Another thing that happens is that television networks and print media report on the things he says.
Yes, they do... with an editorial filter, sufficient spin and nuance to fit their biases and narratives, and oh yeah - omissions of any brutally contradictory fact: you know, for 'brevity'. Afterwards, they toss on a megaton of opinion-makers and talking heads to either bury or twist the original message.
Mind, this is just as true of Fox News as it is of MSNBC or CNN.
Twitter (or, well, any popular social media, really) allows the President (or any other sufficiently-followed figure, really) to get their own message out. You get it raw, unfiltered, and without spin, nuance, or (usually) modification to fit a prevailing narrative.
It's certainly a two-edged sword for the President (e.g. reference to 'Congressman Shitt' was hilarious, but debasing to the office), but I bet there's more than a few ideology-mongers out there who would much prefer to regain the unquestioned control that they once had over their narratives. You know, for your own (and their advertisers') good.
This. These people aren't spying because of their party. They are spying because it pays them billions to.
...unless we're in China.
This is not an argument for either "side" per se, but rather a note of comparison:
In generally free societies, you get spied on for profit (if they can), and little-to-nothing more. The worst they do with your data to is sell what they learn about you to advertisers, who them toss up ads that hopefully get past ad-blockers and try to entice you out of some of your money.
Now let's contrast that with a totalitarian-oriented society, where that data, coupled with omnipresent external cameras, facial recognition, a bit of AI to back it up, and a government-owned/run social credit rating that can either make your life easier (if you're a 'model citizen'), or infinitely harder (if you don't sufficiently conform)?
Now - which of the two do you figure to be the most dangerous to individual life and liberty?
To be honest, I don't much mind carrying a smartphone in the US (half the time I'm out of any cell range anyway, given my rural locale). By contrast, I'd be scared shitless to carry one around if I were a citizen and resident of, say, Shanghai.
Worse - it means that Google is taking a bigger interest in Wikipedia.
Now whether it's just to get a fat tax write-off somewhere, or if there a strategic plan to slowly consume Wikipedia (by becoming its sole monetary/financial support), remains to be seen.
Okay, that was all tinfoil-like, but the possibilities still exist. But, like it or lump it, Wikipedia is the first place people go to get info about something, and Google goes out of its way to prominently display the Wikipedia page for whatever subject you're searching for. The growing 'integration' is becoming more of a thing between the two entities.
Now whether this is a good thing or bad, I leave to the reader... would it give Google control over what people learn? A little perhaps, but perhaps keeping Wikipedia independent enough to resist any such attempts isn't a bad thing, folks.
Thin-film solar uses fun bits like Cadmium, Indium, Gallium...
Mono- and Polycrystal panels use crystallized silicon dioxide as their base, but require a brew of chemicals and materials to crystallize, wafer, coat, and process into a working PV cell.
Moderate-sized solar panel factories (500Wp or more production per year) routinely cost around $500m-$1bn, and take around 3-5 years from bare dirt to first panel shipped (let alone full production output). The one I helped build up took 3-1/2 years and cost $500m - starting from an existing-but-empty complex of buildings and infrastructure.
Also, note that solar panel prices (around $0.80/Wp) are artificially depressed due to Chinese market-dumping and subsidization - it normally costs far more to build a panel that's going to still work 25+ years later (around $1.50/Wp or so.)
Do you know what it takes (in materials and energy) to create a solar panel, a windmill, or an economically viable hydroelectric dam? I'll save you the trip - they're expensive.
Long-term, hydro is the best long-term investment (~100-150+ years if properly maintained), followed by solar (~30 years), followed by windmills (~5-10 years before a required overhaul of major components - if the bearings don't burn out and catch fire from friction first). Hydro is limited because of the finite number of suitable locations, coupled with fierce environmental resistance. Hydro is the only one of the three that can provide a decent baseline output, not dictated by wind or natural diurnal cycles. On the other hand, they require the largest initial capital investment, and rarely is one built these days without national governmental funding, oversight, and control (because if it fails, a whole lot of people and property can be destroyed in a hurry...)
Solar panels are limited by the amount of silicon dioxide - rich ore (and for thin-film cells, rare-earth metal) deposits, the hazmat-level chemicals required to crate and process the solar cells, but most of all the massive amounts of energy required to melt and form the crystals (look up the "Czochralski process" (monocrystal) and the "Siemens process" (polycrystal) to give you an idea. Suffice it to say that building more than a dozen of these furnaces requires the local electric utility to have sufficient advance notice to accommodate them, and a large factory is usually required to notify said utility before starting or shutting down their furnace farms to avoid severe imbalance in the local grid.) Overall, they barely break even insofar as how much energy they produce over their useful lives, versus the energy required to produce them.
Windmills are the lest promising of the three. Yes they can be built in quantity, and can even, if properly maintained, produce more energy than required to build them. However, they are the most prone to failure, and rely on the most capricious of elements. While hydro dams almost always have a sufficient energy source (barring prolonged drought), and solar only requires that the sun comes up to produce at least something... windmills require a sufficiently strong wind to get the blades moving, and in most suitable sites, that's not a given even 50-60% of the time. Note that I haven't even touched on the massive NIMBY aspect of having massive white windmills erected within sight of one's neighborhood, nor have I touched on the nasty little aspect of bird kills caused by windmills.
Most any other type of laboratory-proven renewable (e.g. wave generation) is still too experimental, impractical, or (such as geothermal) too limited to be of widespread use due to the rarity of the energy source.
--
Meanwhile, insofar as nuclear power is concerned, this isn't 1956 anymore; reactor designs and lower-order fissiles (e.g. Thorium) can not only mitigate the potential for damage, but can reduce both radiation danger and nuclear waste to a practical non-issue (see also France.)
No need to mention fusion as anything viable (because a practical method to generate electricity from it hasn't been invented yet), but it is still a possibility.
--
But, I have an idea... why not continue doing what the free market has done all along - increase efficiencies in the products that consume the eventual electricity? An old 24" CRT television would swallow 120W without breaking a sweat - a new 42" LED television, nearly 2x as large, sips 80W (a 24" LED television only consumes 40W.) 120W incandescent light bulbs are being (and mostly have been) replaced by 10W LED bulbs. Massive fire-breathing desktops in the early 2000s that swallowed anywhere from 450-1200W are nowadays replaced by laptops that barely use 85W maximum (15" Macbook Pro specs). Where once you had to stuff batterie
I feel you on that... DAZ Studio gives you MacOS or Windows versions... if there were a Linux-native version, or Apple made a new MacBook Pro with a decent nVidia-based GPU (1060 or 1080GTX w/ 6GB RAM, please), I'd dump 'doze in a heartbeat (and yes it works in WINE, but not very well.) As it is, they don't, so I'm kind of stuck for now.
But... I only keep CG stuff on said laptop, and nothing else.
Yeah I use a little thing called safari. Maybe you have heard of it. It just work right out of the box. No spyware. No malware. No unrenderable pages. No bloat. It is very nice. You should try it some time!
Awesome! Now where can I get an.rpm or.deb for it?
I don't think they're truly shooting for reductio ad absurdum here... it could be as simple as linking villages larger than X people via a single point or two with Satellite Internet (with the 'ground station' being located where it can link up), and spreading the joy via local wifi/wireless.
Satellite Internet can give you 25-30mbps nowadays, no sweat.
It's a bit laggy (okay, laggy as hell), but it is serviceable. I've personally done webex VoIP over ViaSat(formerly Exede), and while it behaves like a one-way radio, it does work. I worked remotely over it before DSL showed up at my semi-remote homestead (they brought out 25mbps DSL because they were running fiber between two small-ish towns anyway, and it was near-trivial to plop down a few DSLAMs along the way.)
You won't be doing FPS twitch-games over Sat, but if you can get used to the slight start delays (think 2000-era http page-loading) it does do a fairly decent job of streaming, browsing, online shopping/banking/whatever, and similar.
The only real disadvantage is the bandwidth caps, and the fact that it's a bit costly to have even a 30GB/mo. plan. That said, prices have been coming down over the years (it used to cost a friggin' mint), and I suspect that they will go down even further over time as the tech gets better.
Only question is, does Canada have geosynchronous satellites that can be reached from most (if not all) rural areas they have? Is it even possible for that to happen in extreme areas (e.g. Northern Yukon Territories) without having to have some rather extreme angles on the ground-side dishes? Also, yes, some folks won't be able to get it due to obstacles (massive trees, mountains to their immediate South, etc.) But, that said, if they can overcome all that, at least *most* folks in rural Canada can get broadband (even if it means having a few dishes shotgunned together in a village with a local (and obviously somewhat boosted) wireless access point for the residents to connect with.)
Note that all of these were FREE, unlike climate change "research" which is a vortex sucking all our research dollars these day.s
This kind of brings up a good point... kinda. I'll explain, though it'll be odd thoughts.
It's not the quantity of research that brings breakthroughs, nor is it money.
It's the intangibles: Creativity, Intelligence, Wisdom. Not enough of that to go around, eh?
Scientific progress isn't something you can mass-produce, and it's not going to follow some sort of goofball variant of Moore's Law. Going from one powerhouse top-end scientific lab to 40 won't suddenly give you 40 Einsteins. You need to seek out 39 more people who are sufficiently smart, curious, creative, and wise to fill them.
There is also the problem of what to pursue. Why is it that overall, we (generally) only chase increasingly esoteric stuff, or pursue avenues that only go further into the weeds (or please political/ideological masters)? Why not encourage the majority of scientists to go after the big impactful stuff, like figuring out gravity enough to defeat it, or achieving telomere regeneration, or similar? Yes, I know, there's lots of scientists going after these (and other) fields, but I suspect not enough. But then, this is not a new problem... 100-150 years ago, the majority of scientists were doing much the same things (e.g. determining the composition of interplanetary ether, Eugenics, or other worthless horseshit...)
Anyrate, these are things that you cannot stuff into a spreadsheet... they're things you have to seek out, nurture, teach (to a small extent), and encourage.
Here's a modest proposal: Ban all tobacco products completely.
Will never happen. Government makes too much money off tobacco to ban it.
...especially state government. How else can you tax the crap out of the poor (since they smoke way more than middle-class and rich folks do) and not get yelled at for it?
Really? I suspect it has nothing to do with teens smoking. Also, teenagers usually go for the taboo stuff first, if only to show off a sense of independence to their peers. If it isn't smoking, it'd likely be something else. Besides, teenagers have been smoking weed for nearly a century now, and at least on a recreational basis, that stuff is illegal as hell for kids to partake of.
Sometimes I wish that statists would just say outright what they want to do - it's not like eliminating smoking is a bad goal, and for once the honesty would be refreshing.
So you want federally mandated software development standards that, because they don't know a damn thing, would require 100% unit and functional test coverage along with passing a State approved linter and vulnerability scanner?
"When I first learned C++ in college, it was expected that sometimes your program would crash." - the author implies that it just happens but that's never been true and I would really be hesitant about hiring a programmer that accepted that his programs sometimes crash.
Nobody blames the 18-wheeler itself if the driver is too incompetent to load or drive it properly under most conditions, and nobody needs to go around blaming C/++, either.
If you're going to play that close to the metal (let alone doing anything further down, like, say, Assembly), at least try to know WTF you're doing, and get help if you're not sure. The more powerful and flexible the tool, the more dangerous (and less tolerant) things can get for the neglectful, the incompetent, and the ignorant.
... because if we switch to renewable energy and (maybe) electric cars...
If you knew what was involved in the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and suchlike (let alone the horrendous amounts of energy and toxic chemistry involved in creating the devices), you wouldn't be so quick to draw such a conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
That's correct.
Another thing that happens is that television networks and print media report on the things he says.
Yes, they do... with an editorial filter, sufficient spin and nuance to fit their biases and narratives, and oh yeah - omissions of any brutally contradictory fact: you know, for 'brevity'. Afterwards, they toss on a megaton of opinion-makers and talking heads to either bury or twist the original message.
Mind, this is just as true of Fox News as it is of MSNBC or CNN.
Twitter (or, well, any popular social media, really) allows the President (or any other sufficiently-followed figure, really) to get their own message out. You get it raw, unfiltered, and without spin, nuance, or (usually) modification to fit a prevailing narrative.
It's certainly a two-edged sword for the President (e.g. reference to 'Congressman Shitt' was hilarious, but debasing to the office), but I bet there's more than a few ideology-mongers out there who would much prefer to regain the unquestioned control that they once had over their narratives. You know, for your own (and their advertisers') good.
This. These people aren't spying because of their party. They are spying because it pays them billions to.
...unless we're in China.
This is not an argument for either "side" per se, but rather a note of comparison:
In generally free societies, you get spied on for profit (if they can), and little-to-nothing more. The worst they do with your data to is sell what they learn about you to advertisers, who them toss up ads that hopefully get past ad-blockers and try to entice you out of some of your money.
Now let's contrast that with a totalitarian-oriented society, where that data, coupled with omnipresent external cameras, facial recognition, a bit of AI to back it up, and a government-owned/run social credit rating that can either make your life easier (if you're a 'model citizen'), or infinitely harder (if you don't sufficiently conform)?
Now - which of the two do you figure to be the most dangerous to individual life and liberty?
To be honest, I don't much mind carrying a smartphone in the US (half the time I'm out of any cell range anyway, given my rural locale). By contrast, I'd be scared shitless to carry one around if I were a citizen and resident of, say, Shanghai.
Worse - it means that Google is taking a bigger interest in Wikipedia.
Now whether it's just to get a fat tax write-off somewhere, or if there a strategic plan to slowly consume Wikipedia (by becoming its sole monetary/financial support), remains to be seen.
Okay, that was all tinfoil-like, but the possibilities still exist. But, like it or lump it, Wikipedia is the first place people go to get info about something, and Google goes out of its way to prominently display the Wikipedia page for whatever subject you're searching for. The growing 'integration' is becoming more of a thing between the two entities.
Now whether this is a good thing or bad, I leave to the reader... would it give Google control over what people learn? A little perhaps, but perhaps keeping Wikipedia independent enough to resist any such attempts isn't a bad thing, folks.
Thin-film solar uses fun bits like Cadmium, Indium, Gallium...
Mono- and Polycrystal panels use crystallized silicon dioxide as their base, but require a brew of chemicals and materials to crystallize, wafer, coat, and process into a working PV cell.
Moderate-sized solar panel factories (500Wp or more production per year) routinely cost around $500m-$1bn, and take around 3-5 years from bare dirt to first panel shipped (let alone full production output). The one I helped build up took 3-1/2 years and cost $500m - starting from an existing-but-empty complex of buildings and infrastructure.
Also, note that solar panel prices (around $0.80/Wp) are artificially depressed due to Chinese market-dumping and subsidization - it normally costs far more to build a panel that's going to still work 25+ years later (around $1.50/Wp or so.)
Small point of order:
Do you know what it takes (in materials and energy) to create a solar panel, a windmill, or an economically viable hydroelectric dam? I'll save you the trip - they're expensive.
Long-term, hydro is the best long-term investment (~100-150+ years if properly maintained), followed by solar (~30 years), followed by windmills (~5-10 years before a required overhaul of major components - if the bearings don't burn out and catch fire from friction first). Hydro is limited because of the finite number of suitable locations, coupled with fierce environmental resistance. Hydro is the only one of the three that can provide a decent baseline output, not dictated by wind or natural diurnal cycles. On the other hand, they require the largest initial capital investment, and rarely is one built these days without national governmental funding, oversight, and control (because if it fails, a whole lot of people and property can be destroyed in a hurry...)
Solar panels are limited by the amount of silicon dioxide - rich ore (and for thin-film cells, rare-earth metal) deposits, the hazmat-level chemicals required to crate and process the solar cells, but most of all the massive amounts of energy required to melt and form the crystals (look up the "Czochralski process" (monocrystal) and the "Siemens process" (polycrystal) to give you an idea. Suffice it to say that building more than a dozen of these furnaces requires the local electric utility to have sufficient advance notice to accommodate them, and a large factory is usually required to notify said utility before starting or shutting down their furnace farms to avoid severe imbalance in the local grid.) Overall, they barely break even insofar as how much energy they produce over their useful lives, versus the energy required to produce them.
Windmills are the lest promising of the three. Yes they can be built in quantity, and can even, if properly maintained, produce more energy than required to build them. However, they are the most prone to failure, and rely on the most capricious of elements. While hydro dams almost always have a sufficient energy source (barring prolonged drought), and solar only requires that the sun comes up to produce at least something... windmills require a sufficiently strong wind to get the blades moving, and in most suitable sites, that's not a given even 50-60% of the time. Note that I haven't even touched on the massive NIMBY aspect of having massive white windmills erected within sight of one's neighborhood, nor have I touched on the nasty little aspect of bird kills caused by windmills.
Most any other type of laboratory-proven renewable (e.g. wave generation) is still too experimental, impractical, or (such as geothermal) too limited to be of widespread use due to the rarity of the energy source.
--
Meanwhile, insofar as nuclear power is concerned, this isn't 1956 anymore; reactor designs and lower-order fissiles (e.g. Thorium) can not only mitigate the potential for damage, but can reduce both radiation danger and nuclear waste to a practical non-issue (see also France.)
No need to mention fusion as anything viable (because a practical method to generate electricity from it hasn't been invented yet), but it is still a possibility.
--
But, I have an idea... why not continue doing what the free market has done all along - increase efficiencies in the products that consume the eventual electricity? An old 24" CRT television would swallow 120W without breaking a sweat - a new 42" LED television, nearly 2x as large, sips 80W (a 24" LED television only consumes 40W.) 120W incandescent light bulbs are being (and mostly have been) replaced by 10W LED bulbs. Massive fire-breathing desktops in the early 2000s that swallowed anywhere from 450-1200W are nowadays replaced by laptops that barely use 85W maximum (15" Macbook Pro specs). Where once you had to stuff batterie
I feel you on that... DAZ Studio gives you MacOS or Windows versions... if there were a Linux-native version, or Apple made a new MacBook Pro with a decent nVidia-based GPU (1060 or 1080GTX w/ 6GB RAM, please), I'd dump 'doze in a heartbeat (and yes it works in WINE, but not very well.) As it is, they don't, so I'm kind of stuck for now.
But... I only keep CG stuff on said laptop, and nothing else.
Yeah I use a little thing called safari. Maybe you have heard of it. It just work right out of the box. No spyware. No malware. No unrenderable pages. No bloat. It is very nice. You should try it some time!
Awesome! Now where can I get an .rpm or .deb for it?
Pretty much this... I managed to prevent FB from knowing where I am by removing (and previously disabling) the stupid app off the phone.
If I actually needed to be in Facebook, I'd just use the mobile browser and kill that tab before I closed it.
"No one ever got fired for buying IBM!"
Oracles stock prices says differently.
One good, hard layoff or bout of book-juggling by the CFO can pump a stock. Let's see what happens a few quarters later...
I don't think they're truly shooting for reductio ad absurdum here... it could be as simple as linking villages larger than X people via a single point or two with Satellite Internet (with the 'ground station' being located where it can link up), and spreading the joy via local wifi/wireless.
Satellite Internet can give you 25-30mbps nowadays, no sweat.
It's a bit laggy (okay, laggy as hell), but it is serviceable. I've personally done webex VoIP over ViaSat(formerly Exede), and while it behaves like a one-way radio, it does work. I worked remotely over it before DSL showed up at my semi-remote homestead (they brought out 25mbps DSL because they were running fiber between two small-ish towns anyway, and it was near-trivial to plop down a few DSLAMs along the way.)
You won't be doing FPS twitch-games over Sat, but if you can get used to the slight start delays (think 2000-era http page-loading) it does do a fairly decent job of streaming, browsing, online shopping/banking/whatever, and similar.
The only real disadvantage is the bandwidth caps, and the fact that it's a bit costly to have even a 30GB/mo. plan. That said, prices have been coming down over the years (it used to cost a friggin' mint), and I suspect that they will go down even further over time as the tech gets better.
Only question is, does Canada have geosynchronous satellites that can be reached from most (if not all) rural areas they have? Is it even possible for that to happen in extreme areas (e.g. Northern Yukon Territories) without having to have some rather extreme angles on the ground-side dishes? Also, yes, some folks won't be able to get it due to obstacles (massive trees, mountains to their immediate South, etc.) But, that said, if they can overcome all that, at least *most* folks in rural Canada can get broadband (even if it means having a few dishes shotgunned together in a village with a local (and obviously somewhat boosted) wireless access point for the residents to connect with.)
Note that all of these were FREE, unlike climate change "research" which is a vortex sucking all our research dollars these day.s
This kind of brings up a good point... kinda. I'll explain, though it'll be odd thoughts.
It's not the quantity of research that brings breakthroughs, nor is it money.
It's the intangibles: Creativity, Intelligence, Wisdom. Not enough of that to go around, eh?
Scientific progress isn't something you can mass-produce, and it's not going to follow some sort of goofball variant of Moore's Law. Going from one powerhouse top-end scientific lab to 40 won't suddenly give you 40 Einsteins. You need to seek out 39 more people who are sufficiently smart, curious, creative, and wise to fill them.
There is also the problem of what to pursue. Why is it that overall, we (generally) only chase increasingly esoteric stuff, or pursue avenues that only go further into the weeds (or please political/ideological masters)? Why not encourage the majority of scientists to go after the big impactful stuff, like figuring out gravity enough to defeat it, or achieving telomere regeneration, or similar? Yes, I know, there's lots of scientists going after these (and other) fields, but I suspect not enough. But then, this is not a new problem... 100-150 years ago, the majority of scientists were doing much the same things (e.g. determining the composition of interplanetary ether, Eugenics, or other worthless horseshit...)
Anyrate, these are things that you cannot stuff into a spreadsheet... they're things you have to seek out, nurture, teach (to a small extent), and encourage.
Here's a modest proposal: Ban all tobacco products completely.
Will never happen. Government makes too much money off tobacco to ban it.
...especially state government. How else can you tax the crap out of the poor (since they smoke way more than middle-class and rich folks do) and not get yelled at for it?
Really? I suspect it has nothing to do with teens smoking. Also, teenagers usually go for the taboo stuff first, if only to show off a sense of independence to their peers. If it isn't smoking, it'd likely be something else. Besides, teenagers have been smoking weed for nearly a century now, and at least on a recreational basis, that stuff is illegal as hell for kids to partake of.
Sometimes I wish that statists would just say outright what they want to do - it's not like eliminating smoking is a bad goal, and for once the honesty would be refreshing.
So you want federally mandated software development standards that, because they don't know a damn thing, would require 100% unit and functional test coverage along with passing a State approved linter and vulnerability scanner?
Well, in some cases... those already exist.
Nobody is waving-away any of the problems (trust me, C/++ has a shitload of them.)
The thing is, *all* languages have hazards to at least some degree, and the closer to the metal you get, the bigger the hazards.
Is it not too much... I mean 7000+ satellites over the US?
Unless they're all geosynchronous, I suspect that they'll be orbiting the entire planet. ;)
Unless that language is, say, HTML, I wish you luck with finding a childproof language. ;)
You do realize that you could pretty much replace "C/C++" with any language that has that level of access, usability, and flexibility, right?
"When I first learned C++ in college, it was expected that sometimes your program would crash." - the author implies that it just happens but that's never been true and I would really be hesitant about hiring a programmer that accepted that his programs sometimes crash.
...welcome to the Java mindset?
(/me ducks and runs, laughing maniacally...)
Shows how optimized your code is. Didnt even make first post.
He forgot to check clock()
Nobody blames the 18-wheeler itself if the driver is too incompetent to load or drive it properly under most conditions, and nobody needs to go around blaming C/++, either.
If you're going to play that close to the metal (let alone doing anything further down, like, say, Assembly), at least try to know WTF you're doing, and get help if you're not sure. The more powerful and flexible the tool, the more dangerous (and less tolerant) things can get for the neglectful, the incompetent, and the ignorant.
The enemies of humanity keep promoting this hoax.
... because if we switch to renewable energy and (maybe) electric cars...
If you knew what was involved in the manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines, and suchlike (let alone the horrendous amounts of energy and toxic chemistry involved in creating the devices), you wouldn't be so quick to draw such a conclusion.