From the Wikipedia page, they've done work on a nuke reactor that can burn uranium waste or thorium,
It's unclear how original their research is, though. From the brief article I read on them a few years ago, they had patented several inventions related to Thorium power without actually developing any prototypes. Meanwhile, there were actual companies in Russia developing real Thorium reactors. It's got to be awfully depressing to pour millions into developing a working prototype only to find that some schmuck at a desk in the U.S. has "invented" it and wants cash.
OPs point IMHO is that there are significant things we can do today to solve this problem without legislation, but even some of the staunchest advocates of CC refuse to do those things.
We all agree that there are actions we can take to solve the problem. This is obvious. Where we appear to disagree is in our belief that these actions will actually be taken without some outside incentive.
These people are showing that they don't really care to do what's necessary to fix the problem; instead they'd rather use government to force others to do things they won't willingly do themselves.
First of all, this is basically an ad hominem attack on a large class of people, many of whom have taken different actions to solve the problem. It's beneath the discussion and it's completely unproductive. This is why I called out the GP poster.
More productively, let me approach this through an analogy. Imagine that there's an asteroid headed towards the earth, we can probably deflect it, and yet a large class of people decided that they will not voluntarily contribute any money towards an asteroid-deflection mission. However, they will contribute money provided that it's taken by the government through taxation. Now these are awful, selfish people. But regardless of their behavior, would we seriously be having an argument about whether or not we should deflect the asteroid? It seems to me that the asteroid would be just as deadly, and the need to deflect it just as urgent irrespective of those individuals' behavior. You might be awfully bitter about the way those people are behaving, but you wouldn't actually risk letting that rock hit the earth.
Now coming back to our current predicament: you might feel differently if any of the following are true. (a) You don't believe the scientific evidence for climate change, and you feel that private citizens' personal behavior is a better indicator of how the climate will work, or (b) you have a better solution that reduces CO2 emissions massively, but does not involve government. I can understand how (a) might be appealing, but it seems like absolute nonsense to me. And I haven't heard anything convincing on (b) yet.
Just want to verify that everyone who is full-on convinced about the negative effects of climate change is a vegetarian.... you've already made the switch, right? Cause you wouldn't want to be hypocritical.
Well, we all know that on the Internet hypocrisy is the greatest and most venal sin. And you've opened my eyes to the fact that people are selfish and screw around, so that absolutely makes it ok for us to double the level of atmospheric CO2. This logic couldn't be more solid.
The truth is that people are fundamentally selfish and want all kinds of things that are bad for them and for the rest of society too. I love buying expensive electronics even though I know it's terrible for the environment. So sue me. I also realize that even if I stop doing this, there's about zero percent chance that my personal do-gooding is going to make any significant difference to world's industrial processes.
This is why I support a carbon tax regime. Not just because it would impact other people's behavior, but because it would actually put some limits on my own selfish behavior. You can say that I'm a bad, weak person, maybe that's true. Who cares. All I know is that from personal experience, individual human beings are probably too selfish to solve this problem. We've evolved to basically grab as much stuff as we can; avoiding global-scale environmental damage was never a major factor in the evolution of our species. But as a civilization we absolutely can take actions that will limit the selfishness in all of us and keep us from killing ourselves.
Imposing a carbon tax (or cap and trade) would certainly impact the price of meat. I don't eat a ton of meat these days (for health reasons, among other things), but I'm sure that would suck a little bit for me. But I'd be willing to deal with that. Moreover, it might also encourage the development of alternative low-carbon meat production technologies, or even of credible alternatives. It would also help to knock a lot of wastefulness out of the system --- and that waste is something that doesn't benefit me at all.
We've been doing it or 2,000 years, and it seems to have worked out ok..
I would submit that it really hasn't. One way of looking at history is as a struggle between people who wanted to keep education and related privileges exclusive, and other forces that pushed to open them up. We live in the richest society in the history of the planet in part because those forces are currently ascendant.
Past performance, future results, etc. But in a world of uncertainty it's one of the safest bets I can think of.
It may not crumple, but it can do terrible things to the driver in an accident. Modern cars are designed to crumple (in a controlled manner) and have a reinforced passenger compartment to keep large pieces of metal from impaling human beings. I'll never find it now but there's a great video online of a big 60s era car in a front end collision with some tiny little "send your kids to college in me" buggy from 2010. Superficially the big car wins, but the "driver" (dummy) is almost certainly dead.
I used to drive an MGB convertible. Great car, I knew it'd kill me in a heartbeat.
We've already gotten to the point where college degrees are so common that they're essentially worthless - making them "free" by fleecing taxpayers would only exacerbate the problem.
Sure, if you start from the perspective that college education is a zero-sum game related to some piece of paper that lets you into the "club" of people who get good jobs. If you start from that perspective, then of course you don't want any competition.
I would be perfectly happy living in a world where everyone had a college degree, provided the degrees actually came with a real education. I also think the country would be a whole lot richer in that case, probably by more than enough to make up for the "fleecing" you mention.
In the real world, a more practical goal isn't to get everyone a college degree, but to make sure that talented people who could benefit from one (and consequently make us all richer) don't wind up flipping burgers instead 'cause they can't afford the tuition. Alternatively, we could just make sure that rich, dumb kids get all the opportunities.
Make it about whether Comcast can raise your rates, by charging Internet companies again for the service you already paid for. Make it clear that the customer's going to pay in the end. Use the name of the local cable/telco monopoly explicitly --- they're not well loved.
The mid 90's saw an explosive growth in technologies that fundamentally changed the human condition... Al Gore aside, none of these things had anything to do with which party was in power... I'm not saying that who controls what is irrelevant, just that most of the data collected since Bush #1 probably needs to be thrown out as being unfairly prejudicial.
Take a look at Federal bond interest rates in the period immediately preceding and during the time you reference. My impression is that much of the boom was driven by the huge amounts of money that exited public sector debt and entered the private sector.
A lot of this money was freed up by good budgetary policy (following some very bad policy during Reagan). The real changes started during the term of George H.W. Bush, who took some solid steps to fix the deficit --- for which he was vilified by the right. Subsequently it involved good budgetary management by Clinton, who raised taxes and cut spending every single year through most of his term. He was also vilified by the Republican congress, who went so far as to shut the entire Federal government down to block his budgets.
These were some of the most important and politically courageous acts of the last twenty years, so it's depressing to see them reduced down into "well, it was all just the Internet, no real lessons to take from that period". There are a lot of lessons to take from that period, but unfortunately nobody's going to take them with all of the mealy-mouthed shit going around.
Still, ironically environmentalism has pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity - as nice as it is, solar and wind are still far more expensive than then their baseload counterparts.... I'd be building nuclear plants
Dirt cheap, subsidized fossil fuels have pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity. Environmentalism is (mostly) a convenient scapegoat. I'd be building nuclear plants too, but they're mostly not competitive with cheap coal, and the current 1970s-era designs are probably/not/ the plants we should be building, at least not if we're serious about building out on a massive scale. It would also be helpful if we agreed on some standardized designs, rather than the hodgepodge that we have today --- this would go hand-in-hand with more regulation and less civil liability for operators.
EVs aren't, can't be the 'only' solution for replacing oil based fuels. But they have their spot, I can say that.
The story of the next 40 years of transportation/energy policy is going to be of fleet electrification, combined with the rollout of more and more non-fossil-fuel based power and huge improvements in efficiency. The grid will contain wind/solar (maybe 25% of total) and a huge amount of nuclear baseload. Uranium/thorium/pebble-bed/reprocessing/breeder technologies, whatever is feasible. All of these things will have to happen together --- they're entirely complementary --- though they may not happen on the same schedule. It's weird how many Slashdot posters (such as the GP poster) act as if these are all somehow competing technologies, and Only. One. Can. Prevail.
The pragmatic - profit-oriented - corporation I can live with. The government or NGO which lacks staff or funding or whose policies change with every shift in the politcal winds, every notion of ideogical purity or political correctness, I am not so sure of.
Will you be able to live with them when they decide that letting you and your family starve to death increases shareholder value? Or is "live with" just a figure of speech?
Sometimes the problem with loving the devil you know (rather than the angel you don't) is that the devil will fucking kill you.
You don't think big companies have bureaucracies in place? They do, and while they always get out of hand, they at the lest, have a limit to their pointlessness. Government programs know of no such limits.
I've worked for some big companies and I know all about how out of hand those bureaucracies can get. I also know what happens when someone inevitably tries to cut them down down to size --- all sorts of useful and important projects get slashed along with the bad. That's why I find it hard to believe that, say, AT&T would be operating a space probe after 33 years.
And non-profits can get completely out of hand, just like government can. Except in a non-profit you typically don't have voters and elected representatives pushing back on how the money gets used. That can be good and it can be bad. Take a look at the spending habits of, say, the catholic church, or the United Way, and tell me that the money is being used optimally. Of course, very few non-profits can muster the sort of resources that government can --- this is why people don't see as much inefficiency. But it's also why I'm not optimistic about these organizations ability to conduct something as massive as interplanetary exploration.
But essentially your argument walks a fine line. You admit that bureaucracies are important to massive projects like space exploration, but you think that private businesses and non-profits will hit the sweet spot of "enough bureaucracy but not too much". You may be right. Who knows. My guess is that --- until a guaranteed, profitable business is found in space --- the sheer level of resources that government can provide is going to consistently dominate concerns about the efficiency with which those resources are applied.
With NASA its a nickel towards a goal and 95 cents spent on pointless bureaucracies.
Sometimes bureaucracies really are pointless. Other times they're the only way you can manage something as vast and multi-generational as interplanetary/interstellar spaceflight. I fear that the pro-privatization Slashdot crowd will learn this to their chagrin in a decade or two.
Right now there are functioning NASA probes at the edge of our solar system that are nearly as old as I am (a gracefully aging 34, thank you). Many of the original team members have probably left the organization, and yet scientific teams at NASA continue to diagnose problems and keep the things online. I'd love to see private space enterprise operate an unprofitable space probe for 33 years. Hell, I'd be shocked if a for-profit organization kept a legacy space probe operating for 10 years, absent massive government subsidies.
You wouldn't have ash encircling the planet and blocking out the sun as with a Chicxulub-type impact (which is by far the most devastating effect of a large asteroid impact to life on a planet), although you may still get some smaller Eyjafjallajokull-size ash clouds. Now if it landed in the ocean you'd have serious mega-tsunamis that would wipe out of a lot of coastal areas all around the world, but again not devastating on a planetary scale.
Well, don't take it as fact, but the geologist who discovered this said (from the TFA):
"Nothing within a few hundred kilometres of the blast would have survived, but more importantly the climate of the entire Earth would have been changed. It would have filled the atmosphere with so much dust that sunlight would be obscured, possibly for several years, killing a large amount of plant life on which animals obviously rely, thereby causing a global kill event - although perhaps not on the scale of the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs."
Also, there was a recent study that suggested an asteroid impact in the ocean could cause massive devastation of the ozone layer, with all sorts of nasty effects for plant life. That was for a 1km asteroid. Still theoretical, but interesting to note.
Computers are going to disappear - your information will be always available from any device with an internet connection... It's a good idea, and a fucking bummer that Apple is the only company doing it.
I absolutely agree with most of what you say here -- the company that does transparent "cloud" sync/storage best will win the game. Unlike you, my take is that Apple is actually way behind in this area, while Google has a convincing, if not insurmountable lead. This isn't about Android, though you can see it a little bit in the way that Android devices instantly populate themselves via the 'net using only a Google ID. By contrast an Apple iDevice won't even turn on until you plug them into a desktop via USB. You can also see it in the piece of crap that is Apple's current.Mac offering ($99/year for, basically, stuff you can get for free elsewhere, with minimal device integration --- yes, I pay for it and I'm ashamed).
But mostly you don't see Google's advantage, because it manifests primarily in the unglamorous, invisible stuff like cloud infrastructure. Google has an order of magnitude more server capacity than most competitors, and absolutely crushes Apple in terms of the user data it holds, not to mention its (still nascent, but growing) customer base for services like Mail, Docs, Maps and Apps.
Apple may show up to the party one of these days --- maybe they'll get 'net-based activation by iPhone 5. But what people fail to understand is that moving from a device business to a cloud business is a not a natural transition, and so far Apple has demonstrated no real instinct for it. To give a silly analogy: at the moment Apple is building the grandest, prettiest castles in town, while Google is buying up all the roads and sewers. One day I fear that Apple will realize how badly they need that infrastructure in order to keep building, and Google will be the only one who can provide it.
Technically Google has committed no crime, and their tax avoidance is entirely legal. While it is normal to feel a moral outrage, I think your anger should be focused on those who created the loopholes in the first place. Washington.
Technically Washington has committed no crime, and their acceptance of massive quantities of cash in exchange for favorable tax legislation is entirely legal. While it is normal to feel a moral outrage, I think your anger should be focused on those who paid for the loopholes in the first place. Google. And Microsoft. And a few hundred other large corporations.
Apparently this is legal, so why should I care? It's not as if the government is going to do better things with that money than Google is.
One of the things they could do is fund their operations, rather than borrowing from overseas with substantial interest penalties for me and my children to pay. Trot this argument out again when the government stops doing that --- then we can talk about whether the government needs that money.
Who's "they"? And, assuming you're referring to google, how are they shafting you? It's not your money.
They're shafting you if you're a much smaller corporation or an individual that can't afford these tax dodges. Then you're bearing a disproportionately large share of the tax burden. And no, getting rid of corporate income taxes doesn't make this better, it makes it worse.
I suggest you overstate your case. Its not like you can log into a voting machine on the internet in every precinct.
The thing about voting machines is that if tampering can occur, than it can easily occur on a nationwide basis. Either it can be conducted by tampering with the code at the factory, or it can be done via malicious software updates. In some cases it may occur via a phone line (when I worked on an election involving Sequoia machines, totals were delivered via telephone).
To offer a less overstated case, there's still a big difference between tampering that requires a gaggle of local, corrupt officials, and tampering that can be conducted by a small number of incognito "voters" who simply insert malicious smartcards into voting machines at a given precinct.
Even manual counting with 5 sets of eyes on every ballot would not protect against this kind of corruption in a tight election.
Yes, but at least it would limit the corruption to areas that are actually, you know, corrupt--- widespread electronic voting makes it possible to tamper with every single precinct in the country.
News Corp owns several satellite providers as well as shares of other ISPs. Their strategy is very heavy on owning broadband. Google it if you will. Comcast owns big, national content providers (NBC). Of course all of this is completely irrelevant to the point I made, but here it is since you asked.
I could care less what you do with your Apache servers, but once you start using copyright law to selectively fart around with who distributes your content, there are public interest issues at stake. You may be in favor of allowing large copyright holders to do whatever the fuck they want with their content (no matter how discriminatory to businesses and customers), but I'm not. We don't really disagree about how networks should just operate, just that there's more to it.
Don't be fooled by the apparent dissimilarity of the two problems. At a fundamental level they're very much related. You have large, entrenched organizations that own content and, in some cases run broadband networks -- facing off against large entrenched organizations that own broadband networks and, in some cases, produce content. The two nearly identical sides are running an experiment, trying to use their market power to try to force each other into favorable business terms.
In both cases the customers are being treated like an asset to be sold, or held hostage, while the corporations use them as a bargaining chip in their real business decisions. Sure, the negotiations can go either direction, but eventually it's the smaller players who are going to get locked out of the game.
In fact, this kind of thing is directly related to the net neutrality argument, because it presents a terrific counterargument for the ISPs. If the ISPs are required to be neutral, but the content providers aren't, then we're essentially going to take away one of the ISPs only weapons in what is really a two-sided business war. I don't love this argument, but I believe it could be persuasive.
At very least you need to understand this as one skirmish in a much broader conflict.
Both sides are right. But what nobody seems to be asking is: Why are important projects now unaffordable? Decades ago, when the federal and state governments were much smaller, they had the means to undertake gigantic new projects, like the Interstate Highway System and the space program. But now, when governments are bigger, they don't.
Answer: they weren't that much less expensive. Adjusted for inflation, the Lincoln Tunnel cost roughly 1/3 of the proposed budget for the Jersey Tunnel, and that tunnel is substantially longer and more complex (much of the cost comes from a huge terminus which has to be buried underneath the existing subway and skyscraper foundations near Herald Square in NYC.) And the Lincoln Tunnel diggers suffered appalling working conditions, with many dying in the process. And please don't get me started on the cost of the Interstate Highways.
We did this stuff back then because we were more willing to commit funds to obviously-necessary infrastructure projects: in the 1930s New York clearly needed another tunnel, so the money was found and it was done. Part of the problem is that nowadays the problems are much more complex. Most people don't really understand transportation planning, so they don't fully understand why NY/NJ need to dramatically increase their rail capacity in the coming years (but if you want a hint, go take an NJ transit train from Summit to Penn Station at rush hour and try to find a place to sit, hell try to find a place to stand.)
The more important problem is the poisonous strain of thought (evidenced by the David Brooks article you cite) that turns every wonky infrastructure project into some stupid fucking unproductive political argument. Does David Brooks think that reducing public sector benefits would make this tunnel affordable? He probably has no clue (in fact, it will have only a tiny impact). But instead of engaging with the much more complex cost/benefit analysis for this tunnel project --- which he is absolutely unqualified to conduct --- he gets to write stupid, facile articles blaming it on his favorite ideological boogeyman. And people cheer.
Then twenty years later they wonder why it takes three hours to get from Summit to midtown Manhattan.
Seems to me that plenty of countries (including the US) manufacture weapons for use and for distribution to other countries. Thing is, you're not at war most of the time, and you're almost never at war with everyone.
This is the approach being taken by the Chevy Volt, which isn't on sale yet but seems far more likely to see widespread adoption than the Aptera (based on marketing budgets and so on).
Somehow we need to put a stop to this practice of appointing "Czars". Anyone who can't pass muster with the Senate shouldn't be calling shots in the Executive Branch.
That's precisely what we need, even more dependence on the totally fucking broken US Senate. Right now there are record numbers of Presidential appointees in limbo, not getting debated, not getting a confirmation vote, not getting anything. These people aren't controversial, nobody thinks they'll do a bad job or that they're even partisan. Most of 'em will eventually get confirmed someday. It's just that right now some politicians in the Senate think it's more valuable to slow this process down to score electoral points. It's not like we need people managing the OMB or the Fed or any of that shit. It basically runs itself, right?
Now, if you're a politician this is all in a day's work. I mean, I get it. They get something out of this, it's a power game. But for an outsider to say "hey, let's throw some more of our critical government functions into this crazy broken process, that'd be a good idea", that's just fucking ludicrous. While we're up to stupid things, why don't we solve our nuclear waste problem by burying it in school playgrounds? These ideas are of roughly the same intellectual caliber.
And don't get me started on this Czars nonsense, where every remaining position the President does have the power to appoint is suddenly referred to as a "czar" (even if that term is nowhere in the title) and we're all supposed to be outraged that the President is appointing people to do the fucking job of running the government like we expect him to.
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From the Wikipedia page, they've done work on a nuke reactor that can burn uranium waste or thorium,
It's unclear how original their research is, though. From the brief article I read on them a few years ago, they had patented several inventions related to Thorium power without actually developing any prototypes. Meanwhile, there were actual companies in Russia developing real Thorium reactors. It's got to be awfully depressing to pour millions into developing a working prototype only to find that some schmuck at a desk in the U.S. has "invented" it and wants cash.
OPs point IMHO is that there are significant things we can do today to solve this problem without legislation, but even some of the staunchest advocates of CC refuse to do those things.
We all agree that there are actions we can take to solve the problem. This is obvious. Where we appear to disagree is in our belief that these actions will actually be taken without some outside incentive.
These people are showing that they don't really care to do what's necessary to fix the problem; instead they'd rather use government to force others to do things they won't willingly do themselves.
First of all, this is basically an ad hominem attack on a large class of people, many of whom have taken different actions to solve the problem. It's beneath the discussion and it's completely unproductive. This is why I called out the GP poster.
More productively, let me approach this through an analogy. Imagine that there's an asteroid headed towards the earth, we can probably deflect it, and yet a large class of people decided that they will not voluntarily contribute any money towards an asteroid-deflection mission. However, they will contribute money provided that it's taken by the government through taxation. Now these are awful, selfish people. But regardless of their behavior, would we seriously be having an argument about whether or not we should deflect the asteroid? It seems to me that the asteroid would be just as deadly, and the need to deflect it just as urgent irrespective of those individuals' behavior. You might be awfully bitter about the way those people are behaving, but you wouldn't actually risk letting that rock hit the earth.
Now coming back to our current predicament: you might feel differently if any of the following are true. (a) You don't believe the scientific evidence for climate change, and you feel that private citizens' personal behavior is a better indicator of how the climate will work, or (b) you have a better solution that reduces CO2 emissions massively, but does not involve government. I can understand how (a) might be appealing, but it seems like absolute nonsense to me. And I haven't heard anything convincing on (b) yet.
Just want to verify that everyone who is full-on convinced about the negative effects of climate change is a vegetarian. ... you've already made the switch, right? Cause you wouldn't want to be hypocritical.
Well, we all know that on the Internet hypocrisy is the greatest and most venal sin. And you've opened my eyes to the fact that people are selfish and screw around, so that absolutely makes it ok for us to double the level of atmospheric CO2. This logic couldn't be more solid.
The truth is that people are fundamentally selfish and want all kinds of things that are bad for them and for the rest of society too. I love buying expensive electronics even though I know it's terrible for the environment. So sue me. I also realize that even if I stop doing this, there's about zero percent chance that my personal do-gooding is going to make any significant difference to world's industrial processes.
This is why I support a carbon tax regime. Not just because it would impact other people's behavior, but because it would actually put some limits on my own selfish behavior. You can say that I'm a bad, weak person, maybe that's true. Who cares. All I know is that from personal experience, individual human beings are probably too selfish to solve this problem. We've evolved to basically grab as much stuff as we can; avoiding global-scale environmental damage was never a major factor in the evolution of our species. But as a civilization we absolutely can take actions that will limit the selfishness in all of us and keep us from killing ourselves.
Imposing a carbon tax (or cap and trade) would certainly impact the price of meat. I don't eat a ton of meat these days (for health reasons, among other things), but I'm sure that would suck a little bit for me. But I'd be willing to deal with that. Moreover, it might also encourage the development of alternative low-carbon meat production technologies, or even of credible alternatives. It would also help to knock a lot of wastefulness out of the system --- and that waste is something that doesn't benefit me at all.
We've been doing it or 2,000 years, and it seems to have worked out ok..
I would submit that it really hasn't. One way of looking at history is as a struggle between people who wanted to keep education and related privileges exclusive, and other forces that pushed to open them up. We live in the richest society in the history of the planet in part because those forces are currently ascendant.
Past performance, future results, etc. But in a world of uncertainty it's one of the safest bets I can think of.
It may not crumple, but it can do terrible things to the driver in an accident. Modern cars are designed to crumple (in a controlled manner) and have a reinforced passenger compartment to keep large pieces of metal from impaling human beings. I'll never find it now but there's a great video online of a big 60s era car in a front end collision with some tiny little "send your kids to college in me" buggy from 2010. Superficially the big car wins, but the "driver" (dummy) is almost certainly dead.
I used to drive an MGB convertible. Great car, I knew it'd kill me in a heartbeat.
We've already gotten to the point where college degrees are so common that they're essentially worthless - making them "free" by fleecing taxpayers would only exacerbate the problem.
Sure, if you start from the perspective that college education is a zero-sum game related to some piece of paper that lets you into the "club" of people who get good jobs. If you start from that perspective, then of course you don't want any competition.
I would be perfectly happy living in a world where everyone had a college degree, provided the degrees actually came with a real education. I also think the country would be a whole lot richer in that case, probably by more than enough to make up for the "fleecing" you mention.
In the real world, a more practical goal isn't to get everyone a college degree, but to make sure that talented people who could benefit from one (and consequently make us all richer) don't wind up flipping burgers instead 'cause they can't afford the tuition. Alternatively, we could just make sure that rich, dumb kids get all the opportunities.
Make it about whether Comcast can raise your rates, by charging Internet companies again for the service you already paid for. Make it clear that the customer's going to pay in the end. Use the name of the local cable/telco monopoly explicitly --- they're not well loved.
The mid 90's saw an explosive growth in technologies that fundamentally changed the human condition ... Al Gore aside, none of these things had anything to do with which party was in power ... I'm not saying that who controls what is irrelevant, just that most of the data collected since Bush #1 probably needs to be thrown out as being unfairly prejudicial.
Take a look at Federal bond interest rates in the period immediately preceding and during the time you reference. My impression is that much of the boom was driven by the huge amounts of money that exited public sector debt and entered the private sector.
A lot of this money was freed up by good budgetary policy (following some very bad policy during Reagan). The real changes started during the term of George H.W. Bush, who took some solid steps to fix the deficit --- for which he was vilified by the right. Subsequently it involved good budgetary management by Clinton, who raised taxes and cut spending every single year through most of his term. He was also vilified by the Republican congress, who went so far as to shut the entire Federal government down to block his budgets.
These were some of the most important and politically courageous acts of the last twenty years, so it's depressing to see them reduced down into "well, it was all just the Internet, no real lessons to take from that period". There are a lot of lessons to take from that period, but unfortunately nobody's going to take them with all of the mealy-mouthed shit going around.
Still, ironically environmentalism has pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity - as nice as it is, solar and wind are still far more expensive than then their baseload counterparts. ... I'd be building nuclear plants
Dirt cheap, subsidized fossil fuels have pretty much killed all non-coal economic sources of electricity. Environmentalism is (mostly) a convenient scapegoat. I'd be building nuclear plants too, but they're mostly not competitive with cheap coal, and the current 1970s-era designs are probably /not/ the plants we should be building, at least not if we're serious about building out on a massive scale. It would also be helpful if we agreed on some standardized designs, rather than the hodgepodge that we have today --- this would go hand-in-hand with more regulation and less civil liability for operators.
EVs aren't, can't be the 'only' solution for replacing oil based fuels. But they have their spot, I can say that.
The story of the next 40 years of transportation/energy policy is going to be of fleet electrification, combined with the rollout of more and more non-fossil-fuel based power and huge improvements in efficiency. The grid will contain wind/solar (maybe 25% of total) and a huge amount of nuclear baseload. Uranium/thorium/pebble-bed/reprocessing/breeder technologies, whatever is feasible. All of these things will have to happen together --- they're entirely complementary --- though they may not happen on the same schedule. It's weird how many Slashdot posters (such as the GP poster) act as if these are all somehow competing technologies, and Only. One. Can. Prevail.
The pragmatic - profit-oriented - corporation I can live with. The government or NGO which lacks staff or funding or whose policies change with every shift in the politcal winds, every notion of ideogical purity or political correctness, I am not so sure of.
Will you be able to live with them when they decide that letting you and your family starve to death increases shareholder value? Or is "live with" just a figure of speech?
Sometimes the problem with loving the devil you know (rather than the angel you don't) is that the devil will fucking kill you.
You don't think big companies have bureaucracies in place? They do, and while they always get out of hand, they at the lest, have a limit to their pointlessness. Government programs know of no such limits.
I've worked for some big companies and I know all about how out of hand those bureaucracies can get. I also know what happens when someone inevitably tries to cut them down down to size --- all sorts of useful and important projects get slashed along with the bad. That's why I find it hard to believe that, say, AT&T would be operating a space probe after 33 years.
And non-profits can get completely out of hand, just like government can. Except in a non-profit you typically don't have voters and elected representatives pushing back on how the money gets used. That can be good and it can be bad. Take a look at the spending habits of, say, the catholic church, or the United Way, and tell me that the money is being used optimally. Of course, very few non-profits can muster the sort of resources that government can --- this is why people don't see as much inefficiency. But it's also why I'm not optimistic about these organizations ability to conduct something as massive as interplanetary exploration.
But essentially your argument walks a fine line. You admit that bureaucracies are important to massive projects like space exploration, but you think that private businesses and non-profits will hit the sweet spot of "enough bureaucracy but not too much". You may be right. Who knows. My guess is that --- until a guaranteed, profitable business is found in space --- the sheer level of resources that government can provide is going to consistently dominate concerns about the efficiency with which those resources are applied.
With NASA its a nickel towards a goal and 95 cents spent on pointless bureaucracies.
Sometimes bureaucracies really are pointless. Other times they're the only way you can manage something as vast and multi-generational as interplanetary/interstellar spaceflight. I fear that the pro-privatization Slashdot crowd will learn this to their chagrin in a decade or two.
Right now there are functioning NASA probes at the edge of our solar system that are nearly as old as I am (a gracefully aging 34, thank you). Many of the original team members have probably left the organization, and yet scientific teams at NASA continue to diagnose problems and keep the things online. I'd love to see private space enterprise operate an unprofitable space probe for 33 years. Hell, I'd be shocked if a for-profit organization kept a legacy space probe operating for 10 years, absent massive government subsidies.
You wouldn't have ash encircling the planet and blocking out the sun as with a Chicxulub-type impact (which is by far the most devastating effect of a large asteroid impact to life on a planet), although you may still get some smaller Eyjafjallajokull-size ash clouds. Now if it landed in the ocean you'd have serious mega-tsunamis that would wipe out of a lot of coastal areas all around the world, but again not devastating on a planetary scale.
Well, don't take it as fact, but the geologist who discovered this said (from the TFA):
Also, there was a recent study that suggested an asteroid impact in the ocean could cause massive devastation of the ozone layer, with all sorts of nasty effects for plant life. That was for a 1km asteroid. Still theoretical, but interesting to note.
Computers are going to disappear - your information will be always available from any device with an internet connection ... It's a good idea, and a fucking bummer that Apple is the only company doing it.
I absolutely agree with most of what you say here -- the company that does transparent "cloud" sync/storage best will win the game. Unlike you, my take is that Apple is actually way behind in this area, while Google has a convincing, if not insurmountable lead. This isn't about Android, though you can see it a little bit in the way that Android devices instantly populate themselves via the 'net using only a Google ID. By contrast an Apple iDevice won't even turn on until you plug them into a desktop via USB. You can also see it in the piece of crap that is Apple's current .Mac offering ($99/year for, basically, stuff you can get for free elsewhere, with minimal device integration --- yes, I pay for it and I'm ashamed).
But mostly you don't see Google's advantage, because it manifests primarily in the unglamorous, invisible stuff like cloud infrastructure. Google has an order of magnitude more server capacity than most competitors, and absolutely crushes Apple in terms of the user data it holds, not to mention its (still nascent, but growing) customer base for services like Mail, Docs, Maps and Apps.
Apple may show up to the party one of these days --- maybe they'll get 'net-based activation by iPhone 5. But what people fail to understand is that moving from a device business to a cloud business is a not a natural transition, and so far Apple has demonstrated no real instinct for it. To give a silly analogy: at the moment Apple is building the grandest, prettiest castles in town, while Google is buying up all the roads and sewers. One day I fear that Apple will realize how badly they need that infrastructure in order to keep building, and Google will be the only one who can provide it.
Technically Google has committed no crime, and their tax avoidance is entirely legal. While it is normal to feel a moral outrage, I think your anger should be focused on those who created the loopholes in the first place. Washington.
Technically Washington has committed no crime, and their acceptance of massive quantities of cash in exchange for favorable tax legislation is entirely legal. While it is normal to feel a moral outrage, I think your anger should be focused on those who paid for the loopholes in the first place. Google. And Microsoft. And a few hundred other large corporations.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/20/google-spends-1-38-million-on-lobbying-in-q1-up-57-percent-from-last-year/
Apparently this is legal, so why should I care? It's not as if the government is going to do better things with that money than Google is.
One of the things they could do is fund their operations, rather than borrowing from overseas with substantial interest penalties for me and my children to pay. Trot this argument out again when the government stops doing that --- then we can talk about whether the government needs that money.
Who's "they"? And, assuming you're referring to google, how are they shafting you?
It's not your money.
They're shafting you if you're a much smaller corporation or an individual that can't afford these tax dodges. Then you're bearing a disproportionately large share of the tax burden. And no, getting rid of corporate income taxes doesn't make this better, it makes it worse.
I suggest you overstate your case. Its not like you can log into a voting machine on the internet in every precinct.
The thing about voting machines is that if tampering can occur, than it can easily occur on a nationwide basis. Either it can be conducted by tampering with the code at the factory, or it can be done via malicious software updates. In some cases it may occur via a phone line (when I worked on an election involving Sequoia machines, totals were delivered via telephone).
To offer a less overstated case, there's still a big difference between tampering that requires a gaggle of local, corrupt officials, and tampering that can be conducted by a small number of incognito "voters" who simply insert malicious smartcards into voting machines at a given precinct.
Even manual counting with 5 sets of eyes on every ballot would not protect against this kind of corruption in a tight election.
Yes, but at least it would limit the corruption to areas that are actually, you know, corrupt--- widespread electronic voting makes it possible to tamper with every single precinct in the country.
News Corp owns several satellite providers as well as shares of other ISPs. Their strategy is very heavy on owning broadband. Google it if you will. Comcast owns big, national content providers (NBC). Of course all of this is completely irrelevant to the point I made, but here it is since you asked.
I could care less what you do with your Apache servers, but once you start using copyright law to selectively fart around with who distributes your content, there are public interest issues at stake. You may be in favor of allowing large copyright holders to do whatever the fuck they want with their content (no matter how discriminatory to businesses and customers), but I'm not. We don't really disagree about how networks should just operate, just that there's more to it.
Don't be fooled by the apparent dissimilarity of the two problems. At a fundamental level they're very much related. You have large, entrenched organizations that own content and, in some cases run broadband networks -- facing off against large entrenched organizations that own broadband networks and, in some cases, produce content. The two nearly identical sides are running an experiment, trying to use their market power to try to force each other into favorable business terms.
In both cases the customers are being treated like an asset to be sold, or held hostage, while the corporations use them as a bargaining chip in their real business decisions. Sure, the negotiations can go either direction, but eventually it's the smaller players who are going to get locked out of the game.
In fact, this kind of thing is directly related to the net neutrality argument, because it presents a terrific counterargument for the ISPs. If the ISPs are required to be neutral, but the content providers aren't, then we're essentially going to take away one of the ISPs only weapons in what is really a two-sided business war. I don't love this argument, but I believe it could be persuasive.
At very least you need to understand this as one skirmish in a much broader conflict.
Both sides are right. But what nobody seems to be asking is: Why are important projects now unaffordable? Decades ago, when the federal and state governments were much smaller, they had the means to undertake gigantic new projects, like the Interstate Highway System and the space program. But now, when governments are bigger, they don't.
Answer: they weren't that much less expensive. Adjusted for inflation, the Lincoln Tunnel cost roughly 1/3 of the proposed budget for the Jersey Tunnel, and that tunnel is substantially longer and more complex (much of the cost comes from a huge terminus which has to be buried underneath the existing subway and skyscraper foundations near Herald Square in NYC.) And the Lincoln Tunnel diggers suffered appalling working conditions, with many dying in the process. And please don't get me started on the cost of the Interstate Highways.
We did this stuff back then because we were more willing to commit funds to obviously-necessary infrastructure projects: in the 1930s New York clearly needed another tunnel, so the money was found and it was done. Part of the problem is that nowadays the problems are much more complex. Most people don't really understand transportation planning, so they don't fully understand why NY/NJ need to dramatically increase their rail capacity in the coming years (but if you want a hint, go take an NJ transit train from Summit to Penn Station at rush hour and try to find a place to sit, hell try to find a place to stand.)
The more important problem is the poisonous strain of thought (evidenced by the David Brooks article you cite) that turns every wonky infrastructure project into some stupid fucking unproductive political argument. Does David Brooks think that reducing public sector benefits would make this tunnel affordable? He probably has no clue (in fact, it will have only a tiny impact). But instead of engaging with the much more complex cost/benefit analysis for this tunnel project --- which he is absolutely unqualified to conduct --- he gets to write stupid, facile articles blaming it on his favorite ideological boogeyman. And people cheer.
Then twenty years later they wonder why it takes three hours to get from Summit to midtown Manhattan.
Seems to me that plenty of countries (including the US) manufacture weapons for use and for distribution to other countries. Thing is, you're not at war most of the time, and you're almost never at war with everyone.
This is the approach being taken by the Chevy Volt, which isn't on sale yet but seems far more likely to see widespread adoption than the Aptera (based on marketing budgets and so on).
Somehow we need to put a stop to this practice of appointing "Czars". Anyone who can't pass muster with the Senate shouldn't be calling shots in the Executive Branch.
That's precisely what we need, even more dependence on the totally fucking broken US Senate. Right now there are record numbers of Presidential appointees in limbo, not getting debated, not getting a confirmation vote, not getting anything. These people aren't controversial, nobody thinks they'll do a bad job or that they're even partisan. Most of 'em will eventually get confirmed someday. It's just that right now some politicians in the Senate think it's more valuable to slow this process down to score electoral points. It's not like we need people managing the OMB or the Fed or any of that shit. It basically runs itself, right?
Now, if you're a politician this is all in a day's work. I mean, I get it. They get something out of this, it's a power game. But for an outsider to say "hey, let's throw some more of our critical government functions into this crazy broken process, that'd be a good idea", that's just fucking ludicrous. While we're up to stupid things, why don't we solve our nuclear waste problem by burying it in school playgrounds? These ideas are of roughly the same intellectual caliber.
And don't get me started on this Czars nonsense, where every remaining position the President does have the power to appoint is suddenly referred to as a "czar" (even if that term is nowhere in the title) and we're all supposed to be outraged that the President is appointing people to do the fucking job of running the government like we expect him to.