No Bullshit. Your response, on the other hand - complete doctrinaire bullshit. How does it feel to be a sock puppet?
Tell ya what - as soon as Canada and the US stop subsidizing oil and gas production and consumption ($600B/year) I will ask for the same for alternative energy ($6B/year)
Approximately 100 households were bought out because they complained. Not because they proved evidence hardship or physical effect. The most-often reported complaint was a drop in property value.
Some valid points re the comparison... but FFS would people please stop hypothesizing and produce the science that says that there is an actual detectable subacoustic signal at the mandated 550 meter minimum distance mandated in Ontario, and that this measurable signal has human effect? More than the sound of waves crashing on the shore?
You fanned away my other points like a bad smell.
All these anti-wind generator points are weak, mostly hypothetical and you miss the main point of my comment and the OP, which is that the anti-windfarm organizations are working overtime to generate FUD for broader political reasons than that they simply don't like wind generators.
Finally, these are first and second-generation machines; they're going to get better as we get further into this. The noise will magically go away when the alternative is freezing in the dark.
In Ontario, the right-wing establishment have successfully united the usual anti-government, anti-progress suspects with some pissed-off farmers, rural retirees, and rich NIMBYs to create a particularly nasty strain of anti-windmill sentiment. They've become the Typhoid Mary of wind farm sickness.
It's true that the Ont. government was a bit overzealous in a few of its land acquisition, and there were a small number of households which were closer than what is considered a comfortable distance from some installations, but as far as i know, every such household has either been paid off or relocated.
The claimed negative health effects are spurious. I wonder what any of the hundreds of thousands of households located close to rail lines, expressways or airports must think when they hear people whinging about effects from wind generators...
Yes windmills kill some birds and bats. In North America the reported bird-kill from windfarms is a fraction of the kill from oil and gas operations.... and several orders of magnitude lower than the number of birds killed annually by.... house-cats. Like birds? Don't let your stupid cat out.
Finally, the technology is still pretty young. There's every reason to expect that wind generators will become more reliable, efficient, quieter, and that their energy can be stored and used more effectively. How many centuries has coal-burning taken to get efficient and clean up a bit?
It's kind of a tough call. On the one hand, if you sign off on something government-y that's technically false, that can boomerang on you later on. On the other hand, since the US and Canadian dollar are within a percent or two of parity, the discrepancy is trivial, so any future correction would be trivial. Me, I'd have probably STFU and signed.
But I could only afford a used boat.So maybe I don't understand...
The flaw in the system seems to be the inordinate amount of power in one agent's hands. If the agent had to call a superior to do the seizure, and explain the stupid reason... I bet the matter would have evaporated at that point.
-sigh- a bit older than 52... I'm still finding decent work in some niches, but the young'uns, both local and visa, are making it harder. (Also, flavour-of-the-month technology choices. Rails...eccch)
Never fear. I'm cross-training as a boat mechanic/electrician. At least I'll get a tan.
First, it's extrapolating from one article's hypothetical projection about solar capacity to the incorrect conclusion that all the proponents of renewable energy have forgotten about energy conservation and Malthusian population limits.
Then, she's doing exactly what she accuses the renewables backers of: playing up only one possible improvement and ignoring the rest.
"Renewable energy advocates typically support conservation efforts, but they don't make reducing consumption their primary goal. Panicked by the urgency of the climate crisis, and rightfully so, their knee-jerk response is a "just do it" approach to technology. "Why don't we just build more solar panels and wind turbines?" they ask.
To which I say: Why don't we just not do it? Let's not build any new power plants except to replace old, inefficient ones. Let's not dig up all the oil. Let's not drive to work alone. Let's not eat meat every day. Let's not turn the thermostat up so high. Let's not buy so many things we don't really need. And above all, let's not accept continued energy growth as a necessary or even desirable way of life".
Her solution, in isolation, is as unworkable as any other single approach.
As long as the various evangelists for alternative energy strategies continue to undercut each other like this, instead of standing together to craft strategy that's actually workable, the pro-oil, pro-growth powers can just point and laugh at the lefty loonies, and little will change.
Ok... the best electronics hardware platform is one of those 300-in-1 kits you see in science stores, RatShack, etc etc. Many have you wire the circuits using wires tucked under springs connected to mounted components, but the best kits give you a breadboard that you plug loose parts into. The circuits in the kit's manual are not stellar but you learn tons by just making them and making the circuits work I learned my trade on a 50-in1 kit back in the 70s... and about 5 years ago I picked up a 300-in-1 set for half-price. It makes a great quickie platform for experimenting.
I've been quite happy with using SourceBoost as a PIC environment C compiler. You can do alot with the free version, and licencing for Pro use isn't that expensive. The simulator plugins at $20 are pretty good. Alas... Windoze only
Back to the original question... I respect the Arduino project, it seems to be a great microcontroller infrastructure, with lots of hardware and community support. But I already have PIC tools and dev boards, and I've attended a few MicroChip courses.
I've got some RPi's now... for $35 wow. I'm learning their capabilities, and I'm going to try talking serial or I2C to a PIC board. Could be my new go-to ethernet-enabled platform.
If I was to be really cynical, I'd say that this proves that any ole programming language, if it survives long enough to be worked-on and added-to for a couple of decades, and given fast enough processing, can evolve. Maybe.
(Also it's a great breakdown/tutorial of the game programming steps)
...Sure, OSWD.org had some hosting issues, but that's not why the site isn't back up; the (seems to me) Second in Command, Aaron, who is dedicating a lot of time and effort into maintaining the site wants to migrate the site to a new host (and has already had everthing set up), except for the content/backups, which Frank refuses to provide.
Speaking personally, for any project that I was #2 on AND for which I was doing most of the maintenance... I'd have a complete local set of files, and/or my own set of backup files. Just sayin'.
The article was light on the details of why the hams are opposed to this, except for the issue of whether or not it will interfere with their signals. If the BPL companies are offering to NOT interfere with the signal, why is there still opposition?
Because the current definition of "not interfering with" is based on fairly loose standards, because BPL noise could ruin the opportunity to use other parts of the RF spectrum in the future, but mainly because power-cabling is unshielded and currently so inefficient at broadband frequencies that they will initially have to use alot of signal, and radiation will be a given, regardless of what's promised.
Think of this as background noise (eg like your neighbour's air conditioner). It may be quiet, but its noise still prevents you from hearing the birds clearly, the breeze in the trees, the buzz of the bees, etc. BPL radiation will reduce our ability to detect faint RF signals. When the extraterrestrials finally get around to thanking us for the LP on Voyager, we won't be able to hear them.
On another note, not to be a dick, but how can a bunch of hams form a "major" opposition against the power companies, IBM, Google etc?
Well, that's the problem. Maybe we need a "sierra club" or "greenpeace" to act as watchdogs on our RF spectrum...
I do believe that BPL is probably inevitable, though... so, sometime in the future, when most of the power grid is adapted for this, and all new AC-powered devices have BPL filters built-in, then the BPL radiation should be less.
At least for the rest of the worlds' flora and fauna, evolution is driven by natural selection which has two components: a means of producing genetic changes (mutation), and then a means for choosing which mutation is reinforced.
In nature, genetic mutations are reinforced if they improve the species' ability to survive and reproduce. aka natural selection.
But currently, natural selection does not much affect humans anymore. People with inherited weaknesses (eg asthma, allergies, blood disorders, increased susceptibility to cancers, fans of pro wrestling) still live and reproduce thanks to modern medicine, so these weaknesses are not being weeded out of the gene pool. Likewise, people with no inherited weaknesses are not breeding up a storm.
So biological evolution for humans is essentially halted, til some great selection mechanism (eg a catastrophe - plague/flu, nuclear war, loss of habitat) comes along.
That's OK. The thing we really need to be cultivating right now is ethical evolution. A lotta work to do here, people.
The author's research has so far just consisted of grazing the consumer-facing websites of the tier one PC suppliers. So what he saw only reflects the current marketing decisions with respect to the consumer walk-in trade.
No big corporation would buy the bulk of their PCs in onesies and twosies from the suppliers website. There's a long, slow dance involved where companies are invited to tender responses to a list of requirements, which are then analysed and compared. At that level, one would expect there to be a sharp clear difference in cost of OS and software between Windows and Linux, and one would hope the people analysing bids are less susceptable to FUD.
Of course this is also the point where M$ can try "special" discounts (eg 100%) or other incentives to try to force their OS into the deal.
Anyway, I don't think the author has made his case in terms of corporate volume purchases of PCs.
I was born about 20 years too early for the Internet, so while waiting for Al Gore to actually get it done, I was an electronics geek in public & high school (early 70's)
One year a prescient uncle gave me one of those kits, and I absolutely devoured it over the next several months. Highlights were the various radio circuits, audio amplifiers where you pressed that pink crystal earphone into service as a microphone, and the pinnacle - an AM transmitter.
Thanks in part to that thing, I went straight into electronics after high school and had a great 20 year career in broadcast electronics before jumping into programming several years ago.
On one of my PC's, the power supply went haywire (and overvoltage) and most of the PC electronics was fried, including the hard-drive.
I was able to locate the same make/model of drive on Ebay, and when the new drive arrived, I installed the new drive's electronics onto the old drive... and I was able to get ALL my hard drive contents back.
Good point about brand-name things. Nonetheless, if you don't go "brand" you can still get good shoes for $20 to $40.
In general I think my point about artificially low prices on much manufactured stuff is still valid - look at all the stuff that's made overseas, and how the actual price has dropped, even without factoring in inflation.
I don't agree that money invested in the stock market always directly results in jobs. Investing is increasingly about just finding gambles (shorting, futures, derivatives, etc) where money is made/lost in some sort of "play". How often do these plays result in a company being downsized or wiped out altogether? These plays usually reward investors at the cost of the downsized worker and the taxpayer.
Re:All I know is...
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I totally agree with your measure of "worth" as how long you have to work to get something.
But you have to compare apples to apples - same timeframe, and same relative framework. it's not helpful to compare a 1st world economy to a 3rd world economy (except to remind oneself how good we currently have it in North America).
A better comparison might be cost of shelter - how many days one has to work for a month's rent (or a month of mortgage, utilities, property taxes)
But two very key things;
First, we only have to work a couple hours to buy shoes... because we don't make them anymore. We get the 3rd world and to make them. ditto for alot of consumer goods. The price we pay is artificially LOW and we are going to get it between the eyes when we run out of cheap labour to exploit.
And second... since we still do have it relatively good... we should be INVESTING AS A SOCIETY in things that will insure future well-being - eg education and research. As a class, the thing rich people are mostly good at is staying rich. Giving them more wealth via tax cuts in this day and age... makes them wealthier, period. They are not reinvesting in things that produce jobs.
So I agree that we have it good, but we're on the wrong course for keeping it good... unless the intent is to maintain our wealth through world domination and intimidation by force (military and capital). Which doesn't seem to be working so well, lately.
In 1988, we lived in a small rented house with old, groundless AC wiring. While trying to interface the once popular Teletype unit to an XT, somehow there was a difference in the ground potential of the XT and the Teletype, and the XT was seriously fried - burnt-traces, blown-up ICs, the works. There wasn't much data to lose, so the real loss was the hardware.
Fast forward to 2000 - a 2 year-old Celeron 300 box with a no-name case and PSU. All by itself, the powersupply went nova, apparently leading to an overvoltage which, similar to 1988, fried most of the electronics, including drive electronics, a $500 multichannel soundcard, and just about everything else.
Thank god for ebay - i was able to find the exact same harddrive, swap it's good electronics into my blown drive, and get all my data back.
The "rabbits" are consumers! They pay to buy and sell stuff, pay to read about other rabbits, pay to view pictures of young shaved rabbits, pay to manage their carrot hoard online, all on the websites we're paid to build.
If there's fewer rabbits, we get paid less.
If rabbits tell other rabbits that one particular "field" (the internet) is full of foxes, they'll stay away, and the rabbits will move off to somebody else's field (like maybe a "secure" proprietary network owned by a big corporation).
Let me make my point another way - instead of the web, let's consider a shopping mall that has pickpockets. By your Darwinian model, we should just sit back, let the shoppers get pickpocketed, and hope that only paranoid shoppers with tight pants will shop in our mall...?
I'm another happy Popfile user - had it for over 8 months now.
It's currently running around 99.2 % correct. Out of roughly 300 messages/day, almost all spam, I see maybe 2 spams a day tagged as good, and there's maybe one or two valid messages tagged as spam per month.
I currently just have Popfile sort into 2 folders - spam and good. About twice a week i look at the spam folder and sort by Subject, which groups the messages nicely (... spam titles are sooo unimaginative), and the valid messages tend to be very visible. Once i've reviewed the spam folder and moved any valid messages over, I empty the spam folder and train Popfile on any errors.
The above procedure takes maybe 10 minutes to complete, even if there's 2000 spam messages to scan. the key is to sort by subject.
I also use Popfile's "magnets" setting for a whitelist of addresses to unconditionally pass.
I just upgraded from Popfile v19 to v21, and it's now about twice as fast booting up and sorting.
... and try to maintain access to wire runs
on
Wiring a Neighborhood?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If possible, plan the wiring system so that new or upgraded cabling can be run to the units in future. Plan for conduit with access and pull points, or an accessible wiring tray in attic, etc.
As a start, I would run to each residence:
1- phone quad cable (plain ole phone system) 1- CAT 5 or 6 (data, local network, internet) 1- Coax (RG-59) for cable TV
If budget allows or if the wiring can't be later accessed for service, I would run 2 of each for redundancy.
I don't think the current wireless neighbourhood solutions are worth the hassle or as reliable or secure as wire. Wire will give better service longer.
I personally don't think data over powerlines will be very successful until all AC-powered equipment is built or modified to not load the data, or generate noise at the data frequencies.
The health care is NOT state-provided. Health care is provided by doctors opening practices or groups of doctors running a clinic. Same as the states and elsewhere. The difference is that the government pays the doctor, the user doesn't pay.
For most people, the government doesn't pay for most drugs, semi-private hospital rooms, physiotherapy, etc. This is where the employer usually contributes. Most companies operating in Canada offer some sort of enhanced health plan to their employees that covers such extras.
Yeah, we pay more taxes in Canada. And our schools are better, there's less crime, and our inner cities don't look like third-world conflict zones. Go figure.
As most posters have confirmed, the Canadian office environment is pretty much identical to the US... maybe a bit less hyperactive.
This is maybe the downside - the Canadian customer is less reactive to high-pressure sales. We're maddeningly slow to cut a deal, and often passive-aggressive when subjected to a high-pressure sales pitch. This drives US salespeople crazy.;^)
Slashdot Mirror
Every stat I could find on Scotland tourism says it's remained steady, even through the 2008 crash, and that it's slated to rise in the future.
No Bullshit. Your response, on the other hand - complete doctrinaire bullshit. How does it feel to be a sock puppet?
Tell ya what - as soon as Canada and the US stop subsidizing oil and gas production and consumption ($600B/year) I will ask for the same for alternative energy ($6B/year)
I do like the reservoir idea. it's on the table.
Approximately 100 households were bought out because they complained. Not because they proved evidence hardship or physical effect. The most-often reported complaint was a drop in property value.
Some valid points re the comparison... but FFS would people please stop hypothesizing and produce the science that says that there is an actual detectable subacoustic signal at the mandated 550 meter minimum distance mandated in Ontario, and that this measurable signal has human effect? More than the sound of waves crashing on the shore?
You fanned away my other points like a bad smell.
All these anti-wind generator points are weak, mostly hypothetical and you miss the main point of my comment and the OP, which is that the anti-windfarm organizations are working overtime to generate FUD for broader political reasons than that they simply don't like wind generators.
Finally, these are first and second-generation machines; they're going to get better as we get further into this. The noise will magically go away when the alternative is freezing in the dark.
In Ontario, the right-wing establishment have successfully united the usual anti-government, anti-progress suspects with some pissed-off farmers, rural retirees, and rich NIMBYs to create a particularly nasty strain of anti-windmill sentiment. They've become the Typhoid Mary of wind farm sickness.
It's true that the Ont. government was a bit overzealous in a few of its land acquisition, and there were a small number of households which were closer than what is considered a comfortable distance from some installations, but as far as i know, every such household has either been paid off or relocated.
The claimed negative health effects are spurious. I wonder what any of the hundreds of thousands of households located close to rail lines, expressways or airports must think when they hear people whinging about effects from wind generators...
Yes windmills kill some birds and bats. In North America the reported bird-kill from windfarms is a fraction of the kill from oil and gas operations.... and several orders of magnitude lower than the number of birds killed annually by.... house-cats. Like birds? Don't let your stupid cat out.
Finally, the technology is still pretty young. There's every reason to expect that wind generators will become more reliable, efficient, quieter, and that their energy can be stored and used more effectively. How many centuries has coal-burning taken to get efficient and clean up a bit?
It's kind of a tough call. On the one hand, if you sign off on something government-y that's technically false, that can boomerang on you later on. On the other hand, since the US and Canadian dollar are within a percent or two of parity, the discrepancy is trivial, so any future correction would be trivial. Me, I'd have probably STFU and signed.
But I could only afford a used boat.So maybe I don't understand...
The flaw in the system seems to be the inordinate amount of power in one agent's hands. If the agent had to call a superior to do the seizure, and explain the stupid reason... I bet the matter would have evaporated at that point.
-sigh- a bit older than 52... I'm still finding decent work in some niches, but the young'uns, both local and visa, are making it harder. (Also, flavour-of-the-month technology choices. Rails...eccch)
Never fear. I'm cross-training as a boat mechanic/electrician. At least I'll get a tan.
That article does more harm than good.
First, it's extrapolating from one article's hypothetical projection about solar capacity to the incorrect conclusion that all the proponents of renewable energy have forgotten about energy conservation and Malthusian population limits.
Then, she's doing exactly what she accuses the renewables backers of: playing up only one possible improvement and ignoring the rest.
"Renewable energy advocates typically support conservation efforts, but they don't make reducing consumption their primary goal. Panicked by the urgency of the climate crisis, and rightfully so, their knee-jerk response is a "just do it" approach to technology. "Why don't we just build more solar panels and wind turbines?" they ask.
To which I say: Why don't we just not do it? Let's not build any new power plants except to replace old, inefficient ones. Let's not dig up all the oil. Let's not drive to work alone. Let's not eat meat every day. Let's not turn the thermostat up so high. Let's not buy so many things we don't really need. And above all, let's not accept continued energy growth as a necessary or even desirable way of life".
Her solution, in isolation, is as unworkable as any other single approach.
As long as the various evangelists for alternative energy strategies continue to undercut each other like this, instead of standing together to craft strategy that's actually workable, the pro-oil, pro-growth powers can just point and laugh at the lefty loonies, and little will change.
Good point.
Ok... the best electronics hardware platform is one of those 300-in-1 kits you see in science stores, RatShack, etc etc. Many have you wire the circuits using wires tucked under springs connected to mounted components, but the best kits give you a breadboard that you plug loose parts into. The circuits in the kit's manual are not stellar but you learn tons by just making them and making the circuits work I learned my trade on a 50-in1 kit back in the 70s... and about 5 years ago I picked up a 300-in-1 set for half-price. It makes a great quickie platform for experimenting.
I've been quite happy with using SourceBoost as a PIC environment C compiler. You can do alot with the free version, and licencing for Pro use isn't that expensive. The simulator plugins at $20 are pretty good. Alas... Windoze only
Back to the original question... I respect the Arduino project, it seems to be a great microcontroller infrastructure, with lots of hardware and community support. But I already have PIC tools and dev boards, and I've attended a few MicroChip courses.
I've got some RPi's now... for $35 wow. I'm learning their capabilities, and I'm going to try talking serial or I2C to a PIC board. Could be my new go-to ethernet-enabled platform.
I'm sort of a JS hater, but that IS impressive.
If I was to be really cynical, I'd say that this proves that any ole programming language, if it survives long enough to be worked-on and added-to for a couple of decades, and given fast enough processing, can evolve. Maybe.
(Also it's a great breakdown/tutorial of the game programming steps)
...Sure, OSWD.org had some hosting issues, but that's not why the site isn't back up; the (seems to me) Second in Command, Aaron, who is dedicating a lot of time and effort into maintaining the site wants to migrate the site to a new host (and has already had everthing set up), except for the content/backups, which Frank refuses to provide.
Speaking personally, for any project that I was #2 on AND for which I was doing most of the maintenance... I'd have a complete local set of files, and/or my own set of backup files. Just sayin'.
The article was light on the details of why the hams are opposed to this, except for the issue of whether or not it will interfere with their signals. If the BPL companies are offering to NOT interfere with the signal, why is there still opposition?
Because the current definition of "not interfering with" is based on fairly loose standards, because BPL noise could ruin the opportunity to use other parts of the RF spectrum in the future, but mainly because power-cabling is unshielded and currently so inefficient at broadband frequencies that they will initially have to use alot of signal, and radiation will be a given, regardless of what's promised.
Think of this as background noise (eg like your neighbour's air conditioner). It may be quiet, but its noise still prevents you from hearing the birds clearly, the breeze in the trees, the buzz of the bees, etc. BPL radiation will reduce our ability to detect faint RF signals. When the extraterrestrials finally get around to thanking us for the LP on Voyager, we won't be able to hear them.
On another note, not to be a dick, but how can a bunch of hams form a "major" opposition against the power companies, IBM, Google etc?
Well, that's the problem. Maybe we need a "sierra club" or "greenpeace" to act as watchdogs on our RF spectrum...
I do believe that BPL is probably inevitable, though... so, sometime in the future, when most of the power grid is adapted for this, and all new AC-powered devices have BPL filters built-in, then the BPL radiation should be less.
Biological evolution means change of a species.
At least for the rest of the worlds' flora and fauna, evolution is driven by natural selection which has two components: a means of producing genetic changes (mutation), and then a means for choosing which mutation is reinforced.
In nature, genetic mutations are reinforced if they improve the species' ability to survive and reproduce. aka natural selection.
But currently, natural selection does not much affect humans anymore. People with inherited weaknesses (eg asthma, allergies, blood disorders, increased susceptibility to cancers, fans of pro wrestling) still live and reproduce thanks to modern medicine, so these weaknesses are not being weeded out of the gene pool. Likewise, people with no inherited weaknesses are not breeding up a storm.
So biological evolution for humans is essentially halted, til some great selection mechanism (eg a catastrophe - plague/flu, nuclear war, loss of habitat) comes along.
That's OK. The thing we really need to be cultivating right now is ethical evolution. A lotta work to do here, people.
The author's research has so far just consisted of grazing the consumer-facing websites of the tier one PC suppliers. So what he saw only reflects the current marketing decisions with respect to the consumer walk-in trade.
No big corporation would buy the bulk of their PCs in onesies and twosies from the suppliers website. There's a long, slow dance involved where companies are invited to tender responses to a list of requirements, which are then analysed and compared. At that level, one would expect there to be a sharp clear difference in cost of OS and software between Windows and Linux, and one would hope the people analysing bids are less susceptable to FUD.
Of course this is also the point where M$ can try "special" discounts (eg 100%) or other incentives to try to force their OS into the deal.
Anyway, I don't think the author has made his case in terms of corporate volume purchases of PCs.
The magic word is "restructuring".
Quantegy bought the reel tape business from AMPEX... and they're apparently failing as a company.
This will probably resolve itself as:
A) Quantegy gets its act together and the plant reopens, or
B) Quantegy goes under, plant is sold and it reopens.
As others have pointed out, there's still a significant pro market, and many audiophile types, so there's enough market for the right supplier.
I was born about 20 years too early for the Internet, so while waiting for Al Gore to actually get it done, I was an electronics geek in public & high school (early 70's)
One year a prescient uncle gave me one of those kits, and I absolutely devoured it over the next several months. Highlights were the various radio circuits, audio amplifiers where you pressed that pink crystal earphone into service as a microphone, and the pinnacle - an AM transmitter.
Thanks in part to that thing, I went straight into electronics after high school and had a great 20 year career in broadcast electronics before jumping into programming several years ago.
Thanks for the link. Those were good memories.
On one of my PC's, the power supply went haywire (and overvoltage) and most of the PC electronics was fried, including the hard-drive.
I was able to locate the same make/model of drive on Ebay, and when the new drive arrived, I installed the new drive's electronics onto the old drive... and I was able to get ALL my hard drive contents back.
Good point about brand-name things. Nonetheless, if you don't go "brand" you can still get good shoes for $20 to $40.
In general I think my point about artificially low prices on much manufactured stuff is still valid - look at all the stuff that's made overseas, and how the actual price has dropped, even without factoring in inflation.
I don't agree that money invested in the stock market always directly results in jobs. Investing is increasingly about just finding gambles (shorting, futures, derivatives, etc) where money is made/lost in some sort of "play". How often do these plays result in a company being downsized or wiped out altogether? These plays usually reward investors at the cost of the downsized worker and the taxpayer.
I totally agree with your measure of "worth" as how long you have to work to get something.
But you have to compare apples to apples - same timeframe, and same relative framework. it's not helpful to compare a 1st world economy to a 3rd world economy (except to remind oneself how good we currently have it in North America).
A better comparison might be cost of shelter - how many days one has to work for a month's rent (or a month of mortgage, utilities, property taxes)
But two very key things;
First, we only have to work a couple hours to buy shoes... because we don't make them anymore. We get the 3rd world and to make them. ditto for alot of consumer goods. The price we pay is artificially LOW and we are going to get it between the eyes when we run out of cheap labour to exploit.
And second... since we still do have it relatively good... we should be INVESTING AS A SOCIETY in things that will insure future well-being - eg education and research. As a class, the thing rich people are mostly good at is staying rich. Giving them more wealth via tax cuts in this day and age... makes them wealthier, period. They are not reinvesting in things that produce jobs.
So I agree that we have it good, but we're on the wrong course for keeping it good... unless the intent is to maintain our wealth through world domination and intimidation by force (military and capital). Which doesn't seem to be working so well, lately.
In 1988, we lived in a small rented house with old, groundless AC wiring. While trying to interface the once popular Teletype unit to an XT, somehow there was a difference in the ground potential of the XT and the Teletype, and the XT was seriously fried - burnt-traces, blown-up ICs, the works. There wasn't much data to lose, so the real loss was the hardware.
Fast forward to 2000 - a 2 year-old Celeron 300 box with a no-name case and PSU. All by itself, the powersupply went nova, apparently leading to an overvoltage which, similar to 1988, fried most of the electronics, including drive electronics, a $500 multichannel soundcard, and just about everything else.
Thank god for ebay - i was able to find the exact same harddrive, swap it's good electronics into my blown drive, and get all my data back.
Needless to say I only buy top-line PSU's now.
One problem with your little scenario.
The "rabbits" are consumers! They pay to buy and sell stuff, pay to read about other rabbits, pay to view pictures of young shaved rabbits, pay to manage their carrot hoard online, all on the websites we're paid to build.
If there's fewer rabbits, we get paid less.
If rabbits tell other rabbits that one particular "field" (the internet) is full of foxes, they'll stay away, and the rabbits will move off to somebody else's field (like maybe a "secure" proprietary network owned by a big corporation).
Let me make my point another way - instead of the web, let's consider a shopping mall that has pickpockets. By your Darwinian model, we should just sit back, let the shoppers get pickpocketed, and hope that only paranoid shoppers with tight pants will shop in our mall...?
I'm another happy Popfile user - had it for over 8 months now.
It's currently running around 99.2 % correct. Out of roughly 300 messages/day, almost all spam, I see maybe 2 spams a day tagged as good, and there's maybe one or two valid messages tagged as spam per month.
I currently just have Popfile sort into 2 folders - spam and good. About twice a week i look at the spam folder and sort by Subject, which groups the messages nicely (... spam titles are sooo unimaginative), and the valid messages tend to be very visible. Once i've reviewed the spam folder and moved any valid messages over, I empty the spam folder and train Popfile on any errors.
The above procedure takes maybe 10 minutes to complete, even if there's 2000 spam messages to scan. the key is to sort by subject.
I also use Popfile's "magnets" setting for a whitelist of addresses to unconditionally pass.
I just upgraded from Popfile v19 to v21, and it's now about twice as fast booting up and sorting.
If possible, plan the wiring system so that new or upgraded cabling can be run to the units in future. Plan for conduit with access and pull points, or an accessible wiring tray in attic, etc.
As a start, I would run to each residence:
1- phone quad cable (plain ole phone system)
1- CAT 5 or 6 (data, local network, internet)
1- Coax (RG-59) for cable TV
If budget allows or if the wiring can't be later accessed for service, I would run 2 of each for redundancy.
I don't think the current wireless neighbourhood solutions are worth the hassle or as reliable or secure as wire. Wire will give better service longer.
I personally don't think data over powerlines will be very successful until all AC-powered equipment is built or modified to not load the data, or generate noise at the data frequencies.
The health care is NOT state-provided. Health care is provided by doctors opening practices or groups of doctors running a clinic. Same as the states and elsewhere. The difference is that the government pays the doctor, the user doesn't pay.
;^)
For most people, the government doesn't pay for most drugs, semi-private hospital rooms, physiotherapy, etc. This is where the employer usually contributes. Most companies operating in Canada offer some sort of enhanced health plan to their employees that covers such extras.
Yeah, we pay more taxes in Canada. And our schools are better, there's less crime, and our inner cities don't look like third-world conflict zones. Go figure.
As most posters have confirmed, the Canadian office environment is pretty much identical to the US... maybe a bit less hyperactive.
This is maybe the downside - the Canadian customer is less reactive to high-pressure sales. We're maddeningly slow to cut a deal, and often passive-aggressive when subjected to a high-pressure sales pitch. This drives US salespeople crazy.