And apparently Android Wear watches aren't what people like. I haven't looked at sales numbers but if Qualcomm can't be bothered updating the chip, there must not be enough money in it. That tells me not many people like Android Wear watches,
Wow, stunning. Cabbies who have invested tons of effort in learning The Knowledge believe that effort adds value! No kidding, anyone who's invested effort learning a skill wants to believe that was worthwhile. No one wants to believe their skill is obsolete or low value.
If this makes cabbie service so much better, wonderful! Let's put it to a test. Uber and Uber drivers are betting GPS is better. Cabbies are betting humans are better. Let them both compete for riders and in a few years, we'll have a really good idea which is preferable.
This is, you'll notice, exactly how we decide which other product and service innovations are worthwhile and which are not.
Absolutely. I remember working with a friend who was trying to launch a company, around 2000. He was enamored with the idea of going public because it seemed flashy and prestigious. I couldn't figure that out. I assumed the only reason a business would want to be public was because it was the only way to raise capital it needed. In practice, it often happens so private investors can cash out and move on to new investments. But being public creates work which, being lazy, I'd much rather avoid.
...73% of children believe there's a monster living under their bed and want the Power Rangers to capture it.
Sheesh. Just because a lot of people (who couldn't tell AI from a hole in the ground) believe something doesn't make it true. And just because they want someone else to pay for their imagined fears doesn't make that a reasonable thing.
Hell, we elected Donald F**ing Trump as President. If that doesn't tell you fear the wisdom of crowds, nothing else will.
If we're going to do a universal health care offering, everyone needs to pay into that safety net,
I'm proposing a very different sort of system. I propose a system of equal opportunity to enter or not enter. If you want to take care of yourself, I think you should be allowed to do that. If you want to use a single-payer system, it would be nice to make that available too. Just like today my employer offers a choice between a low premium/high deductable PPO, a high premium/low deductible PPO, and an all-in-one HMO (Kaiser Permanente). I'd like to ensure people have choices so they can pick a plan which suits their needs.
It's like not getting life insurance until you think you're going to die. That's not how insurance works.
Yes, I understand how insurance works. Generally my fondest hope is that I'll never make a claim. That's not how we use health financing insurance today, where pretty much everyone is making claims all the time. I hestitate to call this "insurance". It's more like a financing plan. But I digress...
I agree there is a free rider problem. I think there are ways to address it other than requiring everyone to pay into a system and take the benefits. For example, we could all pay into a system and get vouchers. We could have a system which has different premiums depending on whether the offering is allowed to take our health status and age into account. We could have offerings which cover pre-existing conditions and other offerings which do not. There's a large number of options.
And unless your company guarantees health insurance as retirement benefit until you die, you're going to need it when you're probably at the most expensive part of your medical life...
And this is one of the points I feel most strongly about. My health financing should not be tied to or paid via my employer. It's a goofy system, an historical accident from WW II. And I think it leads to all sorts of problems, mostly because the person getting the benefit (you and me) isn't the person directly paying the bills (my employer and the insurance company or government are intermediaries). With that indirection, there's very little direct pressure to hold down costs and improve service, and we wind up with a health care system which is expensive and less effective than it could be.
I don't either. What I do expect is that the products will be cheaper.
It must be nice living in your society. On Planet Pete, government agencies are routinely criticized for being inefficient, sluggish, and having poor customer service. I've worked at defense contractors and private companies too. Private companies are much more focused on controlling costs and improving products and services.
I suspect you overestimate the amount of profit typical companies make. A pretty typical net profit is something like 6%. Walmart has a net profit of something like 2%. Apple has an outrageous net profit of something like 25%. Do you really think a government agency without a profit and loss statement will be within 6% as efficient as a private company? I don't.
Let's look at some examples. Who would you rather deal with, FedEx or the US Post Office? A Ford dealer or the DMV? Charles Schwab (or any other bank/broker) or the IRS? A local home builder or your city zoning department? How about the company everyone loves to hate, your cable company or the municipal water district? Personally, I'll take the private enterprise every time.
I'm not sure it will crowd out the possibility of private insurance, however, for one reason. Even if it covers nearly 100% of things, people are still going to want optional or cutting edge treatments, and they're going to want them now.
I don't think I understand your comment. If a MfA plan covers 100% of things, why would I need new, cutting edge treatments? If they're not covered, then MfA doesn't cover 100% o
Personally, I wouldn't make that wish. I'd wish for a universal single-payer option. Medicare for all. Why? Because if an employer wants to offer a better health insurance program, they definitely should be able to as an incentive. But if they don't or can't, (or if the employee is no longer employed) the employee shouldn't be penalized with no health insurance.
That is a very interesting and point. I'm open to considering it but here are some issues.
First, both participation and payment need to be optional. If I'm paying Medicare for all taxes and am entitled to the benefits, that pretty much destroys any market for private insurance (either paid directly by me or via my employer). So what I think it would need to look like is a government-sponsored enterprise. Examples of this are the Post Office, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. Technically these are all independent organizations with their own profit/loss statements. Technically any could go out of business if they don't provide good value for the cost.
They also run afoul of the moral hazard of any GSE. No one expects the federal government to let any of these three fail. Thus they can take risks a private enterprise can't. They also get pressured by politicians to do financially dumb things (and I'm mostly looking at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
At that point, if it's an either/or sort of deal, you have to ask why you expect a GSE to offer better products than any random insurance company. I don't see any reason to expect that.
So how about a different option? Suppose our Medicare for All enterprise only offers minimal coverage? Everyone would use the service and you could supplement with additional coverage if you wanted it. I believe this is sorta how the British system works but I'm not sure. The problem is defining that level of minimal coverage. We could have talked about this in 2013 but never got that far. So, MfA could cover, say, terminal cancer treatments but not routine checkups. To an extent we have this already, in that you can go to any emergency room and get treatment for acute conditions. That's a form of catastrophic coverage for everyone. I'm actually fine with this, it's a good pragmatic system and doesn't actually cost all that much. People love to complain that poor people overuse emergency rooms but it's actually small potatoes compared to other costs.
Problem with that is politicians are really unlikely to do the brutal calculus to come up with a minimal level of care. What politician would you expect to actually meet with a constituent with a toothache and really tell that voter they need to get their tooth pulled (for $200) instead of a $2,000 root canal and crown? You can't, it's entirely unreasonable. So politicians are always going to press for more and more coverage, again crowding out any possibility of private insurance.
BTW, we already see this in the ACA plan definitions. I'm pretty sure there's a viable market for plans below Bronze level but the ACA regulations make it impossible to offer that.
Anyway, I don't expect to convince you. This is a complicated topic. This is exactly what we should have been debating in 2013 but didn't because we all talked past each other.
Portable retirement accounts are called "IRAs". They've been around for decades. Use them. IRAs and 401ks, plans owned by the employee (as opposed to traditional pensions) are wonderful things. No one but me can make a stupid decision and screw up my retirement.
Portable health care insurance is a fabulous idea. I hate having to change my insurance plan (and possibly my doctors) every time I change jobs. If I could make a wish and change one thing about the US health financing system, it would be to remove employers from the health insurance equation.
We REGULATE because we care about the harm evil corporations will do to people.
Well, two points.
First, at this point, we don't know whether gene therapies will help or harm. Past trials turned out to be ineffective or harmful. There are plausible reasons to believe this time will be different. We won't know until people conduct careful (and likely expensive and time consuming) experiments. In the mean time, people are dying. I'm glad I don't have to decide which approach will kill the most people.
Anyway.
My second point is a broad political one. Politicians and regulators say we regulate to protect people, either from evil companies or more likely plain ignorance. But stated intentions aren't real intentions and certainly aren't outcomes. There's a common story these days that much regulation has the predominant effect of protecting incumbents from competition at the expense of consumers. I'm sure there's more than one drug company or AMA lobbyist pushing for regulation ostensibly for safety but really to protect a revenue stream. I'd prefer to think doctors are above that but they're human too with student loans to pay off.
I couldn't resist looking this up. I went to the California Secretary of State's site and pulled up the county-by-county results from the 2016 presidential election.
San Francisco, Alameda, Marin, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and Los Angeles counties look quite blue. All voted over 70% for Clinton. There's a whole flock more in the high 60 percent range. For those not familiar with California geography, these are all mostly urban counties ringing the San Francisco Bay (except, of course, Los Angeles). Santa Cruz and to a lesser extent my home of Santa Clara counties still have agricultural regions but they're dominated by urban areas.
(San Francisco was 85% Clinton. So much for supporting diversity in terms of ideology. But I digress...)
Meanwhile, over on Team Trump, we have Lassen and Modoc counties at over 70% Trump, Tehama and Shasta in the high 60s. Those are completely rural counties with no towns or cities much over the 100,000 people range. I believe any election won by 60% of the vote gets portrayed as a landslide victory so I'd call them pretty red.
On the one hand, this would generate two new Senate seats. Yay! As a Californian, what's not to like about that? Since the new seats would almost certainly be Republican, the Democrats might not like this. Personally, I wouldn't stop at two states, I'd create three or four.
As TFA says, there have been many moves to break up California. It's not driven by any outside interest, it really is a local movement. The state really is too large. The liberal, urban coast has very little in common with the rural mountains and central valley. The coast also dominates state government and the rural counties don't feel heard in Sacramento, let alone Washington.
Financially, it would be really interesting. Most of the state property and income tax also comes from the cities: that's where all the people and companies are. I don't know how the income and expenses would get divided up. Divvying up any state debt would also be really contentious.
Better idea: Split the US in two countries. The Red States and the Blue States. And build a wall between the two.
It's more like Blue Cities and Red Rural. Almost all rural areas vote Republican and all urban areas vote Democratic. It's hard to find states which are entirely red or blue. It would be pretty difficult to wall off all the major cities from their surroundings.
A few harvests of corn without tilling the plant under or at least leaving it lying will mean you *must* fertilize... and that just ends up in our streams polluting our rivers and lakes and killing fish.
Yeah, the soil replenishment issue is the big one which jumps out at me. I know in the California central valley, rice farmers often burn rice straw to rid of it. I don't know what happens to the above-ground parts of soybean and corn plants (or wheat for that matter). I'd like to think it decomposes and feeds the soil but honestly have no idea.
BTW, don't confuse nitrogen fertilizer with compost. Once you've grown the soybean plant, the soil is as charged with fixed nitrogen as it's going to be. I don't believe the composted above-ground plant adds all that much. I could be wrong, I'm not a farmer or soil chemist.
Don't even get me started on how polluting electric vehicles are... both in power generation and production of the batteries.
Battery production pollution is definitely a thing but getting off topic. Let's park that, shall we?
Electric cars powered by electricity from natural gas, hydro, or solar ought to be pretty clean. Are you saying they're not? If so, please explain, I don't understand. I have no idea what sort of pollution a wood burning power plant will generate. It's probably better than coal, worse than natural gas, and relatively close to carbon-neutral.
Fair enough. We already handle this for lots of agricultural products (e.g. hay). You basically just cut it down and let it dry in the sun. I don't know about the density of coal (pretty high), sawgrass hay (dunno) and natural gas (relatively low).
Regardless of density, I'm trying to compare and contrast biofuels vs. bio-fixed-location-power-plants. You have to do all the same cutting down, processing, and moving about. Just with biofuels, you then throw away huge chunks of the plant and spend a bunch of time and energy converting the remainder. That's got to be an enormous potential energy loss. Never mind that there are huge reservoirs of biomass causing problems (e.g. overgrown forests) which can't be used to make liquid fuels. Harvesting that for electric power generation seems like a win-win.
OK, biodiesel and ethanol for liquid fuels were interesting ideas but aren't panning out as planned. Ethanol pushes up corn prices, biodiesel is expensive, no one has a commercial viable process for creating alcohol from cellulose (the great hope around 2000).
At the same time, we have coal plants which are being shuttered in favor of natural gas and/or solar. No, wait, keep reading! I'm not going to advocate burning coal!
Thing is, we have lots of biological fuels, they're just solid instead of liquid. We have corn plants (the whole thing, not just the corn kernels), soybean plants (ditto, the whole plant), overgrown forests, all sorts of stuff. It all burns. So how 'bout we take the trees, brush, switchgrass, vote-buying...er...subsidized crop plants, everything, and just burn it in reconfigured coal plants? Dry the plants, grind them to powder and dump them in. Boom, done, and probably way much more efficient than trying to create liquid fuels.
I'm sure it's harder than I'm making it seem. I don't know if it's economical (but that hasn't stopped us so far). Gotta be better than what we're doing now.
25 down/3 up is considered "entry level" now? Wow, I need an upgrade. I'm at 12/3 and that's not the lowest speed package my ISP (AT&T) offers.
12 seems plenty enough for me, streaming one or two movies at a time, no gaming, no file sharing. no heavy uploads. Video quality is good but not fantastic.
Never actually worked as an manager, executive, CEO, or landlord, have you? They definitely don't just sit no their butts, at least, not the decent ones.
TFA had all sorts of outrage about how these are medical devices, not "socks". I'm sympathetic to the idea that you want to make sure the contacts are manufactured by a reputable factory and won't damage your eye. Corneas don't heal very fast. It sounds like that's not an issue.
Not being an optometrist or ophthalmologist, I have no idea whether you could damage your eye with an incorrect prescription. My guess is it's unlikely but I really don't know. I would tend to trust people with their eyes. I only get one pair and I'm pretty fond of them (misshapen as they are).
True enough. I'd be inclined to put the robot on the street instead but that's just me.
Thing is, the sidewalks in SF are often really crowded and a total mess. That seems the hardest place in the world to unleash a robot. If it were me, I'd start somewhere much easier to navigate. But maybe the two go hand in hand. You need lots of busy people who value convenience, are comfortable with technology, have the cash to pay for delivery, and are crowded together. Would Chicago be better? Boston and NYC are other choices but have similar challenges.
But on a meta level, has this really been a problem yet? I don't hear news stories of people being flattened by errant delivery robots. Perhaps we could wait until there's a demonstrable problem before trying to solve it?
Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians... There has never been a better time to...leverage the publicly available fiber backbone, or build political support for new, local-government owned networks.
We don't want the principles of the internet in the hands of politicians, so let's create a government owned internet? And we don't like nasty corporations so let's use the (corporate owned) fiber backbone?
I'm lost what this guy wants. I guess it's local ownership and I'm sympathetic to that. I like farmer's markets as much as the next person. It's just a little hard to build a cross-country network one town at a time.
What the Internet looks like with no net neutrality.
Or one could look back to those dark years of..oh, wait, what we have today, since the rules have never been in effect.
I can't wait for the new rules because AT&T is constantly blocking access to Netflix and throttling YouTube so I'll buy UVerse instead. Except they're not, ever, because they know I'd drop their service in a heartbeat for Comcast or a less limited cellular data plan. Face it, competition is better at keeping the players honest, not FCC regulations.
Cut down the trees, bake the wood into charcoal, re-bury the charcoal to re-create the coal bed. Problem solved!
Seriously, this would work. I don't believe you even have to actually bury the charcoal. My understanding is it's quite stable and nothing eats it. People in Haiti, who deforested their island to create cooking charcoal, might not understand why we intentionally leave mountains of it around but that's a different problem.
Let's do a little math. 1.7e15 pounds of CO2. That's about 210e12 kg of carbon (CO2 is 12/44 carbon by mass). Coal has a density of around 800 kg/m^3 (charcoal is much less dense but it'll compress when heaped in a big pile). That leaves us with 260e9 m^3 of carbon. Let's assume we make carbon "cone volcanos" about 500 m tall, 2000 meters in diameter (anyone know the angle of a huge pile of charcoal?). That's 260e6 m^3 per hill.
Thus we need around 1,000 500 meter high piles of carbon, all made by cutting down trees. And since we have 80 years, we need to make about 10 a year. Does that sound feasible? I don't know.
Absolutely. Scalpers...er...resellers are just an inevitable result of setting ticket prices too low.
I was just talking with a friend about the IPO frenzy in the lat '90s. Everyone cheered when a company would offer an IPO and the stock price would double or triple on opening day. I always wondered why people were so excited that the company left 50% of the cash on the table.
Slashdot Mirror
People like what they like.
And apparently Android Wear watches aren't what people like. I haven't looked at sales numbers but if Qualcomm can't be bothered updating the chip, there must not be enough money in it. That tells me not many people like Android Wear watches,
Wow, stunning. Cabbies who have invested tons of effort in learning The Knowledge believe that effort adds value! No kidding, anyone who's invested effort learning a skill wants to believe that was worthwhile. No one wants to believe their skill is obsolete or low value.
If this makes cabbie service so much better, wonderful! Let's put it to a test. Uber and Uber drivers are betting GPS is better. Cabbies are betting humans are better. Let them both compete for riders and in a few years, we'll have a really good idea which is preferable.
This is, you'll notice, exactly how we decide which other product and service innovations are worthwhile and which are not.
Absolutely. I remember working with a friend who was trying to launch a company, around 2000. He was enamored with the idea of going public because it seemed flashy and prestigious. I couldn't figure that out. I assumed the only reason a business would want to be public was because it was the only way to raise capital it needed. In practice, it often happens so private investors can cash out and move on to new investments. But being public creates work which, being lazy, I'd much rather avoid.
...73% of children believe there's a monster living under their bed and want the Power Rangers to capture it.
Sheesh. Just because a lot of people (who couldn't tell AI from a hole in the ground) believe something doesn't make it true. And just because they want someone else to pay for their imagined fears doesn't make that a reasonable thing.
Hell, we elected Donald F**ing Trump as President. If that doesn't tell you fear the wisdom of crowds, nothing else will.
We need to tax people who use products powered by AI. How dare they buy products which are cheaper and/or better than ones powered by wetware!
(Never mind that who collects the tax, who pays the tax to the government, and who bears the burden of the tax can all be different.)
If we're going to do a universal health care offering, everyone needs to pay into that safety net,
I'm proposing a very different sort of system. I propose a system of equal opportunity to enter or not enter. If you want to take care of yourself, I think you should be allowed to do that. If you want to use a single-payer system, it would be nice to make that available too. Just like today my employer offers a choice between a low premium/high deductable PPO, a high premium/low deductible PPO, and an all-in-one HMO (Kaiser Permanente). I'd like to ensure people have choices so they can pick a plan which suits their needs.
It's like not getting life insurance until you think you're going to die. That's not how insurance works.
Yes, I understand how insurance works. Generally my fondest hope is that I'll never make a claim. That's not how we use health financing insurance today, where pretty much everyone is making claims all the time. I hestitate to call this "insurance". It's more like a financing plan. But I digress...
I agree there is a free rider problem. I think there are ways to address it other than requiring everyone to pay into a system and take the benefits. For example, we could all pay into a system and get vouchers. We could have a system which has different premiums depending on whether the offering is allowed to take our health status and age into account. We could have offerings which cover pre-existing conditions and other offerings which do not. There's a large number of options.
And unless your company guarantees health insurance as retirement benefit until you die, you're going to need it when you're probably at the most expensive part of your medical life...
And this is one of the points I feel most strongly about. My health financing should not be tied to or paid via my employer. It's a goofy system, an historical accident from WW II. And I think it leads to all sorts of problems, mostly because the person getting the benefit (you and me) isn't the person directly paying the bills (my employer and the insurance company or government are intermediaries). With that indirection, there's very little direct pressure to hold down costs and improve service, and we wind up with a health care system which is expensive and less effective than it could be.
I don't either. What I do expect is that the products will be cheaper.
It must be nice living in your society. On Planet Pete, government agencies are routinely criticized for being inefficient, sluggish, and having poor customer service. I've worked at defense contractors and private companies too. Private companies are much more focused on controlling costs and improving products and services.
I suspect you overestimate the amount of profit typical companies make. A pretty typical net profit is something like 6%. Walmart has a net profit of something like 2%. Apple has an outrageous net profit of something like 25%. Do you really think a government agency without a profit and loss statement will be within 6% as efficient as a private company? I don't.
Let's look at some examples. Who would you rather deal with, FedEx or the US Post Office? A Ford dealer or the DMV? Charles Schwab (or any other bank/broker) or the IRS? A local home builder or your city zoning department? How about the company everyone loves to hate, your cable company or the municipal water district? Personally, I'll take the private enterprise every time.
I'm not sure it will crowd out the possibility of private insurance, however, for one reason. Even if it covers nearly 100% of things, people are still going to want optional or cutting edge treatments, and they're going to want them now.
I don't think I understand your comment. If a MfA plan covers 100% of things, why would I need new, cutting edge treatments? If they're not covered, then MfA doesn't cover 100% o
Personally, I wouldn't make that wish. I'd wish for a universal single-payer option. Medicare for all. Why? Because if an employer wants to offer a better health insurance program, they definitely should be able to as an incentive. But if they don't or can't, (or if the employee is no longer employed) the employee shouldn't be penalized with no health insurance.
That is a very interesting and point. I'm open to considering it but here are some issues.
First, both participation and payment need to be optional. If I'm paying Medicare for all taxes and am entitled to the benefits, that pretty much destroys any market for private insurance (either paid directly by me or via my employer). So what I think it would need to look like is a government-sponsored enterprise. Examples of this are the Post Office, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. Technically these are all independent organizations with their own profit/loss statements. Technically any could go out of business if they don't provide good value for the cost.
They also run afoul of the moral hazard of any GSE. No one expects the federal government to let any of these three fail. Thus they can take risks a private enterprise can't. They also get pressured by politicians to do financially dumb things (and I'm mostly looking at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac).
At that point, if it's an either/or sort of deal, you have to ask why you expect a GSE to offer better products than any random insurance company. I don't see any reason to expect that.
So how about a different option? Suppose our Medicare for All enterprise only offers minimal coverage? Everyone would use the service and you could supplement with additional coverage if you wanted it. I believe this is sorta how the British system works but I'm not sure. The problem is defining that level of minimal coverage. We could have talked about this in 2013 but never got that far. So, MfA could cover, say, terminal cancer treatments but not routine checkups. To an extent we have this already, in that you can go to any emergency room and get treatment for acute conditions. That's a form of catastrophic coverage for everyone. I'm actually fine with this, it's a good pragmatic system and doesn't actually cost all that much. People love to complain that poor people overuse emergency rooms but it's actually small potatoes compared to other costs.
Problem with that is politicians are really unlikely to do the brutal calculus to come up with a minimal level of care. What politician would you expect to actually meet with a constituent with a toothache and really tell that voter they need to get their tooth pulled (for $200) instead of a $2,000 root canal and crown? You can't, it's entirely unreasonable. So politicians are always going to press for more and more coverage, again crowding out any possibility of private insurance.
BTW, we already see this in the ACA plan definitions. I'm pretty sure there's a viable market for plans below Bronze level but the ACA regulations make it impossible to offer that.
Anyway, I don't expect to convince you. This is a complicated topic. This is exactly what we should have been debating in 2013 but didn't because we all talked past each other.
Portable retirement accounts are called "IRAs". They've been around for decades. Use them. IRAs and 401ks, plans owned by the employee (as opposed to traditional pensions) are wonderful things. No one but me can make a stupid decision and screw up my retirement.
Portable health care insurance is a fabulous idea. I hate having to change my insurance plan (and possibly my doctors) every time I change jobs. If I could make a wish and change one thing about the US health financing system, it would be to remove employers from the health insurance equation.
We REGULATE because we care about the harm evil corporations will do to people.
Well, two points.
First, at this point, we don't know whether gene therapies will help or harm. Past trials turned out to be ineffective or harmful. There are plausible reasons to believe this time will be different. We won't know until people conduct careful (and likely expensive and time consuming) experiments. In the mean time, people are dying. I'm glad I don't have to decide which approach will kill the most people.
Anyway.
My second point is a broad political one. Politicians and regulators say we regulate to protect people, either from evil companies or more likely plain ignorance. But stated intentions aren't real intentions and certainly aren't outcomes. There's a common story these days that much regulation has the predominant effect of protecting incumbents from competition at the expense of consumers. I'm sure there's more than one drug company or AMA lobbyist pushing for regulation ostensibly for safety but really to protect a revenue stream. I'd prefer to think doctors are above that but they're human too with student loans to pay off.
I couldn't resist looking this up. I went to the California Secretary of State's site and pulled up the county-by-county results from the 2016 presidential election.
San Francisco, Alameda, Marin, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and Los Angeles counties look quite blue. All voted over 70% for Clinton. There's a whole flock more in the high 60 percent range. For those not familiar with California geography, these are all mostly urban counties ringing the San Francisco Bay (except, of course, Los Angeles). Santa Cruz and to a lesser extent my home of Santa Clara counties still have agricultural regions but they're dominated by urban areas.
(San Francisco was 85% Clinton. So much for supporting diversity in terms of ideology. But I digress...)
Meanwhile, over on Team Trump, we have Lassen and Modoc counties at over 70% Trump, Tehama and Shasta in the high 60s. Those are completely rural counties with no towns or cities much over the 100,000 people range. I believe any election won by 60% of the vote gets portrayed as a landslide victory so I'd call them pretty red.
On the one hand, this would generate two new Senate seats. Yay! As a Californian, what's not to like about that? Since the new seats would almost certainly be Republican, the Democrats might not like this. Personally, I wouldn't stop at two states, I'd create three or four.
As TFA says, there have been many moves to break up California. It's not driven by any outside interest, it really is a local movement. The state really is too large. The liberal, urban coast has very little in common with the rural mountains and central valley. The coast also dominates state government and the rural counties don't feel heard in Sacramento, let alone Washington.
Financially, it would be really interesting. Most of the state property and income tax also comes from the cities: that's where all the people and companies are. I don't know how the income and expenses would get divided up. Divvying up any state debt would also be really contentious.
Better idea: Split the US in two countries. The Red States and the Blue States. And build a wall between the two.
It's more like Blue Cities and Red Rural. Almost all rural areas vote Republican and all urban areas vote Democratic. It's hard to find states which are entirely red or blue. It would be pretty difficult to wall off all the major cities from their surroundings.
A few harvests of corn without tilling the plant under or at least leaving it lying will mean you *must* fertilize... and that just ends up in our streams polluting our rivers and lakes and killing fish.
Yeah, the soil replenishment issue is the big one which jumps out at me. I know in the California central valley, rice farmers often burn rice straw to rid of it. I don't know what happens to the above-ground parts of soybean and corn plants (or wheat for that matter). I'd like to think it decomposes and feeds the soil but honestly have no idea.
BTW, don't confuse nitrogen fertilizer with compost. Once you've grown the soybean plant, the soil is as charged with fixed nitrogen as it's going to be. I don't believe the composted above-ground plant adds all that much. I could be wrong, I'm not a farmer or soil chemist.
Don't even get me started on how polluting electric vehicles are... both in power generation and production of the batteries.
Battery production pollution is definitely a thing but getting off topic. Let's park that, shall we?
Electric cars powered by electricity from natural gas, hydro, or solar ought to be pretty clean. Are you saying they're not? If so, please explain, I don't understand. I have no idea what sort of pollution a wood burning power plant will generate. It's probably better than coal, worse than natural gas, and relatively close to carbon-neutral.
Fair enough. We already handle this for lots of agricultural products (e.g. hay). You basically just cut it down and let it dry in the sun. I don't know about the density of coal (pretty high), sawgrass hay (dunno) and natural gas (relatively low).
Regardless of density, I'm trying to compare and contrast biofuels vs. bio-fixed-location-power-plants. You have to do all the same cutting down, processing, and moving about. Just with biofuels, you then throw away huge chunks of the plant and spend a bunch of time and energy converting the remainder. That's got to be an enormous potential energy loss. Never mind that there are huge reservoirs of biomass causing problems (e.g. overgrown forests) which can't be used to make liquid fuels. Harvesting that for electric power generation seems like a win-win.
OK, biodiesel and ethanol for liquid fuels were interesting ideas but aren't panning out as planned. Ethanol pushes up corn prices, biodiesel is expensive, no one has a commercial viable process for creating alcohol from cellulose (the great hope around 2000).
At the same time, we have coal plants which are being shuttered in favor of natural gas and/or solar. No, wait, keep reading! I'm not going to advocate burning coal!
Thing is, we have lots of biological fuels, they're just solid instead of liquid. We have corn plants (the whole thing, not just the corn kernels), soybean plants (ditto, the whole plant), overgrown forests, all sorts of stuff. It all burns. So how 'bout we take the trees, brush, switchgrass, vote-buying...er...subsidized crop plants, everything, and just burn it in reconfigured coal plants? Dry the plants, grind them to powder and dump them in. Boom, done, and probably way much more efficient than trying to create liquid fuels.
I'm sure it's harder than I'm making it seem. I don't know if it's economical (but that hasn't stopped us so far). Gotta be better than what we're doing now.
25 down/3 up is considered "entry level" now? Wow, I need an upgrade. I'm at 12/3 and that's not the lowest speed package my ISP (AT&T) offers.
12 seems plenty enough for me, streaming one or two movies at a time, no gaming, no file sharing. no heavy uploads. Video quality is good but not fantastic.
Never actually worked as an manager, executive, CEO, or landlord, have you? They definitely don't just sit no their butts, at least, not the decent ones.
It does sound like misplaced outrage to me.
TFA had all sorts of outrage about how these are medical devices, not "socks". I'm sympathetic to the idea that you want to make sure the contacts are manufactured by a reputable factory and won't damage your eye. Corneas don't heal very fast. It sounds like that's not an issue.
Not being an optometrist or ophthalmologist, I have no idea whether you could damage your eye with an incorrect prescription. My guess is it's unlikely but I really don't know. I would tend to trust people with their eyes. I only get one pair and I'm pretty fond of them (misshapen as they are).
How many nerds do you think wear corrective lenses and order them through the Interwebs? Sounds nerdy to me...
True enough. I'd be inclined to put the robot on the street instead but that's just me.
Thing is, the sidewalks in SF are often really crowded and a total mess. That seems the hardest place in the world to unleash a robot. If it were me, I'd start somewhere much easier to navigate. But maybe the two go hand in hand. You need lots of busy people who value convenience, are comfortable with technology, have the cash to pay for delivery, and are crowded together. Would Chicago be better? Boston and NYC are other choices but have similar challenges.
But on a meta level, has this really been a problem yet? I don't hear news stories of people being flattened by errant delivery robots. Perhaps we could wait until there's a demonstrable problem before trying to solve it?
Let's see, a car vs. a delivery robot? I think the robot causes less congestion.
Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians... There has never been a better time to...leverage the publicly available fiber backbone, or build political support for new, local-government owned networks.
We don't want the principles of the internet in the hands of politicians, so let's create a government owned internet? And we don't like nasty corporations so let's use the (corporate owned) fiber backbone?
I'm lost what this guy wants. I guess it's local ownership and I'm sympathetic to that. I like farmer's markets as much as the next person. It's just a little hard to build a cross-country network one town at a time.
What the Internet looks like with no net neutrality.
Or one could look back to those dark years of..oh, wait, what we have today, since the rules have never been in effect.
I can't wait for the new rules because AT&T is constantly blocking access to Netflix and throttling YouTube so I'll buy UVerse instead. Except they're not, ever, because they know I'd drop their service in a heartbeat for Comcast or a less limited cellular data plan. Face it, competition is better at keeping the players honest, not FCC regulations.
Cut down the trees, bake the wood into charcoal, re-bury the charcoal to re-create the coal bed. Problem solved!
Seriously, this would work. I don't believe you even have to actually bury the charcoal. My understanding is it's quite stable and nothing eats it. People in Haiti, who deforested their island to create cooking charcoal, might not understand why we intentionally leave mountains of it around but that's a different problem.
Let's do a little math. 1.7e15 pounds of CO2. That's about 210e12 kg of carbon (CO2 is 12/44 carbon by mass). Coal has a density of around 800 kg/m^3 (charcoal is much less dense but it'll compress when heaped in a big pile). That leaves us with 260e9 m^3 of carbon. Let's assume we make carbon "cone volcanos" about 500 m tall, 2000 meters in diameter (anyone know the angle of a huge pile of charcoal?). That's 260e6 m^3 per hill.
Thus we need around 1,000 500 meter high piles of carbon, all made by cutting down trees. And since we have 80 years, we need to make about 10 a year. Does that sound feasible? I don't know.
Absolutely. Scalpers...er...resellers are just an inevitable result of setting ticket prices too low.
I was just talking with a friend about the IPO frenzy in the lat '90s. Everyone cheered when a company would offer an IPO and the stock price would double or triple on opening day. I always wondered why people were so excited that the company left 50% of the cash on the table.