Government programs have a tendency to have inflating budgets that often don't have anything to do with their actual purpose.
If we're throwing this sort of money at an international science project then I'd like to know that large sums of it aren't going to pay for hookers and cocaine.
And yes... that has happened before and I'd just assume not have it happen again.
except for it didn't preclude you going off to join a new start up or any of the smaller companies that didn't agree to this... it was mostly between the big companies.
In a non-compete system you can't even do that. Its a problem.
Yes but those agreements are not the law. And they were illegal in any case.
You can always leave a big company and join a start up that wouldn't have signed any of those no pouching agreements. In fact, most start ups launch BY poaching.
We need shells that can reach 25,000 Mph... enough to reach low earth orbit. Correct me if I'm wrong on that number...
Then we can translate electricity directly into orbital launch capability.
Obviously useless for moving human beings or sensitive equipment. But for bulk supplies... fuel, air, structural material... maybe food... Suddenly we launch such things for a fraction of cost which means orbital habitats might be sustainable.
And as to this agreement you say NATO broke... cite it. I have no knowledge of this agreement that NATO members signed to not expand NATO.
Russia wasn't to reverse the collapse of the USSR. Well, that's f'ed up. The USSR was an evil shithole. And while Russia might not feel as mighty as they once did... So what? That's just ego. Russia has more then enough in their own territory to deal with and they're doing a piss poor job of it. So why should they have more? To what end? If they ruled the world we'd be starving to death.
Russia even as it is will continue to decline unless it goes through some serious changes. And that will ultimately mean more territorial losses to developing countries at their borders that will likely snip off pieces in a generation or so.
That is Russia's future unless they reform.
Putin is doing nothing to help that. He's damning his own country for nothing.
Forgive the comparison but I see parallels between this and the collapse of the Byzantine empire. Russia is a child of that empire just as the west is a child of the western roman empire. The Byzantines were quite mighty in their time. But through pride they squandered their alliances, cut themselves off from trade, and ultimately were crippled by a Crusade because they wouldn't stop screwing with the Venetians. That crippling led them to be defeated by the Turks... which is why Constantinople is now Istanbul.
All of that was avoidable. If the Byzantines had made peace with the west and not gone out of their way to be unrelenting assholes then they would have had strong allies. And the Byzantines AND the Crusading kings of the west could have driven the Turks out of their land... and possibly gone farther.
But alliances were not to be had because the Byzantines were just too proud.
Likewise, the Russians are destroying themselves by starting fights with the West for NOTHING. There is no point to this hostility. It accomplishes nothing and wastes everything.
They could ally, get western investment, build rail lines from eastern asia to europe that could haul everything that is currently going by container ship. And that's just the beginning. We could run a tunnel from eastern russia to alaska and from there to Canada.
There is no limit. But for any of that to happen we'd have to trust the Russians. And NO ONE trusts them because they're given to moronic bouts of hostility.
They tried rolling out hydrogen fuel cell cars and they moronically expensive. We even have some hydrogen gas stations in my area. Guess what I see more of on the road? Teslas. Why? Because batteries as shitty as they are are better then hydrogen fuel cells.
Ukraine has every right to allign itself one way or the other.
It is not Russia's place to determine these things. It is just this sort of attitude that has caused Russia to squander opportunities.
Imagine for a moment what Russia would look like if its government were more like the US government?
Look at those vast resources... look at the trade connections... look at the resident skill population... the universities... the heavy industry...
Russia has enormous potential IF lead by a rational government.
What does it have though? They're poor, politically isolated, and generally withering on all fronts.
They are not a developing nation... they're a deteriorating nation.
And it is just this sort of behavior from putin that leads to that.
What Russia should be trying to do is get other countries to trust them so they'll invest. At the same time, don't try to scare Ukraine etc into submission, rather make them comfortable with you.
Russia could have formed its own version of the EU with former soviet states in it. The requirement would have been ACTUAL rights and ACTUAL due process. Which are not things ACTUALLY present in the current Russian state.
Putin want's to go back to the cold war... fine. We offered his country a clean slate... Obama even went so far as to offer that reset button thing. And what do we get? This... Well, whatever.
Back to the cold war it is then.
And that means going back to squeezing Russia's economy into ruin.
The ways to do that are obvious... Russia depends heavily on sales of oil and gas. Ruin them. Give their customer's cheap plentiful alternatives.
And calm down hippies... but fracking is happening... get over it... its going to be a big thing in eastern europe at the very least and they'll ideally be able to supply themselves and sell to the western europeans that still think they can't get off oil... despite utterly failing after spending hundreds of billions trying.
I said calm down hippies... When we get the tech to actually get off oil... such as getting a battery worth a damn... then fine. Till then... its here to stay.
People impose value on something and then suddenly everyone has to have one.
If I had the world's greatest art at my fingertips... would I fill my home with it? No. I already have access to the same art. I can get prints or lithographs of any of it and really its close enough that would would care. And if you want to talk about the texture of the brush strokes... fine, there are some prints that exactly match the topography of the original work so closely that it takes a forensic art expert to suss it out.
I could have all of that and more. Why this fascination with getting your hands on the original work? Its a status symbol. As if you're less of a twit because you happen to own an artifact created by someone in the history books. Who cares. You aren't them and simply buying something expensive doesn't make you more sophisticated or special.
You could take the same money and invest it in a giant gold dildo statue and it would be about as meaningful.
Maybe I'm being unkind... but I do not understand collectors at all. Its right up there with gambling... I don't get the fascination with it.
Why am I flushing my money down the drain again? Why am I blowing an absurd amount of money on stuff that can't possibly be worth that to any individual?
All these things violins should just make their way into exhibits or something. By all means... lend them to musicians. But stop putting these stupid things up for auction.
Yep. As stated above, the only places in the country where you find multiple ISPs running cable side by side are in rural and suburban areas. Areas that if anything are economically less viable and logistically more expensive on a user by user basis.
Which means there is no excuse for it not being done in a city short of the cities putting huge taxes and fees on doing anything.
I suspect the cities want their local transit utility unions to do the installations and maintenance. Which would be fine if they weren't often paying those guys upwards of 100k a year for what is often pretty basic labor.
we've all heard about the sanitation workers in SF getting 120k a year. Which is more then a lot of doctors get... but whatever... here is where some foaming at the mouth union supporter tells me its in our interest that we get bled dry.
True but the market would be slowed down a good deal. The ability of the computers to feedback on each other would be radically slowed down... ideally enough that a human being might actually follow the ebb and flow.
Which is ultimately my point here.
Might some market makers be able to enter orders faster or slower? Maybe. Though if you really wanted to take things to the next level you could introduce a system of uniform latency.
That is... you keep moment to moment stats on everyone in the network to figure out their latency. Or possibly you just have statistics on given IP ranges to get a rough idea of their geography. And then you delay order by those fractions of a second so that there is no geographic advantage when placing orders. All systems have the same ping be it next door or around the world.
The delay would be on the order of a half second which is well below the threshold of a human trader. Yes, a human twitch video game player would easily notice. But we're talking about trades with a 10 second pulse. The idea would be not to time the pulses but just trade normally and not worry about them.
Obviously the same people that created the high frequency trading scheme will try to exploit the pulse. That's fine. The instant they figure something out, counter it. And keep countering it. Make it expensive and unprofitable to try and cheat the system. The people just trading without trying to be sneaky about it will be unaffected.
So if I want to control explosions I need to not only control sparks getting near the flamables but also all oxygen in the entire universe...?
Listen, its a question of limiting factors. If I have a whole atmosphere of oxygen and only one little can of gas... where should I focus my energy if I want to prevent the gas can from exploding?
Should I focus it around the entire planet that is full of oxygen or should I focus my effort around that little gas can?
Obviously around the gas can.
Why? Because its finite and I know where it is and if there is a problem it will happen there and no where else.
Likewise... if you want to deal with corruption you deal with the factors that are finite, that are known, that can be monitored, that can be controlled.
Guess what the man with the briefcase is...? None of these.
The man with the briefcase is the oxygen. He's everywhere and there is no limit to him.
The politician or bureaucrat though?... Finite. Known. Controllable.
Which of the two do you want to put energy into controlling? The guy with the briefcase of course... why? Because you're a myopic asshat.
Its owned by the federal government. Its not a co-op. And part of the problem there is that its future is subject to the whims of congress. Which means congress has leverage over your little community.
Don't vote our way? Maybe we'll fuck with you just for the fun of it.
Look, the point of the co-op is so that the local community has actual control over it.
Taking it private would be a good way to do it. But you don't take it private into a typical corporate structure. Rather, you let the users of the utility buy the company. That way the people that actually use the power are the share holders. And that includes the voting/preferred shares and similar bullshit. The people should of course buy the utility. I'm not saying give it to them for free. The federal government likely paid some money for this thing and its worth something. So fine... but spread around that many people you can raise a lot of money without a lot of effort.
Well, with the rise of renewables we're likely to gain power independence at some point.
As to water, between well water, rain water, gray water, etc... there are ways around it. As to food, it doesn't take much land to fully support a family of four. Consider that people did that thousands of years ago with a lot less knowledge of anything then we have today.
Roads... I suspect we're screwed there. I'd like to think we're not likewise screwed with our communications.
There are off grid communities in the new mexico desert that exist with their own water, power, and food. And that is an inhospitable place to do that.
if they can do it there you can do it nearly anywhere so long as you have space. And rural communities... they have space. That's one of the things they're known for as it happens.
Also keep in mind that most rural populations are happy to help maintain poles themselves.
These guys belong to volunteer fire departments and all sorts of other community stuff.
You could even set up a labor instead of fees system where if someone wanted they could take care of some poles and in return they don't have to pay the service fee.
That volunteer thing probably won't work in a city but in sticks... yeah... it does work.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the plankton can be farmed as well and fed on some sort of cultivated feed stock.
It might be a freshwater version of the same thing... so not brine... but yeah.
They gave it up when they said it was made from micro organisms... Its plankton.
Government programs have a tendency to have inflating budgets that often don't have anything to do with their actual purpose.
If we're throwing this sort of money at an international science project then I'd like to know that large sums of it aren't going to pay for hookers and cocaine.
And yes... that has happened before and I'd just assume not have it happen again.
except for it didn't preclude you going off to join a new start up or any of the smaller companies that didn't agree to this... it was mostly between the big companies.
In a non-compete system you can't even do that. Its a problem.
Yes but those agreements are not the law. And they were illegal in any case.
You can always leave a big company and join a start up that wouldn't have signed any of those no pouching agreements. In fact, most start ups launch BY poaching.
So...
Silicon valley has this rule in place... and it has resulted in a more innovative environment.
Non-competes are bad.
I'm sure they do have that many people signed up.
How many of them actually paid to be on it and wanted to be on it?
I'm assuming somewhere between none and 5.
But they've given to a lot of people for free and forced a lot of people into it.
So they have that going for them.
We need shells that can reach 25,000 Mph... enough to reach low earth orbit. Correct me if I'm wrong on that number...
Then we can translate electricity directly into orbital launch capability.
Obviously useless for moving human beings or sensitive equipment. But for bulk supplies... fuel, air, structural material... maybe food... Suddenly we launch such things for a fraction of cost which means orbital habitats might be sustainable.
No, captain strawman, I did not say Russia is not legitimate or does not have legitimate concerns.
What I said is that they have no sovereignty over countries they have no sovereignty over.
Call me captain obvious.
And guess which countries Russia doesn't have sovereignty over? All countries that are not Russia.
Is Ukraine Russia?
No.
End of stupid argument.
Russia has no right to eastern europe.
And as to this agreement you say NATO broke... cite it. I have no knowledge of this agreement that NATO members signed to not expand NATO.
Russia wasn't to reverse the collapse of the USSR. Well, that's f'ed up. The USSR was an evil shithole. And while Russia might not feel as mighty as they once did... So what? That's just ego. Russia has more then enough in their own territory to deal with and they're doing a piss poor job of it. So why should they have more? To what end? If they ruled the world we'd be starving to death.
Russia even as it is will continue to decline unless it goes through some serious changes. And that will ultimately mean more territorial losses to developing countries at their borders that will likely snip off pieces in a generation or so.
That is Russia's future unless they reform.
Putin is doing nothing to help that. He's damning his own country for nothing.
Forgive the comparison but I see parallels between this and the collapse of the Byzantine empire. Russia is a child of that empire just as the west is a child of the western roman empire. The Byzantines were quite mighty in their time. But through pride they squandered their alliances, cut themselves off from trade, and ultimately were crippled by a Crusade because they wouldn't stop screwing with the Venetians. That crippling led them to be defeated by the Turks... which is why Constantinople is now Istanbul.
All of that was avoidable. If the Byzantines had made peace with the west and not gone out of their way to be unrelenting assholes then they would have had strong allies. And the Byzantines AND the Crusading kings of the west could have driven the Turks out of their land... and possibly gone farther.
But alliances were not to be had because the Byzantines were just too proud.
Likewise, the Russians are destroying themselves by starting fights with the West for NOTHING. There is no point to this hostility. It accomplishes nothing and wastes everything.
They could ally, get western investment, build rail lines from eastern asia to europe that could haul everything that is currently going by container ship. And that's just the beginning. We could run a tunnel from eastern russia to alaska and from there to Canada.
There is no limit. But for any of that to happen we'd have to trust the Russians. And NO ONE trusts them because they're given to moronic bouts of hostility.
Putin is a fool.
Bullshit.
They tried rolling out hydrogen fuel cell cars and they moronically expensive. We even have some hydrogen gas stations in my area. Guess what I see more of on the road? Teslas. Why? Because batteries as shitty as they are are better then hydrogen fuel cells.
So no.
Ukraine has every right to allign itself one way or the other.
It is not Russia's place to determine these things. It is just this sort of attitude that has caused Russia to squander opportunities.
Imagine for a moment what Russia would look like if its government were more like the US government?
Look at those vast resources... look at the trade connections... look at the resident skill population... the universities... the heavy industry...
Russia has enormous potential IF lead by a rational government.
What does it have though? They're poor, politically isolated, and generally withering on all fronts.
They are not a developing nation... they're a deteriorating nation.
And it is just this sort of behavior from putin that leads to that.
What Russia should be trying to do is get other countries to trust them so they'll invest. At the same time, don't try to scare Ukraine etc into submission, rather make them comfortable with you.
Russia could have formed its own version of the EU with former soviet states in it. The requirement would have been ACTUAL rights and ACTUAL due process. Which are not things ACTUALLY present in the current Russian state.
As to the ellipse... its a thing I do...
And the method is sadly pretty silly.
Putin want's to go back to the cold war... fine. We offered his country a clean slate... Obama even went so far as to offer that reset button thing. And what do we get? This... Well, whatever.
Back to the cold war it is then.
And that means going back to squeezing Russia's economy into ruin.
The ways to do that are obvious... Russia depends heavily on sales of oil and gas. Ruin them. Give their customer's cheap plentiful alternatives.
And calm down hippies... but fracking is happening... get over it... its going to be a big thing in eastern europe at the very least and they'll ideally be able to supply themselves and sell to the western europeans that still think they can't get off oil... despite utterly failing after spending hundreds of billions trying.
I said calm down hippies... When we get the tech to actually get off oil... such as getting a battery worth a damn... then fine. Till then... its here to stay.
I have VMs of windows XP which I use to access legacy hardware and software.
Best of both worlds.
Both? What does that even mean?
Articulate that concept into a specific policy decision.
When you say you want to track the lobbyists what does that mean?
*gets out the popcorn*
no he isn't... he's everywhere...
Why can you not grasp the distinction between limited and easily tracked targets versus effectively infinite nonspecific untrackable targets?
You can either trace a finite number of politicians and bureaucrats or everyone with money.
I'm now bored with this conversation... *yawn*
Again, if you want to get fancy, you can get prints made that are indistinguishable from the originals without subjecting the whole thing to tests.
Let me get a link here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If they can copy Rembrandt and Van Gogh then they can probably manage your guy.
People impose value on something and then suddenly everyone has to have one.
If I had the world's greatest art at my fingertips... would I fill my home with it? No. I already have access to the same art. I can get prints or lithographs of any of it and really its close enough that would would care. And if you want to talk about the texture of the brush strokes... fine, there are some prints that exactly match the topography of the original work so closely that it takes a forensic art expert to suss it out.
I could have all of that and more. Why this fascination with getting your hands on the original work? Its a status symbol. As if you're less of a twit because you happen to own an artifact created by someone in the history books. Who cares. You aren't them and simply buying something expensive doesn't make you more sophisticated or special.
You could take the same money and invest it in a giant gold dildo statue and it would be about as meaningful.
Maybe I'm being unkind... but I do not understand collectors at all. Its right up there with gambling... I don't get the fascination with it.
Why am I flushing my money down the drain again? Why am I blowing an absurd amount of money on stuff that can't possibly be worth that to any individual?
All these things violins should just make their way into exhibits or something. By all means... lend them to musicians. But stop putting these stupid things up for auction.
Yep. As stated above, the only places in the country where you find multiple ISPs running cable side by side are in rural and suburban areas. Areas that if anything are economically less viable and logistically more expensive on a user by user basis.
Which means there is no excuse for it not being done in a city short of the cities putting huge taxes and fees on doing anything.
I suspect the cities want their local transit utility unions to do the installations and maintenance. Which would be fine if they weren't often paying those guys upwards of 100k a year for what is often pretty basic labor.
we've all heard about the sanitation workers in SF getting 120k a year. Which is more then a lot of doctors get... but whatever... here is where some foaming at the mouth union supporter tells me its in our interest that we get bled dry.
True but the market would be slowed down a good deal. The ability of the computers to feedback on each other would be radically slowed down... ideally enough that a human being might actually follow the ebb and flow.
Which is ultimately my point here.
Might some market makers be able to enter orders faster or slower? Maybe. Though if you really wanted to take things to the next level you could introduce a system of uniform latency.
That is... you keep moment to moment stats on everyone in the network to figure out their latency. Or possibly you just have statistics on given IP ranges to get a rough idea of their geography. And then you delay order by those fractions of a second so that there is no geographic advantage when placing orders. All systems have the same ping be it next door or around the world.
The delay would be on the order of a half second which is well below the threshold of a human trader. Yes, a human twitch video game player would easily notice. But we're talking about trades with a 10 second pulse. The idea would be not to time the pulses but just trade normally and not worry about them.
Obviously the same people that created the high frequency trading scheme will try to exploit the pulse. That's fine. The instant they figure something out, counter it. And keep countering it. Make it expensive and unprofitable to try and cheat the system. The people just trading without trying to be sneaky about it will be unaffected.
Really?
So if I want to control explosions I need to not only control sparks getting near the flamables but also all oxygen in the entire universe...?
Listen, its a question of limiting factors. If I have a whole atmosphere of oxygen and only one little can of gas... where should I focus my energy if I want to prevent the gas can from exploding?
Should I focus it around the entire planet that is full of oxygen or should I focus my effort around that little gas can?
Obviously around the gas can.
Why? Because its finite and I know where it is and if there is a problem it will happen there and no where else.
Likewise... if you want to deal with corruption you deal with the factors that are finite, that are known, that can be monitored, that can be controlled.
Guess what the man with the briefcase is...? None of these.
The man with the briefcase is the oxygen. He's everywhere and there is no limit to him.
The politician or bureaucrat though?... Finite. Known. Controllable.
Which of the two do you want to put energy into controlling? The guy with the briefcase of course... why? Because you're a myopic asshat.
Its owned by the federal government. Its not a co-op. And part of the problem there is that its future is subject to the whims of congress. Which means congress has leverage over your little community.
Don't vote our way? Maybe we'll fuck with you just for the fun of it.
Look, the point of the co-op is so that the local community has actual control over it.
Taking it private would be a good way to do it. But you don't take it private into a typical corporate structure. Rather, you let the users of the utility buy the company. That way the people that actually use the power are the share holders. And that includes the voting/preferred shares and similar bullshit. The people should of course buy the utility. I'm not saying give it to them for free. The federal government likely paid some money for this thing and its worth something. So fine... but spread around that many people you can raise a lot of money without a lot of effort.
Well, with the rise of renewables we're likely to gain power independence at some point.
As to water, between well water, rain water, gray water, etc... there are ways around it. As to food, it doesn't take much land to fully support a family of four. Consider that people did that thousands of years ago with a lot less knowledge of anything then we have today.
Roads... I suspect we're screwed there. I'd like to think we're not likewise screwed with our communications.
There are off grid communities in the new mexico desert that exist with their own water, power, and food. And that is an inhospitable place to do that.
if they can do it there you can do it nearly anywhere so long as you have space. And rural communities... they have space. That's one of the things they're known for as it happens.
Also keep in mind that most rural populations are happy to help maintain poles themselves.
These guys belong to volunteer fire departments and all sorts of other community stuff.
You could even set up a labor instead of fees system where if someone wanted they could take care of some poles and in return they don't have to pay the service fee.
That volunteer thing probably won't work in a city but in sticks... yeah... it does work.