I've been wondering about that. I've got a heat pump, and one down side is that it fares poorly when the weather is significantly below freezing. It's been a wicked couple of winters around here in the Mid Atlantic, and it would have been nice to tap into a huge store of moderate temperature just a few feet below ground.
Many countries are phasing out coal in favor of natural gas, which pollutes less and (due to fracking) has dropped considerably in price. It costs around $1.99 per gigajoule today (http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly/).
Note also that not all environmentalists are in favor of ending nuclear energy. New nuclear plants are being built now, approved by the Obama administration: "DOE’s investments in nuclear energy help secure the three strategic objectives that are foundational to our nation’s energy system: energy security, economic competitiveness, and environmental responsibility." (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/06/fact-sheet-obama-administration-announces-actions-ensure-nuclear-energy). There is indeed a quandary among environmentalists because the issue of nuclear waste is contentious, but many in the environmental movement recognize that nuclear power can be part of an overall strategy in reducing carbon emissions.
Science is respected for its reputation for certainty, and Math is seen as the purest (and thus most certain) of the sciences.
This bugs me. Math, on its own, is so "pure" that it has no connection to the universe whatsoever. Aliens don't appear in pure math. Neither do electrons, polymers, or three-toed sloths. Math is purged of all real world things. Math can't predict anything about the real world. Even the simplest tautologies, like "two apples are equal to two apples", requires extra real-world semantics to apply an abstraction like "equal" (which has many different definitions) to actual things like "apples".
So when people say "according to math", they're aspiring to a certainty that it doesn't earn. You could say "according to science". Science will always incorporate some form of math. But it's not identical, and if scientific claims seem "weaker" than math claims, we just need to live with that. Because we don't, in fact, really truly mathematically "know" anything about aliens. Not even a probability: our probability estimates are themselves subject to enormous amounts of guesswork.
Sorry for the distraction, but this bugs me. The article itself doesn't seem to be of much merit; it's all old news. So I'm gonna gripe about the headline instead. Thank you for your time.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but the conclusion is correct.
You're describing a local hidden variables theory, in which the particles already have a definite value at the point where they were entangled. That doesn't quite describe reality; with some subtle experiments you can see that they interact in ways slightly different from ones that are already set. But that difference still doesn't allow you to communicate.
I wonder what it would take to make it safe down to 40 meters, the limit for recreational divers. Use your phone as your dive computer and to take pictures while you're down there. They already make wireless regulators; they can't be hard to adapt to Bluetooth. (I have no idea what the range of Bluetooth is under water.)
Is anybody making a phone with no jacks at all? Just wireless charging and Bluetooth headsets? That would give you a great opportunity to really seal the device.
Right now not having a charging jack would prove a bit of a pain, but for a specialized heatseeking kind of market I could see people getting into a really ultra-thin phone completely devoid of the need to accommodate any connectors.
A bluetooth headset would have fixed that problem. Slightly more expensive, and it's got its own charging issues, but I would think that's the intended mode of a device without a headphone jack.
You can think of a heat pump as a reversible refrigerator. In cooling mode, it works just like a refrigerator: the compressor compresses gas, lets it radiate heat of compression outside, then pumps it inside to evaporate.
The remarkable thing is that you can turn the process around to heat the inside instead of the outside. You compress the gas outside to make it hot, then pump it inside to release that heat. A carefully-designed valve causes it to go from liquid to gas, or reverse, depending on where you want to absorb heat: outside, even in winter, the evaporated, chilled gas can be warmed up by the outside air.
The trick is getting the right refrigerant, which turns from liquid to gas and back around the temperature you want. I dunno why they've chosen CO2 here, but I suspect it has to do with the ambient temperatures in Alaska.
Yeah, I suspect that they're pretty aggravated by it. It does have the advantage of keeping her name in the news at a time when she might otherwise vanish, and "all publicity is good publicity", but I don't know how much her staff are enjoying those sour grapes.
It shouldn't have come as a complete surprise, though. She's always had high negatives, though it's disappointing that so many of them come from concerted Republican campaigns to smear her. (Remember that Barack Obama had a fightthesmears.com site set up the minute he won the nomination.) It's unsettling to have liberals repeating Republican talking points, in addition to creating their own.
It set her up for there to be some kind of opposition. And the Democratic party has been taking its liberal wing for granted for quite some time, allowing centrists like Obama and both Clintons to get their votes knowing that they'd be unable to get more than the palest pink liberal agenda items actually achieved. I happen to be a left-leaning centrist myself, and think that's about the right thing, but real leftists are understandably upset.
In the end they have the opportunity to realize that they've dragged one candidate a bit left, and get that candidate elected over a far-right candidate. That would be a win, and if it's not the win they were hoping for, it's also the one that doesn't have every Republican and half of the Democrats upset at going too far left. We'll see if they'd rather have half a loaf than none.
Go ahead and evaluate your choices. If you're a Sanders supporter and can look yourself in the eye about the possibility of President Trump or President Cruz, go right ahead. But I suspect that between now and November, Sanders himself will tell you what he'd prefer.
and if it weren't for the super delegate system, he would be very close to winning the nomination.
Sanders is behind Clinton in pledged delegates, 1,428 to 1,189. There's no way to spin that as "Sanders is close to winning"; Clinton is undeniably closer.
If you eliminated unpledged delegates entirely, Clinton's target would be 2,113; she'd need less than 700 of the remaining 1,646 delegates to win.
The only way Sanders could achieve a win would be for him to inspire the superdelegates to change their minds between now and the election. He's hoping somehow to thread the needle, denying her a majority of the (pledged + superdelegates) just with her pledged delegates. That's pretty deceptive. She's winning the pledged delegates; she's winning the superdelegates; she's winning the popular vote.
I don't have the journal article itself, but the way I read the abstract, they mean 0% false negatives and 0% false positives.
They did not, however, appear to test people from outside the group. That is, if I were to show up, it's unclear if it would identify me as not one of the sample. That still leaves a pretty substantial room for error, but it's a very good starting point.
You're right that they only say "ally" because it's far from clear that they actually ARE our ally.
But the Saudi government does cooperate with the US on a lot of things. They're often the targets of the same terrorists that we are. Their intelligence agencies coordinate with ours, and provide a lot of the information that goes into the US "war on terror".
The problem is that the Saudi "government" is a weird thing. It's a kingdom with literally thousands of princes. Many of whom are insanely wealthy, and some of whom actually support terrorism, including terrorism against their own country. That's not an "official" policy, but neither does the Saudi kingdom go out of its way to arrest them, either. Why exactly those princes support violence against their own country and their own family, biting the hand that feeds them caviar... well, let's just say It's Complicated. But they do.
So they say "our ally Saudi Arabia" because it is our ally... often against itself, which is our enemy and its own.
It's even more complicated by the fact of oil; for decades we relied crucially on them. And that's growing more complicated as our dependence grows less. So we're less willing to put up with the support for terrorism, within the family and within the government. We do, in fact, need their help, and simply trying to prosecute Saudi family members (if not the government itself) will make that complicated situation even more ridiculous.
So... I got no idea where we go from here. I see the threat to sell bonds as a really weak threat. The fact that they have those bonds was, in fact, a favor to us, helping prop us up during the economic crisis. But we don't really need that any more; plenty of people are still desperate to buy our bonds. The price of oil has collapsed their cartel.
The government wanted to be our friends, but not at the cost of loosening its own power. Now that's failing, and their options are few. I dunno what happens from here. Those 28 pages won't have nearly the "smoking gun" that people imagine it will, but they won't be pretty either.
Has there been some technology change that allows that? I've got a slightly older phone with a replaceable battery, and it needs to be replaced about once a year or so. Which is OK; they cost around ten bucks. (Forty, if I bought certified parts, but Anker makes knock-off parts that do at least as well.)
Do the non-replaceable batteries have a different technology that allows them to last longer?
But surely those customers are going to want some kind of Internet service. It seems unlikely that they're going to say, "Well, if I can't torrent Orphan Black, I don't need to get email."
They might even let them sign up for the same company. A few days lack of service, plus a reconnect fee, might convince them to cut out illegal downloads (or at least, try harder to hide it).
It might end up with all of the downloaders at the one ISP in town who tolerates them. But I suspect that the other ISPs might have ways of putting pressure on them. Especially if they're also the backbone provider, such as in Verizon's case. Even if not, they may be able to tell the backbone provider, "Look, we're losing customers because they're not playing fair, and we'll complain to your peers if you don't tell them to knock it off."
It does have a tactile feedback. It's done with vibration rather than depressing the keys. I don't know if it's any good; I'd need to try it. I suspect that one would learn a rather new typing style.
Huh. Anecdotally, I'm getting the same service with DVDs that I always have. I generally assume that if I put it in the mail Tuesday, they get it Wednesday, and get me the new disk Thursday. That seems reasonable to me.
I dropped from the 3 disc service back to 2 because I watch a lot more stuff on streaming, but there's a lot of stuff that's only available on disks. I generally have one disk on hand and another in the mail. (Actually, I often end up holding things for a few days, since I watch less stuff than I used to. Trying to get a life.)
So I'm pretty happy with the service. It's the only content I'm paying for; it provides as much as I need for the time I have to spend watching TV.
Sonny the Robot could tell jokes, and hit the timing for a punch line. If a robot can do that, I'll consider it my equal.
It's not the big stuff I'm looking for. It's the common, everyday stuff: telling jokes, folding laundry, telling a picture from a person... all at the same time rather than one algorithm specialized to it. Like people do. I really don't know how far we are from that; it feels like it's 20 years off, same as always. But the AlphaGo thing (using a neural network which just just possibly be able to be re-used for other things) does suggest that maybe it's only 18 years off.
The surprise here is that learning from the game endings of internet GO players and somewhat informed computer vs computer games is enough to train an evaluation function with the predictive power to beat the world champion.
It is surprising. I'd go so far as to say "stunning". This kind of ML is really, really fallible, in exactly the areas that humans do well. I'm kinda baffled.
I darkly suspect that it means that humans aren't really very good at Go. The combinatorial explosion is so fast that the vast majority of moves don't get any consideration at all. Humans apply a well-trained intuition, but there's reason to think that good moves are completely ignored.
In chess, the best computers play slightly better than the best humans; it's as though we're near perfect play even if we can't actually work out all of the routes for all games. In Go, it sounds as if in the near future humans won't even be in consideration; you'd no more ask a human to play Go against a computer than you'd ask one to race an automobile.
Which is to say: perhaps the explanation is that the computer still isn't very good. It's just better than the extremely-fallible human.
I think it's the theater popcorn and merch sales that figure into the price more than Netflix does. The theater owners are going to want to pay much, much less for movies if they don't have a monopoly on (legal) early viewings.
The total amount of money spent by consumers on the movies (including snacks) will probably about come out in the wash at this price point, but theater owners won't stand for 100% of it going to the studio. They'll demand a cut. I'm not sure in what form they'll get it; it might be a profit sharing on the tickets they do sell (rather than sending practically all of it to the distributor). But they won't survive long if they don't get something.
Exactly. It provides a tool for identifying criminals: if you're using bitcoins, then you're doing something illegal. They don't even necessarily have to enforce the bitcoin law, just investigate whatever you're doing for the bitcoins. And if they fail at that, they can enforce the bitcoin law, like putting mobsters in jail for tax evasion.
Not saying that's a good thing, necessarily. The same thing could go for criminalizing cryptography. Even without that, crypto does potentially make you a target, and I suspect that big comms providers like GMail have been specifically discouraged from making crypto too easy.
"Non-profit" is a pretty loaded term here. It implies charities or colleges or arts organizations. That's not really what's going on. It just means that they're not turning their profits over to any shareholders. There are tax consequences, but it's actually not all that big a deal, since even ordinary corporations are only supposed to be paying taxes on profits anyway, not revenues. Which theoretically lets them raise wages and lower prices, though they're not actually all that good at either. Mostly, they turn it into giant executive bonuses.
I'm not exactly sure how MITRE and some other Beltway bandits get away with being "non-profits". I think they call themselves "research". But really, they don't belong in the same category as charities.
The problem is that the places that most need to be "fixed" don't have the money to do it, now or in the future. Yeah, it'll be nice to fix up New York, Amsterdam, and Miami, but Bangladesh and the Maldives can't afford it. And I don't think we'll see Americans (or the Chinese, or the Europeans) rushing to pony up tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to build them new inland cities.
For that matter I don't see them rushing to pay to protect even first-world coastal cities. "The country" has enough money to pay for it, but who exactly is going to shell out the money? Donations? Taxes? Who's going to be put in charge of deciding whether it's spent on enormous dikes versus up and moving entire cities inland.
Reducing carbon emissions will be both cheaper and fairer. Or at least, it would have been cheaper 20 years ago, when people were screaming that things needed to be done. "Fair", to me, would seem to rest heavily on those who delayed implementation because of obviously bogus anti-scientific claims that it wasn't happening at all. Even today, every single one of the Republican candidates for President believes that climate change is some kind of scientific conspiracy. And there's just no way they're going to allow any American money to be spent on it, either preventing it or dealing with the consequences, either here or abroad.
I don't disagree, but this doesn't really affect the Kochs all that much. They're in oil and gas, not coal. It may even be helping them: a lot of the capacity shifts to gas plants, which they supply through fracking.
The drop in oil prices may be hurting them, and some of their fracking operations have as they're no longer profitable. So you can take that as a bit of cheery news.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been wondering about that. I've got a heat pump, and one down side is that it fares poorly when the weather is significantly below freezing. It's been a wicked couple of winters around here in the Mid Atlantic, and it would have been nice to tap into a huge store of moderate temperature just a few feet below ground.
Many countries are phasing out coal in favor of natural gas, which pollutes less and (due to fracking) has dropped considerably in price. It costs around $1.99 per gigajoule today (http://www.eia.gov/naturalgas/weekly/).
Note also that not all environmentalists are in favor of ending nuclear energy. New nuclear plants are being built now, approved by the Obama administration: "DOE’s investments in nuclear energy help secure the three strategic objectives that are foundational to our nation’s energy system: energy security, economic competitiveness, and environmental responsibility." (https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/06/fact-sheet-obama-administration-announces-actions-ensure-nuclear-energy). There is indeed a quandary among environmentalists because the issue of nuclear waste is contentious, but many in the environmental movement recognize that nuclear power can be part of an overall strategy in reducing carbon emissions.
Science is respected for its reputation for certainty, and Math is seen as the purest (and thus most certain) of the sciences.
This bugs me. Math, on its own, is so "pure" that it has no connection to the universe whatsoever. Aliens don't appear in pure math. Neither do electrons, polymers, or three-toed sloths. Math is purged of all real world things. Math can't predict anything about the real world. Even the simplest tautologies, like "two apples are equal to two apples", requires extra real-world semantics to apply an abstraction like "equal" (which has many different definitions) to actual things like "apples".
So when people say "according to math", they're aspiring to a certainty that it doesn't earn. You could say "according to science". Science will always incorporate some form of math. But it's not identical, and if scientific claims seem "weaker" than math claims, we just need to live with that. Because we don't, in fact, really truly mathematically "know" anything about aliens. Not even a probability: our probability estimates are themselves subject to enormous amounts of guesswork.
Sorry for the distraction, but this bugs me. The article itself doesn't seem to be of much merit; it's all old news. So I'm gonna gripe about the headline instead. Thank you for your time.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but the conclusion is correct.
You're describing a local hidden variables theory, in which the particles already have a definite value at the point where they were entangled. That doesn't quite describe reality; with some subtle experiments you can see that they interact in ways slightly different from ones that are already set. But that difference still doesn't allow you to communicate.
I wonder what it would take to make it safe down to 40 meters, the limit for recreational divers. Use your phone as your dive computer and to take pictures while you're down there. They already make wireless regulators; they can't be hard to adapt to Bluetooth. (I have no idea what the range of Bluetooth is under water.)
Is anybody making a phone with no jacks at all? Just wireless charging and Bluetooth headsets? That would give you a great opportunity to really seal the device.
Right now not having a charging jack would prove a bit of a pain, but for a specialized heatseeking kind of market I could see people getting into a really ultra-thin phone completely devoid of the need to accommodate any connectors.
A bluetooth headset would have fixed that problem. Slightly more expensive, and it's got its own charging issues, but I would think that's the intended mode of a device without a headphone jack.
You can think of a heat pump as a reversible refrigerator. In cooling mode, it works just like a refrigerator: the compressor compresses gas, lets it radiate heat of compression outside, then pumps it inside to evaporate.
The remarkable thing is that you can turn the process around to heat the inside instead of the outside. You compress the gas outside to make it hot, then pump it inside to release that heat. A carefully-designed valve causes it to go from liquid to gas, or reverse, depending on where you want to absorb heat: outside, even in winter, the evaporated, chilled gas can be warmed up by the outside air.
The trick is getting the right refrigerant, which turns from liquid to gas and back around the temperature you want. I dunno why they've chosen CO2 here, but I suspect it has to do with the ambient temperatures in Alaska.
But you'll be OK. That's the important thing.
Yeah, I suspect that they're pretty aggravated by it. It does have the advantage of keeping her name in the news at a time when she might otherwise vanish, and "all publicity is good publicity", but I don't know how much her staff are enjoying those sour grapes.
It shouldn't have come as a complete surprise, though. She's always had high negatives, though it's disappointing that so many of them come from concerted Republican campaigns to smear her. (Remember that Barack Obama had a fightthesmears.com site set up the minute he won the nomination.) It's unsettling to have liberals repeating Republican talking points, in addition to creating their own.
It set her up for there to be some kind of opposition. And the Democratic party has been taking its liberal wing for granted for quite some time, allowing centrists like Obama and both Clintons to get their votes knowing that they'd be unable to get more than the palest pink liberal agenda items actually achieved. I happen to be a left-leaning centrist myself, and think that's about the right thing, but real leftists are understandably upset.
In the end they have the opportunity to realize that they've dragged one candidate a bit left, and get that candidate elected over a far-right candidate. That would be a win, and if it's not the win they were hoping for, it's also the one that doesn't have every Republican and half of the Democrats upset at going too far left. We'll see if they'd rather have half a loaf than none.
Go ahead and evaluate your choices. If you're a Sanders supporter and can look yourself in the eye about the possibility of President Trump or President Cruz, go right ahead. But I suspect that between now and November, Sanders himself will tell you what he'd prefer.
and if it weren't for the super delegate system, he would be very close to winning the nomination.
Sanders is behind Clinton in pledged delegates, 1,428 to 1,189. There's no way to spin that as "Sanders is close to winning"; Clinton is undeniably closer.
If you eliminated unpledged delegates entirely, Clinton's target would be 2,113; she'd need less than 700 of the remaining 1,646 delegates to win.
The only way Sanders could achieve a win would be for him to inspire the superdelegates to change their minds between now and the election. He's hoping somehow to thread the needle, denying her a majority of the (pledged + superdelegates) just with her pledged delegates. That's pretty deceptive. She's winning the pledged delegates; she's winning the superdelegates; she's winning the popular vote.
I don't have the journal article itself, but the way I read the abstract, they mean 0% false negatives and 0% false positives.
They did not, however, appear to test people from outside the group. That is, if I were to show up, it's unclear if it would identify me as not one of the sample. That still leaves a pretty substantial room for error, but it's a very good starting point.
You're right that they only say "ally" because it's far from clear that they actually ARE our ally.
But the Saudi government does cooperate with the US on a lot of things. They're often the targets of the same terrorists that we are. Their intelligence agencies coordinate with ours, and provide a lot of the information that goes into the US "war on terror".
The problem is that the Saudi "government" is a weird thing. It's a kingdom with literally thousands of princes. Many of whom are insanely wealthy, and some of whom actually support terrorism, including terrorism against their own country. That's not an "official" policy, but neither does the Saudi kingdom go out of its way to arrest them, either. Why exactly those princes support violence against their own country and their own family, biting the hand that feeds them caviar... well, let's just say It's Complicated. But they do.
So they say "our ally Saudi Arabia" because it is our ally... often against itself, which is our enemy and its own.
It's even more complicated by the fact of oil; for decades we relied crucially on them. And that's growing more complicated as our dependence grows less. So we're less willing to put up with the support for terrorism, within the family and within the government. We do, in fact, need their help, and simply trying to prosecute Saudi family members (if not the government itself) will make that complicated situation even more ridiculous.
So... I got no idea where we go from here. I see the threat to sell bonds as a really weak threat. The fact that they have those bonds was, in fact, a favor to us, helping prop us up during the economic crisis. But we don't really need that any more; plenty of people are still desperate to buy our bonds. The price of oil has collapsed their cartel.
The government wanted to be our friends, but not at the cost of loosening its own power. Now that's failing, and their options are few. I dunno what happens from here. Those 28 pages won't have nearly the "smoking gun" that people imagine it will, but they won't be pretty either.
Has there been some technology change that allows that? I've got a slightly older phone with a replaceable battery, and it needs to be replaced about once a year or so. Which is OK; they cost around ten bucks. (Forty, if I bought certified parts, but Anker makes knock-off parts that do at least as well.)
Do the non-replaceable batteries have a different technology that allows them to last longer?
But surely those customers are going to want some kind of Internet service. It seems unlikely that they're going to say, "Well, if I can't torrent Orphan Black, I don't need to get email."
They might even let them sign up for the same company. A few days lack of service, plus a reconnect fee, might convince them to cut out illegal downloads (or at least, try harder to hide it).
It might end up with all of the downloaders at the one ISP in town who tolerates them. But I suspect that the other ISPs might have ways of putting pressure on them. Especially if they're also the backbone provider, such as in Verizon's case. Even if not, they may be able to tell the backbone provider, "Look, we're losing customers because they're not playing fair, and we'll complain to your peers if you don't tell them to knock it off."
It does have a tactile feedback. It's done with vibration rather than depressing the keys. I don't know if it's any good; I'd need to try it. I suspect that one would learn a rather new typing style.
Huh. Anecdotally, I'm getting the same service with DVDs that I always have. I generally assume that if I put it in the mail Tuesday, they get it Wednesday, and get me the new disk Thursday. That seems reasonable to me.
I dropped from the 3 disc service back to 2 because I watch a lot more stuff on streaming, but there's a lot of stuff that's only available on disks. I generally have one disk on hand and another in the mail. (Actually, I often end up holding things for a few days, since I watch less stuff than I used to. Trying to get a life.)
So I'm pretty happy with the service. It's the only content I'm paying for; it provides as much as I need for the time I have to spend watching TV.
Sonny the Robot could tell jokes, and hit the timing for a punch line. If a robot can do that, I'll consider it my equal.
It's not the big stuff I'm looking for. It's the common, everyday stuff: telling jokes, folding laundry, telling a picture from a person... all at the same time rather than one algorithm specialized to it. Like people do. I really don't know how far we are from that; it feels like it's 20 years off, same as always. But the AlphaGo thing (using a neural network which just just possibly be able to be re-used for other things) does suggest that maybe it's only 18 years off.
The surprise here is that learning from the game endings of internet GO players and somewhat informed computer vs computer games is enough to train an evaluation function with the predictive power to beat the world champion.
It is surprising. I'd go so far as to say "stunning". This kind of ML is really, really fallible, in exactly the areas that humans do well. I'm kinda baffled.
I darkly suspect that it means that humans aren't really very good at Go. The combinatorial explosion is so fast that the vast majority of moves don't get any consideration at all. Humans apply a well-trained intuition, but there's reason to think that good moves are completely ignored.
In chess, the best computers play slightly better than the best humans; it's as though we're near perfect play even if we can't actually work out all of the routes for all games. In Go, it sounds as if in the near future humans won't even be in consideration; you'd no more ask a human to play Go against a computer than you'd ask one to race an automobile.
Which is to say: perhaps the explanation is that the computer still isn't very good. It's just better than the extremely-fallible human.
I think it's the theater popcorn and merch sales that figure into the price more than Netflix does. The theater owners are going to want to pay much, much less for movies if they don't have a monopoly on (legal) early viewings.
The total amount of money spent by consumers on the movies (including snacks) will probably about come out in the wash at this price point, but theater owners won't stand for 100% of it going to the studio. They'll demand a cut. I'm not sure in what form they'll get it; it might be a profit sharing on the tickets they do sell (rather than sending practically all of it to the distributor). But they won't survive long if they don't get something.
Exactly. It provides a tool for identifying criminals: if you're using bitcoins, then you're doing something illegal. They don't even necessarily have to enforce the bitcoin law, just investigate whatever you're doing for the bitcoins. And if they fail at that, they can enforce the bitcoin law, like putting mobsters in jail for tax evasion.
Not saying that's a good thing, necessarily. The same thing could go for criminalizing cryptography. Even without that, crypto does potentially make you a target, and I suspect that big comms providers like GMail have been specifically discouraged from making crypto too easy.
"Non-profit" is a pretty loaded term here. It implies charities or colleges or arts organizations. That's not really what's going on. It just means that they're not turning their profits over to any shareholders. There are tax consequences, but it's actually not all that big a deal, since even ordinary corporations are only supposed to be paying taxes on profits anyway, not revenues. Which theoretically lets them raise wages and lower prices, though they're not actually all that good at either. Mostly, they turn it into giant executive bonuses.
I'm not exactly sure how MITRE and some other Beltway bandits get away with being "non-profits". I think they call themselves "research". But really, they don't belong in the same category as charities.
The problem is that the places that most need to be "fixed" don't have the money to do it, now or in the future. Yeah, it'll be nice to fix up New York, Amsterdam, and Miami, but Bangladesh and the Maldives can't afford it. And I don't think we'll see Americans (or the Chinese, or the Europeans) rushing to pony up tens or hundreds of billions of dollars to build them new inland cities.
For that matter I don't see them rushing to pay to protect even first-world coastal cities. "The country" has enough money to pay for it, but who exactly is going to shell out the money? Donations? Taxes? Who's going to be put in charge of deciding whether it's spent on enormous dikes versus up and moving entire cities inland.
Reducing carbon emissions will be both cheaper and fairer. Or at least, it would have been cheaper 20 years ago, when people were screaming that things needed to be done. "Fair", to me, would seem to rest heavily on those who delayed implementation because of obviously bogus anti-scientific claims that it wasn't happening at all. Even today, every single one of the Republican candidates for President believes that climate change is some kind of scientific conspiracy. And there's just no way they're going to allow any American money to be spent on it, either preventing it or dealing with the consequences, either here or abroad.
I don't disagree, but this doesn't really affect the Kochs all that much. They're in oil and gas, not coal. It may even be helping them: a lot of the capacity shifts to gas plants, which they supply through fracking.
The drop in oil prices may be hurting them, and some of their fracking operations have as they're no longer profitable. So you can take that as a bit of cheery news.