Well, taking a Google Streetview stroll around, "gritty, industrial" doesn't seem too far out of place, but that's not necessarily bad; it's a matter of what you like. It looks a bit like how I imagine 1920s Manhattan to have been, with high density mid-rise residential housing cheek-by jowl with commercial and industrial facilities. Only with densely forested mountains a few miles away.
It's not the way Americans organize things, but it has its attractions. I bet a lot of people walk to work and buy stuff for their evening supper on the way home.
I'm a liberal socialist (the best kid of socialist in my opinion!) and think your numbers are crazy. There are almost seven million tech workers in the US, and the H1-B program is capped at 65,000 visas/year for a three year stay.
As for the quote, it's not uncommon for people to take political quotes out of context, but I went to the source and I have to say the for once the article title is accurate. Either he was drawing a connection saying that a "civic society" (by which I think he means a "civil society") is an argument against having so many Asian/South Asian tech ceos, or he is given to rambling on in unconnected thoughts.
If you were really a socialist you'd understand the workers create wealth.It's the capitalists who leech off that. So more workers aren't the problem. It's management bringing workers in to depress wages. In particular with tech people working in tech tend to create more tech jobs. When you create software it create support and system management jobs -- it may even create more programming jobs. How many American jobs do you thin LInus Torvalds (an immigrant) has created? Red Hat alone employs almost ten thousand people.
Dogs are not eaten everywhere in Asia, but here's a curious thing: in some places dogs are also kept as pets, and people find the idea of eating a pet dog repulsive.
It's a bit like the teacup pig thing in the US. I'm sure that there people who keep miniature pigs as pets who still eat bacon, but would be horrified at the idea of turning their pet into bacon.
I like to fish, and although I release most fish I do occasionally take one for eating -- particularly hatchery fish, which aren't much sport and are almost certain to die a long painful death in the wild. Mainly they're a nuisance, but when I do take one I immediately pith the brain to give it an instant death. It is a frankly brutal thing, which I don't particularly enjoy, but it teaches me to remember that meat is dead animals.
We haven't use nukes in over 70 years, but we still apparently think we need them.
The reason Britain hasn't fired anti-ship missiles from ships recently is that it hasn't needed to. But note that they'll also need the F35 to be fully baked before they can operate the aircraft carriers they're building.
So really it looks like for some period the Royal Navy simply won't have the capability to fight other warships except with their seven submarines. This means they can't really contest command of the sea anywhere or project military power without assistance from the US.
Does it matter? Do they need to have a blue water navy capable of acting independently? Probably not, unless the US pulls out of NATO. Who would they need to contest command of the sea with? Russia did a little saber rattling recently in the channel, but it's only a matter of time before they run out of money too given Russia's dire economic situation.
Except that most people will have certain things they want and others that they don't want. For example you may have a high tolerance for astringency as long as the coffee is strong; or you may not mind burnt notes as long as it has caramelized sweetness. But if you don't handle the coffee carefully you'll get a mish-mash of flavor notes that's bound to have something you don't like: burnt AND watery for example. Those don't normally go together, but it's certainly possible to produce a cup of coffee that expresses both those characteristics.
On the flip side there are certain characteristics that nearly everyone likes. Roasty sweetness; full mouth feel; flavor notes like berry or cocoa; a coffee flavor finish that outlasts the initial acidity or astringency. By handling the coffee in a specific way you can maximize the expression of these popular characteristics. Is such a cup of coffee objectively better? No. You can't tell someone who likes the taste of flat, watery battery acid they're wrong to "under-extract" their coffee. But a cup of coffee that has these characteristics is certainly statistically more pleasing.
Who doesn't know that you need to have the right grind size for your brewing method? The physics and chemistry of brewing of course is complex, but from a user standpoint for any given variety of coffee you only have two to four parameters to vary: the size of the grounds, the amount of coffee grounds per cup, (sometimes) the temperature of the water, and (sometimes) the brewing time. Since you judge the results subjectively, you just have to experiment a bit and find what you like.
Now here's something you might not actually know: the consistency of granules in a grind is critical. So much so that the coffee grinder may be the single most important piece of equipment in the process.
To see why, imagine the worst case: one of those whirling blade countertop coffee grinders. They give you a broad range of ground sizes from very fine powder to big chunks of bean. When you expose what comes out of these things to hot water the fine powdery granules over-extract long before the big chunks have contributed anything. So you end up with a cup of what tastes like diluted oven cleaner.
Your best bet is to buy smallish amounts of whole bean coffee at a specialty store and have them grind it for the method you intend to use. If it's an automatic drip machine then you've done everything you can to get the best results; all you have to do is try using a little more or less coffee than recommended.
If you want to try to improve your results, I recommend getting a $29 Aeropress, an electric water kettle and an instant read thermometer. The usual grind is a little finer for Aeropress than drip, but you can use drip grind. If your coffee comes out overextracted, shorten the brew time or adjust the water temperature and see if it approves. If you drink a lot of coffee you'll get really good at making coffee you like, and fast.
Finally I do not recommend buying a coffee grinder unless you're willing to spend over $200 for a conical burr machine. You're much better off using the coffee store's grinder and buying in small quantities than you would be using a cheap grinder. The main advantage of a home grinder is it lets you use a variety of brewing methods. You can grind for an Aeropress for your personal use, a French press for two people, or a big coffee urn for a party. The only decent cheap grinder I know of is those $33 Hario manual grinders, which actually work better than a $250 conical grinder but take over a minute to crank out enough coffee for a single cup.
Am I the fool for unduly worrying about our only means of survival
Well maybe not quite a fool, but there is almost nothing that would be an extinction level event for the human species. In a sense all those post-apocalyptic stories get it right: no matter how hellish things get people will find a way to survive.
Disruptive change eats its way from the most vulnerable and then moves on up. At the status quo, baseline level of climate change you always had someone somewhere dying from famine, and just above them you have people who are impoverished by it, and above them you have people who aren't affected because they can simply move their assets out of the way. As you ratchet up the rate and geographic scope of climate change, you simply take a bigger bite of the bottom end of society and the lines shift upwards in the economic pecking order. At the very apex of the pyramid you'll have people who as long as they're reasonably prudent won't suffer in anything short of civilization collapsing. In fact within limits they'll make money coming and going: creating the problem and selling things people below them need to adapt to the problem.
or is the majority of the rest of America the fool for being so willfully ignorant of all the scientific research and the associated danger of ultimate extinction of much if not all life on earth, for a few short-term dollars?
Wrong framing. They're fools for willfully ignoring that they'll be paying a larger share of the future costs while others are reaping the lion's share of the present benefit.
China has been reducing its dependency on lignite, aka "brown coal". This is in part to address their epic, mind-boggling smog problems, but it has also had the effect of flattening the net worldwide growth anthropogenic carbon emissions over the past three years. I've checked the journal's impact factor and although it's new it is ranked in the top quartile of Earth and planetary sciences journals.
Don't forget the Russians, who have a vested interest in fossil fuel consumption and use paid trolls in psy-ops campaigns.
I've had interactions here with people who are very likely Russian trolls: very pro-Putin, even pro-Yankuyovych, the disgraced and deposed Ukranian president who embezzled 70 billion dollars from the treasury and built this at a cost of a hundred million dollars of laundered money.
Well this is an extremely garbled take on matters.
Radiosonde are balloon borne instruments. If you add up all the "raw data" you are are adding up both tropospheric and stratospheric measurements. The thing is "Global Warming" is about heat being trapped in the lower atmosphere. This means as the lower atmosphere warms, the layers above it cool. I tracked down some of the sources and they talk about averaged data to the 100mb level (about 1/10 atmosphere). That's about 16km or twice the height of Everest.
The point is what I claimed it was all along: to achieve a balance of performance, economy and price while meeting emissions standards. It's a matter of meeting all constraints, which couldn't be done in a low cost diesel car.
Sure, if by "recent" you mean "after VW got caught in 2014". By cheating VW saved over two thousand dollars on their diesel car, which is a lot when you're selling cars for around $20,000. BMW didn't cheat, but they're selling cars for over $60,000.
So it's simply the case VW could not make a competitive diesel that met US NOx emissions standards as well as consumer expectations. Not in the affordable transportation market segment.
And as we're finding out those cars aren't as clean as advertised. I have friends who bought a diesel VW car, and they were over the moon about it. It had great mileage, more than good enough performance, and it didn't pollute any more than a gasoline car.
Turns out only two of three of those were correct.
It's not impossible to build a vehicle which meets emissions standards and is affordable and is something people want to buy. It's just that it's not possible to do all that and make it a diesel.
Jeez -- you're a toolmaker? Isn't that like being a wheelwright or a swordsmith these days?
Anyhow my point is that Democrats have squandered their credibility with working people. Which was too bad, because there were elements to Clinton's plans that actually made sense -- like retraining coal miners to do wind power installations. It's one thing to train workers for jobs that aren't going to be there, another thing altogether to train them for the jobs that are replacing theirs.
This is nothing against rich people, but it's important to remember just how much your ability to adapt to change is tied to your wealth. If you're a billionaire and the mill moves overseas, your stock goes up; or if it takes a hit, you rebalance your portfolio. If you're a high school dropout and your dad and grandad spent their entire lives working in that mill, you're screwed -- especially if all the mills are closing down across the country.
The thing is in Clinton era everyone knew those southern and midwestern mill towns were doomed. Nobody expected the Republicans to care, but the Democrats were worse than indifferent. They betrayed the working class.
Here was how they excused what they did: we're going to retrain you for new, high paying jobs. Really? Why would anyone locate a whole bunch of jobs that can be done by someone with a few weeks of training in a high-wage area? No, the new, high paying jobs were always going to requires years of education; a Bachelor's at a minimum.
In the short term during a trade war, everyone who works selling Chinese made stuff loses their jobs. Everyone who works making things which require Chinese made parts loses their jobs. Anyone who works making stuff that is exported to China (about eighteen billion dollars of manufactured goods) loses their jobs.
Meanwhile you can't conjure all that manufacturing capacity we had in the early 90s back overnight. It took China over ten years to replace that, and that was with government support. It's reasonable to assume it'll take us roughly as long, and with equal government support. The new factories, however, will be far more automated than the factories that closed in the 90s, so don't expect to get all those jobs back.
The unpleasant truth is that you can't make such a huge change in your economy and then just take it back because the change hurts. Undoing the change will hurt almost as much.
While I'm optimistic about the thorium fuel cycle, it won't be the best solution to our future energy needs. The best solution will be getting our energy from a mix of carbon neutral sources. Plus greater efficiency, of course.
Every means of generating energy is going to have marginal costs that increase with scale, and that includes nuclear. Putting all our energy eggs in the nuclear basket has several undesirable consequences that are more manageable if nuclear is just a contributor. First there's the massive future spike decommissioning and waste disposal costs that you're setting up if you go in for a crash program. There's the problem of what uranium prices will do and their effects will be on political stability. You can look at the global effect instability in the Middle East has as an example of what happens when one commodity becomes utterly critical to economic survival. Uranium of course wouldn't be used up immediately like oil, but control of a country's uranium supply will be tantamount to control of that country's ability to grow its economy.
On the other hand steady increase in nuclear generation over two or three generations doesn't come with a sudden spike in costs; it allows us to develop decommissioning and disposal technology gradually, or to reduce the nuclear contribution to the mix if those things prove impractical.
So the best way to generate more energy from an environmental and international stability standpoint is to tap a number of sources of energy sources. And to make that practical, we need (a) vastly improved electricity distribution technology and (b) better and more ubiquitous battery technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, taking a Google Streetview stroll around, "gritty, industrial" doesn't seem too far out of place, but that's not necessarily bad; it's a matter of what you like. It looks a bit like how I imagine 1920s Manhattan to have been, with high density mid-rise residential housing cheek-by jowl with commercial and industrial facilities. Only with densely forested mountains a few miles away.
It's not the way Americans organize things, but it has its attractions. I bet a lot of people walk to work and buy stuff for their evening supper on the way home.
If you jump into the muck you don't get to posture like you're above it.
I'm a liberal socialist (the best kid of socialist in my opinion!) and think your numbers are crazy. There are almost seven million tech workers in the US, and the H1-B program is capped at 65,000 visas/year for a three year stay.
As for the quote, it's not uncommon for people to take political quotes out of context, but I went to the source and I have to say the for once the article title is accurate. Either he was drawing a connection saying that a "civic society" (by which I think he means a "civil society") is an argument against having so many Asian/South Asian tech ceos, or he is given to rambling on in unconnected thoughts.
If you were really a socialist you'd understand the workers create wealth.It's the capitalists who leech off that. So more workers aren't the problem. It's management bringing workers in to depress wages. In particular with tech people working in tech tend to create more tech jobs. When you create software it create support and system management jobs -- it may even create more programming jobs. How many American jobs do you thin LInus Torvalds (an immigrant) has created? Red Hat alone employs almost ten thousand people.
I'm looking forward to the Klan marching in my town so I can kick their butts.
Good.
Dogs are not eaten everywhere in Asia, but here's a curious thing: in some places dogs are also kept as pets, and people find the idea of eating a pet dog repulsive.
It's a bit like the teacup pig thing in the US. I'm sure that there people who keep miniature pigs as pets who still eat bacon, but would be horrified at the idea of turning their pet into bacon.
I like to fish, and although I release most fish I do occasionally take one for eating -- particularly hatchery fish, which aren't much sport and are almost certain to die a long painful death in the wild. Mainly they're a nuisance, but when I do take one I immediately pith the brain to give it an instant death. It is a frankly brutal thing, which I don't particularly enjoy, but it teaches me to remember that meat is dead animals.
Well,there are Asians in India who have views about how Americans treat cows.
We haven't use nukes in over 70 years, but we still apparently think we need them.
The reason Britain hasn't fired anti-ship missiles from ships recently is that it hasn't needed to. But note that they'll also need the F35 to be fully baked before they can operate the aircraft carriers they're building.
So really it looks like for some period the Royal Navy simply won't have the capability to fight other warships except with their seven submarines. This means they can't really contest command of the sea anywhere or project military power without assistance from the US.
Does it matter? Do they need to have a blue water navy capable of acting independently? Probably not, unless the US pulls out of NATO. Who would they need to contest command of the sea with? Russia did a little saber rattling recently in the channel, but it's only a matter of time before they run out of money too given Russia's dire economic situation.
Except that most people will have certain things they want and others that they don't want. For example you may have a high tolerance for astringency as long as the coffee is strong; or you may not mind burnt notes as long as it has caramelized sweetness. But if you don't handle the coffee carefully you'll get a mish-mash of flavor notes that's bound to have something you don't like: burnt AND watery for example. Those don't normally go together, but it's certainly possible to produce a cup of coffee that expresses both those characteristics.
On the flip side there are certain characteristics that nearly everyone likes. Roasty sweetness; full mouth feel; flavor notes like berry or cocoa; a coffee flavor finish that outlasts the initial acidity or astringency. By handling the coffee in a specific way you can maximize the expression of these popular characteristics. Is such a cup of coffee objectively better? No. You can't tell someone who likes the taste of flat, watery battery acid they're wrong to "under-extract" their coffee. But a cup of coffee that has these characteristics is certainly statistically more pleasing.
Who doesn't know that you need to have the right grind size for your brewing method? The physics and chemistry of brewing of course is complex, but from a user standpoint for any given variety of coffee you only have two to four parameters to vary: the size of the grounds, the amount of coffee grounds per cup, (sometimes) the temperature of the water, and (sometimes) the brewing time. Since you judge the results subjectively, you just have to experiment a bit and find what you like.
Now here's something you might not actually know: the consistency of granules in a grind is critical. So much so that the coffee grinder may be the single most important piece of equipment in the process.
To see why, imagine the worst case: one of those whirling blade countertop coffee grinders. They give you a broad range of ground sizes from very fine powder to big chunks of bean. When you expose what comes out of these things to hot water the fine powdery granules over-extract long before the big chunks have contributed anything. So you end up with a cup of what tastes like diluted oven cleaner.
Your best bet is to buy smallish amounts of whole bean coffee at a specialty store and have them grind it for the method you intend to use. If it's an automatic drip machine then you've done everything you can to get the best results; all you have to do is try using a little more or less coffee than recommended.
If you want to try to improve your results, I recommend getting a $29 Aeropress, an electric water kettle and an instant read thermometer. The usual grind is a little finer for Aeropress than drip, but you can use drip grind. If your coffee comes out overextracted, shorten the brew time or adjust the water temperature and see if it approves. If you drink a lot of coffee you'll get really good at making coffee you like, and fast.
Finally I do not recommend buying a coffee grinder unless you're willing to spend over $200 for a conical burr machine. You're much better off using the coffee store's grinder and buying in small quantities than you would be using a cheap grinder. The main advantage of a home grinder is it lets you use a variety of brewing methods. You can grind for an Aeropress for your personal use, a French press for two people, or a big coffee urn for a party. The only decent cheap grinder I know of is those $33 Hario manual grinders, which actually work better than a $250 conical grinder but take over a minute to crank out enough coffee for a single cup.
Am I the fool for unduly worrying about our only means of survival
Well maybe not quite a fool, but there is almost nothing that would be an extinction level event for the human species. In a sense all those post-apocalyptic stories get it right: no matter how hellish things get people will find a way to survive.
Disruptive change eats its way from the most vulnerable and then moves on up. At the status quo, baseline level of climate change you always had someone somewhere dying from famine, and just above them you have people who are impoverished by it, and above them you have people who aren't affected because they can simply move their assets out of the way.
As you ratchet up the rate and geographic scope of climate change, you simply take a bigger bite of the bottom end of society and the lines shift upwards in the economic pecking order. At the very apex of the pyramid you'll have people who as long as they're reasonably prudent won't suffer in anything short of civilization collapsing. In fact within limits they'll make money coming and going: creating the problem and selling things people below them need to adapt to the problem.
or is the majority of the rest of America the fool for being so willfully ignorant of all the scientific research and the associated danger of ultimate extinction of much if not all life on earth, for a few short-term dollars?
Wrong framing. They're fools for willfully ignoring that they'll be paying a larger share of the future costs while others are reaping the lion's share of the present benefit.
China has been reducing its dependency on lignite, aka "brown coal". This is in part to address their epic, mind-boggling smog problems, but it has also had the effect of flattening the net worldwide growth anthropogenic carbon emissions over the past three years. I've checked the journal's impact factor and although it's new it is ranked in the top quartile of Earth and planetary sciences journals.
Don't forget the Russians, who have a vested interest in fossil fuel consumption and use paid trolls in psy-ops campaigns.
I've had interactions here with people who are very likely Russian trolls: very pro-Putin, even pro-Yankuyovych, the disgraced and deposed Ukranian president who embezzled 70 billion dollars from the treasury and built this at a cost of a hundred million dollars of laundered money.
Well this is an extremely garbled take on matters.
Radiosonde are balloon borne instruments. If you add up all the "raw data" you are are adding up both tropospheric and stratospheric measurements. The thing is "Global Warming" is about heat being trapped in the lower atmosphere. This means as the lower atmosphere warms, the layers above it cool. I tracked down some of the sources and they talk about averaged data to the 100mb level (about 1/10 atmosphere). That's about 16km or twice the height of Everest.
The point is what I claimed it was all along: to achieve a balance of performance, economy and price while meeting emissions standards. It's a matter of meeting all constraints, which couldn't be done in a low cost diesel car.
Sure, if by "recent" you mean "after VW got caught in 2014". By cheating VW saved over two thousand dollars on their diesel car, which is a lot when you're selling cars for around $20,000. BMW didn't cheat, but they're selling cars for over $60,000.
So it's simply the case VW could not make a competitive diesel that met US NOx emissions standards as well as consumer expectations. Not in the affordable transportation market segment.
And as we're finding out those cars aren't as clean as advertised. I have friends who bought a diesel VW car, and they were over the moon about it. It had great mileage, more than good enough performance, and it didn't pollute any more than a gasoline car.
Turns out only two of three of those were correct.
It's not impossible to build a vehicle which meets emissions standards and is affordable and is something people want to buy. It's just that it's not possible to do all that and make it a diesel.
No, I understand what a toolmaker is. It's just that there aren't so many as there used to be.
There's an ice rink in Quito, if you can deal with the 2850m elevation.
Jeez -- you're a toolmaker? Isn't that like being a wheelwright or a swordsmith these days?
Anyhow my point is that Democrats have squandered their credibility with working people. Which was too bad, because there were elements to Clinton's plans that actually made sense -- like retraining coal miners to do wind power installations. It's one thing to train workers for jobs that aren't going to be there, another thing altogether to train them for the jobs that are replacing theirs.
This is nothing against rich people, but it's important to remember just how much your ability to adapt to change is tied to your wealth. If you're a billionaire and the mill moves overseas, your stock goes up; or if it takes a hit, you rebalance your portfolio. If you're a high school dropout and your dad and grandad spent their entire lives working in that mill, you're screwed -- especially if all the mills are closing down across the country.
The thing is in Clinton era everyone knew those southern and midwestern mill towns were doomed. Nobody expected the Republicans to care, but the Democrats were worse than indifferent. They betrayed the working class.
Here was how they excused what they did: we're going to retrain you for new, high paying jobs. Really? Why would anyone locate a whole bunch of jobs that can be done by someone with a few weeks of training in a high-wage area? No, the new, high paying jobs were always going to requires years of education; a Bachelor's at a minimum.
Yes. Because as arrogant as I am, I'm not stupid enough to confuse being different from me with being stupid.
The key word is: eventually.
In the short term during a trade war, everyone who works selling Chinese made stuff loses their jobs. Everyone who works making things which require Chinese made parts loses their jobs. Anyone who works making stuff that is exported to China (about eighteen billion dollars of manufactured goods) loses their jobs.
Meanwhile you can't conjure all that manufacturing capacity we had in the early 90s back overnight. It took China over ten years to replace that, and that was with government support. It's reasonable to assume it'll take us roughly as long, and with equal government support. The new factories, however, will be far more automated than the factories that closed in the 90s, so don't expect to get all those jobs back.
The unpleasant truth is that you can't make such a huge change in your economy and then just take it back because the change hurts. Undoing the change will hurt almost as much.
While I'm optimistic about the thorium fuel cycle, it won't be the best solution to our future energy needs. The best solution will be getting our energy from a mix of carbon neutral sources. Plus greater efficiency, of course.
Every means of generating energy is going to have marginal costs that increase with scale, and that includes nuclear. Putting all our energy eggs in the nuclear basket has several undesirable consequences that are more manageable if nuclear is just a contributor. First there's the massive future spike decommissioning and waste disposal costs that you're setting up if you go in for a crash program. There's the problem of what uranium prices will do and their effects will be on political stability. You can look at the global effect instability in the Middle East has as an example of what happens when one commodity becomes utterly critical to economic survival. Uranium of course wouldn't be used up immediately like oil, but control of a country's uranium supply will be tantamount to control of that country's ability to grow its economy.
On the other hand steady increase in nuclear generation over two or three generations doesn't come with a sudden spike in costs; it allows us to develop decommissioning and disposal technology gradually, or to reduce the nuclear contribution to the mix if those things prove impractical.
So the best way to generate more energy from an environmental and international stability standpoint is to tap a number of sources of energy sources. And to make that practical, we need (a) vastly improved electricity distribution technology and (b) better and more ubiquitous battery technology.