Germany provides about between 6 and 7% of its total net electricity with solar. It's southernmost city (Munich) has the lattitude of St. John in Newfoundland. And yes, there is snow.
Double-blind experiments are not an integral part of science. Do you think Alain Aspect blindfolded himself when he shot photons through a tube? Did Einstein, Newton, Bohr, Dijkstra, Turing, von Neumann, Darwin, Wallace, Knuth, Dirac, Schrodinger, etc, etc, etc. Yes, double-blind experiments have been developed for doing research on human subjects to avoid influencing the subjects. Is it an integral part of science? It's a part, that's for sure. Integral? Hell no.
Although technically what you state is true (closer to perfect leads to further out predictions), there is a catch here. The rate between increases in precision and increases in accuracy is itself non-linear. Non-linear dynamical systems are governed by things called Lyapunov exponents. These define the relationship between the precision of your measurement and the accuracy of your prediction over time. Unfortunately, in the case of Earth's atmospheres the Lyapunov exponents are such that you would need an exponential increase in precision to reach linear increase in accuracy. That's what defines a chaotic system. This gives a limit on how far you can predict in the future, as at some point, you hit Planck lengths for your measurements, and you would need to increase precision in the quantum world, which is considered to be impossible as modeled by Heisenberg's inequality. The exponential nature of the relationship makes this happen sooner than you would like.
I'm not sure where that boundary exactly lies in the case of Earth's atmosphere, but it can very well be that a ten-fold increase in precision leads to a 1.1 increase in accuracy, with another ten fold increase in precision adding just 1.01 (just making the numbers up). This issue of exponentially diminishing returns is well-known in the weather modeling world, so they typically use ensemble models. Instead of running one simulation and trying to increase the precision of that one, they run a few hundred with random perturbances of the initial conditions. This gives a good overview of what the future could bring. I think that's a more principled way to use computational resources than increasing precision of a single model (though, if the payoff in accuracy is good enough for the ensemble, it might be worth it).
Bah. Can you cite a single example of the Supreme Court doing anything remotely like redefining common words to mean something completely different from what they mean?
Well... according to this thread, they redefined 'well regulated" to mean "skilled". That's quite a leap.
Well, if he's not American, he probably doesn't know. I'm not American either, and all of my knowledge of guns comes from the movies. Never touched a gun in my life, let alone fired one.
Under the "individual rights" interpretation of the second amendment, yes it does. Also tactical nukes, being necessary to the security of a free State, should be available to the citizenry. ICBM's? ditto. Feeling uncomfortable with your neighbour having a small nuke in his backyard, fully available to his 9 year old kid with an attitude? Tough luck. Security of a free State FTW.
You might want to read up on some 19th century technology where the problem was figured out. Replace horses with driverless trucks, and realize that it's the cargo that matters, not the horse.
But granted, I shifted goalposts from changing batteries to changing whole trucks. Same principle though. Issues around aging and quality are the same for horses as for trucks/batteries though.
In a real car(riage), when the horse gets tired, I can get to the horse station and get a fresh horse in a few minutes, and I can continue my trip. These new-fangled "auto"-mobiles need to bring all their fuel along. Less range, noisy, and much more cumbersome. It's just a fad for rich people.
Or, even simpler, use the age-old technique of "changing horses', or, in this case "changing batteries". At the appropriate station get the batteries replaced by charged ones in a few minutes and off you go again. Would also give a new purpose for gasoline stations and would even allow some local electricity generation to be efficiently used. And besides, why does a driver-less truck need to wait for food?
Why do you think that? The transportation companies have done the math and know what they can save if they can get rid of the teamsters. Once the technology is there, there will be a continuous lobby for teamster-free trucks. The law will change. Regular cars will follow.
Interesting to hear that the US economy was fueled by telephones, cab-rides and airfares. Quite an accomplishment. There was no other economic activity?
Have you ever considered that the predicted economic recovery for the austerity measures didn't materialize because the prediction was basically wrong? The entirety of the EU zone, not just Greece, has been in a depressed state for many years for as many years as we're trying austerity. Many economists predicted exactly that!
So what's wrong with a massive debt restructuring? The obvious way to get out of this mess would have been a significant inflation. 6% inflation for a decade and the debt would dissappear. Germans have been completely against this for historical reasons, thereby preventing an easy way out.
Small correction. The Greeks spend about 80 billion euros that they didn't have. The rest is interest on the loans. The 86 billion in the agreement will almost entirely go straight back to the lenders. That's how you keep debtors humble.
The difference between your example of a corporation and a nation is that the corporation has limited liability. The janitor of that corporation will lose his job, but he will not be held financially accountable for the bad decisions the CEO made. Not so for the Greeks. Their governments and elites had a ball, and the population is now forced to foot the bill.
The fact of the matter was that Greece has lost 25% of their GDP in the last 6 years, largely due to austerity measures, but were able to create a balanced budget in 2014, and were on the way to have a surplus in 2015. So no, they were no longer living beyond their means. The debt is however crippling at 180% of their GDP (from 135% in 2009, see what a declining GDP can do?).
Totally agree. However, back in the day when Greece was allowed in the EURO (not EU), their obvious unsuitability was waived by France and Germany (under loud protest from the Netherlands and the Finns). It's appalling to see the German politicians ride the moral high-ground after:
1. Allowing the Greeks in the euro in 2001 in the first place when it was obviously a bad fit (same holds for Italy)
2. Breaking the stability pact in 2003 when it was convenient for them, opening the floodgates
3. Profiting immensely from the increased export that was fueled by ill-advised loans to a corrupt elite in the Southern nations
4. Bailing out the banks wrt Greece and offloading the Greek debt on the European population at large
5. Pointing the German anger at a foreign nation to hide their shenanigans
From my point of view it's a very sinister game that's being played here and the European project has failed. The Germans in particular seem to be incapable of taking responsibility for their actions and have stooped to a very dangerous form of demagogy. Let's stop this farce.
If we truly want to increase the carrying capacity of the earth, we should also stop eating plants directly, and just eat some mass-produced gooey that will keep us alive. If we do that, we might be able to sustain a population of a few hundred billion.
In other words, food will always be scarce if the population grows in response to a surplus. Malthusian. Not eating meat is not even the beginning of a solution. Controlling population growth is.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent
- John Maynard Keynes
I.e., yes, you can make a lot of money of it, but it requires a lot of patience and money to be able to do so. The Japanese market was overvalued for about 20 years until the bubble finally burst in the nineties. The current China crisis can go either way -- full bust or a regain of control for another decade. There are only a few people with enough money and patience to profit from this by consistently buying puts that are way out of the money and losing money on them year after year -- waiting for that one moment when they make a fortune. Taleb is one.
Slashdot Mirror
The net gains of fusion are such that there will be ample energy to create a pure hydrogen gas to keep the thing going.
Germany provides about between 6 and 7% of its total net electricity with solar. It's southernmost city (Munich) has the lattitude of St. John in Newfoundland. And yes, there is snow.
Double-blind experiments are not an integral part of science. Do you think Alain Aspect blindfolded himself when he shot photons through a tube? Did Einstein, Newton, Bohr, Dijkstra, Turing, von Neumann, Darwin, Wallace, Knuth, Dirac, Schrodinger, etc, etc, etc. Yes, double-blind experiments have been developed for doing research on human subjects to avoid influencing the subjects. Is it an integral part of science? It's a part, that's for sure. Integral? Hell no.
Although technically what you state is true (closer to perfect leads to further out predictions), there is a catch here. The rate between increases in precision and increases in accuracy is itself non-linear. Non-linear dynamical systems are governed by things called Lyapunov exponents. These define the relationship between the precision of your measurement and the accuracy of your prediction over time. Unfortunately, in the case of Earth's atmospheres the Lyapunov exponents are such that you would need an exponential increase in precision to reach linear increase in accuracy. That's what defines a chaotic system. This gives a limit on how far you can predict in the future, as at some point, you hit Planck lengths for your measurements, and you would need to increase precision in the quantum world, which is considered to be impossible as modeled by Heisenberg's inequality. The exponential nature of the relationship makes this happen sooner than you would like.
I'm not sure where that boundary exactly lies in the case of Earth's atmosphere, but it can very well be that a ten-fold increase in precision leads to a 1.1 increase in accuracy, with another ten fold increase in precision adding just 1.01 (just making the numbers up). This issue of exponentially diminishing returns is well-known in the weather modeling world, so they typically use ensemble models. Instead of running one simulation and trying to increase the precision of that one, they run a few hundred with random perturbances of the initial conditions. This gives a good overview of what the future could bring. I think that's a more principled way to use computational resources than increasing precision of a single model (though, if the payoff in accuracy is good enough for the ensemble, it might be worth it).
Well ... according to this thread, they redefined 'well regulated" to mean "skilled". That's quite a leap.
Well, if he's not American, he probably doesn't know. I'm not American either, and all of my knowledge of guns comes from the movies. Never touched a gun in my life, let alone fired one.
Under the "individual rights" interpretation of the second amendment, yes it does. Also tactical nukes, being necessary to the security of a free State, should be available to the citizenry. ICBM's? ditto. Feeling uncomfortable with your neighbour having a small nuke in his backyard, fully available to his 9 year old kid with an attitude? Tough luck. Security of a free State FTW.
The reason for not giving a receipt is that in that case, people can demand you to show your receipt to check if you voted for the right candidate.
You might want to read up on some 19th century technology where the problem was figured out. Replace horses with driverless trucks, and realize that it's the cargo that matters, not the horse.
But granted, I shifted goalposts from changing batteries to changing whole trucks. Same principle though. Issues around aging and quality are the same for horses as for trucks/batteries though.
Try a solar powered lawn mower. Roomba style. Just have it out on the lawn and let it mow continuously.
In a real car(riage), when the horse gets tired, I can get to the horse station and get a fresh horse in a few minutes, and I can continue my trip. These new-fangled "auto"-mobiles need to bring all their fuel along. Less range, noisy, and much more cumbersome. It's just a fad for rich people.
Or, even simpler, use the age-old technique of "changing horses', or, in this case "changing batteries". At the appropriate station get the batteries replaced by charged ones in a few minutes and off you go again. Would also give a new purpose for gasoline stations and would even allow some local electricity generation to be efficiently used. And besides, why does a driver-less truck need to wait for food?
Get yourself educated!
Why do you think that? The transportation companies have done the math and know what they can save if they can get rid of the teamsters. Once the technology is there, there will be a continuous lobby for teamster-free trucks. The law will change. Regular cars will follow.
Interesting to hear that the US economy was fueled by telephones, cab-rides and airfares. Quite an accomplishment. There was no other economic activity?
They still have the pay the interest on the debt, and the debt itself. They would need a few decades of 10% surplus to be able to address that.
Have you ever considered that the predicted economic recovery for the austerity measures didn't materialize because the prediction was basically wrong? The entirety of the EU zone, not just Greece, has been in a depressed state for many years for as many years as we're trying austerity. Many economists predicted exactly that!
So what's wrong with a massive debt restructuring? The obvious way to get out of this mess would have been a significant inflation. 6% inflation for a decade and the debt would dissappear. Germans have been completely against this for historical reasons, thereby preventing an easy way out.
Small correction. The Greeks spend about 80 billion euros that they didn't have. The rest is interest on the loans. The 86 billion in the agreement will almost entirely go straight back to the lenders. That's how you keep debtors humble.
I guess that after this bit of power-play of Germany the UK will vote themselves out of the EU in 2017.
The difference between your example of a corporation and a nation is that the corporation has limited liability. The janitor of that corporation will lose his job, but he will not be held financially accountable for the bad decisions the CEO made. Not so for the Greeks. Their governments and elites had a ball, and the population is now forced to foot the bill.
The fact of the matter was that Greece has lost 25% of their GDP in the last 6 years, largely due to austerity measures, but were able to create a balanced budget in 2014, and were on the way to have a surplus in 2015. So no, they were no longer living beyond their means. The debt is however crippling at 180% of their GDP (from 135% in 2009, see what a declining GDP can do?).
Totally agree. However, back in the day when Greece was allowed in the EURO (not EU), their obvious unsuitability was waived by France and Germany (under loud protest from the Netherlands and the Finns). It's appalling to see the German politicians ride the moral high-ground after:
1. Allowing the Greeks in the euro in 2001 in the first place when it was obviously a bad fit (same holds for Italy)
2. Breaking the stability pact in 2003 when it was convenient for them, opening the floodgates
3. Profiting immensely from the increased export that was fueled by ill-advised loans to a corrupt elite in the Southern nations
4. Bailing out the banks wrt Greece and offloading the Greek debt on the European population at large
5. Pointing the German anger at a foreign nation to hide their shenanigans
From my point of view it's a very sinister game that's being played here and the European project has failed. The Germans in particular seem to be incapable of taking responsibility for their actions and have stooped to a very dangerous form of demagogy. Let's stop this farce.
If we truly want to increase the carrying capacity of the earth, we should also stop eating plants directly, and just eat some mass-produced gooey that will keep us alive. If we do that, we might be able to sustain a population of a few hundred billion.
In other words, food will always be scarce if the population grows in response to a surplus. Malthusian. Not eating meat is not even the beginning of a solution. Controlling population growth is.
I.e., yes, you can make a lot of money of it, but it requires a lot of patience and money to be able to do so. The Japanese market was overvalued for about 20 years until the bubble finally burst in the nineties. The current China crisis can go either way -- full bust or a regain of control for another decade. There are only a few people with enough money and patience to profit from this by consistently buying puts that are way out of the money and losing money on them year after year -- waiting for that one moment when they make a fortune. Taleb is one.
I think you're confusing free markets with efficient markets.