The other option is to work local - there will be always a market for small businesses/consultants catering to mom & pop businesses that need a website built, accounting or customer management system created, perhaps some reporting beyond what Excel can do. Those are too small fish for the big guys like SAP to go after and too small to be able to afford a team in India/Eastern Europe to manage their systems, not to mention that it would be really impractical. It is a large market - not everyone has to (and can) work for Facebook, Google or Microsoft today.
'work local' is what happens naturally when you work for any small/medium business, even large businesses who's primary focus is not producing software / doesn't specialize in IT.
Work for a school system/ college, hospital, agriculture/fruit warehouse, etc.. and you likely won't get outsourced. Businesses that are not devoted to just churning out software, like a hospital, still have things like "in person meetings between IT and staff":) They want you on site to explain, help, be part of the team, etc..
You exaggerate. Living a sustainable lifestyle != living like a pauper.
It isn't even an exaggeration, but a complete falsehood. Every country that is moving faster towards renewables than the US has proven that there is zero economic downsides, and in fact, often an economic stimulus.
There is no doubt that politicians love to use this a leverage to gain more power and control over the lives of the people.
But this is one of those really important issues that conservatives should feel shamed to ignore just because they have an ingrained distrust of government and a desire to keep government small.
I feel like if we had 95% of scientists saying "hey... we see a comet headed right towards Earth", most of the conservative politicians and media would still be saying stuff like "it is still debatable", "there are two sides to this issue", "must be a conspiracy to sell comet busting tech", "the comet scientists just want more grants", etc...
Being in debt is not so bad if you are making more money from the borrowed money than your debt service is costing you. The reason debt became an evil word is because most Americans use debt to buy things that they can't afford to buy outright and that decrease in value. Debt used to buy a house is not evil debt (although it hasn't paid off well in the last 10 years or so.) Debt used to pay for a vacation because you can't afford the vacation without making payments on it, is bad debt. Debt used to buy a car is bad debt unless you already had the money to pay cash for it and chose to invest that money in something that earns you more than the car loan interest rate.
Well, and none of that debt has anything to do with Government debt. Comparing government debt to household debt is what leads to very misinforming reporting on the subject. https://www.google.com/search?q=difference+between+government+debt+and+household+debt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
where do you see scandal in the Obama administration or more specifically in its foreign policy?
There is none.
The fact that he turned out to be a middle of the road, don't rock the boat, conservative democrat, hasn't stopped conservative media from describing everything Obama does as causing the end of the world.
A pretty boring presidency if you ask me. Obamacare was....well something. It was helpful to most people, harmful to a smaller number of people, and in the end may help some long term costs, but it isn't the healthcare that most liberals wanted. Obamacare is a Heritage Foundation republican plan after all......
Other than that, he continue the foreign policy as usual, ramped up drone strikes, didn't pull us out of any war zones early, but merely followed along with plans laid down during the Bush years (at least with Iraq).
He did grant some benefits/amnesty to targeted sub-groups of illegal immigrants, but then again so did....every single president for the last 45 years....
Nothing Obama has done is either exceptional or unusual. But the amount of push back from congress and conservative media (most filibustering in history) is phenomenal. Well, there is one thing that is different about him.... hmm.. what could that be.....?
I think the place they will dominate first (and next, I guess) is motorcycles.
Outside of the US this is already true. I think the last article I read about E-Bikes stated there were something like 400 million E-Bikes in use in China/India/Far east side of Asia.
And round and round we go. Every time a liberal talks about the golden 50's and unions, a conservative talks about ww2 and living in a golden age of no competition.
Both sides have a point. We did have a tremendous advantage over other countries after ww2. However, there are countries right now with much higher taxes, strong unions, and are doing well financially with high standards of living.
Of course with global trade various industries 'race to the bottom' in terms of wages / benefits. But that isn't every industry. Most remaining industries in the US would not be hurt by higher union numbers, especially jobs that cannot be outsourced, like service industry jobs. And most businesses and people would not be hurt by higher taxes around the Germany / Norway rates.
No one is suggesting returning to 90% taxes. But when billionaires have effective tax rates like 12%, yet we can't seemingly find the money to fix crumbling infrastructure, something is wrong.
Ask a poor person if they would be willing to pay 40% tax, but have free health care, free daycare, 9 months of maternity leave, top notch schools where every teaching position is coveted, has a high salary, and requires a masters degree, (See some place like Finland for example) and perhaps the "raising taxes is always bad" mentality of some poorer conservatives might change.
Out of a total population of 600,000 in the islands and 155,000 registered voters, 140,000 votes were cast, the highest turnout ever in Hawaii. The vote showed approval rates of at least 93% by voters on all major islands (see adjacent figure for details). Of the approximately 140,000 votes cast, fewer than 8000 rejected the Admission Act of 1959.
Do you know the racial/ethnic breakdown of the 140,000 voters? I'm curious if it was predominantly non-native Hawaiians.
I'd say it's pretty fucking obvious why users think music is free. The industry is presenting it that way.
Or, people gravitate towards the natural state that music has been in for thousands of years: people pay to hear a live performances, not so much copies of the performances.
A copy of a song, just like on the radio, should serve as advertising for the artist. A live show is the work that the artist should get paid for, not an infinitely copy'able digital file.
Well, and the Tesla system has 'smart technologies' like storing energy from the grid during off-peak times, and using that stored energy during peak times, to save you money. As others have pointed out above, this would be about a 5 year ROI for most people. That is with zero solar panels, just smarter use of electricity based on local rates.
This is much better than lead-acid, but as you say they are also much more expensive.
But despite the cost, as was pointed out above in posts, for most people the ROI for these is around 5 years. And you get a 10 year warranty with an option of buying another 10 year warranty at the end of the first.
Put a battery pack on your home, like one of these. Get an inverter which feeds excess to the battery and NEVER exports to the grid. The power company loses their only technical reason to gripe, because you are no longer doing Net Metering. At that point, it's all about the Benjamins.
This sort of strategy may help you get around some initial push back from electric companies, but it isn't the future. The future is going to be a much more connected and integrated series of electric grids across the nation with a lot of electrical storage capability to handle near 100% renewable power. A piece of that storage will come from cars and homes equipped with batteries.
You already have an answer to the electric company complaints anyway: 2 fees: 1 for having a connection to the grid and 1 for your actual use. Over time, the connection fee may need to be raised to make ends meet as less electricity is needed from the central power plants (more coming from home solar). But on the flip side, since less central power plants would be needed, the electric companies may have less overhead costs. Time will tell.
You may not "need" the latest smartphone but at the same time, especially among younger people, you could almost say you need to have a smartphone capable of accessing social networks in a reasonable manner because it's extremely difficult to integrate with many peer groups without one.
I picture this in the physical world like being a kid who has to sit in the closet during recess.
The choice isn't pay a high wage or pay a low wage.
The choice is grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries.
And yet, we don't see a wide range of wages for different farm crops or different physical (menial) services. Apparently, every consumer on the planet is only willing to pay for fruit/services that cost minimum wage to produce. Coincidence?
In the age of ever-closer-to-desktop-application websites, I'm only seeing more and more use of javascript frameworks - of which jquery is one...
I don't get why people call jquery a framework. It has never been a framework. The first sentence on their site is: "jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library".
That's irrelevant, as the justice system is not to be a method for taking revenge,
There are many recognized 'goods' that we attempt to reach with a justice system. Justice for the victims (the victims may consider this revenge), mitigating future crime, rehabilitation, social control, protection of society, etc..
That is why a lot of people who oppose the death penalty sometimes hesitate to answer if they would be pro or con if the victim was a close family member. A lot of the voting public, and politicians, support death penalty specifically as a means of revenge for the family or as revenge for their future selfs if they are ever victims. Whether the justice system words things as 'revenge' or as 'justice' is irrelevant, since so many people view the 'justice' as 'revenge'.
Except modern conventional agriculture requires two things: 1) lots of sun, and 2) lots of water. Those two items rarely are in the same region at the same time.
It makes a lot of sense to have agriculture growing in desert regions as opposed to wet/dark regions. It is far easier to deliver water to a desert than it would be to deliver more sun to a shady region.
A market price for water doesn't make a lot of sense, if you are thinking about that market price being the same that consumers pay. Urban consumers are paying price X because it is supporting the infrastructure and other resources used to deliver the water to their individual houses.
Farms aren't using any of the urban infrastructure to get their water. They have a whole 'nother set of pipes (where I lived it was a river, and you bought your own water pump to fill your own set of pipes, private infrastructure per farm), entirely different usage patterns, etc... I can see value in have some more market forces influence the price of agricultural water, but it would never make sense to have it be the same set of market forces that influence consumer water prices.
Plus, there are some goods that we intentionally subsidize, because the forces don't exist in the market, or the market would do a poor job of delivering the outcomes we want. Keeping food/power costs down, are often things that get direct or indirect subsidies because it is beneficial for so many people.
It would be an interesting experiment though, seeing if people would really want something like avocados if they cost 10 bucks because water was pricey.
Most of the crops need the strong sun. That is the entire reason people started growing there.....
The Yakima Valley in Washington is identical: hot and dry climate, fed by mountain reservoirs.
Lets say you did move the farms to a wetter area, like Seattle. Now what? You think it will be cost effective to hang lights over all the fields to mimic the amount of sunlight that most modern crops require?
Right now, water is still far cheaper to move around (or engineer projects to produce more) than creating artificial sunlight. Desert farming isn't going anywhere soon.
There is a huge layer of people between Steve Jobs and the engineers you missed. For one example, UX designers (not the art side of things, the technical "evidence based" side of design...usability studies, statistics, etc...).
However you are correct that a coder, whose only job is to take a requirement sheet (compiled by someone else who met with the designers, customers, etc..) and code it, probably doesn't need a liberal arts education. Is that the majority of coding jobs though?
I would think that the job market has a lot more places open for people that are a bit more well rounded. Like, take a well educated guess based on the current usability best practices of an interface, present it to a client, code it, return to the client, deal with criticism, be willing to compromise your design in a bad way to make a customer happy, etc...
I'll have to look that up sometime: total 'jack of all trades' type coding jobs vs 'hamster in a wheel' type coding jobs at the huge companies (MS, Oracle, etc...) I'm making the assumption that you will find a lot more job opportunities being a jack of all trades type person. I could be wrong.
Technocrats are often valuable additions to a society, but they cause unrest because they believe that there is nothing to the human condition other than the application of technology. This is often hilariously, and occasionally horrifically, wrong.
Very true. And it needs to be said more often.
There seems to be another side to technocrats: the assumption that because their subject matter in school and later in work is difficult for most people to master, that any subject that is perceived as easier to master is a subject that they are qualified to discuss intelligently or comment on.
For example, take every Slashdot discussion on the Humanities. Or...sadly enough most discussions about things like AGW. "I can write kernel code so of course I'm smart enough to figure out why all the climate scientists are wrong...." etc...
Every time you come up with an example situation, replace same-sex with black. Does it still feel right to say "legally compel them to bake a cake depicting a black couple is forcing my values on them"? No, it doesn't. Your right to swing your first ends at the tip of my nose. In other words, your right to refuse to bake a cake ends when my nose happens to a be a legally protected attribute, like race or religion.
The tricky thing here, is not all states legally recognize sexual orientation as a protected class. But that is rapidly changing. People not recognizing that sexual orientation should be fully protected just like race/religion, will find themselves on the wrong side of history in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
The other option is to work local - there will be always a market for small businesses/consultants catering to mom & pop businesses that need a website built, accounting or customer management system created, perhaps some reporting beyond what Excel can do. Those are too small fish for the big guys like SAP to go after and too small to be able to afford a team in India/Eastern Europe to manage their systems, not to mention that it would be really impractical. It is a large market - not everyone has to (and can) work for Facebook, Google or Microsoft today.
'work local' is what happens naturally when you work for any small/medium business, even large businesses who's primary focus is not producing software / doesn't specialize in IT.
Work for a school system/ college, hospital, agriculture/fruit warehouse, etc.. and you likely won't get outsourced. Businesses that are not devoted to just churning out software, like a hospital, still have things like "in person meetings between IT and staff":) They want you on site to explain, help, be part of the team, etc..
You exaggerate. Living a sustainable lifestyle != living like a pauper.
It isn't even an exaggeration, but a complete falsehood. Every country that is moving faster towards renewables than the US has proven that there is zero economic downsides, and in fact, often an economic stimulus.
Yup hehe http://greenmonk.net/2010/01/07/what-if-we-create-a-better-world-for-nothing/
Whether the science it accurate or not...
There is no doubt that politicians love to use this a leverage to gain more power and control over the lives of the people.
But this is one of those really important issues that conservatives should feel shamed to ignore just because they have an ingrained distrust of government and a desire to keep government small.
I feel like if we had 95% of scientists saying "hey... we see a comet headed right towards Earth", most of the conservative politicians and media would still be saying stuff like "it is still debatable", "there are two sides to this issue", "must be a conspiracy to sell comet busting tech", "the comet scientists just want more grants", etc...
The country is 18 trillion dollars in debt.
Being in debt is not so bad if you are making more money from the borrowed money than your debt service is costing you. The reason debt became an evil word is because most Americans use debt to buy things that they can't afford to buy outright and that decrease in value. Debt used to buy a house is not evil debt (although it hasn't paid off well in the last 10 years or so.) Debt used to pay for a vacation because you can't afford the vacation without making payments on it, is bad debt. Debt used to buy a car is bad debt unless you already had the money to pay cash for it and chose to invest that money in something that earns you more than the car loan interest rate.
Well, and none of that debt has anything to do with Government debt. Comparing government debt to household debt is what leads to very misinforming reporting on the subject. https://www.google.com/search?q=difference+between+government+debt+and+household+debt&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
So in a way she's ideal for politics
Lets clarify that: "So in a way she's ideal for winning political campaigns". Because she will say anything, lie, etc..
She is in no way ideal for holding political office.
where do you see scandal in the Obama administration or more specifically in its foreign policy?
There is none.
The fact that he turned out to be a middle of the road, don't rock the boat, conservative democrat, hasn't stopped conservative media from describing everything Obama does as causing the end of the world.
A pretty boring presidency if you ask me. Obamacare was....well something. It was helpful to most people, harmful to a smaller number of people, and in the end may help some long term costs, but it isn't the healthcare that most liberals wanted. Obamacare is a Heritage Foundation republican plan after all......
Other than that, he continue the foreign policy as usual, ramped up drone strikes, didn't pull us out of any war zones early, but merely followed along with plans laid down during the Bush years (at least with Iraq).
He did grant some benefits/amnesty to targeted sub-groups of illegal immigrants, but then again so did....every single president for the last 45 years....
Nothing Obama has done is either exceptional or unusual. But the amount of push back from congress and conservative media (most filibustering in history) is phenomenal. Well, there is one thing that is different about him.... hmm.. what could that be.....?
I think the place they will dominate first (and next, I guess) is motorcycles.
Outside of the US this is already true. I think the last article I read about E-Bikes stated there were something like 400 million E-Bikes in use in China/India/Far east side of Asia.
And round and round we go. Every time a liberal talks about the golden 50's and unions, a conservative talks about ww2 and living in a golden age of no competition.
Both sides have a point. We did have a tremendous advantage over other countries after ww2. However, there are countries right now with much higher taxes, strong unions, and are doing well financially with high standards of living.
Of course with global trade various industries 'race to the bottom' in terms of wages / benefits. But that isn't every industry. Most remaining industries in the US would not be hurt by higher union numbers, especially jobs that cannot be outsourced, like service industry jobs. And most businesses and people would not be hurt by higher taxes around the Germany / Norway rates.
No one is suggesting returning to 90% taxes. But when billionaires have effective tax rates like 12%, yet we can't seemingly find the money to fix crumbling infrastructure, something is wrong.
Ask a poor person if they would be willing to pay 40% tax, but have free health care, free daycare, 9 months of maternity leave, top notch schools where every teaching position is coveted, has a high salary, and requires a masters degree, (See some place like Finland for example) and perhaps the "raising taxes is always bad" mentality of some poorer conservatives might change.
Is the O2 level different on that mountain for some reason? I've been at 14,000 feet on Mount Adams and could breath fairly well.
From wikipedia:
Out of a total population of 600,000 in the islands and 155,000 registered voters, 140,000 votes were cast, the highest turnout ever in Hawaii. The vote showed approval rates of at least 93% by voters on all major islands (see adjacent figure for details). Of the approximately 140,000 votes cast, fewer than 8000 rejected the Admission Act of 1959.
Do you know the racial/ethnic breakdown of the 140,000 voters? I'm curious if it was predominantly non-native Hawaiians.
I'd say it's pretty fucking obvious why users think music is free. The industry is presenting it that way.
Or, people gravitate towards the natural state that music has been in for thousands of years: people pay to hear a live performances, not so much copies of the performances.
A copy of a song, just like on the radio, should serve as advertising for the artist. A live show is the work that the artist should get paid for, not an infinitely copy'able digital file.
Well, and the Tesla system has 'smart technologies' like storing energy from the grid during off-peak times, and using that stored energy during peak times, to save you money. As others have pointed out above, this would be about a 5 year ROI for most people. That is with zero solar panels, just smarter use of electricity based on local rates.
This is much better than lead-acid, but as you say they are also much more expensive.
But despite the cost, as was pointed out above in posts, for most people the ROI for these is around 5 years. And you get a 10 year warranty with an option of buying another 10 year warranty at the end of the first.
Put a battery pack on your home, like one of these. Get an inverter which feeds excess to the battery and NEVER exports to the grid. The power company loses their only technical reason to gripe, because you are no longer doing Net Metering. At that point, it's all about the Benjamins.
This sort of strategy may help you get around some initial push back from electric companies, but it isn't the future. The future is going to be a much more connected and integrated series of electric grids across the nation with a lot of electrical storage capability to handle near 100% renewable power. A piece of that storage will come from cars and homes equipped with batteries.
You already have an answer to the electric company complaints anyway: 2 fees: 1 for having a connection to the grid and 1 for your actual use. Over time, the connection fee may need to be raised to make ends meet as less electricity is needed from the central power plants (more coming from home solar). But on the flip side, since less central power plants would be needed, the electric companies may have less overhead costs. Time will tell.
How do you work out (14 cents per kWh - 5 cents per kWh) = 8 c/kWh, to become $1.40 per day? Curious what formula you used.
You may not "need" the latest smartphone but at the same time, especially among younger people, you could almost say you need to have a smartphone capable of accessing social networks in a reasonable manner because it's extremely difficult to integrate with many peer groups without one.
I picture this in the physical world like being a kid who has to sit in the closet during recess.
The choice isn't pay a high wage or pay a low wage.
The choice is grow strawberries that you can sell at a price people will pay, or don't grow strawberries.
And yet, we don't see a wide range of wages for different farm crops or different physical (menial) services. Apparently, every consumer on the planet is only willing to pay for fruit/services that cost minimum wage to produce. Coincidence?
In the age of ever-closer-to-desktop-application websites, I'm only seeing more and more use of javascript frameworks - of which jquery is one...
I don't get why people call jquery a framework. It has never been a framework. The first sentence on their site is: "jQuery is a fast, small, and feature-rich JavaScript library".
That's irrelevant, as the justice system is not to be a method for taking revenge,
There are many recognized 'goods' that we attempt to reach with a justice system. Justice for the victims (the victims may consider this revenge), mitigating future crime, rehabilitation, social control, protection of society, etc..
That is why a lot of people who oppose the death penalty sometimes hesitate to answer if they would be pro or con if the victim was a close family member. A lot of the voting public, and politicians, support death penalty specifically as a means of revenge for the family or as revenge for their future selfs if they are ever victims. Whether the justice system words things as 'revenge' or as 'justice' is irrelevant, since so many people view the 'justice' as 'revenge'.
Except modern conventional agriculture requires two things: 1) lots of sun, and 2) lots of water. Those two items rarely are in the same region at the same time.
It makes a lot of sense to have agriculture growing in desert regions as opposed to wet/dark regions. It is far easier to deliver water to a desert than it would be to deliver more sun to a shady region.
A market price for water doesn't make a lot of sense, if you are thinking about that market price being the same that consumers pay. Urban consumers are paying price X because it is supporting the infrastructure and other resources used to deliver the water to their individual houses.
Farms aren't using any of the urban infrastructure to get their water. They have a whole 'nother set of pipes (where I lived it was a river, and you bought your own water pump to fill your own set of pipes, private infrastructure per farm), entirely different usage patterns, etc... I can see value in have some more market forces influence the price of agricultural water, but it would never make sense to have it be the same set of market forces that influence consumer water prices.
Plus, there are some goods that we intentionally subsidize, because the forces don't exist in the market, or the market would do a poor job of delivering the outcomes we want. Keeping food/power costs down, are often things that get direct or indirect subsidies because it is beneficial for so many people.
It would be an interesting experiment though, seeing if people would really want something like avocados if they cost 10 bucks because water was pricey.
Most of the crops need the strong sun. That is the entire reason people started growing there.....
The Yakima Valley in Washington is identical: hot and dry climate, fed by mountain reservoirs.
Lets say you did move the farms to a wetter area, like Seattle. Now what? You think it will be cost effective to hang lights over all the fields to mimic the amount of sunlight that most modern crops require?
Right now, water is still far cheaper to move around (or engineer projects to produce more) than creating artificial sunlight. Desert farming isn't going anywhere soon.
There is a huge layer of people between Steve Jobs and the engineers you missed. For one example, UX designers (not the art side of things, the technical "evidence based" side of design...usability studies, statistics, etc...).
However you are correct that a coder, whose only job is to take a requirement sheet (compiled by someone else who met with the designers, customers, etc..) and code it, probably doesn't need a liberal arts education. Is that the majority of coding jobs though?
I would think that the job market has a lot more places open for people that are a bit more well rounded. Like, take a well educated guess based on the current usability best practices of an interface, present it to a client, code it, return to the client, deal with criticism, be willing to compromise your design in a bad way to make a customer happy, etc...
I'll have to look that up sometime: total 'jack of all trades' type coding jobs vs 'hamster in a wheel' type coding jobs at the huge companies (MS, Oracle, etc...) I'm making the assumption that you will find a lot more job opportunities being a jack of all trades type person. I could be wrong.
Technocrats are often valuable additions to a society, but they cause unrest because they believe that there is nothing to the human condition other than the application of technology. This is often hilariously, and occasionally horrifically, wrong.
Very true. And it needs to be said more often.
There seems to be another side to technocrats: the assumption that because their subject matter in school and later in work is difficult for most people to master, that any subject that is perceived as easier to master is a subject that they are qualified to discuss intelligently or comment on.
For example, take every Slashdot discussion on the Humanities. Or...sadly enough most discussions about things like AGW. "I can write kernel code so of course I'm smart enough to figure out why all the climate scientists are wrong...." etc...
Every time you come up with an example situation, replace same-sex with black. Does it still feel right to say "legally compel them to bake a cake depicting a black couple is forcing my values on them"? No, it doesn't. Your right to swing your first ends at the tip of my nose. In other words, your right to refuse to bake a cake ends when my nose happens to a be a legally protected attribute, like race or religion.
The tricky thing here, is not all states legally recognize sexual orientation as a protected class. But that is rapidly changing. People not recognizing that sexual orientation should be fully protected just like race/religion, will find themselves on the wrong side of history in short order.