The technogeek in me finds this stuff fascinating. The practical me asks "What the fuck were they thinking?"
Before Silicon Valley existed, the one place where you could try out all the wild-hair ideas was the military. Apollo itself, despite its civilian window dressing, was an example of this.
If you don't mind killing off most life in the ocean, maybe you could bio engineer some kind of super algae that would convert the CO2 back to oxygen?
No need to bioengineer a new species. Just scatter nutrient on the surface in a fish-desert part of the ocean, and let blooms of existing natural algae suck up CO2. When the nutrient runs out the algae dies and sinks to the bottom.
The Haida tribe of British Columbia tried this on a small scale and it worked really well, which made liberals hopping mad because the algae took one of their cherished apocalypse scenarios to the bottom along with the algae. When we do this on a large scale, let’s use the Pacific Gyre, Sinking algae mats might take a lot of our floating plastic down with it.
Swill like Hillman’s article, in which a crabby old misanthrope hopes that the human race will die out along with his own cirrhosis-wracked liver, is what prompts the same reaction that most people have had to the previous string of crabby old misanthropes, from Malcolm Muggeridge to Paul Ehrlich. These people have spent their unhappy lifetimes making wrong predictions, so, the reasoning goes, they have to be wrong about climate.
But they’re wrong about apocalypse, not necessarily about greenhouse gases. Today’s vast extent of melting ice is the best evidence we have that warming is occurring. Though we don’t know how much of it is caused by human-emitted carbon, it is prudent to work on producing less carbon and sequestering what’s already out there. These are engineering problems, just as those earlier unsolvable problems of population control and plugging the ozone hole once were.
The price increase SpaceX announced was what it hopes to charge in the 2020s. But by then they will be competing with many other providers. NASA will actually pay less.
Yes, I support requiring banks to disclose their fees and rates. And so should hospitals.
Furthermore, what we need to know are not the ‘chargemaster’ list prices that nobody but the occasional Saudi tourist actually pays but the going rate that insurance companies negotiate for their patient pools. In medicine, you can’t negotiate prices while you lie unconscious and bleeding. What price transparency would allow you to do is prearrange your medical access on a more open basis than just rolling the dice on what the insurance your employer has chosen for you deigns to provide. And if you want to try out the single payer approach, why don’t we just allow our existing government-operated medical plans to buy in bulk and negotiate prices? That way, we find out what advantages single-payer might have without having to radically change our whole medical system.
If hospitals were in actual financial distress they would be acting as every other business in the world does under those circumstances - competing openly with advertised prices that slide down the learning curve as each technology they use matures. Instead, they are using monopoly powers to keep on raising prices for old technologies.
Because Microsoft had no business sticking it to a developer who took the trouble to preserve Windows licensing in implementing a restore program. Punishment would have been justified if he had been cavalier about Windows IP, but he explicitly did not do that, using a tool that MS gave away for free, so you spare us the inapplicable bleat about “looting someone’s contracted and paid-for labor.”
Jury nullification is, by necessity, a complete undermining of the legal and judicial process. It is essentially taking the Constitutional architecture for our three branches of government, throwing it out the window, and saying "this mob will rule today". To ask a jury to nullify a case is to declare no confidence in the duly-elected representatives, judges, or attorneys involved.
Which in a case like this would have been exactly the right thing to do!
Jury nullification cannot be used to execute or imprison someone who by law might not have been punished. It can only be used in the other direction, to serve notice that in the eyes of the people the law was wrongly applied to this case and that more freedom applies, not less.
Without profits, there is no incentive to do any R&D. Pharmaceutical companies are not charities.
Intel spends just as many billions to float a new processor as any pharma company, yet it can make large profits without extortionate pricing. The reason is that electronics is a TRUE capitalist market, with competition as well intellectual property. Pharma companies, like many other areas of medicine, have an engrained culture of monopoly which buys legislation to make competition illegal. As an IT man, I can advise my customers to shop on the world market for competitive prices; doctors have no choice but to prescribe within a monopoly system.
Medicine does not really fear socialism, because any system of governmental controls can be gamed by rent-seeking large corporate players. What it really fears is someone opening up medicine to a free market.
Bernie was so wacky that the socialism part was actually the sanest part of his platform. At least this has actually been tried in some countries, even though it has never worked well.
No country has tried going full misanthrope as en environmental program. Probably everyone would be required to go vegan and apologize to all the animals that their forefathers ever killed.
Says a commentator who despises everybody who doesn't fit his private little set of personal crotchets, none of which really relate to Silicon Valley. Who in hell is Nassim Taleb, anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
Parent is using cartoon physics, the kind they teach in journalism school. Radiation always glows green.
The technogeek in me finds this stuff fascinating. The practical me asks "What the fuck were they thinking?"
Before Silicon Valley existed, the one place where you could try out all the wild-hair ideas was the military. Apollo itself, despite its civilian window dressing, was an example of this.
There's a Rosa Parks VR? Surely getting people to sit on an actual fucking bus would be a better exhibit.
At the Ford Museum in Detroit, I did exactly that.That place should be on everyone's bucket list.
Yes, the optimum level of CO2 in the atmosphere is supposedly about 280 ppm. The level now is above 400.
If you don't mind killing off most life in the ocean, maybe you could bio engineer some kind of super algae that would convert the CO2 back to oxygen?
No need to bioengineer a new species. Just scatter nutrient on the surface in a fish-desert part of the ocean, and let blooms of existing natural algae suck up CO2. When the nutrient runs out the algae dies and sinks to the bottom.
The Haida tribe of British Columbia tried this on a small scale and it worked really well, which made liberals hopping mad because the algae took one of their cherished apocalypse scenarios to the bottom along with the algae.
When we do this on a large scale, let’s use the Pacific Gyre, Sinking algae mats might take a lot of our floating plastic down with it.
5) We can see that with you.
was an insightful post until you resorted to needless rudeness
Not ‘needless’ at all because GP’s list contains an item that had already happened.
They drowned the planet in their filthy spawn.
No, you ornate hexagonal crystals of dihydrogen monoxide are the filthy spawn of our filthy spawn.
Swill like Hillman’s article, in which a crabby old misanthrope hopes that the human race will die out along with his own cirrhosis-wracked liver, is what prompts the same reaction that most people have had to the previous string of crabby old misanthropes, from Malcolm Muggeridge to Paul Ehrlich. These people have spent their unhappy lifetimes making wrong predictions, so, the reasoning goes, they have to be wrong about climate.
But they’re wrong about apocalypse, not necessarily about greenhouse gases. Today’s vast extent of melting ice is the best evidence we have that warming is occurring. Though we don’t know how much of it is caused by human-emitted carbon, it is prudent to work on producing less carbon and sequestering what’s already out there. These are engineering problems, just as those earlier unsolvable problems of population control and plugging the ozone hole once were.
I'm a vegan cannibal, so I'm not sure how to feel about this.
Let me congratulate you. If more vegans were eaten by cannibals, there would be one less sojourns of annoyance in the world.
The price increase SpaceX announced was what it hopes to charge in the 2020s. But by then they will be competing with many other providers. NASA will actually pay less.
Yes, I support requiring banks to disclose their fees and rates. And so should hospitals.
Furthermore, what we need to know are not the ‘chargemaster’ list prices that nobody but the occasional Saudi tourist actually pays but the going rate that insurance companies negotiate for their patient pools.
In medicine, you can’t negotiate prices while you lie unconscious and bleeding. What price transparency would allow you to do is prearrange your medical access on a more open basis than just rolling the dice on what the insurance your employer has chosen for you deigns to provide.
And if you want to try out the single payer approach, why don’t we just allow our existing government-operated medical plans to buy in bulk and negotiate prices? That way, we find out what advantages single-payer might have without having to radically change our whole medical system.
If hospitals were in actual financial distress they would be acting as every other business in the world does under those circumstances - competing openly with advertised prices that slide down the learning curve as each technology they use matures. Instead, they are using monopoly powers to keep on raising prices for old technologies.
Because Microsoft had no business sticking it to a developer who took the trouble to preserve Windows licensing in implementing a restore program. Punishment would have been justified if he had been cavalier about Windows IP, but he explicitly did not do that, using a tool that MS gave away for free, so you spare us the inapplicable bleat about “looting someone’s contracted and paid-for labor.”
Jury nullification is, by necessity, a complete undermining of the legal and judicial process. It is essentially taking the Constitutional architecture for our three branches of government, throwing it out the window, and saying "this mob will rule today". To ask a jury to nullify a case is to declare no confidence in the duly-elected representatives, judges, or attorneys involved.
Which in a case like this would have been exactly the right thing to do!
Jury nullification cannot be used to execute or imprison someone who by law might not have been punished. It can only be used in the other direction, to serve notice that in the eyes of the people the law was wrongly applied to this case and that more freedom applies, not less.
Environmental regulations should be strictly based on science, but it should be on published research with publicly available, peer reviewable data.
I’m fortunate to be really healthy, but I had a similar experience in Japan. In the US we don’t know what we’re missing.
Ah, financial derivatives. Replacing fundamental investment analysis by short-term playing with paper. One of the great wastes of human brainpower.
Without profits, there is no incentive to do any R&D. Pharmaceutical companies are not charities.
Intel spends just as many billions to float a new processor as any pharma company, yet it can make large profits without extortionate pricing. The reason is that electronics is a TRUE capitalist market, with competition as well intellectual property. Pharma companies, like many other areas of medicine, have an engrained culture of monopoly which buys legislation to make competition illegal. As an IT man, I can advise my customers to shop on the world market for competitive prices; doctors have no choice but to prescribe within a monopoly system.
Medicine does not really fear socialism, because any system of governmental controls can be gamed by rent-seeking large corporate players. What it really fears is someone opening up medicine to a free market.
And it’s that way in every part of the world. But if we ask for citizenship ID in the US, we’re being racist.
Bernie was so wacky that the socialism part was actually the sanest part of his platform. At least this has actually been tried in some countries, even though it has never worked well.
No country has tried going full misanthrope as en environmental program. Probably everyone would be required to go vegan and apologize to all the animals that their forefathers ever killed.
If that were true, you could just reload the page without pausing your adblocker. This does not work.
As in "Turn left at the big green building with the Circle K next to it, the one that burned down in '93..."
Spot on! The author of the article needs to realize he is in the same bubble.
Note the lack of specific examples, with the phony pretext of not wanting to offend anyone by citing some.
Says a commentator who despises everybody who doesn't fit his private little set of personal crotchets, none of which really relate to Silicon Valley. Who in hell is Nassim Taleb, anyway?
It's pretty much the same sort of thing that happened in the early days of modern joint stock companies in UK and the Netherlands.
Especially in the Netherlands, but at least they ended up with fields of beautiful flowers.