"When society realizes that there is an unmet need for a particular set of skills, people rush/train to meet the need."
Not really. There has been a shortage of doctors for decades and it isn't likely to get better. Not everyone is going to rush and train to become a doctor.
My younger sister became a doctor. She's amazing. When she was embarking on that route, I held my tongue, because, honestly, medical doctors get a ton of shit in the US. The insurance companies make them jump through hoops, and then patients come in and lie or whine or otherwise make their lives hell, and they're in the middle trying to do good work.
The basic problem is that anyone who can be a medical doctor worth having could also be any of a number of other high-paying jobs with lower expectations.
A lot of the solutions seem to involve giving Amazon drivers access to your home (shudder), or a heavy metal dropbox with keys and the like... I find myself wondering if you'd solve 90% or more of the problem by simply having a box to dump things in without any sort of smarts or security. These people come by and see a package, and then are in-and-out quickly. They presumably aren't as interested in walking up and digging around on your porch three times a day just in case there's a package.
Of course, delivery people ain't got time to put a package in a box, so most likely they'd just leave the package on top of or in front of the box.
Well, then Apple shouldn't be giving them an easy payday by being accurate about what they claim. It's really simple.
I can't wait until all the spec sheets list everything with three digits right of the decimal point, plus a complete accounting of their measurement methodology. All the readers will be so smart and enlightened!
Or maybe someday if someone cares about the difference between 5.6875 inches and 5.8 inches when measured along a very specific vector, they'll take responsibility for their own lives and just go measure the damned thing before buying it.
In my experience, swears in comments are like swears in real life - usually 90% of the f-bombs in a given group are one or two people. It's not that the other people are so prim and proper that they won't swear, it's that they only swear when it's called for. But there'll be that one person who has to whip out fuck for as an adjective for every minor ailment in their life.
[Of course, it's different in groups where 90% of the sentences spoken contain a swear word. I haven't often been in such groups since I left the farm.]
They're like a person who's not sorry for the thing they did, they're sorry that you were offended by what they did. It's not so much that they intentionally offended you, they just don't personally see the problem, and so aren't willing to pay any consequences to fix it. Keep in mind that they likely have immediate metrics to hand for how many reduced views and shares they'll receive. Even though they likely have no metric for "does that even matter?", it's still harder to argue for doing the right thing when you can see the specific benefit you're giving up. And their entire business is geared towards improving those engagement metrics.
Think of a corporation as a giant artificial intelligence running the business using machine learning. It has tried a bunch of different actions, and has a good idea of which actions cause which outcomes. But it has no human-level comprehension or feelings. As corporations increase their scope of activity, even the humans within have troubles identifying with the consequences of their actions. A local banker maybe feels bad about foreclosing on a neighbor, a back-office bank worker in New York feels less bad about foreclosing on 100 random people across the country because it gets routine, and a programmer at a credit bureau likely never even considers that a decision they're implementing will prevent a million people from ever getting a house.
So, yes, keep the heat on Facebook, but don't expect Facebook to make subtle changes quickly. We have to keep training them.
Research doesn't contribute to design of most current workspaces, why should research contribute to the design of future workspaces?
These articles are a thin veneer of journalism shilling for the facilities teams at places like Google. Don't tell me about all the amazing point-in-space experiments they are doing with bamboo healing walls and shit - tell me what the average worker actually experiences in an average hour of their day. A green wall is better than a concrete wall, but if there's a single 20-foot length of green wall in a 100,000 sq ft office building filled with desks placed so closely that you can touch your neighbor's shoulder without leaning over, that isn't going to magically fix the problems you're causing.
[In the time I worked at Google, watching them ratchet your personal space down by a half foot or so every year while signing "synergy!" was one of the most demoralizing things. Don't get me wrong, I liked almost everyone I worked with, I just didn't want to be continuously sharing their personal space.]
Based on the history of "work place revolutions", the new hotness will be standing workstations on airport tarmacs. Because "collaboration!" and "synergy!".
I'm not sure why this is marked "Funny". I guess it's not "Insightful", but we've known about a bunch of bad things to do for DECADES, and right now the leading trend in Silicon Valley is to do EXACTLY those bad things - having companies composed of hotelling spaces at the airport isn't even a joke, it's the script for a tech-oriented "dramedy". We're collaborating so hard we can't stand each other.
In both the first example and the second example are prejudiced against certain groups, the first by not letting them work and the second for not believing any could qualify fairly. Part of the problem is that circumstances leading up to the professional world are imbalanced (our culture, our educational system) and particularly culture is hard to fix balance. Many diversification initiatives at professional levels are forced to ignore the other problems not getting fixed and pretend they are and target balances of the general population when a given niche has the deck stacked a certain way.
The problem is that people are biased jerks. In one circumstance, they are biased against minorities and unwilling to inspect that bias. So you show stats and everything, prove there's an issue, and the command comes down from on high "We need to do better". So now people decide "More minorities is the goal" and become biased in the opposite way and are again unwilling to inspect that bias. In neither case do the majority of people do what you _really_ want them to do, which is to look past the most obvious things about a person and evaluate them for their capabilities for the task at hand. Most people don't do that because it is hard work.
Electron is an app "platform" that basically involves installing an app-private copy of Chromium, a node.js webserver, and running the application's logic mostly in Javascript between the two.
To paraphrase Churchill, Electron is the worst architecture for desktop applications, except for all the other ones that have been tried.
This is bad because it's the developer offloading their problems onto the user. The user can just download the 100M zip file which is a 40-line shell-script wrapper, the user can just easter-egg hunt to figure out the UI, the user can just pull the web platform into their local domain and hope for the best as far as security, etc. Since the app is based on 96 third_party dependencies, the user can also pay the price nine months later when the app stops working because while the OS developers are paying attention to not breaking their exposed APIs too badly, nobody can really maintain that amount of API surface coherently.
Only an investment banker would think like that. If you take the same technological infrastructure, pull it out of one company and shove it into another while distributing the new shareholding pro-rata, why exactly is there an expectation that suddenly this 'huge windfall' of new value has been created?
No new value has been created. If anything there will be higher costs from duplicated overheads. The fact that despite this the claim is probably correct and shareholders will get a big bump if this happens (just like when a company does a share split) is testament to how screwed up the economy's idea of 'value' is right now.
You aren't nearly hard enough on the idea. AWS was born out of the tech needs of amazon.com. So, yes, AWS could spin out and be a successful company, but amazon.com still requires AWS to operate. This kind of thing would be like AMD spinning out its chip-making facilities - it didn't do that by choice, it was forced to because it could no longer keep up. The only way this really makes sense is if someday AWS spins out amazon.com because amazon.com has become a distraction.
IMHO, the only cloud provider which could plausibly spin out of its parent company is Azure.
Amazon.com is a trivial part of AWS. “Every day, AWS adds enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon’s global infrastructure when it was a $7 billion annual revenue enterprise,” said James Hamilton, Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, who described the AWS infrastructure at the Re:Invent conference in 2015.
Amazon.com may be a trivial part of AWS - but AWS is a crucial part of Amazon.com. I think it's plausible that AWS could handle the hit of losing amazon.com as a customer, but amazon.com would take a huge hit to margins if it had to buy infrastructure on the open market.
That said... as others, I doubt amazon.com is a trivial part of AWS.
2) Google seems to be doing the same thing Microsoft did 10-15 years ago - trying to push people into adopt Chrome-optimized web sites and Google-specific coding. I hated it when Microsoft did it, and I hate it now.
The big problem here is that websites can only barely be bothered to test with a single browser, and rolling out standards strong enough to count on is hard hard hard work, so the ground truth is that websites routinely rely on browser-specific behaviour without even knowing it. At the user level, figuring out why a site doesn't work is basically impossible, so you just switch browsers until one works well enough then you stop. Together, these mean that it is extremely hard to have a browser with a rendering engine distinct from the dominant rendering engine.
[ObDisclosure: I was part of the team from before Chrome was released until a couple years ago. I agree that this kind of monoculture is a concern. I just find myself at a loss about what response is effective. Maybe browser makers could work together to build a test/eval suite for site authors to use, but that is a serious amount of work which would fall mainly on the top couple browser makers, which is a hard resource-commitment argument to make.]
Whoever told you either of those two things is an idiot and no one in the mainstream scientific community believes that it will never snow again in those locations. What they probably said (or what the scientists said before twisted by someone somewhere) was, snow will be more rare- but also more extreme when it does occur in those locations.
That came out of the mainstream scientific community, and was promoted by the various government meteorological offices and so forth. In the case of the UK, the MET openly stated that kids wouldn't know what snowfall was by I think it was 2015 or something. It was the same with DC.
Wow, in that case it should be SUPER EASY TO FIND, because they just came right out in the open and said it, right? And it was the government, too, not like you can walk that back.
I can find things like this: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story... which is obviously later than your "2015 or something" statement. I could see someone reading this and thinking "There won't be snow in DC", but that would be a conclusion _they_ had based on reading this. I don't think the article in any way says that, though. Statements like "may drop by as much as 65%, on average" - they're trying hard to just present what their model is telling them without making really concrete predictions, because their model is talking about the next 100 years or something, not the coming winter, and that normal human beings have troubles operating that way.
It will never snow in DC again, then DC is crippled by snow that year. It will never snow in UK again, then the UK is crippled by snow.
Whoever told you either of those two things is an idiot and no one in the mainstream scientific community believes that it will never snow again in those locations.
Then the mainstream scientific community needs to get out there and counter the lies. When they allow the statements to be made, and their own research twisted and do not counter it - then they are just as complicit in the lie.
What should we do, Chinese-style censorship? Mass executions?
I mean, I have never heard the statements like "It will never snow in DC again" except from people arguing against climate change saying that statements like that are excessive. Just like I've never heard my liberal friends declare that we should fight hard against Christmas, but I have relatives and friends who every year fill my Facebook feed with posts about the Liberal War On Christmas.
The fact of the matter is that once someone is resorting to strawman arguments, there's not a lot that the other side can do to dissuade them. Once someone prefers lies to truth, adding more truth really doesn't do much.
[I realize that I'm engaging with an Anonymous Coward who may be a troll plant in the first place. Not sure what one can do about that, either.]
Nuclear is not renewable because once the fuel is spent, it's gone.
Once a gust of air pushes against a windmill, it never does that again. Once a photon hits a solar cell and causes a current, it's gone.
"Renewable" energy is just another way of saying that we're tapping into an energy gradient so big and long-lasting that it is effectively infinite. Nuclear fusion isn't that much different, even if you just stick with deuterium. Running out of deuterium is further away from today than our pre-human ancestors are. Uranium is tougher, with current systems reserves will last a few hundred years, but with alternate designs current reserves of fissile materials could carry us for tens of thousands of years, which is presumably enough time to get some sort of asteroid mining up and running.
No term limits and all the politician cares about is re-election. Trump has spent more time campaigning and golfing than being the President in his first 2 years.
You say that like it's a bad thing. On evidence, I'd prefer him to spend less time being President, but unfortunately the consequence is that it delegates authority to mostly unelected actors.
He's only viewed with rose-colored glasses because the current vulgarian is so awful.
No, there was also some other Republican guy in there, I can't quite remember his name, who had a pretty awful run. I mean, that President didn't himself seem like a bad person, but he was very hands-off and let some very bad people take control of the levers of government.
Bitcoin is a hedge, not an investment. It is a hedge against the total collapse of the US dollar. The only thing necessary for bitcoin to be well accepted is for someone to commit to pricing a good or service of value in bitcoin for a sustained period. Example: Venezuela could sell oil at fixed price in bitcoin. Iran could do the same. Both countries have strong incentives to do this (if they were not blind to the reasons why).
The problem is that both countries do not internally produce the things they would want to purchase with the bitcoin they receive from sales of oil. The things they want to purchase are denominated in dollars. For various reasons the US has placed restrictions at least on Iran about providing them with dollars (Venezuela much less so). To some extent, if Iran were to accept bitcoin for oil, that would be helpful to provide cover for the buyer, but it doesn't really help Iran. In fact, it would probably work like an other black market, where they'd be selling at a discount because they have no choice.
In all likelihood, a total collapse of the US dollar wouldn't result in your neighborhood bitcoin holders rising up to rule. They'd get to enjoy the same general chaos as everyone else, because in such a case there will be a flight to stability, not a sudden urge on the part of merchants and employers and the like to take risks on some new form of money. I could see bitcoin replacing the US dollar for many of the gray-market things out there, though, as it's likely inconvenient to deal with dollars when the transaction is not in the US and neither the buyer nor the seller are likely to ever interact with the US other than using USD for transactions...
Next you'll be telling me that celebrities doing product endorsements aren't genuinely enthusiastic about the products and are just doing it for money.
My faith in the purity of ad content is shaken to the core.
Wait. You mean Catheter Cowboy might not be cathing? That's... so disturbing!
We have a hugely complex system that we don't really nderstand. Some people think that human activity may be influencing that system, although absolutely none of the predictive models we have actually work. So...the answer to a non-understood influence on a non-understood system is: muck with the system some more.
How about we first invest in climate monitoring, and try to understand the whole system? If global warming is such an important issue, why is the number of monitoring stations monotonically decreasing, especially in regions like the Arctic?
So, if you were in a car which was heading towards a concrete wall, and someone said "Hit the brakes!", you'd say "No, first we need to be sure which part of the wall we're going to hit"?
I mean, yes, we don't have 100% precise models for climate change. That doesn't mean we should immediately give up. We don't have 100% precise models of how a commercial airline will fly from LAX to EWR, and yet dozens of planes manage to complete that route each day. Crazy, isn't it? It's almost like we could just work on the biggest emitters up front, and assume that in the future someone will figure out how to deal with the more subtle sources.
In the olden days, you could select from a few different decent keyboards. Lots were cheap crap, but they were at least trying to be legit.
Today, you can go to a big-box electronics store and try out an array of keyboards, everyone one of which is just utter crap to type on, and rearranges the shit out of any key outside the primary alpha and numeric keys. Or, you can go online and trawl a keyboard-fetish forum, but you're going to have to take a risk to order it unless you can find someone local willing to let you try theirs. Meanwhile I'm sitting here with a stash of Microsoft Natural keyboards from 1999 which I snagged off eBay once I realized that the terrible compromise keyboards from laptops had trained people to think that that's just what keyboards were supposed to be like.
WHY DO YOU HAVE TO MESS WITH THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE NAVIGATION KEYS! DAMN. IT. JUST STOP. AND CONTROL BELONGS NEXT TO 'A'.
Opposite here. I have accounts at both a local CU and a local bank. The CU is OK, but the bank is much better. The tellers know me by name (no idea how they do that, I'm only in there once a month or so) and they have free soda, popcorn, and sometimes hot dogs. They pay me interest on my checking account (CU does not) and I have a free safe deposit box at the bank as well. It's really no contest. The only reason I keep the CU account is because I've had it for 30 years.
Wow. My local banks have interest-bearing checking accounts. They pay up to.05% interest, and charge like $18/mo for the privilege. My credit union charges $0/month and pays %.65 interest on checking, and 1.9% on savings (which has transaction restrictions, but is a great backstop for my checking account). When I audited things, the numbers varied, but the banks varied between conning you out of your money versus outright stealing it, and the credit unions varied from weak to reasonably competitive with online-only banks like Ally.
I will note that my experience with credit unions is that sometimes it feels like they are a bunch of amateurs WRT their IT systems, whereas banks feel more professional. Which is to say that the credit union sometimes breaks because Chrome moves too fast for them, whereas the banks break because their website uses ALL the third-party libraries (used to be they broke because they'd loop Flash in so they could force their custom authentication system. Gag). So it is kind of a mixed bag on that front.
I have an online service that sends me texts daily (weather forecasts and alerts), as well as a few other people. At some point my cell company started blocking those texts sent by my system. The others still received them (different cell carriers) but I did not, for a period of a few weeks. Then they started coming through again out of the blue.
No notification, no action on my part to indicate they were spam, no recourse to try and get my server whitelisted, etc. They just went in a black hole. I visited my carrier's website and there was no portal I could find for services to contact the carrier about being blocked.
I bet your carrier provides a portal for commercial senders to submit funds to get their postings cleared for transmission, though.
Slashdot Mirror
"When society realizes that there is an unmet need for a particular set of skills, people rush/train to meet the need."
Not really. There has been a shortage of doctors for decades and it isn't likely to get better. Not everyone is going to rush and train to become a doctor.
My younger sister became a doctor. She's amazing. When she was embarking on that route, I held my tongue, because, honestly, medical doctors get a ton of shit in the US. The insurance companies make them jump through hoops, and then patients come in and lie or whine or otherwise make their lives hell, and they're in the middle trying to do good work.
The basic problem is that anyone who can be a medical doctor worth having could also be any of a number of other high-paying jobs with lower expectations.
A lot of the solutions seem to involve giving Amazon drivers access to your home (shudder), or a heavy metal dropbox with keys and the like ... I find myself wondering if you'd solve 90% or more of the problem by simply having a box to dump things in without any sort of smarts or security. These people come by and see a package, and then are in-and-out quickly. They presumably aren't as interested in walking up and digging around on your porch three times a day just in case there's a package.
Of course, delivery people ain't got time to put a package in a box, so most likely they'd just leave the package on top of or in front of the box.
I love when the trolling is deep enough that people rate it "Informative".
Well, then Apple shouldn't be giving them an easy payday by being accurate about what they claim. It's really simple.
I can't wait until all the spec sheets list everything with three digits right of the decimal point, plus a complete accounting of their measurement methodology. All the readers will be so smart and enlightened!
Or maybe someday if someone cares about the difference between 5.6875 inches and 5.8 inches when measured along a very specific vector, they'll take responsibility for their own lives and just go measure the damned thing before buying it.
In my experience, swears in comments are like swears in real life - usually 90% of the f-bombs in a given group are one or two people. It's not that the other people are so prim and proper that they won't swear, it's that they only swear when it's called for. But there'll be that one person who has to whip out fuck for as an adjective for every minor ailment in their life.
[Of course, it's different in groups where 90% of the sentences spoken contain a swear word. I haven't often been in such groups since I left the farm.]
They're like a person who's not sorry for the thing they did, they're sorry that you were offended by what they did. It's not so much that they intentionally offended you, they just don't personally see the problem, and so aren't willing to pay any consequences to fix it. Keep in mind that they likely have immediate metrics to hand for how many reduced views and shares they'll receive. Even though they likely have no metric for "does that even matter?", it's still harder to argue for doing the right thing when you can see the specific benefit you're giving up. And their entire business is geared towards improving those engagement metrics.
Think of a corporation as a giant artificial intelligence running the business using machine learning. It has tried a bunch of different actions, and has a good idea of which actions cause which outcomes. But it has no human-level comprehension or feelings. As corporations increase their scope of activity, even the humans within have troubles identifying with the consequences of their actions. A local banker maybe feels bad about foreclosing on a neighbor, a back-office bank worker in New York feels less bad about foreclosing on 100 random people across the country because it gets routine, and a programmer at a credit bureau likely never even considers that a decision they're implementing will prevent a million people from ever getting a house.
So, yes, keep the heat on Facebook, but don't expect Facebook to make subtle changes quickly. We have to keep training them.
Research doesn't contribute to design of most current workspaces, why should research contribute to the design of future workspaces?
These articles are a thin veneer of journalism shilling for the facilities teams at places like Google. Don't tell me about all the amazing point-in-space experiments they are doing with bamboo healing walls and shit - tell me what the average worker actually experiences in an average hour of their day. A green wall is better than a concrete wall, but if there's a single 20-foot length of green wall in a 100,000 sq ft office building filled with desks placed so closely that you can touch your neighbor's shoulder without leaning over, that isn't going to magically fix the problems you're causing.
[In the time I worked at Google, watching them ratchet your personal space down by a half foot or so every year while signing "synergy!" was one of the most demoralizing things. Don't get me wrong, I liked almost everyone I worked with, I just didn't want to be continuously sharing their personal space.]
Based on the history of "work place revolutions", the new hotness will be standing workstations on airport tarmacs. Because "collaboration!" and "synergy!".
I'm not sure why this is marked "Funny". I guess it's not "Insightful", but we've known about a bunch of bad things to do for DECADES, and right now the leading trend in Silicon Valley is to do EXACTLY those bad things - having companies composed of hotelling spaces at the airport isn't even a joke, it's the script for a tech-oriented "dramedy". We're collaborating so hard we can't stand each other.
In both the first example and the second example are prejudiced against certain groups, the first by not letting them work and the second for not believing any could qualify fairly. Part of the problem is that circumstances leading up to the professional world are imbalanced (our culture, our educational system) and particularly culture is hard to fix balance. Many diversification initiatives at professional levels are forced to ignore the other problems not getting fixed and pretend they are and target balances of the general population when a given niche has the deck stacked a certain way.
The problem is that people are biased jerks. In one circumstance, they are biased against minorities and unwilling to inspect that bias. So you show stats and everything, prove there's an issue, and the command comes down from on high "We need to do better". So now people decide "More minorities is the goal" and become biased in the opposite way and are again unwilling to inspect that bias. In neither case do the majority of people do what you _really_ want them to do, which is to look past the most obvious things about a person and evaluate them for their capabilities for the task at hand. Most people don't do that because it is hard work.
Electron is an app "platform" that basically involves installing an app-private copy of Chromium, a node.js webserver, and running the application's logic mostly in Javascript between the two.
To paraphrase Churchill, Electron is the worst architecture for desktop applications, except for all the other ones that have been tried.
This is bad because it's the developer offloading their problems onto the user. The user can just download the 100M zip file which is a 40-line shell-script wrapper, the user can just easter-egg hunt to figure out the UI, the user can just pull the web platform into their local domain and hope for the best as far as security, etc. Since the app is based on 96 third_party dependencies, the user can also pay the price nine months later when the app stops working because while the OS developers are paying attention to not breaking their exposed APIs too badly, nobody can really maintain that amount of API surface coherently.
Basically, Electron is Flash.
Only an investment banker would think like that. If you take the same technological infrastructure, pull it out of one company and shove it into another while distributing the new shareholding pro-rata, why exactly is there an expectation that suddenly this 'huge windfall' of new value has been created?
No new value has been created. If anything there will be higher costs from duplicated overheads. The fact that despite this the claim is probably correct and shareholders will get a big bump if this happens (just like when a company does a share split) is testament to how screwed up the economy's idea of 'value' is right now.
You aren't nearly hard enough on the idea. AWS was born out of the tech needs of amazon.com. So, yes, AWS could spin out and be a successful company, but amazon.com still requires AWS to operate. This kind of thing would be like AMD spinning out its chip-making facilities - it didn't do that by choice, it was forced to because it could no longer keep up. The only way this really makes sense is if someday AWS spins out amazon.com because amazon.com has become a distraction.
IMHO, the only cloud provider which could plausibly spin out of its parent company is Azure.
Amazon.com is a trivial part of AWS. “Every day, AWS adds enough new server capacity to support all of Amazon’s global infrastructure when it was a $7 billion annual revenue enterprise,” said James Hamilton, Distinguished Engineer at Amazon, who described the AWS infrastructure at the Re:Invent conference in 2015.
Amazon.com may be a trivial part of AWS - but AWS is a crucial part of Amazon.com. I think it's plausible that AWS could handle the hit of losing amazon.com as a customer, but amazon.com would take a huge hit to margins if it had to buy infrastructure on the open market.
That said ... as others, I doubt amazon.com is a trivial part of AWS.
2) Google seems to be doing the same thing Microsoft did 10-15 years ago - trying to push people into adopt Chrome-optimized web sites and Google-specific coding. I hated it when Microsoft did it, and I hate it now.
The big problem here is that websites can only barely be bothered to test with a single browser, and rolling out standards strong enough to count on is hard hard hard work, so the ground truth is that websites routinely rely on browser-specific behaviour without even knowing it. At the user level, figuring out why a site doesn't work is basically impossible, so you just switch browsers until one works well enough then you stop. Together, these mean that it is extremely hard to have a browser with a rendering engine distinct from the dominant rendering engine.
[ObDisclosure: I was part of the team from before Chrome was released until a couple years ago. I agree that this kind of monoculture is a concern. I just find myself at a loss about what response is effective. Maybe browser makers could work together to build a test/eval suite for site authors to use, but that is a serious amount of work which would fall mainly on the top couple browser makers, which is a hard resource-commitment argument to make.]
Whoever told you either of those two things is an idiot and no one in the mainstream scientific community believes that it will never snow again in those locations. What they probably said (or what the scientists said before twisted by someone somewhere) was, snow will be more rare- but also more extreme when it does occur in those locations.
That came out of the mainstream scientific community, and was promoted by the various government meteorological offices and so forth. In the case of the UK, the MET openly stated that kids wouldn't know what snowfall was by I think it was 2015 or something. It was the same with DC.
Wow, in that case it should be SUPER EASY TO FIND, because they just came right out in the open and said it, right? And it was the government, too, not like you can walk that back.
I can find things like this:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story...
which is obviously later than your "2015 or something" statement. I could see someone reading this and thinking "There won't be snow in DC", but that would be a conclusion _they_ had based on reading this. I don't think the article in any way says that, though. Statements like "may drop by as much as 65%, on average" - they're trying hard to just present what their model is telling them without making really concrete predictions, because their model is talking about the next 100 years or something, not the coming winter, and that normal human beings have troubles operating that way.
It will never snow in DC again, then DC is crippled by snow that year.
It will never snow in UK again, then the UK is crippled by snow.
Whoever told you either of those two things is an idiot and no one in the mainstream scientific community believes that it will never snow again in those locations.
Then the mainstream scientific community needs to get out there and counter the lies. When they allow the statements to be made, and their own research twisted and do not counter it - then they are just as complicit in the lie.
What should we do, Chinese-style censorship? Mass executions?
I mean, I have never heard the statements like "It will never snow in DC again" except from people arguing against climate change saying that statements like that are excessive. Just like I've never heard my liberal friends declare that we should fight hard against Christmas, but I have relatives and friends who every year fill my Facebook feed with posts about the Liberal War On Christmas.
The fact of the matter is that once someone is resorting to strawman arguments, there's not a lot that the other side can do to dissuade them. Once someone prefers lies to truth, adding more truth really doesn't do much.
[I realize that I'm engaging with an Anonymous Coward who may be a troll plant in the first place. Not sure what one can do about that, either.]
Nuclear is not renewable because once the fuel is spent, it's gone.
Once a gust of air pushes against a windmill, it never does that again. Once a photon hits a solar cell and causes a current, it's gone.
"Renewable" energy is just another way of saying that we're tapping into an energy gradient so big and long-lasting that it is effectively infinite. Nuclear fusion isn't that much different, even if you just stick with deuterium. Running out of deuterium is further away from today than our pre-human ancestors are. Uranium is tougher, with current systems reserves will last a few hundred years, but with alternate designs current reserves of fissile materials could carry us for tens of thousands of years, which is presumably enough time to get some sort of asteroid mining up and running.
No term limits and all the politician cares about is re-election. Trump has spent more time campaigning and golfing than being the President in his first 2 years.
You say that like it's a bad thing. On evidence, I'd prefer him to spend less time being President, but unfortunately the consequence is that it delegates authority to mostly unelected actors.
He's only viewed with rose-colored glasses because the current vulgarian is so awful.
No, there was also some other Republican guy in there, I can't quite remember his name, who had a pretty awful run. I mean, that President didn't himself seem like a bad person, but he was very hands-off and let some very bad people take control of the levers of government.
Bitcoin is a hedge, not an investment. It is a hedge against the total collapse of the US dollar. The only thing necessary for bitcoin to be well accepted is for someone to commit to pricing a good or service of value in bitcoin for a sustained period. Example: Venezuela could sell oil at fixed price in bitcoin. Iran could do the same. Both countries have strong incentives to do this (if they were not blind to the reasons why).
The problem is that both countries do not internally produce the things they would want to purchase with the bitcoin they receive from sales of oil. The things they want to purchase are denominated in dollars. For various reasons the US has placed restrictions at least on Iran about providing them with dollars (Venezuela much less so). To some extent, if Iran were to accept bitcoin for oil, that would be helpful to provide cover for the buyer, but it doesn't really help Iran. In fact, it would probably work like an other black market, where they'd be selling at a discount because they have no choice.
In all likelihood, a total collapse of the US dollar wouldn't result in your neighborhood bitcoin holders rising up to rule. They'd get to enjoy the same general chaos as everyone else, because in such a case there will be a flight to stability, not a sudden urge on the part of merchants and employers and the like to take risks on some new form of money. I could see bitcoin replacing the US dollar for many of the gray-market things out there, though, as it's likely inconvenient to deal with dollars when the transaction is not in the US and neither the buyer nor the seller are likely to ever interact with the US other than using USD for transactions...
Next you'll be telling me that celebrities doing product endorsements aren't genuinely enthusiastic about the products and are just doing it for money.
My faith in the purity of ad content is shaken to the core.
Wait. You mean Catheter Cowboy might not be cathing? That's ... so disturbing!
We have a hugely complex system that we don't really nderstand. Some people think that human activity may be influencing that system, although absolutely none of the predictive models we have actually work. So...the answer to a non-understood influence on a non-understood system is: muck with the system some more.
How about we first invest in climate monitoring, and try to understand the whole system? If global warming is such an important issue, why is the number of monitoring stations monotonically decreasing, especially in regions like the Arctic?
So, if you were in a car which was heading towards a concrete wall, and someone said "Hit the brakes!", you'd say "No, first we need to be sure which part of the wall we're going to hit"?
I mean, yes, we don't have 100% precise models for climate change. That doesn't mean we should immediately give up. We don't have 100% precise models of how a commercial airline will fly from LAX to EWR, and yet dozens of planes manage to complete that route each day. Crazy, isn't it? It's almost like we could just work on the biggest emitters up front, and assume that in the future someone will figure out how to deal with the more subtle sources.
If we refuse to believe in it, it will just magically fade away.
In the olden days, you could select from a few different decent keyboards. Lots were cheap crap, but they were at least trying to be legit.
Today, you can go to a big-box electronics store and try out an array of keyboards, everyone one of which is just utter crap to type on, and rearranges the shit out of any key outside the primary alpha and numeric keys. Or, you can go online and trawl a keyboard-fetish forum, but you're going to have to take a risk to order it unless you can find someone local willing to let you try theirs. Meanwhile I'm sitting here with a stash of Microsoft Natural keyboards from 1999 which I snagged off eBay once I realized that the terrible compromise keyboards from laptops had trained people to think that that's just what keyboards were supposed to be like.
WHY DO YOU HAVE TO MESS WITH THE ARRANGEMENT OF THE NAVIGATION KEYS! DAMN. IT. JUST STOP. AND CONTROL BELONGS NEXT TO 'A'.
Opposite here. I have accounts at both a local CU and a local bank. The CU is OK, but the bank is much better. The tellers know me by name (no idea how they do that, I'm only in there once a month or so) and they have free soda, popcorn, and sometimes hot dogs. They pay me interest on my checking account (CU does not) and I have a free safe deposit box at the bank as well. It's really no contest. The only reason I keep the CU account is because I've had it for 30 years.
Wow. My local banks have interest-bearing checking accounts. They pay up to .05% interest, and charge like $18/mo for the privilege. My credit union charges $0/month and pays %.65 interest on checking, and 1.9% on savings (which has transaction restrictions, but is a great backstop for my checking account). When I audited things, the numbers varied, but the banks varied between conning you out of your money versus outright stealing it, and the credit unions varied from weak to reasonably competitive with online-only banks like Ally.
I will note that my experience with credit unions is that sometimes it feels like they are a bunch of amateurs WRT their IT systems, whereas banks feel more professional. Which is to say that the credit union sometimes breaks because Chrome moves too fast for them, whereas the banks break because their website uses ALL the third-party libraries (used to be they broke because they'd loop Flash in so they could force their custom authentication system. Gag). So it is kind of a mixed bag on that front.
I have an online service that sends me texts daily (weather forecasts and alerts), as well as a few other people. At some point my cell company started blocking those texts sent by my system. The others still received them (different cell carriers) but I did not, for a period of a few weeks. Then they started coming through again out of the blue.
No notification, no action on my part to indicate they were spam, no recourse to try and get my server whitelisted, etc. They just went in a black hole. I visited my carrier's website and there was no portal I could find for services to contact the carrier about being blocked.
I bet your carrier provides a portal for commercial senders to submit funds to get their postings cleared for transmission, though.