individual homes can often produce as much power as they need with solar and micro-wind turbines. If they tie in to a micro-grid--essentially a neighborhood-level grid--they can load balance against their neighbors.
Decentralizing power production yields many other benefits, too. Individuals save tons of money on power bills (the cost of solar, for example, has been dropping dramatically), the country produces less CO2, and everyone has a lot more money in their pockets they can boost the economy with.
Sports is certainly the last hold-out for live pay TV, but nightly news isn't. I can already watch Tagesschau on my Roku with a mere several hours' delay, if I don't happen to catch it live. Anything more actual than that people will go to Twitter or Facebook or YouTube to see the real-time reports and videos that people upload from their phones. "Real" news is mostly spin and BS anyhow--it has lost all value.
Sports shouldn't get too comfortable, though, because in the era of Google Glass and drones the chance for real-time broadcasts sourced from those who haven't paid the NFL millions for air rights is quickly coming about.
The upshot of all of this is none of us has the luxury of resting on our laurels anymore. We all have to use our brains constantly to make a living.
The NSA, Congress, Executive, and Judiciary represent a clear and present danger to the People and Constitution of the United States of America. They are violating our god-given rights on a daily basis, lying to us about it, and there is no branch of government that is checking that overreach. If there was, we'd be seeing top officials at the NSA perp-walked to supermax cells and the President of the USA would have been impeached by a unanimous vote weeks ago when he admitted knowing about it and doing nothing about it.
So, dear friends, it is the duty of every patriotic American who still loves freedom to resist the government in every way they can, large and small. If you run a business, refuse to serve anyone from the Congress, Judiciary, or Executive branches. Don't let your kids play with their kids. Ostracize them. If you know how to design systems that resist surveillance, do so and then send them off to live autonomously so no one can compel to you compromise them. If you have the know-how, track & publish the whereabouts of every government agent who thinks spying only goes one-way; send everyone in the Starbucks a text alert every time one of those goons enters the establishment, so you know just who to 'accidentally' spill hot coffee on.
If those kinds of actions are too small fry for you, do something else. Knock yourself out. Do what you can, do what you feel comfortable doing, but don't do nothing. Being quiet about this stuff, letting them get away with it, is the very worst you can do if you don't want to see this country slide completely off the cliff into totalitarianism.
This is why when in the past I worked for others I always surfed via my own personal hotspot, not the corporate network. Yes, it does not help you with the NSA, but it at least avoids the entire issue of corporate IT.
I cannot think of one single Microsoft product, hardware or software, that I've wanted to purchase in the last 15 years, whether as a consumer or head of tech departments with big budgets to spend. Lackluster products, poor user-acceptance testing, poor debugging prior to release, poor security, miserable customer support (on contract or per incident), awful product design, and on and on. The last thing I took momentary note of was Kinect, but I have become so disenchanted with Microsoft across the board that I was sure it would be crap too and dismissed the thought.
About 7-8 years ago a colleague showed me his new install of Vista and I felt so bad for him I unclipped the Ubuntu Live thumbdrive I had on my keychain and gave it to him as a gift. Last month my poor brother-in-law begged me to help him with his brand-new Windows 8 machine, struggling and wheezing under the weight of its operating system, freezing and slowing to a crawl to launch basic apps. I put Ubuntu on as a dual boot and I've never seen a happier human being. He's gaming on Steam now and not casting a single look back at MS.
So when all the marketing hype around the Surface hit, it didn't even cause a ripple on my consciousness. These sales figures confirm it hasn't done so for anyone else, either.
I do wonder how long it's going to take for MS to implode. They have failed to innovate or protect their lock-in for more than a decade now. Users and businesses have moved on with their use patterns. MS's then-and-still cash cow, Office, has been satisfyingly re-created by Google and Open/LibreOffice for many years now, so eventually even stodgy IT Managers (Baby Boomers, I'm looking at you) will get religion.
When I was raised we called America, "Land of the Free, Home of the Brave." Calling ourselves something that echoed "Fatherland," or "Motherland" would have met revulsion. Those were appellations for Nazis and Communists. We despised the KGM, Stasi, and SS for their total surveillance. Being stopped to show your papers on a public road was THE test for whether you lived in a totalitarian state. Now we have the NSA violating the highest law of our land at will, and the TSA making random stops on our highways demanding drivers submit to searches and checks of their papers. Americans are still quite heavily armed for a civlian population, and we still do have means to information that circumvent government and official media. We will see if Americans still have enough moxy, enough self-awareness as a free people to rise up and re-assert their freedom, or if they will submit to tyranny and take the whole world down with them. But either way, it will not happen without a great deal of blood.
I spent an hour transitioning my brother-in-law from Windows 8 to Ubuntu on Sunday. His non-functioning, brand-new desktop went to lightening fast like that. Suddenly he could play all the games Windows 8 couldn't. He could use Steam, and interact with the OS and not have it hang for a minute with every click. I have never encountered such a grateful human in a like situation in 15 years.
Microsoft has stumbled very, very badly, and it is the moment for those of us who champion FOSS to pounce. If you know FOSS, do what you can now to liberate all those in your life who still beat on the ramparts of the Walled Garden. It might be the most significant thing you can do to advance the cause of freedom in your life.
I second this. I spend a good portion of graduate school in Beijing and Manchuria, and you hit the nail on the head. The only people who will pay the price for pollution are the dumb schmucks whose guanxi is not powerful enough to shield them from scapegoating.
Another poster pointed out that access to a robust talent pool is a key reason why you'd want to locate a startup in NYC. There is another reason, too. It's not just the tech talent pool that factors into the success of your venture, it's the talent pool in other, closely related industries like design. In New York there's a lot of cross-over that leads to surprising and creative solutions. In every discipline you have the best professionals in the world pushing the envelope, and that both drives and inspires you beyond what you'd be capable of in a sparser, thinner environment. New York has an energy that I have never felt in any other world city, not in Paris, not in Tokyo, not in Shanghai.
But with public transportation, you're really limited in what you can carry. Any kind of office outing requires renting an expensive bus to shuttle everyone to or from the event, too. And if the subway has a problem, you may as well shut the place down until they get things fixed. Additionally, your employees who might otherwise be happy to work late or odd hours to finish some project are constrained by the hours the bus or metro runs. So you lose some potential productivity there too.
Or you could have to drive, only to find that some idiot cut off some other idiot and caused a massive accident that has the expressway backed up for miles, and you have to wait around for hours until they clear the accident. Constrained by the hours the bus or metro runs? Do you have any idea how many public transportation options there are in NYC? There are 24 subway lines that run all night. There's the Metro North, Long Island Railroad, New Jersey PATH trains, New Jersey Light Rail, and Amtrak if you don't like the subway. There are scores and scores of bus lines, dozens of express buses from Staten Island and the like, and those are just the MTA buses; and they run all night. There's Greyhound, Trailways, and about 30 other lines that go into Port Authority on 42nd. There are ferries and water taxis. There are yellow cabs, car services, gypsy cabs, and peddle-cabs. There's a freaking gondola if you live on Roosevelt Island. Or you could rent a bike with CitiBike or ride your own around the extensive network of protected bike lanes.
In short, transportation without owning a car is not even remotely a problem in this town. It's also why you want to locate your startup here instead of somewhere else where the options are limited.
Gladly, coward. They can show up in all the black SUVs they want. The cameras I have mounted streaming that activity will evoke no reaction at all, I bet.
The NSA needs to be flooded with false positives. They need to have so many false positives generated that their illegal, unconstitutional spying is rendered moot.
On the other side, we need to surveille every member of Congress and the Executive and have their every move published on a publicly available site. After all, if they have nothing to hide then they shouldn't worry, right?
In a perfect world the President and every member of Congress who signed off on this unconstitutional behavior would be impeached. But I know this is not a perfect world. So instead I will advocate a world where we turn the panopticon on itself and make them suffer three times for what they make us suffer.
Tyrants must always be hoisted on their own petards.
If we simply man up and burn Washington D.C. and the NSA sites to the ground to send an unequivocal message about how we feel about their assaults on our Constitutional rights. I acknowledge that many polled in these shores would happily bend over for an anal probe. They are not my countrymen. The rest of us must reclaim our liberties from Washington or we will have to pay many more times in blood down the road to do so when more of the apathetic wake up.
Note: this is not a Left vs. Right issue. Both parties have been complicit in this. They are not our friends. They must both be cleansed.
Why would you eat something as repulsive as insects when you can eat spirulina? It's a perfect food. You could eat nothing but spirulina for the rest of your life and have all your nutritional needs satisfied. It's an easy additive to smoothies, puddings, soups, and anything else. It doesn't taste like much on its own, so it blends well with other ingredients. So it's a much lower bar than eating a worm, grasshopper, or any other insect.
The government has been running a full-court press on the media and everyone else to get them to shut up and get in line. Yesterday there was a poll saying the exact opposite, like 59% saying the opposite across the partisan divide, and now magically it's the other way. I've been monitoring the blogs Left & Right and even Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are tamping down since calling it a "coup d'etat" last week.
The government is scared at how nonpartisan the outrage has been. The Whitehouse and Congress are complicit in this all-out assault on the Constitution and the American Republic. They know that if they can cow the American people into swallowing this that they will then have carte blanche. But whether the people do swallow this or not, things go rapidly downhill from here.
And note, which party is in office is totally irrelevant here. The Republicans and Democrats have both been in on it.
I hug my family very close these days, because it's about to get very ugly and we all could lose everything.
I voted for Obama twice.
Anyone who serves as apologist for the NSA, the Whitehouse, and Congress on this proves himself an enemy of the Constitution and the American people. There is no justification for this. There is no gentle dismantling of the Constitution. It stands above this or any government in Washington, D.C. Anyone in Washington D.C. who assaults it like this means the destruction of our Republic and the subjugation of its people.
Obama must be impeached. The Congressmen and Senators who support his actions must be impeached. The courts who OK this must be removed. Washington D.C. must be burned to the ground and rebuilt if there are none there who will honor their oaths to defend and uphold the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The NSA, Congress, and the Whitehouse represent an existential threat to the freedom of the American people, the most dire in the history of the country. The Constitution is the law of the land, not just some "damned piece of paper." If the government, in all its organs, branches, and bodies, conspires to violate that Constitution then the American people have the right and duty to take up arms to defend it. As the oath goes, defend it against "all enemies, foreign or domestic." And this is a domestic enemy of the Constitution.
Let's set aside this Left vs. Right bullshit and take our country back, Americans.
I'm a progressive. Not in the rebranded liberal sense, but in the T. Roosevelt, get your government and big business out of my business or I'll kick your ass sense. I don't oppose Obama because I'm a reflexive Tea Party guy who ridiculously, famously, calls him a muslim and radical Christian, socialist and fascist, at the same time.
But the US government is beyond out of control. Elections don't matter. Courts don't matter. The press is as much the problem, as the problem itself. Every peaceful avenue for reform and redress has been shut off or co-opted. Meanwhile, the thieving classes, meaning the 1%, are doubling down on their behavior thinking that no one in the 99% will ever hold them to account.
That means the clock is ticking for an American Spring. We are not hapless, disarmed Libyans. We are heavily armed Americans who have been raised from birth to believe we have a God-given right to be free. Those in the army are our brothers, sisters, and cousins. They are us. So if the 1% truly believe that they'll simply follow orders and drop napalm on the neighborhoods where their friends and family live, then they are due for an extremely rude awakening.
Go ahead, 1%'ers, move all your wealth to the British Virgin Islands and secrete yourselves there. Much good it will do you. Justice is coming, it's coming very soon, and you have a giant target painted on your ass.
YMMV
The corporate culture does need to be shaken up, as does the federal government, as do the big banks. They feel their control eroding by the day, which is why they're squeezing as hard as they can now. So good luck getting them to hand out startup capital to millenials. And the people making the decision where to allocate capital are MBAs who by definition defend the status quo; they want to stifle innovation if they can, or control it if they can't. The result is we all get a world that continues to Suck while our very serious problems mount quickly.
We are on the cusp of a global revolution (if you like that word) or a paradigm shift (if you don't) that requires we bypass the gatekeepers of capital. That's part of what the crowdfunding movement is about. But what we really need to do is relearn or invent anew a more fundamental skill: how to make something from nothing, using nothing but our wits, our will, our heart, and the strength of our own two hands.
It's very hard. But unless you can walk through that test of fire, acid, and darkness you are nothing more than another wannabe driven by callow greed.
I do wonder if the presence of foreign teachers in Japan for 20 years has contributed to the decline of whale meat consumption among the young. On the J.E.T. program all of us teachers discouraged whaling and eating the meat every chance we got.