A cloaked sith lord sits in an ominous rotating chair aboard the google-star, as he reads the law suit: "Excellent, everything is going precisely as planned. Ready my ship commander."
It's precisely this sort of dominion-over-nature mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. The (annoyingly American) idea that we can solve any problem by simply throwing enough money and ingenuity at it needs to be extinguished, and fast. If we can't even figure out the precise extent of the damage we've already done to our ailingplanet, I shudder to think what nth-order unseen repercussions would result from reducing the level of solar radiation reaching the atmosphere by any meaningful amount. This "fix" is a complete nonstarter and every moment we waste discussing it as if it were a serious option just digs us further into the already deep hole we're in.
Here's the deal, in case you haven't been paying attention. Since about the time that our ancestors figured out how to grow crops and build cities we, as a species, have been living by modifying our environment. Since the beginning of civilization, humans have existed by modifying their environments substantially. This means building dams to irrigate land, draining swamps, clearing forests (either for cropland or for grazing land). It's amazing how relentlessly this process has continued with very few reversals until you realize that its continuation is literally a matter of life and death. Even during the Dark Ages, the land under cultivation in Europe is said to have doubled and to have moved into more intensive farming.
Of course, things really started heating up when we figured out how to burn coal and make it do work in the 19th century and then in the 20th century started using antibiotics, pesticides and effective chemical fertilizers. These are the technologies that have allowed us to largely escape starvation and have allowed our population to increase to 6 billion or so. If you want to give up our dominion over nature, that's fine, but realize we'd have to kill off billions of people to cut the population down to 100 million or so and give up such things as indoor pluming and electric light. This isn't a future I want, so I, for one, will continue doing my best to extend our dominion over nature.
Since we can predict with absolute certainty what the weather of the Earth is going to be 100 years from now (latest IPCC report), why can't we accurately predict the weather 10 days from now? Unless maybe we can't predict the weather 100 years from now. Hmmm.
You're confusing climate and weather. I can tell you from my observations of the climate that it will be hot and sunny in Sacramento on July 18 2007, but I can't tell you if it will be 90 or 115. Climate prediction is about determining the range of temperatures (or amounts of cloud cover, precipitation, etc.) that weather forecasts will fall into, not about determining the temperature on a specific day. People who have made far more extensive and more detailed observations of the climate have observed that temperatures are increasing and that this seems to be related to increasing levels of atmospheric CO2. Beyond just these empirical observations, they have identified an experimentally verified mechanism by which increased CO2 levels should increase temperatures and have created detailed models of this mechanism operating as part of the complex system of the atmosphere. These models predict that the climate in most places on earth should get warmer. I don't see why inaccurate short term forecasting should be much of a problem. You're trying to solve different types of problems, which yield to different analysis techniques.
I am not an economist but for me, in real terms, the price of a kilo of rice seems to be a universal index.
What a Purchasing Power Parity exchange rate is trying to do is to account for the fact that goods, especially locally produced ones, and services are cheaper in some countries than others, which distorts the nominal exchange rates. For example, it is much cheaper to have a tooth removed in Mexico than in the U.S. This variation in prices means that living standards are higher in places where things are cheap than would be suggested by nominal exchange rates.
The ideal way to calculate such an index would be to sample the prices of a broad array of goods and services. However, this is expensive, much more expensive than finding how much one comodity costs.
An iPod is a terrible basis for such an index because it is produced in one location then sent around the world where it (presumably) wholesales for about the same price. The varriation is a measure of distribution costs and taxes and should closely reflect nominal exchange rates. In fact, because the U.S. has low sales taxes (and no VAT) and very efficient distribution networks, the index should always show that the U.S. has lower prices and that the dollar is undervalued.
Rice is better than an iPod because it is locally produced in a bunch of places. However, it isn't very labor intensive to produce and is probably more of a measure of agricultural productivity, agricultrual subsidy policies and the quality of a country's distribution networks than a true measure of how far money will go there. For example, I would expect Japan, which has high rice prices and a protected rice market would appear to have a very overvalued currency under this measure.
The Big Mac includes a broader variety of goods and services. Since it involves a pretty wide variety of inputs, you get some idea of overall agricultrual productivity, as well as some idea of how costly manufacturing is (the bread, special sauce etc). It also has a large labor component, which is a gauge of how expensive labor is in that country. It is definitely an imperfect index, but it is remarkably clever and nearly as accurate in predicting currency moves as a properly calculated index.
To put the range of this weapon in U.S. centric perspective, a ship armed with one of these guns off the Pacific coast could hit targets as far inland as Reno, NV. One off the Atlantic coast could hit Pittsburgh, PA. That's pretty darn impressive.
It lists California as 10.2%, but the income taxes are 9.3% over 40k, sales taxes are 8.25%, and property taxes are about 4-5% on avg. That's ~20% (the overlap)
Uh, property taxes in California are capped at 1% of the assessed value plus the amount needed to pay off county bonds (which means 1.25% is typical in a high tax location) and the assessed value can only increase at 2% per year, which means most people pay FAR UNDER 1% in property taxes. Income taxes in California are very progressive, which means that while the tax rates on earnings over 40K (for a single person) is high, the rate is very low on the first 30K you make, so the average works out to be pretty reasonable. If you are single in CA and make 50K/year, you pay 5.2% in income taxes, which isn't that bad. Similarly, the actual sales tax rate is lower than you suggest because it doesn't cover food or housing, which are pretty big parts of your income. Unless you have a very high income, taxes in California are less than what you would pay in most other states since taxes are about average and a greater share are collected from the rich.
You've just done a great job demonstrating why relative wealth in more important than absolute wealth. A 1200 ft^2 house is a big 2/2 or a small 3/2 and is larger than the average house in the U.S. built in the 1950's. 50 years ago, a house of that size would have been considered solidly middle class and adequate for 2 adults and 4 kids.
That being said, its shocking how much money some people make. All the real gains in wealth in the past 10 years have gone to the top 1/10th of one percent of the population. I have the "interesting" fortune in living in a community populated by these folks (many of whom still insist that they're middle class as they climb out of the Porsche Cayennes). It's a shame that as a slob making under $100k/year I'm barely getting by (paying for my wife's grad school is pretty painful).
The whole point of the article is that this element has a lifespan on the order of seconds, not milliseconds, which means that you can do chemistry and other fun things with them. But, really, people do this for two reasons: 1) to test the theories that predict a set of very heavy elements that are nearly stable and 2) because they can.
However, the fact that nobody's written an extfs driver suggests to me that either it's too Windows-oriented, or the support is incomplete.
They have, see http://www.fs-driver.org/. I seriously considered using it for an external drive that is usually connected to my Linux file server, but that I sometimes use with my laptop when I need to copy a couple hundred gigs of data from another location. However, I ended up choosing FAT-32 because I can connect it to just about any computer and be fairly sure of it working.
I use both SolidWorks and AutoCAD as appropriate. 3d parametric modeling is great for objects that are 3d and need exact representation. However, it sucks for drawing cables, designing 2D parts and laying out silkscreen patterns. For these applications I use AutoCAD (or the AutoCAD clone that now ships with SolidWorks) because it's faster and it makes it easier to display necessary information. Additionally, everyone can read ACAD drawings, while many shops have difficulty with 3d formats.
The other place where AutoCAD comes in handy is when you want to graphically solve a design problem. There are a bunch of hand drafting tricks that also work with ACAD, but don't work well with 3d packages.
The dollar being worth less and things costing more are exactly the same phenomenon. The value of the metals did not inherently increase.
The value of metals DID increase relative to other commodities. So the parent post is right to say that it is a combination of a general decline in the value of the Dollar and an increase in the price of Zinc and Copper.
There are plenty of entry level jobs available, but you have to work to get them. If you've been looking for work for 2 years then you either (a)haven't been trying very hard, (b)do really badly in interviews/have a really poorly assembled resume (c) you are in an area without jobs (d) have some other factor preventing you from getting a job (you just got out of prison, for example).
If you aren't spending 2-3 hours per day looking for a job then you aren't trying very hard. This doesn't just mean responding to want-ads, this means looking up companies who might want to hire you, finding the person who makes the decisions and convincing him you're the best thing since sliced bread. If you aren't an extrovert, and I'm not, it sucks, but it works.
To tell if your resume is ok, have a bunch of people look it over and take their suggestions to heart. Even a spelling error can cost you a job, so make sure it is good. Also, talk to your local unemployment office. In most places they have free resmue writing classes that can teach you how to improve your resumes. Also, are you sending good cover letters to the jobs you want to apply for? Doing this well is very important because lots of people suck at it and it can cause you to rise above other more qualified candidates
As for the other factors, you should be able to figure it out on your own.
Also, get a job hunting book. The Dummies series is good. I also like "What Color is Your Parachute," which advocates methods of finding a job that you might not have thought of.
Interestingly, these books, especially the top suggestions, are mostly focused on a particular strand of Christianity too. Most of these books are from authors of a strong Calvinist bent (all of the first 10, for example) or from authors who are are contriversial in Calvinist circles (Brian D. McLaren).
Oddly, I own 4 of the unsuggestions as well as everything Douglas Adams has written (yes, including last chance to see)
Industrial parts are bought by specification, not by brand name. A product design engineer might call for an M8x50 bolt, a 4.7K ohm 0.25 watt resistor, a quarter-turn ball valve with 22mm. compression fittings, an NPN transistor with a gain of 50 in a TO3 package or a 15x40mm. ball-bearing.
I take it that you've never actually been involved in manufacturing. I can assure you that who makes a part has a great deal to do with weather it actually meets the specification reliably. Most companies have lists of approved vendors for each part, have to qualify a new manufacturer for any given part. The more complex a part is, the greater the chance that a different manufacturer's version of it will prove unsatisfactory. In the case of computers, there are lots of odd quirks that often make parts that are supposed to be interchangeable. For some applications, it would be quite reasonable to be "brand loyal," while for others, where performance doesn't matter as much it isn't. For example, for a 3D CAD system to behave well, you have a very limited choice of graphics cards and sometimes of processors, while for a machine that exists to run Word, you can pick just about any P.C.
Watt is a measure of energy per second. That is, power. Saying 120 megawatts of electricity per day is nonsense. I think they meant to just say 120 megawatts.
Maybe. They also might have meant 120 megawatt hours per day, which is only 5 megawatts.
Bullshit. How exactly is it easy to destroy ANY ballot when you have multiple election workers with their eyes on them at every moment? Plus any number of election observers, which may be representatives of all parties involved, plus any number of federal or foreign observers.
Well... paper systems have plenty of holes. A few years ago several of San Francisco's balot boxes were found floating in the SF bay right after the election, so somebody managed to loose a few... Besides, most polling places don't have that many people working them. You probably would only need to corrupt 2 or 3 poll workers to loose some balots, with a similar amount of effort to messing with an electronic voting machine.
Megapixels are nice, but I would trade high-res for a high-quality lens any day of the week. For example, NASA's Spirit rover took those stunning photos (that we all drooled over) with only a one-megapixel image sensor.
Those were good looking pictures, but I think the reason we were drooling had more to do with the location of the camera... In fact, when I last bought a camera, I was much more interested in getting one that was small, light and sturdy enough for me to take anywhere (including under water...) than in getting the absolute best optics or CCD (although the camera has pretty good optics and a 6 MP ccd)
If you've got a good way for detecting, from orbit, the mineral composition of something 1.5 km beneath the surface, I'm sure there's a lot of NASA scientists that would like to hear about it.
Forget NASA, there's alot of oil companies who would like to hear about that
Slashdot Mirror
But why would the volcano god want all the virgins if no one else does?
If you have to ask the question, you wouldn't understand the answer.
A cloaked sith lord sits in an ominous rotating chair aboard the google-star, as he reads the law suit: "Excellent, everything is going precisely as planned. Ready my ship commander."
So much for that "do no evil" thingie...
It's precisely this sort of dominion-over-nature mentality that got us into this mess in the first place. The (annoyingly American) idea that we can solve any problem by simply throwing enough money and ingenuity at it needs to be extinguished, and fast. If we can't even figure out the precise extent of the damage we've already done to our ailingplanet, I shudder to think what nth-order unseen repercussions would result from reducing the level of solar radiation reaching the atmosphere by any meaningful amount. This "fix" is a complete nonstarter and every moment we waste discussing it as if it were a serious option just digs us further into the already deep hole we're in.
Here's the deal, in case you haven't been paying attention. Since about the time that our ancestors figured out how to grow crops and build cities we, as a species, have been living by modifying our environment. Since the beginning of civilization, humans have existed by modifying their environments substantially. This means building dams to irrigate land, draining swamps, clearing forests (either for cropland or for grazing land). It's amazing how relentlessly this process has continued with very few reversals until you realize that its continuation is literally a matter of life and death. Even during the Dark Ages, the land under cultivation in Europe is said to have doubled and to have moved into more intensive farming.
Of course, things really started heating up when we figured out how to burn coal and make it do work in the 19th century and then in the 20th century started using antibiotics, pesticides and effective chemical fertilizers. These are the technologies that have allowed us to largely escape starvation and have allowed our population to increase to 6 billion or so. If you want to give up our dominion over nature, that's fine, but realize we'd have to kill off billions of people to cut the population down to 100 million or so and give up such things as indoor pluming and electric light. This isn't a future I want, so I, for one, will continue doing my best to extend our dominion over nature.
Since we can predict with absolute certainty what the weather of the Earth is going to be 100 years from now (latest IPCC report), why can't we accurately predict the weather 10 days from now? Unless maybe we can't predict the weather 100 years from now. Hmmm.
You're confusing climate and weather. I can tell you from my observations of the climate that it will be hot and sunny in Sacramento on July 18 2007, but I can't tell you if it will be 90 or 115. Climate prediction is about determining the range of temperatures (or amounts of cloud cover, precipitation, etc.) that weather forecasts will fall into, not about determining the temperature on a specific day. People who have made far more extensive and more detailed observations of the climate have observed that temperatures are increasing and that this seems to be related to increasing levels of atmospheric CO2. Beyond just these empirical observations, they have identified an experimentally verified mechanism by which increased CO2 levels should increase temperatures and have created detailed models of this mechanism operating as part of the complex system of the atmosphere. These models predict that the climate in most places on earth should get warmer. I don't see why inaccurate short term forecasting should be much of a problem. You're trying to solve different types of problems, which yield to different analysis techniques.
I am not an economist but for me, in real terms, the price of a kilo of rice seems to be a universal index.
What a Purchasing Power Parity exchange rate is trying to do is to account for the fact that goods, especially locally produced ones, and services are cheaper in some countries than others, which distorts the nominal exchange rates. For example, it is much cheaper to have a tooth removed in Mexico than in the U.S. This variation in prices means that living standards are higher in places where things are cheap than would be suggested by nominal exchange rates.
The ideal way to calculate such an index would be to sample the prices of a broad array of goods and services. However, this is expensive, much more expensive than finding how much one comodity costs.
An iPod is a terrible basis for such an index because it is produced in one location then sent around the world where it (presumably) wholesales for about the same price. The varriation is a measure of distribution costs and taxes and should closely reflect nominal exchange rates. In fact, because the U.S. has low sales taxes (and no VAT) and very efficient distribution networks, the index should always show that the U.S. has lower prices and that the dollar is undervalued.
Rice is better than an iPod because it is locally produced in a bunch of places. However, it isn't very labor intensive to produce and is probably more of a measure of agricultural productivity, agricultrual subsidy policies and the quality of a country's distribution networks than a true measure of how far money will go there. For example, I would expect Japan, which has high rice prices and a protected rice market would appear to have a very overvalued currency under this measure.
The Big Mac includes a broader variety of goods and services. Since it involves a pretty wide variety of inputs, you get some idea of overall agricultrual productivity, as well as some idea of how costly manufacturing is (the bread, special sauce etc). It also has a large labor component, which is a gauge of how expensive labor is in that country. It is definitely an imperfect index, but it is remarkably clever and nearly as accurate in predicting currency moves as a properly calculated index.
To put the range of this weapon in U.S. centric perspective, a ship armed with one of these guns off the Pacific coast could hit targets as far inland as Reno, NV. One off the Atlantic coast could hit Pittsburgh, PA. That's pretty darn impressive.
It lists California as 10.2%, but the income taxes are 9.3% over 40k, sales taxes are 8.25%, and property taxes are about 4-5% on avg. That's ~20% (the overlap)
Uh, property taxes in California are capped at 1% of the assessed value plus the amount needed to pay off county bonds (which means 1.25% is typical in a high tax location) and the assessed value can only increase at 2% per year, which means most people pay FAR UNDER 1% in property taxes. Income taxes in California are very progressive, which means that while the tax rates on earnings over 40K (for a single person) is high, the rate is very low on the first 30K you make, so the average works out to be pretty reasonable. If you are single in CA and make 50K/year, you pay 5.2% in income taxes, which isn't that bad. Similarly, the actual sales tax rate is lower than you suggest because it doesn't cover food or housing, which are pretty big parts of your income. Unless you have a very high income, taxes in California are less than what you would pay in most other states since taxes are about average and a greater share are collected from the rich.
You've just done a great job demonstrating why relative wealth in more important than absolute wealth. A 1200 ft^2 house is a big 2/2 or a small 3/2 and is larger than the average house in the U.S. built in the 1950's. 50 years ago, a house of that size would have been considered solidly middle class and adequate for 2 adults and 4 kids.
That being said, its shocking how much money some people make. All the real gains in wealth in the past 10 years have gone to the top 1/10th of one percent of the population. I have the "interesting" fortune in living in a community populated by these folks (many of whom still insist that they're middle class as they climb out of the Porsche Cayennes). It's a shame that as a slob making under $100k/year I'm barely getting by (paying for my wife's grad school is pretty painful).
The whole point of the article is that this element has a lifespan on the order of seconds, not milliseconds, which means that you can do chemistry and other fun things with them. But, really, people do this for two reasons: 1) to test the theories that predict a set of very heavy elements that are nearly stable and 2) because they can.
However, the fact that nobody's written an extfs driver suggests to me that either it's too Windows-oriented, or the support is incomplete.
They have, see http://www.fs-driver.org/. I seriously considered using it for an external drive that is usually connected to my Linux file server, but that I sometimes use with my laptop when I need to copy a couple hundred gigs of data from another location. However, I ended up choosing FAT-32 because I can connect it to just about any computer and be fairly sure of it working.
I use both SolidWorks and AutoCAD as appropriate. 3d parametric modeling is great for objects that are 3d and need exact representation. However, it sucks for drawing cables, designing 2D parts and laying out silkscreen patterns. For these applications I use AutoCAD (or the AutoCAD clone that now ships with SolidWorks) because it's faster and it makes it easier to display necessary information. Additionally, everyone can read ACAD drawings, while many shops have difficulty with 3d formats.
The other place where AutoCAD comes in handy is when you want to graphically solve a design problem. There are a bunch of hand drafting tricks that also work with ACAD, but don't work well with 3d packages.
The dollar being worth less and things costing more are exactly the same phenomenon. The value of the metals did not inherently increase.
The value of metals DID increase relative to other commodities. So the parent post is right to say that it is a combination of a general decline in the value of the Dollar and an increase in the price of Zinc and Copper.
I'm depressed that I had no trouble reading that.
There are plenty of entry level jobs available, but you have to work to get them. If you've been looking for work for 2 years then you either (a)haven't been trying very hard, (b)do really badly in interviews/have a really poorly assembled resume (c) you are in an area without jobs (d) have some other factor preventing you from getting a job (you just got out of prison, for example).
If you aren't spending 2-3 hours per day looking for a job then you aren't trying very hard. This doesn't just mean responding to want-ads, this means looking up companies who might want to hire you, finding the person who makes the decisions and convincing him you're the best thing since sliced bread. If you aren't an extrovert, and I'm not, it sucks, but it works.
To tell if your resume is ok, have a bunch of people look it over and take their suggestions to heart. Even a spelling error can cost you a job, so make sure it is good. Also, talk to your local unemployment office. In most places they have free resmue writing classes that can teach you how to improve your resumes. Also, are you sending good cover letters to the jobs you want to apply for? Doing this well is very important because lots of people suck at it and it can cause you to rise above other more qualified candidates
As for the other factors, you should be able to figure it out on your own.
Also, get a job hunting book. The Dummies series is good. I also like "What Color is Your Parachute," which advocates methods of finding a job that you might not have thought of.
Interestingly, these books, especially the top suggestions, are mostly focused on a particular strand of Christianity too. Most of these books are from authors of a strong Calvinist bent (all of the first 10, for example) or from authors who are are contriversial in Calvinist circles (Brian D. McLaren). Oddly, I own 4 of the unsuggestions as well as everything Douglas Adams has written (yes, including last chance to see)
No, I misread it as Stephen Hawking Completely Metal and was about to welcome our new cyborg overlord.
Industrial parts are bought by specification, not by brand name. A product design engineer might call for an M8x50 bolt, a 4.7K ohm 0.25 watt resistor, a quarter-turn ball valve with 22mm. compression fittings, an NPN transistor with a gain of 50 in a TO3 package or a 15x40mm. ball-bearing.
I take it that you've never actually been involved in manufacturing. I can assure you that who makes a part has a great deal to do with weather it actually meets the specification reliably. Most companies have lists of approved vendors for each part, have to qualify a new manufacturer for any given part. The more complex a part is, the greater the chance that a different manufacturer's version of it will prove unsatisfactory. In the case of computers, there are lots of odd quirks that often make parts that are supposed to be interchangeable. For some applications, it would be quite reasonable to be "brand loyal," while for others, where performance doesn't matter as much it isn't. For example, for a 3D CAD system to behave well, you have a very limited choice of graphics cards and sometimes of processors, while for a machine that exists to run Word, you can pick just about any P.C.
Watt is a measure of energy per second. That is, power. Saying 120 megawatts of electricity per day is nonsense. I think they meant to just say 120 megawatts.
Maybe. They also might have meant 120 megawatt hours per day, which is only 5 megawatts.
Bullshit. How exactly is it easy to destroy ANY ballot when you have multiple election workers with their eyes on them at every moment? Plus any number of election observers, which may be representatives of all parties involved, plus any number of federal or foreign observers.
Well... paper systems have plenty of holes. A few years ago several of San Francisco's balot boxes were found floating in the SF bay right after the election, so somebody managed to loose a few... Besides, most polling places don't have that many people working them. You probably would only need to corrupt 2 or 3 poll workers to loose some balots, with a similar amount of effort to messing with an electronic voting machine.
Megapixels are nice, but I would trade high-res for a high-quality lens any day of the week. For example, NASA's Spirit rover took those stunning photos (that we all drooled over) with only a one-megapixel image sensor.
Those were good looking pictures, but I think the reason we were drooling had more to do with the location of the camera... In fact, when I last bought a camera, I was much more interested in getting one that was small, light and sturdy enough for me to take anywhere (including under water...) than in getting the absolute best optics or CCD (although the camera has pretty good optics and a 6 MP ccd)
Alcohol powered robots can bite my shiny metal ass!
The real question is: When will this new extension automatically insert Soviet Russia and Beowolf cluster jokes?
I'm going back into hiding now...
If you've got a good way for detecting, from orbit, the mineral composition of something 1.5 km beneath the surface, I'm sure there's a lot of NASA scientists that would like to hear about it.
Forget NASA, there's alot of oil companies who would like to hear about that
Sony rootkit contributes SCO's intellectual property?
Well, I thought everything under the GPL was really SCO's IP
ducking
What is the major reason for people still sticking with VHS?
Pornography, of course.
The question was with not to .