My understanding is that citric acid is worse. My dad's dentist told him the same thing (or, rather, they told him the 'yellow' soft drinks are worse than the 'brown'.)
I'll gladly pay my portion of the cost of a dramatic reduction in energy usage. If I'm the only one paying more, no change will be made in construction methods, etc., so it's only worth the cost to me if a lot of people do it.
As for green energy...yeah, it'd be nice, But I think the majority of the problem is energy waste (chiefly space heating and cooling), not dirty power generation. At any rate, it would be a lot easier to meet our energy needs with clean energy if our energy needs were cut in half, or even 10%.
I was trying to talk to the fact that amanicdroid and you were both saying "I'll pay shitloads more" to which I was trying to point out that you will not get fit to the curve;)
True enough. I recognize that raising prices will be really, really painful for many people, but I think the majority could handle it, just as they handled rising gas prices (despite the fact that fuel consumption seems to be incredibly inelastic) and countless other changes over the years.
Gas prices are a good example to consider. They can happen relatively rapid, and while many people complain when they rise, people manage to cope, despite the fact that they can't do much about their consumption in the short term. In the long term they can get a more efficient car. Houses are a much longer term invested, but they're also a lot easier to modify to make much more efficient (and there's an insane amount of government money available to help people do that right now). It's hard to say how much we can cut back (as I said, I went without AC for years and can do so again--but it would suck), but it's pretty clear that we have the ability to do things much more efficiency.
On further thought, though, I will accept that taxes are the incorrect way of addressing the issue. Taxes will encourage people to cut back on their usage, but the real savings comes in the initial investment. People would be much willing to buy an energy-efficient home (or weatherize their existing home) if the long-term savings didn't come with an up-front investment. We need to make energy-efficiency cost-effective in the short term, via subsidies. (And there is a ton of money government out there for just that.)
'm sorry even Austin is more expensive than that. Are you sure you're the entire household? Living in an unsubsidized house or apartment? Paying your actual and FULL living expenses?
Nope. That's not really relevant, though, is it? What's relevant is that we have an uncorrected externality, and we need to correct it. This whole examination of my personal finances is a red herring.
I would have been able to afford it, yes. I saved up more than that much. Rent+utilities+food was roughly $550/month--cheaper during the summer. West Campus, Austin, Tx. One of the more expensive neighborhoods, due to being three blocks from campus. Again, I could have cut back. Air conditioning is a luxury I grew up without and could forgo again if I had to. And there are cheaper places to live.
I'm not a family, but I just finished AmeriCorps, which pays roughly $11 000/year. Earning more now, of course, but a year ago I would have been fine as well.
I work with low-income students (teen parents, most of them), and, yes, some can't pay the electric bill and have trouble paying for gas to get to school or work, but most people aren't in that situation. Allocate taxes and subsidies accordingly.
living in poorly insulated homes, likely in less temperate climates?
I'm in central Texas.
There's a chicken-and-egg problem here. No one builds efficient houses except non-profits because people don't see the profit. We have negative externalities (environmental damage and oil dependence). The way to correct that is through taxes. When that causes undue pain to the poor, we counter with subsidies for efficiency improvements, and possibly for low-income families. Simply doing nothing because it's the solutions are unpopular and complicated is clearly not working.
Apparently getting money from people is more important than enforcing laws.
Yes, because illegal aliens wouldn't be any less likely to file taxes if they believed it would result their arrest/deportation.
If we wouldn't have the information to share if we didn't have the protections, then providing the protections doesn't reduce information sharing. May as well argue for getting rid of attorney-client privilege because obviously accused criminals would continue to speak honestly to attorneys even if they knew their attorney would turn around and tell the prosecution everything.
My electricity+water was $61 last month, and that was with some asshole screwing with the thermostat. Triple it. Go ahead. I'll cut back some if I need to.
More importantly, developers will cut back. I work at an organization that builds energy-efficient houses for low-income families (not HfH, though I used to volunteer there) and thanks to intelligent design and a few solar panels, residents have had electric bills well under 100USD per year. I think once guy had an electric bill of 11USD in 2008.
If we tax gasoline a lot, food prices will soar, and that will hit me a lot harder. We already subsidize food like crazy (and not very intelligently) but if necessary we could provide exemptions (or better, tax and subsidize--the point is to correct for the externality).
I mean that if cell phones cause cancer, you would expect the rate of cancer to raise along with the use of cell phones.
Yes, after controlling for hundreds of other factors. What causes do we know for brain cancer and how have they varied? We've increased public awareness of causes of other cancers (smoking, UV, etc.) and taken steps to reduce causes (smog, the worst pesticides, second-hand smoke, etc.) I wouldn't be surprised if some of those affected brain cancer, and there are countless others.
Common sense told people that Earth was stationary was it was the Sun that revolved around it. Turned out to be wrong. And when looking at historic extinction, according to Wikipedia--which provides two actual citations (12)--it's closer to 99.9%.
If you go ask the common person on the street, they'll happily inform you that it's common sense that this is a high estimate, as Noah saved most of them, and only so many can have died in the 6000 years the Earth has been around. Common sense doesn't do you much good when you're a nut, and Wikipedia seems to be calling you one.
99.999% of all species that ever existed are now extinct. Do you believe that 99.999% of all useful coping mechanisms are gone?
Set theory is very useful in many aspects of life. Draw a few Venn diagrams before posting next time and you may save yourself from looking foolish.
And what does any of this have to do with the finding of quantum entanglement in photosynthetic systems?
It's a very informative and potentially useful mechanism, illustrating the fact that there's a lot of weird stuff out in nature that we can learn from as we advance scientifically and technologically. It's foolish to burn all your books before you even learn how to read. Keep them around so you can learn from them once you learn how to read them. It's easier than figuring out how to unburn books (or clone extinct species).
...or insulation from variety of it does work. I can't believe anybody would want it.
If my goal was variety, I'd be using Stumble Upon. I use GWS to find what I'm looking for. This is typically something very specific. There are also domains I'm focused on a whole lot more than the aggregate person, and those I'm much less interested in. When I search for a song title or a line from a song, I never, never, never want a link to a video site that 1. isn't YouTube or 2. doesn't use Flash. Translation: I want personalization. When I searched for Plymouth the other day, I didn't want the freaking car. I wanted the boot loader. What did I end up having to do? Manually searching for 'Plymouth Linux'. Why SHOULDN'T I want those results ranked higher for me than they would be for an auto mechanic, someone living in Plymouth, Mass, or someone who attends Plymouth State University? I want my results personalized for where I live and what I'm interested in. I work in a school in Texas, so when I search for TEA, I want the Texas Education Agency, not the drink or the nutcases. Google should know this, and personalize the results to reflect it.
If I want something outside my usual scope, I can specify that--very occasionally I do intentionally go for non-personalized results because the 'insulation from variety' prevents me from finding what I want, but if customization means I get less 'variety' when I'm not looking for 'variety', and instead gets me what I'm looking for (not what the aggregate person is most frequently looking for), how is that a bad thing? It's silly to assume the same defaults make sense for everyone. I'm pretty sure that you benefit from the fact that Google personalizes the results to mostly return pages written in English. Taking it further can be a disaster, but it can also be incredibly beneficial.
The attack described on the first page of TFA didn't involve any 'reconstruction'. They were able to access the web histories by stealing cookies and using them to access the web histories Google provides. In the second page they talk about using the cookies to view a users' Google Suggest results.
Still, this is relatively unsurprising. If you snoop on my non-https transmissions, yeah, you can get a lot of information that I consider private. It would be nice if everything were https (the EFF has been pushing for all GWS to use https for a while now), but it's not news to me that it's not. The most novel thing here is that because they could access/reconstruct web history by getting my cookies, they didn't need to be watching me when I did my searches--getting my cookie now is as good as sniffing my packets when I was doing criminal activity yesterday.
In other words, technology really did reduce the need for labor.
The need for labour is only fully met when mathematics is complete, scientific discovery is complete and complete technological development has been attained. Good(?) news: none of those will ever happen.
Technology has certainly allowed us to meet the necessities for life---and indeed a much higher standard of living than in the past--with many fewer people farming, running shops, making trinkets, etc., but that doesn't mean we should spend more time at leisure. It means we have the opportunity to increase our pace of advancement.
Solve poverty and then we can all rest. (And just writing a quick paragraph professing that we have enough stuff, but merely need to distribute it better isn't a solution--actually implement a solution.) Well, you know, after we also deal with disease and crime and every other social ill. So long as we can get better, we should strive to do so.
Long-winded essay aside, I do enjoy three day weekends, and more leisure time would address some of society's ills. Just keep in mind, human desires are insatiable, and when dealing with improving ourselves and our world, that's a good thing.
No, it's like realizing one kind of food makes you swell up and die, but continuing to eat other kinds of food. Pretending regulations are all inherently the same is absolutely absurd.
That regulation created the mess I can understand. That it can't fix it seems a complete non-sequitur and very counter-intuitive, in addition to ignoring countless examples from other areas.
You do realize you're responding to a post about someone running ifconfig, right? And subsequently being accused of exhibiting 'possible terrorist activity'.
We are more interested in solving problems quickly than making friends.
That itself is a problem that should be one of your top priorities.
It was initially rejected by publishers as 'very dull' and 'a dreary record of typically family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotion' (Source: 'The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' by Leonard Mlodinow, pp 9-10).
So long as we're just making up numbers, smaller, more maneuverable cars will lead to perhaps one trillion fewer deaths per year.
It's been argued that the ability of small, maneuverable small vehicles to avoid accidents outweighs the increased risk of dying upon a major collision. Gladwell provides numbers to back up his claim--deaths per driver are much more relevant than deaths per accident. Per driver hour or driver mile would be better, of course, and he doesn't normalize against different populations of drivers* (Do bad drivers simply prefer SUVs?), but so long as you note the caveats, actual data beats the mental random number generator any day.
The government is not a monolithic mind. Bureaucratic distance famously hindered information sharing between various agencies pre-9/11, and that was when it was largely in both agencies' interest to cooperate. That wasn't an isolated instance--it's how bureaucracy works. Someone with control over both agencies could force one agency to subjugate its goals to the others', but it's much more complicated, much more controversial, will receive much more resistance, and is over-all much less likely to be attempted than when it's an intra-agency conflict.
If they're going to make this site the *only* way to access these services by shutting down local offices, as planned, they're going to basically require everyone to own a computer and have a broadband connection.
I like broadband. I'd like to make it available to everyone. But in many cases, dial-up does work. Filling out forms in one such case.
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that citric acid is worse. My dad's dentist told him the same thing (or, rather, they told him the 'yellow' soft drinks are worse than the 'brown'.)
I'll gladly pay my portion of the cost of a dramatic reduction in energy usage. If I'm the only one paying more, no change will be made in construction methods, etc., so it's only worth the cost to me if a lot of people do it.
As for green energy...yeah, it'd be nice, But I think the majority of the problem is energy waste (chiefly space heating and cooling), not dirty power generation. At any rate, it would be a lot easier to meet our energy needs with clean energy if our energy needs were cut in half, or even 10%.
True enough. I recognize that raising prices will be really, really painful for many people, but I think the majority could handle it, just as they handled rising gas prices (despite the fact that fuel consumption seems to be incredibly inelastic) and countless other changes over the years.
Gas prices are a good example to consider. They can happen relatively rapid, and while many people complain when they rise, people manage to cope, despite the fact that they can't do much about their consumption in the short term. In the long term they can get a more efficient car. Houses are a much longer term invested, but they're also a lot easier to modify to make much more efficient (and there's an insane amount of government money available to help people do that right now). It's hard to say how much we can cut back (as I said, I went without AC for years and can do so again--but it would suck), but it's pretty clear that we have the ability to do things much more efficiency.
On further thought, though, I will accept that taxes are the incorrect way of addressing the issue. Taxes will encourage people to cut back on their usage, but the real savings comes in the initial investment. People would be much willing to buy an energy-efficient home (or weatherize their existing home) if the long-term savings didn't come with an up-front investment. We need to make energy-efficiency cost-effective in the short term, via subsidies. (And there is a ton of money government out there for just that.)
Nope. That's not really relevant, though, is it? What's relevant is that we have an uncorrected externality, and we need to correct it. This whole examination of my personal finances is a red herring.
I would have been able to afford it, yes. I saved up more than that much. Rent+utilities+food was roughly $550/month--cheaper during the summer. West Campus, Austin, Tx. One of the more expensive neighborhoods, due to being three blocks from campus. Again, I could have cut back. Air conditioning is a luxury I grew up without and could forgo again if I had to. And there are cheaper places to live.
I'm not a family, but I just finished AmeriCorps, which pays roughly $11 000/year. Earning more now, of course, but a year ago I would have been fine as well.
I work with low-income students (teen parents, most of them), and, yes, some can't pay the electric bill and have trouble paying for gas to get to school or work, but most people aren't in that situation. Allocate taxes and subsidies accordingly.
I'm in central Texas.
There's a chicken-and-egg problem here. No one builds efficient houses except non-profits because people don't see the profit. We have negative externalities (environmental damage and oil dependence). The way to correct that is through taxes. When that causes undue pain to the poor, we counter with subsidies for efficiency improvements, and possibly for low-income families. Simply doing nothing because it's the solutions are unpopular and complicated is clearly not working.
Chevron, on the other hand...
Yes, because illegal aliens wouldn't be any less likely to file taxes if they believed it would result their arrest/deportation.
If we wouldn't have the information to share if we didn't have the protections, then providing the protections doesn't reduce information sharing. May as well argue for getting rid of attorney-client privilege because obviously accused criminals would continue to speak honestly to attorneys even if they knew their attorney would turn around and tell the prosecution everything.
My electricity+water was $61 last month, and that was with some asshole screwing with the thermostat. Triple it. Go ahead. I'll cut back some if I need to.
More importantly, developers will cut back. I work at an organization that builds energy-efficient houses for low-income families (not HfH, though I used to volunteer there) and thanks to intelligent design and a few solar panels, residents have had electric bills well under 100USD per year. I think once guy had an electric bill of 11USD in 2008.
If we tax gasoline a lot, food prices will soar, and that will hit me a lot harder. We already subsidize food like crazy (and not very intelligently) but if necessary we could provide exemptions (or better, tax and subsidize--the point is to correct for the externality).
In Chromium (and similar in Chrome): Options: Basics: Default Search: Manage.
Yes, after controlling for hundreds of other factors. What causes do we know for brain cancer and how have they varied? We've increased public awareness of causes of other cancers (smoking, UV, etc.) and taken steps to reduce causes (smog, the worst pesticides, second-hand smoke, etc.) I wouldn't be surprised if some of those affected brain cancer, and there are countless others.
If you go ask the common person on the street, they'll happily inform you that it's common sense that this is a high estimate, as Noah saved most of them, and only so many can have died in the 6000 years the Earth has been around. Common sense doesn't do you much good when you're a nut, and Wikipedia seems to be calling you one.
Set theory is very useful in many aspects of life. Draw a few Venn diagrams before posting next time and you may save yourself from looking foolish.
It's a very informative and potentially useful mechanism, illustrating the fact that there's a lot of weird stuff out in nature that we can learn from as we advance scientifically and technologically. It's foolish to burn all your books before you even learn how to read. Keep them around so you can learn from them once you learn how to read them. It's easier than figuring out how to unburn books (or clone extinct species).
That's grammatically correct.
You want me to read the summary, the article, and the paper? I already went way beyond my duties as a Slashdot commenter. :-)
If my goal was variety, I'd be using Stumble Upon. I use GWS to find what I'm looking for. This is typically something very specific. There are also domains I'm focused on a whole lot more than the aggregate person, and those I'm much less interested in. When I search for a song title or a line from a song, I never, never, never want a link to a video site that 1. isn't YouTube or 2. doesn't use Flash. Translation: I want personalization. When I searched for Plymouth the other day, I didn't want the freaking car. I wanted the boot loader. What did I end up having to do? Manually searching for 'Plymouth Linux'. Why SHOULDN'T I want those results ranked higher for me than they would be for an auto mechanic, someone living in Plymouth, Mass, or someone who attends Plymouth State University? I want my results personalized for where I live and what I'm interested in. I work in a school in Texas, so when I search for TEA, I want the Texas Education Agency, not the drink or the nutcases. Google should know this, and personalize the results to reflect it.
If I want something outside my usual scope, I can specify that--very occasionally I do intentionally go for non-personalized results because the 'insulation from variety' prevents me from finding what I want, but if customization means I get less 'variety' when I'm not looking for 'variety', and instead gets me what I'm looking for (not what the aggregate person is most frequently looking for), how is that a bad thing? It's silly to assume the same defaults make sense for everyone. I'm pretty sure that you benefit from the fact that Google personalizes the results to mostly return pages written in English. Taking it further can be a disaster, but it can also be incredibly beneficial.
The attack described on the first page of TFA didn't involve any 'reconstruction'. They were able to access the web histories by stealing cookies and using them to access the web histories Google provides. In the second page they talk about using the cookies to view a users' Google Suggest results.
Still, this is relatively unsurprising. If you snoop on my non-https transmissions, yeah, you can get a lot of information that I consider private. It would be nice if everything were https (the EFF has been pushing for all GWS to use https for a while now), but it's not news to me that it's not. The most novel thing here is that because they could access/reconstruct web history by getting my cookies, they didn't need to be watching me when I did my searches--getting my cookie now is as good as sniffing my packets when I was doing criminal activity yesterday.
The need for labour is only fully met when mathematics is complete, scientific discovery is complete and complete technological development has been attained. Good(?) news: none of those will ever happen.
Technology has certainly allowed us to meet the necessities for life---and indeed a much higher standard of living than in the past--with many fewer people farming, running shops, making trinkets, etc., but that doesn't mean we should spend more time at leisure. It means we have the opportunity to increase our pace of advancement.
Solve poverty and then we can all rest. (And just writing a quick paragraph professing that we have enough stuff, but merely need to distribute it better isn't a solution--actually implement a solution.) Well, you know, after we also deal with disease and crime and every other social ill. So long as we can get better, we should strive to do so.
Long-winded essay aside, I do enjoy three day weekends, and more leisure time would address some of society's ills. Just keep in mind, human desires are insatiable, and when dealing with improving ourselves and our world, that's a good thing.
Being bigger than Slashdot is not my metric of success when talking about things on the scale of Google and Twitter.
No, it's like realizing one kind of food makes you swell up and die, but continuing to eat other kinds of food. Pretending regulations are all inherently the same is absolutely absurd.
That regulation created the mess I can understand. That it can't fix it seems a complete non-sequitur and very counter-intuitive, in addition to ignoring countless examples from other areas.
You do realize you're responding to a post about someone running ifconfig, right? And subsequently being accused of exhibiting 'possible terrorist activity'.
That itself is a problem that should be one of your top priorities.
It was initially rejected by publishers as 'very dull' and 'a dreary record of typically family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotion' (Source: 'The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives' by Leonard Mlodinow, pp 9-10).
So long as we're just making up numbers, smaller, more maneuverable cars will lead to perhaps one trillion fewer deaths per year.
It's been argued that the ability of small, maneuverable small vehicles to avoid accidents outweighs the increased risk of dying upon a major collision. Gladwell provides numbers to back up his claim--deaths per driver are much more relevant than deaths per accident. Per driver hour or driver mile would be better, of course, and he doesn't normalize against different populations of drivers* (Do bad drivers simply prefer SUVs?), but so long as you note the caveats, actual data beats the mental random number generator any day.
*Disclaimer: I haven't read the article in years.
The government is not a monolithic mind. Bureaucratic distance famously hindered information sharing between various agencies pre-9/11, and that was when it was largely in both agencies' interest to cooperate. That wasn't an isolated instance--it's how bureaucracy works. Someone with control over both agencies could force one agency to subjugate its goals to the others', but it's much more complicated, much more controversial, will receive much more resistance, and is over-all much less likely to be attempted than when it's an intra-agency conflict.
I like broadband. I'd like to make it available to everyone. But in many cases, dial-up does work. Filling out forms in one such case.