You should really go examine the rest of the world. I'm not trying to sound condescending here, really, and if you are deriving true happiness from your job then I apologize in advance. But if you are seriously devoting that much of the prime of your life to a marketing company, you are going to wind up feeling colossally gipped in about 25 years. Or any company, for that matter. Devote yourself to making yourself, your friends, and/or your family happy. But please, don't piss it all away making somebody else some money.
I consider this the same mixed blessing as the invention of guns, specifically cartridge guns. They level the playing field. It makes it incredibly harder for the rich to control the poor, for the aristocracy to control the peasants. There are a lot of ways to control someone besides lethal force. This is what always cracks me up about gun advocates--they equate the right to carry with freedom. Maybe in some limited sense, but... last I checked, the rich were controlling the poor just as well as ever, and this despite our having more guns than any other western nation. A Glock, or even an AK, might stop someone else from taking your life, fine. But as long as the Powers that Be still control the media, the military and the money, that civil uprising all the 2nd amendment types salivate over will never be anything more than a distant fantasy. Don't believe me? Ask yourself why there has been no organized resistance to the continual erosion of civil liberties over the past 8 years? Certainly this is precisely the type of scenario the framers had in mind when asserting the right to bear arms. The answer, of course, is that any such notions were skillfully nipped in the bud through a combination of savvy media marketing and oppressive jingoism. If you can shape discourse and thought, you are all-powerful. The pen really is mightier than the sword.
This is an interesting development in light of recent comments made by Linus about Sun and ZFS in particular, to which Jonathan Schwartz wrote a personal response.
If the commercial did that to you, you should really read the books. Bertie's Jeeves is God, the Oracle, Vishnu, the Illuminati, Yahweh and Tom Bombadil all rolled into one.
That's very true, but my only point (responding to the post) was that just because an idea has been knocking impotently around the labs for last 70 years does not mean it's a failure, or even commercially inviable. Fuel cells might be 200 years old, but the reason I'm writing this using coal-generated electricity (as opposed to hydrogen) has more to do with the cheap accessibility of fossil fuels--and, importantly, the failure to price in the cost of their emissions--than any flaw in fuel cell designs. Alter that equation slightly by making fossil fuels scarce (an inevitability) or people pay for CO2 (a damn good idea) and those advantages disappear. Fuel cells won't become magically cheaper overnight, but mass adoption, better manufacturing techniques and economies of scale will drive their price down, down, down in the long run.
All of those problems could be solved in a much less intrusive, more efficient fashion than they currently are, groceries excepted (the distinction between durable and perishable goods is a valid one.) Come on. Use your imagination. Measure yourself better, send those measurements in, get clothes that fit. Read a review site to figure out what's worth buying and what isn't. If you aren't already doing that anyway, you're shortchanging yourself. I doubt a 10 minute romp over at Mattress Barn is really going to convey useful information about how it holds up long term.
And I find it ironic that I post something topical and relevant, attacking nobody personally, and along comes you, in perfect ad hominem form, calling me the misanthrope. I would expect no less from Slashdot; but still, ironic.
You could have written a very similar story about the internal combustion engine. Working prototypes existed as early as the first decade of the 19th century, but still it took them 100 years to really catch on. And look where we are today.
Awareness of the coming energy crisis and our pernicious dependence on foreign oil has sparked an increase in R&D and general interest in alternative energy that is orders of magnitude higher than anything ever witnessed before. As this page demonstrates, yes, there has been sporadic research on SOFCs dating back to the 1930s, but all of it pales in comparison to the infusion of human and financial capital we're now seeing. The capitalist incentive to develop alternative energy never existed so long as oil was basically free, and of course miniscule amounts of government funding would never amount to much. But that was yesterday. This is the tipping point.
Question: Why are brick and motar stores better? Still waiting for the answer here... in my neck of the woods (or, what's left of them), b&m stores having done nothing except gut virgin tracts of forest and replace them with blankets of asphalt and unsightly monster-warehouses peddling the same acres of monoculture as the category-killer 5 miles up the road. All that energy wasted: HVAC; lighting the stores and their parking lots, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year and destroying what was once a rich, black night sky; gas from the 5,000 cars that visit every day. Compare that with Amazon's approach of building a couple million square ft. of warehouse space in Podunk, NV and I'm left scratching my head as to why we still need this shit invading our landscape.
Didn't you hear? "S..." is the latest in a new line of uber-cursewords. More vulgar that fuck, more offensive than cunt, and it makes the rest of em look like mere punctuation. In fact I am so floored by what I have just seen that I'm going to have to go back and re-read Conan Doyle, for I can't remember Watson ever going so thoroughly apeshit (another word which now reads like a salutation, by comparison.)
You prefer the carrot. I'll opt for the stick. I'll bet that if we priced in all the externalities associated with those carbon-spewing generators, in addition to looking at the PDV of the stream of fuel payments needed to feed each, the prices would be a lot more competitive. Not necessarily no-brainer competitive--$175k is still a lot to pay for 5kW--but all of these new technologies will some day come down in price, and when they do we need to level the playing field with a carbon tax. This problem of ignoring emissions is the classic, canonical example of where markets fail.
I have the same problem. But if you're searching for actual code, you're better off using a code search engine. Or as others have pointed out, search "ruby append operator" if you're interested in the concept.
Another way to make solar cheaper is to drop the PV/Si approach altogether. Few people seem to have gotten the memo, but there are solar generators that exist right now that are making electricity at twice the efficiency of PV. They consist of nothing more complicated than metal and mirrors, and so there are huge opportunities for returns to scale (think cars.) Our continuing dependence on oil is a failure of imagination and political willpower, nothing more--think about how many of these Iraq could have bought. The technology is there.
We're talking about trade policy, and, wow, you managed to work in global warming, "the media" and George Soros. I salute you, winger.
Anyhoo.. you're totally wrong, or at least, at odds with the facts, since facts, truth, and debate in general occupy some fuzzy, extracranial space for people like you. The European Union numbers 500 million, or 2/3 larger than Am'rca, so there would most certainly be people to buy the damn imports. Europe's trade deficit with China is close to that of the United States, as you will find in this report by the Congressional Research Service dated January 4 of this year. Or you could just Google "china trade balance" and read the first 60 or so things that come up, it's all there.
That's not to say that convincing counterarguments to the anthropogenic warming hypothesis cannot be made, but these are not those, and you do not know them. Your slavish repetition of these canards makes it clear that you're not in the game for any sort of self-enlightenment, or desire to get at the truth, but simply to score points and massage your bruised ego by screaming at the George Soroses of the world. You're shouting at cars. Why? A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
So, uhh, what was your point again? GP was saying that if the US fell off the face of the Earth tomorrow, the rest of the world would go chugging right along since the bulk of imports come from China and other developing nations. And (s)he is right. There wouldn't be as many Cisco routers, dot coms, investment banks, or bushels of corn to go around, but, well, bfd. We are mostly a service economy and services, while nice, aren't a deal breaker for most economies. I don't view trade sanctions as likely in the near future, but if we continue down our path while the rest of the world continues down another, it's certainly not out of the question.
As to your point about currency, you need to read up on international finance, my friend. China has us completely by the balls in terms of foreign reserves, and if the constant rumors about the teetering dollar ever spook them into switching even a small portion of that into gold or euros, a major, painful readjustment in the exchange rate would result, and it would not be pleasant for the American economy.
There's an even more fundamental reason why that analogy is flawed: the supply of domain names is not fixed. You can always make more. So in theory, you should never see the sort of price inflation with domain names that you do in real estate (barring branding). And, let's be honest, having an awesome domain name is a (possibly) sufficient, not a necessary condition to running a successful web site. I don't know anyone who goes to www.doctors.com if they want to find a doctor. They Google it. And speaking of Google: Twitter? Zazzle? Meebo? No one ever thought to just type that in. The search engines are the true arbiters of who get hits, not the DNS servers.
Very true. I just read an article about the world's most successful hedge fund manager (2006 compensation: $1.7 billion), who's a total math geek and hires the same. When you consider the essence of a lot of financial industries is extracting signals from gobs of noisy data, there are all sorts of applied scientists who would be a good fit. Astrophysicists, for example. Made me seriously consider going to grad school for applied math instead of econ.
And don't go into consulting. I've been there, and it sucks.
And not all change is bad. Uhh, some of it is. Your nice, tidy, one-sentence dictum seems to be conveniently forgetting a whole bunch. Let's see, just off the top of my head: increased prevalence of tropical diseases; coastal erosion and flooding; loss of biodiversity; increased deaths from heat stroke; stronger storm intensity; drought and flooding; and, to your point, potentially large-scale, unknown effects on the food chain as a whole (where'd all the honeybees go?)
Oooh, random guy on Slashdot called it a hoax. Phew. We can all go back to worrying about American Idol now.
There's a mountain of research showing that you're wrong, but in any case the "truth" about global warming as a lot more nuanced than can be summed up in a couple sentences. You think you can just pop on here, write something stupid like that, and be contributing to the discussion? Moron.
Worse than coal or nuclear is going a bit far considering the environmental impact of coal includes the destruction of entire ecosystem in West Virginia and the lion's share of the responsibility for global warming, and we all know how nice nuclear waste is. But you do have a point.
However... there's more than one way to skin a cat. PV is just one way to harness energy from the sun, and it's not even cheap, environmentally friendly, or efficient. Check out these guys. That's just mirrors and metal, and the world's neatest mechanical engine. I keep waiting for the day when people realize we can generate solar power for prices nearing that of fossil fuels, today, with no scary waste or CO2, but, alas, hasn't happened yet.
There are methods of generating electricity from the sun that exist right now, today, and are or will soon be competitive ($/MW) with coal, oil and NG-fired generators. See www.stirlingenergy.com.
This whole addicted to oil this is not nearly as intractable as the entrenched powers-that-be would like you to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
You should really go examine the rest of the world. I'm not trying to sound condescending here, really, and if you are deriving true happiness from your job then I apologize in advance. But if you are seriously devoting that much of the prime of your life to a marketing company, you are going to wind up feeling colossally gipped in about 25 years. Or any company, for that matter. Devote yourself to making yourself, your friends, and/or your family happy. But please, don't piss it all away making somebody else some money.
Are you suggesting he lobby the governor for a favor? :-) Touche.
This is an interesting development in light of recent comments made by Linus about Sun and ZFS in particular, to which Jonathan Schwartz wrote a personal response.
If the commercial did that to you, you should really read the books. Bertie's Jeeves is God, the Oracle, Vishnu, the Illuminati, Yahweh and Tom Bombadil all rolled into one.
That's very true, but my only point (responding to the post) was that just because an idea has been knocking impotently around the labs for last 70 years does not mean it's a failure, or even commercially inviable. Fuel cells might be 200 years old, but the reason I'm writing this using coal-generated electricity (as opposed to hydrogen) has more to do with the cheap accessibility of fossil fuels--and, importantly, the failure to price in the cost of their emissions--than any flaw in fuel cell designs. Alter that equation slightly by making fossil fuels scarce (an inevitability) or people pay for CO2 (a damn good idea) and those advantages disappear. Fuel cells won't become magically cheaper overnight, but mass adoption, better manufacturing techniques and economies of scale will drive their price down, down, down in the long run.
All of those problems could be solved in a much less intrusive, more efficient fashion than they currently are, groceries excepted (the distinction between durable and perishable goods is a valid one.) Come on. Use your imagination. Measure yourself better, send those measurements in, get clothes that fit. Read a review site to figure out what's worth buying and what isn't. If you aren't already doing that anyway, you're shortchanging yourself. I doubt a 10 minute romp over at Mattress Barn is really going to convey useful information about how it holds up long term.
And I find it ironic that I post something topical and relevant, attacking nobody personally, and along comes you, in perfect ad hominem form, calling me the misanthrope. I would expect no less from Slashdot; but still, ironic.
You could have written a very similar story about the internal combustion engine. Working prototypes existed as early as the first decade of the 19th century, but still it took them 100 years to really catch on. And look where we are today.
Awareness of the coming energy crisis and our pernicious dependence on foreign oil has sparked an increase in R&D and general interest in alternative energy that is orders of magnitude higher than anything ever witnessed before. As this page demonstrates, yes, there has been sporadic research on SOFCs dating back to the 1930s, but all of it pales in comparison to the infusion of human and financial capital we're now seeing. The capitalist incentive to develop alternative energy never existed so long as oil was basically free, and of course miniscule amounts of government funding would never amount to much. But that was yesterday. This is the tipping point.
Didn't you hear? "S..." is the latest in a new line of uber-cursewords. More vulgar that fuck, more offensive than cunt, and it makes the rest of em look like mere punctuation. In fact I am so floored by what I have just seen that I'm going to have to go back and re-read Conan Doyle, for I can't remember Watson ever going so thoroughly apeshit (another word which now reads like a salutation, by comparison.)
You prefer the carrot. I'll opt for the stick. I'll bet that if we priced in all the externalities associated with those carbon-spewing generators, in addition to looking at the PDV of the stream of fuel payments needed to feed each, the prices would be a lot more competitive. Not necessarily no-brainer competitive--$175k is still a lot to pay for 5kW--but all of these new technologies will some day come down in price, and when they do we need to level the playing field with a carbon tax. This problem of ignoring emissions is the classic, canonical example of where markets fail.
I have the same problem. But if you're searching for actual code, you're better off using a code search engine. Or as others have pointed out, search "ruby append operator" if you're interested in the concept.
Another way to make solar cheaper is to drop the PV/Si approach altogether. Few people seem to have gotten the memo, but there are solar generators that exist right now that are making electricity at twice the efficiency of PV. They consist of nothing more complicated than metal and mirrors, and so there are huge opportunities for returns to scale (think cars.) Our continuing dependence on oil is a failure of imagination and political willpower, nothing more--think about how many of these Iraq could have bought. The technology is there.
Guilty. I do think I'm "all awesome." And "someones [sic]" is crying out for the apostrophe you so heartlessly deny it.
We're talking about trade policy, and, wow, you managed to work in global warming, "the media" and George Soros. I salute you, winger.
Anyhoo.. you're totally wrong, or at least, at odds with the facts, since facts, truth, and debate in general occupy some fuzzy, extracranial space for people like you. The European Union numbers 500 million, or 2/3 larger than Am'rca, so there would most certainly be people to buy the damn imports. Europe's trade deficit with China is close to that of the United States, as you will find in this report by the Congressional Research Service dated January 4 of this year. Or you could just Google "china trade balance" and read the first 60 or so things that come up, it's all there.
Which brings me to what really tickles me pink about you, and others like you, viz. where do you get off being so self-righteous when you've obviously spent so little time actually reading primary source material and forming your own thoughts? Bill O'Reilly's talking points do not an argument make. Take that whole diatribe in the middle there, about global warming. Literally every point you make has been thoroughly refuted, and I'm not talking in a polemic, debatable fashion--you can go look these things up for yourself, and anyone who takes the time to do so (as I have) has to admit what you're saying is bunk. The 1970s Ice Age "consensus" consists of about 20 publications, almost all of them in the popular (not scientific) press. The notion that the medieval warm period compares to what we're seeing now is flat wrong. Solar radiation has been constant for the last 30 years, during which time the most significant warming has been recorded, so no correlation there. There is scant evidence that Mars is warming, and even if it is, human activity is a much more convincing explanation for our own warming. Etc. etc. etc.
That's not to say that convincing counterarguments to the anthropogenic warming hypothesis cannot be made, but these are not those, and you do not know them. Your slavish repetition of these canards makes it clear that you're not in the game for any sort of self-enlightenment, or desire to get at the truth, but simply to score points and massage your bruised ego by screaming at the George Soroses of the world. You're shouting at cars. Why? A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
So, uhh, what was your point again? GP was saying that if the US fell off the face of the Earth tomorrow, the rest of the world would go chugging right along since the bulk of imports come from China and other developing nations. And (s)he is right. There wouldn't be as many Cisco routers, dot coms, investment banks, or bushels of corn to go around, but, well, bfd. We are mostly a service economy and services, while nice, aren't a deal breaker for most economies. I don't view trade sanctions as likely in the near future, but if we continue down our path while the rest of the world continues down another, it's certainly not out of the question.
As to your point about currency, you need to read up on international finance, my friend. China has us completely by the balls in terms of foreign reserves, and if the constant rumors about the teetering dollar ever spook them into switching even a small portion of that into gold or euros, a major, painful readjustment in the exchange rate would result, and it would not be pleasant for the American economy.
There's an even more fundamental reason why that analogy is flawed: the supply of domain names is not fixed. You can always make more. So in theory, you should never see the sort of price inflation with domain names that you do in real estate (barring branding). And, let's be honest, having an awesome domain name is a (possibly) sufficient, not a necessary condition to running a successful web site. I don't know anyone who goes to www.doctors.com if they want to find a doctor. They Google it. And speaking of Google: Twitter? Zazzle? Meebo? No one ever thought to just type that in. The search engines are the true arbiters of who get hits, not the DNS servers.
Very true. I just read an article about the world's most successful hedge fund manager (2006 compensation: $1.7 billion), who's a total math geek and hires the same. When you consider the essence of a lot of financial industries is extracting signals from gobs of noisy data, there are all sorts of applied scientists who would be a good fit. Astrophysicists, for example. Made me seriously consider going to grad school for applied math instead of econ.
And don't go into consulting. I've been there, and it sucks.
Pawns? Was your dad a 19th century absentee landlord? Yeesh. No sé si de verdad les llamaras peones, pero .. joder.
Arable land. Yay.
The official groupthink is that "groupthink" is one word. Now get it right, or you're outta the club.
Vote with your dollars. No one is holding a gun to your head. In the meantime, find something worthwhile to post on.
Oooh, random guy on Slashdot called it a hoax. Phew. We can all go back to worrying about American Idol now.
There's a mountain of research showing that you're wrong, but in any case the "truth" about global warming as a lot more nuanced than can be summed up in a couple sentences. You think you can just pop on here, write something stupid like that, and be contributing to the discussion? Moron.
Worse than coal or nuclear is going a bit far considering the environmental impact of coal includes the destruction of entire ecosystem in West Virginia and the lion's share of the responsibility for global warming, and we all know how nice nuclear waste is. But you do have a point.
However... there's more than one way to skin a cat. PV is just one way to harness energy from the sun, and it's not even cheap, environmentally friendly, or efficient. Check out these guys. That's just mirrors and metal, and the world's neatest mechanical engine. I keep waiting for the day when people realize we can generate solar power for prices nearing that of fossil fuels, today, with no scary waste or CO2, but, alas, hasn't happened yet.
There are methods of generating electricity from the sun that exist right now, today, and are or will soon be competitive ($/MW) with coal, oil and NG-fired generators. See www.stirlingenergy.com.
This whole addicted to oil this is not nearly as intractable as the entrenched powers-that-be would like you to believe.