Your link says 3 liters of fuel oil? That's about 1 hour's worth of fossil fuel usage for the average living American. Cremation probably takes longer than that, so you actually burn less carbon while you're literally on fire than while you were alive.
at least you're getting *something* of value at the end.
Yeah, a lifetime's worth of accumulated mercury and other heavy metals, a bellyfull of e. coli, and any parasites, viruses, and prescription drugs you happened to have when you died. Thanks for your generosity.
I mean, whatever you and your family want to do with your body is fine with me, but this is just idiotic from an environmental perspective. The environmental value of your body's chemical components is totally negligible compared to what you consume over your lifetime. I mean, I eat my weight's worth of food in a few months, so returning my body's nitrogen to the farmland is almost worthless. My share of fossil fuel burning is about 17 tonnes of carbon per year, so cremating the couple of kilograms of carbon I contain makes no difference.
The only real environmental problem with burial is that it ties up valuable urban land in a cemetery forever. Which is definitely an issue, but it's easy to solve: just get yourself cremated. This composting thing is expensive, unsafe, and a waste of time.
If you stacked all of Russia's grand plans to do cool stuff in space that never amounted to anything on top of each other, you could *walk* to the moon.
Nuclear weapons create earthquakes, and you can roughly estimate the size of the bomb from the magnitude of the earthquake. In this case, we're looking at a 5.1 magnitude quake:
This law is a little sketchy (earthquake size depends on how tightly the bomb is packed into the ground), but taking it at face value I calculate a 45 kiloton blast. That's nowhere near a true fusion H-bomb (typically hundreds of kilotons up to megatons): it's consistent with a large fission bomb, a boosted fission weapon, or a failed fusion test, where the fusion secondary failed to ignite.
This sounded like a fine idea until they mentioned USB ports. Those suckers are gonna be full of gum, or worse, in 60 seconds. The fact that they're even trying to provide USB charging makes me worry that they totally don't understand how to protect public hardware from vandalism.
If somebody taking a fire axe to your touchscreen isn't part of your interface design document, you don't know what you're doing.
If that is true, then as a citizen of the USA, I think, "holy fuck, the EU is doomed"
Hey, I "migrated" from my home state to Massachusetts for work, and became eligible for Massachusetts benefits the day I signed a lease. What's the difference?
You're falling into the trap of assuming your opposition is naive rather than trying to actually understand their position.
That's not to say these programs are useless. They're essentially wealth redistribution, which can be handy to counter forces leading to income inequality
That's not a handy side benefit, that's the whole damned point. Some of the folks pushing mandatory minimum wage laws and basic income requirements have taken Econ 101, they know that transferring money to the poor will raise prices. But the net cost will be borne by the middle and upper classes. (A little too much the middle class for my taste, but Robin Hooding ain't easy.)
the only way for this to actually work, is if your average productivity is sufficiently high enough that a livable wage constitutes a small fraction of the mean productivity. considering the GDP per capita of the U.S. (one of the wealthier nations) is only around $55k/yr, a modest livable wage of say $20k/yr is a substantial fraction of that average. A 5:1 or 10:1 ratio is about where I think it would start to have a shot of working.
The U.S.'s GDP per *capita* is $55k/yr, but we're not paying basic income to children, and retirees already have one. What matters is the U.S.'s GDP per *worker*, which is $115k per person -- that's above the 5:1 ratio you think might be feasible. So according to your criterion (which, I should mention, is entirely pulled out of your ass), it's worth giving basic income a shot.
This is why there are many people that think the EU is going to rip itself apart if it doesn't improve immigration control with regards to income.
Economic disparity between states is almost as bad in the U.S., but Minnesota doesn't complain that Mississippi is stealing all of its wealth -- well, not much anyway -- because we're all Americans. In the end it comes down to national identity, and where you draw the line between "us" and "them".
Uh, guys? I'm politically liberal and in favor of a basic income, but it really doesn't work on a small local scale with open borders. Utrecht says it's cheaper to pay their 10,000 unemployed people a basic income than to administer a draconian welfare bureaucracy, but if you're handing out money with no strings attached, a lot of unemployed people from around the EU are going to move in to take you up on the deal. How does the cost/benefit look when you're trying to support ten times as many unemployed people as you had before? Sure, the idea is that some of them will get back on their feet and start contributing to the tax base, but that's not going to happen if you can only afford to pay them 1/10th of a basic income, or if you up the taxes on their potential employers by a factor of 10.
To keep this from happening, you need to either restrict immigration into the basic income zone -- which you can't do in the EU -- or implement it on a large enough scale that the tax base can handle the immigration spike, and national, cultural, and language barriers limit the size of the influx.
You can do this across the EU or US. Doing it for one small European city is just madness.
Absolutely. The scale gap between suborbital and orbital rockets is so huge, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic might as well be building hot-air balloons.
God dammit, self, if you're going to make a pedantic post, don't screw it up or the other pedants will eat you. Pu-238: good for spacecraft, bad for bombs. Pu-239: Good for bombs, bad for spacecraft.
I have to wonder how this will be viewed outside the US
Assuming they know more about nuclear materials than some Slashdot anonymous coward, which is likely, they won't give a shit because they'll know that this is the kind of plutonium you build space probes from, not the kind you make nuclear weapons from. 238 is not 235.
I was gonna say, "well, seeing what happens when you go too fast is part of a test pilot / driver's job", until the article mentioned bringing kids along. Ugh, that's reprehensible.
Is that actually true, though? I thought law enforcement, at least, identified fingerprints via a series of distinctive "features" rather than a full image of the fingerprint. In theory, couldn't these features be listed as to their presence/absence and coordinates relative to the center of the fingerprint, creating a consistent hashable value?
If you're not sure who Cengage is, they're one of the the companies that charges $300 for a college Intro Physics textbook and then locks half the content and all the problems behind a website that requires a one-time-use registration card, so that used textbooks are worthless.
Clearly nobody read the link, because it's one big fat ad for a third-party genome-analysis tool and nobody's complained yet. Come on, people, keep up!
Let's talk tactical ethics. I don't follow this battle closely, but if I ignore the underlying issues and accept the facts as you present them, the MRAs' lack of concern about collateral damage means that both sides are *not* equally terrible.
Whatever the ethics of attacking your debate opponent's career, attacking their coworkers' careers is definitely not okay. Whichever side is doing it.
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Your link says 3 liters of fuel oil? That's about 1 hour's worth of fossil fuel usage for the average living American. Cremation probably takes longer than that, so you actually burn less carbon while you're literally on fire than while you were alive.
Yeah, a lifetime's worth of accumulated mercury and other heavy metals, a bellyfull of e. coli, and any parasites, viruses, and prescription drugs you happened to have when you died. Thanks for your generosity.
I mean, whatever you and your family want to do with your body is fine with me, but this is just idiotic from an environmental perspective. The environmental value of your body's chemical components is totally negligible compared to what you consume over your lifetime. I mean, I eat my weight's worth of food in a few months, so returning my body's nitrogen to the farmland is almost worthless. My share of fossil fuel burning is about 17 tonnes of carbon per year, so cremating the couple of kilograms of carbon I contain makes no difference.
The only real environmental problem with burial is that it ties up valuable urban land in a cemetery forever. Which is definitely an issue, but it's easy to solve: just get yourself cremated. This composting thing is expensive, unsafe, and a waste of time.
If you stacked all of Russia's grand plans to do cool stuff in space that never amounted to anything on top of each other, you could *walk* to the moon.
Nuclear weapons create earthquakes, and you can roughly estimate the size of the bomb from the magnitude of the earthquake. In this case, we're looking at a 5.1 magnitude quake:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ear...
There's an empirical law for calculating the size of an underground nuclear blast from the magnitude of the earthquake.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This law is a little sketchy (earthquake size depends on how tightly the bomb is packed into the ground), but taking it at face value I calculate a 45 kiloton blast. That's nowhere near a true fusion H-bomb (typically hundreds of kilotons up to megatons): it's consistent with a large fission bomb, a boosted fission weapon, or a failed fusion test, where the fusion secondary failed to ignite.
Pretty much, yeah. One of the most common types was called a "fortress" phone for a reason.
Vandals have an interest in pooping too, but take a look at your average public restroom.
This sounded like a fine idea until they mentioned USB ports. Those suckers are gonna be full of gum, or worse, in 60 seconds. The fact that they're even trying to provide USB charging makes me worry that they totally don't understand how to protect public hardware from vandalism.
If somebody taking a fire axe to your touchscreen isn't part of your interface design document, you don't know what you're doing.
Hey, I "migrated" from my home state to Massachusetts for work, and became eligible for Massachusetts benefits the day I signed a lease. What's the difference?
You're falling into the trap of assuming your opposition is naive rather than trying to actually understand their position.
That's not a handy side benefit, that's the whole damned point. Some of the folks pushing mandatory minimum wage laws and basic income requirements have taken Econ 101, they know that transferring money to the poor will raise prices. But the net cost will be borne by the middle and upper classes. (A little too much the middle class for my taste, but Robin Hooding ain't easy.)
The U.S.'s GDP per *capita* is $55k/yr, but we're not paying basic income to children, and retirees already have one. What matters is the U.S.'s GDP per *worker*, which is $115k per person -- that's above the 5:1 ratio you think might be feasible. So according to your criterion (which, I should mention, is entirely pulled out of your ass), it's worth giving basic income a shot.
Economic disparity between states is almost as bad in the U.S., but Minnesota doesn't complain that Mississippi is stealing all of its wealth -- well, not much anyway -- because we're all Americans. In the end it comes down to national identity, and where you draw the line between "us" and "them".
What's the "special arrangement for homeless people", and does it lock out the economic migrants I'm talking about?
Uh, guys? I'm politically liberal and in favor of a basic income, but it really doesn't work on a small local scale with open borders. Utrecht says it's cheaper to pay their 10,000 unemployed people a basic income than to administer a draconian welfare bureaucracy, but if you're handing out money with no strings attached, a lot of unemployed people from around the EU are going to move in to take you up on the deal. How does the cost/benefit look when you're trying to support ten times as many unemployed people as you had before? Sure, the idea is that some of them will get back on their feet and start contributing to the tax base, but that's not going to happen if you can only afford to pay them 1/10th of a basic income, or if you up the taxes on their potential employers by a factor of 10.
To keep this from happening, you need to either restrict immigration into the basic income zone -- which you can't do in the EU -- or implement it on a large enough scale that the tax base can handle the immigration spike, and national, cultural, and language barriers limit the size of the influx.
You can do this across the EU or US. Doing it for one small European city is just madness.
Absolutely. The scale gap between suborbital and orbital rockets is so huge, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic might as well be building hot-air balloons.
God dammit, self, if you're going to make a pedantic post, don't screw it up or the other pedants will eat you. Pu-238: good for spacecraft, bad for bombs. Pu-239: Good for bombs, bad for spacecraft.
Assuming they know more about nuclear materials than some Slashdot anonymous coward, which is likely, they won't give a shit because they'll know that this is the kind of plutonium you build space probes from, not the kind you make nuclear weapons from. 238 is not 235.
You've also got a lot of racists, too, apparently.
If your brother's destroyed that many cars, maybe the problem isn't the "Asians".
I'm not sure you can take credit for overcoming your rocket disaster when you "solve" the problem by using some other company's rocket.
After decades of treating the Internet as the greatest threat to American government, *now* you want our help? Yeah, no.
I was gonna say, "well, seeing what happens when you go too fast is part of a test pilot / driver's job", until the article mentioned bringing kids along. Ugh, that's reprehensible.
Best. Anonymous Coward. Ever. Thanks!
Is that actually true, though? I thought law enforcement, at least, identified fingerprints via a series of distinctive "features" rather than a full image of the fingerprint. In theory, couldn't these features be listed as to their presence/absence and coordinates relative to the center of the fingerprint, creating a consistent hashable value?
If you're not sure who Cengage is, they're one of the the companies that charges $300 for a college Intro Physics textbook and then locks half the content and all the problems behind a website that requires a one-time-use registration card, so that used textbooks are worthless.
Clearly nobody read the link, because it's one big fat ad for a third-party genome-analysis tool and nobody's complained yet. Come on, people, keep up!
Let's talk tactical ethics. I don't follow this battle closely, but if I ignore the underlying issues and accept the facts as you present them, the MRAs' lack of concern about collateral damage means that both sides are *not* equally terrible.
Whatever the ethics of attacking your debate opponent's career, attacking their coworkers' careers is definitely not okay. Whichever side is doing it.