That's very informative thanks but I'm not convinced. I'm also not convinced about whether we disagree. When was that announcement about the job cuts? I recall that 2/3 of the coal capacity was from this century, from 1.3Gigaton to 4GT. I doubt they will want to do away with any of these new plants. Likewise the solar/wind/nuclear power was not intended to replace coal but to add to it. So if you say they are hedging their bets, i'd say they are not hedging , just investing in parallel . they could not afford not to use coal. With the economic crisis they will be forced to throttle the power output and that could lead to a lot of closures, but the motivation is different. I do not think they built those new plants with the intent to shut them down quickly.
I think the logic is that they replace the old power plants with new ones and in this way concentrate coal usage. That means the pollution becomes more manageable. They also add scrubbers to the new plants.
I would take that 30% number with a grain of salt. They're not going to cut new power plants and the old ones are also smaller so it's not 30% of the energy production.
Also with the economic crunch they're going through I think the 'solar binge' should be taken with a grain of salt. And a slice of lemon and...
It's not a secret the NSA has been hiring more informaticists. He's saying you're not going to fix this with more informaticists, and while he's on the outside the little data he's got since (including from unofficial contacts of which there are a lot) confirms his opinion and his warnings. The article is a year old but his opinion hasn't changed the last 15 years. Data gathering should be targeted, not trying to do a wide sweep.Targeted spying is much more effective, it's more legal and it's more moral. The general datamining approach is powerful from a forensic point of view but its predictive power is minimal. If you look at the Boston bombing you don't need inside info to deduce this. I think he's talking a lot of sense , while the assumption that the NSA secretly is much better than that is a pretty weak one. Also the claim that he doesn't know what he's talking about because he's out of the loop has been peddled since the start. It's bullshit. That the people on the inside are out of the loop, that I can see. They're too busy datacrunching to see the big picture. A guy from inside the NSA can hardly talk shop with Snowden, but Binney can.
The CIA has similar problems btw. The complaint that you need more feet on the ground instead of hightech has been around for a long time now.
It's been claimed the minute cash is made illegal the bank will give you a negative interest rate on your account. Maybe , maybe not, but one thing is clear: it does mean another shift in power, and it's not a shift in our favor.
That's what Trump seems to understand and you don't: that those bad guys are sometimes doing their job pursuing their legitimate interests. We've got a serious problem that we never seem to recognize that, the same we we never seem to be able to acknowledge that sometimes the others can do deterrence too. We always see it as aggression. I think the North Korean nuclear bombs are one of the clearest instances of deterrence around. Seen anyone call it that way?
So there Trump has said some sound things where the others haven't. It may not mean much because in the end policy can end up completely different, but I think we desperately need to cool down the situation on the international front and I certainly think Clinton is inclined to make things worse. It's also the only positive thing I can think of about Trump, but it's an important one. I'm also not so strongly in favor of it because it's a bit of an 'crooks amongst each other' argument. I am strongly convinced that we need to take our opponents more seriously.
Ok, so Mexico is also partly a foreign policy issue, but it's mostly domestic and he's got an antagonizing domestic policy. His ideas about Syria are probably the same as about Iraq and Lybia: Better leave dictators in place than replacing them by Isis and Al Qaeda. I think that's sensible and it's uncommon. He didn't need to say positive things about Kim Jong-un but he did.
He'll destroy this country and maybe start World War 3.
Clinton: hawk Rubio: neocon Cruz: dunno.
You've got a few people there who support a very antagonizing US foreign policy while Trump has said positive things about the North Korean leader and about Putin and Putin seems to like him. Trump seems the best candidate for normalizing the relations with the designated bad guys. He accepts them as people you can talk with.
The model says life is extremely unlikely and that this makes us probably unique.
If you google 'Rare earth' or 'anthropic principle' you'll see there's a long history of this thinking. There've been these long calculations showing that evolution of life on earth from scratch was also not possible (lookup junkyard tornado for instance).
I think this kind of thinking stinks. It's the wrong kind of model.
Solar sails would work differently than wind sails, as has been pointed out vehemently by others, but while it certainly is impossible to use the sail to move towards a sun, it is an interesting question whether a solar sail can be made that can push you sideways when flying towards the sun. after all, a mirror can deflect light sideways.
I can't judge if laser propulsion will become workable but external propulsion (as opposed to onboard) certainly makes sense. That is, between two of 'our own' locations, with a 'cannon' on both ends. So you would need a stage of slow ships taking ages to reach the target and brake. Then they build the 'braking laser' and then you can get much faster traffic.
Let me finish!.. and it's not just about science. Dyson is a bit difficult about the projections but his main reaction is 'ok, so the north climate is becoming a lot more temperate. That is spectacular but not catastrophic enough for me to stop Chinese development.'
Izzatzo? Randall Munroe seems to agree with Dyson that global warming is not our top priority http://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ . In practice there are many reasonable ways to disagree about global warming. Dyson has reasonable doubts about the projections and about how damaging global warming is. He strongly believes draconic measures to restrict CO2 output are a very bad idea. So bad that he's willing to accept a few disasters such as disappearing glaciers. He doesn't think global warming is catastrophic enough to warrant draconic measures. So the discussion includes different levels.
If 'Climate Denial' is silly, 'Climate Science Denial' isn't much better because it equates science with conformity. People's ideas about science vary of course. I think the global warming topic is about much more than science, and should be treated as such. It's also about action and decisions and priorities. And science should have room for 'difficult people'. In fact it requires a more fundamentalist scientist to be acting difficult when the danger is generally considered too high to wait for more solid proof. Or one with a different agenda of course.
Personally, I'd rather see robots kill each other as opposed to humans slaying each other. Not only does it make sense for the militaries involved (robots can't desert, they will never be afraid of gunfire, and you don't need to tell their family that they died in the war), but the civilians would prefer it too (you don't have to risk your life being shot, you won't have to abandon your home, etc.). Autonomous machines are an advantage for everyone involved, and would be a much more humane way to solve wars.
Most wars are asymmetric. One side has all the big guns. I can imagine several effects a player like the US would prefer:
- freedom to intervene. Using actual soldiers has provided a natural restraint on interventionism. You lose them you get complaints at home. This has changed warfare a lot and everyone wants to use airpower now and avoid landpower. Airpower itself is being replaced by remote controlled drones. For reasons I don't understand the huge financial cost of interventions is not felt directly by the population so it does not cause them to resist it. - advanced technology provides good business for weapons manufacturers, and these are very powerful players. - increase regulations so that advanced technology is required and less advanced technology is a war crime. You can see this at work in Israel where one side has advanced weaponry and the other side has scaled up firecrackers. Somehow the side with the firecrackers is committing a war crime every time it fires one while the side committing all the destruction just has to try to be 'even more humane'. - legal advantages : if an automated system follows rules then one can only condemn/attack the rules. The rules themselves apply in a closed theoretical system meaning they can be made watertight on paper, and it doesn't matter much if they are ridiculous in reality.
I can probably think of others, but not right away...
No I'm not in favor of casting a wide net and discretely investigating things on the off chance that it's true. I'm in favor of not investigating people unless you have very good reason to.
Well I have a lot of imagination. Since you're mindlessly supporting a ridiculous situation you must be trying to divert attention away from yourself. Therefore you must have something to hide. Let's investigate that laptop of yours. I mean, just imagine the things you might be hiding!
The moral is, police should have A LOT of reasons in order to investigate you. If any silly hint is enough you get an obscenity.
Don't forget the public pressure. Perceived cost of doing nothing about something that turns out to be dangerous: huge. Perceived cost of getting up all in arms about nothing: tiny. We hardly have a concept of risks we should accept . Deliberately doing nothing is hard to sell.
While the belgian reactors are old , I think the current worries are mostly a result of the tight regime they're being run at now. Strict safety procedures means lots of powerdowns and lots of news events. This constant media attention then leads the neighbors to start worrying. That's the main issue at work now. It's not due to inherent dangers becoming too high.
That aside, the fact that the reactors are old and still necessary is a symptom of the historical bad approach to nuclear energy that we had in the west. Nuclear energy boomed when the technology was immature, and lots of large scale plants were built with very long lifetime. This slowed down the evolution of the technology. For good evolution you need fast rotation of the plants and good diversity. Then enthusiasm waned and now the west is stuck with very old plants and no mature technology, and the technology here is as good as dead. We don't even have any experience in handling the end of the lifecycle of a plant. China, India and Iran are starting with better knowhow but the conditions are more dangerous (highly populated areas, earthquake prone..), so it looks like they have some disasters in the making too.
Slashdot Mirror
That's very informative thanks but I'm not convinced. I'm also not convinced about whether we disagree. When was that announcement about the job cuts? I recall that 2/3 of the coal capacity was from this century, from 1.3Gigaton to 4GT. I doubt they will want to do away with any of these new plants. Likewise the solar/wind/nuclear power was not intended to replace coal but to add to it. So if you say they are hedging their bets, i'd say they are not hedging , just investing in parallel . they could not afford not to use coal. With the economic crisis they will be forced to throttle the power output and that could lead to a lot of closures, but the motivation is different.
I do not think they built those new plants with the intent to shut them down quickly.
After which he wrote Ullyses to er, drive the point home?
I think the logic is that they replace the old power plants with new ones and in this way concentrate coal usage. That means the pollution becomes more manageable. They also add scrubbers to the new plants.
I would take that 30% number with a grain of salt. They're not going to cut new power plants and the old ones are also smaller so it's not 30% of the energy production.
Also with the economic crunch they're going through I think the 'solar binge' should be taken with a grain of salt. And a slice of lemon and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It's not a secret the NSA has been hiring more informaticists. He's saying you're not going to fix this with more informaticists, and while he's on the outside the little data he's got since (including from unofficial contacts of which there are a lot) confirms his opinion and his warnings. The article is a year old but his opinion hasn't changed the last 15 years. Data gathering should be targeted, not trying to do a wide sweep.Targeted spying is much more effective, it's more legal and it's more moral. The general datamining approach is powerful from a forensic point of view but its predictive power is minimal. If you look at the Boston bombing you don't need inside info to deduce this. I think he's talking a lot of sense , while the assumption that the NSA secretly is much better than that is a pretty weak one. Also the claim that he doesn't know what he's talking about because he's out of the loop has been peddled since the start. It's bullshit. That the people on the inside are out of the loop, that I can see. They're too busy datacrunching to see the big picture. A guy from inside the NSA can hardly talk shop with Snowden, but Binney can.
The CIA has similar problems btw. The complaint that you need more feet on the ground instead of hightech has been around for a long time now.
It's been claimed the minute cash is made illegal the bank will give you a negative interest rate on your account.
Maybe , maybe not, but one thing is clear: it does mean another shift in power, and it's not a shift in our favor.
That's what Trump seems to understand and you don't: that those bad guys are sometimes doing their job pursuing their legitimate interests. We've got a serious problem that we never seem to recognize that, the same we we never seem to be able to acknowledge that sometimes the others can do deterrence too. We always see it as aggression. I think the North Korean nuclear bombs are one of the clearest instances of deterrence around. Seen anyone call it that way?
So there Trump has said some sound things where the others haven't. It may not mean much because in the end policy can end up completely different, but I think we desperately need to cool down the situation on the international front and I certainly think Clinton is inclined to make things worse. It's also the only positive thing I can think of about Trump, but it's an important one. I'm also not so strongly in favor of it because it's a bit of an 'crooks amongst each other' argument. I am strongly convinced that we need to take our opponents more seriously.
Ok, so Mexico is also partly a foreign policy issue, but it's mostly domestic and he's got an antagonizing domestic policy. His ideas about Syria are probably the same as about Iraq and Lybia: Better leave dictators in place than replacing them by Isis and Al Qaeda. I think that's sensible and it's uncommon. He didn't need to say positive things about Kim Jong-un but he did.
Clinton: hawk
Rubio: neocon
Cruz: dunno.
You've got a few people there who support a very antagonizing US foreign policy while Trump has said positive things about the North Korean leader and about Putin and Putin seems to like him.
Trump seems the best candidate for normalizing the relations with the designated bad guys. He accepts them as people you can talk with.
Likeable doesn't come into it.
The model says life is extremely unlikely and that this makes us probably unique.
If you google 'Rare earth' or 'anthropic principle' you'll see there's a long history of this thinking. There've been these long calculations showing that evolution of life on earth from scratch was also not possible (lookup junkyard tornado for instance).
I think this kind of thinking stinks. It's the wrong kind of model.
I was thinking the same thing :) My swarms of 64 1.9kg drones are going to make good money!
Solar sails would work differently than wind sails, as has been pointed out vehemently by others, but while it certainly is impossible to use the sail to move towards a sun, it is an interesting question whether a solar sail can be made that can push you sideways when flying towards the sun. after all, a mirror can deflect light sideways.
I can't judge if laser propulsion will become workable but external propulsion (as opposed to onboard) certainly makes sense. That is, between two of 'our own' locations, with a 'cannon' on both ends.
So you would need a stage of slow ships taking ages to reach the target and brake. Then they build the 'braking laser' and then you can get much faster traffic.
Let me finish! .. and it's not just about science. Dyson is a bit difficult about the projections but his main reaction is 'ok, so the north climate is becoming a lot more temperate. That is spectacular but not catastrophic enough for me to stop Chinese development.'
Izzatzo? Randall Munroe seems to agree with Dyson that global warming is not our top priority http://what-if.xkcd.com/146/ .
In practice there are many reasonable ways to disagree about global warming. Dyson has reasonable doubts about the projections and about how damaging global warming is. He strongly believes draconic measures to restrict CO2 output are a very bad idea. So bad that he's willing to accept a few disasters such as disappearing glaciers. He doesn't think global warming is catastrophic enough to warrant draconic measures. So the discussion includes different levels.
If 'Climate Denial' is silly, 'Climate Science Denial' isn't much better because it equates science with conformity. People's ideas about science vary of course. I think the global warming topic is about much more than science, and should be treated as such. It's also about action and decisions and priorities. And science should have room for 'difficult people'. In fact it requires a more fundamentalist scientist to be acting difficult when the danger is generally considered too high to wait for more solid proof. Or one with a different agenda of course.
What is 'Climate denial' I wonder. There is no such thing as climate! There is only weather!
Even more fun, 'they' will have little drones that secretly hack your body in the night and you'll wake up as a beast with 7 heads.
Most wars are asymmetric. One side has all the big guns.
I can imagine several effects a player like the US would prefer:
- freedom to intervene. Using actual soldiers has provided a natural restraint on interventionism. You lose them you get complaints at home. This has changed warfare a lot and everyone wants to use airpower now and avoid landpower. Airpower itself is being replaced by remote controlled drones. For reasons I don't understand the huge financial cost of interventions is not felt directly by the population so it does not cause them to resist it.
- advanced technology provides good business for weapons manufacturers, and these are very powerful players.
- increase regulations so that advanced technology is required and less advanced technology is a war crime. You can see this at work in Israel where one side has advanced weaponry and the other side has scaled up firecrackers. Somehow the side with the firecrackers is committing a war crime every time it fires one while the side committing all the destruction just has to try to be 'even more humane'.
- legal advantages : if an automated system follows rules then one can only condemn/attack the rules. The rules themselves apply in a closed theoretical system meaning they can be made watertight on paper, and it doesn't matter much if they are ridiculous in reality.
I can probably think of others, but not right away...
..because the potato salad has gone bad?
Definitely a meterrorite attack. They're becoming more sophisticated every day!
No I'm not in favor of casting a wide net and discretely investigating things on the off chance that it's true. I'm in favor of not investigating people unless you have very good reason to.
Well I have a lot of imagination. Since you're mindlessly supporting a ridiculous situation you must be trying to divert attention away from yourself. Therefore you must have something to hide. Let's investigate that laptop of yours. I mean, just imagine the things you might be hiding!
The moral is, police should have A LOT of reasons in order to investigate you. If any silly hint is enough you get an obscenity.
Don't forget the public pressure. Perceived cost of doing nothing about something that turns out to be dangerous: huge. Perceived cost of getting up all in arms about nothing: tiny. We hardly have a concept of risks we should accept . Deliberately doing nothing is hard to sell.
While the belgian reactors are old , I think the current worries are mostly a result of the tight regime they're being run at now. Strict safety procedures means lots of powerdowns and lots of news events. This constant media attention then leads the neighbors to start worrying. That's the main issue at work now. It's not due to inherent dangers becoming too high.
That aside, the fact that the reactors are old and still necessary is a symptom of the historical bad approach to nuclear energy that we had in the west. Nuclear energy boomed when the technology was immature, and lots of large scale plants were built with very long lifetime. This slowed down the evolution of the technology. For good evolution you need fast rotation of the plants and good diversity. Then enthusiasm waned and now the west is stuck with very old plants and no mature technology, and the technology here is as good as dead. We don't even have any experience in handling the end of the lifecycle of a plant. China, India and Iran are starting with better knowhow but the conditions are more dangerous (highly populated areas, earthquake prone..), so it looks like they have some disasters in the making too.