...revamp them to an economy where the Coal Mine isn't the center of the community but just one of many good employers.
Based on the information in the John Oliver segment (which matches with what I vaguely knew about the situation beforehand), most actual coal mining going on today doesn't even fit with being "one of many good employers" for an Appalachian community.
The old model was basically: you have a coal mine. You send people with hand or hand-held power tools down into that mine to dig out the coal. If that particular mine runs out (which it will after many decades of use), the odds are very good you can open a new one within a short enough distance that the people from the same town can still work it. This model took hundreds to thousands of men to extract a modest stream of coal from the mine for a long period of time.
The new model, as I understand it, is: you have a mountain with coal in it. You use explosives and enormous machines to cut the top off the mountain layer by layer and sift the coal out of the debris. This model takes a few men (maybe a few dozen) to extract a huge amount of coal out of the mountain in a short time, then they move on to another mountain.
Not only does the new model employ an order of magnitude fewer people, it doesn't provide a job that stays in one place for decades. That makes it a poor fit for a "good employer" for a community.
(That is, of course, leaving aside entirely what the new model does to the environment, which is godawful, but not relevant to its place as a community employer.
A significant proportion of people with diseases and allergies that were previously (mostly) unknown would just have died from 15,000 years ago to, oh, say, 200 years ago, and their death been attributed to the will of God(s).
Celiac and other food sensitivities have become either more prevalent, or more diagnosed, in recent years (or possibly both). If it is, in fact, a change in prevalence, I think we've got a variety of highly plausible causes based on changes in culture, environment, and diet over the past century or two.
Obama unsuccessfully tried the "election is over, let's all work together" approach. Trump has a completely different approach: "You voted against me, so I don't give a fuck what you think".
Actually, it sounds like he's gone further, and is now saying that people who don't like what Trump thinks don't actually exist—polls showing disapproval of his actions are "fake news".
Do the deaths of little people not matter as long as the great leap forward is achieved? Do you think the statist socialist places weren't doing socialism hard enough, or will you make a 'no true Scottsman' argument and claim they weren't doing it right? It's just that every single time... every. time... every. single. time... it ends in rivers of blood. The useful idealists are liquidated the moment they object.
I'm not going to make a "no true Scotsman" argument, because it's irrelevant whether what they were trying to achieve was "true" socialism.
Socialism, communism, capitalism—none of those have anything particular to do with mass state-sponsored murder. If you think socialism—things like Medicare, Social Security, and the Earned Income Tax Credit—can in any meaningful causative way lead to millions dead, then you're the one who's deluded.
Yes...but the point is that it's not just 1000 cars instead of 100 buses. It's 1000 cars instead of 100 buses and some indeterminate number of private cars.
OK, I see. You're counting all the people who now own personal cars and will give them up to use the futuristic self-driving cars instead.
I'll have to think about that. I'm doubtful, given Americans' love affair with their road machines, but maybe the culture could change. I'm afraid it would require creating "autonomous-only" roads though.
I am talking about self-driving cars as public transport. So instead of 100 busses, you would have 1000 self-driving cars.
1000 self-driving cars will cost more to buy, more to maintain, and more to operate than 100 buses.
You'll have 4000 tires, instead of 400. You'll have 1000 motors instead of 100. 1000 computers instead of 100.
Also, your ratios depend on cars vs buses. If you have cars vs light rail, the ratio goes up to at least 100:1
Yes...but the point is that it's not just 1000 cars instead of 100 buses. It's 1000 cars instead of 100 buses and some indeterminate number of private cars.
Maybe you got that backwards? Maybe self-driving cars are what will make public transport affordable and viable?
If you give this a moment's thought, you'll understand why it's a bad idea. Everyone needing their own $50,000 vehicle is the opposite of public transportation.
That's not what he said, though. The clear implication was not "the personal vehicles everyone owns should be replaced with self-driving ones", but "people should use a system of public self-driving vehicles to get around."
I certainly don't need a car for 90% of most days. It would be much more efficient for me to be able to use one for the trip to and from work, and let it go drive other people around, to work, errands, or whatever else, the rest of the time.
I'm pretty sure Apples App Store, pun intended, is run by a different company than Apple Inc. aka AAPL so good luck in court with your idiotic standpoint.
I'm pretty sure you're woefully uninformed on this.
To the best of my knowledge, Apple doesn't muck about with subsidiaries for all the different stuff they do. Selling computers, making operating systems, selling music downloads, selling apps, and selling music streaming subscriptions all fall within Apple Inc., whose stock ticker symbol is indeed AAPL.
the third-worlder isn't all that much better off than before, and may actually be much worse off if they went from an agricultural job they had some control over their destiny to a dismal factory job where they have no control at all
Why did they switch from the former to the latter then? (And if it wasn't their own choice, what forced them to do it? Honest question, not rhetorical).
Because historically, going to work on the factory has allowed workers to send a huge chunk of their paycheck home (like, 80% or more, sometimes) while living in the company dormitories, work there for a few years, and then effectively retire on the savings.
Here in the West, we see factory work as demanding, unrewarding drudgery. For people in developing countries, it's a way out of abject poverty, and provides a chance for something better for their children, even if they personally don't get a significantly better deal than their parents did. Don't make the mistake of looking at their lives, their culture, and their available choices through the lens of our own situation.
As I understand it, from hearing about this type of thing from other sources, creating chimeras isn't just meant to provide a source of transplantable human organs. It enables researchers to study the effects of drugs (and whatever else) on human organs much better than using straight-animal analogs, without the kinds of ethical issues that make it tricky to impossible to do it in human clinical trials.
"Boo hoo, my emotions are more important than the whole world's privacy."
Sorry, there is literally no way for Apple to build into a phone or an OS a way to unlock it for situations like this that won't also be vulnerable to governments and hackers.
If you never see your son's photos, that will be sad for you.
If Apple actually makes the changes required to make it possible for people like you to get in to phones like these regularly, that will be devastating for all iPhone users everywhere.
Not really. It would be more akin to Sarah gates saying that. Who's Sarah you ask? She is some distant relative in charge of Bill's fortune generations after he is dead.
That's fair.
However, I doubt that the Gates fortune and dynasty will last in the way that the Rockefeller has.
I would also say, though, that I wouldn't be at all surprised if John D. Rockefeller himself, if he were alive today, would react very similarly.
Well, yeah. We all know that. Hell, it's in the story summary.
The point is, even Rockefeller is divesting from fossil fuels. It would be like Bill Gates saying, "Y'know, Windows really is pretty terrible, and is likely to get you infected and turned into a bot. Everyone should ditch it and use Linux."
Well...it is, actually. It shouldn't be, but it is.
What it all comes down to is a question of the purpose of prison—and, indeed, of any court sentence.
As the excellent Illustrated Guide to Law lays out, any of our court sentences have five related purposes (and which purpose is most prioritized for a given sentence informs what the sentence is going to be like): Punishment, Deterrence, Rehabilitation, Removal and Retribution. At present, at least, America tends to focus heavily on Punishment and Retribution. That's what all the Tough On Crime laws are about: if you do something bad, you will be punished for it so that we feel like you've been hurt as much as the people you hurt. That's also partly about Deterrence.
Prison, specifically (and the death penalty, if you think about it), can usually serve the purpose of Removal—separating the criminal from the general population (aka "their potential victims," in many people's eyes, especially in the case of a registered sex offender). And, indeed, as some other people point out, if your real intention with a sex offender registry is to prevent them from coming into contact with potential victims, then the obvious solution is to just keep them locked up for life. Or kill them.
But I think most people would agree that, for most offenses that can land you on such a registry, that's too extreme. And all of this ignores the most utilitarian purpose of a court sentence for a crime: Rehabilitation. Helping the criminal to change whatever it is about themselves, or their life, that caused them to commit the crime in the first place. With a "classic" sex offender, this would have to include some kind of psychological component. Indeed, it might involve a lifetime of counseling, therapy, and/or drugs...but if we actually wanted to prevent people from committing these kinds of crimes again, rather than just hitting them on the head with the big freakin' hammer of the State from time to time when they reoffend (either in truth or merely by technicality, by breaking some condition of their registration), then we should pay a lot more attention to the mental health aspects of them than just thinking of the chiiiiiildren.
Actually, nations with lawfully armed populaces that are subjected to such social engineering for political desires by the ruling elites... tend to shoot the ruling elites and elect or coronate new ones.
You appear to have missed the part about the governments that attempt to enact such social engineering having tanks and planes to kill you with before your guns have a chance to mean a damn thing.
So it's more or less necessary, in such a situation, to have the army (or at least a substantial part of it) on your side. At which point having a lawfully armed populace becomes redundant, because you've got the bloody army on your side.
The problem (or, if you prefer, great part) with this line of reasoning is that if you follow it to its logical conclusion, it strongly suggests that what you would need to submit as a "software patent" is, in fact, the source code, at least for the portion of the program that you wish to patent.
Of course, we already have intellectual property protection for source code: copyright. So should there be software patents at all? Or should software patents replace copyrightable source code? Or should there be some kind of hybrid system, where you can have your source code patented, or copyrighted, but not both...?
The question isn't just whether they'll be as efficient as LEDs. The question is whether they'll last as long and cost as little.
Frankly, for most people, what they liked about incandescents was their cost. I seriously doubt that anything that requires "nanoengineered mirrors" will cost $2.50 for a pack of 10.
"That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted..."
Priests have no problem with such a deception.
There's a huge difference between being deliberately deceptive, and spreading a belief that you yourself devoutly believe in, that happens to also be false.
And if you seriously believe that more than a tiny fraction of priests don't believe in the religion they preach (to the extent that it would be fair to call them deliberately deceptive) then you're an idiot, and probably waaaay too angry at the world in general.
Slashdot Mirror
...revamp them to an economy where the Coal Mine isn't the center of the community but just one of many good employers.
Based on the information in the John Oliver segment (which matches with what I vaguely knew about the situation beforehand), most actual coal mining going on today doesn't even fit with being "one of many good employers" for an Appalachian community.
The old model was basically: you have a coal mine. You send people with hand or hand-held power tools down into that mine to dig out the coal. If that particular mine runs out (which it will after many decades of use), the odds are very good you can open a new one within a short enough distance that the people from the same town can still work it. This model took hundreds to thousands of men to extract a modest stream of coal from the mine for a long period of time.
The new model, as I understand it, is: you have a mountain with coal in it. You use explosives and enormous machines to cut the top off the mountain layer by layer and sift the coal out of the debris. This model takes a few men (maybe a few dozen) to extract a huge amount of coal out of the mountain in a short time, then they move on to another mountain.
Not only does the new model employ an order of magnitude fewer people, it doesn't provide a job that stays in one place for decades. That makes it a poor fit for a "good employer" for a community.
(That is, of course, leaving aside entirely what the new model does to the environment, which is godawful, but not relevant to its place as a community employer.
Dan Aris
A significant proportion of people with diseases and allergies that were previously (mostly) unknown would just have died from 15,000 years ago to, oh, say, 200 years ago, and their death been attributed to the will of God(s).
Celiac and other food sensitivities have become either more prevalent, or more diagnosed, in recent years (or possibly both). If it is, in fact, a change in prevalence, I think we've got a variety of highly plausible causes based on changes in culture, environment, and diet over the past century or two.
Dan Aris
Obama unsuccessfully tried the "election is over, let's all work together" approach. Trump has a completely different approach: "You voted against me, so I don't give a fuck what you think".
Actually, it sounds like he's gone further, and is now saying that people who don't like what Trump thinks don't actually exist—polls showing disapproval of his actions are "fake news".
Dan Aris
Do the deaths of little people not matter as long as the great leap forward is achieved? Do you think the statist socialist places weren't doing socialism hard enough, or will you make a 'no true Scottsman' argument and claim they weren't doing it right? It's just that every single time... every. time... every. single. time... it ends in rivers of blood. The useful idealists are liquidated the moment they object.
I'm not going to make a "no true Scotsman" argument, because it's irrelevant whether what they were trying to achieve was "true" socialism.
Socialism, communism, capitalism—none of those have anything particular to do with mass state-sponsored murder. If you think socialism—things like Medicare, Social Security, and the Earned Income Tax Credit—can in any meaningful causative way lead to millions dead, then you're the one who's deluded.
Dan Aris
Can their "perfect" cup of coffee do this?
I thought not.
Dan Aris
I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like I've seen this construction a lot more in recent weeks, and it really bugs me.
"X Times Less" is mathematical nonsense. "1/X As Much" is usually what is meant by it, and is both mathematically and linguistically correct.
So while I presume this headline means that Macs cost a third as much as Windows machines, that's not what it actually says.
Dan Aris
Most correctly, it's "In China, there are fears that..."
Dan Aris
OK, I see. You're counting all the people who now own personal cars and will give them up to use the futuristic self-driving cars instead.
I'll have to think about that. I'm doubtful, given Americans' love affair with their road machines, but maybe the culture could change. I'm afraid it would require creating "autonomous-only" roads though.
a) I'm all for that.
b) America != World
Dan Aris
1000 self-driving cars will cost more to buy, more to maintain, and more to operate than 100 buses.
You'll have 4000 tires, instead of 400. You'll have 1000 motors instead of 100. 1000 computers instead of 100.
Also, your ratios depend on cars vs buses. If you have cars vs light rail, the ratio goes up to at least 100:1
Yes...but the point is that it's not just 1000 cars instead of 100 buses. It's 1000 cars instead of 100 buses and some indeterminate number of private cars.
Dan Aris
If you give this a moment's thought, you'll understand why it's a bad idea. Everyone needing their own $50,000 vehicle is the opposite of public transportation.
That's not what he said, though. The clear implication was not "the personal vehicles everyone owns should be replaced with self-driving ones", but "people should use a system of public self-driving vehicles to get around."
I certainly don't need a car for 90% of most days. It would be much more efficient for me to be able to use one for the trip to and from work, and let it go drive other people around, to work, errands, or whatever else, the rest of the time.
Dan Aris
I'm pretty sure Apples App Store, pun intended, is run by a different company than Apple Inc. aka AAPL so good luck in court with your idiotic standpoint.
I'm pretty sure you're woefully uninformed on this.
To the best of my knowledge, Apple doesn't muck about with subsidiaries for all the different stuff they do. Selling computers, making operating systems, selling music downloads, selling apps, and selling music streaming subscriptions all fall within Apple Inc., whose stock ticker symbol is indeed AAPL.
Dan Aris
the third-worlder isn't all that much better off than before, and may actually be much worse off if they went from an agricultural job they had some control over their destiny to a dismal factory job where they have no control at all
Why did they switch from the former to the latter then? (And if it wasn't their own choice, what forced them to do it? Honest question, not rhetorical).
Because historically, going to work on the factory has allowed workers to send a huge chunk of their paycheck home (like, 80% or more, sometimes) while living in the company dormitories, work there for a few years, and then effectively retire on the savings.
Here in the West, we see factory work as demanding, unrewarding drudgery. For people in developing countries, it's a way out of abject poverty, and provides a chance for something better for their children, even if they personally don't get a significantly better deal than their parents did. Don't make the mistake of looking at their lives, their culture, and their available choices through the lens of our own situation.
Dan Aris
Is it just me, or is the main link (the one actually referencing Game Developer Barbie) just an anchor tag without an href...?
Dan Aris
Rene Ritchie specifically said that there was not going to be a display with an integrated GPU introduced at WWDC or in the near future.
That doesn't mean that there isn't going to be any Thunderbolt Display refresh.
Dan Aris
As I understand it, from hearing about this type of thing from other sources, creating chimeras isn't just meant to provide a source of transplantable human organs. It enables researchers to study the effects of drugs (and whatever else) on human organs much better than using straight-animal analogs, without the kinds of ethical issues that make it tricky to impossible to do it in human clinical trials.
Dan Aris
Oh, for the love of Cthulhu; read the title of the post!
That's where the error was being propagated, which Opportunist corrected IN ALL CAPS and somehow you still missed it!
Dan Aris
"Boo hoo, my emotions are more important than the whole world's privacy."
Sorry, there is literally no way for Apple to build into a phone or an OS a way to unlock it for situations like this that won't also be vulnerable to governments and hackers.
If you never see your son's photos, that will be sad for you.
If Apple actually makes the changes required to make it possible for people like you to get in to phones like these regularly, that will be devastating for all iPhone users everywhere.
Dan Aris
Not really. It would be more akin to Sarah gates saying that. Who's Sarah you ask? She is some distant relative in charge of Bill's fortune generations after he is dead.
That's fair.
However, I doubt that the Gates fortune and dynasty will last in the way that the Rockefeller has.
I would also say, though, that I wouldn't be at all surprised if John D. Rockefeller himself, if he were alive today, would react very similarly.
Dan Aris
Well, yeah. We all know that. Hell, it's in the story summary.
The point is, even Rockefeller is divesting from fossil fuels. It would be like Bill Gates saying, "Y'know, Windows really is pretty terrible, and is likely to get you infected and turned into a bot. Everyone should ditch it and use Linux."
And, frankly, about time, too.
Dan Aris
It's no a question of punishment.
Well...it is, actually. It shouldn't be, but it is.
What it all comes down to is a question of the purpose of prison—and, indeed, of any court sentence.
As the excellent Illustrated Guide to Law lays out, any of our court sentences have five related purposes (and which purpose is most prioritized for a given sentence informs what the sentence is going to be like): Punishment, Deterrence, Rehabilitation, Removal and Retribution. At present, at least, America tends to focus heavily on Punishment and Retribution. That's what all the Tough On Crime laws are about: if you do something bad, you will be punished for it so that we feel like you've been hurt as much as the people you hurt. That's also partly about Deterrence.
Prison, specifically (and the death penalty, if you think about it), can usually serve the purpose of Removal—separating the criminal from the general population (aka "their potential victims," in many people's eyes, especially in the case of a registered sex offender). And, indeed, as some other people point out, if your real intention with a sex offender registry is to prevent them from coming into contact with potential victims, then the obvious solution is to just keep them locked up for life. Or kill them.
But I think most people would agree that, for most offenses that can land you on such a registry, that's too extreme. And all of this ignores the most utilitarian purpose of a court sentence for a crime: Rehabilitation. Helping the criminal to change whatever it is about themselves, or their life, that caused them to commit the crime in the first place. With a "classic" sex offender, this would have to include some kind of psychological component. Indeed, it might involve a lifetime of counseling, therapy, and/or drugs...but if we actually wanted to prevent people from committing these kinds of crimes again, rather than just hitting them on the head with the big freakin' hammer of the State from time to time when they reoffend (either in truth or merely by technicality, by breaking some condition of their registration), then we should pay a lot more attention to the mental health aspects of them than just thinking of the chiiiiiildren.
Dan Aris
Actually, nations with lawfully armed populaces that are subjected to such social engineering for political desires by the ruling elites... tend to shoot the ruling elites and elect or coronate new ones.
You appear to have missed the part about the governments that attempt to enact such social engineering having tanks and planes to kill you with before your guns have a chance to mean a damn thing.
So it's more or less necessary, in such a situation, to have the army (or at least a substantial part of it) on your side. At which point having a lawfully armed populace becomes redundant, because you've got the bloody army on your side.
Dan Aris
The problem (or, if you prefer, great part) with this line of reasoning is that if you follow it to its logical conclusion, it strongly suggests that what you would need to submit as a "software patent" is, in fact, the source code, at least for the portion of the program that you wish to patent.
Of course, we already have intellectual property protection for source code: copyright. So should there be software patents at all? Or should software patents replace copyrightable source code? Or should there be some kind of hybrid system, where you can have your source code patented, or copyrighted, but not both...?
Dan Aris
The question isn't just whether they'll be as efficient as LEDs. The question is whether they'll last as long and cost as little.
Frankly, for most people, what they liked about incandescents was their cost. I seriously doubt that anything that requires "nanoengineered mirrors" will cost $2.50 for a pack of 10.
Dan Aris
It's about more than "pleasant". It's about arranging your surroundings for health, wealth, and good luck, basically.
What you're thinking about is called "Interior Decorating."
Dan Aris
"That would be unethical, both because you're hawking fraudulent tests, but also because you're encouraging people to believe that their delusion is accepted ..."
Priests have no problem with such a deception.
There's a huge difference between being deliberately deceptive, and spreading a belief that you yourself devoutly believe in, that happens to also be false.
And if you seriously believe that more than a tiny fraction of priests don't believe in the religion they preach (to the extent that it would be fair to call them deliberately deceptive) then you're an idiot, and probably waaaay too angry at the world in general.
Dan Aris