"It would almost certainly be easier to solve the problem by redistributing where the food that is currently grown ends up, but only if you can convince everyone to play well together, and decades of effort by tens of thousands of people hasn't been enough to make that happen."
We have a great way to ensure that food is redistributed from farmers to people who need to eat the food.
It is called the free market.
It lets farmers concentrate on farming, becoming more efficient and productive, and freeing up the time of other people to do other things, like program computers.
Unfortunately, Ethiopia does not have a free market in agriculture. The people there cannot effectively create large, efficient farms because they have no property rights to their land. Thus, small land-leasers inefficiently farm small plots, and the mildest drought makes them starve.
The Ethiopian government is creating large efficient farms by kicking people off their land and leasing the land to foreign companies, mainly for the financial benefit of the government.
"Unstable governments cause starving populations" I'd say this is a rare case. If you look at hunger rates in Somalia (unstable government) and Ethiopia (strong government), Somalia's hunger numbers are slightly better. North Korea has one of the most stable governments on the planet, but has experienced tremendous starvation.
The current Prime Minister of Ethiopia has been in that office since 1995, and in government since 1991. That sounds pretty stable...
It is true that countries like Zimbabwe and Zaire have basically banned GMO crops, but South Africa, Egypt and Burkina Faso are encouraging the use of the technology.
In South Africa, GMO corn farmers realise more than 15 tonnes per hectare compared to three tonnes per hectare of organic corn. 90% of South Arfican white corn is GMO. Monsanto has recently secured cultivation approvals in South Africa for MON89034 (YieldGard II with enhanced insect resistance) and MON89034 x NK603 (stacked trait with insect & herbicide resistance).
From The Economist: "More than three-quarters of the soyabeans grown around the world are now genetically modified, as is roughly half the cotton and over a quarter of the maize (corn). Crucially, developing countries now account for nearly half of the world's 134m hectares of transgenic crops, with Brazil, Argentina, India and China in the vanguard (see chart). Of the 14m or so farmers now benefiting from the technology, perhaps 90% live in poor countries."
Having higher returns on child education, equity of return from women's work in a service-oriented economy, access to medical means of birth control, and being able to invest in growing capital markets for retirement are probably some of the reasons.
Take a look at Zimbabwe as a counterpoint to your assumption. In the 70's, land was owned by less than 1% of the population there until Mugabe started his regime, yet they had no trouble producing food
It should be pointed out that even then, Rhodesia was not a shining star of economic freedom and property rights. The acquisition of land from blacks by whites was not done as legal transactions, but often by direct or indirect force, and there were plenty of legal and extralegal restrictions on black land ownership and participation in the economy.
The "land reform" in Zimbabwe is only one challenge to the economy. It also has seen massive hyperinflation, high tax rates (including income taxes that went as high at 47%, now down to a max of 35%), opaque and burdensome regulations on businesses, significant labor regulation that pushes most work into the inefficient informal sector, regulations that limit foreign investment in companies, and high corruption.
"Private property rights and limited taxes on the rich's income sources also cause poverty because the end results is 1 percent of the people owning everything."
Note I didn't say anything about taxes.
But you should know that Ethiopia has above-average tax rates. The top income and corporate tax rates are 35 percent. Unincorporated businesses are taxed at a rate of 30 percent. Other taxes include a value-added tax (VAT) and a capital gains tax.
But Ethiopia is too poor to have these tax rates - they (along with labor regulations) push much of the economy into the black market. The large informal sector does not pay taxes. In the most recent year, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was only 9.9 percent despite the high legal tax rates.
Regarding property rights, the US has strong private property rights. "Property rights are guaranteed" in the USA as specified in the Economic Freedom of the World Index. The effect: 67% of all occupied housing units are occupied by the unit's owner (~60 million homeowners).
Now I can point you to several countries where the government (1% of the people or less) owns "everything", such as pre-1980 China, Cuba until relatively recently, the USSR, North Korea. And of course, in Ethiopia, the government still owns most of the land.
Davis-Besse had high pressure injection pumps that would reinject lost coolant had the LOCA initiated. Without additional failures of the back-up equipment, it would have been more TMI and less Fukushima.
Clearly the reactor operators missed hints of RPV corrosion such as radiation element system filters being clogged by boric acid and corrosion fines, the build up of boric acid deposits on containment air cooler fins and large amounts of boric acid deposits on the RPV head.
The nuclear industry as a whole should have been more on the watch for boric acid corrosion in general.
"In a visit to Ethiopia in 2009, I talked to more than one citizen there who said that the arability of the land wasn't so much the problem as not having the machines to farm the land productively. "
"In the late 1970s Ethiopia's communist regime nationalised all land, and private ownership remains outlawed. The millions of small-scale farmers work under licence from the state, and most plots are one hectare or less, which has hampered efforts to improve food security."
Now the Ethiopian government is leasing out large scale plots of land to foreign farm companies, which will certainly produce some work for Ethiopians, but your typical Ethiopian still has no ownership of the land and thus no ability to use that capital to get loans for farm equipment, fertilizer, and seed.
As Hernando DeSoto pointed out in "The Mystery of Capital", every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal land ownership to a formal, unified legal property system that allowed people to leverage property into wealth. This has not been done in countries such as Ethiopia (Egypt is another country with little rural private land ownership).
Lack of private property rights and over-regulation and government ownership of business causes poverty. Enhancing private property rights and freedom to participate in commerce cause wealth. Even the Chinese have realized this (belatedly, after starving tens of millions of people to death with collective farming during the Great Leap Forward).
Poor people around the world are not too stupid, too lazy, or too ignorant to be entrepreneurs and productive farmers. They are simply kept from becoming rich by government. They can solve their own problems if they are allowed to.
Fukushima meltdown means your backup cooling method goes out after a scram (and tsunami), and you are basically screwed. This requires a failure of imagination about worst possible scenarios combined with a bad plant location.
Chernobyl explosion is a criticality accident. This requires a really high level of ignorant stupidity or purposeful attack.
Three Mile Island meltdown is that you don't realize a valve is open and your core water boils away. This requires a level of stupidity in human/machine interaction.
What is Apple's obsession with HTTP Live Streaming?
The only way you are going to get iPhone/3G/4G scalable broadcasts is with 3GPP's Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Services (MBMS), and as far as I know this depends on a multicast UDP/RTP framework. As of right now, you can't use RTP with the hardware acceleration of H.264 decoding in the iOS Core Media Framework, only HLS.
I understand why CDNs like HLS (the ease of using HTTP caches for distribution and getting through firewalls), but at the mobile terminal level, it will always be a one-to-one TCP connection, not a many-to-one broadcast.
"Faith has attempted to explain the fundamentals of the world around us since the beginning of civilizations. That is the purpose of religion."
Explaining the beginning of civilizations may just be a side-effect of religion, whereas other elements of religion (social solidarity, behavioral norms, etc.) may have been the source of survival value that allowed the evolution of human spirituality.
"The Earth revolves around the sun, and is not flat."
The challenge is explaining how the Earth's seasons work and why other planets appear to have epicycles if the Earth does not revolve around the sun, because those would both require enormous, unknown forces, whereas the simplest answer (that also agrees with our understanding of gravity, as shown by Earth-bound precise torsion balances) is that the Earth revolves around the sun.
It is pretty simple to demonstrate that the Earth is curved, simply take an airplane far enough north or south and note the change in position of astronomical bodies. Sail or fly around the world from east to west and notice you come back to the same place. An airplane flight of reasonable altitude will also immediately reveal a horizon that agrees with a non-flat earth.
Not sure how I am mischaracterizing the paper, it says:
"Although AT&T undoubtedly encouraged the monopolization of the industry, it was the actions of regulators and federal and state legislators that eventually led to the creation of a nationwide telephone monopoly."
"A Senate Commerce Committee hearing in 1921 stated that "telephoning is a natural monopoly." And a House of Representative committee report noted, "There is nothing to be gained by local competition in the telephone business"
"The year of government nationalization was the nail in the coffin of competition. However, the favorable regulatory treatment AT&T received during government ownership was only partially to blame for the death of competition...Vail's vision of a single, universal service provider was being adopted and implemented by the government through discriminatory rate structuring."
If AT&T Wireless is stifling innovation, someone is going to have to explain where my AWESOME iPhone 4 came from. Because, it is an AWESOME, LIFE CHANGING device.
"do you know how many people died in horse-related accidents"?
In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city's fatality rate per auto in 1997.
The Great Epizootic Epidemic of 1872 killed approximately five percent of the urban horses in the Northeast and debilitated many others. Transportation halted, food prices soared, goods piled up at the docks. Fire ravaged downtown Boston because there were not enough healthy horses to pull the fire trucks.
78,279 people visited the emergency room in 2007 as a result of horse riding related injuries. Over 100 deaths per year are estimated to result from equestrian related activities.
"BWR cannot go above 250C as long as water flows even without the control rods."
I think the point is that water wasn't flowing...and probably was not covering the fuel for a while (due to evaporation).
"There was some circumstantial evidence of some melting shortly after shutdown at quake time due to residual heat of secondary reaction products. But those decay very very rapidly and drop temperature."
Reactor 2 was 784 MWe. A 30% thermal efficiency means it must be ~2.6GW thermal. After 5 hours you would expect ~1% decay heat, or 26 MW thermal, going out to around 10MW after 10 days. That is still a lot of heat to deal with.
However I have a feeling if the fuel melted, it happened on day 1, and it is only recently people have been able to get in close and see leaking highly radioactive water.
The other issue is that the hydrogen explosions may have damaged the fuel assemblies leading to their collapse onto the reactor floor.
Only if for some reason your "mix" includes a bunch of lock down designed to trap the user and control how they use whatever the software is installed on.
What if the lock down is designed to keep malware off of the user's device and maintain its stability, and the user is OK with that?
I bought the iPhone because it is a controlled ecosystem. I don't want my cell phone rooted. I also like the controlled updates. I have a friend with an Android phone who had an update that bricked the device, and his carrier and Google are arguing about who is responsible!
Freedom is great, but we all choose to give up some freedoms for security on occasions.
Motion creates interlace artifacts. 1080i looks great until something moves. That is why the more sports-oriented broadcasters use 720p60.
"The native stuff is actually 1920x540 at 60fps"
However it should be noted that some 1080i30 broadcasters actually use HDCAM (1440x1080) contribution, thus they are never at 1920x1080.
Regarding 1080p60, baseband video of that resolution requires dual-link 1.5 Gbps HD-SDI or 3Gbps HD-SDI, both of which are only now being deployed to broadcasters building new plants. There is a ton of legacy 1.5 Gbps HD-SDI plant (production, post-production, contribution, network master control, station master control) out there that can not handle 1080p60 today.
It should be noted that 74 CFR 73.8000 incorporates by reference:
"ATSC A/53B: "ATSC Digital Television Standard," dated August 7, 2001, Revision B, with Amendment 1 dated May 23, 2002 and Amendment 2 dated May 19, 2003, IBR approved for 73.682, except for section 5.1.2 of Annex A, and the phrase "see Table 3â(TM)" in section 5.1.1. Table 2 and section 5.1.2 Table 4."
Thus the ATSC revisions after 2003 are not incorporated into the law.
But the most important thing is that $2.5 billion worth of DTV converter boxes (46.2 million boxes) were provided by the US government through its coupon project, and none of these supported 1080p or anything else but MPEG-2 video & AC-3 audio.
Not to mention that the hijackers of flight 77, including Mohamed Atta, al-Midhar, Nawaq Alhamzi, and Hani Hanjour, stayed at the Valencia Motel and Pin Del Motel in Laurel.
Slashdot Mirror
"It would almost certainly be easier to solve the problem by redistributing where the food that is currently grown ends up, but only if you can convince everyone to play well together, and decades of effort by tens of thousands of people hasn't been enough to make that happen."
We have a great way to ensure that food is redistributed from farmers to people who need to eat the food.
It is called the free market.
It lets farmers concentrate on farming, becoming more efficient and productive, and freeing up the time of other people to do other things, like program computers.
Unfortunately, Ethiopia does not have a free market in agriculture. The people there cannot effectively create large, efficient farms because they have no property rights to their land. Thus, small land-leasers inefficiently farm small plots, and the mildest drought makes them starve.
The Ethiopian government is creating large efficient farms by kicking people off their land and leasing the land to foreign companies, mainly for the financial benefit of the government.
"Unstable governments cause starving populations" I'd say this is a rare case. If you look at hunger rates in Somalia (unstable government) and Ethiopia (strong government), Somalia's hunger numbers are slightly better. North Korea has one of the most stable governments on the planet, but has experienced tremendous starvation.
The current Prime Minister of Ethiopia has been in that office since 1995, and in government since 1991. That sounds pretty stable...
It is true that countries like Zimbabwe and Zaire have basically banned GMO crops, but South Africa, Egypt and Burkina Faso are encouraging the use of the technology.
In South Africa, GMO corn farmers realise more than 15 tonnes per hectare compared to three tonnes per hectare of organic corn. 90% of South Arfican white corn is GMO. Monsanto has recently secured cultivation approvals in South Africa for MON89034 (YieldGard II with enhanced insect resistance) and MON89034 x NK603 (stacked trait with insect & herbicide resistance).
From The Economist: "More than three-quarters of the soyabeans grown around the world are now genetically modified, as is roughly half the cotton and over a quarter of the maize (corn). Crucially, developing countries now account for nearly half of the world's 134m hectares of transgenic crops, with Brazil, Argentina, India and China in the vanguard (see chart). Of the 14m or so farmers now benefiting from the technology, perhaps 90% live in poor countries."
It should be noted that fertility decreases rapidly with increase in GDP.
Having higher returns on child education, equity of return from women's work in a service-oriented economy, access to medical means of birth control, and being able to invest in growing capital markets for retirement are probably some of the reasons.
Take a look at Zimbabwe as a counterpoint to your assumption. In the 70's, land was owned by less than 1% of the population there until Mugabe started his regime, yet they had no trouble producing food
It should be pointed out that even then, Rhodesia was not a shining star of economic freedom and property rights. The acquisition of land from blacks by whites was not done as legal transactions, but often by direct or indirect force, and there were plenty of legal and extralegal restrictions on black land ownership and participation in the economy.
The "land reform" in Zimbabwe is only one challenge to the economy. It also has seen massive hyperinflation, high tax rates (including income taxes that went as high at 47%, now down to a max of 35%), opaque and burdensome regulations on businesses, significant labor regulation that pushes most work into the inefficient informal sector, regulations that limit foreign investment in companies, and high corruption.
"Private property rights and limited taxes on the rich's income sources also cause poverty because the end results is 1 percent of the people owning everything."
Note I didn't say anything about taxes.
But you should know that Ethiopia has above-average tax rates. The top income and corporate tax rates are 35 percent. Unincorporated businesses are taxed at a rate of 30 percent. Other taxes include a value-added tax (VAT) and a capital gains tax.
But Ethiopia is too poor to have these tax rates - they (along with labor regulations) push much of the economy into the black market. The large informal sector does not pay taxes. In the most recent year, overall tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was only 9.9 percent despite the high legal tax rates.
Regarding property rights, the US has strong private property rights. "Property rights are guaranteed" in the USA as specified in the Economic Freedom of the World Index. The effect: 67% of all occupied housing units are occupied by the unit's owner (~60 million homeowners).
Now I can point you to several countries where the government (1% of the people or less) owns "everything", such as pre-1980 China, Cuba until relatively recently, the USSR, North Korea. And of course, in Ethiopia, the government still owns most of the land.
Davis-Besse had high pressure injection pumps that would reinject lost coolant had the LOCA initiated. Without additional failures of the back-up equipment, it would have been more TMI and less Fukushima.
Clearly the reactor operators missed hints of RPV corrosion such as radiation element system filters being clogged by boric acid and corrosion fines, the build up of boric acid deposits on containment air cooler fins and large amounts of boric acid deposits on the RPV head.
The nuclear industry as a whole should have been more on the watch for boric acid corrosion in general.
"In a visit to Ethiopia in 2009, I talked to more than one citizen there who said that the arability of the land wasn't so much the problem as not having the machines to farm the land productively. "
This is completely ignorant. Read here:
"In the late 1970s Ethiopia's communist regime nationalised all land, and private ownership remains outlawed. The millions of small-scale farmers work under licence from the state, and most plots are one hectare or less, which has hampered efforts to improve food security."
Now the Ethiopian government is leasing out large scale plots of land to foreign farm companies, which will certainly produce some work for Ethiopians, but your typical Ethiopian still has no ownership of the land and thus no ability to use that capital to get loans for farm equipment, fertilizer, and seed.
As Hernando DeSoto pointed out in "The Mystery of Capital", every developed nation in the world at one time went through the transformation from predominantly informal, extralegal land ownership to a formal, unified legal property system that allowed people to leverage property into wealth. This has not been done in countries such as Ethiopia (Egypt is another country with little rural private land ownership).
Lack of private property rights and over-regulation and government ownership of business causes poverty. Enhancing private property rights and freedom to participate in commerce cause wealth. Even the Chinese have realized this (belatedly, after starving tens of millions of people to death with collective farming during the Great Leap Forward).
Poor people around the world are not too stupid, too lazy, or too ignorant to be entrepreneurs and productive farmers. They are simply kept from becoming rich by government. They can solve their own problems if they are allowed to.
Fukushima meltdown means your backup cooling method goes out after a scram (and tsunami), and you are basically screwed. This requires a failure of imagination about worst possible scenarios combined with a bad plant location.
Chernobyl explosion is a criticality accident. This requires a really high level of ignorant stupidity or purposeful attack.
Three Mile Island meltdown is that you don't realize a valve is open and your core water boils away. This requires a level of stupidity in human/machine interaction.
"Tunneling every protocol over HTTP" is the reality, especially HTTPS as you can't see what is inside.
Look at Gmail over HTTPS: email, IM, VOIP, and video chat.
I'm not sure this is really what we all wanted when we started blocking all those ports at firewalls, but it is what we got!
What is Apple's obsession with HTTP Live Streaming?
The only way you are going to get iPhone/3G/4G scalable broadcasts is with 3GPP's Multimedia Broadcast and Multicast Services (MBMS), and as far as I know this depends on a multicast UDP/RTP framework. As of right now, you can't use RTP with the hardware acceleration of H.264 decoding in the iOS Core Media Framework, only HLS.
I understand why CDNs like HLS (the ease of using HTTP caches for distribution and getting through firewalls), but at the mobile terminal level, it will always be a one-to-one TCP connection, not a many-to-one broadcast.
"Faith has attempted to explain the fundamentals of the world around us since the beginning of civilizations. That is the purpose of religion."
Explaining the beginning of civilizations may just be a side-effect of religion, whereas other elements of religion (social solidarity, behavioral norms, etc.) may have been the source of survival value that allowed the evolution of human spirituality.
"The Earth revolves around the sun, and is not flat."
The challenge is explaining how the Earth's seasons work and why other planets appear to have epicycles if the Earth does not revolve around the sun, because those would both require enormous, unknown forces, whereas the simplest answer (that also agrees with our understanding of gravity, as shown by Earth-bound precise torsion balances) is that the Earth revolves around the sun.
It is pretty simple to demonstrate that the Earth is curved, simply take an airplane far enough north or south and note the change in position of astronomical bodies. Sail or fly around the world from east to west and notice you come back to the same place. An airplane flight of reasonable altitude will also immediately reveal a horizon that agrees with a non-flat earth.
"I see no indication that any high speed rail systems in the US would carry freight."
Moreover, the US has one of the world's best freight rail systems, and trying to mix high-speed rail and low-speed freight on the same tracks could be a disaster, see America's system of rail freight is the worldâ(TM)s best. High-speed passenger trains could ruin it.
Not sure how I am mischaracterizing the paper, it says:
"Although AT&T undoubtedly encouraged the monopolization of the industry, it was the actions of regulators and federal and state legislators that eventually led to the creation of a nationwide telephone monopoly."
"A Senate Commerce Committee hearing in 1921 stated that "telephoning is a natural monopoly." And a House of Representative committee report noted, "There is nothing to be gained by local competition in the telephone business"
"The year of government nationalization was the nail in the coffin of competition. However, the favorable regulatory treatment AT&T received during government ownership was only partially to blame for the death of competition...Vail's vision of a single, universal service provider was being adopted and implemented by the government through discriminatory rate structuring."
The Bell System was a monopoly created largely by government under the theory of "natural monopoly".
If AT&T Wireless is stifling innovation, someone is going to have to explain where my AWESOME iPhone 4 came from. Because, it is an AWESOME, LIFE CHANGING device.
"Nuclear would be fine as long as it was strictly regulated by a 3rd party uninterested in profits (read: the government)"
And who, exactly, was running Chernobyl, and what was their viewpoint on profits?
I'm just hoping newer designs don't put the spent fuel pool on top of the reactor, precisely where a hydrogen explosion would occur...
"do you know how many people died in horse-related accidents"?
In New York in 1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. Data from Chicago show that in 1916 there were 16.9 horse-related fatalities for each 10,000 horse-drawn vehicles; this is nearly seven times the city's fatality rate per auto in 1997.
The Great Epizootic Epidemic of 1872 killed approximately five percent of the urban horses in the Northeast and debilitated many others. Transportation halted, food prices soared, goods piled up at the docks. Fire ravaged downtown Boston because there were not enough healthy horses to pull the fire trucks.
78,279 people visited the emergency room in 2007 as a result of horse riding related injuries. Over 100 deaths per year are estimated to result from equestrian related activities.
"BWR cannot go above 250C as long as water flows even without the control rods."
I think the point is that water wasn't flowing...and probably was not covering the fuel for a while (due to evaporation).
"There was some circumstantial evidence of some melting shortly after shutdown at quake time due to residual heat of secondary reaction products. But those decay very very rapidly and drop temperature."
Reactor 2 was 784 MWe. A 30% thermal efficiency means it must be ~2.6GW thermal. After 5 hours you would expect ~1% decay heat, or 26 MW thermal, going out to around 10MW after 10 days. That is still a lot of heat to deal with.
However I have a feeling if the fuel melted, it happened on day 1, and it is only recently people have been able to get in close and see leaking highly radioactive water.
The other issue is that the hydrogen explosions may have damaged the fuel assemblies leading to their collapse onto the reactor floor.
"WHY does anyone give a shit about Nielsen?"
Because TV advertisers pay based on Nielsen numbers.
Only if for some reason your "mix" includes a bunch of lock down designed to trap the user and control how they use whatever the software is installed on.
What if the lock down is designed to keep malware off of the user's device and maintain its stability, and the user is OK with that?
I bought the iPhone because it is a controlled ecosystem. I don't want my cell phone rooted. I also like the controlled updates. I have a friend with an Android phone who had an update that bricked the device, and his carrier and Google are arguing about who is responsible!
Freedom is great, but we all choose to give up some freedoms for security on occasions.
Motion creates interlace artifacts. 1080i looks great until something moves. That is why the more sports-oriented broadcasters use 720p60.
"The native stuff is actually 1920x540 at 60fps"
However it should be noted that some 1080i30 broadcasters actually use HDCAM (1440x1080) contribution, thus they are never at 1920x1080.
Regarding 1080p60, baseband video of that resolution requires dual-link 1.5 Gbps HD-SDI or 3Gbps HD-SDI, both of which are only now being deployed to broadcasters building new plants. There is a ton of legacy 1.5 Gbps HD-SDI plant (production, post-production, contribution, network master control, station master control) out there that can not handle 1080p60 today.
It should be noted that 74 CFR 73.8000 incorporates by reference:
"ATSC A/53B: "ATSC Digital Television Standard," dated August 7, 2001, Revision B, with Amendment 1 dated May 23, 2002 and Amendment 2 dated May 19, 2003, IBR approved for 73.682, except for section 5.1.2 of Annex A, and the phrase "see Table 3â(TM)" in section 5.1.1. Table 2 and section 5.1.2 Table 4."
Thus the ATSC revisions after 2003 are not incorporated into the law.
But the most important thing is that $2.5 billion worth of DTV converter boxes (46.2 million boxes) were provided by the US government through its coupon project, and none of these supported 1080p or anything else but MPEG-2 video & AC-3 audio.
Tuition is expensive because US colleges are extremely greedy and everyone wants a "College Degree".
Also anyone in the US can get a loan for a college degree because of the $100 billion of government-backed student loans issued every year.
Not to mention that the hijackers of flight 77, including Mohamed Atta, al-Midhar, Nawaq Alhamzi, and Hani Hanjour, stayed at the Valencia Motel and Pin Del Motel in Laurel.