"trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life"
Take a break, walk around, work out the kinks, clear out some cobwebs. One exercise, imagine yourself on your death bed looking back at your life and seeing what makes you laugh and what makes you cry. Live accordingly.
I suspect for many of us that boils down to "relax, breathe, play." There doesn't have to be a Big Answer; we tend to judge ourselves too harshly.
"What does "received $1.5 billion in benefits" *mean*?"
I dunno, man. Guess one would have to read the report. In general terms, I take it to mean that the several companies licensed royalty-free NASA patents and used them in the development and sale of devices which they then sold to the medical industry in which case the amount for benefit given might be the total sales up to near the date of the speech or report. I suppose a bit of digging might turn up some answers. The writer on the original site, milk-tongue or no, seemed to be not wholly comfortable with the English language.
Ah, economists. Yeas, those wonderfully scholarly clowns, with their boatloads of data, stage-fulls of shiny charts, and encyclopedias of arcane formulae. Yet, they do try to describe the human condition, and the basics within a defined arena are useful. John Stuart Mill is essential reading; the rest, not too many rise to his level (I'll take a hit on that, and maybe learn something; I never studied econ, so really don't know much about it. I was halfway through Samuelson when my brain barfed.) To the extent they try to model reality, good (just like the climate people or fluid dynamics.) For the rest.... even Laffer repudiated his curve, or the use made of it.
If there ever is a Hari Seldon, he will start with econ, which is after all the attempt to describe how we singly and collectively assign value to things and interact on that assigned value in our lives - economics writ large is at the heart of all our actions and interactions. If the psychologists ever pull their thumb out they will pay attention to it.
Stephen (or Steven?) Possony (and thanks to Jerry Pournelle for mentioning it on his GEnie RT back when) did a delightful, constructive analysis of the Pikeman's Dilemma based off standard econ.
A quick and instructive read is John Kenneth Galbraith's "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went" to get a useful glimpse.
In the main, tho, I agree with you. Most of the yahoos that show up on the talking-head shows I listen to with maybe a quarter ear. Too many seem to be pushing an agenda, but then, commercial TV in particular must pander to lowest-common-denominator, cheap controversy, sound-bite pabulum, and short attention spans.
Over the past forty years every reputable study I've seen shows a general return on space investment, starting with NASA, of triple to ten-fold. Individual projects may not pan out but the industry itself is a gold mine.
Mankins worked on some of this earlier when he was at NASA; I seem to recall he was even paid to write up a study. I expect it would be easy enough to find out at least ballpark figure. Or you could ask him, or visit the website. A start:
"A 2002 study by Professor H.R. Hertzfeld of George Washington University showed there is a large return to the companies work with NASA on its research contracts. These companies are able to commercialize the products developed and market them. The 15 companies studied received $1.5 billion in benefits from a NASA R&D investment of $64 million."
The link for the 2002 study is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14983842 I didn't look to see how one would get the full report. Further, this relates just to life sciences tech transfer.
From the same site,
"A report by the Space Foundation estimated that NASA contributed $180 billion to the economy in 2005. More than 60% of this came from commercial goods and services created by companies related from space techonology. This means that each dollar of NASA spending creates $10 of benefit in the economy. NASA spending created the satellite communications which allows not only radio and television, but also telemedicine, GPS navigation, weather forecasts, and defense."
The link given goes here, to a press release (and not to the mentioned one from the Space Foundation),
One may object that Griffin as then-head of NASA was tooting his own horn but there's no automatic reason to doubt the figures or conclusions - there are plenty of people who spend time looking for errors and outright lies, especially from NASA.
Well, I'm screwed. From panopticlick: "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 3,319,469 tested so far." And later, "21.66 bits of identifying information". Turns out much of it comes from the fonts at 18.69, but the plugins kill it, with the full 21.66.
I like being an individual when I'm at home, so to speak, but when out and about on the 'Net I'd prefer being an anonymous face in the crowd. I have ghostery to prevent tracking via cookies and web bugs, but have no idea about these etag things, never heard of them before.
Ah, crap. It's getting to the point that David Brin's idea of "The Transparent Society" is looking better all the time. Even so, one wants to say, "You first."
Beat me to it. A different perspective but growing up brat I saw a lot of separations, from TDY to duty station, from a week to a year. Most made it, one fashion or another. Never easy, takes work, no guarantees; given the alternative, one tries very hard to make it work.
No, it was a question, not a statement of what I particularly believe. I can see where the possible sarcasm could come out as more than intended. I understand a bit of possible conflict of interest - twisting a story so's to be more dramatic as the tabloids do, and know from history (Hearst, et al) that some publishers are not above chicanery.
What I mean to ask is simple. Does a newspaper being in business require that it's stories are not honest reporting? On one end of things you've got a publisher who hires editors and reporters and tells them to go forth and do their thing; on the other end, a publisher might tell them the corporate catechism and instruct them that all reporting must cleave to it. Where do you think The Guardian lies on that continuum?
By all accounts, including The Independent, this bit of news on GCHG is not down to Snowden, so what changed? Btw, that Great Britain had listening posts abroad is not news but someone decided to make it so.
"all the data is grabbed" While the arrest of Miranda was likely an attempt to find some or all of the repositories, I highly doubt that there is a single complete list or that using a partial list will lead to other locations. If Snowden suddenly dies, I rather suspect that all of the material will be released at once by multiple unknown sources. The earlier destructions of hard drives and such at The Guardian's offices under the guise of security accomplished nothing other than sending a ham-handed threat.
While the bulk of AQ are hardly the brightest bulbs on the tree, I rather think that most anyone with some relevant technical understanding will long have known the basics. That a location of something is posited, or that a code name to a program is revealed adds no useful intel for anyone. Those details merely flesh out a larger story. As regards Manning, even the retired general charged by the court with investigating the harm caused by the material he passed on was unable to name a single person who came to harm. That the disclosures may have put a crimp on some of their activities is open to investigation. That some were embarrassed is obvious. (All three major official investigations of classification of which I've been aware all concluded that the majority of items classified were to prevent the embarrassment of higher-ups.)
I find it amusing and sad that diplomats presume their cables to be secure while at the same time expecting the communications of lesser mortals to be open. I suspect that one of the reasons that Congress and the mainstream media (apart from their corporate overlords' wishes) are not more exercised about the revelations of the past few months is that they are suddenly mindful that all their past decade's communications are, or can be, an open book. The executive doesn't have to say a word, just let the implications sink in. What might have become fruitful debate over a matter with grave constitutional import can now be swept away by the next crisis du jour.
So I suspect that, in a short while, whatever you or I think about any of this will be irrelevant. There will be bits and bobs of denouement that dribble out over time but they will vanish in the chatter of the rest of the ho-hum portions of the news.
This just in: newspapers want to make money. Details at 11.
Funny how that works: Spread news widely, sell more newspapers. Sell more newspapers, make money. Make money, spread news widely.
I might guess that this bit of shocking news matters less to most than the topic under discussion. Or are we supposed to see that because The Guardian is in business that what they report is suspect?
"....I can't think of any work I did that wasn't thrown away within 10 years and not much which lasted over 5 years."
There sometimes are good things to say about working with your hands. A house I worked on, all barn beam, brick, and oak plank, ought to last a good long while unless it burns or gets knocked down. The 55' ferro-cement ketch I helped a friend build could last easily a century so long as the zincs are kept up. Funny, tho, of the things I've worked on or built myself that will last long, none of them paid enough to save from, and the tree-planting was all freebie.
Unless one can leave a work of art or make a discovery, for legacy or sense of purpose, best I can figure is to give of what you know, try to leave a few things better than you found them.
That aside, the points are well-made, and well taken. Thanks. It's easy to get mechanical, less easy to keep in mind that a good mechanic does his work just so.
On the foreign worker thing, Wolfram Alpha gives total IT jobs in U.S. at around 4 million - from CIS research scientists to "miscellaneous computer specialists." David North, at Center for Immigration Studies, gives an estimate (2009) in a small report from 2011 of ~650,000 H1B workers in the country. Link, http://www.cis.org/estimating-h1b-population-2-11. The reason for estimates is that apparently no one is keeping a running tally; it's a short report and worth the reading. I found http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2013/04/19/federal-plan-could-double-h1b-visas.html?page=all worthwhile also.
Of the 10,000/day retiring, how many work in IT? The cited article from the summary doesn't say. Without good numbers to work with.... it's another fun and interesting water-cooler conversation.
CIA did not kill the Mir project. It helps to read the article you cite and to comprehend it. From the Wikipedia article, for clarification purposes:
"The level of technology flowing into the Soviet Union raised concern in the USA and Rauma-Repola was privately threatened with economic sanctions. For example, one concern of the Pentagon was the possibility that the Soviet Union would manufacture a pioneer submarine fleet that could clear the ocean floor of U.S. deep sea listening equipment.[1] With the possibility of losing its lucrative offshore oil platforms market Rauma-Repola yielded, and submarine development ceased in Finland. One project that was abandoned was the development of a fuel cell based air-independent propulsion system."
Nowhere in the cited article was mentioned possible U.S. orders for more Mir.
Submarine dev was canceled, not the Mir submarine project; the Sovs ordered and got two (from the first paragraph of the cited article). (AIP is used for non-nuke quiet subs, either pure or as adjunct to diesel-electric. Come to think of it, I don't recall anyone building pure AIP subs, at least for sale, although there's certainly been talk of it over the years, but never did an extensive search at the time, either.)
Second the thanks. Lot easier than messing with 33ft. per.; when I started having the occasional use for this conversion, tho, in this neck of the woods all the working measurements were still in English.
If you'd lost track of time in the books, there was a knock on the door, "Hey! Star Trek's on." Scoot down to the rec room, into the rows of chairs gathered in front of the maybe 14" b&w tv, and for an hour we had an escape, a story, a parable, however cheesy it may have seemed even at the time. Optimistic? Hell, yes. We needed a bit of that. Kids dealing with the draft, others coming home to an often alien world. Lynchings and other murders of people just wanting to fucking vote. The local stuff, price-gouging and rip-off landlords, cops and narcs and weed, anti-war stuff. Spiced of course by coeds, no bras, the Pill, the Beatles and the Stones, grassers. And always the grind. We were gonna be engineers and doctors and artists, oh my.
Naive? Sure. At least through that generation, it was always the way of things, the sweet folly of youth, all that. Now? I meet too many 16-year olds who think they got a lock on cynicism. Shit. They ain't seen shit, and don't have the brains to be naive. They know it all, with eyes trying to ape the depth of the universe. I'll take Star Trek to that any day.
Yeah, long tradition there. Wolfowitz sure has the real-politik down to a T. It all makes sense and seems reasonable in those terms, and I try to understand full well that there are bad actors out there and will certainly be more, yet I have the nagging question: just what are we really afraid of? That we have some competition? We claim to base our economy upon it, yet want it only if we control the game.
Running the planet in cheat mode - what a concept. Realistically it might even be the right thing to do, yet I find that unsettling.
Given the imprecise or deliberately vague wording of too many laws in describing offenses and the increasing number of those laws, the "let's find something illegal" part becomes easier, even trivial.
I'd mod you up if I could. Good calls on all counts by my reckoning. And you're right, I'd plumb over-looked tripwire. This is one of reasons I regularly visit/. - I can manage a post off the top of my head; the bright folks can furnish scholarly analysis. tnx
The S&R and disaster assistance is available, as you note. The Aceh tsunami comes to mind - although in this case our base was mobile, we had a carrier group in the area. Supply delivery and medevac via helicopter, ship's launches and COD, hospital, electricity and clean water, clothing, food, and sundries. IIRC crew donated stuff also. The bulk of relief came from all US forces in the area, from a hospital ship, supply ships, airlift, medics, TWNY (the whole nine yards.)
[just checked by search; was the USS Abraham Lincoln, CVN-72. From the related Wikipedia article, she's had an interesting career so far. And I'd forgotten we earlier had another ship, first one name after Lincoln, SSBN-602.]
For all the recent US 'adventuring' this role is too often passed by. A search on "US military disaster relief history" and the like turns up a long list. Results are generally good but too often marred by what is apparently down to poor planning, politicking, and Murphy.
Unless you are referring to the social mechanisms of embarrassment at the doings of some alleged douche at Comcast responsible for hiring the professional alleged douchebaggery of Cyveillence and being caught out, noticed by an alert grown-up at Comcast, and sending the "Sorry, we didn't mean to shoot at you. Aren't I glad we missed?" follow-on message to TF.
Be interesting to be a fly on the wall at the meeting at Comcast that sees to the after-action report.
For that matter, TF might still could consider it to be a warning shot.
Troll you may be rated, sir, but... Saw "Leonard J. Crabs" and it didn't set right, so searched, and yup, that's a character's name, alright. Strike. Still nagged me. Aha! _Maynard G. Krebs_! Yes. Of course, one link clicked led to another. By a trail too tortuous to document, I ended up downloading the theme music to "Adventures in Paradise", a show I watched and greatly liked from 1959. Don't know if the "Tiki III" is still afloat, last blurb I saw had it in the water in Papeete.
Yeah, yeah, off-topic. Sorry 'bout that. It's a talent. Or curse.
Of course, I could mention that the DMCA is like too much of recent law more weapon of the rich, mcgrew's experience nothwithstanding. I think that with a complete overhaul and re-write it could be likely done in a fair, useful, manner to protect the weak against the mighty - which, it may be argued, is the basis of law. Historically the mighty have been able to protect themselves.
Amen. Getting that cultural shift is a, if not the, main sticking point in all this. There are a slew of commonly accepted "wisdoms" that, to put it politely, are incongruent with the real world. Adjusting the work week is easy, simple, direct, and at the least effective for near-term. Add proviso that half what is saved from OT goes to benefits. Happy workers makes for good work makes for profit. Now try convince them. Hello, brick wall.
Cheap, abundant electricity is key, later on, but that's another story.
Oh yeah, gotcha. Weird space we're caught in. Good luck and happy trails.
I've got an unknown and much shorter time left, so the actuaries and docs tell me, so I mostly want to keep on truckin', see a few friends while we're still here even if it's only by cam, continue learning, help out a bit where I can. My time for a whole bunch of adventuring is past, but the fire still burns, albeit lower.
Oh, Ok, I see what you mean. Back then it was kinda middle ground - basic heating and simple cooking. A chicken breast, x minutes; a mid-size Idaho, y-minutes. Newer ovens offer nifty capabilities but too often the people who design the control logic that faces the user don't live in the same world I do. I've managed to set the clock and thaw stuff; still trying to track down the manual for the old discontinued item my landlord provides. But mostly I don't do, or have the need to do, anything too fancy.
As for older folks grasping stuff, while I acknowledge some diminution of intellect, my experience is that much depends on how things are presented, explained, and demonstrated. Sometimes there's effectively a language barrier as well; solution is to keep it simple (no, not baby talk or condescension) by just using a common vocabulary; it's easy to use too much non-essential jargon.
Thanks for the great info; aI like the charts and discussion.
Return on investment is a big thing; it's much talked about with regard to investing in the stock market but a too little elsewhere. Or perhaps more accurately, returns in other areas do not often make it as far as the public eye and when it does is often flimsy. The whole discussion of how far out a chain does one go is what I've been calling full accounting for a long time, going back to around the first Earth Day in the U.S.
It can get really messy very quickly but I have long believed that some reasonable attempt ought to be made in order to have better discussion and eventual analysis to aid in making choices, whether what to put on the roof, in one's belly, or which lever to pull at the polls. Doing even a bit of it requires some mutual agreement of terms and of what kinds of things might be reasonably seen to be more important, then some patient digging for data and plodding along with the rest. My observation has been that few of us have patience for it. I don't, most of the time, beyond a nod in the general direction of "we should count this, but not that." I expect you know what I mean.
The state of Corn. I love it. While I had had some notion that we grew lots of corn it was in terms of the traditional "Corn Belt" spoken of in the Fifties or so, the figures you gave are mind-blowing. I'm thinking it's not such a great idea to grow as much as we do, especially the way we do, in contrast to so many other useful crops.
I've been on to the sig site as well; so, double thanks.
We had an "easy" introduction to automation with the auto industry in, what, the '70s and '80s on, with hundreds of thousands of workers displaced. Some found other work. A significant number became chronically unemployed and unemployable.
Varies by whose estimates you go by, but gentlest case I've seen is 1/3 of working population in U.S. jobless by mid-century. As in no work to be had at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Kind words, thank you.
"trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life"
Take a break, walk around, work out the kinks, clear out some cobwebs. One exercise, imagine yourself on your death bed looking back at your life and seeing what makes you laugh and what makes you cry. Live accordingly.
I suspect for many of us that boils down to "relax, breathe, play." There doesn't have to be a Big Answer; we tend to judge ourselves too harshly.
"What does "received $1.5 billion in benefits" *mean*?"
I dunno, man. Guess one would have to read the report. In general terms, I take it to mean that the several companies licensed royalty-free NASA patents and used them in the development and sale of devices which they then sold to the medical industry in which case the amount for benefit given might be the total sales up to near the date of the speech or report. I suppose a bit of digging might turn up some answers. The writer on the original site, milk-tongue or no, seemed to be not wholly comfortable with the English language.
Ah, economists. Yeas, those wonderfully scholarly clowns, with their boatloads of data, stage-fulls of shiny charts, and encyclopedias of arcane formulae. Yet, they do try to describe the human condition, and the basics within a defined arena are useful. John Stuart Mill is essential reading; the rest, not too many rise to his level (I'll take a hit on that, and maybe learn something; I never studied econ, so really don't know much about it. I was halfway through Samuelson when my brain barfed.) To the extent they try to model reality, good (just like the climate people or fluid dynamics.) For the rest.... even Laffer repudiated his curve, or the use made of it.
If there ever is a Hari Seldon, he will start with econ, which is after all the attempt to describe how we singly and collectively assign value to things and interact on that assigned value in our lives - economics writ large is at the heart of all our actions and interactions. If the psychologists ever pull their thumb out they will pay attention to it.
Stephen (or Steven?) Possony (and thanks to Jerry Pournelle for mentioning it on his GEnie RT back when) did a delightful, constructive analysis of the Pikeman's Dilemma based off standard econ.
A quick and instructive read is John Kenneth Galbraith's "Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went" to get a useful glimpse.
In the main, tho, I agree with you. Most of the yahoos that show up on the talking-head shows I listen to with maybe a quarter ear. Too many seem to be pushing an agenda, but then, commercial TV in particular must pander to lowest-common-denominator, cheap controversy, sound-bite pabulum, and short attention spans.
Over the past forty years every reputable study I've seen shows a general return on space investment, starting with NASA, of triple to ten-fold. Individual projects may not pan out but the industry itself is a gold mine.
Mankins worked on some of this earlier when he was at NASA; I seem to recall he was even paid to write up a study. I expect it would be easy enough to find out at least ballpark figure. Or you could ask him, or visit the website. A start:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/716070main_Mankins_2011_PhI_SPS_Alpha.pdf
The NASA grant was NNX11AR34G; I don't know offhand how one would find out how much that cost taxpayers.
A related bit, from http://useconomy.about.com/od/usfederalbudget/p/nasa_budget_cost.htm
"A 2002 study by Professor H.R. Hertzfeld of George Washington University showed there is a large return to the companies work with NASA on its research contracts. These companies are able to commercialize the products developed and market them. The 15 companies studied received $1.5 billion in benefits from a NASA R&D investment of $64 million."
The link for the 2002 study is http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14983842
I didn't look to see how one would get the full report. Further, this relates just to life sciences tech transfer.
From the same site,
"A report by the Space Foundation estimated that NASA contributed $180 billion to the economy in 2005. More than 60% of this came from commercial goods and services created by companies related from space techonology. This means that each dollar of NASA spending creates $10 of benefit in the economy. NASA spending created the satellite communications which allows not only radio and television, but also telemedicine, GPS navigation, weather forecasts, and defense."
The link given goes here, to a press release (and not to the mentioned one from the Space Foundation),
http://useconomy.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=useconomy&cdn=newsissues&tm=544&f=10&su=p284.13.342.ip_p504.6.342.ip_&tt=11&bt=6&bts=6&zu=http%3A//www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/sep/HQ_07193_Griffin_lecture.html
For the pdf of Griffin's speech,
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/189537main_mg_space_economy_20070917.pdf
or for text-only, http://useconomy.about.com/gi/o.htm?zi=1/XJ&zTi=1&sdn=useconomy&cdn=newsissues&tm=544&f=10&su=p284.13.342.ip_p504.6.342.ip_&tt=11&bt=6&bts=6&zu=http%3A//www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2007/sep/HQ_07193_Griffin_lecture.html
One may object that Griffin as then-head of NASA was tooting his own horn but there's no automatic reason to doubt the figures or conclusions - there are plenty of people who spend time looking for errors and outright lies, especially from NASA.
Nope, nowhere near the kind of energy density to do that. You could look it up.
Well, I'm screwed. From panopticlick: "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 3,319,469 tested so far."
And later, "21.66 bits of identifying information". Turns out much of it comes from the fonts at 18.69, but the plugins kill it, with the full 21.66.
I like being an individual when I'm at home, so to speak, but when out and about on the 'Net I'd prefer being an anonymous face in the crowd. I have ghostery to prevent tracking via cookies and web bugs, but have no idea about these etag things, never heard of them before.
Ah, crap. It's getting to the point that David Brin's idea of "The Transparent Society" is looking better all the time. Even so, one wants to say, "You first."
Beat me to it. A different perspective but growing up brat I saw a lot of separations, from TDY to duty station, from a week to a year. Most made it, one fashion or another. Never easy, takes work, no guarantees; given the alternative, one tries very hard to make it work.
No, it was a question, not a statement of what I particularly believe. I can see where the possible sarcasm could come out as more than intended. I understand a bit of possible conflict of interest - twisting a story so's to be more dramatic as the tabloids do, and know from history (Hearst, et al) that some publishers are not above chicanery.
What I mean to ask is simple. Does a newspaper being in business require that it's stories are not honest reporting? On one end of things you've got a publisher who hires editors and reporters and tells them to go forth and do their thing; on the other end, a publisher might tell them the corporate catechism and instruct them that all reporting must cleave to it. Where do you think The Guardian lies on that continuum?
By all accounts, including The Independent, this bit of news on GCHG is not down to Snowden, so what changed? Btw, that Great Britain had listening posts abroad is not news but someone decided to make it so.
"all the data is grabbed" While the arrest of Miranda was likely an attempt to find some or all of the repositories, I highly doubt that there is a single complete list or that using a partial list will lead to other locations. If Snowden suddenly dies, I rather suspect that all of the material will be released at once by multiple unknown sources. The earlier destructions of hard drives and such at The Guardian's offices under the guise of security accomplished nothing other than sending a ham-handed threat.
While the bulk of AQ are hardly the brightest bulbs on the tree, I rather think that most anyone with some relevant technical understanding will long have known the basics. That a location of something is posited, or that a code name to a program is revealed adds no useful intel for anyone. Those details merely flesh out a larger story. As regards Manning, even the retired general charged by the court with investigating the harm caused by the material he passed on was unable to name a single person who came to harm. That the disclosures may have put a crimp on some of their activities is open to investigation. That some were embarrassed is obvious. (All three major official investigations of classification of which I've been aware all concluded that the majority of items classified were to prevent the embarrassment of higher-ups.)
I find it amusing and sad that diplomats presume their cables to be secure while at the same time expecting the communications of lesser mortals to be open. I suspect that one of the reasons that Congress and the mainstream media (apart from their corporate overlords' wishes) are not more exercised about the revelations of the past few months is that they are suddenly mindful that all their past decade's communications are, or can be, an open book. The executive doesn't have to say a word, just let the implications sink in. What might have become fruitful debate over a matter with grave constitutional import can now be swept away by the next crisis du jour.
So I suspect that, in a short while, whatever you or I think about any of this will be irrelevant. There will be bits and bobs of denouement that dribble out over time but they will vanish in the chatter of the rest of the ho-hum portions of the news.
This just in: newspapers want to make money. Details at 11.
Funny how that works:
Spread news widely, sell more newspapers.
Sell more newspapers, make money.
Make money, spread news widely.
I might guess that this bit of shocking news matters less to most than the topic under discussion. Or are we supposed to see that because The Guardian is in business that what they report is suspect?
"....I can't think of any work I did that wasn't thrown away within 10 years and not much which lasted over 5 years."
There sometimes are good things to say about working with your hands. A house I worked on, all barn beam, brick, and oak plank, ought to last a good long while unless it burns or gets knocked down. The 55' ferro-cement ketch I helped a friend build could last easily a century so long as the zincs are kept up. Funny, tho, of the things I've worked on or built myself that will last long, none of them paid enough to save from, and the tree-planting was all freebie.
Unless one can leave a work of art or make a discovery, for legacy or sense of purpose, best I can figure is to give of what you know, try to leave a few things better than you found them.
pp. 13-14 in mine.
That aside, the points are well-made, and well taken. Thanks. It's easy to get mechanical, less easy to keep in mind that a good mechanic does his work just so.
On the foreign worker thing, Wolfram Alpha gives total IT jobs in U.S. at around 4 million - from CIS research scientists to "miscellaneous computer specialists." David North, at Center for Immigration Studies, gives an estimate (2009) in a small report from 2011 of ~650,000 H1B workers in the country. Link, http://www.cis.org/estimating-h1b-population-2-11. The reason for estimates is that apparently no one is keeping a running tally; it's a short report and worth the reading. I found http://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2013/04/19/federal-plan-could-double-h1b-visas.html?page=all worthwhile also.
Of the 10,000/day retiring, how many work in IT? The cited article from the summary doesn't say. Without good numbers to work with.... it's another fun and interesting water-cooler conversation.
CIA did not kill the Mir project. It helps to read the article you cite and to comprehend it. From the Wikipedia article, for clarification purposes:
"The level of technology flowing into the Soviet Union raised concern in the USA and Rauma-Repola was privately threatened with economic sanctions. For example, one concern of the Pentagon was the possibility that the Soviet Union would manufacture a pioneer submarine fleet that could clear the ocean floor of U.S. deep sea listening equipment.[1] With the possibility of losing its lucrative offshore oil platforms market Rauma-Repola yielded, and submarine development ceased in Finland. One project that was abandoned was the development of a fuel cell based air-independent propulsion system."
Nowhere in the cited article was mentioned possible U.S. orders for more Mir.
Submarine dev was canceled, not the Mir submarine project; the Sovs ordered and got two (from the first paragraph of the cited article). (AIP is used for non-nuke quiet subs, either pure or as adjunct to diesel-electric. Come to think of it, I don't recall anyone building pure AIP subs, at least for sale, although there's certainly been talk of it over the years, but never did an extensive search at the time, either.)
Second the thanks. Lot easier than messing with 33ft. per.; when I started having the occasional use for this conversion, tho, in this neck of the woods all the working measurements were still in English.
The earlier Treks all tried to at the least be a collection of modestly self-consistent short stories.
The reboot? It's a comic book.
Take it as you find it, enjoy it as you will.
Izzat so.
Maybe you're talking about then and now.
If you'd lost track of time in the books, there was a knock on the door, "Hey! Star Trek's on." Scoot down to the rec room, into the rows of chairs gathered in front of the maybe 14" b&w tv, and for an hour we had an escape, a story, a parable, however cheesy it may have seemed even at the time. Optimistic? Hell, yes. We needed a bit of that. Kids dealing with the draft, others coming home to an often alien world. Lynchings and other murders of people just wanting to fucking vote. The local stuff, price-gouging and rip-off landlords, cops and narcs and weed, anti-war stuff. Spiced of course by coeds, no bras, the Pill, the Beatles and the Stones, grassers. And always the grind. We were gonna be engineers and doctors and artists, oh my.
Naive? Sure. At least through that generation, it was always the way of things, the sweet folly of youth, all that. Now? I meet too many 16-year olds who think they got a lock on cynicism. Shit. They ain't seen shit, and don't have the brains to be naive. They know it all, with eyes trying to ape the depth of the universe. I'll take Star Trek to that any day.
Yeah, long tradition there. Wolfowitz sure has the real-politik down to a T. It all makes sense and seems reasonable in those terms, and I try to understand full well that there are bad actors out there and will certainly be more, yet I have the nagging question: just what are we really afraid of? That we have some competition? We claim to base our economy upon it, yet want it only if we control the game.
Running the planet in cheat mode - what a concept. Realistically it might even be the right thing to do, yet I find that unsettling.
Right.
Given the imprecise or deliberately vague wording of too many laws in describing offenses and the increasing number of those laws, the "let's find something illegal" part becomes easier, even trivial.
I'd mod you up if I could. Good calls on all counts by my reckoning. And you're right, I'd plumb over-looked tripwire. This is one of reasons I regularly visit /. - I can manage a post off the top of my head; the bright folks can furnish scholarly analysis. tnx
The S&R and disaster assistance is available, as you note. The Aceh tsunami comes to mind - although in this case our base was mobile, we had a carrier group in the area. Supply delivery and medevac via helicopter, ship's launches and COD, hospital, electricity and clean water, clothing, food, and sundries. IIRC crew donated stuff also. The bulk of relief came from all US forces in the area, from a hospital ship, supply ships, airlift, medics, TWNY (the whole nine yards.)
[just checked by search; was the USS Abraham Lincoln, CVN-72. From the related Wikipedia article, she's had an interesting career so far. And I'd forgotten we earlier had another ship, first one name after Lincoln, SSBN-602.]
For all the recent US 'adventuring' this role is too often passed by. A search on "US military disaster relief history" and the like turns up a long list. Results are generally good but too often marred by what is apparently down to poor planning, politicking, and Murphy.
No, the system didn't work.
Unless you are referring to the social mechanisms of embarrassment at the doings of some alleged douche at Comcast responsible for hiring the professional alleged douchebaggery of Cyveillence and being caught out, noticed by an alert grown-up at Comcast, and sending the "Sorry, we didn't mean to shoot at you. Aren't I glad we missed?" follow-on message to TF.
Be interesting to be a fly on the wall at the meeting at Comcast that sees to the after-action report.
For that matter, TF might still could consider it to be a warning shot.
Troll you may be rated, sir, but...
Saw "Leonard J. Crabs" and it didn't set right, so searched, and yup, that's a character's name, alright. Strike. Still nagged me.
Aha! _Maynard G. Krebs_! Yes. Of course, one link clicked led to another. By a trail too tortuous to document, I ended up downloading the theme music to "Adventures in Paradise", a show I watched and greatly liked from 1959. Don't know if the "Tiki III" is still afloat, last blurb I saw had it in the water in Papeete.
So, thank you.
I also found this:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/139580101/Encyclopedia-of-TV-Shows-Series
dude goes on to have a handful encyclopedic publications - TV pilots, characters, etc.
looks like a cultural historian's bonanza
Yeah, yeah, off-topic. Sorry 'bout that. It's a talent. Or curse.
Of course, I could mention that the DMCA is like too much of recent law more weapon of the rich, mcgrew's experience nothwithstanding. I think that with a complete overhaul and re-write it could be likely done in a fair, useful, manner to protect the weak against the mighty - which, it may be argued, is the basis of law. Historically the mighty have been able to protect themselves.
Amen. Getting that cultural shift is a, if not the, main sticking point in all this. There are a slew of commonly accepted "wisdoms" that, to put it politely, are incongruent with the real world. Adjusting the work week is easy, simple, direct, and at the least effective for near-term. Add proviso that half what is saved from OT goes to benefits. Happy workers makes for good work makes for profit. Now try convince them. Hello, brick wall.
Cheap, abundant electricity is key, later on, but that's another story.
Oh yeah, gotcha. Weird space we're caught in. Good luck and happy trails.
I've got an unknown and much shorter time left, so the actuaries and docs tell me, so I mostly want to keep on truckin', see a few friends while we're still here even if it's only by cam, continue learning, help out a bit where I can. My time for a whole bunch of adventuring is past, but the fire still burns, albeit lower.
Oh, Ok, I see what you mean. Back then it was kinda middle ground - basic heating and simple cooking. A chicken breast, x minutes; a mid-size Idaho, y-minutes. Newer ovens offer nifty capabilities but too often the people who design the control logic that faces the user don't live in the same world I do. I've managed to set the clock and thaw stuff; still trying to track down the manual for the old discontinued item my landlord provides. But mostly I don't do, or have the need to do, anything too fancy.
As for older folks grasping stuff, while I acknowledge some diminution of intellect, my experience is that much depends on how things are presented, explained, and demonstrated. Sometimes there's effectively a language barrier as well; solution is to keep it simple (no, not baby talk or condescension) by just using a common vocabulary; it's easy to use too much non-essential jargon.
Thanks for the great info; aI like the charts and discussion.
Return on investment is a big thing; it's much talked about with regard to investing in the stock market but a too little elsewhere. Or perhaps more accurately, returns in other areas do not often make it as far as the public eye and when it does is often flimsy. The whole discussion of how far out a chain does one go is what I've been calling full accounting for a long time, going back to around the first Earth Day in the U.S.
It can get really messy very quickly but I have long believed that some reasonable attempt ought to be made in order to have better discussion and eventual analysis to aid in making choices, whether what to put on the roof, in one's belly, or which lever to pull at the polls. Doing even a bit of it requires some mutual agreement of terms and of what kinds of things might be reasonably seen to be more important, then some patient digging for data and plodding along with the rest. My observation has been that few of us have patience for it. I don't, most of the time, beyond a nod in the general direction of "we should count this, but not that." I expect you know what I mean.
The state of Corn. I love it. While I had had some notion that we grew lots of corn it was in terms of the traditional "Corn Belt" spoken of in the Fifties or so, the figures you gave are mind-blowing. I'm thinking it's not such a great idea to grow as much as we do, especially the way we do, in contrast to so many other useful crops.
I've been on to the sig site as well; so, double thanks.
We had an "easy" introduction to automation with the auto industry in, what, the '70s and '80s on, with hundreds of thousands of workers displaced. Some found other work. A significant number became chronically unemployed and unemployable.
Varies by whose estimates you go by, but gentlest case I've seen is 1/3 of working population in U.S. jobless by mid-century. As in no work to be had at all.
See http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm for a version.