The point of aiming this at 3rd world countries is that energy requirements are fairly low, so that storage could be at moderate pressure or even STP, no need for liquification or fancy storage devices. Store enough to run a small generator or fuel cells for a week. Energy use is local.
That said, even local small scale use sounds inferior to normal cells feeding a lead-acid battery. The efficiency of making, storing, and using hydrogen-oxygen will never beat conventional batteries.
The people able to do the tough brain work are unusual, and make possible some of the major advances in civilization. Understanding the essential way that these people differ, and how to encourage that happening more often, would be a major boon for mankind.
Under linux, device drivers are written in 2 parts. The first responds immediately, and usually just records the event and notifies the OS. When the OS feels like it, the second part is activated to do the heavy lifting.
I suppose they can be written differently for special purposes.
A good mouse allows you to point where you want quickly and repeatably with minimum stress. Extra buttons are a nice bonus if they're ergonomically successful.
I've used 3 optical mice and the best one is 20% slower than a ball mouse because it's erratic. Wireless mice are even worse, occasionally cutting out even if the receiver is only 2" (5 cm) from the mouse.
It's freaky to hold the mouse in one place and watch the cursor climb up the screen. I've never had a ball mouse do that.
Optical mouse technology has a long way to go before it's right.
TFA states that GE has 950 employees dedicated to navigating the tax laws. Think how much productive good those 950 could do if laws were not such that GE is better off employing them in that manner. OUR tax money is being used by people in government to make and enforce laws so that GE employs unproductive people to avoid those laws.
These games are played with humans whose efforts come to no good and make everyone else's lives worse. Wasted lives making waste.
To be left-wing means to support widespread theft of private property, and leaders of the Democrats support that whole-heartedly. Republican leaders are mixed.
Hiring tax evaders is effectively what they're doing. If that technique were used to lower taxes generally, that would be fine. Alas, it's used to lobby for taxes that hurt their competitors and help them, and to manipulate the statement of their earnings in accord with the jimmied tax code.
Protectionism is the only defense we have against being obliterated by cheap labor pools.
^ Complete economic ignorance ^
If someone overseas can do your job so much less expensively that it covers shipping costs and communications difficulties, a number of things are wrong. People who use your services are paying more than they should (or if you're being helped by protectionism, they're being ripped off.) You are charging more than your efforts are worth, therefore either your prices are too high, or you aren't working as efficiently or as hard as you should, or you aren't good at your line of work and should be doing something completely different where your efforts don't represent waste. Taxes and legal restrictions on you and your industry may be excessive. You and/or your industry may not be sufficiently automated.
Looked at from the other direction, if your country is flooded with cheap foreign goods, the cost of living falls, and you can live just as well on less money. You only lose if you were foolish enough to get deeply in debt, and now are less able to pay off your debt. (But "a fool and his money are soon parted" applies under all conditions.)
Automation and more effective tools in general are frequently an adequate defense against cheap labor pools.
Time is the final defense against cheap labor pools. Absent slavery (which has its own disadvantages), cheap labor is made possible by low living costs and widespread poverty. As cheap laborers bring in money they purchase more. Prices rise and they consider their time more valuable, so they charge more for their efforts (by various methods). Eventually, they are no longer cheap labor. "Problem" solved.
Long term, the absence of force and fraud is the greatest promoter of well-being, and the government is everywhere the most significant source of both.
Everybody is a consumer, and most people are also producers. Trade wars hurt all consumers, because trade wars are fought by governments using the tools of tariffs and prohibition, both of which raise prices.
"Globalization" -- free trade, i.e. freedom, applied everywhere -- means that the greatest efficiencies are allowed universally. That means the smallest waste of human effort, of human lives. Those who support protectionism have no problem wasting human lives.
OK, I looked at the site in your sig. Of the ten reasons that "your brain is not a computer" there is a mixture of misunderstandings, irrelevancies, and falsehoods. The brain is very different from a common manufactured computer, it is an evolved biological computer with many peripherals, with all the oddities, advantages and disadvantages that implies. But it's still a computer of sorts.
Typical of the errors in the sig's article is the claim that the brain is analog and therefor not a computer; the claim is false and does not imply the conclusion.
When you start writing about "0.0000000000001%" and preposterous conditions hat there's no evidence for, you fall afoul of Occam's razor. Juries do not accept as possible that you were abducted by aliens whose lookalike robot robbed that bank.
When most people discuss good and bad (and in a slightly different context, good and evil), they almost always leave out the ESSENTIAL question, good for what? If the answer is humanity or some group of humans or just me, then the answer to "what is good" that religions provide is usually mediocre at best. If the answer to "Good for what" is "Good for god", then there is ample reason for any human to reject the morality based thereupon as irrelevant or hostile to his own life.
The more modern a religion is, the more information we have about how it came into being. Scientology is a well documented fraud. Mormon is older, and the documentation is a little less complete, but the conclusion is the same. Islam and Christianity are old enough that the evidence is sparse, but with internal contradictions and what archæology and reliable documents provide us, there's no reason to think that either is anything but manufactured fables interleaved with a biased retelling of actual events.
The "poetry" aspect in Genesis is evidence of oral history. Stuff that's easy to remember gets remembered and passed on, and repetition is a memorization aid. Since oral history is notoriously unreliable, evidence of it is yet another clue to the bogus nature of the bible.
It isn't a productivity boost to spend multiple hours searching the internet to find out how to unscrew the new firefox to make it work like it used to. I shouldn't have to install an extension just so I can have a statusbar that doesn't work as well as the old one.
The new firefox is a delight. So many nifty things, so many things that work now that didn't work previously. And so many senseless changes that have to be worked around.
The AwesomeBar is too aggressive. If I type "http://g" I don't want suggestions that include "http://www.g" and almost everything else that includes the letter g. The list is too long, takes too long to scroll through. Good idea, mediocre implementation.
If you don't get pension there's two choice for you: die miserably or have children who look up after you when you are old.
Do you think before you post? Raising children well is enormously expensive. Save the money you would've spent on kids, save it and make it grow, retire rich.
Free, financial incentives, tax breaks, (government awarded) college credits, school control, foreign aid... This is all accomplished with tax money against the wishes of many people. That's totalitarian, and your saying it's nontotalitarian does make it so.
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The point of aiming this at 3rd world countries is that energy requirements are fairly low, so that storage could be at moderate pressure or even STP, no need for liquification or fancy storage devices. Store enough to run a small generator or fuel cells for a week. Energy use is local.
That said, even local small scale use sounds inferior to normal cells feeding a lead-acid battery. The efficiency of making, storing, and using hydrogen-oxygen will never beat conventional batteries.
The people able to do the tough brain work are unusual, and make possible some of the major advances in civilization. Understanding the essential way that these people differ, and how to encourage that happening more often, would be a major boon for mankind.
Under linux, device drivers are written in 2 parts. The first responds immediately, and usually just records the event and notifies the OS. When the OS feels like it, the second part is activated to do the heavy lifting.
I suppose they can be written differently for special purposes.
A good mouse allows you to point where you want quickly and repeatably with minimum stress. Extra buttons are a nice bonus if they're ergonomically successful.
I've used 3 optical mice and the best one is 20% slower than a ball mouse because it's erratic. Wireless mice are even worse, occasionally cutting out even if the receiver is only 2" (5 cm) from the mouse.
It's freaky to hold the mouse in one place and watch the cursor climb up the screen. I've never had a ball mouse do that.
Optical mouse technology has a long way to go before it's right.
TFA states that GE has 950 employees dedicated to navigating the tax laws. Think how much productive good those 950 could do if laws were not such that GE is better off employing them in that manner. OUR tax money is being used by people in government to make and enforce laws so that GE employs unproductive people to avoid those laws.
These games are played with humans whose efforts come to no good and make everyone else's lives worse. Wasted lives making waste.
The cost is in lives, as prisoners return to the armies of those determined to kill us.
To be left-wing means to support widespread theft of private property, and leaders of the Democrats support that whole-heartedly. Republican leaders are mixed.
So it's crazy to oppose theft?
Hiring tax evaders is effectively what they're doing. If that technique were used to lower taxes generally, that would be fine. Alas, it's used to lobby for taxes that hurt their competitors and help them, and to manipulate the statement of their earnings in accord with the jimmied tax code.
^ Complete economic ignorance ^
If someone overseas can do your job so much less expensively that it covers shipping costs and communications difficulties, a number of things are wrong. People who use your services are paying more than they should (or if you're being helped by protectionism, they're being ripped off.) You are charging more than your efforts are worth, therefore either your prices are too high, or you aren't working as efficiently or as hard as you should, or you aren't good at your line of work and should be doing something completely different where your efforts don't represent waste. Taxes and legal restrictions on you and your industry may be excessive. You and/or your industry may not be sufficiently automated.
Looked at from the other direction, if your country is flooded with cheap foreign goods, the cost of living falls, and you can live just as well on less money. You only lose if you were foolish enough to get deeply in debt, and now are less able to pay off your debt. (But "a fool and his money are soon parted" applies under all conditions.)
Automation and more effective tools in general are frequently an adequate defense against cheap labor pools.
Time is the final defense against cheap labor pools. Absent slavery (which has its own disadvantages), cheap labor is made possible by low living costs and widespread poverty. As cheap laborers bring in money they purchase more. Prices rise and they consider their time more valuable, so they charge more for their efforts (by various methods). Eventually, they are no longer cheap labor. "Problem" solved.
Long term, the absence of force and fraud is the greatest promoter of well-being, and the government is everywhere the most significant source of both.
Everybody is a consumer, and most people are also producers. Trade wars hurt all consumers, because trade wars are fought by governments using the tools of tariffs and prohibition, both of which raise prices.
"Globalization" -- free trade, i.e. freedom, applied everywhere -- means that the greatest efficiencies are allowed universally. That means the smallest waste of human effort, of human lives. Those who support protectionism have no problem wasting human lives.
Let's see. My church is located between a brothel and a crack house. Across the street is a dealer in stolen machine guns.
Can you say "terrorist"? I know they can.
Would you like to explain to me how being on an assembly line helps an integrated circuit design engineer?
An assembly line is not (generally) a place to see how things work, it's a place to see how they're made.
It's called "reasonable man", an aspect of common law.
Health food store sell DL-phenylalanine.
OK, I looked at the site in your sig. Of the ten reasons that "your brain is not a computer" there is a mixture of misunderstandings, irrelevancies, and falsehoods. The brain is very different from a common manufactured computer, it is an evolved biological computer with many peripherals, with all the oddities, advantages and disadvantages that implies. But it's still a computer of sorts.
Typical of the errors in the sig's article is the claim that the brain is analog and therefor not a computer; the claim is false and does not imply the conclusion.
When you start writing about "0.0000000000001%" and preposterous conditions hat there's no evidence for, you fall afoul of Occam's razor. Juries do not accept as possible that you were abducted by aliens whose lookalike robot robbed that bank.
When most people discuss good and bad (and in a slightly different context, good and evil), they almost always leave out the ESSENTIAL question, good for what? If the answer is humanity or some group of humans or just me, then the answer to "what is good" that religions provide is usually mediocre at best. If the answer to "Good for what" is "Good for god", then there is ample reason for any human to reject the morality based thereupon as irrelevant or hostile to his own life.
The more modern a religion is, the more information we have about how it came into being. Scientology is a well documented fraud. Mormon is older, and the documentation is a little less complete, but the conclusion is the same. Islam and Christianity are old enough that the evidence is sparse, but with internal contradictions and what archæology and reliable documents provide us, there's no reason to think that either is anything but manufactured fables interleaved with a biased retelling of actual events.
That perfectly explains the Thuggee and the Assassins. And numerous warrior cults, and cannibals.
The "poetry" aspect in Genesis is evidence of oral history. Stuff that's easy to remember gets remembered and passed on, and repetition is a memorization aid. Since oral history is notoriously unreliable, evidence of it is yet another clue to the bogus nature of the bible.
It isn't a productivity boost to spend multiple hours searching the internet to find out how to unscrew the new firefox to make it work like it used to. I shouldn't have to install an extension just so I can have a statusbar that doesn't work as well as the old one.
The new firefox is a delight. So many nifty things, so many things that work now that didn't work previously. And so many senseless changes that have to be worked around.
There's a Session Manager extension that works well.
The AwesomeBar is too aggressive. If I type "http://g" I don't want suggestions that include "http://www.g" and almost everything else that includes the letter g. The list is too long, takes too long to scroll through. Good idea, mediocre implementation.
Do you think before you post? Raising children well is enormously expensive. Save the money you would've spent on kids, save it and make it grow, retire rich.
The reason that people can live well on potatoes and eggs is that eggs are nutritionally rich (unlike potatoes).
Free, financial incentives, tax breaks, (government awarded) college credits, school control, foreign aid... This is all accomplished with tax money against the wishes of many people. That's totalitarian, and your saying it's nontotalitarian does make it so.