How long do you think it will be before one gets made with our number on it, intentionally, or not?
Thatâ(TM)s not possible for humans. This works by releasing males with a special mutation (gene drive). Whenever they mate, they will produce offspring with the same mutation even if the mother doesnâ(TM)t carry it. If the offspring are male, they will pass it further down the line. If female, they will be unable to bite or reproduce.
So with each generation, the mutation spreads in the population - any mosquito descended from any of the released ones will have it. After enough generations, every mosquito will have it, because they will have a mutated mosquito somewhere in their family tree. Then they will go extinct. Unless of course someone gets a new mutation that counters this, and then that line survives and takes over instead...
It would be hard to do this with humans because you would need to create and release a bunch of mutants who could produce viable male offspring but unviable female (or vice versa). Thatâ(TM)s hard enough to do without being discovered and stopped, but then youâ(TM)d have to wait enough generations for the mutation to spread through the whole gene pool - maybe 27 if you started with an initial population of 100 and doubled each generation. Meanwhile people would be freaking out and demanding genetic tests before having kids, which would probably shit the mutants out of the gene pool pretty quickly.
Sorry, should have said "increasing returns to scale" instead of "economies of scale." But the basic idea is, it's very hard and may not even be a good idea to build a new (phone, electricity, water, social?) network once an incumbent has already done it.
This problem is more complex than it looks. If they split Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apart from each other, it may help with privacy and user choice a little. There may be less trading of information between affiliates and/or less requirement to sign up with one service to make use of another. But each of these companies will still be quasi-monopolies in their respective areas. The same goes for Google.
This may be inevitable -- anytime there are economies of scale in a market, you can get a natural monopoly, where no one can afford to compete with the incumbent firm(s). It cost a lot of money to build Google's search database Facebook's user network. It's nearly impossible for anyone else to come into those niches and compete with them. And do you even really want them too? How many people just use Google because it's good enough (extremely good really, compared to what came before), or Facebook because that's where their friends are?
The traditional answer to natural monopolies is regulation or government ownership. Regulation consists of the "utility compact" -- give the company a guaranteed monopoly, but regulate the prices they charge and the type of service they provide (e.g., require universal access). That's a no-brainer when dealing with essential services -- landline phones, electricity, water, bus service, and maybe Internet access (I would argue that this was the issue at the heart of network neutrality -- are ISPs common carriers or optional products?).
But does the idea of natural monopoly apply to "non-essential" services like Facebook and Google? Or maybe the cost of these services is just so low that we can ignore the inefficiency of having multiple providers in favor of innovation (e.g., people can signup for both WhatsApp and Skype, so what's the problem)? My instinct is that big tech companies may be edging into a gray area. Clearly people have alternatives to these companies, but on the other hand, due to their incumbent status, these companies have a huge advantage and are de facto the default provider for these services, a position they can abuse. We don't regulate electric utilities because they would cutoff service if we didn't; we regulate them so they can't abuse their dominant position. Should the same apply to big tech? I'd lean toward "probably not" at this point, but it's interesting to think about.
I should ignore your question since it starts with a nice bomb of racism.
But the basic answer is, people work jobs making things, get paid for those jobs, then spend the money buying things. Then other people get hired to make the things they buy, and the economy and employment grow. Or if they're entrepreneurially minded (many U.S. immigrants are), they may form a successful business and begin hiring other people themselves.
This works even if they are illiterate or are born in a country you're afraid to visit.
You do know that immigrants create jobs as well as occupying them, right?
Also, who will retrain the employees and enforce shorter workweeks without some kind of communist/socialist intervention? Most companies I know don't want to spend money on retraining, and want employees to work as many hours as possible, presumably so they don't have to pay benefits to additional employees. They may also resent paying a living wage for 30 hours of work instead of 50. So they might need some strong-arming to go along with your plan.
Unless banks deal with the performance issues that AI will cause for ultra-large databases, they will not be able to take the money gained by eliminating positions and spend it on the new services and products they will need in order to stay competitive. . . . Intensive hardware upgrades are often cited as an answer to the problem, but D'Arezzo said that's prohibitively expensive
So banks will switch to AI for all the savings, but there won't be any savings? Then why switch to AI? And if there are savings from switching to AI, then what's the problem? What is this actually saying?
Maybe I can setup an AI that can post AI articles: "Most jobs in the ----- sector will be eliminated in the next 10 years according to AI experts. Companies in the ----- sector must be ready to innovate or they will get left behind. Workers will also need to retrain or be left in the lurch."
Because of Net Neutrality Laws, now Comcast has to shoulder the increased cost of all that traffic without being able to charge.
I don't get this. Doesn't Comcast already charge their customers for the bandwidth they use? Why should they be allowed to go shakedown the companies that their customers happen to access? Isn't it just Comcast's job to carry traffic from the edge of their network to their customers, at prices agreed with their customers? Why should they be able to discriminate based on where the traffic originated, and use that to extort money from the sources?
From 2004 to 2013 they migrated 15000 staff to Linux. That means that today the Windows apps they used should be at least 13 years old (probably more, and maybe a lot more).
You miss the point here -- they are probably going to the city-management, traffic-management and building-management conventions and looking at the specialized software that all their peers are using, and saying "wow, that's cool, why can't we use it?" And the answer is -- those are only written for Windows, because that's what all the other cities use.
There's a whole world of small-market software packages for every industry. Each organization is too small to justify custom software, but their needs are complex and homogenous enough to create a market for a few hundred copies of some package. Those packages may be migrating to a web-services approach, but any of them that have a desktop executable will be Windows-only; the Mac and Linux markets aren't big enough to justify a cross-platform solution. So if you insist on Linux everywhere, you will have to invest a lot of effort "making do," and you will probably still fall behind your peers.
Would a human driver stop right behind a bigger truck and blame the truck when blo
I think what I described is pretty much what a good human driver would do if a truck stopped in front of them and began to back up: stop, look for a way to go around the truck, otherwise honk to let the truck know you're there and backup if possible. But this is a rare situation, so it's just the kind of thing that should be observed in real-world tests and then "taught" to the vehicle to improve its future performance.
Of course a human driver has real intelligence, so in principle they could adapt to this type of situation the first time they saw it. But there are plenty of drivers who would do exactly what this shuttle did the first time they encountered this type of situation.
From the original article: "Police determined that the shuttle came to a stop when it sensed the truck was trying to back up. The truck, however continued to back up until its tires touched the front of the shuttle. The truck’s driver was cited for illegal backing."
So I guess they need to teach the self-driving vehicles to honk their horn and to back up when someone is backing into them. Seem like reasonable things to learn in a pilot test.
most people want to play games, browse the web, do their email and watch NetFlix.
Oh, you need programming languages? A database? Source code control? Then yes, you should start looking at Linux.
I have to say, this is actually a pretty strong argument for a Mac. It has a corporate backer who maintains enough consistency (and market share) to get a lot of the commercial software (Netflix, MS Office, Adobe software, etc.), it has some nice touches that improve on Windows and/or Linux (drag anchors in the title bars, select and scroll in terminal windows just like a word processor, top-notch rendering of PDFs and UI elements, "it just works" support for hardware, a boot process that never fails) and it is also based on BSD, so you get all the open-source Unix/Linux packages. You have to put up with a "closed-source" mentality for the OS itself and high hardware costs (though amazingly durable), but it's a very productive environment.
I think you have it about right there. An EV has somewhat higher greenhouse gas emissions than a hybrid vehicle if the electricity comes from coal. But it could reduce in-city pollutants. On the other hand, coal plants have serious problems with mercury, NOx and SOx (less so for new plant designs, but those are also more expensive), and modern cars are pretty low-emitting (although they apparently remain the main source of smog in LA).
Electric vehicles (or hydrogen vehicles if you're into that) don't make much sense if you run them off of coal, but they make a lot of sense if you charge them with wind or solar power. There is no other way to drive a car without emitting lots of greenhouse gases, gobbling up lots of scarce farmland (i.e., chopping down forests), or using up the surprisingly scarce supply of uranium.
I did not say that the government should be counting all unemployed people in their economic statistics for employment. I suggested the world "underemployed" because that most closely matches the purpose for the statistic
Sorry, I should have read more closely beyond the first couple of lines of your comment. I would note that the thread of your argument is a little unclear. You start by saying the dictionary definitions of unemployment don't exclude people who are retired or don't want to work. (I would argue that people are not "available" for unemployment if they don't want/need paid work, but I don't think we'll get anywhere in that discussion.) You then argue that it's not helpful to count people who are no longer seeking work (I would narrow that to people who no longer want work), when deciding how hard to push for job creation. OK, fine so far, and that's the part I should have caught the first time.
But then you say, "It's also silly (or dishonest) to hide them by using the word "unemployed" incorrectly." In this sentence, as far as I can tell, "them" must refer to the subject of the post and the previous sentence: "housespouses, retired, or those who are no longer seeking employment". But then you go on to act as if these people are "'underemployed'. People who are employed less than they want to be." I would say that is really a separate issue.
Anyway, I think I'm getting too deep into semantics. I think we would probably agree that everyone who wants work but doesn't have it or doesn't have as much as they want, should be counted in the national statistics. I think we would disagree about whether the people who don't want work should be called "unemployed" (I say no). And I think we would agree that it would be helpful to report and act on the "underemployed" statistic. All of those are included in the U-5 statistic that Godrik mentioned - thus my support for his post.
No, his argument is spot on. Other people in this thread are saying things like, "The common definition of 'unemployed' is 'not employed'.... The 'weird ideology' here is called "the English language'." That pretty closely matches the spirit of the original article [summary], which said that unemployment statistics should include everyone who is not currently in a job, including "people who are taking time off... or work at home to look after their family."
The grandparent provided an enlightened discussion of why the current approach to unemployment statistics makes more sense than the original article, and pointed out that there are many useful ways to count unemployment. In that context, your response made no sense at all. You seem to be saying, "the current system would count you correctly, so you shouldn't defend the current system."
Software brings people in, and then change drives them away. It seems so easy to solve, since change only drives upgrades and not new users, and over time software becomes more portable.
I do wonder why none of the big software companies make their packages available for Linux. Microsoft and Adobe sell their products for Mac, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch to make them for Linux. (I know, Microsoft may be doing the bare minimum to avoid anti-trust issues.) But there are a lot of business packages that are Windows-only. Maybe over time, as Windows fades out, more developers will take cross-platform development seriously.
I'm on a Mac, partly because I like some of the interface choices they made (clean, light PDF reader; drag-and-drop from window titles to e-mail; fairly intuitive file browser; and a terminal app that selects and pastes text like a word processor, without having to switch to a copy/paste mode), partly because I can use Adobe/MS software when I need to, and partly because it has a Unix subsystem with lots of nice software available. If there were more commercial software available for Linux, it could occupy that niche pretty easily.
MS screwed up big time when it abandoned the most popular, most well- liked OS in their entire history to go a completely different direction.
Wasn't that what people said when they went from MS-DOS to Windows? Or Windows 3.11 to Windows 95? Windows 98 to Windows 2000? Windows XP to Vista? Windows 7 to Windows 8?
You can only fight the future for so long, but sometimes it works out OK anyway.
Ooh, does this mean House Republicans will start reading the science now? And having confidence in the EPA decision-making process? Yay for transparency!
people seem to forget how hard it was to get software before the internet, especially if you were a kid with no money
I agree, and this goes double for hardware. I grew up with minimal access to computers at home or school. When I stayed with relatives over holidays, I'd spend every possible minute on their computer, but then most of the year I had no access to any computer, let alone any manuals or software. I contented myself with books from the local library, but in 1984 (when I was 13) there wasn't much available. I learned 8080 architecture and machine language, and ANSI C, by reading about them in books, but I didn't have any hardware to try them out on. I would have gotten a lot further, faster, if I'd had the kind of ubiquitous computing hardware, software and documentation that kids have today!
You may not have been able to "stomach voting for Clinton" because of her stands on trade and banking regulation. But I think she could have won easily without all this innuendo, including your language about how "the DNC was so hell-bent on making sure that Hillary was the nominee". She never did anything worth bringing charges over or even really dwelling on (as evidenced by all the investigations and leaks), and she genuinely cares about families, education, raising people out of poverty. People voted against a story, not the real candidate. It would have been thrilling to have a real debate about trade and banking policy, but this campaign got nowhere near that.
What exactly did the DNC do to "mak[e] sure that Hillary was the nominee"? In the end, Democratic voters chose her as their candidate in a series of fair elections. What really sunk her was all this innuendo. If someone is repeatedly accused of misdeeds, but in-depth investigations and leaks never reveal any serious wrongdoing, is she a guilty schemer or the victim of a witch hunt?
Solar power is now cheaper than coal in good locations, and aluminum smelting is an interruptible process (smelters often buy interruptible power to get a better deal), so there's no need for any kind of backup. Solar power and aluminum smelting are a match made in heaven.
Funny, I read that as "somewhere where the environment can't reach you," which would be a fair critique of a robot supply chain on Earth. It's probably easier for robots to setup and maintain solar panels on the moon than to setup wind and solar arrays on earth, where they have to worry about wind loads, mud, corrosion, baby deer running into them, etc. But I don't know if that counterbalances the difficulty of getting started on the moon.
I left ethics as a leading question, because I think it's actually an interesting one. We tend to worry when people start messing up places where there's life or where people might see the view. Can we ignore those concerns in the Sahara Desert? On the moon? In the asteroid belt?
About half of the Earth's land is virtually uninhabited, which means nearly free land; and most of that land has good access to "free" energy (wind and solar power). So why would we have to go to the moon to setup an exponentially growing robot-run supply-chain? Is it ethically better to make rocket fuel and metals on the moon than in Antarctica or the Sahara Desert or northern Canada?
Slashdot Mirror
How long do you think it will be before one gets made with our number on it, intentionally, or not?
Thatâ(TM)s not possible for humans. This works by releasing males with a special mutation (gene drive). Whenever they mate, they will produce offspring with the same mutation even if the mother doesnâ(TM)t carry it. If the offspring are male, they will pass it further down the line. If female, they will be unable to bite or reproduce.
So with each generation, the mutation spreads in the population - any mosquito descended from any of the released ones will have it. After enough generations, every mosquito will have it, because they will have a mutated mosquito somewhere in their family tree. Then they will go extinct. Unless of course someone gets a new mutation that counters this, and then that line survives and takes over instead...
It would be hard to do this with humans because you would need to create and release a bunch of mutants who could produce viable male offspring but unviable female (or vice versa). Thatâ(TM)s hard enough to do without being discovered and stopped, but then youâ(TM)d have to wait enough generations for the mutation to spread through the whole gene pool - maybe 27 if you started with an initial population of 100 and doubled each generation. Meanwhile people would be freaking out and demanding genetic tests before having kids, which would probably shit the mutants out of the gene pool pretty quickly.
Sorry, should have said "increasing returns to scale" instead of "economies of scale." But the basic idea is, it's very hard and may not even be a good idea to build a new (phone, electricity, water, social?) network once an incumbent has already done it.
This problem is more complex than it looks. If they split Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apart from each other, it may help with privacy and user choice a little. There may be less trading of information between affiliates and/or less requirement to sign up with one service to make use of another. But each of these companies will still be quasi-monopolies in their respective areas. The same goes for Google.
This may be inevitable -- anytime there are economies of scale in a market, you can get a natural monopoly, where no one can afford to compete with the incumbent firm(s). It cost a lot of money to build Google's search database Facebook's user network. It's nearly impossible for anyone else to come into those niches and compete with them. And do you even really want them too? How many people just use Google because it's good enough (extremely good really, compared to what came before), or Facebook because that's where their friends are?
The traditional answer to natural monopolies is regulation or government ownership. Regulation consists of the "utility compact" -- give the company a guaranteed monopoly, but regulate the prices they charge and the type of service they provide (e.g., require universal access). That's a no-brainer when dealing with essential services -- landline phones, electricity, water, bus service, and maybe Internet access (I would argue that this was the issue at the heart of network neutrality -- are ISPs common carriers or optional products?).
But does the idea of natural monopoly apply to "non-essential" services like Facebook and Google? Or maybe the cost of these services is just so low that we can ignore the inefficiency of having multiple providers in favor of innovation (e.g., people can signup for both WhatsApp and Skype, so what's the problem)? My instinct is that big tech companies may be edging into a gray area. Clearly people have alternatives to these companies, but on the other hand, due to their incumbent status, these companies have a huge advantage and are de facto the default provider for these services, a position they can abuse. We don't regulate electric utilities because they would cutoff service if we didn't; we regulate them so they can't abuse their dominant position. Should the same apply to big tech? I'd lean toward "probably not" at this point, but it's interesting to think about.
I should ignore your question since it starts with a nice bomb of racism.
But the basic answer is, people work jobs making things, get paid for those jobs, then spend the money buying things. Then other people get hired to make the things they buy, and the economy and employment grow. Or if they're entrepreneurially minded (many U.S. immigrants are), they may form a successful business and begin hiring other people themselves.
This works even if they are illiterate or are born in a country you're afraid to visit.
You do know that immigrants create jobs as well as occupying them, right?
Also, who will retrain the employees and enforce shorter workweeks without some kind of communist/socialist intervention? Most companies I know don't want to spend money on retraining, and want employees to work as many hours as possible, presumably so they don't have to pay benefits to additional employees. They may also resent paying a living wage for 30 hours of work instead of 50. So they might need some strong-arming to go along with your plan.
Unless banks deal with the performance issues that AI will cause for ultra-large databases, they will not be able to take the money gained by eliminating positions and spend it on the new services and products they will need in order to stay competitive. . . . Intensive hardware upgrades are often cited as an answer to the problem, but D'Arezzo said that's prohibitively expensive
So banks will switch to AI for all the savings, but there won't be any savings? Then why switch to AI? And if there are savings from switching to AI, then what's the problem? What is this actually saying?
Maybe I can setup an AI that can post AI articles: "Most jobs in the ----- sector will be eliminated in the next 10 years according to AI experts. Companies in the ----- sector must be ready to innovate or they will get left behind. Workers will also need to retrain or be left in the lurch."
Because of Net Neutrality Laws, now Comcast has to shoulder the increased cost of all that traffic without being able to charge.
I don't get this. Doesn't Comcast already charge their customers for the bandwidth they use? Why should they be allowed to go shakedown the companies that their customers happen to access? Isn't it just Comcast's job to carry traffic from the edge of their network to their customers, at prices agreed with their customers? Why should they be able to discriminate based on where the traffic originated, and use that to extort money from the sources?
From 2004 to 2013 they migrated 15000 staff to Linux. That means that today the Windows apps they used should be at least 13 years old (probably more, and maybe a lot more).
You miss the point here -- they are probably going to the city-management, traffic-management and building-management conventions and looking at the specialized software that all their peers are using, and saying "wow, that's cool, why can't we use it?" And the answer is -- those are only written for Windows, because that's what all the other cities use.
There's a whole world of small-market software packages for every industry. Each organization is too small to justify custom software, but their needs are complex and homogenous enough to create a market for a few hundred copies of some package. Those packages may be migrating to a web-services approach, but any of them that have a desktop executable will be Windows-only; the Mac and Linux markets aren't big enough to justify a cross-platform solution. So if you insist on Linux everywhere, you will have to invest a lot of effort "making do," and you will probably still fall behind your peers.
Would a human driver stop right behind a bigger truck and blame the truck when blo
I think what I described is pretty much what a good human driver would do if a truck stopped in front of them and began to back up: stop, look for a way to go around the truck, otherwise honk to let the truck know you're there and backup if possible. But this is a rare situation, so it's just the kind of thing that should be observed in real-world tests and then "taught" to the vehicle to improve its future performance.
Of course a human driver has real intelligence, so in principle they could adapt to this type of situation the first time they saw it. But there are plenty of drivers who would do exactly what this shuttle did the first time they encountered this type of situation.
From the original article: "Police determined that the shuttle came to a stop when it sensed the truck was trying to back up. The truck, however continued to back up until its tires touched the front of the shuttle. The truck’s driver was cited for illegal backing."
So I guess they need to teach the self-driving vehicles to honk their horn and to back up when someone is backing into them. Seem like reasonable things to learn in a pilot test.
most people want to play games, browse the web, do their email and watch NetFlix.
Oh, you need programming languages? A database? Source code control? Then yes, you should start looking at Linux.
I have to say, this is actually a pretty strong argument for a Mac. It has a corporate backer who maintains enough consistency (and market share) to get a lot of the commercial software (Netflix, MS Office, Adobe software, etc.), it has some nice touches that improve on Windows and/or Linux (drag anchors in the title bars, select and scroll in terminal windows just like a word processor, top-notch rendering of PDFs and UI elements, "it just works" support for hardware, a boot process that never fails) and it is also based on BSD, so you get all the open-source Unix/Linux packages. You have to put up with a "closed-source" mentality for the OS itself and high hardware costs (though amazingly durable), but it's a very productive environment.
I think you have it about right there. An EV has somewhat higher greenhouse gas emissions than a hybrid vehicle if the electricity comes from coal. But it could reduce in-city pollutants. On the other hand, coal plants have serious problems with mercury, NOx and SOx (less so for new plant designs, but those are also more expensive), and modern cars are pretty low-emitting (although they apparently remain the main source of smog in LA).
Ooh, ooh, what if you actually did some research instead of just making stuff up?
Energy payback for solar panels is 1-4 years: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04...
Energy payback for wind turbines is 5-8 months: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...
Electric vehicles (or hydrogen vehicles if you're into that) don't make much sense if you run them off of coal, but they make a lot of sense if you charge them with wind or solar power. There is no other way to drive a car without emitting lots of greenhouse gases, gobbling up lots of scarce farmland (i.e., chopping down forests), or using up the surprisingly scarce supply of uranium.
I did not say that the government should be counting all unemployed people in their economic statistics for employment. I suggested the world "underemployed" because that most closely matches the purpose for the statistic
Sorry, I should have read more closely beyond the first couple of lines of your comment. I would note that the thread of your argument is a little unclear. You start by saying the dictionary definitions of unemployment don't exclude people who are retired or don't want to work. (I would argue that people are not "available" for unemployment if they don't want/need paid work, but I don't think we'll get anywhere in that discussion.) You then argue that it's not helpful to count people who are no longer seeking work (I would narrow that to people who no longer want work), when deciding how hard to push for job creation. OK, fine so far, and that's the part I should have caught the first time.
But then you say, "It's also silly (or dishonest) to hide them by using the word "unemployed" incorrectly." In this sentence, as far as I can tell, "them" must refer to the subject of the post and the previous sentence: "housespouses, retired, or those who are no longer seeking employment". But then you go on to act as if these people are "'underemployed'. People who are employed less than they want to be." I would say that is really a separate issue.
Anyway, I think I'm getting too deep into semantics. I think we would probably agree that everyone who wants work but doesn't have it or doesn't have as much as they want, should be counted in the national statistics. I think we would disagree about whether the people who don't want work should be called "unemployed" (I say no). And I think we would agree that it would be helpful to report and act on the "underemployed" statistic. All of those are included in the U-5 statistic that Godrik mentioned - thus my support for his post.
No, his argument is spot on. Other people in this thread are saying things like, "The common definition of 'unemployed' is 'not employed'.... The 'weird ideology' here is called "the English language'." That pretty closely matches the spirit of the original article [summary], which said that unemployment statistics should include everyone who is not currently in a job, including "people who are taking time off ... or work at home to look after their family."
The grandparent provided an enlightened discussion of why the current approach to unemployment statistics makes more sense than the original article, and pointed out that there are many useful ways to count unemployment. In that context, your response made no sense at all. You seem to be saying, "the current system would count you correctly, so you shouldn't defend the current system."
Software brings people in, and then change drives them away. It seems so easy to solve, since change only drives upgrades and not new users, and over time software becomes more portable.
I do wonder why none of the big software companies make their packages available for Linux. Microsoft and Adobe sell their products for Mac, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch to make them for Linux. (I know, Microsoft may be doing the bare minimum to avoid anti-trust issues.) But there are a lot of business packages that are Windows-only. Maybe over time, as Windows fades out, more developers will take cross-platform development seriously.
I'm on a Mac, partly because I like some of the interface choices they made (clean, light PDF reader; drag-and-drop from window titles to e-mail; fairly intuitive file browser; and a terminal app that selects and pastes text like a word processor, without having to switch to a copy/paste mode), partly because I can use Adobe/MS software when I need to, and partly because it has a Unix subsystem with lots of nice software available. If there were more commercial software available for Linux, it could occupy that niche pretty easily.
MS screwed up big time when it abandoned the most popular, most well- liked OS in their entire history to go a completely different direction.
Wasn't that what people said when they went from MS-DOS to Windows? Or Windows 3.11 to Windows 95? Windows 98 to Windows 2000? Windows XP to Vista? Windows 7 to Windows 8?
You can only fight the future for so long, but sometimes it works out OK anyway.
Ooh, does this mean House Republicans will start reading the science now? And having confidence in the EPA decision-making process? Yay for transparency!
people seem to forget how hard it was to get software before the internet, especially if you were a kid with no money
I agree, and this goes double for hardware. I grew up with minimal access to computers at home or school. When I stayed with relatives over holidays, I'd spend every possible minute on their computer, but then most of the year I had no access to any computer, let alone any manuals or software. I contented myself with books from the local library, but in 1984 (when I was 13) there wasn't much available. I learned 8080 architecture and machine language, and ANSI C, by reading about them in books, but I didn't have any hardware to try them out on. I would have gotten a lot further, faster, if I'd had the kind of ubiquitous computing hardware, software and documentation that kids have today!
You may not have been able to "stomach voting for Clinton" because of her stands on trade and banking regulation. But I think she could have won easily without all this innuendo, including your language about how "the DNC was so hell-bent on making sure that Hillary was the nominee". She never did anything worth bringing charges over or even really dwelling on (as evidenced by all the investigations and leaks), and she genuinely cares about families, education, raising people out of poverty. People voted against a story, not the real candidate. It would have been thrilling to have a real debate about trade and banking policy, but this campaign got nowhere near that.
What exactly did the DNC do to "mak[e] sure that Hillary was the nominee"? In the end, Democratic voters chose her as their candidate in a series of fair elections. What really sunk her was all this innuendo. If someone is repeatedly accused of misdeeds, but in-depth investigations and leaks never reveal any serious wrongdoing, is she a guilty schemer or the victim of a witch hunt?
I'll be happy if he: ...
3. Puts 10,000 troops spread across a 2000 mile border until Mexico decides to build a wall.
Why, to stop undocumented workers from going home? You do realize more unauthorized immigrants have left the U.S. than entered it since 2007, right?
http://www.pewresearch.org/fac...
Solar power is now cheaper than coal in good locations, and aluminum smelting is an interruptible process (smelters often buy interruptible power to get a better deal), so there's no need for any kind of backup. Solar power and aluminum smelting are a match made in heaven.
Funny, I read that as "somewhere where the environment can't reach you," which would be a fair critique of a robot supply chain on Earth. It's probably easier for robots to setup and maintain solar panels on the moon than to setup wind and solar arrays on earth, where they have to worry about wind loads, mud, corrosion, baby deer running into them, etc. But I don't know if that counterbalances the difficulty of getting started on the moon.
I left ethics as a leading question, because I think it's actually an interesting one. We tend to worry when people start messing up places where there's life or where people might see the view. Can we ignore those concerns in the Sahara Desert? On the moon? In the asteroid belt?
About half of the Earth's land is virtually uninhabited, which means nearly free land; and most of that land has good access to "free" energy (wind and solar power). So why would we have to go to the moon to setup an exponentially growing robot-run supply-chain? Is it ethically better to make rocket fuel and metals on the moon than in Antarctica or the Sahara Desert or northern Canada?