Mmm. The question, of course, is WHAT is the What in your "what's sad"? The fact that my comment (which I did try to make funny) was filed as informative, or that the USA is such a twisted mess of fascist corruption, that my indications of it as such are considered informative?
MY GOD!!! We have nations to invade, and children to burn, and a treasury full of cash that needs to be looted by the military industrial complex. We don't need stuff like BASIC RESEARCH. Hell with that crap. We need bombs and guns to keep the empire rolling and extract other nations resources for our own lazy convenience.
That they would demo their multitouch screen using PAINT???
Here they are, massive kick ass gimungous multinational software company, and the best they can do to demo graphics is FUCKING PAINT????
Damn. I bet they'll demo how good it is with games using PONG or something. MS is so hopelessly messed up. I don't care about the touchy feely stuff. I wanted WinFS. I wanted a real system level database so I could do Interesting Things. Instead, it was ripped out, and I was given VISTA. Now, I'm being shown how I can use my screen as a napkin for my greasy cheezypoof fingers as I scrawl kindergarten like drawings in PAINT.
don't they THINK about this crap before they foist it off on the world and call it "innovation"?
I think Andressen (or someone like him, Berners-Lee?) described image tags linking to pages like way the fuck back in 1993 or 1994. I know I've been clicking on images to go to pages since then.
Argh.
If this singapore company is acting as described in TFA, then they are just a bunch of douchebags who make The Gator or Fish Slap look like first rate intellectuals and gentlemen. Pure simple Assholes, and should pay for everyone's legal fees when they lose this in court.
And I never found MS's academic search system that useful, so I am not affected by this directly. I *AM* disappointed that they gave up, though - the fewer players involved, the less competition, and the reduced competition will result in lower quality and slower performance and slower rates of getting books up on the web. Someone has to keep Google on its toes, and it sure isn't going to be Google.
they can make treaties until they are blue in the face. it will simply move to Russia or some other country that finds the west adversarial and/or irritating. Imagine some island nation that is slowly being submerged by the folly of capitalist industrialism wreaking their final (if misguided) revenge by opening up a gigantic solar powered server farm that is filled with music, video, software. they have no treaty with anyone in this regard, and as their world dissolves, they commit themselves to the wreckage of Western Int. Property.
I'm not saying it WILL happen or is even likely, what I am saying is that P2P is just one part of the equation - however, with bandwidth development and collapsing prices of storage, just putting together a searchable "big closet full of downloadable goodies" (viz iTMS) is becoming an increasingly trivial effort. And all it takes is a small group of dedicated and protected people to blow the lid off intellectual property.
I'm gonna get me some lunar acreage. Yep. Just like back in Montana, where I raised me up a crop of lonely dental floss, I'm gonna get in my car and drive off to the moon and stake my claim and... and... Well - I'll think of something when I get there. I bought the Brooklyn Bridge from a really nice fella in Manhattan. He had an arm full of watches, too. So I figure with that sound investment, I can start makin' my way to the moon, and.. and... well, I'll figure out what to do when I get there... Maybe open up a motel there, so's folks can drive on up and check out the scenery on the moon. It's got lots of ummm... ROCKS! Yeah - lots of rocks! And greyish grit! Rocks and Grit! And a big black sky. Not much on sunsets, and the nights are long and cold and really dark. But I'm sure someone will think spending time getting blasted with cosmic rays in an airless wasteland is just a bundle of fun! And so, I'll open up my Lunar Motel, and and and I'll have people come visit and stuff and they can play golf. I'll open up a giant golf course... of course, the whole thing is just one giant sand trap, so's maybe it's not a good golf course. But I know!!! I'll sell MAGIC ROCKS!!! Yeah - that's it! I'll sell magic rocks from the Moon! And you get one free when you stay at my Lunar Motel. And I can carve them into cool shapes like the face on mars, or Marvin the Martian. Or Something. Like that. Maybe.
OK OK - there's really no reason to go to the Moon other than to mark it like some pooch making happy with a fire hydrant. But a fella can dream, can't he?
Get your ass on a stokemonkey or something like it and get with the program. A friend of mine has one and it's WAY fast. I've ridden it, and I was doing 25 mph and generally, but not strenuously pedalling. If your job is 15 miles away, you'd get there in about 50 minutes (accounting for lights and what not) you'd be in much better shape, and you'd KICK ASS.
You can pretty much REPLACE YOUR CAR with a longtail.
I would recommend getting on it NOW, so by the time everyone else is begging for one, you'll already have one and will be "a senior statesman" for your local group for your years of experience.
1. Sites that are skimpy on content will have lots of flash. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit". It makes extracting what content they have that much more difficult.
2. It was designed to be an online animation program. It drove a stake through the heart of Macromedia Director, so the engineers that had made Director (which was originally an animation program) a great steaming tourde, turned their attentions upon Flash and turned it into a great steaming "platform".
3. The user interface for Flash sucked horribley since version 1, and they've done precious little to fix it. It's a pain in the ass to use and is utterly counter intuitive. Only in the past year or so have they made it work like "other" bezier curve illustration programs, and even then, it's suboptimal.
4. Flash, when used in conjunction with ColdFusion is a desperate pig. slow, inconvenient. Ugh. It's why AJAX was invented.
5. Flash is code centric, when it should be design centric.
6. Flash COULD be useful in PDFs - animation in a PDF would fucking rock, but the integration of Flash into PDF is abyssmal, and it would lock the user into using another wanking great tourde: Adobe Reader.
I hate Flash. I want it to disappear, or be completely redesigned from the ground up, so that codemonkeys can do code and see results in a player, or, designers can instantly access reams of code embedded invisibly in flash parts, and do the most complex things without programming. I never use Flash. If it requires some kind of interactivity, there is lots one can do with JavaScript and HTML.
As dorky as Dreamweaver is, I find it a LOT more useful than Flash. I think Flash should be banned.
To me, the strokes look like a clapping pattern. I sat and clapped it out at my desk here, and if done at a fairly brisk pace, the top section is an interesting and often asymmetric rhythm.
Parts of it clap out to sound like "apocalypse in 9/8, (co-starring the delicious talents of Gabble Ratchet)" by Genesis from Foxtrot
But the whole thing is scattered enough that it comes out like more of a one handed improv or approximation of Steve Reich's "Clapping Music".
The bottom section is less rhythmically active, but sounds more "even", kind of "rock and roll" ish.
The middle part is a dull cipher, similar to Nugsoth.
My guess: put a shortcut to the Terminal app in your start up folder. Make sure the terminal window is the size of your screen. So when they start the computer, it will boot into Terminal, and terminal takes over the screen, and then they're lost.
I agree. Fuck that place. I'll drive in, they're not total dickweeds at the little border crossings, but flying is such a pain in the ass and they hire the stupidest chimps to work the airports. It's awful.
Using Director or some similar app, make a "movie" that looks and acts like a BSOD or a "Sad Mac with chimes of Death" play on start up. They start it up, it seems to boot fine, then suddenly it "BSOD's" or the Sad Mac comes out and DING DING DONG" and goes black.
Then you get to yell at then for fucking up your laptop, and demand they buy you a new one RIGHT NOW GOD DAMN IT. And make 'em feel guilty. "LOOK - MY COMPUTER - THEY KILLED MY COMPUTER!!!" Start to cry about how much work you just lost because those numbskulls broke your computer.
They'll close it, right quick, and give it back to you and put you on your plane and hope you shut up.
They were the essence of silicon Valley, having invented a work/life system that was the envy of the industry. Then Carly came along and fucked the place up. Merging with compaq was NOT a victory for HP, but was a major move for Compaq. The pay curves and HR policies were downgraded to compaq levels, and now HP is a shell of its former self. I wouldn't be surprised if after buying EDS they move the HQ from Palo Alto to Houston or Dallas.
they are *extremely* similar, but from my pespective, insolvency can be a simple cashflow problem. Intestingly, that's the exact tack the Fed has chosen - rather than see it as a bankruptcy, it's just a cash problem. So, what the Fed is doing is basically buying all the bad debt. They don't want to SAY that, but essentially, that's what is happening. They're dumping $200 billion in Treasury securities to keep the banks liquid and able to meet their payments. The deficit is caused by the bad debts the banks had the stupidity to loan. So, that's why even though the non-borrowed assets of the country's entire banking system has collapsed to around -$90 billion, the banks are still afloat.
Basically, by seeing insolvency as a cashflow problem, rather than a bankruptcy problem, they're keeping the Titanic afloat. It's kind of like there's a huge leak, so make the boat bigger to counter-balance the loss of bouyancy, so it sinks more evenly...
And that's EXACTLY what you see happening. Rather than a crash, a la 1893, it is drifting into an inflationary heat death, a la the 1970s.
The problem is, this is to b expected, basically, forever, until we replace our economic engine with one based on extraction of resources to one of sustainability. Sustainability has some use for space exploration, specifically in terms of data satellites. But has Zero Use for putting people up there.
The link to the federal reserve page is interesting. It's the " AGGREGATE RESERVES OF DEPOSITORY INSTITUTIONS AND THE MONETARY BASE", aka, "how much money is in the bank". What you want to look at is the Actual Value, i.e., the "NON-BORROWED RESERVES" column. Note that the value as recently as last November was $42 billion. not bad. I've been following this page ever since they stopped publishing the M3 two years ago to hide all the money they've been printing. Basically, for the past few years, we've had a lot of reserves in the bank - sometimes $60 billion, sometimes $40 billion, but certainly plenty of cash.
Well, look at the numbers in that column (the second column):
2007
Nov. 42679 42313
Dec. 42599 27169
2008
May 7p 44177 -85018
So, basically, what this says is the total non-borrowed assets for the entire American Financial System is running $85 billion dollars in the red, and has been in the negative since the first of the year. Basically, the country is insolvent. Not bankrupt: insolvent.
Re: your comment:
We need a truce: Conservatives will acknowledge the dire emergency of global warming, if liberals acknowledge the dire emergency of future national bankruptcy (i.e. increasing liabilities of the federal government, state/local governments, and some private employers).
I would note that the greatest strides in destroying the economy of this country since 1900 have all come under Republican and conservative administrations (harding/coolidge/hoover then reagan/bush and the latest, Bush2/neocon). It is true that roosevelt amped up the nations debt a great deal, but this was quickly fizzled by Truman and eisenhower. Johnson put a lot of money into social programs, and increased the debt, but: the debt mostly went into the Vietnam war. The biggest strides towards fiscal demise were during the reagan Admin and now the Bush v2 junta, both republican and both conservative regimes.
In the meantime, the current administration let the nutty banking policies developed under Clinton's watch to http://www.usa-foreclosure.com/">fester and metasticise, and now the country's technically insolvent.
As a consequence, I think putting people in space is going to be seriously backburnered, and I would humbly submit that the majority of people who will ever be in space have already gone.
I'm not happy about that - I would love to go put bases on the moon to harvest He3 and do all that kind of groovy stuff, but I think we shot our wad, and pissed away the resources on crap like highways for Cadillac Escalades and useless cities like Las Vegas. We had our chance, and we blew it.
Don't brake for animals tonight
Got to keep the passengers safe
No help can be found in this part of the world
Don't brake for animals tonight
Don't let the night slow you down
Got to get the passengers home
The road is empty, your lights are bright
Don't let the night slow you down
B-b-bus plunge (One more cup of coffee and I'll be alright)
The driver says bus plunge (pop a bennie, another bennie)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
Stay to the right of the line
Don't get the passengers scared
The curves in the road are not really there
Stay to the right of the line
B-b-bus plunge (One more cup of coffee and I'll be alright)
The driver says bus plunge (pop a bennie, another bennie)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
Don't brake for animals tonight
(Never mind the creatures in the road ahead)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Run the stoplight, run the stoplight)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Don't think about the lady in the Chevy turning left)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Almost home, you're almost home)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
For a summer I worked at Johns Manville in New Jersey. Yeah - the place that was sued into bankruptcy by its own workforce for being such a toxic shithole.
I worked in building D. D for DEATH. I had to unload a van filled with paper from banks. I'd get the truck weighed at the front gate, net to the sign that said "PHOTOGRAPHY IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN". Geee. I wonder why...
Once it was weighed, I'd drive it to building D, and back it up the ramp into the building itself. The building consisted of several ENORMOUS rooms, each one at least 50 ft wide and 30 ft tall. In the room I ws in was an enormous machine that looked like a cross between a cauldron designed by Rube Goldberg and a funnel designed by NASA. On the side of this thing was a hopper. I would dump paper out the back of the truck into the 6 inches of standing filthy water that filled the floor of the place. Often I could see the V shaped ripples of rats swimming through the smelly brown miasmic watery goo.
Against one wall was a stack of paper that went all the way to the roof, which had gaping holes in it. It was summer, and there was no air conditioning, and wearing a mask was very uncomfortable. But wear one I did, for as I looked down the hallway to the other end of building D, the air was thick with the blue haze of asbestos.
I would stand on the paper bales, and toss more paper into the hopper. Once it was full I'd signal the guy who operated it, Mike, and he would press a red button, and I would press a red button, and the hopper would lurch up the side of the vat, and dump the contents into the steaming smelling chemical bath of crap.
Out of the bottom of the vat was a pipe about 14 inches wide. A steady stream of really foul smelling waxy black ooze would slowly extrude from the pipe. Mike would hack at it with a Machete and it would plop into his wheel barrow. H would then wheel it down the hall to a drop point, where there was a 55 gal drum, and he would dump the stinking vile glop into the drum. Once the drum was full of the black gelatinous offal, he would cap it, crimp it, and seal it, where it would then be "take somewhere", likely some landfill near Newark or Edison or Sayreville.
Some of the people who worked there were practically feral. I remember one fat black guy who drove this miniature bulldozer around at a high rate of speed, splashing the filthy stanky water all over the place. He didn't care wher eit went.
My guess is that all those people who worked on site all day in building D are now dead. And that's industrial capitalism for ya. OF course, now we ship that kind of work to China or Indonesia, so we can't see it, so it's OK....
Guaranteed. The question is how many feeders they leave behind.
Hardship and misery from Peak Oil will cull millions. Climate change will take out millions more. If the economies tank hard enough, then disease will take out a bunch more - perhaps a billion or more.
They will all die. It's just a question of how and when.
I went there, signed up and built a very basic font. Very pleased. It's NOT great font work, but it's fun and could be very useful in an intro to type and typography class, or for high school students.
I emailed the "onduty editor" before the article went live on the error of their calc on what a yotta is. So much for slashdot error prevention...
Anyway, I emailed them this link to the terms in question, and post it here, for your edification. I have a post-it note on my bookcase with these terms - I think that as time goes on, knowing EXACTLY what each one is will be of some use. Until the oil runs out and we are shivering in the cold, anyway...
;-)
Here's their names, abreviations and their power of ten, so you know how big/small it is.
yocto- y 10^-24
zepto- z 10^-21
atto- a 10^-18
femto- f 10^-15
pico- p 10^-12
nano- n 10^-9
micro- m 10^-6
milli- m 10^-3
centi- c 10^-2
deci- d 10^-1
(none) -- --
deka- D 10^1
hecto- H 10^2
kilo- K 10^3
mega- M 10^6
giga- G 10^9
tera- T 10^12
peta- P 10^15
exa- E 10^18
zetta- Z 10^21
yotta- Y 10^24
Slashdot Mirror
best,
RS
RS
Here they are, massive kick ass gimungous multinational software company, and the best they can do to demo graphics is FUCKING PAINT????
Damn. I bet they'll demo how good it is with games using PONG or something. MS is so hopelessly messed up. I don't care about the touchy feely stuff. I wanted WinFS. I wanted a real system level database so I could do Interesting Things. Instead, it was ripped out, and I was given VISTA. Now, I'm being shown how I can use my screen as a napkin for my greasy cheezypoof fingers as I scrawl kindergarten like drawings in PAINT.
don't they THINK about this crap before they foist it off on the world and call it "innovation"?
RS
Argh.
If this singapore company is acting as described in TFA, then they are just a bunch of douchebags who make The Gator or Fish Slap look like first rate intellectuals and gentlemen. Pure simple Assholes, and should pay for everyone's legal fees when they lose this in court.
RS
It's looooks like a lander from Earth!
What? Oh, not another...
I know - let's speak Martian at it!
ACK! ACK ACK ACK!!!
RS
He's from the RIAA, and he's part of a research to find ways to fix the problem at the root.
RS
I'm not saying it WILL happen or is even likely, what I am saying is that P2P is just one part of the equation - however, with bandwidth development and collapsing prices of storage, just putting together a searchable "big closet full of downloadable goodies" (viz iTMS) is becoming an increasingly trivial effort. And all it takes is a small group of dedicated and protected people to blow the lid off intellectual property.
RS
OK OK - there's really no reason to go to the Moon other than to mark it like some pooch making happy with a fire hydrant. But a fella can dream, can't he?
RS
RS
You can pretty much REPLACE YOUR CAR with a longtail.
I would recommend getting on it NOW, so by the time everyone else is begging for one, you'll already have one and will be "a senior statesman" for your local group for your years of experience.
RS
1. Sites that are skimpy on content will have lots of flash. "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit". It makes extracting what content they have that much more difficult.
2. It was designed to be an online animation program. It drove a stake through the heart of Macromedia Director, so the engineers that had made Director (which was originally an animation program) a great steaming tourde, turned their attentions upon Flash and turned it into a great steaming "platform".
3. The user interface for Flash sucked horribley since version 1, and they've done precious little to fix it. It's a pain in the ass to use and is utterly counter intuitive. Only in the past year or so have they made it work like "other" bezier curve illustration programs, and even then, it's suboptimal.
4. Flash, when used in conjunction with ColdFusion is a desperate pig. slow, inconvenient. Ugh. It's why AJAX was invented.
5. Flash is code centric, when it should be design centric.
6. Flash COULD be useful in PDFs - animation in a PDF would fucking rock, but the integration of Flash into PDF is abyssmal, and it would lock the user into using another wanking great tourde: Adobe Reader.
I hate Flash. I want it to disappear, or be completely redesigned from the ground up, so that codemonkeys can do code and see results in a player, or, designers can instantly access reams of code embedded invisibly in flash parts, and do the most complex things without programming. I never use Flash. If it requires some kind of interactivity, there is lots one can do with JavaScript and HTML.
As dorky as Dreamweaver is, I find it a LOT more useful than Flash. I think Flash should be banned.
RS
Here it is:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Brilliant stuff. Really sad. But brilliant.
RS
Parts of it clap out to sound like "apocalypse in 9/8, (co-starring the delicious talents of Gabble Ratchet)" by Genesis from Foxtrot
But the whole thing is scattered enough that it comes out like more of a one handed improv or approximation of Steve Reich's "Clapping Music".
The bottom section is less rhythmically active, but sounds more "even", kind of "rock and roll" ish.
The middle part is a dull cipher, similar to Nugsoth.
That's all I've got.
RS
RS
RS
Using Director or some similar app, make a "movie" that looks and acts like a BSOD or a "Sad Mac with chimes of Death" play on start up. They start it up, it seems to boot fine, then suddenly it "BSOD's" or the Sad Mac comes out and DING DING DONG" and goes black.
Then you get to yell at then for fucking up your laptop, and demand they buy you a new one RIGHT NOW GOD DAMN IT. And make 'em feel guilty. "LOOK - MY COMPUTER - THEY KILLED MY COMPUTER!!!" Start to cry about how much work you just lost because those numbskulls broke your computer.
They'll close it, right quick, and give it back to you and put you on your plane and hope you shut up.
Maybe?
RS
Very very sad.
RS
they are *extremely* similar, but from my pespective, insolvency can be a simple cashflow problem. Intestingly, that's the exact tack the Fed has chosen - rather than see it as a bankruptcy, it's just a cash problem. So, what the Fed is doing is basically buying all the bad debt. They don't want to SAY that, but essentially, that's what is happening. They're dumping $200 billion in Treasury securities to keep the banks liquid and able to meet their payments. The deficit is caused by the bad debts the banks had the stupidity to loan. So, that's why even though the non-borrowed assets of the country's entire banking system has collapsed to around -$90 billion, the banks are still afloat.
Basically, by seeing insolvency as a cashflow problem, rather than a bankruptcy problem, they're keeping the Titanic afloat. It's kind of like there's a huge leak, so make the boat bigger to counter-balance the loss of bouyancy, so it sinks more evenly...
And that's EXACTLY what you see happening. Rather than a crash, a la 1893, it is drifting into an inflationary heat death, a la the 1970s.
The problem is, this is to b expected, basically, forever, until we replace our economic engine with one based on extraction of resources to one of sustainability. Sustainability has some use for space exploration, specifically in terms of data satellites. But has Zero Use for putting people up there.
RS
The link to the federal reserve page is interesting. It's the " AGGREGATE RESERVES OF DEPOSITORY INSTITUTIONS AND THE MONETARY BASE", aka, "how much money is in the bank". What you want to look at is the Actual Value, i.e., the "NON-BORROWED RESERVES" column. Note that the value as recently as last November was $42 billion. not bad. I've been following this page ever since they stopped publishing the M3 two years ago to hide all the money they've been printing. Basically, for the past few years, we've had a lot of reserves in the bank - sometimes $60 billion, sometimes $40 billion, but certainly plenty of cash.
Well, look at the numbers in that column (the second column):
2007 Nov. 42679 42313
Dec. 42599 27169
2008
May 7p 44177 -85018
So, basically, what this says is the total non-borrowed assets for the entire American Financial System is running $85 billion dollars in the red, and has been in the negative since the first of the year. Basically, the country is insolvent. Not bankrupt: insolvent.
Re: your comment:
We need a truce: Conservatives will acknowledge the dire emergency of global warming, if liberals acknowledge the dire emergency of future national bankruptcy (i.e. increasing liabilities of the federal government, state/local governments, and some private employers).
I would note that the greatest strides in destroying the economy of this country since 1900 have all come under Republican and conservative administrations (harding/coolidge/hoover then reagan/bush and the latest, Bush2/neocon). It is true that roosevelt amped up the nations debt a great deal, but this was quickly fizzled by Truman and eisenhower. Johnson put a lot of money into social programs, and increased the debt, but: the debt mostly went into the Vietnam war. The biggest strides towards fiscal demise were during the reagan Admin and now the Bush v2 junta, both republican and both conservative regimes.
RS
In the meantime, the current administration let the nutty banking policies developed under Clinton's watch to http://www.usa-foreclosure.com/">fester and metasticise, and now the country's technically insolvent.
As a consequence, I think putting people in space is going to be seriously backburnered, and I would humbly submit that the majority of people who will ever be in space have already gone.
I'm not happy about that - I would love to go put bases on the moon to harvest He3 and do all that kind of groovy stuff, but I think we shot our wad, and pissed away the resources on crap like highways for Cadillac Escalades and useless cities like Las Vegas. We had our chance, and we blew it.
RS
Got to keep the passengers safe
No help can be found in this part of the world
Don't brake for animals tonight
Don't let the night slow you down
Got to get the passengers home
The road is empty, your lights are bright
Don't let the night slow you down
B-b-bus plunge (One more cup of coffee and I'll be alright)
The driver says bus plunge (pop a bennie, another bennie)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
Stay to the right of the line
Don't get the passengers scared
The curves in the road are not really there
Stay to the right of the line
B-b-bus plunge (One more cup of coffee and I'll be alright)
The driver says bus plunge (pop a bennie, another bennie)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
Don't brake for animals tonight
(Never mind the creatures in the road ahead)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Run the stoplight, run the stoplight)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Don't think about the lady in the Chevy turning left)
The driver says don't brake for animals tonight
(Almost home, you're almost home)
The driver says bus plunge, bus plunge
by The Bobs.
RS
I worked in building D. D for DEATH. I had to unload a van filled with paper from banks. I'd get the truck weighed at the front gate, net to the sign that said "PHOTOGRAPHY IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN". Geee. I wonder why...
Once it was weighed, I'd drive it to building D, and back it up the ramp into the building itself. The building consisted of several ENORMOUS rooms, each one at least 50 ft wide and 30 ft tall. In the room I ws in was an enormous machine that looked like a cross between a cauldron designed by Rube Goldberg and a funnel designed by NASA. On the side of this thing was a hopper. I would dump paper out the back of the truck into the 6 inches of standing filthy water that filled the floor of the place. Often I could see the V shaped ripples of rats swimming through the smelly brown miasmic watery goo.
Against one wall was a stack of paper that went all the way to the roof, which had gaping holes in it. It was summer, and there was no air conditioning, and wearing a mask was very uncomfortable. But wear one I did, for as I looked down the hallway to the other end of building D, the air was thick with the blue haze of asbestos.
I would stand on the paper bales, and toss more paper into the hopper. Once it was full I'd signal the guy who operated it, Mike, and he would press a red button, and I would press a red button, and the hopper would lurch up the side of the vat, and dump the contents into the steaming smelling chemical bath of crap.
Out of the bottom of the vat was a pipe about 14 inches wide. A steady stream of really foul smelling waxy black ooze would slowly extrude from the pipe. Mike would hack at it with a Machete and it would plop into his wheel barrow. H would then wheel it down the hall to a drop point, where there was a 55 gal drum, and he would dump the stinking vile glop into the drum. Once the drum was full of the black gelatinous offal, he would cap it, crimp it, and seal it, where it would then be "take somewhere", likely some landfill near Newark or Edison or Sayreville.
Some of the people who worked there were practically feral. I remember one fat black guy who drove this miniature bulldozer around at a high rate of speed, splashing the filthy stanky water all over the place. He didn't care wher eit went.
My guess is that all those people who worked on site all day in building D are now dead. And that's industrial capitalism for ya. OF course, now we ship that kind of work to China or Indonesia, so we can't see it, so it's OK....
That was the worst place I ever worked.
RS
Hardship and misery from Peak Oil will cull millions. Climate change will take out millions more. If the economies tank hard enough, then disease will take out a bunch more - perhaps a billion or more.
They will all die. It's just a question of how and when.
RS
RS
Anyway, I emailed them this link to the terms in question, and post it here, for your edification. I have a post-it note on my bookcase with these terms - I think that as time goes on, knowing EXACTLY what each one is will be of some use. Until the oil runs out and we are shivering in the cold, anyway...
Here's their names, abreviations and their power of ten, so you know how big/small it is.
yocto- y 10^-24
zepto- z 10^-21
atto- a 10^-18
femto- f 10^-15
pico- p 10^-12
nano- n 10^-9
micro- m 10^-6
milli- m 10^-3
centi- c 10^-2
deci- d 10^-1
(none) -- --
deka- D 10^1
hecto- H 10^2
kilo- K 10^3
mega- M 10^6
giga- G 10^9
tera- T 10^12
peta- P 10^15
exa- E 10^18
zetta- Z 10^21
yotta- Y 10^24
RS