the problem with aluminium as a high-capacity rechargeable battery is that the energy storage capacity is so high (80kWh in a 100kg cell is not unreasonable) that it can easily be classified as a weapon (in the same way that a molotov cocktail can be classified as a weapon).
The energy content of 100 kg of TNT is 115 kWh, so this is almost 70% as high. Thermal destruction of a battery like this won't be pretty. (Well, maybe it *would* be pretty in a Myth Busters/fireworks kind of way, but you won't want to be close by.)
So this big old rock slams into the Earth and makes enough dust out of itself to create the world-wide iridium enriched sedimentary deposits that are the K-T boundary. And in so doing, creates a very long winter.
So how long does it take for all that dust to actually settle? How much other sediments brought about by the more rapid erosion of the early part of the Long Winter would bury the remains of the megafauna before most of the asteroid dust was deposited?...
Bear in mind that an event of this magnitude creates a number of major disruptive effects that manifest themselves for different lengths of time. The rogues gallery includes massive amounts of nitric oxides from the heat of impact causing a worldwide super-acid rain, release of massive amounts of CO2 from the carbonate impact strata, in addition to the dust. So we get an instant super-winter awash with super-acid rain acidifiying waters around the world, replaced a few years later with a millenia long heat wave.
Another idea to chew on: before or around most large extinction events, there is a period of heavy mountain building. MOUNTAINS KILLED DINOSAURS. AFAIK the main case for the asteroid impact theory is that there are diamonds with a particular structure and lots of iridium found in layers around the extinction, suggesting that there was an extraterrestrial impact (because iridium is rare in the Earth's crust, and diamond particulates of that composition are also rare).
But both can be found in the lower layers of the Earth.
All of the theories of the type "there was no giant impact because Earth-bound processes caused all of the impact signatures" are dead (and they died quickly in the 1980s). Why? Because the KT boundary contains all of the expected signatures of a major impact - including ones that only occur during asteroid impacts. The smoking gun is not diamonds, but shock-transformed quartz of which about 1 cubic kilometer was deposited in North America strata. This quartz only forms when a multi-megabar (millions of atmospheres) shock wave passes through cold quartz. It never forms in Earth-bound processes since pressures of that range are only found where it is extremely hot. Even the most violent volcanism cannot create the necessary pressures.
Volcanoes are known for blowing crap from lower layers onto the crust. The Deccan Traps were very active around this time period, spewing heavy elements into the air. A long and protracted period of volcanism and resulting environmental changes is a much more sound explanation for the phenomena.
And they may well have contributed to the extinction event. This is considered a real possibility. How is this "more sound" for the final extinction though?
Of course, the biggest piece of evidence that dinosaurs weren't killed by asteroids is the fact that not all dinosaurs are extinct.
This is a big piece of something, but not evidence. Nobody is claiming that an asteroid impact "killed all the dinosaurs", only the ones that actually went extinct.
The thing that I always wondered about with the asteroid impact theory is that we have several species of large reptiles that survived the extinction event.
Actually you mean "lineages", taxonomic groups that survived. Note that the dinosaurs were in no way reptiles - any more than birds are (quite literally, they are the descendants of flying dinosaurs). The dinosaurs had quite different metabolisms and behavioral patterns, which are postulated to have created unique vulnerabilities to the impact stresses.
While I'm no scientist, I'm wondering if there might not have been some form of communicable disease that was stressing the dinosaur population beforehand that accounts for the gradual diminishing of fossils in the record and the asteroid impact might have been a coup de grace.
Theories of this type have been floated. One problem with this approach is that when talking about "the dinosaurs" we are talking about a large group of diverse species, along the same lines as talking about "the mammals" (we currently count about 4600 mammal species). The notion of a disease that is endemic across such a diverse group of distantly related species on several separate continents and also has similar effects on population survival on all of them is hard to swallow. Think about one disease that causes the extinction of the North American bison and the Asian tiger and the African naked mole rat and the Australian kangaroo and the South American primates (I leave bats out of this example because the bird dinosaur lineages did not go extinct).
I find it hard to imagine that sea turtles and crocadillians would survive while various marine reptiles did not -- moasaurs, plesiosaurs, icthyosaurs, etc. I suppose there will be no easy answers.
BTW the marine reptiles you mention went extinct 20 million years prior to the end of the Cretaceous. But this type of argument is a problem for every extinction theory - why did some lineages go extinct but not others? The fact is we do see these differential extinction patterns repeatedly so clearly extinction events play favorites over and over.
This is one of the bigger problems with the impact hypothesis. Also, amphibians were largely unaffected, and they tend to be very sensitive to environmental problems...
Since the alternative hypotheses claim that non-impact environmental problems caused the gradual extinction of the non-flying dinosaurs I don't see how the survival of the amphibian lineages is a distinctive problem for the impact hypothesis.
Nuclear probably only makes sense if the government does it, by considering the building and operation costs as a subsidies to be recovered in taxes.
It wouldn't have to be done by the government - but government intervention is necessary to direct private money into a venture like this. Nuclear plants are profitable investments after all - the existing plants are much sought after by energy companies because they are now cash cows. A carbon tax on fossil fuel would do it, regulatory provisions requiring nuclear power be added to the mix when capacity is expanded would do it, offering special financing bonds at low interest rates to compensate for the long pay-off time would do it.
Chapter 22 in Teller's Memoirs discusses at length his role as the founding head of the Reactor Safeguard Committee in the 1940s, and his lifelong concern for nuclear power safety.
I am not Teller fan, but this was a very important contribution - perhaps his most important one.
I love how the global climate change believers are so quick to blame the U.S. on the grounds that the U.S. uses roughly 25% of the world's energy. Correlation does not equal causation. But if it did, why isn't the causation China's industrialization which exactly tracks the hockey-stick graph...
Umm... China's industrialization is a caustive factor, which no one disputes. Until recently it was the second largest factor after the U.S., but has recently overtaken that mantle by a bit. The U.S. is to blame for its share, which may be 25%, and the entire problem cannot be addresses unless the U.S. does its share.
...Mastercard refusing to process payments for you is not like having the water turned off.
It is more like FedEx or UPS decides to blacklist you, and inform you that they will no longer
accept any package to be sent from your address.
Yes, you might have just lost one of your convenient options for delivering your products,
but nothing stops you from using independent freight companies or using an alternative like DHL.
If the water company shuts you off nothing stops you from using independent freight companies from hauling water in by truck. You just lost one your convenient options for getting water.
At some point inconvenience becomes more than just "inconvenient".
We are easily there with the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
"Foot-and-mouth" disease is the term the official report uses -- and it seems to be the preferred term today. Try Googling: "foot-and-mouth disease" virus and "hoof-and-mouth disease" virus and compare the results.
It is harder than it looks - botulinum strains are ubiquitous, but effective producers of potent toxin need to be isolated to make a weapon. A random selection of any of these pathogens is unlikely to be virulent or an effective toxin producer. This is why potent virulent strains of pathogens, like the anthrax Ames strain, are fairly big deals.
Naah... for that they will be using the big brother of this machine which not mentioned in this article because it is classified.
Do you think the Chinese tell everyone about their national security projects?
You actually wouldn't need to even start with Vaccinia virus. In 2008, scientists at the J Craig Venter Institute synthesized and assembled the genome of an entire bacterium from scratch (Gibson et al. 2008. Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome. Science 319: 1215 - 1220. doi:10.1126/science.1151721) . The bacterial genome they synthesized was 580,000 base pairs compared to the 186,000 base pair size of the smallpox genome. Of course, commercial gene synthesis companies would never sell anyone any sequence resembling a smallpox sequence, but given enough resources, a government or even some well funded group could conceivably resurrect smallpox without needing a sample of the virus.
True. The Vaccinia path is the shortest though - not only because of the small number of base pairs that need to be cutout/spliced in but because pox virus replication also requires some specialized enzymes that Vaccinia provides for free. And one must ponder how short a sequence one would need to order before it is recognized as being a subcomponent of small pox.
Eventually gene synthesis is going to percolate down to the level of undergraduate bio lab courses, and won't stop there either.
In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is hidden.
Nonsense. Opinions do *not* need to be hidden, opinions are one source of information. What needs to be suppressed are cliques, groupthink, etc.
In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is considered but not blindly followed, where individuals think for themselves.
In other words it almost always only works when the opinions of others are hidden. Those cases of groups of tough-minded independent thinkers being vanishingly rare.
Even among seasoned experts overcoming the effects of groupthink requires special measures. Consider the "Delphi Technique" developed at RAND - where the experts pool their knowledge in multiple rounds anonymously.
Declaring that people can avoid this by "just thinking for themselves" is akin to decreeing quality control by asserting "just don't make mistakes". It ignores the manifest reality of human existence in favor of idealized pip-dreams.
Since the smallpox genome was decoded and published in 2006, it is impossible to rid the world of the threat of smallpox.
The Vaccinia virus used in smallpox vaccinations is 95% similar to
smallpox (see http://www.nap.edu/html/variola_virus/ch1.html). This
means that the base difference is 10,000 bases. This is only modestly
more than the 7500 bases assembled to synthetically recreate polio, which was also accomplished in 2006. You can order custom gene sequences of 1000 base pairs today at a cost of $1.30 per base pair.
A gene assembly lab, a sample of Vaccinia and a hundred thousand dollars can recreate smallpox today.
There is no other option but continue smallpox research for defensive purposes.
And when "dirt road in the middle of nowhere" meant "homesteader" instead of "backward anti-social extremist", and "receive mail" meant "the only way to give someone a message" instead of "archaic form of communication insisted upon by idiotic lawyers and technologically-illiterate local governments", that was relevant.
Ah, so you have defined the need for rural mail delivery out of existence because a) people living in rural areas are "backward anti-social extremists" (and thus undeserving of any sort of physical delivery), and b) they shouldn't (according to you) want or need any sort of physical delivery anyway.
News for you bud - lots of non-urbanized areas get zero UPS and FedEx service. You don't even have to be all that far outside of a significant town to be "off route". Did you know that?
Second - lots of physical things still need to get delivered not just the "archaic forms of communication" which you feel shouldn't exist (but nonetheless actually do).
Solving problems is easy if you get to wave your hand and say "no one should want or need that".
... UPS and Fedex are profitable because they skim off the lucrative parts of the business - large package and express delivery - leaving the rest for the USPS....
And, do not forget, you cannot Fedex or UPS something to any physical address in the U.S. You can with USPS. Try to get a crucial notarized legal document to a rural location with Fedex or UPS. I have had to do this and found that I could not - the address was not served, but USPS would do it (and, if I let it take another day or two, for less than 1/10 the price).
USPS is more expensive than UPS or FedEx for shipping stuff which must be shipped, you know, "stuff".
Lots of "stuff" still consists of paper - electronic documents have not replaced every use of that old folding stuff. Can I ship a 1 oz envelope for 44 cents with UPS or FedEx? No I cannot, so for a whole class of mail USPS is cheaper.
Until very recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined a charge and found it baseless, it was â" for all intents and purposes â" dropped,
Its only bad when its your guy.. damned hypocrites. I still remember Dan Rather making up news, and only admitting it once he got caught.. At least this is actual news.
On the subject of "making up news" - Dan Rather was a far to credulous victim of a hoax, for which he deserves all the criticism he received.
Asserting that he was the actual forger (which is apparently the claim here) is -- just makin' stuff up yourself.
I thought about citing research data that exposure to the far more toxic cousin of dihydrogen monoxide produced by industrial economies - dihydrogen dioxide - might be the environmental factor causing this remarkable epigenetic phenomenon, but that seemed to be "gilding the lily" as they say.
Fortunately the disappearance of the blonde gene in females cannot happen due to a interesting epigenetic phenomenon.
As is well known, blondeness is fairly prevalent at birth in both males and females but fades as the individual matures, with most blondes turning brunette before the end of adolescence. But a remarkable phenomenon, evidently involving the modification of the blonde gene possibly through environmental effects, often occurs soon after whereupon the prevalence of blondeness starts to increase again. Most remarkable, individuals whose innate blondeness was never expressed as a child (they were always brunette), begin to express the blonde gene in early adulthood. For reasons that so far remain unexplained this phenomenon, though not avoiding males entirely, is almost entirely seen in females.
It appears then that this epigenetic phenomenon will act to restore blondeness to the female population offsetting any long-term trends to the gene's underlying extinction.
It has been 50 years away for about 50 years. Still dismal, but no-where near as bad as you say. And progress is still being made, so one-day we may have fusion still.
The trend line for predictions is worse than that - it has been monotonically increasing with time. In the 1950s it was ten years (which is why Project Sherwood was highly classified - they expected fusion power would be a big national security asset in the near future. By the 1970s it was 25 years. Now, a full 60 years since fusion power research started, it is roughly estimated that the first prototype power plant might start operation in 50 years or so. The successful full operation of Iter, which will be necessary to design this prototype is 20 years away even though it is under construction now.
But it is very questionable whether magnetic confinement D-T fusion power will work at all - for reasons having nothing to do with reaching the necessary plasma parameters, which is the focus of all current research efforts. I count three reasons - two of which are related to the breeding blanket.
First, the breeding blanket is a huge complex structure that has such stringent design requirements no one can demonstrate that is possible to build one (it has to have effectively no parasitic neutron absorption), it has been observed that more important than the current fusion plasma research, a project as big as Iter should be started simply to develop a viable blanket system, or prove it cannot be done.
Second, the breeding blanket capital costs (counting only the raw materials) alone will make fusion power much more expensive than fission power, which is currently crippled by its high capital costs.
Third, a magnetic confinement fusion plant houses a multi-gigawatt power source inside a huge container cooled internally to near absolute zero. The problem of extracting this heat successfully and productively is another enormous unsolved engineering problem being kicked down the road.
A non-viable D-T power plant might be a stepping stone, a century or so from now, to a viable He-3 fueled plant (because it makes the breeding blanket problem go away).
... The real investors are not buying shares in Facebook, they are buying shares in a GS fund, which just happens to be backed 100% by shares in Facebook. It's a fairly obvious way of avoiding this regulation - I suggested exactly this strategy about five years ago as an example of one of the problems with attempting to regulate financial markets, and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't a remotely new idea even then.
Financial markets need duck laws: if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's taxed and regulated like a duck.
Indeed. And, since the value of those shares are determined by Goldman-Sachs alone, on data that this deal keeps secret, we can be fairly well assured that it is a vehicle for Goldman-Sachs to fleece their investors. Could their investors actually make money? Sure, but nothing comparable to the risk G-S is exposing them to. G-S on the other hand will take the lion;s hare with no risk to themselves.
... Worked in a sawmill here outside of the US and I'm pretty sure that you can get timber in metric sizes and the only tape measurements I saw were all metric.
Baltic birch panels, a premium quality plywood of exceptional mechanical performance, are sold in better U.S. lumber departments and are available only in metric units (60 cm on a side, and various mm thicknesses). A lot of high quality cabinetry is built with this.
Slashdot Mirror
the problem with aluminium as a high-capacity rechargeable battery is that the energy storage capacity is so high (80kWh in a 100kg cell is not unreasonable) that it can easily be classified as a weapon (in the same way that a molotov cocktail can be classified as a weapon).
The energy content of 100 kg of TNT is 115 kWh, so this is almost 70% as high. Thermal destruction of a battery like this won't be pretty. (Well, maybe it *would* be pretty in a Myth Busters/fireworks kind of way, but you won't want to be close by.)
...
So this big old rock slams into the Earth and makes enough dust out of itself to create the world-wide iridium enriched sedimentary deposits that are the K-T boundary. And in so doing, creates a very long winter.
So how long does it take for all that dust to actually settle? How much other sediments brought about by the more rapid erosion of the early part of the Long Winter would bury the remains of the megafauna before most of the asteroid dust was deposited?...
Bear in mind that an event of this magnitude creates a number of major disruptive effects that manifest themselves for different lengths of time. The rogues gallery includes massive amounts of nitric oxides from the heat of impact causing a worldwide super-acid rain, release of massive amounts of CO2 from the carbonate impact strata, in addition to the dust. So we get an instant super-winter awash with super-acid rain acidifiying waters around the world, replaced a few years later with a millenia long heat wave.
Another idea to chew on: before or around most large extinction events, there is a period of heavy mountain building. MOUNTAINS KILLED DINOSAURS. AFAIK the main case for the asteroid impact theory is that there are diamonds with a particular structure and lots of iridium found in layers around the extinction, suggesting that there was an extraterrestrial impact (because iridium is rare in the Earth's crust, and diamond particulates of that composition are also rare).
But both can be found in the lower layers of the Earth.
All of the theories of the type "there was no giant impact because Earth-bound processes caused all of the impact signatures" are dead (and they died quickly in the 1980s). Why? Because the KT boundary contains all of the expected signatures of a major impact - including ones that only occur during asteroid impacts. The smoking gun is not diamonds, but shock-transformed quartz of which about 1 cubic kilometer was deposited in North America strata. This quartz only forms when a multi-megabar (millions of atmospheres) shock wave passes through cold quartz. It never forms in Earth-bound processes since pressures of that range are only found where it is extremely hot. Even the most violent volcanism cannot create the necessary pressures.
Volcanoes are known for blowing crap from lower layers onto the crust. The Deccan Traps were very active around this time period, spewing heavy elements into the air. A long and protracted period of volcanism and resulting environmental changes is a much more sound explanation for the phenomena.
And they may well have contributed to the extinction event. This is considered a real possibility. How is this "more sound" for the final extinction though?
Of course, the biggest piece of evidence that dinosaurs weren't killed by asteroids is the fact that not all dinosaurs are extinct.
This is a big piece of something, but not evidence. Nobody is claiming that an asteroid impact "killed all the dinosaurs", only the ones that actually went extinct.
The thing that I always wondered about with the asteroid impact theory is that we have several species of large reptiles that survived the extinction event.
Actually you mean "lineages", taxonomic groups that survived. Note that the dinosaurs were in no way reptiles - any more than birds are (quite literally, they are the descendants of flying dinosaurs). The dinosaurs had quite different metabolisms and behavioral patterns, which are postulated to have created unique vulnerabilities to the impact stresses.
While I'm no scientist, I'm wondering if there might not have been some form of communicable disease that was stressing the dinosaur population beforehand that accounts for the gradual diminishing of fossils in the record and the asteroid impact might have been a coup de grace.
Theories of this type have been floated. One problem with this approach is that when talking about "the dinosaurs" we are talking about a large group of diverse species, along the same lines as talking about "the mammals" (we currently count about 4600 mammal species). The notion of a disease that is endemic across such a diverse group of distantly related species on several separate continents and also has similar effects on population survival on all of them is hard to swallow. Think about one disease that causes the extinction of the North American bison and the Asian tiger and the African naked mole rat and the Australian kangaroo and the South American primates (I leave bats out of this example because the bird dinosaur lineages did not go extinct).
I find it hard to imagine that sea turtles and crocadillians would survive while various marine reptiles did not -- moasaurs, plesiosaurs, icthyosaurs, etc. I suppose there will be no easy answers.
BTW the marine reptiles you mention went extinct 20 million years prior to the end of the Cretaceous. But this type of argument is a problem for every extinction theory - why did some lineages go extinct but not others? The fact is we do see these differential extinction patterns repeatedly so clearly extinction events play favorites over and over.
This is one of the bigger problems with the impact hypothesis. Also, amphibians were largely unaffected, and they tend to be very sensitive to environmental problems...
Since the alternative hypotheses claim that non-impact environmental problems caused the gradual extinction of the non-flying dinosaurs I don't see how the survival of the amphibian lineages is a distinctive problem for the impact hypothesis.
It wouldn't have to be done by the government - but government intervention is necessary to direct private money into a venture like this. Nuclear plants are profitable investments after all - the existing plants are much sought after by energy companies because they are now cash cows. A carbon tax on fossil fuel would do it, regulatory provisions requiring nuclear power be added to the mix when capacity is expanded would do it, offering special financing bonds at low interest rates to compensate for the long pay-off time would do it.
Chapter 22 in Teller's Memoirs discusses at length his role as the founding head of the Reactor Safeguard Committee in the 1940s, and his lifelong concern for nuclear power safety.
I am not Teller fan, but this was a very important contribution - perhaps his most important one.
I love how the global climate change believers are so quick to blame the U.S. on the grounds that the U.S. uses roughly 25% of the world's energy. Correlation does not equal causation. But if it did, why isn't the causation China's industrialization which exactly tracks the hockey-stick graph...
Umm... China's industrialization is a caustive factor, which no one disputes. Until recently it was the second largest factor after the U.S., but has recently overtaken that mantle by a bit. The U.S. is to blame for its share, which may be 25%, and the entire problem cannot be addresses unless the U.S. does its share.
...Mastercard refusing to process payments for you is not like having the water turned off. It is more like FedEx or UPS decides to blacklist you, and inform you that they will no longer accept any package to be sent from your address.
Yes, you might have just lost one of your convenient options for delivering your products, but nothing stops you from using independent freight companies or using an alternative like DHL.
If the water company shuts you off nothing stops you from using independent freight companies from hauling water in by truck. You just lost one your convenient options for getting water.
At some point inconvenience becomes more than just "inconvenient".
We are easily there with the Visa/Mastercard duopoly.
"Foot-and-mouth" disease is the term the official report uses -- and it seems to be the preferred term today. Try Googling: "foot-and-mouth disease" virus and "hoof-and-mouth disease" virus and compare the results.
It is harder than it looks - botulinum strains are ubiquitous, but effective producers of potent toxin need to be isolated to make a weapon. A random selection of any of these pathogens is unlikely to be virulent or an effective toxin producer. This is why potent virulent strains of pathogens, like the anthrax Ames strain, are fairly big deals.
Tier 1:
See: http://www.phe.gov/Preparedness/legal/boards/fesap/Documents/fesap-recommendations-101102.pdf
Naah... for that they will be using the big brother of this machine which not mentioned in this article because it is classified. Do you think the Chinese tell everyone about their national security projects?
You actually wouldn't need to even start with Vaccinia virus. In 2008, scientists at the J Craig Venter Institute synthesized and assembled the genome of an entire bacterium from scratch (Gibson et al. 2008. Complete Chemical Synthesis, Assembly, and Cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium Genome. Science 319: 1215 - 1220. doi:10.1126/science.1151721) . The bacterial genome they synthesized was 580,000 base pairs compared to the 186,000 base pair size of the smallpox genome. Of course, commercial gene synthesis companies would never sell anyone any sequence resembling a smallpox sequence, but given enough resources, a government or even some well funded group could conceivably resurrect smallpox without needing a sample of the virus.
True. The Vaccinia path is the shortest though - not only because of the small number of base pairs that need to be cutout/spliced in but because pox virus replication also requires some specialized enzymes that Vaccinia provides for free. And one must ponder how short a sequence one would need to order before it is recognized as being a subcomponent of small pox.
Eventually gene synthesis is going to percolate down to the level of undergraduate bio lab courses, and won't stop there either.
In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is hidden.
Nonsense. Opinions do *not* need to be hidden, opinions are one source of information. What needs to be suppressed are cliques, groupthink, etc. In short, crowd intelligence only works in cases where the opinion of others is considered but not blindly followed, where individuals think for themselves.
In other words it almost always only works when the opinions of others are hidden. Those cases of groups of tough-minded independent thinkers being vanishingly rare.
Even among seasoned experts overcoming the effects of groupthink requires special measures. Consider the "Delphi Technique" developed at RAND - where the experts pool their knowledge in multiple rounds anonymously.
Declaring that people can avoid this by "just thinking for themselves" is akin to decreeing quality control by asserting "just don't make mistakes". It ignores the manifest reality of human existence in favor of idealized pip-dreams.
Since the smallpox genome was decoded and published in 2006, it is impossible to rid the world of the threat of smallpox.
The Vaccinia virus used in smallpox vaccinations is 95% similar to smallpox (see http://www.nap.edu/html/variola_virus/ch1.html). This means that the base difference is 10,000 bases. This is only modestly more than the 7500 bases assembled to synthetically recreate polio, which was also accomplished in 2006. You can order custom gene sequences of 1000 base pairs today at a cost of $1.30 per base pair.
A gene assembly lab, a sample of Vaccinia and a hundred thousand dollars can recreate smallpox today.
There is no other option but continue smallpox research for defensive purposes.
And when "dirt road in the middle of nowhere" meant "homesteader" instead of "backward anti-social extremist", and "receive mail" meant "the only way to give someone a message" instead of "archaic form of communication insisted upon by idiotic lawyers and technologically-illiterate local governments", that was relevant.
Ah, so you have defined the need for rural mail delivery out of existence because a) people living in rural areas are "backward anti-social extremists" (and thus undeserving of any sort of physical delivery), and b) they shouldn't (according to you) want or need any sort of physical delivery anyway.
News for you bud - lots of non-urbanized areas get zero UPS and FedEx service. You don't even have to be all that far outside of a significant town to be "off route". Did you know that?
Second - lots of physical things still need to get delivered not just the "archaic forms of communication" which you feel shouldn't exist (but nonetheless actually do).
Solving problems is easy if you get to wave your hand and say "no one should want or need that".
... UPS and Fedex are profitable because they skim off the lucrative parts of the business - large package and express delivery - leaving the rest for the USPS....
And, do not forget, you cannot Fedex or UPS something to any physical address in the U.S. You can with USPS. Try to get a crucial notarized legal document to a rural location with Fedex or UPS. I have had to do this and found that I could not - the address was not served, but USPS would do it (and, if I let it take another day or two, for less than 1/10 the price).
USPS is more expensive than UPS or FedEx for shipping stuff which must be shipped, you know, "stuff".
Lots of "stuff" still consists of paper - electronic documents have not replaced every use of that old folding stuff. Can I ship a 1 oz envelope for 44 cents with UPS or FedEx? No I cannot, so for a whole class of mail USPS is cheaper.
Until very recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined a charge and found it baseless, it was â" for all intents and purposes â" dropped,
Its only bad when its your guy.. damned hypocrites. I still remember Dan Rather making up news, and only admitting it once he got caught.. At least this is actual news.
On the subject of "making up news" - Dan Rather was a far to credulous victim of a hoax, for which he deserves all the criticism he received.
Asserting that he was the actual forger (which is apparently the claim here) is -- just makin' stuff up yourself.
Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.
I thought about citing research data that exposure to the far more toxic cousin of dihydrogen monoxide produced by industrial economies - dihydrogen dioxide - might be the environmental factor causing this remarkable epigenetic phenomenon, but that seemed to be "gilding the lily" as they say.
Fortunately the disappearance of the blonde gene in females cannot happen due to a interesting epigenetic phenomenon.
As is well known, blondeness is fairly prevalent at birth in both males and females but fades as the individual matures, with most blondes turning brunette before the end of adolescence. But a remarkable phenomenon, evidently involving the modification of the blonde gene possibly through environmental effects, often occurs soon after whereupon the prevalence of blondeness starts to increase again. Most remarkable, individuals whose innate blondeness was never expressed as a child (they were always brunette), begin to express the blonde gene in early adulthood. For reasons that so far remain unexplained this phenomenon, though not avoiding males entirely, is almost entirely seen in females.
It appears then that this epigenetic phenomenon will act to restore blondeness to the female population offsetting any long-term trends to the gene's underlying extinction.
It has been 50 years away for about 50 years. Still dismal, but no-where near as bad as you say. And progress is still being made, so one-day we may have fusion still.
The trend line for predictions is worse than that - it has been monotonically increasing with time. In the 1950s it was ten years (which is why Project Sherwood was highly classified - they expected fusion power would be a big national security asset in the near future. By the 1970s it was 25 years. Now, a full 60 years since fusion power research started, it is roughly estimated that the first prototype power plant might start operation in 50 years or so. The successful full operation of Iter, which will be necessary to design this prototype is 20 years away even though it is under construction now.
But it is very questionable whether magnetic confinement D-T fusion power will work at all - for reasons having nothing to do with reaching the necessary plasma parameters, which is the focus of all current research efforts. I count three reasons - two of which are related to the breeding blanket.
First, the breeding blanket is a huge complex structure that has such stringent design requirements no one can demonstrate that is possible to build one (it has to have effectively no parasitic neutron absorption), it has been observed that more important than the current fusion plasma research, a project as big as Iter should be started simply to develop a viable blanket system, or prove it cannot be done.
Second, the breeding blanket capital costs (counting only the raw materials) alone will make fusion power much more expensive than fission power, which is currently crippled by its high capital costs.
Third, a magnetic confinement fusion plant houses a multi-gigawatt power source inside a huge container cooled internally to near absolute zero. The problem of extracting this heat successfully and productively is another enormous unsolved engineering problem being kicked down the road.
A non-viable D-T power plant might be a stepping stone, a century or so from now, to a viable He-3 fueled plant (because it makes the breeding blanket problem go away).
... The real investors are not buying shares in Facebook, they are buying shares in a GS fund, which just happens to be backed 100% by shares in Facebook. It's a fairly obvious way of avoiding this regulation - I suggested exactly this strategy about five years ago as an example of one of the problems with attempting to regulate financial markets, and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't a remotely new idea even then.
Financial markets need duck laws: if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's taxed and regulated like a duck.
Indeed. And, since the value of those shares are determined by Goldman-Sachs alone, on data that this deal keeps secret, we can be fairly well assured that it is a vehicle for Goldman-Sachs to fleece their investors. Could their investors actually make money? Sure, but nothing comparable to the risk G-S is exposing them to. G-S on the other hand will take the lion;s hare with no risk to themselves.
Same as it ever was.
... Worked in a sawmill here outside of the US and I'm pretty sure that you can get timber in metric sizes and the only tape measurements I saw were all metric.
Baltic birch panels, a premium quality plywood of exceptional mechanical performance, are sold in better U.S. lumber departments and are available only in metric units (60 cm on a side, and various mm thicknesses). A lot of high quality cabinetry is built with this.