I agree with your point, but that's the most ridiculous example of a cross-border crime I've ever heard. How about using smuggling, mail fraud, or some other crime that actually happens?
If Mabie really has engaged in fraud and extortion in his business practices, wouldn't it be interesting if he was also lying about his military service, dishonoring veterans like yourself? It's a long shot, but you never know.
Many of the comments here question the ethics of Valador. Here's an interesting tidbit: the CEO, Kevin Mabie, is a U.S. military veteran, disabled in the line of duty. Check this out.. Which raises two questions:
1) How dare you people dishonor a distinguished military veteran, who lost his... something... defending your freedoms? Don't you realize that the moment he was discharged from active duty, he instantly became a paragon of virtue, unable to lie, cheat, or defraud, and thus this accusation by SpaceX is not only baseless, but treasonous?
2) How difficult is it to fake this sort of thing? And does anyone in the Slashdot community care enough to go the extra mile to check his credentials, and possibly make some *real* news?
I can't find a source for your 40% statistic, and as bad as the lead problem is, I doubt environmental lead is as widely distributed in China as, it was, say, in the heyday of leaded gasoline in the U.S.
But your point about Upton Sinclair is dead on. China is in the middle of its industrial revolution: it's seen the benefits of industrialism, but is only beginning to experience the downside. China in 2011 is the U.S. in 1900. Its Upton Sinclair, Big Bill Haywood, Samuel Gompers and Susan B. Anthony haven't found their voices yet.
But they will. And in a nation of 100 million PCs and 500 million cell phones, no pathetic "Great Firewall of China" will be able to stop them.
I'm not saying the current system is anywhere near a utopia, but for all its ugly faults, let's look at the alternative.
Is chronic asthma from pollution better than chronic malnutrition? I say YES. Is a 45-hour work week in a factory better than an 80-hour work week in a rice paddy? I say YES. Is living in a cramped apartment block with poor electricity and heating better than living in a tin-roofed shack with no walls or utilities? I say YES. Is dying at age 80 from lung cancer better than dying at age 5 from cholera? I say YES.
And I think most of a billion Chinese will agree with me.
Re:BitCoins are simply a hobby, not a currency
on
Bitcoin Price Crashes
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· Score: 1
Agree. But you're missing one more key way bitcoins are not a currency. It's so important it's printed on the dollar bill: "this bill is legal tender for all debts, public and private". The first rule of money is, you must be able to use it to buy *anything*. This is what separates money from company scrip, stocks, or tulip bulbs.
How do you ensure that your money will be universally accepted? That sounds like a really high bar to clear. Well, it's not so hard if you're a sovereign government.
"intensive purposes" signifies acceptance of current practice regardless of past intents. In fact, it implies that previously, "for all intents and purposes" meant something else.
Look it up. Everyone on the Internet, from the Urban Dictionary to the New York Times, agrees: you are wrong.
You're operating under the critical misconception that a whole billion Chinese have been elevated to high standards. (By the way, there are actually 1.3 billion now).
No, I don't believe that all 1.3 billion Chinese are shopping for Gucci in a chic Shanghai highrise shopping center right now, and I realize that true wealth is only found among the ruling and business class. And yes, I do know the population of China: one of the reasons I talked about the fate of "1 billion Chinese" rather than 1.3 billion is because several hundred million are still stuck working on the same rice fields their grandfathers farmed.
But while only a few have become wealthy, the majority have seen huge relative gains, and very few Chinese could be said to have been totally "left behind". If you look at the data and research any statistic that applies to the population as a whole rather than the elite -- % of population earning below $2 a day, food calories consumed per person, electricity use per person, infant mortality, access to clean water and improved sanitation, cell phone use -- all of these show huge gains that extend to (almost) all of society, not just the elite.
The ruling class and the business class are living well, and the other billion are just scraping by.
The definition of "just scraping by" has changed radically. Now it's, "can I afford a cell phone? A computer? Maybe a car someday?" rather than "will my child die of malnutrition this year?"
Are you dying of cholera? Are your children suffering from kwashiorkor? Is the price of a luxury good like a DVD player equal to your annual salary?
I'm looking at a scale that spans all of humanity and centuries of time. I do not consider a 4% increase in unemployment and a few percent drop in median real income a "collapse", especially when compared to the incredible increases in standard of living experienced by the Chinese. If the globalized economy is a seesaw, it's an incredibly imbalanced one.
People who oppose globalization should really think about this. In a couple of decades, the globalized economy has elevated a nation of a billion people from the bottom rung of world socioeconomic status to the solid middle ground. No question, the elevation of China has had some negative impacts on the economy of the developed world, but not so bad, really: the US economy has not collapsed during the process, and its manufacturing industry has been weakened but survives. No question, the process has had some negative impacts on Chinese workers, but nothing compared to the servitude, abuse, and death of the West's own industrial revolution. And finally, no question that political freedoms in China have not changed with the economic times, but I consider the *ability* to communicate a prerequisite to the *freedom* to speak, and the Chinese government may soon realize it has a tiger by the tail in that regard.
And consider on the other hand, the positives. A billion people are now able to live in comfortable housing, free of disease and pestilence, able to travel across the continent and participate in global dialogue. A good chunk of these billion people are now in a position to buy US-made products like World of Warcraft, Ford Explorers, and a million things made in China, but designed in the US by 3M, IBM, and Microsoft.
A rising tide may not lift all boats, and it surely doesn't lift all boats equally, but still, a billion boats is a damned good start.
I'm all in favor of subsidies as a general proposition, for the reasons you mention. However, corn ethanol does not meet the criteria of any of your justifications.
Production: is not in itself a good thing, if the thing you're producing is not useful. * Research: all these billions funneled into corn ethanol have not led to new insight into how to make the process provide positive net energy. Ethanol production turns one gallon of gasoline and 20 pounds of corn into one gallon of ethanol. * Desirable industry: while farmers may come and go, agribusiness as a whole is doing just fine. * Push off the ground: the subsidies we've provided have turned corn ethanol into a gigantic business, but despite the economy of scale it provides no useful service to anyone * Critical to defense: Ethanol per se is not vital, and while food is, America is not going to stop farming any time soon * Loss to foreign competition: this is not itself a bad thing. * Staples in reach of the poor: this subsidy *harms* the poor, by inflating food prices while having no influence on gas prices.
I have no problem with subsidies being used to bootstrap economies of scale. The problem is that no matter how big a scale you operate at -- and we've now tried it at a titanic scale -- corn ethanol gives you essentially zero net energy gain. These subsidies achieve nothing but providing a cash pipeline to Big Agriculture.
What? Oh, you thought the tariff elimination I was talking about applied to imported *sugar* too? Hahaha, don't be ridiculous. The bill only eliminates tariffs on *ethanol*. It'll be a cold day in hell before high fructose corn syrup goes away.
It's simple. Gasoline lobby + food manufacturers' lobby > corn lobby. This bill also drops tariffs on imported sugar cane based ethanol, which will make the raw materials for 10% ethanol/gas mixtures cheaper. Meanwhile, prices on good ol' corn syrup will drop, since it's not being made into ethanol anymore.
Who said anything about E10 (10% ethanol-gas mixtures) going away? The same bill eliminates the tariff on ethanol imports from outside the US, which allows Brazil to send us good cheap sugar cane ethanol. This stuff has its own problems, but at least has an energy return on energy invested (EROI) greater than one.
Fans of Palin, opponents of Palin looking to screw with her reputation, trolls who think this is funny, random lunatics... could be any or all of the above.
Anyone who tries to score political points based on anonymous Wiki edits is as big an idiot as Palin herself.
This question got me curious, so I did a little homework. What are the odds of a building in Maryland being struck by a tornado during its lifetime?
Found an AMAZING website: The Tornado History Project, which has statistics for all recorded tornadoes in the U.S., integrated with Google Maps and with a spreadsheet export function. So I grabbed the stats for every historical tornado in Maryland, used the site's track width and length data to find out the area of land affected by each one, and added them all up. The usual caveats about rounding error, reporting bias, etc. apply.
The result: about 43 square km of Maryland has been hit by tornados in the last 60 years. The area of Maryland is 32,000 km^2, so the odds of a random patch of land in Maryland being hit by a tornado over a 60-year period are roughly 1 in 750. (60 years happens to be roughly the useful life of your average building.)
Is this risk high enough to be worth redesigning the building for? I guess it depends on the consequences of loss. It's not a negligible risk, but if the data is backed up elsewhere, I wouldn't worry about it myself. I can think of plenty ofotherbuildings in the area whose loss would be more of a concern.
This question got me curious, so I did a little homework. What are the odds of a building in Maryland being struck by a tornado during its lifetime?
Found an AMAZING website: The Tornado History Project, which has statistics for all recorded tornadoes in the U.S., integrated with Google Maps and with a spreadsheet export function. So I grabbed the stats for every historical tornado in Maryland, used the site's track width and length data to find out the area of land affected by each one, and added them all up. The usual caveats about rounding error, reporting bias, etc. apply.
The result: about 43 square km of Maryland has been hit by tornados in the last 60 years. The area of Maryland is 32,000 km^2, so the odds of a random patch of land in Maryland being hit by a tornado are roughly 1 in 750.
Is this risk high enough to be worth redesigning the building for? I guess it depends on the consequences of loss. It's not a negligible risk, but if the data is backed up elsewhere, I wouldn't worry about it myself. I can think of plenty ofotherbuildings in the area whose loss would be more of a concern.
Oh, also, the "weapon" paradigm totally misrepresents the asymmetry of offense vs defense. In your tank vs ak-47 example, yes, if you know about an AK-47, you can defend against it. But to defend against it you need a tank -- to negate a thousand-dollar threat you need a million-dollar defense. Your land mine analogy works the same: it's far more expensive and hazardous to clear a minefield than it is to deploy it.
But for cyber weapons, an attack that cost millions to research can be negated for pennies by typing "mysql_real_escape_string()" in the right place.
You're right that information is power even in conventional warfare, but I worry that calling them "cyber weapons" will totally mislead the people making policy decisions. If you're a government official funding conventional weapons, you fork over your $1 billion and you get a weapon system. 5 years later, when the shit hits the fan, you can pull it out of the arsenal and hurt people with it. Even 20 years later, it still does the job pretty well.
But if you buy $1 billion in "cyber weapons", five years later -- even six months later -- you've got absolutely nothing.
The idea of "Cyber Weapons" is a deliberately wrong paradigm whose only purpose is to wring money out of national defense agencies. A cyber attack is nothing more than an idea. If you know something about computer security which the other guy doesn't, you can attack him with it. But as soon as he (or his operating system or antivirus vendor) knows it too, you've got nothing.
This is completely unlike a weapon. An AK-47 is still deadly even if your opponent knows what an assault rifle is, but an unpatched SQL injection vulnerability is useless the moment your opponent learns about it.
You've clearly got more experience than me, which is great, but keep in mind my goal here. I'm not trying to prove that flywheels cannot be made safe, I'm trying to show that the "NIMBY fears" about them aren't completely ludicrous. As you yourself said:
Now, for the large stationary flywheels, lower speeds and higher mass is used. Those you don't want to be near
and those are the kind we're discussing, not portable vehicle flywheels. Burying them underground will certainly help, but are you certain that in the extraordinarily complex collision/detonation between flywheel and outer wall, none of the material will escape at high speed?
I also question your assertion that even a portable flywheel will burn up instantly inside its containment: there's not enough air. Stoichiometrically, to burn up a small 10 kg carbon flywheel you need about 30 kg of oxygen, which means 100 cubic meters of air --- a couple of shipping containers. So there's a risk of high-speed pieces of carbon flying out several meters from the flywheel. For larger flywheels, increase the volume proportionally.
I personally believe that flywheels can be made safe, and I trust good engineering, but the point of the above is that making them safe isn't easy. I personally think their low energy density is more intractable problem, but my point is that people are right to be cautious about them -- just like any high power energy source.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you can work a car analogy in there if you work at it.
I agree with your point, but that's the most ridiculous example of a cross-border crime I've ever heard. How about using smuggling, mail fraud, or some other crime that actually happens?
I'm not arguing that among veterans, fraud is common. I'm arguing that among fraudsters, false claims of military service are quite common.
http://www.justice.gov/usao/waw/press/2007/sep/operationstolenvalor.html
If Mabie really has engaged in fraud and extortion in his business practices, wouldn't it be interesting if he was also lying about his military service, dishonoring veterans like yourself? It's a long shot, but you never know.
Many of the comments here question the ethics of Valador. Here's an interesting tidbit: the CEO, Kevin Mabie, is a U.S. military veteran, disabled in the line of duty. Check this out.. Which raises two questions:
1) How dare you people dishonor a distinguished military veteran, who lost his ... something ... defending your freedoms? Don't you realize that the moment he was discharged from active duty, he instantly became a paragon of virtue, unable to lie, cheat, or defraud, and thus this accusation by SpaceX is not only baseless, but treasonous?
2) How difficult is it to fake this sort of thing? And does anyone in the Slashdot community care enough to go the extra mile to check his credentials, and possibly make some *real* news?
I can't find a source for your 40% statistic, and as bad as the lead problem is, I doubt environmental lead is as widely distributed in China as, it was, say, in the heyday of leaded gasoline in the U.S.
But your point about Upton Sinclair is dead on. China is in the middle of its industrial revolution: it's seen the benefits of industrialism, but is only beginning to experience the downside. China in 2011 is the U.S. in 1900. Its Upton Sinclair, Big Bill Haywood, Samuel Gompers and Susan B. Anthony haven't found their voices yet.
But they will. And in a nation of 100 million PCs and 500 million cell phones, no pathetic "Great Firewall of China" will be able to stop them.
I'm not saying the current system is anywhere near a utopia, but for all its ugly faults, let's look at the alternative.
Is chronic asthma from pollution better than chronic malnutrition? I say YES.
Is a 45-hour work week in a factory better than an 80-hour work week in a rice paddy? I say YES.
Is living in a cramped apartment block with poor electricity and heating better than living in a tin-roofed shack with no walls or utilities? I say YES.
Is dying at age 80 from lung cancer better than dying at age 5 from cholera? I say YES.
And I think most of a billion Chinese will agree with me.
Agree. But you're missing one more key way bitcoins are not a currency. It's so important it's printed on the dollar bill: "this bill is legal tender for all debts, public and private". The first rule of money is, you must be able to use it to buy *anything*. This is what separates money from company scrip, stocks, or tulip bulbs.
How do you ensure that your money will be universally accepted? That sounds like a really high bar to clear. Well, it's not so hard if you're a sovereign government.
Look it up. Everyone on the Internet, from the Urban Dictionary to the New York Times, agrees: you are wrong.
Ugh, URL error: "the data" should link to http://www.gapminder.org/
No, I don't believe that all 1.3 billion Chinese are shopping for Gucci in a chic Shanghai highrise shopping center right now, and I realize that true wealth is only found among the ruling and business class. And yes, I do know the population of China: one of the reasons I talked about the fate of "1 billion Chinese" rather than 1.3 billion is because several hundred million are still stuck working on the same rice fields their grandfathers farmed.
But while only a few have become wealthy, the majority have seen huge relative gains, and very few Chinese could be said to have been totally "left behind". If you look at the data and research any statistic that applies to the population as a whole rather than the elite -- % of population earning below $2 a day, food calories consumed per person, electricity use per person, infant mortality, access to clean water and improved sanitation, cell phone use -- all of these show huge gains that extend to (almost) all of society, not just the elite.
The definition of "just scraping by" has changed radically. Now it's, "can I afford a cell phone? A computer? Maybe a car someday?" rather than "will my child die of malnutrition this year?"
As for the ability to travel, consider that 230 *million* Chinese traveled from the cities where they work to their home towns this past Chinese new year. That's not just the elite business class: that's mobility for the working person.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/jan/27/china-railways-audio-slideshow
Are you dying of cholera? Are your children suffering from kwashiorkor? Is the price of a luxury good like a DVD player equal to your annual salary?
I'm looking at a scale that spans all of humanity and centuries of time. I do not consider a 4% increase in unemployment and a few percent drop in median real income a "collapse", especially when compared to the incredible increases in standard of living experienced by the Chinese. If the globalized economy is a seesaw, it's an incredibly imbalanced one.
People who oppose globalization should really think about this. In a couple of decades, the globalized economy has elevated a nation of a billion people from the bottom rung of world socioeconomic status to the solid middle ground. No question, the elevation of China has had some negative impacts on the economy of the developed world, but not so bad, really: the US economy has not collapsed during the process, and its manufacturing industry has been weakened but survives. No question, the process has had some negative impacts on Chinese workers, but nothing compared to the servitude, abuse, and death of the West's own industrial revolution. And finally, no question that political freedoms in China have not changed with the economic times, but I consider the *ability* to communicate a prerequisite to the *freedom* to speak, and the Chinese government may soon realize it has a tiger by the tail in that regard.
And consider on the other hand, the positives. A billion people are now able to live in comfortable housing, free of disease and pestilence, able to travel across the continent and participate in global dialogue. A good chunk of these billion people are now in a position to buy US-made products like World of Warcraft, Ford Explorers, and a million things made in China, but designed in the US by 3M, IBM, and Microsoft.
A rising tide may not lift all boats, and it surely doesn't lift all boats equally, but still, a billion boats is a damned good start.
I'm all in favor of subsidies as a general proposition, for the reasons you mention. However, corn ethanol does not meet the criteria of any of your justifications.
Production: is not in itself a good thing, if the thing you're producing is not useful.
* Research: all these billions funneled into corn ethanol have not led to new insight into how to make the process provide positive net energy. Ethanol production turns one gallon of gasoline and 20 pounds of corn into one gallon of ethanol.
* Desirable industry: while farmers may come and go, agribusiness as a whole is doing just fine.
* Push off the ground: the subsidies we've provided have turned corn ethanol into a gigantic business, but despite the economy of scale it provides no useful service to anyone
* Critical to defense: Ethanol per se is not vital, and while food is, America is not going to stop farming any time soon
* Loss to foreign competition: this is not itself a bad thing.
* Staples in reach of the poor: this subsidy *harms* the poor, by inflating food prices while having no influence on gas prices.
I have no problem with subsidies being used to bootstrap economies of scale. The problem is that no matter how big a scale you operate at -- and we've now tried it at a titanic scale -- corn ethanol gives you essentially zero net energy gain. These subsidies achieve nothing but providing a cash pipeline to Big Agriculture.
What? Oh, you thought the tariff elimination I was talking about applied to imported *sugar* too? Hahaha, don't be ridiculous. The bill only eliminates tariffs on *ethanol*. It'll be a cold day in hell before high fructose corn syrup goes away.
It's simple. Gasoline lobby + food manufacturers' lobby > corn lobby. This bill also drops tariffs on imported sugar cane based ethanol, which will make the raw materials for 10% ethanol/gas mixtures cheaper. Meanwhile, prices on good ol' corn syrup will drop, since it's not being made into ethanol anymore.
ADM loses, Chevron and Coca-Cola win.
Who said anything about E10 (10% ethanol-gas mixtures) going away? The same bill eliminates the tariff on ethanol imports from outside the US, which allows Brazil to send us good cheap sugar cane ethanol. This stuff has its own problems, but at least has an energy return on energy invested (EROI) greater than one.
Democrat, Republican, whatever. My political support goes for congressmen who believe in the laws of thermodynamics.
Fans of Palin, opponents of Palin looking to screw with her reputation, trolls who think this is funny, random lunatics... could be any or all of the above.
Anyone who tries to score political points based on anonymous Wiki edits is as big an idiot as Palin herself.
This question got me curious, so I did a little homework. What are the odds of a building in Maryland being struck by a tornado during its lifetime?
Found an AMAZING website: The Tornado History Project, which has statistics for all recorded tornadoes in the U.S., integrated with Google Maps and with a spreadsheet export function. So I grabbed the stats for every historical tornado in Maryland, used the site's track width and length data to find out the area of land affected by each one, and added them all up. The usual caveats about rounding error, reporting bias, etc. apply.
The result: about 43 square km of Maryland has been hit by tornados in the last 60 years. The area of Maryland is 32,000 km^2, so the odds of a random patch of land in Maryland being hit by a tornado over a 60-year period are roughly 1 in 750. (60 years happens to be roughly the useful life of your average building.)
Is this risk high enough to be worth redesigning the building for? I guess it depends on the consequences of loss. It's not a negligible risk, but if the data is backed up elsewhere, I wouldn't worry about it myself. I can think of plenty of other buildings in the area whose loss would be more of a concern.
This question got me curious, so I did a little homework. What are the odds of a building in Maryland being struck by a tornado during its lifetime?
Found an AMAZING website: The Tornado History Project, which has statistics for all recorded tornadoes in the U.S., integrated with Google Maps and with a spreadsheet export function. So I grabbed the stats for every historical tornado in Maryland, used the site's track width and length data to find out the area of land affected by each one, and added them all up. The usual caveats about rounding error, reporting bias, etc. apply.
The result: about 43 square km of Maryland has been hit by tornados in the last 60 years. The area of Maryland is 32,000 km^2, so the odds of a random patch of land in Maryland being hit by a tornado are roughly 1 in 750.
Is this risk high enough to be worth redesigning the building for? I guess it depends on the consequences of loss. It's not a negligible risk, but if the data is backed up elsewhere, I wouldn't worry about it myself. I can think of plenty of other buildings in the area whose loss would be more of a concern.
Oh, also, the "weapon" paradigm totally misrepresents the asymmetry of offense vs defense. In your tank vs ak-47 example, yes, if you know about an AK-47, you can defend against it. But to defend against it you need a tank -- to negate a thousand-dollar threat you need a million-dollar defense. Your land mine analogy works the same: it's far more expensive and hazardous to clear a minefield than it is to deploy it.
But for cyber weapons, an attack that cost millions to research can be negated for pennies by typing "mysql_real_escape_string()" in the right place.
You're right that information is power even in conventional warfare, but I worry that calling them "cyber weapons" will totally mislead the people making policy decisions. If you're a government official funding conventional weapons, you fork over your $1 billion and you get a weapon system. 5 years later, when the shit hits the fan, you can pull it out of the arsenal and hurt people with it. Even 20 years later, it still does the job pretty well.
But if you buy $1 billion in "cyber weapons", five years later -- even six months later -- you've got absolutely nothing.
The idea of "Cyber Weapons" is a deliberately wrong paradigm whose only purpose is to wring money out of national defense agencies. A cyber attack is nothing more than an idea. If you know something about computer security which the other guy doesn't, you can attack him with it. But as soon as he (or his operating system or antivirus vendor) knows it too, you've got nothing.
This is completely unlike a weapon. An AK-47 is still deadly even if your opponent knows what an assault rifle is, but an unpatched SQL injection vulnerability is useless the moment your opponent learns about it.
You've clearly got more experience than me, which is great, but keep in mind my goal here. I'm not trying to prove that flywheels cannot be made safe, I'm trying to show that the "NIMBY fears" about them aren't completely ludicrous. As you yourself said:
and those are the kind we're discussing, not portable vehicle flywheels. Burying them underground will certainly help, but are you certain that in the extraordinarily complex collision/detonation between flywheel and outer wall, none of the material will escape at high speed?
I also question your assertion that even a portable flywheel will burn up instantly inside its containment: there's not enough air. Stoichiometrically, to burn up a small 10 kg carbon flywheel you need about 30 kg of oxygen, which means 100 cubic meters of air --- a couple of shipping containers. So there's a risk of high-speed pieces of carbon flying out several meters from the flywheel. For larger flywheels, increase the volume proportionally.
I personally believe that flywheels can be made safe, and I trust good engineering, but the point of the above is that making them safe isn't easy. I personally think their low energy density is more intractable problem, but my point is that people are right to be cautious about them -- just like any high power energy source.