``The biometric data was stored on servers located off-site, in space leased from a third party. Lee argued the business had never sought its workers' consent to use fingerprint scanning, and feared his biometric data would be accessed by unknown groups and individuals.''
Management may unaware of it but that information will be accessed by unknown groups and individuals. It's just a matter of time.
Or if they want, they could get the same information from the break room trash can, only slightly less conveniently.
Let's suppose that only one Starbucks patron in a million watches porn at Starbucks, and let's suppose that you've visited Starbucks four times daily, seven days per week, for 10 years. That's just over 100,000 visits. The probability that you'd have seen a porn-watcher in 100K visits is 9.5%.
There's a flaw in the reasoning here. This assumes each time he goes to a Starbucks he observes exactly one other patron. They are usually more crowded than that, especially at times the OP is most likely to be visiting the.
Valid point, though it doesn't change the answer that much. A bigger flaw -- in the opposite direction -- is that he doesn't see a random sample from the pool of all Starbucks customers, but will tend to mostly see people from one smallish pool, many of them repeatedly. So a better way to think about this is to estimate the size of the pool that he has observed and calculate the probability that at least one of them is a Starbucks porn watcher.
The real question that needs answering, is one more likely to observe someone else's porn at Starbucks or get hit by lightning?
Get hit by lightning inside a Starbucks? I would hope that the odds of that are extremely low.:P
That's enough to destroy the arguments of all the 'self driving cars will change everything' derpers, as well as the valuation and proposed future business model of Uber.
Self driving cars have no steering wheel. Everything else is 'driver assist', like cruise control.
Nonsense. A car with a steering wheel but no one behind it is self-driving. That's what Waymo is doing.
Employees don't run a corporation no matter their rank.
This mostly isn't true at Google. Google is very bottom-up, with many -- perhaps most -- product decisions being made by the engineers doing the work. (Aside: This is why Google often seems to have such a short attention span; the engineers driving a project have moved onto something else). This is slowly changing because it's a difficult way for a large corporation to operate, and also varies from organization to organization, but it's still a very employee-driven company. That's a part of what is driving so much internal outrage, the fact that employees are accustomed to being listened to and even being primary decisionmakers.
Authority is vested in a board of directors who are controlled by large shareholders. Unless we are talking about Facebook, in which case Mark Zuckerberg is to blame for everything.
Actually, Zuckerberg got the idea for his corporate structure from Google. Google's IPO and subsequent stock split (into GOOG and GOOGL shares) were structured to ensure that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, collectively, had enough voting shares to outvote all the rest of the stockholders. This is still the case; as long as the three of them vote together, they have the final say.
It's sad that people take pride in lacking basic math skills, and yet so common. Very basic math, even. A competent high school freshman can do the calculations I did. And anyone with basic mathematical literacy doesn't even need to run the numbers to see that your sample size is completely inadequate to make any judgments about nationwide frequency.
Innumeracy aside, why would you expect to find this on the news? It's not a crime, just really obnoxious. And videos of people watching porn mostly wouldn't be allowed on YouTube, because of the porn.
But, that said, a simple google search turned up these three links on the first page of results. I'm sure there'd have been more but the page was mostly filled with stories about Starbucks decision to block porn. If you dig deeper, I'm sure you can find lots, lots more:
I can assure you that people watching porn in Starbucks is not a real issue
You really can't, at least not with any sort of authority. You go to Starbucks regularly, sure, but your sample of behavior at Starbucks' coffee shops is still ludicrously small for drawing any conclusions.
Let's suppose that only one Starbucks patron in a million watches porn at Starbucks, and let's suppose that you've visited Starbucks four times daily, seven days per week, for 10 years. That's just over 100,000 visits. The probability that you'd have seen a porn-watcher in 100K visits is 9.5%.
There are about 14,000 Starbucks stores in the US. Let's suppose that, on average, each serves 500 patrons per day. That's 7M daily visits. On average, there will be 7 porn-watchers in Starbucks stores on any day, and the probability that any one day finds no one watching porn in any of their stores is 0.09%.
And since a high percentage of these porn watchers will generate complaints, and those will likely all get reported to corporate, I'm sure to Starbucks' corporate offices this seems like a huge problem, even at an incidence of only one in one million.
Agreed - if the driver was looking away per training and performing a task the employer told her to do.
However it was my understanding that the driver was likely viewing a personal entertainment video based on this news report
I skimmed through the police report and based on page 64 it looks like you're right. Netflix and YouTube confirmed that she wasn't using their services but Hulu (after a mistake where they provided someone else's data), found that she was watching "The Voice" during the minutes leading up to the accident.
In the days after the incident I saw a news report that claimed she was doing work on her mobile device, but it looks like that wasn't true.
The money quote: 'But L5 is impossible, said Krafcik.'
You're taking that quote out of context. Read on and he clearly says that self-driving cars *are* going to be doing a lot of fully-automated driving, with no human involvement. The snippet you quoted is merely him trying to reassure the journalist that there will always be some place for human driving, some sorts of specialized driving that computers won't be trained to do. I suppose that makes sense; there is a lot of specialized driving that very few human drivers can do either.
The article goes on to point out that self-driving cars will initially "operate in designated areas on familiar roads", and then widen those areas, diminishing the need for human driving. This is obvious. It makes perfect sense to start in the most controlled conditions and then gradually widen the scope as experience is gained and problems are solved.
Actually, it was carelessness or negligence by two people (the safety driver and the pedestrian).
I don't fault the safety driver. The safety driver was doing what she was supposed to do, logging information on a tablet. I fault the people who (a) turned off the anti-collision systems (two of them) and (b) tasked the safety driver with doing something other than acting as a safety driver (especially in conjunction with (a)).
Less energy and more efficient usage is the key to real environmentally savvy policies.
Renewables and lower prices can lead to higher energy use.
Higher energy use is by itself a good thing. If we had enough cheap energy, we could transmute lead into gold as much as we wanted. The more energy you have the more cool things you can make happen.
The only problem is when energy production damages the environment. That is what we want to avoid, but don't get confused that the goal is less energy use.
Any energy you use will be in part transformed into heat to be released into the environment.
It's not my belief, it's thermodynamics.
More energy == More heat.
Do you still think this is good?
Bah. The direct effects of heat produced by human industry are negligible. Our current total energy production (including renewables, which are actually solar in origin and therefore shouldn't be counted) is about 1/75000th of the energy that is absorbed from the sun. And increasing energy from renewables doesn't significantly increase human heat input; it mostly just moves it around.
What isn't negligible is the way we increase the greenhouse effect and reduce the amount of heat that radiates into space.
My Tesla Model S, on the other hand, loses very little range at highway speeds.
Unless you have highways with low speed limits, that isn't true. Highway speeds where I live are between 70-80mph and that has a notable effect on fuel economy even for Tesla. You are correct that the Tesla is more streamlined so the effect is smaller but the effect is still there and still notable.
It's there, but it's quite small. Highways near me have 75-80 mph limits so I drive 80-85.
The only real range issue I see with it for local driving is that at highway speeds the range goes to shit because it only has the one gear.
No, that's not the reason. Having more gears wouldn't change the efficiency of the electric motor, unlike an ICEV. The Bolt's problem at highway speeds is that it has high drag coefficient, 0.32. My Nissan Leaf has the same problem, though not quite as bad as the Bolt. My Tesla Model S, on the other hand, loses very little range at highway speeds. It also has only one "gear".
No, it's neither by government decree nor by belief, that would be too simple, but then again it's only slightly more complex. It is by the objective trustworthiness of the promise that money invested in the currency area will come back as more money, meaning how reliably the promise is backed by the industry's profitability and growth within the currency area.
Your claim begs the question. You're saying that the trustworthiness of a currency is a result of the effectiveness of the industry among people who trust the currency. Why do the people in this currency-trusting industry trust the currency? Why do they use it rather than something else?
The truth is the two answers you dismissed as "too simple". But they aren't too simple, they are the real reasons that people trust a currency. Your argument about expected investment profitability is a red herring.
Currency has value because people believe it has value. And a big part of the reason they believe that is government decree. Specifically, the government decree that says "this currency is legal tender", which more precisely means "this currency must be accepted by any creditor in this region as retirement of any financial debt". And, of course, one of the most important such "creditors" is the government itself, which uniquely -- in most areas, anyway -- has the authority to use physical force to compel payment of debts. Note that the currency's use to pay taxes is an important one, but the status of legal tender means it can be used for any debt, public or private, and the private part of that is, in most cases, more important than the public part.
it'd be wiser to not do anything now to slow down economic growth, but instead spend resources on remediation
Slow down, cowboy, that's a claim that requires evidence. The trillion dollar question, right now, is exactly the one you glibly answer: Which will cause the most economic impact, continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and then paying the economic cost of living with the effects, or paying the economic cost of replacing our energy infrastructure?
This report attempts to provide an answer to one part of that question, namely, what will be the cost of simply living on a hotter planet. And its answer is that the cost will be enormous. Now compare the range of predictions with the cost of retooling our energy infrastructure.
Nobody cares if you or anyone else who wants to uses solar instead of coal power. What they care about is if you propose to force them to waste a bunch of their resources to pay your buddies in the solar industry off instead of allowing them to use less expensive energy sources.
Here's a better option: Let's avoid arbitrarily favoring anyone's buddies, and let the market figure it out. First, remove all subsidies, explicit and implicit, from both fossil and renewable energy sources. Second, do our best to compete the long-term environmental impact of each energy source, and levy corresponding taxes. That is, internalize the environmental externalities. This latter part is hard to get exactly right, but we can get a reasonable approximation, and adjust it as we learn more.
The freshwater problems of these islands is not due to climate. It is almost always a case of local overuse. When the islanders pump to much fresh water out of the island, salt water impinges. Overuse of freshwater can also cause land subsidence.
Nope, not in this case. The island's population and water use has fallen dramatically over the last 20 years. This is because of climate. Specifically, sea level.
Coral atolls grow higher when sea levels rise. The question is one of rates. As long as the sea level rises are slow enough, the atolls will be more or less fine. But if the water rises faster than the corals can grow, they'll be inundated. Massive corals of the sort that make up these atoll reefs can grow up to 5mm per year. Over the 20th century the average annual sea level increase was 1.7mm. No problem, they can keep up with that. Since the 90s the rate has averaged 3.2mm per year. The corals can handle that, too... but the rate doesn't have to accelerate much more to overwhelm them.
Indeed, even at current rates, islands are having problems. I was on Rarotonga last month, in the Cook Islands. Natives there told me that their lagoons used to be two to three times deeper than they are now. The problem is that seas are crashing higher over the reefs and depositing more sand, causing the lagoons to fill in. This has created problems for fishing and for the tourist industry (snorkeling in a foot of water isn't much fun). However, it's expected that over the next 20 years the waves will rise higher yet and begin removing sand from the lagoons and the beaches, reversing the shallowing trend and then beginning to eat away at the island. Rarotonga will be fine; it's volcanic and rises over 2000 feet above sea level at its highest point. At worst people will have to move inland a little bit. But it could easily devastate the already-fragile island economy.
I was also on Mangaia and they're facing a different problem. Much of the island's fresh water supply comes from inland lakes which flow through tunnels in the makatea (fossil coral) to the ocean. But sea levels have risen enough that during storms water now flows in through the tunnels, turning the lakes brackish. This is having serious effects on the island ecosystems as well as making fresh water harder to come by.
The bottom line is that for many islanders, climate change is already having very real and very visible effects, mostly due to rising sea levels. And it's going to get much worse. And many low-lying coral atolls may just disappear when the rate of sea level rise exceeds the rate at which the corals can grow.
Only difference is in the US private companies keep scores on you instead of the government.
Well, the other difference is that the only credit score they track is about, well, credit -- your ability to borrow money and otherwise incur future debts. And it's not some judgment on your overall fitness for society, it's just a judgment on how likely you are to pay what you owe.
This "other difference" is enormous. So big that they aren't remotely the same things at all.
The closest thing the US has to this social credit score is a criminal record. If you are convicted of a crime, especially a felony, then the government keeps track of that, and it will affect your ability to get a job, own a job, vote (in most states), etc. And if your crime was sexual in nature, it will affect where you're allowed to live and work as well. What makes this particularly nasty is that prosecutors are really good at extracting confessions and pleas of guilt even from innocent people.
My wrists yellowline pretty quickly when I have to type on a rectangular keyboard. The split keyboard works like a charm!
The MS keyboard is pretty good. I used it for years. But then I discovered Kinesis... and now my wrists never, ever hurt, no matter how much typing I do. It takes a few days to get used to the Kinesis shape, and it's very frustrating at first because you keep hitting the wrong keys. After you get past that, though, it's amazing. Fast and completely pain free because you don't have to move anything but your fingers.
Of course, by the time it's feasible and economical, we all ride in affordable self-driving electric cars with a range of over 1000km.
FTFY
Self-driving makes long-distance road travel much more appealing. I live in northern Utah, but have reason to regularly visit Boulder, Colorado. The flight takes an hour and fifteen minutes... but I actually have to leave home 90 minutes before the flight so I can drive to the airport, park and get through security in time, and it takes another hour (sometimes more) to rent a car and get from DEN to Boulder. So, total travel time is about four hours. The return is a bit worse. That's clearly better than the seven and a half hours it takes to drive... but only because I have to be awake and paying attention for the drive.
With a self-driving car with an area that lays flat in the back, I would drive rather than fly. I'd get in the car around bedtime, sack out in the back and wake up to find my car parked in the parking lot in Boulder. I'd run into the office, shower, etc., grab some breakfast and be fresh and ready for the day. It would be far more convenient for me, with basically zero wasted time.
Cost-wise, driving is a bit more expensive than flying if I know far enough in advance to buy my tickets early. I figure the long-term cost-per-mile of my Tesla is about 28 cents ($50K for purchase price and maintenance, 200K miles vehicle life, 3 cents per mile for "fuel"), so 976 miles round trip costs $273 (in fact I have free supercharging, so it's more like $244, but that's a novelty). If I buy in advance, I can usually get round-trip airfare for about $100. $200 for a more comfortable seat. But if I can't buy in advance, it can be as much as $500. Oh, plus another $60 to rent and fuel a car for the day.
So, advance purchase total is about $160 vs $273 for driving. Flying would save $113, at a cost of about 3 hours of my time and a lot of aggravation. I think I might just opt to drive, even if I'm paying for it (in fact, this would generally be a business trip, and I'd get reimbursed $0.50 cents per mile for personal car use, which means I'd turn a tidy profit each time!). On short notice, driving is clearly and unambiguously better.
Also, if I'm not going alone, driving is better. If my wife goes with me, the flight cost is $260 (incl. rental car) even with advance purchase. That's negligibly cheaper than driving.
Obviously this could also be done via rail service, if functional long-distance passenger rail existed in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Management may unaware of it but that information will be accessed by unknown groups and individuals. It's just a matter of time.
Or if they want, they could get the same information from the break room trash can, only slightly less conveniently.
Let's suppose that only one Starbucks patron in a million watches porn at Starbucks, and let's suppose that you've visited Starbucks four times daily, seven days per week, for 10 years. That's just over 100,000 visits. The probability that you'd have seen a porn-watcher in 100K visits is 9.5%.
There's a flaw in the reasoning here. This assumes each time he goes to a Starbucks he observes exactly one other patron. They are usually more crowded than that, especially at times the OP is most likely to be visiting the.
Valid point, though it doesn't change the answer that much. A bigger flaw -- in the opposite direction -- is that he doesn't see a random sample from the pool of all Starbucks customers, but will tend to mostly see people from one smallish pool, many of them repeatedly. So a better way to think about this is to estimate the size of the pool that he has observed and calculate the probability that at least one of them is a Starbucks porn watcher.
The real question that needs answering, is one more likely to observe someone else's porn at Starbucks or get hit by lightning?
Get hit by lightning inside a Starbucks? I would hope that the odds of that are extremely low. :P
That's enough to destroy the arguments of all the 'self driving cars will change everything' derpers, as well as the valuation and proposed future business model of Uber.
Self driving cars have no steering wheel. Everything else is 'driver assist', like cruise control.
Nonsense. A car with a steering wheel but no one behind it is self-driving. That's what Waymo is doing.
Employees don't run a corporation no matter their rank.
This mostly isn't true at Google. Google is very bottom-up, with many -- perhaps most -- product decisions being made by the engineers doing the work. (Aside: This is why Google often seems to have such a short attention span; the engineers driving a project have moved onto something else). This is slowly changing because it's a difficult way for a large corporation to operate, and also varies from organization to organization, but it's still a very employee-driven company. That's a part of what is driving so much internal outrage, the fact that employees are accustomed to being listened to and even being primary decisionmakers.
Authority is vested in a board of directors who are controlled by large shareholders. Unless we are talking about Facebook, in which case Mark Zuckerberg is to blame for everything.
Actually, Zuckerberg got the idea for his corporate structure from Google. Google's IPO and subsequent stock split (into GOOG and GOOGL shares) were structured to ensure that Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, collectively, had enough voting shares to outvote all the rest of the stockholders. This is still the case; as long as the three of them vote together, they have the final say.
You really can't, at least not with any sort of authority.
Have you ever BEEN on Starbucks WiFi? No way anyone is streaming anything over that pitifully slow network, much less porn.
I have. Some are okay, most suck.
It's sad that people take pride in lacking basic math skills, and yet so common. Very basic math, even. A competent high school freshman can do the calculations I did. And anyone with basic mathematical literacy doesn't even need to run the numbers to see that your sample size is completely inadequate to make any judgments about nationwide frequency.
Innumeracy aside, why would you expect to find this on the news? It's not a crime, just really obnoxious. And videos of people watching porn mostly wouldn't be allowed on YouTube, because of the porn.
But, that said, a simple google search turned up these three links on the first page of results. I'm sure there'd have been more but the page was mostly filled with stories about Starbucks decision to block porn. If you dig deeper, I'm sure you can find lots, lots more:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101001/15475611255/starbucks-staffer-claims-he-was-fired-for-turning-off-wifi-to-block-porn-watchers.shtml
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.businessinsider.co...
I can assure you that people watching porn in Starbucks is not a real issue
You really can't, at least not with any sort of authority. You go to Starbucks regularly, sure, but your sample of behavior at Starbucks' coffee shops is still ludicrously small for drawing any conclusions.
Let's suppose that only one Starbucks patron in a million watches porn at Starbucks, and let's suppose that you've visited Starbucks four times daily, seven days per week, for 10 years. That's just over 100,000 visits. The probability that you'd have seen a porn-watcher in 100K visits is 9.5%.
There are about 14,000 Starbucks stores in the US. Let's suppose that, on average, each serves 500 patrons per day. That's 7M daily visits. On average, there will be 7 porn-watchers in Starbucks stores on any day, and the probability that any one day finds no one watching porn in any of their stores is 0.09%.
And since a high percentage of these porn watchers will generate complaints, and those will likely all get reported to corporate, I'm sure to Starbucks' corporate offices this seems like a huge problem, even at an incidence of only one in one million.
Agreed - if the driver was looking away per training and performing a task the employer told her to do.
However it was my understanding that the driver was likely viewing a personal entertainment video based on this news report
I skimmed through the police report and based on page 64 it looks like you're right. Netflix and YouTube confirmed that she wasn't using their services but Hulu (after a mistake where they provided someone else's data), found that she was watching "The Voice" during the minutes leading up to the accident.
In the days after the incident I saw a news report that claimed she was doing work on her mobile device, but it looks like that wasn't true.
Waymo's director of 'self driving' cars recently said in an interview that 'level 5 self driving cars are impossible.'
Link: https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/21...
The money quote: 'But L5 is impossible, said Krafcik.'
You're taking that quote out of context. Read on and he clearly says that self-driving cars *are* going to be doing a lot of fully-automated driving, with no human involvement. The snippet you quoted is merely him trying to reassure the journalist that there will always be some place for human driving, some sorts of specialized driving that computers won't be trained to do. I suppose that makes sense; there is a lot of specialized driving that very few human drivers can do either.
The article goes on to point out that self-driving cars will initially "operate in designated areas on familiar roads", and then widen those areas, diminishing the need for human driving. This is obvious. It makes perfect sense to start in the most controlled conditions and then gradually widen the scope as experience is gained and problems are solved.
Actually, it was carelessness or negligence by two people (the safety driver and the pedestrian).
I don't fault the safety driver. The safety driver was doing what she was supposed to do, logging information on a tablet. I fault the people who (a) turned off the anti-collision systems (two of them) and (b) tasked the safety driver with doing something other than acting as a safety driver (especially in conjunction with (a)).
Less energy and more efficient usage is the key to real environmentally savvy policies. Renewables and lower prices can lead to higher energy use.
Higher energy use is by itself a good thing. If we had enough cheap energy, we could transmute lead into gold as much as we wanted. The more energy you have the more cool things you can make happen.
The only problem is when energy production damages the environment. That is what we want to avoid, but don't get confused that the goal is less energy use.
Any energy you use will be in part transformed into heat to be released into the environment. It's not my belief, it's thermodynamics. More energy == More heat. Do you still think this is good?
Bah. The direct effects of heat produced by human industry are negligible. Our current total energy production (including renewables, which are actually solar in origin and therefore shouldn't be counted) is about 1/75000th of the energy that is absorbed from the sun. And increasing energy from renewables doesn't significantly increase human heat input; it mostly just moves it around.
What isn't negligible is the way we increase the greenhouse effect and reduce the amount of heat that radiates into space.
My Tesla Model S, on the other hand, loses very little range at highway speeds.
Unless you have highways with low speed limits, that isn't true. Highway speeds where I live are between 70-80mph and that has a notable effect on fuel economy even for Tesla. You are correct that the Tesla is more streamlined so the effect is smaller but the effect is still there and still notable.
It's there, but it's quite small. Highways near me have 75-80 mph limits so I drive 80-85.
The only real range issue I see with it for local driving is that at highway speeds the range goes to shit because it only has the one gear.
No, that's not the reason. Having more gears wouldn't change the efficiency of the electric motor, unlike an ICEV. The Bolt's problem at highway speeds is that it has high drag coefficient, 0.32. My Nissan Leaf has the same problem, though not quite as bad as the Bolt. My Tesla Model S, on the other hand, loses very little range at highway speeds. It also has only one "gear".
No, it's neither by government decree nor by belief, that would be too simple, but then again it's only slightly more complex. It is by the objective trustworthiness of the promise that money invested in the currency area will come back as more money, meaning how reliably the promise is backed by the industry's profitability and growth within the currency area.
Your claim begs the question. You're saying that the trustworthiness of a currency is a result of the effectiveness of the industry among people who trust the currency. Why do the people in this currency-trusting industry trust the currency? Why do they use it rather than something else?
The truth is the two answers you dismissed as "too simple". But they aren't too simple, they are the real reasons that people trust a currency. Your argument about expected investment profitability is a red herring.
Currency has value because people believe it has value. And a big part of the reason they believe that is government decree. Specifically, the government decree that says "this currency is legal tender", which more precisely means "this currency must be accepted by any creditor in this region as retirement of any financial debt". And, of course, one of the most important such "creditors" is the government itself, which uniquely -- in most areas, anyway -- has the authority to use physical force to compel payment of debts. Note that the currency's use to pay taxes is an important one, but the status of legal tender means it can be used for any debt, public or private, and the private part of that is, in most cases, more important than the public part.
No this is because it's a shithole and no one wants to live there.
That's an odd comment. Are you always an asshole, or only on slashdot?
it'd be wiser to not do anything now to slow down economic growth, but instead spend resources on remediation
Slow down, cowboy, that's a claim that requires evidence. The trillion dollar question, right now, is exactly the one you glibly answer: Which will cause the most economic impact, continuing to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and then paying the economic cost of living with the effects, or paying the economic cost of replacing our energy infrastructure?
This report attempts to provide an answer to one part of that question, namely, what will be the cost of simply living on a hotter planet. And its answer is that the cost will be enormous. Now compare the range of predictions with the cost of retooling our energy infrastructure.
Nobody cares if you or anyone else who wants to uses solar instead of coal power. What they care about is if you propose to force them to waste a bunch of their resources to pay your buddies in the solar industry off instead of allowing them to use less expensive energy sources.
Here's a better option: Let's avoid arbitrarily favoring anyone's buddies, and let the market figure it out. First, remove all subsidies, explicit and implicit, from both fossil and renewable energy sources. Second, do our best to compete the long-term environmental impact of each energy source, and levy corresponding taxes. That is, internalize the environmental externalities. This latter part is hard to get exactly right, but we can get a reasonable approximation, and adjust it as we learn more.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...
The freshwater problems of these islands is not due to climate. It is almost always a case of local overuse. When the islanders pump to much fresh water out of the island, salt water impinges. Overuse of freshwater can also cause land subsidence.
Nope, not in this case. The island's population and water use has fallen dramatically over the last 20 years. This is because of climate. Specifically, sea level.
Data shows that coral-based islands (like the Marshalls) are growing. Eighty percent are either stable or growing. Tuvalu has added 3% more land in the last 50 years, and the Maldives, which famously held a cabinet meeting underwater to show their nation is doomed has no change in land area over the last 60 years.
Coral atolls grow higher when sea levels rise. The question is one of rates. As long as the sea level rises are slow enough, the atolls will be more or less fine. But if the water rises faster than the corals can grow, they'll be inundated. Massive corals of the sort that make up these atoll reefs can grow up to 5mm per year. Over the 20th century the average annual sea level increase was 1.7mm. No problem, they can keep up with that. Since the 90s the rate has averaged 3.2mm per year. The corals can handle that, too... but the rate doesn't have to accelerate much more to overwhelm them.
Indeed, even at current rates, islands are having problems. I was on Rarotonga last month, in the Cook Islands. Natives there told me that their lagoons used to be two to three times deeper than they are now. The problem is that seas are crashing higher over the reefs and depositing more sand, causing the lagoons to fill in. This has created problems for fishing and for the tourist industry (snorkeling in a foot of water isn't much fun). However, it's expected that over the next 20 years the waves will rise higher yet and begin removing sand from the lagoons and the beaches, reversing the shallowing trend and then beginning to eat away at the island. Rarotonga will be fine; it's volcanic and rises over 2000 feet above sea level at its highest point. At worst people will have to move inland a little bit. But it could easily devastate the already-fragile island economy.
I was also on Mangaia and they're facing a different problem. Much of the island's fresh water supply comes from inland lakes which flow through tunnels in the makatea (fossil coral) to the ocean. But sea levels have risen enough that during storms water now flows in through the tunnels, turning the lakes brackish. This is having serious effects on the island ecosystems as well as making fresh water harder to come by.
The bottom line is that for many islanders, climate change is already having very real and very visible effects, mostly due to rising sea levels. And it's going to get much worse. And many low-lying coral atolls may just disappear when the rate of sea level rise exceeds the rate at which the corals can grow.
own a job
Er, I meant "own a gun". That's a funny typo.
Only difference is in the US private companies keep scores on you instead of the government.
Well, the other difference is that the only credit score they track is about, well, credit -- your ability to borrow money and otherwise incur future debts. And it's not some judgment on your overall fitness for society, it's just a judgment on how likely you are to pay what you owe.
This "other difference" is enormous. So big that they aren't remotely the same things at all.
The closest thing the US has to this social credit score is a criminal record. If you are convicted of a crime, especially a felony, then the government keeps track of that, and it will affect your ability to get a job, own a job, vote (in most states), etc. And if your crime was sexual in nature, it will affect where you're allowed to live and work as well. What makes this particularly nasty is that prosecutors are really good at extracting confessions and pleas of guilt even from innocent people.
Mod parent up Kinesis will permanently eliminate all traces of CTS. And make you a faster typist, too.
My wrists yellowline pretty quickly when I have to type on a rectangular keyboard. The split keyboard works like a charm!
The MS keyboard is pretty good. I used it for years. But then I discovered Kinesis... and now my wrists never, ever hurt, no matter how much typing I do. It takes a few days to get used to the Kinesis shape, and it's very frustrating at first because you keep hitting the wrong keys. After you get past that, though, it's amazing. Fast and completely pain free because you don't have to move anything but your fingers.
Obviously, Google has to bid on it as well.
This would be fair if Google Shopping was its own company, completely independent from Google Search. I don't know if that's the case.
How would making it a separate company change anything?
Of course, by the time it's feasible and economical, we all ride in affordable self-driving electric cars with a range of over 1000km.
FTFY
Self-driving makes long-distance road travel much more appealing. I live in northern Utah, but have reason to regularly visit Boulder, Colorado. The flight takes an hour and fifteen minutes... but I actually have to leave home 90 minutes before the flight so I can drive to the airport, park and get through security in time, and it takes another hour (sometimes more) to rent a car and get from DEN to Boulder. So, total travel time is about four hours. The return is a bit worse. That's clearly better than the seven and a half hours it takes to drive... but only because I have to be awake and paying attention for the drive.
With a self-driving car with an area that lays flat in the back, I would drive rather than fly. I'd get in the car around bedtime, sack out in the back and wake up to find my car parked in the parking lot in Boulder. I'd run into the office, shower, etc., grab some breakfast and be fresh and ready for the day. It would be far more convenient for me, with basically zero wasted time.
Cost-wise, driving is a bit more expensive than flying if I know far enough in advance to buy my tickets early. I figure the long-term cost-per-mile of my Tesla is about 28 cents ($50K for purchase price and maintenance, 200K miles vehicle life, 3 cents per mile for "fuel"), so 976 miles round trip costs $273 (in fact I have free supercharging, so it's more like $244, but that's a novelty). If I buy in advance, I can usually get round-trip airfare for about $100. $200 for a more comfortable seat. But if I can't buy in advance, it can be as much as $500. Oh, plus another $60 to rent and fuel a car for the day.
So, advance purchase total is about $160 vs $273 for driving. Flying would save $113, at a cost of about 3 hours of my time and a lot of aggravation. I think I might just opt to drive, even if I'm paying for it (in fact, this would generally be a business trip, and I'd get reimbursed $0.50 cents per mile for personal car use, which means I'd turn a tidy profit each time!). On short notice, driving is clearly and unambiguously better.
Also, if I'm not going alone, driving is better. If my wife goes with me, the flight cost is $260 (incl. rental car) even with advance purchase. That's negligibly cheaper than driving.
Obviously this could also be done via rail service, if functional long-distance passenger rail existed in the US.