I have been doing a bunch of looking, since reading your post to see if I could find references to what you are speaking of.
Based on my searches, I have several things to say to you. First, by posting what you did, in the manner that you did, without providing one shred of evidence, you have effectively engaged in libel. That kind of behavior has opened you up to a potential lawsuit. Given the daily readership of this site, coupled with the nature of your claims, I would say that if you have any assets to protect that you pray she does not become aware of your posts, or, if she does, that she doesn't subsequently contact an attorney.
The second thing I have to say is: Fuck you asshole. That kind of shit being posted anonymously, is exactly the reason that our freedoms get eroded daily. Your apparent willingness to defame someone, and to try to protect yourself by doing it anonymously reflects badly on everyone here, and is just one more piece of ammunition in the hands of those that wish to strip us of our rights. If you can't control yourself enough to take part in an adult conversation about the larger issues without the need to spew bullshit into the conversation just to make yourself feel more important, then kindly leave, as you have nothing of value to contribute.
Stop working for shitty salaries in overpriced cities and the executives running these corporations will stop expecting people to ruin themselves in order to bloat the executive bonuses.
When you're staring at the want ads, on line job sites, the newspaper jobs section and anything else you can think of to find a job because you graduated 5 months ago and you're still looking for something that pays more than minimum wage, you notice something very disturbing. There are literally thousands of job postings for minimum wage jobs, and almost no postings for anything that would be considered middle class or up (maybe 1 listing in 20). Just because we have low unemployment doesn't mean that underemployment isn't rampant as hell. Sure there are plenty of other places to work, but they all pay the same crap starvation wages. Starbucks still pays the same crappy wage so that those fortunate enough to have found a solid job don't have to pay too $4 for a latte (ohhhhh, never mind, they charge that much anyways). So, all of these employees on the bottom decide to collectively have themselves a strike. What would it accomplish? The powers that be just ride it out and wait 3 weeks. Those employees will be back, and willing to do absolutely anything because, as this person so ineloquently stated, no money, no eat.
The basic trouble with the labor market, is that workers do not have the luxury of simply not engaging in the market if the terms are unfair. The employer can file chapter 11 and shut their doors, or can wait out a strike, or can simply fire the employee and get another one. In short, they have options. The employees however are stuck with the tyranny of having a stomach and an undeniable need to put food in it with shocking regularly. In short, they have no options.
What happens at the negotiating table when one party A needs party B, but party B doesn't need party A? Party A gets hosed. The free market theory requires that all parties have the option not to take part if the deal is not in their best interest. With the labor market, that is not the case. Workers must earn money or die. Whether the employers know that when they set wages is irrelevant, as they take advantage of it to offer minimum wage jobs nonetheless.
Since 1980, median individual income has risen from $20,500 per year to $27,000 per year, an annual increase of about 0.8% per year. Over that same period, inflation has averaged 3.37%. after 35 years of that, buying power is only 28% of what it used to be, and wages are only up 31%. This means that the total buying power of the median wage today is only 36% of the median buying power in 1980. In effect, wages have fallen to 1/3 of what they were in 1980. This is partly offset by a massive increase in the number of women who are working (2 income households), as well as a marked increase in the number of hours that individual employees are working.
As if that wasn't enough, we are fast approaching a debt crisis, as our debt to GDP is quickly approaching the highest in American history. We have been giving out massive tax break to the wealthy for almost 40 years, and financing it by going into nati
No, he's just seeking affirmation of his choice to purchase an EV while ignoring that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are actually in use today. He was blithering about it above and spouting nonsense there too. They're the kind of people who will absolutely refuse to acknowledge facts. It's not really their fault. It's brain damage from having a poor self-image. They're mentally ill and need affirmation from others to make themselves feel better. You see it when people will insist they use the one and only true OS, the best browser, the only IDE worth having, the best phone, etc. It's not even remotely uncommon but it's certainly a mental illness.
The shame is that in 60 years, when history has proven me right, you will have completely forgotten your ill conceived and ignorant position on this. You might even convince yourself that you were right all along about "alternative fuels".
Sorry, but that is: 70 mpg, OR can seat 4 full sized adults OR can reach mach 1.
Not really no. Weight has very little effect on fuel efficiency in a vehicle that has regenerative braking. The biggest factors affecting fuel economoy in those vehicles is either aerodynamics, or power train efficiency (depending on speed). At low speeds, the model S can achieve 89 mpg (its EPA rated efficiency). Under normal use, that number is closer to 70, which is the figure I used.
Caterpillar and all the other diesel manufacturers are pushing dual fuel engines.
Of course they are. It is a fairly trivial change to go from gasoline to LNG or even hydrogen. They can adapt the existing designs.
Going form gasoline to electric motors is a whole different game altogether. Instead of a host of mechanical engineers (and almost all engineers in the transportation industry are mechanical engineers), you need a cadre of electrical engineers. This basically means laying off a large percentage of your engineering workforce, many of whom are barely more than glorified autocad draftsmen, and replacing them with electrical engineers. Because this would be a whole new discipline for the manufacturers, they would have all kinds of hell trying to get product to the market, and would have to hire top electrical engineers or risk having the project fail. It would quickly mean higher costs and lower margins for the manufacturers. Why on earth would they sign up for that if they didn't have to. Electric vehicles are great for consumers (although the technology is not quite there yet), and great for electrical engineers (especially power systems engineers), but bad for established companies, and especially bad for mechanical engineers (A typical IC engine vehicle has 10,000 moving parts, of which 98.5% are in the engine, or are related to the IC engine).
People talk about an oil industry conspiracy to kill off electric vehicles, but the reality needs no such complex explanation. The simple truth is that the existing companies are not capable of building cost effective electric equipment, so they don't. It takes an upstart in the industry, like Tesla motors, to come along and force the industry to keep up or die. My prediction is that the electric revolution will kill upwards of 50% of the established auto manufacturers, and a similar effect will be seen in industrial and construction equipment soon thereafter.
as it is fairly obvious this technology has the potential to eventually be viable.
HAHAHA.
No, No it has virtually no potential.
According to the wikipedia page, the hydrogen vehicles are at a terrible disadvantage to electric cars because hydrogen generating systems are horribly inefficient, and there is no real infrastructure to support hydrogen vehicles. Building a hydrogen refueling station will cost upwards of a million dollars for the equivalent of a gas station. Compare this with a cost of $1000 to get a level 2 charging station ($10,000 after install costs), $50,000 for a level 3 charging station (including installation costs). Improvements in battery technology will bring us to level 4 charging stations which will allow a 5 minute 80% charge, good enough to directly compete with gasoline. Even the level 3 chargers will get you 80% in half an hour. For a Tesla, thats a half hour for every 4 hours of driving. Hell, after 4 hours, I *need* a half hour break just to keep from going batty. All of that technology can be installed virtually anywhere, because the electric grid is virtually everywhere.
Quite some time ago, smart people looked at what the fuel source of the future would be, and they concluded that: if only batteries were better, electric cars would be the way to go hands down. Here we are 30 years later, and batteries are getting pretty decent. At the rate of recent improvement, they will surpass gasoline as the best option in a whole host of categories within another 5 years. Electric cars are already better than gasoline in several key metrics, and are better than LNG and Hydrogen in almost every way.
Because adding that much weight (fuel cans, armor, bigger engine) wouldn't completely destroy the fuel economy... nope... not at all.
Its not even that good fuel economy. Hydrogen has an energy density approximately 3 times that of gasoline. So this thing gets the equivalent of 80 mpg. I have a Mitsubishi Miev, and that gets the equivalent of 110 mpg and while it looks retarded, it can seat 4 full sized adults, and still make it up a hill. Or you could go with a Tesla that gets the equivalent of 70 mpg, and can seat 4 full sized adults and still reach mach 1. Riversimple has developed a market failure, nothing more. There is no hydrogen economy. There will be no hydrogen economy. The sooner people stop trying to come up with inferior alternatives to electric cars, and spend their research money improving batteries instead, the sooner we can get on with the future. Electric cars need a small improvement in battery technology, and some economies of scale. Hydrogen cars need a hundred billion dollars in infrastructure. I shouldn't need to point out that it is never gonna happen.
I know you're particular troll clan doesn't like facts, but you might try them instead of regurgitating whatever idiot thing you heard on Fox last night.
So then, what is needed is a planned economy. Right?
That kind of short sighted knee jerk thinking is why we have these kinds of problems in the first place. A planned economy will not work because it fails to take human greed into account. What we need is a system that has built in functions for preventing the extremes in both directions. Something that requires a person to work harder to make money the more they have, and gives the down-and-out a guaranteed opportunity to earn their keep.
Personally, I am a big fan of the Roosevelts WPA. I would propose a public works program of that same scale, and paid for by progressive taxation. It has the invaluable advantage of having been tried before and not being a flop. The only reason we don't still have it today is because it was costing the Rockefellers of the world and they didn't like it. It took them more than a decade to kill it off.
God knows we have enough infrastructure in this country in need of repairs. Make the rich pay for it, for the logical reason that they are the only ones who can afford it...
They are infinitely more well off than 50 years ago, let alone longer.
Umm, no.
Todays poor have to worry about a where their next meal is coming from more than ever before. The vast majority (although less now thanks to obamacare) do not have health insurance, and are one hospital visit away from economic ruination. Thanks to nearly continuous cuts by various republican lawmakers, the social safety net, that used to feed and clothe these people, is almost non-existent today. Moreover, the adjusted standard of living for the bottom 80% of the United states has been dropping since the early eighties. Although most Americans have cell phones and big-screen tvs, that is offset by the things they do not have anymore: Cars. In the 1950s, nearly every American owned a car. Getting your first car was an American rite of passage. Since the 1970s, American car ownership has been in significant decline. Ownership is down 10% in just the last decade alone. That is how the poor afford all the bling despite reduced buying power. Not having the cars is massively hurting their upward mobility, but leaves them with a few hundred $ extra each month, part of which pays for the bling that you have mistaken for wealth.
In every statistic that matters, the poor in this country are getting poorer. This has been happening pretty steadily since the early 1980s. That in spite of the fact that GDP has been increasing fairly consistent with the decades before 1980.
Even more to the point, if we look at jobs from 50 years ago, about 50% of those no longer exist. Yet we don't have 50% unemployment.
There is another side to that that most people never see. There are people, who had jobs back in the 50s, who would be unemployed and unemployable today. My son falls in that category. He will never be able to drive a car, he will never progress beyond a third grade reading level, and most maths will be beyond him. We have hope he might be able to comprehend and manage his own money, but I doubt it. In the 50s, there were any number of jobs he could have been trained to do. He could have been trained to handle packages at UPS (probably would be nicer to the packages than most handlers these days). He could have gotten a job as a shop assistant, or a job assembling do-dads for some company or other. He wouldn't have made a stellar living, but he'd have done alright for himself. Today, he *might* get something as a simple shop assistant at a convenience store, but only if he learned to count money. He will never make more than minimum wage and more likely he will live his life on the charity of others. Right now, my son is in the 5th percentile. What happens when there are not enough jobs for the people who are in the 20th percentile. Do we expect 20% of the population to live their lives on the charity of others? Do we just expect them to die?
50 years ago, we had nearly full employment because there were any number of luxury items that the lower end of society could not afford because the amount of labor did not allow everything to be built, so the economy was labor limited. Today we are fast approaching the time when the economy is consumption limited (80% of households below the poverty level in the US have big screen TVs). Even the very bottom rung of American society has smart phones. Everyone has almost everything they want that an increase in labor supply could provide. As we move forward, the demand for goods will be lower than the supply of labor needed to produce those goods. Accelerating automation will exacerbate that problem ten fold. One factory owner with a shop full of robots builds product XYZ and has a solid income, but employs zero people. If demand for his product goes up 1000%, he still employs zero people. If one type of product works that way, we say good for the owner, he has an awesome business model. If 50% of the economy works that way, we say economic collapse and civil war.
A totally unemployed person in a western country today would still be better off than a fully employed person 1000 years ago.
Not in the United states. A completely unemployed person in the United states has to rely on charity in order to eat. 1000 years ago, an unemployed person could still find wilderness and hunt their own food. Today that is not possible in *any?* western country anymore. I would stipulate that a chronically unemployed person in this day and age is *worse off* than that same chronically unemployed person was 1000 years ago.
To look at it another way, a person who is healthy and whole, but has an IQ of 60 is basically unemployable in todays western world. In the United States, there are NO jobs that these people will be hired to do. Why would any employer hire someone who needs to have their hand held through every part of the job because they just don't get it? Those employers hire people with 80,90 or 100 IQs instead. The folks in the 60 range collect permanent disability from the government (if they are lucky, and the republican party is continually trying to cut the few programs that do exist). Today that number is 60. With automation taking ever larger numbers of unskilled jobs, how long until that line is 80 IQ points? 90 IQ points? what about 100 when 50% of the population cant even qualify for a job? Do they just go on permanent disability and the other 50% have to work (often at jobs they wont like) for no other reason than because they are the ones who can do the work? You might even make it work if you could eliminate all of the work, that people don't like to do, all at once, but you can't, you'll replace a little bit at a time, so you'll be left with them that can and them that cant. How do we convince the capable people to do the crappy jobs while we give the incapable people a free ride? The capable people are not going to like that, and will sooner or later start electing politicians who promise to sterilize the incapable portion of the population "for the greater good". Being the ones with the money, they will have the power, under our current economic and political model, to do as they please, and they will get their sterilization programs.
When you own a company, you can decide how much your CEO is worth.
I own a small piece of a large number of companies, and I have exactly as much say in how much those CEOs are paid as I do in how much the President of the United States is paid.
Sorry. His job is not to optimize the number of jobs, but to optimize profits. Robotics tend to help with that.
Until recently, corporate goals and missions were to serve some social function. Companies were not in place for the purpose of making money, but rather making money was a necessary component to successfully completing their mission (hence the corporate mission statement). In fact, in the 18th and 19th centuries, submitting corporate filings with only a stated goal of making money, would result in the state refusing your company its corporate papers (in essence you would be refused permission to start the company), on the grounds that your company did not serve any social function that the state considered valuable. It was not until late in the 20th century that companies for the sake of profits only became an acceptable concept, and now we have the situation where a companies officers can actually be sued for not following the path to greatest profit. This situation is not at all how companies are supposed to work, and will be the ruin of our country.
What amazes me is that so many people now are just willing to throw away Capitalism entirely.
People are wiling to throw away capitalism so easily because a lot of people can understand at an intuitive level that capitalism coupled with the fundamental laws of nature will result in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Although most people don't have the engineering background to understand how the laws governing feedback loops, harmonics and system stability apply to macro and micro economics, the reality is that they can sense the wrongness of the capitalist economic model. The early attempts at a fix failed to take human psychology into account and consequently communism was born, had its run, and failed. In the mean time, we have regulated capitalism that has shown the most promise, but we have discovered that the less regulated it is, the worse it gets (more unstable, and less politically viable, think runaway income inequality). At the root of the problem is that money *is* power, and the more power any given group has the more they have the ability to modify the system to suit themselves. Any economic system needs two key components to be viable in the long term. First, it has to have powerful protections against modification to suit any particular agenda. This necessitates that the system be correctly designed in th first place, there can be no opportunity to "fix" it later, or you open the possibility of the system being gamed. The second thing it needs is a negative feedback mechanism to prevent runaway wealth accumulation. This is a tricky requirement as it appears to be 100% at odds with human psychology. It is this conflict that could potentially mean that human kind is fundamentally incapable of stable economic behavior.
It's not "distributed", it's earned. Until you understand this, you have nothing to contribute.
Until "earning" CEO pay requires more skill than luck, I'm going to stick with the word distributed.
Put another way, small amounts of money (less than $1M) are earned. Large amounts of money are distributed. Wealth accumulation is not stable, it is a runaway process under our current economic system. There is a positive feedback loop between having money and income. If we were to build any other engineered system this way, it would result in catastrophe (think harmonics in buildings and bridges, or god forbid, positive void co-efficient in nuclear engineering). Intelligently designing systems is all about negative feedback to limit excess and undesirable oscillation. For some reason we ignore all of that when it comes to economics, and the result is an economic model that can best be described as cyclical booms and busts. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. That kind of system behavior in engineering would require a redesign of the broken part because the original engineer failed to do their job properly.
Hey, these guys sound real awesome. I know! Let's give them $150 billion dollars in order to pretend they're not building nukes for a little while! And then when they break the agreement, we'll just pretend they didn't. Let's also pay them a nice bribe of another billion to return our soldiers they took hostage. But doing that would make our President look incompetent, so we'll still do it but just have our buddies in the media completely ignore the story.
Let us keep in mind that the US has been killing innocent people by way of drone strikes for more than a decade now. It can easily be argued that the US is the worlds largest exporter of terror weapons. In fact, our terrorist activities dwarf any in the history of mankind. We have become so adept at it that we can detonate bombs from 5000 miles away with accuracy measured in centimeters. We can do that without even risking our own people at all. If the terrorists could do that, The US would be short a few hundred politicians, and the white house would have been target #1.
The thing you have to remember about terrorism is that it takes two sides to fight. As long as we keep bombing them, we keep the cycle of hate going, and they keep bombing us. That sounds suspiciously like the definition of insanity.
I've even seen ground fault systems that trip from inrush current, which should be something simple to implement but somehow ones exist that can't handle noise and surges on the lines they monitor (resulting in a lot of wasted time debugging of a device once trying to track down a transient ground fault that wasn't there).
Ground fault devices that experience even a transient current *must* trip. Any ground fault excursion is dangerous, and the result of a faulty piece of equipment. If you were seeing a transient ground fault, in a device, that device is *dangerous*, and the design fault with that device should be corrected. Most likely, you have some relatively high power signal that is coupling to the case. The easiest way to fix that problem is to ensure a strong enough coupling of all of your power supplies (bigger bypass caps), and better grounding (Most likely culprit is unexpected ground loops, or parts too close to the chassis ground). You might also have been victim of counterfeit breakers, which did not actually meet the CE/UL markings on the devices.
limiting that rush has less to do with protecting the PSU and more to do with not tripping crappy breakers if you plug them in coincident with the peak of the mains sine wave.
This has not been true since breakers were introduced. One of the principle advantages to the breakers was a magnetic *and* thermal capability. This allows breakers ( even crappy ones ) to handle inrush of massive machinery.
If you are feeling brave, you can try the following experiment ( I already have with several different types of breakers ): Take a dead short (Large gauge wire like 8 AWG or 6 AWG. Hook it up to a power transistor controlled by a microprocessor. International Rectifier makes some 100A jobbers that can handle spikes of up to thousands of Amps for less than 10ms bursts. Set up a zero cross detect on your microprocessor and turn the juice on through the dead short for 1 full wave of 120VAC. Hook up an o-scope to your mains and check the line voltage as you turn this critter on.
What you will get is one full cycle of severely browned out mains (might drop as far as 10Vp-p. across a 1mOhm load ). For those astute at math, that would be 10,000Amps at 10Vp-p, or about 60 kWatts RMS. As long as you only do this for one full cycle and no more, you will neither blow the breaker, nor significantly heat any of you components. The reason for this is because breakers are mechanical devices and have a specified amount of time before they can "react" to overload. Even their thermal shutdown takes time. Long story short, a standard 15A wall breaker can dispense about 15kAmps for 10ms without tripping. That is far more than the transformer at the pole can handle, and its own internal resistance becomes the current limiting factor. A good line supply will provide you with about 10kAmps before the current limiting drops the line voltage significantly. A typical residential supply will only dump about 1000 Amps before significant drops in voltage. Either way, the breakers will not trip no matter what you do, as long as the entire incident is shorter than 10ms.
This design is very much on purpose. As I have seen, and what these experiments demonstrates is that in-wall wiring, breakers, and utility company equipment are not seriously threatened by short power spikes, so they have no reason to try to protect against them. The breakers in your house are there to prevent enough power from flowing through the wires in the walls to cause them to start fires.
The inrush can however severely damage switching power supplies. Many of them are built to just barely handle the voltages they are designed for. This is done to save money and weight in the extremely competitive mobile power supply market. This market is so competitive, and the margins are so thin, that they will do almost anything sketchy they can to shave pennies off the design. I have personally seen transformerless designs that were built assuming one of the two main lugs was neutral. If they are plugged into a reverse polarity outlet, they short the hot line to the ground directly... This is a common design used on many different power supplies, and is one of the primary reasons you should never open one of those supplies while it is powered. Even in the lab the damn things are dangerous.
Why would anyone think there's a constant proper relationship between revenue and the number of employees across all businesses?
Because employees cost a pretty predictable amount of money. Your revenues from existing product lines are pretty predictable too. If you have a very disproportionate number of employees to the revenue your business model can expect, then yes you have too many employees. What he's saying is that Yahoo better figure out how to make their existing business model work with 3000 employees because if they don't, the ride comes to a magnificent halt when the employee paychecks start bouncing (aka corporate suicide).
There has never been anything else that could produce as well as alta vista when all you wanted was technical information. These days, Google has become so watered down with BS that the signal to noise ratio is absolute crap.
The simple truth is that there are two types of searches, and nobody has figured out how to deal with it. There are searches that will end in money changing hands, and there are searches that will result in information moving. There is almost never any overlap. Someone could make a *lot* of people happy by making a search engine that could tell the difference and skip the adds altogether when there is a very low chance of someone buying anything. Save the bandwidth, save the advertisers money, and improve their effectiveness by spewing adds only where there is value to do so, and gain market share by being the best of both worlds.
True but with rooftop, you pretty much need one inverter per rooftop, which adds substantial amounts to the cost. With these paved roadways, you could probably get the equivalent of 10-20 rooftops with only one inverter, thus significantly reducing the cost of installation. Plus, under most circumstances, installers wont fall off the roadway, thus creating a *very* expensive insurance liability. The cost of liability insurance is a very large (~20%) part of the cost a given rooftop solar installation. Playing around on roofs tends to kill and maim people with rather frightening frequency.
Serial ports haven't been included on PCs in more than a decade. Sure you can get them as a special item, but that will likely be true for VGA as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Bunch of bullshit removed
I have been doing a bunch of looking, since reading your post to see if I could find references to what you are speaking of.
Based on my searches, I have several things to say to you. First, by posting what you did, in the manner that you did, without providing one shred of evidence, you have effectively engaged in libel. That kind of behavior has opened you up to a potential lawsuit. Given the daily readership of this site, coupled with the nature of your claims, I would say that if you have any assets to protect that you pray she does not become aware of your posts, or, if she does, that she doesn't subsequently contact an attorney.
The second thing I have to say is: Fuck you asshole. That kind of shit being posted anonymously, is exactly the reason that our freedoms get eroded daily. Your apparent willingness to defame someone, and to try to protect yourself by doing it anonymously reflects badly on everyone here, and is just one more piece of ammunition in the hands of those that wish to strip us of our rights. If you can't control yourself enough to take part in an adult conversation about the larger issues without the need to spew bullshit into the conversation just to make yourself feel more important, then kindly leave, as you have nothing of value to contribute.
Stop working for shitty salaries in overpriced cities and the executives running these corporations will stop expecting people to ruin themselves in order to bloat the executive bonuses.
When you're staring at the want ads, on line job sites, the newspaper jobs section and anything else you can think of to find a job because you graduated 5 months ago and you're still looking for something that pays more than minimum wage, you notice something very disturbing. There are literally thousands of job postings for minimum wage jobs, and almost no postings for anything that would be considered middle class or up (maybe 1 listing in 20). Just because we have low unemployment doesn't mean that underemployment isn't rampant as hell. Sure there are plenty of other places to work, but they all pay the same crap starvation wages. Starbucks still pays the same crappy wage so that those fortunate enough to have found a solid job don't have to pay too $4 for a latte (ohhhhh, never mind, they charge that much anyways). So, all of these employees on the bottom decide to collectively have themselves a strike. What would it accomplish? The powers that be just ride it out and wait 3 weeks. Those employees will be back, and willing to do absolutely anything because, as this person so ineloquently stated, no money, no eat.
The basic trouble with the labor market, is that workers do not have the luxury of simply not engaging in the market if the terms are unfair. The employer can file chapter 11 and shut their doors, or can wait out a strike, or can simply fire the employee and get another one. In short, they have options. The employees however are stuck with the tyranny of having a stomach and an undeniable need to put food in it with shocking regularly. In short, they have no options.
What happens at the negotiating table when one party A needs party B, but party B doesn't need party A? Party A gets hosed. The free market theory requires that all parties have the option not to take part if the deal is not in their best interest. With the labor market, that is not the case. Workers must earn money or die. Whether the employers know that when they set wages is irrelevant, as they take advantage of it to offer minimum wage jobs nonetheless.
12.7% of American workers make less than $10 per hour. 51% of American workers make less than $14.50 per hour. That means that the average American employee will not earn more than $14.50 per hour until they are 40 years old.
Since 1980, median individual income has risen from $20,500 per year to $27,000 per year, an annual increase of about 0.8% per year. Over that same period, inflation has averaged 3.37%. after 35 years of that, buying power is only 28% of what it used to be, and wages are only up 31%. This means that the total buying power of the median wage today is only 36% of the median buying power in 1980. In effect, wages have fallen to 1/3 of what they were in 1980. This is partly offset by a massive increase in the number of women who are working (2 income households), as well as a marked increase in the number of hours that individual employees are working.
As if that wasn't enough, we are fast approaching a debt crisis, as our debt to GDP is quickly approaching the highest in American history. We have been giving out massive tax break to the wealthy for almost 40 years, and financing it by going into nati
No, he's just seeking affirmation of his choice to purchase an EV while ignoring that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are actually in use today. He was blithering about it above and spouting nonsense there too. They're the kind of people who will absolutely refuse to acknowledge facts. It's not really their fault. It's brain damage from having a poor self-image. They're mentally ill and need affirmation from others to make themselves feel better. You see it when people will insist they use the one and only true OS, the best browser, the only IDE worth having, the best phone, etc. It's not even remotely uncommon but it's certainly a mental illness.
The shame is that in 60 years, when history has proven me right, you will have completely forgotten your ill conceived and ignorant position on this. You might even convince yourself that you were right all along about "alternative fuels".
I believe that we will see a hydrogen economy in our lifetimes.
Make a note to yourself, so that on your deathbed you can look back and reflect on what a stupid and unqualified belief that was.
Sorry, but that is: 70 mpg, OR can seat 4 full sized adults OR can reach mach 1.
Not really no. Weight has very little effect on fuel efficiency in a vehicle that has regenerative braking. The biggest factors affecting fuel economoy in those vehicles is either aerodynamics, or power train efficiency (depending on speed). At low speeds, the model S can achieve 89 mpg (its EPA rated efficiency). Under normal use, that number is closer to 70, which is the figure I used.
Caterpillar and all the other diesel manufacturers are pushing dual fuel engines.
Of course they are. It is a fairly trivial change to go from gasoline to LNG or even hydrogen. They can adapt the existing designs.
Going form gasoline to electric motors is a whole different game altogether. Instead of a host of mechanical engineers (and almost all engineers in the transportation industry are mechanical engineers), you need a cadre of electrical engineers. This basically means laying off a large percentage of your engineering workforce, many of whom are barely more than glorified autocad draftsmen, and replacing them with electrical engineers. Because this would be a whole new discipline for the manufacturers, they would have all kinds of hell trying to get product to the market, and would have to hire top electrical engineers or risk having the project fail. It would quickly mean higher costs and lower margins for the manufacturers. Why on earth would they sign up for that if they didn't have to. Electric vehicles are great for consumers (although the technology is not quite there yet), and great for electrical engineers (especially power systems engineers), but bad for established companies, and especially bad for mechanical engineers (A typical IC engine vehicle has 10,000 moving parts, of which 98.5% are in the engine, or are related to the IC engine).
People talk about an oil industry conspiracy to kill off electric vehicles, but the reality needs no such complex explanation. The simple truth is that the existing companies are not capable of building cost effective electric equipment, so they don't. It takes an upstart in the industry, like Tesla motors, to come along and force the industry to keep up or die. My prediction is that the electric revolution will kill upwards of 50% of the established auto manufacturers, and a similar effect will be seen in industrial and construction equipment soon thereafter.
as it is fairly obvious this technology has the potential to eventually be viable.
HAHAHA.
No, No it has virtually no potential.
According to the wikipedia page, the hydrogen vehicles are at a terrible disadvantage to electric cars because hydrogen generating systems are horribly inefficient, and there is no real infrastructure to support hydrogen vehicles. Building a hydrogen refueling station will cost upwards of a million dollars for the equivalent of a gas station. Compare this with a cost of $1000 to get a level 2 charging station ($10,000 after install costs), $50,000 for a level 3 charging station (including installation costs). Improvements in battery technology will bring us to level 4 charging stations which will allow a 5 minute 80% charge, good enough to directly compete with gasoline. Even the level 3 chargers will get you 80% in half an hour. For a Tesla, thats a half hour for every 4 hours of driving. Hell, after 4 hours, I *need* a half hour break just to keep from going batty. All of that technology can be installed virtually anywhere, because the electric grid is virtually everywhere.
Quite some time ago, smart people looked at what the fuel source of the future would be, and they concluded that: if only batteries were better, electric cars would be the way to go hands down. Here we are 30 years later, and batteries are getting pretty decent. At the rate of recent improvement, they will surpass gasoline as the best option in a whole host of categories within another 5 years. Electric cars are already better than gasoline in several key metrics, and are better than LNG and Hydrogen in almost every way.
Because adding that much weight (fuel cans, armor, bigger engine) wouldn't completely destroy the fuel economy... nope... not at all.
Its not even that good fuel economy. Hydrogen has an energy density approximately 3 times that of gasoline. So this thing gets the equivalent of 80 mpg. I have a Mitsubishi Miev, and that gets the equivalent of 110 mpg and while it looks retarded, it can seat 4 full sized adults, and still make it up a hill. Or you could go with a Tesla that gets the equivalent of 70 mpg, and can seat 4 full sized adults and still reach mach 1. Riversimple has developed a market failure, nothing more. There is no hydrogen economy. There will be no hydrogen economy. The sooner people stop trying to come up with inferior alternatives to electric cars, and spend their research money improving batteries instead, the sooner we can get on with the future. Electric cars need a small improvement in battery technology, and some economies of scale. Hydrogen cars need a hundred billion dollars in infrastructure. I shouldn't need to point out that it is never gonna happen.
Other than those areas directly engaging in armed conflict, where exactly have living standards failed to rise in the past few decades?
How about The United States
I know you're particular troll clan doesn't like facts, but you might try them instead of regurgitating whatever idiot thing you heard on Fox last night.
So then, what is needed is a planned economy. Right?
That kind of short sighted knee jerk thinking is why we have these kinds of problems in the first place. A planned economy will not work because it fails to take human greed into account. What we need is a system that has built in functions for preventing the extremes in both directions. Something that requires a person to work harder to make money the more they have, and gives the down-and-out a guaranteed opportunity to earn their keep.
Personally, I am a big fan of the Roosevelts WPA. I would propose a public works program of that same scale, and paid for by progressive taxation. It has the invaluable advantage of having been tried before and not being a flop. The only reason we don't still have it today is because it was costing the Rockefellers of the world and they didn't like it. It took them more than a decade to kill it off.
God knows we have enough infrastructure in this country in need of repairs. Make the rich pay for it, for the logical reason that they are the only ones who can afford it...
They are infinitely more well off than 50 years ago, let alone longer.
Umm, no.
Todays poor have to worry about a where their next meal is coming from more than ever before. The vast majority (although less now thanks to obamacare) do not have health insurance, and are one hospital visit away from economic ruination. Thanks to nearly continuous cuts by various republican lawmakers, the social safety net, that used to feed and clothe these people, is almost non-existent today. Moreover, the adjusted standard of living for the bottom 80% of the United states has been dropping since the early eighties. Although most Americans have cell phones and big-screen tvs, that is offset by the things they do not have anymore: Cars. In the 1950s, nearly every American owned a car. Getting your first car was an American rite of passage. Since the 1970s, American car ownership has been in significant decline. Ownership is down 10% in just the last decade alone. That is how the poor afford all the bling despite reduced buying power. Not having the cars is massively hurting their upward mobility, but leaves them with a few hundred $ extra each month, part of which pays for the bling that you have mistaken for wealth.
In every statistic that matters, the poor in this country are getting poorer. This has been happening pretty steadily since the early 1980s. That in spite of the fact that GDP has been increasing fairly consistent with the decades before 1980.
Even more to the point, if we look at jobs from 50 years ago, about 50% of those no longer exist. Yet we don't have 50% unemployment.
There is another side to that that most people never see. There are people, who had jobs back in the 50s, who would be unemployed and unemployable today. My son falls in that category. He will never be able to drive a car, he will never progress beyond a third grade reading level, and most maths will be beyond him. We have hope he might be able to comprehend and manage his own money, but I doubt it. In the 50s, there were any number of jobs he could have been trained to do. He could have been trained to handle packages at UPS (probably would be nicer to the packages than most handlers these days). He could have gotten a job as a shop assistant, or a job assembling do-dads for some company or other. He wouldn't have made a stellar living, but he'd have done alright for himself. Today, he *might* get something as a simple shop assistant at a convenience store, but only if he learned to count money. He will never make more than minimum wage and more likely he will live his life on the charity of others. Right now, my son is in the 5th percentile. What happens when there are not enough jobs for the people who are in the 20th percentile. Do we expect 20% of the population to live their lives on the charity of others? Do we just expect them to die?
50 years ago, we had nearly full employment because there were any number of luxury items that the lower end of society could not afford because the amount of labor did not allow everything to be built, so the economy was labor limited. Today we are fast approaching the time when the economy is consumption limited (80% of households below the poverty level in the US have big screen TVs). Even the very bottom rung of American society has smart phones. Everyone has almost everything they want that an increase in labor supply could provide. As we move forward, the demand for goods will be lower than the supply of labor needed to produce those goods. Accelerating automation will exacerbate that problem ten fold. One factory owner with a shop full of robots builds product XYZ and has a solid income, but employs zero people. If demand for his product goes up 1000%, he still employs zero people. If one type of product works that way, we say good for the owner, he has an awesome business model. If 50% of the economy works that way, we say economic collapse and civil war.
A totally unemployed person in a western country today would still be better off than a fully employed person 1000 years ago.
Not in the United states. A completely unemployed person in the United states has to rely on charity in order to eat. 1000 years ago, an unemployed person could still find wilderness and hunt their own food. Today that is not possible in *any?* western country anymore. I would stipulate that a chronically unemployed person in this day and age is *worse off* than that same chronically unemployed person was 1000 years ago.
To look at it another way, a person who is healthy and whole, but has an IQ of 60 is basically unemployable in todays western world. In the United States, there are NO jobs that these people will be hired to do. Why would any employer hire someone who needs to have their hand held through every part of the job because they just don't get it? Those employers hire people with 80,90 or 100 IQs instead. The folks in the 60 range collect permanent disability from the government (if they are lucky, and the republican party is continually trying to cut the few programs that do exist). Today that number is 60. With automation taking ever larger numbers of unskilled jobs, how long until that line is 80 IQ points? 90 IQ points? what about 100 when 50% of the population cant even qualify for a job? Do they just go on permanent disability and the other 50% have to work (often at jobs they wont like) for no other reason than because they are the ones who can do the work? You might even make it work if you could eliminate all of the work, that people don't like to do, all at once, but you can't, you'll replace a little bit at a time, so you'll be left with them that can and them that cant. How do we convince the capable people to do the crappy jobs while we give the incapable people a free ride? The capable people are not going to like that, and will sooner or later start electing politicians who promise to sterilize the incapable portion of the population "for the greater good". Being the ones with the money, they will have the power, under our current economic and political model, to do as they please, and they will get their sterilization programs.
When you own a company, you can decide how much your CEO is worth.
I own a small piece of a large number of companies, and I have exactly as much say in how much those CEOs are paid as I do in how much the President of the United States is paid.
Sorry. His job is not to optimize the number of jobs, but to optimize profits. Robotics tend to help with that.
Until recently, corporate goals and missions were to serve some social function. Companies were not in place for the purpose of making money, but rather making money was a necessary component to successfully completing their mission (hence the corporate mission statement). In fact, in the 18th and 19th centuries, submitting corporate filings with only a stated goal of making money, would result in the state refusing your company its corporate papers (in essence you would be refused permission to start the company), on the grounds that your company did not serve any social function that the state considered valuable. It was not until late in the 20th century that companies for the sake of profits only became an acceptable concept, and now we have the situation where a companies officers can actually be sued for not following the path to greatest profit. This situation is not at all how companies are supposed to work, and will be the ruin of our country.
What amazes me is that so many people now are just willing to throw away Capitalism entirely.
People are wiling to throw away capitalism so easily because a lot of people can understand at an intuitive level that capitalism coupled with the fundamental laws of nature will result in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Although most people don't have the engineering background to understand how the laws governing feedback loops, harmonics and system stability apply to macro and micro economics, the reality is that they can sense the wrongness of the capitalist economic model. The early attempts at a fix failed to take human psychology into account and consequently communism was born, had its run, and failed. In the mean time, we have regulated capitalism that has shown the most promise, but we have discovered that the less regulated it is, the worse it gets (more unstable, and less politically viable, think runaway income inequality). At the root of the problem is that money *is* power, and the more power any given group has the more they have the ability to modify the system to suit themselves. Any economic system needs two key components to be viable in the long term. First, it has to have powerful protections against modification to suit any particular agenda. This necessitates that the system be correctly designed in th first place, there can be no opportunity to "fix" it later, or you open the possibility of the system being gamed. The second thing it needs is a negative feedback mechanism to prevent runaway wealth accumulation. This is a tricky requirement as it appears to be 100% at odds with human psychology. It is this conflict that could potentially mean that human kind is fundamentally incapable of stable economic behavior.
It's not "distributed", it's earned. Until you understand this, you have nothing to contribute.
Until "earning" CEO pay requires more skill than luck, I'm going to stick with the word distributed.
Put another way, small amounts of money (less than $1M) are earned. Large amounts of money are distributed. Wealth accumulation is not stable, it is a runaway process under our current economic system. There is a positive feedback loop between having money and income. If we were to build any other engineered system this way, it would result in catastrophe (think harmonics in buildings and bridges, or god forbid, positive void co-efficient in nuclear engineering). Intelligently designing systems is all about negative feedback to limit excess and undesirable oscillation. For some reason we ignore all of that when it comes to economics, and the result is an economic model that can best be described as cyclical booms and busts. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. That kind of system behavior in engineering would require a redesign of the broken part because the original engineer failed to do their job properly.
True, and so 0.0001% of the population will benefit from this.
The other 99% of the population would benefit enormously if that 0.0001% could bring the smart phone in...
Hey, these guys sound real awesome. I know! Let's give them $150 billion dollars in order to pretend they're not building nukes for a little while! And then when they break the agreement, we'll just pretend they didn't. Let's also pay them a nice bribe of another billion to return our soldiers they took hostage. But doing that would make our President look incompetent, so we'll still do it but just have our buddies in the media completely ignore the story.
Lets remember that only one country has ever actually used Nuclear weapons against any target, and was probably not even necessary to end that war.
Let us keep in mind that the US has been killing innocent people by way of drone strikes for more than a decade now. It can easily be argued that the US is the worlds largest exporter of terror weapons. In fact, our terrorist activities dwarf any in the history of mankind. We have become so adept at it that we can detonate bombs from 5000 miles away with accuracy measured in centimeters. We can do that without even risking our own people at all. If the terrorists could do that, The US would be short a few hundred politicians, and the white house would have been target #1.
The thing you have to remember about terrorism is that it takes two sides to fight. As long as we keep bombing them, we keep the cycle of hate going, and they keep bombing us. That sounds suspiciously like the definition of insanity.
I've even seen ground fault systems that trip from inrush current, which should be something simple to implement but somehow ones exist that can't handle noise and surges on the lines they monitor (resulting in a lot of wasted time debugging of a device once trying to track down a transient ground fault that wasn't there).
Ground fault devices that experience even a transient current *must* trip. Any ground fault excursion is dangerous, and the result of a faulty piece of equipment. If you were seeing a transient ground fault, in a device, that device is *dangerous*, and the design fault with that device should be corrected. Most likely, you have some relatively high power signal that is coupling to the case. The easiest way to fix that problem is to ensure a strong enough coupling of all of your power supplies (bigger bypass caps), and better grounding (Most likely culprit is unexpected ground loops, or parts too close to the chassis ground). You might also have been victim of counterfeit breakers, which did not actually meet the CE/UL markings on the devices.
limiting that rush has less to do with protecting the PSU and more to do with not tripping crappy breakers if you plug them in coincident with the peak of the mains sine wave.
This has not been true since breakers were introduced. One of the principle advantages to the breakers was a magnetic *and* thermal capability. This allows breakers ( even crappy ones ) to handle inrush of massive machinery.
If you are feeling brave, you can try the following experiment ( I already have with several different types of breakers ): Take a dead short (Large gauge wire like 8 AWG or 6 AWG. Hook it up to a power transistor controlled by a microprocessor. International Rectifier makes some 100A jobbers that can handle spikes of up to thousands of Amps for less than 10ms bursts. Set up a zero cross detect on your microprocessor and turn the juice on through the dead short for 1 full wave of 120VAC. Hook up an o-scope to your mains and check the line voltage as you turn this critter on.
What you will get is one full cycle of severely browned out mains (might drop as far as 10Vp-p. across a 1mOhm load ). For those astute at math, that would be 10,000Amps at 10Vp-p, or about 60 kWatts RMS. As long as you only do this for one full cycle and no more, you will neither blow the breaker, nor significantly heat any of you components. The reason for this is because breakers are mechanical devices and have a specified amount of time before they can "react" to overload. Even their thermal shutdown takes time. Long story short, a standard 15A wall breaker can dispense about 15kAmps for 10ms without tripping. That is far more than the transformer at the pole can handle, and its own internal resistance becomes the current limiting factor. A good line supply will provide you with about 10kAmps before the current limiting drops the line voltage significantly. A typical residential supply will only dump about 1000 Amps before significant drops in voltage. Either way, the breakers will not trip no matter what you do, as long as the entire incident is shorter than 10ms.
This design is very much on purpose. As I have seen, and what these experiments demonstrates is that in-wall wiring, breakers, and utility company equipment are not seriously threatened by short power spikes, so they have no reason to try to protect against them. The breakers in your house are there to prevent enough power from flowing through the wires in the walls to cause them to start fires.
The inrush can however severely damage switching power supplies. Many of them are built to just barely handle the voltages they are designed for. This is done to save money and weight in the extremely competitive mobile power supply market. This market is so competitive, and the margins are so thin, that they will do almost anything sketchy they can to shave pennies off the design. I have personally seen transformerless designs that were built assuming one of the two main lugs was neutral. If they are plugged into a reverse polarity outlet, they short the hot line to the ground directly... This is a common design used on many different power supplies, and is one of the primary reasons you should never open one of those supplies while it is powered. Even in the lab the damn things are dangerous.
Why would anyone think there's a constant proper relationship between revenue and the number of employees across all businesses?
Because employees cost a pretty predictable amount of money. Your revenues from existing product lines are pretty predictable too. If you have a very disproportionate number of employees to the revenue your business model can expect, then yes you have too many employees. What he's saying is that Yahoo better figure out how to make their existing business model work with 3000 employees because if they don't, the ride comes to a magnificent halt when the employee paychecks start bouncing (aka corporate suicide).
And I remember Alta Vista now get off my lawn
There has never been anything else that could produce as well as alta vista when all you wanted was technical information. These days, Google has become so watered down with BS that the signal to noise ratio is absolute crap.
The simple truth is that there are two types of searches, and nobody has figured out how to deal with it. There are searches that will end in money changing hands, and there are searches that will result in information moving. There is almost never any overlap. Someone could make a *lot* of people happy by making a search engine that could tell the difference and skip the adds altogether when there is a very low chance of someone buying anything. Save the bandwidth, save the advertisers money, and improve their effectiveness by spewing adds only where there is value to do so, and gain market share by being the best of both worlds.
The duty cycle on rooftops is a lot better
True but with rooftop, you pretty much need one inverter per rooftop, which adds substantial amounts to the cost. With these paved roadways, you could probably get the equivalent of 10-20 rooftops with only one inverter, thus significantly reducing the cost of installation. Plus, under most circumstances, installers wont fall off the roadway, thus creating a *very* expensive insurance liability. The cost of liability insurance is a very large (~20%) part of the cost a given rooftop solar installation. Playing around on roofs tends to kill and maim people with rather frightening frequency.
Serial port?
Serial ports haven't been included on PCs in more than a decade. Sure you can get them as a special item, but that will likely be true for VGA as well.