To belabor the obvious, the original poster was implying that if Putin's name isn't directly on the paperwork, then he isn't involved. A lot of people are of the view, if it's not seen, then it doesn't exist. Which does make sense. It's not that hard to frame people, even world leaders, if you don't have to provide evidence.
Spending energy chasing his various hidden agendas does nothing for the general public.
Why would you think that? It's not like Putin is dogcatcher of some podunk town in the middle of nowhere. His corruption and the other nasty things he does affects tens of millions. And as I indicated above, you need proof, not just some vague feeling about the guy, if you're going to change the minds of people who aren't already on your side or if Putin is to ever face justice in a serious court for his crimes.
in contrast, putin's implication is indirect at best, with vague indefinite connections,"The Russian presidentâ(TM)s best friend â" a cellist called Sergei Roldugin - is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putinâ(TM)s daughter Katerina got married."
best friend not described as that before? and location of a wedding reception?
In contrast to what? Putin is a bigger fish than even Cameron much less some MPs. Sure, it's "indirect", but most of the people associated with the Putin story wouldn't have that kind of money without Putin's help (as noted in the article). For example, his alleged "best friend", Sergei Roldugin apparently has at least 100 million USD. But why would he have anything at all, if it weren't for his relationship with Putin? At this point, the only real question is what is Putin's take from these shenanigans?
There have been some wild guesses as to Putin's wealth, going up to 200 billion USD. At least, an inside peek like this will give us a better idea of how much looting is going on.
When I compare how people lived 100 years ago to today, I really do believe that it is possible that by 2116, we have solved this problem. When I look at the society of today, which is threatened by so many parties, I am not sure though whether society will be ready for it in 2116. It would mean lots of changes. We would need to start to adopt regulation of children, as place on earth is limited. What about life imprisonment? The concept of pensions in countries that regulate pensions needs to be thought over too, it can't be age based anymore. It can perhaps be that you have a 40/20 approach: work forty years, then enjoy 20 years without work, then work 40 years again, the ratio being changed depending on how much we need human workforce.
So what? I don't see those problems even as a whole coming anywhere near the difficulty of reversing aging in the first place. Modern capitalist societies already do a good job of reducing female fertility without requiring regulation of number of children. Similarly, pensions have not been shown to be a good idea even in today's world (too much gets promised and can't be delivered). If someone can't figure out how to work 40 years and afford downtime of 20 years, then I don't think society should do it for them.
We can decide whether to change life imprisonment or not. After all, many of the crimes for which life imprisonment is used now, would have gotten worse as well. And there's always pardoning, if you think someone has done sufficient penance for their crimes.
The problem here is your beliefs, not actual babyboomers or whatnot.
And before any bitter, overly-scared-of-brown-people 60-somethings start whining, I'm quite aware that my own generation and the following generations will be equally reviled for the same thing.
There's that cognitive dissonance.
Humanity is absolutely terrible about passing the goddamned baton when they should.
There have been numerous collisions over that time. For example, this article details eightknown collisions. There may have been more unknown collisions of inactive satellites with small debris.
Why the fuck do you think I pointed out the precise reason why it wouldn't work in this case? Did you even read what I wrote?
It would help, if you were right, but you aren't. There's nothing magical about hand-made projects that makes them impervious to economies of scale. R&D and costly production errors don't need to be replicated. Molds and similar construction aid tools can be reused. Everyone is more experienced with making the project and can to some degree work more efficiently on further copies.
I wonder how much the US would have gotten done in space by now, if the grown ups who actually know something about economies and manufacture had been in charge.
I think the OP is asking why we don't try to use economies of scale to lower the cost while increasing the science capabilities we have available.
Because "economies of scale" isn't a magic wand that you can just wave and magically make everything cheaper. In particular, items with enormous amounts of touch labor (such as the mirrors carried by Hubble or Hitomi) aren't really susceptible to economies of scale because the costs of actually building the thing far exceed the costs of setting up to build the thing.
The obvious rebuttal is that R&D on the first one is a one-time significant cost. You don't have to re-research or redevelop Hubble from scratch with each additional telescope constructed. Additional development would have to be done to correct for errors found in either the construction process or the final product, but those costs would pale compared to the cost of the original development.
Similarly, you don't need separate operations for each telescope. It is not significantly harder to manage five telescopes than it is to manage one.
It's a perfectly good question, one that ultimately is probably answered by "there's too many politicians who don't see value in science."
No, as usual, the answer is far more pedestrian - it's "a Slashdot poster pulled a term out of his ass without actually understanding what the term means and implies".
The answer is the first answer, it's political status signalling. If the science were that important, there'd be more telescopes in Hubble's category.
Hand-made routinely has economies of scale to it as well. And there's the obvious matter that there are huge one time costs in the development of the first spacecraft that would not need to be duplicated in copies.
Also, consider this: if we had made five Hubbles, we would have screwed up all five of them with the same mistakes we made on the first one, and would never have been able to repair them all.
You wouldn't need to. When the first one demonstrated the error in space, then you can remake the mirrors for the other four before launching them. The gyroscope problem also turned up well before the first service repair mission.
So then you have one bad Hubble that you can deorbit and four working ones that you don't need to deorbit.
(you usually don't need those 5 grocery bags, when you can buy grocery within walking range)
Depends on how you buy, how much you buy, and how quickly you consume food. But there are considerable fixed costs to going to the store, navigating the entire store for the items you need, and hauling it home.
I agree. But as I said, it doesn't sound like the decisions were correct. California has been notorious for decades for making huge long term project and policy decisions that were poor at the time they were made.
Yeah yeah you can go on about economies of scale all you like but if there is a tangible benefit to doing something your way then why accede to the creed of mass production?
Depends on whether the benefits of the custom-made system outweigh its increased costs. Here, it doesn't sound like they do.
Iman Wilkens makes a case for the Trojan War not occuring in the Mediteranean
So what? Iman Wilkens could make a case for the Moon being made of green cheese with equal facility. There's no way the Greeks of the time knew where England was, much less had the capability to invade it. And the Bronze Age collapse (of which the "sea peoples" were mentioned by the Egyptians) never affected Western Europe as far as we can tell but was contained to the lands around the eastern Mediterranean.
640,000 years ago = Quaternary mass extinction event
There wasn't a significant mass extinction event then. In fact, there hasn't been a significant one during the entire known lifespan of the Yellowstone hotspot.
When you are dealing with hundreds if not over a thousand kilometres of magma in the largest eruptions, anything we could do would be like throwing an icecube into a hottub and hoping it would freeze over.
We can throw some huge ice cubes and we'll probably have plenty of lead time.
Is it not possible to 'ease' Yellowstone a little bit, by harvesting its heat? It would be a double whammy: free energy and less risk of an eruption. (Remember - I said 'ease', not 'neutralize').
Sure, but it'd be an epic engineering feat. I recall estimating that the gravitational potential energy from the hotspot could be dissipated in about a century by a terawatt of geothermal power dissipation (there's still the thermal energy as well). That probably would require evaporating every scrap of water that currently flows out of the Yellowstone area. Toss in additional rainfall from the huge increase in moisture content and I think you could make it happen.
Just because humans suck at something, that doesn't necessarily imply that computers are any better at it.
The low accident rate per billion miles tells us otherwise. There are many people out there who drive a vast amount and have very few accidents.
Most humans suck at singing.
So what? We don't care whether most humans can sing or not. We do care if most humans can drive or not.
The problem here is two-fold. First, we have a very low accident rate in the US. There is not that much room for improvement. If you look at the proposed benefits of self-driving vehicles, you find that they speak of highway driving a lot. That is already among the safest sort of driving.
Further, both cargo and taxi driving are high priority targets. It would replace the safest human drivers, the ones who do it as a profession.
There could be a period of time when automated driving makes things worse due to replacing the safest human driving and human rather than the worst.
But you have to ask what is worse, the rare mass shooting in the headlines that statistically has no relevance to your personal safety or the far more statistically relevant suicides and accidental deaths.
I was confused a bit by that argument. At first, it sounded like you were claiming that the only benefit of firearms was to prevent mass shootings. You do have to wonder why people are so much more concerned about what shows up in the news. Maybe the real solution here is to watch less news, or at least watch less of the "if it bleeds, it leads" news.
I know how to handle a gun safely.
And your story indicates that at that time, you did not.
So I guess my stance is that guns aren't the problem, education and safety training combined with thoughtful consideration are the real solution. Shortest version: it kinda sucks to be a moderate libertarian.
Freedom to act means the freedom to do stupid and sometimes evil actions.
You don't believe oil is a destructive as is claimed by the people who dedicate their lives to studying this? What, because you understand climate science and chemistry and astronomy so much better than these people do? You're so much more qualified to decide whether they are right or not?
We see the same problem with mutual funds. They're run by people who have a lot more experience, skill, and knowledge than I do. But I can get similar performance by dropping my money into a low expense index fund.
The problem here is that all that "qualification" is impaired by conflict of interest. It's in the interests of the mutual funds to siphon as much investor money as they can and to pull in investor money even when it doesn't make sense to do so (such as when a fund has a great run up, and pulls in a lot of new investor money after most of the action has already passed).
Meanwhile climatologists need funding. And currently, the game in town with the most funding is climate change. Many tens of billions of dollars a year are spent by governments worldwide and this is how they justify it.
I think we can see the resulting dishonesty in the estimate of long term global temperature sensitivity to a doubling of CO2. It's a full factor of three from smallest bound to largest. Similarly, we have a complete lack of justification for the harm that this warming is supposed to do. At the low end, which is where I think it is, we have many decades to centuries before serious harm happens.
Slashdot Mirror
The real question for me is WHY?
To belabor the obvious, the original poster was implying that if Putin's name isn't directly on the paperwork, then he isn't involved. A lot of people are of the view, if it's not seen, then it doesn't exist. Which does make sense. It's not that hard to frame people, even world leaders, if you don't have to provide evidence.
Spending energy chasing his various hidden agendas does nothing for the general public.
Why would you think that? It's not like Putin is dogcatcher of some podunk town in the middle of nowhere. His corruption and the other nasty things he does affects tens of millions. And as I indicated above, you need proof, not just some vague feeling about the guy, if you're going to change the minds of people who aren't already on your side or if Putin is to ever face justice in a serious court for his crimes.
in contrast, putin's implication is indirect at best, with vague indefinite connections,"The Russian presidentâ(TM)s best friend â" a cellist called Sergei Roldugin - is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putinâ(TM)s daughter Katerina got married." best friend not described as that before? and location of a wedding reception?
In contrast to what? Putin is a bigger fish than even Cameron much less some MPs. Sure, it's "indirect", but most of the people associated with the Putin story wouldn't have that kind of money without Putin's help (as noted in the article). For example, his alleged "best friend", Sergei Roldugin apparently has at least 100 million USD. But why would he have anything at all, if it weren't for his relationship with Putin? At this point, the only real question is what is Putin's take from these shenanigans?
There have been some wild guesses as to Putin's wealth, going up to 200 billion USD. At least, an inside peek like this will give us a better idea of how much looting is going on.
When I compare how people lived 100 years ago to today, I really do believe that it is possible that by 2116, we have solved this problem. When I look at the society of today, which is threatened by so many parties, I am not sure though whether society will be ready for it in 2116. It would mean lots of changes. We would need to start to adopt regulation of children, as place on earth is limited. What about life imprisonment? The concept of pensions in countries that regulate pensions needs to be thought over too, it can't be age based anymore. It can perhaps be that you have a 40/20 approach: work forty years, then enjoy 20 years without work, then work 40 years again, the ratio being changed depending on how much we need human workforce.
So what? I don't see those problems even as a whole coming anywhere near the difficulty of reversing aging in the first place. Modern capitalist societies already do a good job of reducing female fertility without requiring regulation of number of children. Similarly, pensions have not been shown to be a good idea even in today's world (too much gets promised and can't be delivered). If someone can't figure out how to work 40 years and afford downtime of 20 years, then I don't think society should do it for them.
We can decide whether to change life imprisonment or not. After all, many of the crimes for which life imprisonment is used now, would have gotten worse as well. And there's always pardoning, if you think someone has done sufficient penance for their crimes.
And before any bitter, overly-scared-of-brown-people 60-somethings start whining, I'm quite aware that my own generation and the following generations will be equally reviled for the same thing.
There's that cognitive dissonance.
Humanity is absolutely terrible about passing the goddamned baton when they should.
There's no "should" here.
I don't see that gender is going to matter here.
It has the potential to enlarge the conflict by bringing in the PC crowd.
There have been numerous collisions over that time. For example, this article details eight known collisions. There may have been more unknown collisions of inactive satellites with small debris.
Why the fuck do you think I pointed out the precise reason why it wouldn't work in this case? Did you even read what I wrote?
It would help, if you were right, but you aren't. There's nothing magical about hand-made projects that makes them impervious to economies of scale. R&D and costly production errors don't need to be replicated. Molds and similar construction aid tools can be reused. Everyone is more experienced with making the project and can to some degree work more efficiently on further copies.
I wonder how much the US would have gotten done in space by now, if the grown ups who actually know something about economies and manufacture had been in charge.
I think the OP is asking why we don't try to use economies of scale to lower the cost while increasing the science capabilities we have available.
Because "economies of scale" isn't a magic wand that you can just wave and magically make everything cheaper. In particular, items with enormous amounts of touch labor (such as the mirrors carried by Hubble or Hitomi) aren't really susceptible to economies of scale because the costs of actually building the thing far exceed the costs of setting up to build the thing.
The obvious rebuttal is that R&D on the first one is a one-time significant cost. You don't have to re-research or redevelop Hubble from scratch with each additional telescope constructed. Additional development would have to be done to correct for errors found in either the construction process or the final product, but those costs would pale compared to the cost of the original development.
Similarly, you don't need separate operations for each telescope. It is not significantly harder to manage five telescopes than it is to manage one.
It's a perfectly good question, one that ultimately is probably answered by "there's too many politicians who don't see value in science."
No, as usual, the answer is far more pedestrian - it's "a Slashdot poster pulled a term out of his ass without actually understanding what the term means and implies".
The answer is the first answer, it's political status signalling. If the science were that important, there'd be more telescopes in Hubble's category.
Also, consider this: if we had made five Hubbles, we would have screwed up all five of them with the same mistakes we made on the first one, and would never have been able to repair them all.
You wouldn't need to. When the first one demonstrated the error in space, then you can remake the mirrors for the other four before launching them. The gyroscope problem also turned up well before the first service repair mission.
So then you have one bad Hubble that you can deorbit and four working ones that you don't need to deorbit.
(you usually don't need those 5 grocery bags, when you can buy grocery within walking range)
Depends on how you buy, how much you buy, and how quickly you consume food. But there are considerable fixed costs to going to the store, navigating the entire store for the items you need, and hauling it home.
I agree. But as I said, it doesn't sound like the decisions were correct. California has been notorious for decades for making huge long term project and policy decisions that were poor at the time they were made.
The most freightening words
I saw what you did there.
Yeah yeah you can go on about economies of scale all you like but if there is a tangible benefit to doing something your way then why accede to the creed of mass production?
Depends on whether the benefits of the custom-made system outweigh its increased costs. Here, it doesn't sound like they do.
Iman Wilkens makes a case for the Trojan War not occuring in the Mediteranean
So what? Iman Wilkens could make a case for the Moon being made of green cheese with equal facility. There's no way the Greeks of the time knew where England was, much less had the capability to invade it. And the Bronze Age collapse (of which the "sea peoples" were mentioned by the Egyptians) never affected Western Europe as far as we can tell but was contained to the lands around the eastern Mediterranean.
640,000 years ago = Quaternary mass extinction event
There wasn't a significant mass extinction event then. In fact, there hasn't been a significant one during the entire known lifespan of the Yellowstone hotspot.
What does H1-B have to do with open trade?
When you are dealing with hundreds if not over a thousand kilometres of magma in the largest eruptions, anything we could do would be like throwing an icecube into a hottub and hoping it would freeze over.
We can throw some huge ice cubes and we'll probably have plenty of lead time.
Is it not possible to 'ease' Yellowstone a little bit, by harvesting its heat? It would be a double whammy: free energy and less risk of an eruption. (Remember - I said 'ease', not 'neutralize').
Sure, but it'd be an epic engineering feat. I recall estimating that the gravitational potential energy from the hotspot could be dissipated in about a century by a terawatt of geothermal power dissipation (there's still the thermal energy as well). That probably would require evaporating every scrap of water that currently flows out of the Yellowstone area. Toss in additional rainfall from the huge increase in moisture content and I think you could make it happen.
Just because humans suck at something, that doesn't necessarily imply that computers are any better at it.
The low accident rate per billion miles tells us otherwise. There are many people out there who drive a vast amount and have very few accidents.
Most humans suck at singing.
So what? We don't care whether most humans can sing or not. We do care if most humans can drive or not.
The problem here is two-fold. First, we have a very low accident rate in the US. There is not that much room for improvement. If you look at the proposed benefits of self-driving vehicles, you find that they speak of highway driving a lot. That is already among the safest sort of driving.
Further, both cargo and taxi driving are high priority targets. It would replace the safest human drivers, the ones who do it as a profession.
There could be a period of time when automated driving makes things worse due to replacing the safest human driving and human rather than the worst.
Can anyone else come up with valid reasons why a non-criminal, non-terrorist would need to make an anonymous phone call?
Because they want to. That is sufficiently valid.
But you have to ask what is worse, the rare mass shooting in the headlines that statistically has no relevance to your personal safety or the far more statistically relevant suicides and accidental deaths.
I was confused a bit by that argument. At first, it sounded like you were claiming that the only benefit of firearms was to prevent mass shootings. You do have to wonder why people are so much more concerned about what shows up in the news. Maybe the real solution here is to watch less news, or at least watch less of the "if it bleeds, it leads" news.
I know how to handle a gun safely.
And your story indicates that at that time, you did not.
So I guess my stance is that guns aren't the problem, education and safety training combined with thoughtful consideration are the real solution. Shortest version: it kinda sucks to be a moderate libertarian.
Freedom to act means the freedom to do stupid and sometimes evil actions.
Or it could be caused by the non existence of the "Kupiter Belt"
It's a bit late to bring up that concern. We already have observed numerous members of that belt.
These are things that there is conclusive proof are being caused by human activity
So how big are these things? Current research indicates that they are rather small to date.
That's because (most) mutual funds aren't about maximizing returns. Mutual funds offer less risk, with the trade off being lower returns.
Less risk than an index fund?
You don't believe oil is a destructive as is claimed by the people who dedicate their lives to studying this? What, because you understand climate science and chemistry and astronomy so much better than these people do? You're so much more qualified to decide whether they are right or not?
We see the same problem with mutual funds. They're run by people who have a lot more experience, skill, and knowledge than I do. But I can get similar performance by dropping my money into a low expense index fund.
The problem here is that all that "qualification" is impaired by conflict of interest. It's in the interests of the mutual funds to siphon as much investor money as they can and to pull in investor money even when it doesn't make sense to do so (such as when a fund has a great run up, and pulls in a lot of new investor money after most of the action has already passed).
Meanwhile climatologists need funding. And currently, the game in town with the most funding is climate change. Many tens of billions of dollars a year are spent by governments worldwide and this is how they justify it.
I think we can see the resulting dishonesty in the estimate of long term global temperature sensitivity to a doubling of CO2. It's a full factor of three from smallest bound to largest. Similarly, we have a complete lack of justification for the harm that this warming is supposed to do. At the low end, which is where I think it is, we have many decades to centuries before serious harm happens.