Every now and then, I need to sort a stack of a few dozen numbered envelopes in numerical order. The first two digits are the same (year) and the last two digits go up to 70-something.
I once used quicksort, but found it too cumbersome for the task at hand.
What I do now is just deal them into piles by the second digit. Each stack is small enough that it's easy to just eyeball-sort them, starting with the 0 stack and ending at the 7 stack.
Cue breathless, hysterical stories about how fusion energy will cause three-headed babies, global enturbulation, and the heartbreak of psorisis in 3... 2... 1...
Uranium "running out" is hundreds or a thousand years away -- assuming we abandon the insanely wasteful "Once through and throw most of the fuel away" cycle. That doesn't count extracting uranium from sea water, which the Japanese demonstrated back in the 70s could be done with an ion exchange process for a few hundred dollars a pound in 1970s dollars. And then there's thorium...
The omni-obstructionists and the arithmetic denialists oppose any energy source -- that's any energy source -- that risks allowing the continuing of technological civilization. If it threatens to provide enough energy, it will be opposed. Every tiime. See Paul Erlich's editorial expressing horror at the possibility that there might have been something to cold fusion back in the 80s.
Detroit's problems can't be fixed by just saying "Oh, the poor people, let's throw billions of dollars at them." Detroit's problems are like the problems of a meth addict. You can't help the meth addict by giving him money for more meth. You have to get him off the meth first -- which means, he has to want to get off the meth; if he wants to keep doing meth, sad to say, there is no help for him. That's just grim reality
Helping the people of Detroit is going to require fixing Detroit's endemic problems, but there's no significant constituencey in Detroit for fixing the problems. Fixing the problems are going to be masively unpopular in Detroit, resulting in either abject failure of the attempt, or constant shrieks of "That un-Democratic!!"
Pretending that industrial-technological civilization can be run entirely on "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy is exactly what I mean by "Arithmetic Denialism."
There is certainly a place for solar. But at 1 kw/m^2 at noon on a cloudless day, times whatever percentage efficiency of the cells... it isn't going to be the whole solution. Not even in California.
I don't see it among those who loudly and continuously complain about CO2. The most they will allow is "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy, not anything capable of powering a 24x7 365.24 days per year industrial economy. That is, nuclear.
Yes, there are exceptions. James Hansen is one. They are, however, very few and far between. Most of the people "oh so concerned about CO2" are also shrieking technophobes whenever nuclear is mentioned.
Because you haven't "upgraded". The old Google Maps had this feature (I think you had to enable it from "Labs"), but they took it out of the new maps.
They also removed the "Select a rectangle and zoom to it" feature.
For both of those reasons, I downgraded back to the old one. I have no interest whatsoever in "upgrading" unless and until those features are put back.
That's all I see of these web pages that are nothing but flash -- a big blank nothing, and a little icon telling me that NoScript has blocked something.
At that point, I decide just how interested I am in the content of the page after all. Usually, the answer is "Not interested enough", and I close the tab.
Each of those craters is an nuclear bomb crater, with fission products and residual plutonium completely uncontained, except by the fact that they're underground.
The waste at Yucca Mountain, by contrast, would have been very stringently contained, mixed with molten glass and cast into solid lumps, inside concrete and steel casks. Not just sitting inside a hole in the bottom of a crater.
At last, Hansen is turning his attention to something that can make it possible to phase out burning of fossil fuels. Just "Don't Burn Fossil Fuels" without any alternative (and "sunny days when the wind happens to be blowing" energy is NOT an alternative) are never going to replace 24x7x365.24 energy.
I grabbed a copy of this the last time it came up on Slashdot -- mostly, the same sorts of tax breaks for cost of doing business that most companies get, except the oil companies in most cases get less (not more) of it than other companies do.
The biggest is what's called the Domestic Manufacturing Deduction. It's a 2004 tax change meant to encourage companies to manufacture in the U.S. It allows companies of almost any type to deduct from their taxable income up to 9 percent of profits from domestic manufacturing. Under the rule, oil and gas companies were classified as manufacturers, but their deduction was capped at 6 percent.
This provision alone is expected to save the oil and gas industry $18.2 billion over the next ten years, or 42 percent of the $44 billion total.
The oil industry feels unfairly singled out. "It can't be good for some and not for others or it is just a punishment," says Stephen Comstock, the tax policy manager at the American Petroleum Institute, an oil industry lobbying group.
Another subsidy, established in 1913 to encourage domestic drilling, allows oil companies to deduct more quickly all of the so-called intangible costs of preparing a site for drilling.
To accountants, intangible costs are costs for things that have no salvage value when the well runs dry, including clearing land and pouring concrete. Ordinarily, a business would have to deduct these costs over the life of the drilling site. Instead, small, independent drillers are allowed to deduct all of these expenses in the first year; major, so-called integrated companies like ExxonMobil can deduct 70 percent in the first year.
The break is worth $12.5 billion over the next ten years.
Comstock compares the oil industry's ability to write off the cost of preparing a well to other companies' ability to write off research and development costs. Other tax experts say this is clearly a subsidy.
A rule dating from 1926 that establishes how oil companies can depreciate the value of their wells allows drillers to deduct 15 percent of the well's revenue from its taxable income per year. This is instead of a more traditional depreciation scheme in which the cost of the well is depreciated over the well's life. The tax break was created in part to simplify accounting, so companies wouldn't have to guess how long an oil or gas field would produce in order to calculate how to depreciate it. It can be a boon: The total of the deductions over the life of the well can sometimes be bigger than what the company actually spent on the well.
This provision was eliminated for major oil companies in 1975, but it continues for independent producers. The break is worth $11 billion over 10 years.
Royalties that companies pay foreign governments for the oil they extract are not deductible from U.S taxes. But often the industry is allowed to claim royalties as foreign taxes, which are deductible. Obama and Senate Democrats call this a loophole, and want to close it. Obama doesn't include this in his $44 billion proposal, but Whitney Stanco, an analyst at MF Global, calculates that removing this benefit could cost the industry $8.5 billion over ten years.
So, if you increase the fuel costs of coal plants by 33%, plus whatever the costs are of the CO2 capture technology are, but forbid them to raise rates to pay for it... What happens then? What is their profit margin currently? Don't quote billions$$, quote me percentages of rates. Is there some reason you believe that it is impossible for electric utilities to go bankrupt?
I had a cancerous right kidney removed in 2002, the old-fashioned "split half open" surgery. Six months? I was told I should expect to be off work for one month. After three weeks, I was going stir crazy, so I went back to work early. Granted, I was strictly ordered not to pick up anything over ten pounds for a good bit longer than that. I forget how long, six weeks? But it certainly wan't six months.
Is there any actual case of anyone suggesting nitrogen asphyxiation should not be used as a method of execution because it's "too pleasant"? At all? Ever? Anywhere?
Bonus points if it's someone actually in government at any level, as opposed to finding someone in some trailer out in the sticks somewhere.
I think the actual objection that will come up is from people who are misinformed on the subject, and think it'd be a cruel method, that the criminal would feel suffocated. An interesting angle on nitrogen asphyxiation is that it's actually possible to let the dubious experience it, up to the point of unconsciousness, without a great deal of risk, as long as there's careful medical supervision. Dr. Jonathan Miller demonstrated this on himself in his TV show "The Body In Question" back in the 1970s.
No, I think the real objection will be from those who are adamantly opposed to capital punishment in any form at any time for any reason.
I guess if we went with it, Europe would ban export of nitrogen gas to the U.S.
No matter how many millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours must be diverted from inconsequential terrorist threats, perpetrators of this sort of lèse-majesté and thoughtcrime must be stampped out.
What almost everyone else is saying, I'll just add my vote -- Slashdot is about **CONTENT**. I want information density. Vertical screen real estate is precious. I hate beyond all expression of hatred when there's a narrow stripe of the content I'm after, as if I'm reading this on a phone even when I'm on a big monitor. Especially when there's a whole bunch of vertical screen real estate wasting extra whitespace and formatting fluff.
The current layout would drive me to spend more time on ycombinator "hacker news", which I dislike (in comparision to Slashdot) for other reasons. (Fire-hose of constantly moving topics so you can't see just new stuff. Bleah)
One posting cites numbers and sources. The "refutation" spouts unsupported assertions of generalities, and brings in some politician with... problematic... baggage who the previous poster didn't cite as a source in any way.
Oh, yeah, and the "refutation" is by an Anonymous Coward. Perfect troll trifecta!
Simple. "Doing something about climate change", phasing out burning of coal in favor of the only power source capable of replacing it, quad for quad, has been obstructed at every turn for the past 40 years by the omni-obstructionists. They still won't permit any nuclear power plants to be built.
One might easily come to the conclusion that they do not care about CO2 warming at all; that their actual agenda is something else entirely.
Is anyone but a tiny, tiny minority really concerned about CO2/global warming? Where are the marches demanding that we as quickly as possible replace coal power plants (the biggest single source of CO2) with nuclear power plants? No, the marches I see are all against nuclear power.
Slashdot Mirror
Every now and then, I need to sort a stack of a few dozen numbered envelopes in numerical order. The first two digits are the same (year) and the last two digits go up to 70-something.
I once used quicksort, but found it too cumbersome for the task at hand.
What I do now is just deal them into piles by the second digit. Each stack is small enough that it's easy to just eyeball-sort them, starting with the 0 stack and ending at the 7 stack.
I'm sure glad I installed DDWRT on my E3000 about a year ago.
Cue breathless, hysterical stories about how fusion energy will cause three-headed babies, global enturbulation, and the heartbreak of psorisis in 3... 2... 1...
Uranium "running out" is hundreds or a thousand years away -- assuming we abandon the insanely wasteful "Once through and throw most of the fuel away" cycle. That doesn't count extracting uranium from sea water, which the Japanese demonstrated back in the 70s could be done with an ion exchange process for a few hundred dollars a pound in 1970s dollars. And then there's thorium...
The omni-obstructionists and the arithmetic denialists oppose any energy source -- that's any energy source -- that risks allowing the continuing of technological civilization. If it threatens to provide enough energy, it will be opposed. Every tiime. See Paul Erlich's editorial expressing horror at the possibility that there might have been something to cold fusion back in the 80s.
Detroit's problems can't be fixed by just saying "Oh, the poor people, let's throw billions of dollars at them." Detroit's problems are like the problems of a meth addict. You can't help the meth addict by giving him money for more meth. You have to get him off the meth first -- which means, he has to want to get off the meth; if he wants to keep doing meth, sad to say, there is no help for him. That's just grim reality
Helping the people of Detroit is going to require fixing Detroit's endemic problems, but there's no significant constituencey in Detroit for fixing the problems. Fixing the problems are going to be masively unpopular in Detroit, resulting in either abject failure of the attempt, or constant shrieks of "That un-Democratic!!"
Pretending that industrial-technological civilization can be run entirely on "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy is exactly what I mean by "Arithmetic Denialism."
There is certainly a place for solar. But at 1 kw/m^2 at noon on a cloudless day, times whatever percentage efficiency of the cells... it isn't going to be the whole solution. Not even in California.
I don't see it among those who loudly and continuously complain about CO2. The most they will allow is "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy, not anything capable of powering a 24x7 365.24 days per year industrial economy. That is, nuclear.
Yes, there are exceptions. James Hansen is one. They are, however, very few and far between. Most of the people "oh so concerned about CO2" are also shrieking technophobes whenever nuclear is mentioned.
Because you haven't "upgraded". The old Google Maps had this feature (I think you had to enable it from "Labs"), but they took it out of the new maps.
They also removed the "Select a rectangle and zoom to it" feature.
For both of those reasons, I downgraded back to the old one. I have no interest whatsoever in "upgrading" unless and until those features are put back.
That's all I see of these web pages that are nothing but flash -- a big blank nothing, and a little icon telling me that NoScript has blocked something.
At that point, I decide just how interested I am in the content of the page after all. Usually, the answer is "Not interested enough", and I close the tab.
There's a lot of bad stuff already in that general area.
Google Maps satellite view of the Yucca Flats area: http://goo.gl/maps/y7DcV
Each of those craters is an nuclear bomb crater, with fission products and residual plutonium completely uncontained, except by the fact that they're underground.
The waste at Yucca Mountain, by contrast, would have been very stringently contained, mixed with molten glass and cast into solid lumps, inside concrete and steel casks. Not just sitting inside a hole in the bottom of a crater.
It's not NIMBY.
It's BANANAs.
Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.
At last, Hansen is turning his attention to something that can make it possible to phase out burning of fossil fuels. Just "Don't Burn Fossil Fuels" without any alternative (and "sunny days when the wind happens to be blowing" energy is NOT an alternative) are never going to replace 24x7x365.24 energy.
From the link you posted, that particular (subsidy/tax break) ended 40 years ago.
So, if you increase the fuel costs of coal plants by 33%, plus whatever the costs are of the CO2 capture technology are, but forbid them to raise rates to pay for it... What happens then? What is their profit margin currently? Don't quote billions$$, quote me percentages of rates. Is there some reason you believe that it is impossible for electric utilities to go bankrupt?
There's just something about that distinctive sound, isn't there.
I had a cancerous right kidney removed in 2002, the old-fashioned "split half open" surgery. Six months? I was told I should expect to be off work for one month. After three weeks, I was going stir crazy, so I went back to work early. Granted, I was strictly ordered not to pick up anything over ten pounds for a good bit longer than that. I forget how long, six weeks? But it certainly wan't six months.
Citation needed
Is there any actual case of anyone suggesting nitrogen asphyxiation should not be used as a method of execution because it's "too pleasant"? At all? Ever? Anywhere?
Bonus points if it's someone actually in government at any level, as opposed to finding someone in some trailer out in the sticks somewhere.
I think the actual objection that will come up is from people who are misinformed on the subject, and think it'd be a cruel method, that the criminal would feel suffocated. An interesting angle on nitrogen asphyxiation is that it's actually possible to let the dubious experience it, up to the point of unconsciousness, without a great deal of risk, as long as there's careful medical supervision. Dr. Jonathan Miller demonstrated this on himself in his TV show "The Body In Question" back in the 1970s.
No, I think the real objection will be from those who are adamantly opposed to capital punishment in any form at any time for any reason.
I guess if we went with it, Europe would ban export of nitrogen gas to the U.S.
No matter how many millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours must be diverted from inconsequential terrorist threats, perpetrators of this sort of lèse-majesté and thoughtcrime must be stampped out.
Maybe this will get some real firepower (Predator drones?) directed at spammers.
What almost everyone else is saying, I'll just add my vote -- Slashdot is about **CONTENT**. I want information density. Vertical screen real estate is precious. I hate beyond all expression of hatred when there's a narrow stripe of the content I'm after, as if I'm reading this on a phone even when I'm on a big monitor. Especially when there's a whole bunch of vertical screen real estate wasting extra whitespace and formatting fluff.
The current layout would drive me to spend more time on ycombinator "hacker news", which I dislike (in comparision to Slashdot) for other reasons. (Fire-hose of constantly moving topics so you can't see just new stuff. Bleah)
One posting cites numbers and sources. The "refutation" spouts unsupported assertions of generalities, and brings in some politician with ... problematic ... baggage who the previous poster didn't cite as a source in any way.
Oh, yeah, and the "refutation" is by an Anonymous Coward. Perfect troll trifecta!
How about "Best performance pretending to be a real gullible person and wasting the maximum amount of 419er's time."
Simple. "Doing something about climate change", phasing out burning of coal in favor of the only power source capable of replacing it, quad for quad, has been obstructed at every turn for the past 40 years by the omni-obstructionists. They still won't permit any nuclear power plants to be built.
One might easily come to the conclusion that they do not care about CO2 warming at all; that their actual agenda is something else entirely.
Is anyone but a tiny, tiny minority really concerned about CO2/global warming? Where are the marches demanding that we as quickly as possible replace coal power plants (the biggest single source of CO2) with nuclear power plants? No, the marches I see are all against nuclear power.
Arithmetic denialism.