Of course we have the population density; it's just not uniformly distributed. Sure, the US on average is not densely populated, but the average American lives in a densely populated area, and many of those densely populated areas are merging into megalopolises.
If you take a super-densely populated, highly afflurent neighborhood, it doesn't matter whether that neighborhood is Azabu in Tokyo or the Upper East Side in New York. The staggering concentration of wealthy people is capable of supporting anything that is feasible and desirable. Tokyo is the richest city in the world, and New York is a close second. Of the twenty richest cities in the world, eleven are in the US.
No, there are only two barriers to the adoption of 5G in the US: (1) A political culture reluctant to adopt and promote technical standards and (2) the fact there is no such thing as 5G.
Presuming the Russians want to damage her campaign, if she does get elected then we'll have elected her despite having seen all her dirty laundry. She'll be the most transparently elected President in history.
Cruise control is so far from true autopilot that it's perfectly clear you're still driving the car. But add lane keeping and some people, some of the time, will treat the car as if it were self-driving. Telling them that they still have to drive the car won't make much difference.
Clearly we have the technological capability to create self-driving cars that are safer than the vast majority of drivers on the road. But for whatever reasons -- retail cost or risk management -- manufacturers aren't quite ready to jump in all the way. Introducing self-driving functions piecemeal is bound to create a transition period in which users misuse those functions. Because that's what users do: they use things the way they can, not the way you tell them to.
Except the ones that turn out to be crazy conspiracy theories... like all the people the Clintons supposedly murdered. Nobody can prove that the Bush Justice Department wasn't in on the coverup -- which of course it would have to be.
We live in the era when people feel entitled to their own facts if their feelings tell them those things are true. Once an attention-whore like Assange achieves notoriety he can dine out for the rest of his life on bullshit.
The whole concept of branding is to create intangible value. It's profitable because the marginal cost to the vendor is zero, but you the consumer pay a premium in cold hard cash for what objectively speaking is nothing.
I never buy anything that claims to have a "proprietary formula", because that's exactly the same kind of intangible value ploy. "Proprietary" and "evidence-based" are mutually exclusive adjectives. Anything with a sound foundation in science can be reproduced by anyone with access to scientific literature. If it's "proprietary" it's cooked up by a crackpot or charlatan.
I prefer food. I'm not a meat-and-potatoes man, mind you, but I'd definitely take a rare steak, baked potato and cup of freshly-ground Columbian Supremo over this. Or tea if there were compelling data that theanine was really all that useful. A salmon steak and a cup of tea is actually a typical lunch for me.
The words "proprietary blend" smack of branding. The advantage is bound to be the placebo effect, for which they hope to charge me a premium. If there is empirical evidence you can point to on Google Scholar or PubMed that a particular mix of nutrients is special. then I'll blend it myself and save the branding premium.
If you're going to try to hack your brain, be a hacker, not a consumer.
The implicit dichotomy you're asking us to assume is bogus: i.e., that activism can't be based on scientific knowledge. We can't answer the question the way you'd like it to be with out accepting a counter-factual proposition.
Clearly this is activism at any rate. That doesn't make it untrue or unsupported, although obviously one could look critically at the presentation of the data and find flaws in the statistics and methods used.
Now common sense should tell you that we're almost certainly using resources at a higher rate than ever before, simply because the world's population is greater than it has ever been before, and Gross World Product is greater than it has ever been before -- although admittedly some of that is intangible stuff like intellectual property. But it's a safe assumption that we are consuming physical resources at an unprecedented rate.
The most credible line of attack for a figure like this is that it must in some way combine apples and oranges from a dynamic standpoint. For example, suppose you remove a ton of fish from the sea, does that move you a ton closer to depleting fish stocks? You can't say, because it depends on whether fish populations are at, near, or far from equilibrium. Removing fish from a population at equilibrium causes the system to produce exactly enough to produce exactly enough more fish to replace them; hauling the last mommy and daddy fish from the sea destroys that population forever.
So you're on most solid ground when you talk about specific resources. But some kind of composite figure does make sense if you want to think about human impact as a whole, as long as you don't ask too much of such a figure.
Well, in theory you're right. But as the old engineering saying goes: in theory, theory and practice are the same but in practice they're different.
Sure, in many cases you can depart from best practices and still be OK... if you are scrupulous about other best practices. But if the reason you're being cavalier with the rules of thumb you're breaking is that you don't have the budget or bandwidth to implement them, chances are that reason applies across the board.
So a lot depends on why you do something questaionable. For example you might keep XP around because you have software that doesn't run correctly in XP compatibility mode and the company that wrote the software is gone. It's plausible that you could run XP on a limited number of computers that you watch carefully as you look for a replacement app. But if the reason that you're running XP is that you don't have the capacity to admin your computers properly, you're just screwed. Even on computers straight out of the box running the latest and greatest.
Sure, you can make it illegal to reveal state secrets. You can't make it illegal to disucss revealed former secrets.
That's because an restriction on speech has to be narrowly tailored to achieve a legitimate public purpose. In other words bullshit excuses for power grabs aren't accepted.
Before a secret is revealed, there is a legitimate public purpose to restrict discussing them: to keep them out of enemy hands. Once they are revealed this purpose no longer applies; the reasons for going after people discussing them is to target domestic political opponents. That won't pass Constitutional muster.
I too expect exaggeration. The aircraft has numerous external hardpoints so if it were a problem all you'd do is mount something reflective on one of those.
The fact that they're claiming this is a "problem" suggests to me they weren't trying very hard. I expect Russia and China will be a little more enterprising.
Even the US Navy is beginning to make noises about backing away from stealth, and that may be because they've been studying the problem of detecting enemy stealth aircraft. Some people believe the Navy's actually has the capability of targeting stealth aircraft today. It's possible that may be an exaggeration, but if the Navy at least isn't working on it then something is very wrong with them.
They were one of my clients for many years, until I sold my company about ten years ago. They are almost certainly the most sophisticated and technically capable mosquito control operation in the world, and I've worked with hundreds of them.
Many visitors to the Keys are unaware of the potential for a hellish mosquito problem there. This is not a natural situation. There are few places that have such a concentration of prime mosquito habitat next to dense human populations. If the Florida Keys Mosquito District simply stopped doing mosquito stopped doing mosquito control, I am confident that within a year the problem would be so bad that keys would be largely depopulated. Tourists, even many residents remain blissfully unaware of this because FKMCD is also one of the most effective district anywhere.
One of the reasons the FKMCD is so effective is it has been willing to try things that nobody else has ever done. For example they did a study of how well common pesticides actually work on the mosquitoes in their district. You'd think every district would do this routinely; after all it's pointless to spend money on pesticides your mosquitoes are resistant to, but nobody does it but FKMCD. The way most agencies choose pesticides is they go with the cheapest one. And if that doesn't work, they use more of it. FKMCD *knows* what works in their district, and how much they need to use. When you spend a million and a half bucks a year on pesticides, this is a big deal: in saving money, in reducing environmental impacts, and in keeping people from getting bit.
FKMCD has put a huge amount of investment into rapid response. Usually when a district goes out to spray an area it's in response to information that they received days, or even weeks earlier. This is not cost effective because usually the problem will have run its course by then; the mosquitoes just aren't there, they're somewhere else. In the Keys if you see a spray truck you can be sure it is being directed from data that is about twelve hours old. Since fogging has to be done in the wee hours of the morning, this is the theoretical limit for how quickly you can respond to information you receive during the day. Faster and more targeted response was the major focus of my work with them, and they paid me a lot of money to achieve success at that. It was money well spent, if I do say so myself.
This cost-is-no-object approach enabled FKMCD to achieve things that other districts can only dream of. On the other hand, it has its downsides. You could argue that the agency doesn't have to be quite as vigilant as it is, and that its success was fostering a cavalier attitude about ratepayer money. A few years ago the second-in-command was caught giving a company phone to his wife and daughter, something which did immense reputational harm to the district.
Also across Florida in the 2010s there was a movement by Tea Party to gain control of local government boards. The "Mosquitoeers" campaigned against sitting mosquito control board members by linking them with Obama, and this proved successful, even in the Keys. The results, according to the people I stay in contact with, is that spray missions have had to be curtailed because of vehicles with worn tires, or even running low on pesticides -- something that was unheard of ten years ago. They've also had management turnover -- their long-term and very experienced director retired and the replacement left after a few short years.
Still, if there's any district that can do this pilot project and track the effectiveness of the results, it's FKMCD. It is the ideal place to try it. And you just can't go off half-cocked in the Keys either, because Federal regulators watch the place like a hawk. Hopefully this represents a turn to a more balanced approach -- still aggressive and innovative, but a little more cost conscious.
$700 million is comparable to what you'd pay to construct a brand new cruise ship. And what they'd end up if they renovated the United States wouldn't be a cruise ship, it'd be an ocean liner.
The difference between a liner and a cruise ship is this: a liner is built to perform regularly scheduled service between ports. Even if the seas are high and there's a storm blowing an ocean liner still goes out because her purpose is to get her passengers to point B when the schedule says they'll be there. So an ocean-liner has to be built to be very fast and very seaworthy.
When air travel supplanted sea travel the companies who owned ocean liners repurposed them for leisurely pleasure cruising. However for this purpose ocean liners are over-built in certain respects and under-built in others. A cruise ship doesn't have to be fast, or shed high seas or stand up to gale force winds. What she needs to do is to take as many people and amusements as possible, at a leisurely pace, into as many interesting places as possible.So cruise ships look nothing like the elegant ocean greyhounds of old like the SS Normandie or the SS United States. A modern cruise ship is basically a top-heavy motorized barge which, despite having jaw-dropping dimensions, can squeeze into shallow harbors that normally can't handle big ships. And they're pokey, even by the standards of 1930s ocean-liners. Cruise passengers aren't really paying to go places, they're paying to spend time on the ship. The ship's ports of call are just for breaking the monotony of incessant luxuriating.
At present there is only one active vessel in the world that is capable of providing true liner service: the RMS Queen Mary 2. Although she resembles a modern cruise ship in her amenities she carries relatively few passengers (2700) for her size (79,000 tons) and cost ($900 million). For a hundred million less you could have a pure cruise ship that carries 1/3 more passengers, and into shallower harbors too. She couldn't sail around the Horn in July in the teeth of a winter gale, but the market for that particular experience is somewhat limited.
Looking at the article, one of the concerns that led to abandoning the SS United States project is the stability of the ship. So clearly they weren't restoring the United States to her original 1950s configuration. That was stable enough but only provided 1900 berths, and those in conditions that while elegant enough would be spartan by modern standards. You wouldn't have swimming pools, bowling alleys, planetariums, or any of the other ridiculous things modern ship designers throw in to astonish and delight their customers. These people must have wanted to transform the SS US into a kind of hybrid liner-cruise ship like the QM2. For that they'd have add space for a lot more passengers along with all the amenities they'd expect on their very expensive vacation. Since you can't make the hull bigger, that means building up. Way up.
Even if they succeeded in the technical challenges of squeezing all that stuff into the hull, the commercial viability of the project is doubtful. There is no practical need in this world for a vessel like the QM2; her sole reason for existing is thrilling customers who are so jaded that an ordinary extraordinary ship just won't do. Only an unique ship will.
Newsman Walter Cronkite even went there. What was a secret was what they were up to -- which by the way they didn't explain honestly to the Danish government, which was told this was a polar research station but didn't know that the ultimate aim was to set up a missile base.
Does what you are saying mean it is no longer white peoples fault the world sucks? Or is this a new way of phrasing the same old tired refrain?
Oh, genetic testing has pretty much shown the whole idea of a "white person" is wrong. The whole notion of inbreeding groups that descend, largely pristine, from primordial times is a fairy tale. So it can't be white peoples' fault, any more than it can be the fault of the fairies. There's no such thing.
Actually, some of the key papers behind the "replication crisis" notion haven't stood up to scrutiny. I am not being ironic here; the non-replicability results haven't been replicated.
This of course is normal for science. Error is an expected part of the scientific method; the existence of non replicable results is presumed. That's why when a hypothesis is proposed it's almost always immediately refuted. Then it will be un-refuted, and after that re-refuted. This continues until evidence begins to decisively mount on one side or the other. So there may be a replication crisis; there may not be. As usual we won't know until the tennis match is over. This by the way is why layman shouldn't ever use individual scientific papers in making any kind of important decision (e.g.,what is healthy to eat). You should only rely upon either a trusted expert, or review papers published in high-impact journals.
The only way funders can increase the speed of purging bad results is to increase funding. There's no way they can ensure that the results they pay for will definitely be reproducible without putting their thumbs on the scale in favor of or against. That of course would get you the appearance of the result you want without the substance.
As for the number of useless papers, everyone knows this is true. The reason nobody has done anything about it is that the forces creating this problem are decentralized; nobody has control over them. On one hand you have thousands of tenure committees exerting publication pressure on untenured faculty. On the other hand you have thousands journal editors eager to pad out their publications even if it means accepting duff. This doesn't seem to be an issue that funders can fix. I don't know if anyone has studying the economic costs of pot-boiler papers, but from what I've seen crap papers are generally not high rent affairs. People for the most part don't seem to take major grants and produce pointless papers; they cobble together their pot-boilers out odds and ends they have lying around.
Over a thousand years? You really think that Britain in, say, the 13th or 14th C was advanced compared to China, Korea, Japan, the Fatmid Empire, India, or Ghana? You probably didn't even realize Ghana was once a major world power because of the parochialism of history as taught in European schools, but it was the world's largest producer of gold. Ghanian gold in trans-Saharan trade caused inflation in medieval Egypt, and high prices spurred the development of Venetian trade. That brought wealth and knowledge into Italy, making the Renaissance possible. So no Ghana, no European civilization as we know it.
Until the Enlightenment, Europe was the most backward shit-hole in the world, intellectually, culturally and technologically. Why do you think Columbus and everyone else was so anxious to get to China? Because that's where all the good stuff was; amazing stuff like paper, chimneys, dental fillings,cast iron and a merit-based civil service system. The one thing Europe was advanced in, though was fighting. Europeans were unruly, uncivilized barbarians who fought each other all the time, so naturally they got very good at it.
If you were sentenced to be sent back by time machine to live in the 1200s, Europe would be low on the list of places you'd want to end up. China probably wins based on the availability of toilet paper alone. Britain was relatively peaceful and advanced for Northern Europe, but it's hard to think of places in Asia or Africa that suffered multiple decades-spanning civil wars that Britain did.
I don't sleep with them, I just don't keep anything that emits blue light in the room I sleep in. But if I need to be sure of getting a good night's sleep I'll put a pair of amber safety glasses on a few hours before I want to go to bed. It makes a noticeable difference. Google S1933X for cheap, optically OK amber tinted safety glasses which are dramatically opaque to far blue spectrum light. As a bonus when you put them on all those annoying super-bright blue LEDs simply disappear. You have to take the glasses off to see whether a blue LED is lit.
And if you feel like a dork wearing safety glasses around the house, just remind yourself this is brain hacking. I've contemplated trying EEG hedsets and TMS all that kind of stuff, but never have taken the plunge; but for $12 and being willing to look an ass you can actually alter the function of your brain to be more to your liking, which is kind of cool. Now I can unwind at the end of the day by watching Netflix -- after awhile your brain adjusts to the altered color temperature and in most cases you don't miss the bright blue. Instead of binge watching into the wee hours you'll get sleepy and go to bed at a reasonable time.
Just the accounting you'd need to sell the thing to the government would cost you $100K. Oh, and you'd have to pay yourself or someone else to take part in the bidding process or apply for the granted, and that has to be recouped as part of the sale cost. Er... you were planning on paying yourself for your time, weren't you?
Also, there's a big difference between building a prototype from junk you scrounged and building a reproducible product. When you build a product the second copy should be exactly the same as the first but cost less. Duplicating a one-off prototype exactly usually costs more. Why? Proof of concept prototypes are cheap because you make them with surplus stuff you have lying around or can buy for fractions of a penny on the dollar. You can be opportunistic. The problem is any particular set of opportunities (e..g the $10,000 assembly you picked up at auction for $50) aren't reproducible.
I had a colleague whose first job out of school was writing up a detailed specification for a prototype midget submarine a defense research lab built for the Navy. The Navy was pleased at the low cost and so they wanted to be able to build a second one just like it. Well it turned out that a second one would have cost a hundred times as much they'd have had to pay manufacturers to reverse engineer stuff or start up production lines. It was one of the pointless, futile tasks you dump on newbie engineers before you know you can trust their work.
That's an asinine argument. Other people who should do it don't do it, so I won't do it either.
Wikileaks won't do it because Assange is a chaos-monger posing as a crusader. Wikileaks should do curate its leaks because when you possess information you act responsibly with it, e.g., don't expose people it is about to identity fraud.
If you want to see Democrats sniping at each others' candidates or complaining about what the party's up to, just go on any Democratic blog.
It's not a scandal. It's not a secret. It's not even a problem -- not even when people get hot under the collar and start acting like assholes. George Washington was elected unanimously by the Electoral College, but in every election since then politics has been turning Americans into assholes.
And that is a good thing. You can't make politics 100% civil without pushing out unpopular opinions.
I spent about fifteen years of my career in the non-profit sector, so I have some perspective on this.
Raising money in a non-profit is just like selling stuff is for a for-profit. Generating gross revenue is relatively easy -- if you spend a lot of money you can rake in a lot of dough. What's a bitch to generate is net profit. In the non-profit sector we don't use the term "profitability" very much, so the metric that's often used to describe financial is "cost to raise a dollar." For typical fundraising activities cost-to-raise-a-dollar runs from 0.25 to 1.5 dollars/dollar.
Take junk mail. The cost to raise a dollar for a well-run direct mail campaign is in the range of $1.25 to $1.50, so if I want to raise $115,000 to spend on other things I have to scale my direct mail campaign to bring inover $258,000 gross. As you can see I chose a net target that was exactly 1/1000 the size of the ALS bucket challenge net, so you can compare the efficiency of the processes readily. The cost to raise a dollar for the ALS bucket challenge is actually better than a well-run direct mail campaign -- $0.91.
And it should be more efficient than direct mail, because direct mail is about the least efficient method there is. The marginal costs are huge because you pay for the names and addresses as well as printing and mailing of each piece, and most of those pieces will end up in the landfill unopened. So if direct mail is so inefficient, why use it? Because the financial inefficiency doesn't matter to the organization doing the fundraising. The end result of my hypothetical direct mail campaign is that my organization has $115,000 it didn't have before. That probably pays for one and half full time staff positions (at the low do-gooder wages we pay) for a year.
So the ALS challenge was in the financial efficiency range of methods normally used by non-profits, albeit a little towards the inefficient end. That doesn't really tell us if the campaign was responsibly run or not; to know that you'd have to look at all the expenses and compare those to costs in other viral Internet fundraising campaigns. But the bottom line is that the ALS association ended up with $115 million it didn't have before.
Can you think of a way of raising $115 million in a few months? I thought not. So presuming the guys who ran the campaign didn't spend the money on hookers and blow, I wouldn't be unduly concerned by a cost-to-raise-a-dollar of $0.91 if I was on the board.
Should donors care that the ALS challenge was a little high on the cost-to-raise-a-dollar metric? Well, I look at it this way. People did it because it was fun and for a good cause, and two years later we can point to concrete and significant scientific results from the money raised. That's not only pretty good, it's pretty damned awesome.
Actually, it's thoroughly impossible to tell how the new standards work based upon by the linked articles, but it sounds like in plain language that Florida is using a computer model that could allow more flexibility in discharge permitting. This can lead to better results, whether your definition of better is "more rationally defensible" or "more in line with what my donors want." Determining which way it is better requires review by a competent expert. It might be both.
The real issue here is this phrase from TFA: "one of a kind." That's not so good.
It's important in managing environmental data to do things in the usual way. This is contrary to the way public thinks about new technologies. If there's a new iPhone, you expect it to be better in every way or at least as good. It's not like that with scientific methods; new techniques are proposed because they have certain advantages, obviously. But they always have one big disadvantage: their results are hard to compare with what you already know. You need to do a lot of work to justify doing things a new way, otherwise you can find yourself unable to compare what is happening now to what was happening before.
Fortunately Florida can't do this on its own; it has to get EPA approval. Since this is an administration that is generally favorable to environmental regulation, if they can get this past Obama's EPA that will help give these new methods more credibility.
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Of course we have the population density; it's just not uniformly distributed. Sure, the US on average is not densely populated, but the average American lives in a densely populated area, and many of those densely populated areas are merging into megalopolises.
If you take a super-densely populated, highly afflurent neighborhood, it doesn't matter whether that neighborhood is Azabu in Tokyo or the Upper East Side in New York. The staggering concentration of wealthy people is capable of supporting anything that is feasible and desirable. Tokyo is the richest city in the world, and New York is a close second. Of the twenty richest cities in the world, eleven are in the US.
No, there are only two barriers to the adoption of 5G in the US: (1) A political culture reluctant to adopt and promote technical standards and (2) the fact there is no such thing as 5G.
Presuming the Russians want to damage her campaign, if she does get elected then we'll have elected her despite having seen all her dirty laundry. She'll be the most transparently elected President in history.
Cruise control is so far from true autopilot that it's perfectly clear you're still driving the car. But add lane keeping and some people, some of the time, will treat the car as if it were self-driving. Telling them that they still have to drive the car won't make much difference.
Clearly we have the technological capability to create self-driving cars that are safer than the vast majority of drivers on the road. But for whatever reasons -- retail cost or risk management -- manufacturers aren't quite ready to jump in all the way. Introducing self-driving functions piecemeal is bound to create a transition period in which users misuse those functions. Because that's what users do: they use things the way they can, not the way you tell them to.
Except the ones that turn out to be crazy conspiracy theories... like all the people the Clintons supposedly murdered. Nobody can prove that the Bush Justice Department wasn't in on the coverup -- which of course it would have to be.
We live in the era when people feel entitled to their own facts if their feelings tell them those things are true. Once an attention-whore like Assange achieves notoriety he can dine out for the rest of his life on bullshit.
The whole concept of branding is to create intangible value. It's profitable because the marginal cost to the vendor is zero, but you the consumer pay a premium in cold hard cash for what objectively speaking is nothing.
I never buy anything that claims to have a "proprietary formula", because that's exactly the same kind of intangible value ploy. "Proprietary" and "evidence-based" are mutually exclusive adjectives. Anything with a sound foundation in science can be reproduced by anyone with access to scientific literature. If it's "proprietary" it's cooked up by a crackpot or charlatan.
Predicting the consequences of tech adoption is impossible.
I prefer food. I'm not a meat-and-potatoes man, mind you, but I'd definitely take a rare steak, baked potato and cup of freshly-ground Columbian Supremo over this. Or tea if there were compelling data that theanine was really all that useful. A salmon steak and a cup of tea is actually a typical lunch for me.
The words "proprietary blend" smack of branding. The advantage is bound to be the placebo effect, for which they hope to charge me a premium. If there is empirical evidence you can point to on Google Scholar or PubMed that a particular mix of nutrients is special. then I'll blend it myself and save the branding premium.
If you're going to try to hack your brain, be a hacker, not a consumer.
The implicit dichotomy you're asking us to assume is bogus: i.e., that activism can't be based on scientific knowledge. We can't answer the question the way you'd like it to be with out accepting a counter-factual proposition.
Clearly this is activism at any rate. That doesn't make it untrue or unsupported, although obviously one could look critically at the presentation of the data and find flaws in the statistics and methods used.
Now common sense should tell you that we're almost certainly using resources at a higher rate than ever before, simply because the world's population is greater than it has ever been before, and Gross World Product is greater than it has ever been before -- although admittedly some of that is intangible stuff like intellectual property. But it's a safe assumption that we are consuming physical resources at an unprecedented rate.
The most credible line of attack for a figure like this is that it must in some way combine apples and oranges from a dynamic standpoint. For example, suppose you remove a ton of fish from the sea, does that move you a ton closer to depleting fish stocks? You can't say, because it depends on whether fish populations are at, near, or far from equilibrium. Removing fish from a population at equilibrium causes the system to produce exactly enough to produce exactly enough more fish to replace them; hauling the last mommy and daddy fish from the sea destroys that population forever.
So you're on most solid ground when you talk about specific resources. But some kind of composite figure does make sense if you want to think about human impact as a whole, as long as you don't ask too much of such a figure.
Well, in theory you're right. But as the old engineering saying goes: in theory, theory and practice are the same but in practice they're different.
Sure, in many cases you can depart from best practices and still be OK ... if you are scrupulous about other best practices. But if the reason you're being cavalier with the rules of thumb you're breaking is that you don't have the budget or bandwidth to implement them, chances are that reason applies across the board.
So a lot depends on why you do something questaionable. For example you might keep XP around because you have software that doesn't run correctly in XP compatibility mode and the company that wrote the software is gone. It's plausible that you could run XP on a limited number of computers that you watch carefully as you look for a replacement app. But if the reason that you're running XP is that you don't have the capacity to admin your computers properly, you're just screwed. Even on computers straight out of the box running the latest and greatest.
Sure, you can make it illegal to reveal state secrets. You can't make it illegal to disucss revealed former secrets.
That's because an restriction on speech has to be narrowly tailored to achieve a legitimate public purpose. In other words bullshit excuses for power grabs aren't accepted.
Before a secret is revealed, there is a legitimate public purpose to restrict discussing them: to keep them out of enemy hands. Once they are revealed this purpose no longer applies; the reasons for going after people discussing them is to target domestic political opponents. That won't pass Constitutional muster.
I too expect exaggeration. The aircraft has numerous external hardpoints so if it were a problem all you'd do is mount something reflective on one of those.
The fact that they're claiming this is a "problem" suggests to me they weren't trying very hard. I expect Russia and China will be a little more enterprising.
Even the US Navy is beginning to make noises about backing away from stealth, and that may be because they've been studying the problem of detecting enemy stealth aircraft. Some people believe the Navy's actually has the capability of targeting stealth aircraft today. It's possible that may be an exaggeration, but if the Navy at least isn't working on it then something is very wrong with them.
They were one of my clients for many years, until I sold my company about ten years ago. They are almost certainly the most sophisticated and technically capable mosquito control operation in the world, and I've worked with hundreds of them.
Many visitors to the Keys are unaware of the potential for a hellish mosquito problem there. This is not a natural situation. There are few places that have such a concentration of prime mosquito habitat next to dense human populations. If the Florida Keys Mosquito District simply stopped doing mosquito stopped doing mosquito control, I am confident that within a year the problem would be so bad that keys would be largely depopulated. Tourists, even many residents remain blissfully unaware of this because FKMCD is also one of the most effective district anywhere.
One of the reasons the FKMCD is so effective is it has been willing to try things that nobody else has ever done. For example they did a study of how well common pesticides actually work on the mosquitoes in their district. You'd think every district would do this routinely; after all it's pointless to spend money on pesticides your mosquitoes are resistant to, but nobody does it but FKMCD. The way most agencies choose pesticides is they go with the cheapest one. And if that doesn't work, they use more of it. FKMCD *knows* what works in their district, and how much they need to use. When you spend a million and a half bucks a year on pesticides, this is a big deal: in saving money, in reducing environmental impacts, and in keeping people from getting bit.
FKMCD has put a huge amount of investment into rapid response. Usually when a district goes out to spray an area it's in response to information that they received days, or even weeks earlier. This is not cost effective because usually the problem will have run its course by then; the mosquitoes just aren't there, they're somewhere else. In the Keys if you see a spray truck you can be sure it is being directed from data that is about twelve hours old. Since fogging has to be done in the wee hours of the morning, this is the theoretical limit for how quickly you can respond to information you receive during the day. Faster and more targeted response was the major focus of my work with them, and they paid me a lot of money to achieve success at that. It was money well spent, if I do say so myself.
This cost-is-no-object approach enabled FKMCD to achieve things that other districts can only dream of. On the other hand, it has its downsides. You could argue that the agency doesn't have to be quite as vigilant as it is, and that its success was fostering a cavalier attitude about ratepayer money. A few years ago the second-in-command was caught giving a company phone to his wife and daughter, something which did immense reputational harm to the district.
Also across Florida in the 2010s there was a movement by Tea Party to gain control of local government boards. The "Mosquitoeers" campaigned against sitting mosquito control board members by linking them with Obama, and this proved successful, even in the Keys. The results, according to the people I stay in contact with, is that spray missions have had to be curtailed because of vehicles with worn tires, or even running low on pesticides -- something that was unheard of ten years ago. They've also had management turnover -- their long-term and very experienced director retired and the replacement left after a few short years.
Still, if there's any district that can do this pilot project and track the effectiveness of the results, it's FKMCD. It is the ideal place to try it. And you just can't go off half-cocked in the Keys either, because Federal regulators watch the place like a hawk. Hopefully this represents a turn to a more balanced approach -- still aggressive and innovative, but a little more cost conscious.
$700 million is comparable to what you'd pay to construct a brand new cruise ship. And what they'd end up if they renovated the United States wouldn't be a cruise ship, it'd be an ocean liner.
The difference between a liner and a cruise ship is this: a liner is built to perform regularly scheduled service between ports. Even if the seas are high and there's a storm blowing an ocean liner still goes out because her purpose is to get her passengers to point B when the schedule says they'll be there. So an ocean-liner has to be built to be very fast and very seaworthy.
When air travel supplanted sea travel the companies who owned ocean liners repurposed them for leisurely pleasure cruising. However for this purpose ocean liners are over-built in certain respects and under-built in others. A cruise ship doesn't have to be fast, or shed high seas or stand up to gale force winds. What she needs to do is to take as many people and amusements as possible, at a leisurely pace, into as many interesting places as possible.So cruise ships look nothing like the elegant ocean greyhounds of old like the SS Normandie or the SS United States. A modern cruise ship is basically a top-heavy motorized barge which, despite having jaw-dropping dimensions, can squeeze into shallow harbors that normally can't handle big ships. And they're pokey, even by the standards of 1930s ocean-liners. Cruise passengers aren't really paying to go places, they're paying to spend time on the ship. The ship's ports of call are just for breaking the monotony of incessant luxuriating.
At present there is only one active vessel in the world that is capable of providing true liner service: the RMS Queen Mary 2. Although she resembles a modern cruise ship in her amenities she carries relatively few passengers (2700) for her size (79,000 tons) and cost ($900 million). For a hundred million less you could have a pure cruise ship that carries 1/3 more passengers, and into shallower harbors too. She couldn't sail around the Horn in July in the teeth of a winter gale, but the market for that particular experience is somewhat limited.
Looking at the article, one of the concerns that led to abandoning the SS United States project is the stability of the ship. So clearly they weren't restoring the United States to her original 1950s configuration. That was stable enough but only provided 1900 berths, and those in conditions that while elegant enough would be spartan by modern standards. You wouldn't have swimming pools, bowling alleys, planetariums, or any of the other ridiculous things modern ship designers throw in to astonish and delight their customers. These people must have wanted to transform the SS US into a kind of hybrid liner-cruise ship like the QM2. For that they'd have add space for a lot more passengers along with all the amenities they'd expect on their very expensive vacation. Since you can't make the hull bigger, that means building up. Way up.
Even if they succeeded in the technical challenges of squeezing all that stuff into the hull, the commercial viability of the project is doubtful. There is no practical need in this world for a vessel like the QM2; her sole reason for existing is thrilling customers who are so jaded that an ordinary extraordinary ship just won't do. Only an unique ship will.
Newsman Walter Cronkite even went there. What was a secret was what they were up to -- which by the way they didn't explain honestly to the Danish government, which was told this was a polar research station but didn't know that the ultimate aim was to set up a missile base.
Sure, assuming the requirements for the software were written by morons.
Clean water isn't as sexy as spies and blowing shit up.
Does what you are saying mean it is no longer white peoples fault the world sucks? Or is this a new way of phrasing the same old tired refrain?
Oh, genetic testing has pretty much shown the whole idea of a "white person" is wrong. The whole notion of inbreeding groups that descend, largely pristine, from primordial times is a fairy tale. So it can't be white peoples' fault, any more than it can be the fault of the fairies. There's no such thing.
Actually, some of the key papers behind the "replication crisis" notion haven't stood up to scrutiny. I am not being ironic here; the non-replicability results haven't been replicated.
This of course is normal for science. Error is an expected part of the scientific method; the existence of non replicable results is presumed. That's why when a hypothesis is proposed it's almost always immediately refuted. Then it will be un-refuted, and after that re-refuted. This continues until evidence begins to decisively mount on one side or the other. So there may be a replication crisis; there may not be. As usual we won't know until the tennis match is over. This by the way is why layman shouldn't ever use individual scientific papers in making any kind of important decision (e.g.,what is healthy to eat). You should only rely upon either a trusted expert, or review papers published in high-impact journals.
The only way funders can increase the speed of purging bad results is to increase funding. There's no way they can ensure that the results they pay for will definitely be reproducible without putting their thumbs on the scale in favor of or against. That of course would get you the appearance of the result you want without the substance.
As for the number of useless papers, everyone knows this is true. The reason nobody has done anything about it is that the forces creating this problem are decentralized; nobody has control over them. On one hand you have thousands of tenure committees exerting publication pressure on untenured faculty. On the other hand you have thousands journal editors eager to pad out their publications even if it means accepting duff. This doesn't seem to be an issue that funders can fix. I don't know if anyone has studying the economic costs of pot-boiler papers, but from what I've seen crap papers are generally not high rent affairs. People for the most part don't seem to take major grants and produce pointless papers; they cobble together their pot-boilers out odds and ends they have lying around.
Over a thousand years? You really think that Britain in, say, the 13th or 14th C was advanced compared to China, Korea, Japan, the Fatmid Empire, India, or Ghana? You probably didn't even realize Ghana was once a major world power because of the parochialism of history as taught in European schools, but it was the world's largest producer of gold. Ghanian gold in trans-Saharan trade caused inflation in medieval Egypt, and high prices spurred the development of Venetian trade. That brought wealth and knowledge into Italy, making the Renaissance possible. So no Ghana, no European civilization as we know it.
Until the Enlightenment, Europe was the most backward shit-hole in the world, intellectually, culturally and technologically. Why do you think Columbus and everyone else was so anxious to get to China? Because that's where all the good stuff was; amazing stuff like paper, chimneys, dental fillings,cast iron and a merit-based civil service system. The one thing Europe was advanced in, though was fighting. Europeans were unruly, uncivilized barbarians who fought each other all the time, so naturally they got very good at it.
If you were sentenced to be sent back by time machine to live in the 1200s, Europe would be low on the list of places you'd want to end up. China probably wins based on the availability of toilet paper alone. Britain was relatively peaceful and advanced for Northern Europe, but it's hard to think of places in Asia or Africa that suffered multiple decades-spanning civil wars that Britain did.
I don't sleep with them, I just don't keep anything that emits blue light in the room I sleep in. But if I need to be sure of getting a good night's sleep I'll put a pair of amber safety glasses on a few hours before I want to go to bed. It makes a noticeable difference. Google S1933X for cheap, optically OK amber tinted safety glasses which are dramatically opaque to far blue spectrum light. As a bonus when you put them on all those annoying super-bright blue LEDs simply disappear. You have to take the glasses off to see whether a blue LED is lit.
And if you feel like a dork wearing safety glasses around the house, just remind yourself this is brain hacking. I've contemplated trying EEG hedsets and TMS all that kind of stuff, but never have taken the plunge; but for $12 and being willing to look an ass you can actually alter the function of your brain to be more to your liking, which is kind of cool. Now I can unwind at the end of the day by watching Netflix -- after awhile your brain adjusts to the altered color temperature and in most cases you don't miss the bright blue. Instead of binge watching into the wee hours you'll get sleepy and go to bed at a reasonable time.
Just the accounting you'd need to sell the thing to the government would cost you $100K. Oh, and you'd have to pay yourself or someone else to take part in the bidding process or apply for the granted, and that has to be recouped as part of the sale cost. Er... you were planning on paying yourself for your time, weren't you?
Also, there's a big difference between building a prototype from junk you scrounged and building a reproducible product. When you build a product the second copy should be exactly the same as the first but cost less. Duplicating a one-off prototype exactly usually costs more. Why? Proof of concept prototypes are cheap because you make them with surplus stuff you have lying around or can buy for fractions of a penny on the dollar. You can be opportunistic. The problem is any particular set of opportunities (e..g the $10,000 assembly you picked up at auction for $50) aren't reproducible.
I had a colleague whose first job out of school was writing up a detailed specification for a prototype midget submarine a defense research lab built for the Navy. The Navy was pleased at the low cost and so they wanted to be able to build a second one just like it. Well it turned out that a second one would have cost a hundred times as much they'd have had to pay manufacturers to reverse engineer stuff or start up production lines. It was one of the pointless, futile tasks you dump on newbie engineers before you know you can trust their work.
That's an asinine argument. Other people who should do it don't do it, so I won't do it either.
Wikileaks won't do it because Assange is a chaos-monger posing as a crusader. Wikileaks should do curate its leaks because when you possess information you act responsibly with it, e.g., don't expose people it is about to identity fraud.
If you want to see Democrats sniping at each others' candidates or complaining about what the party's up to, just go on any Democratic blog.
It's not a scandal. It's not a secret. It's not even a problem -- not even when people get hot under the collar and start acting like assholes. George Washington was elected unanimously by the Electoral College, but in every election since then politics has been turning Americans into assholes.
And that is a good thing. You can't make politics 100% civil without pushing out unpopular opinions.
I spent about fifteen years of my career in the non-profit sector, so I have some perspective on this.
Raising money in a non-profit is just like selling stuff is for a for-profit. Generating gross revenue is relatively easy -- if you spend a lot of money you can rake in a lot of dough. What's a bitch to generate is net profit. In the non-profit sector we don't use the term "profitability" very much, so the metric that's often used to describe financial is "cost to raise a dollar." For typical fundraising activities cost-to-raise-a-dollar runs from 0.25 to 1.5 dollars/dollar.
Take junk mail. The cost to raise a dollar for a well-run direct mail campaign is in the range of $1.25 to $1.50, so if I want to raise $115,000 to spend on other things I have to scale my direct mail campaign to bring inover $258,000 gross. As you can see I chose a net target that was exactly 1/1000 the size of the ALS bucket challenge net, so you can compare the efficiency of the processes readily. The cost to raise a dollar for the ALS bucket challenge is actually better than a well-run direct mail campaign -- $0.91.
And it should be more efficient than direct mail, because direct mail is about the least efficient method there is. The marginal costs are huge because you pay for the names and addresses as well as printing and mailing of each piece, and most of those pieces will end up in the landfill unopened. So if direct mail is so inefficient, why use it? Because the financial inefficiency doesn't matter to the organization doing the fundraising. The end result of my hypothetical direct mail campaign is that my organization has $115,000 it didn't have before. That probably pays for one and half full time staff positions (at the low do-gooder wages we pay) for a year.
So the ALS challenge was in the financial efficiency range of methods normally used by non-profits, albeit a little towards the inefficient end. That doesn't really tell us if the campaign was responsibly run or not; to know that you'd have to look at all the expenses and compare those to costs in other viral Internet fundraising campaigns. But the bottom line is that the ALS association ended up with $115 million it didn't have before.
Can you think of a way of raising $115 million in a few months? I thought not. So presuming the guys who ran the campaign didn't spend the money on hookers and blow, I wouldn't be unduly concerned by a cost-to-raise-a-dollar of $0.91 if I was on the board.
Should donors care that the ALS challenge was a little high on the cost-to-raise-a-dollar metric? Well, I look at it this way. People did it because it was fun and for a good cause, and two years later we can point to concrete and significant scientific results from the money raised. That's not only pretty good, it's pretty damned awesome.
Actually, it's thoroughly impossible to tell how the new standards work based upon by the linked articles, but it sounds like in plain language that Florida is using a computer model that could allow more flexibility in discharge permitting. This can lead to better results, whether your definition of better is "more rationally defensible" or "more in line with what my donors want." Determining which way it is better requires review by a competent expert. It might be both.
The real issue here is this phrase from TFA: "one of a kind." That's not so good.
It's important in managing environmental data to do things in the usual way. This is contrary to the way public thinks about new technologies. If there's a new iPhone, you expect it to be better in every way or at least as good. It's not like that with scientific methods; new techniques are proposed because they have certain advantages, obviously. But they always have one big disadvantage: their results are hard to compare with what you already know. You need to do a lot of work to justify doing things a new way, otherwise you can find yourself unable to compare what is happening now to what was happening before.
Fortunately Florida can't do this on its own; it has to get EPA approval. Since this is an administration that is generally favorable to environmental regulation, if they can get this past Obama's EPA that will help give these new methods more credibility.