...We found that at NREL's yield rates, 11,000 square miles (2.82 million hectares) of algae ponds would be needed to replace all petroleum transportation fuels with biodiesel. At the cost of $60,000 per hectare, that would work out to roughly $169 billion, to build the farms.
The operating costs (including power consumption, labor, chemicals, and fixed capital costs (taxes, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and return on investment) worked out to $12,000 per hectare. That would equate to $50.7 billion per year for all the algae farms, to yield all the oil feedstock necessary for the entire country. Compare that to the more than $100 billion the US spends each year just on purchasing crude oil from foreign countries.
The most pathetic part is that the entire cost of the project, all of it, is less than the money we have already spent in Iraq to give that nation as a gift to energy traders so that they may continue on their merry international price-fixing way.
Nobody seems to have realized that we have long passed the point where it is much more cost-effective to substitute fossil fuel consumption with something else than it is to defend our alleged interests in Persian Gulf oil with military might. And that does not include construction, production, and transportation costs, amortization, etc.
They shouldn't have raised the price by 25 cents, they should have dropped it to 25 cents. These people are dreaming if they think a track of pop music is worth more than a quarter.
The only effective strategy is for everyone to boycott RIAA-affiliated music sources for a year or so (without pirating it, switch to non-RIAA music sources instead). Sadly, that will not occur. The great mob of consumers will pay that and more for their daily doses of empty, expensive pop culture.
All of you folks complaining about overkill are behind the curve on this. Yes, having a computer as powerful as an early Cray in parking meters sounds completely asinine. The word "overkill" isn't even close, it sounds like apples and oranges.
But it isn't
That powerful little bastard is the pattern for the immediate future. As one poster mentioned, you probably can't even buy less than 64 Mb at a time, or even a slower cpu and save any significant amount of money. Go to the store and find a 32 Mb flash RAM card. The 64 Mb ones will be off the market by this time next year.
Ladies and gentlemen, some time ago, we passed an important milestone and didn't pay it much attention. Very powerful computers are so cheap today, that there is now no point in using anything less powerful in even the most banal appliances. Parking meters are now Cray-class UNIX boxes. Deal with it.
You have to be pretty conservative to consider the NYT liberal. Mind you, they have liberal affectations so that they don't appear simple-minded or shallow, but when push comes to shove, they are neither liberal nor conservative, they are staunchly pro-establishment.
The tags liberal and conservative are low information content cartoon labels that describe overall intent in a vaguely useful way, but rarely describe individual people in any great detail unless the person in question is an idiot.
Conservatives, as the legend goes, are capitalistic, religious, and individualistic. Liberals are held to be socialistic, secular, and concerned with the community. As you read this, these simplistic little kernels, you will immediately want to dispute them or add your own commentary. Why? Because the terms themselves are crude and vague. When you get right down to it, their meaning slips through your fingers like sand.
There are more of these, in the form of "hot button issues." Abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and many others that are being trotted out to distract the meek and humble, and push their buttons to make them vote in a rote, predictable way this November. The issues themselves are not very important. In the grand scheme of things, few lives are lost to abortion, few people fall into bitter depravity if they happen to be gay, and aside from sportsmen and criminals, most of us will rarely if ever discharge a firearm (nor would we have any hope of victory if there were ever a need to rise up against an evil dicatator if he controlled the Pentagon). And yet, consider how many people will decide what president to vote for, strongly influenced by their stance on these minor political issues.
"News" is and has always been Theater. There is a stage, the world stage, the national stage, or whatever. There are actors, there is a storyline, and the script gets written and recited extemporaneously, albeit with great care and under severe constraints. I conjecture that the world press only reports what is in the formal storyline, and tends to ignore anything that diverges or disagrees with it unless and until it is folded in formally.
Examples:
When was the last time you saw a detailed news story in the mainstream press showing what companies are making how much money from defense spending, managing the Iraqi oil industry, and other economic activities surrounding the war? What happened to the "follow the money" dictum vis a vis the war in Iraq?
Lots of articles about how the Bush administration planned the war ahead of time and made up bogus reasons to go to war, but where is a well documented discussion about the "real" reasons? If it wasn't WMD, terrorism, democratization of Iraq, or the "gathering threat" (and it appears that all of those have been fleeting pretexts), then what was it?
No doubt many of you can find examples in many other contexts. The upshot is that journalists are in practice theater critics of a rigid Kabuki, where characters ratchet through formal storylines, and the rich backstage dynamics that inform the drama are outside of public view.
The Philosopher's Google Box
on
Google's Next Steps
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Google and Yahoo have become as almost parts of the operating system, a "layer" as John Battelle puts it, above Windows, Mac OS or Linux
...and everyone starts gushing about it. Are your text editor, web browser, desktop background, or MP3 player "layers" on top of your OS, or just software applications? Will Google take over disk I/O, thread management, or the loading of executables into memory? This is bullshit. I am quickly losing the esteem I have always had for Google with this out of control shitfest of sappy, foaming-at-the-mouth hype.
Wake up, folks, they are only going to give you an account where you can store your email and have a decent search engine connected to it. Frankly, I would feel uncomfortable giving my data to any company, especially if they are not obligated to destroy it after I terminate my account. They will have sifted it, analyzed it, and wrung it out like just-washed socks to use almost as they please long after it is out of my control.
I'm sure John Poindexter and John Ashcroft are starting to salivate over it.
I agree with your other responder that "the right to keep and bear arms is now itself a smokescreen." Of course you have the right to keep and bear arms. That, contrary to your shallow appreciation of the issue, is not the point. Citizens who arm themselves to the teeth outside of the context of a formal citizens' militia with high powered firearms, very often of the type useful only for military operations, is hardly what the founding fathers had in mind.
You still don't get that the NRA's defense of the 2nd amendment has to do with stimulating the business of firearms? You actually need someone to spell it out for you? You couldn't figure it out on your own? You actually thought Charleton Heston was out there fighting for our rights?
In any case, while I have no use for firearms myself, I know many people do and there are certainly legitimate reasons for some people to own them. Furthermore, I would not sacrifice a constitutional right lightly. We have the right to own firearms as well as the right to free speech. Both should be cherished and defended. This, however, is a far cry from encouraging morons to own important collections of assault weapons. It is most certainly not the same thing, just as the 1st amendment does not protect libel or child pornography.
We must embrace the power of faith, but we must never confuse politics and piety. For me, may I say that it is against my religion to impose my religion.
Is he insane? His grip on reality seems a bit in doubt. The credibility of his public speaking is certainly questionable.
Lucky bastard. The stuff I like tends not to exist. It is somewhere between the stuff you can get at the average neighborhood video store and the grotesque stuff they keep behind the curtain.
On usenet, I dig the female imagery with a good healthy look at their genitals, but I hate it when they tug, tear, flap, or otherwise manipulate their snatch. Of course, sticking objects in there is a serious turn-off for me, especially all of those kitschy, brightly colored or shiny dildos. Unfortunately, most of the stuff out their has that sort of thing.
Some feminists, for example, feel that pornography violates women by virtue of it turning them into objects to be gawked at.
It can be argued that those depicted in porn as well as those who compulsively consume porn are exploited. Nevertheless, this is hardly a reason to suspend the right of free expression.
Also, the grandparent asked:
Could certain kinds of porn make viewers mentally unhealthy?
This question seems like the inverse of what can be observed. I conjecture that viewers with unhealthy tastes or mindsets gravitate towards the more perverse forms of porn such as scat, rape imagery, etc. I suspect that in the controversies surrounding violence in entertainment, including but not limited to TV, films, and video games, something similar is going on. Such violence may not cause violent behavior de novo, but may provide positive feedback to those already pre-disposed and in need only of a little nudging.
Again, not an argument in favor of suspending the right of free expression. It would be more of an argument to bolster the availability of mental health services, but since "defense" companies, energy traders, and other current political heavyweights won't make any money there, it's a non-starter.
Next time we hear someone piously profess shock at how the ACLU defends pornographers, we can at least explain to them the true consequences of censorship, as well as the hidden motives of those who claim to defend "decency."
Blowing the shit out of civilians in foreign lands, taking stewardship of their natural resources, selling them land mines, protecting the opium crops of our allies, looking the other way as our allies sell nuclear weapons technology on the black market, channelling hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to the "defense" industry, making sure Joe SixPack is armed to the teeth back home, destroying our own natural resources, canceling Constitutional rights as necessary, etc. etc.? Good. A God-given duty, in fact.
Wake up, folks. The only thing the religious fanatics that have leached into our government do not insist upon is the use of burkas by American women. OK, they also allow them to be on the same floor in public buildings.
Why in god's name would I care about how important the stories are perceived to be by the media (or how successful the propoganda/marketing has been, depending on the story)? This opacifies the news even further instead of helping me find interesting information. This is in effect a media echo chamber echo chamber. If this software were to be customizable, and we were able to invert and tune some of the criteria, then maybe we would get somewhere.
[Spoken while making hypnotist hand gestures with a Bela Lugosi-like glare]
You are going deeper, and deeper to sleep. Way down. With every breath that you take, deeper... deeper to sleep. You are asleep, way down, way, way down.
You will set up a GMail account.
You will use it for all your email.
You will point all your current email accounts to it, and have them copy all their traffic to it.
When we give you the opportunity, you will also upload all of your personal files for long term storage. All documents, archives, images, videos, spreadsheets, code, presentations, everything.
You will encourage all of your friends and relatives to do likewise.
You will zealously promote this as a Good Thing. Secure. Safe. Reliable. Trustworthy. Good.
When I snap my fingers, you will immediately go out and do all of these things. You will feel great happiness and satisfaction. If you are male, you will have erections during about 80% of your waking hours for the next 12 months, as long as you are carrying out these tasks. If you are female, the sight of anyone you like or feel even slightly attracted to will give you a rush and make you wet, also during the next 12 months only as long as you carry out these tasks. People you like a lot will make you gush like a fountain. You will need to stock up on panty liners.
If that's the case, then I stand corrected. However, it sounds like this would require massive infrastructure change for most users of gasoline to switch over.
Oddly enough, I was about to launch into a counterargument having to do with greenhouse gas emissions and the energy balance comparing biodiesel with fossil fuels, but it appears that biodiesel produces less CO2 and has a more favorable energy balance than petroleum diesel.
Interesting. I wonder why we are sacrificing thousands of human lives and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to control a far away petroleum producer given the data in those two documents. Conspiracy theories, anyone? It might be useful to inject this into the public discussion of the US presidential campaign.
Get the driver out of the vehicle? Inhumane aspects of automobile related deaths? Your safety and mine aren't that important. The "defense" industry's safety and well being on the other hand, are of prime concern. Automating the Stryker military vehicle will cost hundreds of millions (billions in the end, I'd wager).
Very imaginative! Unfortunately, this claim is unsustainable:
The tremedous advantage in societal cost, safety, improved environment, ease of living, efficiency, and quality of life would make living in such a place, a slice of heaven. Enhanced taxbase, with tremendously reduced cost of living, would allow money to be available for fantastic free schools, enhanced medical care, and a gorgeous, sparkling infrastructure.
Your world would be incredibly expensive to build, and the "enhanced taxbase" is almost certainly a mirage. For society to pay for such huge and expensive infarstructure and expect a "tremendously reduced cost of living" is a non sequitur from the start.
The greatest problem would come from high population density. The cost of sewage, water, power, and so on for such large and dense habitats would be very high. Densely populated areas tend to be high in crime and low on "crime prevention, cleanliness, well lit open airy spaces."
Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly agree with your initial premise:
The question should be how are we going to support a world with 10,000,000,000 people in it, while maintaining some semblance of quality of life. This idea of half a billion people in the U.S. going anywhere they feel like, any time they feel like, each in their own vehicle, which if by current standards continues is 7 feet high, 18 feet long, weighs 12 tons, sleeps 10, and get's 8 MPG, is at best insane. It ignores sanity on so many fundamental levels, I'm not even going to bother listing.
Slashdot Mirror
The operating costs (including power consumption, labor, chemicals, and fixed capital costs (taxes, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and return on investment) worked out to $12,000 per hectare. That would equate to $50.7 billion per year for all the algae farms, to yield all the oil feedstock necessary for the entire country. Compare that to the more than $100 billion the US spends each year just on purchasing crude oil from foreign countries.
The most pathetic part is that the entire cost of the project, all of it, is less than the money we have already spent in Iraq to give that nation as a gift to energy traders so that they may continue on their merry international price-fixing way.
Nobody seems to have realized that we have long passed the point where it is much more cost-effective to substitute fossil fuel consumption with something else than it is to defend our alleged interests in Persian Gulf oil with military might. And that does not include construction, production, and transportation costs, amortization, etc.
The only effective strategy is for everyone to boycott RIAA-affiliated music sources for a year or so (without pirating it, switch to non-RIAA music sources instead). Sadly, that will not occur. The great mob of consumers will pay that and more for their daily doses of empty, expensive pop culture.
But it isn't
That powerful little bastard is the pattern for the immediate future. As one poster mentioned, you probably can't even buy less than 64 Mb at a time, or even a slower cpu and save any significant amount of money. Go to the store and find a 32 Mb flash RAM card. The 64 Mb ones will be off the market by this time next year.
Ladies and gentlemen, some time ago, we passed an important milestone and didn't pay it much attention. Very powerful computers are so cheap today, that there is now no point in using anything less powerful in even the most banal appliances. Parking meters are now Cray-class UNIX boxes. Deal with it.
And this is only the beginning.
The tags liberal and conservative are low information content cartoon labels that describe overall intent in a vaguely useful way, but rarely describe individual people in any great detail unless the person in question is an idiot.
Conservatives, as the legend goes, are capitalistic, religious, and individualistic. Liberals are held to be socialistic, secular, and concerned with the community. As you read this, these simplistic little kernels, you will immediately want to dispute them or add your own commentary. Why? Because the terms themselves are crude and vague. When you get right down to it, their meaning slips through your fingers like sand.
There are more of these, in the form of "hot button issues." Abortion, gay marriage, gun control, and many others that are being trotted out to distract the meek and humble, and push their buttons to make them vote in a rote, predictable way this November. The issues themselves are not very important. In the grand scheme of things, few lives are lost to abortion, few people fall into bitter depravity if they happen to be gay, and aside from sportsmen and criminals, most of us will rarely if ever discharge a firearm (nor would we have any hope of victory if there were ever a need to rise up against an evil dicatator if he controlled the Pentagon). And yet, consider how many people will decide what president to vote for, strongly influenced by their stance on these minor political issues.
Examples:
- When was the last time you saw a detailed news story in the mainstream press showing what companies are making how much money from defense spending, managing the Iraqi oil industry, and other economic activities surrounding the war? What happened to the "follow the money" dictum vis a vis the war in Iraq?
- Lots of articles about how the Bush administration planned the war ahead of time and made up bogus reasons to go to war, but where is a well documented discussion about the "real" reasons? If it wasn't WMD, terrorism, democratization of Iraq, or the "gathering threat" (and it appears that all of those have been fleeting pretexts), then what was it?
No doubt many of you can find examples in many other contexts. The upshot is that journalists are in practice theater critics of a rigid Kabuki, where characters ratchet through formal storylines, and the rich backstage dynamics that inform the drama are outside of public view.Wake up, folks, they are only going to give you an account where you can store your email and have a decent search engine connected to it. Frankly, I would feel uncomfortable giving my data to any company, especially if they are not obligated to destroy it after I terminate my account. They will have sifted it, analyzed it, and wrung it out like just-washed socks to use almost as they please long after it is out of my control.
I'm sure John Poindexter and John Ashcroft are starting to salivate over it.
What? Don't tell me none of you run up and down the rows of cubicles screaming and slamming tree branches on the carpet!
You still don't get that the NRA's defense of the 2nd amendment has to do with stimulating the business of firearms? You actually need someone to spell it out for you? You couldn't figure it out on your own? You actually thought Charleton Heston was out there fighting for our rights?
In any case, while I have no use for firearms myself, I know many people do and there are certainly legitimate reasons for some people to own them. Furthermore, I would not sacrifice a constitutional right lightly. We have the right to own firearms as well as the right to free speech. Both should be cherished and defended. This, however, is a far cry from encouraging morons to own important collections of assault weapons. It is most certainly not the same thing, just as the 1st amendment does not protect libel or child pornography.
Hey! When I was about 4, Daisy was one of my favorite lingerie models.
We must embrace the power of faith, but we must never confuse politics and piety. For me, may I say that it is against my religion to impose my religion.
Is he insane? His grip on reality seems a bit in doubt. The credibility of his public speaking is certainly questionable.
On usenet, I dig the female imagery with a good healthy look at their genitals, but I hate it when they tug, tear, flap, or otherwise manipulate their snatch. Of course, sticking objects in there is a serious turn-off for me, especially all of those kitschy, brightly colored or shiny dildos. Unfortunately, most of the stuff out their has that sort of thing.
It can be argued that those depicted in porn as well as those who compulsively consume porn are exploited. Nevertheless, this is hardly a reason to suspend the right of free expression.
Also, the grandparent asked:
Could certain kinds of porn make viewers mentally unhealthy?
This question seems like the inverse of what can be observed. I conjecture that viewers with unhealthy tastes or mindsets gravitate towards the more perverse forms of porn such as scat, rape imagery, etc. I suspect that in the controversies surrounding violence in entertainment, including but not limited to TV, films, and video games, something similar is going on. Such violence may not cause violent behavior de novo, but may provide positive feedback to those already pre-disposed and in need only of a little nudging.
Again, not an argument in favor of suspending the right of free expression. It would be more of an argument to bolster the availability of mental health services, but since "defense" companies, energy traders, and other current political heavyweights won't make any money there, it's a non-starter.
In Soviet Russia pornstars watch you!
Heil Dubya! Sieg Heil!
Blowing the shit out of civilians in foreign lands, taking stewardship of their natural resources, selling them land mines, protecting the opium crops of our allies, looking the other way as our allies sell nuclear weapons technology on the black market, channelling hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars to the "defense" industry, making sure Joe SixPack is armed to the teeth back home, destroying our own natural resources, canceling Constitutional rights as necessary, etc. etc.? Good. A God-given duty, in fact.
Wake up, folks. The only thing the religious fanatics that have leached into our government do not insist upon is the use of burkas by American women. OK, they also allow them to be on the same floor in public buildings.
Why in god's name would I care about how important the stories are perceived to be by the media (or how successful the propoganda/marketing has been, depending on the story)? This opacifies the news even further instead of helping me find interesting information. This is in effect a media echo chamber echo chamber. If this software were to be customizable, and we were able to invert and tune some of the criteria, then maybe we would get somewhere.
It's like sloppy seconds, except you'll wish you had brought along some mouthwash.
You will set up a GMail account.
You will use it for all your email.
You will point all your current email accounts to it, and have them copy all their traffic to it.
When we give you the opportunity, you will also upload all of your personal files for long term storage. All documents, archives, images, videos, spreadsheets, code, presentations, everything.
You will encourage all of your friends and relatives to do likewise.
You will zealously promote this as a Good Thing. Secure. Safe. Reliable. Trustworthy. Good.
When I snap my fingers, you will immediately go out and do all of these things. You will feel great happiness and satisfaction. If you are male, you will have erections during about 80% of your waking hours for the next 12 months, as long as you are carrying out these tasks. If you are female, the sight of anyone you like or feel even slightly attracted to will give you a rush and make you wet, also during the next 12 months only as long as you carry out these tasks. People you like a lot will make you gush like a fountain. You will need to stock up on panty liners.
Oddly enough, I was about to launch into a counterargument having to do with greenhouse gas emissions and the energy balance comparing biodiesel with fossil fuels, but it appears that biodiesel produces less CO2 and has a more favorable energy balance than petroleum diesel.
Interesting. I wonder why we are sacrificing thousands of human lives and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to control a far away petroleum producer given the data in those two documents. Conspiracy theories, anyone? It might be useful to inject this into the public discussion of the US presidential campaign.
Diesel exhaust exposure and lung cancer: adjustment for the effect of smoking in a retrospective cohort study
Lung cancer in heavy equipment operators and truck drivers with diesel exhaust exposure in the construction industry
Sorry Dude. I know you meant well.
The tremedous advantage in societal cost, safety, improved environment, ease of living, efficiency, and quality of life would make living in such a place, a slice of heaven. Enhanced taxbase, with tremendously reduced cost of living, would allow money to be available for fantastic free schools, enhanced medical care, and a gorgeous, sparkling infrastructure.
Your world would be incredibly expensive to build, and the "enhanced taxbase" is almost certainly a mirage. For society to pay for such huge and expensive infarstructure and expect a "tremendously reduced cost of living" is a non sequitur from the start.
The greatest problem would come from high population density. The cost of sewage, water, power, and so on for such large and dense habitats would be very high. Densely populated areas tend to be high in crime and low on "crime prevention, cleanliness, well lit open airy spaces."
Nevertheless, I wholeheartedly agree with your initial premise:
The question should be how are we going to support a world with 10,000,000,000 people in it, while maintaining some semblance of quality of life. This idea of half a billion people in the U.S. going anywhere they feel like, any time they feel like, each in their own vehicle, which if by current standards continues is 7 feet high, 18 feet long, weighs 12 tons, sleeps 10, and get's 8 MPG, is at best insane. It ignores sanity on so many fundamental levels, I'm not even going to bother listing.