That does assume it goes off in the presence of random 2.4ghz signals, very specific encrypted watermark type codes within those signals could be a bit more targeted but then that is also hardly anything new.
I'll have to finish reading the paper. But this doesn't sound good...
"In this work, we leverage the fine-grained channel state information (CSI) that is readily available in low-cost WiFi devices to detect and identify suspicious objects hidden in baggage without intrusion (e.g., opening the bag)."
This is absolutely horrific. You are telling me that these idiots who've gone along with the NSA illegally monitoring our traffic can now use state backdoors to identify every bit of gold/silver/gun wealth and resistance across the country? Wifi is everywhere and *I* can get into half the systems using nothing but default credentials.
If you both think the trivially modified in flight news you receive via video and internet can be trusted more than anecdote and believe any platform should be deciding what is fake and real for you then you already have demonstrated you lack the required critical thinking skills to participate in politics. Nothing against you but you are probably calling healthy rational skepticism paranoia by this point and believing every plea to authority that falls in line with your confirmation bias.
If this represents you, please stop voting or spreading your political ideas. DON'T participate. I don't care what your actually political views are or if there are millions of you ready to raise me up as king and get my way on all my views. If your views aren't based on sound reason and logic it no longer matters what they are.
You'd be doing quite a bit better than that because your gelling agent is largely organic carbon that now won't be released back into the atmosphere (at least not quickly) not to mention the improvement the magnesite dust brings in.
More importantly, as I said we have no need to avoid trapping other gases (many of which are also problematic) with any efficiency as long as the process is simple, fast, and massively scalable. Most mining techniques are extremely inefficient in the manner you speak of, digging up and crushing hundreds of tons of material to get at ounces of their target material, yet they work so well we destroy and create mountains of material with them. The difference here is the mountains are the goal. This would work more like hydraulic mining methods that are so efficient in result and inefficient in the amount of material they move that they are largely outlawed.
My argument has been that we've thickened the atmosphere with all the CO2 added during the industrial revolution so sequestering atmosphere and therefore thinning it would result in a reduced concentration because we are no longer adding new CO2 at the rate we previously did. My thought was that using an organic gelling agent to trap atmosphere in foam and then storing somewhere cold and dry in layer after layer (insulting like the ice at the poles) might do the trick and be fairly inexpensive as well as scale. Trapping at sea level would increase concentration of heavy elements like CO2 without any fancy processes. The poles could be a good place to store it, the more you store the cooler the poles get and there is a massive amount of unutilized 3d space there. The inspiration being the gas trapped in polar ice core bubbles for thousands of years. As a benefit if we ever went "too far" or otherwise needed to adjust things it would be easy to release. Sure, it would slowly leak but you don't need to trap it forever.
I could be wrong on many of the details but the key point is this, CO2 is already concentrated in the atmosphere at greater concentration than organic life recycles it out and what we trap does not need to be in any way chemically isolated and pure.
Magnesite dust incorporated into the process (simply grind into fine particulate and mix into the stream of air used in foaming as one possibility) could improve the CO2 concentration in the trapped atmosphere improving the efficiency of the overall process.
If I'd realized someone was trying to solve this problem I could have helped out. I've been snapping spaghetti in this manner for as long as I can remember sans fancy rig.
I've argued we in the tech industry need to do it for a long time. It shouldn't look exactly like older professions like engineering, law, and medical because those industries are tied the established formal education. We have the power to ground airlines, shut down power grids, automate out co-workers, sell snake oil security, and skew research data. When we are faced with ethical dillemas we should know we can fall back on professional regulation to refuse on ethical grounds and our employers will lose a massive amount of face and business if they don't respect that.
That said, this also remains one of the few knowledge industries where it is still possible for a highly intelligent individual and dedicated individual who is totally impoverished to avoid bias and debt in academia and to not only learn enough to practice but even become a leader in our field with nothing but a low end computer and an internet connection. We will never eliminate the advantages of being born to privilege but this has always been one field where the odds are more even for someone who is underprivileged but the merit and raw capacity that defines the right to be at the top.
I'm sorry but you are simply making things up here. Panels have a warranty of 30 years? Which panels, from which manufacturer? Because panels do not all have the same warranty terms or specifications. Just like batteries panels degrade and lose capacity over time. A 1 kw panel might lose between 15-30% capacity over 10 years and since it is dark 12yrs each day and your solar panel was probably operating nowhere near peak for most of that time and also has poor efficiency in the first place that is likely enough to guarantee you need to replace your entire installation. Also, your doped panels may or may not be recyclable and doing so requires a boatload of energy (you don't just have to melt them, you have to burn out the impurities we added on purpose during manufacturing).
Solar is not the devil but it isn't a one size fits all answer either. Advocates who make crap up and cut corners to try to win the debate are the ones destroying the Earth not climate change deniers, climate change deniers are skeptical precisely because advocates make up so much bullshit trying to sell what they believe in.
Okay, prove it, pick a race and provide a fixed definition without resorting to subjective identification by oneself or others... 1. 2. 3 go.
You'll fail. There are things we tend to group with loose general and incorrect perceptions of the definition of a race that are real, things like national or regional origin and culture; as well as common highly visible traits like skin color, eye shape, dna ancestry, etc. None of these define a race and at this point the genetics and nationalities are so blended in our society that if they once did it no longer matters. The truth is we have sets of characteristics we tend to lump under race categories and people just go along with what everyone around them has said when they grew up.
Legally your race is defined by self-identification because we have no way to define it. Right now we play so fast and loose with that word that it is meaningless. There are certain medical factors that go along with genetic race but the utility of considering that is no different than screening for any of the millions of genetic illnesses that don't have a high correlation to racial identification. The DNA ancestry and culture angle is highly in congruent with the way most are defining these things. For example here in the states everyone who is black is treated like a former slave and those who are former slaves are that this point genetically as much or more like their slave owner ancestors than their slave ancestors and you can't from a genetic standpoint claim one more than the other. Almost every disadvantage associated with being one of them that can actually objectively be proven can be solved in a single generation by moving outside of neighborhoods that group others with the same label together, integrating with general american culture, and hard work. In other words, those problems have to do with neighborhoods and cultures and not genetic history.
"Being a man doesn't magically make your life harder or more oppressed."
It does when the burden of proof has shifted away from reasonable doubt if you are falsely accused of rape. It does if you are institutionally disadvantaged with equal qualifications for education admissions, scholarships, and employment. It certainly does when women who hate each other will band together like blood sisters on a war path if you accidentally said something that they've decided based on subjective and arbitrary criteria somehow slights women while men are instinctively loaners.
Men had the overt power in our society but the person in the top seat rarely is actually the most powerful person, the people who whisper in their ear and make them think things are their idea has the power and that was always women. It's like the "problem" of women in IT... women are being discriminated against because... survey after survey shows they think tech is boring? Why exactly do we need every group to match up with some diversity profile, if women tend to prefer to biology and men prefer computing... why is that so terrible? Men and women should on the whole be treated with equal respect and have equal opportunity but this isn't like race which is entirely artificial, men and women are biologically different and their gender roles were mostly defined by the elders of both genders over time.
Ancient alien lizard people leaders without a doubt. I'm pretty sure I saw them on doctor who so they must be real.
Do you know what happens if you embrace rather than argue with those who say "All lives matter" in response to the "black lives matter" issue? Suddenly your message resonates rather than alienates the majority of people in this country and you have an unstoppable united front on the issue of police militarizing and killing civilians without consequence. Solving that issue for "all lives" also solves it for those who happen to have a bit more resistance to a sun burn. Instead our leaders want to stir it up, make the issue about an emotional issue of race and keep people divided while they continue to militarize our police and drive us slowly toward more and more of a police state.
"99% of all solar panels (silicon based) don't contain any rare earth elements at all.... and if they would, why care?"
The panels have to replaced every decade or so and the biggest reason to care is foreign dependence. Silicon is rare enough... woah now... I don't mean as an element in nature, I mean as found in nature in a pure enough form to subsequently make wafers from.
"There are cheap and environmentally friendly battery options. We mostly do not use them because they take up a lot more space, but who cares? We have lots of free space."
I agree and said as much as well but it doesn't matter if nobody uses them.
"The materials do degrade and need replacement. I've personally seen the Halliburton truck taking a new turbine to Calpine. (I'm told it was built by Hitachi, IIRC? Can't remember.) Also, the stuff that has to be cleaned off the turbine before that is toxic. It includes nice stuff like Arsenic. They used to pressure wash the blades, put the resulting slurry into drums, and bury it off Butts Canyon rd. There is a superfund site there now. Today, they are instead building a toxic layer cake of dried accumulants and concrete, right next to the plant."
That puts you, literally, a lot closer to the problems with at least one site than me so I won't argue. But I will say that while the concentration is obviously impacted locally, overall, these are net zero contributions in that they come from the groundwater in the first place, the net result should be the same amount of arsenic, etc that was there to begin with. My understanding has been the mineral buildup is little different than your hot water pipes and can be pressure washed or just like your pipes dissolved off with some vinegar but eventually mechanical wear would be an issue. I mean eventually, it will all degrade if we are being literal, but the mean operation hours are going to be dramatically higher than solar and most of that equipment can be melted out and reformed with little loss because most of it is metal and most of the energy can come right from your geothermal heat source without need to convert to electricity. Solar panel output begins dropping immediately using up not only rare earth materials but relatively common materials that actually are far less common in the purity needed to make these kinds of cells and require a large amount of power to refine and produce wafers even from that level of purity.
"Developing it? It's been developed. You rarely see them because there's not a lot of profit to be made. Capitalism ruins everything."
There are still a lot of gains to be made here, maybe not so much in the actual science, but engineering and an economy of scale for equipment that could be present.
I don't think we are really that far apart on this, although it has been valuable getting insight from someone closer to a larger geothermal operation.
Feminism is not the belief that women should be treated equal to men. It is a term which defines itself as the movement for gender equality with a carefully chosen name from a group obsessed with words at the time, the name begs the question and equates promoting the interests of women as the same thing as gender equality.
Of course the movement runs into a bit of trouble in that most women have never wanted to be the browbeating asshole careerman or CEO they think women should be and most of the culture they fight against and propose as the evil "patriarchy" is actually the result of the matriarchy. So now the effort is largely about convincing women to not bond with or raise their children and to encourage brainwashing children to try to turn all our daughters into people who think this sort of lowlife bottom-dweller oppressor is someone to idolize.
Of course it is very hard to explain how the evil patriarchy didn't lock them all in mental asylums and begin executing them with their portrayal of the extreme situations where husbands were abusive as if they were commonly held and accepted events.
"Then as you get near retirement age, your responsibilities decline, and then are exposed to such media again nearly a half a century later you find that the same-old actually had changed and is promoting a life style and culture that you are not comfortable with and take it as a threatening message."
In my mid-30's I can already tell you the slippery slope is real. We compromise one small thing at a time, become comfortable with the change as it becomes the new norm and then the next step feels like a small change from normal. In some ways it is very real and threatening. You look at personal liberties, privacy and their extreme decline. You look at the extreme positions we pretended were true because we agreed with their overall message and realize that society actually believes those things. They really think there are neo-nazi's on every block just waiting to beat them if they are gay or black and women think there are rapists around every corner.
As a child in a small town in backwater Illinois people thought racism was bad and didn't much care what people did in the privacy of their own bedrooms, my grandparents exposed me to a plethora of programming with this as the heart of it's message showing over and over again the closed minded racist antagonist discriminating against the different. People made jokes and slurs, especially in mixed groups and the same guy they called a jew bastard in jest and in anger they'd literally fight and bleed for the same as their other friends. Today that is a sacred right reserved for comedians and you are told these people are evil racists with hate in their heart on par with Nazi's. What is worse is that when someone with warmth and friendliness in their heart, possibly even a deep grained respect for the historical traditions of native culture calls someone an "injun" and you call them out as evil and attack them telling them they are racist even if they don't know it... well that sort of attack is exactly what WILL lead to thousands of Klan members and neo-nazis.
In the US you are allowed to openly hate men if they are white just for being white and men who grew up in the same economic conditions with the same education, the same broken home, the same drugs in the streets. You can discriminate against them if equally qualified for employment or education. We hire staff in publicly traded companies dedicated to making sure that too many of them aren't too successful. Why? Because straight white men are the scapegoats, they have no real connection to troubles of the past, nor does the situation of any other group in the present have any connection to those who were troubled int he past but when anything doesn't go your way we can blame them. Currently we are spreading a widescale eugenics effort by telling white women they are racist if they don't sleep with black men and spreading the idea they all have giant penises alongside spreading the idea that being cuckolded by black men is something sexy. Why ship people off to gas chambers when you can deny them education, employment, and encourage widespread social acceptance of breeding them out? Either way, you've got the populace good with hate and you can prop up your dictatorship on it just like hitler and the nazi party.
Definite note though, a couple geology oriented courses in college a fair while back aside I am certainly no geologist. Don't go drilling randomly in supervolcanos on my say so!
I was waiting for someone to bring up the risk of it blowing. We don't actually have much reason to think that would happen though, we are just incredibly afraid of it. It is quite possible the (relatively speaking) tiny trickle of heat extracted might relieve the pressure slowly and avert the forthcoming disaster.
Solar requires panels and expensive storage technologies that utilize rare earth materials both the storage and the panels degrade over time. Geothermal is working just fine in other nations, the only thing holding it back here is that there is no money behind the end game because while some forms need cleaned and a pipe replaced here and there the materials don't dramatically degrade and need replacement. Even the battery technology for solar could be dramatically more robust if you stop trying to use modern energy dense materials and use the fact that you can bury a massive and heavy battery storage with little or no concern about those factors. Yes you need more raw materials but they are common materials.
It might not be plug and play the way solar electric is but you can actually build solar heat collectors in the back yard as well. The reason you rarely see it vs heat pipes for water heating (although you can certainly do home cooling on the same technology) is that nobody is putting serious effort into developing the technology. You can make heat directing parabolas all day long with a simple mold, a bit of fiberglass, and a sheet of mylar film (you could even put together a set of 3d printable tiles that you use to provide the same for a concrete mold). Store the heat in a salt tank with a number of solid rock pillars at the core to add thermal mass and utilize the ridiculously efficient insulating ceramic blankets that are so effective they form the basis of DIY liquid nitrogen generators and so cheap they are used for $100 diy forges, drip water onto a plate to generate steam and feed the output into a modified generator. The beauty of the system is that you are talking about a couple grand to build it out if you have the skills and it is cheap to expand. You could even make it modular. A little extra thought and energy needs to be utilized to make sure you aren't wasting loads of potable water of course.
Taking that from a backyard project an engineer could do with a handy machine shop, an EE buddy, and a mechanic buddy into something most DIYers could build in a weekend would take a lot of effort and likely wouldn't include much profit in the end.
In the end we can make any of these things work and for a lot less than we've spent on colliders and fusion projects too because the challenges are purely engineering and not theoretical sciences, but we have a lot more three dimensional space and naturally concentrated heat inside the earth than we have extra surface to cover with panels.
The systems you mention with pipes, in most places you could easily power entire homes with them if you want a more distributed or a supplemental solution. If the state/city invested in the equipment to drill and place deep loops you could sink a hell of a lot more energy in vertical space that way. The big cost is mostly the drilling and paying someone to drill you a well or even renting equipment to drill a well is dramatically more expensive than the wear and tear cost and cost of operation for the equipment and labor. These systems aren't viable everywhere but they are viable through most of the US and don't require anything on the roof to get trashed by hail damage.
These days we all have dozens of little subscriptions for this and that nickel and diming us. You sign up for a new movie thing, cool, you remember to use it the first month, forget you have it the second, etc. You could easily find yourself having remembered to use the thing 3 times 8 months down the line. And of course the most important thing to remember is that the good movies all come out in a cluster during about 3 months of the year... it isn't like you are going to start going to the movies just for the sake of doing it. This fact alone should allow them to offer a much lower price vs once a month.
It isn't like they are the only ones using this model to make money, your ISP, cell phone provider, cable provider, and many many others are using the same logic except they generally crank it up to max in order to milk higher profit not just enough to operate and net a tidy profit.
The US has a massive source of geothermal energy to pump into the grid, yellowstone national park. Good luck getting the environmentalists who want to save the earth to go along with exploiting it. Or the existing power companies to not throw a fit if free federally funded power from federal lands slashes their profits. What am I thinking? Knowing our country taxes would be raised on the middle class to offset the cost and the power companies would get to keep the savings as additional profits.
"Even fox news has real journalists and reporters."
The credibility of CNN is on par with Fox News these days, which is very sad. Gone are the days where very credible sounding straw men for right/conservative sides of the coin are presented alongside solid reasoning for left spin corporatism (as opposed to fox right spin corporatism) in order to make the better educated believe they were presented reasonably unbiased information and reached their own conclusion.
Now it isn't much different than Fox, everything a plea to emotion designed to stir up the rapid choir that is their base. Queue another fake Hitler youth style camp from the border or pronouncement of Trump as a dictator before he was even sworn in. Sorry, that crap is no better than the birther nonsense.
That is where the same party keeping us carefully divided comes in. The same set of rules don't make sense for publically vs privately traded companies, there should probably be some kind of numeric factor as well but I wouldn't claim to know where to put the mark.
The R's make sense to people like you and people in small towns because the "free market" and trickle down ideas alongside the damage costs of regulation cause can be seen and are very pronounced there. Logically it seems like the same thing should scale.
The D's just push for policies that ignore these groups on the basis of the large employers and cities being a 51% majority, pretending that means it's okay to ignore the rest.
We can't ignore that massive entities impact too many employees and citizens with their policies to be allowed to be given the same privileges as small ones any more than we can ignore that smaller entities are basically synonymous with their owners and are incorporated mostly for liability protection which we sorely need to encourage new business in our country.
The split and being forced to choose down the line which amendments to back and which spin to support is just too elegant for me not to think of the two major parties as different sides of the same coin. Divide and conquer. You just can't have a logical argument and come together if you can't admit when the other side makes a good argument.
The goal for all of us should not be to win the debate, that just means winning the crowd, the goal should be to debate in a sincere manner based on solid rationale so the best possible answer wins the debate.
"2. Believing the two main parties were nearly as equal as far as their lives went. Many of those stayed home. Some might have voted for Trump because well your back to 1. This is false, but yah, we are here. Our voter participation is crap. I'd like to say those people are getting a wakeup call, but yah, not seeing it."
Hillary Clinton collaborated with the democratic party to try to rig the primary. Okay, she denies active collusion, even though they were systematically funneling money from state funds to her campaign but she knew about it before the DNC vote and there is only one credible and ethical response to finding out you've won, especially a close race, with a stacked deck. Hillary Clinton had zero moral and political capital after this. You can't just let out a delighted giggle and take the ill gotten gains anyway and think you are going to win the election.
The DNC was hosted by a major bank who contributed to her campaign. The massive protest outside the DNC was barely covered, instead CNN and friends just kept saying over and over again how Sanders needs to get his people on a leash. Oh and justification that "of course they were pushing for the real democrat." Last I checked Sanders was by far and away more left than Hillary ever was regardless of what he declared.
During her debates with Trump she admitted that what she admired about Lincoln wasn't freeing slaves it was the way he acted in a duplicitous and manipulative manner to get his way.
I'm sorry but if you are choosing between a candidate who is pumping money into the oil industry and one who supports the copyright and tech cartels that IS all just one party with two spins.
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That does assume it goes off in the presence of random 2.4ghz signals, very specific encrypted watermark type codes within those signals could be a bit more targeted but then that is also hardly anything new.
I'll have to finish reading the paper. But this doesn't sound good...
"In this work,
we leverage the fine-grained channel state information (CSI)
that is readily available in low-cost WiFi devices to detect
and identify suspicious objects hidden in baggage without
intrusion (e.g., opening the bag)."
This is absolutely horrific. You are telling me that these idiots who've gone along with the NSA illegally monitoring our traffic can now use state backdoors to identify every bit of gold/silver/gun wealth and resistance across the country? Wifi is everywhere and *I* can get into half the systems using nothing but default credentials.
If you both think the trivially modified in flight news you receive via video and internet can be trusted more than anecdote and believe any platform should be deciding what is fake and real for you then you already have demonstrated you lack the required critical thinking skills to participate in politics. Nothing against you but you are probably calling healthy rational skepticism paranoia by this point and believing every plea to authority that falls in line with your confirmation bias.
If this represents you, please stop voting or spreading your political ideas. DON'T participate. I don't care what your actually political views are or if there are millions of you ready to raise me up as king and get my way on all my views. If your views aren't based on sound reason and logic it no longer matters what they are.
You'd be doing quite a bit better than that because your gelling agent is largely organic carbon that now won't be released back into the atmosphere (at least not quickly) not to mention the improvement the magnesite dust brings in.
More importantly, as I said we have no need to avoid trapping other gases (many of which are also problematic) with any efficiency as long as the process is simple, fast, and massively scalable. Most mining techniques are extremely inefficient in the manner you speak of, digging up and crushing hundreds of tons of material to get at ounces of their target material, yet they work so well we destroy and create mountains of material with them. The difference here is the mountains are the goal. This would work more like hydraulic mining methods that are so efficient in result and inefficient in the amount of material they move that they are largely outlawed.
My argument has been that we've thickened the atmosphere with all the CO2 added during the industrial revolution so sequestering atmosphere and therefore thinning it would result in a reduced concentration because we are no longer adding new CO2 at the rate we previously did. My thought was that using an organic gelling agent to trap atmosphere in foam and then storing somewhere cold and dry in layer after layer (insulting like the ice at the poles) might do the trick and be fairly inexpensive as well as scale. Trapping at sea level would increase concentration of heavy elements like CO2 without any fancy processes. The poles could be a good place to store it, the more you store the cooler the poles get and there is a massive amount of unutilized 3d space there. The inspiration being the gas trapped in polar ice core bubbles for thousands of years. As a benefit if we ever went "too far" or otherwise needed to adjust things it would be easy to release. Sure, it would slowly leak but you don't need to trap it forever.
I could be wrong on many of the details but the key point is this, CO2 is already concentrated in the atmosphere at greater concentration than organic life recycles it out and what we trap does not need to be in any way chemically isolated and pure.
Magnesite dust incorporated into the process (simply grind into fine particulate and mix into the stream of air used in foaming as one possibility) could improve the CO2 concentration in the trapped atmosphere improving the efficiency of the overall process.
If I'd realized someone was trying to solve this problem I could have helped out. I've been snapping spaghetti in this manner for as long as I can remember sans fancy rig.
I've argued we in the tech industry need to do it for a long time. It shouldn't look exactly like older professions like engineering, law, and medical because those industries are tied the established formal education. We have the power to ground airlines, shut down power grids, automate out co-workers, sell snake oil security, and skew research data. When we are faced with ethical dillemas we should know we can fall back on professional regulation to refuse on ethical grounds and our employers will lose a massive amount of face and business if they don't respect that.
That said, this also remains one of the few knowledge industries where it is still possible for a highly intelligent individual and dedicated individual who is totally impoverished to avoid bias and debt in academia and to not only learn enough to practice but even become a leader in our field with nothing but a low end computer and an internet connection. We will never eliminate the advantages of being born to privilege but this has always been one field where the odds are more even for someone who is underprivileged but the merit and raw capacity that defines the right to be at the top.
I'm sorry but you are simply making things up here. Panels have a warranty of 30 years? Which panels, from which manufacturer? Because panels do not all have the same warranty terms or specifications. Just like batteries panels degrade and lose capacity over time. A 1 kw panel might lose between 15-30% capacity over 10 years and since it is dark 12yrs each day and your solar panel was probably operating nowhere near peak for most of that time and also has poor efficiency in the first place that is likely enough to guarantee you need to replace your entire installation. Also, your doped panels may or may not be recyclable and doing so requires a boatload of energy (you don't just have to melt them, you have to burn out the impurities we added on purpose during manufacturing).
Solar is not the devil but it isn't a one size fits all answer either. Advocates who make crap up and cut corners to try to win the debate are the ones destroying the Earth not climate change deniers, climate change deniers are skeptical precisely because advocates make up so much bullshit trying to sell what they believe in.
Okay, prove it, pick a race and provide a fixed definition without resorting to subjective identification by oneself or others... 1. 2. 3 go.
You'll fail. There are things we tend to group with loose general and incorrect perceptions of the definition of a race that are real, things like national or regional origin and culture; as well as common highly visible traits like skin color, eye shape, dna ancestry, etc. None of these define a race and at this point the genetics and nationalities are so blended in our society that if they once did it no longer matters. The truth is we have sets of characteristics we tend to lump under race categories and people just go along with what everyone around them has said when they grew up.
Legally your race is defined by self-identification because we have no way to define it. Right now we play so fast and loose with that word that it is meaningless. There are certain medical factors that go along with genetic race but the utility of considering that is no different than screening for any of the millions of genetic illnesses that don't have a high correlation to racial identification. The DNA ancestry and culture angle is highly in congruent with the way most are defining these things. For example here in the states everyone who is black is treated like a former slave and those who are former slaves are that this point genetically as much or more like their slave owner ancestors than their slave ancestors and you can't from a genetic standpoint claim one more than the other. Almost every disadvantage associated with being one of them that can actually objectively be proven can be solved in a single generation by moving outside of neighborhoods that group others with the same label together, integrating with general american culture, and hard work. In other words, those problems have to do with neighborhoods and cultures and not genetic history.
"Being a man doesn't magically make your life harder or more oppressed."
It does when the burden of proof has shifted away from reasonable doubt if you are falsely accused of rape. It does if you are institutionally disadvantaged with equal qualifications for education admissions, scholarships, and employment. It certainly does when women who hate each other will band together like blood sisters on a war path if you accidentally said something that they've decided based on subjective and arbitrary criteria somehow slights women while men are instinctively loaners.
Men had the overt power in our society but the person in the top seat rarely is actually the most powerful person, the people who whisper in their ear and make them think things are their idea has the power and that was always women. It's like the "problem" of women in IT... women are being discriminated against because... survey after survey shows they think tech is boring? Why exactly do we need every group to match up with some diversity profile, if women tend to prefer to biology and men prefer computing... why is that so terrible? Men and women should on the whole be treated with equal respect and have equal opportunity but this isn't like race which is entirely artificial, men and women are biologically different and their gender roles were mostly defined by the elders of both genders over time.
Ancient alien lizard people leaders without a doubt. I'm pretty sure I saw them on doctor who so they must be real.
Do you know what happens if you embrace rather than argue with those who say "All lives matter" in response to the "black lives matter" issue? Suddenly your message resonates rather than alienates the majority of people in this country and you have an unstoppable united front on the issue of police militarizing and killing civilians without consequence. Solving that issue for "all lives" also solves it for those who happen to have a bit more resistance to a sun burn. Instead our leaders want to stir it up, make the issue about an emotional issue of race and keep people divided while they continue to militarize our police and drive us slowly toward more and more of a police state.
"99% of all solar panels (silicon based) don't contain any rare earth elements at all .... and if they would, why care?"
The panels have to replaced every decade or so and the biggest reason to care is foreign dependence. Silicon is rare enough... woah now... I don't mean as an element in nature, I mean as found in nature in a pure enough form to subsequently make wafers from.
"There are cheap and environmentally friendly battery options. We mostly do not use them because they take up a lot more space, but who cares? We have lots of free space."
I agree and said as much as well but it doesn't matter if nobody uses them.
"The materials do degrade and need replacement. I've personally seen the Halliburton truck taking a new turbine to Calpine. (I'm told it was built by Hitachi, IIRC? Can't remember.) Also, the stuff that has to be cleaned off the turbine before that is toxic. It includes nice stuff like Arsenic. They used to pressure wash the blades, put the resulting slurry into drums, and bury it off Butts Canyon rd. There is a superfund site there now. Today, they are instead building a toxic layer cake of dried accumulants and concrete, right next to the plant."
That puts you, literally, a lot closer to the problems with at least one site than me so I won't argue. But I will say that while the concentration is obviously impacted locally, overall, these are net zero contributions in that they come from the groundwater in the first place, the net result should be the same amount of arsenic, etc that was there to begin with. My understanding has been the mineral buildup is little different than your hot water pipes and can be pressure washed or just like your pipes dissolved off with some vinegar but eventually mechanical wear would be an issue. I mean eventually, it will all degrade if we are being literal, but the mean operation hours are going to be dramatically higher than solar and most of that equipment can be melted out and reformed with little loss because most of it is metal and most of the energy can come right from your geothermal heat source without need to convert to electricity. Solar panel output begins dropping immediately using up not only rare earth materials but relatively common materials that actually are far less common in the purity needed to make these kinds of cells and require a large amount of power to refine and produce wafers even from that level of purity.
"Developing it? It's been developed. You rarely see them because there's not a lot of profit to be made. Capitalism ruins everything."
There are still a lot of gains to be made here, maybe not so much in the actual science, but engineering and an economy of scale for equipment that could be present.
I don't think we are really that far apart on this, although it has been valuable getting insight from someone closer to a larger geothermal operation.
Feminism is not the belief that women should be treated equal to men. It is a term which defines itself as the movement for gender equality with a carefully chosen name from a group obsessed with words at the time, the name begs the question and equates promoting the interests of women as the same thing as gender equality.
Of course the movement runs into a bit of trouble in that most women have never wanted to be the browbeating asshole careerman or CEO they think women should be and most of the culture they fight against and propose as the evil "patriarchy" is actually the result of the matriarchy. So now the effort is largely about convincing women to not bond with or raise their children and to encourage brainwashing children to try to turn all our daughters into people who think this sort of lowlife bottom-dweller oppressor is someone to idolize.
Of course it is very hard to explain how the evil patriarchy didn't lock them all in mental asylums and begin executing them with their portrayal of the extreme situations where husbands were abusive as if they were commonly held and accepted events.
"Then as you get near retirement age, your responsibilities decline, and then are exposed to such media again nearly a half a century later you find that the same-old actually had changed and is promoting a life style and culture that you are not comfortable with and take it as a threatening message."
In my mid-30's I can already tell you the slippery slope is real. We compromise one small thing at a time, become comfortable with the change as it becomes the new norm and then the next step feels like a small change from normal. In some ways it is very real and threatening. You look at personal liberties, privacy and their extreme decline. You look at the extreme positions we pretended were true because we agreed with their overall message and realize that society actually believes those things. They really think there are neo-nazi's on every block just waiting to beat them if they are gay or black and women think there are rapists around every corner.
As a child in a small town in backwater Illinois people thought racism was bad and didn't much care what people did in the privacy of their own bedrooms, my grandparents exposed me to a plethora of programming with this as the heart of it's message showing over and over again the closed minded racist antagonist discriminating against the different. People made jokes and slurs, especially in mixed groups and the same guy they called a jew bastard in jest and in anger they'd literally fight and bleed for the same as their other friends. Today that is a sacred right reserved for comedians and you are told these people are evil racists with hate in their heart on par with Nazi's. What is worse is that when someone with warmth and friendliness in their heart, possibly even a deep grained respect for the historical traditions of native culture calls someone an "injun" and you call them out as evil and attack them telling them they are racist even if they don't know it... well that sort of attack is exactly what WILL lead to thousands of Klan members and neo-nazis.
In the US you are allowed to openly hate men if they are white just for being white and men who grew up in the same economic conditions with the same education, the same broken home, the same drugs in the streets. You can discriminate against them if equally qualified for employment or education. We hire staff in publicly traded companies dedicated to making sure that too many of them aren't too successful. Why? Because straight white men are the scapegoats, they have no real connection to troubles of the past, nor does the situation of any other group in the present have any connection to those who were troubled int he past but when anything doesn't go your way we can blame them. Currently we are spreading a widescale eugenics effort by telling white women they are racist if they don't sleep with black men and spreading the idea they all have giant penises alongside spreading the idea that being cuckolded by black men is something sexy. Why ship people off to gas chambers when you can deny them education, employment, and encourage widespread social acceptance of breeding them out? Either way, you've got the populace good with hate and you can prop up your dictatorship on it just like hitler and the nazi party.
Definite note though, a couple geology oriented courses in college a fair while back aside I am certainly no geologist. Don't go drilling randomly in supervolcanos on my say so!
I was waiting for someone to bring up the risk of it blowing. We don't actually have much reason to think that would happen though, we are just incredibly afraid of it. It is quite possible the (relatively speaking) tiny trickle of heat extracted might relieve the pressure slowly and avert the forthcoming disaster.
Solar requires panels and expensive storage technologies that utilize rare earth materials both the storage and the panels degrade over time. Geothermal is working just fine in other nations, the only thing holding it back here is that there is no money behind the end game because while some forms need cleaned and a pipe replaced here and there the materials don't dramatically degrade and need replacement. Even the battery technology for solar could be dramatically more robust if you stop trying to use modern energy dense materials and use the fact that you can bury a massive and heavy battery storage with little or no concern about those factors. Yes you need more raw materials but they are common materials.
It might not be plug and play the way solar electric is but you can actually build solar heat collectors in the back yard as well. The reason you rarely see it vs heat pipes for water heating (although you can certainly do home cooling on the same technology) is that nobody is putting serious effort into developing the technology. You can make heat directing parabolas all day long with a simple mold, a bit of fiberglass, and a sheet of mylar film (you could even put together a set of 3d printable tiles that you use to provide the same for a concrete mold). Store the heat in a salt tank with a number of solid rock pillars at the core to add thermal mass and utilize the ridiculously efficient insulating ceramic blankets that are so effective they form the basis of DIY liquid nitrogen generators and so cheap they are used for $100 diy forges, drip water onto a plate to generate steam and feed the output into a modified generator. The beauty of the system is that you are talking about a couple grand to build it out if you have the skills and it is cheap to expand. You could even make it modular. A little extra thought and energy needs to be utilized to make sure you aren't wasting loads of potable water of course.
Taking that from a backyard project an engineer could do with a handy machine shop, an EE buddy, and a mechanic buddy into something most DIYers could build in a weekend would take a lot of effort and likely wouldn't include much profit in the end.
In the end we can make any of these things work and for a lot less than we've spent on colliders and fusion projects too because the challenges are purely engineering and not theoretical sciences, but we have a lot more three dimensional space and naturally concentrated heat inside the earth than we have extra surface to cover with panels.
The systems you mention with pipes, in most places you could easily power entire homes with them if you want a more distributed or a supplemental solution. If the state/city invested in the equipment to drill and place deep loops you could sink a hell of a lot more energy in vertical space that way. The big cost is mostly the drilling and paying someone to drill you a well or even renting equipment to drill a well is dramatically more expensive than the wear and tear cost and cost of operation for the equipment and labor. These systems aren't viable everywhere but they are viable through most of the US and don't require anything on the roof to get trashed by hail damage.
These days we all have dozens of little subscriptions for this and that nickel and diming us. You sign up for a new movie thing, cool, you remember to use it the first month, forget you have it the second, etc. You could easily find yourself having remembered to use the thing 3 times 8 months down the line. And of course the most important thing to remember is that the good movies all come out in a cluster during about 3 months of the year... it isn't like you are going to start going to the movies just for the sake of doing it. This fact alone should allow them to offer a much lower price vs once a month.
It isn't like they are the only ones using this model to make money, your ISP, cell phone provider, cable provider, and many many others are using the same logic except they generally crank it up to max in order to milk higher profit not just enough to operate and net a tidy profit.
The US has a massive source of geothermal energy to pump into the grid, yellowstone national park. Good luck getting the environmentalists who want to save the earth to go along with exploiting it. Or the existing power companies to not throw a fit if free federally funded power from federal lands slashes their profits. What am I thinking? Knowing our country taxes would be raised on the middle class to offset the cost and the power companies would get to keep the savings as additional profits.
"Even fox news has real journalists and reporters."
The credibility of CNN is on par with Fox News these days, which is very sad. Gone are the days where very credible sounding straw men for right/conservative sides of the coin are presented alongside solid reasoning for left spin corporatism (as opposed to fox right spin corporatism) in order to make the better educated believe they were presented reasonably unbiased information and reached their own conclusion.
Now it isn't much different than Fox, everything a plea to emotion designed to stir up the rapid choir that is their base. Queue another fake Hitler youth style camp from the border or pronouncement of Trump as a dictator before he was even sworn in. Sorry, that crap is no better than the birther nonsense.
That is where the same party keeping us carefully divided comes in. The same set of rules don't make sense for publically vs privately traded companies, there should probably be some kind of numeric factor as well but I wouldn't claim to know where to put the mark.
The R's make sense to people like you and people in small towns because the "free market" and trickle down ideas alongside the damage costs of regulation cause can be seen and are very pronounced there. Logically it seems like the same thing should scale.
The D's just push for policies that ignore these groups on the basis of the large employers and cities being a 51% majority, pretending that means it's okay to ignore the rest.
We can't ignore that massive entities impact too many employees and citizens with their policies to be allowed to be given the same privileges as small ones any more than we can ignore that smaller entities are basically synonymous with their owners and are incorporated mostly for liability protection which we sorely need to encourage new business in our country.
The split and being forced to choose down the line which amendments to back and which spin to support is just too elegant for me not to think of the two major parties as different sides of the same coin. Divide and conquer. You just can't have a logical argument and come together if you can't admit when the other side makes a good argument.
The goal for all of us should not be to win the debate, that just means winning the crowd, the goal should be to debate in a sincere manner based on solid rationale so the best possible answer wins the debate.
"2. Believing the two main parties were nearly as equal as far as their lives went. Many of those stayed home. Some might have voted for Trump because well your back to 1. This is false, but yah, we are here. Our voter participation is crap. I'd like to say those people are getting a wakeup call, but yah, not seeing it."
Hillary Clinton collaborated with the democratic party to try to rig the primary. Okay, she denies active collusion, even though they were systematically funneling money from state funds to her campaign but she knew about it before the DNC vote and there is only one credible and ethical response to finding out you've won, especially a close race, with a stacked deck. Hillary Clinton had zero moral and political capital after this. You can't just let out a delighted giggle and take the ill gotten gains anyway and think you are going to win the election.
The DNC was hosted by a major bank who contributed to her campaign. The massive protest outside the DNC was barely covered, instead CNN and friends just kept saying over and over again how Sanders needs to get his people on a leash. Oh and justification that "of course they were pushing for the real democrat." Last I checked Sanders was by far and away more left than Hillary ever was regardless of what he declared.
During her debates with Trump she admitted that what she admired about Lincoln wasn't freeing slaves it was the way he acted in a duplicitous and manipulative manner to get his way.
I'm sorry but if you are choosing between a candidate who is pumping money into the oil industry and one who supports the copyright and tech cartels that IS all just one party with two spins.
So he lays out a logical argument and all you have is name calling?