The problem with MBA's isn't that they maximize profits, it's that they maximize next quarter's profits And that isn't the MBA's fault -- it's usually the fault of being a publicly traded corporation, which leads to separation of ownership and control..
If this is really the problem, over the long-term, shouldn't private companies be beating out public companies? Yet the opposite seems to be true.
I suspect that long-term planning isn't as useful as people claim it is. Yes, if everything goes according to plan it's great. But that rarely happens - the further you plan ahead, the more uncertainty there is in your plan. If you make a ten-year plan, and 3 years into it someone invents a new way to manufacture a key component in your industry, your ten-year plan is shot and most or all the effort that went into designing it is wasted. The sweet spot balancing short-term myopia with uncertainty about the future seems to be planning a few years ahead (with a few exceptions). Which is well within the range of even publicly traded companies.
Global warming is expected to create much more evaporation from the oceans and lead to more rain. (cf the flooded central US).
The problem I've always had with this theory is that increased evaporation leads to greater cloud cover, which leads to a higher albedo, which leads to cooler temperatures.
That if the slot machine hasn't paid out for a while, then it's "due" so you should play it. The thing about random sequences is that while they will generate a uniform pattern, that pattern is useless for predicting individual events. That is, if I start flipping coins and it begins with an unusually large number of heads, that doesn't mean that there's a higher probability of a tail to balance the heads out. All that happens is that the sheer number of subsequent flips tending to be 50/50 swamps out the spike created by those early heads.
RTFA, it seems like there's two things they're working on. One is the predictive stuff, which is bullocks.* The other is regular statistical analysis to detect problem areas, which works but AFAIK has been done for decades. They're just throwing more data at it and using computers to analyze the larger number of potential correlations between variables.
* Though I suppose in a one-man or one-team crime wave, it could have predictive value since an individual's behavior is rarely truly random.
Re:Not enough energy potential in solar?
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Bill Gates On Energy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Potential problems:
solar panels smashed en masse in a hail storm - solar is offline until panels are replaced and structure is back on grid power. If owner has insurance, that is used to pay for the replacement.
Batteries leak, owner stops storing power for overnight use and goes back on to the grid, and replaces batteries and cleans up acid spill
Absolute Worst Case- solar system causes a fire and the small structure burns.
You left off people falling off of rooftops during installation, maintenance, and replacement. That kills far more people per TWh than nuclear.
Contrast to nuclear:
Startup:
Spend billions to build obtain land, fight local opposition, and build the plant.
spend millions to obtain ROW to install power transmission lines
Per TWh generated, solar is currently far more expensive to construct and takes up more land. The average generation capacity of a U.S. nuclear plant is a bit over 1.5 GW. With a 90% capacity factor, that means they generate on average 1.4 GW throughout the year. Cost estimates for a new 1 GW reactor range from about $1 billion (Westinghouse's estimate after production is ramped up) to $5 billion (high end estimate) excluding interest payments for financing. So for 1.5 GW of capacity you're talking $1.5 - $7.7 billion.
Commercial panels are only about 15% efficient. Some are up to 16%, and I've seen 18% ones available if you're willing to pay (a lot) extra. Go with 16%. Sunlight hits the earth's surface with about 700-800 W per m^2 perpendicular to the rays. Go with 750 W. So one square meter of commercial panels has a peak generating potential of ~120 Watts.
Capacity factor, taking into account night, weather, changing angle of the sun throughout the day, etc. ranges from about 12% in the northern U.S. to 18% in the desert southwest. Assume you build in the best areas for solar and go with 18%. So the average annual production of of a square meter of panels is 120 W * 0.18 = 21.6 Watts.
To match the average annual power generation of one nuclear plant (1.4 GW) at 21.6 Watts per m^2, you'd need 64.8 square km of PV panels. So already you can see solar is going to require acquiring a lot more land than nuclear. In terms of cost, if your construction budget matches that of the nuclear plant with the same power output ($1.5 - $7.7 billion), the panels have to cost $23 - $119 per square meter. No commercial panels are close to that price point yet, and this is ignoring the cost of batteries to time-shift your electricity production to match demand.
Refine nuclear fuel in a high security factory
transport fuel in an expensive manner via truck convoy
employ dozens, if not hundreds of engineers and technicians to fuel, power up, and baby sit the reactor
The U.S. currently uses about 2000 tons of enriched uranium as fuel each year in its 3-4 decade old heavy water reactors which don't reprocess. By volume that's about two tractor trailer's worth. The amount of high-risk material we're talking about to power the entire country is minuscule compared to alternatives. To power the average U.S. home for 30 years would require just 2.5 tablespoons of uranium, vs over 150 tons of coal.
Personally, I don't see what the problem is. Nuclear is great for baseline load but sucks for daily load variances. Of the green renewables, only hydro is able to provide baseline load, but its real strength is being able to respond almost instantly to variable load. Solar's variable production coincides with daily load variances. So you start with nuclear as your baseline power source, add wind on top of that, add solar to compensate for some of the daily variance, and use hydro to top it off and make generation exactly match demand. Any solution which relies only on nuclear, or only on renewables adds considerable expense and engineering obstacles because you'd be using the technologies for things they suck at. And all of them are much, much better than coal.
Defense spending is hardly untouchable. Defense is about the only part of the Federal budget which has been consistently decreasing over the last 50 years as a percentage of GDP. It's ticked up a bit since 9/11, but is still lower than during Reagan's build-up in the 1980s, and nowhere near as high as during the Vietnam War.
The thing that's threatening to bust the budget is entitlements. Medicare and Medicaid speciically. Just the growth predicted for entitlements between now and 2035 will exceed the entire defense budget. Go read the CBO's long-term outlooks if you don't believe me. I'm not saying entitlements have to go, but any budget plan which refuses to change entitlements is doomed to fail before it even starts.
Yeah I keep hearing these same quotes that either ethanol uses more energy to produce or it breaks even. I rarely hear anyone sourcing where this information comes from or a breakdown of these energy costs. Most of the petroleum costs that are quoted refer to fertilizer and tractor fuel, etc and not the actual production of Ethanol. I believe they generally use natural gas in the production.
From an energy standpoint, the problem with ethanol from food crops is that we've reduced the labor to produce food crops by massively increasing the energy costs. That is, as technology drives the cost of energy down and the standard of living up, labor becomes much more expensive than fuel. So food production has been optimized to minimize labor, substituting the burning of more energy instead. Think about it - you can't eat oil. But by mechanized growing of crops, you can turn oil into food. Since food is much more important than oil, it makes economic sense to pump more energy into food's production than you'd get back if you merely burned the food as fuel.
The U.S. produces an excess amount of food (particularly corn) in order to stave off famine should there be another major crop failure like in the early 1930s (this is the primary rationale for farm subsidies). Consequently, we're left wondering what to do with all this excess corn. Some gets donated as foreign aid. Some is converted into high fructose corn syrup. Some is used as cattle feed to lower the price of steaks, since people like steaks. And we still have tons of it left. Someone came up with the bright idea of turning it into ethanol to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. If you add up all the energy used to produce corn ethanol, I'm fairly certain it would cost nearly as much or more energy than the fuel it produces. But that's beside the point because that corn would still be produced regardless of whether or not it's converted into ethanol.
The real problem with turning food crops into ethanol is that there's no market barrier between the two uses. If the price of fuel goes up, more corn gets shifted into ethanol production, meaning less corn for food, meaning food prices go up. If we're going to be turning corn into ethanol, then the farmers (farming corporations really) should be required to specify at planting whether that field's crop is going to be used for food or for fuel. That way the government can still work to ensure there's still an oversupply of food, and farmers aren't tempted to sell their food corn as fuel corn should the price of gas rise.
Not sure how this got modded up, it's just plain wrong. Trees never stop growing. Those rings you see when you cut a tree down? That's how they grow - by adding a new ring of cellulose throughout the year. If you look closely, you'll notice the width of the annual rings do not vary with the age of the tree. And in fact, since the outer rings have a greater circumference, they're growing faster as the tree gets older.
The CO2 trees (and plants) remove from the air gets converted into sugars, which are linked into longer sugars called cellulose. All the carbon in wood used to be CO2. Yes plants respire some CO2 - their cells use the same mechanism of breaking down sugar to release energy to power the cell as in animals (sugar is the energy storage medium of choice for aerobic life). But it is far, far exceeded by the amount of CO2 they take in for photosynthesis. The correct rate of carbon sequestration is typically several to tens of kg per tree per year. Per hectare, you're probably talking about tons or tens of tons per year. The parent post is off by many orders of magnitude.
Even if the files are bit-for-bit the same, as far as law is concerned, the distinction is still important.
When the law has this large a disjoint with reality, it's a pretty clear sign the law needs to be changed. Next they'll be telling us deduplication is illegal...
I don't see why it would be any longer than a four-way stop.
It can take longer than a four-way stop because instead of there being a set order to who has the right of way, the more aggressive drivers get right of way by entering first. A less aggressive driver (read: one who waits for a safe space to open up, instead of charging in and relying on the person behind them to slow down) can get stuck at the entrance because a larger space never opens up. It's basically the same problem as on crowded highways - if you try to drive with a safe distance in front of you, inevitably an unsafe driver pulls into that space, spreading their unsafeness to you. Except with a rotary, you can't slow down to create a larger safe space, so you get stuck at the entrance waiting for such a space to open up.
The ideal solution would be to have traffic enter on the inside of the circle and exit on the outside (or vice versa). That way entering and exiting cars don't cross paths. But that's pretty much the same as turning intersections into over/under-passes with exit ramps for those wishing to make right/left turns. To expensive to really be viable outside of highways.
Visa/Mastercard have 98% market share in the EU - If they decide to stop payment processing for any political parties they don't like, or boycott any business competitor's of their "preferred partners", or as in this case try to stifle whistleblowers - it is societies legal (and moral) obligation to punish financially that companies bad behavior, at worst drive it right out of the market for not playing fair and by the rules.
Unfortunately, "fair" is a subjective measure. e.g. the majority of journalists fall towards the left side of the political scale. Does that mean in order to be fair, society (i.e. government) should support right-wing journalists in order to even things out?
There's a line between public and private infrastructure which you're casually crossing. If you truly believe Visa/Mastercard have an obligation to make everything fair, then we should just dispense with appearances and nationalize their credit card payment systems. Have them run by the government instead of private companies. (I might actually support that despite my pro-free market beliefs. The credit card companies have managed to drastically overcharge (typically 10-25 cents + 1-2% for transmitting a few bytes of data and making appropriate changes in a database), while at the same time nearly completely offloading their risk and liability onto merchants. Market forces are not working as they should be.)
If you're unwilling to nationalize, and wish payment processing to remain within the realm of private business, then the correct solution to Visa/MC boycotting certain political parties is for someone to start a new payment processing company which will cater to those parties.
Yes it is societies place to decide how a company can and cannot behave, including with whom they can and can't do business with... since the company is after all operating as a guest within the framework society has setup (not the other way around, as appears to be the thinking in the US).
That's a gross mischaracterization of U.S. philosophy on law. The U.S. is based on the principle that the only powers government has are those given to it in the Constitution and subsequently passed laws. In other words, you believe that nothing should happen without the approval of government. The U.S. belief is that you (as an individual or a company) are free to do anything unless the government is specifically empowered to prevent it. You have to remember that just as too much power in corporations is a threat to free society, so is too much power in government. Otherwise you're just trading one overlord for another.
And well; coming from Europe I have to say that the continuous examples as to how prude the US actually is always makes me chuckle. The banned superbowl commercials for example; when looking at those I often have a hard time understanding what the fuss is all about.
I doubt the commercials were really banned. Marketing just says they are to pique people's curiosity and get them to visit the website. There's a rather wide gulf between watching a commercial for a website on TV, and getting people to actually visit the website. The "banned ad" is just a tool to entice people to cross that gulf. It worked on you, didn't it?
Even if pet selling was illegal, adopting should still be an option. There are quite a few pet shops that only sell supplies and refuse to support the Puppy Mill market, instead these host regular foster home gatherings where you can adopt pets and give them a proper home.
Wouldn't a ban on selling pets put the law-abiding breeders who actually care about their animals out of business, leaving the "puppy mill" owners as the only avenue for buying a pet (on the black market). And since the law-abiding breeders are out of business, wouldn't the only pets available for adoption be the ones the "puppy mill" owners dumped onto the street because they didn't sell before the animal grew past the "cute baby" stage?
Like the war on drugs, this whole thing sounds like a supply-restriction response to a demand-driven problem. It works if you can tightly control the supply. But if your control is weak enough to let a black market (puppy mills) flourish, demand will cause the problem (excess number of abandoned pets needing to be put down in shelters) to persist despite your attempts to control supply.
If you're hiring someone, and he says "let me call my lawyer", don't you get a knot in your stomach, like maybe this guy likes to sue a lot? Who calls their lawyer over an ordinary job contract (I've actually never signed a job contract; I've just been given confirmation of what I'll receive in return for my work)?
If the contract is complex or obtuse enough to need the advice of a lawyer (to people unfamiliar with legal terms, most are), I'd have no problem with it. It tells me the prospective employee is someone who is responsible, careful, and thinks through commitments before he makes them. i.e. Someone I want to hire.
I would actually be more worried about hiring the guy who just signed it after a quick read-through. That tells me he's impatient, reckless, unconcerned about consequences if preparing for them annoys him, and is probably going to end up costing me liability when he carries that attitude over to our clients.
Maybe if you're hiring an artist or a marketer, you'd think the other way around. But this is a tech site, and most companies want to hire tech workers who are responsible, careful, and plan ahead.
Nobody ever claimed that Word wouldn't go through the motions of opening old Word files and produce *some* kind of output, but my own experience with older versions of Word is that they couldn't be relied upon to render large, complex documents consistently, even if the documents were created in the same versions of Word. Granted, such documents should be produced in something like page layout software, but Word was what we had to produce proposals with and we didn't have time to teach everyone a totally different kind of software.
Word processors like Word have never rendered documents consistently. Often the same version will produce different outputs on different computers simply because of different fonts being installed. The primary purpose of a word processor is to assist you in getting text into a computer file, and editing them. Things like pagination, indentation, page number consistency, etc. are frills added on which are secondary to the word processor's primary purpose. If those things are your primary concern, you should be using a page layout program like Illustrator.
WYSIWYG caused many people to assume that WYS will always and forever be WYG when it comes to word processors. It is not. WYSIWYG merely means what you see on your screen at that moment is what you'll get if you hit the print button. If you want WYSWAAFBWYG, you need to be converting completed word docs into PDF, or copy/pasting the text into a page layout program.
Ideally a page layout program would have sufficient text processing tools to function as a word processor, and we could combine the two into one. But as it turns out, the vast majority of people using a word processor only need WYSIWYG, and not WYSWAAFBWYG. They're using it to compose term papers, letters, and monthly reports. Stuff that'll be printed and viewed once, and nobody cares if it'll look exactly the same if they have to review it 2 years later. So it makes little sense for them to pay extra for the page layout features. There simply isn't a large enough market for a hybrid app - there simply aren't enough people like you who want page layout features, but don't want to learn to use a page layout program.
What is the UK planning to do about nuclear waste? It cannot be kept in cooling ponds forever.
While it can't be kept in cooling ponds forever, we are nowhere near the point where a long-term storage solution is imminently necessary. Too often, the sense of scale is lost when discussing nuclear waste. Figures are given in tons without context. Like the uranium it started as, nuclear waste is incredibly dense. A typical nuclear plant will only generate 1 or 2 m^3 worth of waste in a year. The power a typical U.S. household consumes in 30 years results in about 2.5 tablespoons of nuclear waste, and a UK household uses about half that.
Googling, it looks like the UK's high-level waste from >60 years of nuclear power generation comes out to about 60,000 tons. That's about 25 semi-trailers worth, or a little more than a single olympic-sized swimming pool. So continuing to store it in cooling ponds, while not ideal, is a viable solution for probably a couple hundred more years. Reprocessing or burning the "waste" (it still contains >90% of its initial energy) in some of the newer reactor designs can reduce the quantity significantly (as well as shorten the time it's "hot" to a couple hundred years) or eliminate it entirely.
Of course, in real life, if they actually are abusing their authority then they do have something to hide. Seems to me any cop that doesn't want themselves to be recorded while performing PUBLIC duties in PUBLIC places isn't confident that they're not going to get in trouble for doing something wrong.
Generally I'm agreed. However, who's to say the recording won't be edited and the parts which exonerate the cop's behavior deleted before it's made public? If I were a cop, having one person recording what's going on would seem to be the worst possible case. No recording or 2+ recordings would be preferable.
I looked up how many nuclear sites there are (440 roughly) and how many major disasters have occurred (chernoble, TMI and now Fukishima). So a quick calculation says if I have a plant within a few miles of me, there is roughly a 1% chance in a typical lifetime that my home will be un-inhabitable for the next 100 years or so. I'm not a big pro or anti nuke guy. Actually I was sort of positive on them until I considered the probabilities. I mean, some people may be NIMBY about turbines, but man, I am definitely NIMBY for a nuke plant now.
Well yeah, that's what happens when you consolidate production. Comparing accident rate per plant (implicitly equating one nuclear plant to one coal plant), is basically the same as saying hundreds of people die when a plane crashes while only a few people die when a car crashes, therefore cars are safer. You're ignoring the fact that planes move a lot more people in fewer trips / there are a lot fewer homes around the perimeter of nuclear plants than other types of power plants for an equivalent amount of power generated. If you correctly account for the amount of power generated:
The U.S. has just 65 nuclear plants (104 reactors) with 101 GW nominal capacity. That's an average of 1550 MW per nuclear plant. Nuclear capacity factor is about 90%, for an average 1400 MW production per plant.
The U.S. has 1493 coal plants with a nominal capacity of 335.8 GW. That's an average of 225 MW per coal plant. Coal has a capacity factor of 60%-70%, for an average 135-158 MW production per plant. A single nuclear plant is equivalent to 9-10 coal plants.
If you assume 1 MW wind turbines @ 20% capacity factor, that's an average 0.2 MW production per turbine. A single nuclear plant is equivalent to 7000 1 MW wind turbines.
If you assume 15% efficient PV panels (nominal 125 W/m^2) with 18% capacity factor (typical for desert southwest), you get 22.5 W/m^2 average production, or an average 22.5 MW production per square km. A single nuclear plant is equivalent to 62 square km of solar panels.
So if you want to compare cost, risk, and environmental impact equally, you need to compare a single nuclear plant, to 9-10 coal plants, to 7000 1 MW wind turbines, to 62 sq. km of solar panels.
Fining the ass off of Employers that are hiring illegal aliens?
Oh, I forgot who has the bigger lobby.
As an employer, I am all for this. However, you have to understand that:
- It is illegal (discrimination) to reject a job applicant simply because you suspect they are illegal.
- It is illegal to ask a job applicant what their citizenship is (you can ask if you're authorized to work in the U.S.). Security clearance jobs excepted.
- The I-9 form requires one or two pieces of documentation. If the applicant produces them and they appear genuine to you, then you are legally required to consider the applicant eligible to work in the U.S.
The reality is, it's actually fairly difficult to knowingly hire illegal aliens. You have to never produce any paper trail that you've hired them, and you have to pay them in cash (because checks produce a paper trail). The far more common case is an illegal immigrant pays for forged documents to satisfy the I-9. If they give you these documents and they look genuine, it is illegal for you to refuse to hire them because you suspect they are illegal.
If your fining process can adequately distinguish between these two cases, then I am all for fining employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. But if you're proposing fining any employer who hires someone who turns out to be illegal, then you're putting employers in a catch-22. You're saying they'll be fined if they hire someone who turns out to be illegal, but they'll also be fined if they refuse to hire someone they suspect is illegal.
Under that legal construct, there is no way to comply with both sets of laws and avoid fines. If you err on the side of not hiring any illegals, you will violate the anti-discrimination laws. If you err on the side of not discriminating, you can unknowingly hire an illegal alien who has good forged documents. The vast majority of business owners want to comply with the law. But you have to make the law something that can be complied with. They want a series of steps which they follow, and if they follow it to the letter, they are absolved of any legal liability. Fining them for having hired someone who turns out to be illegal makes it impossible to do that - employers would be at risk of breaking the law no matter what they do.
Re:Connect it to a tablet and use it for sheet mus
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USB Foot Controls
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· Score: 2
There are lots of them. You can even use a wireless mouse on the ground (wedge it in place with something) with the left/right buttons mapped to forward/back in a PDF. Foot pedals for turning pages is easy. The main problems with sheet music on a laptop/tablet have been:
- All the tablet screen sizes are too small - 10.1" max. Letter is equivalent to 13.9", A4 equivalent to 14.3", and the Henle Urtext pages are equivalent to 15.3". Yes the edges of the pages are blank, but they're still substantially larger than any tablet.
- They're too low resolution. The iPad looks like it would work, but 1024x768 is simply inadequate for any complex scores. It turns many of the details of an intricate Chopin or Listz score into a blurry mess. e-ink should have the advantage here, if it didn't take so long to turn pages.
- Laptops have pretty much all become widescreen 16:10 (1.6) or 16:9 (1.78). The old 4:3 (1.33) is nearly ideal for displaying letter (1.29) or A4 (1.41) sized sheet music with minimum wasted screen space. The Henle Urtexts are 1.32. Yes you could re-encode sheet music to fit the widescreen aspect ratio, but that gets to the last problem:
- AFAIK almost nobody is truly digitizing music. They're just scanning old sheet music into PDFs. The music score publishers are deathly afraid of going digital because they figure everyone will just copy all the scores instead of buying it from them. They've been milking the "change a few fonts and publish a new version with a new copyright" workaround to copyright expiration for centuries. So all that's left are independent musicians to take the time and effort to convert an out-of-copyright score into something like a.mus (Finale) file or MuseScore or LilyPond.
I ended up getting an old used tablet PC with a 1400x1050 12.1" screen.
Except applied to email addresses instead of websites? It works great at first. Then the spammers start creating artificial networks between their bots and fake sites/emails, to make them look more like legit sites/email addresses. And soon you need a multi-billion dollar company constantly working to refine it to keep it one step ahead of the spammers.
Cryptography is one of just a handful of embarrassingly parallel computing problems (3D graphics is the most notable one). For the vast majority of things people use computers for, a not-so-parallel general purpose CPU is better.
Or to put it another way, you have two choices in how to regulate something which (at the time) is relatively new and for which you don't have enough long-term operating data to build a characteristic failure history:
- You can start off with overly conservative regulations, then ease off on them as time and accrued operating evidence allow you to better refine safety margins
- Or you can start off with inadequate regulations, then gradually ramp them up as accidents indicate they are not strong enough.
I really hope we're doing the former, which makes TFA likely a non-story as it's symptomatic of the system working the way it's supposed to. The specific problem incidents are a story and warrant further investigation. But the industry and regulators behaving this way in general is how you want the system to work.
While DRM is bad, ebooks suffer from the ultimate analog hole. You can take a pic of an ebook page and OCR it to create non-DRMed plaintext (literally). Consequently, DRM on ebooks will persist only as long as the DRM remains less annoying than OCRing the book one page at a time. The same cannot be said for music and (especially) movies, whose analog representations of the digital content are much harder to "capture" in pristine form.
Of course, wind power is not exactly environmentally neutral if you consider constructional, maintenance, and impact on bats, birds and weather patterns.
In terms of maintenance, wind is already more dangerous than nuclear per TWh generated. Maintenance deaths from wind just aren't on the radar yet because wind generates so little electricity. But if you normalize for the amount of electricity generated (scale up wind's output numbers to match that of nuclear, or scale down nuclear's to match that of wind), you find it kills about 3 to 4 times as many people as nuclear.
As for construction costs, a 2 MW turbine costs about $3.5 million. Multiply it by a 20% capacity factor, and you end up at a cost of $7.9 billion for enough turbines to yield an average 900 MW generating capacity throughout the year. An AP1000 reactor at 90% capacity factor generates 900 MW, and costs about $3.5 billion. So wind is about 2x as expensive to construct as nuclear, kWh for kWh. (I should note however that offshore wind frequently has capacity factors exceeding 30%, which is beginning to become competitive with the more expensive tail of nuclear and fossil fuels. Despite being pro-nuclear, I am not anti-wind. I just come across that way because so many wind proponents seem to have little grasp of the numbers.)
I also calculated the waste produced by each technology. Lemme dig it up...
Any definition of "cleaner" must be normalized to the same amount of energy generated. Since most people have little concept of what a MW or kWh is, let's put it in terms they can relate to. How much electricity does a typical U.S. home use in 30 years? The average U.S. home in 2009 consumed about 11,040 kWh/yr. So in 30 years it would use 330 MWh.
According to the EIA, a ton of coal yields about 2000 kWh of electricity. To power a typical U.S. home for 30 years with coal will take about 165 tons of coal. You'll see this is so high I'm not even gonna bother calculating the steel and concrete needed for the coal plant itself.
Commercial solar panels generate about 125 W/m^2 peak. Factor in night, weather, angle to the sun, and they have a capacity factor of about 15% (ranging from about 12% at northern latitudes, to about 19% in the desert Southwest). So on average you're getting about 20 W/m^2 throughout the year. I'm feeling generous so let's say this house is in the Southwest and you're getting a 20% capacity factor. 25 W/m^2. One year is 8766 hours, so to generate 11,040 kWh in the year would require 50 m^2 of solar panels. They typically have a 20-25 year rated life, but let's give them 30. And ignore any battery requirements - pretend there's another power source (like nuclear) providing base load. The stats I'm finding online say with support structure, solar panels are about 16 kg/m^2, so 50 m^2 would 800 kg of trash after 30 years.
How about wind? A 1 MW wind turbine needs about 150 tons of steel and concrete. It operates at a 20%-25% capacity factor, but let's go with the higher 25%. So the average generation from the turbine will be 250 kW. Over a year, that's 2192 MWh/yr. A typical home uses 11 MWh/yr, so the single turbine will provide for about 200 homes. They have a rated life of 30 years (U.S. accounting uses 40 years, but the rest of the world uses 30 years before they're expected to need to be replaced). So after 30 years of wind electricity generation for your home, you're talking about 150/200 = 3/4 ton of trash = 750 kg. I'll make the same assumption about batteries as with solar.
How about nuclear? The U.S. generated about 800 TWh of electricity using nuclear in 2008, producing about 2000 tons of nuclear waste in the process. That's about 2.5 tons per TWh. So the 11 MWh of our typical home in 30 years results in the production of 0.0000275 tons, or 27.5 grams of nuclear waste.
That's pretty good evidence of malfeasance all of it's own.
At least the journos now know there'll be a reason to collect and analyse all of those US Letter pages...
But malfeasance on the part of whom? You're assuming it's Palin while she was governor. It very well could be. But it could just as easily be some admin who's ticked off that s/he has a lot of other stuff to do, but s/he first has to comply with this huge FOIA request regarding a person who no longer holds political office and should no longer be politically relevant were it not for the press' seeming fascination with her as she makes the talk show circuit.
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If this is really the problem, over the long-term, shouldn't private companies be beating out public companies? Yet the opposite seems to be true.
I suspect that long-term planning isn't as useful as people claim it is. Yes, if everything goes according to plan it's great. But that rarely happens - the further you plan ahead, the more uncertainty there is in your plan. If you make a ten-year plan, and 3 years into it someone invents a new way to manufacture a key component in your industry, your ten-year plan is shot and most or all the effort that went into designing it is wasted. The sweet spot balancing short-term myopia with uncertainty about the future seems to be planning a few years ahead (with a few exceptions). Which is well within the range of even publicly traded companies.
The problem I've always had with this theory is that increased evaporation leads to greater cloud cover, which leads to a higher albedo, which leads to cooler temperatures.
That if the slot machine hasn't paid out for a while, then it's "due" so you should play it. The thing about random sequences is that while they will generate a uniform pattern, that pattern is useless for predicting individual events. That is, if I start flipping coins and it begins with an unusually large number of heads, that doesn't mean that there's a higher probability of a tail to balance the heads out. All that happens is that the sheer number of subsequent flips tending to be 50/50 swamps out the spike created by those early heads.
RTFA, it seems like there's two things they're working on. One is the predictive stuff, which is bullocks.* The other is regular statistical analysis to detect problem areas, which works but AFAIK has been done for decades. They're just throwing more data at it and using computers to analyze the larger number of potential correlations between variables.
* Though I suppose in a one-man or one-team crime wave, it could have predictive value since an individual's behavior is rarely truly random.
You left off people falling off of rooftops during installation, maintenance, and replacement. That kills far more people per TWh than nuclear.
Per TWh generated, solar is currently far more expensive to construct and takes up more land. The average generation capacity of a U.S. nuclear plant is a bit over 1.5 GW. With a 90% capacity factor, that means they generate on average 1.4 GW throughout the year. Cost estimates for a new 1 GW reactor range from about $1 billion (Westinghouse's estimate after production is ramped up) to $5 billion (high end estimate) excluding interest payments for financing. So for 1.5 GW of capacity you're talking $1.5 - $7.7 billion.
Commercial panels are only about 15% efficient. Some are up to 16%, and I've seen 18% ones available if you're willing to pay (a lot) extra. Go with 16%. Sunlight hits the earth's surface with about 700-800 W per m^2 perpendicular to the rays. Go with 750 W. So one square meter of commercial panels has a peak generating potential of ~120 Watts.
Capacity factor, taking into account night, weather, changing angle of the sun throughout the day, etc. ranges from about 12% in the northern U.S. to 18% in the desert southwest. Assume you build in the best areas for solar and go with 18%. So the average annual production of of a square meter of panels is 120 W * 0.18 = 21.6 Watts.
To match the average annual power generation of one nuclear plant (1.4 GW) at 21.6 Watts per m^2, you'd need 64.8 square km of PV panels. So already you can see solar is going to require acquiring a lot more land than nuclear. In terms of cost, if your construction budget matches that of the nuclear plant with the same power output ($1.5 - $7.7 billion), the panels have to cost $23 - $119 per square meter. No commercial panels are close to that price point yet, and this is ignoring the cost of batteries to time-shift your electricity production to match demand.
The U.S. currently uses about 2000 tons of enriched uranium as fuel each year in its 3-4 decade old heavy water reactors which don't reprocess. By volume that's about two tractor trailer's worth. The amount of high-risk material we're talking about to power the entire country is minuscule compared to alternatives. To power the average U.S. home for 30 years would require just 2.5 tablespoons of uranium, vs over 150 tons of coal.
Personally, I don't see what the problem is. Nuclear is great for baseline load but sucks for daily load variances. Of the green renewables, only hydro is able to provide baseline load, but its real strength is being able to respond almost instantly to variable load. Solar's variable production coincides with daily load variances. So you start with nuclear as your baseline power source, add wind on top of that, add solar to compensate for some of the daily variance, and use hydro to top it off and make generation exactly match demand. Any solution which relies only on nuclear, or only on renewables adds considerable expense and engineering obstacles because you'd be using the technologies for things they suck at. And all of them are much, much better than coal.
Defense spending is hardly untouchable. Defense is about the only part of the Federal budget which has been consistently decreasing over the last 50 years as a percentage of GDP. It's ticked up a bit since 9/11, but is still lower than during Reagan's build-up in the 1980s, and nowhere near as high as during the Vietnam War.
The thing that's threatening to bust the budget is entitlements. Medicare and Medicaid speciically. Just the growth predicted for entitlements between now and 2035 will exceed the entire defense budget. Go read the CBO's long-term outlooks if you don't believe me. I'm not saying entitlements have to go, but any budget plan which refuses to change entitlements is doomed to fail before it even starts.
Most of it sources papers by David Pimentel who seems to have a real axe to grind against ethanol. There are a lot of contradictory studies too.
From an energy standpoint, the problem with ethanol from food crops is that we've reduced the labor to produce food crops by massively increasing the energy costs. That is, as technology drives the cost of energy down and the standard of living up, labor becomes much more expensive than fuel. So food production has been optimized to minimize labor, substituting the burning of more energy instead. Think about it - you can't eat oil. But by mechanized growing of crops, you can turn oil into food. Since food is much more important than oil, it makes economic sense to pump more energy into food's production than you'd get back if you merely burned the food as fuel.
The U.S. produces an excess amount of food (particularly corn) in order to stave off famine should there be another major crop failure like in the early 1930s (this is the primary rationale for farm subsidies). Consequently, we're left wondering what to do with all this excess corn. Some gets donated as foreign aid. Some is converted into high fructose corn syrup. Some is used as cattle feed to lower the price of steaks, since people like steaks. And we still have tons of it left. Someone came up with the bright idea of turning it into ethanol to help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. If you add up all the energy used to produce corn ethanol, I'm fairly certain it would cost nearly as much or more energy than the fuel it produces. But that's beside the point because that corn would still be produced regardless of whether or not it's converted into ethanol.
The real problem with turning food crops into ethanol is that there's no market barrier between the two uses. If the price of fuel goes up, more corn gets shifted into ethanol production, meaning less corn for food, meaning food prices go up. If we're going to be turning corn into ethanol, then the farmers (farming corporations really) should be required to specify at planting whether that field's crop is going to be used for food or for fuel. That way the government can still work to ensure there's still an oversupply of food, and farmers aren't tempted to sell their food corn as fuel corn should the price of gas rise.
Not sure how this got modded up, it's just plain wrong. Trees never stop growing. Those rings you see when you cut a tree down? That's how they grow - by adding a new ring of cellulose throughout the year. If you look closely, you'll notice the width of the annual rings do not vary with the age of the tree. And in fact, since the outer rings have a greater circumference, they're growing faster as the tree gets older.
The CO2 trees (and plants) remove from the air gets converted into sugars, which are linked into longer sugars called cellulose. All the carbon in wood used to be CO2. Yes plants respire some CO2 - their cells use the same mechanism of breaking down sugar to release energy to power the cell as in animals (sugar is the energy storage medium of choice for aerobic life). But it is far, far exceeded by the amount of CO2 they take in for photosynthesis. The correct rate of carbon sequestration is typically several to tens of kg per tree per year. Per hectare, you're probably talking about tons or tens of tons per year. The parent post is off by many orders of magnitude.
When the law has this large a disjoint with reality, it's a pretty clear sign the law needs to be changed. Next they'll be telling us deduplication is illegal...
It can take longer than a four-way stop because instead of there being a set order to who has the right of way, the more aggressive drivers get right of way by entering first. A less aggressive driver (read: one who waits for a safe space to open up, instead of charging in and relying on the person behind them to slow down) can get stuck at the entrance because a larger space never opens up. It's basically the same problem as on crowded highways - if you try to drive with a safe distance in front of you, inevitably an unsafe driver pulls into that space, spreading their unsafeness to you. Except with a rotary, you can't slow down to create a larger safe space, so you get stuck at the entrance waiting for such a space to open up.
The ideal solution would be to have traffic enter on the inside of the circle and exit on the outside (or vice versa). That way entering and exiting cars don't cross paths. But that's pretty much the same as turning intersections into over/under-passes with exit ramps for those wishing to make right/left turns. To expensive to really be viable outside of highways.
Unfortunately, "fair" is a subjective measure. e.g. the majority of journalists fall towards the left side of the political scale. Does that mean in order to be fair, society (i.e. government) should support right-wing journalists in order to even things out?
There's a line between public and private infrastructure which you're casually crossing. If you truly believe Visa/Mastercard have an obligation to make everything fair, then we should just dispense with appearances and nationalize their credit card payment systems. Have them run by the government instead of private companies. (I might actually support that despite my pro-free market beliefs. The credit card companies have managed to drastically overcharge (typically 10-25 cents + 1-2% for transmitting a few bytes of data and making appropriate changes in a database), while at the same time nearly completely offloading their risk and liability onto merchants. Market forces are not working as they should be.)
If you're unwilling to nationalize, and wish payment processing to remain within the realm of private business, then the correct solution to Visa/MC boycotting certain political parties is for someone to start a new payment processing company which will cater to those parties.
That's a gross mischaracterization of U.S. philosophy on law. The U.S. is based on the principle that the only powers government has are those given to it in the Constitution and subsequently passed laws. In other words, you believe that nothing should happen without the approval of government. The U.S. belief is that you (as an individual or a company) are free to do anything unless the government is specifically empowered to prevent it. You have to remember that just as too much power in corporations is a threat to free society, so is too much power in government. Otherwise you're just trading one overlord for another.
I doubt the commercials were really banned. Marketing just says they are to pique people's curiosity and get them to visit the website. There's a rather wide gulf between watching a commercial for a website on TV, and getting people to actually visit the website. The "banned ad" is just a tool to entice people to cross that gulf. It worked on you, didn't it?
Wouldn't a ban on selling pets put the law-abiding breeders who actually care about their animals out of business, leaving the "puppy mill" owners as the only avenue for buying a pet (on the black market). And since the law-abiding breeders are out of business, wouldn't the only pets available for adoption be the ones the "puppy mill" owners dumped onto the street because they didn't sell before the animal grew past the "cute baby" stage?
Like the war on drugs, this whole thing sounds like a supply-restriction response to a demand-driven problem. It works if you can tightly control the supply. But if your control is weak enough to let a black market (puppy mills) flourish, demand will cause the problem (excess number of abandoned pets needing to be put down in shelters) to persist despite your attempts to control supply.
If the contract is complex or obtuse enough to need the advice of a lawyer (to people unfamiliar with legal terms, most are), I'd have no problem with it. It tells me the prospective employee is someone who is responsible, careful, and thinks through commitments before he makes them. i.e. Someone I want to hire.
I would actually be more worried about hiring the guy who just signed it after a quick read-through. That tells me he's impatient, reckless, unconcerned about consequences if preparing for them annoys him, and is probably going to end up costing me liability when he carries that attitude over to our clients.
Maybe if you're hiring an artist or a marketer, you'd think the other way around. But this is a tech site, and most companies want to hire tech workers who are responsible, careful, and plan ahead.
Word processors like Word have never rendered documents consistently. Often the same version will produce different outputs on different computers simply because of different fonts being installed. The primary purpose of a word processor is to assist you in getting text into a computer file, and editing them. Things like pagination, indentation, page number consistency, etc. are frills added on which are secondary to the word processor's primary purpose. If those things are your primary concern, you should be using a page layout program like Illustrator.
WYSIWYG caused many people to assume that WYS will always and forever be WYG when it comes to word processors. It is not. WYSIWYG merely means what you see on your screen at that moment is what you'll get if you hit the print button. If you want WYSWAAFBWYG, you need to be converting completed word docs into PDF, or copy/pasting the text into a page layout program.
Ideally a page layout program would have sufficient text processing tools to function as a word processor, and we could combine the two into one. But as it turns out, the vast majority of people using a word processor only need WYSIWYG, and not WYSWAAFBWYG. They're using it to compose term papers, letters, and monthly reports. Stuff that'll be printed and viewed once, and nobody cares if it'll look exactly the same if they have to review it 2 years later. So it makes little sense for them to pay extra for the page layout features. There simply isn't a large enough market for a hybrid app - there simply aren't enough people like you who want page layout features, but don't want to learn to use a page layout program.
While it can't be kept in cooling ponds forever, we are nowhere near the point where a long-term storage solution is imminently necessary. Too often, the sense of scale is lost when discussing nuclear waste. Figures are given in tons without context. Like the uranium it started as, nuclear waste is incredibly dense. A typical nuclear plant will only generate 1 or 2 m^3 worth of waste in a year. The power a typical U.S. household consumes in 30 years results in about 2.5 tablespoons of nuclear waste, and a UK household uses about half that.
Googling, it looks like the UK's high-level waste from >60 years of nuclear power generation comes out to about 60,000 tons. That's about 25 semi-trailers worth, or a little more than a single olympic-sized swimming pool. So continuing to store it in cooling ponds, while not ideal, is a viable solution for probably a couple hundred more years. Reprocessing or burning the "waste" (it still contains >90% of its initial energy) in some of the newer reactor designs can reduce the quantity significantly (as well as shorten the time it's "hot" to a couple hundred years) or eliminate it entirely.
Generally I'm agreed. However, who's to say the recording won't be edited and the parts which exonerate the cop's behavior deleted before it's made public? If I were a cop, having one person recording what's going on would seem to be the worst possible case. No recording or 2+ recordings would be preferable.
Well yeah, that's what happens when you consolidate production. Comparing accident rate per plant (implicitly equating one nuclear plant to one coal plant), is basically the same as saying hundreds of people die when a plane crashes while only a few people die when a car crashes, therefore cars are safer. You're ignoring the fact that planes move a lot more people in fewer trips / there are a lot fewer homes around the perimeter of nuclear plants than other types of power plants for an equivalent amount of power generated. If you correctly account for the amount of power generated:
The U.S. has just 65 nuclear plants (104 reactors) with 101 GW nominal capacity. That's an average of 1550 MW per nuclear plant. Nuclear capacity factor is about 90%, for an average 1400 MW production per plant.
The U.S. has 1493 coal plants with a nominal capacity of 335.8 GW. That's an average of 225 MW per coal plant. Coal has a capacity factor of 60%-70%, for an average 135-158 MW production per plant. A single nuclear plant is equivalent to 9-10 coal plants.
If you assume 1 MW wind turbines @ 20% capacity factor, that's an average 0.2 MW production per turbine. A single nuclear plant is equivalent to 7000 1 MW wind turbines.
If you assume 15% efficient PV panels (nominal 125 W/m^2) with 18% capacity factor (typical for desert southwest), you get 22.5 W/m^2 average production, or an average 22.5 MW production per square km. A single nuclear plant is equivalent to 62 square km of solar panels.
So if you want to compare cost, risk, and environmental impact equally, you need to compare a single nuclear plant, to 9-10 coal plants, to 7000 1 MW wind turbines, to 62 sq. km of solar panels.
As an employer, I am all for this. However, you have to understand that:
- It is illegal (discrimination) to reject a job applicant simply because you suspect they are illegal.
- It is illegal to ask a job applicant what their citizenship is (you can ask if you're authorized to work in the U.S.). Security clearance jobs excepted.
- The I-9 form requires one or two pieces of documentation. If the applicant produces them and they appear genuine to you, then you are legally required to consider the applicant eligible to work in the U.S.
The reality is, it's actually fairly difficult to knowingly hire illegal aliens. You have to never produce any paper trail that you've hired them, and you have to pay them in cash (because checks produce a paper trail). The far more common case is an illegal immigrant pays for forged documents to satisfy the I-9. If they give you these documents and they look genuine, it is illegal for you to refuse to hire them because you suspect they are illegal.
If your fining process can adequately distinguish between these two cases, then I am all for fining employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. But if you're proposing fining any employer who hires someone who turns out to be illegal, then you're putting employers in a catch-22. You're saying they'll be fined if they hire someone who turns out to be illegal, but they'll also be fined if they refuse to hire someone they suspect is illegal.
Under that legal construct, there is no way to comply with both sets of laws and avoid fines. If you err on the side of not hiring any illegals, you will violate the anti-discrimination laws. If you err on the side of not discriminating, you can unknowingly hire an illegal alien who has good forged documents. The vast majority of business owners want to comply with the law. But you have to make the law something that can be complied with. They want a series of steps which they follow, and if they follow it to the letter, they are absolved of any legal liability. Fining them for having hired someone who turns out to be illegal makes it impossible to do that - employers would be at risk of breaking the law no matter what they do.
There are lots of them. You can even use a wireless mouse on the ground (wedge it in place with something) with the left/right buttons mapped to forward/back in a PDF. Foot pedals for turning pages is easy. The main problems with sheet music on a laptop/tablet have been:
.mus (Finale) file or MuseScore or LilyPond.
- All the tablet screen sizes are too small - 10.1" max. Letter is equivalent to 13.9", A4 equivalent to 14.3", and the Henle Urtext pages are equivalent to 15.3". Yes the edges of the pages are blank, but they're still substantially larger than any tablet.
- They're too low resolution. The iPad looks like it would work, but 1024x768 is simply inadequate for any complex scores. It turns many of the details of an intricate Chopin or Listz score into a blurry mess. e-ink should have the advantage here, if it didn't take so long to turn pages.
- Laptops have pretty much all become widescreen 16:10 (1.6) or 16:9 (1.78). The old 4:3 (1.33) is nearly ideal for displaying letter (1.29) or A4 (1.41) sized sheet music with minimum wasted screen space. The Henle Urtexts are 1.32. Yes you could re-encode sheet music to fit the widescreen aspect ratio, but that gets to the last problem:
- AFAIK almost nobody is truly digitizing music. They're just scanning old sheet music into PDFs. The music score publishers are deathly afraid of going digital because they figure everyone will just copy all the scores instead of buying it from them. They've been milking the "change a few fonts and publish a new version with a new copyright" workaround to copyright expiration for centuries. So all that's left are independent musicians to take the time and effort to convert an out-of-copyright score into something like a
I ended up getting an old used tablet PC with a 1400x1050 12.1" screen.
Except applied to email addresses instead of websites? It works great at first. Then the spammers start creating artificial networks between their bots and fake sites/emails, to make them look more like legit sites/email addresses. And soon you need a multi-billion dollar company constantly working to refine it to keep it one step ahead of the spammers.
Cryptography is one of just a handful of embarrassingly parallel computing problems (3D graphics is the most notable one). For the vast majority of things people use computers for, a not-so-parallel general purpose CPU is better.
Or to put it another way, you have two choices in how to regulate something which (at the time) is relatively new and for which you don't have enough long-term operating data to build a characteristic failure history:
- You can start off with overly conservative regulations, then ease off on them as time and accrued operating evidence allow you to better refine safety margins
- Or you can start off with inadequate regulations, then gradually ramp them up as accidents indicate they are not strong enough.
I really hope we're doing the former, which makes TFA likely a non-story as it's symptomatic of the system working the way it's supposed to. The specific problem incidents are a story and warrant further investigation. But the industry and regulators behaving this way in general is how you want the system to work.
While DRM is bad, ebooks suffer from the ultimate analog hole. You can take a pic of an ebook page and OCR it to create non-DRMed plaintext (literally). Consequently, DRM on ebooks will persist only as long as the DRM remains less annoying than OCRing the book one page at a time. The same cannot be said for music and (especially) movies, whose analog representations of the digital content are much harder to "capture" in pristine form.
In terms of maintenance, wind is already more dangerous than nuclear per TWh generated. Maintenance deaths from wind just aren't on the radar yet because wind generates so little electricity. But if you normalize for the amount of electricity generated (scale up wind's output numbers to match that of nuclear, or scale down nuclear's to match that of wind), you find it kills about 3 to 4 times as many people as nuclear.
As for construction costs, a 2 MW turbine costs about $3.5 million. Multiply it by a 20% capacity factor, and you end up at a cost of $7.9 billion for enough turbines to yield an average 900 MW generating capacity throughout the year. An AP1000 reactor at 90% capacity factor generates 900 MW, and costs about $3.5 billion. So wind is about 2x as expensive to construct as nuclear, kWh for kWh. (I should note however that offshore wind frequently has capacity factors exceeding 30%, which is beginning to become competitive with the more expensive tail of nuclear and fossil fuels. Despite being pro-nuclear, I am not anti-wind. I just come across that way because so many wind proponents seem to have little grasp of the numbers.)
I also calculated the waste produced by each technology. Lemme dig it up...
Any definition of "cleaner" must be normalized to the same amount of energy generated. Since most people have little concept of what a MW or kWh is, let's put it in terms they can relate to. How much electricity does a typical U.S. home use in 30 years? The average U.S. home in 2009 consumed about 11,040 kWh/yr. So in 30 years it would use 330 MWh.
According to the EIA, a ton of coal yields about 2000 kWh of electricity. To power a typical U.S. home for 30 years with coal will take about 165 tons of coal. You'll see this is so high I'm not even gonna bother calculating the steel and concrete needed for the coal plant itself.
Commercial solar panels generate about 125 W/m^2 peak. Factor in night, weather, angle to the sun, and they have a capacity factor of about 15% (ranging from about 12% at northern latitudes, to about 19% in the desert Southwest). So on average you're getting about 20 W/m^2 throughout the year. I'm feeling generous so let's say this house is in the Southwest and you're getting a 20% capacity factor. 25 W/m^2. One year is 8766 hours, so to generate 11,040 kWh in the year would require 50 m^2 of solar panels. They typically have a 20-25 year rated life, but let's give them 30. And ignore any battery requirements - pretend there's another power source (like nuclear) providing base load. The stats I'm finding online say with support structure, solar panels are about 16 kg/m^2, so 50 m^2 would 800 kg of trash after 30 years.
How about wind? A 1 MW wind turbine needs about 150 tons of steel and concrete. It operates at a 20%-25% capacity factor, but let's go with the higher 25%. So the average generation from the turbine will be 250 kW. Over a year, that's 2192 MWh/yr. A typical home uses 11 MWh/yr, so the single turbine will provide for about 200 homes. They have a rated life of 30 years (U.S. accounting uses 40 years, but the rest of the world uses 30 years before they're expected to need to be replaced). So after 30 years of wind electricity generation for your home, you're talking about 150/200 = 3/4 ton of trash = 750 kg. I'll make the same assumption about batteries as with solar.
How about nuclear? The U.S. generated about 800 TWh of electricity using nuclear in 2008, producing about 2000 tons of nuclear waste in the process. That's about 2.5 tons per TWh. So the 11 MWh of our typical home in 30 years results in the production of 0.0000275 tons, or 27.5 grams of nuclear waste.
But malfeasance on the part of whom? You're assuming it's Palin while she was governor. It very well could be. But it could just as easily be some admin who's ticked off that s/he has a lot of other stuff to do, but s/he first has to comply with this huge FOIA request regarding a person who no longer holds political office and should no longer be politically relevant were it not for the press' seeming fascination with her as she makes the talk show circuit.