My ex wrote a novel that was published by Viking a few years ago and got a fair amount of critical acclaim.
When she first started working on it, in '99, I gave her my old laptop with Debian and Gedit. She did 50 or so pages, and then decided to move to Word to print it out. All the line-breaks were messed up, and she never forgave me. I did eventually set her up with a nice netbook and Openoffice, but it was too late, and now we're divorced.
She went from Gedit, which she hated to Word, which she hated, to OpenOffice, which she admires for its ability to reproduce all the defects in Word. On a good day, it's a tool, and like any tool, if you use it regularly, at some point you're going to hurt yourself with it.
If anything is a distraction, it's not the editor, cursor, or background color, it's wifi. Get a laptop with a Broadcom chipset, and you'll be incredibly productive.
I still get half the royalties from the book, so buy it and help me pay for my child support.
I was thinking of buying a gas or diesel powered automobile, but I heard that they have batteries that contain lead and sulfuric acid. They have to be replaced frequently over the lifetime of a car, and if the batteries are improperly cared for, they can explode. This sounds like an environmental disaster to me. Can anyone explain the entire lifecycle of car batteries before I make the leap and purchase a car?
What's with all the anti-hybrid sentiment on Slashdot lately? I followed the comments to this article last Thursday, and there are a surprising number of people who go out of their way to make up reasons not to get better gas mileage. Hybrids are some of the geekiest and most technologically advanced cars on the road.
I'm all for questioning the environmental impact of manufacturing, but this topic really reads like a troll. Next week, are we going to see "I heard that Priuses kill blind people..."?
You forgot depreciation and federal tax credits. Consumer Reports ran the numbers this month and came up with several hybrid cars that will save money over their non-hybrid equivalents. These were often the same model of car for a true apples-to-apples comparison. They claim that many hybrids will save money after the first year.
There's a nice table of the results, but it's for subscribers. They calculate the total cost of ownership for a five year period, and they come up with $28,250 for the Prius and $29,750 for a Civic LX. The Prius costs $24,170 list and the Civic is $18,430. The Prius has the lowest 5-year total owner cost on the cart.
I think it's fair to assume that gas price inflation will keep pace with the return on a T-Bill, so the interest isn't going to help. It depends a lot on whether we elect another representative from the oil industry as Vice President, but that's a topic for another conversation.
Time to call BS on all the insanely great hardware arguments. Apple is buying off the shelf components, and there aren't that many to choose from. Clone manufacturers will stick to the same CPU, the same GPU, and the same chipsets with the same embedded NICs, sound, bluetooth, and Wifi for the same insanely great results. Otherwise, the manufacturer will be fielding support calls, not Apple. Obviously, they wouldn't ship a product that requires downloads to get components working, any more than Linux vendors would ship a partially enabled system and tell customers to recompile the kernel.
As for third party hardware, Apple support isn't much better than Linux support these days anyway. I just tried to get an old webcam to work with my mini, and all I could get was hazy blobs. I assumed it would just work, since it worked well with Linux several years ago when I bought it, but OSX doesn't support USB webcams. After some searching, I found and installed the open source macam driver, but my Logitech camera is only partially supported. My choices now are to buy an iSight or go back to using the webcam with Linux.
This is just one example, but I've run into the same problem with HP printers and wifi cards with OSX. With either OS, you're at the mercy of the manufacturer. And, as far as reliability and usability, I find Ubuntu to be at the same level as OSX, except for power management and iPhone support.
I hear you on that, and I'm all for it. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, even if Obama wins by a landslide.
Drugs are expensive to research, but I'm not entirely clear on how much of that research is already state or nationally funded. Production probably costs about the same as jujubees once the clinical trials are done. Patent protection is largely what keeps drugs more expensive than jujubees.
I also imagine drugs would be a lot less expensive if the manufacturers weren't allowed to market them. They shouldn't be creating demand, and they shouldn't be adding in the cost of marketing for those who actually need the medication.
I have to admit, I don't use the Mach 3. I buy the generic two-blade razors. I think they're expensive because of the shelf-space cabal that left us with a razor duopoly.
There's no such thing as a flop in the pharma industry. If they spend the money to do research, they sure as hell spend the money to get the clinical trials come out the way they want.
Think I'm exaggerating? Check out the latestresearch regarding Prozac.
Besides that, $1bn is chump change for research these days. Gillette claims to have spent $750 million on R&D for the Mach 3 razor, and these were pretty reasonably priced, even when they were introduced. Pharma pricing is all about inelastic demand, and it needs to either be moderated through collective bargaining at the national level or outright regulation.
I priced out getting solar for my house. It would be about $30k, and it would provide for 90% of my electrical needs, even in Brooklyn. I bought a slightly used Prius for $20k, and it gets 37mpg in the city, and 50mpg on the freeway.
I just now priced out a Cadillac Escalade. I see a lot of those on the road, even in New York City, where they're completely impractical. I see a lot more of them than solar installations, even in the Southwest. You could get both the Prius and the solar installation for the price of the Escalade, and you'll get a tax break on both.
Renewable energy is economical. It's just not well marketed.
I think the guy is bitter because he reinvented the wheel, and now nobody is using his wheel. If he would have created an Eclipse plugin, he wouldn't have had to write the portion of the software that he's now giving away. He could have concentrated on the collaboration part.
Honestly, I don't really get what UNA buys you over the combination of Eclipse, Mylyn, SVN, and an IRC or IM plugin. I can't imagine that I'd want someone typing in the same file I'm working on.
New York City is the safest city in America. My daughter, who is 10, goes out for lunch with her friends every day in Brooklyn. She does not get lost, kidnapped, or in other ways harmed. She gets sushi or pizza.
The anarcho part is there to get the chix0rz. This guy probably used to be a libertarian, but when he'd take his stand at a co-ed party, those who heard him properly would back away warily, and the rest would think he works in the library. Now, he can leech some anarcho cred, differentiate himself from his dad's tired old brand of capitalism, and on occasion wear a black hoodie. Just don't look for him on the streets at the next WTO meeting. He'll be inside with the interns.
In '97, I met a record store owner through a friend, and as soon as he found out that I was a programmer, he wanted me to build a website for his store. I was a frequent customer of the store, and I was dropping about $100/month there, so I figured I could work out a good deal for both of us. I had a day job building websites, so I assumed it would be something quick I could do after work.
The only problem was, he wanted the site to interact with his POS system, and the POS system was several years out of date. It ran on SCO, and he had scanners, printers, and VT100s hooked into it. It worked well for his needs, but he had filled up the drive, and the database was big enough that the app was running low on memory for large queries. I spent the next several months learning SCO, specing out a new box, buying a new multi-port card for the VT100s, and putting it all together. I spent a couple weekends installing all of it, and I had some uncomfortable conversations with his POS vendor about moving everything over. I finally managed it with a null modem connection. Needless to say, the record store owner could not have done any of this himself.
After about six months of wrangling, my goodwill was exhausted, and I had accumulated more CDs than I could ever listen to. The store started making support calls to my day job, and I found myself running out during my lunch hour to help them out. The system finally proved solid, and I put the website idea on the backburner. My wife was pregnant, and I had a lot of catching up to do at work before the baby was due. The owner was extremely happy with the new POS, and I felt pretty good about the job.
On the last night before my wife gave birth, the owner of the store called me to say that he had dropped the external multi-port card on top of server. The hard drive in the box was mounted on the top, so it basically bounced off the drive, and now the machine was dead. I told him to call SCO, and he had to bring in a consultant to rescue the drive. The consultant was extremely expensive, and he knew less about the system than I did. He ended up calling me at work to talk him through the recovery. I don't know if they ever got the POS back up, and the store went out of business within the year. My wife had a healthy child, and I took a month of paternity leave.
My point isn't about SCO, the POS, or FOSS. It's about technology and small business. Small retail shops can't handle technology unless the owner can deal with it him or herself. If you get them in a position where they depend on you for software development or even system maintenance, you might be doing them a huge disservice, even if you use free solutions. (I believe SCO was already free as in beer at that point, BTW.) They need to focus on selling comics with as little technology as possible, and if you're frustrated that you're not doing development, it's a sign that you're ready to change careers. Get paid to develop software or do system administration and spend all your money on comics. The comic book shop should figure out how much it can afford to spend for set-up and maintenance, then use an off the shelf solution, where the costs are largely known and fixed. You'll save yourself a lot of support calls down the road, and you won't put the store in a position where they depend on you for services they really can't afford.
That's not entirely fair. Other religions don't have to pay a massive legal retainer. Then there's manufacturing all the E-meters, and those celebrity centers don't just grow on trees. Scientology has a lot of expenses that other religions don't have to deal with, and they're up front about it. What other religion is straightforward enough to call their sacred rite an audit?
I went through the exact same line of reasoning and just bought a Sony. The Kindle had already come out, so I factored it in, but it's $100 more expensive and painfully ugly. It was a close call with the Cybook, but they're out of stock for the indefinite future. One other thing I looked for was Linux support, and, as the other reply mentioned, the libprs500 module works well. It does an excellent job of pulling down the New York Times (for free).
I bothered to get the 100 free books, and I think it's worth considering. You could get the same books from Gutenberg, but Sony's formatting is cleaner.
The final confirmation for me was seeing a Kindle on the train the other day. A guy pulled out what I thought was a massive day-planner and opened it to reveal the Kindle. It was alarmingly large compared to the Sony. In my opinion, the Sony has a better form factor than a book, even a paperback.
I have to say, the cult of the Kindle isn't happening in New York City, where people seriously read in public. When the iPod first came out, I started seeing them on the train right away. I've only seen that one Kindle. I've seen more Segways on the streets. Of course, I haven't seen any Sony Readers, aside from my co-worker's, but it didn't get a Newsweek cover story. I'm curious to see if more of them will pop up after the holidays.
Saunders' second story in In Persuasion Nation does a good job imagining what New York will be like when advertisers fully have their way with the city.
Don't forget the Japanese in 1999. That nuked worker in the photo doesn't look too happy. Here's a nice little quote from the article:
"Tokaimura was the site of Japan's worst nuclear plant incident in 1997, when 35 workers were contaminated by radiation after a fire at a processing plant was not extinguished properly and caused an explosion."
Germany is using solar power on a large scale, primarily because there's so much opposition to nuclear power there. Granted, they're only shooting for 3% of their capacity from solar, but they don't get much sun. Maybe they're planning on getting a lot more in the future. In the meantime, they're building a solar power industry.
I priced out solar for my house in New York, and I can provide 90% of my electric needs with a $30k installation in a part of the country that doesn't get that much sun (more than Germany, though). Anyone in the southwest would get a lot more bang for their buck, and it's not that expensive, relative to the price of an SUV. I can get some decent tax breaks, on top of it.
It's not pie-in-the-sky thinking. The problem is that everyone is waiting for the government to solve the energy problem. My brother and my parents live in Arizona, they have the money in the bank to put up solar panels, and they're engineers, but they won't consider it. They tell me they're waiting for a breakthrough in solar, even though existing technology could easily provide all their power needs and feed into the grid. They also drive V8 Mustangs and SUVs. The price of fuel needs to get a lot more expensive to wake people up.
I'll get the solar going in about a year. I just dropped a bunch of cash on a Prius.
Every new house in the Southwest is required to use solar power. I live in the Northeast, and I'm pricing out a system for my house. For about $30K, I can take care of 90% of my residential electric needs. This would add about 15% to the price of an average new home in the Southwest, which is not an undue burden on those who can already afford to buy a new house.
I'll consider nuclear power when every new car and truck in the US is required to get at least 40mpg. I already own one, so it's not impossible or unproven technology. It cost me $20k, so the technology is not especially expensive.
I'll give nuclear a chance when you can't buy an incandescent light bulb. I swapped out all mine for fluorescent last year.
We already have technology and resources in place to reduce our power consumption incrementally, and we're not doing it. I don't see the need to make massive investments in nuclear when we're not taking these simple steps.
I would like to see us make the same investment in solar that Germany is making. The article makes it clear that Germany would not be investing so massively in solar power if they did not have such a strong anti-nuclear movement.
"The problem with mass transit is it kind of takes you to where you want to go and at the approximate time you want to get there, but not exactly. Sometimes you have to walk up to a mile from the last train or subway stop,"
It only takes 15 minutes to walk a mile. I just walked a mile in a light rain from my train station to work. It was not an undue burden on me, and most able-bodied individuals shouldn't need a 1,000 pound electric device to pull it off. A good system of bike lanes and parking would solve the same problem, be substantially less expensive, and be more than adequate for all trips under 2 miles.
I'm all for electric vehicles, but the "city car" is an oxymoron. Amsterdam does it right. Make the city safe and convenient for bikes and people will bike. Use buses and rail for longer hauls. This doesn't take any new technology, but the political will isn't there to pull it off.
For the record, I'm a zip car member, and I hate it. It's expensive and inconvenient. The last time I went to pick up my car, it wasn't there, and I spent half an hour walking around the neighborhood in a downpour looking for it. I've been a member off and on since they started, and every time I've gone to pick up a car it's been a hassle. Every time I've used the car it would have been cheaper to rent for a full day. The only reason I hold on to it is for emergencies.
Find the Russian community in your area and get a Russian art instructor. My wife is Russian, and she was taught to paint as a child by the last remnants of the Socialist Realist school. She did her undergrad at the Art Institute of Chicago, and she has an MFA in painting from UC Davis.
We live in Brooklyn, we have kids, and every now and then, we run across a class for kids with a Russian instructor. My wife always laughs because the kids do charming work, but it's exactly the same as her work as a child. She calls it teaching a bear to ride a bicycle.
Our older daughter takes art classes. She was going to the Brooklyn Museum, and now she's learning from one of my wife's friends, who has an MFA. My daughter learns the American way, haphazardly, without any emphasis on rendering, instead focusing on light, composition, and art history. My wife seems happy with it.
She doesn't think that the Russian approach can create artists. If you've ever been to a gallery that specializes in contemporary Russian art you'll know what she means. The work is always the same: churches, flowers, landscapes, and maybe something resembling Braque. What we've seen in Moscow is similar. I love Sotz Art, which was created in opposition to Socialist Realism, but I can't think of any top tier Russian artists that came to prominence after '91, except for the guy who molests farm animals.
My wife eternally laments the fate of one of her peers from her art academy in Moscow, who she thought was incredibly talented as a teen, but he now paints cubist churches. His art is technically excellent, but it's lifeless and hackneyed.
It may just be sour grapes, since she hasn't painted for several years. She also says she won't encourage our daughters to pursue art degrees later on. However, she did write a book that fondly draws on her experience at art school.
I bought my daughters a bunch of the Ed Emberley books. I really loved them as a kid. His aesthetic reminds me of OOP.
Monopoly was featured prominently in the Young Ones "Boring" episode. I first saw it as a teen, and I was amazed at how universal the close association between Monopoly and boredom is.
I admit that the auction rule would make the game move along. I first came across it last year while teaching the game to my kids. I didn't teach it to them because I had never played with it, and I thought it was some new addition to the game. Plus, it was pretty hard to get the kids to understand why they'd want to buy the deeds in the first place, without trying to run an auction every turn. After about an hour into the game, I was wishing I had followed the rules.
I disliked Monopoly as a kid until I figured out I could make a run on the currency and bring the game to halt by gathering up all of the mid-sized bills.
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My ex wrote a novel that was published by Viking a few years ago and got a fair amount of critical acclaim.
When she first started working on it, in '99, I gave her my old laptop with Debian and Gedit. She did 50 or so pages, and then decided to move to Word to print it out. All the line-breaks were messed up, and she never forgave me. I did eventually set her up with a nice netbook and Openoffice, but it was too late, and now we're divorced.
She went from Gedit, which she hated to Word, which she hated, to OpenOffice, which she admires for its ability to reproduce all the defects in Word. On a good day, it's a tool, and like any tool, if you use it regularly, at some point you're going to hurt yourself with it.
If anything is a distraction, it's not the editor, cursor, or background color, it's wifi. Get a laptop with a Broadcom chipset, and you'll be incredibly productive.
I still get half the royalties from the book, so buy it and help me pay for my child support.
I was thinking of buying a gas or diesel powered automobile, but I heard that they have batteries that contain lead and sulfuric acid. They have to be replaced frequently over the lifetime of a car, and if the batteries are improperly cared for, they can explode. This sounds like an environmental disaster to me. Can anyone explain the entire lifecycle of car batteries before I make the leap and purchase a car?
What's with all the anti-hybrid sentiment on Slashdot lately? I followed the comments to this article last Thursday, and there are a surprising number of people who go out of their way to make up reasons not to get better gas mileage. Hybrids are some of the geekiest and most technologically advanced cars on the road.
I'm all for questioning the environmental impact of manufacturing, but this topic really reads like a troll. Next week, are we going to see "I heard that Priuses kill blind people..."?
You forgot depreciation and federal tax credits. Consumer Reports ran the numbers this month and came up with several hybrid cars that will save money over their non-hybrid equivalents. These were often the same model of car for a true apples-to-apples comparison. They claim that many hybrids will save money after the first year.
There's a nice table of the results, but it's for subscribers. They calculate the total cost of ownership for a five year period, and they come up with $28,250 for the Prius and $29,750 for a Civic LX. The Prius costs $24,170 list and the Civic is $18,430. The Prius has the lowest 5-year total owner cost on the cart.
I think it's fair to assume that gas price inflation will keep pace with the return on a T-Bill, so the interest isn't going to help. It depends a lot on whether we elect another representative from the oil industry as Vice President, but that's a topic for another conversation.
Time to call BS on all the insanely great hardware arguments. Apple is buying off the shelf components, and there aren't that many to choose from. Clone manufacturers will stick to the same CPU, the same GPU, and the same chipsets with the same embedded NICs, sound, bluetooth, and Wifi for the same insanely great results. Otherwise, the manufacturer will be fielding support calls, not Apple. Obviously, they wouldn't ship a product that requires downloads to get components working, any more than Linux vendors would ship a partially enabled system and tell customers to recompile the kernel.
As for third party hardware, Apple support isn't much better than Linux support these days anyway. I just tried to get an old webcam to work with my mini, and all I could get was hazy blobs. I assumed it would just work, since it worked well with Linux several years ago when I bought it, but OSX doesn't support USB webcams. After some searching, I found and installed the open source macam driver, but my Logitech camera is only partially supported. My choices now are to buy an iSight or go back to using the webcam with Linux.
This is just one example, but I've run into the same problem with HP printers and wifi cards with OSX. With either OS, you're at the mercy of the manufacturer. And, as far as reliability and usability, I find Ubuntu to be at the same level as OSX, except for power management and iPhone support.
I can't find the link, but I believe the makers of crap sued crapulous and won an injunction.
I hear you on that, and I'm all for it. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too much, even if Obama wins by a landslide.
Drugs are expensive to research, but I'm not entirely clear on how much of that research is already state or nationally funded. Production probably costs about the same as jujubees once the clinical trials are done. Patent protection is largely what keeps drugs more expensive than jujubees.
I also imagine drugs would be a lot less expensive if the manufacturers weren't allowed to market them. They shouldn't be creating demand, and they shouldn't be adding in the cost of marketing for those who actually need the medication.
I have to admit, I don't use the Mach 3. I buy the generic two-blade razors. I think they're expensive because of the shelf-space cabal that left us with a razor duopoly.
There's no such thing as a flop in the pharma industry. If they spend the money to do research, they sure as hell spend the money to get the clinical trials come out the way they want.
Think I'm exaggerating? Check out the latest research regarding Prozac.
Besides that, $1bn is chump change for research these days. Gillette claims to have spent $750 million on R&D for the Mach 3 razor, and these were pretty reasonably priced, even when they were introduced. Pharma pricing is all about inelastic demand, and it needs to either be moderated through collective bargaining at the national level or outright regulation.
I'm willing to take the hit "thru" my 401k.
I priced out getting solar for my house. It would be about $30k, and it would provide for 90% of my electrical needs, even in Brooklyn. I bought a slightly used Prius for $20k, and it gets 37mpg in the city, and 50mpg on the freeway.
I just now priced out a Cadillac Escalade. I see a lot of those on the road, even in New York City, where they're completely impractical. I see a lot more of them than solar installations, even in the Southwest. You could get both the Prius and the solar installation for the price of the Escalade, and you'll get a tax break on both.
Renewable energy is economical. It's just not well marketed.
I think the guy is bitter because he reinvented the wheel, and now nobody is using his wheel. If he would have created an Eclipse plugin, he wouldn't have had to write the portion of the software that he's now giving away. He could have concentrated on the collaboration part.
Honestly, I don't really get what UNA buys you over the combination of Eclipse, Mylyn, SVN, and an IRC or IM plugin. I can't imagine that I'd want someone typing in the same file I'm working on.
You must be thinking of Denver or Phoenix.
The anarcho part is there to get the chix0rz. This guy probably used to be a libertarian, but when he'd take his stand at a co-ed party, those who heard him properly would back away warily, and the rest would think he works in the library. Now, he can leech some anarcho cred, differentiate himself from his dad's tired old brand of capitalism, and on occasion wear a black hoodie. Just don't look for him on the streets at the next WTO meeting. He'll be inside with the interns.
I think this is what you're looking for.
Don't forget that Ruiz is the highest-paid CEO in the semiconductor industry.
In '97, I met a record store owner through a friend, and as soon as he found out that I was a programmer, he wanted me to build a website for his store. I was a frequent customer of the store, and I was dropping about $100/month there, so I figured I could work out a good deal for both of us. I had a day job building websites, so I assumed it would be something quick I could do after work.
The only problem was, he wanted the site to interact with his POS system, and the POS system was several years out of date. It ran on SCO, and he had scanners, printers, and VT100s hooked into it. It worked well for his needs, but he had filled up the drive, and the database was big enough that the app was running low on memory for large queries. I spent the next several months learning SCO, specing out a new box, buying a new multi-port card for the VT100s, and putting it all together. I spent a couple weekends installing all of it, and I had some uncomfortable conversations with his POS vendor about moving everything over. I finally managed it with a null modem connection. Needless to say, the record store owner could not have done any of this himself.
After about six months of wrangling, my goodwill was exhausted, and I had accumulated more CDs than I could ever listen to. The store started making support calls to my day job, and I found myself running out during my lunch hour to help them out. The system finally proved solid, and I put the website idea on the backburner. My wife was pregnant, and I had a lot of catching up to do at work before the baby was due. The owner was extremely happy with the new POS, and I felt pretty good about the job.
On the last night before my wife gave birth, the owner of the store called me to say that he had dropped the external multi-port card on top of server. The hard drive in the box was mounted on the top, so it basically bounced off the drive, and now the machine was dead. I told him to call SCO, and he had to bring in a consultant to rescue the drive. The consultant was extremely expensive, and he knew less about the system than I did. He ended up calling me at work to talk him through the recovery. I don't know if they ever got the POS back up, and the store went out of business within the year. My wife had a healthy child, and I took a month of paternity leave.
My point isn't about SCO, the POS, or FOSS. It's about technology and small business. Small retail shops can't handle technology unless the owner can deal with it him or herself. If you get them in a position where they depend on you for software development or even system maintenance, you might be doing them a huge disservice, even if you use free solutions. (I believe SCO was already free as in beer at that point, BTW.) They need to focus on selling comics with as little technology as possible, and if you're frustrated that you're not doing development, it's a sign that you're ready to change careers. Get paid to develop software or do system administration and spend all your money on comics. The comic book shop should figure out how much it can afford to spend for set-up and maintenance, then use an off the shelf solution, where the costs are largely known and fixed. You'll save yourself a lot of support calls down the road, and you won't put the store in a position where they depend on you for services they really can't afford.
That's not entirely fair. Other religions don't have to pay a massive legal retainer. Then there's manufacturing all the E-meters, and those celebrity centers don't just grow on trees. Scientology has a lot of expenses that other religions don't have to deal with, and they're up front about it. What other religion is straightforward enough to call their sacred rite an audit?
SCO is listed on Pinksheets.
I went through the exact same line of reasoning and just bought a Sony. The Kindle had already come out, so I factored it in, but it's $100 more expensive and painfully ugly. It was a close call with the Cybook, but they're out of stock for the indefinite future. One other thing I looked for was Linux support, and, as the other reply mentioned, the libprs500 module works well. It does an excellent job of pulling down the New York Times (for free).
I bothered to get the 100 free books, and I think it's worth considering. You could get the same books from Gutenberg, but Sony's formatting is cleaner.
The final confirmation for me was seeing a Kindle on the train the other day. A guy pulled out what I thought was a massive day-planner and opened it to reveal the Kindle. It was alarmingly large compared to the Sony. In my opinion, the Sony has a better form factor than a book, even a paperback.
I have to say, the cult of the Kindle isn't happening in New York City, where people seriously read in public. When the iPod first came out, I started seeing them on the train right away. I've only seen that one Kindle. I've seen more Segways on the streets. Of course, I haven't seen any Sony Readers, aside from my co-worker's, but it didn't get a Newsweek cover story. I'm curious to see if more of them will pop up after the holidays.
Saunders' second story in In Persuasion Nation does a good job imagining what New York will be like when advertisers fully have their way with the city.
Don't forget the Japanese in 1999. That nuked worker in the photo doesn't look too happy. Here's a nice little quote from the article:
"Tokaimura was the site of Japan's worst nuclear plant incident in 1997, when 35 workers were contaminated by radiation after a fire at a processing plant was not extinguished properly and caused an explosion."
Germany is using solar power on a large scale, primarily because there's so much opposition to nuclear power there. Granted, they're only shooting for 3% of their capacity from solar, but they don't get much sun. Maybe they're planning on getting a lot more in the future. In the meantime, they're building a solar power industry.
I priced out solar for my house in New York, and I can provide 90% of my electric needs with a $30k installation in a part of the country that doesn't get that much sun (more than Germany, though). Anyone in the southwest would get a lot more bang for their buck, and it's not that expensive, relative to the price of an SUV. I can get some decent tax breaks, on top of it.
It's not pie-in-the-sky thinking. The problem is that everyone is waiting for the government to solve the energy problem. My brother and my parents live in Arizona, they have the money in the bank to put up solar panels, and they're engineers, but they won't consider it. They tell me they're waiting for a breakthrough in solar, even though existing technology could easily provide all their power needs and feed into the grid. They also drive V8 Mustangs and SUVs. The price of fuel needs to get a lot more expensive to wake people up.
I'll get the solar going in about a year. I just dropped a bunch of cash on a Prius.
Every new house in the Southwest is required to use solar power. I live in the Northeast, and I'm pricing out a system for my house. For about $30K, I can take care of 90% of my residential electric needs. This would add about 15% to the price of an average new home in the Southwest, which is not an undue burden on those who can already afford to buy a new house.
I'll consider nuclear power when every new car and truck in the US is required to get at least 40mpg. I already own one, so it's not impossible or unproven technology. It cost me $20k, so the technology is not especially expensive.
I'll give nuclear a chance when you can't buy an incandescent light bulb. I swapped out all mine for fluorescent last year.
We already have technology and resources in place to reduce our power consumption incrementally, and we're not doing it. I don't see the need to make massive investments in nuclear when we're not taking these simple steps.
I would like to see us make the same investment in solar that Germany is making. The article makes it clear that Germany would not be investing so massively in solar power if they did not have such a strong anti-nuclear movement.
"The problem with mass transit is it kind of takes you to where you want to go and at the approximate time you want to get there, but not exactly. Sometimes you have to walk up to a mile from the last train or subway stop,"
It only takes 15 minutes to walk a mile. I just walked a mile in a light rain from my train station to work. It was not an undue burden on me, and most able-bodied individuals shouldn't need a 1,000 pound electric device to pull it off. A good system of bike lanes and parking would solve the same problem, be substantially less expensive, and be more than adequate for all trips under 2 miles.
I'm all for electric vehicles, but the "city car" is an oxymoron. Amsterdam does it right. Make the city safe and convenient for bikes and people will bike. Use buses and rail for longer hauls. This doesn't take any new technology, but the political will isn't there to pull it off.
For the record, I'm a zip car member, and I hate it. It's expensive and inconvenient. The last time I went to pick up my car, it wasn't there, and I spent half an hour walking around the neighborhood in a downpour looking for it. I've been a member off and on since they started, and every time I've gone to pick up a car it's been a hassle. Every time I've used the car it would have been cheaper to rent for a full day. The only reason I hold on to it is for emergencies.
How can this guy be trusted to understand climatology if he can't tell the difference between dilution and delusion?
Find the Russian community in your area and get a Russian art instructor. My wife is Russian, and she was taught to paint as a child by the last remnants of the Socialist Realist school. She did her undergrad at the Art Institute of Chicago, and she has an MFA in painting from UC Davis.
We live in Brooklyn, we have kids, and every now and then, we run across a class for kids with a Russian instructor. My wife always laughs because the kids do charming work, but it's exactly the same as her work as a child. She calls it teaching a bear to ride a bicycle.
Our older daughter takes art classes. She was going to the Brooklyn Museum, and now she's learning from one of my wife's friends, who has an MFA. My daughter learns the American way, haphazardly, without any emphasis on rendering, instead focusing on light, composition, and art history. My wife seems happy with it.
She doesn't think that the Russian approach can create artists. If you've ever been to a gallery that specializes in contemporary Russian art you'll know what she means. The work is always the same: churches, flowers, landscapes, and maybe something resembling Braque. What we've seen in Moscow is similar. I love Sotz Art, which was created in opposition to Socialist Realism, but I can't think of any top tier Russian artists that came to prominence after '91, except for the guy who molests farm animals.
My wife eternally laments the fate of one of her peers from her art academy in Moscow, who she thought was incredibly talented as a teen, but he now paints cubist churches. His art is technically excellent, but it's lifeless and hackneyed.
It may just be sour grapes, since she hasn't painted for several years. She also says she won't encourage our daughters to pursue art degrees later on. However, she did write a book that fondly draws on her experience at art school.
I bought my daughters a bunch of the Ed Emberley books. I really loved them as a kid. His aesthetic reminds me of OOP.
Monopoly was featured prominently in the Young Ones "Boring" episode. I first saw it as a teen, and I was amazed at how universal the close association between Monopoly and boredom is.
I admit that the auction rule would make the game move along. I first came across it last year while teaching the game to my kids. I didn't teach it to them because I had never played with it, and I thought it was some new addition to the game. Plus, it was pretty hard to get the kids to understand why they'd want to buy the deeds in the first place, without trying to run an auction every turn. After about an hour into the game, I was wishing I had followed the rules.
I disliked Monopoly as a kid until I figured out I could make a run on the currency and bring the game to halt by gathering up all of the mid-sized bills.