Assuming for a moment that, on average, delivery by USPS is cheaper (in the relevant sense) than the customer going to the store themselves: there is still the difference between the cost of the items being shipped wholesale to the store and individually to the customer. The former is necessarily cheaper than the latter, the question is by how much and if the difference is big enough to cancel out any reduced costs implied by the previous assumption.
I'm speculating that wholesale transport is that much cheaper and goes a long way to cover the customer's traveling to the store. I'm also fairly sure that on average, USPS is not cheaper, ie. the previous assumption is false. Sure, if you live in a rural/suburban place and you factor in a drive to the store for every individual item you buy, then the trip by USPS will be cheaper. But that's not how it works: often you buy several items at the same store/mall, and often you are mobile anyway and stop at the store on a trip you would have made anyway, making the stop at the store just as "free" as the USPS stop. And the average case also covers the many city dwellers, who don't have to make long trips, often short enough to be done by foot/bike/subway.
I also reside in communal living quarters, though I usually call them a flat in an apartment building. I don't need a car to buy groceries and I often have the option of buying local stuff -- even though the reduced distance isn't reflected in the price since we're still living in the age of essentially free energy and mobility. Going to the extremes of Chinese migratory worker accommodations is probably not necessary; in fact, I assume that at some point an increase in population density will no longer be benefitial even if you ignore the social downsides.
On a sidenote. Foxconn optimises for "efficiency", but efficiency is a meaningless word unless it's grounded -- you can't be efficient, you can only be efficient with respects to some quantity, ie. time, money, resources. Clearly, the factory city is efficient in terms of money spent by Foxconn (or whoever), but it may not be efficient in terms of money (eventually) spent by other people or overall resources.
I think if you're in a position where you apparently own Ksplice's servers, it'd be easy enough and far more damaging to quietly add a security hole to lots of systems using their patch infrastructure. Seems like a better attack vector than spreading an odd source file via a site full of distrustful/inquisitive geeks...
I'm not so sure high entropy data is all that rare. While the container format makes them distinguishable from completely random data, compressed audio and video files do have very high entropy, I think. And much of the space of a drive will probably be used for movies and music.
You say his argument is both completely illogical and irrelevant.
What was illogical about his argument? He really didn't even make an argument, he just delivered two facts that plug into the argument you made for him. The upshot being that your argument has an interesting conclusion: the US is among the countries that should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons (and in fact, this is true for all countries). I think that's an unsurprising result and shows that your argument is sound.
As for being irrelevant, well maybe. The argument that the US and any other country shouldn't have nuclear weapons pales against the reality that the US and many other countries do have nuclear weapons. However, the non-proliferation debate tends to imply differences between "legal" nuclear weapon states and the "nuclear upstarts" where there aren't any. Non-proliferation can only be attained if nuclear disarmament goes along with it.
Also, you really had it coming with your phrasing of argument A. At first I thought you were being ironic...
Bush seemed pretty serious about his religious convictions. So seem many of your (assumedly) fellow countrypeople. And unlike Ahmadinejad he did have the bomb and he did start a war against another country.
You exaggerate. Capitalization is not very meaningful in English, anyway (unlike, say, in German, where all nouns start with a capital letter). And from what I can see, he does have proper punctuation except in paragraph-final position where a full stop is arguably redundant. I certainly prefer that to people writing without paragraphs -- now that I can't read (I know, strawman, false dichotomy, etc).
Yes. But the fact alone that you usually edit the code in one window and step through it in another makes Firebug less convenient in my eyes. But yeah, it's awesome, I didn't claim otherwise. I really hate developing without a working debugger, particularly with an unfamiliar codebase.
Firebug does all those things, AFAIK. Although I certainly agree that it's not as convenient a debugging environment as Eclipse and other full blown IDEs.
I'm pretty sure that if the eco movement people had had their way, there would have been no loophole and no unintended consequence. And either way, it certainly isn't their fault that the loophole wasn't closed. Not sure what greens you're referring to, btw: AFAIK there is a Green party in the US, but it's a rather small, even fringe party, I somehow doubt they had something to do with it. So perhaps the greens are progressive members of the Democratic party.
Incidently, we had (have) a similar situation in Germany, where the Green party gets 10% or even 15+% and is routinely involved in legislation: the license tax on cars is based on some characteristic (displacement, maybe) unless it's something like a "light truck" (then it's lower). But of course, we also have basically a 50% tax on gasoline, so there's still an economical pressure to go for a more efficient car -- obviously you can affect a market demand using legislation and taxation.
Your assertion that oil plays the same role today as coal did in the industrial revolution is questionable. And I don't think the author says what you think he says about coal; at least he doesn't in the abstract or the conclusion of the single paper I found about coal in the industrial revolution.
I was talking specifically about the paper, not about Peak Oil or nuclear power or coal-to-liquid, of which I'm very much aware, so I'm not going into that.
Yes, I saw that page. It hardly resolved my objections, though, there is no paper about the consequences of peak oil, and while a few papers are about resource economics in history, I didn't see anything that dealt specifically with a sharp decrease of the availability of a resource. AFAIK there was no talk of peak coal during the industrial revolution. (Not sure if there is any historic precedent of similar scale.)
I just don't think the claims he makes can be made with just history to back you up, without extensive research into the particulars of the oil economy.
The dominant type of new nuclear power plant, light-water reactors (LWRs), proved unnanceable in the robust 2005–08 capital market, despite new U.S. subsidies approaching or exceeding their total construction cost. New LWRs are now so costly and slow that they save 2–20× less carbon, 20–40× slower, than micropower and efficient end-use. As this becomes evident, other kinds of reactors are being proposed instead—novel designs claimed to solve LWRs problems of economics, proliferation, and waste. But on closer examination, the two kinds most often promoted—Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and thorium reactors—reveal no economic, environmental, or security rationale, and the thesis is unsound for any nuclear reactor.
I'm not sure that he considers driving an old station wagon part of the effort. That said, modern station wagons can be very fuel efficient, no different than any other model from the same line, really. It's just when you're talking antique, giant, heavy, badly engineered stuff that you get terrible mileage. I'm also not sure why you think greens (like him) are responsible for the popularity of the SUV -- it seems general human stupidity (particularly in certain areas of the world) takes most of the blame.
Some enthusiasts prefer fueling reactors with thorium—an element 3 as abundant as uranium but even more uneconomic to use. India has for decades failed to commercialize breeder reactors to exploit its thorium deposits. But thorium can’t fuel a reactor by itself: rather, a uranium- or plutonium-fueled reactor can convert thorium-232 into fissionable (and plutonium-like, highly bomb-usable) uranium-233. Thorium’s proliferation,i waste, safety, and cost problems differ only in detail from uranium’s: e.g., thorium ore makes less mill waste, but highly radioactive U-232 makes fabricating or reprocessing U-233 fuel hard and costly. And with uranium-based nuclear power continuing its decades-long economic collapse, it’s awfully late to be thinking of developing a whole new fuel cycle whose problems differ only in detail from current versions.
Spent LWR fuel “burned” in IFRs, it’s claimed, could meet all humanity’s energy needs for centuries. But renewables and efficiency can do that forever at far lower cost, with no proliferation, nuclear wastes, or major risks.ii Moreover, any new type of reactor would probably cost even more than today’s models: even if the nuclear part of a new plant were free, the rest—two-thirds of its capital cost—would still be grossly uncompetitive with any efficiency and most renewables, sending out a kilowatt-hour for ~9–13/kWh instead of new LWRs’ ~12–18+. In contrast, the average U.S. windfarm completed in 2007 sold its power (net of a 1/kWh subsidy that’s a small fraction of nuclear subsidies) for 4.5/kWh. Add ~0.4 to make it dispatchable whether the wind is blowing or not and you get under a nickel delivered to the grid.
Most other renewables also beat new thermal power plants too, cogeneration is often comparable or cheaper, and efficiency is cheaper than just running any nuclear- or fossil-fueled plant. Obviously these options would also easily beat proposed fusion reactors that are sometimes claimed to be comparable to today’s fission reactors in size and cost. And unlike any kind of hypothetical fusion or new fission reactor—or LWRs, which have a market share below 2%—efficiency and micropower now provide at least half the world’s new electrical services, adding tens of times more capacity each year than nuclear power does. It’s a far bigger gamble to assume that the nuclear market loser will become a winner than that these winners will turn to losers.
That blog post you link seems to quote a newspaper article which is very light on the details and big on rhetoric. It claims that with energy 5x more expensive, living standard would decline by 11%. Without further definitions, that phrase is completely devoid of meaning: living standard as measured by what? And if properly defined, the question remains, how did they come up with the figure? And more: why 5x more expensive? Does that factor in the cost of the energy that's part of anything manufactured or transported? What about the increased of prize products that are directly (plastics, medicine) and indirectly (food through fertilizer) based on oil?
Huh? That's a bit much coming from someone who's also using headphones while cycling. I'm just not deluding myself into thinking it'll make me safer. That said, I'm still a lot safer than anybody using a motorcycle, and safer for the world at large than anybody driving a car. I'd encourage those people to start walking or cycling -- with or without phones -- to make the world a better and safer place.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming for a moment that, on average, delivery by USPS is cheaper (in the relevant sense) than the customer going to the store themselves: there is still the difference between the cost of the items being shipped wholesale to the store and individually to the customer. The former is necessarily cheaper than the latter, the question is by how much and if the difference is big enough to cancel out any reduced costs implied by the previous assumption.
I'm speculating that wholesale transport is that much cheaper and goes a long way to cover the customer's traveling to the store. I'm also fairly sure that on average, USPS is not cheaper, ie. the previous assumption is false. Sure, if you live in a rural/suburban place and you factor in a drive to the store for every individual item you buy, then the trip by USPS will be cheaper. But that's not how it works: often you buy several items at the same store/mall, and often you are mobile anyway and stop at the store on a trip you would have made anyway, making the stop at the store just as "free" as the USPS stop. And the average case also covers the many city dwellers, who don't have to make long trips, often short enough to be done by foot/bike/subway.
I also reside in communal living quarters, though I usually call them a flat in an apartment building. I don't need a car to buy groceries and I often have the option of buying local stuff -- even though the reduced distance isn't reflected in the price since we're still living in the age of essentially free energy and mobility. Going to the extremes of Chinese migratory worker accommodations is probably not necessary; in fact, I assume that at some point an increase in population density will no longer be benefitial even if you ignore the social downsides.
On a sidenote. Foxconn optimises for "efficiency", but efficiency is a meaningless word unless it's grounded -- you can't be efficient, you can only be efficient with respects to some quantity, ie. time, money, resources. Clearly, the factory city is efficient in terms of money spent by Foxconn (or whoever), but it may not be efficient in terms of money (eventually) spent by other people or overall resources.
I think if you're in a position where you apparently own Ksplice's servers, it'd be easy enough and far more damaging to quietly add a security hole to lots of systems using their patch infrastructure. Seems like a better attack vector than spreading an odd source file via a site full of distrustful/inquisitive geeks...
I'm not so sure high entropy data is all that rare. While the container format makes them distinguishable from completely random data, compressed audio and video files do have very high entropy, I think. And much of the space of a drive will probably be used for movies and music.
You say his argument is both completely illogical and irrelevant.
What was illogical about his argument? He really didn't even make an argument, he just delivered two facts that plug into the argument you made for him. The upshot being that your argument has an interesting conclusion: the US is among the countries that should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons (and in fact, this is true for all countries). I think that's an unsurprising result and shows that your argument is sound.
As for being irrelevant, well maybe. The argument that the US and any other country shouldn't have nuclear weapons pales against the reality that the US and many other countries do have nuclear weapons. However, the non-proliferation debate tends to imply differences between "legal" nuclear weapon states and the "nuclear upstarts" where there aren't any. Non-proliferation can only be attained if nuclear disarmament goes along with it.
Also, you really had it coming with your phrasing of argument A. At first I thought you were being ironic...
Nice strategy of denial there. Also try crying and flailing about with your arms next time you hear an argument you don't like.
Bush seemed pretty serious about his religious convictions. So seem many of your (assumedly) fellow countrypeople. And unlike Ahmadinejad he did have the bomb and he did start a war against another country.
You exaggerate. Capitalization is not very meaningful in English, anyway (unlike, say, in German, where all nouns start with a capital letter). And from what I can see, he does have proper punctuation except in paragraph-final position where a full stop is arguably redundant. I certainly prefer that to people writing without paragraphs -- now that I can't read (I know, strawman, false dichotomy, etc).
Yes. But the fact alone that you usually edit the code in one window and step through it in another makes Firebug less convenient in my eyes. But yeah, it's awesome, I didn't claim otherwise. I really hate developing without a working debugger, particularly with an unfamiliar codebase.
Firebug does all those things, AFAIK. Although I certainly agree that it's not as convenient a debugging environment as Eclipse and other full blown IDEs.
+1 Bizarrely unique combination of sentences
I'm pretty sure that if the eco movement people had had their way, there would have been no loophole and no unintended consequence. And either way, it certainly isn't their fault that the loophole wasn't closed. Not sure what greens you're referring to, btw: AFAIK there is a Green party in the US, but it's a rather small, even fringe party, I somehow doubt they had something to do with it. So perhaps the greens are progressive members of the Democratic party.
Incidently, we had (have) a similar situation in Germany, where the Green party gets 10% or even 15+% and is routinely involved in legislation: the license tax on cars is based on some characteristic (displacement, maybe) unless it's something like a "light truck" (then it's lower). But of course, we also have basically a 50% tax on gasoline, so there's still an economical pressure to go for a more efficient car -- obviously you can affect a market demand using legislation and taxation.
Your assertion that oil plays the same role today as coal did in the industrial revolution is questionable. And I don't think the author says what you think he says about coal; at least he doesn't in the abstract or the conclusion of the single paper I found about coal in the industrial revolution.
I was talking specifically about the paper, not about Peak Oil or nuclear power or coal-to-liquid, of which I'm very much aware, so I'm not going into that.
Yes, I saw that page. It hardly resolved my objections, though, there is no paper about the consequences of peak oil, and while a few papers are about resource economics in history, I didn't see anything that dealt specifically with a sharp decrease of the availability of a resource. AFAIK there was no talk of peak coal during the industrial revolution. (Not sure if there is any historic precedent of similar scale.)
I just don't think the claims he makes can be made with just history to back you up, without extensive research into the particulars of the oil economy.
"New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story
The dominant type of new nuclear power plant, light-water reactors (LWRs), proved unnanceable in the robust 2005–08 capital market, despite new U.S. subsidies approaching or exceeding their total construction cost. New LWRs are now so costly and slow that they save 2–20× less carbon, 20–40× slower, than micropower and efficient end-use. As this becomes evident, other kinds of reactors are being proposed instead—novel designs claimed to solve LWRs problems of economics, proliferation, and waste. But on closer examination, the two kinds most often promoted—Integral Fast Reactors (IFRs) and thorium reactors—reveal no economic, environmental, or security rationale, and the thesis is unsound for any nuclear reactor.
I'm not sure that he considers driving an old station wagon part of the effort. That said, modern station wagons can be very fuel efficient, no different than any other model from the same line, really. It's just when you're talking antique, giant, heavy, badly engineered stuff that you get terrible mileage. I'm also not sure why you think greens (like him) are responsible for the popularity of the SUV -- it seems general human stupidity (particularly in certain areas of the world) takes most of the blame.
Source: RMI, "New" Nuclear Reactors, Same Old Story
That blog post you link seems to quote a newspaper article which is very light on the details and big on rhetoric. It claims that with energy 5x more expensive, living standard would decline by 11%. Without further definitions, that phrase is completely devoid of meaning: living standard as measured by what? And if properly defined, the question remains, how did they come up with the figure? And more: why 5x more expensive? Does that factor in the cost of the energy that's part of anything manufactured or transported? What about the increased of prize products that are directly (plastics, medicine) and indirectly (food through fertilizer) based on oil?
Propane wok burner? Hmm, I guess I need a bigger kitchen.
You know, there are plenty of... activities... that don't incur that risk.
YHBT?
Eugh. I hope you're joking.
Einstein Stool Box? WTF?
Oh, sorry, I took that the wrong way then.
Huh? That's a bit much coming from someone who's also using headphones while cycling. I'm just not deluding myself into thinking it'll make me safer. That said, I'm still a lot safer than anybody using a motorcycle, and safer for the world at large than anybody driving a car. I'd encourage those people to start walking or cycling -- with or without phones -- to make the world a better and safer place.