Look closer. Most of them are in South Williamson, across the border in Kentucky. Even if it's possible to fill controlled substance prescriptions across the state line, dollars to donuts most docs will write them and most people will fill them in their state.
And as I pointed out in more detail further down, Williamson is the only town of any size and thus has some of the only pharmacies in that part of the state, so they're serving a lot more people than just the ~3k inside the technical city limits. I'd guess you're looking at more like a pill or two per person per week once you factor that in. Back of the envelope, you probably can get to numbers like that with a fairly small population of heavy users on top of your normal, legitimate baseline volume.
Yeah, hard math tends to hurt splashy headlines (as well as Congressional investigations looking for a silver bullet/whipping boy).
On top of that, this part of WV is very sparsely populated and they don't have a pharmacy in every small town. Those pharmacies in Williamson are just about the only ones in that part of WV, so they're serving a much larger regional population than just those in the city limits. Total population in surrounding Mingo County in 2010 was nearly 27k. The numbers start getting really small really fast when you take into account how that part of the country actually operates.
See my above more detailed post -- only about 6% of U.S. farmland is irrigated. Even if all the scary stories about groundwater are true, you're probably looking at only a percentage point or two of crops that would be affected.
Texas was the first such state to hit "peak water" and that was almost 20 years ago.
A cute turn of phrase I hadn't heard before, and it looks like it was coined fairly recently. It took about 60 years for the "peak oil" meme to quiet down, so I suppose this one will run along for a while as well.
Kansas hit peak water in 2010. Its available water is also dropping annually.
The first article I found that wasn't from an activist says that Kansas isn't projected to "peak" until 2040 under current usage, and farmers have agreed to short-term reductions that should push that out to at least 2070.
From your own link, the average farm in America spends $17,000 annually on energy for pumping water.
Actually, my link says the average farm in America that irrigates spent $17,238 in 2012 (though if you divide the $2.7 billion total pumping costs against the 229,237 farms that irrigate, that comes out to $11,778 by my calculator -- close enough for government work, I suppose).
There are just over 900 million acres of farmland in the U.S. That means the ~55 million acres that irrigate are ~6% of total farmland. The other 94% use only water from the sky.
Another way to look at it is that $2.7 billion total irrigation costs across 900 million total acres comes out to $3 per acre. Taking corn as an example, the national average yield of 175 bushels per acre at an exceptionally conservative spot price of $3/bushel (it was about twice that in the same time frame as the above irrigation numbers, and is still higher today) means your $3/acre irrigation expenses are just over one half of one percent of your $525/acre revenue.
Irrigation in the U.S. is minuscule any way you slice it. The only way to make it look even remotely scary is to throw out misleading numbers in a vacuum.
Moving water around takes energy, which mostly comes from fossil fuels. . . . Purifying water and disposing of waste water also takes a lot of energy.
The shock-and-awe water consumption numbers like the ones OP threw out are mostly water to grow the grass/grain the animals eat. Nearly all of that comes straight from the sky or from local wells, with no purification or disposal required.
We have this thing called burden of proof, and it is on the accuser.
More correctly, the burden of proof is on the person making a claim. Here, the first claim is made by the person alleging a high score. You could argue the still photo initially satisfied the burden of proof for that claim, but after people provided detailed evidence of why that still photo could not have been accurate, the burden would flip back to the claimant to show that he somehow achieved that score despite the strength of the evidence that he physically could not have.
Yeah, I considered going down the electricity route -- on top of reliability, power companies generally will only run a line/meter so far into a property and beyond that you're on your own for installation/maintenance. But apart from that, I think electrical coverage is a lot more comprehensive these days than water/sewer/cable so I feared that would end up turning into a sideshow. Given the general tone of the rest of the responses so far, it probably didn't matter one way or the other....
What you do have a right to do is initiate a conversation about whether it would be a net benefit for the country to have everyone connected through cell service or whatever.
Of course. But that's not what OP was doing, as you know.
If so, is this the slow-grant-day, jargon-filled restatement of millenia of common knowledge that it appears to be, or is there actually something interesting here?
Sage gems like this don't give me much hope:
The environment that parents provide for their children could reflect the long arm of nurture by previous ancestors.
If you already know that there used to be something else at the title "Charismatic leaders" and you want to know what happened to it, well then you need to know how to look up the history of an article
an article titled "Charismatic leaders" (with that capitalization) now redirects to the preceding link after the article that used to be there got moved to Populist leaders of Latin America in the 20th century (which has since been merged into the article on Populism generally)
Pedantry over the capitalized L aside, I have no doubt there's a trail of breadcrumbs you could follow to figure all that out if you're facile with Wikipedia. To the more casual reader, it would look very much like the original article was deleted.
It is only because there's so little going to it that this is an effective method. There's no way it will be effective on a very large scale.
If it doesn't scale worth a crap (or, as you posit, actually makes things worse in the long haul), then why are we even talking about it rather than putting that money into researching things that actually can scale? Simply because because the same save-the-rainforest crowd that has been around for many, many decades has adopted the current hot-button language to motivate/guilt people into giving them money they wouldn't have otherwise?
But if you do want to not think about it much, one thing you can do is simply donate to carbon offsetting causes. By some metrics, Cool Earth's rainforest preservation work has the most negative CO2 per a dollar https://www.coolearth.org/get-... [coolearth.org]. They are extremely efficient, and by some metrics it is about $10 worth of offset to Cool Earth for a trans-Atlantic flight, which means that simply donating a very small amount each month will be more than enough.
Wait, what? This entire problem can go away just by planting more green shit and/or preserving the green shit we already have? This is fantastic news! You really should spread the word to all the frothing activists out there who want us to live in adobe huts and give each other rides to work in rickshaws.
Proof positive that Maslow is a harsh mistress. This generation has a quality of life their grandparents never would have dreamed of, and it would be even higher if they had 10% of their grandparents' ability to be satisfied with what they have. But that's a tough perspective to pull off when they're surrounded with people like you constantly spreading negativity and discontent.
It doesn't seem like the chosen approach can distinguish between the two either.
When you only have two states, you can't distinguish among three conditions. What you can do, however, is cluster all the "bad" conditions together, which is what they did here:
LED on = copacetic. LED off = something's wrong = notification to user so they can fix it.
If there is a reason why this approach was chosen, it would be good to know.
As GP said, if LED off was the happy state, you could have a power or other issue with the lens and think everything was fine in the neighborhood while your blood sugar was off the charts.
"Fail safe" is (or used to be, and still should be) standard design practice.
With a lot more details and illustrations. As the summary hinted, the big issue appears to be how close the wireless power coil has to be to the lens: 5mm in testing.
Wrong again. It just happens to be a place that kept limitations on development.
That's exactly backwards. Development limitations would make real estate prices skyrocket just like SF, they Bay area, and the rest of the supply-starved cities in California. Prices are lower because demand is lower, and at least one reason demand is lower because there's not much of a local job market and people don't want to commute 1-2 hours to get to one.
There are too many jackoffs here on Slashdot.
Yeah, because your mailbox says "PopeRatzo." Whatever.
Let's just say it's the Central Coast and leave it at that.
So you're living in a population of a couple hundred thousand at most, and probably a lot less. Comparing the cost of living there to that in Houston, with a population of 2+ million, is disingenuous for reasons I should not have to explain.
So we're basically back where I figured we were at the outset, plus some asterisks. The cost of living for YOU, in your fairly unique set of circumstances, is about the same out in the sticks in California as it was in the fourth largest city in the nation. You've simply established what we all already knew, which is that the cost of living in Cali is out of control.
See above -- he's ignoring housing costs. So his claim collapses into (somewhere undisclosed in) Cali having a comparable cost of living to Houston for someone who happens to have enough money in their jeans to buy a house outright. The rest of the people living in the real world are SOL, apparently.
Slashdot Mirror
Look closer. Most of them are in South Williamson, across the border in Kentucky. Even if it's possible to fill controlled substance prescriptions across the state line, dollars to donuts most docs will write them and most people will fill them in their state.
And as I pointed out in more detail further down, Williamson is the only town of any size and thus has some of the only pharmacies in that part of the state, so they're serving a lot more people than just the ~3k inside the technical city limits. I'd guess you're looking at more like a pill or two per person per week once you factor that in. Back of the envelope, you probably can get to numbers like that with a fairly small population of heavy users on top of your normal, legitimate baseline volume.
Yeah, hard math tends to hurt splashy headlines (as well as Congressional investigations looking for a silver bullet/whipping boy).
On top of that, this part of WV is very sparsely populated and they don't have a pharmacy in every small town. Those pharmacies in Williamson are just about the only ones in that part of WV, so they're serving a much larger regional population than just those in the city limits. Total population in surrounding Mingo County in 2010 was nearly 27k. The numbers start getting really small really fast when you take into account how that part of the country actually operates.
See my above more detailed post -- only about 6% of U.S. farmland is irrigated. Even if all the scary stories about groundwater are true, you're probably looking at only a percentage point or two of crops that would be affected.
Texas was the first such state to hit "peak water" and that was almost 20 years ago.
A cute turn of phrase I hadn't heard before, and it looks like it was coined fairly recently. It took about 60 years for the "peak oil" meme to quiet down, so I suppose this one will run along for a while as well.
Kansas hit peak water in 2010. Its available water is also dropping annually.
The first article I found that wasn't from an activist says that Kansas isn't projected to "peak" until 2040 under current usage, and farmers have agreed to short-term reductions that should push that out to at least 2070.
From your own link, the average farm in America spends $17,000 annually on energy for pumping water.
Actually, my link says the average farm in America that irrigates spent $17,238 in 2012 (though if you divide the $2.7 billion total pumping costs against the 229,237 farms that irrigate, that comes out to $11,778 by my calculator -- close enough for government work, I suppose).
There are just over 900 million acres of farmland in the U.S. That means the ~55 million acres that irrigate are ~6% of total farmland . The other 94% use only water from the sky.
Another way to look at it is that $2.7 billion total irrigation costs across 900 million total acres comes out to $3 per acre . Taking corn as an example, the national average yield of 175 bushels per acre at an exceptionally conservative spot price of $3/bushel (it was about twice that in the same time frame as the above irrigation numbers, and is still higher today) means your $3/acre irrigation expenses are just over one half of one percent of your $525/acre revenue.
Irrigation in the U.S. is minuscule any way you slice it. The only way to make it look even remotely scary is to throw out misleading numbers in a vacuum.
Moving water around takes energy, which mostly comes from fossil fuels. . . . Purifying water and disposing of waste water also takes a lot of energy.
The shock-and-awe water consumption numbers like the ones OP threw out are mostly water to grow the grass/grain the animals eat. Nearly all of that comes straight from the sky or from local wells, with no purification or disposal required.
We have this thing called burden of proof, and it is on the accuser.
More correctly, the burden of proof is on the person making a claim. Here, the first claim is made by the person alleging a high score. You could argue the still photo initially satisfied the burden of proof for that claim, but after people provided detailed evidence of why that still photo could not have been accurate, the burden would flip back to the claimant to show that he somehow achieved that score despite the strength of the evidence that he physically could not have.
Yeah, I considered going down the electricity route -- on top of reliability, power companies generally will only run a line/meter so far into a property and beyond that you're on your own for installation/maintenance. But apart from that, I think electrical coverage is a lot more comprehensive these days than water/sewer/cable so I feared that would end up turning into a sideshow. Given the general tone of the rest of the responses so far, it probably didn't matter one way or the other....
What you do have a right to do is initiate a conversation about whether it would be a net benefit for the country to have everyone connected through cell service or whatever.
Of course. But that's not what OP was doing, as you know.
And this includes building systems in poorly covered areas where private capital doesn't see the ROI to justify the service.
If I make a conscious choice to live out in the sticks, that choice has pluses and minuses attached to it just like any other lifestyle choice.
I have no right to demand that you subsidize my choice by building out cell infrastructure to reach my preferred location than I do the other two.
If so, is this the slow-grant-day, jargon-filled restatement of millenia of common knowledge that it appears to be, or is there actually something interesting here?
Sage gems like this don't give me much hope:
The environment that parents provide for their children could reflect the long arm of nurture by previous ancestors.
Collective golf clap from the Kennedys.
If you already know that there used to be something else at the title "Charismatic leaders" and you want to know what happened to it, well then you need to know how to look up the history of an article
Exactly my point.
an article titled "Charismatic leaders" (with that capitalization) now redirects to the preceding link after the article that used to be there got moved to Populist leaders of Latin America in the 20th century (which has since been merged into the article on Populism generally)
Pedantry over the capitalized L aside, I have no doubt there's a trail of breadcrumbs you could follow to figure all that out if you're facile with Wikipedia. To the more casual reader, it would look very much like the original article was deleted.
It is only because there's so little going to it that this is an effective method. There's no way it will be effective on a very large scale.
If it doesn't scale worth a crap (or, as you posit, actually makes things worse in the long haul), then why are we even talking about it rather than putting that money into researching things that actually can scale? Simply because because the same save-the-rainforest crowd that has been around for many, many decades has adopted the current hot-button language to motivate/guilt people into giving them money they wouldn't have otherwise?
But if you do want to not think about it much, one thing you can do is simply donate to carbon offsetting causes. By some metrics, Cool Earth's rainforest preservation work has the most negative CO2 per a dollar https://www.coolearth.org/get-... [coolearth.org]. They are extremely efficient, and by some metrics it is about $10 worth of offset to Cool Earth for a trans-Atlantic flight, which means that simply donating a very small amount each month will be more than enough.
Wait, what? This entire problem can go away just by planting more green shit and/or preserving the green shit we already have? This is fantastic news! You really should spread the word to all the frothing activists out there who want us to live in adobe huts and give each other rides to work in rickshaws.
Future is bleak
neck deep in shit
utter hopelessness
Proof positive that Maslow is a harsh mistress. This generation has a quality of life their grandparents never would have dreamed of, and it would be even higher if they had 10% of their grandparents' ability to be satisfied with what they have. But that's a tough perspective to pull off when they're surrounded with people like you constantly spreading negativity and discontent.
It doesn't seem like the chosen approach can distinguish between the two either.
When you only have two states, you can't distinguish among three conditions. What you can do, however, is cluster all the "bad" conditions together, which is what they did here:
LED on = copacetic.
LED off = something's wrong = notification to user so they can fix it.
If there is a reason why this approach was chosen, it would be good to know.
As GP said, if LED off was the happy state, you could have a power or other issue with the lens and think everything was fine in the neighborhood while your blood sugar was off the charts.
"Fail safe" is (or used to be, and still should be) standard design practice.
With a lot more details and illustrations. As the summary hinted, the big issue appears to be how close the wireless power coil has to be to the lens: 5mm in testing.
http://advances.sciencemag.org...
pick up the slack that the federal government is abdicating . . . maintain civilization on state by state basis . . . those anarchic lunatics.
The irony is strong with you.
You can't beat the rake.
Do we really know they were actively working on a fix for half a year? I hadn't seen anything but speculation to that effect, but may have missed it.
Maybe it's time for a slightly more measured approach?
Wrong again. It just happens to be a place that kept limitations on development.
That's exactly backwards. Development limitations would make real estate prices skyrocket just like SF, they Bay area, and the rest of the supply-starved cities in California. Prices are lower because demand is lower, and at least one reason demand is lower because there's not much of a local job market and people don't want to commute 1-2 hours to get to one.
There are too many jackoffs here on Slashdot.
Yeah, because your mailbox says "PopeRatzo." Whatever.
Let's just say it's the Central Coast and leave it at that.
So you're living in a population of a couple hundred thousand at most, and probably a lot less. Comparing the cost of living there to that in Houston, with a population of 2+ million, is disingenuous for reasons I should not have to explain.
So we're basically back where I figured we were at the outset, plus some asterisks. The cost of living for YOU, in your fairly unique set of circumstances, is about the same out in the sticks in California as it was in the fourth largest city in the nation. You've simply established what we all already knew, which is that the cost of living in Cali is out of control.
See above -- he's ignoring housing costs. So his claim collapses into (somewhere undisclosed in) Cali having a comparable cost of living to Houston for someone who happens to have enough money in their jeans to buy a house outright. The rest of the people living in the real world are SOL, apparently.