Never mind, should have just looked it up for myself. Another reboot of the whole DC Universe. Looks like they did it without a Crisis event this time, they just editorially declared "everything is different now, except for some stuff that isn't" and restarted the issue numbers.
Well, Gandalf and Saruman and Sauron and the Balrog are all the same kind of being: Maiar. The Maiar are supposed to be shape-shifters or at least wear the forms mere mortals perceive them as like a kind of disguise, so the Balrog may be able to have wings some of the time and not have wings the rest of the time (and be man-sized or gigantic as required). Sauron was described as being able to directly shape-shift, for example. That was before he put some of his power into the One Ring and lost it, however, so that doesn't say whether all of the Maiar can do it. There is some evidence that the form they took was handed out when they entered the world and that they therefore might not be able to change it without leaving the world and coming back in, which would be pretty hard for the Balrog to do with Morgoth banished... So, still inconclusive.
Oh, I push for it where I can. The problem is, who exactly do you think is in charge of these elections? The two major parties are. They have absolutely no incentive to alter a system that's keeping them on top.
Well, when I said you could spend your whole life doing that, I meant not just for the one espresso machine, but for the various things you might want to replicate. Regardless, the few weeks seems overly optimistic. Among other things, it should take longer than that to properly test it. Sure, you can probably cobble together something that works well enough, but if there were good reasons for the original design choices in the first place, altering the design is surely going to cause issues that will crop up over time forcing you to repair it again and again and again and again. Believe me, I can see the fun and educational value in doing it from scratch until you get it right, but sometimes you just want to get things right the first time. There's a clear benefit in having the distilled knowledge of those who came before you to reference, even when you decide to go in a different direction.
But in another twenty years, that magic year may cease to be relevant. For example, if 99% of cars on the road at that point are zero-emissions, they may not bother with emissions tests for old cars any more. Or, possibly, they won't allow them on the road and people will only have them for private tracks.
The claims are probably still bunk, but I think the point was that the frequencies of the LEDs could be optimized for plant growing. Green plants obviously don't absorb much green light, although the radiation peak for natural sunlight falls right at green. So, there's probably a decent efficiency bump in using properly tuned LEDs vs. sunlight. As you point out, the efficiency losses from the solar panel setup and the LEDs are probably greater than that can offset. Still, it does mean there is something to offset those other efficiency losses.
Now, regardless of the lower efficiency, solar panels plus LEDs may still have their place, especially in setups like this. There are plenty of rooftops, parking lots, etc. where it would be completely impractical to build a vertical farm but easily practical to mount solar cells, and you can send that power to LEDs in centralized vertical farms. Even if the efficiency of sunlight to plant growth is only 10-20% you're still making use of sunlight which otherwise would have gone unused for agriculture.
If it's true, it's still not a problem. As it stands "third parties" are made up mostly of idealists who know that they don't have any chance of winning. All the hard-core pragmatists join the Democrats or Republicans. If a truly democratic voting system were implemented in the US, there would be more parties.
It's worth noting that, in the US, the Democrats and Republicans obviously recognize that the system of voting used doesn't actually work properly, which is why they implement their own runoff system in the form of their own primary elections.
But the system of financing the voting system is affected by voting system itself. The simple plurality voting system used helps push towards a stable two party system. A stable two party system is much more corruptible.
You're assuming a simple plurality voting system, which is what is used 99% of the time in the US. It's the perfect voting system for exactly two choices, but for more than two choices it falls down completely due to effects like the ones you mention. Pretty much every single pass voting system is better, although they all do have some problems (none as bad as simple plurality) perfectly representing the will of the population. Personally I think that democracy is important enough that there's no reason to balk at a multiple pass system. Anyway, the current farce of a system that the US uses now, where a coin is tossed to see if a Democrat or a Republican will get the job, really needs to change.
Great, we've established that corporate revenues and personal income is treated differently. This is a feature, not a bug.
The problem is the question of fairness. You're the one who brought fairness into it by mentioning the term "fair share". We're not disputing that the laws allow these things to be treated differently, we're saying that just because it's legal doesn't make it fair.
Now, please explain for us dim unwashed masses exactly why you think the US government has any right to a "fair share" of taxes earned by European corporations doing business in Europe, when those revenues are never funneled back to an American holding company?
Firstly, it's about the difference between personal taxes and corporate. US citizens outside the US earning money and not funnelling any back to the US are still expected to pay taxes to the US if they're not paying enough tax overseas. The question is why different logic for what's "fair" is applied to private citizens and large corporations. Secondly, I question your assertion that the revenues are never funnelled back to the US in any way. At the very least, foreign divisions of a corporation have to be considered assets of the parent company and therefore potentially taxable.
And that's the problem - there's all kinds of outrage that "they only pay TWO PERCENT!" but if the law allows it, that *is* their "fair share."
Secondly, the problem with the "fair share" is what the law allows for different actors. For typical private citizens of the US, if they're making money overseas, they still have to file with the IRS. I may have some of the deatails of, but it goes something like: if you paid tax on your overseas earnings overseas and the tax is less than what you would have paid at home, you make up the difference to the IRS. It's a lot more complicated than that, I'm sure, but pretty much any private citizen of the US paying 2% overseas owes extra money to the IRS. By the sound of this article, big corporations don't.
You might be able to say that for price per Joule maybe since Joules are units you can divorce conceptually from the fixed startup costs. You can't really divorce Wattage from the startup costs that way. You buy a certain amount of equipment and it provides a certain wattage (depending on average conditions at the location, etc.).
You might want to look into either getting an account or using some sort of public key signing for your posts, or some other authentication scheme. Maybe get a website and copy and paste time stamped copies of your posts there.
Not to mention that a broader pool of viable candidates means it's less likely that any corporation or other special influence could simply compromise all viable candidates. When you have just two viable candidates, a big player can simply make a large contribution to both sides. If you have more viable candidates, that sort of thing becomes much harder. It's also valuable simply for how it breaks up the stagnation that occurs in a two party system. Having more than two viable candidates also compromises the effectiveness of gerrymandering, which can only be a good thing. Aside from that, it would be nice to have elections that aren't mostly decided by differences in vote counts that are smaller than the margin of error.
I certainly do think that the fact that US elections generally come down to a virtual coin-toss between two undesirable candidates is _one_ of the things that's wrong. Frankly I'm confused by your post since you seem to object to everything I've said, but you're completely opaque on your own views on the subject. Do you think that things are perfect and I shouldn't be complaining? Do you think that all that's wrong is that Obama is the devil? Do you think that Obama is the best, most perfect President ever and how dare I suggest that he's only the lesser evil? Do you think that the real problem is the reptiloid conspiracy and I'm naive not to see it? From what you posted, I have absolutely no idea what your views are and in what particular way you believe I'm wrong.
Didn't mean to imply you were pushing some sort of agenda. It just galls me a little whenever I see that the language used in the discourse on any particular topic seems to be automatically slanted to one side. I just mention it to get people to think about some of the automatic assumptions that are made all the time in the debate.
I also believe that belief is spelled with an f. But you're poor grammar...
This is something I've learned from years and years on the Internet and on Usenet. Never, ever post about spelling and grammar (unless it's particularly bad). You are virtually guaranteed to make your own mistake while posting such a comment. It's a law of the universe or something.
Anyway, on your original post, I have to say that these things can go either way. People do have human interactions at work, so, to the degree that non-work related interaction is acceptable, religious discourse would seem to be as well. Providing the courts in question are reasonably just, I would imagine that your neighbor probably didn't let her views impinge on her work as much as the JPL guy and/or that the reaction of her employer to those views was more extreme and discriminatory than the reaction of JPL to this employee. For example, if JPL just repeatedly asked the employee in emails and meetings to please stay on task, and the car dealership people screamed at your neighbor that she was a whore of Satan and would burn for all eternity, that would explain it. Actually since the parties doing the firing would have been pretty neutral in the case of JPL but religiously partisan in the case of the car dealership, that by itself might account for the different outcomes. A larger, more heterogenous, organization can probably make a stronger claim to impartiality.
Whoops, you miss the point. I don't care about the expense, I care about the complicity. There's a lot of things people do on principle that cost more than the alternative because the cheaper option is not the morally sound option.
If you think I missed that point, then you didn't read past the third sentence in my post. The _fourth_ sentence was:
The _emotional_ argument of "I don't want to pay for this", where people feel that, by paying for it with public money they become somehow responsible for the death, still has some legs.
You just didn't make it very clear which argument dominated your disapproval in your original post. Actually, the fact that you wrote: "then I become responsible for paying for it" rather than "then I become responsible [by] paying for it" suggested to me that it was the financial argument rather than the emotional that was swaying you.
In any case, I find the complicity argument unconvincing. Mainly because of the sheer impossibility of finding any system of anything that everyone can agree on. At some point you have to be able to shrug your shoulders and say: "I don't agree with it, but the link between my actions in paying my taxes and the personal choice of some far-removed terminal patient is so ridiculously tenuous my culpability is effectively nil" If you can't do that, pretty much nothing can ever get done.
How long before society, family, and other people who have to bear the burden of a terminal patient who wants to live until the end start pressuring such a person to choose death for their own comfort?
How long before? I have some news for you - it's not exactly new news and, as a matter of fact, it predates recorded history and almost certainly the development of language itself - this already happens and has happened for a long time. It's not just for the terminally ill. You might look up the practice of Sati, where a grieving widow throws herself on her husband's funeral pyre, sometimes with a little assistance from family or community if she's nervous about it.
People being pressured to take the suicide option, either in the form of direct suicide or just avoiding medical treatment, is a real ethical problem. The causes of the pressure are sometimes financial and sometimes emotional, and sometimes some of each. The financial reasons are obvious, the emotional stuff is more complicated. As far as the financial goes, I've always found it an excellent argument for a strong public healthcare system since it spreads the burden as widely as possible so that, if a patient must be a burden on people, they can at least be so anonymously. For the emotional side, there's never going to be a solution. At least physician assisted suicide is better than the situation for the people who attempt suicide by not seeking treatment in the first place, or who hide their medication and pretend to take it in order to hasten death. In the end, the best you can do is hope that the physician doing the assisting acts ethically and is good at getting a read on the real situation.
Because no ethical red flags would be raised if people suggested that. As it stands, I don't see how physician assisted suicide in terminal cases is the gateway you believe. I mean, sure there are inhuman scum out there who might believe that terminal patients who can't pay for their own care are better off just killed, but, without the killing option, why wouldn't those same people just say that terminal patients who can't pay for their own care should be left to die in the street. You seem quite comfortable with the idea that poor terminally ill patients should just die already (or possibly that they should be taken care of, but only if they happen to be fortunate enough to have charitable acquaintances).
Uploading copyrighted material is against the law in the U.S.
Since the US adopted the Berne Convention, anything copyrightable is copyrighted to its creator (barring contractual copyright assignment obligations or local work for hire laws that may assign it to someone else) automatically as soon as it's fixed in tangible form. In a lot of ways, that's sort of a nightmare, but it does make just about everything that everyone creates copyrighted. Including this post and your post which I'm replying to. Even if you make a reference to permission later in the sentence, please try not to spread the idea that we're not all copyright holders. I get so sick of seeing the term "copyright holders" being tossed around as if it's a title belonging only to certain wealthy and influential industry groups rather than meaning all of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Never mind, should have just looked it up for myself. Another reboot of the whole DC Universe. Looks like they did it without a Crisis event this time, they just editorially declared "everything is different now, except for some stuff that isn't" and restarted the issue numbers.
Well, Gandalf and Saruman and Sauron and the Balrog are all the same kind of being: Maiar. The Maiar are supposed to be shape-shifters or at least wear the forms mere mortals perceive them as like a kind of disguise, so the Balrog may be able to have wings some of the time and not have wings the rest of the time (and be man-sized or gigantic as required). Sauron was described as being able to directly shape-shift, for example. That was before he put some of his power into the One Ring and lost it, however, so that doesn't say whether all of the Maiar can do it. There is some evidence that the form they took was handed out when they entered the world and that they therefore might not be able to change it without leaving the world and coming back in, which would be pretty hard for the Balrog to do with Morgoth banished... So, still inconclusive.
Anyway, is that more like it? :)
I haven't read comics in a while. Can anyone tell me what's up with the numbering? Shouldn't Action Comics be in the 1000's by now?
Oh, I push for it where I can. The problem is, who exactly do you think is in charge of these elections? The two major parties are. They have absolutely no incentive to alter a system that's keeping them on top.
Well, when I said you could spend your whole life doing that, I meant not just for the one espresso machine, but for the various things you might want to replicate. Regardless, the few weeks seems overly optimistic. Among other things, it should take longer than that to properly test it. Sure, you can probably cobble together something that works well enough, but if there were good reasons for the original design choices in the first place, altering the design is surely going to cause issues that will crop up over time forcing you to repair it again and again and again and again. Believe me, I can see the fun and educational value in doing it from scratch until you get it right, but sometimes you just want to get things right the first time. There's a clear benefit in having the distilled knowledge of those who came before you to reference, even when you decide to go in a different direction.
Yes, you could spend your whole life doing that. Or you could have some documentation providing that knowledge right off the bat.
Yes, and their goal is to document that knowledge.
But in another twenty years, that magic year may cease to be relevant. For example, if 99% of cars on the road at that point are zero-emissions, they may not bother with emissions tests for old cars any more. Or, possibly, they won't allow them on the road and people will only have them for private tracks.
The claims are probably still bunk, but I think the point was that the frequencies of the LEDs could be optimized for plant growing. Green plants obviously don't absorb much green light, although the radiation peak for natural sunlight falls right at green. So, there's probably a decent efficiency bump in using properly tuned LEDs vs. sunlight. As you point out, the efficiency losses from the solar panel setup and the LEDs are probably greater than that can offset. Still, it does mean there is something to offset those other efficiency losses.
Now, regardless of the lower efficiency, solar panels plus LEDs may still have their place, especially in setups like this. There are plenty of rooftops, parking lots, etc. where it would be completely impractical to build a vertical farm but easily practical to mount solar cells, and you can send that power to LEDs in centralized vertical farms. Even if the efficiency of sunlight to plant growth is only 10-20% you're still making use of sunlight which otherwise would have gone unused for agriculture.
If it's true, it's still not a problem. As it stands "third parties" are made up mostly of idealists who know that they don't have any chance of winning. All the hard-core pragmatists join the Democrats or Republicans. If a truly democratic voting system were implemented in the US, there would be more parties.
It's worth noting that, in the US, the Democrats and Republicans obviously recognize that the system of voting used doesn't actually work properly, which is why they implement their own runoff system in the form of their own primary elections.
But the system of financing the voting system is affected by voting system itself. The simple plurality voting system used helps push towards a stable two party system. A stable two party system is much more corruptible.
You're assuming a simple plurality voting system, which is what is used 99% of the time in the US. It's the perfect voting system for exactly two choices, but for more than two choices it falls down completely due to effects like the ones you mention. Pretty much every single pass voting system is better, although they all do have some problems (none as bad as simple plurality) perfectly representing the will of the population. Personally I think that democracy is important enough that there's no reason to balk at a multiple pass system. Anyway, the current farce of a system that the US uses now, where a coin is tossed to see if a Democrat or a Republican will get the job, really needs to change.
Great, we've established that corporate revenues and personal income is treated differently. This is a feature, not a bug.
The problem is the question of fairness. You're the one who brought fairness into it by mentioning the term "fair share". We're not disputing that the laws allow these things to be treated differently, we're saying that just because it's legal doesn't make it fair.
Now, please explain for us dim unwashed masses exactly why you think the US government has any right to a "fair share" of taxes earned by European corporations doing business in Europe, when those revenues are never funneled back to an American holding company?
Firstly, it's about the difference between personal taxes and corporate. US citizens outside the US earning money and not funnelling any back to the US are still expected to pay taxes to the US if they're not paying enough tax overseas. The question is why different logic for what's "fair" is applied to private citizens and large corporations. Secondly, I question your assertion that the revenues are never funnelled back to the US in any way. At the very least, foreign divisions of a corporation have to be considered assets of the parent company and therefore potentially taxable.
First of all. Whoosh.
And that's the problem - there's all kinds of outrage that "they only pay TWO PERCENT!" but if the law allows it, that *is* their "fair share."
Secondly, the problem with the "fair share" is what the law allows for different actors. For typical private citizens of the US, if they're making money overseas, they still have to file with the IRS. I may have some of the deatails of, but it goes something like: if you paid tax on your overseas earnings overseas and the tax is less than what you would have paid at home, you make up the difference to the IRS. It's a lot more complicated than that, I'm sure, but pretty much any private citizen of the US paying 2% overseas owes extra money to the IRS. By the sound of this article, big corporations don't.
You might be able to say that for price per Joule maybe since Joules are units you can divorce conceptually from the fixed startup costs. You can't really divorce Wattage from the startup costs that way. You buy a certain amount of equipment and it provides a certain wattage (depending on average conditions at the location, etc.).
You might want to look into either getting an account or using some sort of public key signing for your posts, or some other authentication scheme. Maybe get a website and copy and paste time stamped copies of your posts there.
Not to mention that a broader pool of viable candidates means it's less likely that any corporation or other special influence could simply compromise all viable candidates. When you have just two viable candidates, a big player can simply make a large contribution to both sides. If you have more viable candidates, that sort of thing becomes much harder. It's also valuable simply for how it breaks up the stagnation that occurs in a two party system. Having more than two viable candidates also compromises the effectiveness of gerrymandering, which can only be a good thing. Aside from that, it would be nice to have elections that aren't mostly decided by differences in vote counts that are smaller than the margin of error.
I certainly do think that the fact that US elections generally come down to a virtual coin-toss between two undesirable candidates is _one_ of the things that's wrong. Frankly I'm confused by your post since you seem to object to everything I've said, but you're completely opaque on your own views on the subject. Do you think that things are perfect and I shouldn't be complaining? Do you think that all that's wrong is that Obama is the devil? Do you think that Obama is the best, most perfect President ever and how dare I suggest that he's only the lesser evil? Do you think that the real problem is the reptiloid conspiracy and I'm naive not to see it? From what you posted, I have absolutely no idea what your views are and in what particular way you believe I'm wrong.
Didn't mean to imply you were pushing some sort of agenda. It just galls me a little whenever I see that the language used in the discourse on any particular topic seems to be automatically slanted to one side. I just mention it to get people to think about some of the automatic assumptions that are made all the time in the debate.
I also believe that belief is spelled with an f. But you're poor grammar...
This is something I've learned from years and years on the Internet and on Usenet. Never, ever post about spelling and grammar (unless it's particularly bad). You are virtually guaranteed to make your own mistake while posting such a comment. It's a law of the universe or something.
Anyway, on your original post, I have to say that these things can go either way. People do have human interactions at work, so, to the degree that non-work related interaction is acceptable, religious discourse would seem to be as well. Providing the courts in question are reasonably just, I would imagine that your neighbor probably didn't let her views impinge on her work as much as the JPL guy and/or that the reaction of her employer to those views was more extreme and discriminatory than the reaction of JPL to this employee. For example, if JPL just repeatedly asked the employee in emails and meetings to please stay on task, and the car dealership people screamed at your neighbor that she was a whore of Satan and would burn for all eternity, that would explain it. Actually since the parties doing the firing would have been pretty neutral in the case of JPL but religiously partisan in the case of the car dealership, that by itself might account for the different outcomes. A larger, more heterogenous, organization can probably make a stronger claim to impartiality.
Whoops, you miss the point. I don't care about the expense, I care about the complicity. There's a lot of things people do on principle that cost more than the alternative because the cheaper option is not the morally sound option.
If you think I missed that point, then you didn't read past the third sentence in my post. The _fourth_ sentence was:
The _emotional_ argument of "I don't want to pay for this", where people feel that, by paying for it with public money they become somehow responsible for the death, still has some legs.
You just didn't make it very clear which argument dominated your disapproval in your original post. Actually, the fact that you wrote: "then I become responsible for paying for it" rather than "then I become responsible [by] paying for it" suggested to me that it was the financial argument rather than the emotional that was swaying you.
In any case, I find the complicity argument unconvincing. Mainly because of the sheer impossibility of finding any system of anything that everyone can agree on. At some point you have to be able to shrug your shoulders and say: "I don't agree with it, but the link between my actions in paying my taxes and the personal choice of some far-removed terminal patient is so ridiculously tenuous my culpability is effectively nil" If you can't do that, pretty much nothing can ever get done.
How long before society, family, and other people who have to bear the burden of a terminal patient who wants to live until the end start pressuring such a person to choose death for their own comfort?
How long before? I have some news for you - it's not exactly new news and, as a matter of fact, it predates recorded history and almost certainly the development of language itself - this already happens and has happened for a long time. It's not just for the terminally ill. You might look up the practice of Sati, where a grieving widow throws herself on her husband's funeral pyre, sometimes with a little assistance from family or community if she's nervous about it.
People being pressured to take the suicide option, either in the form of direct suicide or just avoiding medical treatment, is a real ethical problem. The causes of the pressure are sometimes financial and sometimes emotional, and sometimes some of each. The financial reasons are obvious, the emotional stuff is more complicated. As far as the financial goes, I've always found it an excellent argument for a strong public healthcare system since it spreads the burden as widely as possible so that, if a patient must be a burden on people, they can at least be so anonymously. For the emotional side, there's never going to be a solution. At least physician assisted suicide is better than the situation for the people who attempt suicide by not seeking treatment in the first place, or who hide their medication and pretend to take it in order to hasten death. In the end, the best you can do is hope that the physician doing the assisting acts ethically and is good at getting a read on the real situation.
Because no ethical red flags would be raised if people suggested that. As it stands, I don't see how physician assisted suicide in terminal cases is the gateway you believe. I mean, sure there are inhuman scum out there who might believe that terminal patients who can't pay for their own care are better off just killed, but, without the killing option, why wouldn't those same people just say that terminal patients who can't pay for their own care should be left to die in the street. You seem quite comfortable with the idea that poor terminally ill patients should just die already (or possibly that they should be taken care of, but only if they happen to be fortunate enough to have charitable acquaintances).
Uploading copyrighted material is against the law in the U.S.
Since the US adopted the Berne Convention, anything copyrightable is copyrighted to its creator (barring contractual copyright assignment obligations or local work for hire laws that may assign it to someone else) automatically as soon as it's fixed in tangible form. In a lot of ways, that's sort of a nightmare, but it does make just about everything that everyone creates copyrighted. Including this post and your post which I'm replying to. Even if you make a reference to permission later in the sentence, please try not to spread the idea that we're not all copyright holders. I get so sick of seeing the term "copyright holders" being tossed around as if it's a title belonging only to certain wealthy and influential industry groups rather than meaning all of us.