This may be news to you, but trees have a feature called "reproduction", where they grow seeds, and these seeds fall on the ground, are scattered by wind, and grow into new trees. So in 100 years, 1 tree is replaced by 10 or 100 trees. These replacement trees sequester much more carbon than the parent tree's remains release.
Wow, Mr. Ponzi! I was not aware!
But... but.... but if that's true and we extract the trend lines out then... if we plant even one tree then eventually we'll have a million billion kajillion trillion trees and they'll be everywhere and the planet will be doomed!!! HELP!
Here in the deep desert of Arizona, we have many species of trees, such as Mesquite, which grow naturally with the regular rainfall in this region. No extra water needed.
Oh, so we can put 1,000,000,000 trees in the Arizona desert this year and everything will be fine. No? Oh, right, so you're saying that trees need water. like I said. awesome.
Oh btw. Chopping down everything in sight for subdivisions? (In 2009? Who's buying?) That aside, sure, locally that's kinda annoying, but it's piddly-beans next to the real culprit behind chopping down forests throughout human history: agriculture. (Even into modernity. Ever hear of "the rainforest"?)
They need water. (Hello California.) They need sunlight. You need a place to put them. They may be mildly sensitive to environmental shock when you're putting them up. They're somewhat low-density. The roots can damage structures in the vicinity. After several decades they die, and if you don't do something with the carbon they sequestered in the wood it'll make its way back to the atmosphere.
In general, if you're a "nerdy" type and not going to impress women by being all Manly and Buff and Muscular...
heck, try something that's conventionally not-very-manly, like dance, or gardening - heck, maybe even needlepoint,
or something like that. (I understand it's very systematic.)
First, women will think that it's somewhat interesting,
and it will make you stand out from the crowd -- doubly so to the sort of interesting, intelligent women in whom you
are more likely to be interested.
Secondly, if you can do something like that, and stand up to or deflect the sort of flack that it generates from your
co-workers and other male acquaintances, you will be securing the confidence in yourself without which any pursuit of
girls is seriously at risk of being doomed.
I thought the whole point of insurance was to protect me if something unforseen randomly happened, like getting in a car crash, that would really be a big financial strain. We don't get insurance to pay for each others' lousy driving, we get it to reduce our exposure to risk. Why should health insurance be any different? Even if you do slip a bit of routine care in there to take advantage of some economies of scope? (Hey, Geico will help hook you up with things like windshield repair and oil change discounts too.)
And as a way to redistribute money, insurance is pretty lousy. If insurance was a tax, it would be a very regressive tax and burden those with lower income a lot more than those with higher incomes.
Would we be better off "without expensive treatments" then "with expensive treatments that only the rich people can afford"? Is society better off with certain people less healthy?
I realize that some people love to hate "the rich", but this is Slashdot. A lot of people here are highly paid computer nerds who worked their rear ends off making their money. Would depriving us (them) of higher-quality health care really render the world a better place?
(Safeway for example managed to reduce health insurance costs by 40% or so by encouraging their employees to take care of themselves)
And also in the Wall Street Journal,
here is an article about Mr. Burd, of Safeway, going to Washington to lobby regarding how the market can rein in costs:
Today, Safeway has accomplished what Washington claims is the goal: The company's per-capita health-care expenses have remained flat, compared to the near 40% increase experienced by the rest of corporate America over the past four years. This has not been done by cutting care or shifting costs to employees. Nearly 80% of the 30,000 nonunion Safeway workers who take part in the program rate it good, very good, or excellent.
Well, for the "medium" sized businesses in SMB.... with the advent of 802.11n, wireless to your desktop is about as effective (if you've got decent gear) and frequently cheaper than stringing Ethernet cables and hooking them up to fancy switches. Or so the marketing message goes:
A typical enterprise 48-port switch costs 3-5x more than an 802.11n AP, yet they support about the same number of devices in common usage. Annual wired costs are also several times higher for maintenance fees, moves/adds/changes, power, depreciation and hardware refresh. The difference is often thousands of dollars per year for every switch. Consequently, annual savings from rightsizing may well exceed the cost of a new pervasive 802.11n WLAN build out, thus achieving net budget savings in the first year.
But I work for these people; what do I know? *shrug*
Government: "Here are subsidies for schools, and for student loans!"
College A: "Hmm, look, money! We could build some spiffy new facilities that'll look good on the tour, and attract a slightly richer set of people!"
College B: "Hmm, look, money! Good thing, too, because otherwise we couldn't keep up with College A and C. We need nicer stuff to attract the same students. And besides, what university administration doesn't like spiffy-looking new facilities?"
People: "College is still soo expensive!!"
Throwing money at colleges in the US may produce a variety of desirable effects. However, "cheaper college education for all" is not necessarily among them. Universities are experts at price discrimination (the art of charging someone as much as you can get away with). They even have you fill out forms ("financial aid") so they can figure out exactly how much to charge you!
Why? Discrete mathematics, my friend, and in particular, modular arithmetic. (You know, from fourth grade, when you'd do 11 / 3 and get "3 remainder 2" - the 'modulo' operation just gives you the 2.) Now suppose you have an algorithm:
a = x % 731
b = x % 129
Now take a number: say, x = 10,000. Easy to compute: a = 497. b = 67. Very easy to calculate. But, working backwards from a and b alone, can you determine x? Suppose a = 616 and b = 100; can you tell me what my number is? It's not quite that easy! You'll need to do a lot more math. Not too much, in this case, as this is a ridiculously simple code and the numbers are small, but a lot more than a simple integer-division-and-remainder operation.
That's not an encrypted message. (Public-key cryptography is related but different.) That's a simple one-way cryptographic hash: a secret number (your password) goes in, and a mysterious hash-value (a and b) comes out, and there's no easy way to map it back. But if you give me the password, it's easy to check that it's right. That hash value is what's in your shadow password file. Except it uses MD5 or SHA or whatever-the-latest-hotness-is.
Now, granted, there's few enough passwords that you can check them all, given enough time. (You might even precompute them all, which is why you add a little random 'salt' to each password that makes them all different. In the example above, the 'salt' could be 'add 12345 to X before hashing it'. You can store the salt next to the encrypted password - you'll need it to check the password. It only protects you from the guy who calculated all the passwords adding +12344 each time - his "rainbow table" of passwords and hashes is now useless.). That's why the shadow-password file isn't usually broadcasted to the world. You try to keep it reasonably secret: not world-readable, certainly not exposed to the Internet. But it's a whole lot better than nothing.
Really what's the difference between orbit and a Vomit Comet - besides the fact that the latter is aimed so that it'll hit the ground sooner or or later, and the former isn't? From the relativistic point of view, there isn't really much - just different tracks through a curved region of spacetime. I mean, I suppose objects may be slightly more energetic in orbit and time will elapse at a slightly faster rate, but it's not that much.
Really, we only experience the feeling of gravity when we try to stop it. (Like when the ground's in the way.) Want to free yourself entirely form the influence of gravity from distant objects that affects the shape of the spacetime you're in ? Sorry, buddy, try another universe.
Singer - manufacturer of sewing machines - had a really good trick around the turn of the century or so, I hear. Sell your snazzy new sewing machines for a ridiculous amount of money... then offer an equally ridiculous trade-in credit for old sewing machines. Then, as soon as you get the old sewing machines, destroy them utterly.
I just remembered this one; rumour has it that the WFU Business School hired anyone who couldn't get a job last year so they could put out some BS about how all their graduates got jobs even in These Turbulent Economic Times (tm).
Even if you're not going this far.... the business school at Wake Forest University a few years ago suddenly became a lot more selective and shrunk the number of people it would accept. The idea, I believe, was to increase the standings in various rankings. Of course, there were side effects of this, such as the economics department being flooded with people who didn't make it.... and it's not really good for the university as a whole, either... or "education" in the abstract.... It's going to look real good on someone's resume, though.
Typical principal-agent problem at work.
(Then there's the "omg new logo" debacle... gaak... and you guys wonder why I don't give you a $5/yr pittance to "improve your ranking" in the alumni-willing-to-give category)...
I think it's not just billing -- there's probably (also) obnoxious federal paperwork regulations too. As for the "tenuous"ness of treatment without records, you'd be surprised what the threat of multimillion dollar lawsuits will do to people. (Typically, "whatever our malpractice insurance tells us to".)
Email is not a niche app. Aside from webmail and Outlook (which is $$), there's Thunderbird, and... okay, Eudora is probably still around, Pegasus Mail probably isn't dead yet.... and, ah.... idunno, Thunderbird's kinda the big one in any geek's repertoire. unless they're using mutt or something.:P
Eh. The problem with your idea isn't the idea per se - but
some people might prefer not living in an experiment like that... and any city of appreciable size is likely to have a good number of those people, so
if you're going to be embarking on crazy city reengineering projects, you need to give the people-in-charge an awful lot of power to make it happen... and then you need to make sure that they're actually interested in doing that sort of experiment instead of pushing another preexisting pet sociopolitical agenda
many of the most vibrant and well-regarded sorts of neighborhoods in this country were built without much central planning
Slashdot Mirror
DC is safe "as long as you don't ride the Metro"? You haven't driven on the Beltway recently, have you?
Wow, Mr. Ponzi! I was not aware!
But... but.... but if that's true and we extract the trend lines out then... if we plant even one tree then eventually we'll have a million billion kajillion trillion trees and they'll be everywhere and the planet will be doomed!!! HELP!
Oh, so we can put 1,000,000,000 trees in the Arizona desert this year and everything will be fine. No? Oh, right, so you're saying that trees need water. like I said. awesome.
Oh btw. Chopping down everything in sight for subdivisions? (In 2009? Who's buying?) That aside, sure, locally that's kinda annoying, but it's piddly-beans next to the real culprit behind chopping down forests throughout human history: agriculture. (Even into modernity. Ever hear of "the rainforest"?)
Still great, stuff, just not perfect.
I'm gonna need a hacksaw.
First, women will think that it's somewhat interesting, and it will make you stand out from the crowd -- doubly so to the sort of interesting, intelligent women in whom you are more likely to be interested. Secondly, if you can do something like that, and stand up to or deflect the sort of flack that it generates from your co-workers and other male acquaintances, you will be securing the confidence in yourself without which any pursuit of girls is seriously at risk of being doomed.
And as a way to redistribute money, insurance is pretty lousy. If insurance was a tax, it would be a very regressive tax and burden those with lower income a lot more than those with higher incomes.
Would we be better off "without expensive treatments" then "with expensive treatments that only the rich people can afford"? Is society better off with certain people less healthy? I realize that some people love to hate "the rich", but this is Slashdot. A lot of people here are highly paid computer nerds who worked their rear ends off making their money. Would depriving us (them) of higher-quality health care really render the world a better place?
And also in the Wall Street Journal, here is an article about Mr. Burd, of Safeway, going to Washington to lobby regarding how the market can rein in costs:
OMG! Genetically modified organisms! KILL STABBITY STAB STAB DIE DIE DIE DIE! burnthewitch
really, um, exactly what sort of "social pressures" do they propose exist which will lead to more "ethical research"?
And their bondholders!
Well, for the "medium" sized businesses in SMB.... with the advent of 802.11n, wireless to your desktop is about as effective (if you've got decent gear) and frequently cheaper than stringing Ethernet cables and hooking them up to fancy switches. Or so the marketing message goes:
But I work for these people; what do I know? *shrug*
Stale old trolls aside, I would think Dell is more interested in putting OpenOffice and Firefox and GIMP on the Windows desktop than Linux.
It works like this.
People: "College is soo expensive!"
Government: "Here are subsidies for schools, and for student loans!"
College A: "Hmm, look, money! We could build some spiffy new facilities that'll look good on the tour, and attract a slightly richer set of people!"
College B: "Hmm, look, money! Good thing, too, because otherwise we couldn't keep up with College A and C. We need nicer stuff to attract the same students. And besides, what university administration doesn't like spiffy-looking new facilities?"
People: "College is still soo expensive!!"
Throwing money at colleges in the US may produce a variety of desirable effects. However, "cheaper college education for all" is not necessarily among them. Universities are experts at price discrimination (the art of charging someone as much as you can get away with). They even have you fill out forms ("financial aid") so they can figure out exactly how much to charge you!
Why? Discrete mathematics, my friend, and in particular, modular arithmetic. (You know, from fourth grade, when you'd do 11 / 3 and get "3 remainder 2" - the 'modulo' operation just gives you the 2.) Now suppose you have an algorithm:
a = x % 731
b = x % 129
Now take a number: say, x = 10,000. Easy to compute: a = 497. b = 67. Very easy to calculate. But, working backwards from a and b alone, can you determine x? Suppose a = 616 and b = 100; can you tell me what my number is? It's not quite that easy! You'll need to do a lot more math. Not too much, in this case, as this is a ridiculously simple code and the numbers are small, but a lot more than a simple integer-division-and-remainder operation.
That's not an encrypted message. (Public-key cryptography is related but different.) That's a simple one-way cryptographic hash: a secret number (your password) goes in, and a mysterious hash-value (a and b) comes out, and there's no easy way to map it back. But if you give me the password, it's easy to check that it's right. That hash value is what's in your shadow password file. Except it uses MD5 or SHA or whatever-the-latest-hotness-is.
Now, granted, there's few enough passwords that you can check them all, given enough time. (You might even precompute them all, which is why you add a little random 'salt' to each password that makes them all different. In the example above, the 'salt' could be 'add 12345 to X before hashing it'. You can store the salt next to the encrypted password - you'll need it to check the password. It only protects you from the guy who calculated all the passwords adding +12344 each time - his "rainbow table" of passwords and hashes is now useless.). That's why the shadow-password file isn't usually broadcasted to the world. You try to keep it reasonably secret: not world-readable, certainly not exposed to the Internet. But it's a whole lot better than nothing.
We can bring together music, text, video, news, everything, to one agency, simplify things, save the economy a billion a year probably! I want 10%.
Really what's the difference between orbit and a Vomit Comet - besides the fact that the latter is aimed so that it'll hit the ground sooner or or later, and the former isn't? From the relativistic point of view, there isn't really much - just different tracks through a curved region of spacetime. I mean, I suppose objects may be slightly more energetic in orbit and time will elapse at a slightly faster rate, but it's not that much.
Really, we only experience the feeling of gravity when we try to stop it. (Like when the ground's in the way.) Want to free yourself entirely form the influence of gravity from distant objects that affects the shape of the spacetime you're in ? Sorry, buddy, try another universe.
Singer - manufacturer of sewing machines - had a really good trick around the turn of the century or so, I hear. Sell your snazzy new sewing machines for a ridiculous amount of money... then offer an equally ridiculous trade-in credit for old sewing machines. Then, as soon as you get the old sewing machines, destroy them utterly.
I just remembered this one; rumour has it that the WFU Business School hired anyone who couldn't get a job last year so they could put out some BS about how all their graduates got jobs even in These Turbulent Economic Times (tm).
Even if you're not going this far.... the business school at Wake Forest University a few years ago suddenly became a lot more selective and shrunk the number of people it would accept. The idea, I believe, was to increase the standings in various rankings. Of course, there were side effects of this, such as the economics department being flooded with people who didn't make it.... and it's not really good for the university as a whole, either... or "education" in the abstract.... It's going to look real good on someone's resume, though.
Typical principal-agent problem at work.
(Then there's the "omg new logo" debacle... gaak... and you guys wonder why I don't give you a $5/yr pittance to "improve your ranking" in the alumni-willing-to-give category)...
Your approach has some merit... the thing is... have you ever seen that closed source software? .... yeah it's more of the same, trust me.
I think it's not just billing -- there's probably (also) obnoxious federal paperwork regulations too. As for the "tenuous"ness of treatment without records, you'd be surprised what the threat of multimillion dollar lawsuits will do to people. (Typically, "whatever our malpractice insurance tells us to".)
What you mean "we", white man?
(yeah yeah I'm as white as the next guy :P)
Email is not a niche app. Aside from webmail and Outlook (which is $$), there's Thunderbird, and... okay, Eudora is probably still around, Pegasus Mail probably isn't dead yet.... and, ah.... idunno, Thunderbird's kinda the big one in any geek's repertoire. unless they're using mutt or something. :P
The real world, alas, is not as simple as SimCity. :P
"Bill! Fix your computer and stop sending me spam!"
"Dude, whatev-"
"Stop sending me spam!"
"Geez, man!
"Spam spam spam spam spam spam spam!"