While it's true that it's way better to burn methane than emit it, exactly how do you propose to do this with millions of acres of permafrost every year?
Because employment is a short term thing these days.
Getting a job used to be like getting married. It wasn't unusual to get a job at a place (the mill, Big Blue, the bank) in your 20s, and retire from that place forty years later. People changed employers maybe three times in their career. The average today according to BLS is twelve, with the average duration 4.2 years, and the trend is toward even shorter term employment.
If someone is going to work for you for ten or more years, you might well invest in them because you'll reap the benefits later. Companies have more of a "just in time" mentality too. IF they need specialized skills they'd rather hire them, then let them go. So even if you are technically an employee, you've got to think more like a contractor.
Well, that's the reason there is a presumption of innocence. They've got to bring this guy before a Texas jury and make a case beyond a reasonable doubt.
That's a pretty high bar to hit.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of prosecutorial abuse, but mostly it targets people who can't afford to defend themselves. Texas is one of the worst states in the country in terms of spending on and independence of public defenders. So if this guy can scrape together enough money to hire his own lawyer, the prosecutor had better have a pretty solid case because the jury won't be inclined to convict him because he makes guns. That's a powerful deterrent to politically motivated charges -- against people with money.
It's not like buying something like oil. It's capital investment and it affect the stuff you've already bought.
This is Deere turning an occasional choice about which farmers do have choice into regular payments for which they won't have choice.
This all reminds me of something Gandhi once said. A reporter asked him what he thought of Western Civilization, and he replied that he thought it would be a good idea. Capitalism only works because of competition, but companies do everything they can to avoid actually competing, for example making it hard to compare their products to other vendors (boy to vendors hate being in "commodity" businesses), or in this case by trying to make it difficult for customers to choose competitors for some transactions.
And if it's legal to evade competiing, why not? The fact that this undermines the justification for capitalism isn't your problem. This is a situation where you need regulation to ensure a free market can operate the way its' suppose to.
The Kuhn Rikon Swiss Peeler. Go into any high-end restaurant kitchen, and there's a good chance you'll find a couple of these marvels. You, the home cook, can own this wonder too, but it will set you back: $4.49.
Now go into a home kitchen supply store and you'll find peeling gizmos costing four or five times as much that don't work as well. Somebody once gave me a Wustof peeler that costs over $50, and you know what? It's just as good as the Rikon at over 10x the price. It's pretty to look at, and nicer to hold, but it doesn't get your spuds naked any faster.
So why do people shell out $20,$30, even $50 for a vegetable peeler if the best peeler in the world? Because of what I call the "SUV theory of marketing": people equate heavyweight with quality, not design, performance or durability.
Office automation software hit Rikon Swiss levels of quality twenty years ago. It's possible that iOS hit Rikon Swiss levels of quality around five years ago, with support for the A7 secure enclave. After you get to a certain point, the only way to add to perceived quality is to do stuff that adds weight. Looking at iOS releases, it's probably fair to say that there have been some genuine functional improvements since iOS 7, in areas like multitasking and battery life. A lot of changes are superficial stylistic ones that dont' really matter. In some ways the operating system has found new ways to be intrusive on your attention. Those superficial changes are all excess weight added to create the perception of quality.
France went in big for nuclear for the same reason nuclear was adopted in Japan: it doesn't have the fossil fuel reserves it needs to power its economy. During the 1973 oil crisis, France made nearly all its electricity from imported oil, which is why they went on a nuclear crash course. France doesn't have any uranium either, but you only refuel a reactor every couple of years, and with the fabrication lead time it makes it hard for foreign powers to twist your arm with your energy supply.
But if nuclear is *resistant* to foreign meddling in your economy, renewables are bullet-proof. France will generate almost a quarter of its electricity from renewables some time in the next several years.
Likewise, Iceland gets 100% of its energy from renewables: 87% hydro, 13% geothermal. That's because it it has *zero* coal, oil, or natural gas, but it's a volcanic country with abundant water and topography. Renewables are a no-brainer.
The UK still has coal reserves, but much of the coal is not economical to extract. UK coal production peaked at the start of the 20th Century and collapsed at the turn of the 21st, leading to a sharp increase in coal imports. For that reason the UK has been aggressively replacing coal with renewables, like Scottish wind power.
These moves toward renewables are all no-brainer kinds of decisions based on national interest. The situation for countries like Germany or Norway is more complicated, because they could increase their fossil fuel energy production if they wanted -- Germany by coal and Norway by oil. The adoption of renewables there is driven by externalities -- pollution in other words. The same in China, although China also sees leadership in renewable energy technology as strategically important.
None of this is unknown, and none of this is that hard to solve with a little money.
The big problem with DDT is that it is *highly* valuable to people who don't have very much making it inevitable that some of it will be stolen. That's true of permethrin, but you can just write that off. Permethrin treated bed nets, even more so. What are people going to use them for? Exactly what you bought them for.
I don't think the public as a whole has anything to do with the creating of crypotcurrencies, only a tiny fraction of the public has anything to do with the cryptocurrency bubble, and most of them were speculating, not taking some kind of political position.
Actually, the percentage of US households owning guns has actually dropped significantly since the 1970s, largely reflecting a historic decline in hunting. Overall the rate of gun homicide has also dropped since the 1970s. But the size of gun collections has skyrocketed, particularly after Obama was elected, so now there's more guns in America than people. Half those guns are owned by 3% of the population.
Like many real-world scenarios, when you look into it the American gun situation is complex, far more complex than the rhetoric from either side of the gun control debate admits. Both sides implicitly agree that the biggest factor in the rate of shootings is the number of guns on the street, they just disagree on the direction of the effect. In fact there is little evidence to support either position.
Given that, I am inclined to regard the sheer number of guns Americans own as neither here nor there, although the size, nature, and sometimes insecure storage of personal arsenals probably has had an effect on the rise of mass shootings on a horrific scale. That's not in the least mathematically inconsistent with the overall rate of shootings dropping.
In any case, I am doubtful that this particular mass shootings has anything definitive to say about the gun control debate or the state of American society as a whole. The scale of the shooting is feasible with the kinds of weapons people typically owned fifty years ago, and the gunman has no criminal record, so no state has any kind of gun control laws that would have prevented it. Possibly a cooling off law if the guns were purchased for the occasion, but nobody could be sure even then.
I think anyone who's in a group of people where something makes them stand out would be.
Branch Rickey chose Jackie Robinson to be the man to breach baseball's color line, not just because he was an outstanding player, which the first would have to be. Jackie Robinson was also uncommonly mentally tough.
House based spraying of permethrin and permethrin impregnated bed nets. DDT would be potentially useful, but it has to at all costs be kept from being stolen and diverted to agricultural use. Believe me, I know, I worked for years in vector borne disease control and it's feasible and I was asked to look into the feasibility of promoting the use of DDT for household applications. DDT could be useful, but is neither necessary nor sufficient, and is a management can of worms.
You don't have to colonize, a modest amount of money buys you everything you need, and it doesn't take much to get a lot of labor in the third world. That's why malaria is no longer endemic in places like the US and the UK. Both places were able to eradicate it in the 20th century, Britain after it had been endemic for centuries, because they had the resources to pay.
Why would we pay? Self-interest. Malaria is a force which subtly destabilizes countries in multiple ways. In the long run we'd both save money in defense and make money in trade as malaria-infested places become more prosperous. Why don't we pay? It'd take enlightened self-interest.
You know, that kind of reminds me of my reaction to seeing all the tabloid and magazine articles about the British royal family in my American supermarket checkout. I wouldn't buy a magazine about the royal family if I were British FFS. I don't see why anybody cares about them. But evidently people do.
So here we an article about the impact of technology on poor people and you have exactly the same reaction: why would anybody care about these people? I can only answer the same way: it may be mystifying to you, but evidently people do.
Well, as with any other technology, what actually gets done with it is very different from what possibly could get done with it.
We've long had the technology for some time to eliminate many, many problems the poor of the world have. For example malaria kills half a million people around the world annually and debilitates hundreds of millions more, but we've had the scientific knowledge to eradicate it for decades now.
The problem is that poor people don't have the money to pay for it. That's always the problem. It doesn't take a genius to figure out all kinds of applications of AI that would improve the lot of poor third world villages, but it takes one hell of a genius to figure out how to get those systems built and deployed to those people.
To be fair, the funding for doing larger, better designed studies isn't exactly abundant.
The US weight-loss industry rakes in nearly seventy billion dollars a year, mostly for stuff that either has little scientific evidence supporting, or more commonly none. That's not even counting spending on foods marketed as "diet" foods, which is probably several times that. A 1% tax on such foods and services would easy fund a Moon shot style research program to discover what actually works -- but of course that would be disastrous for the industry, and not because of the taxes. It's because most of what is being sold is bullshit.
... are just so stories. Their sole criterion for believing is how believable they sound. They can explain everything, so they shed light on nothing. The leap of logic from the experiment they did to the conclusions they drew was, quite literally, mind boggling.
Sure we have a genetic predisposition to conserve energy, otherwise we'd walk ourselves into starvation. But that's not the same as saying we're born to be couch potatoes; if that were true then how do you explain the existence of marathon runners? You could just as easily argue that we evolved to chase down mammoths; we certainly have physical adaptations unique among land animals for long distance running.
The one obvious thing about human behavior is that it is tremendous flexible. Under the right circumstances a couch potato will become a marathon runner.
The "exercise paradox" usually refers to the fact that increasing physical activity does not, on its own, result in weight loss. That's not really a paradox, it's just a reflection of the fact that calorie consumption tends to naturally rise as our activity levels rise. The behavioral "exercise paradox" they're talking about here isn't a paradox either. It's just social psychology. It's well-established that telling people you are going to pursue a goal (like exercising more) actually reduces the chances of you taking concrete steps toward that goal.
You had a paper tape reader? Luxury! We used to live a wastepaper bin in the IPC and had comptuer dots dumped on us every morning, which we ate for breakfast -- if we were lucky.
Let's stipulate that your claim is correct. It has to be interpreted in the context that we've been building, and the government has been promoting, nuclear power plants for some sixty years now. While photovoltaics have been around for a long time the panels have only become cheap enough to be competitive, and batteries good enough to back them up, in the past few years.
There is every prospect of continued dramatic improvements in the economics of photovoltaics and battery technology. This would be true even if there were no government subsidies; the technology is over that hump and market forces will continue to drive prices down.
Improvements to nuclear power will probably require more government underwriting. Even if the goal of the new designs is greater safety (which will result in lower operational costs), there's no guarantee a radical new design will actually be practical. If you look at the investment profile, the profit isn't big enough to justify the risk for private investors.
Government involvement in developing nuclear technology is problematic for two reasons. The first is that the government has little ability to focus on events that are more than four or five years in the future. Therefore you can be sure it will not tackle the decomissioning and waste storage problems in a major nuclear power campaign. They'll just kick that can down the road and hope for the best.
The second problem is the influence of campaign money and the resultant regulatory capture. A nuclear power generation industry needs external supervision. There is an argument that economic incentives will make industry effectively self-regulate, but TEPCO abundantly demonstrates that isn't true. And that was Japan, not some basket-case society like Russia or Venezuela. If self-regulation is going to work anywhere, Japan would be the place.
US carbon emissions have gone down as a result of natural gas displacing coal. That's because natural gas is more economical than coal, but the natural gas industry benefited by (unpopular) pro-fracking policies... ten years ago.
Nope, it doesn't require financial gain on the part of the infringer. Felony copyright infringement requires distribution including by electronic means of works where the net retail value of all the copies distributed over a period of up to 180 days is at least $2500.
That said, given that this particular act is so common and its prosecution as a crime is so rare, you have to assume there's something capricious in the application of the law. For practical economic purposes nothing would change if this crime were never prosecuted, so why have the law at all?
Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Copyright violations are a felony, and can carry fines of up to $250,000 or five years in prison for a first offense -- as you'd know if you've ever actually read the text that displays when you pop a DVD into a drive.
Now it's actually rare to pursue criminal charges against copyright infringers. Usually it's a civil suit. Fewer than two hundred criminal prosecutions are undertaken against all kinds of IP violators in the entire US each year. Given the frequency at which copyright infringement occurs, your chances of facing criminal prosecution at all is close to zero.
But it's not quite zero, and if you *do* end up facing prosecution, yes you can go to jail. In this case the reason is probably that the guy didn't make any money that could be recovered. He just did it to be a dick, and pretty much dared prosecutors to throw him in jail. That said, six months seems pretty excessive; that Stanford swim team rapist got six months in prison for three convictions on felony sexual assault.
Slashdot Mirror
While it's true that it's way better to burn methane than emit it, exactly how do you propose to do this with millions of acres of permafrost every year?
Because employment is a short term thing these days.
Getting a job used to be like getting married. It wasn't unusual to get a job at a place (the mill, Big Blue, the bank) in your 20s, and retire from that place forty years later. People changed employers maybe three times in their career. The average today according to BLS is twelve, with the average duration 4.2 years, and the trend is toward even shorter term employment.
If someone is going to work for you for ten or more years, you might well invest in them because you'll reap the benefits later. Companies have more of a "just in time" mentality too. IF they need specialized skills they'd rather hire them, then let them go. So even if you are technically an employee, you've got to think more like a contractor.
Oh, right. All we've got to do is cure cancer and heart disease.
You could be a member of four different Facebook analogues and not even know it, if they all used the same content syndication standards.
Well, that's the reason there is a presumption of innocence. They've got to bring this guy before a Texas jury and make a case beyond a reasonable doubt.
That's a pretty high bar to hit.
Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of prosecutorial abuse, but mostly it targets people who can't afford to defend themselves. Texas is one of the worst states in the country in terms of spending on and independence of public defenders. So if this guy can scrape together enough money to hire his own lawyer, the prosecutor had better have a pretty solid case because the jury won't be inclined to convict him because he makes guns. That's a powerful deterrent to politically motivated charges -- against people with money.
Yeah, cause we know how anti-gun the government in Texas is.
People who are fans of this guy are just paranoid.
It's not like buying something like oil. It's capital investment and it affect the stuff you've already bought.
This is Deere turning an occasional choice about which farmers do have choice into regular payments for which they won't have choice.
This all reminds me of something Gandhi once said. A reporter asked him what he thought of Western Civilization, and he replied that he thought it would be a good idea. Capitalism only works because of competition, but companies do everything they can to avoid actually competing, for example making it hard to compare their products to other vendors (boy to vendors hate being in "commodity" businesses), or in this case by trying to make it difficult for customers to choose competitors for some transactions.
And if it's legal to evade competiing, why not? The fact that this undermines the justification for capitalism isn't your problem. This is a situation where you need regulation to ensure a free market can operate the way its' suppose to.
The Kuhn Rikon Swiss Peeler. Go into any high-end restaurant kitchen, and there's a good chance you'll find a couple of these marvels. You, the home cook, can own this wonder too, but it will set you back: $4.49.
Now go into a home kitchen supply store and you'll find peeling gizmos costing four or five times as much that don't work as well. Somebody once gave me a Wustof peeler that costs over $50, and you know what? It's just as good as the Rikon at over 10x the price. It's pretty to look at, and nicer to hold, but it doesn't get your spuds naked any faster.
So why do people shell out $20,$30, even $50 for a vegetable peeler if the best peeler in the world? Because of what I call the "SUV theory of marketing": people equate heavyweight with quality, not design, performance or durability.
Office automation software hit Rikon Swiss levels of quality twenty years ago. It's possible that iOS hit Rikon Swiss levels of quality around five years ago, with support for the A7 secure enclave. After you get to a certain point, the only way to add to perceived quality is to do stuff that adds weight. Looking at iOS releases, it's probably fair to say that there have been some genuine functional improvements since iOS 7, in areas like multitasking and battery life. A lot of changes are superficial stylistic ones that dont' really matter. In some ways the operating system has found new ways to be intrusive on your attention. Those superficial changes are all excess weight added to create the perception of quality.
France went in big for nuclear for the same reason nuclear was adopted in Japan: it doesn't have the fossil fuel reserves it needs to power its economy. During the 1973 oil crisis, France made nearly all its electricity from imported oil, which is why they went on a nuclear crash course. France doesn't have any uranium either, but you only refuel a reactor every couple of years, and with the fabrication lead time it makes it hard for foreign powers to twist your arm with your energy supply.
But if nuclear is *resistant* to foreign meddling in your economy, renewables are bullet-proof. France will generate almost a quarter of its electricity from renewables some time in the next several years.
Likewise, Iceland gets 100% of its energy from renewables: 87% hydro, 13% geothermal. That's because it it has *zero* coal, oil, or natural gas, but it's a volcanic country with abundant water and topography. Renewables are a no-brainer.
The UK still has coal reserves, but much of the coal is not economical to extract. UK coal production peaked at the start of the 20th Century and collapsed at the turn of the 21st, leading to a sharp increase in coal imports. For that reason the UK has been aggressively replacing coal with renewables, like Scottish wind power.
These moves toward renewables are all no-brainer kinds of decisions based on national interest. The situation for countries like Germany or Norway is more complicated, because they could increase their fossil fuel energy production if they wanted -- Germany by coal and Norway by oil. The adoption of renewables there is driven by externalities -- pollution in other words. The same in China, although China also sees leadership in renewable energy technology as strategically important.
None of this is unknown, and none of this is that hard to solve with a little money.
The big problem with DDT is that it is *highly* valuable to people who don't have very much making it inevitable that some of it will be stolen. That's true of permethrin, but you can just write that off. Permethrin treated bed nets, even more so. What are people going to use them for? Exactly what you bought them for.
Exactly.
Can't have the rewards without the risks now can we?
You can if you're rich enough to buy politicians.
I don't think the public as a whole has anything to do with the creating of crypotcurrencies, only a tiny fraction of the public has anything to do with the cryptocurrency bubble, and most of them were speculating, not taking some kind of political position.
Actually, the percentage of US households owning guns has actually dropped significantly since the 1970s, largely reflecting a historic decline in hunting. Overall the rate of gun homicide has also dropped since the 1970s. But the size of gun collections has skyrocketed, particularly after Obama was elected, so now there's more guns in America than people. Half those guns are owned by 3% of the population.
Like many real-world scenarios, when you look into it the American gun situation is complex, far more complex than the rhetoric from either side of the gun control debate admits. Both sides implicitly agree that the biggest factor in the rate of shootings is the number of guns on the street, they just disagree on the direction of the effect. In fact there is little evidence to support either position.
Given that, I am inclined to regard the sheer number of guns Americans own as neither here nor there, although the size, nature, and sometimes insecure storage of personal arsenals probably has had an effect on the rise of mass shootings on a horrific scale. That's not in the least mathematically inconsistent with the overall rate of shootings dropping.
In any case, I am doubtful that this particular mass shootings has anything definitive to say about the gun control debate or the state of American society as a whole. The scale of the shooting is feasible with the kinds of weapons people typically owned fifty years ago, and the gunman has no criminal record, so no state has any kind of gun control laws that would have prevented it. Possibly a cooling off law if the guns were purchased for the occasion, but nobody could be sure even then.
I think anyone who's in a group of people where something makes them stand out would be.
Branch Rickey chose Jackie Robinson to be the man to breach baseball's color line, not just because he was an outstanding player, which the first would have to be. Jackie Robinson was also uncommonly mentally tough.
House based spraying of permethrin and permethrin impregnated bed nets. DDT would be potentially useful, but it has to at all costs be kept from being stolen and diverted to agricultural use. Believe me, I know, I worked for years in vector borne disease control and it's feasible and I was asked to look into the feasibility of promoting the use of DDT for household applications. DDT could be useful, but is neither necessary nor sufficient, and is a management can of worms.
You don't have to colonize, a modest amount of money buys you everything you need, and it doesn't take much to get a lot of labor in the third world. That's why malaria is no longer endemic in places like the US and the UK. Both places were able to eradicate it in the 20th century, Britain after it had been endemic for centuries, because they had the resources to pay.
Why would we pay? Self-interest. Malaria is a force which subtly destabilizes countries in multiple ways. In the long run we'd both save money in defense and make money in trade as malaria-infested places become more prosperous. Why don't we pay? It'd take enlightened self-interest.
You know, that kind of reminds me of my reaction to seeing all the tabloid and magazine articles about the British royal family in my American supermarket checkout. I wouldn't buy a magazine about the royal family if I were British FFS. I don't see why anybody cares about them. But evidently people do.
So here we an article about the impact of technology on poor people and you have exactly the same reaction: why would anybody care about these people? I can only answer the same way: it may be mystifying to you, but evidently people do.
Well, as with any other technology, what actually gets done with it is very different from what possibly could get done with it.
We've long had the technology for some time to eliminate many, many problems the poor of the world have. For example malaria kills half a million people around the world annually and debilitates hundreds of millions more, but we've had the scientific knowledge to eradicate it for decades now.
The problem is that poor people don't have the money to pay for it. That's always the problem. It doesn't take a genius to figure out all kinds of applications of AI that would improve the lot of poor third world villages, but it takes one hell of a genius to figure out how to get those systems built and deployed to those people.
To be fair, the funding for doing larger, better designed studies isn't exactly abundant.
The US weight-loss industry rakes in nearly seventy billion dollars a year, mostly for stuff that either has little scientific evidence supporting, or more commonly none. That's not even counting spending on foods marketed as "diet" foods, which is probably several times that. A 1% tax on such foods and services would easy fund a Moon shot style research program to discover what actually works -- but of course that would be disastrous for the industry, and not because of the taxes. It's because most of what is being sold is bullshit.
... are just so stories. Their sole criterion for believing is how believable they sound. They can explain everything, so they shed light on nothing. The leap of logic from the experiment they did to the conclusions they drew was, quite literally, mind boggling.
Sure we have a genetic predisposition to conserve energy, otherwise we'd walk ourselves into starvation. But that's not the same as saying we're born to be couch potatoes; if that were true then how do you explain the existence of marathon runners? You could just as easily argue that we evolved to chase down mammoths; we certainly have physical adaptations unique among land animals for long distance running.
The one obvious thing about human behavior is that it is tremendous flexible. Under the right circumstances a couch potato will become a marathon runner.
The "exercise paradox" usually refers to the fact that increasing physical activity does not, on its own, result in weight loss. That's not really a paradox, it's just a reflection of the fact that calorie consumption tends to naturally rise as our activity levels rise. The behavioral "exercise paradox" they're talking about here isn't a paradox either. It's just social psychology. It's well-established that telling people you are going to pursue a goal (like exercising more) actually reduces the chances of you taking concrete steps toward that goal.
You had a paper tape reader? Luxury! We used to live a wastepaper bin in the IPC and had comptuer dots dumped on us every morning, which we ate for breakfast -- if we were lucky.
Let's stipulate that your claim is correct. It has to be interpreted in the context that we've been building, and the government has been promoting, nuclear power plants for some sixty years now. While photovoltaics have been around for a long time the panels have only become cheap enough to be competitive, and batteries good enough to back them up, in the past few years.
There is every prospect of continued dramatic improvements in the economics of photovoltaics and battery technology. This would be true even if there were no government subsidies; the technology is over that hump and market forces will continue to drive prices down.
Improvements to nuclear power will probably require more government underwriting. Even if the goal of the new designs is greater safety (which will result in lower operational costs), there's no guarantee a radical new design will actually be practical. If you look at the investment profile, the profit isn't big enough to justify the risk for private investors.
Government involvement in developing nuclear technology is problematic for two reasons. The first is that the government has little ability to focus on events that are more than four or five years in the future. Therefore you can be sure it will not tackle the decomissioning and waste storage problems in a major nuclear power campaign. They'll just kick that can down the road and hope for the best.
The second problem is the influence of campaign money and the resultant regulatory capture. A nuclear power generation industry needs external supervision. There is an argument that economic incentives will make industry effectively self-regulate, but TEPCO abundantly demonstrates that isn't true. And that was Japan, not some basket-case society like Russia or Venezuela. If self-regulation is going to work anywhere, Japan would be the place.
US carbon emissions have gone down as a result of natural gas displacing coal. That's because natural gas is more economical than coal, but the natural gas industry benefited by (unpopular) pro-fracking policies... ten years ago.
Nope, it doesn't require financial gain on the part of the infringer. Felony copyright infringement requires distribution including by electronic means of works where the net retail value of all the copies distributed over a period of up to 180 days is at least $2500.
That said, given that this particular act is so common and its prosecution as a crime is so rare, you have to assume there's something capricious in the application of the law. For practical economic purposes nothing would change if this crime were never prosecuted, so why have the law at all?
Just because you haven't heard of it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Copyright violations are a felony, and can carry fines of up to $250,000 or five years in prison for a first offense -- as you'd know if you've ever actually read the text that displays when you pop a DVD into a drive.
Now it's actually rare to pursue criminal charges against copyright infringers. Usually it's a civil suit. Fewer than two hundred criminal prosecutions are undertaken against all kinds of IP violators in the entire US each year. Given the frequency at which copyright infringement occurs, your chances of facing criminal prosecution at all is close to zero.
But it's not quite zero, and if you *do* end up facing prosecution, yes you can go to jail. In this case the reason is probably that the guy didn't make any money that could be recovered. He just did it to be a dick, and pretty much dared prosecutors to throw him in jail. That said, six months seems pretty excessive; that Stanford swim team rapist got six months in prison for three convictions on felony sexual assault.