Why not give diseases numbers, and refer to emerging infections people who don't know by name using the number? You could have a system where each number prefix tells you more or less the family of diseases you're dealing with.
I know it sounds bizarre, but people seemed to be OK with H1N1 for "Swine Flu", so why not extend that to any kind of infectious (flu, malaria) or environmental (Minamata disease) etc.?
Porn doesn't invent tests to see if you really love them. Porn doesn't create drama.
Clearly we are living in a post-irony world.
I was reading an essay the other day by a woman who was against Mother's Day. She raised her kids not to observe Mother's Day because she didn't want to be one of those Moms dragging screaming toddlers into restaurants to have dinner with Grandma. My reaction to her was the same as my reaction to you, which is get a grip, for chrissakes.
Let me give you some genuine old-fart perspective. Everyone thinks they're more special than they really are, especially when they're young. This extends to having troubles. Everyone thinks they got a raw break; that their generation got a raw break. Hell, my generation thought so; I went to college in an era after The Pill and when there were no STDs that couldn't be cured with penicillin; the minimal standard of "do-ability" was at a historic low. And still people were miserable. And the funny thing was our parents had to pull themselves out of the Great Depression then go over the Europe to kick Hitler's ass and they thought of themselves as lucky.
Not getting goodies handed you you gratis does not make you special. Life costs you, just like it has costed every generation of humans since Olduvai Gorge.
This is how much south west airline charges to fly there in less time. This is 5 th grade math government.
Sure, but you realize that just comparing the present cost of the intercity air link to the future cost of an intercity rail link is simplistic, right? If we can move up to high school math for a moment, you need project the future costs of *both* modes of transit *plus* the links on either end (parking at the home terminal, car rental or public transit at the destination terminal). And for university level credit you have to account for the impact of the growth you plan to accommodate on what you'll be asking the passengers to pay.
Let's imagine you want to quadruple intercity travel from LA to SF in 20 years. If you attempted to quadruple the number of air trips and made the passengers pay for that, would airfare still be $70? Supposing you could even do that, what would happen if aviation fuel doubled in price?
Plus the brass ring in science is proving what everyone else believes is wrong, or even better, not even wrong.
The public understanding of scientists is misguided in nearly every point, but one thing the tropes get right: that note of maniacal glee when the mad scientist holds a test tube aloft and crows, "AND THEY SAID IT COULDN'T BE DONE!" Any scientist would jump at a chance to be able to disprove something most of his colleagues believed implicitly.
Of course it would be very bad form to act that way in public, but scientists have their own way of showboating, which is writing a paper in unusually straightforward language. That's why landmark papers are often so readable. It's a scholar's smug way of saying "Bring it, 'cause this is da shit."
In 1903 mathematician Frank Nelson Cole made a presentation to the American Mathematical Society in which he walked to the blackboard and wrote, "193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287" and then proceeded work out the product as "147,573,952,589,676,412,927". Then without saying a word he sat down to thunderous applause and mathematical immortality: he'd just proved by demonstration that the sixty-seventh Mersenne number is not prime.
That's the dream, to show your colleagues you know something they don't. How much do you think you'd have to pay Cole not to reveal that? Or the people in that lecture to not be there? And it was already known on theoretical grounds that M67 was composite; what if that weren't the case? Denialist conspiracy theorists are so unimaginative and dull that they actually believe that you could hush the whole thing up by spreading a little grant money around.
That's laughable if you know anything about scientists. You could no more hush up disproof of the scientific consensus with grant money than you could stop cocaine use by handing addicts wads of cash.
picking a fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free speech against each other
This is a bit like Marx writing in 1848 that Communism is a specter haunting Europe. Sure, in seventy years time but in 1848 that was just posturing for shock value.
The idea that somehow that 3D printed guns are going to be a wedge issue to use against the left is fantasy. Domestically we're awash in cheap guns that are way better than anything that could be printed and would take generations to get off the street, even if we had the political will to do so which we don't. Internationally, I have two letters and two numbers which together puncture any pretense of significance for 3D guns: A-K and 4-7. There are over 100 million AK-47s and derivatives in the world -- that's one for every seventy human beings on Earth. And if you wanted to bring that number closer to parity, building more AK-47s would be far more effective.
Sure, in twenty years 3D printed firearms may become a potent transformative political force. But at present it's political theater.
Well, you could ask, "Am I being detained or arrested?" and if the answer is "no", then "I do not wish to talk with you. Please carry on while I film, officer."
I understand. But you asked whether it mattered, and my point is that's a very different question than "is it likely to have made a difference."
You can't say, "this would almost certainly have made no difference, so there was in practical terms no harm done," because the whole point of football is to see improbable plays shift the tide of fortune back and forth. It may be highly improbable that Colts fans were robbed of a victory, but it's quite possible that they were robbed of a memorable play. If the standard is "no foul if it produces the expected result" is the standard, you might as well watch WWE instead of NFL.
Football isn't like most other games. Everything about it is designed to be hyper-dramatic -- histrionic even. If you have any doubts, watch a few NFL films with their martial music and moralistically thrilling tales of redemption and damnation.
It starts with the small number of games played. The average NFL player over the course of his entire career is eligible to play in one third the number of regular season games a baseball player does in a single season. So every football game is a big deal. The structure of football's post-season single elimination tournament is perfectly contrived for dramatic upsets of favorites.
Football is designed so every game to matters and that every individual play is potentially be the turning point of a season or even of a career. While it's absolutely true that subsequent play in the AFC Championshipo game suggests such a dramatic turn earlier on would have been unlikely, that's neither here nor there. It would have been unlikely in any case. The whole attraction of the sport is being there when something surprising creates a dramatic and unexpected shift in fortunes.
The important point is that the AFC championship game wasn't what it was supposed to be. That the result is probably the same as it would have been misses the point. Likewise the idea that Brady probably knew he probably didn't need to cheat has no bearing on whether he might have cheated. Pro athletes are selected for their competitiveness, not their philosophical perspective. So the only thing we can go by is evidence, circumstantial or direct.
I'd like to know which brand of microwave lasts 17 years?
Any brand, so long as it was made more than 25 years ago or so.
My kids like to watch vintage TV shows, and in one sitcom from the early 80s there was a plot line involving a TV remote -- this was back when remotes were still an expensive novelty. I paused and pointed out the thing in question. It was huge blocky moster of metal and wood, and looked like it had been forged by Durin in the deeps of Mount Gundabad. While virtually everything they use is incomparably more sophisticated than that thing, nothing approaches the build quality; physically it's all injection-molded crap that's been designed to be discarded after two or three years and replaced.
We can thank Bill Clinton and his China trade deals for amazingly cheap consumer goods that are designed to fail after a couple of years and be impossible to repair.
So actually bothering to read the government's account of what it has done makes you a "leftist" then? And then telling other people what you found is "harassment"?
It must be easy to whip up that old self-righteous anger when you're so -- let's say, "semantically flexible".
The issue isn't secrecy OR expansiveness, or even both. The problem comes when you add fast track to those two.
Fast track is intended to strengthen the US negotiator's hand in trade deals. Here's how it works. By granting the President "fast track", Congress agrees to vote on the treaty exactly as negotiated by the President within sixty days, only forty-five of which the bill is in the hands of the relevant committee.
Fast track developed in the Cold War era. The idea was for situations like this. Suppose we we are discreetly negotiating with the Kingdom of Wakanda for access to their vibranium reserves. But we're worried about the Soviets getting wind of this, so we keep everything on the DL and rush like hell to get the deal through Congress before they can stick their oar in and queer the deal.
And for a relatively simple quid-pro quo type deal negotiated on the side in a bi-lateral world where you're with the commies or not, this procedure makes sense. But not for a massive, complex, multi-lateral accord that will govern the economic relations between twelve nations, and which took ten years to draft. How the hell is Congress supposed to examine something like that in forty-five days?
There's nothing wrong with drafting a treaty in secret, it's often necessary. But you can't make it so hard to examine the treaty and debate it during the ratification process.
That's because ratifying treaties puts more restrictions on Americans in the future than anything else Congress can do. Treaties pre-empt local law and pre-existing federal law. Congress can pass contradictory laws in the future but those would be considered unilateral abrogations under international law and undermine US demands that other countries live up to *their* treaty obligations.
So if there is something dodgy in a ratified treaty for practical purposes you're stuck with it. Anything which hinders the Senate's ability to examine and debate the treaty in detail undermines the Senate's constitutional role. It is not an exaggeration to call something like that a step toward tyranny.
What nobody's ever explained to my satisfaction is why I should give a flying f*ck. As far as I can see "fragmentation" is simply the result of users and developers not all being forced to upgrade to the latest and greatest when the platform vendor demands it. This is actually a *good* thing.
It means I can find a $40 Android tablet running KitKat, which is perfectly fine for things I want to use a $40 tablet for. I'm out of the developer business now, but I still dabble to keep up with developments, and far as I can see the Google tools do a really nice job of allowing developers to target a range of platforms and still look up to date on the latest and greatest. So I don't have to shut out people who bought a smartphone last year if I want to use Material Design (which is cartoony for my taste but does a nice job setting out consistent UI guidelines).
If this is fragmentation hell, all I can say is come on in, the the lava is fine. Sure it would be *nice* if the adoption rate for the latest and greatest was higher, but as a long time user and developer I have to say that not being pushed over the upgrade cliff on the platform vendor's orders is nice too.
Go really retro and have token ring and round robin instead of ethernet....
No, that's for after I've sold them all ThickNet. Then I'll have them bying STP-A cable by the spool to run to the MAO. Maybe I'll package a whole concentrator rack inside a vintage Frigidaire unit so that anytime anyone wants a Pabst they'll see you're more retro than thou.
The summary conflates two papers, a review paper in Science which summarizes the state of knowledge about fracking the Marcellus Shale (Vidic et al. 2013), and a study of an individual incident published this month in PNAS in which researcher purport to have found a single instance of minor contamination from a fracking well (Llewellyn et al. 2015). Neither paper is particularly damning or inflammatory, so at first blush it's not immediately obvious why the fracking PR flacks have gone to DEFCON 3 on this. The key is to read the review paper first. This is almost always the best way to start because review papers are supposed to give a full and balanced overview of the current state of scientific knowledge on a topic. TL;DR, I know, but stick with me for a few paragraphs and I think I can make the problem clear.
Vidic paints a rather favorable picture of the fracking industry's response to problems that have arisen during the fracking boom in the Marcellus shale. It absolves them of any responsibility for the infamous "burning tapwater" we've all seen in Youtube videos. It states they have been quick to respond to wastewater leaks and well blowouts before contamination could spread. It says the industry has redesigned wells in response to concerns that they might leak fracking water as they pass through the aquifer. And it says that fracking water that returns to the surface ("flowback") is treated and re-used for more fracking -- an expensive environmental "best practice".
Vidic does raise some important concerns, however, and the most important is this. At present recycling flowback into more fracking water is practical because production is booming. But at some point production will level off and begin to decline, and when that happens the industry will be producing more flowback than it can use economically. In Texas, where fracking was pioneered, flowback was disposed of in deep wells -- a process not without its drawbacks, but better than leaving the contaminated water on the surface. Pennsylvania doesn't have enough disposal capacity to handle today's flowback, which helps make recycling fracking water attractive at the present time.
We now have enough context to understand Llewellyn, and why Llewellyn is so upsetting to the industry. Llewellyn's paper documents a single instance of minor contamination which matched the chemical fingerprint of flowback from a nearby well. This contamination was well below a level that would be cause for any concern. Llewellyn concludes the most likely cause was a small spill from the flowback holding pit, although it can't rule out the possibility that the contamination occurred inside the well. Taken with the picture Vidic paints of an industry that is generally on top of stuff like this, the occurrence of a single mishap with negligible consequences is hardly damning. So why has the fracking industry unleashed its flying PR monkeys on this?
Because the fracking industry apparently has made no plans for when the day comes it can no longer recycle all the flowback it uses, and it doesn't want the public to think about that.
It would be sensible for them to prepare for the flowback problem now on the upswing of the boom, for the same reason the industry has been able to be so responsive to date: these are good times for the industry in the Marcellus Shale. They're flush. Although preparing for the problem now would be expensive, it wouldn't slow the boom appreciably, and it would add jobs. But... if the industry can kick the flowback can far enough down the road, we'll have to ask it to fix the problem while production and probably the regional economy is in decline. Doing something about the problem then will cost jobs and require money nobody will have.
So if the industry isn't forced to do something about the looming problem soon, it will become politically if not financially impossible to make them do that ever. That's why the industry is allergic to the very mention that surfa
37% of wives and girlfriends are likely to cheat on you too. But what you gonna do about it? Dump your cheating girlfriend and just end up with another cheating girlfriend? What's the point of that? So most people just stay with their lousy operating system or girlfriend. Really it is all pointless anyway.
Er... presuming that the cheating is important to you, you have a 100% chance of having a cheating girlfriend if you stay with the current one but only a 37% chance if you switch to a new, randomly chosen girlfriend.
But... if you don't instinctively see that, then I have to conclude that on some level you want abuse from your girlfriend/software vendor. In fact given your track record of past choices it seems likely that your choice will perform worse than chance, although a probably bad new choice remains a better strategy than staying with the devil you know.
If you don't have the confidence in your discretion to improve upon chance, a randomly chosen girlfriend/OS is a reasonable next step. You should try *anything* that meets the obvious superficial criteria (e.g., is biologically female, has companies providing professional support services). In fact studies suggest that while attractiveness makes a huge difference in who people ask out on a date, it has no effect on their satisfaction with that date once it takes place. What we think we want and what will make us happy are often two different things.
Slashdot Mirror
We're not talking about Antarctic sea ice. We're talking about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is a totally different thing.
Do try to keep up.
Why not give diseases numbers, and refer to emerging infections people who don't know by name using the number? You could have a system where each number prefix tells you more or less the family of diseases you're dealing with.
I know it sounds bizarre, but people seemed to be OK with H1N1 for "Swine Flu", so why not extend that to any kind of infectious (flu, malaria) or environmental (Minamata disease) etc.?
Porn doesn't invent tests to see if you really love them. Porn doesn't create drama.
Clearly we are living in a post-irony world.
I was reading an essay the other day by a woman who was against Mother's Day. She raised her kids not to observe Mother's Day because she didn't want to be one of those Moms dragging screaming toddlers into restaurants to have dinner with Grandma. My reaction to her was the same as my reaction to you, which is get a grip, for chrissakes.
Let me give you some genuine old-fart perspective. Everyone thinks they're more special than they really are, especially when they're young. This extends to having troubles. Everyone thinks they got a raw break; that their generation got a raw break. Hell, my generation thought so; I went to college in an era after The Pill and when there were no STDs that couldn't be cured with penicillin; the minimal standard of "do-ability" was at a historic low. And still people were miserable. And the funny thing was our parents had to pull themselves out of the Great Depression then go over the Europe to kick Hitler's ass and they thought of themselves as lucky.
Not getting goodies handed you you gratis does not make you special. Life costs you, just like it has costed every generation of humans since Olduvai Gorge.
This is how much south west airline charges to fly there in less time. This is 5 th grade math government.
Sure, but you realize that just comparing the present cost of the intercity air link to the future cost of an intercity rail link is simplistic, right? If we can move up to high school math for a moment, you need project the future costs of *both* modes of transit *plus* the links on either end (parking at the home terminal, car rental or public transit at the destination terminal). And for university level credit you have to account for the impact of the growth you plan to accommodate on what you'll be asking the passengers to pay.
Let's imagine you want to quadruple intercity travel from LA to SF in 20 years. If you attempted to quadruple the number of air trips and made the passengers pay for that, would airfare still be $70? Supposing you could even do that, what would happen if aviation fuel doubled in price?
You need to build a better grid.
Then again If you want to replace nukes with renewables, you need to build a better grid.
Plus the brass ring in science is proving what everyone else believes is wrong, or even better, not even wrong.
The public understanding of scientists is misguided in nearly every point, but one thing the tropes get right: that note of maniacal glee when the mad scientist holds a test tube aloft and crows, "AND THEY SAID IT COULDN'T BE DONE!" Any scientist would jump at a chance to be able to disprove something most of his colleagues believed implicitly.
Of course it would be very bad form to act that way in public, but scientists have their own way of showboating, which is writing a paper in unusually straightforward language. That's why landmark papers are often so readable. It's a scholar's smug way of saying "Bring it, 'cause this is da shit."
In 1903 mathematician Frank Nelson Cole made a presentation to the American Mathematical Society in which he walked to the blackboard and wrote, "193,707,721 × 761,838,257,287" and then proceeded work out the product as "147,573,952,589,676,412,927". Then without saying a word he sat down to thunderous applause and mathematical immortality: he'd just proved by demonstration that the sixty-seventh Mersenne number is not prime.
That's the dream, to show your colleagues you know something they don't. How much do you think you'd have to pay Cole not to reveal that? Or the people in that lecture to not be there? And it was already known on theoretical grounds that M67 was composite; what if that weren't the case? Denialist conspiracy theorists are so unimaginative and dull that they actually believe that you could hush the whole thing up by spreading a little grant money around.
That's laughable if you know anything about scientists. You could no more hush up disproof of the scientific consensus with grant money than you could stop cocaine use by handing addicts wads of cash.
picking a fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free speech against each other
This is a bit like Marx writing in 1848 that Communism is a specter haunting Europe. Sure, in seventy years time but in 1848 that was just posturing for shock value.
The idea that somehow that 3D printed guns are going to be a wedge issue to use against the left is fantasy. Domestically we're awash in cheap guns that are way better than anything that could be printed and would take generations to get off the street, even if we had the political will to do so which we don't. Internationally, I have two letters and two numbers which together puncture any pretense of significance for 3D guns: A-K and 4-7. There are over 100 million AK-47s and derivatives in the world -- that's one for every seventy human beings on Earth. And if you wanted to bring that number closer to parity, building more AK-47s would be far more effective.
Sure, in twenty years 3D printed firearms may become a potent transformative political force. But at present it's political theater.
My doctor told me to drink a cup of tea after a hot bath...
Well, you could ask, "Am I being detained or arrested?" and if the answer is "no", then "I do not wish to talk with you. Please carry on while I film, officer."
I understand. But you asked whether it mattered, and my point is that's a very different question than "is it likely to have made a difference."
You can't say, "this would almost certainly have made no difference, so there was in practical terms no harm done," because the whole point of football is to see improbable plays shift the tide of fortune back and forth. It may be highly improbable that Colts fans were robbed of a victory, but it's quite possible that they were robbed of a memorable play. If the standard is "no foul if it produces the expected result" is the standard, you might as well watch WWE instead of NFL.
Football isn't like most other games. Everything about it is designed to be hyper-dramatic -- histrionic even. If you have any doubts, watch a few NFL films with their martial music and moralistically thrilling tales of redemption and damnation.
It starts with the small number of games played. The average NFL player over the course of his entire career is eligible to play in one third the number of regular season games a baseball player does in a single season. So every football game is a big deal. The structure of football's post-season single elimination tournament is perfectly contrived for dramatic upsets of favorites.
Football is designed so every game to matters and that every individual play is potentially be the turning point of a season or even of a career. While it's absolutely true that subsequent play in the AFC Championshipo game suggests such a dramatic turn earlier on would have been unlikely, that's neither here nor there. It would have been unlikely in any case. The whole attraction of the sport is being there when something surprising creates a dramatic and unexpected shift in fortunes.
The important point is that the AFC championship game wasn't what it was supposed to be. That the result is probably the same as it would have been misses the point. Likewise the idea that Brady probably knew he probably didn't need to cheat has no bearing on whether he might have cheated. Pro athletes are selected for their competitiveness, not their philosophical perspective. So the only thing we can go by is evidence, circumstantial or direct.
Featuring GGL (Gateless Gate Logic).
I'd like to know which brand of microwave lasts 17 years?
Any brand, so long as it was made more than 25 years ago or so.
My kids like to watch vintage TV shows, and in one sitcom from the early 80s there was a plot line involving a TV remote -- this was back when remotes were still an expensive novelty. I paused and pointed out the thing in question. It was huge blocky moster of metal and wood, and looked like it had been forged by Durin in the deeps of Mount Gundabad. While virtually everything they use is incomparably more sophisticated than that thing, nothing approaches the build quality; physically it's all injection-molded crap that's been designed to be discarded after two or three years and replaced.
We can thank Bill Clinton and his China trade deals for amazingly cheap consumer goods that are designed to fail after a couple of years and be impossible to repair.
You mean like one of these>?
So actually bothering to read the government's account of what it has done makes you a "leftist" then? And then telling other people what you found is "harassment"?
It must be easy to whip up that old self-righteous anger when you're so -- let's say, "semantically flexible".
The issue isn't secrecy OR expansiveness, or even both. The problem comes when you add fast track to those two.
Fast track is intended to strengthen the US negotiator's hand in trade deals. Here's how it works. By granting the President "fast track", Congress agrees to vote on the treaty exactly as negotiated by the President within sixty days, only forty-five of which the bill is in the hands of the relevant committee.
Fast track developed in the Cold War era. The idea was for situations like this. Suppose we we are discreetly negotiating with the Kingdom of Wakanda for access to their vibranium reserves. But we're worried about the Soviets getting wind of this, so we keep everything on the DL and rush like hell to get the deal through Congress before they can stick their oar in and queer the deal.
And for a relatively simple quid-pro quo type deal negotiated on the side in a bi-lateral world where you're with the commies or not, this procedure makes sense. But not for a massive, complex, multi-lateral accord that will govern the economic relations between twelve nations, and which took ten years to draft. How the hell is Congress supposed to examine something like that in forty-five days?
This could be fun, actually.
Mine failed and I ended up in orbit.
There's nothing wrong with drafting a treaty in secret, it's often necessary. But you can't make it so hard to examine the treaty and debate it during the ratification process.
That's because ratifying treaties puts more restrictions on Americans in the future than anything else Congress can do. Treaties pre-empt local law and pre-existing federal law. Congress can pass contradictory laws in the future but those would be considered unilateral abrogations under international law and undermine US demands that other countries live up to *their* treaty obligations.
So if there is something dodgy in a ratified treaty for practical purposes you're stuck with it. Anything which hinders the Senate's ability to examine and debate the treaty in detail undermines the Senate's constitutional role. It is not an exaggeration to call something like that a step toward tyranny.
Well, that's BYOD, not Google's fault. If your provisioning the devices you plan accordingly.
The Android fragmentation boogeyman.
What nobody's ever explained to my satisfaction is why I should give a flying f*ck. As far as I can see "fragmentation" is simply the result of users and developers not all being forced to upgrade to the latest and greatest when the platform vendor demands it. This is actually a *good* thing.
It means I can find a $40 Android tablet running KitKat, which is perfectly fine for things I want to use a $40 tablet for. I'm out of the developer business now, but I still dabble to keep up with developments, and far as I can see the Google tools do a really nice job of allowing developers to target a range of platforms and still look up to date on the latest and greatest. So I don't have to shut out people who bought a smartphone last year if I want to use Material Design (which is cartoony for my taste but does a nice job setting out consistent UI guidelines).
If this is fragmentation hell, all I can say is come on in, the the lava is fine. Sure it would be *nice* if the adoption rate for the latest and greatest was higher, but as a long time user and developer I have to say that not being pushed over the upgrade cliff on the platform vendor's orders is nice too.
Ah, but did you write a sendmail.cf file for sending out emails with bang path routing?
Yep. With least cost routing, dude.
Go really retro and have token ring and round robin instead of ethernet....
No, that's for after I've sold them all ThickNet. Then I'll have them bying STP-A cable by the spool to run to the MAO. Maybe I'll package a whole concentrator rack inside a vintage Frigidaire unit so that anytime anyone wants a Pabst they'll see you're more retro than thou.
The summary conflates two papers, a review paper in Science which summarizes the state of knowledge about fracking the Marcellus Shale (Vidic et al. 2013), and a study of an individual incident published this month in PNAS in which researcher purport to have found a single instance of minor contamination from a fracking well (Llewellyn et al. 2015). Neither paper is particularly damning or inflammatory, so at first blush it's not immediately obvious why the fracking PR flacks have gone to DEFCON 3 on this. The key is to read the review paper first. This is almost always the best way to start because review papers are supposed to give a full and balanced overview of the current state of scientific knowledge on a topic. TL;DR, I know, but stick with me for a few paragraphs and I think I can make the problem clear.
Vidic paints a rather favorable picture of the fracking industry's response to problems that have arisen during the fracking boom in the Marcellus shale. It absolves them of any responsibility for the infamous "burning tapwater" we've all seen in Youtube videos. It states they have been quick to respond to wastewater leaks and well blowouts before contamination could spread. It says the industry has redesigned wells in response to concerns that they might leak fracking water as they pass through the aquifer. And it says that fracking water that returns to the surface ("flowback") is treated and re-used for more fracking -- an expensive environmental "best practice".
Vidic does raise some important concerns, however, and the most important is this. At present recycling flowback into more fracking water is practical because production is booming. But at some point production will level off and begin to decline, and when that happens the industry will be producing more flowback than it can use economically. In Texas, where fracking was pioneered, flowback was disposed of in deep wells -- a process not without its drawbacks, but better than leaving the contaminated water on the surface. Pennsylvania doesn't have enough disposal capacity to handle today's flowback, which helps make recycling fracking water attractive at the present time.
We now have enough context to understand Llewellyn, and why Llewellyn is so upsetting to the industry. Llewellyn's paper documents a single instance of minor contamination which matched the chemical fingerprint of flowback from a nearby well. This contamination was well below a level that would be cause for any concern. Llewellyn concludes the most likely cause was a small spill from the flowback holding pit, although it can't rule out the possibility that the contamination occurred inside the well. Taken with the picture Vidic paints of an industry that is generally on top of stuff like this, the occurrence of a single mishap with negligible consequences is hardly damning. So why has the fracking industry unleashed its flying PR monkeys on this?
Because the fracking industry apparently has made no plans for when the day comes it can no longer recycle all the flowback it uses, and it doesn't want the public to think about that.
It would be sensible for them to prepare for the flowback problem now on the upswing of the boom, for the same reason the industry has been able to be so responsive to date: these are good times for the industry in the Marcellus Shale. They're flush. Although preparing for the problem now would be expensive, it wouldn't slow the boom appreciably, and it would add jobs. But... if the industry can kick the flowback can far enough down the road, we'll have to ask it to fix the problem while production and probably the regional economy is in decline. Doing something about the problem then will cost jobs and require money nobody will have.
So if the industry isn't forced to do something about the looming problem soon, it will become politically if not financially impossible to make them do that ever. That's why the industry is allergic to the very mention that surfa
37% of wives and girlfriends are likely to cheat on you too. But what you gonna do about it? Dump your cheating girlfriend and just end up with another cheating girlfriend? What's the point of that? So most people just stay with their lousy operating system or girlfriend. Really it is all pointless anyway.
Er... presuming that the cheating is important to you, you have a 100% chance of having a cheating girlfriend if you stay with the current one but only a 37% chance if you switch to a new, randomly chosen girlfriend.
But... if you don't instinctively see that, then I have to conclude that on some level you want abuse from your girlfriend/software vendor. In fact given your track record of past choices it seems likely that your choice will perform worse than chance, although a probably bad new choice remains a better strategy than staying with the devil you know.
If you don't have the confidence in your discretion to improve upon chance, a randomly chosen girlfriend/OS is a reasonable next step. You should try *anything* that meets the obvious superficial criteria (e.g., is biologically female, has companies providing professional support services). In fact studies suggest that while attractiveness makes a huge difference in who people ask out on a date, it has no effect on their satisfaction with that date once it takes place. What we think we want and what will make us happy are often two different things.