And nobody cares, because there hasn't been a believable opportunity for change - both parties had fallen under the economic sway of many of the same people, the game was rigged, and everybody got used to just complaining about it.
But now our political parties are both seeing major upsets and instabilities forming in their power base. New and unexpected players are suddenly finding themselves in prominent positions on the national stage. Former political dropouts are starting to wake up to the fact that they're in the majority now, and can in fact make a difference.
Now, is that a momentary aberration? Or a beginning of a turning of the tide? Time will tell, but I'm hoping for the tide.
Sure - you allow the government, or anyone else willing to hire a good hacker, the ability to know exactly where you are, and listen to everything around you, whenever they want.
Individually, that's at least a little unnerving to consider, but really, who would care about me? On the other hand, that's the sort of information that makes it really easy to apply leverage to powerful people. And on the population level - that's the kind of civilian intelligence network that would have made the KGB wet themselves with glee.
Now maybe nobody is abusing that information for anything beyond marketing yet. But exactly how long do you think you can dangle that sort of temptation in front of the sort of ambitious men that gravitate to positions of power, before someone manages to seize it for their own ambitions?
My suggestion was mostly in jest, but do you really doubt that public video evidence of every bribe received and lobbyist request made would at least give more honest opponents valuable political ammunition?
How about a compromise: 24-hour redundant surveillance of elected officials, available publicly (perhaps with a few days lag to avoid compromising security). Every word, text, fart, and impassioned moan is open to public scrutiny for the entirety of your time in office. The only exception being "closed-chamber" Congressional meetings - during which all other outside communication is still tapped for public consumption.
It sounds like you've actually though about this, so I'll address your "personal favorite":
3000PPM is still only 0.3%. The amount of oxygen is not appreciably affected - in fact, oxygen levels were *also* much higher at the time, about 30% versus the current 21%, which is why insects could grow so much larger than today (without a circulatory system their size is limited by ambient oxygen concentration)
As for why it'd be a big deal - Earth's global climate toggles back and forth between two states. There's the current glacial/interglacial "icehouse" state, with persistent ice caps and mostly temperate climates in between glacial periods, which has lasted 2.8 million years - since around the time that would-be humans evolved into homo habilis - ape-y looking folks whose skulls still didn't extend much above their eyebrow-ridges. We became human entirely under these conditions.
The other state is a hothouse Earth - that's the state the planet was in then dinosaurs dominated the Earth. High temperatures, no ice caps, like a global greenhouse, where the deserts haven't taken over. All in all, probably a marked improvement, aside from the ever-present nuisance insects that never get killed back by winter.
The problem if we take things that far is not the destination, it's with the transition between those two states. Every time it's happened in the past it's been a very fast and clear transition (by geological standards), that kills most of the species on the planet and takes tens of thousands of years more before the ecology really recovers. That promises to be a bad ride all around.
They're discussing a few of the absolutely predictable, short term expected outcomes of the "best case" amount of climate change that's already realistically unavoidable. The sort of things we've see happen countless times throughout history in response to much more localized climate changes.
Where it has the potential to get interesting is if we instead keep burning fossil carbon like it's going out of style, and absolutely predictably keep the process going for a century or more, until stable climates and predictable weather are something they only talk in history books.
Well, since the oceans are the primary source of oxygen, and acidification is hard on a lot of the species that produce that oxygen. Specifically, diatoms, the single largest source of oxygen on the planet.
As I suspect that you enjoy breathing as much as I do: Yes, we should care.
Yeah, I realized I failed to address that point. But the fact is universities mostly don't fund research, rather the research grants,etc. help fund the university via "administrative overhead", etc. And from what I've seen, most grad students tend to be employed within their own program - so the engineering grad students mostly aren't working for the scientists anyways, nor vice versa.
And that's before we even get into the institutional exploitation of grad students - if researchers paid their assistants what a person with the needed skills and experience was actually worth, then they wouldn't need a captive pool of grad students. Why should we subsidize the enrichment of the researchers and their funders off the backs of the middle class?
I do agree that there is much to be said for having a breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge and experience available at one institution. I just don't see any way to pressure universities into changing their foundational institutional mandates in order to serve a population that didn't exist when they were conceived. Far easier to create a new term for a new class of dedicated high-end trade schools designed to serve the middle class, distinct from the universities designed to fleece the middle class, and let market pressures do the rest.
Nobody's claiming it's free - rather they're claiming it's Free, as in "you can't lock up this software"
If you want free code that you *can* lock up inside your own proprietary product, then by all means restrict yourself to using BSD or any other "glorified public domain" license. It's a really simple distinction, and only an idiot would claim confusion.
And how many of the calls you make are to other people's cell phones?
You do make a legitimate argument from a personal perspective - assuming you would be okay with *never* receiving calls, but most people seem to consider being available to their loved ones, at least in an "emergency", to be one of the most important reasons to own a cell phone.
And really, a phone only does two things: it lets you make calls, and it lets you receive them. Everything else is the PDA the phone is built into. If it can't do one of those two things, it's hard to argue that it hasn't suffered a major loss in functionality.
More than semantics - institutional attack strategy.
If you're going for a graduate degree in a field with a high demand for grad students, then you're probably on your way to being an academic (or at least an intellectual) and the university system is probably serving you well. Well, except for those fields where there are few careers outside academia, in which case the fact that there's a lot more grad students than professors should be a giant red flag.
A "white collar trade school" would be for the rest of the middle-class population - all those people looking to lay a foundation for "real" career out in the world. Nobody is looking for grad students in IT, medical services, etc. other than a source of cheap, desperate labor. You need grad students for labor-intensive research.
I should be clear - I absolutely think we need the sort of high-end trade schools you seem to be advocating for colleges to become. I just don't see any reason (or way) to gut the college system to provide it. Lets build the schools, call them whatever you want, and let the colleges go back to focussing on their real strengths, rebuild themselves in the new style, or collapse under the weight of their own irrelevance.
Trade: noun. A skilled job, typically one requiring manual skills and special training.
Absolutely - doctors are little more than bio-technicians, not scientists of any sort. Engineers straddle the line a little more, but both are real-world practical jobs - a.k.a. trades.
Both benefit from some of the theoretical knowledge colleges excel at - but nobody's getting hired out of college to be a "real" doctor or engineer - that comes after years of real world experience as junior flunky to one or more "real" professionals. (Or years in a dedicated medical school, for doctors).
If that were the deal, it would be a bad one. But it's not - you chose to give up your privacy and security for your own personal convenience. You could easily choose otherwise, just as he did. Now, if enough people chose that route then borrowing someone else's phone would stop being viable, and there might be a market for phones you could easily and confidently turn off. But that's a world that doesn't currently exist.
Absolutely - just like forcing people to give up their money for free in exchange for food is totally Stalinist.
If you don't like the price I charge for my code (GPL compliance) then don't use it, or try to convince me to sell it to you under other terms. It's as simple as that. Or do you think you are entitled to steal my code and give me nothing in return?
And to add to the other AC's comment - if you're blocking the transmission of signals, then you're also blocking their reception, and can't receive phone calls. Which defeats on of the major reasons for carrying a phone with you.
Nope. If you want to be able to receive phone calls, then the phone network has to know approximately where you are at all times. GPS tracking is a secondary, independent feature. Even if you could make an app that would spoof your GPS location in such a way that even the (presumed compromised) operating system was fooled (good luck with that...), all it takes is a trivial cross-check with network data to realize that fact and fall back to the "accurate to within a few dozen/hundred meters" network tracking.
And of course it does nothing whatsoever to prevent the use of the microphone as a remote listening device.
Not much better there - again, it's European colonialism that caused most of Africa's problems. The U.S. got a bit of an "advantage" there, since instead of exploiting the natives we massacred them and recolonized, so that the fight for independence was between Europeans and European emigrants, and once we won our independence we built a new government explicitly to avoid the worst problems we saw with Monarchies.
Europe learned their lesson from that, and afterwards the colonial powers mostly loosened their grip to fade into a "power behind the throne" role, avoiding outright rebellion, while leaving exploitative colonial power structures in place in the hands of native-born bureaucrats.
As I heard it well expressed once - Africa doesn't have what most of the rest of the world would consider "governments" - institutions at least nominally looking out for the well-being of the nation and its people - instead they have colonial wealth-extracting bureaucracies established for the sole purpose of putting wealth into the pockets of the top bureaucrats. And since those bureaucrats are now (mostly) elected locals rather than foreign powers, it's far more difficult to foster the public outcry needed for a revolution.
Why? College offers very little for such people. You want trade skills, go to a trade school.
The problem is that colleges market themselves as "white collar" trade schools, which they aren't.
Let me put it this way - which seems easier to you? Altering an institutional mandate that has endured for centuries across many disparate colleges? Or cluing the populace into the fact that they're the victims of an ongoing scam?
You might be right, but I believe the dominant source of helium is deposits that get captured along with natural gas, so a monopoly seems... problematic.
I believe I do remember something about the price of helium increasing significantly though, which might be related.
At any rate, don't operate your airship with a lift gas it was intentionally designed not to use.
In fairness, whenever the Middle East starts getting their shit together, Western powers overthrow their democratically elected governments and install puppet dictators in their place. Ditto when the puppets stop doing what they're told. Can't have a government that answers to the populace and their own interests interfering with the cheap flow of that sweet, sweet crude.
Probably a lot closer than closer than that - we've got several that may achieve break-even in the next 5-10 years.
Everyone likes to rag on "20 years away", but if I promised you a $1,000,000 per year for 20 years to build something, and then cut your funding to only a $1,000 per year, do you really think you could still finish the same thing in 20 years, for $20,000 dollars, rather than the original $20 million you were promised? Because that's basically what happened with fusion research - progress per dollar received has actually pretty much kept pace with initial estimates, but they're still nowhere close to receiving the funding they were supposed to get over that first twenty years, and are getting further every year as funding continues to be cut.
The end result is that the all the reactors that are actually approaching break-even are those that were conceived to be developed and built on a shoestring budget through other channels, rather than the ever-dwindling tokamak funding. And frankly that may end up being for the best in the long term, as several of the new techniques promise to scale up their reaction energies much better than tokamaks, putting more difficult aneutronic fusion reactions within relatively easy reach.
Slashdot Mirror
To-may-to, to-mah-to
And nobody cares, because there hasn't been a believable opportunity for change - both parties had fallen under the economic sway of many of the same people, the game was rigged, and everybody got used to just complaining about it.
But now our political parties are both seeing major upsets and instabilities forming in their power base. New and unexpected players are suddenly finding themselves in prominent positions on the national stage. Former political dropouts are starting to wake up to the fact that they're in the majority now, and can in fact make a difference.
Now, is that a momentary aberration? Or a beginning of a turning of the tide? Time will tell, but I'm hoping for the tide.
Google "definition of a trade". I lifted it directly from definition #2
Sure - you allow the government, or anyone else willing to hire a good hacker, the ability to know exactly where you are, and listen to everything around you, whenever they want.
Individually, that's at least a little unnerving to consider, but really, who would care about me? On the other hand, that's the sort of information that makes it really easy to apply leverage to powerful people. And on the population level - that's the kind of civilian intelligence network that would have made the KGB wet themselves with glee.
Now maybe nobody is abusing that information for anything beyond marketing yet. But exactly how long do you think you can dangle that sort of temptation in front of the sort of ambitious men that gravitate to positions of power, before someone manages to seize it for their own ambitions?
They're starting to.
My suggestion was mostly in jest, but do you really doubt that public video evidence of every bribe received and lobbyist request made would at least give more honest opponents valuable political ammunition?
Obviously not enough people currently do - but let it hide and the problem will only get worse.
How about a compromise: 24-hour redundant surveillance of elected officials, available publicly (perhaps with a few days lag to avoid compromising security). Every word, text, fart, and impassioned moan is open to public scrutiny for the entirety of your time in office. The only exception being "closed-chamber" Congressional meetings - during which all other outside communication is still tapped for public consumption.
Same as it's always been: research and entertaining the nobility. Professors generally don't get the job for their impressive teaching skills.
And you don't need experience doing first-hand research to benefit from past research.
It sounds like you've actually though about this, so I'll address your "personal favorite":
3000PPM is still only 0.3%. The amount of oxygen is not appreciably affected - in fact, oxygen levels were *also* much higher at the time, about 30% versus the current 21%, which is why insects could grow so much larger than today (without a circulatory system their size is limited by ambient oxygen concentration)
As for why it'd be a big deal - Earth's global climate toggles back and forth between two states. There's the current glacial/interglacial "icehouse" state, with persistent ice caps and mostly temperate climates in between glacial periods, which has lasted 2.8 million years - since around the time that would-be humans evolved into homo habilis - ape-y looking folks whose skulls still didn't extend much above their eyebrow-ridges. We became human entirely under these conditions.
The other state is a hothouse Earth - that's the state the planet was in then dinosaurs dominated the Earth. High temperatures, no ice caps, like a global greenhouse, where the deserts haven't taken over. All in all, probably a marked improvement, aside from the ever-present nuisance insects that never get killed back by winter.
The problem if we take things that far is not the destination, it's with the transition between those two states. Every time it's happened in the past it's been a very fast and clear transition (by geological standards), that kills most of the species on the planet and takes tens of thousands of years more before the ecology really recovers. That promises to be a bad ride all around.
Past 10? That wasn't even a 2.
They're discussing a few of the absolutely predictable, short term expected outcomes of the "best case" amount of climate change that's already realistically unavoidable. The sort of things we've see happen countless times throughout history in response to much more localized climate changes.
Where it has the potential to get interesting is if we instead keep burning fossil carbon like it's going out of style, and absolutely predictably keep the process going for a century or more, until stable climates and predictable weather are something they only talk in history books.
Well, since the oceans are the primary source of oxygen, and acidification is hard on a lot of the species that produce that oxygen. Specifically, diatoms, the single largest source of oxygen on the planet.
As I suspect that you enjoy breathing as much as I do: Yes, we should care.
Yeah, I realized I failed to address that point. But the fact is universities mostly don't fund research, rather the research grants,etc. help fund the university via "administrative overhead", etc. And from what I've seen, most grad students tend to be employed within their own program - so the engineering grad students mostly aren't working for the scientists anyways, nor vice versa.
And that's before we even get into the institutional exploitation of grad students - if researchers paid their assistants what a person with the needed skills and experience was actually worth, then they wouldn't need a captive pool of grad students. Why should we subsidize the enrichment of the researchers and their funders off the backs of the middle class?
I do agree that there is much to be said for having a breadth of interdisciplinary knowledge and experience available at one institution. I just don't see any way to pressure universities into changing their foundational institutional mandates in order to serve a population that didn't exist when they were conceived. Far easier to create a new term for a new class of dedicated high-end trade schools designed to serve the middle class, distinct from the universities designed to fleece the middle class, and let market pressures do the rest.
Nobody's claiming it's free - rather they're claiming it's Free, as in "you can't lock up this software"
If you want free code that you *can* lock up inside your own proprietary product, then by all means restrict yourself to using BSD or any other "glorified public domain" license. It's a really simple distinction, and only an idiot would claim confusion.
And how many of the calls you make are to other people's cell phones?
You do make a legitimate argument from a personal perspective - assuming you would be okay with *never* receiving calls, but most people seem to consider being available to their loved ones, at least in an "emergency", to be one of the most important reasons to own a cell phone.
And really, a phone only does two things: it lets you make calls, and it lets you receive them. Everything else is the PDA the phone is built into. If it can't do one of those two things, it's hard to argue that it hasn't suffered a major loss in functionality.
More than semantics - institutional attack strategy.
If you're going for a graduate degree in a field with a high demand for grad students, then you're probably on your way to being an academic (or at least an intellectual) and the university system is probably serving you well. Well, except for those fields where there are few careers outside academia, in which case the fact that there's a lot more grad students than professors should be a giant red flag.
A "white collar trade school" would be for the rest of the middle-class population - all those people looking to lay a foundation for "real" career out in the world. Nobody is looking for grad students in IT, medical services, etc. other than a source of cheap, desperate labor. You need grad students for labor-intensive research.
I should be clear - I absolutely think we need the sort of high-end trade schools you seem to be advocating for colleges to become. I just don't see any reason (or way) to gut the college system to provide it. Lets build the schools, call them whatever you want, and let the colleges go back to focussing on their real strengths, rebuild themselves in the new style, or collapse under the weight of their own irrelevance.
>Are those "trade skills"?
Trade: noun. A skilled job, typically one requiring manual skills and special training.
Absolutely - doctors are little more than bio-technicians, not scientists of any sort. Engineers straddle the line a little more, but both are real-world practical jobs - a.k.a. trades.
Both benefit from some of the theoretical knowledge colleges excel at - but nobody's getting hired out of college to be a "real" doctor or engineer - that comes after years of real world experience as junior flunky to one or more "real" professionals. (Or years in a dedicated medical school, for doctors).
If that were the deal, it would be a bad one. But it's not - you chose to give up your privacy and security for your own personal convenience. You could easily choose otherwise, just as he did. Now, if enough people chose that route then borrowing someone else's phone would stop being viable, and there might be a market for phones you could easily and confidently turn off. But that's a world that doesn't currently exist.
Absolutely - just like forcing people to give up their money for free in exchange for food is totally Stalinist.
If you don't like the price I charge for my code (GPL compliance) then don't use it, or try to convince me to sell it to you under other terms. It's as simple as that. Or do you think you are entitled to steal my code and give me nothing in return?
And to add to the other AC's comment - if you're blocking the transmission of signals, then you're also blocking their reception, and can't receive phone calls. Which defeats on of the major reasons for carrying a phone with you.
Nope. If you want to be able to receive phone calls, then the phone network has to know approximately where you are at all times. GPS tracking is a secondary, independent feature. Even if you could make an app that would spoof your GPS location in such a way that even the (presumed compromised) operating system was fooled (good luck with that...), all it takes is a trivial cross-check with network data to realize that fact and fall back to the "accurate to within a few dozen/hundred meters" network tracking.
And of course it does nothing whatsoever to prevent the use of the microphone as a remote listening device.
Not much better there - again, it's European colonialism that caused most of Africa's problems. The U.S. got a bit of an "advantage" there, since instead of exploiting the natives we massacred them and recolonized, so that the fight for independence was between Europeans and European emigrants, and once we won our independence we built a new government explicitly to avoid the worst problems we saw with Monarchies.
Europe learned their lesson from that, and afterwards the colonial powers mostly loosened their grip to fade into a "power behind the throne" role, avoiding outright rebellion, while leaving exploitative colonial power structures in place in the hands of native-born bureaucrats.
As I heard it well expressed once - Africa doesn't have what most of the rest of the world would consider "governments" - institutions at least nominally looking out for the well-being of the nation and its people - instead they have colonial wealth-extracting bureaucracies established for the sole purpose of putting wealth into the pockets of the top bureaucrats. And since those bureaucrats are now (mostly) elected locals rather than foreign powers, it's far more difficult to foster the public outcry needed for a revolution.
Why? College offers very little for such people. You want trade skills, go to a trade school.
The problem is that colleges market themselves as "white collar" trade schools, which they aren't.
Let me put it this way - which seems easier to you? Altering an institutional mandate that has endured for centuries across many disparate colleges? Or cluing the populace into the fact that they're the victims of an ongoing scam?
You might be right, but I believe the dominant source of helium is deposits that get captured along with natural gas, so a monopoly seems... problematic.
I believe I do remember something about the price of helium increasing significantly though, which might be related.
At any rate, don't operate your airship with a lift gas it was intentionally designed not to use.
In fairness, whenever the Middle East starts getting their shit together, Western powers overthrow their democratically elected governments and install puppet dictators in their place. Ditto when the puppets stop doing what they're told. Can't have a government that answers to the populace and their own interests interfering with the cheap flow of that sweet, sweet crude.
Probably a lot closer than closer than that - we've got several that may achieve break-even in the next 5-10 years.
Everyone likes to rag on "20 years away", but if I promised you a $1,000,000 per year for 20 years to build something, and then cut your funding to only a $1,000 per year, do you really think you could still finish the same thing in 20 years, for $20,000 dollars, rather than the original $20 million you were promised? Because that's basically what happened with fusion research - progress per dollar received has actually pretty much kept pace with initial estimates, but they're still nowhere close to receiving the funding they were supposed to get over that first twenty years, and are getting further every year as funding continues to be cut.
The end result is that the all the reactors that are actually approaching break-even are those that were conceived to be developed and built on a shoestring budget through other channels, rather than the ever-dwindling tokamak funding. And frankly that may end up being for the best in the long term, as several of the new techniques promise to scale up their reaction energies much better than tokamaks, putting more difficult aneutronic fusion reactions within relatively easy reach.