He keeps adding to the existing rewards, though. The $35 dollar level, for instance, now comes with 6 episodes of the original show (which retail at $10 / episode) as well as the first episode of the new series. Every level above $35 basically includes every level below them, so by the time you get to the $100 level, you get 6 episodes of the old series, all the episodes of the new series, a T-shirt, a coffee mug, your name in the credits and various other tchotchke. He's also added some other non-KS items that will be rolled into the final budget (e.g., you can buy all 87 available episodes of the original series for $150 today and the $150 counts toward the total). He hasn't figured out how to add the non-KS revenue to the KS page, but has been letting people know the totals as the project progresses.
$100 is obviously overpriced if you are only interested in viewing whatever number of new episodes (6, 9 or 12) finally get produced - Vimeo will stream them for $3/episode probably - but for fans that want new content produced and own the episodes and the other swag, it's not bad for KS.
It is a little ridiculous, but as I was telling my kids a few hours ago, parliamentary elections are inherently easier and quicker than a Presidential election would ever be. Party slates and party voting is just a lot easier than publicly selecting your party's standard bearer. In most parliamentary elections, the party has already decided its leadership internally (via party conferences) and generally puts forth it's slate fairly easily. The actual election season is thus just the race between the various parties. That's sort of equivalent to the US race after the big party conventions - which take place in late August for an early November election, which works out to around 60-70 day campaigns. That's roughly in line with your elections.
Back before we made the nominating process so open, American campaigns were shorter. If we went back to the days of the party picking the candidate, we'd be pretty close.
I'm well aware of PRT (even covered it once for a publication back in the 90s). PRT has been a pipe dream for decades and will remain so until it gets a technological reboot (probably in the form of autonomous cars). We simply don't live in the type of society that can do big infrastructure any more - it's too expensive. Most forms of PRT are not distributed enough - if a main track has a problem, the entire system has a problem. That's really a non-starter.
Now, I'd love to see something like an Elon Musk fantasy come true - autonomous electric cars that pick you up from wherever you are and take you to your local destination or take you to the nearest local Hyperloop which might deliver you to a longer-distance Hyperloop or airport for longer transit. Most supplies delivered to your doorstep by autonomous delivery vehicles. It leverages the infrastructure we've already built with a more cost-effective solution for longer trips.
It's theoretically doable in 20-30 years (in some locales, sooner) but it's an enormous task with a lot of societal and infrastructural inertia. And, ironically, easier to implement in the suburbs than the cities.
People who like to live in cities should live in cities. Cities have a lot of fantastic aspects that appeal to a large number of people. But they have significant downsides too - your ability to affect what goes on in your community is effectively nil when you are one of a few million. Politics, graft and pull is a necessity in cities to an extent that simply does not apply to smaller towns.
If your lifestyle is perfectly orthogonal to city living (you are a user of services, most of which are provided to you without any input but are satisfactory to you, and your concept of "community" is primarily hanging out with friends and lots of strange faces are exciting/meaningless to you - or - you're a political animal and want to be involved in organizing groups of people), you should live there. If, on the other hand, you want to be more involved with your kid's school and school district, you don't really see the need for politics in trash collection and you want to recognize most of the people you see each day, a suburb may be a better choice.
(I have both aspects to my own personality - I'm suburban at the moment because it feels right for my family as it is now, but I could easily see myself living in the city when the kids are gone.)
Except we already had that utopia. The early part of the 20th century had better, faster, more reliable and regular inter and intra city transit with lots of overlapping service providers (light rail, urban rail, streetcars, etc.). And for the most part, it was ripped up and abandoned - and not, pace urbanist conspiracy theory, because GM had some nefarious plan to do away with it all.
Cars were just a whole lot more convenient - transit is great there is a break down, or a strike, or a budget crisis, or an urgent need to get somewhere *now*, or the need to go to a destination that isn't on your line, or to get more supplies than you can carry. Which happened so often that the car seemed like a dream - and people flocked to its distributed model and fled the centralized model of transit whenever they could.
I say this as a transit enthusiast - I love an good streetcar and have purposefully chosen to live within a few blocks of transit (and use it) my entire adult life.
Yeah - no. There is no way you can rent 8 hours/day, 5 days/week consistently. Considering the number of ZipCars I see just sitting around in the Evanston garage waiting for someone to rent them - if a highly marketed service can't do it, you can't either.
You're describing Arlington Heights (16 miles west of Evanston), which attempted the same thing around its mass transit hub - a single Metra stop. It's not exactly a disaster, but it's not a roaring success. Transit-oriented development makes sense in real cities with real transit. Even in Evanston, with all its college students and transit links, it really only works in a north/side direction for the 8 blocks to each side of the rail lines and mostly just in the east, lakeside/campus portion. For anyone outside that zone (or anyone in that zone who needs to go in an east/west direction), it's made things worse and, as a side benefit, just sucked the money out of the rest of the city.
The answer is that "walkable" Evanston is only walkable in a handful of spots - downtown, parts of Chicago Avenue, Dempster/Main shopping districts. Effectively, only the part of the "city" that is east of Ridge Street or the 8 blocks nearest Lake Michigan.
Which is a tiny part of actual Evanston - the majority of which is an old-line suburb with a mix of single family homes and small apartments with lots of cars. You have two other business "districts" (Central/Green Bay and Emerson/Dodge) but the two block Central district is the only one that's "walkable" and it doesn't have a grocery store. Dodge is a high crime area (and location of the high school) - walking is a daylight operation only and even then there's parts you don't walk.
The Evanston city council is basically made up of goo-goo types from the richer East Side attempting to buy off the poor South/West side with services that no one can afford. It sort-of works - unless by "works" you mean has a reasonable budget and tax base and schools that perform on par with surrounding communities, in which case it doesn't work at all. But they do have better restaurants...
Actually, I moved out of Evanston (lived there for years) precisely because our stupid city council adopted all that high-density, "smart growth" strategy in the worst possible ways. There have been some reasonable successes (the core downtown area) but even those were the result of years of failure and really poor civil planning.
The funny thing is that even the most successful portion of the strategy effectively just recreated the downtown that existed in the 30s-60s. Downtown Evanston used to be defined by the Sherman corridor - it was a hub of shopping (a gorgeous fieldstone Marshall Fields being the anchor), entertainment (a large theater), shops and restaurants and a large parking garage. Over the years, the mix of business changed (the Fields and theatre closed, Barnes and Noble moved in) because Old Orchard and the like siphoned away all the energy and retail (with lots of parking).
The new downtown is just... newer. It hasn't really changed all that much. A few things shifted (the Barnes and Noble moved across the street, the old parking garage was knocked down and rebuilt with some new, low quality retail, the theatre is now Maple) but Sherman is still struggling, Davis is in the midst of rebuilding mostly due to fires and the same restaurants have just moved around (Dave's Italian Kitchen, the Chinese place, Lulu's, etc.).
Major retailers still can't stay open (the Gap is gone, Borders is gone, the Buffalo Wild Wings is gone, Puck's is gone) and while some of them have been replaced with similar or lower quality entrants, chunks of it are now being bought up by our wildly expansionist hospital system for doctors offices. The big new opening of late is a tiny Sprint store on the prime Sherman/Church corner that is the exact center of "downtown" Evanston. Half the building is still vacant but will probably be fronted by an ATM branch of some national bank while the core of the building is empty.
And the TIF financing did no great favors for the school district or city coffers - the city still has endemic budget problems that were supposed to be solved by "smart growth" - bring in childless Gen Y/Millenials and get all that yummy tax money with no kids and no cars... But those people start having kids and then need cars because there are no grocery stores (one of the "smart growth" plans knocked down the only neighborhood grocery on the south side of the city and replaced it with a high-density townhouse development with inadequate parking - all of whom have to drive to Chicago just to get groceries).
The whole thing is a mess. 20 years from now, it will be redeveloped again. The only reason Evanston survives its crappy city council is because 25K Northwestern students keep the downtown at least somewhat viable. Which is great for those of us ex-Evanstonians who live close by and can park at the two big garages and walk to the same restaurants that we ate at when we were kids (Buffalo Joe's!).
Actually, the Purple Line is the only line that has stops within Evanston borders. You can transfer to the other two lines at Howard Street but by that measure, you can count Evanston as having every CTA line.
Evanston actually used to be home to a bunch of car dealerships and still has a number of them. They are clustered around the main north/south street (Chicago Avenue). I bought my current car at one of those dealers.
Ironically, the main "density corridor" in Evanston is also along Chicago Avenue. Both the CTA and Metra rail lines run parallel to Chicago Avenue and most of the stops on the south side of the "city" exit to Chicago Avenue. In fact, two of the stops (Dempster and Main) are within a few hundred feet of a car dealership and South used to be until they tore down one of the dealerships for a condo complex.
Given that social science studies are notoriouslybad, why do we think things would be any better if we used "science" in police training?
We'd probably be better off if we made some structural changes, like limiting qualified immunity and requiring all interactions with the public and accused to be videotaped.
Geez, another release? Why do they insist on revving the release numbers so often? Mozilla really jumped the shark when they made Chrome match the ridiculous version numbering scheme of Google's Firefox browser.
Every flipping couple of weeks, Mozilla comes out with another version of Chrome with a list of "improvements" that no one wants while ignoring the obvious memory bloat and CPU utilization problems caused by their stupid multiprocess tab browsing. I remember when Mozilla Chrome was a sleek, fast browser - now it's a bloated mess. And when are they ever going to have the rich Add-Ons ecosystem that Google has had for-freaking-ever?
I swear to God I'm going to switch to Google Firefox if this crap keeps up.
I should also note that the Oxitec technology is very targeted - it only affects one (Ae. aegypti) out of 3,500 mosquito species. Where it is currently being used (the Americas), that species in a non-native invasive species, introduced only in the last few decades. No native species at all depends on Ae. aegypti and they make up less than 1% of any American mosquito population.
Bats don't depend on them at all as far as we can tell. Studies of the stomach contents of bats (and purple martins, another supposed mosquito abated) found less than 1% of their diet consists of mosquitoes. They just aren't nutrient dense - you'd have to eat a lot of mosquitoes to support the metabolism of a bat (flying mammals have high metabolisms). Insectivorous bats primarily eat moths and wasps. Mosquitoes are a rounding error in terms of their diet.
I wonder if this would be any more effective than the GMO mosquitoes developed by Oxitec. It's a fascinating technology - the mosquitoes are modified to have a "dominant lethal" allele that can be suppressed by feeding the mosquitoes tetracycline. They raise a generation of mosquitoes with access to tetracycline, separate out the males, and release them into the wild, where they breed with wild females. All their offspring die during the larval phase. The release plan usually overwhelms the local wild male population, so the population crashes hard (90+%) within a generation or two. And the trait doesn't "escape" because it's 100% lethal even with just one allele.
They've had a lot of success in their field trials - Brazil is moving forward with it, as are several Caribbean islands. They were going to use it one the Florida Keys but, of course, someone sued to stop it, so it's on hold ATM.
Actually, Nature asked a bunch of ecologists that very question and the response was, basically, kill them all.
But we don't need to go that far. Of the 3,500 species of mosquito, only 40 spread human disease. Eradicate every single one of those and you still have 3,460 species of mosquito to fill every conceivable mosquito niche. If I remember correctly, there's another 30 or so species that target important domesticated species (dogs, cows, horses, etc), so wiping those out would be a nice phase 2.
Human-vectoring mosquitoes cause enormous human suffering for vanishingly little environmental utility. Getting rid of them would be a big win for the environment - as long as they are around, we will be forced to use pesticides that have real negative environmental consequences.
Mosquitoes are an insignificant part (under 1%) of the diet of insectivorous bats. Bats prefer moths and wasps - many more calories per catch. Bats will eat mosquitoes, they just prefer just about anything else.
The first and third cases involve policy (should the government kill Americans without benefit of trial while not actively involved in an imminent threat to life and should the government sell and encourage the use of surplus military equipment to local police forces) while the second is about technique (if you have to shoot someone because they are an active, imminent threat to life, he doesn't care if you use a gun, a drone or a lightsaber).
There's nothing particularly flip-floppy about those three statements. You have to actively spin them to make them conflict.
Slashdot Mirror
He keeps adding to the existing rewards, though. The $35 dollar level, for instance, now comes with 6 episodes of the original show (which retail at $10 / episode) as well as the first episode of the new series. Every level above $35 basically includes every level below them, so by the time you get to the $100 level, you get 6 episodes of the old series, all the episodes of the new series, a T-shirt, a coffee mug, your name in the credits and various other tchotchke. He's also added some other non-KS items that will be rolled into the final budget (e.g., you can buy all 87 available episodes of the original series for $150 today and the $150 counts toward the total). He hasn't figured out how to add the non-KS revenue to the KS page, but has been letting people know the totals as the project progresses.
$100 is obviously overpriced if you are only interested in viewing whatever number of new episodes (6, 9 or 12) finally get produced - Vimeo will stream them for $3/episode probably - but for fans that want new content produced and own the episodes and the other swag, it's not bad for KS.
It is a little ridiculous, but as I was telling my kids a few hours ago, parliamentary elections are inherently easier and quicker than a Presidential election would ever be. Party slates and party voting is just a lot easier than publicly selecting your party's standard bearer. In most parliamentary elections, the party has already decided its leadership internally (via party conferences) and generally puts forth it's slate fairly easily. The actual election season is thus just the race between the various parties. That's sort of equivalent to the US race after the big party conventions - which take place in late August for an early November election, which works out to around 60-70 day campaigns. That's roughly in line with your elections.
Back before we made the nominating process so open, American campaigns were shorter. If we went back to the days of the party picking the candidate, we'd be pretty close.
'Steven Universe' fandom is melting down after bullied fanartist attempts suicide
I'm well aware of PRT (even covered it once for a publication back in the 90s). PRT has been a pipe dream for decades and will remain so until it gets a technological reboot (probably in the form of autonomous cars). We simply don't live in the type of society that can do big infrastructure any more - it's too expensive. Most forms of PRT are not distributed enough - if a main track has a problem, the entire system has a problem. That's really a non-starter.
Now, I'd love to see something like an Elon Musk fantasy come true - autonomous electric cars that pick you up from wherever you are and take you to your local destination or take you to the nearest local Hyperloop which might deliver you to a longer-distance Hyperloop or airport for longer transit. Most supplies delivered to your doorstep by autonomous delivery vehicles. It leverages the infrastructure we've already built with a more cost-effective solution for longer trips.
It's theoretically doable in 20-30 years (in some locales, sooner) but it's an enormous task with a lot of societal and infrastructural inertia. And, ironically, easier to implement in the suburbs than the cities.
People who like to live in cities should live in cities. Cities have a lot of fantastic aspects that appeal to a large number of people. But they have significant downsides too - your ability to affect what goes on in your community is effectively nil when you are one of a few million. Politics, graft and pull is a necessity in cities to an extent that simply does not apply to smaller towns.
If your lifestyle is perfectly orthogonal to city living (you are a user of services, most of which are provided to you without any input but are satisfactory to you, and your concept of "community" is primarily hanging out with friends and lots of strange faces are exciting/meaningless to you - or - you're a political animal and want to be involved in organizing groups of people), you should live there. If, on the other hand, you want to be more involved with your kid's school and school district, you don't really see the need for politics in trash collection and you want to recognize most of the people you see each day, a suburb may be a better choice.
(I have both aspects to my own personality - I'm suburban at the moment because it feels right for my family as it is now, but I could easily see myself living in the city when the kids are gone.)
Except we already had that utopia. The early part of the 20th century had better, faster, more reliable and regular inter and intra city transit with lots of overlapping service providers (light rail, urban rail, streetcars, etc.). And for the most part, it was ripped up and abandoned - and not, pace urbanist conspiracy theory, because GM had some nefarious plan to do away with it all.
Cars were just a whole lot more convenient - transit is great there is a break down, or a strike, or a budget crisis, or an urgent need to get somewhere *now*, or the need to go to a destination that isn't on your line, or to get more supplies than you can carry. Which happened so often that the car seemed like a dream - and people flocked to its distributed model and fled the centralized model of transit whenever they could.
I say this as a transit enthusiast - I love an good streetcar and have purposefully chosen to live within a few blocks of transit (and use it) my entire adult life.
Yeah - no. There is no way you can rent 8 hours/day, 5 days/week consistently. Considering the number of ZipCars I see just sitting around in the Evanston garage waiting for someone to rent them - if a highly marketed service can't do it, you can't either.
ugh - "north/side direction" should be "north/south direction".
You're describing Arlington Heights (16 miles west of Evanston), which attempted the same thing around its mass transit hub - a single Metra stop. It's not exactly a disaster, but it's not a roaring success. Transit-oriented development makes sense in real cities with real transit. Even in Evanston, with all its college students and transit links, it really only works in a north/side direction for the 8 blocks to each side of the rail lines and mostly just in the east, lakeside/campus portion. For anyone outside that zone (or anyone in that zone who needs to go in an east/west direction), it's made things worse and, as a side benefit, just sucked the money out of the rest of the city.
The answer is that "walkable" Evanston is only walkable in a handful of spots - downtown, parts of Chicago Avenue, Dempster/Main shopping districts. Effectively, only the part of the "city" that is east of Ridge Street or the 8 blocks nearest Lake Michigan.
Which is a tiny part of actual Evanston - the majority of which is an old-line suburb with a mix of single family homes and small apartments with lots of cars. You have two other business "districts" (Central/Green Bay and Emerson/Dodge) but the two block Central district is the only one that's "walkable" and it doesn't have a grocery store. Dodge is a high crime area (and location of the high school) - walking is a daylight operation only and even then there's parts you don't walk.
The Evanston city council is basically made up of goo-goo types from the richer East Side attempting to buy off the poor South/West side with services that no one can afford. It sort-of works - unless by "works" you mean has a reasonable budget and tax base and schools that perform on par with surrounding communities, in which case it doesn't work at all. But they do have better restaurants...
Actually, I moved out of Evanston (lived there for years) precisely because our stupid city council adopted all that high-density, "smart growth" strategy in the worst possible ways. There have been some reasonable successes (the core downtown area) but even those were the result of years of failure and really poor civil planning.
The funny thing is that even the most successful portion of the strategy effectively just recreated the downtown that existed in the 30s-60s. Downtown Evanston used to be defined by the Sherman corridor - it was a hub of shopping (a gorgeous fieldstone Marshall Fields being the anchor), entertainment (a large theater), shops and restaurants and a large parking garage. Over the years, the mix of business changed (the Fields and theatre closed, Barnes and Noble moved in) because Old Orchard and the like siphoned away all the energy and retail (with lots of parking).
The new downtown is just... newer. It hasn't really changed all that much. A few things shifted (the Barnes and Noble moved across the street, the old parking garage was knocked down and rebuilt with some new, low quality retail, the theatre is now Maple) but Sherman is still struggling, Davis is in the midst of rebuilding mostly due to fires and the same restaurants have just moved around (Dave's Italian Kitchen, the Chinese place, Lulu's, etc.).
Major retailers still can't stay open (the Gap is gone, Borders is gone, the Buffalo Wild Wings is gone, Puck's is gone) and while some of them have been replaced with similar or lower quality entrants, chunks of it are now being bought up by our wildly expansionist hospital system for doctors offices. The big new opening of late is a tiny Sprint store on the prime Sherman/Church corner that is the exact center of "downtown" Evanston. Half the building is still vacant but will probably be fronted by an ATM branch of some national bank while the core of the building is empty.
And the TIF financing did no great favors for the school district or city coffers - the city still has endemic budget problems that were supposed to be solved by "smart growth" - bring in childless Gen Y/Millenials and get all that yummy tax money with no kids and no cars... But those people start having kids and then need cars because there are no grocery stores (one of the "smart growth" plans knocked down the only neighborhood grocery on the south side of the city and replaced it with a high-density townhouse development with inadequate parking - all of whom have to drive to Chicago just to get groceries).
The whole thing is a mess. 20 years from now, it will be redeveloped again. The only reason Evanston survives its crappy city council is because 25K Northwestern students keep the downtown at least somewhat viable. Which is great for those of us ex-Evanstonians who live close by and can park at the two big garages and walk to the same restaurants that we ate at when we were kids (Buffalo Joe's!).
Actually, the Purple Line is the only line that has stops within Evanston borders. You can transfer to the other two lines at Howard Street but by that measure, you can count Evanston as having every CTA line.
Evanston actually used to be home to a bunch of car dealerships and still has a number of them. They are clustered around the main north/south street (Chicago Avenue). I bought my current car at one of those dealers.
Ironically, the main "density corridor" in Evanston is also along Chicago Avenue. Both the CTA and Metra rail lines run parallel to Chicago Avenue and most of the stops on the south side of the "city" exit to Chicago Avenue. In fact, two of the stops (Dempster and Main) are within a few hundred feet of a car dealership and South used to be until they tore down one of the dealerships for a condo complex.
Bono won't play Sun City
Technically, falling is real. Gravity is the theory we have for why things fall.
Given that social science studies are notoriously bad, why do we think things would be any better if we used "science" in police training?
We'd probably be better off if we made some structural changes, like limiting qualified immunity and requiring all interactions with the public and accused to be videotaped.
Geez, another release? Why do they insist on revving the release numbers so often? Mozilla really jumped the shark when they made Chrome match the ridiculous version numbering scheme of Google's Firefox browser.
Every flipping couple of weeks, Mozilla comes out with another version of Chrome with a list of "improvements" that no one wants while ignoring the obvious memory bloat and CPU utilization problems caused by their stupid multiprocess tab browsing. I remember when Mozilla Chrome was a sleek, fast browser - now it's a bloated mess. And when are they ever going to have the rich Add-Ons ecosystem that Google has had for-freaking-ever?
I swear to God I'm going to switch to Google Firefox if this crap keeps up.
Whoooosh!
I should also note that the Oxitec technology is very targeted - it only affects one (Ae. aegypti) out of 3,500 mosquito species. Where it is currently being used (the Americas), that species in a non-native invasive species, introduced only in the last few decades. No native species at all depends on Ae. aegypti and they make up less than 1% of any American mosquito population.
Bats don't depend on them at all as far as we can tell. Studies of the stomach contents of bats (and purple martins, another supposed mosquito abated) found less than 1% of their diet consists of mosquitoes. They just aren't nutrient dense - you'd have to eat a lot of mosquitoes to support the metabolism of a bat (flying mammals have high metabolisms). Insectivorous bats primarily eat moths and wasps. Mosquitoes are a rounding error in terms of their diet.
I wonder if this would be any more effective than the GMO mosquitoes developed by Oxitec. It's a fascinating technology - the mosquitoes are modified to have a "dominant lethal" allele that can be suppressed by feeding the mosquitoes tetracycline. They raise a generation of mosquitoes with access to tetracycline, separate out the males, and release them into the wild, where they breed with wild females. All their offspring die during the larval phase. The release plan usually overwhelms the local wild male population, so the population crashes hard (90+%) within a generation or two. And the trait doesn't "escape" because it's 100% lethal even with just one allele.
They've had a lot of success in their field trials - Brazil is moving forward with it, as are several Caribbean islands. They were going to use it one the Florida Keys but, of course, someone sued to stop it, so it's on hold ATM.
Slash dot ate the Nature link. It's here: http://www.nature.com/news/201...
Actually, Nature asked a bunch of ecologists that very question and the response was, basically, kill them all.
But we don't need to go that far. Of the 3,500 species of mosquito, only 40 spread human disease. Eradicate every single one of those and you still have 3,460 species of mosquito to fill every conceivable mosquito niche. If I remember correctly, there's another 30 or so species that target important domesticated species (dogs, cows, horses, etc), so wiping those out would be a nice phase 2.
Human-vectoring mosquitoes cause enormous human suffering for vanishingly little environmental utility. Getting rid of them would be a big win for the environment - as long as they are around, we will be forced to use pesticides that have real negative environmental consequences.
Mosquitoes are an insignificant part (under 1%) of the diet of insectivorous bats. Bats prefer moths and wasps - many more calories per catch. Bats will eat mosquitoes, they just prefer just about anything else.
The first and third cases involve policy (should the government kill Americans without benefit of trial while not actively involved in an imminent threat to life and should the government sell and encourage the use of surplus military equipment to local police forces) while the second is about technique (if you have to shoot someone because they are an active, imminent threat to life, he doesn't care if you use a gun, a drone or a lightsaber).
There's nothing particularly flip-floppy about those three statements. You have to actively spin them to make them conflict.