The actual climate change can be measured. The increase in greenhouse gasses can be measured. The link between them is a theory dependant on our imperfect understanding and ability to model the climate of the entire world. But there are many other influences as well, like solar cycles, volcanism besides the man made greenhouse emission.
While nobody's proven that the current extraordinary warming trend is man-made, scientists have been very successful in ruling out the other causes you mention (even in combination). The current warming is not caused by volcanism, changes in solar radiation levels, etc. Which means that it's either (a) man-made (a theory for which there is good evidence) or (b) it's due to some completely different force that we don't know about (aliens, the earth's core going out of alignment, mutating neutrinos, ok, I kid).
Either (a) or (b) should be a subject of concern for us. In fact, I think that if you're inclined to rule out (a) then you'd better be working damn hard on figuring out what (b) is.
But more importantly, while the theory begins with experimental science, it's now mostly an exercise in risk management. We know that there's a phenomenon occurring, we know that it may prove very --- if not catastrophically --- costly to our society, and we know that industrial waste emissions are probably (meaning, with some very reasonable probability) the cause of it.
So the question is: from a cost-benefit perspective, what's the best thing to do about emission levels today? Obviously the answer to that question depends on your evaluation of all the factors. However, given that the costs seem quite high (especially when you factor in the low-probability outcomes), you don't need anything approaching absolute proof to justify reducing GHG emissions --- even if there's only a moderate probability that it helps, you can justify it against the potential costs. I think that that the science is firm enough to justify pre-emptive GHG reduction.
You forget that Canada and Venezuella each have tar sands that are equivalent to the words oil reserves. A nuclear plant can create cheap steam. If a barel of oil hits $200 then it will be economical to make them oil without nuclear. We have oil for a century and then some..
What you are describing is the/cost of producing the oil/, not the actual price of the oil which will be dictated by a combination of supply and demand factors.
If you want a window onto future demand, compare the energy intensity per-capita of China to that of the advanced OECD nations. Now project what forty years of economic development will do to that number.
Wind and wave are also dead ends for total replacement as they dont scale.... Geothermal and hydrogen could be viable, too.
Nobody's asking for total replacement. Most likely the energy mixture of the future is going to be a bunch of baseload nuclear plus quite a bit of variable power from solar, wind, tidal, etc.
The advantage of solar and wind is that there's a phenomenal amount of energy in these sources. Either one can provide more than enough power to satisfy all of our needs. The major challenge is that we can't use it for our current electrical needs, since these sources are inherently variable. Wind in particular, could probably provide for somewhere between 15-25% (with advanced forecasting and major upgrades to the grid), but probably not more than that.
However, this does not preclude the development of new industries that are optimized to use cheap, variable power. This could apply in any situation where energy is the dominant cost --- for example, chemical manufacture or fertilizer production. These industries would situate themselves near a major source of wind/solar power, and run when the energy is cheap. This isn't totally unprecedented: Alcoa moved their aluminum processing plants to Iceland because energy costs dominated everything else in their business, including labor and raw materials supply. Battery charging is another potential application, presuming that we make progress in electrifying our vehicle fleets.
I'm not sure how hydrogen is an energy source here, but it might be a useful storage technology for the other sources I mentioned above.
This is a very insightful post. You guys need to understand that Beck/Limbaugh/Maddows/whomever are all alike. They are exploiting your fear of people you see as "opposite" to you in order to make millions of dollars off of their show
NotAGoodNickName makes a very good point. No need to look at the factual content of their shows, clearly all opinionated newscasters are the same. Beck is no worse than everyone else. In fact, he's just doing what all the rest of them do, but he's doing it better!
Incidentally, NotAGoodNickname, you seem like a very intelligent and discerning individual. I wonder if you'd be interested in conducting some non-traditional banking transactions on my behalf? I assure you there's a good percentage in it for you.
It is possible that this is the reason behind some of the cold weather that the northern hemisphere has been experiencing this winter.
The thing is, the northern hemisphere/hasn't/ been all that cold --- just parts of it. For example, the arctic is experiencing record warm temperatures:
Increasing taxes does very little to increase federal revenue, though we might squeeze 10% or so out of higher taxes
This is dogma spread by people who don't want taxes raised, and it's in complete opposition to empirical fact.
If you want to figure out how to balance the budget, take a look at Federal revenues both before and after the Bush tax cuts. Take a look at Federal revenues both before and after the Clinton tax hikes.
Finally, take a look at the long-term CBO projections of what makes up the next ten years worth of deficits.
If we hiked tax rates back to Clinton-era levels, if we reduced most of the military spending that came after 2001 (especially the ongoing wars) and if the recession ends, we can get close to balancing the budget. Some modest tweaks to entitlements and non-military spending and we're there.
The problem, of course, is that the next 10 years don't matter at all compared to the next 30 years, when Medicare spending wipes us all out.
We need to cut spending across the board by almost half to get to where we're repaying the debt. Everthing has to be cut, and cut by nearly half. Cutting science and other useful programs is barely going to make an impact, but it's a needed prerequisite to cutting retirement programs. People aren't going to accept that they aren't going to get their "entitlement" before it's clear that everyone everywhere is sharing the pain, with no exemptions or sacred cows. How are we going to explain charging a substantial tax to support these entitlement programs (nearly 15% of all income, counting the part hidden in the employer's books) if we don't plan to deliver the entitlement benefits?
And if we do maintain a tax that isn't actually providing the benefits it was designed to support, are we going to maintain the ridiculous income caps? Right now the Social Security payroll tax is about 12.4% (including the employer portion) but it only applies to the first $90k or so of your income. For most people means they pay on every dollar. For the rich, who represent a big share of income, it means most of their income is exempted.
That sort of makes sense if you view the SS tax as paying for a personal entitlement benefit. If you plan to slash the benefits, then it's just another income tax and it should be applied to all income equally. In fact, I'd love to see what happens to the politician who tries this.
Why do people who insist on cutting social security (or think that this is inevitable) not realize this is going to happen?
And if we are going to increase taxes across, the board, why not just do it --- combined with some spending cuts and reform --- and deal with the deficits in a sensible way? Hint: it worked just fine in the 90s, it will work again once the recession ends.
Bankrupt and irresponsible countries, states and municipalities should correct their spending binges instead of looking for creative taxation.
The problem is that these bankrupt countries, states and municipalities were not binging. Most had balanced budgets in an "ok" economic time. The problem is that the economy suddenly cratered, bringing tax revenues down by as much as 1/3rd in some cases. It's very hard to cut government spending that quickly while actually having an effective organization.
Worse, if states do have to dramatically reduce their spending, it means huge layoffs and cuts in projects, which can easily cause further economic damage and loss of revenue.
We need a way to deal with situations where states can lose revenue this quickly. Maybe that means a mandatory rainy day fund, maybe it means borrowing. But what it does not mean is moralizing about "binges" when the problem is sudden losses in revenue.
High speed rail for the US is a dumb idea. We have an EXTREMELY functional interstate system for local travel, and for all other domestic travel we have airplanes (very efficient and low cost if tickets are bought in advance. Don't like fees? Fly southwest).
When you make transportation policy, you need to plan for between 10 and 40 years in the future. In other words, you probably shouldn't base your policy on today's SWA airfares.
You may not have noticed today's Wikileak cable, but in the opinion of US diplomats, the Saudis have been dramatically overstating the size of their oil reserves. The plentiful cheap oil from Saudi Arabia is what's keeping flights and car travel relatively cheap. As the global economy comes out of its stupor, there's a very good chance that we'll be headed towards dramatically higher fuel prices. As in, you're in the last few years of cheap air travel --- enjoy it.
This problem may not be insurmountable for highway driving, assuming we can get widespread electrification and a huge network of charging stations. But it looks to be a bad time for air travel --- absent major breakthroughs in coal fuel conversion (and the willingness to dramatically increase coal usage across the board), driving and flying are probably not going to win the future.
As for her selling the site, I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind.
I don't know that HuffPo ever promised its readers or contributors that it was going to be, say, the Wikimedia foundation. Is that something you heard?
If there's a counterargument to what you say, it's that there's a dearth of well-funded, corporate backed left wing media (as compared to the political right). Rectifying this imbalance is one of the biggest tasks that facing the left. To whatever extent the HuffPo sale does this, it's a very good thing for the left.
If contributors don't like it, they'll probably go elsewhere or start their own blogs.
Simple, with a ski lift, you don't have to haul the engine everywhere you go. While a railroad involves massive engines which travel back and forth with each route, the motive force in a ropeway is provided by fixed elements and used to pull the cable around a cycle.
Technically with an electrified train you're not really dragging an "engine" around, but rather a set of motors. I'm using the technical term rather than the railway definition, of course. But there is a practical difference in terms of the weight you have to carry.
You also have to keep in mind that operating a rope lift involves moving rather a large gross tonnage of rope, not to mention overcoming friction at every single place where the ropeway touches a fixed emplacement. Those costs will grow roughly linearly with the distance of the route, and can really add up for longer routes. On the other hand overhead for an electrified train is (roughly) constant --- you'll pay something for electrical transmission losses, but you're not paying to move the whole track.
There's a reason we mostly use electricity to ship motive power across even short factory-sized distances, as cool as it would be to build ropes, belts and drive shafts everywhere.
Egypt is less brutal than other countries in that region, they have a relatively moderate stance regarding international relations, they try not to let Muslim radicals do too much harm.
This is one way of looking at things. The other is that the local population's views aren't (or at one point, weren't) deemed compatible with the U.S.'s strategic and economic interests in the reason. As a result, it became convenient to ally with a totalitarian regime that overrode those interests.
In this view, which I believe is pretty well supported by history, Muslim extremists are more of a symptom than a cause of U.S. policy (i.e., if a regime crushes all of its non-violent, secular opponents, sooner or later you'll be left with fanatics who are willing to die for their cause). For a great view on this, look up the history of the U.S. in Iran, and in particular how our Operation Ajax eventually replaced a secular prime minister with a radical Islamic government.
The one thing I'll offer in "our" defense is that these things are highly path dependent. In other words, our mistakes beget a dictator, which leads to radicalism, which leads to our offering more support to the dictator in order to hold down the radicals --- basically the situation you described in your post. It can be very difficult to untangle yourself from bad decisions made by your predecessors.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try --- even as a practical matter (rather than a moral one) these dictatorships in the middle east aren't going to last forever, and the longer we support them the worse it'll be for us when the shit hits.
As for the new Chinese stealth fighter, it's reported to be an even match for the Raptor, and used designs on a Lockheed HDD that was not wiped before being sold overseas. I wonder what else remained on that drive, though...
Do you have a cite for that? I'm not disputing your post, I think it's a great story. Google isn't being helpful.
I wrote that small businesses get squashed by regulation, but big businesses can avoid it. Why would you conclude, in an article about Facebook and Goldman Sachs avoiding regulation, that I thought both of them were "small"?
I didn't say anything about Goldman-Sachs being small. Where did you get that idea? I concluded that you thought Facebook was small, and I noted their valuation. To understand why, let me review your original post (emphasis mine):
Going public means having to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley [techdirt.com]. Compliance is an entire industry unto itself, so the law of unintended consequences happens:
Small companies can't afford to go public... so they don't. The IPO market is strangled, and Thee Little Guy is no longer regulated because he no longer exists. Large companies can comply... if they want to. SarbOx is expensive enough that a scheme like this is actually profitable in comparison. The Big Guy is no longer regulated, because he has an army of lawyers to smuggle his shares out of the country in their rectums.
Without SarbOx, something this complicated and dangerously-close-to-illegal would just be stupid, and Facebook would be publicly traded, with all the oversight that entailed. But, maybe all that extra regulation everyone's dodging already prevented a second Enron~
Ergo, my interpretation of your statement is that Facebook is not publicly traded, but that it would be if Sarbanes-Oxley did not exist, and in your opinion it's Sarbanes-Oxley compliance that prevents small companies from going public. Ergo, you think Facebook is a small company. Of course this may not be what you intended to say, but it's the standard interpretation.
Goldman values Facebook at $50bn. That's not some tiny startup that can't afford regulatory compliance. It's more than some huge publicly traded firms.
Now you might argue that this valuation is fantasy and I would not disagree. However, this high valuation exists because Goldman is running a scam. You can't simultaneously argue that Facebook is some poor startup getting squished by regulation and also that Goldman should be free to sell it to investors as a $50bn behemoth.
What Goldman was doing was essentially illegal in the US. Facebook is a private company and without opening it's books such a company can't take on more than 499 investors. To skirt this requirement Goldman was acting as a single "investor" but actually just planned to sell shares of it's stake on to it's clients (with hefty commissions). This is a violation of the spirit and possibly the letter of the law, and the SEC stepped in. To take the heat off Goldman is now going to run their scam outside of the US where presumably it's legal.
And yes, this probably is a scam. There are good reasons not to allow public investment in opaque ventures whose value can't be determined, and Goldman is clearly banking on charging oversized commissions because it's selling a product you can't get anywhere else (cause it's illegal, hmm). The first investors will make loads of cash just like in any pump and dump scheme, the suckers will get rolled. The Facebook guys get to cash out, turning some of those pretend billions into real dough before the company goes Myspace. Worthwhile tech ventures will go underfunded and even larger numbers of (dumb) investors will lose confidence in the markets.
I was going to congratulate you on a reasonable post until the bits where you (a) ridiculed the notion that the US was detaining people without trial in cuba, and (b) claimed that all you need to do to get healthcare in the US is show up to a hospital. Unfortunately, this nonsense puts you in exactly the same nut-boat as the lunatic you were trying to shut down.
Here's a patchwork discussion of how to get assistance if you're uninsured and have cancer. Note that hospitals are not required to provide more than stabilization, though many underfunded county hospitals do provide "indigent care". The uninsured have roughly half the five-year survival rate of people who have insurance. Even Medicaid isn't always enough --- several people have been recently been denied organ transplants recently because of state and local budget cuts.
Lesson: respond vigorously to cranks but do not treat it as an opportunity to push your own broken worldview.
Well, you're assuming that the incentives are aligned for all manufacturers to work together. Some might believe that as other manufacturers de-buffer, they can gain a relative performance advantage by keeping their buffers large. Or maybe they'll just be ignorant about the problem. Or maybe they'll screw it up, or find some other way to break TCP. Or maybe the manufacturers will do it right and users will update their configurations by installing SpeedBoost9.7. Or maybe it'll all work out but it'll take 10 years (remember that some people are probably still running Windows 98 or XP circa 2001).
The consensus expressed in TFA (and related blog posts) is that nowadays it doesn't take a particularly large percentage of devices to saturate even big pipes, especially if those pipes are already pretty well loaded. I think one of the articles even mentions that a single PC can saturate a 6mbps cable modem connection. The reason this kind of thing doesn't kill all of your neighbors' connectivity is that the cable company runs some kind of QoS (I may be using the wrong term here, not a networking engineer) to keep one customer from saturating the entire local loop.
So if this is a real 'sky is falling' kind of problem, I'm not convinced that voluntary device modifications are going to do it. If it's not that bad of a problem, then we probably shouldn't be freaking out about it.
Yes, but the problem is that these buffers exist within zillions of different devices. Your computer has one, your smartphone has one, your wireless router has one, your DSL/Cable modem might have one, the router up the street may very well have on, and on and on through to the webserver you're talking to right now. Fixing this problem means getting thousands of manufacturers and software developers to change the operation of their products, then pushing those updates out to millions of users to install.
Now, I recently updated the firmware wireless router, but I'm pretty sure that I'm the exception --- and honestly, I wouldn't have done it if the thing hadn't been malfunctioning. I certainly can't do the same thing for my cable modem. And I'm what my grandmother would call 'tech-savvy'. Consider the millions of users who aren't tech savvy, and that they're running hardware and software that's out of date. Even if they knew how to update it, much of it probably doesn't even have a good update path/assuming/ you could get the manufacturers to care enough about this problem.
So well you've hit on the "right" solution, it's also the one that's least likely to be implemented. The question is: what solution will be adopted in its place?
2. QoS used that way is a hack to work around an issue that doesn't have to be there in the first place 3. How do you determine the maximum throughput? It's not necessarily the official line's speed. The nice thing about TCP is that it's supposed to figure out on its own how much bandwidth there is. You're proposing a regression to having to tell the system by hand. 4. QoS is most effective on stuff you're sending, but in the current consumer-oriented internet most people download a lot more than they upload.
While the Internet in-theory is beautiful, our modern implementation really is a series of layered hacks. And the solution to Bufferbloat is going to be another hack. You're crazy if you think that the solution to the Bufferbloat 'problem' is going to be some fundamental redesign of the TCP protocol (how would you force 10 people to use it?), or the total re-architecture of millions of consumer devices to remove buffering. You're also crazy if you think the ISPs and backbone providers are going to stand by while this thing kills the Internet.
So the question is: which hack will it be? The GP poster already identified one that works well enough --- using QoS to control flows. Your final objection about content providers stressing connections is the real one. But there's some probably a good hack to deal with it --- or more likely a series of hacks, some at the content providers themselves (e.g., Netflix), some in the backbone, and some at your ISP. It won't be elegant, but it will keep this problem from ever becoming anything more than a few cranky blog posts.
Putting unusual effort and resource into investigating something that you have very good reason to suspect is complete nonsense, is not good.
This particular project is physical, has some interesting technical challenges, involves all the senses, lets you conquer some personal fears,/and/ it gives you a great story to tell your friends. In fact, it's better in just about every way than what we're both doing right now: wasting time on Slashdot.
US law currently prevents Facebook from taking on more than 499 investors unless it discloses its financial results to the public. Facebook does not want to do this, but it certainly wants investment money. Plus there's a lot of dumb money out there that would love to invest in Facebook. How to get around this?
The answer is, apparently, to take on a single investor --- Goldman Sachs. G-S will then sell "shares" of their stake to their own investors, collecting a handsome commission along the way. Most likely the investment house won't even wind up with too much exposure of its own, so when Facebook inevitably dot-bombs they'll just be sitting on a pile of cash. Plus there are opportunities here to make and return profits to their preferred clients (as the stock goes up), making sure that only the fools get stuck when it plummets.
Normally it wouldn't bother me too much to see rich people getting fleeced, but how much do you want to bet that somehow your money will wind up in that pool, even if it's indirectly through mutual funds and third-party companies?
Slashdot Mirror
While nobody's proven that the current extraordinary warming trend is man-made, scientists have been very successful in ruling out the other causes you mention (even in combination). The current warming is not caused by volcanism, changes in solar radiation levels, etc. Which means that it's either (a) man-made (a theory for which there is good evidence) or (b) it's due to some completely different force that we don't know about (aliens, the earth's core going out of alignment, mutating neutrinos, ok, I kid).
Either (a) or (b) should be a subject of concern for us. In fact, I think that if you're inclined to rule out (a) then you'd better be working damn hard on figuring out what (b) is.
But more importantly, while the theory begins with experimental science, it's now mostly an exercise in risk management. We know that there's a phenomenon occurring, we know that it may prove very --- if not catastrophically --- costly to our society, and we know that industrial waste emissions are probably (meaning, with some very reasonable probability) the cause of it.
So the question is: from a cost-benefit perspective, what's the best thing to do about emission levels today? Obviously the answer to that question depends on your evaluation of all the factors. However, given that the costs seem quite high (especially when you factor in the low-probability outcomes), you don't need anything approaching absolute proof to justify reducing GHG emissions --- even if there's only a moderate probability that it helps, you can justify it against the potential costs. I think that that the science is firm enough to justify pre-emptive GHG reduction.
What you are describing is the /cost of producing the oil/, not the actual price of the oil which will be dictated by a combination of supply and demand factors.
If you want a window onto future demand, compare the energy intensity per-capita of China to that of the advanced OECD nations. Now project what forty years of economic development will do to that number.
Nobody's asking for total replacement. Most likely the energy mixture of the future is going to be a bunch of baseload nuclear plus quite a bit of variable power from solar, wind, tidal, etc.
The advantage of solar and wind is that there's a phenomenal amount of energy in these sources. Either one can provide more than enough power to satisfy all of our needs. The major challenge is that we can't use it for our current electrical needs, since these sources are inherently variable. Wind in particular, could probably provide for somewhere between 15-25% (with advanced forecasting and major upgrades to the grid), but probably not more than that.
However, this does not preclude the development of new industries that are optimized to use cheap, variable power. This could apply in any situation where energy is the dominant cost --- for example, chemical manufacture or fertilizer production. These industries would situate themselves near a major source of wind/solar power, and run when the energy is cheap. This isn't totally unprecedented: Alcoa moved their aluminum processing plants to Iceland because energy costs dominated everything else in their business, including labor and raw materials supply. Battery charging is another potential application, presuming that we make progress in electrifying our vehicle fleets.
I'm not sure how hydrogen is an energy source here, but it might be a useful storage technology for the other sources I mentioned above.
Exactly --- just like Iran did with their centrifuge controllers.
NotAGoodNickName makes a very good point. No need to look at the factual content of their shows, clearly all opinionated newscasters are the same. Beck is no worse than everyone else. In fact, he's just doing what all the rest of them do, but he's doing it better!
Incidentally, NotAGoodNickname, you seem like a very intelligent and discerning individual. I wonder if you'd be interested in conducting some non-traditional banking transactions on my behalf? I assure you there's a good percentage in it for you.
The thing is, the northern hemisphere /hasn't/ been all that cold --- just parts of it. For example, the arctic is experiencing record warm temperatures:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2011/02/record-low-arctic-sea-ice-in-january/1
This is dogma spread by people who don't want taxes raised, and it's in complete opposition to empirical fact.
If you want to figure out how to balance the budget, take a look at Federal revenues both before and after the Bush tax cuts. Take a look at Federal revenues both before and after the Clinton tax hikes.
Finally, take a look at the long-term CBO projections of what makes up the next ten years worth of deficits.
If we hiked tax rates back to Clinton-era levels, if we reduced most of the military spending that came after 2001 (especially the ongoing wars) and if the recession ends, we can get close to balancing the budget. Some modest tweaks to entitlements and non-military spending and we're there.
The problem, of course, is that the next 10 years don't matter at all compared to the next 30 years, when Medicare spending wipes us all out.
We need to cut spending across the board by almost half to get to where we're repaying the debt. Everthing has to be cut, and cut by nearly half. Cutting science and other useful programs is barely going to make an impact, but it's a needed prerequisite to cutting retirement programs. People aren't going to accept that they aren't going to get their "entitlement" before it's clear that everyone everywhere is sharing the pain, with no exemptions or sacred cows.
How are we going to explain charging a substantial tax to support these entitlement programs (nearly 15% of all income, counting the part hidden in the employer's books) if we don't plan to deliver the entitlement benefits?
And if we do maintain a tax that isn't actually providing the benefits it was designed to support, are we going to maintain the ridiculous income caps? Right now the Social Security payroll tax is about 12.4% (including the employer portion) but it only applies to the first $90k or so of your income. For most people means they pay on every dollar. For the rich, who represent a big share of income, it means most of their income is exempted.
That sort of makes sense if you view the SS tax as paying for a personal entitlement benefit. If you plan to slash the benefits, then it's just another income tax and it should be applied to all income equally. In fact, I'd love to see what happens to the politician who tries this.
Why do people who insist on cutting social security (or think that this is inevitable) not realize this is going to happen?
And if we are going to increase taxes across, the board, why not just do it --- combined with some spending cuts and reform --- and deal with the deficits in a sensible way? Hint: it worked just fine in the 90s, it will work again once the recession ends.
Bankrupt and irresponsible countries, states and municipalities should correct their spending binges instead of looking for creative taxation.
The problem is that these bankrupt countries, states and municipalities were not binging. Most had balanced budgets in an "ok" economic time. The problem is that the economy suddenly cratered, bringing tax revenues down by as much as 1/3rd in some cases. It's very hard to cut government spending that quickly while actually having an effective organization.
Worse, if states do have to dramatically reduce their spending, it means huge layoffs and cuts in projects, which can easily cause further economic damage and loss of revenue.
We need a way to deal with situations where states can lose revenue this quickly. Maybe that means a mandatory rainy day fund, maybe it means borrowing. But what it does not mean is moralizing about "binges" when the problem is sudden losses in revenue.
When you make transportation policy, you need to plan for between 10 and 40 years in the future. In other words, you probably shouldn't base your policy on today's SWA airfares.
You may not have noticed today's Wikileak cable, but in the opinion of US diplomats, the Saudis have been dramatically overstating the size of their oil reserves. The plentiful cheap oil from Saudi Arabia is what's keeping flights and car travel relatively cheap. As the global economy comes out of its stupor, there's a very good chance that we'll be headed towards dramatically higher fuel prices. As in, you're in the last few years of cheap air travel --- enjoy it.
This problem may not be insurmountable for highway driving, assuming we can get widespread electrification and a huge network of charging stations. But it looks to be a bad time for air travel --- absent major breakthroughs in coal fuel conversion (and the willingness to dramatically increase coal usage across the board), driving and flying are probably not going to win the future.
As for her selling the site, I suppose there's absolutely nothing illegal about it though it does seem to go against the basic assumptions someone would make about why she put it together in the first place. The assumption would be that it's intended to be a megaphone for getting progressive values into the public sphere, gaining suitable publicity, and any money-making activity there should be limited to the non-profit, self-perpetuating kind.
I don't know that HuffPo ever promised its readers or contributors that it was going to be, say, the Wikimedia foundation. Is that something you heard?
If there's a counterargument to what you say, it's that there's a dearth of well-funded, corporate backed left wing media (as compared to the political right). Rectifying this imbalance is one of the biggest tasks that facing the left. To whatever extent the HuffPo sale does this, it's a very good thing for the left.
If contributors don't like it, they'll probably go elsewhere or start their own blogs.
Technically with an electrified train you're not really dragging an "engine" around, but rather a set of motors. I'm using the technical term rather than the railway definition, of course. But there is a practical difference in terms of the weight you have to carry.
You also have to keep in mind that operating a rope lift involves moving rather a large gross tonnage of rope, not to mention overcoming friction at every single place where the ropeway touches a fixed emplacement. Those costs will grow roughly linearly with the distance of the route, and can really add up for longer routes. On the other hand overhead for an electrified train is (roughly) constant --- you'll pay something for electrical transmission losses, but you're not paying to move the whole track.
There's a reason we mostly use electricity to ship motive power across even short factory-sized distances, as cool as it would be to build ropes, belts and drive shafts everywhere.
This is one way of looking at things. The other is that the local population's views aren't (or at one point, weren't) deemed compatible with the U.S.'s strategic and economic interests in the reason. As a result, it became convenient to ally with a totalitarian regime that overrode those interests.
In this view, which I believe is pretty well supported by history, Muslim extremists are more of a symptom than a cause of U.S. policy (i.e., if a regime crushes all of its non-violent, secular opponents, sooner or later you'll be left with fanatics who are willing to die for their cause). For a great view on this, look up the history of the U.S. in Iran, and in particular how our Operation Ajax eventually replaced a secular prime minister with a radical Islamic government.
The one thing I'll offer in "our" defense is that these things are highly path dependent. In other words, our mistakes beget a dictator, which leads to radicalism, which leads to our offering more support to the dictator in order to hold down the radicals --- basically the situation you described in your post. It can be very difficult to untangle yourself from bad decisions made by your predecessors.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't try --- even as a practical matter (rather than a moral one) these dictatorships in the middle east aren't going to last forever, and the longer we support them the worse it'll be for us when the shit hits.
As for the new Chinese stealth fighter, it's reported to be an even match for the Raptor, and used designs on a Lockheed HDD that was not wiped before being sold overseas. I wonder what else remained on that drive, though...
Do you have a cite for that? I'm not disputing your post, I think it's a great story. Google isn't being helpful.
I wrote that small businesses get squashed by regulation, but big businesses can avoid it. Why would you conclude, in an article about Facebook and Goldman Sachs avoiding regulation, that I thought both of them were "small"?
I didn't say anything about Goldman-Sachs being small. Where did you get that idea? I concluded that you thought Facebook was small, and I noted their valuation. To understand why, let me review your original post (emphasis mine):
Ergo, my interpretation of your statement is that Facebook is not publicly traded, but that it would be if Sarbanes-Oxley did not exist, and in your opinion it's Sarbanes-Oxley compliance that prevents small companies from going public. Ergo, you think Facebook is a small company. Of course this may not be what you intended to say, but it's the standard interpretation.
Goldman values Facebook at $50bn. That's not some tiny startup that can't afford regulatory compliance. It's more than some huge publicly traded firms.
Now you might argue that this valuation is fantasy and I would not disagree. However, this high valuation exists because Goldman is running a scam. You can't simultaneously argue that Facebook is some poor startup getting squished by regulation and also that Goldman should be free to sell it to investors as a $50bn behemoth.
What Goldman was doing was essentially illegal in the US. Facebook is a private company and without opening it's books such a company can't take on more than 499 investors. To skirt this requirement Goldman was acting as a single "investor" but actually just planned to sell shares of it's stake on to it's clients (with hefty commissions). This is a violation of the spirit and possibly the letter of the law, and the SEC stepped in. To take the heat off Goldman is now going to run their scam outside of the US where presumably it's legal.
And yes, this probably is a scam. There are good reasons not to allow public investment in opaque ventures whose value can't be determined, and Goldman is clearly banking on charging oversized commissions because it's selling a product you can't get anywhere else (cause it's illegal, hmm). The first investors will make loads of cash just like in any pump and dump scheme, the suckers will get rolled. The Facebook guys get to cash out, turning some of those pretend billions into real dough before the company goes Myspace. Worthwhile tech ventures will go underfunded and even larger numbers of (dumb) investors will lose confidence in the markets.
I'm reasonably liberal even by European standards, but seriously, don't defend Hugo Chavez. He's Pinochet with a better PR department.
And why are now able to run with only half that many?
Who says they are? In my experience, when a firm lays off half of their employees, the other half aren't far behind.
I was going to congratulate you on a reasonable post until the bits where you (a) ridiculed the notion that the US was detaining people without trial in cuba, and (b) claimed that all you need to do to get healthcare in the US is show up to a hospital. Unfortunately, this nonsense puts you in exactly the same nut-boat as the lunatic you were trying to shut down.
For the record:
The United States has and currently holds individuals without trial in Cuba.
Here's a patchwork discussion of how to get assistance if you're uninsured and have cancer. Note that hospitals are not required to provide more than stabilization, though many underfunded county hospitals do provide "indigent care". The uninsured have roughly half the five-year survival rate of people who have insurance. Even Medicaid isn't always enough --- several people have been recently been denied organ transplants recently because of state and local budget cuts.
Lesson: respond vigorously to cranks but do not treat it as an opportunity to push your own broken worldview.
Well, you're assuming that the incentives are aligned for all manufacturers to work together. Some might believe that as other manufacturers de-buffer, they can gain a relative performance advantage by keeping their buffers large. Or maybe they'll just be ignorant about the problem. Or maybe they'll screw it up, or find some other way to break TCP. Or maybe the manufacturers will do it right and users will update their configurations by installing SpeedBoost9.7. Or maybe it'll all work out but it'll take 10 years (remember that some people are probably still running Windows 98 or XP circa 2001).
The consensus expressed in TFA (and related blog posts) is that nowadays it doesn't take a particularly large percentage of devices to saturate even big pipes, especially if those pipes are already pretty well loaded. I think one of the articles even mentions that a single PC can saturate a 6mbps cable modem connection. The reason this kind of thing doesn't kill all of your neighbors' connectivity is that the cable company runs some kind of QoS (I may be using the wrong term here, not a networking engineer) to keep one customer from saturating the entire local loop.
So if this is a real 'sky is falling' kind of problem, I'm not convinced that voluntary device modifications are going to do it. If it's not that bad of a problem, then we probably shouldn't be freaking out about it.
Yes, but the problem is that these buffers exist within zillions of different devices. Your computer has one, your smartphone has one, your wireless router has one, your DSL/Cable modem might have one, the router up the street may very well have on, and on and on through to the webserver you're talking to right now. Fixing this problem means getting thousands of manufacturers and software developers to change the operation of their products, then pushing those updates out to millions of users to install.
Now, I recently updated the firmware wireless router, but I'm pretty sure that I'm the exception --- and honestly, I wouldn't have done it if the thing hadn't been malfunctioning. I certainly can't do the same thing for my cable modem. And I'm what my grandmother would call 'tech-savvy'. Consider the millions of users who aren't tech savvy, and that they're running hardware and software that's out of date. Even if they knew how to update it, much of it probably doesn't even have a good update path /assuming/ you could get the manufacturers to care enough about this problem.
So well you've hit on the "right" solution, it's also the one that's least likely to be implemented. The question is: what solution will be adopted in its place?
2. QoS used that way is a hack to work around an issue that doesn't have to be there in the first place
3. How do you determine the maximum throughput? It's not necessarily the official line's speed. The nice thing about TCP is that it's supposed to figure out on its own how much bandwidth there is. You're proposing a regression to having to tell the system by hand.
4. QoS is most effective on stuff you're sending, but in the current consumer-oriented internet most people download a lot more than they upload.
While the Internet in-theory is beautiful, our modern implementation really is a series of layered hacks. And the solution to Bufferbloat is going to be another hack. You're crazy if you think that the solution to the Bufferbloat 'problem' is going to be some fundamental redesign of the TCP protocol (how would you force 10 people to use it?), or the total re-architecture of millions of consumer devices to remove buffering. You're also crazy if you think the ISPs and backbone providers are going to stand by while this thing kills the Internet.
So the question is: which hack will it be? The GP poster already identified one that works well enough --- using QoS to control flows. Your final objection about content providers stressing connections is the real one. But there's some probably a good hack to deal with it --- or more likely a series of hacks, some at the content providers themselves (e.g., Netflix), some in the backbone, and some at your ISP. It won't be elegant, but it will keep this problem from ever becoming anything more than a few cranky blog posts.
Putting unusual effort and resource into investigating something that you have very good reason to suspect is complete nonsense, is not good.
This particular project is physical, has some interesting technical challenges, involves all the senses, lets you conquer some personal fears, /and/ it gives you a great story to tell your friends. In fact, it's better in just about every way than what we're both doing right now: wasting time on Slashdot.
Why the hell does an investment bank, who normally act as a "service provider" want to take a direct stake in a Social networking company ?
Two words: regulatory arbitrage.
US law currently prevents Facebook from taking on more than 499 investors unless it discloses its financial results to the public. Facebook does not want to do this, but it certainly wants investment money. Plus there's a lot of dumb money out there that would love to invest in Facebook. How to get around this?
The answer is, apparently, to take on a single investor --- Goldman Sachs. G-S will then sell "shares" of their stake to their own investors, collecting a handsome commission along the way. Most likely the investment house won't even wind up with too much exposure of its own, so when Facebook inevitably dot-bombs they'll just be sitting on a pile of cash. Plus there are opportunities here to make and return profits to their preferred clients (as the stock goes up), making sure that only the fools get stuck when it plummets.
Normally it wouldn't bother me too much to see rich people getting fleeced, but how much do you want to bet that somehow your money will wind up in that pool, even if it's indirectly through mutual funds and third-party companies?