It depends on (a) how much cheaper it is to mine stuff and (b) the price elasticity of demand.
For example, suppose the price of coal drops so much that people use twice as much of it. You'll end up with exactly the same number of people working at coal mines. In that case the impact would be to stymie any attempts to reduce pollution by burning less coal.
On the other hand, suppose coal demand is inelastic; then you'll have half the number of workers but the companies in the business are more profitable; you may have more mines that continue to operate.
Third possibility: coal prices will go down AND coal demand will go down because of environmental regulations. Then everyone hurts except people with automation skills and vendors with automation products.
I was thinking in terms of Windows, and to a lesser degree MacOS. Yes, stuff can get hidden, which is generally the first thing I do (hit F11 in Windows for example). Which just proves my point: you may be proud of that stuff but it's just clutter to me.
This is not a magic hack that lets you take over ANY drone; somebody figured out the frequency hopping sequence and OTA protocol for a common protocol used in toy drones. This is going to allow you to take overjust those toys, not MQ-9 Reapers. And somewhere between the tricky but doable hack of a toy spread-spectrum based protocol and the military grade encryption used in the Reapers' ARC-210 transceiver there is probably an economical level of protection that is good enough for police use.
My brother-in-law was asking about the Dyn DDOS attack last week; he wanted to know why the devices used to launch the attack weren't secure. The answer is simple: because they're sold to people who wouldn't pay $0.05 more for a secure device. So it follows that some police departments will use hobby drones and those will certainly get hacked.
Something that can and is used to invade other peoples' privacy.
There need to be federal regulations on how something like this is used though. There are 1.1 million cops in the country, and if they have their share of sociopaths (about 5%) then there's 55,000 sociopath cops out there. Add to that having more than their share of officious idiots too.
I've worked many years in and with non-profits and government agencies, and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. You get bad and ugly when there's too little or too much money.
Too little money is pretty straightforward; as a department is starved for resources and expertise it adopts a defensive posture. More time is spent trying to avoid work it can't do than doing work. The theme of the under-resourced department is stop the world from changing so we can catch up.
Too much money is just a more costly way of having not enough money. Where money is too abundant, expectations tend to be poorly defined and there's never enough money to do all the things you might want to do. The theme of the over-resourced department is sky's the limit, but stuff just doesn't get done.
You know you have the right amount of money when the work that's laid out for you looks difficult to do with the resources you have, but achievable.
Your story sounds like an under-resourced operation, which nonetheless may look very expensive to people who have no idea how much things cost. Policies that make user go away are the best case for them.
While I agree with you 100% (well, maybe 90%; I've never seen a dock or dock analog that I liked), it kind of makes us dinosaurs to even have much of an opinion. Even an old fart like me switches between Windows, MacOS, Mint and Xfce and I hardly even notice. The differences between them may look stark, but it's like arguing about how much chrome trim you can slap on your car's tailfins before it gets tacky.
I used to be a KDE user, and I try every new version that comes out and I come to the same conclusion: gee that's impressive, but I don't need it; what I really want out of a desktop environment is to stay out of my way. In a way desktop environments have become like the command line shell -- which as a developer I still use quite a bit. You still need them, but the center of mass of user experience has shifted out to the cloud and to mobile devices. Stuff like widgets are a total waste of time because people do that stuff on their phone, or in browser extensions. A good file manager is nice, but these days most of my work data is in the cloud or in git. Most of the native desktop apps I use are cross platform, except one does occasionally need to fire up MS Office to communicate with the primitives.
If it weren't for MS Office there'd be no reason at all to ever use Windows. I may be a little ahead of the curve for my ancient cohort, but my college age kids have no attachment to Windows or MacOS at all; they use whatever is provided. What matters to them is the phone and the browser.
The main differences these days are how much screen real estate your desktop environment takes up (less is more), how user notifications are handled (getting better in most cases), and how nice the fonts are (still rocky in some Linux distros).
Being older you probably won't have any issues getting the drivers to work (although I have had bad luck Toshiba laptops), and of course there won't be any SecureBoot headaches either.
The main thing I'd look out for is bad keyboards. In fact when I'm using my laptop as a desktop replacement I always use an external keyboard to cut down on wear and tear. Replacing keyboards can be a pain in the neck so I'd look on iFixit or some other repair site for ones where this repair is easy. I actually didn't have much difficulty replacing MacBook keyboards, but my hobby is watch repair so tiny screws don't scare me. It's bending plastic that makes me nervous.
If cheap is the main desideratum, then I'd look at something like a refurbished Thinkpad from about four years ago.
What the hell is that "easier to fix" comment about?
How are you going to issue a software patch to the pile of rubble on another planet? This is not a situation where you can ship the product without testing and fix it in firmware later!.
I've been doing a lot of reading about the early space programs of the US and the Soviet Union, and that context the meaning is clear: you can use the same approach in the next Mars landing attempt; you don't have to redesign an entirely new system.
"Rocket science" is hard, because you not only have to be smart, you have to be able to stand repeated failure. Normal people when faced with a spectacular fiasco give up, or they wipe the slate clean and start over. But in something as complicated as a mission like this you have to look at it this way: from a vehicular standpoint everything worked like a charm right up until the last three minutes or so of the trip.
Are all men equal by that definition of "equal"? Or all women exactly like all other women?
"Men" aren't stamped out of some kind of archetypal "man" mold, nor are all women exactly whatever you think a "woman" is or should be. Both men and women are going to be distributed along a normal curve (or maybe log-normal) when it comes to their fitness for some particular job.
So this raises the question: how much overlap do those populations have? The traditionalist view is that there are manly jobs for which no woman is suitable; the radically opposite viewpoint is that there are no differences at all between the populations for any job. But leaving aside jobs like NFL offensive lineman or surrogate mother, I'd say that unless you take one or the other of these extreme positions it's not necessary to have an opinion on precisely how much overlap there is. The only thing that really matters is the individual you are evaluating for the job. If a woman is the best candidate for an engineering position or CEO or whatever, it literally doesn't matter whether or not men are usually better at that sort of thing.
I have known or at least met many environmental luminaries in the course of my career, and as one of them put it: I = P*S/T -- that is to say environmental impact is proportional to population and standard of living, but is inversely proportional to technology.
So the key to avoiding a dystopian future is to keep the rate of technological improvement greater than the rate of population growth. The way to do that is to invest in people. Societies who have lower infant mortality rates have lower birth rates; societies with better education are more innovative.
Will the future way we do things look radically different from today? Yes! Just as the way we do things today look radically different from the past. Change happens in both the environment and human society; it's inevitable. The question is whether it happens at a rate organisms and people can adapt to, and in particular whether we make a conscious decision to direct that change or have it forced upon us.
The abundance of one species does not a healthy ecosystem make. I have a friend whose family owns a 1700 acre island off the coast of New England. It used to support an enormous white tail deer population -- and not coincidentally it had a plague of ticks, because everything in nature is food for something else. You would not have wanted to visit there back in the 1970s because the tick problem was insane. Everyone in his family has had Lyme disease, which also feasted on the swollen deer population.
Then in the 1980s the Western Coyote made it to New England, and a pack swam out to the island. In a single season they took down most of the deer herd, and now the island is a pleasant and sanitary place to live. And this is not some kind of odd aberration; this is how ecology works. If you disturb an ecosystem (say by killing off all the native timber wolves), weed species take over and they end up riddled with disease.
Weed species the ones who by sheer luck can live in conjunction with or off of large human populations. In a healthy ecosystem they may be cute, but an ecosystem dominated by weed animals can be nightmarish. I know lots of natural science geeks, and for the most part animals don't scare them. I once went for a walk with a girl who picked up a rotting coyote head and put it in her jacket pocket. She was TA'ing an anatomy course and wanted to show it to her students. But even she wouldn't go near a racoon, because unchecked by predation suburban raccoons are chock full of leptospirosis, salmonella and roundworm -- not to mention rabies. Those diseases can and do cripple, even kill people.
A world dominated by weed species would be quite horrible to live in.
Does it have to be all of them for there to be a problem we need to think about?
I confess your reasoning seems incoherent to me. You appear to be implying that if a single species would have gone extinct anyway it makes no difference how many wildlife populations people destroy.
People per se have almost no impact on climate. It's what people do and how much in aggregate they do it.
Environmentalists are often stereotyped as pessimists, but really most of the people I know who've dedicated their careers are optimistic that technology can address many environmental problems. Sure, they'd like to see the global population stabilized, or even somewhat reduced, because that makes the job of preserving the environment much easier. But they actually believe the sustainability problem can be licked, even without reducing the global population by much.
I'll give you one example of how an actual environmentalist thinks. I was at a meeting with the sustainability director of a major sportswear manufacturer, and he was describing the research they were doing into improving the recyclability of polyester fleece clothing. He made the point that scale is critical to assessing the environmental impact. For a small band of hunter-gatherers, wild animal pelts would be the source of clothing with the least impact; wool would have intermediate impact; a chemical plant that reprocesses coke bottles into polyester resins would have a ridiculously large impact. But if you are making hundreds of thousands of garments, the impacts are actually reversed: the chemical plant has the least environmental impact. Once you turn those bottles into fleece you can continually recycle those molecules into more fleece. He describes recycling as "living off your environmental income instead of your capital."
Environmentalists -- by which I mean the people who are actually working on solutions to environmental problems -- generally believe that even with a large population we can make use of the products of ecosystems without disturbing the equilibria that sustain those systems. As one civil engineering environmentalist I know put it: I = P*S/T ; impact is proportional to population and standard of living but inversely proportional to technology. You can reduce the environmental impact of home heating by reducing the number of people; or you could do it by people getting used to being colder. But you can get the same result by insulating your house and heating it with renewable energy.
It's actually the anti-environmentalists who are the pessimists; they don't believe in people's ability to adapt, and they anticipate nothing but suffering from trying to do anything about problems. Their version of "optimism" is to discount any evidence that problems exist, or to convincing themselves if we do nothing everything will work out for the best.
I'm an old time leftie; I'm perfectly OK with a study that says rich people are bastards -- if it can back that up. However I'm a nerd first -- particularly a data nerd. Sloppy inferences really piss me off.
Yep, GP loses at bad-research bingo. Also, he missed the actual problem with this research: the subjects are divided into classes by self-reporting. So the headline should read, "People who consider themselves above other people pay less attention to others." It's not an un-interesting result, but it is not quite as interesting when you put it that way.
I've worked with people of all classes, and anecdotally at least I've found that F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: the rich aren't like you and me; they have more money. Old money at least lives a little bit like the people you read about in Jane Austen books; a lot of their energy goes into socializing with others of their class. So it would be interesting to look at old money/new money this way. Another interesting confounding factor is urban/rural. Rural people tend to be poorer. Urban people actually get more human interaction per time while participating in less per person encountered.
In most interesting social science research it's not the first and obvious way of dividing up people that draws your attention (e.g. rich/poor, young/old, male/female); it's the second cut. That's because most of our pop-psych deals in the first cuts (men are from Mars, women from Venus); the second cut tells us the ways our intuitions are limited.
Because copyright law is bunch of crude analogies hacked together that used the physical encodings of information as a proxy for a creator's financial interests in a work. It worked great in the age of print when mainly you were talking about books which were cheap to mass produce but expensive to copy.
But today, conceptualizing an author's rights to a work as a monopoly on copying leads to nonsensical results. Suppose I download a song to the same computer twice, as can easily happen. Technically because the thing I did wrong was copying, I infringed *twice*; however it hardly does twice the harm to the author's interests. On the other hand if I copy that song once but listen to it a thousand times, you could reasonably argue I'm doing more harm to the author's interest than if I downloaded it a thousand times but *never* listened to it.
It's all just a way to get content creators paid; a ridiculously complex and arcane way, but it's familiar because it's traditional. You can't expect it to make sense, especially by trying to draw subtly different analogies.
Still has no value in itself. It only has utility in achieving something else of value -- either a TD for field goal. Of course a 35 yard field goal should be pretty easy. But that's straining the analogy, which was bad in the first place.
The football analogy is stupid. Reaching the 35 yard line has no value in itself, indeed neither does reaching the 0 yard line. The only thing that goes up on the score board is getting into the end zone.
Generating, say, half of your energy from renewables is more like reaching the half-way point in your quest to earn a million dollars; the half-mil in your pocket has utility right now. What's more since non-renewables aren't going away overnight, reducing their use is immediately useful in reducing carbon emissions and other pollution.
The economics of renewables are considerably different than non-renewables, which means we have to adjust our thinking (and engineering). To maximize the impact of renewables, we need a much better electricity grid, which will help us smooth over local variations in supply. We'll also need to work on storage at some point. Storage for renewables doesn't have to be as physically efficient as it would be for non-renewables, but it has to be cheap to build and operate.
Actually... This thing can potentially deliver up to 15 separate warheads, which could in aggregate sum up to 50 MT, which coincidentally was the approximate yield of the Tsar Bomba. However those warheads would have immensely more destructive capacity than the Tsar Bomba.
The reason is simple geometry: the energy of an explosion is dissipated in three dimension, but people live on an approximately two dimensional surface; all that energy which goes down and up is wasted. To do more destruction, you need to find a way of distributing the energy of the attack across the surface of the Earth, which can easily be done by delivering two warheads of half the size, or even better ten warheads of 1/10 the size.
This is what is behind the whole "area the size of France" thing. You couldn't do that with a single massive bomb, but ten smaller bombs might do the trick. Also note that terrain makes a difference -- as it did in the Nagasaki bombing, which missed its mark, causing the blast to be contained by the Urakami Valley. Southern France is extremely rugged, so it is unlikely that all of France could be destroyed by one of these things; however, there's no question that France as a country would be destroyed.
I like Skagen, and they're a rare example of clean design at an affordable price. I especially like an Ancher model -- the arabic version with leather band for general wear and the baton dial for dress. The Holst with day/date dials combines two things I don't usually like (subdials and day/date complications) but does it in a way that I actually like quite a bit. For me it's not the existence of the complication per se, but the readability of the watch. Unfortunately the Holst is a bit on the thick side, but you can't have everything. Shave 3 mm off the thickness and you'd be looking at a $1000 watch.
There are few odd missteps in the lineup. Their rectangular dress watches have batons in a circular pattern, which is a bit... unusual. They also have a watch that has a month calculation. It's done nicely, but it's an utterly ridiculous feature.
Overall Skagen designs remind me of Baum et Mercier at about 20% of the price, and just little bit more Scandanavian if you know what I mean.
Danish Design watches seem pretty similar; I wouldn't be surprised in they came out of the same company. They almost certainly use the same movements. Ironically the faces seem less Scandinavian to me but what do I know? One of their designs reminds of the famous Swiss railway clocks.
I don't have watches from either of these companies because I focus on vintage pre-80s watches.
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It depends on (a) how much cheaper it is to mine stuff and (b) the price elasticity of demand.
For example, suppose the price of coal drops so much that people use twice as much of it. You'll end up with exactly the same number of people working at coal mines. In that case the impact would be to stymie any attempts to reduce pollution by burning less coal.
On the other hand, suppose coal demand is inelastic; then you'll have half the number of workers but the companies in the business are more profitable; you may have more mines that continue to operate.
Third possibility: coal prices will go down AND coal demand will go down because of environmental regulations. Then everyone hurts except people with automation skills and vendors with automation products.
I was thinking in terms of Windows, and to a lesser degree MacOS. Yes, stuff can get hidden, which is generally the first thing I do (hit F11 in Windows for example). Which just proves my point: you may be proud of that stuff but it's just clutter to me.
Touch screen won't do it. Have you seen any movies at all?
Taking control of any computer system is a three step process.
(1) Adopt the right attitude (bored condescension).
(2) Type a random string on your keyboard. This must be of the buckling springs type to get that all important tappity-tap sound.
(3) Look up and announce to the guy who is way cooler than you, "I'm in."
If they use the same protocol.
This is not a magic hack that lets you take over ANY drone; somebody figured out the frequency hopping sequence and OTA protocol for a common protocol used in toy drones. This is going to allow you to take overjust those toys, not MQ-9 Reapers. And somewhere between the tricky but doable hack of a toy spread-spectrum based protocol and the military grade encryption used in the Reapers' ARC-210 transceiver there is probably an economical level of protection that is good enough for police use.
My brother-in-law was asking about the Dyn DDOS attack last week; he wanted to know why the devices used to launch the attack weren't secure. The answer is simple: because they're sold to people who wouldn't pay $0.05 more for a secure device. So it follows that some police departments will use hobby drones and those will certainly get hacked.
Something that can and is used to invade other peoples' privacy.
There need to be federal regulations on how something like this is used though. There are 1.1 million cops in the country, and if they have their share of sociopaths (about 5%) then there's 55,000 sociopath cops out there. Add to that having more than their share of officious idiots too.
I've worked many years in and with non-profits and government agencies, and have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. You get bad and ugly when there's too little or too much money.
Too little money is pretty straightforward; as a department is starved for resources and expertise it adopts a defensive posture. More time is spent trying to avoid work it can't do than doing work. The theme of the under-resourced department is stop the world from changing so we can catch up.
Too much money is just a more costly way of having not enough money. Where money is too abundant, expectations tend to be poorly defined and there's never enough money to do all the things you might want to do. The theme of the over-resourced department is sky's the limit, but stuff just doesn't get done.
You know you have the right amount of money when the work that's laid out for you looks difficult to do with the resources you have, but achievable.
Your story sounds like an under-resourced operation, which nonetheless may look very expensive to people who have no idea how much things cost. Policies that make user go away are the best case for them.
While I agree with you 100% (well, maybe 90%; I've never seen a dock or dock analog that I liked), it kind of makes us dinosaurs to even have much of an opinion. Even an old fart like me switches between Windows, MacOS, Mint and Xfce and I hardly even notice. The differences between them may look stark, but it's like arguing about how much chrome trim you can slap on your car's tailfins before it gets tacky.
I used to be a KDE user, and I try every new version that comes out and I come to the same conclusion: gee that's impressive, but I don't need it; what I really want out of a desktop environment is to stay out of my way. In a way desktop environments have become like the command line shell -- which as a developer I still use quite a bit. You still need them, but the center of mass of user experience has shifted out to the cloud and to mobile devices. Stuff like widgets are a total waste of time because people do that stuff on their phone, or in browser extensions. A good file manager is nice, but these days most of my work data is in the cloud or in git. Most of the native desktop apps I use are cross platform, except one does occasionally need to fire up MS Office to communicate with the primitives.
If it weren't for MS Office there'd be no reason at all to ever use Windows. I may be a little ahead of the curve for my ancient cohort, but my college age kids have no attachment to Windows or MacOS at all; they use whatever is provided. What matters to them is the phone and the browser.
The main differences these days are how much screen real estate your desktop environment takes up (less is more), how user notifications are handled (getting better in most cases), and how nice the fonts are (still rocky in some Linux distros).
Being older you probably won't have any issues getting the drivers to work (although I have had bad luck Toshiba laptops), and of course there won't be any SecureBoot headaches either.
The main thing I'd look out for is bad keyboards. In fact when I'm using my laptop as a desktop replacement I always use an external keyboard to cut down on wear and tear. Replacing keyboards can be a pain in the neck so I'd look on iFixit or some other repair site for ones where this repair is easy. I actually didn't have much difficulty replacing MacBook keyboards, but my hobby is watch repair so tiny screws don't scare me. It's bending plastic that makes me nervous.
If cheap is the main desideratum, then I'd look at something like a refurbished Thinkpad from about four years ago.
What the hell is that "easier to fix" comment about?
How are you going to issue a software patch to the pile of rubble on another planet? This is not a situation where you can ship the product without testing and fix it in firmware later!.
I've been doing a lot of reading about the early space programs of the US and the Soviet Union, and that context the meaning is clear: you can use the same approach in the next Mars landing attempt; you don't have to redesign an entirely new system.
"Rocket science" is hard, because you not only have to be smart, you have to be able to stand repeated failure. Normal people when faced with a spectacular fiasco give up, or they wipe the slate clean and start over. But in something as complicated as a mission like this you have to look at it this way: from a vehicular standpoint everything worked like a charm right up until the last three minutes or so of the trip.
Are all men equal by that definition of "equal"? Or all women exactly like all other women?
"Men" aren't stamped out of some kind of archetypal "man" mold, nor are all women exactly whatever you think a "woman" is or should be. Both men and women are going to be distributed along a normal curve (or maybe log-normal) when it comes to their fitness for some particular job.
So this raises the question: how much overlap do those populations have? The traditionalist view is that there are manly jobs for which no woman is suitable; the radically opposite viewpoint is that there are no differences at all between the populations for any job. But leaving aside jobs like NFL offensive lineman or surrogate mother, I'd say that unless you take one or the other of these extreme positions it's not necessary to have an opinion on precisely how much overlap there is. The only thing that really matters is the individual you are evaluating for the job. If a woman is the best candidate for an engineering position or CEO or whatever, it literally doesn't matter whether or not men are usually better at that sort of thing.
I have known or at least met many environmental luminaries in the course of my career, and as one of them put it: I = P*S/T -- that is to say environmental impact is proportional to population and standard of living, but is inversely proportional to technology.
So the key to avoiding a dystopian future is to keep the rate of technological improvement greater than the rate of population growth. The way to do that is to invest in people. Societies who have lower infant mortality rates have lower birth rates; societies with better education are more innovative.
Will the future way we do things look radically different from today? Yes! Just as the way we do things today look radically different from the past. Change happens in both the environment and human society; it's inevitable. The question is whether it happens at a rate organisms and people can adapt to, and in particular whether we make a conscious decision to direct that change or have it forced upon us.
Well, we have messed up many places in a misguided attempt to save them, (History of Yellowstone) so yes, doing nothing may be better!
Err... "Doing nothing" in this case doesn't mean leaving nature alone; it means leaving human modification of nature alone.
Emacs: it's yoga for your fingers.
The abundance of one species does not a healthy ecosystem make. I have a friend whose family owns a 1700 acre island off the coast of New England. It used to support an enormous white tail deer population -- and not coincidentally it had a plague of ticks, because everything in nature is food for something else. You would not have wanted to visit there back in the 1970s because the tick problem was insane. Everyone in his family has had Lyme disease, which also feasted on the swollen deer population.
Then in the 1980s the Western Coyote made it to New England, and a pack swam out to the island. In a single season they took down most of the deer herd, and now the island is a pleasant and sanitary place to live. And this is not some kind of odd aberration; this is how ecology works. If you disturb an ecosystem (say by killing off all the native timber wolves), weed species take over and they end up riddled with disease.
Weed species the ones who by sheer luck can live in conjunction with or off of large human populations. In a healthy ecosystem they may be cute, but an ecosystem dominated by weed animals can be nightmarish. I know lots of natural science geeks, and for the most part animals don't scare them. I once went for a walk with a girl who picked up a rotting coyote head and put it in her jacket pocket. She was TA'ing an anatomy course and wanted to show it to her students. But even she wouldn't go near a racoon, because unchecked by predation suburban raccoons are chock full of leptospirosis, salmonella and roundworm -- not to mention rabies. Those diseases can and do cripple, even kill people.
A world dominated by weed species would be quite horrible to live in.
Really? All of them?
Does it have to be all of them for there to be a problem we need to think about?
I confess your reasoning seems incoherent to me. You appear to be implying that if a single species would have gone extinct anyway it makes no difference how many wildlife populations people destroy.
People per se have almost no impact on climate. It's what people do and how much in aggregate they do it.
Environmentalists are often stereotyped as pessimists, but really most of the people I know who've dedicated their careers are optimistic that technology can address many environmental problems. Sure, they'd like to see the global population stabilized, or even somewhat reduced, because that makes the job of preserving the environment much easier. But they actually believe the sustainability problem can be licked, even without reducing the global population by much.
I'll give you one example of how an actual environmentalist thinks. I was at a meeting with the sustainability director of a major sportswear manufacturer, and he was describing the research they were doing into improving the recyclability of polyester fleece clothing. He made the point that scale is critical to assessing the environmental impact. For a small band of hunter-gatherers, wild animal pelts would be the source of clothing with the least impact; wool would have intermediate impact; a chemical plant that reprocesses coke bottles into polyester resins would have a ridiculously large impact. But if you are making hundreds of thousands of garments, the impacts are actually reversed: the chemical plant has the least environmental impact. Once you turn those bottles into fleece you can continually recycle those molecules into more fleece. He describes recycling as "living off your environmental income instead of your capital."
Environmentalists -- by which I mean the people who are actually working on solutions to environmental problems -- generally believe that even with a large population we can make use of the products of ecosystems without disturbing the equilibria that sustain those systems. As one civil engineering environmentalist I know put it: I = P*S/T ; impact is proportional to population and standard of living but inversely proportional to technology. You can reduce the environmental impact of home heating by reducing the number of people; or you could do it by people getting used to being colder. But you can get the same result by insulating your house and heating it with renewable energy.
It's actually the anti-environmentalists who are the pessimists; they don't believe in people's ability to adapt, and they anticipate nothing but suffering from trying to do anything about problems. Their version of "optimism" is to discount any evidence that problems exist, or to convincing themselves if we do nothing everything will work out for the best.
I'm an old time leftie; I'm perfectly OK with a study that says rich people are bastards -- if it can back that up. However I'm a nerd first -- particularly a data nerd. Sloppy inferences really piss me off.
Yep, GP loses at bad-research bingo. Also, he missed the actual problem with this research: the subjects are divided into classes by self-reporting. So the headline should read, "People who consider themselves above other people pay less attention to others." It's not an un-interesting result, but it is not quite as interesting when you put it that way.
I've worked with people of all classes, and anecdotally at least I've found that F. Scott Fitzgerald was right: the rich aren't like you and me; they have more money. Old money at least lives a little bit like the people you read about in Jane Austen books; a lot of their energy goes into socializing with others of their class. So it would be interesting to look at old money/new money this way. Another interesting confounding factor is urban/rural. Rural people tend to be poorer. Urban people actually get more human interaction per time while participating in less per person encountered.
In most interesting social science research it's not the first and obvious way of dividing up people that draws your attention (e.g. rich/poor, young/old, male/female); it's the second cut. That's because most of our pop-psych deals in the first cuts (men are from Mars, women from Venus); the second cut tells us the ways our intuitions are limited.
Well, I'm presuming the downloader is making a copy on his local storage for later use. If he's streaming it's different (sort of).
Because copyright law is bunch of crude analogies hacked together that used the physical encodings of information as a proxy for a creator's financial interests in a work. It worked great in the age of print when mainly you were talking about books which were cheap to mass produce but expensive to copy.
But today, conceptualizing an author's rights to a work as a monopoly on copying leads to nonsensical results. Suppose I download a song to the same computer twice, as can easily happen. Technically because the thing I did wrong was copying, I infringed *twice*; however it hardly does twice the harm to the author's interests. On the other hand if I copy that song once but listen to it a thousand times, you could reasonably argue I'm doing more harm to the author's interest than if I downloaded it a thousand times but *never* listened to it.
It's all just a way to get content creators paid; a ridiculously complex and arcane way, but it's familiar because it's traditional. You can't expect it to make sense, especially by trying to draw subtly different analogies.
Still has no value in itself. It only has utility in achieving something else of value -- either a TD for field goal. Of course a 35 yard field goal should be pretty easy. But that's straining the analogy, which was bad in the first place.
The football analogy is stupid. Reaching the 35 yard line has no value in itself, indeed neither does reaching the 0 yard line. The only thing that goes up on the score board is getting into the end zone.
Generating, say, half of your energy from renewables is more like reaching the half-way point in your quest to earn a million dollars; the half-mil in your pocket has utility right now. What's more since non-renewables aren't going away overnight, reducing their use is immediately useful in reducing carbon emissions and other pollution.
The economics of renewables are considerably different than non-renewables, which means we have to adjust our thinking (and engineering). To maximize the impact of renewables, we need a much better electricity grid, which will help us smooth over local variations in supply. We'll also need to work on storage at some point. Storage for renewables doesn't have to be as physically efficient as it would be for non-renewables, but it has to be cheap to build and operate.
Actually... This thing can potentially deliver up to 15 separate warheads, which could in aggregate sum up to 50 MT, which coincidentally was the approximate yield of the Tsar Bomba. However those warheads would have immensely more destructive capacity than the Tsar Bomba.
The reason is simple geometry: the energy of an explosion is dissipated in three dimension, but people live on an approximately two dimensional surface; all that energy which goes down and up is wasted. To do more destruction, you need to find a way of distributing the energy of the attack across the surface of the Earth, which can easily be done by delivering two warheads of half the size, or even better ten warheads of 1/10 the size.
This is what is behind the whole "area the size of France" thing. You couldn't do that with a single massive bomb, but ten smaller bombs might do the trick. Also note that terrain makes a difference -- as it did in the Nagasaki bombing, which missed its mark, causing the blast to be contained by the Urakami Valley. Southern France is extremely rugged, so it is unlikely that all of France could be destroyed by one of these things; however, there's no question that France as a country would be destroyed.
The name for the next class of device should be "Sovereign".
I like Skagen, and they're a rare example of clean design at an affordable price. I especially like an Ancher model -- the arabic version with leather band for general wear and the baton dial for dress. The Holst with day/date dials combines two things I don't usually like (subdials and day/date complications) but does it in a way that I actually like quite a bit. For me it's not the existence of the complication per se, but the readability of the watch. Unfortunately the Holst is a bit on the thick side, but you can't have everything. Shave 3 mm off the thickness and you'd be looking at a $1000 watch.
There are few odd missteps in the lineup. Their rectangular dress watches have batons in a circular pattern, which is a bit... unusual. They also have a watch that has a month calculation. It's done nicely, but it's an utterly ridiculous feature.
Overall Skagen designs remind me of Baum et Mercier at about 20% of the price, and just little bit more Scandanavian if you know what I mean.
Danish Design watches seem pretty similar; I wouldn't be surprised in they came out of the same company. They almost certainly use the same movements. Ironically the faces seem less Scandinavian to me but what do I know? One of their designs reminds of the famous Swiss railway clocks.
I don't have watches from either of these companies because I focus on vintage pre-80s watches.