Oh, I have, I have. That it is SOP on gmail is what grinds me (and several other details that piss me off about Google in general). I have a HUGE sunk cost in yahoo - years and years of email. Jumping over to gmail isn't an optimal option, although it is getting more attractive by the day...
I completely agree. I got my yahoo account (IIRC) back around 1997. It was fine then - always a bit clunky, but it always worked. Now, it just sucks. The colours are garish, and they've shifted to this idiotic "Tabbed" system which was innovative in 1999. And the tabbing is stupendously stupid. Example: If you route email to certain folders, it gets dumb. I route Facebook notices to a Facebook folder. I click the Facebook folder and the Inbox tab becomes the FAcebook tab. Which is stupid. Then I click on one of the notification emails from FB, and read it. It's not that important so I click the BACK button. What happens? I'm back in Inbox, yet my FB email is still in its tab. Rather than go back to the list of FB email, I got dumped back in Inbox. Grrrrr.
So I open up a bunch of FB notifications and they all appear in tabs. Once the horizontal of the tabs is filled, an arrow down tab appears, letting you access extra tabs, right? Wrong. It lists ALL the tabs, nd you have to scroll down to the end to find the most recent ones...
Now, over the years my eyes are not as good as they were, so I have to CTRL-+ a few times to be able to read stuff easily. So, the entire interface scales up and the stupid tabs and wasted space crowd out the text, leaving me with one or two lines of text to type into. Heck - I have the same mag here in slashdot, and I can see most of my post so far.
And then some times when I open Yahoo it barks at me that my screen res is too low (which is bullshit - it's 1920 x 1280 as usual).
And while I detest Google's threaded system, at least when you start typing someone's name in the search bar, it automagically finds the person you're looking for.
Yahoo would be better stripping down the UI - reduce the glitz and colours, ditch the tabbed UI, and just make something that WORKS.
All you have to do is fill the compartment with tools, blankets, water, and similar emergency materials. If you get pulled over and they find your "compartment" you're clearly not intending it for drug use, because it's clearly IN USE for legitimate purposes. The compartment is one thing, but intent is another, and intending to keep emergency materials at hand in a car is actually a GOOD THING, and having a compartment for it means you're not sacrificing trunk space.
Business is complex. Making the right decision to sell at the right time to parasitically extract money from the vector capitalists is fraught with peril.
Interesting. So do I. I also run the office Xmas food fund. Gotta feed people.
I plant in a community garden.
There are none here, so I tend my own with a neighbour.
I recycle.
As do I.
I sponsor children in the third world.
As do I.
I'm converting my house to solar.
Recently moved into this house, so first order of business is re-insulation to reduce load, and then shift to geothermal HVAC. Due to neighbour's trees, solar isn't a great idea on my house. But the guy across the street will have an easy time of it.
I vote in every election.
I can't. I'm not a citizen of the country I live in.
I educate myself every day, even though I graduated college.
I'm a professor, so that's my job.:-)
I was in the Peace Corps.
I've travelled a good bit. Never did Peace corp.
I worked at an after school program for youth.
Similar: I read stories at a children's library for a number of years.
I bought an electric car.
I ride a bicycle. Just bought a new trailer for it! Works great, esp. for getting groceries and hauling stuff.
I donate to the EFF, the ACLU, and the NAACP.
I donate to EFF, Greenpeace, Amnesty Int'l, and a local charity for underprivileged youth.
So, in terms of what I do, you and I are very very similar. The difference is, you seem to think technical civilisation is by its nature a net good. I do not. I don't see it as good or bad. It is simply the present condition of humans. Nothing lasts forever, and thermodynamics will not be denied. In my work as an educator, I explain very carefully and precisely to university students the precarious situation society and the biosphere are in, and I explain how due to the luck of the draw, their generation is going to have to do all the heavy lifting. My generation can point the direction toward "better" policies, but they and their kids are the ones who are going to get stuck doing stupid shit like building dikes around NYC and having to deal with uncontrollable plagues, and dealing with north bound migration and drought etc.
We're not going back to some "idyllic garden". Even if humans disappeared tomorrow, there would still be a massive rise in temperature for the next few centuries.
I don't see the loss of civilisation and the disappearance of humanity as a bad thing. It's just how the universe operates. I don't see the glass as half full (as optimists such as yourself do), nor do I see the glass as half empty (as pessimists like the Peak Oil crew, and the likes of Guy McPherson, and similar doomers do). To me, the glass is simply asymmetric to its contents.
In our dealings with society, we should work to reduce suffering, especially of the innocent. We should work at developing a humane and socialist system based around human need not private greed. We need to solarise our societies as much as possible. But this will not get us out of the thermo-demo dynamic trap. We are in the Anthropocene. That tiny human caused geological blip that triggered a major extinction event. Denying its so won't change it. But it's basically the same deal as Kubler Ross stages. First is denial... I'm well into the acceptance phase on the death of civilisation and the fate of humanity. It's not as big a deal as you might think.
By making Iran a client state, they can support them enough to keep them from fully exploiting south pars, which has been the case. Also, by supporting Iran, it drives the Americans crazy, and keeps Russia present in the middle east.
So, conservatively, it's doubling every 2 years or so. It is presently at about 5% of total electrical production. At present rates of growth, it will be at 100% of present production in 9 years. That, of course, isn't going to happen, but even doubling that length to 18 years means that nuclear power is superfluous. Oh and FUKUSHIMA MOFO.
Fracking doesn't have major effects on oil prices, and won't until cars run on natgas. Iran's oil production peaked years ago, and that's an open secret. They will not be increasing oil production, ever. What fracking does do is crush the market for natgas. And it just so happens that BTU for BTU, Iran has more natgas than Saudi Arabia has oil. Iran is in a suboptimal energy spot. They know that their carbon fuels will eventually run out. They need to have alternatives in place to keep the lights on before things get out of hand. The standard response has been "Nukes". Also, nukes can help make nuke weapons, which kept the USA at bay.
Well, the USA is falling apart. Therefore the need for nukes isn't quite as extreme as it once was. Also, Germany and Denmark are pointing towards how an advanced society can operate without nukes or carbon, and in a place as sunny as Iran, this becomes a kind of no-brainer.
Iran's biggest worry is their biggest asset: The South Pars gas field. The Europeans want it BAD as an alternative to Russian natgas, and the Americans would love to take it away from Iran, just cuz the Americans are a bunch of greedy dicks who'd love to stick it to the Russians, and screw the Iranians in the process. As long as South Pars stays underground, the Russians have their captured market (Europe) and Iran has money in the bank. As long as Iran was banging the nuke drum, the Americans were able to keep their psychotic fear machine rolling. Now that the USA Empire is entering late afternoon, they can afford to play nice with them and their pointy little all american bullet headed saxon mother's sons. Franking is crushing the natgas market, but everyone knows franking is a temporary solution, so Iran will hold that Ace of South Pars and cash big time when they will need the money to transition to solar. At that point the USA will be in some kind of tizzy tea party dipshit media freak show - probably with Britney Spears running as a Republican and (fill in name of faceless bureaucrat) on the Democratic ticket and some frothing tool of the Koch guard as a third party spoiler.
Ya gotta look at this stuff with a longer term view...
"As we shut down more coal plants and when the economy picks up, we will be faced with the choice of becoming heavily dependant on gas, or building more nuclear."
Or, more solar and wind plugged into decentralised local grids. See: Germany and Denmark who are doing just that without the benefit of Texas Sun.
In 100 years there won't be a USA. There will be a north American confederacy of states, composed of what was the USA and Canada. It will be a massively decentralised confederacy. Most transportation will be by electric train. Personal transport will be by bicycle. The suburbs will have been abandoned and plowed back into farms. Much of the midwest USA will no longer be habitable due to drought and the collapse of the acquifers from draining them and from poisoning them via gas fracking earlier in the century. This confederacy will eventually unravel as the temperatures increase and the southern sections migrate north. Plagues (most flu but also drug resistant bacteria) will sweep through the urban populations, killing millions.
In 1000 years, the population, compared to 2013, will have been more than decimated. What is left of humanity will live in valleys in high elevations, or near the Arctic and Antarctic circle. There will be very little metals left, and many people will live as hunter gatherers. Those cursed with civilisation will mostly live in coastal cities in Siberia and Canada and the horn of S. America. Fishing villages will appear in the archepelago of Antarctica. The level of technology will, at best, be roughly that of the 16th century.
In 10,000 years, the few metals will have long ago oxidised. The few million remaining people will live as hunter gatherers in Siberia and Canada and Antarctica. Everything between the 50th parallels will be a hot desert or a hellish jungle where the wet-bulb temp far exceeds human survival. The few temperate forests left will be in the far north and south. The pyramids will be underwater, and the rest of the world's cities were dismantled and stripped for metals 9,500 years earlier. The Anthropocene will have disrupted the glacial cycle, and the world won't grow cold again for another 50,000 - 100,000 years.
In 100,000,000 years, the earth will be a bit warmer than today, as the sun continues to increase its radiance as helium "ash" collects at the core. The decendants of racoons will have evolved and grown into furry bipeds with opposable thumbs and complex social systems. They will re-invent the wheel, and perhaps the scientific method. They will dig into the earth and find a thin layer of carbon and radioactivity. They will find our skeletons, most of them dated to within a few millennia, and realise what happened:
At the edge of the forest is where there is the most activity and disruption. Weed species abound - crappy, sappy, trees with shallow roots, shrubs and grasses that strangle other plants, and this constant churn over territory and nutrients bounded by the soil and the sun permits for a great deal of opportunity for animals and plants to reproduce. One of these weed species evolved in Africa 103,000,000 years earlier than these racoonish scientists. The species was bipedal and omnivorous and highly social. Breaking into bands of 30 to 50 and assembling into crowds of 150 they believed that unseen beings controlled their world. They built shrines to these beings after a particularly cold ice age. To build these shrines they needed members of their society in place all year round, and thus devised small villages and agriculture. This permitted over population, but it also created hierarchy in their society. Where previously sociopathic behaviour was not tolerated in the small bands (murderers were punished by death), sociopaths were now able to flourish and institute systems of slavery and domination. These systems evolved the villages into cities; areas of such density that they required the import of resources. Emphasis on require. Soon, millions of people were slaughter by one city or group of cities for their resources. Shortly there after, the species discovered huge carbon deposits which were burned as fuel, and powered this weed species into planetary dominance. The oceans were quickly emptied of fish, and the air was filled with CO2, and the population skyrocketed. All of the metals that could be extracted, were.
The "researchers" would probably think this is a society of retards, when actually it's just a different way of living and thinking. Numbers don't exist. The universe is not mathematical. Those are both stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world...
Or, develop a society that is actually based in sustainable principles and change the way you live and work so it is more in accordance with your local environment. And if that means the end of your happy motoring society and a disallowal of nuclear power, STFU and adapt.
Not quite. You're assuming they CARE enough to bother.... They watch Fox, MSNBC, NPR, whatevs. They've got all the money they need, they really don't care that much. They don't need to be super up to date on things because they don't need to be super up to date on things.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I have, I have. That it is SOP on gmail is what grinds me (and several other details that piss me off about Google in general). I have a HUGE sunk cost in yahoo - years and years of email. Jumping over to gmail isn't an optimal option, although it is getting more attractive by the day...
Small
Cheap
Easy to repair
Pick two.
So I open up a bunch of FB notifications and they all appear in tabs. Once the horizontal of the tabs is filled, an arrow down tab appears, letting you access extra tabs, right? Wrong. It lists ALL the tabs, nd you have to scroll down to the end to find the most recent ones...
Now, over the years my eyes are not as good as they were, so I have to CTRL-+ a few times to be able to read stuff easily. So, the entire interface scales up and the stupid tabs and wasted space crowd out the text, leaving me with one or two lines of text to type into. Heck - I have the same mag here in slashdot, and I can see most of my post so far.
And then some times when I open Yahoo it barks at me that my screen res is too low (which is bullshit - it's 1920 x 1280 as usual).
And while I detest Google's threaded system, at least when you start typing someone's name in the search bar, it automagically finds the person you're looking for.
Yahoo would be better stripping down the UI - reduce the glitz and colours, ditch the tabbed UI, and just make something that WORKS.
All you have to do is fill the compartment with tools, blankets, water, and similar emergency materials. If you get pulled over and they find your "compartment" you're clearly not intending it for drug use, because it's clearly IN USE for legitimate purposes. The compartment is one thing, but intent is another, and intending to keep emergency materials at hand in a car is actually a GOOD THING, and having a compartment for it means you're not sacrificing trunk space.
Around here, we don't dignify them with such latinate terms, we just call them assholes.
Don't forget how Allende killed himself - the first world leader to shoot himself in the back with an M16 from 20 paces, pausing only once to reload!
Headlines from Captain Obvious.
Yahoo mail's UI is horrific. Besides being ugly, if you have to enlarge text it becomes disuseful... It's a trainwreck of a UI.
demonstrates the bankruptcy of contemporary education.
FUCK YOU.
Interesting. So do I. I also run the office Xmas food fund. Gotta feed people.
I plant in a community garden.
There are none here, so I tend my own with a neighbour.
I recycle.
As do I.
I sponsor children in the third world.
As do I.
I'm converting my house to solar.
Recently moved into this house, so first order of business is re-insulation to reduce load, and then shift to geothermal HVAC. Due to neighbour's trees, solar isn't a great idea on my house. But the guy across the street will have an easy time of it.
I vote in every election.
I can't. I'm not a citizen of the country I live in.
I educate myself every day, even though I graduated college.
I'm a professor, so that's my job. :-)
I was in the Peace Corps.
I've travelled a good bit. Never did Peace corp.
I worked at an after school program for youth.
Similar: I read stories at a children's library for a number of years.
I bought an electric car.
I ride a bicycle. Just bought a new trailer for it! Works great, esp. for getting groceries and hauling stuff.
I donate to the EFF, the ACLU, and the NAACP.
I donate to EFF, Greenpeace, Amnesty Int'l, and a local charity for underprivileged youth.
So, in terms of what I do, you and I are very very similar. The difference is, you seem to think technical civilisation is by its nature a net good. I do not. I don't see it as good or bad. It is simply the present condition of humans. Nothing lasts forever, and thermodynamics will not be denied. In my work as an educator, I explain very carefully and precisely to university students the precarious situation society and the biosphere are in, and I explain how due to the luck of the draw, their generation is going to have to do all the heavy lifting. My generation can point the direction toward "better" policies, but they and their kids are the ones who are going to get stuck doing stupid shit like building dikes around NYC and having to deal with uncontrollable plagues, and dealing with north bound migration and drought etc.
We're not going back to some "idyllic garden". Even if humans disappeared tomorrow, there would still be a massive rise in temperature for the next few centuries.
I don't see the loss of civilisation and the disappearance of humanity as a bad thing. It's just how the universe operates. I don't see the glass as half full (as optimists such as yourself do), nor do I see the glass as half empty (as pessimists like the Peak Oil crew, and the likes of Guy McPherson, and similar doomers do). To me, the glass is simply asymmetric to its contents.
In our dealings with society, we should work to reduce suffering, especially of the innocent. We should work at developing a humane and socialist system based around human need not private greed. We need to solarise our societies as much as possible. But this will not get us out of the thermo-demo dynamic trap. We are in the Anthropocene. That tiny human caused geological blip that triggered a major extinction event. Denying its so won't change it. But it's basically the same deal as Kubler Ross stages. First is denial... I'm well into the acceptance phase on the death of civilisation and the fate of humanity. It's not as big a deal as you might think.
By making Iran a client state, they can support them enough to keep them from fully exploiting south pars, which has been the case. Also, by supporting Iran, it drives the Americans crazy, and keeps Russia present in the middle east.
Year......Capacity......Yield
2002......296......162
2003......435......313
2004......1,105......556
2005......2,056......1,282
2006......2,899......2,220
2007......4,170......3,075
2008......6,120......4,420
2009......10,565......6,583
2010......17,554......11,729
2011......25,039......19,340
2012......32,643......28,000
So, conservatively, it's doubling every 2 years or so. It is presently at about 5% of total electrical production. At present rates of growth, it will be at 100% of present production in 9 years. That, of course, isn't going to happen, but even doubling that length to 18 years means that nuclear power is superfluous. Oh and FUKUSHIMA MOFO.
Well, the USA is falling apart. Therefore the need for nukes isn't quite as extreme as it once was. Also, Germany and Denmark are pointing towards how an advanced society can operate without nukes or carbon, and in a place as sunny as Iran, this becomes a kind of no-brainer.
Iran's biggest worry is their biggest asset: The South Pars gas field. The Europeans want it BAD as an alternative to Russian natgas, and the Americans would love to take it away from Iran, just cuz the Americans are a bunch of greedy dicks who'd love to stick it to the Russians, and screw the Iranians in the process. As long as South Pars stays underground, the Russians have their captured market (Europe) and Iran has money in the bank. As long as Iran was banging the nuke drum, the Americans were able to keep their psychotic fear machine rolling. Now that the USA Empire is entering late afternoon, they can afford to play nice with them and their pointy little all american bullet headed saxon mother's sons. Franking is crushing the natgas market, but everyone knows franking is a temporary solution, so Iran will hold that Ace of South Pars and cash big time when they will need the money to transition to solar. At that point the USA will be in some kind of tizzy tea party dipshit media freak show - probably with Britney Spears running as a Republican and (fill in name of faceless bureaucrat) on the Democratic ticket and some frothing tool of the Koch guard as a third party spoiler.
Ya gotta look at this stuff with a longer term view...
Or, more solar and wind plugged into decentralised local grids. See: Germany and Denmark who are doing just that without the benefit of Texas Sun.
In 100 years there won't be a USA. There will be a north American confederacy of states, composed of what was the USA and Canada. It will be a massively decentralised confederacy. Most transportation will be by electric train. Personal transport will be by bicycle. The suburbs will have been abandoned and plowed back into farms. Much of the midwest USA will no longer be habitable due to drought and the collapse of the acquifers from draining them and from poisoning them via gas fracking earlier in the century. This confederacy will eventually unravel as the temperatures increase and the southern sections migrate north. Plagues (most flu but also drug resistant bacteria) will sweep through the urban populations, killing millions. In 1000 years, the population, compared to 2013, will have been more than decimated. What is left of humanity will live in valleys in high elevations, or near the Arctic and Antarctic circle. There will be very little metals left, and many people will live as hunter gatherers. Those cursed with civilisation will mostly live in coastal cities in Siberia and Canada and the horn of S. America. Fishing villages will appear in the archepelago of Antarctica. The level of technology will, at best, be roughly that of the 16th century.
In 10,000 years, the few metals will have long ago oxidised. The few million remaining people will live as hunter gatherers in Siberia and Canada and Antarctica. Everything between the 50th parallels will be a hot desert or a hellish jungle where the wet-bulb temp far exceeds human survival. The few temperate forests left will be in the far north and south. The pyramids will be underwater, and the rest of the world's cities were dismantled and stripped for metals 9,500 years earlier. The Anthropocene will have disrupted the glacial cycle, and the world won't grow cold again for another 50,000 - 100,000 years. In 100,000,000 years, the earth will be a bit warmer than today, as the sun continues to increase its radiance as helium "ash" collects at the core. The decendants of racoons will have evolved and grown into furry bipeds with opposable thumbs and complex social systems. They will re-invent the wheel, and perhaps the scientific method. They will dig into the earth and find a thin layer of carbon and radioactivity. They will find our skeletons, most of them dated to within a few millennia, and realise what happened:
At the edge of the forest is where there is the most activity and disruption. Weed species abound - crappy, sappy, trees with shallow roots, shrubs and grasses that strangle other plants, and this constant churn over territory and nutrients bounded by the soil and the sun permits for a great deal of opportunity for animals and plants to reproduce. One of these weed species evolved in Africa 103,000,000 years earlier than these racoonish scientists. The species was bipedal and omnivorous and highly social. Breaking into bands of 30 to 50 and assembling into crowds of 150 they believed that unseen beings controlled their world. They built shrines to these beings after a particularly cold ice age. To build these shrines they needed members of their society in place all year round, and thus devised small villages and agriculture. This permitted over population, but it also created hierarchy in their society. Where previously sociopathic behaviour was not tolerated in the small bands (murderers were punished by death), sociopaths were now able to flourish and institute systems of slavery and domination. These systems evolved the villages into cities; areas of such density that they required the import of resources. Emphasis on require. Soon, millions of people were slaughter by one city or group of cities for their resources. Shortly there after, the species discovered huge carbon deposits which were burned as fuel, and powered this weed species into planetary dominance. The oceans were quickly emptied of fish, and the air was filled with CO2, and the population skyrocketed. All of the metals that could be extracted, were.
I can't get enough iLivid installs! That and another Ask! toolbar! Sign me up!
no one in QA uses a mouse? WTF?
What Happens When a Language Has No Numbers?
The "researchers" would probably think this is a society of retards, when actually it's just a different way of living and thinking. Numbers don't exist. The universe is not mathematical. Those are both stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSactZxGGrw And kill the working class in a world of diminished resources.
What else would you do after nuking an innocent planet?
Oh.
downloading books for free...
Or, develop a society that is actually based in sustainable principles and change the way you live and work so it is more in accordance with your local environment. And if that means the end of your happy motoring society and a disallowal of nuclear power, STFU and adapt.
Not quite. You're assuming they CARE enough to bother.... They watch Fox, MSNBC, NPR, whatevs. They've got all the money they need, they really don't care that much. They don't need to be super up to date on things because they don't need to be super up to date on things.