Gas, insurance, wear and tear on the vehicle, cost of foreign wars, etc.
The point is, taxpayer costs are a pretty irrelevant way of measuring the efficiency of a transportation system. $0.01/mile only covers the costs of maintaining the roads, $0.22/mile only covers the difference between the passenger ticket and the operating costs. We'd like to see a total cost comparison.
With a 35k commute, I'm surprised you even made the attempt. That's downright intimidating. I have a much shorter commute, and I still ended up getting an electric bike kit to make my commute painless.
A high end electric bike kit would probably fit your situation well, if you can recharge the battery at work as well as home. That would almost certainly cut your commute down to about an hour. The bike itself can be anything but nifty. I strapped the electric kit onto a fourteen year old bike I stole from my brother.
It doesn't help with the flats, though. If anything, it makes the bike heavier and increases wear on the tires. For flats, I went with an Armadillo tire, and it's worked fine so far.
This is kind of a pricy approach. I spent nearly $1800 (£14) on my kit. If you're going to go that route, you have to think of your bike as your primary commuting vehicle, and that certainly doesn't work out for everybody. What are your options for working closer to home, living closer to work, or maybe telecommuting? Those seem like your best options, if you can get them.
Depending on who you ask, it's either to make good web developers more productive, or to make idiot web developers marginally productive. As an idiot web developer, I can only vouch for the latter. But I must say, I do love me some Rails.
Actually, the Long Tail does predict that, because the obscure stuff is now available, that stuff will sell, and such sales will probably eat into the success of the blockbusters. It also expected that sub-sub-subgenres would develop and attract small communities, which would take money and attention away from more mass-appeal material.
It may be happening. It may not be happening. It may just be taking longer than some expected. The evidence does seem preliminary at best.
I'm not sure how convincing the article's evidences are. For example, a study that says 0.4% of an online catalog are responsible for 80% of sales sounds damning. But where is the traditional sales outlet with 13 million items for us to compare it to?
I believe Wal-Mart stocks about 5000 CDs, or about 50,000 songs. That's roughly equivalent to the 52000 songs that constituted 80% of the online retailer's sales. But in Wal-Mart's case, 50,000 songs generate 100% of sales. So the dredges of that online catalog do generate a large number of sales.
If a song has a, say, 98% chance of only generating two or three plays (and zero sales), it's probably worthwhile to keep it in the catalog, just in case it breaks out. But to me, such numbers don't show that the site carries 98% crap. It's more likely that the site just isn't making the songs discoverable enough, or that they're not providing much incentive to explore.
If I were running such a site, and I wanted to get a better understanding of the hidden side of my catalog, I might offer random shoppers the opportunity to listen to five random-but-obscure songs (perhaps filtered by genre), rate them, and get a free download in return. They could also buy the songs at a discount if they liked it enough. That might give me more knowledge, which I could use to make better recommendations.
There might also be a way to stagger prices so that sales-free songs go for trivial sums ($.10 for the first purchaser, $.12 for the second, etc.), just to encourage dumpster diving.
The point is, the tools can be crafted so as to encourage the Long Tail phenomenon, or to undermine it. If the site doesn't have at least a "listen to something totally random" button, don't expect much out of the tail.
But if the cost of stocking a virtual item is low enough, it may be worth carrying a thousand products in the hopes that one or two of them garner a single sale.
For example, say that the cost of maintaining a single song is (to pull a number out of the void).1 cents a year, while the profit to the store for selling one song is 50 cents.
Given those numbers, one sale from one obscure song could support the inventory cost of 500 slacker songs for an entire year. Since you don't know which of the non-selling songs might make a sale in the future, it's easy to justify their dead weight.
I thought "new media" referred to how the content was delivered. Not the fact that the content itself was actually new. "Pride and Prejudice" on a Kindle would be new media, whereas the latest Paul Krugman column on ink-spattered parchment would not.
I don't think that's what The Long Tail says at all. It doesn't say that an obscure indie movie or book should make as much as a blockbuster. It just says that the indie movie ought to be able to make money now, when it would have lost money under older distribution systems.
The indie movie shouldn't need to gather a huge cult following. It just needs to find the audience that would enjoy watching it. That wouldn't have happened under the old 'roll out in thirty theaters nationwide model'. According to the new doubters, it may still not be happening.
Bzzt is for getting something factually wrong, not for having a different perspective or opinion.
As I said, I'm okay with letting laymen use "Linux" to refer to the whole stack of apps and interfaces that commonly come in desktop distros. If someone asked you "How do I get this Linux thing everyone keeps telling me about?" you wouldn't tell them to buy an Android phone. You'd probably get them a Ubuntu CD. Or, if you're an evil bastard, Slackware.
The point is, Linux has much greater mindshare than Ubuntu, or any flavor of the week, and those flavors have enough in common that we can treat "Linux" as an umbrella brand for mass marketing purposes. When you market "Linux" the alternative to Windows and OSX, you're not marketing the Invisible Man, you're marketing him with a certain selection of masks and wardrobes. Which will serve.
The creator of howobamagotelected.com is an idiot. Specifically, John Zeigler is a standard, right-wing blowhard (former) talkshow host. Check out Nate Silver's interview with Zeigler, where they discuss the poll that is the flimsy centerpiece of howobamagotelected.com.
He calls Silver a "pinhead", "a hack", "the enemy", and ended the interview by twice telling Silver to "go fuck [himself]. He refuses to say who financed the poll, and constantly mocks his interviewer for not having the guts to post a transcript of the interview.
The poll itself is manipulative and misleading. It dings Obama supporters for not knowing that their candidate "would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket," which isn't close to what Obama said.*
On the Hannity and Colmes show, he said "There are three questions on this list that a group of monkeys, if they had been guessing, would have done better than the Obama voters did."
Remember that Zeigler -- in between comparing Obama supporters unfavorably to a pack of howler monkeys -- continually asserts that his poll is showing that the media didn't do their jobs, not that Obama voters are stupid. But this obscures a crucial fact: the poll never once asks which sort of media the respondents were consuming.
Also, one of the questions designed to show how well the Evil Liberal Media had done in getting out damaging news about McCain and Palin ("Which candidate said they could see Russia from their house?") seems specifically designed to cast a bad light on the respondents. First, the possible answers were "Sarah Palin" or "John McCain". The actual correct answer (Tina Fey) isn't offered. It's also the only question where Obama and Biden aren't offered as alternatives. Both facts seem designed to drive up the "stupid Obama voters who bought into a fraudulent anti-Palin meme hook line and sinker" percent. In fact, I think that the question shows only that the people taking the survey didn't expect to be subjected to trick questions.
The message of the poll is that "anti-Obama controversies" didn't get as much media attention as "anti-McCain controversies." But unless you actually believe that Barack Obama, Harvard graduate and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, really believed that there were 57 or more states, why should his gaffe have gotten media attention? Gaffes are supposed to be important because they're moments when the candidate lets his or her public persona slip for a few brief seconds and gives insight into the workings of their mind. McCain's inability to say how many houses he had was one such moment. So were Palin's various exaggerations of her foreign policy credentials.
By comparison, Biden's previous "plagiarism controversy" was no such thing. The formulation he was criticized for using was one he'd correctly attributed numerous times in previous stump speeches. The media reported two other examples at the time, but a Biden speechwriter took the blame for one. The point is, since the "plagiarism" was an oversight by a man who is a known to be a one man gaffe factory, not a true attempt to pass off the work of another as his own, nothing really new would be gained by focusing media attention on it.
Notice that none of the howobamagotelected questions ask about the ancient history of McCain or Palin. Nothing was asked of McCain's Keating Five connection, or his "bottom 1%" graduation from the Naval Academy. Nor were voters asked about the controversies that did gain traction, like the Jeremiah Wright association, or his comment about people bitterly clinging to guns and religion. Obama supporters did get asked about Obama's "spread the wealth" comment, and did exceptionally well (81% correct). So of course that result shows up nowhere in Zeigler's summaries of the poll.
Certainly news/political bloggers are news sources. They tell us new things about their subjects. Hell, powerful and influential people sometimes give them scoops, exclusives, and leaks.
The idea that old media journalists have standards while bloggers do not is simply ludicrous. It's surprising that anyone makes that claim while simultaneously sharing a planet with Fox News.
In looking for information on "blogging standards", I came across this post on journalistic ethics. Author points out that, unlike real professions with real codes of conduct:
* Journalists are not licensed. * Journalists cannot be disbarred for violating their professed standards.
The only code of conduct for journalists are the ones that they and their sponsoring organizations choose for themselves. Many embrace the code of ethics outlined by the Society of Professional Journalists, but then, so do many of the best bloggers. Bloggers consistently criticize each other and the news media when violations of these standards occur.
Professionalizing journalism -- that is, creating licensing requirements for journalism, and having a professional body which could choose to disbar bad actors -- would probably be illegal under the First Amendment. As it stands, "professional journalists" are only so in the sense that they're getting paid for it.
Also technically, the "operating system" is the program which interfaces with the hardware and runs all the other programs. Which means that the Linux kernel is the only part of a given distribution that can claim to be the operating system.
But the ad campaign isn't really interested in the technical side of things. Linux is a common shorthand for all the various distributions, window managers, and open source applications that are commonly included in distros. Yes, once you've decided to "try Linux," you still have choices to make, and they're more complex than choosing between Vista Home and Vista Ultimate, or deciding whether to upgrade from Jaguar to Leopard. But "Linux is a free, highly customizable operating system that will run on your current computer" is good enough for 90% of the population.
As far as branding goes, the "Linux brand" is far more valuable than whatever flavor-of-the-year is currently best for new users. If by this time next year, somebody trots out "ClickAndDrool Linux" that manages to be absolutely perfect for everybody, or if it is revealed that Ubuntu is actually Windows Vista with a few custom themes, the marketing pitch can stay the same.
Well, if you assume the cost of getting the infrastructure up there is zero, space-based systems have some major advantages. There's more energy falling on the solar cells, and it spends almost all its time in full sunlight.
The big drawbacks are the cost of installing and repairing, and the fact that it just cannot be done small. The microwave antennae are about a kilometer wide, so you have to hook up a lot of panels to justify that fixed cost.
Still, once we have a heavy duty space elevator running, the rest is easy.:)
1) Why exactly does this depopulation have to occur over the course of twenty years? If you jumped it up to a hundred or two hundred, it could be done without a single premature death.
2) In a thousand years, what happens to the six hundred billion people living in the solar system, when the incredibly complex mechanisms we're using to get the hydrocarbons from Titan and the iron from the asteroid belt get disrupted, or start to become less productive? Aren't you just guaranteeing that a forced die-off will eventually happen, but on a much larger scale? Or do you believe that mankind can (and should) continue increasing its resource consumption forever?
3) Why do you peg the long-term sustainable population at 200M? Even the most blunt estimates I've seen from the people making such arguments put the numbers at 500M to 1B. The number of people the Earth can sustain is a matter of the way those inhabitants live and the technologies they use to bring about that lifestyle.
4) Is unemployment really a matter of personal choice? What happened during the Great Depression? Did 25% of the population just decide that idleness and sloth were the new black? Are the job losses of the last few months a result of a sudden uptick in moral vice?
5) Do you realize that it is entirely possible to reduce the amount of energy and natural resources that we use, while simultaneously maintaining or even increasing our standard of living? I'm not even talking about radical technological breakthroughs (though I expect such breakthroughs to happen as we pursue these reductions); existing materials can be used in radically more efficient ways, good design can greatly reduce the need for resource inputs.
6) Why do you arbitrarily demand that the processes that recycle our wastes be "natural?" If we build an electric car with lithium ion batteries, does the car have to be landfilled at the end of its life? Does this mean that we can only build electric cars as fast as the toxic lithium can be "naturally" absorbed back into the environment? If you try to pretend to answer this one, here's a hint: No, it is *not* environmentalists making the demand, nor is it required by the definition of "sustainable".
No free market failure here? Sure, in the same way that there has never been a failure of the Communist ideology, or the Christian ideology, or of Libertarian philosophy, or in Keyenesian economics. If you want to protect your ideas from criticism by invoking this asinine defense, go ahead. Just realize that you're arguing yourself into a corner where you'll also define away any evidence that would support your beliefs.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will see this crisis for what it was: free people, left to themselves, without any coercion or oversight from government, choosing to bugger themselves and six billion innocent bystanders.
Detroit labor is not $75/hr. That's basically a made-up statistic (also). Detroit used to employ many, many more workers, to whom they promised a good retirement. Counting the cost of those retirees against the company's bottom line makes sense; saying it's part of the current worker's paycheck is not.
When you do the math properly, a line worker for the UAW and a Japanese plant in the South make very similar wages.
$36/barrel is still 50% above the $24/barrel that we had when Bush took office, and nobody is expecting these prices to survive even the lamest economic uptick. Try buying a barrel of oil to be delivered five years from now. I'll bet you can't get one for less than $80.
It gets worse because the current low prices aren't enough to fund the next round of exploration that would be needed to keep this unsustainable resource going another decade.
Lack of transparency was a free choice by an underregulated industry.
Nothing in the CRA required any bank to lend to a borrower who wasn't fit. It just made redlining illegal. Further, the CRA has been gutted over the course of the Bush administration, which reduced reporting requirements, reduced the number of institutions covered, and slashed the regulatory budget.
Further, investment banks were never covered by the CRA, and investment banks were the ones launching themselves into the subprime lending business over the last five years.
There has never in the history of the world been a "free market" consisting of more than 100 persons. This makes it convenient for lazy libertarians, who can always say -- no matter how clearly the free market failed -- can always find some tangential regulation. Aha! The free market could have worked, but for that!
I admire your ability to divine cause and effect. Could you please offer evidence for the following:
A) that Toyota plants in America can really build a car with half as many man hours as the Big 3 average.
B) that this impressive state of affairs is in fact due to the fallen nature of the shiftless, perfidious Union Worker, and not any of the following plausible factors:
* Japan's impressive robotics technology. * Greater ability to update and modernize their assembly lines, due to their better financial outlook. * The fact that they're producing smaller, probably simpler-to-manufacture cars. * The higher employee morale that comes from making cars that people actually want to buy.
You make it sound as though the two groups of workers are making the exact same product on the exact same assembly line.
I put "uncoerced" in "air" "quotes" for reasons which I explained in detail. If you only give management the ability to explain its position, while depriving unionizers of the same opportunity, you simply cannot say that the resulting vote is uncoerced.
"What's wrong with employees hearing the other side of the story?" Nothing. The problem is, for the months before the actual vote, the employer can hold daily, mandatory meetings where they can say whatever they want. There is no punishment for lying. There is no punishment for forcing pro-union forces to stay silent. Unionizers, meanwhile, can only make their case 1) during breaks and lunch, and 2) to those employees who 2a) want to hear what they have to say, and 2b) are also on break.
Make no mistake, employers can legally threaten their employees' jobs if they unionize. They can't say, "we'll find out how you voted, and target you for elimination," but they can say "if you unionize, we'll be forced to cut hundreds of jobs, and yours might be among them." Further, the secret ballot really only protects those who kept their mouths shut to avoid revealing their loyalties. Outspoken unionizers are usually known to management, and can be targeted for firing between the card ballot and the secret ballot.
Oh, wait, but that's illegal. Damn straight it is. But a flimsy pretense covers a multitude of sins. The advantages to firing the worker are huge. The employer gets rid of a proponent as well as a vote, while sending a strong "shutthefukkup" to any who would follow the unionizer's lead. The downside? Maybe if the employee fights it in court, you might have to pay him back wages a few years down the line.
Employers get to control the flow of information AND remove active opposition from the workplace, and you call the resulting vote uncoerced? Spare me.
Slashdot Mirror
>> As much as you may dislike the color schemes of Fox News, they are consistently far more accurate and professional in their reporting.
Okay, now you're just trolling.
Gas, insurance, wear and tear on the vehicle, cost of foreign wars, etc.
The point is, taxpayer costs are a pretty irrelevant way of measuring the efficiency of a transportation system. $0.01/mile only covers the costs of maintaining the roads, $0.22/mile only covers the difference between the passenger ticket and the operating costs. We'd like to see a total cost comparison.
With a 35k commute, I'm surprised you even made the attempt. That's downright intimidating. I have a much shorter commute, and I still ended up getting an electric bike kit to make my commute painless.
A high end electric bike kit would probably fit your situation well, if you can recharge the battery at work as well as home. That would almost certainly cut your commute down to about an hour. The bike itself can be anything but nifty. I strapped the electric kit onto a fourteen year old bike I stole from my brother.
It doesn't help with the flats, though. If anything, it makes the bike heavier and increases wear on the tires. For flats, I went with an Armadillo tire, and it's worked fine so far.
This is kind of a pricy approach. I spent nearly $1800 (£14) on my kit. If you're going to go that route, you have to think of your bike as your primary commuting vehicle, and that certainly doesn't work out for everybody. What are your options for working closer to home, living closer to work, or maybe telecommuting? Those seem like your best options, if you can get them.
Depending on who you ask, it's either to make good web developers more productive, or to make idiot web developers marginally productive. As an idiot web developer, I can only vouch for the latter. But I must say, I do love me some Rails.
Actually, the Long Tail does predict that, because the obscure stuff is now available, that stuff will sell, and such sales will probably eat into the success of the blockbusters. It also expected that sub-sub-subgenres would develop and attract small communities, which would take money and attention away from more mass-appeal material.
It may be happening. It may not be happening. It may just be taking longer than some expected. The evidence does seem preliminary at best.
I'm not sure how convincing the article's evidences are. For example, a study that says 0.4% of an online catalog are responsible for 80% of sales sounds damning. But where is the traditional sales outlet with 13 million items for us to compare it to?
I believe Wal-Mart stocks about 5000 CDs, or about 50,000 songs. That's roughly equivalent to the 52000 songs that constituted 80% of the online retailer's sales. But in Wal-Mart's case, 50,000 songs generate 100% of sales. So the dredges of that online catalog do generate a large number of sales.
If a song has a, say, 98% chance of only generating two or three plays (and zero sales), it's probably worthwhile to keep it in the catalog, just in case it breaks out. But to me, such numbers don't show that the site carries 98% crap. It's more likely that the site just isn't making the songs discoverable enough, or that they're not providing much incentive to explore.
If I were running such a site, and I wanted to get a better understanding of the hidden side of my catalog, I might offer random shoppers the opportunity to listen to five random-but-obscure songs (perhaps filtered by genre), rate them, and get a free download in return. They could also buy the songs at a discount if they liked it enough. That might give me more knowledge, which I could use to make better recommendations.
There might also be a way to stagger prices so that sales-free songs go for trivial sums ($.10 for the first purchaser, $.12 for the second, etc.), just to encourage dumpster diving.
The point is, the tools can be crafted so as to encourage the Long Tail phenomenon, or to undermine it. If the site doesn't have at least a "listen to something totally random" button, don't expect much out of the tail.
Yes, yes. 90% of everything is crap. Maybe in Long Tail world, 99.9% of everything is crap. What's the point that you're trying to make?
But if the cost of stocking a virtual item is low enough, it may be worth carrying a thousand products in the hopes that one or two of them garner a single sale.
For example, say that the cost of maintaining a single song is (to pull a number out of the void) .1 cents a year, while the profit to the store for selling one song is 50 cents.
Given those numbers, one sale from one obscure song could support the inventory cost of 500 slacker songs for an entire year. Since you don't know which of the non-selling songs might make a sale in the future, it's easy to justify their dead weight.
I thought "new media" referred to how the content was delivered. Not the fact that the content itself was actually new. "Pride and Prejudice" on a Kindle would be new media, whereas the latest Paul Krugman column on ink-spattered parchment would not.
I don't think that's what The Long Tail says at all. It doesn't say that an obscure indie movie or book should make as much as a blockbuster. It just says that the indie movie ought to be able to make money now, when it would have lost money under older distribution systems.
The indie movie shouldn't need to gather a huge cult following. It just needs to find the audience that would enjoy watching it. That wouldn't have happened under the old 'roll out in thirty theaters nationwide model'. According to the new doubters, it may still not be happening.
Bzzt is for getting something factually wrong, not for having a different perspective or opinion.
As I said, I'm okay with letting laymen use "Linux" to refer to the whole stack of apps and interfaces that commonly come in desktop distros. If someone asked you "How do I get this Linux thing everyone keeps telling me about?" you wouldn't tell them to buy an Android phone. You'd probably get them a Ubuntu CD. Or, if you're an evil bastard, Slackware.
The point is, Linux has much greater mindshare than Ubuntu, or any flavor of the week, and those flavors have enough in common that we can treat "Linux" as an umbrella brand for mass marketing purposes. When you market "Linux" the alternative to Windows and OSX, you're not marketing the Invisible Man, you're marketing him with a certain selection of masks and wardrobes. Which will serve.
When the New York Times withheld the Bush wiretap story until after the 2004 election, were they doing so to help "their candidate?"
The creator of howobamagotelected.com is an idiot. Specifically, John Zeigler is a standard, right-wing blowhard (former) talkshow host. Check out Nate Silver's interview with Zeigler, where they discuss the poll that is the flimsy centerpiece of howobamagotelected.com.
He calls Silver a "pinhead", "a hack", "the enemy", and ended the interview by twice telling Silver to "go fuck [himself]. He refuses to say who financed the poll, and constantly mocks his interviewer for not having the guts to post a transcript of the interview.
The poll itself is manipulative and misleading. It dings Obama supporters for not knowing that their candidate "would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket," which isn't close to what Obama said.*
On the Hannity and Colmes show, he said "There are three questions on this list that a group of monkeys, if they had been guessing, would have done better than the Obama voters did."
Remember that Zeigler -- in between comparing Obama supporters unfavorably to a pack of howler monkeys -- continually asserts that his poll is showing that the media didn't do their jobs, not that Obama voters are stupid. But this obscures a crucial fact: the poll never once asks which sort of media the respondents were consuming.
Also, one of the questions designed to show how well the Evil Liberal Media had done in getting out damaging news about McCain and Palin ("Which candidate said they could see Russia from their house?") seems specifically designed to cast a bad light on the respondents. First, the possible answers were "Sarah Palin" or "John McCain". The actual correct answer (Tina Fey) isn't offered. It's also the only question where Obama and Biden aren't offered as alternatives. Both facts seem designed to drive up the "stupid Obama voters who bought into a fraudulent anti-Palin meme hook line and sinker" percent. In fact, I think that the question shows only that the people taking the survey didn't expect to be subjected to trick questions.
The message of the poll is that "anti-Obama controversies" didn't get as much media attention as "anti-McCain controversies." But unless you actually believe that Barack Obama, Harvard graduate and former editor of the Harvard Law Review, really believed that there were 57 or more states, why should his gaffe have gotten media attention? Gaffes are supposed to be important because they're moments when the candidate lets his or her public persona slip for a few brief seconds and gives insight into the workings of their mind. McCain's inability to say how many houses he had was one such moment. So were Palin's various exaggerations of her foreign policy credentials.
By comparison, Biden's previous "plagiarism controversy" was no such thing. The formulation he was criticized for using was one he'd correctly attributed numerous times in previous stump speeches. The media reported two other examples at the time, but a Biden speechwriter took the blame for one. The point is, since the "plagiarism" was an oversight by a man who is a known to be a one man gaffe factory, not a true attempt to pass off the work of another as his own, nothing really new would be gained by focusing media attention on it.
Notice that none of the howobamagotelected questions ask about the ancient history of McCain or Palin. Nothing was asked of McCain's Keating Five connection, or his "bottom 1%" graduation from the Naval Academy. Nor were voters asked about the controversies that did gain traction, like the Jeremiah Wright association, or his comment about people bitterly clinging to guns and religion. Obama supporters did get asked about Obama's "spread the wealth" comment, and did exceptionally well (81% correct). So of course that result shows up nowhere in Zeigler's summaries of the poll.
This poll is
Certainly news/political bloggers are news sources. They tell us new things about their subjects. Hell, powerful and influential people sometimes give them scoops, exclusives, and leaks.
The idea that old media journalists have standards while bloggers do not is simply ludicrous. It's surprising that anyone makes that claim while simultaneously sharing a planet with Fox News.
In looking for information on "blogging standards", I came across this post on journalistic ethics. Author points out that, unlike real professions with real codes of conduct:
* Journalists are not licensed.
* Journalists cannot be disbarred for violating their professed standards.
The only code of conduct for journalists are the ones that they and their sponsoring organizations choose for themselves. Many embrace the code of ethics outlined by the Society of Professional Journalists, but then, so do many of the best bloggers. Bloggers consistently criticize each other and the news media when violations of these standards occur.
Professionalizing journalism -- that is, creating licensing requirements for journalism, and having a professional body which could choose to disbar bad actors -- would probably be illegal under the First Amendment. As it stands, "professional journalists" are only so in the sense that they're getting paid for it.
Technically, Linux is a brand.
Also technically, the "operating system" is the program which interfaces with the hardware and runs all the other programs. Which means that the Linux kernel is the only part of a given distribution that can claim to be the operating system.
But the ad campaign isn't really interested in the technical side of things. Linux is a common shorthand for all the various distributions, window managers, and open source applications that are commonly included in distros. Yes, once you've decided to "try Linux," you still have choices to make, and they're more complex than choosing between Vista Home and Vista Ultimate, or deciding whether to upgrade from Jaguar to Leopard. But "Linux is a free, highly customizable operating system that will run on your current computer" is good enough for 90% of the population.
As far as branding goes, the "Linux brand" is far more valuable than whatever flavor-of-the-year is currently best for new users. If by this time next year, somebody trots out "ClickAndDrool Linux" that manages to be absolutely perfect for everybody, or if it is revealed that Ubuntu is actually Windows Vista with a few custom themes, the marketing pitch can stay the same.
Well, if you assume the cost of getting the infrastructure up there is zero, space-based systems have some major advantages. There's more energy falling on the solar cells, and it spends almost all its time in full sunlight.
The big drawbacks are the cost of installing and repairing, and the fact that it just cannot be done small. The microwave antennae are about a kilometer wide, so you have to hook up a lot of panels to justify that fixed cost.
Still, once we have a heavy duty space elevator running, the rest is easy. :)
Questions I don't expect a decent answer to:
1) Why exactly does this depopulation have to occur over the course of twenty years? If you jumped it up to a hundred or two hundred, it could be done without a single premature death.
2) In a thousand years, what happens to the six hundred billion people living in the solar system, when the incredibly complex mechanisms we're using to get the hydrocarbons from Titan and the iron from the asteroid belt get disrupted, or start to become less productive? Aren't you just guaranteeing that a forced die-off will eventually happen, but on a much larger scale? Or do you believe that mankind can (and should) continue increasing its resource consumption forever?
3) Why do you peg the long-term sustainable population at 200M? Even the most blunt estimates I've seen from the people making such arguments put the numbers at 500M to 1B. The number of people the Earth can sustain is a matter of the way those inhabitants live and the technologies they use to bring about that lifestyle.
4) Is unemployment really a matter of personal choice? What happened during the Great Depression? Did 25% of the population just decide that idleness and sloth were the new black? Are the job losses of the last few months a result of a sudden uptick in moral vice?
5) Do you realize that it is entirely possible to reduce the amount of energy and natural resources that we use, while simultaneously maintaining or even increasing our standard of living? I'm not even talking about radical technological breakthroughs (though I expect such breakthroughs to happen as we pursue these reductions); existing materials can be used in radically more efficient ways, good design can greatly reduce the need for resource inputs.
6) Why do you arbitrarily demand that the processes that recycle our wastes be "natural?" If we build an electric car with lithium ion batteries, does the car have to be landfilled at the end of its life? Does this mean that we can only build electric cars as fast as the toxic lithium can be "naturally" absorbed back into the environment? If you try to pretend to answer this one, here's a hint: No, it is *not* environmentalists making the demand, nor is it required by the definition of "sustainable".
No free market failure here? Sure, in the same way that there has never been a failure of the Communist ideology, or the Christian ideology, or of Libertarian philosophy, or in Keyenesian economics. If you want to protect your ideas from criticism by invoking this asinine defense, go ahead. Just realize that you're arguing yourself into a corner where you'll also define away any evidence that would support your beliefs.
Meanwhile, the rest of us will see this crisis for what it was: free people, left to themselves, without any coercion or oversight from government, choosing to bugger themselves and six billion innocent bystanders.
I can't believe it either.
I was hoping to get modded "funny".
It probably deserved a "troll", though.
Detroit labor is not $75/hr. That's basically a made-up statistic (also). Detroit used to employ many, many more workers, to whom they promised a good retirement. Counting the cost of those retirees against the company's bottom line makes sense; saying it's part of the current worker's paycheck is not.
When you do the math properly, a line worker for the UAW and a Japanese plant in the South make very similar wages.
$36/barrel is still 50% above the $24/barrel that we had when Bush took office, and nobody is expecting these prices to survive even the lamest economic uptick. Try buying a barrel of oil to be delivered five years from now. I'll bet you can't get one for less than $80.
It gets worse because the current low prices aren't enough to fund the next round of exploration that would be needed to keep this unsustainable resource going another decade.
And not a moment too soon.
Lack of transparency was a free choice by an underregulated industry.
Nothing in the CRA required any bank to lend to a borrower who wasn't fit. It just made redlining illegal. Further, the CRA has been gutted over the course of the Bush administration, which reduced reporting requirements, reduced the number of institutions covered, and slashed the regulatory budget.
Further, investment banks were never covered by the CRA, and investment banks were the ones launching themselves into the subprime lending business over the last five years.
There has never in the history of the world been a "free market" consisting of more than 100 persons. This makes it convenient for lazy libertarians, who can always say -- no matter how clearly the free market failed -- can always find some tangential regulation. Aha! The free market could have worked, but for that!
Paging Captain Obvious! People ingest lithium when they want to feel better!
Sigh. So much misguided thinking to correct, so few mod points.
I admire your ability to divine cause and effect. Could you please offer evidence for the following:
A) that Toyota plants in America can really build a car with half as many man hours as the Big 3 average.
B) that this impressive state of affairs is in fact due to the fallen nature of the shiftless, perfidious Union Worker, and not any of the following plausible factors:
* Japan's impressive robotics technology.
* Greater ability to update and modernize their assembly lines, due to their better financial outlook.
* The fact that they're producing smaller, probably simpler-to-manufacture cars.
* The higher employee morale that comes from making cars that people actually want to buy.
You make it sound as though the two groups of workers are making the exact same product on the exact same assembly line.
I put "uncoerced" in "air" "quotes" for reasons which I explained in detail. If you only give management the ability to explain its position, while depriving unionizers of the same opportunity, you simply cannot say that the resulting vote is uncoerced.
"What's wrong with employees hearing the other side of the story?" Nothing. The problem is, for the months before the actual vote, the employer can hold daily, mandatory meetings where they can say whatever they want. There is no punishment for lying. There is no punishment for forcing pro-union forces to stay silent. Unionizers, meanwhile, can only make their case 1) during breaks and lunch, and 2) to those employees who 2a) want to hear what they have to say, and 2b) are also on break.
Make no mistake, employers can legally threaten their employees' jobs if they unionize. They can't say, "we'll find out how you voted, and target you for elimination," but they can say "if you unionize, we'll be forced to cut hundreds of jobs, and yours might be among them." Further, the secret ballot really only protects those who kept their mouths shut to avoid revealing their loyalties. Outspoken unionizers are usually known to management, and can be targeted for firing between the card ballot and the secret ballot.
Oh, wait, but that's illegal. Damn straight it is. But a flimsy pretense covers a multitude of sins. The advantages to firing the worker are huge. The employer gets rid of a proponent as well as a vote, while sending a strong "shutthefukkup" to any who would follow the unionizer's lead. The downside? Maybe if the employee fights it in court, you might have to pay him back wages a few years down the line.
Employers get to control the flow of information AND remove active opposition from the workplace, and you call the resulting vote uncoerced? Spare me.