My question about the original study is whether they looked at the cost-benefit analysis of cybercrime in Africa.
They make tons of money from the 419 scam (aka "Nigerian scam"). I wonder if you add up the money they make from cybercrime, and then subtract the money they lose, whether on the whole it's a net importer of money.
How does regulation increase vulnerability in Africa? Somehow I suspect that they don't generally regulate maximum encryption strengths or password lengths.
They may not regulate because cutting down on cybercrime would not be in their best interest.
When you have billions of poor, desperate people, crime (including cybercrime) and environmental destruction are the result.
Let me remind you that the population density of Africa (87.1 people per square mile) is half of the population density of Europe (187.8 per square mile).
Or, for the West to stop feeding with with hundreds of billions of dollars of food aid.
May be a good idea, in fact, because it would be more effective to improve Africa's agricultural productivity than to do direct food aid. However, the US prefers food aid over actually solving the problem because the farmers' lobby in America loves food aid, because it means markets for them.
Poverty does not cause crime. Crime causes poverty.
Both. It's a feedback cycle.
When you spend all of your time committing crime, instead of getting an education and working, then you live in poverty. When the only thing you care about is killing and stealing, then you live in poverty.
And, in reverse, when you have no possibility of getting an education and no jobs, then you live in poverty, and are likely to commit crimes as a way to improve your situation, or even as a way to survive.
...This is an example of why you should always read the article, not just the headline....
You're right. I'm wrong. Often am. Probably just con-fusion on my part. There are fusion reactors out there now, who aim to fuse hydrogen into helium, and release incredible amounts of clean energy to the grid. But none sell electricity yet. So far, it's just research.
Right. In fact, not only do none of the fusion reactors sell electricity, none of them even make electricity. Since they haven't gotten fusion to work yet to the point where it produces more power out than you put power in, nobody's bothered to install generators to turn the power that they're not producing into electricity.
If you read that article more carefully, the headline says that they've "switched the reactor on" but the text says that they "achieved 'first plasma'." That's "turning it on," I agree... but it's not fusion.
They haven't actually put deuterium (much less tritium) in yet, in fact, they haven't yet (as of the article) yet achieved fusion threshold temperature (the article you cite says at they "hope to achieve the fusion threshold of 100 million degrees Celsius" by next year; an article from this year says that they expect to hit 15 million degrees this year: https://www.power-technology.c...
> In the near term, people charging their electric vehicles overnight is a very, very good thing for utilities.
Here in Ontario when you buy a EV and a charger, you get a deal so night-time power is free.
I love it. That's a win for the the consumer and the utility.
Right-wing all up in arms over this of course.
They shouldn't be. It actually makes perfect sense. It encourages the consumer to hold off charging their EV until late, when the power is almost unused, instead of plugging in at 5, when power is most expensive.
Yet, when you examine the numbers, it turns out giving EV owners free power is actually cheaper, because Ontario Power Generation currently *pays* New York to haul away our excess.
The crashing the economy warning is in the context of a command from on high telling the nation (or world) that they will stop using fossil fuels on some timetable.
The economy isn't crashing. The transition from one energy source to another had been incremental, replacing the most expensive fossil fuel plants first.
In general, upgrading infrastructure helps the economy, rather than hurt it.
They have approximately doubled their end consumer energy cost for grid tied electricity thanks to their "cheap" expansion of green retardable energy.
Correlation does not imply causation.
In this case it is causation, but the ultimate cause is not the technology itself, but simply early adopter cost. ("An early adopter is likely to pay more for the product than later adopters, but accepts this premium" -- Investopedia).
The early adopters end up paying down development costs to allow the rest of us to buy at cheap rates, so: thanks, Germany.
On the plus side, there will be a lot of very cheap power available. That's a very big opportunity right there.
There already is a lot of cheap power available. It turns out to be available when nobody wants it: from roughly midnight to 6 am, the actual cost of power is zero. (Not the price, but that's because regulators don't allow time-dependent pricing.)
This is something a lot of people commenting don't seem to understand. Utilities dump power in the dead of night-- they can't spin down to zero generation.
In the near term, people charging their electric vehicles overnight is a very, very good thing for utilities.
Intermittently cheap power when all those panels and wind overproduce power that needs to be dumped....
Yes, what happens is that the period of cheap energy will change from midnight to 6 am to roughly 9am solar time to 3pm solar time.
No, you have the Broken Window principle backwards.
The broken window principle states that having broken windows in a neighborhood encourages crime. The city thus requires people to repair their broken windows immediately. The broken window principle actually helps window repairmen get business.
but somebody made a good point about this switch to solar & renewables: it's going to crash the economy. Let me explain. We've got massive amounts of investment wealth tied up in fossil fuels. People's retirements are heavily vested in them.
This is true of every change in technology, of course. People who invested in radio stations moved their investments elsewhere. Radio stations still exist, of course, but because demand is down they aren't the huge moneymakers they were when everybody listened to the radio. Fossil fuels will still exist and still be used, of course, but if demand goes down they won't be the big moneymakers they once were.
People move investments around. This is what happens. The economy does not crash, in fact, it is actually GOOD for the economy to build new infrastructure to replace old, run down infrastructure.
... And that's before we start talking about what's going to happen to the middle east.
I can't help but think that what will happen in the middle east will be good (and good for ALL the parties involved) once all the powerful interests that have no motivation but oil, oil, and oil stop messing around.
I think that's similar to the argument that technology is going to take all of our jobs while we are at 'full employment' and been made for 100s of years
I'm much more scared of that, actually. In this case what the "disruptive technology" is making obsolete is people. As long as it makes new jobs for people, that's fine. But I'm not sure what happens when AI can do things better than any person in any job.
The stock is up 20% this week so I have switched my short TSLA positions to long! Gooooo Tesla!
If your investment strategy is that you've been going short before the stock goes up, and now that it went up you're going long, you're doing it backwards.
People are doing just that. But do not discount the economic value of standardizing on a common technology even if it isn't optimal for a given use case.
Why doesn't your car battery use the same battery chemistry as your flashlight flashlight, and neither one the same chemistry as your mobile phone?
They should consult Tesla. Elon Musk has excellent battery technology and has it all figured out already.
Tesla does use some nice technology, but their showcase application requires high power to weight, where for utility-scale electrical storage weight is not a big issue, while cost and cycle efficiency is much more of an issue. Lithium's greatest asset is low mass, not low cost.
In any case, as one of the other commentators noted, it's worth looking at multiple technological solutions, rather than fixating on just one approach.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Are you referring to the fact that the sun is getting brighter at a rate of about 1% every hundred million years? That is true, but has nothing to do with the time scale of human civilization.
Eventually temperatures will rise to and exceed the levels we've been told are bad, it's simply a matter of how quickly they get there.
Yes, in a few hundred million years we may need to worry.
Democrats generally want more ILLEGAL aliens they can later TURN INTO voting residents who are dependent on "the system" through never-ending amnesty programs.
That's silly. There aren't any "never ending" amnesty programs, there are no amnesty programs whatsoever that turn illegal aliens into voting residents,period. These don't exist.
Actually, I've seen exactly the opposite analysis.
Democratic politicians want more legal immigration but less illegal immigration. Legal immigrants vote and pay taxes, illegals don't.
Republican politicians want less legal immigration, but more illegal immigration. Illegal immigration depresses wages, meaning more profits for corporations. (Even if the corporations don't hire illegals, the illegals have a downward pressure on all unskilled-labor wages).
On the Explicit category, there is me. I explicitly state that ANYONE that shows up at the border, and checks in (documented) should be allowed in*.
OK, I'm curious now. Why do you think documents are important? Why do you think a government should be given the power to issue or not issue documents to allow a person to cross borders?
Or, what if the random number generator only picked numbers divisible by three? Or always alternated an odd number with an even number? That's not random at all-- but it doesn't affect who gets picked to immigrate.
The story is about an issue that is completely irrelevant.
It doesn't matter whether the "RND" function is ideally random in a mathematical sense. It only matters whether the "random" number generated is independent of the identities of the people applying to be admitted.
Won't work. People can't sign away their consumer rights. If they get a bad product and sue, they'll win no matter what boxes they checked.
Which is commendable, for goods that are returned for cause.
Many web retailers, however, have a policy of returns for any reason, including "I changed my mind". (Or even, in the case of my wife, "I bought three in different colors because I wasn't sure which color I would like best so I wanted to try them all, and am now returning the two I didn't like.")
Slashdot Mirror
Did somebody read the original study?
My question about the original study is whether they looked at the cost-benefit analysis of cybercrime in Africa.
They make tons of money from the 419 scam (aka "Nigerian scam"). I wonder if you add up the money they make from cybercrime, and then subtract the money they lose, whether on the whole it's a net importer of money.
How does regulation increase vulnerability in Africa? Somehow I suspect that they don't generally regulate maximum encryption strengths or password lengths.
They may not regulate because cutting down on cybercrime would not be in their best interest.
When you have billions of poor, desperate people, crime (including cybercrime) and environmental destruction are the result.
Let me remind you that the population density of Africa (87.1 people per square mile) is half of the population density of Europe (187.8 per square mile).
Or, for the West to stop feeding with with hundreds of billions of dollars of food aid.
May be a good idea, in fact, because it would be more effective to improve Africa's agricultural productivity than to do direct food aid. However, the US prefers food aid over actually solving the problem because the farmers' lobby in America loves food aid, because it means markets for them.
So let's start with YOU, shall we? Asshole.
Poverty does not cause crime. Crime causes poverty.
Both. It's a feedback cycle.
When you spend all of your time committing crime, instead of getting an education and working, then you live in poverty. When the only thing you care about is killing and stealing, then you live in poverty.
And, in reverse, when you have no possibility of getting an education and no jobs, then you live in poverty, and are likely to commit crimes as a way to improve your situation, or even as a way to survive.
XXongo says
...This is an example of why you should always read the article, not just the headline....
You're right. I'm wrong. Often am. Probably just con-fusion on my part. There are fusion reactors out there now, who aim to fuse hydrogen into helium, and release incredible amounts of clean energy to the grid. But none sell electricity yet. So far, it's just research.
Right. In fact, not only do none of the fusion reactors sell electricity, none of them even make electricity. Since they haven't gotten fusion to work yet to the point where it produces more power out than you put power in, nobody's bothered to install generators to turn the power that they're not producing into electricity.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-uk-has-just-switch-on-its-tokamak-nuclear-fusion-reactor
If you read that article more carefully, the headline says that they've "switched the reactor on" but the text says that they "achieved 'first plasma'." That's "turning it on," I agree... but it's not fusion.
They haven't actually put deuterium (much less tritium) in yet, in fact, they haven't yet (as of the article) yet achieved fusion threshold temperature (the article you cite says at they "hope to achieve the fusion threshold of 100 million degrees Celsius" by next year; an article from this year says that they expect to hit 15 million degrees this year: https://www.power-technology.c...
> In the near term, people charging their electric vehicles overnight is a very, very good thing for utilities.
Here in Ontario when you buy a EV and a charger, you get a deal so night-time power is free.
I love it. That's a win for the the consumer and the utility.
Right-wing all up in arms over this of course.
They shouldn't be. It actually makes perfect sense. It encourages the consumer to hold off charging their EV until late, when the power is almost unused, instead of plugging in at 5, when power is most expensive.
Yet, when you examine the numbers, it turns out giving EV owners free power is actually cheaper, because Ontario Power Generation currently *pays* New York to haul away our excess.
Thanks.
BTW, some say fusion reactors are economically viable now (6).
Since nobody has yet demonstrated a fusion reactor that generates even one watt of power, no. Maybe some day, but not "now".
(6) https://phys.org/news/2015-10-...
This is an example of why you should always read the article, not just the headline. The first sentence of the article you cite says:
Decades from now. Not "now".
The crashing the economy warning is in the context of a command from on high telling the nation (or world) that they will stop using fossil fuels on some timetable.
The economy isn't crashing. The transition from one energy source to another had been incremental, replacing the most expensive fossil fuel plants first.
In general, upgrading infrastructure helps the economy, rather than hurt it.
They have approximately doubled their end consumer energy cost for grid tied electricity thanks to their "cheap" expansion of green retardable energy.
Correlation does not imply causation.
In this case it is causation, but the ultimate cause is not the technology itself, but simply early adopter cost. ("An early adopter is likely to pay more for the product than later adopters, but accepts this premium" -- Investopedia).
The early adopters end up paying down development costs to allow the rest of us to buy at cheap rates, so: thanks, Germany.
On the plus side, there will be a lot of very cheap power available. That's a very big opportunity right there.
There already is a lot of cheap power available. It turns out to be available when nobody wants it: from roughly midnight to 6 am, the actual cost of power is zero. (Not the price, but that's because regulators don't allow time-dependent pricing.)
This is something a lot of people commenting don't seem to understand. Utilities dump power in the dead of night-- they can't spin down to zero generation.
In the near term, people charging their electric vehicles overnight is a very, very good thing for utilities.
Intermittently cheap power when all those panels and wind overproduce power that needs to be dumped....
Yes, what happens is that the period of cheap energy will change from midnight to 6 am to roughly 9am solar time to 3pm solar time.
The broken window principle states that having broken windows in a neighborhood encourages crime. The city thus requires people to repair their broken windows immediately. The broken window principle actually helps window repairmen get business.
but somebody made a good point about this switch to solar & renewables: it's going to crash the economy. Let me explain. We've got massive amounts of investment wealth tied up in fossil fuels. People's retirements are heavily vested in them.
This is true of every change in technology, of course. People who invested in radio stations moved their investments elsewhere. Radio stations still exist, of course, but because demand is down they aren't the huge moneymakers they were when everybody listened to the radio. Fossil fuels will still exist and still be used, of course, but if demand goes down they won't be the big moneymakers they once were.
People move investments around. This is what happens. The economy does not crash, in fact, it is actually GOOD for the economy to build new infrastructure to replace old, run down infrastructure.
... And that's before we start talking about what's going to happen to the middle east.
I can't help but think that what will happen in the middle east will be good (and good for ALL the parties involved) once all the powerful interests that have no motivation but oil, oil, and oil stop messing around.
I think that's similar to the argument that technology is going to take all of our jobs while we are at 'full employment' and been made for 100s of years
I'm much more scared of that, actually. In this case what the "disruptive technology" is making obsolete is people. As long as it makes new jobs for people, that's fine. But I'm not sure what happens when AI can do things better than any person in any job.
The stock is up 20% this week so I have switched my short TSLA positions to long! Gooooo Tesla!
If your investment strategy is that you've been going short before the stock goes up, and now that it went up you're going long, you're doing it backwards.
People are doing just that. But do not discount the economic value of standardizing on a common technology even if it isn't optimal for a given use case.
Why doesn't your car battery use the same battery chemistry as your flashlight flashlight, and neither one the same chemistry as your mobile phone?
They should consult Tesla. Elon Musk has excellent battery technology and has it all figured out already.
Tesla does use some nice technology, but their showcase application requires high power to weight, where for utility-scale electrical storage weight is not a big issue, while cost and cycle efficiency is much more of an issue. Lithium's greatest asset is low mass, not low cost.
In any case, as one of the other commentators noted, it's worth looking at multiple technological solutions, rather than fixating on just one approach.
I think you and headwind are talking about different things.
You are talking about eutectic salt thermal energg storage: https://energydesignresources....
He is talking about molten-salt electrolyte batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Completely different things.
The Earth's average temperature is rising and would be rising even if humans did not exist.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. Are you referring to the fact that the sun is getting brighter at a rate of about 1% every hundred million years? That is true, but has nothing to do with the time scale of human civilization.
Eventually temperatures will rise to and exceed the levels we've been told are bad, it's simply a matter of how quickly they get there.
Yes, in a few hundred million years we may need to worry.
Indeed. Improving electrical storage would have benefits for many applications, not just for reducing carbon emissions.
Democrats generally want more ILLEGAL aliens they can later TURN INTO voting residents who are dependent on "the system" through never-ending amnesty programs.
That's silly. There aren't any "never ending" amnesty programs, there are no amnesty programs whatsoever that turn illegal aliens into voting residents,period. These don't exist.
The last time there was an amnesty program was under President Reagan, who provided amnesty for 3 million illegal immigrants. That was back in 1987, over thirty years ago. (that was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, followed by Reagan's executive action to give legal status to more illegals not covered by the Immigration act the year following that.)
I think you're confusing libertarians with anarchists.
That wouldn't be surprising. Libertarians often confuse libertarians with anarchists.
Actually, I've seen exactly the opposite analysis.
Democratic politicians want more legal immigration but less illegal immigration. Legal immigrants vote and pay taxes, illegals don't.
Republican politicians want less legal immigration, but more illegal immigration. Illegal immigration depresses wages, meaning more profits for corporations. (Even if the corporations don't hire illegals, the illegals have a downward pressure on all unskilled-labor wages).
On the Explicit category, there is me. I explicitly state that ANYONE that shows up at the border, and checks in (documented) should be allowed in*.
OK, I'm curious now. Why do you think documents are important? Why do you think a government should be given the power to issue or not issue documents to allow a person to cross borders?
Or, what if the random number generator only picked numbers divisible by three? Or always alternated an odd number with an even number? That's not random at all-- but it doesn't affect who gets picked to immigrate.
It doesn't matter whether the "RND" function is ideally random in a mathematical sense. It only matters whether the "random" number generated is independent of the identities of the people applying to be admitted.
Won't work. People can't sign away their consumer rights. If they get a bad product and sue, they'll win no matter what boxes they checked.
Which is commendable, for goods that are returned for cause.
Many web retailers, however, have a policy of returns for any reason, including "I changed my mind". (Or even, in the case of my wife, "I bought three in different colors because I wasn't sure which color I would like best so I wanted to try them all, and am now returning the two I didn't like.")