But it's a great way for trading firms and wall street to skim money off the top of everyone's energy bill via high frequency trading and various market manipulation schemes that has nothing to do with actually producing energy.
Exactly! We need to further our research instead on ultrasonic birth control. It's terrible that we didn't stop inventing new power sources before we came up with nuclear fission power back 80 years ago in the 30s. If we had just had the forsight to shutdown all these new power technologies before then we would be well on our way to keeping the human population within controllable limits.
Imagine you're Bill Gates, you're the richest guy in the world, yet you still have to sit in traffic. So why not devote the rest of your life to population control?
I think the greatest example of half-assed awful engineering was the White Sea Canal. It's estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 people died because Stalin wanted it built in the winter, with hand tools, with brutally treated gulag labor. The canal is only 13 feet deep, it's also frozen over half the year and the water is too low to make it useful in dry summers.
BTW, The Ghost Of The Executed Engineer is a great read, drawing from first hand accounts, about the less publicized but stunningly awful failures of Soviet engineering.
Climate Science's real problem is lack of falsifiability.
If all of a sudden, hundreds of completely bizarre species of creatures of a rather large size (say the size of small mammals or bigger) with totally novel biology (say silicon based) and adapted well to earth suddenly appeared in the middle of central park in New York City, one might start to doubt the theory that all life on earth evolved from one-celled organisms, at least on this planet. This has obviously not happened, but it would disprove the theory of evolution.
If one discovered galaxies that were not red-shifting and were instead accelerating in all sorts of random vector paths, one might doubt the big bang theory.
On the other hand, If the temperature goes up, or down, if there is more rain, or less rain, more hurricanes, or less hurricanes, glaciers get bigger or smaller, see ice expands or contracts, droughts or floods, it's all evidence for global warming! If we entered a new ice age or a new warm period everything and anything is proof of global warming! Global warming can not be disproven!
In the end, the people who have to believe in global warming are the Chinese and the Indian governments and they don't believe it. That and no government has meaningfully reduced its carbon emissions since the Kyoto protocol was signed anyway. There is a heck of a lot of money in cap and trade though.
The pattern in the current system, where lobbyists write the legislation and the politicians sign it, is to make things as complicated as possible to prevent scrutiny and to grant advantage to the author. The law is littered with examples of this, the tax code in particular. The same goes on outside of the government as well. For example, some derivatives contracts that blew up in 2008 were so complicated, arguably on purpose, that no one who wasn't a rare breed of specialist could make sense of them and understand the risks involved. I fear health care reform is following this pattern as well. What's needed are simpler laws and simpler systems but there is so much hidden advantage in complicating things that the trend is going to be difficult to reverse.
Scala isn't that bad. One can program it like Java, and then use language features to compress the code down to 1/10th the size it would be in Java. However, if you use all the language features, you have to comment every line because the logic gets really really dense. I am getting up to speed in it and it's fun, really. It's just that there's a big big learning curve. Lift is a pretty bizarre web framework too, especially coming from traditional Java web development. Overall, I'm undecided if the feature density is worth it. Sometimes it's nice that Java is so verbose because it's really hard to be clever in a bad way. This mainly serves to keep clever programmers, at least the bad kind of clever, from wrecking a project.
Have you ever seen the movie Sunshine? That was about as hard sci-fi as it gets. The nerdiness unfortunately was just oozing out of that movie, it was almost too much, even for me. The ending was great though.
They would never do it. That's because The Man in The High Castle paints a not entirely negative picture of Japanese colonialism. It's too much cognitive dissonance for the whole world to handle. I could however see a low budget indie-manga being made out of it if they could somehow get the rights.
I think they should just find out who was responsible and put them in prison and leave the rest of leave the company alone. They do this in China all the time. Instead, in the U.S we have this world of legal fictions and obfuscations made possible by corporate personhood.
Tian Wenhua, 67, former chairwoman of Sanlu Group, was sentenced to life in prison in January 2009 on charges of producing and selling fake or substandard products.... Three former executives of China's one-time biggest beverage maker, Jianlibao Group, were jailed for stealing from the staff welfare fund to buy insurance for themselves.... Yang Shiming received an 18-year sentence and Li Qingyuan and Ruan Juyuan were each given 14 years. They were also fined 150,000 yuan ($20,000) each. All three were former vice presidents of the group.... Yang Yanming, a former general manager of a Galaxy Securities branch in Beijing, was executed on Dec 8, 2009, for embezzling almost 70 million yuan ($10.25 million) and misappropriating another 25 million yuan,... Wu Ying, 28, former owner of the Zhejiang-based Bense Holding Group, was sentenced to death in Zhejiang province on Dec 18 for defrauding investors of 384 million yuan.
Godwin's Law : "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
Lovelock's Law: "As an online discussion about environmentalism grows longer, the probability that someone will propose population control as a solution to all environmental problems approaches 1."
It's sort of like patent trolling. The company has no legitimate business activity except to act as an entity that can be "damaged" such that they can sue for damages. Remember that guy who got a bad paint job on his BMW and sued and won a 2 million dollar judgment? It's a bit like these companies are hunting around for cars with bad paint jobs and buying them for double the retail value, not because they need to drive somewhere, but just so they can get the rights to sue for the "damage".
The whole anti-fat/anti-atkins hysteria makes perfect sense if you presume the goal is to get everyone to be a vegetarian. Sugary foods are thus not maligned because they are vegetarian. Probably a bunch of the PETA crowd behind it all.
Confucius, one of the most influential philosophers in Chinese history. He has something to say about censorship and the role that the government should play in communicating with the people that I think makes what the Chinese are trying to accomplish a bit clearer:
XIX. The Duke Gae asked, saying, “What should be done in order to secure the submission of the people.” Confucius replied, “Advance the upright and set aside the crooked, then the people will submit. Advance the crooked and set aside the upright, then the people will not submit.”
XX. Ke K‘ang asked how to cause the people to reverence their ruler, to be faithful to him, and to urge themselves to virtue. The Master said, “Let him preside over them with gravity;—then they will reverence him. Let him be filial and kind to all;—then they will be faithful to him. Let him advance the good and teach the incompetent;—then they will eagerly seek to be virtuous.”
So notice how Chinese censorship not only applies to political messages but also to non-political messages that are deemed to not be representative of virtue. They shutdown people who have stock tip blogs, who are writing sex gossip columns, who become popular in signing and dancing competitions and professional sports culture. They don't want people who the government considers to be not good role models for the people to achieve any degree of fame. The government would never permit the kind of gangster/mafia glorifying culture in China which is so popular in many parts of the rest of the world no matter how non-poltiical.
BTW, I urge anyone who wants to understand China better to read Confucius. He was writing in about 200BCE, before China had any contact at all with the West so in order to fully appreciate it, one has to temporarily disregard everything one is familiar with in the western traditions and carefully digest his words.
Ahh... Another Dr. Pangloss who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds... We've been dealing with this sort of idiocy for quite some time now, at least since Voltaire satirized it in 1759
Dr. Pangloss and his philosophy are the principal focus of Voltaire’s satire. Dr. Pangloss, Candide’s tutor and mentor, teaches that in this best of all possible worlds, everything happens out of absolute necessity, and that everything happens for the best. This philosophy parodies the beliefs of Gottfried Leibniz, an Enlightenment era thinker who believed that the world was perfect and that all evil in it was simply a means to greater good.
Every twist of the plot, every new natural disaster, disease, and incident of robbery or assault in Candide is intended to prove Pangloss’s Optimism utterly absurd and out of touch with reality. Pangloss’s personal sufferings alone are more than unusually extreme. In regard to his own misfortune, Pangloss responds that it is necessary to the greater good. The result is that the philosopher appears utterly blind to his own experiences as well as the horrors endured by his friends.
* Google is somehow a greedy capitalist bastard for doing all this. I have no idea why or how, but they're a big company so this whole thing must be part of some diabolically clever evil plan.
So you're saying this is essentially a mechanism that allows people to avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance? People can't be rich or succeed at anything so they pretend to on-line in order to avoid admitting to themselves that they've lived a wasted pathetic life?
You know, a mainstream economist would say that having companies like Applied Materials in the U.S.A doesn't matter because consumer spending is 70% of the economy and Applied Materials does not produce anything that consumers buy directly! That's the problem with Keynesian economics. We think we can get ahead by stimulus and just consuming things and not producing things. People who have read and understood Friedrich Hayek's works know that the producers of goods further back in the chain of production are out competed for resources of all kinds by the consumption sectors when consumer credit is stimulated through cheap consumer credit as it has been in the USA over the previous 30 years. These firms that produce goods further from direct consumption by the consumer have to move to a less consumer oriented economy, like China to have better access to land, labor and capital.
I think they should take your genetic identity and use it as the bottom 64 bits of your 128 bit IPV6 address whenever you access the internet. They can even program it in into a tamper-proof RFID chip implanted under your skin, so that when you access the internet all you have to do is scan your chip! Think of the genetic segmentation we could do in online marketing!!! We could tie this to a facial identification database and your cell phone and then you could rent time on homeland security predator drones to see what your friends are up to in real-time!!! Wow.. We have such an absolutely wonderful future ahead of us!
Has anybody actually done any research to figure out what causes autism other than vaccines? Has the whole epidemiological process been derailed by the vaccine connection controversy? This is a serious question that now seems to be have become one of these taboo science topics that nobody wants to investigate because its history has been so controversial.
Unpatentable but useful procedures are a big hole in FDA policy, and I think the whitehouse should fund the HIH to get approvals for such procedures.
EXACTLY! If there is a medical procedure or drug that one must spend millions to prove is effective, and it can't be patented, it will never be developed no matter how well it works. That's because its use without approval will be illegal and it will cost millions just to give it away. This is the biggest problem in all of medicine and why we have DSHEA and other regulations.
If you are into investing in bubbles remember this famous quote:
"Economic history is a never-ending series of episodes based on falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money. The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that trend, and step off before it is discredited." - George Soros
Nor would we want to. That caused the Great Depression. Regulation of the free markets is a necessary activity. Any economist will tell you there needs to be ways of moderating the natural boom-bust cycle of capitalism. Of course, nobody agrees on how to do this... Subsidies are one answer. If you want to suggest another one, present your argument, but don't just wish for it to go away without a valid replacement.
Fractional reserve banking causes the boom and bust cycle. Getting rid of fractional reserve banking may be politically impossible, but don't fool yourself into thinking that inflation and deflation are acts of god.
Slashdot Mirror
But it's a great way for trading firms and wall street to skim money off the top of everyone's energy bill via high frequency trading and various market manipulation schemes that has nothing to do with actually producing energy.
Exactly! We need to further our research instead on ultrasonic birth control. It's terrible that we didn't stop inventing new power sources before we came up with nuclear fission power back 80 years ago in the 30s. If we had just had the forsight to shutdown all these new power technologies before then we would be well on our way to keeping the human population within controllable limits.
Imagine you're Bill Gates, you're the richest guy in the world, yet you still have to sit in traffic. So why not devote the rest of your life to population control?
I think the greatest example of half-assed awful engineering was the White Sea Canal. It's estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 people died because Stalin wanted it built in the winter, with hand tools, with brutally treated gulag labor. The canal is only 13 feet deep, it's also frozen over half the year and the water is too low to make it useful in dry summers.
BTW, The Ghost Of The Executed Engineer is a great read, drawing from first hand accounts, about the less publicized but stunningly awful failures of Soviet engineering.
Climate Science's real problem is lack of falsifiability.
If all of a sudden, hundreds of completely bizarre species of creatures of a rather large size (say the size of small mammals or bigger) with totally novel biology (say silicon based) and adapted well to earth suddenly appeared in the middle of central park in New York City, one might start to doubt the theory that all life on earth evolved from one-celled organisms, at least on this planet. This has obviously not happened, but it would disprove the theory of evolution.
If one discovered galaxies that were not red-shifting and were instead accelerating in all sorts of random vector paths, one might doubt the big bang theory.
On the other hand, If the temperature goes up, or down, if there is more rain, or less rain, more hurricanes, or less hurricanes, glaciers get bigger or smaller, see ice expands or contracts, droughts or floods, it's all evidence for global warming! If we entered a new ice age or a new warm period everything and anything is proof of global warming! Global warming can not be disproven!
In the end, the people who have to believe in global warming are the Chinese and the Indian governments and they don't believe it. That and no government has meaningfully reduced its carbon emissions since the Kyoto protocol was signed anyway. There is a heck of a lot of money in cap and trade though.
The pattern in the current system, where lobbyists write the legislation and the politicians sign it, is to make things as complicated as possible to prevent scrutiny and to grant advantage to the author. The law is littered with examples of this, the tax code in particular. The same goes on outside of the government as well. For example, some derivatives contracts that blew up in 2008 were so complicated, arguably on purpose, that no one who wasn't a rare breed of specialist could make sense of them and understand the risks involved. I fear health care reform is following this pattern as well. What's needed are simpler laws and simpler systems but there is so much hidden advantage in complicating things that the trend is going to be difficult to reverse.
Scala isn't that bad. One can program it like Java, and then use language features to compress the code down to 1/10th the size it would be in Java. However, if you use all the language features, you have to comment every line because the logic gets really really dense. I am getting up to speed in it and it's fun, really. It's just that there's a big big learning curve. Lift is a pretty bizarre web framework too, especially coming from traditional Java web development. Overall, I'm undecided if the feature density is worth it. Sometimes it's nice that Java is so verbose because it's really hard to be clever in a bad way. This mainly serves to keep clever programmers, at least the bad kind of clever, from wrecking a project.
Have you ever seen the movie Sunshine? That was about as hard sci-fi as it gets. The nerdiness unfortunately was just oozing out of that movie, it was almost too much, even for me. The ending was great though.
They would never do it. That's because The Man in The High Castle paints a not entirely negative picture of Japanese colonialism. It's too much cognitive dissonance for the whole world to handle. I could however see a low budget indie-manga being made out of it if they could somehow get the rights.
I think they should just find out who was responsible and put them in prison and leave the rest of leave the company alone. They do this in China all the time. Instead, in the U.S we have this world of legal fictions and obfuscations made possible by corporate personhood.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/09tentopnews/2009-12/24/content_9223590.htm
Godwin's Law : "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."
Lovelock's Law: "As an online discussion about environmentalism grows longer, the probability that someone will propose population control as a solution to all environmental problems approaches 1."
It's sort of like patent trolling. The company has no legitimate business activity except to act as an entity that can be "damaged" such that they can sue for damages. Remember that guy who got a bad paint job on his BMW and sued and won a 2 million dollar judgment? It's a bit like these companies are hunting around for cars with bad paint jobs and buying them for double the retail value, not because they need to drive somewhere, but just so they can get the rights to sue for the "damage".
The whole anti-fat/anti-atkins hysteria makes perfect sense if you presume the goal is to get everyone to be a vegetarian. Sugary foods are thus not maligned because they are vegetarian. Probably a bunch of the PETA crowd behind it all.
Confucius, one of the most influential philosophers in Chinese history. He has something to say about censorship and the role that the government should play in communicating with the people that I think makes what the Chinese are trying to accomplish a bit clearer:
Source
So notice how Chinese censorship not only applies to political messages but also to non-political messages that are deemed to not be representative of virtue. They shutdown people who have stock tip blogs, who are writing sex gossip columns, who become popular in signing and dancing competitions and professional sports culture. They don't want people who the government considers to be not good role models for the people to achieve any degree of fame. The government would never permit the kind of gangster/mafia glorifying culture in China which is so popular in many parts of the rest of the world no matter how non-poltiical.
BTW, I urge anyone who wants to understand China better to read Confucius. He was writing in about 200BCE, before China had any contact at all with the West so in order to fully appreciate it, one has to temporarily disregard everything one is familiar with in the western traditions and carefully digest his words.
Ahh... Another Dr. Pangloss who believes we live in the best of all possible worlds... We've been dealing with this sort of idiocy for quite some time now, at least since Voltaire satirized it in 1759
http://www.shmoop.com/candide/dr-pangloss.html
There's also a much higher risk of rejection if stem cells from an embryo are used. If a person's own cells are used there's no risk of rejection.
* Google is somehow a greedy capitalist bastard for doing all this. I have no idea why or how, but they're a big company so this whole thing must be part of some diabolically clever evil plan.
Not to mention the more recent P-700 Granit cruise missile which can go mach 4.5.
So you're saying this is essentially a mechanism that allows people to avoid the pain of cognitive dissonance? People can't be rich or succeed at anything so they pretend to on-line in order to avoid admitting to themselves that they've lived a wasted pathetic life?
You know, a mainstream economist would say that having companies like Applied Materials in the U.S.A doesn't matter because consumer spending is 70% of the economy and Applied Materials does not produce anything that consumers buy directly! That's the problem with Keynesian economics. We think we can get ahead by stimulus and just consuming things and not producing things. People who have read and understood Friedrich Hayek's works know that the producers of goods further back in the chain of production are out competed for resources of all kinds by the consumption sectors when consumer credit is stimulated through cheap consumer credit as it has been in the USA over the previous 30 years. These firms that produce goods further from direct consumption by the consumer have to move to a less consumer oriented economy, like China to have better access to land, labor and capital.
I think they should take your genetic identity and use it as the bottom 64 bits of your 128 bit IPV6 address whenever you access the internet. They can even program it in into a tamper-proof RFID chip implanted under your skin, so that when you access the internet all you have to do is scan your chip! Think of the genetic segmentation we could do in online marketing!!! We could tie this to a facial identification database and your cell phone and then you could rent time on homeland security predator drones to see what your friends are up to in real-time!!! Wow.. We have such an absolutely wonderful future ahead of us!
Has anybody actually done any research to figure out what causes autism other than vaccines? Has the whole epidemiological process been derailed by the vaccine connection controversy? This is a serious question that now seems to be have become one of these taboo science topics that nobody wants to investigate because its history has been so controversial.
EXACTLY! If there is a medical procedure or drug that one must spend millions to prove is effective, and it can't be patented, it will never be developed no matter how well it works. That's because its use without approval will be illegal and it will cost millions just to give it away. This is the biggest problem in all of medicine and why we have DSHEA and other regulations.
If you are into investing in bubbles remember this famous quote:
Fractional reserve banking causes the boom and bust cycle. Getting rid of fractional reserve banking may be politically impossible, but don't fool yourself into thinking that inflation and deflation are acts of god.