About 11 years ago I was working at Sun Microsystems working on getting patches to customers from legacy compiler engineering for escalated bugs against FORTRAN and CC++. I know that sales of the compilers exceeded $1 Million a year even though Sun was giving Java away for free and not competing very well with its IDE against IBM and others. I hadn't coded in FORTRAN for about 15 years at that point and had to learn about developments in the language while I had redirected me experience to C/C++. and I was surprised by the demand, but quickly learned that our customers liked FORTRAN because of the overall performance of legacy numerical analysis libraries. It would be interesting for people at Oracle to comment on this.
Any desalinization would increase salinity in the waste water. So even if the ocean is an efficient heat sink for the plant, the brine that would result from the process could become a problem by creating density currents in the water column. In cold water, brine does not mix well and significant production of dense brine would pose an environmental problem in the Southern California Boarder Land because the bathemetry of those basins. If enough brine was produced it could cause massive erosion and landslides in the deep ocean. It may be that the size of these brine plumes isn't ever large enough to pose a risk, but one way to deal with the problem is to conceive your desalinization in stages that produces brine waste in sequences that progressively dilute it.
A discussion of alternative techniques of desalinization might relate to this problem. If a combination of solar driven fractionation of brackish water from sea water is used and then reverse osmosis is used for the final stages of purification, the advantages of each can be optimized in a staged process. The energy needed might be greater overall, but if the energy problem could be solved then maybe the costs and waste products could be distributed with reduced impact. The cost of desalination is very sensitive to energy costs, so either a large solar input of some sort, maybe not just solarvoltaic, or a high energy density nuclear source, Fusion, if it proves feasible, or some lower risk fission source, such as Thorium, could be used. I am not saying straight away that Santa Barbra should consider running a Thorium reactor, only that some kind of energy solution needs to be created for the general problem.
The "Grid" is is built mostly to meet the needs of carbon fueled energy companies, and of course they want it to stay that way. So even if there is huge wind power resource in Nebraska, the coal and oil and natural gas companies, who by the way are the bulk of the contributators to the Conservative and GOP Super PACS aren't going to willingly do something that promotes alternative energy, which is why the U.S. did not have a meaningful energy policy during the Bush years especially. The coming on-line of fracking has improved the natural-gas and oil resource picture, improving their competativeness with alternatives, but of course at a cost that the carbon companies want you to not notice and continue in your old habits of pumping green house gases into the atmosphere, for your convenience. One hopes that the terrible weather in the eastern two thirds of the nation becomes a wake-up call to the connection.
Once electrons go on the grid, they cannot be efficiently saved. It is better to let them go to ground. If batteries were all that efficient, then we could save energy in one part of the grid and transport it to somewhere else. Wind farms in Nebraska could be set up off the grid or on, and if there were efficient batteries or other storage, the energy could be stored and used later, but this does not exist and transforming energy to other forms suffers the same problem, the ways it can be stored are relatively inefficient or they suffer from other bad side effects, like having to create more carbon fuels that get burned in the atmosphere. If and when we decide that our energy should come from less and less breaking of carbon bonds, we will either need to find a much higher energy density fuel than carbon or find a very efficient way to store what energy we make. Nuclear fusion of hydrogen could be a solution to the energy density source, and Thorium fission might be much safer than Uranium fission, so there is possibly a nuclear solution. For alternatives such as solar and wind, it is battery technology that may decide how much they can do. Right now, the carbon fuels industry has a vested interest in obstructing these efforts, one way for them to do that is to ensure that the grid does not go out to places where the alternative energy is available. An answer to them is to bring alternative energy to the grid, either make it possible to bring nuclear energy to the grid or to invent efficient batteries.
Interesting facts, there, and thank you. The desalination cost is very sensitive to energy supply. That is why if nuclear fusion passes break even there could be an opportunity for it to solve the problem. I wonder even about the debate over Th vs. U for producing electricity using nuclear fission. If Th reactors are much more simple and safer than water-cooled high-pressure U reactors, and the bias in DOE for U reactors has to do with the military bias towards fission reactors that produce weapons-grade Pu, than Th or Fusion could co-locate with places to desalinate sea-water, and compete economically with pumping fresh water over long distances.
I can see that even the issue of brine causing gravity dynamics in the marine water column could be anticipated if the desalination is staged so that brackish stages are returned to the marine environment in a way that they cause minimal impact, and the relatively fresh fraction is purified upstream. Water taken in at the shore would be purified only a small amount, and most of the brackish water returned, we need only a very small amount of the sea water in the ocean to be desalinated, and the desalinated process increased upstream producing less salinity directly into the marine environment. This would be made possible through solving the energy problem, and that could be done with safe nuclear energy which is not the steam reactor type driven by U.
The dissconect in logic is even more pronounced in the housing crunch up in the San Francisco Bay area. You would think that people would see a connection between the crunch and growth, but that isn't the way things happen. The reason is that growth isn't controlled by its limiting resources, any more than it is constrained by water supply. It might be constrained by water just as it might be constrained by availability of land to build on and transportation, roads and fuel, to get people from where they live to where they work, but only in the long run.
It is in the short term where the disconnect happens, and it happens because in the short term growth is dictated by investment, where people with money want to spend it, and that has little to do with what a majority of people want to spend THEIR money on, so they adjust. They pay more for housing, lots more, and everything else, they pay more for fuel and for transportation so they can share in the benefits of living in a beautiful place, even though their incentives are controlled by wealthy people who have the money to invest. The problem here is that we live in a political economy in which a smaller and smaller minority gets to call the shots. The answer is to either take back power from the rich to dictate to the rest of us what the priorities are, or to hope that the consequences of the disconnect speedup. In the latter, nature is helping. Nature does not care about business plans or the desire of people to hold onto wealth and get more. It just reacts to purtebations in its system and if human greed is a cause of that it simply reacts by limiting available resources until some technology changes the economics or the resource is exhausted.
Here, I'd like to help you out, which way did you come in? It isn't that government sanctioning business can't lead to abuse, it is that business needs sanctioning, and by the way that is the norm and not the exception. Government and business are intimate and always have been. Government is only the seeming enemy to business that greedy elitist bastards who spout Rand say it is, while they forget that governments are used all the time to help establish industries by taking on the start-up risk and then the profitable business come back and ask government to enforce a cartel or monopoly. If you don't buy that. examine the history of coal, steel, rail, and communications in this country. Further, you of all people, should know about sweetheart deals between governments and businesses, look at how major German companies made deals with the government and how it was German capitalists who made Hitler possible. Shame.
I live in Silicon Valley. Yesterday, the news media reported with some hoopla that BART has bored a nice tunnel under Lake Elizabeth in Fremont for its extension to Warm Springs and Silicon Valley. Nice, now tech workers can live in the East Bay and get to work in San Jose faster. What they didn't tell you, and I should know because I have my degrees in Geology and studied the geology of the Bay Area, is that Lake Elizabeth is probably a sag pond associated with if not in the Hayward Fault. The OP link to the article which correctly pointed out that an expected M = 6.5 to 7.5 quake on the Hayward Fault in the East Bay would have much more effect than even the Loma Prieta even on the San Andreas Fault in 1989, because the epicenter could be very close to major population density. So a tunnel in soft sediment very near or across a active fault line that could have six feet of strike slip could result in disruption of the commute line, if not risk for passengers. I was quite shocked that this is where BART chose to dig a tunnel and at the potential risk. Judging by BART's recent history, I can say that I have doubts about the quality of its management, and I guess that is a general problem with business and government in a financialized world. Too many people with business backgrounds that deny scientific findings.
Don't blame Al Gore. He is only an effect, a hanger-on. The guys you should be looking at are harder to find and examine. Might I suggest that the guys you should be looking at are the economists in the Stanford University School or Economics and School of Business who proposed in about 2004 how to monetize web-site click counts into a market and began to persuade investors to spend good money after bad in companies like Facebook and Google. Before that Silicon Valley might have had a legitimate claim to fame for supplying mil-spec hardware, although it could be argued that Social Media is but Signals and Code technology originally developed for radars applied to streams of words supplied by people.
I had trouble with a popup when I first loaded the linked page, but going back to it the popup wasn't there and I got to read the article, and I agree with it mostly. I have said many of the same things it does in my posts here. I live in SV and am pretty critical of what it has become especially after 2000. I am critical of investment, the amount of capital companies with dubious business plans have been able to raise. That and the banking situation and the face that the problems that caused the Bubble of 2008 haven't really been addressed either by government or investors, and the result is an imbalanced and unfair economy. That is true not only in SV but worldwide and it has caused continuing unrest in the rest of the world and sows dragon's teeth for war and disruption.
I would say that the problems in the Bay Area with housing and the unrest that is could cause shows that investors do not care very much about side-effects and especially the unintended consequences of their decisions. A worse possibility is that investors, people who buy public equities, venture capitalists, and private investors are all elitists, perhaps emboldended by the way they have been able to rig finance and possibly by having Conservative political views, and simply don't care who their actions may hurt.
Greed and denying inclusiveness to protect advantage is the norm in history, it is nothing new, but as many notorious cases of the rich and powerful being brought to heel, lately being Donald Sterling, that unintended consequences are being brought to bear sooner than most of the powerful expect, and often their efforts to use public relations to obscure their transgressions are not enough; the sole benefit of social media, which, though, depends on the issue being very easy to grasp. That is why the uproar over Google Bus is so important and why people who would call themselves innocents become targets because of association. It is the speeding up of effects that matters and why people who might have not have gained the limelight might now get exposed to it and be totally unaware of why. People are beginning to question whether having a super-intelligent elite is really a benefit to most who rub shoulders with them. They will question weather the companies in SV with the huge market caps were good investments when the stock tanks in the next burst, and hopefully it will dawn on people that investors aren't all that smart and why did we ever set our priorities in society to make it super easy for them. They may not rregret the exodus of 200,000 jobs from Silicon Valley. At least the housing market wil return to some kind of sanity.
Do you really believe that stock prices and investment in today's economy is really connected to anything of value? I have my doubts. I also doubt that monitory policy is real important, it is a right-wing red herring used to cover up the speculation going on by international investment that is based on HFT and little else. The bubble that will burst is a global economic one, and we will get more guys like Putin as a result. We have been down this road before, like 75 years ago, The causes are the same, an unfair and imbalanced economic system driven by the interests of an oligarchy, a capitalist oligarchy, and the result is predictable enough, violence on a global scale as sociopaths like Putin, like Hitler, take, advantage of discontent in the have not's and disrupt wealth and investment, the only recourse they have against selfishness. We are all insane; having made the same grand mistake over and over. The only trouble is that now we are capable of destroying all of humanity in each cycle until we learn that economics is lethal and that ecology is what we need. We should eat the rich.
But not in the way the website intended. When I navigate to the link using Chrome with Ubuntu 12.04 a popup appears and stays on the screen making it had to read the text of the article. I might save the page to see if I can defeat the advertising, and that is why Silicon Valley Tech is a bursting bubble. The greed-driven intrusions companies are creating on their web pages is driving people away. There is only so bang for the buck that can be squeezed out of the real estate of a web page without getting disruptive and either web designers don't really know how to handle all the browsers correctly or they don't care and want the advertisers to interfere with the user's experience. I wanted to read what the writer had to say since I live in Silicon Valley, and I have become a critic of the economics of business on the web, especially social media, that seems to be the latest fad in Silicon Valley. Having been through the dot gone bust of 2000 I can tell you that what turns on investors and what drives the economics of Silicon Valley may have little to do with reality, at least of view of it longer than six months.
The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.
But, they will get your attention when they pack you off to prison or worse for writtng that program which was widely used to create some perceived injustice, What if your "sin" was to be a quant or to set up some HST server that destroyed the equities markets by unleashing speculation and sucking away most of the useful capital in the economy? Then you wish that you had some advance knowledge of politics, history, and economics, not to mention ethics and philosophy. The very speed with which technology is now yielding results should give you pause that you will live to see its consequences and you could be on the list of people who get blamed for its consequences.
In my experience, engineers are particularly bad at forseeing unintended consequences, and part of the reason for that is their naivete about humanities subjects, such as history and politics. It does not vindicate your efforts to simply assert that these aren't science and aren't interesting to you, that may simply mean that by being a geek or a nerd that you are insensitive to the nuances of living by perception and impressions, the way most people iive and think. To be out in front of the subjective with rationalizations, even very well based ones, does not protect you from the effects of most of mankind acting on impressions and fears, especially if they come to the conclusion that you are the cause of their fears. Increasingly technical people are becoming the focus of subjective fears in other people, if for no other reason than that you must take the humanities more seriously.
You are missing the age of the deposit. It has little to do with the age of the earth which is gotten from U/Pb ratios in zircons. The U in the deposit was concentrated in an open system which became closed in the formation of the deposit. It then evolved so that a natural reactor could form, as a closed system for some 300.000 years. The age of 1.5 BYA has to come from field relations and probably some absolute dating. It would be enough for concordant U/Pb ages to come from rocks surrounding the deposit to bracket the date of its formation, even though the natural reactor caused its U-235/U-238 ratio to be altered. Possibly, there is independent U/Pb dating, but it needn't have concordance within the deposit, and the system needn't remain closed to geochemistry since its formation, only that surrounding rocks give concordant ages and constrain its relative age stratigraphically.
Understand that absolute dates give the date a system was closed. Different isotopes can be used to date different parts of the history of a system. U/Pb can date the prolith of a grainite, for example. Zircons survve the metasomatic process that metamorphoses sediments into granite or gneiss. K/Ar dates might reveal a younger age from the same rock dating when the system was open to introduction of alkali metals in the later metamorphic process. Further studying field relations can justify dates of subsequent dates of metamorphism when the clock for different pairs of isotopes are reset giving different ages, such as Sr/Rb and K/Ar dates but reveal when prograde and retrograde metamorphic events occurred that must match up with field relations. This has been extensively done for the batholithic rocks of California and the West Coast and the geochemical and thermal history of these rocks is now well known and related to plate tectonics history.
More cool is the idea that nature can do these things herself without any help from intelligent design. Given correct conditions the natural reactor can happen, or why the earth's interior is hot, noting heat flow all over the planet. The story points to several important facts, There is an average ratio of isotopes of U for all the deposits of earth, pointing to a common source prior to their accumulation in the crust. This deposit showed a major deviation in the ratio which suggested depletion, which suggested that a natural reactor had formed. I remember seeing an article in Scientific American from the time cited in the OP for the development of this theory. I do not recall if there is further geochemical evidence for the fission products. Admitedly, there would have to be an argument that the reactor had been a closed system for enough time so that the decay products would still be able to be found in the minerology of the deposit. I assume that would be abnormal concentration of beta decay products of the fission products, things like Rb, and Te, for example.
Wouldn't this abuse be easily fixed by instituting a random variable latency into every trade, assuming that unfair advantage is speed and speculation, Either that or hack the connections of HFT houses so their communications are delayed, in a random way. There are ways to disrupt their business model.
I take a different tact on investment and how it shapes change. I think that digital technology has not only eliminated jobs and not replaced opportunity for more people than it has helped, but that human nature, greed, really has used digital technology to drive investment into unproductive behavior and that has caused the imbalances and lopsided income distribution. That effect will lead to greater social and political instability the world over and tech workers, engineers, and programmers may eventually bear the burden of blame. I am not talking Luddism, but I am talking political economy.
Although the points about growth, integration, and the reduction of quality are well taken, they don't go far enough to describe how computers have driven business into shorter and shorter term management and demands from investors for quicker ROI without regard for rendering anything of value. I am particularly concerned about how programmed trading and the large servers management by investment firms has encouraged speclative investment practices and about the large amounts of capital tied up in arbritage transactions. Classical theorists did not have to deal with this level of unproductive investment because the technology to enable it did not exist and markets had a sanity that reflected judgments of humans making "rational" choices. The use of computers in investment has changed all of that. It was a major factor in the crash of 2008 and the systemic problems has not been addressed by regulators. It needs to be. At least there needs to be latency introduced into equities transactions, 30 seconds a trade would probably repair much of the damage being done.
If the 800 pound ape in the room is a large institutional investment house who financializes all its decisions, how can small businesses and small investors have a chance to make decisions based on producing quality services or products?
Both of you are missing the point, or getting suckered by elitist arguments. As it stands now only a tiny minority of people can pay fully for their health care. The ACA sounded like a good idea until you analyze it as 1) Not addressing the root causes for the costs of health care in the U.S. which are twice as high per capeta as the next most expensive nation, and 2) That the ACA as enacted by Congress is basically subdedized insurance with no controls on private insurers raising premiums and on controlling what the health care industry gets to charge. The worst case scenereo for the Conservatives who fought against it, may either be the only fix, that in order to provide health care to a majority it has to be nationalized just to get cost disclosures and controls, or it becomes another example of society degrading into have and have-nots, which Conservatives, who are to a man elitist, don't mind, but that will further degrade the society. Inequalities are a real threat to this nation especially when people remember their not being an issue. When people have tasted fairness and equality they behave badly when it is taken away.
Something similar is going to happen to the Internet and over the issue of net-neutrality, which has become moot as ISVs throttle connections and Google Search biases results. The Social Media business model is all about biasing results of searches so that business partners are favored; that is at least as serious a problem as biasing access to IP addresses. The Internet is then killing itself through spying, spamming, and Social Media is a huge cause. People are getting turned off, even despite Facebook's revenue claims, just as death panels in insurance companies or Midicare are a threat to the health care status quo, a major abuse of data Facebook is gathering on anyone who visits the site would be enough to frighten people off the Internet.
Just as failure of health care might prompt doing something completely differently, note the pressure on health care professionals to donate their time to free clinics to help the under served. so maybe the answer to on-line communication is to imagine a non-IP network that removes the choak points of the current Internet and one which uses much more dynamic routing, perhaps even communication technology that avoids both the wired Internet and the wireless cartels, and for the reason of better communication that is more secure. Such a network could be quite different from the current Internet. Users may have to adjust to latent communications, but if you remember the days of UUCP and dialup, that is only a delay of instant gratification. You may need to accept that in order to make it harder for governments and corporations to spy on you, and to be free of the abuses of social media.
Likewise you might have to accept that nationalizing health care, or at least the threat of it, might force the health care industry to disclose its costs and its profits and the same for insurers. People love to hate government when graft is exposed. Those who cry the most about the abuse of government power fail to own up to the fact that if private business had to disclose as much it too would be blamed for graft, and since people are people everywhere, and abuse of power occurs often in secret. it may be that the threat of socialism might force the health care industry and related business to clean their house and justify their costs. That included some responsibility on the part of the public to begin asking about whether their health care dollar is used wisely by the industry. One thing is clear, Medicare is a huge player in dealing with costs, just through its share of the market, and the government could have a large effect on what everybody does by just holding providers accountable. It may be that the Congress in trying to reduce entitlements was prevented much more by those professions and businesses who had come to be used to their subsedy and less by concern for the recipients of the services.
The FCC ruling and the administration's response may be reactions to the cat already having got out of the bog, meaning the idea of Net Neutrality have have become moot on a variety of levels. ISPs are already throttling bandwidth for business gain, and how could regulators stop that as long as they allow major ISPs, Comcast, AT&T, etc. to have de facto monopolies, and bias search results and bandwidth? Google search is at least as non-net-neutral in a different way by biasing what you see first.
Couple that with the NSA spying and Internet security attacks, and we may be seeing the end of the Internet and the emergence of its alternatives including those that trade freedom from spying and spam for less than instant gratification. The incentives are to make the Internet moot. Maybe our networks don't need to be always on and connectionless, maybe they can be more latent and secure and yet serve us nearly as well and maybe better with fewer bottlenecks and single failure points and fewer big corporations and governments controlling what we can see and do.
Latency, even lots of latency may be a good thing and require low bandwidth and time to broadcast. I remember getting e-mail and USENET over 56KB phone lines with UUCP. The needs of a mesh or ad hoc network using packet switched radio for text and images and sound, needn't be that demanding if people adjusted to latent communication. If you goal was to have discussion free of commercial pressures, you could get by with delays, short transmission times, store and forward technology and ad hoc communication away from the Internet and the mobile network. If you didn't require voice or video, you could get text and images for much less resource, even if you had to pirate from allocated bands to do it. Maybe you do the opposite of cell-phone comm, you do narrow bandwidth very directional short burst comm even in allocated bands. If people are patient, you do this in a low demand way and it is difficult to prevent; all the better if your use of bandwidth is super efficient and you disrupt no one.
I think we have yet to face the bottleneck and that we are contributing to its arrival. The basis for that opinion is that the ultimate cause of the five or so mass extinctions that have happened in the past half billion years of earth history is a disruption of the carbon cycle and subsequent poisoning of the biosphere. Mankind is powerful enough to hasten the arrival of another event and we are in the midst of it; there is a major mass extinction going on and has been for more than 10,000 years, and our mismanagement of the biosphere is just the sort of thing that can result in a greater disruption and threaten us and the rest of the megafauna on Earth.
The warning in the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent technological races may not have the wisdom to see the signs of a collapse of the biosphere until it is too late and be able to survive in a colony elsewhere with the numbers of individuals and the time needed. It may take 40,000 to 1 million individuals to migrate somewhere and 10,000 to 200,000 years to wait out the disaster.
Well then, the pepper in your face is that in a land were "All Men Are Created Equal" does not mean that "All people ARE equal." in the vein that credit rating agencies create class distinctions based on how well you pay off your debts to financial institutions. In the same way, there are people who think that they have "earned" better treatment than most of the rest of us because of how much money they control, who they know, what church they attend and even the color of their skin and where their ancestors came from, maybe which college they attended and who they got to know there. They feel more entitled to favor, to influience, than most everyone else. People like this are a big part of what this nation has become and they are not ashamed or shy about it, in fact people who are "have nots" admire them to some extant as they have hopes to become just like them, until it dawns on them that the elite is becoming harder and harder to attain.
I see no point in criticizing your education, formal and informal, but to point out the benefits of formal education and the risks entailed by the lack of a personal exposure to experts and mentors and peers it supplies.
I am saying that I see the holes in thinking in people who are informally trained or whose formal training is too specialized. The group where the latter problem is obvious is engineering. These kind of people know a great deal about something very small in the large scope of knowledge and as with people who were not exposed to a systematic curriculum, have big areas in which not only are they ignorant, but that their opinions hold dangerous and incorrect ideas that it is difficult to persuade them to reconsider.
There is the idea of what constitutes a good breadth of general exposure to various disciplines of knowledge, and that is often both the subjects of a core curriculum at a college and those which a career-oriented and pragmatically focused training or education does not necessarily supply. Also, the "lab" in any subject is vital. Watching You Tube videos on how to do something is no substitute for having to do that task under the critical eye of a master.
There are tools for critical thinking, the original context of the term "rhetoric", that needs to be pointed out and exercised. In fact the Internet could be a good place to practice, but most web sites do not have the right tools for this. The blog post which does not even the context reply you are using here, cannot support dealing with rhetoric. For
learning how to reason and debate a formal education puts you in the company of critics that you are compelled to answer, that is not a useless skill generally. The Internet provides some opportunity but because of the limitations of blogs and the incorrect belief of many that to argue and disagree with people is rude, in most blogs and places like Facebook, the Internet is often not a very good way to exercise those skills, even though they are vital to citizenship in a democracy, and to trying to solve problems where everyone must have a say. It is almost as though the corporations that push Social Media actually want to suppress public opinion and the debate it needs; although it is enough to suppose that the business plan to mine comments for marketing keywords is a sufficient reason to not want more complexity in conversation than a blog supports.
As to your contention that your personal motivation is enough to assure that you get a broad training, I would counter that even personal interest does not assure that you know how knowledge you do not yet have is important and that other people, teachers and mentors, are very important to you in the early part of your life, especially, to give you some guidance and to steer you into subjects. I acknowledge that there are many other ways to learn than a formal curriculum, and to pay tuition, and that everyone must continue learning after graduation. Increasingly, what one learns as a young person becomes obsolete sooner and sooner in one's career. When I said that you learn how to learn, I didn't mean just how to study, but how to think and make decisions and to get the information you need to do that. In order to do that what you grow up believing needs to be personally challenged by people with expertise and your peers.
What I see in most of my fellow adults in America is that they are out of practice in thinking or never learned how to think, meaning that most of them either never were challenged to state an argument persuasively and then defend it, and they seem socially conditioned not to do this, instead accepting others' conclusions uncritically and being unable to support them intelligently.
First of all, I live within a public transit route distance from Google in Mountain View and interviewed there about 8 years ago, and I wouldn't try again, being a second tier javascript or python programmer, or having a "B" in CS, might be less important than having an "A" in English, or knowing how to write given the damage technology being pushed by Google is doing to writing and communication generally.
I am not merely speaking against the privacy issue or the Big Data abuses; these are major threats pushed by Google on computer users, but I am being sharply critical of the idea that a blog is a standard for communication and that a javascript textarea widget is good enough to be the standard tool people need for on-line communication. The tools someone needs to get the "A" in English now seem more important to me as a user of the world wide web than those that interest s CS graduate.
Greed in the Social Media companies, led by Google, but also Facebook and Twitter and others, dictates that the blog is the standard because text blocks are easy to search for keywords for the Big Data application. Blogging interferes with the exchange of ideas between writers, does not support any collaboration and does not preserve context. Compare Slashdot and Redditt, which do have some of these features with Google+ and Facebook. Google+ is particularly bad. It is for a bunch of fanboys and self-promoters, like LinkedIn, fine for business types, but totally defeats writers and people with ideas to discuss, forget it.
This raises red flags that it represents an effort by the owner of Slashdot, dice.com, a major recruitment firm, to spread prejudicial opinion to support its interests, and that brings into question the wisdom of posting to slashdot that the headlines are mostly plants by biased individuals working for the special interest of the parent company.
On the face of it the expectation cited by the OP doesn't square with reality. I would rather see what the real earning power of developers is, statistics, a distribution of income, rather than some pollyanna wish, some pumped up and self-serving propaganda. I expect that the percentage of developers who have made $1 million is far less than this hoped for amount. That most are not successful to that extant.
And besides, why choose that amount of money? $1 Million is not a huge amount of money, by today's standards. Maybe it is for a couple of people to live off the fat of the lamb, but really not that much. If you estimate 10X inflation of prices over 40 years, or so. $100 K in 1974 would be the same amount of money.
The article linked to by the OP is informative and well researched, but it is driving an agenda to complicate what is really very simple, something every commentator on the home purchase and rental market gets right away, that prices are simply being driven up by demand in a restricted market. The article tries to explain why the market is tight through a complex argument that is designed to exonerate the failings of judgement and greed that drives it. It misses the notion that the problem is nothing new, that it existed back in 1970 before Prop. 13 and rent control and when most of the factors were exactly what they are today: politicians are seduced by the tax revenue from business and so they encourage development with little or no regard to the side effects. To split hairs about demographic preferences that young techies who work in Social Media companies vs. those of electrical engineers who make hardware down in Santa Clara doesn't account for the inflated prices that began to rise in 1970 and which were kept up by the tax burdin placed on buyers of existing homes after Proposition 13 passed in 1978. The cities are locked into overassessing property values both by the tax burden and the demand, and have been long before there was incleased demand for housing in San Francisco.
The argument does not explain how sale prices down on the Peninsula have resumed their insane appreciation as 1 br 1 bath cottages go for more than $1 million in Menlo Pakr and Palo Alto and rent increases follow suit. Clearly economic expansion in Silicon Valley continues and the forces that drive it do not care about ridiculous side effects.
Also, look at a map. See how much flat ground there is to build on. This is not L.A. and although the article, obviously written from a pro-business point of view neglects to say that height limits have a practical benefit in a seismically active region where fire and getting to upper stories of multistory buildings is a serious risk. That is what the recent Mission Bay fire in apartments under construction in San Francisco taught, and it stretched the resources of SFFD to contain. In the event of a M = 7.5 quake on the San Andreas or Hayward fault the risk of fire is still very great. More buildings and people were lost in 1906 due to fire than the quake itself and San Francisco is about as vulnerable to that kind of destruction today. There are more than 1000 buildings in S.F. and that many in Oakland that will sustain major damage from the expected large quakes on nearby faults. If you think that the Loma Prieta Quake on 1989 is as bad as it gets, think again.
I'll bet the real estate agents who sell over-priced properties to people with cash, and most of these are investors, not people who intend to live in those properties, do not tell them of the risks from quakes, the fires they are capable of starting, wild land fires, and landslides in steep slopes. The venture capitalists don't care either, and the politicians who booster the business investment don't care either. I will smile at all them ironically when it all literally comes crashing down or when they have to leave because the congestion on the freeways has become so great that it is beginning to cut into productivity like it did in 1999. Then again, if we really do live in a fool's paradise and especially with regard to the world economic situation, a crash like 2008 is coming and that will rain on their parade. Maybe Rick Perry should have seduced all those companies away, and Texas would have been taught the downside of development.
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About 11 years ago I was working at Sun Microsystems working on getting patches to customers from legacy compiler engineering for escalated bugs against FORTRAN and CC++. I know that sales of the compilers exceeded $1 Million a year even though Sun was giving Java away for free and not competing very well with its IDE against IBM and others. I hadn't coded in FORTRAN for about 15 years at that point and had to learn about developments in the language while I had redirected me experience to C/C++. and I was surprised by the demand, but quickly learned that our customers liked FORTRAN because of the overall performance of legacy numerical analysis libraries. It would be interesting for people at Oracle to comment on this.
Any desalinization would increase salinity in the waste water. So even if the ocean is an efficient heat sink for the plant, the brine that would result from the process could become a problem by creating density currents in the water column. In cold water, brine does not mix well and significant production of dense brine would pose an environmental problem in the Southern California Boarder Land because the bathemetry of those basins. If enough brine was produced it could cause massive erosion and landslides in the deep ocean. It may be that the size of these brine plumes isn't ever large enough to pose a risk, but one way to deal with the problem is to conceive your desalinization in stages that produces brine waste in sequences that progressively dilute it.
A discussion of alternative techniques of desalinization might relate to this problem. If a combination of solar driven fractionation of brackish water from sea water is used and then reverse osmosis is used for the final stages of purification, the advantages of each can be optimized in a staged process. The energy needed might be greater overall, but if the energy problem could be solved then maybe the costs and waste products could be distributed with reduced impact. The cost of desalination is very sensitive to energy costs, so either a large solar input of some sort, maybe not just solarvoltaic, or a high energy density nuclear source, Fusion, if it proves feasible, or some lower risk fission source, such as Thorium, could be used. I am not saying straight away that Santa Barbra should consider running a Thorium reactor, only that some kind of energy solution needs to be created for the general problem.
The "Grid" is is built mostly to meet the needs of carbon fueled energy companies, and of course they want it to stay that way. So even if there is huge wind power resource in Nebraska, the coal and oil and natural gas companies, who by the way are the bulk of the contributators to the Conservative and GOP Super PACS aren't going to willingly do something that promotes alternative energy, which is why the U.S. did not have a meaningful energy policy during the Bush years especially. The coming on-line of fracking has improved the natural-gas and oil resource picture, improving their competativeness with alternatives, but of course at a cost that the carbon companies want you to not notice and continue in your old habits of pumping green house gases into the atmosphere, for your convenience. One hopes that the terrible weather in the eastern two thirds of the nation becomes a wake-up call to the connection.
Once electrons go on the grid, they cannot be efficiently saved. It is better to let them go to ground. If batteries were all that efficient, then we could save energy in one part of the grid and transport it to somewhere else. Wind farms in Nebraska could be set up off the grid or on, and if there were efficient batteries or other storage, the energy could be stored and used later, but this does not exist and transforming energy to other forms suffers the same problem, the ways it can be stored are relatively inefficient or they suffer from other bad side effects, like having to create more carbon fuels that get burned in the atmosphere. If and when we decide that our energy should come from less and less breaking of carbon bonds, we will either need to find a much higher energy density fuel than carbon or find a very efficient way to store what energy we make. Nuclear fusion of hydrogen could be a solution to the energy density source, and Thorium fission might be much safer than Uranium fission, so there is possibly a nuclear solution. For alternatives such as solar and wind, it is battery technology that may decide how much they can do. Right now, the carbon fuels industry has a vested interest in obstructing these efforts, one way for them to do that is to ensure that the grid does not go out to places where the alternative energy is available. An answer to them is to bring alternative energy to the grid, either make it possible to bring nuclear energy to the grid or to invent efficient batteries.
Interesting facts, there, and thank you. The desalination cost is very sensitive to energy supply. That is why if nuclear fusion passes break even there could be an opportunity for it to solve the problem. I wonder even about the debate over Th vs. U for producing electricity using nuclear fission. If Th reactors are much more simple and safer than water-cooled high-pressure U reactors, and the bias in DOE for U reactors has to do with the military bias towards fission reactors that produce weapons-grade Pu, than Th or Fusion could co-locate with places to desalinate sea-water, and compete economically with pumping fresh water over long distances.
I can see that even the issue of brine causing gravity dynamics in the marine water column could be anticipated if the desalination is staged so that brackish stages are returned to the marine environment in a way that they cause minimal impact, and the relatively fresh fraction is purified upstream. Water taken in at the shore would be purified only a small amount, and most of the brackish water returned, we need only a very small amount of the sea water in the ocean to be desalinated, and the desalinated process increased upstream producing less salinity directly into the marine environment. This would be made possible through solving the energy problem, and that could be done with safe nuclear energy which is not the steam reactor type driven by U.
The dissconect in logic is even more pronounced in the housing crunch up in the San Francisco Bay area. You would think that people would see a connection between the crunch and growth, but that isn't the way things happen. The reason is that growth isn't controlled by its limiting resources, any more than it is constrained by water supply. It might be constrained by water just as it might be constrained by availability of land to build on and transportation, roads and fuel, to get people from where they live to where they work, but only in the long run.
It is in the short term where the disconnect happens, and it happens because in the short term growth is dictated by investment, where people with money want to spend it, and that has little to do with what a majority of people want to spend THEIR money on, so they adjust. They pay more for housing, lots more, and everything else, they pay more for fuel and for transportation so they can share in the benefits of living in a beautiful place, even though their incentives are controlled by wealthy people who have the money to invest. The problem here is that we live in a political economy in which a smaller and smaller minority gets to call the shots. The answer is to either take back power from the rich to dictate to the rest of us what the priorities are, or to hope that the consequences of the disconnect speedup. In the latter, nature is helping. Nature does not care about business plans or the desire of people to hold onto wealth and get more. It just reacts to purtebations in its system and if human greed is a cause of that it simply reacts by limiting available resources until some technology changes the economics or the resource is exhausted.
Here, I'd like to help you out, which way did you come in? It isn't that government sanctioning business can't lead to abuse, it is that business needs sanctioning, and by the way that is the norm and not the exception. Government and business are intimate and always have been. Government is only the seeming enemy to business that greedy elitist bastards who spout Rand say it is, while they forget that governments are used all the time to help establish industries by taking on the start-up risk and then the profitable business come back and ask government to enforce a cartel or monopoly. If you don't buy that. examine the history of coal, steel, rail, and communications in this country. Further, you of all people, should know about sweetheart deals between governments and businesses, look at how major German companies made deals with the government and how it was German capitalists who made Hitler possible. Shame.
I live in Silicon Valley. Yesterday, the news media reported with some hoopla that BART has bored a nice tunnel under Lake Elizabeth in Fremont for its extension to Warm Springs and Silicon Valley. Nice, now tech workers can live in the East Bay and get to work in San Jose faster. What they didn't tell you, and I should know because I have my degrees in Geology and studied the geology of the Bay Area, is that Lake Elizabeth is probably a sag pond associated with if not in the Hayward Fault. The OP link to the article which correctly pointed out that an expected M = 6.5 to 7.5 quake on the Hayward Fault in the East Bay would have much more effect than even the Loma Prieta even on the San Andreas Fault in 1989, because the epicenter could be very close to major population density. So a tunnel in soft sediment very near or across a active fault line that could have six feet of strike slip could result in disruption of the commute line, if not risk for passengers. I was quite shocked that this is where BART chose to dig a tunnel and at the potential risk. Judging by BART's recent history, I can say that I have doubts about the quality of its management, and I guess that is a general problem with business and government in a financialized world. Too many people with business backgrounds that deny scientific findings.
Don't blame Al Gore. He is only an effect, a hanger-on. The guys you should be looking at are harder to find and examine. Might I suggest that the guys you should be looking at are the economists in the Stanford University School or Economics and School of Business who proposed in about 2004 how to monetize web-site click counts into a market and began to persuade investors to spend good money after bad in companies like Facebook and Google. Before that Silicon Valley might have had a legitimate claim to fame for supplying mil-spec hardware, although it could be argued that Social Media is but Signals and Code technology originally developed for radars applied to streams of words supplied by people.
I had trouble with a popup when I first loaded the linked page, but going back to it the popup wasn't there and I got to read the article, and I agree with it mostly. I have said many of the same things it does in my posts here. I live in SV and am pretty critical of what it has become especially after 2000. I am critical of investment, the amount of capital companies with dubious business plans have been able to raise. That and the banking situation and the face that the problems that caused the Bubble of 2008 haven't really been addressed either by government or investors, and the result is an imbalanced and unfair economy. That is true not only in SV but worldwide and it has caused continuing unrest in the rest of the world and sows dragon's teeth for war and disruption.
I would say that the problems in the Bay Area with housing and the unrest that is could cause shows that investors do not care very much about side-effects and especially the unintended consequences of their decisions. A worse possibility is that investors, people who buy public equities, venture capitalists, and private investors are all elitists, perhaps emboldended by the way they have been able to rig finance and possibly by having Conservative political views, and simply don't care who their actions may hurt.
Greed and denying inclusiveness to protect advantage is the norm in history, it is nothing new, but as many notorious cases of the rich and powerful being brought to heel, lately being Donald Sterling, that unintended consequences are being brought to bear sooner than most of the powerful expect, and often their efforts to use public relations to obscure their transgressions are not enough; the sole benefit of social media, which, though, depends on the issue being very easy to grasp. That is why the uproar over Google Bus is so important and why people who would call themselves innocents become targets because of association. It is the speeding up of effects that matters and why people who might have not have gained the limelight might now get exposed to it and be totally unaware of why. People are beginning to question whether having a super-intelligent elite is really a benefit to most who rub shoulders with them. They will question weather the companies in SV with the huge market caps were good investments when the stock tanks in the next burst, and hopefully it will dawn on people that investors aren't all that smart and why did we ever set our priorities in society to make it super easy for them. They may not rregret the exodus of 200,000 jobs from Silicon Valley. At least the housing market wil return to some kind of sanity.
Do you really believe that stock prices and investment in today's economy is really connected to anything of value? I have my doubts. I also doubt that monitory policy is real important, it is a right-wing red herring used to cover up the speculation going on by international investment that is based on HFT and little else. The bubble that will burst is a global economic one, and we will get more guys like Putin as a result. We have been down this road before, like 75 years ago, The causes are the same, an unfair and imbalanced economic system driven by the interests of an oligarchy, a capitalist oligarchy, and the result is predictable enough, violence on a global scale as sociopaths like Putin, like Hitler, take, advantage of discontent in the have not's and disrupt wealth and investment, the only recourse they have against selfishness. We are all insane; having made the same grand mistake over and over. The only trouble is that now we are capable of destroying all of humanity in each cycle until we learn that economics is lethal and that ecology is what we need. We should eat the rich.
But not in the way the website intended. When I navigate to the link using Chrome with Ubuntu 12.04 a popup appears and stays on the screen making it had to read the text of the article. I might save the page to see if I can defeat the advertising, and that is why Silicon Valley Tech is a bursting bubble. The greed-driven intrusions companies are creating on their web pages is driving people away. There is only so bang for the buck that can be squeezed out of the real estate of a web page without getting disruptive and either web designers don't really know how to handle all the browsers correctly or they don't care and want the advertisers to interfere with the user's experience. I wanted to read what the writer had to say since I live in Silicon Valley, and I have become a critic of the economics of business on the web, especially social media, that seems to be the latest fad in Silicon Valley. Having been through the dot gone bust of 2000 I can tell you that what turns on investors and what drives the economics of Silicon Valley may have little to do with reality, at least of view of it longer than six months.
The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.
But, they will get your attention when they pack you off to prison or worse for writtng that program which was widely used to create some perceived injustice, What if your "sin" was to be a quant or to set up some HST server that destroyed the equities markets by unleashing speculation and sucking away most of the useful capital in the economy? Then you wish that you had some advance knowledge of politics, history, and economics, not to mention ethics and philosophy. The very speed with which technology is now yielding results should give you pause that you will live to see its consequences and you could be on the list of people who get blamed for its consequences.
In my experience, engineers are particularly bad at forseeing unintended consequences, and part of the reason for that is their naivete about humanities subjects, such as history and politics. It does not vindicate your efforts to simply assert that these aren't science and aren't interesting to you, that may simply mean that by being a geek or a nerd that you are insensitive to the nuances of living by perception and impressions, the way most people iive and think. To be out in front of the subjective with rationalizations, even very well based ones, does not protect you from the effects of most of mankind acting on impressions and fears, especially if they come to the conclusion that you are the cause of their fears. Increasingly technical people are becoming the focus of subjective fears in other people, if for no other reason than that you must take the humanities more seriously.
You are missing the age of the deposit. It has little to do with the age of the earth which is gotten from U/Pb ratios in zircons. The U in the deposit was concentrated in an open system which became closed in the formation of the deposit. It then evolved so that a natural reactor could form, as a closed system for some 300.000 years. The age of 1.5 BYA has to come from field relations and probably some absolute dating. It would be enough for concordant U/Pb ages to come from rocks surrounding the deposit to bracket the date of its formation, even though the natural reactor caused its U-235/U-238 ratio to be altered. Possibly, there is independent U/Pb dating, but it needn't have concordance within the deposit, and the system needn't remain closed to geochemistry since its formation, only that surrounding rocks give concordant ages and constrain its relative age stratigraphically.
Understand that absolute dates give the date a system was closed. Different isotopes can be used to date different parts of the history of a system. U/Pb can date the prolith of a grainite, for example. Zircons survve the metasomatic process that metamorphoses sediments into granite or gneiss. K/Ar dates might reveal a younger age from the same rock dating when the system was open to introduction of alkali metals in the later metamorphic process. Further studying field relations can justify dates of subsequent dates of metamorphism when the clock for different pairs of isotopes are reset giving different ages, such as Sr/Rb and K/Ar dates but reveal when prograde and retrograde metamorphic events occurred that must match up with field relations. This has been extensively done for the batholithic rocks of California and the West Coast and the geochemical and thermal history of these rocks is now well known and related to plate tectonics history.
More cool is the idea that nature can do these things herself without any help from intelligent design. Given correct conditions the natural reactor can happen, or why the earth's interior is hot, noting heat flow all over the planet. The story points to several important facts, There is an average ratio of isotopes of U for all the deposits of earth, pointing to a common source prior to their accumulation in the crust. This deposit showed a major deviation in the ratio which suggested depletion, which suggested that a natural reactor had formed. I remember seeing an article in Scientific American from the time cited in the OP for the development of this theory. I do not recall if there is further geochemical evidence for the fission products. Admitedly, there would have to be an argument that the reactor had been a closed system for enough time so that the decay products would still be able to be found in the minerology of the deposit. I assume that would be abnormal concentration of beta decay products of the fission products, things like Rb, and Te, for example.
Wouldn't this abuse be easily fixed by instituting a random variable latency into every trade, assuming that unfair advantage is speed and speculation, Either that or hack the connections of HFT houses so their communications are delayed, in a random way. There are ways to disrupt their business model.
I take a different tact on investment and how it shapes change. I think that digital technology has not only eliminated jobs and not replaced opportunity for more people than it has helped, but that human nature, greed, really has used digital technology to drive investment into unproductive behavior and that has caused the imbalances and lopsided income distribution. That effect will lead to greater social and political instability the world over and tech workers, engineers, and programmers may eventually bear the burden of blame. I am not talking Luddism, but I am talking political economy.
Although the points about growth, integration, and the reduction of quality are well taken, they don't go far enough to describe how computers have driven business into shorter and shorter term management and demands from investors for quicker ROI without regard for rendering anything of value. I am particularly concerned about how programmed trading and the large servers management by investment firms has encouraged speclative investment practices and about the large amounts of capital tied up in arbritage transactions. Classical theorists did not have to deal with this level of unproductive investment because the technology to enable it did not exist and markets had a sanity that reflected judgments of humans making "rational" choices. The use of computers in investment has changed all of that. It was a major factor in the crash of 2008 and the systemic problems has not been addressed by regulators. It needs to be. At least there needs to be latency introduced into equities transactions, 30 seconds a trade would probably repair much of the damage being done.
If the 800 pound ape in the room is a large institutional investment house who financializes all its decisions, how can small businesses and small investors have a chance to make decisions based on producing quality services or products?
Both of you are missing the point, or getting suckered by elitist arguments. As it stands now only a tiny minority of people can pay fully for their health care. The ACA sounded like a good idea until you analyze it as 1) Not addressing the root causes for the costs of health care in the U.S. which are twice as high per capeta as the next most expensive nation, and 2) That the ACA as enacted by Congress is basically subdedized insurance with no controls on private insurers raising premiums and on controlling what the health care industry gets to charge. The worst case scenereo for the Conservatives who fought against it, may either be the only fix, that in order to provide health care to a majority it has to be nationalized just to get cost disclosures and controls, or it becomes another example of society degrading into have and have-nots, which Conservatives, who are to a man elitist, don't mind, but that will further degrade the society. Inequalities are a real threat to this nation especially when people remember their not being an issue. When people have tasted fairness and equality they behave badly when it is taken away.
Something similar is going to happen to the Internet and over the issue of net-neutrality, which has become moot as ISVs throttle connections and Google Search biases results. The Social Media business model is all about biasing results of searches so that business partners are favored; that is at least as serious a problem as biasing access to IP addresses. The Internet is then killing itself through spying, spamming, and Social Media is a huge cause. People are getting turned off, even despite Facebook's revenue claims, just as death panels in insurance companies or Midicare are a threat to the health care status quo, a major abuse of data Facebook is gathering on anyone who visits the site would be enough to frighten people off the Internet.
Just as failure of health care might prompt doing something completely differently, note the pressure on health care professionals to donate their time to free clinics to help the under served. so maybe the answer to on-line communication is to imagine a non-IP network that removes the choak points of the current Internet and one which uses much more dynamic routing, perhaps even communication technology that avoids both the wired Internet and the wireless cartels, and for the reason of better communication that is more secure. Such a network could be quite different from the current Internet. Users may have to adjust to latent communications, but if you remember the days of UUCP and dialup, that is only a delay of instant gratification. You may need to accept that in order to make it harder for governments and corporations to spy on you, and to be free of the abuses of social media.
Likewise you might have to accept that nationalizing health care, or at least the threat of it, might force the health care industry to disclose its costs and its profits and the same for insurers. People love to hate government when graft is exposed. Those who cry the most about the abuse of government power fail to own up to the fact that if private business had to disclose as much it too would be blamed for graft, and since people are people everywhere, and abuse of power occurs often in secret. it may be that the threat of socialism might force the health care industry and related business to clean their house and justify their costs. That included some responsibility on the part of the public to begin asking about whether their health care dollar is used wisely by the industry. One thing is clear, Medicare is a huge player in dealing with costs, just through its share of the market, and the government could have a large effect on what everybody does by just holding providers accountable. It may be that the Congress in trying to reduce entitlements was prevented much more by those professions and businesses who had come to be used to their subsedy and less by concern for the recipients of the services.
The FCC ruling and the administration's response may be reactions to the cat already having got out of the bog, meaning the idea of Net Neutrality have have become moot on a variety of levels. ISPs are already throttling bandwidth for business gain, and how could regulators stop that as long as they allow major ISPs, Comcast, AT&T, etc. to have de facto monopolies, and bias search results and bandwidth? Google search is at least as non-net-neutral in a different way by biasing what you see first.
Couple that with the NSA spying and Internet security attacks, and we may be seeing the end of the Internet and the emergence of its alternatives including those that trade freedom from spying and spam for less than instant gratification. The incentives are to make the Internet moot. Maybe our networks don't need to be always on and connectionless, maybe they can be more latent and secure and yet serve us nearly as well and maybe better with fewer bottlenecks and single failure points and fewer big corporations and governments controlling what we can see and do.
Latency, even lots of latency may be a good thing and require low bandwidth and time to broadcast. I remember getting e-mail and USENET over 56KB phone lines with UUCP. The needs of a mesh or ad hoc network using packet switched radio for text and images and sound, needn't be that demanding if people adjusted to latent communication. If you goal was to have discussion free of commercial pressures, you could get by with delays, short transmission times, store and forward technology and ad hoc communication away from the Internet and the mobile network. If you didn't require voice or video, you could get text and images for much less resource, even if you had to pirate from allocated bands to do it. Maybe you do the opposite of cell-phone comm, you do narrow bandwidth very directional short burst comm even in allocated bands. If people are patient, you do this in a low demand way and it is difficult to prevent; all the better if your use of bandwidth is super efficient and you disrupt no one.
I think we have yet to face the bottleneck and that we are contributing to its arrival. The basis for that opinion is that the ultimate cause of the five or so mass extinctions that have happened in the past half billion years of earth history is a disruption of the carbon cycle and subsequent poisoning of the biosphere. Mankind is powerful enough to hasten the arrival of another event and we are in the midst of it; there is a major mass extinction going on and has been for more than 10,000 years, and our mismanagement of the biosphere is just the sort of thing that can result in a greater disruption and threaten us and the rest of the megafauna on Earth.
The warning in the Fermi Paradox is that intelligent technological races may not have the wisdom to see the signs of a collapse of the biosphere until it is too late and be able to survive in a colony elsewhere with the numbers of individuals and the time needed. It may take 40,000 to 1 million individuals to migrate somewhere and 10,000 to 200,000 years to wait out the disaster.
Well then, the pepper in your face is that in a land were "All Men Are Created Equal" does not mean that "All people ARE equal." in the vein that credit rating agencies create class distinctions based on how well you pay off your debts to financial institutions. In the same way, there are people who think that they have "earned" better treatment than most of the rest of us because of how much money they control, who they know, what church they attend and even the color of their skin and where their ancestors came from, maybe which college they attended and who they got to know there. They feel more entitled to favor, to influience, than most everyone else. People like this are a big part of what this nation has become and they are not ashamed or shy about it, in fact people who are "have nots" admire them to some extant as they have hopes to become just like them, until it dawns on them that the elite is becoming harder and harder to attain.
I see no point in criticizing your education, formal and informal, but to point out the benefits of formal education and the risks entailed by the lack of a personal exposure to experts and mentors and peers it supplies.
I am saying that I see the holes in thinking in people who are informally trained or whose formal training is too specialized. The group where the latter problem is obvious is engineering. These kind of people know a great deal about something very small in the large scope of knowledge and as with people who were not exposed to a systematic curriculum, have big areas in which not only are they ignorant, but that their opinions hold dangerous and incorrect ideas that it is difficult to persuade them to reconsider.
There is the idea of what constitutes a good breadth of general exposure to various disciplines of knowledge, and that is often both the subjects of a core curriculum at a college and those which a career-oriented and pragmatically focused training or education does not necessarily supply. Also, the "lab" in any subject is vital. Watching You Tube videos on how to do something is no substitute for having to do that task under the critical eye of a master.
There are tools for critical thinking, the original context of the term "rhetoric", that needs to be pointed out and exercised. In fact the Internet could be a good place to practice, but most web sites do not have the right tools for this. The blog post which does not even the context reply you are using here, cannot support dealing with rhetoric. For learning how to reason and debate a formal education puts you in the company of critics that you are compelled to answer, that is not a useless skill generally. The Internet provides some opportunity but because of the limitations of blogs and the incorrect belief of many that to argue and disagree with people is rude, in most blogs and places like Facebook, the Internet is often not a very good way to exercise those skills, even though they are vital to citizenship in a democracy, and to trying to solve problems where everyone must have a say. It is almost as though the corporations that push Social Media actually want to suppress public opinion and the debate it needs; although it is enough to suppose that the business plan to mine comments for marketing keywords is a sufficient reason to not want more complexity in conversation than a blog supports.
As to your contention that your personal motivation is enough to assure that you get a broad training, I would counter that even personal interest does not assure that you know how knowledge you do not yet have is important and that other people, teachers and mentors, are very important to you in the early part of your life, especially, to give you some guidance and to steer you into subjects. I acknowledge that there are many other ways to learn than a formal curriculum, and to pay tuition, and that everyone must continue learning after graduation. Increasingly, what one learns as a young person becomes obsolete sooner and sooner in one's career. When I said that you learn how to learn, I didn't mean just how to study, but how to think and make decisions and to get the information you need to do that. In order to do that what you grow up believing needs to be personally challenged by people with expertise and your peers.
What I see in most of my fellow adults in America is that they are out of practice in thinking or never learned how to think, meaning that most of them either never were challenged to state an argument persuasively and then defend it, and they seem socially conditioned not to do this, instead accepting others' conclusions uncritically and being unable to support them intelligently.
First of all, I live within a public transit route distance from Google in Mountain View and interviewed there about 8 years ago, and I wouldn't try again, being a second tier javascript or python programmer, or having a "B" in CS, might be less important than having an "A" in English, or knowing how to write given the damage technology being pushed by Google is doing to writing and communication generally.
I am not merely speaking against the privacy issue or the Big Data abuses; these are major threats pushed by Google on computer users, but I am being sharply critical of the idea that a blog is a standard for communication and that a javascript textarea widget is good enough to be the standard tool people need for on-line communication. The tools someone needs to get the "A" in English now seem more important to me as a user of the world wide web than those that interest s CS graduate.
Greed in the Social Media companies, led by Google, but also Facebook and Twitter and others, dictates that the blog is the standard because text blocks are easy to search for keywords for the Big Data application. Blogging interferes with the exchange of ideas between writers, does not support any collaboration and does not preserve context. Compare Slashdot and Redditt, which do have some of these features with Google+ and Facebook. Google+ is particularly bad. It is for a bunch of fanboys and self-promoters, like LinkedIn, fine for business types, but totally defeats writers and people with ideas to discuss, forget it.
This raises red flags that it represents an effort by the owner of Slashdot, dice.com, a major recruitment firm, to spread prejudicial opinion to support its interests, and that brings into question the wisdom of posting to slashdot that the headlines are mostly plants by biased individuals working for the special interest of the parent company.
On the face of it the expectation cited by the OP doesn't square with reality. I would rather see what the real earning power of developers is, statistics, a distribution of income, rather than some pollyanna wish, some pumped up and self-serving propaganda. I expect that the percentage of developers who have made $1 million is far less than this hoped for amount. That most are not successful to that extant.
And besides, why choose that amount of money? $1 Million is not a huge amount of money, by today's standards. Maybe it is for a couple of people to live off the fat of the lamb, but really not that much. If you estimate 10X inflation of prices over 40 years, or so. $100 K in 1974 would be the same amount of money.
The article linked to by the OP is informative and well researched, but it is driving an agenda to complicate what is really very simple, something every commentator on the home purchase and rental market gets right away, that prices are simply being driven up by demand in a restricted market. The article tries to explain why the market is tight through a complex argument that is designed to exonerate the failings of judgement and greed that drives it. It misses the notion that the problem is nothing new, that it existed back in 1970 before Prop. 13 and rent control and when most of the factors were exactly what they are today: politicians are seduced by the tax revenue from business and so they encourage development with little or no regard to the side effects. To split hairs about demographic preferences that young techies who work in Social Media companies vs. those of electrical engineers who make hardware down in Santa Clara doesn't account for the inflated prices that began to rise in 1970 and which were kept up by the tax burdin placed on buyers of existing homes after Proposition 13 passed in 1978. The cities are locked into overassessing property values both by the tax burden and the demand, and have been long before there was incleased demand for housing in San Francisco.
The argument does not explain how sale prices down on the Peninsula have resumed their insane appreciation as 1 br 1 bath cottages go for more than $1 million in Menlo Pakr and Palo Alto and rent increases follow suit. Clearly economic expansion in Silicon Valley continues and the forces that drive it do not care about ridiculous side effects.
Also, look at a map. See how much flat ground there is to build on. This is not L.A. and although the article, obviously written from a pro-business point of view neglects to say that height limits have a practical benefit in a seismically active region where fire and getting to upper stories of multistory buildings is a serious risk. That is what the recent Mission Bay fire in apartments under construction in San Francisco taught, and it stretched the resources of SFFD to contain. In the event of a M = 7.5 quake on the San Andreas or Hayward fault the risk of fire is still very great. More buildings and people were lost in 1906 due to fire than the quake itself and San Francisco is about as vulnerable to that kind of destruction today. There are more than 1000 buildings in S.F. and that many in Oakland that will sustain major damage from the expected large quakes on nearby faults. If you think that the Loma Prieta Quake on 1989 is as bad as it gets, think again.
I'll bet the real estate agents who sell over-priced properties to people with cash, and most of these are investors, not people who intend to live in those properties, do not tell them of the risks from quakes, the fires they are capable of starting, wild land fires, and landslides in steep slopes. The venture capitalists don't care either, and the politicians who booster the business investment don't care either. I will smile at all them ironically when it all literally comes crashing down or when they have to leave because the congestion on the freeways has become so great that it is beginning to cut into productivity like it did in 1999. Then again, if we really do live in a fool's paradise and especially with regard to the world economic situation, a crash like 2008 is coming and that will rain on their parade. Maybe Rick Perry should have seduced all those companies away, and Texas would have been taught the downside of development.