Yes, obviously profit is evil and is never good for anything. That's not even remotely insinuated by any rational interpretation of what I said. The fact is short term profit can make people make bad decisions. For things such as nuclear power, which have great ramifications should anything go seriously wrong, a similarly long-range viewpoint is needed, which is simply not achievable in a profit-only motivation, which is by design limited only to the working tenure of whoever is in place, making decisions at that time. This, while the impact of their decisions may be felt by those hundreds of years down the road.
Safer than an airplane? It would have to be 1000000x safer than *walking* to answer for the potential catastrophes it could create. So far, it probably is. But it's a fairly limited set of data, so you'd have to forgive reasonable people still be less than convinced, especially if they are not nuclear engineers.
So you have faith, that's great. I want more than faith. I want crazy, amazingly intrusive and transparent oversight. Because I want to be really, really, REALLY sure someone isn't cutting a corner on a nuke plant to make a quarterly profit goal.
Beyond that, maybe you're right and maybe pebble bed reactors are the answer. If so, then the nuclear power community is wasting a prime opportunity to get PR out there, NOW, demonstrating why that is the case. Maybe you should get mad at them for sitting on their thumbs. But don't get mad at people who are not willing to trust a "free market" to make the best long-term decisions consistently without regulation in place. Since the ideal solution in a 'free market' is to find a place as close as possible, to minimize transport costs, to dump the waste generated by the cheapest possible nuclear station.
Ok, so the prices you give are not relevant to the us except for the high range prices.
I'm keenly interested in electric power. I live in the US, in the northeast, so it gets cold. I have to be able to drive 30 miles at a whack.. NO less, under any circumstances.. to make it worthwhile to have a particular car (until I sell my house, unfortunately, I'm stuck commuting). while Driving, I will need heat for part of the year and I have to be able to drive at least 45 miles per hour unless I want to be "that asshole" from my house to my office.
Lucky for me, I get fairly green electricity at my home simply by choosing who I pay to generate it, so that's nice. Unfortunately, it's 0.13/kwh and up, but hey, I'll pay it. at 26kBTUs per $1 vs gasoline's 41kBTUs per $1 (at current $3/gallon gas), it's hardly "1/10th" gas costs though.
But, the car I need does not appear to exist yet, in the US, for a price I can afford, being someone who has never owned a car worth more than $10k in my life. Which also includes nearly every other car I see on the road in my region. Dropping $15k on top of the cost of a car (for its body) is just plain not feasible, no matter how much I want it.
You're right to raise awareness, but you've got the language and the attitude of a zealot. Be careful you don't sour more people to your cause than you convert.
hardly. Most of the best fun I ever had was competing with friends, and if you had a good game or a good contest, saying so it just honest, hardly "stupid". The "I'll get you next time" is implied, or you wouldn't keep playing unless you like losing. There is no need to focus on the need to win. The idea that playing the game is fun by itself, and it's fun because you try to win, not because you have to win is a pretty good lesson to learn, IMHO.
The GP was basically saying that idea makers are irrelevant to him because they do not complete the delivery of a product to HIM, and implicitly, it advocated for the current all-to-common situation of an exploiter profiting because they deliver the value - that stance is what I am disagreeing with, as it seems awful short sighted to focus on only one link of the chain and value that to the exclusion of all other links. Agreed on that at least? Obviously the rest of this is speculation based on that core idea.
A society that allows its thinkers to wither and die (or, in modern terms, to go unrewarded with money earned from the ideas) eventually selects out thinkers. Not entirely, not immediately, but over generations, they must be lessened. Whether by actual natural selection, or by the neglect of the "myth of the inventor" or whatever you want to call it when society raises archetypes up for people to see as examples (such as a successful businessman, the idea of which makes other people want to be successful businessmen).
The only ways around this are creating structures that ensure the idea-maker is rewarded WITH the idea-exploiter, or to require that idea-makers also learn to exploit their own ideas. We currently do a little of both, if the idea-maker is resourced enough to patent, he has some claim, but in general many industries are littered with people with amazing ideas who die broke because they are not exploiters.
Requiring people to distract themselves from the fields in which they can make their ideas, in order to learn to how to exploit their ideas (i.e., learn about business), reduces the amount of time and effort they can spend on making the ideas in the first place. That's not great for society (reducing available ideas), though it's not always horrible either. But it does mean the society rewards self-reliance, rather than interdependance, and that is wasteful duplication of effort (someone else already learned how to exploit) as well as running counter to the entire point of a society, as I said.
The most efficient and beneficial long-term situation would be for idea-makers and idea-exploiters to work together, rather than allowing exploiters to exploit while ignoring the source of their ideas, and allowing that "golden geese", as it were, to wither, whether by a relative lack of mates because you are not 'successful' or because of a lack of acclaim drawing others into the realm of making ideas.
You can disagree with me if you like, but I hope at least that is clear enough for you to follow this time.
But it takes both kinds. Imagine this actually involved natural selection, and we were selecting for one or the other... because, in a way, we are. Shouldn't people who have the ideas be rewarded at least somewhat, by others who profit on the fruits of their labor?
To learn about business, means NOT learning more about your chosen field. You would have everyone be a generalist rather than allowing for any specialization?
If so, that is absolutely against the entire idea of a society at all, which is predicted on the division of labor and interdependance resulting in a far superior situation than everyone trying to be completely self-reliant.
Perhaps you would prefer we live by the "law of the jungle" in all things? If not, then why here?
That's funny. I listen all the time and I haven't paid a dime yet. Weird, your definition of "free" and mine must be really different.
Commercial television is free too, you know. I didn't say commercial free, after all.
Regardless of your oversensitivity to a very small amount of broadcast time being related to keeping the broadcasts alive, the business model is valid, and thriving. No, they are not relying ONLY on voluntary, unsolicited donations. I'm sorry, we don't live in utopia. But occasionally solicited donations do, in fact, represent a very significant revenue stream. Combined with a few other ways of garnering some cash, as I have already mentioned, it allows things to work quite acceptably for most of us.
You're wrong about the validity of the business model.
For almost 40 years public broadcasting has followed exactly this model, with total anonymity of its listeners and viewers. Sure, they get funding from other sources; and so can musicians (live shows, mercandise, comissions).
The "pay what you like" method is completely valid as one source of income in a business model that has been demonstrated to be VERY successful so far.
Squint a different way, and you could say the artists have inspired people to pay for their advertising for their live shows, merchandise, and possible future comission work.
Who, exactly, is going to stop buying cheap coal power first, if additional control is not put on the market? Whoever does is at a competitive disadvantage. It's a gigantic game of prisoner's dilemna, and you're going to gamble that everyone, down to the mass of consumers, is going to choose tit for tat, "if you do it I will too"?
No, you're right, the free market will definitely take care of it. Because the price of coal will naturally rise before it has catastrophic effects on people who don't live next to coal plants, right? And if not, when those catastrophic effects become more well known, people will still naturally jump at being the first to disadvantage themselves to use more expensive power to save themselves with no guarantee that everyone else will follow, right? Or, naturally the price of nuclear will fall to make coal obsolete on this time scale, somehow.
Now, bear in mind, this is nothing less than the survival of many people you are discussing here. So if there is any reasonable room for questioning that these scenarios will indeed occur on a time frame that happens to beat the time frame in which inaction might cause major problems, then a reasonable person would indeed take a "need to be managed by experts" arguement.
Because... and I'll just say this one time... yes, free markets can't do everything. There, I said it! Let it go. It's ok. They do a lot! Free Markets can be good! But they are not good at everything, and ultimately they serve those who benefit from the markets primarily, which is not always the same as saying "people" on a more general scale.
that's not what he said. what he said is that market forces drive firms to cut costs, and that cost cutting shouldn't be the primary goal when something this important is at stake.
One company prioritizing short term profits... or one person at one company... over safety, and you can have a significant zone of uninhabitable land for at least a couple of generations, if not many.
Sometimes, the dollar figure is not an acceptable measure of risk and reward, to a point. The point is still there, you can't protect against everything all the time, but sometimes the point needs to be shifted in the interest of the public, not the profit.
that's a horrible example. Why would a young person need to know their phone number?
In the old days, you learned it by giving it to people all the time.
These days, all of your friends have caller id. Call them once and they have your number. you never have to give it to anyone.
Personally I really hope I am more family-focused when I'm older than I am now, when I'm fairly young and still self-absorbed as I build for my future.
if they really wanted to study this, they would have to test for random information. Like how well the youngsters can memorize strings of numbers. Otherwise, we're just wringing hands over the fact that we don't have to personally track the same details we used to have to track in daily living.
That doesn't mean less details though. and it doesn't mean we are lesser beings. Hell, older people still can't program VCRs, often times. Does that make them lesser people? What about people who can't touch type, or thumb type? Are young people more able to create logic structures for scripts or playlist filters?
How about a real case for there even being a problem?
I'm not sure I follow your sustainability angle. What is the nature of the current problem, they over consume cows and potatoes significantly enough that correcting such a problem would have a real impact?
as far as mcdonalds is concerned, it would also increase their quality. I should know, being a former employee;) but seriously, that would be win-win for them, for sure.
I can't even tell you how much I would pay for a robotic cooking system, but $500 would have me camping out at the store waiting. That's an hour a day reclaimed for whatever other task I care to partake in, without paying the price of eating crappy food, presumably. If I could just type what I want for meals (with recommendations a la netflix queue), train it to order the food components, and communicate with it to sync with my daily movements to have food ready when I wanted it.... shit, that would be worth nearly anything I could afford. I'd even be willing to unpack the shipment and buy add ons intended for particular food items (now, for $19.99 buy the lettuce shredder upgrade to add salad to your list of available food products! Now, for $39.99 buy the wok upgrade for stir fries! but wait, there's more!). Hell, a company that could pull this together would have me as a willing and completely enthusiastic customer for the rest of my life.
I can't be the only person who not only does not have the time, but absolutely hates cooking, can I?
Does it matter? enough are. And a lot of times, it's not that "oh, no one cares", it's just that people don't feel they always have to be the one footing the bill. I haven't been a member myself, but I will be someday soon. And when I do, I have no problem footing more of the bill than I would have otherwise if I am able to do so. And, I don't feel bad about not paying right now. Right now it would be a pain in the ass for me. In a year or two, much less so.
This experiment with radiohead is a resounding success. Yes, 60% of downloaders didn't pay. But, for a freely available file, heck that's a pretty good ratio! So a bunch of people aren't really big fans, or are not in a place to buy the album really right now, and they downloaded it for free. Maybe they'll like it and go a live show. Maybe they will share it with a friend (advertise) for free. Who cares?
Furthermore, if they had to pay, how many of those 60% would never have downloaded it in the first place? How do you even know that they like radiohead? What percentage of them downloaded it and hated it?
As this thing becomes more common, the question is not about the people who don't pay... it's about how do you inspire enough people to WANT to pay you. period.
In my state, bars don't even accept out of state ID if you look underage.
Regardless, a universal ID is not an acceptable price to pay to "fight underage drinking". yes, I know, won't we think of the children! But in this case, I'd rather think of the adults, and what they tend to do with too much consolidation of power.
A computer wonk refers to training people to fit your corporate culture as "reprogramming" and that's evil??
Are you really serious?
I'm sorry, I don't know squat about google, but I can say as a business owner that once you have established a business model and a corporate culture you want to continue to grow and nurish, you need team players. You need people who are willing to execute the company plan, not their last company's plan.
are you guys really reaching this hard for reasons to dislike google? Haven't they done other stuff you can legitimately get mad at?. When I'm looking at a new hire, one of the BIGGEST issues is, "can this person work here, help us achieve our goals, and be happy doing it?" If they are not willing to do business our way, work to our standards, work as a team player, then hiring them would be disasterous to both them, and my company. that's lose-lose, no good for anybody. It does me no good to hire someone who can do X, if they can't also do it while working with the systems we have established, with the people we have in place, in a way that their co-workers can anticipate and work with, to a high level of quality and with a minimum of retraining.
Anyone who doesn't talk about "assimilation", "reprogramming", or other such language when talking about bringing in new hires to an existing company structure has no idea what the hell they are talking about. Grow up.
no, seriously,.dmgs are not automatically opened when you download them. You're first warned that it is an application, and then it asks you for an admin password in order to install. At least, that is what my mac does, each and every time I download an application from the internet, and that was a default setting.
not true at all, because the buck is also orders of magnitude smaller. 9/11 took years to plan and execute, scads of cash, a relatively large team, and had a high risk of failure as they depended on a lot of factors the terrorists had no control over (weather, plane schedules, etc).
The queue attack requires a duffel or bomb vest, a willing volunteer and a holiday weekend.
I would bet you could you a whole lot more queue attacks than 30 for what it took to pull off 9/11, and you don't need anyone other than the bomb maker to have any special training at all (such as how to pilot a commercial airplane).
I'll take the point that the storage issue is apparently not that reasonable (though there are plenty of limiting factors on the use of that energy dealing with extraction, waste, etc) if your numbers are correct, regarding uranium. I'll do you one better and point out that it's not inconceivable that we could learn to release energy from all matter someday, since everything in the universe is just condensed energy after all.
I would never argue that we have our current infrastructure for any reason other than it has made sense; from an economic standpoint, so far.
The problem with our current infrastructure in particular is that it can "go south" a lot faster than we can prepare an alternative. A good size war in the middle east, and most of the world economy implodes. That could happen in weeks, not 20 years. Venezuala decides not to sell to the US anymore, and the US is in recession (or, trotting off to war again). This is not a stable situation for all kinds of reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with environmentalism; and the free market works well on stable situations, but it's not so good at security against future threats, because people don't value security against a threat until it has bitten them. Apparently the nips of gasoline refineries shutting down temporarily and such haven't been nip enough to get people serious, but that doesn't mean the threat is not there. And it will take more than just shrugging and saying that someone, someday, might decide to do something, when technology is ready and it becomes profitable. That's a pretty big risk to ignore in the meantime.
Throw any kind of environmental arguement into the mix, and the case just gets more compelling that we should, in fact, get off of oil in particular as fast as possible, as much as we possibly can.
Ultimately, if we want to exist sustainably, without just passing complications on to future generations, I suppose the 7 generation rule is a good one. If what we're doing is sustainable for 7 generations, to the best of our ability to tell, then it's good enough. I suppose that's a more realistic stance than the net-input limitation, perhaps.
Maybe the 7 generation rule is even too much. But simply waiting for the free market to take a threat seriously is not an adequate response.
Not necessarily. Or are you really arguing that the billions of years the sun will be around is really on the same scale as coal, uranium or oil?
That would seem to be a head in the sand position, one of politics and emotion rather than rationality. I'm sure you might find some circumstance where we might extend the use of all those things for awhile, but not on the scale of the sun. A few orders of magnitude make all the difference.
Oooh, that's an interesting idea... gravitational. I hadn't thought of that as an "energy input" before. Thanks!
I noted the eventual lack of sustainability in another post.. you could go far enough and say the 2nd law dooms everything to nothingness and every time we use energy we just speed up entropy. But, a more immediate issue is how to keep the rock we're living on habitable for the longest period of time, and preferably healthy for us and the other life forms we depend on (whether we are aware of our dependancy or not). I suppose a more accurate term than "source" is "very long term input", perhaps.
and frankly, I'm not buying any current estimates for timeframes of energy source depletion. Energy is just too useful. As we figure out how to make it do more and more things, our usage will likely not grow at a steady rate, it should increase exponentially. Maybe not in steady curves. Perhaps in steady curves with periodic jumps. Energy use might have been linear for centuries plotted against population growth... then the car was invented, for example. So I don't really buy arguements that we don't have any concerns for such a long term that it would be silly to worry about it now.
Obviously that's not scientifically rigorous and I understand that. Still, while we may not need to be perfectly sustainable in 5 years, it does seem that it should be a priority, right there along with learning how to live on rocks other than just this one (which will probably be best ensured by being able to use inputs we know exist in other areas, like solar and gravitational forces). maybe not the highest of high priorities, but it should be an area of serious research and experimentation at least. And the serious preference for attempting to reach sustainability is not a belief to be ridiculed, IMHO.
but we don't have a source of uranium, we only have a storehouse of it. The only thing that brings a reliable input of energy to earth is the sun. If our usage of energy exceeds that which the sun can provide, then we are on a path towards energy depletion, which (depending on our rate of energy usage over that limit) will require either the mining of energy offplanet, or the reduction of energy usage on some time scale. Note I include energy to grow plants and such in that simplistic equation, not just electricity/heat.
We have quite a bit of stored energy of course, but barring a massive population crash, or a sudden radical discovery that allows for the reduction of energy use, sooner or later we're going to have to abide by the limits of the energy input to the earth, right?
And even that only buys us until the sun burns down;) hopefully by then it will just be a question of which sun you decide to live near....
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Yes, obviously profit is evil and is never good for anything. That's not even remotely insinuated by any rational interpretation of what I said. The fact is short term profit can make people make bad decisions. For things such as nuclear power, which have great ramifications should anything go seriously wrong, a similarly long-range viewpoint is needed, which is simply not achievable in a profit-only motivation, which is by design limited only to the working tenure of whoever is in place, making decisions at that time. This, while the impact of their decisions may be felt by those hundreds of years down the road.
Safer than an airplane? It would have to be 1000000x safer than *walking* to answer for the potential catastrophes it could create. So far, it probably is. But it's a fairly limited set of data, so you'd have to forgive reasonable people still be less than convinced, especially if they are not nuclear engineers.
So you have faith, that's great. I want more than faith. I want crazy, amazingly intrusive and transparent oversight. Because I want to be really, really, REALLY sure someone isn't cutting a corner on a nuke plant to make a quarterly profit goal.
Beyond that, maybe you're right and maybe pebble bed reactors are the answer. If so, then the nuclear power community is wasting a prime opportunity to get PR out there, NOW, demonstrating why that is the case. Maybe you should get mad at them for sitting on their thumbs. But don't get mad at people who are not willing to trust a "free market" to make the best long-term decisions consistently without regulation in place. Since the ideal solution in a 'free market' is to find a place as close as possible, to minimize transport costs, to dump the waste generated by the cheapest possible nuclear station.
Ok, so the prices you give are not relevant to the us except for the high range prices.
I'm keenly interested in electric power. I live in the US, in the northeast, so it gets cold. I have to be able to drive 30 miles at a whack.. NO less, under any circumstances.. to make it worthwhile to have a particular car (until I sell my house, unfortunately, I'm stuck commuting). while Driving, I will need heat for part of the year and I have to be able to drive at least 45 miles per hour unless I want to be "that asshole" from my house to my office.
Lucky for me, I get fairly green electricity at my home simply by choosing who I pay to generate it, so that's nice. Unfortunately, it's 0.13/kwh and up, but hey, I'll pay it. at 26kBTUs per $1 vs gasoline's 41kBTUs per $1 (at current $3/gallon gas), it's hardly "1/10th" gas costs though.
But, the car I need does not appear to exist yet, in the US, for a price I can afford, being someone who has never owned a car worth more than $10k in my life. Which also includes nearly every other car I see on the road in my region. Dropping $15k on top of the cost of a car (for its body) is just plain not feasible, no matter how much I want it.
You're right to raise awareness, but you've got the language and the attitude of a zealot. Be careful you don't sour more people to your cause than you convert.
Those price conversions include batteries?
If so, Of what kind of range?
And you can get Honda or Toyaota to do plug in conversions here in the US??
hardly. Most of the best fun I ever had was competing with friends, and if you had a good game or a good contest, saying so it just honest, hardly "stupid". The "I'll get you next time" is implied, or you wouldn't keep playing unless you like losing. There is no need to focus on the need to win. The idea that playing the game is fun by itself, and it's fun because you try to win, not because you have to win is a pretty good lesson to learn, IMHO.
The GP was basically saying that idea makers are irrelevant to him because they do not complete the delivery of a product to HIM, and implicitly, it advocated for the current all-to-common situation of an exploiter profiting because they deliver the value - that stance is what I am disagreeing with, as it seems awful short sighted to focus on only one link of the chain and value that to the exclusion of all other links. Agreed on that at least? Obviously the rest of this is speculation based on that core idea.
A society that allows its thinkers to wither and die (or, in modern terms, to go unrewarded with money earned from the ideas) eventually selects out thinkers. Not entirely, not immediately, but over generations, they must be lessened. Whether by actual natural selection, or by the neglect of the "myth of the inventor" or whatever you want to call it when society raises archetypes up for people to see as examples (such as a successful businessman, the idea of which makes other people want to be successful businessmen).
The only ways around this are creating structures that ensure the idea-maker is rewarded WITH the idea-exploiter, or to require that idea-makers also learn to exploit their own ideas. We currently do a little of both, if the idea-maker is resourced enough to patent, he has some claim, but in general many industries are littered with people with amazing ideas who die broke because they are not exploiters.
Requiring people to distract themselves from the fields in which they can make their ideas, in order to learn to how to exploit their ideas (i.e., learn about business), reduces the amount of time and effort they can spend on making the ideas in the first place. That's not great for society (reducing available ideas), though it's not always horrible either. But it does mean the society rewards self-reliance, rather than interdependance, and that is wasteful duplication of effort (someone else already learned how to exploit) as well as running counter to the entire point of a society, as I said.
The most efficient and beneficial long-term situation would be for idea-makers and idea-exploiters to work together, rather than allowing exploiters to exploit while ignoring the source of their ideas, and allowing that "golden geese", as it were, to wither, whether by a relative lack of mates because you are not 'successful' or because of a lack of acclaim drawing others into the realm of making ideas.
You can disagree with me if you like, but I hope at least that is clear enough for you to follow this time.
But it takes both kinds. Imagine this actually involved natural selection, and we were selecting for one or the other... because, in a way, we are. Shouldn't people who have the ideas be rewarded at least somewhat, by others who profit on the fruits of their labor?
To learn about business, means NOT learning more about your chosen field. You would have everyone be a generalist rather than allowing for any specialization?
If so, that is absolutely against the entire idea of a society at all, which is predicted on the division of labor and interdependance resulting in a far superior situation than everyone trying to be completely self-reliant.
Perhaps you would prefer we live by the "law of the jungle" in all things? If not, then why here?
That's funny. I listen all the time and I haven't paid a dime yet. Weird, your definition of "free" and mine must be really different.
Commercial television is free too, you know. I didn't say commercial free, after all.
Regardless of your oversensitivity to a very small amount of broadcast time being related to keeping the broadcasts alive, the business model is valid, and thriving. No, they are not relying ONLY on voluntary, unsolicited donations. I'm sorry, we don't live in utopia. But occasionally solicited donations do, in fact, represent a very significant revenue stream. Combined with a few other ways of garnering some cash, as I have already mentioned, it allows things to work quite acceptably for most of us.
You're wrong about the validity of the business model.
For almost 40 years public broadcasting has followed exactly this model, with total anonymity of its listeners and viewers. Sure, they get funding from other sources; and so can musicians (live shows, mercandise, comissions).
The "pay what you like" method is completely valid as one source of income in a business model that has been demonstrated to be VERY successful so far.
Squint a different way, and you could say the artists have inspired people to pay for their advertising for their live shows, merchandise, and possible future comission work.
Who, exactly, is going to stop buying cheap coal power first, if additional control is not put on the market? Whoever does is at a competitive disadvantage. It's a gigantic game of prisoner's dilemna, and you're going to gamble that everyone, down to the mass of consumers, is going to choose tit for tat, "if you do it I will too"?
No, you're right, the free market will definitely take care of it. Because the price of coal will naturally rise before it has catastrophic effects on people who don't live next to coal plants, right? And if not, when those catastrophic effects become more well known, people will still naturally jump at being the first to disadvantage themselves to use more expensive power to save themselves with no guarantee that everyone else will follow, right? Or, naturally the price of nuclear will fall to make coal obsolete on this time scale, somehow.
Now, bear in mind, this is nothing less than the survival of many people you are discussing here. So if there is any reasonable room for questioning that these scenarios will indeed occur on a time frame that happens to beat the time frame in which inaction might cause major problems, then a reasonable person would indeed take a "need to be managed by experts" arguement.
Because... and I'll just say this one time... yes, free markets can't do everything. There, I said it! Let it go. It's ok. They do a lot! Free Markets can be good! But they are not good at everything, and ultimately they serve those who benefit from the markets primarily, which is not always the same as saying "people" on a more general scale.
that's not what he said. what he said is that market forces drive firms to cut costs, and that cost cutting shouldn't be the primary goal when something this important is at stake.
One company prioritizing short term profits... or one person at one company... over safety, and you can have a significant zone of uninhabitable land for at least a couple of generations, if not many.
Sometimes, the dollar figure is not an acceptable measure of risk and reward, to a point. The point is still there, you can't protect against everything all the time, but sometimes the point needs to be shifted in the interest of the public, not the profit.
that's a horrible example. Why would a young person need to know their phone number?
In the old days, you learned it by giving it to people all the time.
These days, all of your friends have caller id. Call them once and they have your number. you never have to give it to anyone.
Personally I really hope I am more family-focused when I'm older than I am now, when I'm fairly young and still self-absorbed as I build for my future.
if they really wanted to study this, they would have to test for random information. Like how well the youngsters can memorize strings of numbers. Otherwise, we're just wringing hands over the fact that we don't have to personally track the same details we used to have to track in daily living.
That doesn't mean less details though. and it doesn't mean we are lesser beings. Hell, older people still can't program VCRs, often times. Does that make them lesser people? What about people who can't touch type, or thumb type? Are young people more able to create logic structures for scripts or playlist filters?
How about a real case for there even being a problem?
I'm not sure I follow your sustainability angle. What is the nature of the current problem, they over consume cows and potatoes significantly enough that correcting such a problem would have a real impact?
as far as mcdonalds is concerned, it would also increase their quality. I should know, being a former employee ;) but seriously, that would be win-win for them, for sure.
I can't even tell you how much I would pay for a robotic cooking system, but $500 would have me camping out at the store waiting. That's an hour a day reclaimed for whatever other task I care to partake in, without paying the price of eating crappy food, presumably. If I could just type what I want for meals (with recommendations a la netflix queue), train it to order the food components, and communicate with it to sync with my daily movements to have food ready when I wanted it.... shit, that would be worth nearly anything I could afford. I'd even be willing to unpack the shipment and buy add ons intended for particular food items (now, for $19.99 buy the lettuce shredder upgrade to add salad to your list of available food products! Now, for $39.99 buy the wok upgrade for stir fries! but wait, there's more!). Hell, a company that could pull this together would have me as a willing and completely enthusiastic customer for the rest of my life.
I can't be the only person who not only does not have the time, but absolutely hates cooking, can I?
how many people listen to NPR and aren't members?
Does it matter? enough are. And a lot of times, it's not that "oh, no one cares", it's just that people don't feel they always have to be the one footing the bill. I haven't been a member myself, but I will be someday soon. And when I do, I have no problem footing more of the bill than I would have otherwise if I am able to do so. And, I don't feel bad about not paying right now. Right now it would be a pain in the ass for me. In a year or two, much less so.
This experiment with radiohead is a resounding success. Yes, 60% of downloaders didn't pay. But, for a freely available file, heck that's a pretty good ratio! So a bunch of people aren't really big fans, or are not in a place to buy the album really right now, and they downloaded it for free. Maybe they'll like it and go a live show. Maybe they will share it with a friend (advertise) for free. Who cares?
Furthermore, if they had to pay, how many of those 60% would never have downloaded it in the first place? How do you even know that they like radiohead? What percentage of them downloaded it and hated it?
As this thing becomes more common, the question is not about the people who don't pay... it's about how do you inspire enough people to WANT to pay you. period.
How about, not being a complete coward, accepting that life has some risk, and moving on?
Do we really need a babysitter watching over us every step of our lives?
If so, go to jail. They watch pretty close in there. You can even get put in solitary if you're that scared. Let the rest of us live, please. Thanks!
In my state, bars don't even accept out of state ID if you look underage.
Regardless, a universal ID is not an acceptable price to pay to "fight underage drinking". yes, I know, won't we think of the children! But in this case, I'd rather think of the adults, and what they tend to do with too much consolidation of power.
Are you serious?
A computer wonk refers to training people to fit your corporate culture as "reprogramming" and that's evil??
Are you really serious?
I'm sorry, I don't know squat about google, but I can say as a business owner that once you have established a business model and a corporate culture you want to continue to grow and nurish, you need team players. You need people who are willing to execute the company plan, not their last company's plan.
are you guys really reaching this hard for reasons to dislike google? Haven't they done other stuff you can legitimately get mad at?. When I'm looking at a new hire, one of the BIGGEST issues is, "can this person work here, help us achieve our goals, and be happy doing it?" If they are not willing to do business our way, work to our standards, work as a team player, then hiring them would be disasterous to both them, and my company. that's lose-lose, no good for anybody. It does me no good to hire someone who can do X, if they can't also do it while working with the systems we have established, with the people we have in place, in a way that their co-workers can anticipate and work with, to a high level of quality and with a minimum of retraining.
Anyone who doesn't talk about "assimilation", "reprogramming", or other such language when talking about bringing in new hires to an existing company structure has no idea what the hell they are talking about. Grow up.
I personally have gotten my grandmother a mac so she wouldn't have to worry about viruses and malware.
Luckily for her, she's not a porn fan, and so she is still, as of today, still 100% safe from viruses, worms and trojans, because she uses a mac.
Sorry to bust your arguement, but it's not only a reason to purchase a mac, it's a damn good one.
no, seriously, .dmgs are not automatically opened when you download them. You're first warned that it is an application, and then it asks you for an admin password in order to install. At least, that is what my mac does, each and every time I download an application from the internet, and that was a default setting.
exactly what else do you want?
not true at all, because the buck is also orders of magnitude smaller. 9/11 took years to plan and execute, scads of cash, a relatively large team, and had a high risk of failure as they depended on a lot of factors the terrorists had no control over (weather, plane schedules, etc).
The queue attack requires a duffel or bomb vest, a willing volunteer and a holiday weekend.
I would bet you could you a whole lot more queue attacks than 30 for what it took to pull off 9/11, and you don't need anyone other than the bomb maker to have any special training at all (such as how to pilot a commercial airplane).
I'll take the point that the storage issue is apparently not that reasonable (though there are plenty of limiting factors on the use of that energy dealing with extraction, waste, etc) if your numbers are correct, regarding uranium. I'll do you one better and point out that it's not inconceivable that we could learn to release energy from all matter someday, since everything in the universe is just condensed energy after all.
I would never argue that we have our current infrastructure for any reason other than it has made sense; from an economic standpoint, so far.
The problem with our current infrastructure in particular is that it can "go south" a lot faster than we can prepare an alternative. A good size war in the middle east, and most of the world economy implodes. That could happen in weeks, not 20 years. Venezuala decides not to sell to the US anymore, and the US is in recession (or, trotting off to war again). This is not a stable situation for all kinds of reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with environmentalism; and the free market works well on stable situations, but it's not so good at security against future threats, because people don't value security against a threat until it has bitten them. Apparently the nips of gasoline refineries shutting down temporarily and such haven't been nip enough to get people serious, but that doesn't mean the threat is not there. And it will take more than just shrugging and saying that someone, someday, might decide to do something, when technology is ready and it becomes profitable. That's a pretty big risk to ignore in the meantime.
Throw any kind of environmental arguement into the mix, and the case just gets more compelling that we should, in fact, get off of oil in particular as fast as possible, as much as we possibly can.
Ultimately, if we want to exist sustainably, without just passing complications on to future generations, I suppose the 7 generation rule is a good one. If what we're doing is sustainable for 7 generations, to the best of our ability to tell, then it's good enough. I suppose that's a more realistic stance than the net-input limitation, perhaps.
Maybe the 7 generation rule is even too much. But simply waiting for the free market to take a threat seriously is not an adequate response.
Not necessarily. Or are you really arguing that the billions of years the sun will be around is really on the same scale as coal, uranium or oil?
That would seem to be a head in the sand position, one of politics and emotion rather than rationality. I'm sure you might find some circumstance where we might extend the use of all those things for awhile, but not on the scale of the sun. A few orders of magnitude make all the difference.
Oooh, that's an interesting idea... gravitational. I hadn't thought of that as an "energy input" before. Thanks!
I noted the eventual lack of sustainability in another post.. you could go far enough and say the 2nd law dooms everything to nothingness and every time we use energy we just speed up entropy. But, a more immediate issue is how to keep the rock we're living on habitable for the longest period of time, and preferably healthy for us and the other life forms we depend on (whether we are aware of our dependancy or not). I suppose a more accurate term than "source" is "very long term input", perhaps.
and frankly, I'm not buying any current estimates for timeframes of energy source depletion. Energy is just too useful. As we figure out how to make it do more and more things, our usage will likely not grow at a steady rate, it should increase exponentially. Maybe not in steady curves. Perhaps in steady curves with periodic jumps. Energy use might have been linear for centuries plotted against population growth... then the car was invented, for example. So I don't really buy arguements that we don't have any concerns for such a long term that it would be silly to worry about it now.
Obviously that's not scientifically rigorous and I understand that. Still, while we may not need to be perfectly sustainable in 5 years, it does seem that it should be a priority, right there along with learning how to live on rocks other than just this one (which will probably be best ensured by being able to use inputs we know exist in other areas, like solar and gravitational forces). maybe not the highest of high priorities, but it should be an area of serious research and experimentation at least. And the serious preference for attempting to reach sustainability is not a belief to be ridiculed, IMHO.
but we don't have a source of uranium, we only have a storehouse of it. The only thing that brings a reliable input of energy to earth is the sun. If our usage of energy exceeds that which the sun can provide, then we are on a path towards energy depletion, which (depending on our rate of energy usage over that limit) will require either the mining of energy offplanet, or the reduction of energy usage on some time scale. Note I include energy to grow plants and such in that simplistic equation, not just electricity/heat.
;) hopefully by then it will just be a question of which sun you decide to live near....
We have quite a bit of stored energy of course, but barring a massive population crash, or a sudden radical discovery that allows for the reduction of energy use, sooner or later we're going to have to abide by the limits of the energy input to the earth, right?
And even that only buys us until the sun burns down