Diamonds are no longer a non-renewable resource, petrol is next. I've always been inspired by that Twilight Zone episode where a band of gold thieves time-travel with their booty to the future only to find out gold is easily produced and valueless there.
Because of mad cow disease, using offal in animal feed is facing restriction. When there's no other use for offal, meat processors have to pay to dispose it. Depolymerization seems like a great way to reverse that cost. Although this first plant only uses turkey offal (blood and guts), the process can works with many other materials, plastic for example.
The work behind this first commercial facility has taken longer than a couple of years. The process has actually been around for decades. The breakthrough was making it efficient enough for commercial application. This plant's production is paltry, but if it's an effective test bed, we should see bigger and better plants in the future.
I'll challenge your skepticism with my optimism: $1000 if the (inflation-adjusted) price for oil hasn't fallen by 2014?
Did the Institute for Justice's "eminent domain" ad remind anyone else of the beginning of H2G2? I guess a hyperspace bypass isn't that bad of an eminent domain abuse compared to building a limousine garage for that Vogon, Donald Trump.
This is the first full-production depolymerization plant. The second will be better. And they should be much better long before 1,000 plants are built. Also, it won't have to completely replace other sources of oil to have a dramatic effect on prices, just as other new processes - like refining bitumen into oil - have affected prices.
I first read about this company in Discover Magazine. The Discover article makes clear that this first small-scale facility is more a test bed than a final example of what depolymerization is ultimately capable of. For example, turkey guts is just one possible "feedstock". Plastic, and many other things that currently end up in landfills, will work.
BOBBY: The key to writing a good Yakov Smirnoff joke is to picture yourself arriving in America and noticing that it is different from Russia. BILL: And when he says "reckon" and "y'all" in that accent of his, I just lose it. It's brilliant, really. DALE: The only thing "brilliant, really" about Yakov Smirnoff is that he's a KGB spy. He's been sending U.S. secrets back to Mother Russia while tourists are seduced by his fake comedy act. Although his beard is real.
BOBBY: In America, you put "In God We Trust" on your money. In Russia, we have no money!
YAKOV SMIRNOFF: Hey, kid, I don't do Russian jokes for last ten years. Now I do jokes about relationships and things I observe.
I've always felt all sporting is inherently ungeeky: sportsmen are numskulled bullies; they should stick to throwing balls - we should stick to coding and second-rate sports like laser tag or geocaching.
My (nongeek) brother got me into playing basketball recently. I never would have imagined how much fun it actually is. I wish I'd give up StarCraft for basketball a long time ago. Shedding my geek physique was easer than I thought, and I've got more vim for coding nowadays.
Italy deregulated broadcasting (on free speach grounds), and the result was vibrant: it replaced the state-run "cathedral" with a privately run "bazaar".
The FCC is a tool to stiffle free speach. National Public Radio was one of the forces that pushed the FCC to crack down on microbroadcasters. It wasn't for fear of chaos. It was to stiffle NPR's competitors. Someone from Radio Free Berkley (true community radio, as opposed to "public" radio) once called NPR the "agent orange of grassroots radio". If NPR is agent orange, then the FCC is mustard gas.
TTTAAC... Now that I think about it... I read about that law a decade ago in a P.J. O'Rourke book that was itself a decade old at the time. So, things have changed in 20 years?
Anyway, the original poster suggested the US shouldn't do business with India because its labor laws aren't up to par. I've read about India's unions and minimum wage more recently. I think my point still stands: that India's competitive strengths are real, not due to sweatshop conditions.
Last time I checked, it was illegal to fire an employee in India, period. Once your hire someone, you're stuck with them until they quit or croak. I think India should reject trading with the US until we adopt such "progressive" labor laws. And, yes, India has unions and a minimum wage.
Up until the antitrust case, MS ignored Washington. The antitrust case is what got them interested in political contributions and lobbying. I remember smug pundits at the start of the trial saying MS was getting its just desserts for not contributing "a lot of money to both US political parties."
In a sense, it's almost like politicians use antitrust for their own racketeering purposes. It's been revealed that Nixon definitely targeted companies with antitrust investigation that peeved him politically.
Milton Friedman's take on the US MS antitrust suite is interesting:
...as I watched what actually happened, I saw that, instead of promoting competition, antitrust laws tended to do exactly the opposite, because they tended, like so many government activities, to be taken over by the people they were supposed to regulate and control.
...is it really in the self-interest of Silicon Valley to set the government on Microsoft? Your industry, the computer industry, moves so much more rapidly than the legal process, that by the time this suit is over, who knows what the shape of the industry will be....you will rue the day when you called in the government.
>"...other than personal computers and the Internet..."
I suppose that, other than smelting and metalworking, the Bronze Age wasn't that remarkable. Let me guess, you're waiting for flying cars and housemaid robots? Golly Gee Willikers, if you've been bored by the progress in the last quarter century, you've been playing at Rip Van Winkle!
Today, I access vast swaths of human knowledge from my living room (Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, Slashdot, The Onion) on a machine running three billion operations per second that only cost me a few weeks pay. My car has airbags and ABS, it rarely breaks down, and has more electronics than you can shake a stick at, and is still cheaper than a car from the '70s.
Apart from everyday stuff, you've apparently missed out on amorphous metal, nanocoatings, depolymerization, the nuclear battery, DDR RAM, hyperthreading, steel minimills, not to mention all the advances in medicine and agriculture.
What could you do on the Net in '76? Could you search Google, shop Amazon, or play XBox Live? Do you need zeplins that moor atop the Empire State Building and biplanes with laser guns to feel like you're living in the future? The future is a gyp unless it enfolds by the stale plan of antediluvian futurists? I'd look to Century City before the works of Jules Vern or Ray Bradbury to see what quantum computing, biotech, and nanotech may have in store.
I hope you didn't think I was talking about seawater droplets. Sea spray does contain submicron particles. And with toast, I was talking about aerosol soot, not bread crumbs.
You're not playing Chicken Little; I'm not throwing caution to the wind. I'd rather see someone like the Forsight Institute setting the pace for nanotech; you'd probably rather see someone like the EPA or FDA.
You're right that caution can kill. How about a real-life example? The FDA took ten years to approve the Sensor Pad, a simple device that makes self-examination for breast cancer much more effective. FDA put it in the same class as an artificial heart for approval. Their incentives are wholly on the side of caution. They're not accountable to the victims of their delays. Another notable example is the FDA's footdragging on approval for the home HIV test. The FDA serves a good function. But that function often comes at a high price. My point is that regulation isn't a panacea.
I'm not an anarchist, and I'm sure you're not a totalitarian. But we probably do have different world views. You're worried about DDT thinning egg shells; I'm worried about millions of people dying from malaria. You don't like asbestos; I don't like the thought of dying in a house fire. You're offended by car exhaust; I can't stand horse manure. Nanotech could be poised to drastically improve material conditions in the world. I'm asking that you consider the flipside of your worldview, the risks of choking progress, as you promote regulation.
When you impy we should wait until the best experts have given us a thorough diagnosis on the safety of nanotech, I'm thinking of the benefits we'll lose while stalled: cleaner cars, safer buildings, medical breakthroughs, better slacks. I'm also skeptical that nanotech regulation won't be motivated by junk science, liker other health scares (e.g. alar, saccharin, acrylamide, etc).
Beaches should be banned before nanotube yarn. Marine aerosol (i.e. sea spray) contains plenty of nanoparticles. Why not impose a full moratorium on surfing, sandcastles, and beach volleyball until the full health effects of marine aerosol nanoparticles on the human body is understood?
One question about nanomaterials and nanocoatings is how likely are you to inhale substantial quantities of them in the first place. You create nanoparticles when you toast a piece of bread. You'll probably inhale less nanoparticles from your space elevator or Eddie Bauer Nano-Care khakis than you do from your breakfast toast. More seriously, I'd worry about nanoparticles from normal car exhaust before I'd worry about dust from nanoyarn.
"Thoroughly examined" in practice too often means worrying idefinitely about insubstantial risks. I want the benefits of nanotech in my lifetime. I don't want it to get bogged down forever by politically motivated scaremongering like oelstra, electronic pasteurization, and biotech have.
Third degree price discrimination (segmenting a market based on different demand elasticities) is proof of a monopoly. It couldn't happen in a perfectly competitive theoretical model economy. It's exploiting consumers because they have varied williness to pay for a good, rather than because selling to them entails different costs. Anyone who practices this should be locked away forever, especially movie theaters and restaurants that give discounts to children or seniors.
That's a funny caricature of right-wing, fundamentalist, homeschoolers. But your view of homeschooling is about twenty years out of date. Liberal-minded homeschooling parents have to deal enough with the stigma fundamentatists have given homeschool. Lets give that old stereotype a rest.
If you're so beholden to the school unions that you can't objectively consider the merits of homeschool, send your kid to a public school from which he'll emerge with an empty head. I'll homeschool my son, and we'll see which becomes the citizen best prepared to champion liberal causes.
The stultifying atmosphere of a prison-like public school may have been fine for acclimating a child to work in the industrial era. It'll hardly prepare her to be competitive in the 21st century. Your point reminds me of the tired "school choice is bad because it only helps the children whose parents take advantage of it" argument. You'd rather hear a child droning:
Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfuly glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard.
Homeschooling doesn't mean isolating or cloistering your child. Homeschooling parents often have their kids engaged in more social activities than the average public schooler.
Socialization isn't nuetral. There's bad socialization and good socialization. The least qualified people to teach a young child good social skills are their agemates. The peer dependency that kids often get from institutional elementary schools is more a handicap than a social skill. Kids who are educated by their parents until at least age eight tend to have fewer behavioral problems and are more likely to become self-directed social leaders.
>The donations you mention are often court settlements...Like the $100 million he donated to fight malaria? Why you gotta be a hater? Gates donates billions to charity. How much do you donate? And don't give me a "widow's mite" spiel. A mite ain't gonna go far in developing a malaria vaccine.
Oh, reducing CO2 emissions is useless, Imperator. Once the sun burns out, this planet is doomed. You're just making sure we spend our last days using inferior products.
You're right that my post confused fauna with flora. And volcanism does only account for around 3% of CO2 production nowadays. The Cretaceous, of course, was a different story. You still can't discount the effect of a single erruption emitting tens of thousands of tons of CO2 all at once.
70,000 people in the 20th century were killed by volcanos. Popocatepetl could do a lot more environmental damage in a single day than Exxon Mobil could do in decades. Why do environmentalists quake in fear of Exxon, but smile at old Popo? Nature is our enemy.
You wouldn't go so far with your fear of anthropengic CO2 as to advocate stopping the removal of toxic petroleum from our national parks, would you? If we've learned anything from the dinosaurs it should be eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow Deccan Traps will cause a nuclear winter, a giant meteor will strike, a nearby star will go supernova, or methane will belch from the sea.
I'm not condoning pollution. I'm saying I wish the EPA could have been around to protect dinosaurs from volcanic emissions during the Cretaceous period. I wish Greenpeace could have done something about the wholesale slaughter of 95% of Earth's species at the end of the Paleozoic Era. It's humbling and frightening to see just how truly Mother Nature does not share our moral sensibilities.
"Comets giveth and comets taketh away." - Carl Sagan
>...fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again...
Land vegetation, oceans, and volcanoes put about 200 billion tons of CO2 into the air, compared to 6 billion tons from humans. If we're going to avoid the fate of the dinos, somebody needs to get Monntserrat and Krakatau to ratify Kyoto.
Slashdot Mirror
Diamonds are no longer a non-renewable resource, petrol is next. I've always been inspired by that Twilight Zone episode where a band of gold thieves time-travel with their booty to the future only to find out gold is easily produced and valueless there.
Because of mad cow disease, using offal in animal feed is facing restriction. When there's no other use for offal, meat processors have to pay to dispose it. Depolymerization seems like a great way to reverse that cost. Although this first plant only uses turkey offal (blood and guts), the process can works with many other materials, plastic for example.
The work behind this first commercial facility has taken longer than a couple of years. The process has actually been around for decades. The breakthrough was making it efficient enough for commercial application. This plant's production is paltry, but if it's an effective test bed, we should see bigger and better plants in the future.
I'll challenge your skepticism with my optimism: $1000 if the (inflation-adjusted) price for oil hasn't fallen by 2014?
Did the Institute for Justice's "eminent domain" ad remind anyone else of the beginning of H2G2? I guess a hyperspace bypass isn't that bad of an eminent domain abuse compared to building a limousine garage for that Vogon, Donald Trump.
This is the first full-production depolymerization plant. The second will be better. And they should be much better long before 1,000 plants are built. Also, it won't have to completely replace other sources of oil to have a dramatic effect on prices, just as other new processes - like refining bitumen into oil - have affected prices.
I first read about this company in Discover Magazine. The Discover article makes clear that this first small-scale facility is more a test bed than a final example of what depolymerization is ultimately capable of. For example, turkey guts is just one possible "feedstock". Plastic, and many other things that currently end up in landfills, will work.
BOBBY: The key to writing a good Yakov Smirnoff joke is to picture yourself arriving in America and noticing that it is different from Russia.
BILL: And when he says "reckon" and "y'all" in that accent of his, I just lose it. It's brilliant, really.
DALE: The only thing "brilliant, really" about Yakov Smirnoff is that he's a KGB spy. He's been sending U.S. secrets back to Mother Russia while tourists are seduced by his fake comedy act. Although his beard is real.
BOBBY: In America, you put "In God We Trust" on your money. In Russia, we have no money!
YAKOV SMIRNOFF: Hey, kid, I don't do Russian jokes for last ten years. Now I do jokes about relationships and things I observe.
I've always felt all sporting is inherently ungeeky: sportsmen are numskulled bullies; they should stick to throwing balls - we should stick to coding and second-rate sports like laser tag or geocaching.
My (nongeek) brother got me into playing basketball recently. I never would have imagined how much fun it actually is. I wish I'd give up StarCraft for basketball a long time ago. Shedding my geek physique was easer than I thought, and I've got more vim for coding nowadays.
Italy deregulated broadcasting (on free speach grounds), and the result was vibrant: it replaced the state-run "cathedral" with a privately run "bazaar".
The FCC is a tool to stiffle free speach. National Public Radio was one of the forces that pushed the FCC to crack down on microbroadcasters. It wasn't for fear of chaos. It was to stiffle NPR's competitors. Someone from Radio Free Berkley (true community radio, as opposed to "public" radio) once called NPR the "agent orange of grassroots radio". If NPR is agent orange, then the FCC is mustard gas.
I have reason to suspect former Caldera exec, Ransom Love, is a member of the Strange Name Mafia. I bet judge Learned Hand also belonged.
TTTAAC... Now that I think about it... I read about that law a decade ago in a P.J. O'Rourke book that was itself a decade old at the time. So, things have changed in 20 years?
Anyway, the original poster suggested the US shouldn't do business with India because its labor laws aren't up to par. I've read about India's unions and minimum wage more recently. I think my point still stands: that India's competitive strengths are real, not due to sweatshop conditions.
Last time I checked, it was illegal to fire an employee in India, period. Once your hire someone, you're stuck with them until they quit or croak. I think India should reject trading with the US until we adopt such "progressive" labor laws. And, yes, India has unions and a minimum wage.
In a sense, it's almost like politicians use antitrust for their own racketeering purposes. It's been revealed that Nixon definitely targeted companies with antitrust investigation that peeved him politically.
Milton Friedman's take on the US MS antitrust suite is interesting:
- DCOM
- DCOM2
- MyDoom backdoor *
- DameWare *
- Locator Service
- [Administrative] shares with weak passwords
- WebDav
- WKS - Windows Workstation Service
* Apply to 9X (although these are backdoors, not exploits)>"...other than personal computers and the Internet..."
I suppose that, other than smelting and metalworking, the Bronze Age wasn't that remarkable. Let me guess, you're waiting for flying cars and housemaid robots? Golly Gee Willikers, if you've been bored by the progress in the last quarter century, you've been playing at Rip Van Winkle!
Today, I access vast swaths of human knowledge from my living room (Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia, Slashdot, The Onion) on a machine running three billion operations per second that only cost me a few weeks pay. My car has airbags and ABS, it rarely breaks down, and has more electronics than you can shake a stick at, and is still cheaper than a car from the '70s.
Apart from everyday stuff, you've apparently missed out on amorphous metal, nanocoatings, depolymerization, the nuclear battery, DDR RAM, hyperthreading, steel minimills, not to mention all the advances in medicine and agriculture.
What could you do on the Net in '76? Could you search Google, shop Amazon, or play XBox Live? Do you need zeplins that moor atop the Empire State Building and biplanes with laser guns to feel like you're living in the future? The future is a gyp unless it enfolds by the stale plan of antediluvian futurists? I'd look to Century City before the works of Jules Vern or Ray Bradbury to see what quantum computing, biotech, and nanotech may have in store.
I hope you didn't think I was talking about seawater droplets. Sea spray does contain submicron particles. And with toast, I was talking about aerosol soot, not bread crumbs.
You're not playing Chicken Little; I'm not throwing caution to the wind. I'd rather see someone like the Forsight Institute setting the pace for nanotech; you'd probably rather see someone like the EPA or FDA.
You're right that caution can kill. How about a real-life example? The FDA took ten years to approve the Sensor Pad, a simple device that makes self-examination for breast cancer much more effective. FDA put it in the same class as an artificial heart for approval. Their incentives are wholly on the side of caution. They're not accountable to the victims of their delays. Another notable example is the FDA's footdragging on approval for the home HIV test. The FDA serves a good function. But that function often comes at a high price. My point is that regulation isn't a panacea.
I'm not an anarchist, and I'm sure you're not a totalitarian. But we probably do have different world views. You're worried about DDT thinning egg shells; I'm worried about millions of people dying from malaria. You don't like asbestos; I don't like the thought of dying in a house fire. You're offended by car exhaust; I can't stand horse manure. Nanotech could be poised to drastically improve material conditions in the world. I'm asking that you consider the flipside of your worldview, the risks of choking progress, as you promote regulation.
When you impy we should wait until the best experts have given us a thorough diagnosis on the safety of nanotech, I'm thinking of the benefits we'll lose while stalled: cleaner cars, safer buildings, medical breakthroughs, better slacks. I'm also skeptical that nanotech regulation won't be motivated by junk science, liker other health scares (e.g. alar, saccharin, acrylamide, etc).
Your nanoyarn vest won't do you any good once nanotube munitions are available. In the nearer future, Liquidmetal should make a good armor.
Beaches should be banned before nanotube yarn. Marine aerosol (i.e. sea spray) contains plenty of nanoparticles. Why not impose a full moratorium on surfing, sandcastles, and beach volleyball until the full health effects of marine aerosol nanoparticles on the human body is understood?
One question about nanomaterials and nanocoatings is how likely are you to inhale substantial quantities of them in the first place. You create nanoparticles when you toast a piece of bread. You'll probably inhale less nanoparticles from your space elevator or Eddie Bauer Nano-Care khakis than you do from your breakfast toast. More seriously, I'd worry about nanoparticles from normal car exhaust before I'd worry about dust from nanoyarn.
"Thoroughly examined" in practice too often means worrying idefinitely about insubstantial risks. I want the benefits of nanotech in my lifetime. I don't want it to get bogged down forever by politically motivated scaremongering like oelstra, electronic pasteurization, and biotech have.
Third degree price discrimination (segmenting a market based on different demand elasticities) is proof of a monopoly. It couldn't happen in a perfectly competitive theoretical model economy. It's exploiting consumers because they have varied williness to pay for a good, rather than because selling to them entails different costs. Anyone who practices this should be locked away forever, especially movie theaters and restaurants that give discounts to children or seniors.
That's a funny caricature of right-wing, fundamentalist, homeschoolers. But your view of homeschooling is about twenty years out of date. Liberal-minded homeschooling parents have to deal enough with the stigma fundamentatists have given homeschool. Lets give that old stereotype a rest.
If you're so beholden to the school unions that you can't objectively consider the merits of homeschool, send your kid to a public school from which he'll emerge with an empty head. I'll homeschool my son, and we'll see which becomes the citizen best prepared to champion liberal causes.
Homeschooling doesn't mean isolating or cloistering your child. Homeschooling parents often have their kids engaged in more social activities than the average public schooler.
Socialization isn't nuetral. There's bad socialization and good socialization. The least qualified people to teach a young child good social skills are their agemates. The peer dependency that kids often get from institutional elementary schools is more a handicap than a social skill. Kids who are educated by their parents until at least age eight tend to have fewer behavioral problems and are more likely to become self-directed social leaders.
>The donations you mention are often court settlements ...Like the $100 million he donated to fight malaria? Why you gotta be a hater? Gates donates billions to charity. How much do you donate? And don't give me a "widow's mite" spiel. A mite ain't gonna go far in developing a malaria vaccine.
Oh, reducing CO2 emissions is useless, Imperator. Once the sun burns out, this planet is doomed. You're just making sure we spend our last days using inferior products.
You're right that my post confused fauna with flora. And volcanism does only account for around 3% of CO2 production nowadays. The Cretaceous, of course, was a different story. You still can't discount the effect of a single erruption emitting tens of thousands of tons of CO2 all at once.
70,000 people in the 20th century were killed by volcanos. Popocatepetl could do a lot more environmental damage in a single day than Exxon Mobil could do in decades. Why do environmentalists quake in fear of Exxon, but smile at old Popo? Nature is our enemy.
You wouldn't go so far with your fear of anthropengic CO2 as to advocate stopping the removal of toxic petroleum from our national parks, would you? If we've learned anything from the dinosaurs it should be eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow Deccan Traps will cause a nuclear winter, a giant meteor will strike, a nearby star will go supernova, or methane will belch from the sea.
P.S. Most of this post was meant to be sarcastic.
I'm not condoning pollution. I'm saying I wish the EPA could have been around to protect dinosaurs from volcanic emissions during the Cretaceous period. I wish Greenpeace could have done something about the wholesale slaughter of 95% of Earth's species at the end of the Paleozoic Era. It's humbling and frightening to see just how truly Mother Nature does not share our moral sensibilities.
"Comets giveth and comets taketh away." - Carl Sagan
>...fossil fuel carbon still on the surface (where we're presently putting it again...
Land vegetation, oceans, and volcanoes put about 200 billion tons of CO2 into the air, compared to 6 billion tons from humans. If we're going to avoid the fate of the dinos, somebody needs to get Monntserrat and Krakatau to ratify Kyoto.