Actually, I tried to expound upon a topic I know a bit about and find interesting. I intended to use the guy's presumably off-the-cuff remark as a somewhat amusing jumping off point to correct a fairly common misunderstanding. I'm sorry if you, he, or anyone misunderstood that intent.
"Nerds" (such as myself) frequently have difficulty in that they sound like jerks when they correct others, while in reality, we are simply well-informed, and enjoy sharing our well-informedness with others. In most social situations, being nice is considered more important than being correct. Much of the fun of hanging out (virtually at least) in places like Slashdot that are dominated by like-minded nerds, is being free to concentrate on being right, and not having to worry so much if anyone thinks you're a jerk. So, I don't think I'm a jerk, and I kind of hope you don't. But, nothing personal, I mostly don't give a damn.
The fastest most powerful part of the jet stream drifts about a bit, and you probaly couldn't keep this thing in it all the time. You could a lot of the time, as it's a pretty big-ass stream, and in any case, if you pick the the average lattitude of the jet stream, it's still pretty windy at 5km up pretty much all the time, even if you're not getting the super-duper windy core of the jet stream, which, again, is about 300 miles wide.
I beleive I correctly understood the position of RMS when he wrote the essays I found so persuasive (sometime before 1993, when I read them), but that his position has drifted and/or hardened since then. That's his right, but I liked the kinder, gentler RMS better:)
Frankly, I think that in this RMS is somewhat a victim of his own success. He was instumental in convincing me, and quite a number of my contemporaries, that open was (technically) better. He may have seen that as only a side point to his main argument that proprietary was (morally) wrong, but to us, the technical superiority of openness was more obvious and compelling. The resulting rise in the popularity of "open" without necessarily caring about "Free" has forced RMS to focus more exclusively on the moral side of his argument, which is weaker and/or more difficult depending on your perspective.
I agree; I was only trying to address the posters apparent misconception about the nature of the butterfly effect, which is common.
As for the real effect of this system, my back-of-the-envelope estimation suggests that a high-efficiency rotor the size of a football field will extract on the order of 1 one-millionth of the energy in the jet stream; and we're nowhere close to being able to get a rotor that size up there, much less the tens of thousands of them that would be required before I would start to be concerned.
For the record, I wasn't sure if your original post was a joke or not, but it didn't matter. I simply found it amusing that someone was trying to give me a helpful pointer to a wikipedia article I could easily have written. There is no way you could have known I was actually more than passingly familiar with the butterfly effect, so I hope you didn't take any personal offense. The Butterfly Effect is widely misunderstood, so I thought your post would make a fun jumping-off point to expound on a topic I know something about and find interesting.
I did not intend in that post to lend support to my original conclusion, but only to rebut your apparent sugestion that the Butterfly Effect was relevant to the discussion at hand. The butterfly effect means you cannot make good predictions about the detail behaviours of chaotic systems. It does not mean you cannot make macroscopic assesments of the range of possible future behaviors. It is still entirely reasonable to say that if the total energy you take out of the wind is small enough, you need not worry about the long term effects. I certainly don't worry before I go fly a kite with my daughter, for example.
So you are quite right that I have yet to provide any evidence for my contention that the total energy taken is negligible in this case. Let us consider it: The best wind turbines extract something like half the energy of the wind that passes through their swept area. According to the first source I could find, the very core, fastest winds of the jet stream form a layer 3 miles deep by 300 miles wide. So, by my calculations, a turbine the size of a football field will extract about 0.00001% of the energy in those winds.
Hmmm, I was under the impression real turbines didn't get very close to the theoretical maximums at all. But OK, let's call it 60% of the air that passes through the swept area, and let's call that swept area something ridiculously big, like 100,000 square meters (about 25 football fields). With just the core, fastest winds of the jet stream being about 300 miles wide by 3 miles thick, that will extract, by my calculations, 0.0026% of the total energy. I'm not worried.
"Perhaps you are neglecting the Butterfly Effect."
I am not. I have a degree in Mathematics in which I made a particular study of chaotic dynamical systems. I've written papers about the Butterfly effect; I've constructed physical models that demonstrate it. Let me tell you about the Butterfly Effect, so that you can refrain from bringing it up in discussions such as this in the future:
In a system which exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions (such as the weather), you cannot predict the details of long-term behavior (will there be a tornado in Iowa exactly 1 year from today) because tiny variations, well below what your measurement of the system could possibly account for (such as the breeze generated by the flapping of butterfly wings) will cause reality to drift further and further out of synch with your model until there is no resemblance on the detail level.
So the butterfly effect makes it impossible to ever predict what day it will rain months in advance, for example. But it does not prevent predictions about the aggregate, macroscopic behaviour of the system as a whole. In Meterological terms, long term weather prediction is impossible, but short-to-mid term climate prediction is easy.
Lets be ridiculously generous, and say this system takes a thousanth of a percent of the wind energy in the jet stream out. Is it reasonable to suppose this might cause significant changes in the world climate that will make a huge difference in its suitability for humans? No; it is not remotely reasonable. It's just not enough energy to make much difference.
Would it mean sometime in the future there will be a thunderstorm one day and not another? Absolutely. Whether you exhale the next breath you take slowly or forcefully means exactly the same thing; the minute difference in the velocity of a few thousand molecules of air your breathing pattern makes will eventually mean the difference in what day you get a thunderstorm.
The relevance of the Butterfly Effect in deciding whether to build this wind farm is the same as its relevance in deciding how forcefully to exhale your next breath. It means that the exact effect of either cannot be predicted, and that's it. It's not a reason to not do anything. (Well, except things like attempting long term prediction of weather detail.)
"They used them to prevent aircraft from flying over towns/cities/military targets (it sort of worked)."
Yes, very large numbers of balloons each of which had very large numbers of unmarked trailing cables, which were moved around a lot without telling the enemy where they were, were vaugely successful in making aircraft that wished to attack specific small targets fly at a different altitude. (those balloons were not at 10Km, but low to the ground, and only made the attackers fly a bit higher, where they could be more easily targeted by AA fire).
The relevance of this to the case at hand is a bit of a stretch. Airliners would presumably be told where these were, and they'd be made easily visible to boot. Airliners would just fly around them. They currently avoid one another, and there are many more of them than there would be of these.
And your understanding of high-altitude winds isn't much better.
The jet stream is instumental in pushing storm systems around, but is itself a fairly stable, continuous flow at a higher altitude than the storms.
The tethers will keep these continuously grounded, so any static is just some bonus power. The teathers will be great lightning rods, which will probably be more power at once than can be made usable, but it is entirely possible to design them so it's not destructive either.
Ice build up would have to be dealt with, but, hey, it's a power station, if nothing better, heat the cable.
There are definitely technical hurdles to overcome; this is at the conceptual daydreaming stage so far. But the obvious problems seem entirely doable to me.
I'd say the big issue is if you can get reliability good enough that maintenance costs don't kill your cost effectiveness.
Update: Just for kicks, I Read The Fine Article. In it, it is estimated that 1% of the power in the jet stream would power the entirety of human civilization. Not that you'd ever get that much, but again, not a problem.
So don't RTFA (I haven't:) ), but make some estimate in your head of the total percent of the energy in the jet stream they could possibly harvest. I have some idea the scales involved and the efficiency of wind turbines, and in my wildest speculations I can't see how they are going to make even a tenth of a percent difference in the strenght of the stream. It's not going to be a problem.
"Is it even possible for us to tap enough power from the jet stream (or other high altitude winds) to cause problems?"
No. The total power we could possibly harvest with systems like those in the article is not worth mentioning in the scale of the total energy in the jet stream. Windmills take a few percent of the energy of the wind that actually passes over them, wich would only be a tiny fraction of the wind in the jet stream.
I'm familiar with the argument, though I haven't seen the evidence. Having once bought a house in Virginia without hiring a lawyer, I assume your friends case involves more specifics. Proposing to make lawyer jokes illegal sounds like, itself, a joke; it wasn't enacted in any case.
But I'm sure there are examples of laws arguably biased in favor of lawyers. On the other hand, I know there are plenty of examples of laws that suck due to their authors lack of legal expertise. That are too porly written to be comprehensible, or conflict with existing law in unintended, but obvious ways, or that are just obviously unconstitutional.
Well, I agree. Why GPL3 no matter what the provisions?
If I recall correctly, I first came across open source in 1993, when I read some fairly persuasive essays about it by RMS. I was initially sceptical of the GPLs share-alike restricitons. I recall RMS arguing that the nascent open-source movement didn't have the resources, code base, or more-or-less "head start" that proprietary software had, and they must give themselves a leg up by creating software that was only available ot themselves. This was part of the justification for the LGPL: if equivalent proprietary libraries existed, or would exist, anyway, it was better to have the open library become the standard since it wouldn't give free software any advantage anyway. The implication (which I though was even explicitly stated, though I can't find the reference) was that eventually such provisions would be unnecessary. That one day a certain critical mass would be attained, and the basic superiority of the open development model would be sufficient to sustain the movement.
Well, I think that day is here. I'd say let people take the code and do what they want with it. Those who close it will shortly wind up with suckier software, and that will be the end of it. The technical superiority of open development is sufficient, all by itself, to make open software win vs closed software. Restrictions that attempt to keep the software open are not needed, and not without cost. They require some effort to understand, and may exclude people who would otherwise have made useful contributions.
It was those essays by RMS that first convinced me of the superiority of open development, though he seemed a buit the zealot. It amuses me that I now seem to have more faith in that superiority than he.
Before I get a million angry rebuttals, let me note that I fully respect others right to disagree with me on any of this, and please use whatever license you like on your own code. But at this point in history, if you want as many people as possible to use and contribute to your project, I recommend BSD.
"Just because something is more well defined doesn't mean it is less arbitrary."
Is definitely true. If I define "Human" as something that can drive a sports car, that's perfectly well-defined, but it's arbitrary: it's just the first dumb example that popped into my head, there is nothing particularly good motivating it.
The definition of what a species is not so well defined as you imply (google "ring species" for my favorite example). But even if it were perfectly well defined for the purpose of identifying what can interbreed, it is arbitrary in terms of deciding what should morally be accorded rights. If science provides a way for humans to produce offspring with animals they previously couldn't, do those animals, or their half-human offspring get human rights? For that matter, I've had a vasectomy, and will not be producing further offspring with anything. Am I still human? Basically, what does interbreeding have to do, directly, with deserving rights? Nothing.
Frankly, any proposal that draws a hard-edged, unambigous line in response to a question like "Who deserves 'human' rights?" is certain to be wrong. It's an inherently ambigous question, rife with grey areas.
Your clock is your clock and you may set it to whatever you like. Your schedule is your schedule and you can keep it however you like.
The people of the United States, through the admittedly imperfect mechanism of collective action we call government, have decided to change the setting on those clocks that belong to us through that government, acording to a scheme we call DST. It is beleived by some that this is the easiest way to effect the seasonal change in scedule you seem to ackowledege is desirable, and particularly the easiest for others who wish coordinate changes to their schedules.
None the less, nobody is touching your freakin' clock. If you have some wacky idea that the time your clock indicates is somehow sacredly ordained, and not merely an artificial construct for convenience in coordinating activities with others, by all means set it to mean solar time for your exact location, or whatever else you like.
Actually, my compliments on your willingness to do simple research, but you have misread my statement.
While the majority *has* consisted of lawyers in past congresses, the majority of (current) congresspeople are not, and *have* never been lawyers. My use of the plural "have" attaches the dependent clause to the similarly plural "congresspeople", not to the singular "majority".
Pedantry aside, I continue to maintain that a significant amount of legal expertise is desirable in a body charged with making law.
I don't think most businesses would change their hours seasonally without DST. I think they would pick one set of hours and stick with it all year. I beleive experience from before DST and from places that don't observe it support this. If I understand you correctly, so far we agree.
We disagree in that I think keeping the same hours (relative to the sun) all year round is undesirable. I think it's better for most to start our days earlier in the summer, but that we won't do it if we don't all do it together.
In the summer time, even with DST, most people I know get up long after sunrise and go to bed well after dark. But in the depths of winter, most people I know get up just after sunrise. I conclude that not getting up before sunrise, even in the winter, is the driving concern that ultimately sets business hours, and thus that despite your intuition, hours won't move forward year round.
The majority of congresspeople are not, and have never been, lawyers. There are quite a few lawyers, which is probably a good thing since their job is to make laws.
But in any case, I don't think it's a plus to take vacation most of the time, just to show up occasionally and rubber stamp what the lobbyists and/or President have worked out for you. Working fewer days than anyone ever before didn't prevent them from spending more of my money than anyone ever before.
I used to think that if I disagreed with some elected official, it would be better if they were incompetent. Experience has disabused me of this notion.
You say if four-strokes didn't have a big lead, fuel cells (or whatever) would be better, and four-strokes wouldn't compete. I don't know one way or another, but I'll happily stipulate that this is true.
This only supports my assertion that the analogy is bad.
Chip designers starting from scratch definitely can do better than x86, even without requiring x86 to start over. Not only can they, they *have*. More efficient instruction sets have been developed, and have been in production and available for quite some time. x86 remains dominant for reasons entirely unrelated to the reasons 4 stroke engines do.
Most people do have a very assymetrical schedule. My analysis is that most people don't want to get up before sunrise, even during most of the winter, but are happy to stay up after dark. Given that, the midnight-8 sleep schedule makes sense in the winter; but then people pin it to the clock, and don't adjust it in the summer when dawn comes earlier. So in that context, a seasonal adjustment of the clock, such as DST, makes sense. Most people can't set their own hour independently of the rest of society due to jobs, etc. To make a seasonal adjustment in a sychronized manner, it's going to be forced. Though, actually, if you can set your schedule seperately from others, it's not forced; just get up the same time you always did (by the sun), and reserve DST adjustment for comunicating with others.
"I also like it when the time on a clock bears some vague resemblance to physical events like midnight."
I agree on some aesthetic level, but I don't see a practical benefit. I set my clock based on my time zone, not strick astonomy, in any case.
I imagine people who's life depends on the sun ignore DST in terms of when to get up. DST is a crude adjustment, fine for people who kind of like an earlier day in the summer than the winter, but not for those who really depend on it.
"The government's laws should be about encouraging businesses to set working hours to match the sun"
An excellent idea, but wouldn't it be nice if businesses could make seasonal adjustments in their working hours in some organized fashion? Synchronized even?
I don't know of anyone who is "tricked" by DST; it's not unpublicized, snuck past anyone, or, get this, required. You can set your watch to whatever you please; nobody will arrest you. If you need a fundamental measurement system, use UTC, or other non-adjusted time reference. If you want to adjust you schedule seasonally, while remaining syncronized with most of society, as is apropriate for almost all practical purposes, use DST.
Right. Without DST, we could all independently choose to move our schedules earlier acording to the clock. And every buisiness could pick their own day to change their hours, etc. The net effect would be just like DST, except far more confusing and haphazard. Why would that be good?
From what I can tell, workers in businesses that depend on daylight, such as construction, are the only ones who regularly get up before sunrise, so as to be on the jobsite as early as possible. They keep earlier, and frequently longer, hours than the rest of us. My conclusion is that working hours for the rest of us are driven by most people not haveing to get up before sunrise most of the time. Which naturally sets societys hours to something that makes sense in the winter, but is later than optimal in the summer. Hence DST.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I tried to expound upon a topic I know a bit about and find interesting. I intended to use the guy's presumably off-the-cuff remark as a somewhat amusing jumping off point to correct a fairly common misunderstanding. I'm sorry if you, he, or anyone misunderstood that intent.
"Nerds" (such as myself) frequently have difficulty in that they sound like jerks when they correct others, while in reality, we are simply well-informed, and enjoy sharing our well-informedness with others. In most social situations, being nice is considered more important than being correct. Much of the fun of hanging out (virtually at least) in places like Slashdot that are dominated by like-minded nerds, is being free to concentrate on being right, and not having to worry so much if anyone thinks you're a jerk. So, I don't think I'm a jerk, and I kind of hope you don't. But, nothing personal, I mostly don't give a damn.
The fastest most powerful part of the jet stream drifts about a bit, and you probaly couldn't keep this thing in it all the time. You could a lot of the time, as it's a pretty big-ass stream, and in any case, if you pick the the average lattitude of the jet stream, it's still pretty windy at 5km up pretty much all the time, even if you're not getting the super-duper windy core of the jet stream, which, again, is about 300 miles wide.
I beleive I correctly understood the position of RMS when he wrote the essays I found so persuasive (sometime before 1993, when I read them), but that his position has drifted and/or hardened since then. That's his right, but I liked the kinder, gentler RMS better
Frankly, I think that in this RMS is somewhat a victim of his own success. He was instumental in convincing me, and quite a number of my contemporaries, that open was (technically) better. He may have seen that as only a side point to his main argument that proprietary was (morally) wrong, but to us, the technical superiority of openness was more obvious and compelling. The resulting rise in the popularity of "open" without necessarily caring about "Free" has forced RMS to focus more exclusively on the moral side of his argument, which is weaker and/or more difficult depending on your perspective.
I agree; I was only trying to address the posters apparent misconception about the nature of the butterfly effect, which is common.
As for the real effect of this system, my back-of-the-envelope estimation suggests that a high-efficiency rotor the size of a football field will extract on the order of 1 one-millionth of the energy in the jet stream; and we're nowhere close to being able to get a rotor that size up there, much less the tens of thousands of them that would be required before I would start to be concerned.
For the record, I wasn't sure if your original post was a joke or not, but it didn't matter. I simply found it amusing that someone was trying to give me a helpful pointer to a wikipedia article I could easily have written. There is no way you could have known I was actually more than passingly familiar with the butterfly effect, so I hope you didn't take any personal offense. The Butterfly Effect is widely misunderstood, so I thought your post would make a fun jumping-off point to expound on a topic I know something about and find interesting.
I did not intend in that post to lend support to my original conclusion, but only to rebut your apparent sugestion that the Butterfly Effect was relevant to the discussion at hand. The butterfly effect means you cannot make good predictions about the detail behaviours of chaotic systems. It does not mean you cannot make macroscopic assesments of the range of possible future behaviors. It is still entirely reasonable to say that if the total energy you take out of the wind is small enough, you need not worry about the long term effects. I certainly don't worry before I go fly a kite with my daughter, for example.
So you are quite right that I have yet to provide any evidence for my contention that the total energy taken is negligible in this case. Let us consider it: The best wind turbines extract something like half the energy of the wind that passes through their swept area. According to the first source I could find, the very core, fastest winds of the jet stream form a layer 3 miles deep by 300 miles wide. So, by my calculations, a turbine the size of a football field will extract about 0.00001% of the energy in those winds.
I remain unworried.
Hmmm, I was under the impression real turbines didn't get very close to the theoretical maximums at all. But OK, let's call it 60% of the air that passes through the swept area, and let's call that swept area something ridiculously big, like 100,000 square meters (about 25 football fields). With just the core, fastest winds of the jet stream being about 300 miles wide by 3 miles thick, that will extract, by my calculations, 0.0026% of the total energy. I'm not worried.
"Perhaps you are neglecting the Butterfly Effect."
I am not. I have a degree in Mathematics in which I made a particular study of chaotic dynamical systems. I've written papers about the Butterfly effect; I've constructed physical models that demonstrate it. Let me tell you about the Butterfly Effect, so that you can refrain from bringing it up in discussions such as this in the future:
In a system which exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions (such as the weather), you cannot predict the details of long-term behavior (will there be a tornado in Iowa exactly 1 year from today) because tiny variations, well below what your measurement of the system could possibly account for (such as the breeze generated by the flapping of butterfly wings) will cause reality to drift further and further out of synch with your model until there is no resemblance on the detail level.
So the butterfly effect makes it impossible to ever predict what day it will rain months in advance, for example. But it does not prevent predictions about the aggregate, macroscopic behaviour of the system as a whole. In Meterological terms, long term weather prediction is impossible, but short-to-mid term climate prediction is easy.
Lets be ridiculously generous, and say this system takes a thousanth of a percent of the wind energy in the jet stream out. Is it reasonable to suppose this might cause significant changes in the world climate that will make a huge difference in its suitability for humans? No; it is not remotely reasonable. It's just not enough energy to make much difference.
Would it mean sometime in the future there will be a thunderstorm one day and not another? Absolutely. Whether you exhale the next breath you take slowly or forcefully means exactly the same thing; the minute difference in the velocity of a few thousand molecules of air your breathing pattern makes will eventually mean the difference in what day you get a thunderstorm.
The relevance of the Butterfly Effect in deciding whether to build this wind farm is the same as its relevance in deciding how forcefully to exhale your next breath. It means that the exact effect of either cannot be predicted, and that's it. It's not a reason to not do anything. (Well, except things like attempting long term prediction of weather detail.)
Hope that helps.
"They used them to prevent aircraft from flying over towns/cities/military targets (it sort of worked)."
Yes, very large numbers of balloons each of which had very large numbers of unmarked trailing cables, which were moved around a lot without telling the enemy where they were, were vaugely successful in making aircraft that wished to attack specific small targets fly at a different altitude. (those balloons were not at 10Km, but low to the ground, and only made the attackers fly a bit higher, where they could be more easily targeted by AA fire).
The relevance of this to the case at hand is a bit of a stretch. Airliners would presumably be told where these were, and they'd be made easily visible to boot. Airliners would just fly around them. They currently avoid one another, and there are many more of them than there would be of these.
And your understanding of high-altitude winds isn't much better.
The jet stream is instumental in pushing storm systems around, but is itself a fairly stable, continuous flow at a higher altitude than the storms.
The tethers will keep these continuously grounded, so any static is just some bonus power. The teathers will be great lightning rods, which will probably be more power at once than can be made usable, but it is entirely possible to design them so it's not destructive either.
Ice build up would have to be dealt with, but, hey, it's a power station, if nothing better, heat the cable.
There are definitely technical hurdles to overcome; this is at the conceptual daydreaming stage so far. But the obvious problems seem entirely doable to me.
I'd say the big issue is if you can get reliability good enough that maintenance costs don't kill your cost effectiveness.
Update: Just for kicks, I Read The Fine Article. In it, it is estimated that 1% of the power in the jet stream would power the entirety of human civilization. Not that you'd ever get that much, but again, not a problem.
So don't RTFA (I haven't :) ), but make some estimate in your head of the total percent of the energy in the jet stream they could possibly harvest. I have some idea the scales involved and the efficiency of wind turbines, and in my wildest speculations I can't see how they are going to make even a tenth of a percent difference in the strenght of the stream. It's not going to be a problem.
"Is it even possible for us to tap enough power from the jet stream (or other high altitude winds) to cause problems?"
No. The total power we could possibly harvest with systems like those in the article is not worth mentioning in the scale of the total energy in the jet stream. Windmills take a few percent of the energy of the wind that actually passes over them, wich would only be a tiny fraction of the wind in the jet stream.
I'm familiar with the argument, though I haven't seen the evidence. Having once bought a house in Virginia without hiring a lawyer, I assume your friends case involves more specifics. Proposing to make lawyer jokes illegal sounds like, itself, a joke; it wasn't enacted in any case.
But I'm sure there are examples of laws arguably biased in favor of lawyers. On the other hand, I know there are plenty of examples of laws that suck due to their authors lack of legal expertise. That are too porly written to be comprehensible, or conflict with existing law in unintended, but obvious ways, or that are just obviously unconstitutional.
Well, I agree. Why GPL3 no matter what the provisions?
If I recall correctly, I first came across open source in 1993, when I read some fairly persuasive essays about it by RMS. I was initially sceptical of the GPLs share-alike restricitons. I recall RMS arguing that the nascent open-source movement didn't have the resources, code base, or more-or-less "head start" that proprietary software had, and they must give themselves a leg up by creating software that was only available ot themselves. This was part of the justification for the LGPL: if equivalent proprietary libraries existed, or would exist, anyway, it was better to have the open library become the standard since it wouldn't give free software any advantage anyway. The implication (which I though was even explicitly stated, though I can't find the reference) was that eventually such provisions would be unnecessary. That one day a certain critical mass would be attained, and the basic superiority of the open development model would be sufficient to sustain the movement.
Well, I think that day is here. I'd say let people take the code and do what they want with it. Those who close it will shortly wind up with suckier software, and that will be the end of it. The technical superiority of open development is sufficient, all by itself, to make open software win vs closed software. Restrictions that attempt to keep the software open are not needed, and not without cost. They require some effort to understand, and may exclude people who would otherwise have made useful contributions.
It was those essays by RMS that first convinced me of the superiority of open development, though he seemed a buit the zealot. It amuses me that I now seem to have more faith in that superiority than he.
Before I get a million angry rebuttals, let me note that I fully respect others right to disagree with me on any of this, and please use whatever license you like on your own code. But at this point in history, if you want as many people as possible to use and contribute to your project, I recommend BSD.
"Just because something is more well defined doesn't mean it is less arbitrary."
Is definitely true. If I define "Human" as something that can drive a sports car, that's perfectly well-defined, but it's arbitrary: it's just the first dumb example that popped into my head, there is nothing particularly good motivating it.
The definition of what a species is not so well defined as you imply (google "ring species" for my favorite example). But even if it were perfectly well defined for the purpose of identifying what can interbreed, it is arbitrary in terms of deciding what should morally be accorded rights. If science provides a way for humans to produce offspring with animals they previously couldn't, do those animals, or their half-human offspring get human rights? For that matter, I've had a vasectomy, and will not be producing further offspring with anything. Am I still human? Basically, what does interbreeding have to do, directly, with deserving rights? Nothing.
Frankly, any proposal that draws a hard-edged, unambigous line in response to a question like "Who deserves 'human' rights?" is certain to be wrong. It's an inherently ambigous question, rife with grey areas.
"Change your schedule, not my clock"
Your clock is your clock and you may set it to whatever you like. Your schedule is your schedule and you can keep it however you like.
The people of the United States, through the admittedly imperfect mechanism of collective action we call government, have decided to change the setting on those clocks that belong to us through that government, acording to a scheme we call DST. It is beleived by some that this is the easiest way to effect the seasonal change in scedule you seem to ackowledege is desirable, and particularly the easiest for others who wish coordinate changes to their schedules.
None the less, nobody is touching your freakin' clock. If you have some wacky idea that the time your clock indicates is somehow sacredly ordained, and not merely an artificial construct for convenience in coordinating activities with others, by all means set it to mean solar time for your exact location, or whatever else you like.
"As long as they don't really match up anyway we might as well just shift hours in operation and leave the clocks alone."
Why would that be better? Either way we change what time we do things (which is good), but by changing the clocks we do it in a synchronized manner.
Actually, my compliments on your willingness to do simple research, but you have misread my statement.
While the majority *has* consisted of lawyers in past congresses, the majority of (current) congresspeople are not, and *have* never been lawyers. My use of the plural "have" attaches the dependent clause to the similarly plural "congresspeople", not to the singular "majority".
Pedantry aside, I continue to maintain that a significant amount of legal expertise is desirable in a body charged with making law.
I don't think most businesses would change their hours seasonally without DST. I think they would pick one set of hours and stick with it all year. I beleive experience from before DST and from places that don't observe it support this. If I understand you correctly, so far we agree.
We disagree in that I think keeping the same hours (relative to the sun) all year round is undesirable. I think it's better for most to start our days earlier in the summer, but that we won't do it if we don't all do it together.
In the summer time, even with DST, most people I know get up long after sunrise and go to bed well after dark. But in the depths of winter, most people I know get up just after sunrise. I conclude that not getting up before sunrise, even in the winter, is the driving concern that ultimately sets business hours, and thus that despite your intuition, hours won't move forward year round.
The majority of congresspeople are not, and have never been, lawyers. There are quite a few lawyers, which is probably a good thing since their job is to make laws.
But in any case, I don't think it's a plus to take vacation most of the time, just to show up occasionally and rubber stamp what the lobbyists and/or President have worked out for you. Working fewer days than anyone ever before didn't prevent them from spending more of my money than anyone ever before.
I used to think that if I disagreed with some elected official, it would be better if they were incompetent. Experience has disabused me of this notion.
You say if four-strokes didn't have a big lead, fuel cells (or whatever) would be better, and four-strokes wouldn't compete. I don't know one way or another, but I'll happily stipulate that this is true.
This only supports my assertion that the analogy is bad.
Chip designers starting from scratch definitely can do better than x86, even without requiring x86 to start over. Not only can they, they *have*. More efficient instruction sets have been developed, and have been in production and available for quite some time. x86 remains dominant for reasons entirely unrelated to the reasons 4 stroke engines do.
Most people do have a very assymetrical schedule. My analysis is that most people don't want to get up before sunrise, even during most of the winter, but are happy to stay up after dark. Given that, the midnight-8 sleep schedule makes sense in the winter; but then people pin it to the clock, and don't adjust it in the summer when dawn comes earlier. So in that context, a seasonal adjustment of the clock, such as DST, makes sense.
Most people can't set their own hour independently of the rest of society due to jobs, etc. To make a seasonal adjustment in a sychronized manner, it's going to be forced. Though, actually, if you can set your schedule seperately from others, it's not forced; just get up the same time you always did (by the sun), and reserve DST adjustment for comunicating with others.
"I also like it when the time on a clock bears some vague resemblance to physical events like midnight."
I agree on some aesthetic level, but I don't see a practical benefit. I set my clock based on my time zone, not strick astonomy, in any case.
"If you life depends on the sun, get up earlier."
I imagine people who's life depends on the sun ignore DST in terms of when to get up. DST is a crude adjustment, fine for people who kind of like an earlier day in the summer than the winter, but not for those who really depend on it.
"The government's laws should be about encouraging businesses to set working hours to match the sun"
An excellent idea, but wouldn't it be nice if businesses could make seasonal adjustments in their working hours in some organized fashion? Synchronized even?
I don't know of anyone who is "tricked" by DST; it's not unpublicized, snuck past anyone, or, get this, required. You can set your watch to whatever you please; nobody will arrest you. If you need a fundamental measurement system, use UTC, or other non-adjusted time reference. If you want to adjust you schedule seasonally, while remaining syncronized with most of society, as is apropriate for almost all practical purposes, use DST.
It's a novel application of tech to gain new utility from existing capabilities.
I don't know what your definition of a hack is, but that's mine.
Right. Without DST, we could all independently choose to move our schedules earlier acording to the clock. And every buisiness could pick their own day to change their hours, etc. The net effect would be just like DST, except far more confusing and haphazard. Why would that be good?
From what I can tell, workers in businesses that depend on daylight, such as construction, are the only ones who regularly get up before sunrise, so as to be on the jobsite as early as possible. They keep earlier, and frequently longer, hours than the rest of us. My conclusion is that working hours for the rest of us are driven by most people not haveing to get up before sunrise most of the time. Which naturally sets societys hours to something that makes sense in the winter, but is later than optimal in the summer. Hence DST.