I posted a pretty solid defense of meta naval gazing the last time CmdrTaco brought it up. It was moderated down as a troll, so this is probably a meta troll. It's unfortunate. Had all the naval comments been modded up last time around, CmdrTaco might have figured out the homonym and remembered it.
In his weekly economic reporting reviews Baker is a regular advocate of allowing unlimited numbers of computer programmers into the country to drive down the wages of software engineers:
This article reports on a new World Bank study that shows that many developing countries are harmed by the loss of highly educated workers to rich countries. At one point the article asserts that the United States and other rich countries have an immigration policy that is intended to attract highly educated workers from the developing workers.
This is not true. While the United States allows in millions of less-skilled workers to work as custodians, restaurant workers, and cab drivers, it sharply limits the number of more highly skilled workers who can work in the country. These restrictions take a variety of forms. Professional and licensing restrictions in occupations like medicine and law make it very difficult for foreign educated workers to fill these positions. These restrictions were quite consciously designed to protect U.S. professionals who fear foreign competition.
Standard U.S. restrictions on immigrant workers also protect higher educated workers more than less educated workers. While restaurants know that they can hire as many undocumented workers as they want with impunity, a major corporation like IBM or Microsoft would never hire large numbers of undocumented software engineers in complete disregard of the law. This is because software engineers have considerably more political power than restaurant workers. While these companies may bring in immigrant workers on H1-B visas, and similar programs, the number of highly-skilled workers who enter the country this way is a tiny fraction of the number who would enter in a free market.
It is worth noting that it would be easy to design a policy that would ensure that developing countries share in the benefits from freer trade in more highly skilled professional services. If a tax were imposed on the earnings of these workers in the United States, which would reimburse developing countries for the expenses associated with educating these workers, then both rich countries and poor countries would benefit.
Economists who support "free trade" would be pushing hard for such policies, since they would take advantage of the comparative advantage that developing countries enjoy in educating highly skilled workers. It is far cheaper to educate doctors, lawyers, and economists in the developing world than in the United States. The world economy would experience enormous gains if educated workers in developing countries could freely work in the United States (vastly reducing the cost of health care and other services provided by highly educated professionals) and their home countries were compensated for educating these workers. The political power of the professionals in the rich countries who would have to accept lower pay in this scenario keeps rich country protectionist barriers in place.
He regularly overstates the political power of software engineers, and singles them out despite the fact that H-1B visas explicitly target the profession. He doesn't seem to understand the practice or business of software engineering particularly well. It's unfortunate because much of his analysis regarding the stock bubble and housing bubble is accurate.
Meta naval gazing can be quite entertaining. New York City offers many opportunities for naval gazing that are popular and lend themselves to meta naval gazing, including the U.S.S. Intrepid, water taxis, the Staten Island ferry, and the annual Fleet Week celebration. Last weekend I drove by the Intrepid, and I was delighted to see people viewing the ship. Whenever I ride the ferry, I watch people observing ships as much as I gaze directly at the ships themselves. Meta naval gazing often relieves the pressures of direct naval gazing, since the best seats are always taken, and its easier to stand in the back and watch other people watch ships. CmdrTaco should open his heart and experience the joy of casting glances at those admiring seafaring vessels.
I've never lived on a farm, but my parents own a farm, and I am familiar with the fundamental workings of chickens. The idea with the chickens is you give them to people who already have sufficient access to grain but don't have a reliable source of protien in their diet. The program isn't for starving refugees, it's for impoverished people that need a sustainable source of food higher up on the food chain. Heifer trains people to care for the animals it provides.
Renewable solutions are ideal, but I don't see the laptops to be a renewable solution either. Kids will destroy those things pretty quickly no matter how ruggedized they are. Even then, the batteries aren't likely to last that long with daily use.
I like your suggestions for water purification. I admittedly don't know anything about it, aside from what I know about camping purifiers, and the filter replacements on those are expensive. An ideal solution would be to set up a community treatment center that could serve a larger number of people for a longer time. My point with the tablets was that there are ways to address many more immediate needs with the same money and effort. A kid with dysentery can't learn.
I also don't think computers are that essential to education below the university level. I got my education entirely from books. Books are a proven solution with very few disadvantages. You can probably get a pretty decent high school education with 20 books if they're selected carefully. Even my programming education came largely from books. I worked on time-shared machines until I was in college.
This is a concern of mine, and I earmark my funds for goats and chickens. I agree that supporting cattle ranching is absurd. From what I've read, Heifer promotes sustainable agriculture through education and outreach programs, so I would assume they are teaching crop rotation. This is the first I've heard of links to missionary churches, and the link you provided doesn't offer much detail. It certainly isn't an advertised part of their program.
You posted the wrong link! The Heifer you linked to is a small offshoot of Heifer proper. The reason their expense to outlay ratio is so bad is because they only brought in $3 million last year.
This is the actual link to Heifer International on the Charity Navigator. The expense ratio is in line with other charities of its size. Note that the CEO still makes a fat lot of cash, as they all seem to do at that level. As always, non-profit doesn't mean you can't line your pockets on the backs of the poor. They at least manage to get 71% to the people that need it.
Thanks for the link. Heifer is rated poorly by the site, as you mentioned. I was donating to Heifer largely because of a friend's recommendation. I'll check out some of the comparable charities. I'd rather see my money go to those who need it.
Please post some evidence for this. From what I've read about Heifer, they use indigenous domesticated animals. You can give a water buffalo, llamas, and honeybees. Everything I've read says that Heifer trains people in sustainable agricultrual methods; those that protect and preserve local habitats.
I'm doing my part, so I think I've earned the right to spout. I donate more than a couple craptops worth of cash to Heifer each year. I like Heifer's approach, which emphasizes agricultural sustainability.
I'm not the only one that thinks laptops are a poor way to address poverty. In 2000, Bill Gates put a damper on the Digital Divide conference in Seattle with a similar message. When, as the article states, 80% of the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day, desiging them a $100 laptop is frivolous. If someone gave me a laptop worth three months of my salary, I'd put it on eBay in an instant and buy something I really needed.
Look at it this way. With $20, you could give a family a flock of chicks that could lay hundreds of eggs a year, providing them with additional protein and a source of trade income. For another $30, you can get two packs of Micropur tablets, which will treat 30 liters of water each. The tablets last for 3 years, so they can be saved for when it isn't possible to boil water. Another $30 could go to seed, rice, or lentils to give the family a little reserve. Then, spend the final $20 on whatever texts the kids need for their elementary school. $100 goes a lot farther when you're not spending it on computers.
The technological community has come up with much more creative ways to address poverty. I liked the clay pot refridgeration system for storing food that was mentioned on/. a while back. I read in Spectrum about a guy wiring villages in South America with solar-powered LED lighting so families wouldn't have to use kerosene lamps. The lamps are dangerous, the fuel is expensive, and the smoke causes searious health problems. I'd like to see more attention given to people with geniunely helpful ideas and less to Negroponte's schemes.
You have another choice. You can buy a cheap imitation. I'm sure if you check the bars near your local university, you'll be able to find a number of White Stripes knockoffs, possibly even performing White Stripes covers. You could even do White Stripes karaoke, if you were so inclined.
Like Coldplay? Check out Moby. Fan of Ian McEwan? Try Philip Roth. Those who bought "Harry Potter" also liked "The Chronicles of Narnia."
They missed "if you like Star Wars, you'll love Lord of the Rings." I wish Amazon and Netflix would tell me something I don't know. I put probably an hour into training both their engines, and I still get LOTR half the time on both sites. Today I got "William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle (Re/Search #4/5)" and "UML Distilled" on Amazon's front page, so it's doing a little better. I stick to the lists, (ListMANIA... MANIA... MANIA) and they're geniunely useful.
Here's another one from the article:
"Say you hate sports, but you want to know who won the Super Bowl so you can go to work knowing what people are talking about," Konstan said. "People... want some level of commonality."
I remember my mom doing that kind of thing so that she could talk to other engineers at Motorola. It just doesn't work. The true believer can easily sniff out the infidel. It just lets you waste your time listening to people talk about things you geniunely don't care about. My level of commonality is being the guy who gives you a blank stare if you talk about televised sports. Someone has to be the one wearing Converse in every sitcom.
I'm not a believer in revolutionary consumerism or non-consumerism, but this article really makes it out like it threatens the system if you don't buy into all of it 100%, all the time. If you don't know the results of the SuperBowl, the whole world will "balkanize" into a state of "tribalism". I suppose that means we'd all learn Bosnian, get Maori tattoos, and play drums in the park. I can accept that risk.
By your description, I was able to instantly tell that you went to Arizona State and took assembler from Pheanis. I had Neuman, who held the same philosophy, (Pheanis was off that year), and it was probably my most valuable class in college. Oddly enough, it landed me my first programming job using Java (which I did not know at the time). I described my assembler implementation of the multi-threaded OS, and that won the interviewers' hearts.
Patterns are an amazing tool in the hands of a bad programmer, though. Without the GOF, I don't think a bad programmer would ever think to create an AbstractFactoryBuilderAdapter that happens to be a singleton.
It used to be that a bad programmer would just write one class with one method in it. It was pretty easy to pick apart into smaller methods, then refactor into meaningful classes. With Eclipse, I can do it painlessly in a matter of minutes.
I find that poorly patterned code is a lot harder to clean up, and it's harder to tell what's going on in the first place since the classes all have the same name (*Factory, *Builder, *Adapter, *Adaptor, Abstract*) regardless of their actual function.
I don't mean to downplay "Design Patterns". It's on my desk, and I consult it whenever I get stuck on a design problem. But it's unique as a source of some of the worst programming I've ever seen. I can't think of any other CS concept that has been so thoroughly misapplied.
I'll give you one more point that you haven't made, before you go. Nuclear plants in this country are at the end of their lifecycle. Many should already have been decommissioned. So your either/or argument has more merit than I've been letting on. We have a much more pressing energy crisis than Social Security crisis.
I'll admit to a certain degree of bitterness that Americans aren't more farsighted, and I would probably cede to a nuclear plan if it included guaranteed investments in alternate energy sources, additional mass transit (where are this country's bullet trains?), and strict conservation restrictions (higher MPG standards, adherence to international environmental treaties). Unfortunately, neither of our agendas are on the table, and I honestly think Americans did anticpate Bush's environmental policy. It differs little from Reagan and Bush Sr. energy and environmental policies. Voters just didn't care, and they turned out to cement these policies last fall.
Fortunately, there's a lot that can be done on an individual level. I replaced my windows this year, and I'm upgrading my gas boiler this summer. We're not entirely dependent on waiting for the government to step in or the energy industry to wake up or even for Americans to have some sort of big day of reckoning. I'm a lot more rational when I can run the numbers myself and make my own steps forward.
I still hope that you'll look into the Clear Skies Initiative and see that environmentalists are actively opposed to coal power emissions. The Clear Skies Initiative was part of Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, and in effect, Bush has answered your question for all of us. More coal, more greenhouse gases, and more particulates is official US policy.
If so that's great, but American society did have to make that choice (e.g around the time of the TMI scare). So you've ducked the question.
That was 30 years ago. Then as now, we have a whole range of options, which I'm sure you're aware of. You're not presenting all the options, which is what I take issue with.
Well, this is interesting. I suspect that you've been sold a load of greenwashing -- a lot of people would argue that "hydro" isn't exactly clean, for example -- but we might hope that I'm being excessively cynical...
Quite possibly. It would be nice to have a regulatory agency that would certify power as green, much as food is certified as organic. Until then, I have to hope for the best. Besides, are you implying that energy suppliers can't be trusted?
Nuclear power *is* clean power. And no, the price tag isn't *really* what's holding back, it's the phobia.
While typing that over and over again may be satisfying, it doesn't solve nuclear waste disposal problems, which we are still grappling with as a society.
The point that I keep trying to make is that with nuclear power you get to think about where the waste goes, and however politically agonizing this choice is for us, at least we have the choice. With coal power, you don't: you get to breath it, and if our understanding global warming is correct, it threatens the entire planet.
I understand your point, and you have made it. It doesn't make nuclear waste any more appealing to me. You have to admit radioactive waste with a potential 100,000 year half life is pretty nasty. Are you willing to host a nuclear waste dump in your community? Are you willing to share the road with nuclear waste transport vehicles? Few people are. It's not just a matter of being irrational.
If I remember right, the energy budget for the US right now is supplied by something like 50% coal and 20% nuclear. Why doesn't anyone demand that those percentages be reversed?
That's right, according to the DoE. I'm sure there are guys at GE demanding it. The environmental movement has other priorities that address the same problem without leaving toxic dumps behind.
Oh, I get it. You meant "sustainable" in a sense that you just made up for the sake of this argument.
I was being flip, but by sustainable I meant that it does not produce potentially unsurmountable environmental problems, which is a fairly common usage of the word with regard to environmental approaches to farming, construction, and land use. It was perhaps imprecise in this context.
I think you're in denial about the "natural gas" being clean. It's better than coal -- most things are -- but you're still pumping out carbon.
I'm not in denial any more than you're in denial that there are other options besides coal and nuclear until we get to ecotopia.
You guess correctly, but the public was already hyped up about nuclear power before the TMI incident -- it happened on the weekend that the "China Syndrome" movie was released, remember? Industrial accidents typically get a page 3 story that fades the next day. TMI was a big capital loss with a risk of human loss that never materialized, but it was front page news for weeks on end.
You may feel like no one listens much to environmentalists these days, and you might be right, but in the late 60s, early 70s time frame that was not the case. (Note: the EPA was founded in 1970.)
Again, you're going back 30 years to blame this on environmentalists. Three decades is a long time to repair a reputation, and the nuclear power industry has had ample resources to do it. Even Nixon had been rehabilitated to a certain extent over the same period.
Environmentalists, which have had a waning influence a
Brand may be out-of-date on this one, but I'd say it's more like by 15 years than 30.
Fair enough. I'm aware of the back to the land movement. Arizona has some great back to the land mining towns.
Well that's a surprise. Try answering a simple question: "Which is better, coal or nuclear?" I will stipulate that there may be other choices that may be better than either. If you had to make that choice, which would you choose?
I don't have to make that choice. The choice I make is, "Do I cheap out and buy coal and nuclear, or do I spend slightly more and get clean (solar, wind, hydro) energy from my supplier?" I made the right choice and paid a little more. The question is moot, if you can afford it. I think the US as a whole can afford to make the same choice.
Nuclear power *is* clean power. And no, the price tag isn't *really* what's holding back, it's the phobia.
Ask all those long-haired eco-terrorists in Nevada how clean nuclear energy is. Yucca Mountain is not what I'd call a clean solution.
(1) Who care's if an energy source is sustainable? The life time of a nuclear plant is measured in decades. If you've got something better you switch to it when it's time to retire the plant.
I meant sustainable in the sense that it doesn't produce radioactive waste.
(2) What do you call ignoring the *actual* consequences of your actions because you insist on utopia or nothing? I think "irrational" is a good description.
Why exactly am I insisting on utopia? I already buy all my electric power from clean sources. I use natural gas for heating.
And whose fault is that exactly? Who stampeded that mob?
I wish environmentalists had the sway in this country you attribute to them. If I had to guess, I'd say Chernobyl and Three Mile Island had something to do with nuclear's bad reputation. Possibly even the warnings in the last four years that our nuclear infrastructure is vulnerable to terrorist attack. Maybe we can chalk it all up to the vivid imaginations of the creators of the Simpsons.
Of the major sources of energy, nuclear power is one of the safest and cleanest, and has been for decades. And this record has created a PR problem?
Let's just say that when it does fail, the nuclear industry fails spectacularly. And, the DoE emails leaking out about Yucca Mountain aren't confidence building.
Anyone who disagrees with you must have been bought, eh?
If you're doing it for free, you're missing a great income opportunity. Are you willing to relocate to the DC area?
The one I would give you is that solar energy at the earth's surface is genuinely extremely diffuse, which makes it difficult (though I wouldn't go as far as to say it's "impossible") to use it as a major source of energy.
I grew up in Phoenix, where every house has 2000 square feet of roof surface. None of that surface is used for anything, and much of it is painted black. Solar could do a lot there, as it could through much of the South and Southwest.
But then, President Carter's Science Advisor was once asked what he thought of the Solar Power Satellite idea, and he responded "You can be pro-solar and stupid, too."
So sometimes you hear other answers besides "not profitable".
When was that, 1978? The technology has improved since the days of Skylab.
Now: when was the last time you heard about environmentalists protesting a coal burning plant? (I can think of one instance in the last 30 years.) When was the last time you saw a front page newspaper story with an anti-coal spin? (My answer is "never".)
I can't blame you for blocking out most of the 80s. I wish I could. I b
I think Brand included the urban argument because he's 30 years out of touch. Even in the 70s, Paolo Soleri was pushing arcologies, which were high-density, low foot print urban structures. Not that he got anywhere, and suburban sprawl from Phoenix is now overtaking his utopia.
I don't buy the either/or nature of the nuclear argument. I live where I have an option of purchasing all my power from clean sources (solar, hydroelectric, and wind) from ConEdSolutions, and I do, and I pay more for it. Is it really that we have to have coal or nuclear, or are we just unwilling to pay the price of clean power?
Is it irrational to say neither when both are unsustainable options? Are corporate scientists acting rationally when they continue pushing a non-solution that the public at large is overwhelmingly against? Are the good people of Nevada all starry-eyed romantics for not wanting the Yucca Mountain dump in their backyard? The nuclear industry has created its own PR problem, not environmentalists. Nobody outside of MIT and GE likes nuclear power, and its few, well-funded proponents are using the "environmentalist" label the same way the coporate right wields the "liberal" smear.
Environmentalists have been saying for 30 years to invest in renewable energy sources, and the answer is always when it's profitable. The real reason that we're burning more coal is not that environmentalists have opposed nuclear power, it's because high energy prices have made coal profitable to extract and burn. If there was any government regulation on air quality, industry would have been forced to come up with new solutions instead of backsliding.
Brand's first two assumptions are not necessarily correct. I consider myself an environmentalist, and I've been aware for several years now that the global population is flattening out. I regularly use his argument against racist anti-immigrant Malthusians on the right.
When I moved to an urban area, I recognized instantly that I was lowering my environmental impact. I do not drive, I take up less land, and I take advantage of economies of scale for shipping and distribution of goods. I also have more options for recycling and co-op purchasing. Environmentalists are opposed largely to suburban sprawl that destroys habitats, wastes water for lawns, and makes mass transit impractical.
Brand writes off environmentalists' opposition to GM crops and nuclear power as romantic, but an environmentalist would just as easily paint his glowing portrait of these technologies as naive scientific idealism. It's unfortunate that Brand is unwilling to see the highly rational thinking behind environmentalists' opposition to GM and nuclear power.
Food and power "shortages" are in large part economic, which is to say they're a distribution problem, or ultimately a political problem. As an environmentalist, I do not see an inherent or immediate need for GM crops or additional nuclear power. I'm aware that we could already feed everybody on Earth with existing agricultural technologies, but we lack the political and economic will. Further, I do not trust corporations sponsoring genetic research. They are motivated by profit, not by environmental conservation, and will gladly wipe out everything that can't sue them on their way to profitability.
Environmentalists have already seen corporations do massive damage to the environment, and there is no reason to believe that corporations have changed in any way. 50 years ago, scientists were using the same food shortage arguments to back the introduction of pesticides, hormones, and chemical fertilizers into the food chain. I would rather not see a repeat of DDT with GM crops, and as corporations gain legal impunity, I see no reason to trust them or the scientists in their employ. Rather, I would like to see an emphasis on organic, sustainable farming, with a slow, balanced introduction of GM species after careful scientific peer review and heavy governmental oversight. Unfortunately, we do not currently have the political structure to provide trustworthy governmental oversight of GM foods, and until we do, it would be better in my opinion to hold off.
As for nuclear power, there are better options that have been ignored or underfunded in favor of GE's and MIT's pet projects. Whether it's tidal generators, solar, wind power, or bioenergy, I think it's worth focusing first on technologies that don't produce toxic wastes that will be around for thousands of years and can be used to make weapons, no matter how "safe" they are. It's not that nuclear energy is heresy, it's that it looks like a poor stopgap measure when we're on the way to genuinely sustainable power. Rather than invest in a nuclear power problem, it would be better to promote sustainable power and conservation in the meantime.
Re:Still no mail notification for Evolution!
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Gnome 2.10 Released
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· Score: 1
I wish it was. I already tried it. I apt-got mail-notification, configured it, and got "unsupported" when I pointed it to.evolution/mail/local/Inbox. I could use it if I wanted to use fetchmail, but I don't want to go through the mail-notify->check mail two-step with evolution.
Note that evolution doesn't quite store mail properly in mbox format. It doesn't mark mail as read in the mbox file. Thus, standard biff clients don't really play well with it.
Still no mail notification for Evolution!
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Gnome 2.10 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The Mailbox Monitor has been removed because it was unmaintained and insecure. We hope to have a solution integrated with our Evolution mail client in the future. If you don't use Evolution for your mail, you can use a third party application such as mailnotify.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that after years of touting GNORBA or.gnet or whatever wonderful object/event model what supposed to underlie the gnome desktop, there still isn't a gnome applet that will tell you when Evolution has new mail? It used to be that you could tell by the text in the task list, but even that is gone. There's a bounty
of $400 outstanding for this problem if anyone has some free time.
Slashdot Mirror
For some reason yesterday's Slashback linked to an Australian paper's coverage of the Nature story rather than the Nature story itself.
I posted a pretty solid defense of meta naval gazing the last time CmdrTaco brought it up. It was moderated down as a troll, so this is probably a meta troll. It's unfortunate. Had all the naval comments been modded up last time around, CmdrTaco might have figured out the homonym and remembered it.
In his weekly economic reporting reviews Baker is a regular advocate of allowing unlimited numbers of computer programmers into the country to drive down the wages of software engineers:
He regularly overstates the political power of software engineers, and singles them out despite the fact that H-1B visas explicitly target the profession. He doesn't seem to understand the practice or business of software engineering particularly well. It's unfortunate because much of his analysis regarding the stock bubble and housing bubble is accurate.
Meta naval gazing can be quite entertaining. New York City offers many opportunities for naval gazing that are popular and lend themselves to meta naval gazing, including the U.S.S. Intrepid, water taxis, the Staten Island ferry, and the annual Fleet Week celebration. Last weekend I drove by the Intrepid, and I was delighted to see people viewing the ship. Whenever I ride the ferry, I watch people observing ships as much as I gaze directly at the ships themselves. Meta naval gazing often relieves the pressures of direct naval gazing, since the best seats are always taken, and its easier to stand in the back and watch other people watch ships. CmdrTaco should open his heart and experience the joy of casting glances at those admiring seafaring vessels.
Note that the test data was from 461 U.S. citizens. I imagine the researchers had difficulty finding people in Jersualem that aren't anxious.
Are you implying that Islam is an advertisement?
I've never lived on a farm, but my parents own a farm, and I am familiar with the fundamental workings of chickens. The idea with the chickens is you give them to people who already have sufficient access to grain but don't have a reliable source of protien in their diet. The program isn't for starving refugees, it's for impoverished people that need a sustainable source of food higher up on the food chain. Heifer trains people to care for the animals it provides.
Renewable solutions are ideal, but I don't see the laptops to be a renewable solution either. Kids will destroy those things pretty quickly no matter how ruggedized they are. Even then, the batteries aren't likely to last that long with daily use.
I like your suggestions for water purification. I admittedly don't know anything about it, aside from what I know about camping purifiers, and the filter replacements on those are expensive. An ideal solution would be to set up a community treatment center that could serve a larger number of people for a longer time. My point with the tablets was that there are ways to address many more immediate needs with the same money and effort. A kid with dysentery can't learn.
I also don't think computers are that essential to education below the university level. I got my education entirely from books. Books are a proven solution with very few disadvantages. You can probably get a pretty decent high school education with 20 books if they're selected carefully. Even my programming education came largely from books. I worked on time-shared machines until I was in college.
This is a concern of mine, and I earmark my funds for goats and chickens. I agree that supporting cattle ranching is absurd. From what I've read, Heifer promotes sustainable agriculture through education and outreach programs, so I would assume they are teaching crop rotation. This is the first I've heard of links to missionary churches, and the link you provided doesn't offer much detail. It certainly isn't an advertised part of their program.
You posted the wrong link! The Heifer you linked to is a small offshoot of Heifer proper. The reason their expense to outlay ratio is so bad is because they only brought in $3 million last year.
This is the actual link to Heifer International on the Charity Navigator. The expense ratio is in line with other charities of its size. Note that the CEO still makes a fat lot of cash, as they all seem to do at that level. As always, non-profit doesn't mean you can't line your pockets on the backs of the poor. They at least manage to get 71% to the people that need it.
If someone gave me a computer worth three months of my salary, I'd have a computer until I sold it on eBay.
Once I sold the computer and went back to living on $1 per day, I probably wouldn't have much need to buy or sell things on eBay.
Thanks for the link. Heifer is rated poorly by the site, as you mentioned. I was donating to Heifer largely because of a friend's recommendation. I'll check out some of the comparable charities. I'd rather see my money go to those who need it.
Please post some evidence for this. From what I've read about Heifer, they use indigenous domesticated animals. You can give a water buffalo, llamas, and honeybees. Everything I've read says that Heifer trains people in sustainable agricultrual methods; those that protect and preserve local habitats.
Shame on you for trolling against a charity.
I'm doing my part, so I think I've earned the right to spout. I donate more than a couple craptops worth of cash to Heifer each year. I like Heifer's approach, which emphasizes agricultural sustainability.
I'm not the only one that thinks laptops are a poor way to address poverty. In 2000, Bill Gates put a damper on the Digital Divide conference in Seattle with a similar message. When, as the article states, 80% of the world's population lives on less than a dollar a day, desiging them a $100 laptop is frivolous. If someone gave me a laptop worth three months of my salary, I'd put it on eBay in an instant and buy something I really needed.
Look at it this way. With $20, you could give a family a flock of chicks that could lay hundreds of eggs a year, providing them with additional protein and a source of trade income. For another $30, you can get two packs of Micropur tablets, which will treat 30 liters of water each. The tablets last for 3 years, so they can be saved for when it isn't possible to boil water. Another $30 could go to seed, rice, or lentils to give the family a little reserve. Then, spend the final $20 on whatever texts the kids need for their elementary school. $100 goes a lot farther when you're not spending it on computers.
The technological community has come up with much more creative ways to address poverty. I liked the clay pot refridgeration system for storing food that was mentioned on /. a while back. I read in Spectrum about a guy wiring villages in South America with solar-powered LED lighting so families wouldn't have to use kerosene lamps. The lamps are dangerous, the fuel is expensive, and the smoke causes searious health problems. I'd like to see more attention given to people with geniunely helpful ideas and less to Negroponte's schemes.
You have another choice. You can buy a cheap imitation. I'm sure if you check the bars near your local university, you'll be able to find a number of White Stripes knockoffs, possibly even performing White Stripes covers. You could even do White Stripes karaoke, if you were so inclined.
They missed "if you like Star Wars, you'll love Lord of the Rings." I wish Amazon and Netflix would tell me something I don't know. I put probably an hour into training both their engines, and I still get LOTR half the time on both sites. Today I got "William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Throbbing Gristle (Re/Search #4/5)" and "UML Distilled" on Amazon's front page, so it's doing a little better. I stick to the lists, (ListMANIA ... MANIA ... MANIA) and they're geniunely useful.
Here's another one from the article:
I remember my mom doing that kind of thing so that she could talk to other engineers at Motorola. It just doesn't work. The true believer can easily sniff out the infidel. It just lets you waste your time listening to people talk about things you geniunely don't care about. My level of commonality is being the guy who gives you a blank stare if you talk about televised sports. Someone has to be the one wearing Converse in every sitcom.
I'm not a believer in revolutionary consumerism or non-consumerism, but this article really makes it out like it threatens the system if you don't buy into all of it 100%, all the time. If you don't know the results of the SuperBowl, the whole world will "balkanize" into a state of "tribalism". I suppose that means we'd all learn Bosnian, get Maori tattoos, and play drums in the park. I can accept that risk.
By your description, I was able to instantly tell that you went to Arizona State and took assembler from Pheanis. I had Neuman, who held the same philosophy, (Pheanis was off that year), and it was probably my most valuable class in college. Oddly enough, it landed me my first programming job using Java (which I did not know at the time). I described my assembler implementation of the multi-threaded OS, and that won the interviewers' hearts.
It used to be that a bad programmer would just write one class with one method in it. It was pretty easy to pick apart into smaller methods, then refactor into meaningful classes. With Eclipse, I can do it painlessly in a matter of minutes.
I find that poorly patterned code is a lot harder to clean up, and it's harder to tell what's going on in the first place since the classes all have the same name (*Factory, *Builder, *Adapter, *Adaptor, Abstract*) regardless of their actual function.
I don't mean to downplay "Design Patterns". It's on my desk, and I consult it whenever I get stuck on a design problem. But it's unique as a source of some of the worst programming I've ever seen. I can't think of any other CS concept that has been so thoroughly misapplied.
I spoke way too soon on this one. I just saw the news about the Bush nuclear plan. It appears that this argument is timely.
I'll give you one more point that you haven't made, before you go. Nuclear plants in this country are at the end of their lifecycle. Many should already have been decommissioned. So your either/or argument has more merit than I've been letting on. We have a much more pressing energy crisis than Social Security crisis.
I'll admit to a certain degree of bitterness that Americans aren't more farsighted, and I would probably cede to a nuclear plan if it included guaranteed investments in alternate energy sources, additional mass transit (where are this country's bullet trains?), and strict conservation restrictions (higher MPG standards, adherence to international environmental treaties). Unfortunately, neither of our agendas are on the table, and I honestly think Americans did anticpate Bush's environmental policy. It differs little from Reagan and Bush Sr. energy and environmental policies. Voters just didn't care, and they turned out to cement these policies last fall.
Fortunately, there's a lot that can be done on an individual level. I replaced my windows this year, and I'm upgrading my gas boiler this summer. We're not entirely dependent on waiting for the government to step in or the energy industry to wake up or even for Americans to have some sort of big day of reckoning. I'm a lot more rational when I can run the numbers myself and make my own steps forward.
I still hope that you'll look into the Clear Skies Initiative and see that environmentalists are actively opposed to coal power emissions. The Clear Skies Initiative was part of Bush's 2003 State of the Union Address, and in effect, Bush has answered your question for all of us. More coal, more greenhouse gases, and more particulates is official US policy.
Thanks for the engaging debate.
That was 30 years ago. Then as now, we have a whole range of options, which I'm sure you're aware of. You're not presenting all the options, which is what I take issue with.
Quite possibly. It would be nice to have a regulatory agency that would certify power as green, much as food is certified as organic. Until then, I have to hope for the best. Besides, are you implying that energy suppliers can't be trusted?
While typing that over and over again may be satisfying, it doesn't solve nuclear waste disposal problems, which we are still grappling with as a society.
I understand your point, and you have made it. It doesn't make nuclear waste any more appealing to me. You have to admit radioactive waste with a potential 100,000 year half life is pretty nasty. Are you willing to host a nuclear waste dump in your community? Are you willing to share the road with nuclear waste transport vehicles? Few people are. It's not just a matter of being irrational.
That's right, according to the DoE. I'm sure there are guys at GE demanding it. The environmental movement has other priorities that address the same problem without leaving toxic dumps behind.
I was being flip, but by sustainable I meant that it does not produce potentially unsurmountable environmental problems, which is a fairly common usage of the word with regard to environmental approaches to farming, construction, and land use. It was perhaps imprecise in this context.
I'm not in denial any more than you're in denial that there are other options besides coal and nuclear until we get to ecotopia.
Again, you're going back 30 years to blame this on environmentalists. Three decades is a long time to repair a reputation, and the nuclear power industry has had ample resources to do it. Even Nixon had been rehabilitated to a certain extent over the same period.
Environmentalists, which have had a waning influence a
Fair enough. I'm aware of the back to the land movement. Arizona has some great back to the land mining towns.
I don't have to make that choice. The choice I make is, "Do I cheap out and buy coal and nuclear, or do I spend slightly more and get clean (solar, wind, hydro) energy from my supplier?" I made the right choice and paid a little more. The question is moot, if you can afford it. I think the US as a whole can afford to make the same choice.
Ask all those long-haired eco-terrorists in Nevada how clean nuclear energy is. Yucca Mountain is not what I'd call a clean solution.
I meant sustainable in the sense that it doesn't produce radioactive waste.
Why exactly am I insisting on utopia? I already buy all my electric power from clean sources. I use natural gas for heating.
I wish environmentalists had the sway in this country you attribute to them. If I had to guess, I'd say Chernobyl and Three Mile Island had something to do with nuclear's bad reputation. Possibly even the warnings in the last four years that our nuclear infrastructure is vulnerable to terrorist attack. Maybe we can chalk it all up to the vivid imaginations of the creators of the Simpsons.
Let's just say that when it does fail, the nuclear industry fails spectacularly. And, the DoE emails leaking out about Yucca Mountain aren't confidence building.
If you're doing it for free, you're missing a great income opportunity. Are you willing to relocate to the DC area?
I grew up in Phoenix, where every house has 2000 square feet of roof surface. None of that surface is used for anything, and much of it is painted black. Solar could do a lot there, as it could through much of the South and Southwest.
When was that, 1978? The technology has improved since the days of Skylab.
I can't blame you for blocking out most of the 80s. I wish I could. I b
I don't buy the either/or nature of the nuclear argument. I live where I have an option of purchasing all my power from clean sources (solar, hydroelectric, and wind) from ConEdSolutions, and I do, and I pay more for it. Is it really that we have to have coal or nuclear, or are we just unwilling to pay the price of clean power?
Is it irrational to say neither when both are unsustainable options? Are corporate scientists acting rationally when they continue pushing a non-solution that the public at large is overwhelmingly against? Are the good people of Nevada all starry-eyed romantics for not wanting the Yucca Mountain dump in their backyard? The nuclear industry has created its own PR problem, not environmentalists. Nobody outside of MIT and GE likes nuclear power, and its few, well-funded proponents are using the "environmentalist" label the same way the coporate right wields the "liberal" smear.
Environmentalists have been saying for 30 years to invest in renewable energy sources, and the answer is always when it's profitable. The real reason that we're burning more coal is not that environmentalists have opposed nuclear power, it's because high energy prices have made coal profitable to extract and burn. If there was any government regulation on air quality, industry would have been forced to come up with new solutions instead of backsliding.
When I moved to an urban area, I recognized instantly that I was lowering my environmental impact. I do not drive, I take up less land, and I take advantage of economies of scale for shipping and distribution of goods. I also have more options for recycling and co-op purchasing. Environmentalists are opposed largely to suburban sprawl that destroys habitats, wastes water for lawns, and makes mass transit impractical.
Brand writes off environmentalists' opposition to GM crops and nuclear power as romantic, but an environmentalist would just as easily paint his glowing portrait of these technologies as naive scientific idealism. It's unfortunate that Brand is unwilling to see the highly rational thinking behind environmentalists' opposition to GM and nuclear power.
Food and power "shortages" are in large part economic, which is to say they're a distribution problem, or ultimately a political problem. As an environmentalist, I do not see an inherent or immediate need for GM crops or additional nuclear power. I'm aware that we could already feed everybody on Earth with existing agricultural technologies, but we lack the political and economic will. Further, I do not trust corporations sponsoring genetic research. They are motivated by profit, not by environmental conservation, and will gladly wipe out everything that can't sue them on their way to profitability.
Environmentalists have already seen corporations do massive damage to the environment, and there is no reason to believe that corporations have changed in any way. 50 years ago, scientists were using the same food shortage arguments to back the introduction of pesticides, hormones, and chemical fertilizers into the food chain. I would rather not see a repeat of DDT with GM crops, and as corporations gain legal impunity, I see no reason to trust them or the scientists in their employ. Rather, I would like to see an emphasis on organic, sustainable farming, with a slow, balanced introduction of GM species after careful scientific peer review and heavy governmental oversight. Unfortunately, we do not currently have the political structure to provide trustworthy governmental oversight of GM foods, and until we do, it would be better in my opinion to hold off.
As for nuclear power, there are better options that have been ignored or underfunded in favor of GE's and MIT's pet projects. Whether it's tidal generators, solar, wind power, or bioenergy, I think it's worth focusing first on technologies that don't produce toxic wastes that will be around for thousands of years and can be used to make weapons, no matter how "safe" they are. It's not that nuclear energy is heresy, it's that it looks like a poor stopgap measure when we're on the way to genuinely sustainable power. Rather than invest in a nuclear power problem, it would be better to promote sustainable power and conservation in the meantime.
Note that evolution doesn't quite store mail properly in mbox format. It doesn't mark mail as read in the mbox file. Thus, standard biff clients don't really play well with it.