Are there statistics that separate pollution figures of heavy traffic (busses and trucks) from personal transportation (cars)? Because it's usually cars that get targetted by "green" measures.
Air pollution in 1st world cities is much, much, much less of a problem than it used to be 20, 50 or even 100 years ago. The main reason is the switch from wood and coal to electricity and gas for cooking and heating (something that hasn't happened in many 3rd world cities, and still a major contributor to pollution there). The decline in power generation from coal has also helped.
As for cars, modern vehicles emit a lot less particulates than old ones. Despite an increase in car ownership and usage, cars aren't even the number one contributor to particulates anymore in many places. If you want to improve air quality, in most cases it isn't cars that should be addressed first. The problem is not flat earthers denying the impact their vehicles have, but environmentalists tilting at the same old windmills instead of tackling actual major sources of air pollution. Though to be fair, in certain cities, older cars and especially 2 stroke mopeds certainly are part of the problem. And I'm speaking of particulate and carcinogenic emissions only of course, not greenhouse gases.
Actually, if enough labour is replaced with robots, communism might be preferable to UBI. UBI in any form currently being proposed will not solve mass unemployment. It'll gravitate towards a Universal Minimum Income, i.e. the minimum amount you need to survive. And much of that may be paid in kind, which sounds nice but takes away a lot of your choices. I can see a future where most of us will live in government provided (shit) housing, eating in a communal dining hall, and being supplied with most of our other needs like clothing and furniture, with only a couple of bucks of freely spendable pocket money. With no hope of betterment, and only the happy few enjoying the fruits of their robots' labour. They wouldn't need much of a consumer market anymore, and the old economy would become more or less meaningless. The only thing that would matter is ownership: of land, robots, and natural resources.
The communist version of that would be that we all share ownership of those things, and of the means of production (robots). You'd still have little chance of betterment, but at least all would be equal and - much more importantly - it would leave everyone much more free in their choice of lifestyle. At least if we set the size of the pie to be divided at a reasonable level, because if some eco-nutter in power decides that we should minimize our footprint, we'll all be stuck in that shit government housing again, eating shit food.
I'm no communist, I believe in individual ownership, and I believe that our current economic system is fair and reasonably effective. But I also believe that it will break down horribly if we get to a situation where the employment rate will be very low for a very long time.
Some laws to that effect woulld be even nicer. I want to be able to trust those companies, and I want a really big stick to whoop them with if they violate that trust.
So you don't unload the entire block all in one go. Just like people do on the stock market. Demand for BTC remains pretty strong (still plenty of speculators eager to take a gamble), so they can sell smaller blocks on the way up. I bet they've already started doing that a while back.
I don't know about despair, but in a lot of cases you're right: it's about treating yourself. And as Jack Vance wrote in one of his novels: "Money spent on pleasure is money well spent." Or Oscar Wilde: "I have often deprived myself of the necessities of life, but I have never consented to give up a luxury." Contrast that with one of our reality TV shows where a financial adviser comes to help out families in debt. Always the advise is to forego the little things that add up to bugger all, compared to the bigger bills they have to deal with, but gives them some pleasure in life. If you can't afford it, you can't have it, sure, but otherwise everyone needs to treat themselves from time to time. Maybe that's having some overpriced coffee in a hipster joint.
The intention is good, I suppose. Perhaps the backers do this in part to toot their own horn, show the world what great benefactors they are. Well, let them.
But what irks me is that the summary lists all of the important backers, as well as a bunch of the celebrities trotted out for the ceremony, but only one of the scientists is mentioned by name. Just who are we supposed to be celebrating here? This doesn't really help to turn our best scientists into rock stars. Even the headline mentions "Silicon Valley billionaires" rather than "The Breakthrough Foundation". The Guardian article isn't a great deal better, though at least they do mention the scientists.
Responsible central banks adjust the money supply to the size of the economy so that its value is relatively stable, even though there is no direct connection to economic output. Some would argue that controlling inflation / deflation is the central banks only real function. The value of money is not what any fool would pay for it (like BTC or even gold); it is reasonably stable because it is controlled.
The vast majority of interest in Bitcoin is from people hoping to make a quick buck riding the bubble. That, and scammers. People may have little confidence in financial institutions, but in general they do trust their currency... mostly because they notice that wat a $ or € buys you today, will buy it tomorrow. And if you think that BC threatens financial institutions, you are sorely mistaken.
The things they learn from launching FH will probably help them a lot putting BFR together. The fact that it turns out to be this hard for them to develop FH means that they probably could use the experience before scaling up.
Or buy machines from vendors that offer vanilla Windows installations. Just be careful that the crapware isn't still there, masquerading as little driver configurators in the toolbar.
The one thing I cannot fathom is why any sane hardware supplier would ship their machines with Norton preinstalled. It's a notorious piece of crap, yet I find it on quite a few PCs. If someone asks me if "I can figure out why their PC is so slow", the first thing I do is ditch Norton: 9 out of 10 cases that fixes the problem.
Somehow karma is broken in a lot of these cases. Often I read news like: “Texting driver kills family of 4, escapes unharmed”. For some reason, the idiots often get to tell the tale.
That's the reality for most of the early miners: they probably all cashed out early-ish. There's a few stories of people hanging on to them longer for whatever reason, like that student who lost the password for his wallet, and finally found it when his stash was worth €300k or so. He bought an apartment with it, and good for him... but that same stash would be in the low 8 figures today.
Quite. Which is why the inclusion of a framework should be a matter of design not coding. This decision should be left to a software architect rather than a developer.
Anything that allows us to reduce errors, increase functional complexity, reduce development time, improve readability and maintainability, and/or make it easier to code for a greater amount of people, is progress in my book. Working at a higher abstraction level achieves some or all of those goals.
And good frameworks help with that. When I build a house, I don't want a craftsman who takes time to learn how to use an adze so he can plane down lumber to the correct size for the job; I want a builder who knows he can get lumber of the correct dimensions right at the store. The skills to build instead of buy are useful in many trades (both building and programming), but they are expensive and a possible source of additional errors. Frameworks are often a good answer to that... as long as the developer understands the nature of the framework, its limitations, the licensing model, its viability, and thus can assess the consequences of using it.
As you note yourself in your post, there is no “the predictions”. There are different predictions made by different groups of scientists. Is there a single model or prediction that fits the data pretty well? Or is there a matching prediction to be found for every data point?
Apparently the point is to simulate a powerful machine with many cores, so that people can develop and optimize their code without requiring CPU time on the actual (very expensive) machine.
It's a legal pyramid scheme on a global scale. I'd be profoundly surprised if Big Finance (for lack of a better term) didn't already have their hands at the helm. I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but I am very sceptical about these articles claiming that "banks and exchanges are starting to show an interest in cryptocurrency". That interest would have been at maximum the second their financial analysts had a brief look at the crypto market.
Slashdot Mirror
Are there statistics that separate pollution figures of heavy traffic (busses and trucks) from personal transportation (cars)? Because it's usually cars that get targetted by "green" measures.
Air pollution in 1st world cities is much, much, much less of a problem than it used to be 20, 50 or even 100 years ago. The main reason is the switch from wood and coal to electricity and gas for cooking and heating (something that hasn't happened in many 3rd world cities, and still a major contributor to pollution there). The decline in power generation from coal has also helped.
As for cars, modern vehicles emit a lot less particulates than old ones. Despite an increase in car ownership and usage, cars aren't even the number one contributor to particulates anymore in many places. If you want to improve air quality, in most cases it isn't cars that should be addressed first. The problem is not flat earthers denying the impact their vehicles have, but environmentalists tilting at the same old windmills instead of tackling actual major sources of air pollution. Though to be fair, in certain cities, older cars and especially 2 stroke mopeds certainly are part of the problem. And I'm speaking of particulate and carcinogenic emissions only of course, not greenhouse gases.
Actually, if enough labour is replaced with robots, communism might be preferable to UBI. UBI in any form currently being proposed will not solve mass unemployment. It'll gravitate towards a Universal Minimum Income, i.e. the minimum amount you need to survive. And much of that may be paid in kind, which sounds nice but takes away a lot of your choices. I can see a future where most of us will live in government provided (shit) housing, eating in a communal dining hall, and being supplied with most of our other needs like clothing and furniture, with only a couple of bucks of freely spendable pocket money. With no hope of betterment, and only the happy few enjoying the fruits of their robots' labour. They wouldn't need much of a consumer market anymore, and the old economy would become more or less meaningless. The only thing that would matter is ownership: of land, robots, and natural resources.
The communist version of that would be that we all share ownership of those things, and of the means of production (robots). You'd still have little chance of betterment, but at least all would be equal and - much more importantly - it would leave everyone much more free in their choice of lifestyle. At least if we set the size of the pie to be divided at a reasonable level, because if some eco-nutter in power decides that we should minimize our footprint, we'll all be stuck in that shit government housing again, eating shit food.
I'm no communist, I believe in individual ownership, and I believe that our current economic system is fair and reasonably effective. But I also believe that it will break down horribly if we get to a situation where the employment rate will be very low for a very long time.
Some laws to that effect woulld be even nicer. I want to be able to trust those companies, and I want a really big stick to whoop them with if they violate that trust.
To Gizmodo as well as yourself: your concerns are valid and noted. But I'll be the damn judge of what I or my family needs, thank you.
So you don't unload the entire block all in one go. Just like people do on the stock market. Demand for BTC remains pretty strong (still plenty of speculators eager to take a gamble), so they can sell smaller blocks on the way up. I bet they've already started doing that a while back.
I don't know about despair, but in a lot of cases you're right: it's about treating yourself. And as Jack Vance wrote in one of his novels: "Money spent on pleasure is money well spent." Or Oscar Wilde: "I have often deprived myself of the necessities of life, but I have never consented to give up a luxury." Contrast that with one of our reality TV shows where a financial adviser comes to help out families in debt. Always the advise is to forego the little things that add up to bugger all, compared to the bigger bills they have to deal with, but gives them some pleasure in life. If you can't afford it, you can't have it, sure, but otherwise everyone needs to treat themselves from time to time. Maybe that's having some overpriced coffee in a hipster joint.
The intention is good, I suppose. Perhaps the backers do this in part to toot their own horn, show the world what great benefactors they are. Well, let them.
But what irks me is that the summary lists all of the important backers, as well as a bunch of the celebrities trotted out for the ceremony, but only one of the scientists is mentioned by name. Just who are we supposed to be celebrating here? This doesn't really help to turn our best scientists into rock stars. Even the headline mentions "Silicon Valley billionaires" rather than "The Breakthrough Foundation". The Guardian article isn't a great deal better, though at least they do mention the scientists.
Why did Brooks even need Lucas' blessing to make his parody?
Responsible central banks adjust the money supply to the size of the economy so that its value is relatively stable, even though there is no direct connection to economic output. Some would argue that controlling inflation / deflation is the central banks only real function. The value of money is not what any fool would pay for it (like BTC or even gold); it is reasonably stable because it is controlled.
The vast majority of interest in Bitcoin is from people hoping to make a quick buck riding the bubble. That, and scammers. People may have little confidence in financial institutions, but in general they do trust their currency... mostly because they notice that wat a $ or € buys you today, will buy it tomorrow. And if you think that BC threatens financial institutions, you are sorely mistaken.
Whatever. As long as you're not calling them "pies".
The things they learn from launching FH will probably help them a lot putting BFR together. The fact that it turns out to be this hard for them to develop FH means that they probably could use the experience before scaling up.
You avoid the shitware by not buying HP. Their drivers are pretty crap too, especially for scanners.
it's being run on the phone, rather than sent for processing on the company's powerful cloud servers.
Although I am sure this means: "it's being run on the phone before being sent to the company for further processing".
Or buy machines from vendors that offer vanilla Windows installations. Just be careful that the crapware isn't still there, masquerading as little driver configurators in the toolbar.
The one thing I cannot fathom is why any sane hardware supplier would ship their machines with Norton preinstalled. It's a notorious piece of crap, yet I find it on quite a few PCs. If someone asks me if "I can figure out why their PC is so slow", the first thing I do is ditch Norton: 9 out of 10 cases that fixes the problem.
They are living in a fantasy world, that's exactly the point...
Somehow karma is broken in a lot of these cases. Often I read news like: “Texting driver kills family of 4, escapes unharmed”. For some reason, the idiots often get to tell the tale.
You don’t get very far in life not saying “it”. Ni!
That's the reality for most of the early miners: they probably all cashed out early-ish. There's a few stories of people hanging on to them longer for whatever reason, like that student who lost the password for his wallet, and finally found it when his stash was worth €300k or so. He bought an apartment with it, and good for him... but that same stash would be in the low 8 figures today.
Quite. Which is why the inclusion of a framework should be a matter of design not coding. This decision should be left to a software architect rather than a developer.
Anything that allows us to reduce errors, increase functional complexity, reduce development time, improve readability and maintainability, and/or make it easier to code for a greater amount of people, is progress in my book. Working at a higher abstraction level achieves some or all of those goals.
And good frameworks help with that. When I build a house, I don't want a craftsman who takes time to learn how to use an adze so he can plane down lumber to the correct size for the job; I want a builder who knows he can get lumber of the correct dimensions right at the store. The skills to build instead of buy are useful in many trades (both building and programming), but they are expensive and a possible source of additional errors. Frameworks are often a good answer to that... as long as the developer understands the nature of the framework, its limitations, the licensing model, its viability, and thus can assess the consequences of using it.
As you note yourself in your post, there is no “the predictions”. There are different predictions made by different groups of scientists. Is there a single model or prediction that fits the data pretty well? Or is there a matching prediction to be found for every data point?
Apparently the point is to simulate a powerful machine with many cores, so that people can develop and optimize their code without requiring CPU time on the actual (very expensive) machine.
It's a legal pyramid scheme on a global scale. I'd be profoundly surprised if Big Finance (for lack of a better term) didn't already have their hands at the helm. I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but I am very sceptical about these articles claiming that "banks and exchanges are starting to show an interest in cryptocurrency". That interest would have been at maximum the second their financial analysts had a brief look at the crypto market.
Maybe. But how many false positives are there in total? Maybe the algorithm is still better than humans, despite this obvious error.