Sure. Sorry to have offended you. I thought you were being snitty. I apologize for being aggressive in my response.
It's also probably harder to get the hydrogen out of the ammonia in secondary processes than from hydrocarbons - plus if it's fuel cell usage you do not need to go all the way down to hydrogen gas anyway.
I was originally thinking that ammonia could be used directly in internal combustion engines, as a replacement for oil when that starts to become scarce. Of course there are replacements for oil in most applications (plug-in cars and electrified rail), but there are some applications where a liquid fuel would be very helpful (such as remote construction equipment, ships, and so on).
There are very few combustible liquids which can be made out of the main constituents of air and water, and so wouldn't alter the composition of the atmosphere when burned. That's one reason I was excited about a process which produces ammonia using less energy.
I was referring to how the above poster can find out about the relative danger of propane and ammonia and get some real understanding. Got it now?
I was referring to the paragraph I quoted, in which you were discussing making ammonia. I think you actually understand that.
You didn't know we were discussing making ammonia without fossil fuels, and you made a big fool out of yourself. As follows:
It doesn't come as ammonia. It comes as something like oil or natural gas, then you get hydrogen out of that, and then you make ammonia out of the hydrogen. It's an extra step
Don't guess or ask. LOOK IT UP... No, and for a very good reason. It doesn't come as ammonia. It comes as something like oil or natural gas, then you get hydrogen out of that, and then you make ammonia out of the hydrogen. It's an extra step
Why don't you try LOOKING IT UP by reading the actual article before commenting? The article (and the discussion) is about making ammonia without oil or natural gas, using a process other than Haber Bosch.
How would that be more dangerous than propane? LP gas would do exactly as stated above, if someone poked a hole in a fuel tank with their drill, they would get sprayed by rapidly evaporating fuel.
Ammonia is caustic and would cause a chemical burn on the surface of your eyes, unlike LP.
IMHO, this might be the way to have a hydrogen economy. If a nitrogen fixing process is easy and economical, making liquid ammonia is a lot easier and requires less pressure than converting water to hydrogen via electrolysis.
It seems much more sensible to use ammonia than hydrogen gas, because ammonia has handling and storage properties similar to propane which solves the major problem of hydrogen gas.
It makes a big difference if you can store something as a liquid and transport it through pipelines. That explains why oil sells for 10x more than coal, per BTU, and several times more than natural gas.
Something not mentioned here is that ammonia is suitable as a fuel in internal combustion engines. Ammonia is liquid under modest pressures (like propane), is easily transported, and will burn inside an engine.
If we made ammonia out of nitrogen and water vapor, then it would become nitrogen and water vapor again when burned. It's a closed cycle that would not alter the composition of the atmosphere at all.
It probably wouldn't be suitable as a fuel for your car, because of safety issues (if you hammered a hole in the fuel tank, the fuel inside would flash boil and could shoot out into your eyes causing a chemical burn). However it would probably be fine for trains, airplanes, ships, and so on, where special handling procedures could be enforced and people could be required to wear goggles before working on the fuel tank.
The amount of capital there has increased a lot over the last few decades. That implies fewer workers relative to capital, and higher wages for workers.
but there were plenty of places to squirrel that money away rather than pay workers.
When there's a scarcity of workers relative to capital, then workers have bargaining power. They can leave a job which pays too little for a job which pays more. It makes sense (ie is more profitable) for companies to pay more, otherwise they cannot attract enough workers to run their equipment. Competition among workers for jobs pushes wages up, when capital is abundant, just as competition between firms for customers lowers prices and pushes wages back down.
Companies in the US and western countries have always paid the lowest they can to their workers. Google has to pay $100k per engineer. If they paid only $50k, then all those engineers would go elsewhere and google would be no more. Labor is scarce in silicon valley, because there's more money than engineers. The relative scarcity of labor is what pushes the price of labor (wages) up everywhere, and is the only reason labor makes more than bare subsistence ($2/day) in any country. In countries where there is no capital (no factories, no investment money, etc), there is no labor scarcity relative to capital, and people actually make bare subsistence wages ($2/day).
You must be an American if you equate liberal with socialist. In Europe, they tend to be the very opposite of each other.
In the USA, the left appropriated the term liberal and started using it to refer to itself in the early 20th century. It stuck. As a result, the word liberal now has almost the opposite meaning in the USA as everywhere else.
For example some liberals are now promoting nuclear energey now that global climate change has proved to be a much bigger issue.
Some liberals do, but others don't. To me, it appears there's a small group of people who are reasonable and who really consider things. I would say that they are mildly liberal on average. Which does not imply that most people who are liberal are reasonable and really consider things.
this is why people don't believe in AGW. Because every time that a proponent of it comes into contact with something that disagrees with their tidy view of the world, the first thing they do is lash out. And in the minds of a rational person, this simply screams "scam."
You don't believe in AGW because someone on slashdot was impolite in a comment? Which proves the whole thing is a scam to any "rational" person?
Try this. People who think the world is flat are fuckfaces. Does that imply that the round-earth idea is a scam?
EVERYONE states on their resume that all their prior projects were very successful, and that they're excellent employees.
If your employer was going by your resume and had no direct experience with your prior work, then they had no way of knowing what kind of employee you'd be. No one "minded" six month jumps on your resume because you code in ruby on small projects, and it's common among that group of people to jump around all the time, so nobody cared.
Although experience is awesome, new people always come in ready to work, and they always present fresh ideas.
New people do not always come in ready to work, and do not always present fresh ideas. You are conflating personality attributes, with whether someone is new to your company or not.
And, to be totally honest, I'd prefer to hire someone with 1 or 2 years of experience in my industry as compared to someone that had 25 years.
That is a tremendous mistake. Although there are diminishing returns to additional experience, only 1 or 2 years is not enough to be equivalent to someone with more experience. Granted, there is probably little difference between someone with (say) 8 years of experience versus someone with 25. However, 1 or 2 years of experience is not enough for complicated projects.
I would be curious as to why someone with 25 years hasn't taken the initiative to learn something new.
You are conflating experience, with not having taken the initiative to learn something new. You are also conflating lack of experience, with initiative. They are not related.
Many people have been programmers for 25+ years but learn new things all the time. Many people have been programmers for 1 year but are very resistant to learning new things. It's a personality attribute.
If you are not considering people simply based on their length of employment
That's not what the parent poster said.
if you were the hiring manager at my company, you would be the first one out the door.
Over and over again, you're just operating under the influence of incorrect inferences, crude and incorrect stereotypes you've invented, and incorrect generalizations you've reached. You repeatedly conflate things which have nothing to do with each other.
Happily, it will make little difference. Most places use a selection procedure which is equivalent to throwing darts at a board. If you had concluded that "people with green eyes feel special, so they'll bring fresh ideas", you'd probably have similar success to what you have now. That's what most places achieve. It will make no difference.
Anhydrous ammonia is dangerous. Certainly much more dangerous than you seem to think it is.
Lots of things are dangerous. It's a question of the kinds of safety measures that can be used to prevent injury.
For example, your car has antifreeze made out of methanol. If you consume even a tiny amount of that, it will cause permanent nerve damage and blindness. Your car also contains a large tank of highly flammable gasoline which can explode and light you on fire during an accident (whereas ammonia only combusts under pressure when it's in the cylinder of your engine). Your car also has a pressurized coolant system, and if you open the hood of your engine and unscrew the cap to the coolant system while the engine is hot, the coolant will flash boil and stream up into your face and burn your eyes. Your car also produces carbon monoxide during its normal operation, which will kill you if it leaks into the cabin. However, those things don't happen that often. The coolant cap has a sign on it saying "DO NOT OPEN WHILE ENGINE IS HOT", and the tank of gasoline is reinforced and protected in such a way that it doesn't usually explode during an accident, and the anti-freeze has a childproof cap and a prominent warning, etc.
Ammonia vapors are only dangerous in an enclosed space. You can tell right away if ammonia is leaking into the cabin because ammonia a characteristic pungent odor even at very low concentrations. (Contrast this with carbon monoxide, which your car produces now, and which can kill you and has no odor).
The main danger from ammonia is that it must be stored in mildly pressurized tanks. If you puncture the tank while staring at it, the ammonia can flash boil, stream out into your face, and cause a chemical burn on the surface of your eyes. That is the most significant danger. In order to mitigate this danger, the fuel tank would have to be designed in such a way that people do not have access to it, and it vents downward in case of accident. Also, refueling stations would be different from how they are now.
I don't know offhand how much of a danger ammonia fuel would be in practice, after reasonable precautions are taken. It's a question of what kinds of technological mitigations we can employ to prevent the fuel tank from splitting open and spewing into someone's eyes directly.
That's the astonishing thing about this. I read some of Elliot Rodger's book, and he was obviously an extremely disturbed man, who had a severe case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and also had other psychiatric disorders besides. At various points, he considered lashing out violently against society for the "injustice" he suffered when he did not win the powerball $400m lottery, which he felt he had been certain to win, and was entitled to.
He was crazy. He had a whole team of shrinks working on him, since he was age 8, to no avail. For much of his life he went to psychologists every single day, to no avail. He was crazy.
Yet so many people on the internet will find the moral or political lesson in it. For example: this massacre just goes to show how depraved Hollywood culture is (the editorial at the Washington Post said this). Or, it just demonstrates what's really wrong in American culture (approximately a third of the comments on scribd said this). Or, it just shows how the country has become too conservative, or too liberal. Or, it's a classic example of postmodern leftism run amok ('"ELLIOT RODGERS: PSYCHO SPEWING POSTMODERNIST CRAP"). Or, this is just another example of geek culture, even though Elliot Rodger obviously was not a geek, and spent much of his free time shopping for expensive Armani clothing.
The very silliest of these claims, was the contention that it shows what's wrong with geek culture. Elliot Rodgers was obviously not a geek. Quite the opposite, he had utter contempt for geeks. He considered them as not "alpha" males, and therefore beneath contempt, and he says so repeatedly in his "manifesto". The very first people he killed were his geeky roommates, whom he stabbed to death for precisely that reason. Claiming that Rodgers was inspired by geek culture is the most absurd of the moral lessons being drawn, and is even less serious than claiming he was inspired by postmodern leftism.
But it doesn't matter Elliot Rodgers was obviously not a geek. Even so, his massacre will still serve for Arthur Chu's moral indictment. The massacre can still be used as an indictment of geek culture, despite the obvious lack of any real connection between geek culture and Rodger's acts.
But to address your fears, I don't think you'll have to worry about the future of sailing too much. Of course it has to share time with other pastimes, especially if it gets cheaper and hence people can afford having more than just this one pastime (but, frankly, I can't really say that sailing is so much cheaper now than it was a decade ago). I know a fair lot of younger people who enjoy sailing. Yes, you will find few teenagers, but a fair amount of people in their 20s and 30s pick it up, exactly because it is a relaxing, "slow" activity that allows them to get away from hectic and stress.
It's not going away any time soon, and there are definitely some young people who are interested in it. I'm sure sailing will continue to exist as a sport or pastime for a long time.
That said, most people who sail are boomers. Whenever I visit a race, excursion, or yacht club, I notice that 75% or more of the people there are boomers, in general. There are exceptions, but that's the average, I'd guess.
There are some young people interested in it, so it will be around for a long time. However, I'd guess there are only half as many people sailing 40 years from now, relative to the size of the population.
I'm an avid sailor, and the same discussion is being had in the sport of sailing. The sport of sailing is in rapid decline, at least in the US. It's far less popular than it was 30 years ago. Most of the people who do it are baby boomers who will soon retire from it.
There is great consternation within the sport of sailing about what can be done to save it, but really, nothing can be done. The sport is not appropriate for the times.
It's not a matter of cost. Sports like golf, sailing, lawn bowling, and other sports which are in rapid decline can be done affordably. Sailing, for example, is cheaper than ever because more and more used sailboats are dumped on the market every year (fiberglass sailboats almost never wear out).
The pace of life has changed. That is the issue. Young people, who've been reared on dizzyingly fast-paced entertainment such as first-person shooter games, are not thrilled at the idea of racing at five miles per hour (or sometimes less) in a sailboat for four hours. Nor do they find it exciting to play shuffleboard or do golf. By the standards of today, those sports are boring.
Nothing should be done to make golf or sailing more interesting for younger people. It won't help to make golf holes bigger. The only way to make these sports more interesting is to make them drastically faster paced, which will ruin them for the people who enjoy them now. These sports should just accept unpopularity.
The Civil War was related to slavery, but not exactly cause much by it. It was more of the southern states trying to favor "states' rights" over federal power, and the growing opposition against slavery in the north made the more stubborn southern states feel resentful of the federal government taking action.
That's just all wrong, and I don't think any serious historians believe it. Although the south wanted "states' rights", the particular states' right they wanted was the right to be slaveholding. They indicated no other "states' rights" which were important to them in the main historical documents at the time. The debate within the south over whether they should secede, focused almost entirely upon slavery. The main documents in which they explained their reasons for secession (such as the various declarations of Independence of southern states, and Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina) usually mention nothing other than slavery, and always mention slavery as their main concern.
The Emancipation Proclamation in wording freed slaves, but it also discouraged Europeans from assisting the south as they would seem like they were promoting a morally wrong practice.
No. The south indicated very clearly what the issue was for them. There is no reason that the South would conspire against themselves and go along with Lincoln's supposed PR campaign, in order to deny themselves support from Europeans. The crucial thing here is that the historical documents from the South clearly and obviously don't support what you're saying. It's possible to attribute other motives to Lincoln, and to claim he didn't really care about slavery but was using that issue to sound high-minded. You could always attribute his anti-slavery statements and actions to insincerity. However, it was the south which seceded, opened fire on Fort Sumter, and formally started the civil war. They were very frank in their reasons for doing so, and it was always about slavery.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued long after Europeans had decided not to intervene on behalf of the South in the civil war (not that they ever had any serious intention of doing so). As a result, the Emancipation Proclamation cannot have been intended to prevent Europeans from entering the war.
I suspect you have been influenced by the Lost Cause historical revisionist movement, which was a crackpot revisionist movement that arose about 30 years after the civil war had ended, and which sought to re-write history regarding the civil war. It wished to portray the civil war as being due to causes other than slavery (which is entirely wrong) and it portrayed slavery as a benign institution, done for the benefit of slaves (also entirely wrong).
Unfortunately, that group has tremendous influence among the general public, particularly in the American south. It's just ignored by professional historians, who consider it a crackpot group. But it has managed to propagate all kinds of historical falsehoods which are now widespread. It's a crackpot movement, but it's very successful. It's claims are repeated all the time by all sorts of people, even here, on slashdot.
The evidence weighs very heavily against that point of view, and no serious historians believe it.
I suspect the problem here is that the stock market is inefficient or irrational, and the Efficient Market Hypothesis is wrong. I suspect that alibaba is in a bubble and overvalued. Furthermore, it has been bid up in a bubble by amateur investors, who don't realize that they could acquire a stake in alibaba more cheaply by buying yahoo stock instead. Professional investors won't short alibaba, because they think the price for it won't correct quickly enough.
If my suspicion is correct, then the CEO of Yahoo should sell all shares in alibaba and yahoo japan, and should retain the $48bn as cash for yahoo. Professional investors will then bid up the price of yahoo stock (now shed of what they think is an overvalued asset) because they realize that yahoo plus $48bn is worth more than $48bn, since yahoo is slightly profitable. By doing so, yahoo would gain $13bn or more in market capitalization. Yahoo will have "cashed out" on what professional investors think is an overvalued asset (alibaba), and will have benefitted from amateur investors bidding up the price of something which yahoo partially owns without realizing that they should have bought yahoo stock instead.
Also, I think I should mention what you left out of your quotation. That remark (by Lincoln) was a response to a fiery editorial by Horace Greeley that the Federal Government must seize all slaves immediately and free them from their masters, including those slaves in the border states which had not seceded. Congress had already passed a law to that effect. From the editorial:
We think you [Lincoln] are strangely and disastrously remiss in the discharge of your official and imperative duty with regard to the emancipating provisions of the new Confiscation Act. Those provisions were designed to fight Slavery with Liberty...
III. We think you are unduly influenced by the counsels... of certain fossil politicians hailing from the Border Slave States. Knowing well that the heartily, unconditionally loyal portion of the White citizens of those States do not expect nor desire chat Slavery shall be upheld to the prejudice of the Union... we ask you to consider that Slavery is everywhere the inciting cause and sustaining base of treason: the most slaveholding sections of Maryland...
Lincoln was treading very carefully there because he didn't wish to alienate the "Border Slave" states such as Kentucky, which could cause them to secede also, and to join the south in the war. Ordering federal troops to seize and free all slaves in the border states at that time, could have caused the North to lose the war.
Even in the example you provided, the issue was entirely about slavery. Lincoln's letter was a response to a demand that he free slaves according to a law just passed by Congress. Lincoln was being political and compromising, which is why he didn't act according to that law.
That is just taken way out of context, and your interpretation of it is wrong. I've seen that quotation many times. You're relying upon quotations which have been carefully cherry-picked from personal correspondence, by a crackpot movement, in order to support a point of view. Instead of doing that, let's look at the main historical documents from that period.
Upon seceding, many of the southern states produced their own declarations of independence, declaring plainly their reasons for seceding. For example, the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina, states plainly that the entire reason for the secession of South Carolina is to preserve slavery. It states plainly that their main complaint is that the north is not upholding its constitutional obligations or the Fugitive Slave Act, and has not been returning runaway slaves to their masters in the south, and intended eventually to abolish slavery. From the document:
But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations... In many of these States the fugitive [slave] is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied [with their return]...The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor... A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery... [and that] the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
The entire document is only a few pages. It raises no issues other than slavery, the preservation of slavery, and the return of fugitive slaves. This is not a cherry-picked quotation from personal correspondence. This is a formal declaration of independence which explains South Carolina's reasons for secession right before they opened fire on Fort Sumter, thereby formally beginning the American civil war.
[Slavery] was obviously not [Lincoln's] main motivation in the Civil war.
Lincoln did not start the civil war. The south seceded and then opened fire on Fort Sumter, in order to preserve slavery. It was the south which started the civil war, and their main motivation was to preserve slavery, and they said so, very plainly, on many occasions.
Lincoln didn't want a war at all--in fact he was desperate to avoid one. Lincoln was perfectly willing to allow a gradual phase-out of slavery over time in order to placate the south and prevent them from seceding. Lincoln was trying to offer any possible inducement to avoid a war, which he believed would be disastrous.
The south rebuffed Lincoln's attempts to compromise or produce a gradual phase-out of slavery, then seceded and opened fire on fort Sumter. Their only stated motive for doing so was the preservation of slavery.
That if nothing else proves that the US is an Oligarchy.
It certainly doesn't prove anything like that. It's not a crime to screw up, make huge mistakes, and bankrupt your own bank. There would be no way to "jail" the CEOs because errors (no matter how severe) are not crimes. This demonstrates nothing about whether the US is an oligarchy or not.
Sorry, but no, you're not. You are not given the opportunity to vote for your representatives and leaders. You're given a false dichotomy, the illusion that you have a choice while in fact the system is rigged and perverted to the point to ensure that you actually have none. The main reason why there is no threat of violence or worse for making the wrong choice is simply that you CAN NOT make the wrong choice.
That's just all wrong. The existence of only two parties in the USA is an artifact of the voting system. If you use first-past-the-post voting for each position separately, then splitting the vote is a sure way to lose, so all groups consolidate as much as possible before the final election. Look at it this way: if the Democrat party divided into mildly left and far left, then neither of those leftist parties would ever approach 50% of the voting population for any given elected position, so both of those leftist parties would certainly lose every election. As a result, all kinds of compromises and voting ("primaries") happens before the actual final election, because consolidation before the final election is crucial in that kind of voting system.
This implies that all kinds of compromises are made in order to appeal to the median voter, even before the election has begun. Within each party, there are intense primary battles in which democrats and republicans vote for who they want their candidate to be. Anyone can vote in those primary elections. There are often extremists put forth at that stage. However, each party must be very careful not to stray too far from the median voter because that's a sure way to lose, given the voting system.
This implies that some kinds of voting and compromises are happening before the final election happens, as opposed to afterwards, as in many European countries.
If either party proposed something flagrantly unpopular, then a third party would immediately spring up, and the original party which proposed something unpopular would go away. Everything would revert to two parties, because the voting system encourages consolidation, but one of the parties would be a new party and the old one would die away (this has already happened more than once; the two parties used to be Democrats and Whigs). Neither party could propose something totally unpopular, and win anyway because there is no choice. Instead, the parties must calculate and vote amongst themselves about what the median voter will support, before even proposing a final candidate.
The US voting system is silly, and I'm no fan of it. It's archaic and should be replaced. However, it has nothing to do with what you portray. It is totally unlike the parties which existed under communism.
No, the civil war was about slavery. There were other issues also (like tariffs), but the primary issue was slavery.
That point is extremely obvious if you read the primary sources in this case, which include declarations of independence by the states which were seceding, in which they explain very clearly what their main motives were.
There was no other issue at the time so important that it would have caused a civil war. There was no other issue which would have caused the southern states to secede. Although there were other disagreements, such as disagreements about tariffs, those disagreements were nowhere near so intense that they would have provoked a secession or civil war.
the slavery thing was pretty much just a PR tool Lincoln used to solidify public opinion in the north.
You are repeating a historical fiction propagated at the end of the 19th century and which continues today in some conservative circles. It's a strain of thought which arose long after the civil war was over. It started with the publication of The Rise And Fall Of The Confederate Government by Jefferson Davis. It was an attempt to downplay the importance of slavery to southerners, and to portray slavery as a benign institution anyway which was done primarily to benefit of the enslaved. It's considered a crackpot theory among all serious historians, but it inspired a movement in the south which continues today.
There was a long prelude to the American civil war. Tensions had been building for decades. In fact, the civil war had already started (for all intents and purposes), in bleeding Kansas and other places, where fighting had already broken out, years before the formal beginning of the civil war. All this happened long before Lincoln was president. The issue was slavery, and both sides said so in no uncertain terms.
It's good to know that mass "education" is successfully keeping people confused about this.
Sadly, you're the confused one. You've been misled by a crackpot revisionist group.
I wonder why this topic is so much discussed in the USA. In every other country climate change and the fact that we, humans, are causing it is accepted as a scientific fact.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Global warming denial is common in many places of the world, especially in the formerly communist countries, middle eastern countries, south asian countries, and anglo countries. The USA has similar levels of global warming denial as Russia, India, the UK, Australia, the Czech Republic, and many other places.
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Sure. Sorry to have offended you. I thought you were being snitty. I apologize for being aggressive in my response.
I was originally thinking that ammonia could be used directly in internal combustion engines, as a replacement for oil when that starts to become scarce. Of course there are replacements for oil in most applications (plug-in cars and electrified rail), but there are some applications where a liquid fuel would be very helpful (such as remote construction equipment, ships, and so on).
There are very few combustible liquids which can be made out of the main constituents of air and water, and so wouldn't alter the composition of the atmosphere when burned. That's one reason I was excited about a process which produces ammonia using less energy.
I was referring to the paragraph I quoted, in which you were discussing making ammonia. I think you actually understand that.
You didn't know we were discussing making ammonia without fossil fuels, and you made a big fool out of yourself. As follows:
Why don't you try LOOKING IT UP by reading the actual article before commenting? The article (and the discussion) is about making ammonia without oil or natural gas, using a process other than Haber Bosch.
Ammonia is caustic and would cause a chemical burn on the surface of your eyes, unlike LP.
It seems much more sensible to use ammonia than hydrogen gas, because ammonia has handling and storage properties similar to propane which solves the major problem of hydrogen gas.
It makes a big difference if you can store something as a liquid and transport it through pipelines. That explains why oil sells for 10x more than coal, per BTU, and several times more than natural gas.
Something not mentioned here is that ammonia is suitable as a fuel in internal combustion engines. Ammonia is liquid under modest pressures (like propane), is easily transported, and will burn inside an engine.
If we made ammonia out of nitrogen and water vapor, then it would become nitrogen and water vapor again when burned. It's a closed cycle that would not alter the composition of the atmosphere at all.
It probably wouldn't be suitable as a fuel for your car, because of safety issues (if you hammered a hole in the fuel tank, the fuel inside would flash boil and could shoot out into your eyes causing a chemical burn). However it would probably be fine for trains, airplanes, ships, and so on, where special handling procedures could be enforced and people could be required to wear goggles before working on the fuel tank.
The amount of capital there has increased a lot over the last few decades. That implies fewer workers relative to capital, and higher wages for workers.
When there's a scarcity of workers relative to capital, then workers have bargaining power. They can leave a job which pays too little for a job which pays more. It makes sense (ie is more profitable) for companies to pay more, otherwise they cannot attract enough workers to run their equipment. Competition among workers for jobs pushes wages up, when capital is abundant, just as competition between firms for customers lowers prices and pushes wages back down.
Companies in the US and western countries have always paid the lowest they can to their workers. Google has to pay $100k per engineer. If they paid only $50k, then all those engineers would go elsewhere and google would be no more. Labor is scarce in silicon valley, because there's more money than engineers. The relative scarcity of labor is what pushes the price of labor (wages) up everywhere, and is the only reason labor makes more than bare subsistence ($2/day) in any country. In countries where there is no capital (no factories, no investment money, etc), there is no labor scarcity relative to capital, and people actually make bare subsistence wages ($2/day).
No it doesn't. I was asking whether the procedure was logically valid, not whether some people think it's valid. The two aren't the same.
In the USA, the left appropriated the term liberal and started using it to refer to itself in the early 20th century. It stuck. As a result, the word liberal now has almost the opposite meaning in the USA as everywhere else.
Some liberals do, but others don't. To me, it appears there's a small group of people who are reasonable and who really consider things. I would say that they are mildly liberal on average. Which does not imply that most people who are liberal are reasonable and really consider things.
You don't believe in AGW because someone on slashdot was impolite in a comment? Which proves the whole thing is a scam to any "rational" person?
Try this. People who think the world is flat are fuckfaces. Does that imply that the round-earth idea is a scam?
EVERYONE states on their resume that all their prior projects were very successful, and that they're excellent employees.
If your employer was going by your resume and had no direct experience with your prior work, then they had no way of knowing what kind of employee you'd be. No one "minded" six month jumps on your resume because you code in ruby on small projects, and it's common among that group of people to jump around all the time, so nobody cared.
New people do not always come in ready to work, and do not always present fresh ideas. You are conflating personality attributes, with whether someone is new to your company or not.
That is a tremendous mistake. Although there are diminishing returns to additional experience, only 1 or 2 years is not enough to be equivalent to someone with more experience. Granted, there is probably little difference between someone with (say) 8 years of experience versus someone with 25. However, 1 or 2 years of experience is not enough for complicated projects.
You are conflating experience, with not having taken the initiative to learn something new. You are also conflating lack of experience, with initiative. They are not related.
Many people have been programmers for 25+ years but learn new things all the time. Many people have been programmers for 1 year but are very resistant to learning new things. It's a personality attribute.
That's not what the parent poster said.
Over and over again, you're just operating under the influence of incorrect inferences, crude and incorrect stereotypes you've invented, and incorrect generalizations you've reached. You repeatedly conflate things which have nothing to do with each other.
Happily, it will make little difference. Most places use a selection procedure which is equivalent to throwing darts at a board. If you had concluded that "people with green eyes feel special, so they'll bring fresh ideas", you'd probably have similar success to what you have now. That's what most places achieve. It will make no difference.
Take a look at solid state ammonia synthesis.
Lots of things are dangerous. It's a question of the kinds of safety measures that can be used to prevent injury.
For example, your car has antifreeze made out of methanol. If you consume even a tiny amount of that, it will cause permanent nerve damage and blindness. Your car also contains a large tank of highly flammable gasoline which can explode and light you on fire during an accident (whereas ammonia only combusts under pressure when it's in the cylinder of your engine). Your car also has a pressurized coolant system, and if you open the hood of your engine and unscrew the cap to the coolant system while the engine is hot, the coolant will flash boil and stream up into your face and burn your eyes. Your car also produces carbon monoxide during its normal operation, which will kill you if it leaks into the cabin. However, those things don't happen that often. The coolant cap has a sign on it saying "DO NOT OPEN WHILE ENGINE IS HOT", and the tank of gasoline is reinforced and protected in such a way that it doesn't usually explode during an accident, and the anti-freeze has a childproof cap and a prominent warning, etc.
Ammonia vapors are only dangerous in an enclosed space. You can tell right away if ammonia is leaking into the cabin because ammonia a characteristic pungent odor even at very low concentrations. (Contrast this with carbon monoxide, which your car produces now, and which can kill you and has no odor).
The main danger from ammonia is that it must be stored in mildly pressurized tanks. If you puncture the tank while staring at it, the ammonia can flash boil, stream out into your face, and cause a chemical burn on the surface of your eyes. That is the most significant danger. In order to mitigate this danger, the fuel tank would have to be designed in such a way that people do not have access to it, and it vents downward in case of accident. Also, refueling stations would be different from how they are now.
I don't know offhand how much of a danger ammonia fuel would be in practice, after reasonable precautions are taken. It's a question of what kinds of technological mitigations we can employ to prevent the fuel tank from splitting open and spewing into someone's eyes directly.
That's the astonishing thing about this. I read some of Elliot Rodger's book, and he was obviously an extremely disturbed man, who had a severe case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and also had other psychiatric disorders besides. At various points, he considered lashing out violently against society for the "injustice" he suffered when he did not win the powerball $400m lottery, which he felt he had been certain to win, and was entitled to.
He was crazy. He had a whole team of shrinks working on him, since he was age 8, to no avail. For much of his life he went to psychologists every single day, to no avail. He was crazy.
Yet so many people on the internet will find the moral or political lesson in it. For example: this massacre just goes to show how depraved Hollywood culture is (the editorial at the Washington Post said this). Or, it just demonstrates what's really wrong in American culture (approximately a third of the comments on scribd said this). Or, it just shows how the country has become too conservative, or too liberal. Or, it's a classic example of postmodern leftism run amok ('"ELLIOT RODGERS: PSYCHO SPEWING POSTMODERNIST CRAP"). Or, this is just another example of geek culture, even though Elliot Rodger obviously was not a geek, and spent much of his free time shopping for expensive Armani clothing.
The very silliest of these claims, was the contention that it shows what's wrong with geek culture. Elliot Rodgers was obviously not a geek. Quite the opposite, he had utter contempt for geeks. He considered them as not "alpha" males, and therefore beneath contempt, and he says so repeatedly in his "manifesto". The very first people he killed were his geeky roommates, whom he stabbed to death for precisely that reason. Claiming that Rodgers was inspired by geek culture is the most absurd of the moral lessons being drawn, and is even less serious than claiming he was inspired by postmodern leftism.
But it doesn't matter Elliot Rodgers was obviously not a geek. Even so, his massacre will still serve for Arthur Chu's moral indictment. The massacre can still be used as an indictment of geek culture, despite the obvious lack of any real connection between geek culture and Rodger's acts.
It's not going away any time soon, and there are definitely some young people who are interested in it. I'm sure sailing will continue to exist as a sport or pastime for a long time.
That said, most people who sail are boomers. Whenever I visit a race, excursion, or yacht club, I notice that 75% or more of the people there are boomers, in general. There are exceptions, but that's the average, I'd guess.
There are some young people interested in it, so it will be around for a long time. However, I'd guess there are only half as many people sailing 40 years from now, relative to the size of the population.
I'm an avid sailor, and the same discussion is being had in the sport of sailing. The sport of sailing is in rapid decline, at least in the US. It's far less popular than it was 30 years ago. Most of the people who do it are baby boomers who will soon retire from it.
There is great consternation within the sport of sailing about what can be done to save it, but really, nothing can be done. The sport is not appropriate for the times.
It's not a matter of cost. Sports like golf, sailing, lawn bowling, and other sports which are in rapid decline can be done affordably. Sailing, for example, is cheaper than ever because more and more used sailboats are dumped on the market every year (fiberglass sailboats almost never wear out).
The pace of life has changed. That is the issue. Young people, who've been reared on dizzyingly fast-paced entertainment such as first-person shooter games, are not thrilled at the idea of racing at five miles per hour (or sometimes less) in a sailboat for four hours. Nor do they find it exciting to play shuffleboard or do golf. By the standards of today, those sports are boring.
Nothing should be done to make golf or sailing more interesting for younger people. It won't help to make golf holes bigger. The only way to make these sports more interesting is to make them drastically faster paced, which will ruin them for the people who enjoy them now. These sports should just accept unpopularity.
That's just all wrong, and I don't think any serious historians believe it. Although the south wanted "states' rights", the particular states' right they wanted was the right to be slaveholding. They indicated no other "states' rights" which were important to them in the main historical documents at the time. The debate within the south over whether they should secede, focused almost entirely upon slavery. The main documents in which they explained their reasons for secession (such as the various declarations of Independence of southern states, and Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina) usually mention nothing other than slavery, and always mention slavery as their main concern.
No. The south indicated very clearly what the issue was for them. There is no reason that the South would conspire against themselves and go along with Lincoln's supposed PR campaign, in order to deny themselves support from Europeans. The crucial thing here is that the historical documents from the South clearly and obviously don't support what you're saying. It's possible to attribute other motives to Lincoln, and to claim he didn't really care about slavery but was using that issue to sound high-minded. You could always attribute his anti-slavery statements and actions to insincerity. However, it was the south which seceded, opened fire on Fort Sumter, and formally started the civil war. They were very frank in their reasons for doing so, and it was always about slavery.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued long after Europeans had decided not to intervene on behalf of the South in the civil war (not that they ever had any serious intention of doing so). As a result, the Emancipation Proclamation cannot have been intended to prevent Europeans from entering the war.
I suspect you have been influenced by the Lost Cause historical revisionist movement, which was a crackpot revisionist movement that arose about 30 years after the civil war had ended, and which sought to re-write history regarding the civil war. It wished to portray the civil war as being due to causes other than slavery (which is entirely wrong) and it portrayed slavery as a benign institution, done for the benefit of slaves (also entirely wrong).
Unfortunately, that group has tremendous influence among the general public, particularly in the American south. It's just ignored by professional historians, who consider it a crackpot group. But it has managed to propagate all kinds of historical falsehoods which are now widespread. It's a crackpot movement, but it's very successful. It's claims are repeated all the time by all sorts of people, even here, on slashdot.
The evidence weighs very heavily against that point of view, and no serious historians believe it.
I suspect the problem here is that the stock market is inefficient or irrational, and the Efficient Market Hypothesis is wrong. I suspect that alibaba is in a bubble and overvalued. Furthermore, it has been bid up in a bubble by amateur investors, who don't realize that they could acquire a stake in alibaba more cheaply by buying yahoo stock instead. Professional investors won't short alibaba, because they think the price for it won't correct quickly enough.
If my suspicion is correct, then the CEO of Yahoo should sell all shares in alibaba and yahoo japan, and should retain the $48bn as cash for yahoo. Professional investors will then bid up the price of yahoo stock (now shed of what they think is an overvalued asset) because they realize that yahoo plus $48bn is worth more than $48bn, since yahoo is slightly profitable. By doing so, yahoo would gain $13bn or more in market capitalization. Yahoo will have "cashed out" on what professional investors think is an overvalued asset (alibaba), and will have benefitted from amateur investors bidding up the price of something which yahoo partially owns without realizing that they should have bought yahoo stock instead.
Also, I think I should mention what you left out of your quotation. That remark (by Lincoln) was a response to a fiery editorial by Horace Greeley that the Federal Government must seize all slaves immediately and free them from their masters, including those slaves in the border states which had not seceded. Congress had already passed a law to that effect. From the editorial:
Lincoln was treading very carefully there because he didn't wish to alienate the "Border Slave" states such as Kentucky, which could cause them to secede also, and to join the south in the war. Ordering federal troops to seize and free all slaves in the border states at that time, could have caused the North to lose the war.
Even in the example you provided, the issue was entirely about slavery. Lincoln's letter was a response to a demand that he free slaves according to a law just passed by Congress. Lincoln was being political and compromising, which is why he didn't act according to that law.
That is just taken way out of context, and your interpretation of it is wrong. I've seen that quotation many times. You're relying upon quotations which have been carefully cherry-picked from personal correspondence, by a crackpot movement, in order to support a point of view. Instead of doing that, let's look at the main historical documents from that period.
Upon seceding, many of the southern states produced their own declarations of independence, declaring plainly their reasons for seceding. For example, the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina, states plainly that the entire reason for the secession of South Carolina is to preserve slavery. It states plainly that their main complaint is that the north is not upholding its constitutional obligations or the Fugitive Slave Act, and has not been returning runaway slaves to their masters in the south, and intended eventually to abolish slavery. From the document:
The entire document is only a few pages. It raises no issues other than slavery, the preservation of slavery, and the return of fugitive slaves. This is not a cherry-picked quotation from personal correspondence. This is a formal declaration of independence which explains South Carolina's reasons for secession right before they opened fire on Fort Sumter, thereby formally beginning the American civil war.
Lincoln did not start the civil war. The south seceded and then opened fire on Fort Sumter, in order to preserve slavery. It was the south which started the civil war, and their main motivation was to preserve slavery, and they said so, very plainly, on many occasions.
Lincoln didn't want a war at all--in fact he was desperate to avoid one. Lincoln was perfectly willing to allow a gradual phase-out of slavery over time in order to placate the south and prevent them from seceding. Lincoln was trying to offer any possible inducement to avoid a war, which he believed would be disastrous.
The south rebuffed Lincoln's attempts to compromise or produce a gradual phase-out of slavery, then seceded and opened fire on fort Sumter. Their only stated motive for doing so was the preservation of slavery.
It certainly doesn't prove anything like that. It's not a crime to screw up, make huge mistakes, and bankrupt your own bank. There would be no way to "jail" the CEOs because errors (no matter how severe) are not crimes. This demonstrates nothing about whether the US is an oligarchy or not.
That's just all wrong. The existence of only two parties in the USA is an artifact of the voting system. If you use first-past-the-post voting for each position separately, then splitting the vote is a sure way to lose, so all groups consolidate as much as possible before the final election. Look at it this way: if the Democrat party divided into mildly left and far left, then neither of those leftist parties would ever approach 50% of the voting population for any given elected position, so both of those leftist parties would certainly lose every election. As a result, all kinds of compromises and voting ("primaries") happens before the actual final election, because consolidation before the final election is crucial in that kind of voting system.
This implies that all kinds of compromises are made in order to appeal to the median voter, even before the election has begun. Within each party, there are intense primary battles in which democrats and republicans vote for who they want their candidate to be. Anyone can vote in those primary elections. There are often extremists put forth at that stage. However, each party must be very careful not to stray too far from the median voter because that's a sure way to lose, given the voting system.
This implies that some kinds of voting and compromises are happening before the final election happens, as opposed to afterwards, as in many European countries.
If either party proposed something flagrantly unpopular, then a third party would immediately spring up, and the original party which proposed something unpopular would go away. Everything would revert to two parties, because the voting system encourages consolidation, but one of the parties would be a new party and the old one would die away (this has already happened more than once; the two parties used to be Democrats and Whigs). Neither party could propose something totally unpopular, and win anyway because there is no choice. Instead, the parties must calculate and vote amongst themselves about what the median voter will support, before even proposing a final candidate.
The US voting system is silly, and I'm no fan of it. It's archaic and should be replaced. However, it has nothing to do with what you portray. It is totally unlike the parties which existed under communism.
No, the civil war was about slavery. There were other issues also (like tariffs), but the primary issue was slavery.
That point is extremely obvious if you read the primary sources in this case, which include declarations of independence by the states which were seceding, in which they explain very clearly what their main motives were.
There was no other issue at the time so important that it would have caused a civil war. There was no other issue which would have caused the southern states to secede. Although there were other disagreements, such as disagreements about tariffs, those disagreements were nowhere near so intense that they would have provoked a secession or civil war.
You are repeating a historical fiction propagated at the end of the 19th century and which continues today in some conservative circles. It's a strain of thought which arose long after the civil war was over. It started with the publication of The Rise And Fall Of The Confederate Government by Jefferson Davis. It was an attempt to downplay the importance of slavery to southerners, and to portray slavery as a benign institution anyway which was done primarily to benefit of the enslaved. It's considered a crackpot theory among all serious historians, but it inspired a movement in the south which continues today.
There was a long prelude to the American civil war. Tensions had been building for decades. In fact, the civil war had already started (for all intents and purposes), in bleeding Kansas and other places, where fighting had already broken out, years before the formal beginning of the civil war. All this happened long before Lincoln was president. The issue was slavery, and both sides said so in no uncertain terms.
Sadly, you're the confused one. You've been misled by a crackpot revisionist group.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Global warming denial is common in many places of the world, especially in the formerly communist countries, middle eastern countries, south asian countries, and anglo countries. The USA has similar levels of global warming denial as Russia, India, the UK, Australia, the Czech Republic, and many other places.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_opinion_by_country