It's inconvenient. It's not a "disaster". And although humans clearly are causing many algal blooms, they are also a natural phenomenon; you can't eliminate them.
What's happening in America nowadays is very worrying
There are lots of things that are worrying in America. The breakup of the Bell Telephone system (Bell Labs), the elimination of the monopoly on photocopying (Xerox), and any reduction in defense spending (The Skunkworks) aren't among the things that should worry you.
And at that time Darpa funded a lot of basic research as well Today, all gone
R&D spending on both basic and applied reseach has generally been going up for decades until about 2008. Since then, federal R&D spending has been declining strongly, thanks to the policies of our oh-so-science-friendly administration.
"Wyvern is like a skilled international negotiator who can smoothly switch between languages to get a whole team of people to work together," Aldrich said. "Such a person can be extremely effective and, likewise, I think our new approach can have a big impact on building software systems."
Yeah, about as skilled and effective as past Israeli-Palestinian negotiators...
Oh geez, this guy is quoting a bogus argument invented by the Koch brothers.
No, it is a correct argument obvious to anybody who knows anything about economics, and it goes back to Adam Smith. when you force people to engage in economic transactions against their will (e.g., "power companies must buy power") or subsidize something, someone gets screwed, and it won't be "the power companies", because they are just a legal construct.
From your link:
These laws have helped the solar industry reach a tipping point where the business model is finally viable. In a world where too much CO2 from coal, gas and oil is being pumped into the atmosphere, that seems like a good thing, but the Kochs and the utilities claim solar’s success is a threat to the future of the power grid.
The solar industry hasn't reached a "tipping point" because solar power is still not cost-competitive. All that's happening is that the government has created demand for a bad product, and when the subsidies and mandates end, the demand collapses again.
Isn't it wonderful that the ultra-rich can spend money and convince the non-ultra-rich like silfen here that solar power is bad for poor old people?
You should be more concerned about the ultra-rich who convince dopes like you to support their money-making schemes.
Holy crap, are you kidding? Every single line of code, bit of data, and the entire methodology is all on their web site!
Bullshit. The app is closed source (https://twitter.com/NRELdev). Electric data comes from Ventex (private partner). Solar irradiance info comes from another private partner. There are no links on the PVWatts site (in fact, the site is overall crappy). There are no peer reviewed publications analyzing or checking any of this.
Seriously, are you trying to back up the statement that California gets FOUR TIMES more sunlight than Florida?!?
Are you illiterate? I said "The NREL data doesn't look right to me. Bakersfield has twice the number of sunny days as Tampa, and the difference should be greater, even accounting for the difference in latitude." I.e., I make no specific claims as to what the numbers should be, other than pointing out that the numbers you give based on NREL are implausible and not verifiable or even peer reviewed.
You are absolutely right: this is free market capitalism at work. Solar power subsidies or net metering force the poor to subsidize solar power for the affluent, and that's certainly not a free market.
You're also right that Republicans hate Tesla; that's because of the federal subsidies it receives, something we all should oppose.
The issue with car dealerships is not as clear cut as you seem to imply. Restrictions on direct car sales actually hurt big corporations and help small businesses (car dealers). It's corporate interests vs. special interests of small businesses. If you are against these laws, you align with the interests of big corporations over the interests of small businesses. (Personally, I'm against the dealership restrictions, but I'm also against the subsidies.)
The NREL data doesn't look right to me. Bakersfield has twice the number of sunny days as Tampa, and the difference should be greater, even accounting for the difference in latitude. (You also picked two non-representative cities when his statement was about states. Overall, California has the best locations for solar power in the country, while Florida really generally isn't that good for solar power generation.)
The NREL system has no description of its methodology, data sources, or other independently verifiable information; it does have a clear political and economic motivation behind it, namely to get people to buy solar cells; there is no reason to trust the NREL data.
Try finding a source that actually explains where its numbers come from and what they mean.
States where solar thrives typically pay homeowners attractive rates for the excess power they generate and require utilities to get a considerable share of their power from renewable sources. That gives companies an incentive to promote use of solar.
Those "attractive rates" mean that the power companies pay retail for the power that you feed back to them, which automatically tells you that they are overpaying, since it doesn't include all of the expenses that power companies have. You know who pays for those "attractive rates"? Not the power companies, that's for sure; they pass the losses on to the rest of their customers. It's non-solar power users who subsidize solar power users.
Doesn't sound so bad: people who waste fossil fuels should pay for their sins, and we should reward people who use pristine power! Isn't that what we want? Until you realize that people who put in solar power systems into their homes are primarily affluent, and the money comes primarily from the poor and lower middle class.
Solar power incentives end up being a massive handout to the affluent, paid for by the less well off.
So you have this confluence of powerful, "environmentally conscious" affluent folks railing against carbon emissions, and lobbying for their expensive lifestyle gimmicks (electric cars, solar power, etc., you name it), combined with lobbying from the solar and electric car industry, and you get these junk laws pushed through. Then people pat themselves on their back about how great they are, while at the same time complaining about growing "inequality", which this policy (among many other "progressive" policies) actually contributes to.
Experiments on reactionless drives really are the least of our worries; those are so "out there" that they are not at great risk of replication unless they make a pretty good case for themselves.
If there is a "denial of service attack" on science, it's health, genetics, psychology, economics, and social science studies; they are mostly wrong, meaningless, and often have costly and dangerous consequences. They don't even have "crackpot" theories behind them, they often have no theory at all behind them.
What does that even mean? The Chinese reported some result, NASA tried to reproduce it, and didn't get very convincing results. Any halfway reasonable person looks at what was reported in the press and says "hey, nothing really to see here, they didn't really prove or disprove anything", to which one might add "how nice that people try some new and crazy stuff occasionally".
Which part of that chain of events is supposed to constitute "bad science"? Who exactly is supposed to have been fooled? Which step along the way does Siegel consider "bad science" and why?
Instead of making a rational argument for the cost/benefit of this particular experiment, Siegel goes off on some tangent about N-rays, supposedly illustrating the foolishness of some experiments. But there are many other cases where weird observations and experiments that most people thought never could work opened up entirely new areas in physics and biology. If one can learn anything from the history of science, it's that you should sometimes try crazy and foolish experiments because occasionally, they yield a big payoff.
the impossible space engine that runs off of microwave power reflected inside a cavity
Nobody knows whether reactionless drives are "impossible" or not; anybody who makes definitive statements one way or the other is a charlatan at this point, including Siegel.
Sure, it violates the known laws of physics,
The known laws of physics violate the known laws of physics, because they are not only incomplete but internally inconsistent. Somewhere along the line, you will have to do experiments whose results might violate the known laws of physics if you want to make progress.
On the contrary, this is bad science because: The results are not robust, in that they are not identically-or-similarly reproducible by different teams.
I still don't know what that "this" is that Siegel is referring to. How do you know that the results aren't reproducible or robust if you don't try to reproduce them?
Siegel has the kind of dull mind that we don't want to teach our next generation of scientists or kids, and it is disturbing that guys like him are actually active in science education. Kids: try stupid things that violate known physics. Try things that sticks-in-the-mud like Siegel tell you don't work. And try to reproduce other people's experiments, both the ones that everybody believes and the ones nobody else could get to work.
Back in the day journalists also brought a budget, to hire people who knew what they were talking about.
They merely used their budget to hire people who promoted their own biases and agendas; "credentials" just made their biased choices easier to sell. That's true even today: there are so many people who appear to "know what they are talking about" and have the credentials to prove it that any journalist can put any spin on any story by just getting the right "experts" together.
The problem lay in proving to people who didn't have enough background knowledge of international politics to have said "half a brain," that their President was clearly completely full of shit. Which happened in Canada, because they had a guy with all four of the characteristics I mentioned; but did not happen in the US.
The Canadian press wasn't motivated any better than the US press, it simply had different biases, biases that in that particular case happened to agree with a policy you and I liked (although probably for different reasons; whether Saddam had WMDs was irrelevant as far as I'm concerned). Shitty Canadian press and TV reporting before and after show that they are no different from the US press.
So if there was some way to pay journalists at something approaching 70s-levels, then they'd have a hell of a lot to offer
You mean pay-to-play? Influence peddling? Political blackmail? Advocating the biased views of their own social class? Promoting the political and economic goals of their corporate masters? Yeah, sure, they'd be "offering" that in spades again. This myth that journalism is like some powerful and honest watchdog is a myth promoted by journalists themselves, for their own interest. And pre-Internet, who had the power to stand up and say they were a bunch of hypocritical liars?
We're taking the money out of journalism, and that's a good thing. The goal of journalism in the past has always been primarily to make money, by any means possible, and usually as part of powerful and wealthy corporations. This means saying things that sell and not rubbing government officials the wrong way, in varying proportions. Truth by itself doesn't pay, neither for journalists nor politicians. Now, if we could only figure out how to take the money out of politics in the same way...
Old journalism's real heyday was the 70s. Journalists aren't BSing when they say they forced a President out, exposed the Vietnam War, etc. At that time period they were also the major agents exposing local-level corruption, generally beating the cops to the story.
Given the number of journalists around at the time, the number of journalists doing that sort of thing was vanishingly small in comparison. And their motivation was still primarily to advance their own careers or promote an ideology they liked. Then, as now, the best way for journalists to get ahead was not to rock the boat: be nice to politicians and be nice to your corporate masters.
The Iraq War is a great example. The case against Saddam really depended on the assertion that this one specific Kurdish Islamist group was linked to both...
Anybody with half a brain could figure out that the case for the Iraq war was utterly bogus; you didn't need interviews in Norway to see that.
The real problem with journalists is that they are largely incompetent; they know how to write, but they don't understand what they are writing about. They may be able to uncover some obvious, blatant malfeasance, like what Nixon did, but otherwise, they are usually utterly naive.
Since many people who do know what they are talking about are now also writing for the public (in blogs), I don't see what journalists still bring to the table.
Auto insurance is regulated to ensure coverage and ability to pay. You can buy unregulated insurance for your car, it will simply not satisfy the requirements you need for driving it.
I'm not aware of general legal restrictions on insurance contracts.
Insurance-type contracts are extremely common in business. Every time you contract with a business that says "deliver X on date Y or pay penalty Z", it's a form of insurance contract, and usually involves many factors outside that business' control.
Many employees at tech companies are "exempt"; they don't get overtime pay. LinkedIn's dispute is about overtime for non-exempt sales people. The law is pretty murky, so calling this "wage theft" is a stretch. And this isn't going to change anything for tech employees; they are usually exempt anyway.
Is this good for the employees? I doubt it. LinkedIn isn't going to pay more compensation overall, they are simply going to shift it around. If it has any effect, it's going to be shifting money from higher performing sales people to lower performing sales people in the short term, and make it more likely that lower performers get fired in the long term.
You don't want to be an hourly employee. First of all, it means a sh*tload of bookkeeping. If you're a good performer, you'll be underpaid, and if you're a bad performer, you're more likely to get fired.
My town of less than 100,000... This is terrible, and we're not anywhere near a large enough community to support a profitable website.
I subscribe to half a dozen publications, and they certainly are worth their money and making money on what they are doing. Obviously, people can make a living off journalism and publishing if they provide something readers want to read.
About $1/year/person pays for a good journalist and online publishing. If you can't get enough subscriptions sold to pay for that, well, perhaps you don't need a newspaper.
So you have no argument other than that which exists in your imagination.
Correct. It also exists in the imagination of lots of economists. Every form of progress exists in the imagination first before it is realized.
The UK has roughly equivalent regulations for what's available on prescription and what's OTC. Yet the drugs here are far cheaper.
Yes, and the result has been a lack of innovation in medicine in the UK and similarly price-controlled markets (price controls in health care also lead to shortages of doctors, cf NHS problems).
Innovation in drugs and medicine these days is nearly single-handedly financed by the US market. The US market is overregulated and deeply dysfunctional, but at least it's not price controlled yet.
The American problem is not regulation here, it's the fact you don't have a national healthcare system
I don't see that as a problem at all. The lousy UK health care system is one of the reasons I choose to live in the US rather than the UK.
Whatever the cause, reduced testosterone levels enabled increasingly social people to better learn from and cooperate with each other
That's pure speculation at this point. Falling testosterone levels may have been a consequence of civilization, not a cause. Or it may have been coincidental.
People really need to start separating scientific fact from speculation.
Slashdot Mirror
It's inconvenient. It's not a "disaster". And although humans clearly are causing many algal blooms, they are also a natural phenomenon; you can't eliminate them.
There are lots of things that are worrying in America. The breakup of the Bell Telephone system (Bell Labs), the elimination of the monopoly on photocopying (Xerox), and any reduction in defense spending (The Skunkworks) aren't among the things that should worry you.
R&D spending on both basic and applied reseach has generally been going up for decades until about 2008. Since then, federal R&D spending has been declining strongly, thanks to the policies of our oh-so-science-friendly administration.
Yeah, about as skilled and effective as past Israeli-Palestinian negotiators...
No, it is a correct argument obvious to anybody who knows anything about economics, and it goes back to Adam Smith. when you force people to engage in economic transactions against their will (e.g., "power companies must buy power") or subsidize something, someone gets screwed, and it won't be "the power companies", because they are just a legal construct.
From your link:
The solar industry hasn't reached a "tipping point" because solar power is still not cost-competitive. All that's happening is that the government has created demand for a bad product, and when the subsidies and mandates end, the demand collapses again.
You should be more concerned about the ultra-rich who convince dopes like you to support their money-making schemes.
Bullshit. The app is closed source (https://twitter.com/NRELdev). Electric data comes from Ventex (private partner). Solar irradiance info comes from another private partner. There are no links on the PVWatts site (in fact, the site is overall crappy). There are no peer reviewed publications analyzing or checking any of this.
http://scholar.google.com/scho...
Are you illiterate? I said "The NREL data doesn't look right to me. Bakersfield has twice the number of sunny days as Tampa, and the difference should be greater, even accounting for the difference in latitude." I.e., I make no specific claims as to what the numbers should be, other than pointing out that the numbers you give based on NREL are implausible and not verifiable or even peer reviewed.
You are absolutely right: this is free market capitalism at work. Solar power subsidies or net metering force the poor to subsidize solar power for the affluent, and that's certainly not a free market.
You're also right that Republicans hate Tesla; that's because of the federal subsidies it receives, something we all should oppose.
The issue with car dealerships is not as clear cut as you seem to imply. Restrictions on direct car sales actually hurt big corporations and help small businesses (car dealers). It's corporate interests vs. special interests of small businesses. If you are against these laws, you align with the interests of big corporations over the interests of small businesses. (Personally, I'm against the dealership restrictions, but I'm also against the subsidies.)
The NREL data doesn't look right to me. Bakersfield has twice the number of sunny days as Tampa, and the difference should be greater, even accounting for the difference in latitude. (You also picked two non-representative cities when his statement was about states. Overall, California has the best locations for solar power in the country, while Florida really generally isn't that good for solar power generation.)
The NREL system has no description of its methodology, data sources, or other independently verifiable information; it does have a clear political and economic motivation behind it, namely to get people to buy solar cells; there is no reason to trust the NREL data.
Try finding a source that actually explains where its numbers come from and what they mean.
Those "attractive rates" mean that the power companies pay retail for the power that you feed back to them, which automatically tells you that they are overpaying, since it doesn't include all of the expenses that power companies have. You know who pays for those "attractive rates"? Not the power companies, that's for sure; they pass the losses on to the rest of their customers. It's non-solar power users who subsidize solar power users.
Doesn't sound so bad: people who waste fossil fuels should pay for their sins, and we should reward people who use pristine power! Isn't that what we want? Until you realize that people who put in solar power systems into their homes are primarily affluent, and the money comes primarily from the poor and lower middle class.
Solar power incentives end up being a massive handout to the affluent, paid for by the less well off.
So you have this confluence of powerful, "environmentally conscious" affluent folks railing against carbon emissions, and lobbying for their expensive lifestyle gimmicks (electric cars, solar power, etc., you name it), combined with lobbying from the solar and electric car industry, and you get these junk laws pushed through. Then people pat themselves on their back about how great they are, while at the same time complaining about growing "inequality", which this policy (among many other "progressive" policies) actually contributes to.
Experiments on reactionless drives really are the least of our worries; those are so "out there" that they are not at great risk of replication unless they make a pretty good case for themselves.
If there is a "denial of service attack" on science, it's health, genetics, psychology, economics, and social science studies; they are mostly wrong, meaningless, and often have costly and dangerous consequences. They don't even have "crackpot" theories behind them, they often have no theory at all behind them.
What does that even mean? The Chinese reported some result, NASA tried to reproduce it, and didn't get very convincing results. Any halfway reasonable person looks at what was reported in the press and says "hey, nothing really to see here, they didn't really prove or disprove anything", to which one might add "how nice that people try some new and crazy stuff occasionally".
Which part of that chain of events is supposed to constitute "bad science"? Who exactly is supposed to have been fooled? Which step along the way does Siegel consider "bad science" and why?
Instead of making a rational argument for the cost/benefit of this particular experiment, Siegel goes off on some tangent about N-rays, supposedly illustrating the foolishness of some experiments. But there are many other cases where weird observations and experiments that most people thought never could work opened up entirely new areas in physics and biology. If one can learn anything from the history of science, it's that you should sometimes try crazy and foolish experiments because occasionally, they yield a big payoff.
Nobody knows whether reactionless drives are "impossible" or not; anybody who makes definitive statements one way or the other is a charlatan at this point, including Siegel.
The known laws of physics violate the known laws of physics, because they are not only incomplete but internally inconsistent. Somewhere along the line, you will have to do experiments whose results might violate the known laws of physics if you want to make progress.
I still don't know what that "this" is that Siegel is referring to. How do you know that the results aren't reproducible or robust if you don't try to reproduce them?
Siegel has the kind of dull mind that we don't want to teach our next generation of scientists or kids, and it is disturbing that guys like him are actually active in science education. Kids: try stupid things that violate known physics. Try things that sticks-in-the-mud like Siegel tell you don't work. And try to reproduce other people's experiments, both the ones that everybody believes and the ones nobody else could get to work.
They merely used their budget to hire people who promoted their own biases and agendas; "credentials" just made their biased choices easier to sell. That's true even today: there are so many people who appear to "know what they are talking about" and have the credentials to prove it that any journalist can put any spin on any story by just getting the right "experts" together.
The Canadian press wasn't motivated any better than the US press, it simply had different biases, biases that in that particular case happened to agree with a policy you and I liked (although probably for different reasons; whether Saddam had WMDs was irrelevant as far as I'm concerned). Shitty Canadian press and TV reporting before and after show that they are no different from the US press.
You mean pay-to-play? Influence peddling? Political blackmail? Advocating the biased views of their own social class? Promoting the political and economic goals of their corporate masters? Yeah, sure, they'd be "offering" that in spades again. This myth that journalism is like some powerful and honest watchdog is a myth promoted by journalists themselves, for their own interest. And pre-Internet, who had the power to stand up and say they were a bunch of hypocritical liars?
We're taking the money out of journalism, and that's a good thing. The goal of journalism in the past has always been primarily to make money, by any means possible, and usually as part of powerful and wealthy corporations. This means saying things that sell and not rubbing government officials the wrong way, in varying proportions. Truth by itself doesn't pay, neither for journalists nor politicians. Now, if we could only figure out how to take the money out of politics in the same way...
Given the number of journalists around at the time, the number of journalists doing that sort of thing was vanishingly small in comparison. And their motivation was still primarily to advance their own careers or promote an ideology they liked. Then, as now, the best way for journalists to get ahead was not to rock the boat: be nice to politicians and be nice to your corporate masters.
Anybody with half a brain could figure out that the case for the Iraq war was utterly bogus; you didn't need interviews in Norway to see that.
The real problem with journalists is that they are largely incompetent; they know how to write, but they don't understand what they are writing about. They may be able to uncover some obvious, blatant malfeasance, like what Nixon did, but otherwise, they are usually utterly naive.
Since many people who do know what they are talking about are now also writing for the public (in blogs), I don't see what journalists still bring to the table.
I guess it applies in education too: "The first generation builds the business, the second makes it a success, and the third wrecks it”
Stop offering "unlimited" plans and start calling it the "2G" or the "5G" or the "500M" plan and everybody will be OK with it.
Auto insurance is regulated to ensure coverage and ability to pay. You can buy unregulated insurance for your car, it will simply not satisfy the requirements you need for driving it.
I'm not aware of general legal restrictions on insurance contracts.
Insurance-type contracts are extremely common in business. Every time you contract with a business that says "deliver X on date Y or pay penalty Z", it's a form of insurance contract, and usually involves many factors outside that business' control.
Simple solution:
"This hotel has been removed from our system. Here are some nearby hotels you may want to consider: ..."
Avoids any debates about who said what and who did what. The user can draw their own conclusions.
Many employees at tech companies are "exempt"; they don't get overtime pay. LinkedIn's dispute is about overtime for non-exempt sales people. The law is pretty murky, so calling this "wage theft" is a stretch. And this isn't going to change anything for tech employees; they are usually exempt anyway.
Is this good for the employees? I doubt it. LinkedIn isn't going to pay more compensation overall, they are simply going to shift it around. If it has any effect, it's going to be shifting money from higher performing sales people to lower performing sales people in the short term, and make it more likely that lower performers get fired in the long term.
You don't want to be an hourly employee. First of all, it means a sh*tload of bookkeeping. If you're a good performer, you'll be underpaid, and if you're a bad performer, you're more likely to get fired.
Where the hell does this idea come from that the old world of journalism was any good? What evidence is there that it was any good?
The researchers' salaries isn't where the money is going primarily; it's going into infrastructure, animal testing, support, testing, insurance, etc.
Viruses like these are potential bioterrorism agents, that's why the US funds research into treating them. It's also useful basic research.
Down the road, it may lead to effective treatments for Africans, but the current treatments are too expensive.
I subscribe to half a dozen publications, and they certainly are worth their money and making money on what they are doing. Obviously, people can make a living off journalism and publishing if they provide something readers want to read.
About $1/year/person pays for a good journalist and online publishing. If you can't get enough subscriptions sold to pay for that, well, perhaps you don't need a newspaper.
Oh, I agree. I just hope we can overcome those problems and complete the destruction of journalism sooner rather than later.
Correct. It also exists in the imagination of lots of economists. Every form of progress exists in the imagination first before it is realized.
Yes, and the result has been a lack of innovation in medicine in the UK and similarly price-controlled markets (price controls in health care also lead to shortages of doctors, cf NHS problems).
Innovation in drugs and medicine these days is nearly single-handedly financed by the US market. The US market is overregulated and deeply dysfunctional, but at least it's not price controlled yet.
I don't see that as a problem at all. The lousy UK health care system is one of the reasons I choose to live in the US rather than the UK.
It's not "impossible", and he even told you how to do it. Incidentally, your ear works the way he suggested.
That's pure speculation at this point. Falling testosterone levels may have been a consequence of civilization, not a cause. Or it may have been coincidental.
People really need to start separating scientific fact from speculation.