its amazing people actually fall for that bulls***
i really must be in the wrong business. i'm thinking about this whole "business plan" concept wrong. i'm thinking "what do people want and need and how can i give that to them better than the competition"
i should be thinking "how can i prey on stupidity and fear of authority"
because i'm already on double mandatory probation from the grammar nazis. the spelling masters want me under house arrest and the punctuation protectors and the capitalization czars are intent on having me executed
so stand in line, i'm not interested. my usage of the word is perfectly reasonable. feel free to petition the UN, or perhaps, swallow a shotgun
anyone with knowledge of advertising or public relations knows you have to give something like this a snazzy name, the excite-o-porium, nor the neato-gonzo-hyperium, or the whatsthat?-OMFG-ium
really want respect, all they have to do is send an urgent email to the ceo that the dilithium crystals are deteriorating, and that the antimatter containment fields are failing, and we can't take much more of this captain
Otlet, born in 1868, did not set foot in a schoolroom until age 12. His mother died when he was 3; his father was a successful entrepreneur who made a fortune selling trams all over the world. The senior Otlet kept his son out of school, out of a conviction that classrooms stifled children's natural abilities. Left at home with his tutors and with few friends, the young Otlet lived the life of a solitary bookworm.
When he finally entered secondary school, he made straight for the library. "I could lock myself into the library and peruse the catalog, which for me was a miracle," he later wrote. Soon after entering school, Otlet took on the role of school librarian.
In the years that followed, Otlet never really left the library. Though his father pushed him into law school, he soon left the bar to return to his first love, books. In 1895, he met a kindred spirit in the future Nobel Prize winner Henri La Fontaine, who joined him in planning to create a master bibliography of all the world's published knowledge.
obviously you can see how his upbringing shaped his life's work and life's focus. to me, there are all kinds of crazy pluses and minuses to this idea of stifling your child's social upbringing in order to encourage his intellectual upbringing. of course, you need social skills in life to really succeed. at the same time, there is something genuinely valuable to be said about focusing a child's intellectual development in solitude. there's obvious trade offs here, but otlet seems to be a success, in a narrow focused way. one wonders at examples of lives that are failures of this kind of upbringing though
people always mention the successes of this kind of focused upbringing, like tiger woods or the williams sisters in tennis (parents focusing their kid's athletic talents). or parents who focus their children to be masters of the piano or cello. but for every yo-yo ma, one never hears about the hundreds who wind up as burn-outs, drug addicts or prostitutes
its an interesting subject, the focused childhood solitary education
ever hear of the statement "wear your beliefs on your sleeve" or "wear your feelings on your sleeve"? example: you go to a party, and meet a stranger and ask how are they, and instead of a polite reply they tell you that their husband likes asian shemale pornography or their wife can't achieve orgasm except with her own hand
that doesn't really bother me, nor do the bumper stickers. the point isn't about my aversion to someone else's personal info, the point is someone who aggressively puts their personal issues and beliefs out there for all too see. people can handle this sort of thing, this isn't about strangers being exposed to personal beliefs being somehow damaged or discomforted
the issue are those who have the need to aggressively get their deeply personal beliefs and feelings out there in front of strangers. it belies large psychological blind spots. its healthy to not want random strangers to know deeply personal things about yourself. to invert that simple protection mechanism isn't about a surfeit of confidence, it is about a surfeit of lack of self-awareness
who have a psychotic need to display their politics so aggressively
i'm talking about the people with 4-5 bumper stickers, all stridently ideological
of course you are entitled to be proud of your beliefs, but if you are radioactively evangelical about them, then i am 100% certain that your mind is completely closed and your brain dead hack partisanship is total
on the other hand, you can be assured no one will want to borrow or steal your car... although these bumper sticker hordes are usually stuck on a 15 year old rust eaten subcompact
that may be all well and true, but don't call her a fascist. only because, much like the epithet terrorist, the word has lost all meaning due to overuse
"fascist" was once reserved for the likes of franco, mussolini and hitler. it is now applied to small town planning and zoning boards, website administrators, and bad hairstylists
pick an epithet with more oomph next time if you want to insult the woman, you terrorist;-)
if you can't get the transparency from your democratic government that you deserve, petition the chinese government to air their copies of our government's email
if you think what you wrote above is a valid comment on the economics of algae-harvested oil, then frankly, you're retarded. i'm wasting my time talking to you
"The facts that used vegetable oil still goes to dumps, and other rendered fat simply gets disposed of indicate that there is currently some minimum amount of energy that is necessary for gathering it to be worthwhile; I would not be surprised if a similar situation took hold."
i take this to mean you are an insulated rich westerner, ignorant of the wider, poorer world
in china, people, children, whole towns and families break up used computers for tiny bits of metal to be melted down, getting exposed to horrible levels of lead, mercury and cadmium for the sake of pennies. these computers get shipped there from all over the world for "recycling"
in the philippines, there are tens of thousands of people, an entire economy and subculture of people, who live and work in the trash dumps of manila, scavenging and recycling every conceivable type of waste. it's called "smoky mountain"
in india, dead humongous hulking tankers and ocean liners go to die on the beach. they are chopped up by giant armies of men living the most dangerous of lives, armed with the crudest of implements, to recycle iron and steel for the slightest of margins
so would selling a poor fisherman in the third world a plastic jug and a tap of algae for a dime and telling him it will be worth $1 every 3 months really work economically?
absolutely, without the slightest shred of doubt, you would have a riot on your hands of poor villagers seeking to buy these supplies
then you just set up a low tech distiller to harvest. same economic cost and and economic benefit
meanwhile, you have your multinationals with streamlined aquaculture projects doing the same thing on a scale of millions of gallons of octane.
ok... and like i said, because a multinational farms, say, yams, or coffee, or bananas, or palms, or tea, pineapples, or wahtever... that means a poor cash cropper is suddenly unable to make money farming the same thing?
if your mind cannot consider these sentences proof enough of the viability of the poor fisherman turned octane farmer, you have a serious deficiency in abstract thinking abilities
more likely, you are just being stubborn, too proud to admit you are wrong directly, even though privately you already admit it to yourself
here's a new topic: "who would win in a fight: batman or superman?"
now, go ahead and endlessly blather about the topic. mod people's various calculations and scenarios up as insightful
in the end, the entire topic and the entire thread is absolutely useless
not that you can't have great fun scheming and strategizing, some of the greatest topics for watercooler chit chat are essentially completely pointless
but the idea that women are better or worse coders according to incredibly broad sweeping generalizations and stereotypes is, absolutely, without any shred of doubt, completely and utterly useless and pointless
but you are assuming that the point of algae-produced octane, on land, on sea, whatever, that the goal is to completely replace current consumption levels
no, that doesn't matter. it doesn't matter if algae-produced octane only dents 1% of of consumption levels
what matters is simply that there is incentive to make it work, that you can make a buck doing it. demonstrate that that is possible, and my bet is that algae-produced octane will ramp up production phenomenally in a decade or two: the simple economic rules of supply and demand: "hey, i'm making $200 a year with these 100 jugs of seawater, and there's no end in sight to demand. so why can't i go the bank to get the tiny bit of seed money i need for 10,000 more jugs and make $20,000 a year?"
multiply that thought by a million strivers and entrepreneurs on coastal communities all over the world, in deserts near the ocean all over the world. you would have an explosion of interest if the process, as simple and low tech as it is, were proven
such that, the simple laws of economics would continually ramp up production every year until you really did satisfy a large amount of consumption levels. there's a lot of shallow seas in the world, there's a lot of substinence fishermen. it doesn't take much to make this scheme work, the motivation is simple. someone just needs the right plastic jug design and the right gm algae
you understand, in your own words, how a mill yolks a bunch of cash crop poor farmers into an economy that gives them an incentive to farm
but for some reason, you can't or won't apply that simple lesson to algae "distilled" octane, even though all it is is simple low tech aquaculture
so, according to your logic, the billions of cash crop substinence farmers and fishers in the world wouldn't be doing exactly what they are doing right now because... drum roll please... big agribusiness exists, somewhere, like a villain in a movie
because when it comes to understanding economics, you're a dolt
say you have a guy, with just one jug, just one jug, and he can throw it in the ocean, and come back 3 months later and turn that one jug into $1 at a simple low tech processing plant. rinse and repeat. what is that called? its called agriculture. the logic surrounding this simple cash crop agriculture incentive and simple reward i just described predates the written word. and yet you can't seem to grasp it. why?
now, you wish to tell me a large company that can invest a lot more up front can harvest more jugs than a cash crop substinence farmer. ok. you're 100% right. and? why do you think that matters? what is that supposed to mean? right now, there are poor african farmers growing cash crop yams on an acre of soil. right now there is an agribusiness mass harvesting a million yams. the existence of the agribusiness means the poor farmer doesn't ahve any incentive to plant yams? and yet he does, and is doing it right now. so what is your point? why do you think you have a point?
answer: you have no point. you simply have zero understanding of simple economics. your brain isn't wired to understand the idea of incentive, and to think abstractly about that in large groups of motivated individuals to make a buck
here is simple truth, whether you grasp it or not: it doesn't matter if there is incentive for one guy to work with one jug, or a multinational to work with a million jugs. all that matters is that there is economic incentive, and so the need is fulfilled, simply because there is a pricepoint on a curve of supply and demand at which the undertaking is profitable for anyone involved
you seriously don't understand that simple concept
take any large city. say new york city or shanghai or new delhi. now, according to your grasp of the laws of supply and demand demonstrated in what you just wrote above, in terms of economic incentive and logistical complexity, throwing in some further wrinkles like food spoilage and variety of food choices... please tell me: how the heck does everyone manage to get fed?
your mind has demonstrated to me, in your comment above, what i will call a low level of understanding about the laws of supply and demand. so now i wish that you see in yourself that your understanding of economics is poor by applying your level of demonstrated understanding above, of economics, to a problem like feeding everyone in a large city, with variety and spoilage thrown in as an even further logistical and economic complication. how does it all work?
the answer is: it doesn't matter how it works. it just works. because its simple economics, simple supply and demand, moving people like an army of ants to do something far more complicated than any single ant can grasp, each ant only motivated by the simplest of motivations, no one orchestrating the movement of the ants from above. its incredibly complicated and beyond the grasp of any single mind. and yet it works far superior to any consciously engineered effort. thats the glory of economics
now: you wish to tell me that those same economic forces will be powerless to wrangle plastic jugs in the ocean?
if we use your rationale, it is impossible for people in say, ghana to grow, harvest and distribute peanuts. and yet they do
yet you wish to tell us that algae is plastic jugs is too complicated... plastic jugs, full of ocean water. do you know what commercial fishing operations are like? compare it with that on the order of "its impossible logistically and economically" wtf?
so you are saying plastic jugs in the ocean full of ocean water, compared to say, commercial fishing or peanut farming or tea plantations.... jugs full of algae... is vastly more complicated than those ventures and, furthermore, get this: jugs full of algae will drive oil prices down and put them all out of business
dude. try to study simple economics concepts someday
Slashdot Mirror
its amazing people actually fall for that bulls***
i really must be in the wrong business. i'm thinking about this whole "business plan" concept wrong. i'm thinking "what do people want and need and how can i give that to them better than the competition"
i should be thinking "how can i prey on stupidity and fear of authority"
Good suggestion. I am going to put a contact info form on my film's web site
because i'm already on double mandatory probation from the grammar nazis. the spelling masters want me under house arrest and the punctuation protectors and the capitalization czars are intent on having me executed
so stand in line, i'm not interested. my usage of the word is perfectly reasonable. feel free to petition the UN, or perhaps, swallow a shotgun
xoxoxoxox
you got me, poorly said on my part ;-)
was that it was called the mundane-um
why not call it the snore-ium or boring-um
anyone with knowledge of advertising or public relations knows you have to give something like this a snazzy name, the excite-o-porium, nor the neato-gonzo-hyperium, or the whatsthat?-OMFG-ium
really want respect, all they have to do is send an urgent email to the ceo that the dilithium crystals are deteriorating, and that the antimatter containment fields are failing, and we can't take much more of this captain
obviously you can see how his upbringing shaped his life's work and life's focus. to me, there are all kinds of crazy pluses and minuses to this idea of stifling your child's social upbringing in order to encourage his intellectual upbringing. of course, you need social skills in life to really succeed. at the same time, there is something genuinely valuable to be said about focusing a child's intellectual development in solitude. there's obvious trade offs here, but otlet seems to be a success, in a narrow focused way. one wonders at examples of lives that are failures of this kind of upbringing though
people always mention the successes of this kind of focused upbringing, like tiger woods or the williams sisters in tennis (parents focusing their kid's athletic talents). or parents who focus their children to be masters of the piano or cello. but for every yo-yo ma, one never hears about the hundreds who wind up as burn-outs, drug addicts or prostitutes
its an interesting subject, the focused childhood solitary education
ever hear of the statement "wear your beliefs on your sleeve" or "wear your feelings on your sleeve"? example: you go to a party, and meet a stranger and ask how are they, and instead of a polite reply they tell you that their husband likes asian shemale pornography or their wife can't achieve orgasm except with her own hand
that doesn't really bother me, nor do the bumper stickers. the point isn't about my aversion to someone else's personal info, the point is someone who aggressively puts their personal issues and beliefs out there for all too see. people can handle this sort of thing, this isn't about strangers being exposed to personal beliefs being somehow damaged or discomforted
the issue are those who have the need to aggressively get their deeply personal beliefs and feelings out there in front of strangers. it belies large psychological blind spots. its healthy to not want random strangers to know deeply personal things about yourself. to invert that simple protection mechanism isn't about a surfeit of confidence, it is about a surfeit of lack of self-awareness
who have a psychotic need to display their politics so aggressively
i'm talking about the people with 4-5 bumper stickers, all stridently ideological
of course you are entitled to be proud of your beliefs, but if you are radioactively evangelical about them, then i am 100% certain that your mind is completely closed and your brain dead hack partisanship is total
on the other hand, you can be assured no one will want to borrow or steal your car... although these bumper sticker hordes are usually stuck on a 15 year old rust eaten subcompact
that may be all well and true, but don't call her a fascist. only because, much like the epithet terrorist, the word has lost all meaning due to overuse
;-)
"fascist" was once reserved for the likes of franco, mussolini and hitler. it is now applied to small town planning and zoning boards, website administrators, and bad hairstylists
pick an epithet with more oomph next time if you want to insult the woman, you terrorist
if you can't get the transparency from your democratic government that you deserve, petition the chinese government to air their copies of our government's email
i'm sure they have a copy of the inboxes in question sitting around somewhere
thank god for shoddy us government computer security and snooping totalitarian regimes: securing the transparency in our democracy that we deserve!
if you think what you wrote above is a valid comment on the economics of algae-harvested oil, then frankly, you're retarded. i'm wasting my time talking to you
a plastic jug costs $50?
(scratches head)
"The facts that used vegetable oil still goes to dumps, and other rendered fat simply gets disposed of indicate that there is currently some minimum amount of energy that is necessary for gathering it to be worthwhile; I would not be surprised if a similar situation took hold."
i take this to mean you are an insulated rich westerner, ignorant of the wider, poorer world
in china, people, children, whole towns and families break up used computers for tiny bits of metal to be melted down, getting exposed to horrible levels of lead, mercury and cadmium for the sake of pennies. these computers get shipped there from all over the world for "recycling"
in the philippines, there are tens of thousands of people, an entire economy and subculture of people, who live and work in the trash dumps of manila, scavenging and recycling every conceivable type of waste. it's called "smoky mountain"
in india, dead humongous hulking tankers and ocean liners go to die on the beach. they are chopped up by giant armies of men living the most dangerous of lives, armed with the crudest of implements, to recycle iron and steel for the slightest of margins
so would selling a poor fisherman in the third world a plastic jug and a tap of algae for a dime and telling him it will be worth $1 every 3 months really work economically?
absolutely, without the slightest shred of doubt, you would have a riot on your hands of poor villagers seeking to buy these supplies
then you just set up a low tech distiller to harvest. same economic cost and and economic benefit
meanwhile, you have your multinationals with streamlined aquaculture projects doing the same thing on a scale of millions of gallons of octane.
ok... and like i said, because a multinational farms, say, yams, or coffee, or bananas, or palms, or tea, pineapples, or wahtever... that means a poor cash cropper is suddenly unable to make money farming the same thing?
if your mind cannot consider these sentences proof enough of the viability of the poor fisherman turned octane farmer, you have a serious deficiency in abstract thinking abilities
more likely, you are just being stubborn, too proud to admit you are wrong directly, even though privately you already admit it to yourself
i'm not saying you aren't entitled
i'm just saying, the topic is entirely useless
here's a new topic: "who would win in a fight: batman or superman?"
now, go ahead and endlessly blather about the topic. mod people's various calculations and scenarios up as insightful
in the end, the entire topic and the entire thread is absolutely useless
not that you can't have great fun scheming and strategizing, some of the greatest topics for watercooler chit chat are essentially completely pointless
but the idea that women are better or worse coders according to incredibly broad sweeping generalizations and stereotypes is, absolutely, without any shred of doubt, completely and utterly useless and pointless
my point is, its economically feasible, for a single guy with a jug, all the way up to a multinational with a million jugs
meanwhile, you wish to prove it is only economically feasible for the multinational
so go ahead, prove it. you haven't
but you are assuming that the point of algae-produced octane, on land, on sea, whatever, that the goal is to completely replace current consumption levels
no, that doesn't matter. it doesn't matter if algae-produced octane only dents 1% of of consumption levels
what matters is simply that there is incentive to make it work, that you can make a buck doing it. demonstrate that that is possible, and my bet is that algae-produced octane will ramp up production phenomenally in a decade or two: the simple economic rules of supply and demand: "hey, i'm making $200 a year with these 100 jugs of seawater, and there's no end in sight to demand. so why can't i go the bank to get the tiny bit of seed money i need for 10,000 more jugs and make $20,000 a year?"
multiply that thought by a million strivers and entrepreneurs on coastal communities all over the world, in deserts near the ocean all over the world. you would have an explosion of interest if the process, as simple and low tech as it is, were proven
such that, the simple laws of economics would continually ramp up production every year until you really did satisfy a large amount of consumption levels. there's a lot of shallow seas in the world, there's a lot of substinence fishermen. it doesn't take much to make this scheme work, the motivation is simple. someone just needs the right plastic jug design and the right gm algae
ok, let's take $10,000 and move to the rural philippines ;-)
;-)
call it the "johnny appleseed project"
or... the "junnie algaeseed project"
to mean that you are too stubborn to directly and manfully acquiesce on a topic you have been proven wrong about
and yes, my use of the word substinence was wrong in that context
(!?)
you understand, in your own words, how a mill yolks a bunch of cash crop poor farmers into an economy that gives them an incentive to farm
but for some reason, you can't or won't apply that simple lesson to algae "distilled" octane, even though all it is is simple low tech aquaculture
so, according to your logic, the billions of cash crop substinence farmers and fishers in the world wouldn't be doing exactly what they are doing right now because... drum roll please... big agribusiness exists, somewhere, like a villain in a movie
my head asplode
because when it comes to understanding economics, you're a dolt
say you have a guy, with just one jug, just one jug, and he can throw it in the ocean, and come back 3 months later and turn that one jug into $1 at a simple low tech processing plant. rinse and repeat. what is that called? its called agriculture. the logic surrounding this simple cash crop agriculture incentive and simple reward i just described predates the written word. and yet you can't seem to grasp it. why?
now, you wish to tell me a large company that can invest a lot more up front can harvest more jugs than a cash crop substinence farmer. ok. you're 100% right. and? why do you think that matters? what is that supposed to mean? right now, there are poor african farmers growing cash crop yams on an acre of soil. right now there is an agribusiness mass harvesting a million yams. the existence of the agribusiness means the poor farmer doesn't ahve any incentive to plant yams? and yet he does, and is doing it right now. so what is your point? why do you think you have a point?
answer: you have no point. you simply have zero understanding of simple economics. your brain isn't wired to understand the idea of incentive, and to think abstractly about that in large groups of motivated individuals to make a buck
here is simple truth, whether you grasp it or not: it doesn't matter if there is incentive for one guy to work with one jug, or a multinational to work with a million jugs. all that matters is that there is economic incentive, and so the need is fulfilled, simply because there is a pricepoint on a curve of supply and demand at which the undertaking is profitable for anyone involved
you seriously don't understand that simple concept
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huda_Salih_Mahdi_Ammash
take any large city. say new york city or shanghai or new delhi. now, according to your grasp of the laws of supply and demand demonstrated in what you just wrote above, in terms of economic incentive and logistical complexity, throwing in some further wrinkles like food spoilage and variety of food choices... please tell me: how the heck does everyone manage to get fed?
your mind has demonstrated to me, in your comment above, what i will call a low level of understanding about the laws of supply and demand. so now i wish that you see in yourself that your understanding of economics is poor by applying your level of demonstrated understanding above, of economics, to a problem like feeding everyone in a large city, with variety and spoilage thrown in as an even further logistical and economic complication. how does it all work?
the answer is: it doesn't matter how it works. it just works. because its simple economics, simple supply and demand, moving people like an army of ants to do something far more complicated than any single ant can grasp, each ant only motivated by the simplest of motivations, no one orchestrating the movement of the ants from above. its incredibly complicated and beyond the grasp of any single mind. and yet it works far superior to any consciously engineered effort. thats the glory of economics
now: you wish to tell me that those same economic forces will be powerless to wrangle plastic jugs in the ocean?
but i do know that wildly speculative sweeping generalizations provides lots of fodder for utterly useless watercooler chit chat
congrats slashdot for picking a topic everyone feels entitled to comment on and absolutely no one actually says anything useful on
how expensive is tea?
if we use your rationale, it is impossible for people in say, ghana to grow, harvest and distribute peanuts. and yet they do
yet you wish to tell us that algae is plastic jugs is too complicated... plastic jugs, full of ocean water. do you know what commercial fishing operations are like? compare it with that on the order of "its impossible logistically and economically" wtf?
so you are saying plastic jugs in the ocean full of ocean water, compared to say, commercial fishing or peanut farming or tea plantations.... jugs full of algae... is vastly more complicated than those ventures and, furthermore, get this: jugs full of algae will drive oil prices down and put them all out of business
dude. try to study simple economics concepts someday