One of the great things about bachelor parties is all the stories about how stupid you and your friends were and how lucky we all were to live to breed. Our kids are going to tell great stories about how they sneaked into the living room at 2am to play video games. Woo-Hoo! You just can't let your kids do dumb stuff like our parents could.
Like your stories, we used to ride our bikes down to the Tennessee river and hang out around the locks at the dam and fish at the hydro-power outlet. We even built a Huck-Finn style raft and floated down a small river to the lake - all without parental supervision or even parental knowledge. You try letting your kids do stuff like that today and you'll get arrested and CPS will come "evaluate" your household.
That being said, some things stay the same. My dad took me to see the Saturn V launch when I was a little kid, and I just took my kids to see the Falcon Heavy launch. And just like I was, they got all fired up about it.
Well, Ok, it wasn't exactly the same. When I was a kid we listened to NASA mission control on the radio and Dad took pictures with a little Brownie camera and a super-8 movie camera. My kids and I watched with the SpaceX live-stream on our tablet while taking video with a cell phone... But in both cases we went swimming in the ocean and chased crabs after the launch.... So some things don't change....
Yeah, we used to play deathmatch on custom wads on Doom, so I understand the kids completely. We'd sit down to play after work and after "a few" games someone would say "i'm hungry, you wanna grab some dinner?" That's when we'd notice that it was nearing midnight and we hadn't moved (or blinked) for 5 hours.
I would never have said anything like "addicted", but playing a social game like that can make time go by really fast, that's for sure. Apex is the "next thing" here in the US as well. For those who haven't seen it, it is exactly the same as Fortnite, but with a slightly older target demographic. So the graphics are a little bit more realistic, but still not classic FPS level. There are some tweaks and unique features, but at a base level it is the same thing. As the kids move from elementary/middle to middle/high school they'll naturally age out of Fortnite and into something else. Apex seems to be aiming to capture those kids.
Comic books, TV, video games, arcades, pinball, myspace, facebook, instagram, snapchat, etc.... everything under the sun has been some sort of unique threat that only this generation has to face. It comes around every 8-10 years as a new crop of parents comes along. There's always someone around trying to make a buck off of it, and usually they end up pushing for the government to "do something".
There's nothing unique or new about Fortnite. It is just a well-excecuted plan to use the freeware model to get people to buy in to the universe and pay money for add ons. The game is perfectly designed and targetted for elementary and middle school kids. Easy access to gameplay, short games that reset quickly, social play in small groups of 2 or 4, ever changing game landscape and in-game fashion. It is just really, really well-done.
The game is dead simple - basically familiar to anyone playing first person shooters since the days of Doom and Quake - or even more specifically since Unreal Tournament. The graphics are kept cartoonish and non-threatening so moms don't get upset when their 8 year old tries the game out.... it really is well thought-out.
But there's nothing here to fear. It is just a game that kids play together. If you think your kids are putting too much time and energy into it, then send them off to do something else. It isn't like they are sneaking around behind the school gym to do drugs. It's just a game.
We have similar issues with our kids and Fortnite.... our son will put up a fight when told to quit no matter how long he has been playing. The thing that really makes it so important to them is, surprisingly, the social aspect. They get together with their friends and play online.
The "danger" aspect of this for me isn't the amount of time spent playing a game - we can regulate that quite easily with parental control software on the computer and router - but the lessons of peer pressure and status rewards for doing something incredibly stupid: spending real world dollars on cosmetic online items. They get "status" among their friends for having cool new skins. So they want to spend actual cash on something that makes no difference in the gameplay at all.
We use this as a teaching opportunity - allowing them to make limited mistakes and suffering the consequences. Like spending their V-bucks on some pickaxe skin and then not having any left to buy the next season's battle pass.
It is a pretty good way to teach lessons in being responsible with money and planning ahead for things you want to buy in the future - delaying gratification. Lessons my father taught me using the mini-bike that I couldn't afford to buy instead of video games.
The other thing that is handy about this fad is that it makes for easy punishments. Middle school boys are pretty hard to discipline. They are testing out their limits and finding something to take away can be challenging. Enter Fortnite. Our son is currently sitting through a week without Fortnite (and any other video games, but be realistic... all he really cares about is Fortnite. Maybe Apex is coming up too, but that's not where everyone hangs out.) He has really policed up his attitude in the first couple of days under this restriction, so we definitely got his attention.
Like everything, games are just something they enjoy. It can be a burden, or a teaching opportunity. It just depends on what the parents make of it.
Exactly so. They just didn't catch it before because they never load tested against that much traffic.
I've run in to this situation before... we had several pages on CRM packages that calculated "what do I do next" for different workers. They pulled fairly complicated queries across millions of records.... but they worked fine because we did a good job of optimizing everything.
And then....
Someone started a fad of hitting refresh a bunch of times to get a better assignment.
One person doing that still wasn't a big deal. But hundreds? It multiplied the load from one two requests per agent every five minutes to several per second. Oooops. Didn't plan on that.
Determining the scope of "what are users going to do" is surprisingly tricky. People do things that, from the point of a developer...... well, they just don't make sense.
I only peek in from time to time these days. They really left the nerd site stuff way behind. It is a shame, because it was a great community. There was a time where you might find yourself arguing the merits of a protocol with the guy who actually wrote it.
It isn't really written in a heightened parody style... but does anyone really think like that? And do they have Slashdot accounts, where we all believe that "information wants to be free" and wear T-Shirts with the RSA code to protest the declaration of that code as a "munition"?
Surely nobody who has been posting on slashdot for 20 years would ever seriously entertain those thoughts, beyond parody... right?
Apparently quite a few of them have taken to posting on Slashdot.
Oh, how my Slashdot has fallen.
Once upon a time, free speech was the be-all end-all value of the Slashdot crowd. Now we can't even get a decent technical discussion going on a nerd site, let alone agree that people who disagree with us should be allowed to publish their ideas.
I'll speculate that it was more of a "follow me and I'll follow you" tit-for-tat strategy that is employed by "influencers". It is the famous people crowd's currency. You go on someone's podcast and say how great they are, and they say how great you are. It is all just advertising, paid for by in-kind contributions.
If you violate the contract, then they retaliate in kind. Hence the celebrity twitter wars of hate. It is simple tit-for-tat game theory.
So if someone with a big list of followers follows you, then you follow them back. Simple as that. You don't even have to read any of their stuff.... in fact, you probably couldn't read it all, not if you are following hundreds or even thousands of people.
I think his point was that from the SJW crowd, anything other than fealty to SJW values, mores and speech codes is definitionally alt-right.
So poking fun at PC culture is alt-right. Even if you are a democratic socialist from a democratic socialist country. Like all who's primary motivation in life is political affiliation, they will brook no dissent.
Therefore, if you are of the "SJW groupthinkers" Highdude702 is describing, then yes, "just because he wants to make fun of extremists bigots" does in fact make him alt-right.
Tow that party lion, or you are the enemy of the people.
One could simply choose not to do business with companies that lock in their customers to walled gardens of licenced product ecosystems.
You know, just choosing for yourself instead of sending other people with guns to force everyone else to make the same choices you make.
Look, I don't get it either. I didn't buy an Apple laptop, not because they aren't great products, but because I would rather have an open ecosystem. In practical terms it doesn't really make much sense, since Apple commands so much attention on the accessories market. But still.. I like my linux box because of an idea of freedom just as much as because of the quality of the OS. It sure isn't for the quality of the third party apps (insert eyeroll emojii here)
"stimulate local economies instead of unsustainable overseas factories."
You know, sometimes I think people use buzzwords just to sound like they know what they are talking about - even though they really don't know what the buzzwords mean.
But it is hardly the authoritative source for space news. Yet here on Slashdot we post from Ars instead of any of a couple of dozen more authoritative sources. There are astronomy sites, general science sites, planetary exploration sites, rocket science sites.... Heck, go straight to the NASA project site.
A computer tech blog isn't the last place to go for news about a NASA planetary science project, but it certainly is pretty far down the list.
I like your version better. Less sappy. More relevant to the youth audience. And it could have real emotion instead of the staged emotion of "look at the poor handicapped kid".
Heck, if you wanted you could even do it for real... have the kid play Ninja with a bunch of his friends watching, and then when he finally gets a kill against Ninja they would all go crazy. Then it wouldn't feel so heavy-handed. Of course the real target audience probably wasn't gamers or parents of kids with special needs that could benefit from the controller. The audience was probably potential Microsoft investors - looking to create a little brand good will with the almost-PSA ad.
Hey, Microsoft - if you adopt his idea, don't forget to kick some cash toward sunking2. It's a good idea for an ad.
It was sappy. Sure, it is great that some kid gets to play minecraft with the other kids. But let's get real. It wasn't even the best commercial about some sappy, tug-at-your-heartstrings topic.
And this was the year of the overdone, sappy commercial.
So no, not the best thing about the superbowl. Not even close.
I share your cynicism, but it wouldn't take unlimited funding to land a man on mars, and it wouldn't take 30 years. SpaceX thinks they are less than 10 years away from that capability, and they don't have unlimited funding.
Given reasonably unfettered funding, you could cobble together a Mars landing and return mission inside of 10 years. SpaceX, Blue Origin and the ULA all have heavy launchers in development that could do the job in the next couple of years. Falcon Heavy and Delta IV Heavy could participate now.
Companies that built modules for the ISS could be tasked with a transit craft. Given enough money you could start putting it up when New Glenn or BFR/Starship is ready. Dragon 2.0 could put legs back on and be ready as a lander in a couple of years.
Given "unlimited" funding, hitting the 2024 launch window (given a start date of 2017) wasn't impossible. It would cost less than we spend on stupid wars, and the money wouldn't be spent killing people. So there's that.
But that assumes an unreal scenario, I suppose. I really doubt congress would get on board with such a proposal in anything like the timeline needed. It would probably take them 4 years to approve a huge budget that, as you say, breaks the project up into a bunch of district-specific pork-barrel projects. And judging by the "quick option" SLS which used "off the shelf" components, I suppose your 30 year number wasn't actually unrealistic.
"Seen from orbit" isn't meaningless. It is a graphic demonstration of expense. That's why it doesn't exist, not because it takes up space. It costs too dang much. Tesla could build a battery the size of a coal-fired power plant to handle fluctuating loads and supplies. The tech already exists. But nobody is interested in paying for it when they have a coal-fired plant or a gas turbine that will do the job for a tiny fraction of the cost.
You have posted a bunch of talking-point style stuff, but this one is one you should skip. The idea that a nuclear plant going down for maintenance means that nuclear power is unstable and unreliable is just stupid. Nuclear plants don't have to be on/off designs that are always operating at 100% or always off. Absent other concerns it would be easy to build a nuclear-only grid for the US that could handle fluctuating loads.
This cannot be said of solar or wind. The intermittent nature of these power sources is a legitimate concern. A concern that has ways of being addressed, including energy storage systems, a better transmission system that would allow transfer of power across the continent or farther, overbuilding to provide redundancy of wind power, etc. Those solutions have problems as well... but then so does the nuclear "everything is super easy and super safe" sales pitch.
On the renewable front it is easy enough to see that the rosy version isn't true..... if it really was that cheap, easy and reliable it would have pushed other sources out already. Look at what happened when natural gas became cheap and readily available... gas turbines popped up everywhere almost overnight. Power companies want to make money. They'll buy the cheapest and easiest power that meets their customers needs. Wind and solar brings significant problems along with it... that's why it isn't the leading source of power right now.
Those problems are solvable though. It is much better to talk honestly about how to proceed, instead of making up a silly argument like "nuclear plants can go down for maintenance" as a counter to "the sun only shines half the time". Now that renewable power exists in fairly large amounts, it is reasonable to assume that someone is going to solve the storage problem. There are loads of possibilities and a large incentive to getting it to work. As prices for wind and solar come down, this is only going to get more true... eventually it will be inevitable.
Meanwhile, the demand for cheap energy isn't going away. It is only going to get worse. India, China and Africa will be developing into 1st world economies soon. China is already moving to overtake the US and Europe. As this happens, the demand for energy will double or triple globally. Maybe even more. They are going to obtain that energy. Whether using nuclear, renewables or coal and gas.... the demand isn't going anywhere but up. There are 3 billion people still living in low-energy poverty. When their economies begin transforming as China's already has, they'll begin using energy just like the west does. So there's your real driver for development. Either solar and electric are actually viable, price-competitive and reliable options, or all of the available coal and oil are going to be burned. Nuclear would be a third alternative, if reliable and safe nuclear reactors were developed.
If you are at all worried about CO2 and global warming, that's the real elephant in the room. Regulation isn't going to stop all of that coal from being burned. Only a cheaper alternative will do that. And China, India and Africa as first world economies will dwarf the current demand of the west - there are simply too many people.
Yeah, but you don't have to go all the way to $60. Cricket has unlimited talk and text for $25. Others are even less. But if you want to just have an emergency line, $3 buck is an amazing price.
But I have T-mobile for my family, and I have 7 lines of unlimited 4G for $155, all-in. That's a lot of money, but it does include 7 devices and hotspot use. Plus I got 7 free devices from them, including 4 flagship phones worth about $750 each (at the time).
Sprint has unlimited hotspot use at 4g speed for the price you cite, if you can get service where you are.
Yeah, I gotta agree..... the "better than google" bit was a little on the click-bait side, but other than that, it was a bog standard article covering a tech demo. They are usually not terribly critical of the claims presented, unless they are obviously fraudulent from the jump.
You don't have to worry about evil corporate profits to understand why that wouldn't work.
The government is "the few". Piss off a bunch of rich people who own and/or run companies and they have a problem.
Piss off everyone in the entire country by telling them that they cannot have the things they want, and you aren't running the government any more.
Heck, banning alcohol in the US created a culture of widespread criminality as people ignored the regulations. The current drug war has wrought similar problems, albeit on a smaller scale. But start telling people they can't have a nice, new TV or car because the snail darter will be incrementally less threatened.... well, that isn't going to go well for you. Same goes for telling them they aren't allowed to have a hamburger because cows use too much land to make food.
None of that is driven by scary, evil "corporate masters". That's simple politics. People will only tolerate so much crap before they change the government.
Slashdot Mirror
Love your post...
I lived the same youth. It really is sad...
One of the great things about bachelor parties is all the stories about how stupid you and your friends were and how lucky we all were to live to breed. Our kids are going to tell great stories about how they sneaked into the living room at 2am to play video games. Woo-Hoo! You just can't let your kids do dumb stuff like our parents could.
Like your stories, we used to ride our bikes down to the Tennessee river and hang out around the locks at the dam and fish at the hydro-power outlet. We even built a Huck-Finn style raft and floated down a small river to the lake - all without parental supervision or even parental knowledge. You try letting your kids do stuff like that today and you'll get arrested and CPS will come "evaluate" your household.
That being said, some things stay the same. My dad took me to see the Saturn V launch when I was a little kid, and I just took my kids to see the Falcon Heavy launch. And just like I was, they got all fired up about it.
Well, Ok, it wasn't exactly the same. When I was a kid we listened to NASA mission control on the radio and Dad took pictures with a little Brownie camera and a super-8 movie camera. My kids and I watched with the SpaceX live-stream on our tablet while taking video with a cell phone... But in both cases we went swimming in the ocean and chased crabs after the launch.... So some things don't change....
Yeah, we used to play deathmatch on custom wads on Doom, so I understand the kids completely. We'd sit down to play after work and after "a few" games someone would say "i'm hungry, you wanna grab some dinner?" That's when we'd notice that it was nearing midnight and we hadn't moved (or blinked) for 5 hours.
I would never have said anything like "addicted", but playing a social game like that can make time go by really fast, that's for sure.
Apex is the "next thing" here in the US as well. For those who haven't seen it, it is exactly the same as Fortnite, but with a slightly older target demographic. So the graphics are a little bit more realistic, but still not classic FPS level. There are some tweaks and unique features, but at a base level it is the same thing. As the kids move from elementary/middle to middle/high school they'll naturally age out of Fortnite and into something else. Apex seems to be aiming to capture those kids.
Yeah, that's a classic parental moral panic.
Comic books, TV, video games, arcades, pinball, myspace, facebook, instagram, snapchat, etc.... everything under the sun has been some sort of unique threat that only this generation has to face. It comes around every 8-10 years as a new crop of parents comes along. There's always someone around trying to make a buck off of it, and usually they end up pushing for the government to "do something".
There's nothing unique or new about Fortnite. It is just a well-excecuted plan to use the freeware model to get people to buy in to the universe and pay money for add ons. The game is perfectly designed and targetted for elementary and middle school kids. Easy access to gameplay, short games that reset quickly, social play in small groups of 2 or 4, ever changing game landscape and in-game fashion. It is just really, really well-done.
The game is dead simple - basically familiar to anyone playing first person shooters since the days of Doom and Quake - or even more specifically since Unreal Tournament. The graphics are kept cartoonish and non-threatening so moms don't get upset when their 8 year old tries the game out.... it really is well thought-out.
But there's nothing here to fear. It is just a game that kids play together. If you think your kids are putting too much time and energy into it, then send them off to do something else. It isn't like they are sneaking around behind the school gym to do drugs. It's just a game.
We have similar issues with our kids and Fortnite.... our son will put up a fight when told to quit no matter how long he has been playing. The thing that really makes it so important to them is, surprisingly, the social aspect. They get together with their friends and play online.
The "danger" aspect of this for me isn't the amount of time spent playing a game - we can regulate that quite easily with parental control software on the computer and router - but the lessons of peer pressure and status rewards for doing something incredibly stupid: spending real world dollars on cosmetic online items. They get "status" among their friends for having cool new skins. So they want to spend actual cash on something that makes no difference in the gameplay at all.
We use this as a teaching opportunity - allowing them to make limited mistakes and suffering the consequences. Like spending their V-bucks on some pickaxe skin and then not having any left to buy the next season's battle pass.
It is a pretty good way to teach lessons in being responsible with money and planning ahead for things you want to buy in the future - delaying gratification. Lessons my father taught me using the mini-bike that I couldn't afford to buy instead of video games.
The other thing that is handy about this fad is that it makes for easy punishments. Middle school boys are pretty hard to discipline. They are testing out their limits and finding something to take away can be challenging. Enter Fortnite. Our son is currently sitting through a week without Fortnite (and any other video games, but be realistic... all he really cares about is Fortnite. Maybe Apex is coming up too, but that's not where everyone hangs out.) He has really policed up his attitude in the first couple of days under this restriction, so we definitely got his attention.
Like everything, games are just something they enjoy. It can be a burden, or a teaching opportunity. It just depends on what the parents make of it.
Exactly so. They just didn't catch it before because they never load tested against that much traffic.
I've run in to this situation before... we had several pages on CRM packages that calculated "what do I do next" for different workers. They pulled fairly complicated queries across millions of records.... but they worked fine because we did a good job of optimizing everything.
And then....
Someone started a fad of hitting refresh a bunch of times to get a better assignment.
One person doing that still wasn't a big deal. But hundreds? It multiplied the load from one two requests per agent every five minutes to several per second. Oooops. Didn't plan on that.
Determining the scope of "what are users going to do" is surprisingly tricky. People do things that, from the point of a developer...... well, they just don't make sense.
I only peek in from time to time these days. They really left the nerd site stuff way behind. It is a shame, because it was a great community. There was a time where you might find yourself arguing the merits of a protocol with the guy who actually wrote it.
On the other hand..... much, much less goat sex.
Now that is a Slashdot response!
Well done!
I was trying to decide if that was a parody.
It isn't really written in a heightened parody style... but does anyone really think like that? And do they have Slashdot accounts, where we all believe that "information wants to be free" and wear T-Shirts with the RSA code to protest the declaration of that code as a "munition"?
Surely nobody who has been posting on slashdot for 20 years would ever seriously entertain those thoughts, beyond parody... right?
Apparently quite a few of them have taken to posting on Slashdot.
Oh, how my Slashdot has fallen.
Once upon a time, free speech was the be-all end-all value of the Slashdot crowd. Now we can't even get a decent technical discussion going on a nerd site, let alone agree that people who disagree with us should be allowed to publish their ideas.
I'll speculate that it was more of a "follow me and I'll follow you" tit-for-tat strategy that is employed by "influencers". It is the famous people crowd's currency. You go on someone's podcast and say how great they are, and they say how great you are. It is all just advertising, paid for by in-kind contributions.
If you violate the contract, then they retaliate in kind. Hence the celebrity twitter wars of hate. It is simple tit-for-tat game theory.
So if someone with a big list of followers follows you, then you follow them back. Simple as that. You don't even have to read any of their stuff.... in fact, you probably couldn't read it all, not if you are following hundreds or even thousands of people.
I think his point was that from the SJW crowd, anything other than fealty to SJW values, mores and speech codes is definitionally alt-right.
So poking fun at PC culture is alt-right. Even if you are a democratic socialist from a democratic socialist country. Like all who's primary motivation in life is political affiliation, they will brook no dissent.
Therefore, if you are of the "SJW groupthinkers" Highdude702 is describing, then yes, "just because he wants to make fun of extremists bigots" does in fact make him alt-right.
Tow that party lion, or you are the enemy of the people.
Or....
One could simply choose not to do business with companies that lock in their customers to walled gardens of licenced product ecosystems.
You know, just choosing for yourself instead of sending other people with guns to force everyone else to make the same choices you make.
Look, I don't get it either. I didn't buy an Apple laptop, not because they aren't great products, but because I would rather have an open ecosystem. In practical terms it doesn't really make much sense, since Apple commands so much attention on the accessories market. But still.. I like my linux box because of an idea of freedom just as much as because of the quality of the OS. It sure isn't for the quality of the third party apps (insert eyeroll emojii here)
You know, sometimes I think people use buzzwords just to sound like they know what they are talking about - even though they really don't know what the buzzwords mean.
Ars Technica is great.
But it is hardly the authoritative source for space news. Yet here on Slashdot we post from Ars instead of any of a couple of dozen more authoritative sources. There are astronomy sites, general science sites, planetary exploration sites, rocket science sites.... Heck, go straight to the NASA project site.
A computer tech blog isn't the last place to go for news about a NASA planetary science project, but it certainly is pretty far down the list.
I like your version better. Less sappy. More relevant to the youth audience. And it could have real emotion instead of the staged emotion of "look at the poor handicapped kid".
Heck, if you wanted you could even do it for real... have the kid play Ninja with a bunch of his friends watching, and then when he finally gets a kill against Ninja they would all go crazy. Then it wouldn't feel so heavy-handed. Of course the real target audience probably wasn't gamers or parents of kids with special needs that could benefit from the controller. The audience was probably potential Microsoft investors - looking to create a little brand good will with the almost-PSA ad.
Hey, Microsoft - if you adopt his idea, don't forget to kick some cash toward sunking2. It's a good idea for an ad.
What he said.
It was sappy. Sure, it is great that some kid gets to play minecraft with the other kids. But let's get real. It wasn't even the best commercial about some sappy, tug-at-your-heartstrings topic.
And this was the year of the overdone, sappy commercial.
So no, not the best thing about the superbowl. Not even close.
I share your cynicism, but it wouldn't take unlimited funding to land a man on mars, and it wouldn't take 30 years. SpaceX thinks they are less than 10 years away from that capability, and they don't have unlimited funding.
Given reasonably unfettered funding, you could cobble together a Mars landing and return mission inside of 10 years. SpaceX, Blue Origin and the ULA all have heavy launchers in development that could do the job in the next couple of years. Falcon Heavy and Delta IV Heavy could participate now.
Companies that built modules for the ISS could be tasked with a transit craft. Given enough money you could start putting it up when New Glenn or BFR/Starship is ready. Dragon 2.0 could put legs back on and be ready as a lander in a couple of years.
Given "unlimited" funding, hitting the 2024 launch window (given a start date of 2017) wasn't impossible. It would cost less than we spend on stupid wars, and the money wouldn't be spent killing people. So there's that.
But that assumes an unreal scenario, I suppose. I really doubt congress would get on board with such a proposal in anything like the timeline needed. It would probably take them 4 years to approve a huge budget that, as you say, breaks the project up into a bunch of district-specific pork-barrel projects. And judging by the "quick option" SLS which used "off the shelf" components, I suppose your 30 year number wasn't actually unrealistic.
Excellent post.
Would read again.
"Seen from orbit" isn't meaningless. It is a graphic demonstration of expense. That's why it doesn't exist, not because it takes up space. It costs too dang much. Tesla could build a battery the size of a coal-fired power plant to handle fluctuating loads and supplies. The tech already exists. But nobody is interested in paying for it when they have a coal-fired plant or a gas turbine that will do the job for a tiny fraction of the cost.
You have posted a bunch of talking-point style stuff, but this one is one you should skip. The idea that a nuclear plant going down for maintenance means that nuclear power is unstable and unreliable is just stupid. Nuclear plants don't have to be on/off designs that are always operating at 100% or always off. Absent other concerns it would be easy to build a nuclear-only grid for the US that could handle fluctuating loads.
This cannot be said of solar or wind. The intermittent nature of these power sources is a legitimate concern. A concern that has ways of being addressed, including energy storage systems, a better transmission system that would allow transfer of power across the continent or farther, overbuilding to provide redundancy of wind power, etc. Those solutions have problems as well... but then so does the nuclear "everything is super easy and super safe" sales pitch.
On the renewable front it is easy enough to see that the rosy version isn't true..... if it really was that cheap, easy and reliable it would have pushed other sources out already. Look at what happened when natural gas became cheap and readily available... gas turbines popped up everywhere almost overnight. Power companies want to make money. They'll buy the cheapest and easiest power that meets their customers needs. Wind and solar brings significant problems along with it... that's why it isn't the leading source of power right now.
Those problems are solvable though. It is much better to talk honestly about how to proceed, instead of making up a silly argument like "nuclear plants can go down for maintenance" as a counter to "the sun only shines half the time". Now that renewable power exists in fairly large amounts, it is reasonable to assume that someone is going to solve the storage problem. There are loads of possibilities and a large incentive to getting it to work. As prices for wind and solar come down, this is only going to get more true... eventually it will be inevitable.
Meanwhile, the demand for cheap energy isn't going away. It is only going to get worse. India, China and Africa will be developing into 1st world economies soon. China is already moving to overtake the US and Europe. As this happens, the demand for energy will double or triple globally. Maybe even more. They are going to obtain that energy. Whether using nuclear, renewables or coal and gas.... the demand isn't going anywhere but up. There are 3 billion people still living in low-energy poverty. When their economies begin transforming as China's already has, they'll begin using energy just like the west does. So there's your real driver for development. Either solar and electric are actually viable, price-competitive and reliable options, or all of the available coal and oil are going to be burned. Nuclear would be a third alternative, if reliable and safe nuclear reactors were developed.
If you are at all worried about CO2 and global warming, that's the real elephant in the room. Regulation isn't going to stop all of that coal from being burned. Only a cheaper alternative will do that. And China, India and Africa as first world economies will dwarf the current demand of the west - there are simply too many people.
Well, the Hyundai Kona is getting favorable comparisons to the Model 3, so it is about to come under big price pressure.
Yeah, but you don't have to go all the way to $60. Cricket has unlimited talk and text for $25. Others are even less. But if you want to just have an emergency line, $3 buck is an amazing price.
But I have T-mobile for my family, and I have 7 lines of unlimited 4G for $155, all-in. That's a lot of money, but it does include 7 devices and hotspot use. Plus I got 7 free devices from them, including 4 flagship phones worth about $750 each (at the time).
Sprint has unlimited hotspot use at 4g speed for the price you cite, if you can get service where you are.
Yeah, I gotta agree..... the "better than google" bit was a little on the click-bait side, but other than that, it was a bog standard article covering a tech demo. They are usually not terribly critical of the claims presented, unless they are obviously fraudulent from the jump.
This was a decent summary of what was presented.
You don't have to worry about evil corporate profits to understand why that wouldn't work.
The government is "the few". Piss off a bunch of rich people who own and/or run companies and they have a problem.
Piss off everyone in the entire country by telling them that they cannot have the things they want, and you aren't running the government any more.
Heck, banning alcohol in the US created a culture of widespread criminality as people ignored the regulations. The current drug war has wrought similar problems, albeit on a smaller scale. But start telling people they can't have a nice, new TV or car because the snail darter will be incrementally less threatened.... well, that isn't going to go well for you. Same goes for telling them they aren't allowed to have a hamburger because cows use too much land to make food.
None of that is driven by scary, evil "corporate masters". That's simple politics. People will only tolerate so much crap before they change the government.
It's funny because you said that here, not in China....