No offense to our ancestors but anyone who climbed a mountain and held up a straight edge against the horizon would notice that it's not flat. I've seen this myself.
Sure, that's one possibility, it just won't actually happen. The correct response is to impose a nitrogen waste runoff tax to correct the current externalized cost then let the market sort it out.
I haven't seen anything that Snowden has revealed that hurt our national security in any serious way. Sure, plenty of embarrassment for the administration but that's hardly the same thing. Personally, I'm glad that he did what he did since it's started a very real discussion about intelligence service over-reach and lack of sufficient oversight. The right thing to do would be for the president to grant him a pardon on the condition that he come back to the US and turn over any remaining materials. That way we keep the information out of the hands of our rivals and demonstrate that we protect whistleblowers at the same time.
Look, obviously material has to be divided into certain size chunks for it to work in a formal setting. Previously the most efficient chunk size was the term or semester. That's not because it was optimal for the student though, it was optimal for the university due to the overhead of organizing the whole thing. Now that we have more technology the overhead has become lower and it's possible to use a smaller chunk size that's more optimal for students. I'm not seeing a lot of downside there.
Allow me to give a personal example. I took an intermediate accounting class as part of my business degree, it was required since I was taking the finance option. This class was the "weed out" class for people who want to be accountants but there were a few bits that the finance majors needed. One of the things we learned was the purpose of the statement of cash flows and how to construct it in depth. That was critical information for me to have and I definitely needed it, however we also covered a ton of things I had no need or desire to learn. If they could have chopped that course into three modules and allowed me to just take the part on the statement of cash flows it would have saved considerable time and effort.
Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Registered Libertarian but completely agree. The market for lifesaving treatment is not the same as the market for Oranges. Dental work for the most part is not life threatening and works pretty well on free market principles, heart surgery on the other hand does not.
My personal politics shade towards colorblindness, but in order to have an intelligent discourse about the problem I've made an effort to understand the other main point of view. Understanding the other sides argument doesn't mean I agree.
and what is "a more positive way" to practice racism?
I guess you can say that I fall into that first school of thought.
It's important to acknowledge that there is another way of looking at it. From that perspective what matters is the fairness of the outcomes. So for example a company that has a colorblind hiring process but a significant racial imbalance would not be considered acceptable. That sort of reasoning leads to "restorative justice" policies like affirmative action. The basic idea is that previous unfairness must be compensated for by providing preferential treatment for the class of wronged individuals until the situation has be been rebalanced.
And you think party members can't be influenced via gifts or bribes? Transparency international rates them the 175th most corrupt country out of 177 total.
Wouldn't it be more fair to be colorblind in the workplace and hire people according to skill?
There are two different schools of thought when it comes to solving racial inequity issues. Once school recommends that we strive towards colorblindness in decision making, the other school suggests that we deliberately take color into account but in a more positive way. The justification for the first school is that "two wrongs don't make a right". The justification for the second school is that "the situation won't resolve itself naturally". It's the whole equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcomes argument that tends to dominate our political discourse.
We all hate the system but as with many things we can't agree on what the replacement should be. Solutions from the left would probably work, solutions from the right would probably work, instead we get the worst features of both.
If the Israelis are carrying out an extermination campaign they're not doing a very good job. So far they've killed 1065 Palestinians out of 1.816 million in the Gaza Strip, so that's like 0.06%. They've been at it for 22 days, if they kept this pace continually they'd kill just under 1% per year which is lower than the population growth rate. Unless they seriously step up their game the Palestinians are in no danger of extinction.
Or perhaps we could just acknowledge that Hamas is deliberately siting their weapons near civilians in order to increase the collateral damage of Israeli strikes. Frankly I think the Israelis are being pretty restrained given the scope of the problem. I can guarantee you that if the Mexicans were lobbing rockets into El Paso, Texas we'd be lighting them up like the 4th of July. (No offense to the Mexican people who for the most part would rather move here than lob rockets at us).
The US isn't some white knight, we do underhanded things all the time. We've routinely overthrown democratic governments and backed dictators around the world when it suited our interests. Here's a nice quote from Smedly Butler, a man I consider a hero and patriot:
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
Those sorts of interventions didn't end when gunboat diplomacy went out of style, we just shifted to more covert tactics. Most evidence suggests we had a hand in the overthrow of at least twenty different governments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions).
President Viktor Yanukovych was incredibly corrupt even if he was legitimately elected. (in a technical sense, he used a variety of dirty tricks including possibly poisoning his opponent) I'm not surprised that the Western Ukrainians wanted to get rid of him. Since he was pro-Russian I'm not surprised we gave things a bit of a push in the right direction. Heck, in a realpolitik kind of way, it may even have been a good idea. It's a bit disingenuous to suggest we're innocent impartial observers to the whole mess though. The State Department has been waist deep in that place since at least the Orange Revolution in 2004 when we backed Victor Yushchenko.
I have to agree. As an example, when Hitler first invaded the Ukraine the people were so happy they cheered the Nazis for throwing out the Soviets. Of course subsequent events showed that optimism to be seriously misplaced but it demonstrates how much they hated the Soviets. (Although I used the word Soviets in this context for all intents and purposes they were the Russians)
I remain quite suspicious of Kiev - although I'm not yet willing to state anything like "Kiev did it in an attempt to gain world support for a genocidal campaign in the east of the country." Not willing to commit myself to such a statement yet, but I'm leaning that way.
That seems like a higher level of competence than we should give them credit for. Based on the evidence I've seen so far I'm thinking it's more "Rebel forces with a poorly understood but shiny new toy accidentally shoot down a civilian airliner they thought was a government transport plane".
Absolutely not. Russia is the villain. US is an impartial observer not participating (yet) in the events, but US is being a prudent observer in stating that it would not do business with a bully (at best) or a madman (at worst). That doesn't make US a villain. It makes US sane.
We're not exactly as lily white as you're portraying here. The ouster of president Yanukovich was encouraged and covertly supported by Western intelligence agencies including the CIA. So essentially we're got a proxy conflict between two puppet states, one backed by the West and the other by Russia. The whole thing reminds me of the 80s.
I just find it pretty naive to suggest that a corporation the size of ExxonMobil has "zero influence", have you never heard of lobbyists or campaign contributions?
Well, lets use commercial grade bulk purchase instead the retail price which works out to about $0.91//ft^2 (http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/3mm-19mm-Clear-Tempered-Glass_273110379.html?s=p) With that sort of volume I'm sure you could probably get it even cheaper. Additionally, there is no need to pay for it all up front, issue some bonds and pay for it over 30 years. With that in mind you're looking at $8.6 Billion for the glass total and less than $300 million per year as payments, a large project to be sure but quite doable if we wished.
You're talking about indirect solar & reverse osmosis, that's a different ballgame. In direct solar basically they pump the seawater into into an evaporation pond that has a transparent ceiling and a gravity collection system for the water. No power involved except the pumps to get the water into the pond.
I am not an industrial engineer and I'm sure there are many factors to consider, however small scale systems generally have a production value of around 6 liters per square meter of collection surface per day. (http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/2778020/soa-seawater_desalination.pdf)
Groundwater usage is only about 20% of total, so about 310,403 million liters per day. (http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2009/3098/pdf/2009-3098.pdf) I don't think there is any point in trying to replace surface water usage since that appears to be functioning normally. Given that amount we're looking at 51,734 sq. km. worth of collectors. The land area of the US is 9.872 million sq. km. so that's about 0.5%, not nothing but it sounds roughly workable.
To put some scope on this, lets talk about my home state of Oregon. Just eyeballing the water usage map, we probably use 5,678 million liters of groundwater which is 946 sq. km. of direct distilling capacity needed. If we assume 10 plants (for which there is plenty of room in the near coastal areas) and include some room for overhead you're looking at 3000 acre parcels. Throw in some space for pipelines and solar power generation for the pumps and it looks pretty feasible from an engineering and land use perspective.
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No offense to our ancestors but anyone who climbed a mountain and held up a straight edge against the horizon would notice that it's not flat. I've seen this myself.
Yes, using S.A.M. (Software Automatic Mouth) via the SID audio chip built in.
Non-nuclear power has well known consequences. An important one for coal is the release of mercury, lead and radon (!) into the atmosphere.
Oh, and enough radioactive carbon-14 to make nuclear power look safe by comparison.
Although I like his moral stance on this particular issue I haven't seen anything to suggest he's qualified for that sort of job.
Sure, that's one possibility, it just won't actually happen. The correct response is to impose a nitrogen waste runoff tax to correct the current externalized cost then let the market sort it out.
I haven't seen anything that Snowden has revealed that hurt our national security in any serious way. Sure, plenty of embarrassment for the administration but that's hardly the same thing. Personally, I'm glad that he did what he did since it's started a very real discussion about intelligence service over-reach and lack of sufficient oversight. The right thing to do would be for the president to grant him a pardon on the condition that he come back to the US and turn over any remaining materials. That way we keep the information out of the hands of our rivals and demonstrate that we protect whistleblowers at the same time.
Look, obviously material has to be divided into certain size chunks for it to work in a formal setting. Previously the most efficient chunk size was the term or semester. That's not because it was optimal for the student though, it was optimal for the university due to the overhead of organizing the whole thing. Now that we have more technology the overhead has become lower and it's possible to use a smaller chunk size that's more optimal for students. I'm not seeing a lot of downside there.
Allow me to give a personal example. I took an intermediate accounting class as part of my business degree, it was required since I was taking the finance option. This class was the "weed out" class for people who want to be accountants but there were a few bits that the finance majors needed. One of the things we learned was the purpose of the statement of cash flows and how to construct it in depth. That was critical information for me to have and I definitely needed it, however we also covered a ton of things I had no need or desire to learn. If they could have chopped that course into three modules and allowed me to just take the part on the statement of cash flows it would have saved considerable time and effort.
Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Registered Libertarian but completely agree. The market for lifesaving treatment is not the same as the market for Oranges. Dental work for the most part is not life threatening and works pretty well on free market principles, heart surgery on the other hand does not.
The hiring manager was a Director and had trouble understanding moderately clever/optimized solutions to CS200 problems.
I fail to see why that's a problem unless he was the one conducting the technical portion of the interview.
In my experience that means the appearance of work triples while actual productivity drops by half.
My personal politics shade towards colorblindness, but in order to have an intelligent discourse about the problem I've made an effort to understand the other main point of view. Understanding the other sides argument doesn't mean I agree.
and what is "a more positive way" to practice racism?
I guess you can say that I fall into that first school of thought.
It's important to acknowledge that there is another way of looking at it. From that perspective what matters is the fairness of the outcomes. So for example a company that has a colorblind hiring process but a significant racial imbalance would not be considered acceptable. That sort of reasoning leads to "restorative justice" policies like affirmative action. The basic idea is that previous unfairness must be compensated for by providing preferential treatment for the class of wronged individuals until the situation has be been rebalanced.
And you think party members can't be influenced via gifts or bribes? Transparency international rates them the 175th most corrupt country out of 177 total.
Wouldn't it be more fair to be colorblind in the workplace and hire people according to skill?
There are two different schools of thought when it comes to solving racial inequity issues. Once school recommends that we strive towards colorblindness in decision making, the other school suggests that we deliberately take color into account but in a more positive way. The justification for the first school is that "two wrongs don't make a right". The justification for the second school is that "the situation won't resolve itself naturally". It's the whole equality of opportunity vs. equality of outcomes argument that tends to dominate our political discourse.
I can tell you from experience that the standard forms in the military are horrible.
We all hate the system but as with many things we can't agree on what the replacement should be. Solutions from the left would probably work, solutions from the right would probably work, instead we get the worst features of both.
They're scarier.
If the Israelis are carrying out an extermination campaign they're not doing a very good job. So far they've killed 1065 Palestinians out of 1.816 million in the Gaza Strip, so that's like 0.06%. They've been at it for 22 days, if they kept this pace continually they'd kill just under 1% per year which is lower than the population growth rate. Unless they seriously step up their game the Palestinians are in no danger of extinction.
Or perhaps we could just acknowledge that Hamas is deliberately siting their weapons near civilians in order to increase the collateral damage of Israeli strikes. Frankly I think the Israelis are being pretty restrained given the scope of the problem. I can guarantee you that if the Mexicans were lobbing rockets into El Paso, Texas we'd be lighting them up like the 4th of July. (No offense to the Mexican people who for the most part would rather move here than lob rockets at us).
The US isn't some white knight, we do underhanded things all the time. We've routinely overthrown democratic governments and backed dictators around the world when it suited our interests. Here's a nice quote from Smedly Butler, a man I consider a hero and patriot:
"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
Those sorts of interventions didn't end when gunboat diplomacy went out of style, we just shifted to more covert tactics. Most evidence suggests we had a hand in the overthrow of at least twenty different governments (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covert_United_States_foreign_regime_change_actions).
President Viktor Yanukovych was incredibly corrupt even if he was legitimately elected. (in a technical sense, he used a variety of dirty tricks including possibly poisoning his opponent) I'm not surprised that the Western Ukrainians wanted to get rid of him. Since he was pro-Russian I'm not surprised we gave things a bit of a push in the right direction. Heck, in a realpolitik kind of way, it may even have been a good idea. It's a bit disingenuous to suggest we're innocent impartial observers to the whole mess though. The State Department has been waist deep in that place since at least the Orange Revolution in 2004 when we backed Victor Yushchenko.
I have to agree. As an example, when Hitler first invaded the Ukraine the people were so happy they cheered the Nazis for throwing out the Soviets. Of course subsequent events showed that optimism to be seriously misplaced but it demonstrates how much they hated the Soviets. (Although I used the word Soviets in this context for all intents and purposes they were the Russians)
I remain quite suspicious of Kiev - although I'm not yet willing to state anything like "Kiev did it in an attempt to gain world support for a genocidal campaign in the east of the country." Not willing to commit myself to such a statement yet, but I'm leaning that way.
That seems like a higher level of competence than we should give them credit for. Based on the evidence I've seen so far I'm thinking it's more "Rebel forces with a poorly understood but shiny new toy accidentally shoot down a civilian airliner they thought was a government transport plane".
Absolutely not. Russia is the villain. US is an impartial observer not participating (yet) in the events, but US is being a prudent observer in stating that it would not do business with a bully (at best) or a madman (at worst). That doesn't make US a villain. It makes US sane.
We're not exactly as lily white as you're portraying here. The ouster of president Yanukovich was encouraged and covertly supported by Western intelligence agencies including the CIA. So essentially we're got a proxy conflict between two puppet states, one backed by the West and the other by Russia. The whole thing reminds me of the 80s.
I just find it pretty naive to suggest that a corporation the size of ExxonMobil has "zero influence", have you never heard of lobbyists or campaign contributions?
Well, lets use commercial grade bulk purchase instead the retail price which works out to about $0.91//ft^2 (http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/3mm-19mm-Clear-Tempered-Glass_273110379.html?s=p) With that sort of volume I'm sure you could probably get it even cheaper. Additionally, there is no need to pay for it all up front, issue some bonds and pay for it over 30 years. With that in mind you're looking at $8.6 Billion for the glass total and less than $300 million per year as payments, a large project to be sure but quite doable if we wished.
You're talking about indirect solar & reverse osmosis, that's a different ballgame. In direct solar basically they pump the seawater into into an evaporation pond that has a transparent ceiling and a gravity collection system for the water. No power involved except the pumps to get the water into the pond.
I am not an industrial engineer and I'm sure there are many factors to consider, however small scale systems generally have a production value of around 6 liters per square meter of collection surface per day. (http://pure.ltu.se/portal/files/2778020/soa-seawater_desalination.pdf)
Groundwater usage is only about 20% of total, so about 310,403 million liters per day. (http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2009/3098/pdf/2009-3098.pdf) I don't think there is any point in trying to replace surface water usage since that appears to be functioning normally. Given that amount we're looking at 51,734 sq. km. worth of collectors. The land area of the US is 9.872 million sq. km. so that's about 0.5%, not nothing but it sounds roughly workable.
To put some scope on this, lets talk about my home state of Oregon. Just eyeballing the water usage map, we probably use 5,678 million liters of groundwater which is 946 sq. km. of direct distilling capacity needed. If we assume 10 plants (for which there is plenty of room in the near coastal areas) and include some room for overhead you're looking at 3000 acre parcels. Throw in some space for pipelines and solar power generation for the pumps and it looks pretty feasible from an engineering and land use perspective.