I love your books and I am delighted that you are so highly-thought-of by one of my other favorite authors, Neil Gaiman. Before I ask this question, I want to reiterate that in my opinion, all of your books are splendid.
All of that said then, why do your books tend to degenerate into senseless violence half to three-quarters of the way through? The first half of Snowcrash makes my short list of the best books I've ever read, but then sometime in the middle everything goes kerplooey (kerplooey in a fascinating and interesting way, but kerplooey nonetheless). Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon and Zodiac do not make that short list, but they are great books, and they share the same sort of end. Do you write these amazing books and then decide at some point that it is just time to end it, at which point you tear down what you've built up (or perhaps start books and then finish them much later), or are those plot-lines ones that you had all along? Either way, your prose is ingenuitive and captivating; I am just curious about the origin of the end-stories to these pieces.
(My karma is excellent, so I think even if this gets downmodded as offtopic I'll be ok. I think though that enough days have gone by that I'll be ok....)
Skip the real life stuff... I just want one of the models to play with. That would make the ultimate dollhouse/GI Joe fort. Unfortunately, it's not exactly Barbie sized, so my six-year-old sister might refuse to give me an excuse to play with it.... Darn that "I only want to play with Barbies" age....
I think I figured out this guy's motivation though! He wants a free membership to the That's-Too-Dangerous-Club!
Now the question we must answer is why.... Why would he want to join the people that took lawn darts out of our stores and work to keep our coffee luke-warm? Has he no sense of adventure? Oh, wait....yeah, I think that's what the article said....
While your post is interesting and somewhat credible, I disagree with your statement that if it does go into the Columbia River it will be diluted well below any level of concern. My dad used to work for Rockwell cleaning up the Hanford waste in the 80's (his job was in part to design ways of cleaning up the waste better), and then went on to work for PNNL. I grew up swimming in the Columbia River. When I was around fifteen he requested that we quit swimming in the river because he had access to information that led him to not want his kids swimming in it. He's a smart man, and I don't think he would have revoked our river privileges without pretty good reason. Shortly thereafter, I remember that DOE formally admitted that portions of the Columbia riverbed (and water) were radioactive.
We didn't listen to him, of course, and kept swimming in it because like all teenagers we had a stupid streak and are all right for now, but I suspect that there may be much higher than usual cancer rates for kids who grew up in the Tri-Cities and were constantly swimming downstream of Hanford in the Columbia - especially those swimming in the Columbia before the Yakima and Snake's waters are dumped in it - like me. While we will have to wait a decade or two (and maybe longer) to find out for sure, I think that caution is really key.
BTW, Kelso is really far from Hanford along the riverbank. I suspect that your nonchalance (and your uncle's) about the subject might have to do with the fact that the residents of the Kelso/Longview area are far enough away that the radiation really might be a non-issue for them.
I'm sorry you got modded as a troll. Anyway, my mother has used a wheelchair for the last 20 years (since I was five) and has been disabled to some extent since she was nine years old. When I was in middle school, she became an activist for persons (don't ask me why they use the word persons instead of people, but they do) with disabilities. As such, I grew up with lots of people who used wheelchairs, read braille, used sign language and all kinds of other disabilities, some apparent, some not. The guy who taught me to drive was mostly confined to a wheelchair because of MS. All this to say, I've known over a hundred people with disabilities, and almost every one of them would find that phrase really funny.
Occasionally, you'll find that someone is really bitter about their disability and wouldn't find that phrase funny. Give it a few months though, maybe even a few years, and most of them would agree that obligatory wheelchair ride jokes are really funny. When I was a kid, my mom happened to have two electric wheelchairs, and once we were really bored and she wasn't using either (she had sort of stand-up arm-chairs that she would sit in occasionally), so she let us race them up and down the driveway. My little brother grew up catching a ride by standing on the little tilt bars on the back (meant to sort of help pop the chair up a curb if necessary). She still gives rides to little kids. I think this joke is really quite appropriate, especially given Stephen Hawking's own seeming good-naturedness about his disability.
A coworker of mine once speculated that for the average Joe, an individual's gross adjusted expenditures on alcohol remain roughly constant throughout the drinking adult years, but that the quantity and quality are inversely correlated. I think he might have been about right.
Yeah, if you want good TP, you've gotta go to the Union, or Wohler's (formerly Com West). They keep the good stuff (2 ply, rolls out without breaking) on hand in case nature happens to call a visiting dignitary.
For the average user, every computer is a disposable one... one to three years later it is deemed junk.. Joe Schmoe will find it very freeing to be able to actually toss these rather than just add them to the pile in the basement or attic!
I believe it was noted pre-Case For Mars that our present rockets could get us there, although I cannot give you specifics b/c I don't remember them. In fact, the only reason I can say this is because I remember hearing it before I graduated from high school in '96. It could be however that that idea was noted by Zubrin in his '91 paper on Mars Direct.
What you say in your second paragraph is correct, AFAIK, however it is the logistics of it that have only recently been solved... the "What?" of in-situ propellant production I suppose was thought of as listed, but the "How?" was solved a few years ago. I was referring to the answer to the "How?" question when I said that wasn't someone affiliated with Zubrin. Of course, that doesn't mean that the team in question hasn't read Zubrin and fully examined his ideas.
I don't know where or how my dad gets funding, but he does. There were a few scary years there where he only had one account to charge his team's time to, but those years are over. It might be that he works with NASA but gets funding from another agency, like DOE or something because of dual-use technology.
Actually, Robert Zubrin's Case for Mars is was not the first to point out that information, and he and his colleagues at The Mars Society are not the ones that came up with the solution to which I was referring. I know the guy that did, but it's not really information I should give out right now... not because it's classified (although to a certain extent I suppose it is), but because I sort of like my anonymity and I don't really want to tell the world whose daughter I am (mostly because then you would know my real name...).
But, I will tell you this much. Until the recent space disasters (Columbia, Mars probes) they had anticipated sending men to Mars for a two year fact-finding mission in 2009, then 2011. They have to do it in two year windows because of the orbits. Those dates have been pushed back now, but I think the whole project is still a go. (Read: I haven't heard otherwise, but that doesn't mean that otherwise isn't true.)
Rumors about their infamous program where true. Their advanced weapon programs contained powerful rockets capable of shuttling us to Mars and back.
Nope, not true. We've had rockets powerful enough to take us to Mars for years. We've just not had powerful enough rockets to take us, and all the oxygen we need to breathe while there, and burn to blast off and get back. If you run the numbers you'll see why, and then see that even super-duper-Iranian rockets aren't going to make up the difference.
The scientists are going to be able to make it to Mars though, and it's not because of a rocket break-through - it's because a few people were thinking outside of the box and figured out a better solution.
Actually, most of the technology for this already has been developed, and most of the people who are going to be in charge of the nuts and bolts stuff are already in place. The only major problem is that it is expensive - very expensive - and no private industry is going to pay those kinds of costs, no matter how good they are for mankind. Thus the bill, to sort of pre-empt the earmarking of the necessary government funds for the building of all of the necessary components.
Well... since you replied AC you probably won't get this reply, but anyway...
Everything that happened in a span of about nine seconds. Even if the Ohio lines were the start, the reaction of generators (rightly so, to avoid ruining their equipment) across the whole area was to go offline. Pre-Ohio information, Sir Adam Beck, in Canada is the first one to have been seen to go offline, so they initially thought it began with that. I wouldn't be surprised if they learn that the Ohio lines went down and then the next thing that happened was the Canadian plant went offline, and then did some others.
As for the reliability of the North American grid, I don't have any stats off the top of my head and I can't remember where I heard or read solid information on that. But... if you read what people write in the IEEE PES journal, and if you talk to customers and power engineers in places other than the US, it becomes pretty clear that those that reside in the US or Canada are among the lucky few with regard to electric reliability.
Here are some facts about the North American power system and power systems in general, that you are apparently unaware of. North America has the biggest grid in the world. Actually, it has three different grids (five if you include Quebec and Mexico), which are only connected to each other through DC lines, although those lines really don't carry much power.
There are at least four world-wide makers of software that can do power systems analysis. All of the ones I know about were developed by firms or professors based in the United States. Your friends do not do it by hand, indeed they cannot solve a system with more than a few buses without the aid of a computer. If you do not believe me, ask them.
Here is what power companies worldwide do, and what your friends likely helped with in Europe:
They have to create a model of the system. North America has the largest grid, and therefore their model is likely the most complicated. This consists of counting the nodes and applying the rules that power engineers learn in their schooling (and mathematicians learn if they feel like it) to them and the lines, transformers, loads, generators, shunts, etc., that are connected. This is math. This involves equations. This is part of what your friends must have done for Europe. I assure you the same has been done in the US. The rest of what I am about to explain is done in Europe as well, and given that, any European state could have the same problem as the US did yesterday.
After the model is created, contingency lists must be made. These are lists of all the disasters that could happen (line outages, blown transformers, you name it, and combinations of these things). Software that can solve the "If this happens, what happens to the power flow?" question is used on each of these contingency lists, and then the power engineers have to figure out what the best thing to do to avoid problems is given each contingency, often using the same software.
Here is what you apparently don't know about. In Europe and in the US, control systems then have to be programmed to do the proper thing given a contingency. These are "elementary computer control systems based on simple feedback," as you described them. Europe uses them too. When a given transmission line goes out, the proper solution to avoid voltage collapse has to be done very quickly, faster than a human (even a mathematician) can do it. New faces are put on control systems constantly, but the underlying principles are the same.
When you said "As a result you simply cannot take out the grid like this in any European country unless the country has grown complacent and has stopped updating the models to account for change in power usage patterns," you were incorrect. Yesterday's problem had nothing to do with loadflow. It was about a single Canadian generating station that effectively went offline, after which several US stations went offline as well to prevent ruining their generators (the correct contingency solutions). Something similar could easily happen in any European country.
Finally, it is of note that even given the problems of yesterday, the United States has the most reliable power system in the world, with its average customer reporting the least amount of time without power per year than anywhere else.
I agree with your specifics, but I disagree with your preface in that I think this might still be a result of deregulation. But, let me make a disclaimer. I don't know the illness, I only can give you symptoms. And, while the cure to the illness is to fix things and then take precautions in the future not to get sick, deregulation has made it unlikely that in the event the power system gets "sick" the symptoms will be treated. I am not going to speculate about the nature of the illness.
The major symptom the Northeast saw yesterday was voltage collapse. The usual treatment for this is amputation of the area (each area disconnects from the problem area, turning it into an island), allowing the rest of the grid to stay healthy. Then when the problem area gets their stuff back up and running, they can be reconnected. (Although, since NYC can't support its own supply, the actual getting back online for them might have been problematic, which might explain the reaction of the nearby grids...) This did not happen. What did happen was that much of the rest of that part of the Atlantic Interconnect got sick as well.
How does that have to do with deregulation? It doesn't, directly. Indirectly, when different ISO's (Independent System Operators) are running contingency analysis, they talk to each other and to the regulatory bodies over them (in the Northeast it is a coordinating council) and talk about the various "what if" situations. Each of these groups use different models and have different ideas of what is important, and therefore come to different conclusions. Sometimes what happens is that one group says to another "if this happens, this is a mess; thus to avoid this you need to do this..." to which the standard response is "no, you're looking at that wrong; that's not our problem." Deregulation is good. Standardization is needed.
How does that have to do with the recent problem directly? I have no idea.
I wonder if they'll ever do a complete face-lift on our moulah so that old bills become worthless, as they did sometime a long time ago... my grandmother had a few of the really old and now worthless (save for collectors) bills. Have other countries done this? Given that ours will be getting new looks every 7-10 years, will our old twenties (the ones that do not look like play money) be pulled out of circulation and eventually be denied as legal tender?
What do they do with old bills and coinage? Do they recycle it? Does anyone know?
Yes, but with one major difference... Then, we knew we wanted to do those things, but we didn't know how. Now we know how, but we don't know if we want to do those things.
Let me make a prediction, if I may... By 2025, in addition to having been to near earth asteroids to gather space resources, we will have people living on the moon, and have sent two teams to Mars and will be exploring the possibilities of putting a permanent residence there. Whether this will be done by federal agencies or the private sector remains to be seen. I am just fairly certain that someone will be doing it.
Christopher Buckley is amazing...
on
Little Green Men
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· Score: 3
... Little Green Men is a great book, as is Thank You for Smoking. Christopher Buckley is a master of taking all the things we know about our ridiculous society and placing them in front of us so clearly that we cannot help but laugh at the satire. I highly recommend him to anyone that doesn't mind poking a finger at life in America.
How about speakerphone? It's illegal almost everywhere I can think of to wear two headphones whilst driving... because it may impair your ability to hear an emergency vehicles siren. And the major problem with cell phone driving without a hands-free device is just that... one of your hands is not free.
Right on! To quote one of my favorite bands the detachment kit "Ladies and gentlemen... this life is dangerous." I think it is at the beginning of Hurricane Designed for People.
In every single economic statistics class I've ever taken, you start by learning two things... the first is that there is an expected cost (revenue) for everything, and the second is that there is an economically efficient level of everything... death, pollution, crime, you name it. Then, you learn that the expected cost and chance determine every single rational decision you ever make and the outcome of those decisions. We know that there are risks associated with everything, the accuracy of this assessment is based upon our available knowledge, and unless we are agoraphobic, we choose to go out in the world each day anyway. Eventually, we all become statistics.
The end quote of the article says If the theory of an ancient chimp epidemic would hold true for humans, he said, "the implications are pretty scary."
Just how are the implications pretty scary? Chimps weren't doing anything to stop the spread of the disease, we are. We're educating people and trying to encourage safer practices. The chimps who were almost wiped out didn't have a 7th grade health class where they learned that condoms can significantly lower their risks of contracting SIV. We do. The places where HIV has become an epidemic are the ones where there aren't such classes. They need them.
Slashdot Mirror
I love your books and I am delighted that you are so highly-thought-of by one of my other favorite authors, Neil Gaiman. Before I ask this question, I want to reiterate that in my opinion, all of your books are splendid.
All of that said then, why do your books tend to degenerate into senseless violence half to three-quarters of the way through? The first half of Snowcrash makes my short list of the best books I've ever read, but then sometime in the middle everything goes kerplooey (kerplooey in a fascinating and interesting way, but kerplooey nonetheless). Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon and Zodiac do not make that short list, but they are great books, and they share the same sort of end. Do you write these amazing books and then decide at some point that it is just time to end it, at which point you tear down what you've built up (or perhaps start books and then finish them much later), or are those plot-lines ones that you had all along? Either way, your prose is ingenuitive and captivating; I am just curious about the origin of the end-stories to these pieces.
Thanks.
Hey there. I love you. Don't forget it.
(My karma is excellent, so I think even if this gets downmodded as offtopic I'll be ok. I think though that enough days have gone by that I'll be ok....)
Skip the real life stuff... I just want one of the models to play with. That would make the ultimate dollhouse/GI Joe fort. Unfortunately, it's not exactly Barbie sized, so my six-year-old sister might refuse to give me an excuse to play with it.... Darn that "I only want to play with Barbies" age....
I think I figured out this guy's motivation though! He wants a free membership to the That's-Too-Dangerous-Club!
Now the question we must answer is why.... Why would he want to join the people that took lawn darts out of our stores and work to keep our coffee luke-warm? Has he no sense of adventure? Oh, wait....yeah, I think that's what the article said....
While your post is interesting and somewhat credible, I disagree with your statement that if it does go into the Columbia River it will be diluted well below any level of concern. My dad used to work for Rockwell cleaning up the Hanford waste in the 80's (his job was in part to design ways of cleaning up the waste better), and then went on to work for PNNL. I grew up swimming in the Columbia River. When I was around fifteen he requested that we quit swimming in the river because he had access to information that led him to not want his kids swimming in it. He's a smart man, and I don't think he would have revoked our river privileges without pretty good reason. Shortly thereafter, I remember that DOE formally admitted that portions of the Columbia riverbed (and water) were radioactive.
We didn't listen to him, of course, and kept swimming in it because like all teenagers we had a stupid streak and are all right for now, but I suspect that there may be much higher than usual cancer rates for kids who grew up in the Tri-Cities and were constantly swimming downstream of Hanford in the Columbia - especially those swimming in the Columbia before the Yakima and Snake's waters are dumped in it - like me. While we will have to wait a decade or two (and maybe longer) to find out for sure, I think that caution is really key.
BTW, Kelso is really far from Hanford along the riverbank. I suspect that your nonchalance (and your uncle's) about the subject might have to do with the fact that the residents of the Kelso/Longview area are far enough away that the radiation really might be a non-issue for them.
I'm sorry you got modded as a troll. Anyway, my mother has used a wheelchair for the last 20 years (since I was five) and has been disabled to some extent since she was nine years old. When I was in middle school, she became an activist for persons (don't ask me why they use the word persons instead of people, but they do) with disabilities. As such, I grew up with lots of people who used wheelchairs, read braille, used sign language and all kinds of other disabilities, some apparent, some not. The guy who taught me to drive was mostly confined to a wheelchair because of MS. All this to say, I've known over a hundred people with disabilities, and almost every one of them would find that phrase really funny.
Occasionally, you'll find that someone is really bitter about their disability and wouldn't find that phrase funny. Give it a few months though, maybe even a few years, and most of them would agree that obligatory wheelchair ride jokes are really funny. When I was a kid, my mom happened to have two electric wheelchairs, and once we were really bored and she wasn't using either (she had sort of stand-up arm-chairs that she would sit in occasionally), so she let us race them up and down the driveway. My little brother grew up catching a ride by standing on the little tilt bars on the back (meant to sort of help pop the chair up a curb if necessary). She still gives rides to little kids. I think this joke is really quite appropriate, especially given Stephen Hawking's own seeming good-naturedness about his disability.
A coworker of mine once speculated that for the average Joe, an individual's gross adjusted expenditures on alcohol remain roughly constant throughout the drinking adult years, but that the quantity and quality are inversely correlated. I think he might have been about right.
Yeah, if you want good TP, you've gotta go to the Union, or Wohler's (formerly Com West). They keep the good stuff (2 ply, rolls out without breaking) on hand in case nature happens to call a visiting dignitary.
For the average user, every computer is a disposable one... one to three years later it is deemed junk.. Joe Schmoe will find it very freeing to be able to actually toss these rather than just add them to the pile in the basement or attic!
I believe it was noted pre-Case For Mars that our present rockets could get us there, although I cannot give you specifics b/c I don't remember them. In fact, the only reason I can say this is because I remember hearing it before I graduated from high school in '96. It could be however that that idea was noted by Zubrin in his '91 paper on Mars Direct.
What you say in your second paragraph is correct, AFAIK, however it is the logistics of it that have only recently been solved... the "What?" of in-situ propellant production I suppose was thought of as listed, but the "How?" was solved a few years ago. I was referring to the answer to the "How?" question when I said that wasn't someone affiliated with Zubrin. Of course, that doesn't mean that the team in question hasn't read Zubrin and fully examined his ideas.
I don't know where or how my dad gets funding, but he does. There were a few scary years there where he only had one account to charge his team's time to, but those years are over. It might be that he works with NASA but gets funding from another agency, like DOE or something because of dual-use technology.
Actually, Robert Zubrin's Case for Mars is was not the first to point out that information, and he and his colleagues at The Mars Society are not the ones that came up with the solution to which I was referring. I know the guy that did, but it's not really information I should give out right now... not because it's classified (although to a certain extent I suppose it is), but because I sort of like my anonymity and I don't really want to tell the world whose daughter I am (mostly because then you would know my real name...).
But, I will tell you this much. Until the recent space disasters (Columbia, Mars probes) they had anticipated sending men to Mars for a two year fact-finding mission in 2009, then 2011. They have to do it in two year windows because of the orbits. Those dates have been pushed back now, but I think the whole project is still a go. (Read: I haven't heard otherwise, but that doesn't mean that otherwise isn't true.)
Rumors about their infamous program where true. Their advanced weapon programs contained powerful rockets capable of shuttling us to Mars and back.
Nope, not true. We've had rockets powerful enough to take us to Mars for years. We've just not had powerful enough rockets to take us, and all the oxygen we need to breathe while there, and burn to blast off and get back. If you run the numbers you'll see why, and then see that even super-duper-Iranian rockets aren't going to make up the difference.
The scientists are going to be able to make it to Mars though, and it's not because of a rocket break-through - it's because a few people were thinking outside of the box and figured out a better solution.
Actually, most of the technology for this already has been developed, and most of the people who are going to be in charge of the nuts and bolts stuff are already in place. The only major problem is that it is expensive - very expensive - and no private industry is going to pay those kinds of costs, no matter how good they are for mankind. Thus the bill, to sort of pre-empt the earmarking of the necessary government funds for the building of all of the necessary components.
Well... since you replied AC you probably won't get this reply, but anyway...
Everything that happened in a span of about nine seconds. Even if the Ohio lines were the start, the reaction of generators (rightly so, to avoid ruining their equipment) across the whole area was to go offline. Pre-Ohio information, Sir Adam Beck, in Canada is the first one to have been seen to go offline, so they initially thought it began with that. I wouldn't be surprised if they learn that the Ohio lines went down and then the next thing that happened was the Canadian plant went offline, and then did some others.
As for the reliability of the North American grid, I don't have any stats off the top of my head and I can't remember where I heard or read solid information on that. But... if you read what people write in the IEEE PES journal, and if you talk to customers and power engineers in places other than the US, it becomes pretty clear that those that reside in the US or Canada are among the lucky few with regard to electric reliability.
They do. There's a giant DC line that comes down and deposits itself (I think) in Connecticut.
Here are some facts about the North American power system and power systems in general, that you are apparently unaware of. North America has the biggest grid in the world. Actually, it has three different grids (five if you include Quebec and Mexico), which are only connected to each other through DC lines, although those lines really don't carry much power.
There are at least four world-wide makers of software that can do power systems analysis. All of the ones I know about were developed by firms or professors based in the United States. Your friends do not do it by hand, indeed they cannot solve a system with more than a few buses without the aid of a computer. If you do not believe me, ask them.
Here is what power companies worldwide do, and what your friends likely helped with in Europe:
They have to create a model of the system. North America has the largest grid, and therefore their model is likely the most complicated. This consists of counting the nodes and applying the rules that power engineers learn in their schooling (and mathematicians learn if they feel like it) to them and the lines, transformers, loads, generators, shunts, etc., that are connected. This is math. This involves equations. This is part of what your friends must have done for Europe. I assure you the same has been done in the US. The rest of what I am about to explain is done in Europe as well, and given that, any European state could have the same problem as the US did yesterday.
After the model is created, contingency lists must be made. These are lists of all the disasters that could happen (line outages, blown transformers, you name it, and combinations of these things). Software that can solve the "If this happens, what happens to the power flow?" question is used on each of these contingency lists, and then the power engineers have to figure out what the best thing to do to avoid problems is given each contingency, often using the same software.
Here is what you apparently don't know about. In Europe and in the US, control systems then have to be programmed to do the proper thing given a contingency. These are "elementary computer control systems based on simple feedback," as you described them. Europe uses them too. When a given transmission line goes out, the proper solution to avoid voltage collapse has to be done very quickly, faster than a human (even a mathematician) can do it. New faces are put on control systems constantly, but the underlying principles are the same.
When you said "As a result you simply cannot take out the grid like this in any European country unless the country has grown complacent and has stopped updating the models to account for change in power usage patterns," you were incorrect. Yesterday's problem had nothing to do with loadflow. It was about a single Canadian generating station that effectively went offline, after which several US stations went offline as well to prevent ruining their generators (the correct contingency solutions). Something similar could easily happen in any European country.
Finally, it is of note that even given the problems of yesterday, the United States has the most reliable power system in the world, with its average customer reporting the least amount of time without power per year than anywhere else.
I agree with your specifics, but I disagree with your preface in that I think this might still be a result of deregulation. But, let me make a disclaimer. I don't know the illness, I only can give you symptoms. And, while the cure to the illness is to fix things and then take precautions in the future not to get sick, deregulation has made it unlikely that in the event the power system gets "sick" the symptoms will be treated. I am not going to speculate about the nature of the illness.
The major symptom the Northeast saw yesterday was voltage collapse. The usual treatment for this is amputation of the area (each area disconnects from the problem area, turning it into an island), allowing the rest of the grid to stay healthy. Then when the problem area gets their stuff back up and running, they can be reconnected. (Although, since NYC can't support its own supply, the actual getting back online for them might have been problematic, which might explain the reaction of the nearby grids...) This did not happen. What did happen was that much of the rest of that part of the Atlantic Interconnect got sick as well.
How does that have to do with deregulation? It doesn't, directly. Indirectly, when different ISO's (Independent System Operators) are running contingency analysis, they talk to each other and to the regulatory bodies over them (in the Northeast it is a coordinating council) and talk about the various "what if" situations. Each of these groups use different models and have different ideas of what is important, and therefore come to different conclusions. Sometimes what happens is that one group says to another "if this happens, this is a mess; thus to avoid this you need to do this..." to which the standard response is "no, you're looking at that wrong; that's not our problem." Deregulation is good. Standardization is needed.
How does that have to do with the recent problem directly? I have no idea.
I wonder if they'll ever do a complete face-lift on our moulah so that old bills become worthless, as they did sometime a long time ago... my grandmother had a few of the really old and now worthless (save for collectors) bills. Have other countries done this? Given that ours will be getting new looks every 7-10 years, will our old twenties (the ones that do not look like play money) be pulled out of circulation and eventually be denied as legal tender?
What do they do with old bills and coinage? Do they recycle it? Does anyone know?
Exactly. I can already see it...
"Hey, are you going straight home after school?"
"Yeah"
"Can you drop my phone on my doorstep on your way?"
That would have been my method at least...
Yes, but with one major difference... Then, we knew we wanted to do those things, but we didn't know how. Now we know how, but we don't know if we want to do those things.
Let me make a prediction, if I may... By 2025, in addition to having been to near earth asteroids to gather space resources, we will have people living on the moon, and have sent two teams to Mars and will be exploring the possibilities of putting a permanent residence there. Whether this will be done by federal agencies or the private sector remains to be seen. I am just fairly certain that someone will be doing it.
... Little Green Men is a great book, as is Thank You for Smoking. Christopher Buckley is a master of taking all the things we know about our ridiculous society and placing them in front of us so clearly that we cannot help but laugh at the satire. I highly recommend him to anyone that doesn't mind poking a finger at life in America.
How about speakerphone? It's illegal almost everywhere I can think of to wear two headphones whilst driving... because it may impair your ability to hear an emergency vehicles siren. And the major problem with cell phone driving without a hands-free device is just that... one of your hands is not free.
That said, I still do it.
Right on! To quote one of my favorite bands the detachment kit "Ladies and gentlemen... this life is dangerous." I think it is at the beginning of Hurricane Designed for People.
In every single economic statistics class I've ever taken, you start by learning two things... the first is that there is an expected cost (revenue) for everything, and the second is that there is an economically efficient level of everything... death, pollution, crime, you name it. Then, you learn that the expected cost and chance determine every single rational decision you ever make and the outcome of those decisions. We know that there are risks associated with everything, the accuracy of this assessment is based upon our available knowledge, and unless we are agoraphobic, we choose to go out in the world each day anyway. Eventually, we all become statistics.
The end quote of the article says If the theory of an ancient chimp epidemic would hold true for humans, he said, "the implications are pretty scary."
Just how are the implications pretty scary? Chimps weren't doing anything to stop the spread of the disease, we are. We're educating people and trying to encourage safer practices. The chimps who were almost wiped out didn't have a 7th grade health class where they learned that condoms can significantly lower their risks of contracting SIV. We do. The places where HIV has become an epidemic are the ones where there aren't such classes. They need them.