Many people (and I'm one of them) are of the opinion we're at or very close to peak car ownership in most western countries.
This is down to both congestion and self-driving technologies maturing enough that people don't have to drive and won't need to pay high rates for taxis (single highest expense == driver), therefore won't buy cars in large numbers from about 20 years time.
Tailoffs in ownership in urban areas are already noted along with a steep decline in the numbers of younger people getting driving licenses.
There's a paragraph in Chip Delany's "The Stars in my pocket like grains of sand" detailing the revulsion of a meat eater who discovered blood vessels in what he was eating and realised it had once been alive.
Nice theory, but pandas will eat meat _if_ they can catch it. One of the artifacts of their vege diet is that they're so slow most things can run outrun them.
Pandas are easily attracted with meat baits and I'm aware of at least one chinese guard in the panda reserves who got careless and savaged/partially eaten by one (happened in the 1990s)
The 2016 global methane survey couldn't account for a significant amount of methane in the atmosphere and the surveyors postulated that it was coming from farming (rice paddies and cow farts), but the sensors weren't tuned for emissions over water (apparently it's a lot harder to detect this) and they weren't looking at the Laptev sea because they weren't aware of it. The processing software only looked for methane over land (not even sea ice).
They're now aware of the emissions and their possible size - which would be about the size of the unaccounted-for methane in the atmosphere. Efforts are being made to comb the collected data to see if methane emissions over water can be worked out from what was collected. (This is similar to the 1970s ozone problem. Raw data may hold the answer, which is why you don't toss it), otherwise a new survey with appropriately tuned instruments will be needed.
The russian government isn't cooperating to let independent scientitsts into the Laptev area and russian reports are regarded as highly unreliable by western researchers, so it's critical that the claimed emission plumes are verified independently somehow.
As usual with all climate research, when it's not high profile and it's actual science, getting the money required to do this job is extremely hard (RAs, programmers, storage space and processing all need to be paid for)
Keynes is right for the most part. The problem is that it's so much hassle to employ people that some end up overworked whilst many do none at all.
If you average it out amongst the working age population you'd easily find that 4 hour/day 4 day/week is about right, even with the explosive growth of the services economy since the 1930s.
As a society, we should stop pretending there's enough work to go around and vilifying unemployment. Full employment will never ever happen again and not-working or underemployment is the new norm.
"a small pH swing will, and some of the CO2 that isn't staying in the air is doing so by forming carbonic acid."
Enough carbonic acid that ion concentration in the oceans has changed by about 30% in the last 200 years. Apart from coral bleaching the oceans are getting acidic enough to start preventing shells/coral reefs from forming and that's a likely precursor to an axnoic event (look that one up and start worrying)
> Nope, "modern" light water reactors currently operating are actually pretty good at load following:
Up to a point. 3-5% Pr/min is a VERY slow load follower and completely useless for peaking work.
They can only be turned down a small amount(*) without long delays in turning the power back up and the Xenon generated causes long-term damage to the fuel rods which vastly complicates reprocessing later on and can result in the things leaking. The neutron poisoning problem shows in your "once or twice a day" comment.
It's the fuel rod damage issue which dissuades operators from attempting to load follow with light water reactors. Avoidable instances of radiological contamination result in regulators getting stroppy.
(*) MSRs can turn down to near Zero and back up again quickly(**)(***), because the xenon is vented. Attempts to go below minimums were the root cause of the Chernobyl disaster.
(**) To the point that the Oak Ridge Experiment was turned off on Friday nights and fired up again on Monday mornings so that noone needed to be around to look after it during weekends.
(***)Thermal inertia of the salts means that drawing more heat or less heat on a short-term basis is perfectly feasible. The salt itself acts as spinning reserve and has more dynamic reserve than boiling water or wet/dry steam offers because the thermodynamic range between hot and cold side of your generator is so much higher than a water-based system.
This is the story I meant to link to. The other one mentioned this incident and explains the increasing vulnerability as "renewables" become a greater part of the power generation mix.
South Australia's power grid is described by some as "The world's crash test dummy for renewables generation"
They're not. 1: The things cost a fortune to run up and keep on standby 2: Coal plants cost a lot to run compared to gas ones, so gas plants are taking over on pure economics.
Thanks to market distortions caused by the "must take renewables" rules, there have been a number of cases where short term drops in windfarm output have resulted in rolling power outages because without a guarantee that the coal/gas plant can be allowed to run long enough to actually pay their startup costs the operators have declined to fire the things up.
" If a driver NEEDS to react to someone making a left turn, that left turn driver is in the wrong"
Which would explain why Joshua Brown's gopro is missing - as the trucker would have been wanting to get rid of any evidence that showed how little time he had to react (by all accounts many truckers are instructed to look for and dispose of dashcams in the event of a fatal crash)
Joshua recorded virtually every drive he made. It doesn't make sense that he wouldn't have been recording that one.
"The external USB HDDs have labels on them, like "(HOSTNAME) TimeMachine" or "(HOSTNAME) BackInTime". I don't use these for anything else. This is important!"
Don't keep them _anywhere_ near your computers.
I've had to deal with a number of staff who've been burgled where the thieves not only took their laptops, but the backup USB drives conveniently placed on a shelf above the desk.
"They'll sell it for drug money, and the buyer will just wipe the damn thing."
If it's not passworded then they won't even do that. The number of cases where people find their stolen devices are logging in across town/country (or internationally) is surprising.
What should be more concerning than the level of thefts of technology is that there's clear enough evidence of an organised transportation network for stolen goods to warrant investigation.
"hint: carrying bolt cutters and power tools and whatnot is a dead giveaway that you're not a door-to-door salesman)"
The standard garb for a professional/experienced thief is a suit and tie and a briefcase - you'd be surprised what fits in one of those and they fit the "normal" expectation, so don't get pulled up by suspicious police very much. They also work an area for months.
This information comes from interviews with professional car thieves that were published in the 1980s and 90s.
One of the other tactics used is to deliberately set off car and house alarms in an area for a few days/weeks so that both the police and the inhabitants treat them as false alarms. Once they see responders failing to show up (or being laggardy) is when they'll actually make the strike.
This kind of criminal is a different class to the addict opportunist looking for an unsecured door/window/gate and anything not nailed down that can be sold for the value of the next fix (and has a large bearing on why treating addiction as a health problem has a LARGE effect on rates of minor burglary in the countries that have taken that path)
The incremental cost of any one-off satellite or probe is tiny compared to the launch price - which usually includes hundreds of prototypes and _at least_ 1 (usually 2) flight spares.
For every flight spare, there will be a dozen spare subsystems sitting with contractors to test things before going anywhere near the flight spares, etc.
What that means is: Take that billion dollar price tag with a large dose of salt. If it gets lost in a launch incident there's a spare already paid for and ready to go. If you wanted to build a second one it'd probably only cost a few tens of millions.
"More funding for the police could have stopped this attack how exactly? "
The people behind the attacks were reported to security services by _multiple_ people, including family members, imams and actual anti-terrorist researchers as unstable, espousing terrorism and likely to be dangerous.
Due to lack of resources the tip offs were not investigated correctly. Had they been, it's likely that the attacks would never have happened because the culprits would have been sitting in rubber rooms or otherwise diverted from their deadly paths.
Following on from this - because of the way cross slot stuff works you don't need to use monsanto seeds, etc. The NZ developers took a specific dislike to Monsanto's patent system and wanted to make it usable by farmers without exposing them to crop royalties.
Slashdot Mirror
No need for extra carriages.
London Underground is doing this by putting the water blocks under the seats and the chilling equipment under the carriages.
The chillers run when the trains are above ground (which is a large chunk of the network) and thermal inertia is used below ground.
This doesn't work for the "Deep Lines" which are 40-200 feet underground their entire length and other methods are being worked on for that.
Many people (and I'm one of them) are of the opinion we're at or very close to peak car ownership in most western countries.
This is down to both congestion and self-driving technologies maturing enough that people don't have to drive and won't need to pay high rates for taxis (single highest expense == driver), therefore won't buy cars in large numbers from about 20 years time.
Tailoffs in ownership in urban areas are already noted along with a steep decline in the numbers of younger people getting driving licenses.
The times, they are a changing.
"I've never tried eating people, but it sounds revolting."
It's supposed to be the tastiest meat - and it's been the subject of an artficial meat story (one of Asimov's)
"primarily because it just sounds gross "
There's a paragraph in Chip Delany's "The Stars in my pocket like grains of sand" detailing the revulsion of a meat eater who discovered blood vessels in what he was eating and realised it had once been alive.
It's a good meme, but....
Nice theory, but pandas will eat meat _if_ they can catch it. One of the artifacts of their vege diet is that they're so slow most things can run outrun them.
Pandas are easily attracted with meat baits and I'm aware of at least one chinese guard in the panda reserves who got careless and savaged/partially eaten by one (happened in the 1990s)
The 2016 global methane survey couldn't account for a significant amount of methane in the atmosphere and the surveyors postulated that it was coming from farming (rice paddies and cow farts), but the sensors weren't tuned for emissions over water (apparently it's a lot harder to detect this) and they weren't looking at the Laptev sea because they weren't aware of it. The processing software only looked for methane over land (not even sea ice).
They're now aware of the emissions and their possible size - which would be about the size of the unaccounted-for methane in the atmosphere. Efforts are being made to comb the collected data to see if methane emissions over water can be worked out from what was collected. (This is similar to the 1970s ozone problem. Raw data may hold the answer, which is why you don't toss it), otherwise a new survey with appropriately tuned instruments will be needed.
The russian government isn't cooperating to let independent scientitsts into the Laptev area and russian reports are regarded as highly unreliable by western researchers, so it's critical that the claimed emission plumes are verified independently somehow.
As usual with all climate research, when it's not high profile and it's actual science, getting the money required to do this job is extremely hard (RAs, programmers, storage space and processing all need to be paid for)
Keynes is right for the most part. The problem is that it's so much hassle to employ people that some end up overworked whilst many do none at all.
If you average it out amongst the working age population you'd easily find that 4 hour/day 4 day/week is about right, even with the explosive growth of the services economy since the 1930s.
As a society, we should stop pretending there's enough work to go around and vilifying unemployment. Full employment will never ever happen again and not-working or underemployment is the new norm.
"But there is a lot of that stuff in the ocean. Ice with a lot of methane trapped in it. Hopefully the stuff in the ocean is stable."
four words which should give you the answer you need "Laptev Sea Methane emissions"
There's somewhere between 1 and 5GT in that area and the keyword for probable effects is "Storegga"
Flooding isn't what you need to worry about.
How well can you (or your grandchildren) survive in a 16% oxygen atmosphere?
"a small pH swing will, and some of the CO2 that isn't staying in the air is doing so by forming carbonic acid ."
Enough carbonic acid that ion concentration in the oceans has changed by about 30% in the last 200 years. Apart from coral bleaching the oceans are getting acidic enough to start preventing shells/coral reefs from forming and that's a likely precursor to an axnoic event (look that one up and start worrying)
The OP should also bear in mind that the initial bleaching is caused by the animal part ejecting its algae passenger due to the heat.
> Nope, "modern" light water reactors currently operating are actually pretty good at load following:
Up to a point. 3-5% Pr/min is a VERY slow load follower and completely useless for peaking work.
They can only be turned down a small amount(*) without long delays in turning the power back up and the Xenon generated causes long-term damage to the fuel rods which vastly complicates reprocessing later on and can result in the things leaking. The neutron poisoning problem shows in your "once or twice a day" comment.
It's the fuel rod damage issue which dissuades operators from attempting to load follow with light water reactors. Avoidable instances of radiological contamination result in regulators getting stroppy.
(*) MSRs can turn down to near Zero and back up again quickly(**)(***), because the xenon is vented. Attempts to go below minimums were the root cause of the Chernobyl disaster.
(**) To the point that the Oak Ridge Experiment was turned off on Friday nights and fired up again on Monday mornings so that noone needed to be around to look after it during weekends.
(***)Thermal inertia of the salts means that drawing more heat or less heat on a short-term basis is perfectly feasible. The salt itself acts as spinning reserve and has more dynamic reserve than boiling water or wet/dry steam offers because the thermodynamic range between hot and cold side of your generator is so much higher than a water-based system.
This is the story I meant to link to. The other one mentioned this incident and explains the increasing vulnerability as "renewables" become a greater part of the power generation mix.
South Australia's power grid is described by some as "The world's crash test dummy for renewables generation"
http://www.news.com.au/nationa...
In order to stave off the inevitable "citation required":
http://www.theaustralian.com.a...
They're not. 1: The things cost a fortune to run up and keep on standby 2: Coal plants cost a lot to run compared to gas ones, so gas plants are taking over on pure economics.
Thanks to market distortions caused by the "must take renewables" rules, there have been a number of cases where short term drops in windfarm output have resulted in rolling power outages because without a guarantee that the coal/gas plant can be allowed to run long enough to actually pay their startup costs the operators have declined to fire the things up.
" If a driver NEEDS to react to someone making a left turn, that left turn driver is in the wrong"
Which would explain why Joshua Brown's gopro is missing - as the trucker would have been wanting to get rid of any evidence that showed how little time he had to react (by all accounts many truckers are instructed to look for and dispose of dashcams in the event of a fatal crash)
Joshua recorded virtually every drive he made. It doesn't make sense that he wouldn't have been recording that one.
Such systems are called autoland, etc.
As for Joshua Brown, whilst the criticisms are valid, he is known to have recorded every trip he made. Where is his Gopro?
"The external USB HDDs have labels on them, like "(HOSTNAME) TimeMachine" or "(HOSTNAME) BackInTime". I don't use these for anything else. This is important!"
Don't keep them _anywhere_ near your computers.
I've had to deal with a number of staff who've been burgled where the thieves not only took their laptops, but the backup USB drives conveniently placed on a shelf above the desk.
"They'll sell it for drug money, and the buyer will just wipe the damn thing."
If it's not passworded then they won't even do that. The number of cases where people find their stolen devices are logging in across town/country (or internationally) is surprising.
What should be more concerning than the level of thefts of technology is that there's clear enough evidence of an organised transportation network for stolen goods to warrant investigation.
"hint: carrying bolt cutters and power tools and whatnot is a dead giveaway that you're not a door-to-door salesman)"
The standard garb for a professional/experienced thief is a suit and tie and a briefcase - you'd be surprised what fits in one of those and they fit the "normal" expectation, so don't get pulled up by suspicious police very much. They also work an area for months.
This information comes from interviews with professional car thieves that were published in the 1980s and 90s.
One of the other tactics used is to deliberately set off car and house alarms in an area for a few days/weeks so that both the police and the inhabitants treat them as false alarms. Once they see responders failing to show up (or being laggardy) is when they'll actually make the strike.
This kind of criminal is a different class to the addict opportunist looking for an unsecured door/window/gate and anything not nailed down that can be sold for the value of the next fix (and has a large bearing on why treating addiction as a health problem has a LARGE effect on rates of minor burglary in the countries that have taken that path)
Disclosure: I work in the space industry.
The incremental cost of any one-off satellite or probe is tiny compared to the launch price - which usually includes hundreds of prototypes and _at least_ 1 (usually 2) flight spares.
For every flight spare, there will be a dozen spare subsystems sitting with contractors to test things before going anywhere near the flight spares, etc.
What that means is: Take that billion dollar price tag with a large dose of salt. If it gets lost in a launch incident there's a spare already paid for and ready to go. If you wanted to build a second one it'd probably only cost a few tens of millions.
LEO is not "outer space" - not even close to it. You're still in the atmosphere.
"More funding for the police could have stopped this attack how exactly? "
The people behind the attacks were reported to security services by _multiple_ people, including family members, imams and actual anti-terrorist researchers as unstable, espousing terrorism and likely to be dangerous.
Due to lack of resources the tip offs were not investigated correctly. Had they been, it's likely that the attacks would never have happened because the culprits would have been sitting in rubber rooms or otherwise diverted from their deadly paths.
Following on from this - because of the way cross slot stuff works you don't need to use monsanto seeds, etc. The NZ developers took a specific dislike to Monsanto's patent system and wanted to make it usable by farmers without exposing them to crop royalties.
Specifically, cross-slot seed drills usually achieve better growing results for lower costs. They're already widely used in the Dakotas.