No, the sales and marketing industry is built around making people want to give you money. Fraud at worst, not theft. This is different from those industries based around taking money, which includes banks, governments, burglars, and extortionists.
Feasibility ultimately boils down to cost-efficiency. If renewable energy was ultimately as cost-efficient as petroleum, this wouldn't even be a discussion. Profitability is a side issue; there are costs, and someone needs to pay them, whether it's a government, or a corporation, or you the consumer. Ignoring the economic reality doesn't make it go away; renewable energy is currently less cost-efficient than petroleum. Therefore, spending money on renewable energy produces more expensive power than does petroleum. Therefore, governments pushing renewable energy are under more budgetary pressure, corporations investing in renewable energy are less profitable and more prone to failure, and consumers whose energy needs are met by renewable sources have less wealth in real terms.
Gravity is also not God, and it also does not require worship. But the fact that you are bound by it, and might prefer not to be, doesn't mean you can ignore it's reality.
And if we have to switch to renewables anyway, why not do it as soon as possible.
Efficiency curves. Sure, as the oil supply continues to be used up, it'll get less and less efficient to extract it, leading to higher prices, leading to alternative petroleum sources, like those produced by fracking and such, to become more feasible. Even so, those options are chosen because they remain more cost-effective than the renewable options. The renewable options are slowly getting more efficient, as the technology improves... but given the rate of improvement, they'll remain less efficient than petroleum-based solutions for some time now.
When renewable energy really does become feasible, it won't be in a sudden big news moment. It'll come slowly, over time, as the technology slowly improves to the point where it's able to compete with the slowly degrading efficiency of fossil fuels. That is, notably, a point in which the price of energy will be higher than it is today. That, right there, is what 'peak oil' will really look like; not a bang, but a whimper.
That'd actually be a good thing, really. I mean, it's short-term terrible about civilian casualties and the destruction of a city and all, but long-term, the investments in space technology and meteor detection would be vastly more positive for everyone in general than any of these other wars have been.
That is in fact where political and economic reality arrives.
Political reality: not growing in numbers means population control. Even really draconian population control policies are only somewhat effective, and they generate a lot of bad will.
Economic reality: growing in affluence requires growing in energy consumption. For that matter, staying at the current amount of affluence while increasing the population requires growing in energy consumption.
Not at all. It's easy enough to release a video claiming responsibility; as you pointed out, that kind of thing is what provides credibility to the organization.
That's what I was referring to, yeah. We've got a much better grasp of the tech these days then we did back when, so if the object is safe cheap power instead of superweapons, we can just do that and not have so much in the way of nasty byproducts to deal with forever. Even so, we still do have all kinds of old spent fuel lying around needing storage, that can't be efficiently reprocessed, so it'd make sense to get places like Yucca Mountain running.
Off the top of my head... given the lack of entertainment in medieval times, I'd imagine that the ancestors in question were too busy fucking horses to care what their far future descendants might eventually get up to.
So... what do you think we should do about it? We need some form of energy to keep running society. The default option is coal. You can try playing around with wind and solar, sure. I say 'play around' because the fact that you can't make money on them is an indicator of the deeper issue: they aren't efficient enough to actually run society. As such, attempts to use them wind up eating up a bunch of money and resources, and not meeting the actual needs of society, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. Geography permitting, you can use hydroelectric and geothermal, but it doesn't always permit. Also, even when it does, some people get pissy about dams 'destroying natural habitats' and similar bull; result being that the plants don't get built, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. Nuclear would be the best option; we know how to build efficient Thorium reactors, and we can put them anywhere, and we know how to keep them safe, and we know how to properly dispose of the spent fuel... but it's like there's some switch inside people's heads that makes them turn into frothing idiots when nuclear power gets mentioned, and so we can't actually build nuclear plants, nor places to safely store the spent fuel, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. When enough people fall back on coal, price fluctuations get it competing with natural gas and such, but it's basically the same thing; more burnt hydrocarbons, more CO2 in the atmosphere. If that was actually something you cared about minimizing, you'd get behind energy sources that actually produce the way we need them to produce, instead of producing the way you'd like them to produce.
Mod parent up, please. Most people commenting here are simply reciting the dogma of their favourite brand of politics, without any real understanding of the facts. All too rare to hear from someone who actually does this for a living.
There are all kinds of corporate responsibility laws that essentially exist as legal weapons for shareholders to attack the execs of the company if/when they do stupid things that result in lost money. It's how corporations work pretty much everywhere.
Yes, actually. It's not like these are criminal doctors, breaking the law like some shady purveyors of fraudulent and harmful 'alternative' medicine. When that happens, it gets different headlines, and is treated differently; the doctors involved get fined, stripped of license, jailed, or punished in some way, and that's the end of it. No these aren't criminals at all; they have an official exemption from the Ministry of Health to continue performing the procedure for 'research' purposes (but with sample groups an order of magnitude larger than is normal for this sort of study). It's like if the FDA banned something, but then turned around and started semi-secretly passing out research exemptions to continue use of the banned treatment, and the 'research' groups were mostly just running the procedure as a normal treatment option, instead of as a proper clinical trial (with the associated procedures and controls required to make such trials meaningful). Accordingly, if such a thing were to occur, and then be leaked, with a drug or surgery that actually was harmful, then the headline would be justified; it would be the same kind of situation.
Agent Orange was meant to kill plants. Guess what else it did? Guess what company was responsible for making it? The effects aren't always as advertised.
I haven't heard of anyone dying from GMO corn, but people have died from eating GMO crops: look up Pioneer Hi-Bred soybeans.
Do people really need to die before you consider something to be harmful? The fact is that with GMO, we do not know the effects, and it could easily be decades before they become apparent. Biology is complicated shit, and changes introduced by GMO are not examined with an eye towards the unknown. We are like Marie Curie playing with glow-in-the-dark isotopes, only in our case there are hundreds of millions of us.
Cite source better? Googling "Pioneer Hi-Bred soybeans" gets me stuff by the company itself, pages of positive news results, and government documents determining that the stuff doesn't pose a risk.
Now, it's all well and good to call for caution. Remember, though... every policy has costs. Do you think people farm with pesticides, chemical fertilizers and toxin-resistant crops just because because they're greedy SOBs and absolutely must take in maximum profit for their investments? No, they do this because in some places, you simply can't grow enough food any other way, so if you don't farm that way, there's not enough food, and people starve to death. Google 'Green Revolution'. There are the technologies that transform starvation into plenty. Yes, they turn a profit... but more importantly, they save lives.
Really, that is the essence of the situation. We're NOT merely talking about 'maybe some company makes a little more or less money'. This is food. Being able to grow it better, in worse conditions, means more places where we can grow food, and better yields in those places we can already grow food. That means people can live who could otherwise not.
Like it or not, it IS progress; more food for more people. You can argue specifics about specific cases; scientists are not infallible. Sometimes they fuck up, even with billions of dollars of research riding on them. But on the whole, we have progress; human life gets better on average, permitting more human lives to exist. Your cautions are all well and good, and don't think for a moment that the scientists devising these things are ignorant of the risks. At the same time, don't you be ignorant of the benefits. Norman Borlaug, by spearheading the implementation of this stuff, may have saved a billion lives. That's billion with a B; one-seventh of all humans alive. This is a benefit which vastly outweighs the consequences. Indeed, I'd argue that it's a benefit that vastly outweighs all consequences, but perhaps you have an epistemic position that places something other than human life as your highest good, that considers some other factor as more important. If so, we don't even have a basis for discussion... but if you agree that human life is the highest concern, then you can't disagree that the real effect of these technologies, in human terms, is positive.
Well... it doesn't help that you're an AC. Show some balls and post with your name. Maybe your karma will take a hit, maybe not, but you'll never know if you hide in the shadows. Really, it's just a number. Does the idea of it going down a little frighten you?
That said, I'd be inclined to argue that the 'quality of ingredients' problem is really two problems; one is how to keep good food fresh and healthy between production and consumption (a preservation and distribution problem), and the other is the competition between expensive good food and cheap inferior food (an economic problem).
The first problem is a big deal; fresh food, in the most natural and healthy forms, doesn't have much shelf life... so to continue to feed a growing population, all kinds of preservation tricks were thought up. This is a millennia-old problem; and it's seriously a matter of life-and-death, since failing to use proper preservation and transportation techniques mean that whenever anything happens to the food supply, lots of people die; this is called 'famine'. It's not as much of a problem these days, thanks to preservatives; we can leave processed food in cans and bags on shelves for years, then ship it to the other side of the world when it's needed. Less healthy, sure, but starvation is MUCH less healthy.
The second problem is the result of the practical consequences of solving the first. Preservatives and such make it easy to have cheap food available, and easy to sell it. Quality ingredients don't retain their quality for long; they rot. Yes, you can sell them for more when fresh... but only if you can sell them quickly. To call it 'greed' that corporations prefer to sell inferior, mass-market, preservative-laden food is to ignore the bigger picture; it's not feasible for seven billion people to get their food fresh from the farms, regardless of whatever companies stand between producer and consumer. The current population of the world is unsustainable without modern methods of preservation and distribution.
You, individually, may or may not be in a position to choose better. Many people are too poor to choose otherwise; these people are among those who would die of starvation in the absence of the modern system. Those who can, may not choose to go to the effort regardless; they weigh other factors above their health, and make their purchasing decisions accordingly. Don't judge them too harshly; it's likely that you, too, have economic priorities higher than your own health. The economic state we are in now results from the decisions everyone makes, yes... but that doesn't mean that it's something that anyone or everyone could change. Population continues to increase. The modern system of preservation and distribution is part of the larger system that keeps them alive. There's only so much that can be done to increase productivity of land, so expect to see even more artificial chemicals and such in food as time goes on, not less. This will, of course, have negative local consequences. But life expectancy, on the whole, will continue to increase with population. This is called progress.
Loan guarantees like the one A123 got totalled $90 billion in the "stimulus" bill passed in 2009.
Government sticking its thumb on the scales of the economy is always a bad idea--whether it be bailing out banks or perpetual ethanol subsidies + ethanol mandates + import tariffs.
Just a few clarifications to your post.
Loan guarantees are not grants.
A123 received a $250 million loan guarantee, not $90 billion.
Government has a vital role to play in keeping the economy moving. This is done through tax incentives, loans, stimulus programs and grants.
The problem is that the wrong corporations capture these incentives. Obsolete industries and industries which are doing fine without incentives tend to capture most of them... (i.e. General Electric receives enough government incentives that they pay no taxes but they are a perfectly viable business to stand on their own.)
Read post more carefully before refuting, parent was quoting the total amount of 'stimulus' loan guarantees in that year, not the money given to A123 specifically. Now, you could argue that it'd work fine if it weren't for the 'wrong' corporations getting the money, but really... are there 'right' corporations that could be getting money? Someone has to pay the taxes in the first place, after all... and since when has robbing Peter to pay Paul ever resulted in net gains?
I don't; but if I did, that'd be one of the first passwords I changed. Anything related to your money is up there, as should be anything that can get someone into your other accounts (like the emails you use for 'lost passwords' and such).
Generally speaking, you don't make a gazillion tries through the actual authentication gates; that sort of brute force is an obvious threat that people know how to look for, like an army of barbarians storming the gates of the city. The kind of action described here is more an army of monkeys on typewriters trying to guess passwords off a stolen list of passwords; eventually, they'll get it. They won't know they've gotten it unless they already had (the hash of) your password to begin with, but that's doable now; we finally have enough monkeys to get the correct answers in a reasonable amount of time. Essentially, what this finding means is that the way passwords are currently stored in hashes is no longer cryptographically strong enough to be computationally safe, and a higher standard of security is needed.
Having been, up until just a few months ago, one of those unwise people who used the same, only moderately complex password everywhere, for everything, I understand the convenience issue. There are dozens of sites that want you to login, and you can't remember dozens of passwords. Best practice is to maintain separate passwords, so the loss of one won't affect the others... but that doesn't feel like something that could happen to YOU. Then, something DID happen to me; I got a warning from the Guild Wars 2 people that someone was trying to access my account, with my password, from China, and would I confirm the access? (no!) This woke me up, because it immediately occurred to me that I was using the same password for my gmail which secured that access method, which implied that, since the email had only just come in, that I might literally only have minutes to do something about it. And so I quickly changed all my compromised, important passwords... and then, the same day, downloaded a password manager. Nowadays, I don't even use words for passwords; they're all long groupings of random characters, which I couldn't remember if I tried. Fortunately, I don't need to try; I've got machines to handle this stuff for me, and I don't even need to bother typing the monsters myself.
Sign an agreement to work for them for free. That doesn't exempt you from minimum wage laws. Nor can you agree to be sexually harassed, or fired for being a member of a protected class.
Just because you sign it, that doesn't make it legal.
Ahem. I had meant 'if they have a piece of paper you signed that cedes your rights to something that you're legally able to cede, as in the case of invention rights, then it's legal for them to take all credit and profit, even retroactively, if it turns out that you wind up coming up with something of value at some point while you were under contract with them, or if lawyers have grounds to argue that you came up with the idea during that time'. Not the trivially false 'absolutely anything you sign is automatically legally binding, regardless of all laws anywhere'. But that first is long to say, and it should have made sense in context, being a statement of the status quo as it exists and is being discussed in this article, so your strawman regarding an illogical extension of the point is not helpful. Of course, as you implied, there are laws that limit what you can legally sign away. That's what's being discussed here, whether invention rights is something that should be legal to sign away, especially as part of a standard employment contract that you hit non-R&D workers with, just for leverage in case they should happen to think of something that might be worth something ever. That was why I brought up my own anecdote; it's a widespread practice to tack on 'we get your intellectual property' clauses, because it costs nothing and gives lawyers a nice big hook.
Bleh, I know what you mean. There was a 'we get to own your inventions' clause in the contract for the last job I had, even though the job itself was a bullshit minimum wage tech-support deal. If they can get you to sign it, it's legal. If you don't feel like signing, there's plenty of people clamoring for a job, they don't need you specifically.
For starters, none of the emissions/pollution reduction stuff (the favored sort of political solution) will undo what's already been done. If humanity were to be wiped out instantly, as some of the more rabid environmentalists seem to want, the changes we've made will remain, since the chemistry has in fact been altered, and won't spontaneously change back on it's own. To reverse it, we'll need to make the oceans more alkali, back the way they were, which is a different problem. The kinds of a solutions that'd be needed are chemical (dump large quantities of certain chemicals into the oceans and atmosphere, to reverse the trend), biological (engineer organisms that can not only survive in an acidic environment, but make it more alkali over time by it's waste products), or something of the same sort.
And you're not getting it. You seem to be suffering under the delusion that people are monolithic, and will all act in concert given evidence to suggest a threat on the order of centuries. We aren't. That doesn't mean that we can't solve a problem like this, though. There are three general types of solutions out there... unanimous solutions, which require everyone's cooperation, and fail if anyone defects; majority solutions, which require most people to cooperate, but fails unless most people cooperate; and minority solutions, which are effective if only a handful of people cooperate, regardless of what anyone else does. Climate is not the sort of problem that requires a unanimous solution (fortunately, as unanimous solutions are generally unworkable). Majority solutions are the type which most people are trying now... unsuccessfully, as it takes a great deal of effort to enact a majority change, and anyone who defects benefits. For that matter, anyone who contributes less to the problem than the rest benefits. Emission reductions is a huge political issue that the big players can fight about all day, as an excuse to bash at their rivals and engage in economic warfare... but it's ultimately pointless, as the best case scenario only slows the process down, and the best case scenario is ludicrously unrealistic. The really effective solutions are minority solutions, which don't require everyone to cooperate; all they need is for people to enact them. Geoengineering is something that single wealthy individuals could successfully engage in. There are proposed schemes which could have a notable impact on climate which would merely cost millions of dollars, rather than the trillions fought over at the level of majority solutions. Accordingly, when it comes down to it, that's what'll happen; some people who've seen it coming will get together the funds needed to enact change, and they'll just do it. Not, as you seem to think, utter catastrophe and the end human life. Change on the order of centuries is something we humans can deal with, easily. Shame about the lions and tigers, but most people don't really care that much about them... and if we should happen to find ourselves regretful at some future date, we'll be able to clone them back up from stored samples,
That's not really meaningful. A lot can change in 60 years, after all; we'll be a lot better equipped to tackle the problem by the time we're actually in a position to land there and start setting up shop. Any specifics at this point, would be pure speculation... but if you're not averse to fiction, I'd refer you to Red Mars. If the goal isn't 'immediately fabricate a habitable environment from scratch', but instead 'make small, incremental changes, leading in the direction of the environment you want', the problem is much easier. Anywhere you can add extra heat, oxygen, or water to the system is a net win; the question is simply how to most effectively do this on a large scale. And there's lots of things you can do to push the process along in small ways, which you can do on the side as you study the big picture.
Don't mistake me. I don't mean to suggest that this is not at all a problem; my point was that it's not an urgent problem. Yes, it's a change, in a system that doesn't normally change. But it's a slow change, and even blind natural selection does pretty well at dealing with slow changes. And we've got intelligent problem-solving, which can handle much faster changes. Accordingly, we've got time to solve it. In fact, we've got time to sit around scratching our heads and researching whole new fields of science to develop better tools for solving it. We don't have forever, of course, but we've got time for a measured, deliberate response. And if things do suddenly jump the gaps, and get worse faster than expected, than we can get up off our asses and start implementing some of the more drastic solutions that we know about. The reason why we're not currently employing geoengineering, for example, is because it's a completely new field of scientific endeavor, and it's kinda sensible to do some basic investigation into the consequences before we start deliberately fucking around with the climate. But if things change suddenly, or new data comes in suggesting we have less time than anticipated... then we can jump right in and see what happens. Indeed, we'll have no choice. Fortunately, our preliminary studies of geoengineering suggest that making intentional modifications to the planet is much faster and more effective at changing the climate than making minuscule adjustments to the levels of waste we're emitting.
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No, the sales and marketing industry is built around making people want to give you money. Fraud at worst, not theft. This is different from those industries based around taking money, which includes banks, governments, burglars, and extortionists.
Gravity is also not God, and it also does not require worship. But the fact that you are bound by it, and might prefer not to be, doesn't mean you can ignore it's reality.
And if we have to switch to renewables anyway, why not do it as soon as possible.
Efficiency curves. Sure, as the oil supply continues to be used up, it'll get less and less efficient to extract it, leading to higher prices, leading to alternative petroleum sources, like those produced by fracking and such, to become more feasible. Even so, those options are chosen because they remain more cost-effective than the renewable options. The renewable options are slowly getting more efficient, as the technology improves... but given the rate of improvement, they'll remain less efficient than petroleum-based solutions for some time now.
When renewable energy really does become feasible, it won't be in a sudden big news moment. It'll come slowly, over time, as the technology slowly improves to the point where it's able to compete with the slowly degrading efficiency of fossil fuels. That is, notably, a point in which the price of energy will be higher than it is today. That, right there, is what 'peak oil' will really look like; not a bang, but a whimper.
That'd actually be a good thing, really. I mean, it's short-term terrible about civilian casualties and the destruction of a city and all, but long-term, the investments in space technology and meteor detection would be vastly more positive for everyone in general than any of these other wars have been.
That is in fact where political and economic reality arrives. Political reality: not growing in numbers means population control. Even really draconian population control policies are only somewhat effective, and they generate a lot of bad will. Economic reality: growing in affluence requires growing in energy consumption. For that matter, staying at the current amount of affluence while increasing the population requires growing in energy consumption.
Not at all. It's easy enough to release a video claiming responsibility; as you pointed out, that kind of thing is what provides credibility to the organization.
That's what I was referring to, yeah. We've got a much better grasp of the tech these days then we did back when, so if the object is safe cheap power instead of superweapons, we can just do that and not have so much in the way of nasty byproducts to deal with forever. Even so, we still do have all kinds of old spent fuel lying around needing storage, that can't be efficiently reprocessed, so it'd make sense to get places like Yucca Mountain running.
Off the top of my head... given the lack of entertainment in medieval times, I'd imagine that the ancestors in question were too busy fucking horses to care what their far future descendants might eventually get up to.
So... what do you think we should do about it? We need some form of energy to keep running society. The default option is coal. You can try playing around with wind and solar, sure. I say 'play around' because the fact that you can't make money on them is an indicator of the deeper issue: they aren't efficient enough to actually run society. As such, attempts to use them wind up eating up a bunch of money and resources, and not meeting the actual needs of society, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. Geography permitting, you can use hydroelectric and geothermal, but it doesn't always permit. Also, even when it does, some people get pissy about dams 'destroying natural habitats' and similar bull; result being that the plants don't get built, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. Nuclear would be the best option; we know how to build efficient Thorium reactors, and we can put them anywhere, and we know how to keep them safe, and we know how to properly dispose of the spent fuel... but it's like there's some switch inside people's heads that makes them turn into frothing idiots when nuclear power gets mentioned, and so we can't actually build nuclear plants, nor places to safely store the spent fuel, and so we fall back on the default option, coal. When enough people fall back on coal, price fluctuations get it competing with natural gas and such, but it's basically the same thing; more burnt hydrocarbons, more CO2 in the atmosphere. If that was actually something you cared about minimizing, you'd get behind energy sources that actually produce the way we need them to produce, instead of producing the way you'd like them to produce.
Better to grow a flower in a basement, than to grow it in a sewer.
Mod parent up, please. Most people commenting here are simply reciting the dogma of their favourite brand of politics, without any real understanding of the facts. All too rare to hear from someone who actually does this for a living.
There are all kinds of corporate responsibility laws that essentially exist as legal weapons for shareholders to attack the execs of the company if/when they do stupid things that result in lost money. It's how corporations work pretty much everywhere.
Yes, actually. It's not like these are criminal doctors, breaking the law like some shady purveyors of fraudulent and harmful 'alternative' medicine. When that happens, it gets different headlines, and is treated differently; the doctors involved get fined, stripped of license, jailed, or punished in some way, and that's the end of it. No these aren't criminals at all; they have an official exemption from the Ministry of Health to continue performing the procedure for 'research' purposes (but with sample groups an order of magnitude larger than is normal for this sort of study). It's like if the FDA banned something, but then turned around and started semi-secretly passing out research exemptions to continue use of the banned treatment, and the 'research' groups were mostly just running the procedure as a normal treatment option, instead of as a proper clinical trial (with the associated procedures and controls required to make such trials meaningful). Accordingly, if such a thing were to occur, and then be leaked, with a drug or surgery that actually was harmful, then the headline would be justified; it would be the same kind of situation.
Agent Orange was meant to kill plants. Guess what else it did? Guess what company was responsible for making it? The effects aren't always as advertised.
I haven't heard of anyone dying from GMO corn, but people have died from eating GMO crops: look up Pioneer Hi-Bred soybeans.
Do people really need to die before you consider something to be harmful? The fact is that with GMO, we do not know the effects, and it could easily be decades before they become apparent. Biology is complicated shit, and changes introduced by GMO are not examined with an eye towards the unknown. We are like Marie Curie playing with glow-in-the-dark isotopes, only in our case there are hundreds of millions of us.
Cite source better? Googling "Pioneer Hi-Bred soybeans" gets me stuff by the company itself, pages of positive news results, and government documents determining that the stuff doesn't pose a risk.
Now, it's all well and good to call for caution. Remember, though... every policy has costs. Do you think people farm with pesticides, chemical fertilizers and toxin-resistant crops just because because they're greedy SOBs and absolutely must take in maximum profit for their investments? No, they do this because in some places, you simply can't grow enough food any other way, so if you don't farm that way, there's not enough food, and people starve to death. Google 'Green Revolution'. There are the technologies that transform starvation into plenty. Yes, they turn a profit... but more importantly, they save lives.
Really, that is the essence of the situation. We're NOT merely talking about 'maybe some company makes a little more or less money'. This is food. Being able to grow it better, in worse conditions, means more places where we can grow food, and better yields in those places we can already grow food. That means people can live who could otherwise not.
Like it or not, it IS progress; more food for more people. You can argue specifics about specific cases; scientists are not infallible. Sometimes they fuck up, even with billions of dollars of research riding on them. But on the whole, we have progress; human life gets better on average, permitting more human lives to exist. Your cautions are all well and good, and don't think for a moment that the scientists devising these things are ignorant of the risks. At the same time, don't you be ignorant of the benefits. Norman Borlaug, by spearheading the implementation of this stuff, may have saved a billion lives. That's billion with a B; one-seventh of all humans alive. This is a benefit which vastly outweighs the consequences. Indeed, I'd argue that it's a benefit that vastly outweighs all consequences, but perhaps you have an epistemic position that places something other than human life as your highest good, that considers some other factor as more important. If so, we don't even have a basis for discussion... but if you agree that human life is the highest concern, then you can't disagree that the real effect of these technologies, in human terms, is positive.
Well... it doesn't help that you're an AC. Show some balls and post with your name. Maybe your karma will take a hit, maybe not, but you'll never know if you hide in the shadows. Really, it's just a number. Does the idea of it going down a little frighten you?
That said, I'd be inclined to argue that the 'quality of ingredients' problem is really two problems; one is how to keep good food fresh and healthy between production and consumption (a preservation and distribution problem), and the other is the competition between expensive good food and cheap inferior food (an economic problem).
The first problem is a big deal; fresh food, in the most natural and healthy forms, doesn't have much shelf life... so to continue to feed a growing population, all kinds of preservation tricks were thought up. This is a millennia-old problem; and it's seriously a matter of life-and-death, since failing to use proper preservation and transportation techniques mean that whenever anything happens to the food supply, lots of people die; this is called 'famine'. It's not as much of a problem these days, thanks to preservatives; we can leave processed food in cans and bags on shelves for years, then ship it to the other side of the world when it's needed. Less healthy, sure, but starvation is MUCH less healthy.
The second problem is the result of the practical consequences of solving the first. Preservatives and such make it easy to have cheap food available, and easy to sell it. Quality ingredients don't retain their quality for long; they rot. Yes, you can sell them for more when fresh... but only if you can sell them quickly. To call it 'greed' that corporations prefer to sell inferior, mass-market, preservative-laden food is to ignore the bigger picture; it's not feasible for seven billion people to get their food fresh from the farms, regardless of whatever companies stand between producer and consumer. The current population of the world is unsustainable without modern methods of preservation and distribution.
You, individually, may or may not be in a position to choose better. Many people are too poor to choose otherwise; these people are among those who would die of starvation in the absence of the modern system. Those who can, may not choose to go to the effort regardless; they weigh other factors above their health, and make their purchasing decisions accordingly. Don't judge them too harshly; it's likely that you, too, have economic priorities higher than your own health. The economic state we are in now results from the decisions everyone makes, yes... but that doesn't mean that it's something that anyone or everyone could change. Population continues to increase. The modern system of preservation and distribution is part of the larger system that keeps them alive. There's only so much that can be done to increase productivity of land, so expect to see even more artificial chemicals and such in food as time goes on, not less. This will, of course, have negative local consequences. But life expectancy, on the whole, will continue to increase with population. This is called progress.
Loan guarantees like the one A123 got totalled $90 billion in the "stimulus" bill passed in 2009. Government sticking its thumb on the scales of the economy is always a bad idea--whether it be bailing out banks or perpetual ethanol subsidies + ethanol mandates + import tariffs.
Just a few clarifications to your post. Loan guarantees are not grants. A123 received a $250 million loan guarantee, not $90 billion. Government has a vital role to play in keeping the economy moving. This is done through tax incentives, loans, stimulus programs and grants. The problem is that the wrong corporations capture these incentives. Obsolete industries and industries which are doing fine without incentives tend to capture most of them... (i.e. General Electric receives enough government incentives that they pay no taxes but they are a perfectly viable business to stand on their own.)
Read post more carefully before refuting, parent was quoting the total amount of 'stimulus' loan guarantees in that year, not the money given to A123 specifically. Now, you could argue that it'd work fine if it weren't for the 'wrong' corporations getting the money, but really... are there 'right' corporations that could be getting money? Someone has to pay the taxes in the first place, after all... and since when has robbing Peter to pay Paul ever resulted in net gains?
I don't; but if I did, that'd be one of the first passwords I changed. Anything related to your money is up there, as should be anything that can get someone into your other accounts (like the emails you use for 'lost passwords' and such).
Generally speaking, you don't make a gazillion tries through the actual authentication gates; that sort of brute force is an obvious threat that people know how to look for, like an army of barbarians storming the gates of the city.
The kind of action described here is more an army of monkeys on typewriters trying to guess passwords off a stolen list of passwords; eventually, they'll get it. They won't know they've gotten it unless they already had (the hash of) your password to begin with, but that's doable now; we finally have enough monkeys to get the correct answers in a reasonable amount of time. Essentially, what this finding means is that the way passwords are currently stored in hashes is no longer cryptographically strong enough to be computationally safe, and a higher standard of security is needed.
Having been, up until just a few months ago, one of those unwise people who used the same, only moderately complex password everywhere, for everything, I understand the convenience issue. There are dozens of sites that want you to login, and you can't remember dozens of passwords. Best practice is to maintain separate passwords, so the loss of one won't affect the others... but that doesn't feel like something that could happen to YOU.
Then, something DID happen to me; I got a warning from the Guild Wars 2 people that someone was trying to access my account, with my password, from China, and would I confirm the access? (no!) This woke me up, because it immediately occurred to me that I was using the same password for my gmail which secured that access method, which implied that, since the email had only just come in, that I might literally only have minutes to do something about it. And so I quickly changed all my compromised, important passwords... and then, the same day, downloaded a password manager.
Nowadays, I don't even use words for passwords; they're all long groupings of random characters, which I couldn't remember if I tried. Fortunately, I don't need to try; I've got machines to handle this stuff for me, and I don't even need to bother typing the monsters myself.
This is stupidly false.
Sign an agreement to work for them for free. That doesn't exempt you from minimum wage laws. Nor can you agree to be sexually harassed, or fired for being a member of a protected class.
Just because you sign it, that doesn't make it legal.
Ahem. I had meant 'if they have a piece of paper you signed that cedes your rights to something that you're legally able to cede, as in the case of invention rights, then it's legal for them to take all credit and profit, even retroactively, if it turns out that you wind up coming up with something of value at some point while you were under contract with them, or if lawyers have grounds to argue that you came up with the idea during that time'. Not the trivially false 'absolutely anything you sign is automatically legally binding, regardless of all laws anywhere'. But that first is long to say, and it should have made sense in context, being a statement of the status quo as it exists and is being discussed in this article, so your strawman regarding an illogical extension of the point is not helpful.
Of course, as you implied, there are laws that limit what you can legally sign away. That's what's being discussed here, whether invention rights is something that should be legal to sign away, especially as part of a standard employment contract that you hit non-R&D workers with, just for leverage in case they should happen to think of something that might be worth something ever. That was why I brought up my own anecdote; it's a widespread practice to tack on 'we get your intellectual property' clauses, because it costs nothing and gives lawyers a nice big hook.
Bleh, I know what you mean. There was a 'we get to own your inventions' clause in the contract for the last job I had, even though the job itself was a bullshit minimum wage tech-support deal. If they can get you to sign it, it's legal. If you don't feel like signing, there's plenty of people clamoring for a job, they don't need you specifically.
For starters, none of the emissions/pollution reduction stuff (the favored sort of political solution) will undo what's already been done. If humanity were to be wiped out instantly, as some of the more rabid environmentalists seem to want, the changes we've made will remain, since the chemistry has in fact been altered, and won't spontaneously change back on it's own. To reverse it, we'll need to make the oceans more alkali, back the way they were, which is a different problem. The kinds of a solutions that'd be needed are chemical (dump large quantities of certain chemicals into the oceans and atmosphere, to reverse the trend), biological (engineer organisms that can not only survive in an acidic environment, but make it more alkali over time by it's waste products), or something of the same sort.
And you're not getting it. You seem to be suffering under the delusion that people are monolithic, and will all act in concert given evidence to suggest a threat on the order of centuries. We aren't. That doesn't mean that we can't solve a problem like this, though.
There are three general types of solutions out there... unanimous solutions, which require everyone's cooperation, and fail if anyone defects; majority solutions, which require most people to cooperate, but fails unless most people cooperate; and minority solutions, which are effective if only a handful of people cooperate, regardless of what anyone else does. Climate is not the sort of problem that requires a unanimous solution (fortunately, as unanimous solutions are generally unworkable). Majority solutions are the type which most people are trying now... unsuccessfully, as it takes a great deal of effort to enact a majority change, and anyone who defects benefits. For that matter, anyone who contributes less to the problem than the rest benefits. Emission reductions is a huge political issue that the big players can fight about all day, as an excuse to bash at their rivals and engage in economic warfare... but it's ultimately pointless, as the best case scenario only slows the process down, and the best case scenario is ludicrously unrealistic. The really effective solutions are minority solutions, which don't require everyone to cooperate; all they need is for people to enact them. Geoengineering is something that single wealthy individuals could successfully engage in. There are proposed schemes which could have a notable impact on climate which would merely cost millions of dollars, rather than the trillions fought over at the level of majority solutions.
Accordingly, when it comes down to it, that's what'll happen; some people who've seen it coming will get together the funds needed to enact change, and they'll just do it. Not, as you seem to think, utter catastrophe and the end human life. Change on the order of centuries is something we humans can deal with, easily. Shame about the lions and tigers, but most people don't really care that much about them... and if we should happen to find ourselves regretful at some future date, we'll be able to clone them back up from stored samples,
That's not really meaningful. A lot can change in 60 years, after all; we'll be a lot better equipped to tackle the problem by the time we're actually in a position to land there and start setting up shop. Any specifics at this point, would be pure speculation... but if you're not averse to fiction, I'd refer you to Red Mars. If the goal isn't 'immediately fabricate a habitable environment from scratch', but instead 'make small, incremental changes, leading in the direction of the environment you want', the problem is much easier. Anywhere you can add extra heat, oxygen, or water to the system is a net win; the question is simply how to most effectively do this on a large scale. And there's lots of things you can do to push the process along in small ways, which you can do on the side as you study the big picture.
Don't mistake me. I don't mean to suggest that this is not at all a problem; my point was that it's not an urgent problem. Yes, it's a change, in a system that doesn't normally change. But it's a slow change, and even blind natural selection does pretty well at dealing with slow changes. And we've got intelligent problem-solving, which can handle much faster changes. Accordingly, we've got time to solve it. In fact, we've got time to sit around scratching our heads and researching whole new fields of science to develop better tools for solving it. We don't have forever, of course, but we've got time for a measured, deliberate response.
And if things do suddenly jump the gaps, and get worse faster than expected, than we can get up off our asses and start implementing some of the more drastic solutions that we know about. The reason why we're not currently employing geoengineering, for example, is because it's a completely new field of scientific endeavor, and it's kinda sensible to do some basic investigation into the consequences before we start deliberately fucking around with the climate. But if things change suddenly, or new data comes in suggesting we have less time than anticipated... then we can jump right in and see what happens. Indeed, we'll have no choice. Fortunately, our preliminary studies of geoengineering suggest that making intentional modifications to the planet is much faster and more effective at changing the climate than making minuscule adjustments to the levels of waste we're emitting.