When low tar/low nicotine cigarettes came on the market they achieved that low nicotine delivery in smoking machines that emulated how people normally smoked cigarettes. But subsequent studies showed that people smoking these cigarettes were still consuming the same amount of nicotine (and tar). How so? Partly this was due to them smoking more cigarettes, and the other part was an unconscious change in how they smoked them. The low-low cigarettes worked partly by having porous paper that allowed air to dilute the nicotine (and tar) consumed. But the smokers started inserting them farther into their mouths, defeating this effect, and dragging on them differently (longer and deeper), extracting more nicotine than the smoking machines measured.
Sure. The nicotine has almost nothing to do with smoking. Sure.
Nicotine has a unique place in the harmfulness of cigarettes, which no amount of reformulation can erase. Nicotine is a cancer promoter. Inhaling a cancer promoter into your lungs on a regular basis is never going to be even a "health neutral" activity.
Some of this lagging can be explained away by the United States' mammoth geography,..
The ever popular corporate go-to excuse for poor wireless service in the U.S.
This is a very thin layer of truthiness - an excuse that sounds sort of plausible - if you don't actually look at any data or think about the subject at all.
What is it about the large thinly populated sections of the U.S. that would pull down wireless speeds on average? Wireless service is a local service, and the U.S. is highly urbanized. It is no more challenging to provide high speed service to a U.S. city than any other city in the world. Sure, maybe service for the 1/3 of Wyoming's population that live outside of cities is slow -- but this is very few people and should have a very slight effect on the national average. Even in those low density states, most people live in cities (the only states for which that is not true is Maine, Vermont and West Virginia).
Consider that Australia, which is nearly as large as the U.S. has faster wireless service, despite having only one tenth the population. It population density is one of the lowest in the world.
Consider that Finland, which has less than half the U.S. population density of the U.S. has the third fastest wireless in the world. Similarly with Norway which is number five.
The important statistic is not total land area (the empty space in the Yukon, Wyoming or Montana is not slowing down traffic in Greater New York), or even population density, but urbanization. The urbanization of the U.S. is 82.4%, about the same as Finland. All urban areas have high population density, and building out a fast service for that population is as easy in the U.S. as anywhere else. All that empty space in Finland is not slowing down their service.
The "but the U.S. is so big!" excuse makes no sense.
Since they are not transparent about what they spend the money on, you don't know if they deserve it or not. All you know for sure is that WMF's foundation thinks it is best to obscure the truth.
There are several organizations that rate charities. You should do your research before you donate.
At the very least you should do this. But charity ratings have serious limitations. They are limited mostly based on certain standardized transparency criteria - budget reporting and the like, to ensure that the money is not just being deposited in someones private bank account, for example. Wikimedia has a high charity rating, which puzzled me since I could not find out what they were actually doing with the money they bring in. Digging a little deeper, I concluded that Jimmy has broken new ground in "charity engineering", working out how to structure the organization to get a high rating - but rendering those standards absolutely meaningless.
Consider all the money being spent on "engineering".
Is any meaningful engineering actually being done? Where is the value being added? What deficiencies in Wikipedia were that have been remedied by this "engineering"? What enhancements? Since this is charity for educational purposes, maybe all the "engineering" could be put on Github, or open sourced like for-profit companies are know to do. And then they could leverage volunteer developers like Linux and other open source projects do, and make Wikimedia's funds go farther.
If that "engineering" even exists.
But if instead fat "engineering" salaries are being paid out to FOJ ("friends of Jimmy") for doing nothing, the charity rating organizations would not know or care, and would (and do) give them high marks simply by providing that line item in public reports. And as the business with the 990 forms shows, Wikimedia only seems to "care" about transparency when it is just checking off the list of things that charity raters use for compiling scores.
Looking at Wikimedia's "roadmaps" that they share over the last several years a key point are plans for 20% revenue increase every year, year after year. No rationale is offered for why this aggressive growth is "needed". This is a plan for an aggressively expanding start up, not a charity.
Many, many non-profits are not what they seem. They divert huge amounts of money into salary, perks, and fund raising, while only a small fraction is spent on the supposed beneficiaries. I once visited the United Way offices in Alexandria VA, and marveled at all the beautiful Italian marble tiling. How many children went hungry to pay for that?
The United Way has long disturbed me. It is not really charity itself, it is a "bundler" for other charities. I have worked at companies where United Way was the quasi-official charity for the company, which sponsored contribution drives, and pressured employees to donate. In recent years Untied Way has paid incredible salaries to its CEO, at a time of poor organizational performance.
It's currently cheaper to run my plug-in hybrid on gasoline than on electricity.
And for tens millions of people, with above average marginal electricity rates (the cost of the last KWH they buy), that is going to remain true. The idea that electric cars are going to be ten times cheaper to run is ludicrous. It would not be true even if the car or the electricity were free (but make them both free, and now you're talking...).
A free market may well include monopolies and cartels, but in general these are due to the presence of regulations, not their absence. The more heavily regulated the market the higher the barriers to entry and the more prone it becomes to regulatory capture, both of which favor a small number of large, well-established players.
You should decide whether you believe "free market" actually means anything in actual economics. Early on you agree that it is a political term, then continue to pretend it has meaning.
The claim that monopolies are "in general these are due to the presence of regulations" is nonsense. The most famous examples of monopolies and cartels - the Standard Oil Monopoly, the U.S. Steel monopoly and the de Beers cartel had nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with unfettered market power.
The military already has its own production facilities sufficient to supply any actual war. But they have not expanded them to keep up with the escalating consumption for training, and so have been making large ammo buys from outside sources. This "green" training ammo would be additional production capability for training, having no impact on war readiness.
Try Googling about this, and you find lots and lots of people actually expressing shock, astonishment, and incredulity. Recently Alt Right sites were pushing the notion that DHS training ammo purchases, again larger than Iraq combat expenditure (not as large as the military purchases), was proof of an Obama plan to impose martial law in the U.S. because it couldn't possibly be needed for training.
Yep. They do. Their annual ammunition buy is currently about 1.8 billion rounds a year, and essentially all of this gets used in training.
How many rounds do they use in actual combat operations? At the height of the Iraq War the U.S. expended only seventy two million rounds a year in combat. How many were they expending in training each year at that time? 1.1 billion rounds! The rate of training ammunition expenditure has since gone up, and is now 1.8 billion rounds. Before 9/11 the military had a less intense training regimen, they only expended 350 million rounds a year, but that was still five times more than the rate of expenditure in Iraq.
People are always astounded (incredulous, really) to learn that ammunition used in war these days is just round-off error in training ammo purchases.
So, yes, not having to clean up one or two billion casings a year would be a big benefit.
No, they didn't. You cannot read the popular summary written by someone who did not read the actual paper to understand what the finding was. What they found was ten times more galaxies that had been seen to date in the early Universe, due to the limitations of the data collection methods used thus far, but this matches the expected value that is predicted by current theoretical models!
The number of galaxies in the Universe declines with time, as their average mass increases due to processes of galactic coalescence. This paper detected the galaxy density at an earlier time than hitherto been observed, but this closely matches the expected value predicted for example by the theoretical model cited in the paper (Torrey, P., et al. 2015, MNRAS, 454, 2770).
So instead of "revising estimates" it instead confirmed predictions an almost diametrically opposite result.
I would normally agree, but if they fire you and then send out an email to everyone telling you how bad you were (and you feel that that's a lie), then that's crossing the line. The industry is pretty small, you're bound to run into many of those people again in later jobs, and the bad reputation of you they are creating can have a real impact down the road.
Quite true. Smearing your professional reputation is actual damages. But also realize that personnel matters are legally confidential and sending out an at-large critique of the employee is a clear violation of employment law. Your employment file is not a black-mail dossier for the company to use as it sees fit. There should be heavy penalties for this, on top of considerable actual damages. Only a hit that noticeably dents the bottom line of a corporation will get its attention.
At some level, you have to ask if "damages" are the only value of a lawsuit. If there's illegal behavior like this at a massive scale, the words "too big to fail" come to mind. There has to be a fine, even if that fine doesn't go to the plaintiff. Half of their quarterly profit would be nice, except the accountants would Hollywood the shit out of that.
This nails the issue precisely.
You hear a lot of conservative rhetoric about government regulations and enforcers to the effect of "we don't need no stinkin' regulations or regulators, private lawsuits are perfectly capable of controlling corporate behavior". Well, this what private lawsuits to provide a check on corporate behavior looks like. Another private lawsuit option is of course a class action lawsuit, but strangely conservatives have been working hard to make those very difficult to file. Almost as if their talk about torte liability being a check on corporate behavior was pure hypocrisy.
Funny how a political cult that proclaims the sanctity of "original intent" is ignorant about the intent of the Electoral College. It is to prevent unwise popular passion from selecting an unfit executive.
From Federalist Paper 68:
It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.
Thats right. The Electoral College exists specifically to thwart an "extraordinary or violent movement" that might directly select one unfit person.
If the Electoral College does not do its duty this year, fulfilling the specific reason it was created, then it should be abolished.
Well yeah, philosophically there isn't any really good comeback to nihilism.
How about this (said to a self-proclaimed nihilist): "You are a liar and a hypocrite. If you really thought nothing mattered, you not bother to continue living." Every living self-proclaimed nihilist is a lying hypocrite. The "nihilism" is only selectively deployed against things they don't like (yet again proof of their lying hypocrisy).
How the fuck did this guy get modded up?
Trump is NOT his employer. Trump is fucking civilian until he actually takes the office.
And even then he will NOT be their employer (and he will still be a civilian). He does not own the United States or Federal Government. He is temporary management hired by the voters, and lacks unlimited powers, even within the executive branch which he manages. We do not elect gods, or kings, or tyrants (only tyrant-wannabes).
Energy is localized. A solar plant in Texas can't send energy to Ireland. So in places where they physically can, they do. I would expect their Oregon datacenters are 100% hydro. In other places they just can't.
With the construction of HVDC lines, a technology in use since 1930 or so, a solar plant in Texas could send the energy to anywhere in North America (including Mexico, and even Latin America if we wanted to build those lines). Localized to the American super-continent, with a billion person market (or merely the 580 million in North America)? I can live with that. Not all that "localized".
HVDC lines can however connect the east and west coasts (and Canada and the U.S.), making a continent-wide electricity supply system (and market). Coast to coast losses are quite small (a few percent). Being able to balance production and demand across all of North America makes the need for storage and peaking a minor issue.
No single technology provides a complete solution to every problem, anywhere, ever. So criticizing HVDC for what it does not do, but does not need to do, is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
That's some quality AC BS there.
When low tar/low nicotine cigarettes came on the market they achieved that low nicotine delivery in smoking machines that emulated how people normally smoked cigarettes. But subsequent studies showed that people smoking these cigarettes were still consuming the same amount of nicotine (and tar). How so? Partly this was due to them smoking more cigarettes, and the other part was an unconscious change in how they smoked them. The low-low cigarettes worked partly by having porous paper that allowed air to dilute the nicotine (and tar) consumed. But the smokers started inserting them farther into their mouths, defeating this effect, and dragging on them differently (longer and deeper), extracting more nicotine than the smoking machines measured.
Sure. The nicotine has almost nothing to do with smoking. Sure.
Nicotine has a unique place in the harmfulness of cigarettes, which no amount of reformulation can erase. Nicotine is a cancer promoter. Inhaling a cancer promoter into your lungs on a regular basis is never going to be even a "health neutral" activity.
A tautological argument.
If data rates today make a particular usage impractical is will not be common today. It would likely be common, if the data rates supported it.
The ever popular corporate go-to excuse for poor wireless service in the U.S.
This is a very thin layer of truthiness - an excuse that sounds sort of plausible - if you don't actually look at any data or think about the subject at all.
What is it about the large thinly populated sections of the U.S. that would pull down wireless speeds on average? Wireless service is a local service, and the U.S. is highly urbanized. It is no more challenging to provide high speed service to a U.S. city than any other city in the world. Sure, maybe service for the 1/3 of Wyoming's population that live outside of cities is slow -- but this is very few people and should have a very slight effect on the national average. Even in those low density states, most people live in cities (the only states for which that is not true is Maine, Vermont and West Virginia).
Consider that Australia, which is nearly as large as the U.S. has faster wireless service, despite having only one tenth the population. It population density is one of the lowest in the world.
Consider that Finland, which has less than half the U.S. population density of the U.S. has the third fastest wireless in the world. Similarly with Norway which is number five.
The important statistic is not total land area (the empty space in the Yukon, Wyoming or Montana is not slowing down traffic in Greater New York), or even population density, but urbanization. The urbanization of the U.S. is 82.4%, about the same as Finland. All urban areas have high population density, and building out a fast service for that population is as easy in the U.S. as anywhere else. All that empty space in Finland is not slowing down their service.
The "but the U.S. is so big!" excuse makes no sense.
They deserve it, honestly.
Since they are not transparent about what they spend the money on, you don't know if they deserve it or not. All you know for sure is that WMF's foundation thinks it is best to obscure the truth.
There are several organizations that rate charities. You should do your research before you donate.
At the very least you should do this. But charity ratings have serious limitations. They are limited mostly based on certain standardized transparency criteria - budget reporting and the like, to ensure that the money is not just being deposited in someones private bank account, for example. Wikimedia has a high charity rating, which puzzled me since I could not find out what they were actually doing with the money they bring in. Digging a little deeper, I concluded that Jimmy has broken new ground in "charity engineering", working out how to structure the organization to get a high rating - but rendering those standards absolutely meaningless.
Consider all the money being spent on "engineering".
Is any meaningful engineering actually being done? Where is the value being added? What deficiencies in Wikipedia were that have been remedied by this "engineering"? What enhancements? Since this is charity for educational purposes, maybe all the "engineering" could be put on Github, or open sourced like for-profit companies are know to do. And then they could leverage volunteer developers like Linux and other open source projects do, and make Wikimedia's funds go farther.
If that "engineering" even exists.
But if instead fat "engineering" salaries are being paid out to FOJ ("friends of Jimmy") for doing nothing, the charity rating organizations would not know or care, and would (and do) give them high marks simply by providing that line item in public reports. And as the business with the 990 forms shows, Wikimedia only seems to "care" about transparency when it is just checking off the list of things that charity raters use for compiling scores.
Looking at Wikimedia's "roadmaps" that they share over the last several years a key point are plans for 20% revenue increase every year, year after year. No rationale is offered for why this aggressive growth is "needed". This is a plan for an aggressively expanding start up, not a charity.
Many, many non-profits are not what they seem. They divert huge amounts of money into salary, perks, and fund raising, while only a small fraction is spent on the supposed beneficiaries. I once visited the United Way offices in Alexandria VA, and marveled at all the beautiful Italian marble tiling. How many children went hungry to pay for that?
The United Way has long disturbed me. It is not really charity itself, it is a "bundler" for other charities. I have worked at companies where United Way was the quasi-official charity for the company, which sponsored contribution drives, and pressured employees to donate. In recent years Untied Way has paid incredible salaries to its CEO, at a time of poor organizational performance.
A very common thing. You get points just for showing up in the office.
It's currently cheaper to run my plug-in hybrid on gasoline than on electricity.
And for tens millions of people, with above average marginal electricity rates (the cost of the last KWH they buy), that is going to remain true. The idea that electric cars are going to be ten times cheaper to run is ludicrous. It would not be true even if the car or the electricity were free (but make them both free, and now you're talking...).
Sounds like a plan!
A free market may well include monopolies and cartels, but in general these are due to the presence of regulations, not their absence. The more heavily regulated the market the higher the barriers to entry and the more prone it becomes to regulatory capture, both of which favor a small number of large, well-established players.
You should decide whether you believe "free market" actually means anything in actual economics. Early on you agree that it is a political term, then continue to pretend it has meaning.
The claim that monopolies are "in general these are due to the presence of regulations" is nonsense. The most famous examples of monopolies and cartels - the Standard Oil Monopoly, the U.S. Steel monopoly and the de Beers cartel had nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with unfettered market power.
This ridiculous item was posted to Slashdot with a headline falsely asserting the opposite.
Hasn't got as much spam in it as spam egg sausage and spam, has it?
C'mon, someone mod this guy "funny"!
(And as the Sage of Springfield says "It's funny because its true!"
Don't try to out-weird me or I retaliate with things you wish you could unsee.
With My Own Eyes
This is not the only way Walmart connives to sponge off the tax payer. They skimp on store security, treating the local police as their security force.
The military already has its own production facilities sufficient to supply any actual war. But they have not expanded them to keep up with the escalating consumption for training, and so have been making large ammo buys from outside sources. This "green" training ammo would be additional production capability for training, having no impact on war readiness.
Try Googling about this, and you find lots and lots of people actually expressing shock, astonishment, and incredulity. Recently Alt Right sites were pushing the notion that DHS training ammo purchases, again larger than Iraq combat expenditure (not as large as the military purchases), was proof of an Obama plan to impose martial law in the U.S. because it couldn't possibly be needed for training.
So yeah, a lot of people find this shocking.
Yep. They do. Their annual ammunition buy is currently about 1.8 billion rounds a year, and essentially all of this gets used in training.
How many rounds do they use in actual combat operations? At the height of the Iraq War the U.S. expended only seventy two million rounds a year in combat. How many were they expending in training each year at that time? 1.1 billion rounds! The rate of training ammunition expenditure has since gone up, and is now 1.8 billion rounds. Before 9/11 the military had a less intense training regimen, they only expended 350 million rounds a year, but that was still five times more than the rate of expenditure in Iraq.
People are always astounded (incredulous, really) to learn that ammunition used in war these days is just round-off error in training ammo purchases.
So, yes, not having to clean up one or two billion casings a year would be a big benefit.
Someone recently did revise estimates of the number of galaxies by an order of magnitude.
http://phys.org/news/2016-10-universe-ten-galaxies-previously-thought.html
No, they didn't. You cannot read the popular summary written by someone who did not read the actual paper to understand what the finding was. What they found was ten times more galaxies that had been seen to date in the early Universe, due to the limitations of the data collection methods used thus far, but this matches the expected value that is predicted by current theoretical models!
The number of galaxies in the Universe declines with time, as their average mass increases due to processes of galactic coalescence. This paper detected the galaxy density at an earlier time than hitherto been observed, but this closely matches the expected value predicted for example by the theoretical model cited in the paper (Torrey, P., et al. 2015, MNRAS, 454, 2770).
So instead of "revising estimates" it instead confirmed predictions an almost diametrically opposite result.
I would normally agree, but if they fire you and then send out an email to everyone telling you how bad you were (and you feel that that's a lie), then that's crossing the line. The industry is pretty small, you're bound to run into many of those people again in later jobs, and the bad reputation of you they are creating can have a real impact down the road.
Quite true. Smearing your professional reputation is actual damages. But also realize that personnel matters are legally confidential and sending out an at-large critique of the employee is a clear violation of employment law. Your employment file is not a black-mail dossier for the company to use as it sees fit. There should be heavy penalties for this, on top of considerable actual damages. Only a hit that noticeably dents the bottom line of a corporation will get its attention.
At some level, you have to ask if "damages" are the only value of a lawsuit. If there's illegal behavior like this at a massive scale, the words "too big to fail" come to mind. There has to be a fine, even if that fine doesn't go to the plaintiff. Half of their quarterly profit would be nice, except the accountants would Hollywood the shit out of that.
This nails the issue precisely.
You hear a lot of conservative rhetoric about government regulations and enforcers to the effect of "we don't need no stinkin' regulations or regulators, private lawsuits are perfectly capable of controlling corporate behavior". Well, this what private lawsuits to provide a check on corporate behavior looks like. Another private lawsuit option is of course a class action lawsuit, but strangely conservatives have been working hard to make those very difficult to file. Almost as if their talk about torte liability being a check on corporate behavior was pure hypocrisy.
Funny how a political cult that proclaims the sanctity of "original intent" is ignorant about the intent of the Electoral College. It is to prevent unwise popular passion from selecting an unfit executive.
From Federalist Paper 68:
It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief. The choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes.
Thats right. The Electoral College exists specifically to thwart an "extraordinary or violent movement" that might directly select one unfit person.
If the Electoral College does not do its duty this year, fulfilling the specific reason it was created, then it should be abolished.
Well yeah, philosophically there isn't any really good comeback to nihilism.
How about this (said to a self-proclaimed nihilist): "You are a liar and a hypocrite. If you really thought nothing mattered, you not bother to continue living." Every living self-proclaimed nihilist is a lying hypocrite. The "nihilism" is only selectively deployed against things they don't like (yet again proof of their lying hypocrisy).
How the fuck did this guy get modded up? Trump is NOT his employer. Trump is fucking civilian until he actually takes the office.
And even then he will NOT be their employer (and he will still be a civilian). He does not own the United States or Federal Government. He is temporary management hired by the voters, and lacks unlimited powers, even within the executive branch which he manages. We do not elect gods, or kings, or tyrants (only tyrant-wannabes).
Energy is localized. A solar plant in Texas can't send energy to Ireland. So in places where they physically can, they do. I would expect their Oregon datacenters are 100% hydro. In other places they just can't.
With the construction of HVDC lines, a technology in use since 1930 or so, a solar plant in Texas could send the energy to anywhere in North America (including Mexico, and even Latin America if we wanted to build those lines). Localized to the American super-continent, with a billion person market (or merely the 580 million in North America)? I can live with that. Not all that "localized".
HVDC lines can however connect the east and west coasts (and Canada and the U.S.), making a continent-wide electricity supply system (and market). Coast to coast losses are quite small (a few percent). Being able to balance production and demand across all of North America makes the need for storage and peaking a minor issue.
No single technology provides a complete solution to every problem, anywhere, ever. So criticizing HVDC for what it does not do, but does not need to do, is irrelevant.