...rural Americans deserve services that are comparable to those in urban areas..."
Why? I am a 'rural American' and even I don't agree with that. I expect that there are costs to living in the middle of nowhere and connectivity is going to be one of them. Besides, as many people have pointed out, we have flushed gobs of public money down that hole before and got nothing. I still don't have the ISDN service out here the industry was subsidized to provide years ago. In fact, the phone service theoretically available out here doesn't even reliably support dial-up. We depend on a radio link to the next town, but that is my problem, not that of 'urban Americans'.
[Actually, the fixed radio link works surprisingly well. Much better than the land-line didn't. Except when there is lightning. Anywhere.]
I agree with the AC that no amount of gun-control seems to be enough, and the fact that, for instance, Australia's gun laws are frequently held up as an example even though they would violate a whole raft of Constitutional rights if implemented in the US is certainly worrisome. But the problem is deeper and much more troublesome than that. Existing laws are not employed against known threats by objective criteria-- the Parkland gunman had over thirty encounters with law enforcement, several of which were chargeable as felony assault, and a request for involuntary confinement which was ignored. There was an agreement between the county and the school district to avoid criminal charges for students (in order to affect statistics and get more grant money) and this may have played into the matter. And yet, the Sheriff (the one who screwed up in the first place) immediately blames the NRA, blames gun-owners, asks for even more authority, pointing the finger at everybody except himself. They cannot apply objective criteria correctly, and yet they ask to be allowed to apply subjective criteria and have even more discretion. The country would be stupid to permit that.
At the same time, protections for law-abiding gun owners are not enforced. As just one example, carry permits and registries are often sold to the populace with promises of protection for the confidential data. Here in Missouri we had a scandal in 2013 where the Department of Revenue was collecting information the law explicitly did not permit them to collect and then it was discovered that the entire registry had been illegally distributed (this scandal occurred shortly after a similar database in the NE, including addresses of gun of registered gun-owners, was published by a newspaper). The law makes these things felonies, but there was no investigation and no criminal charges. The impeachment proceedings against the governor were derailed by a committee chairman without informing the committee (I was at the hearings, myself, and spoke to members of the committee). As part of the backlash, the people pushed to take the registry away from the DOR and finally to allow concealed-carry without a permit.
So, you have two major practical problems: 1) LE has implemented the power they have in both an ineffective and frequently corrupt fashion, and 2) the 'teeth' supposedly in the law to protect rights in existing laws are not enforced. The result is that gun-owners--- even those like myself who believe guns should be kept out of the wrong hands--- have no trust in the system. It has been concretely demonstrated that the system cannot be trusted and we would be stupid to support further restrictions. If more of the gun-control advocacy had showed interest in having the law enforced, perhaps we would feel differently.
There was a backup. The phone belonged to the terrorist's public employer who were cooperating to provide access. The FBI requested that San Bernardino reset the phone password which then caused the phone to stop syncing data which had not yet been backed up (correct and expected behavior).
...by resetting the password, the county, which owned Farook’s phone, and the FBI eliminated the possibility of seeing whether additional data beyond Oct. 19 might be recovered from the phone through the auto-backup feature, experts said. [FBI asked San Bernardino to reset the password for shooter’s phone backup]
So, it was the FBI's error that caused the phone data to be potentially important in the first place. Of course, the FBI did not actually know (and could not know) whether there was additional data on the phone or not, so the importance of the phone itself was highly speculative.
If he's pretty smart, then you might be able to hand him a copy of Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory....
Indeed, I started that way, myself. Between his thought experiments and illustrations, Einstein did a very good job of bringing the extreme conditions he was talking about down to things you could imagine. I also read a number of Asimov's non-fiction books between 4th and 7th grade (my parents had a very good library downstairs). Today, I have a tabletop illustrated edition of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Universe In a Nutshell which I have worked through parts of with our daughter (now 13). The combination of a text which takes a layman's approach without dumbing it down and good illustrations is key.
Good movies also help. My wife and I have had really good conversations with our daughter at a diner with a pen and a pile of napkins after a movie. Hidden Figures was one she has gotten hooked on. She is now reading the book and interested enough to sit down and voluntarily work through Algebra problems in a Schaum's Outline with me while it is otherwise very difficult to get her to sit still for anything. Others which got her thinking were Arrival, The Martian and... blast... the one involving ecological disaster, a colonizing mission, a black hole, and a time loop... one of the characters was 'Murph'. Anyway, kids need to be able to think about things in context, even a fictional one, and sometimes the faults in the fiction can even become teaching examples themselves. Honestly, most adults learn best that way, too, we just don't always admit it.
We were surprised to find that there are a few good 'space camps' around and in different parts of the country. We sent our daughter to a program in the Midwest over the summer after she got hooked on the Martian; just an introductory program, but some of the exhibits and simulators they had for kids to learn on were amazing. If kids can see where some of the knowledge plugs in in a real physical, visceral way, they have someplace to file even knowledge that they don't quite understand yet. It can become a puzzle that they keep coming back to as they get more pieces.
I mean I'm sure that would lead to a bit of an arms race as someone develops a bittorrent client that stops transmitting...
At least some bittorrent clients already have configurable bandwidth throttles. Other clients (e.g. rsync, wget) often do as well. You can also throttle your clients at your own router, before your traffic leaves your internal/home network,
What the red states put into the federal budget, the red states get back in federal spending within their borders; what blue states put in blue states receive back.
At that point why not cut out the middle man? States could (shudder) actually mostly fund their own projects within their own borders. The federal purse could remain what it was supposed to be: a fund for regional and national emergencies, federal courts and administration, common defense, etc. This would, of course, force federal budgets down and state budgets up. State taxpayers would, as a result, actually have proportionally more control over their own money. Collecting national revenue to subsidize effectively local non-emergency needs never really made sense anyway, and the state budget should be the first stop even in crisis (which it sometimes is now).
Here is a free red state example for you: a nearby (mostly blue) city mismanaged its budget for years, including not adequately funding its own police/fire pension fund. They preferred ice-skating and dog-walking parks (which bought immediate votes) to fiscal security. So, when the state courts forced them to make good on the shortfall, they drew down their police/fire personnel sharply, leading to an inability to deal with routine emergencies (no, 'routine emergencies' is not an oxymoron). So, they applied for and got federal COPS emergency funding to hire more police (at least twice to my recollection). How is it fair for this city to charge people in California (or myself, elsewhere in the state) for their own mismanagement?
The bigger problem: what incentive is there to ever correct the budget problems there or anywhere else? For that matter, why have one dollar of local money go up to the federal government, pay the federal bureaucracy, and then come back down as much less than a dollar to pay purely local personnel?
On top of that, subsidies always come with strings. Blue states often want to legislate a level or type of service other states cannot afford (even without local mismanagement). We cannot adequately prioritize our limited resources because of federal mandates (more than half our budget tends to be non-discretionary). So, we need to follow federal requirements whether we want to or not--- even if that means other things which are arguably bigger local problems go untreated.
So, personally, in a red state, I don't have a problem with getting rid of whole swaths of inappropriate subsidies(*), even if I am a net beneficiary, because I am smart enough to realize that we all lose the way it is now.
(*) And yes, that includes most Ag subsidies, although there is arguably a place for some strategic Ag/food reserve as a valid component of national defense.
It also could allow politicians to ban a subject by deeming it terrorist content. "You think you have a right to look at information on birth control? Well, that could be used by terrorists so we've classified all birth control information as 'terrorist content.' You are now under arrest for viewing terrorist content."
Yes, precisely, and the wonderful thing about that is that since no one else can read the content in question, no one can challenge the fact that the information claimed to be about terrorism is really about birth control, or, for that matter, intelligently provide oversight on the laws or the application of the laws (let alone open academic debate on controversial subjects). Censorship obliterates the last vestige of any democratic oversight over the government.
... The fact is that the only reason we keep cows around is that we eat them/use their milk. If we stopped doing that, which again, we don't have to do, cow emissions go away.
Um. Sure. To be replaced by fossil-fuel-driven irrigation, pesticide, and erosion-heavy agriculture alone? And are you going to shoot all of the other methane-producing grazing animals on the planet too, or just cows? How much methane will decomposing deer release in the first few years?
Feed lots are a problem and they produce a lot of methane. Grazing animals, per se, are not the problem. Nor do most grazers produce that much methane on an appropriate forage-heavy diet.
Here's a "novel" concept...
When cattle eat food they are biologically suited to eat (grass, not corn) they produce a lot less methane.
Yes, thank you. Some of us in flyover country understand that. We raise sheep ourselves, and our hardy primitive breed (Shetlands) neither need nor get much grain at all. The problem is not the design of cattle but the design of the feed lots cattle are raised in which also require large amounts of fossil fuels to supply. Grazing animals, grazed properly, are a fairly efficient autonomous device to gather solar power off the land.
In practice that is going to be problematic, because some of this information is personnal - I would guess sex changes, in some jurisdiction : the person doesn't necessarily want that the history of past sex identities to be publicly known.
Yes, and there are many other situations where there is a long legal tradition of retroactive and potentially sealed changes to a birth record:
Retroactive citizenship changes.
Adoption out of a dangerous situation, i.e. where the child becomes a ward of the state and is subsequently adopted because of abusive or criminal parents who may be an ongoing danger to the child's life and well-being.
Adoption where the biological parent insists on confidentiality.
Witness protection (or similar legal name-changes connected to a protective order where there is a physical danger from revealing not just the change but the fact that a change ever took place).
Deep undercover operations (becoming much more difficult for a variety of reasons).
Anyway, in any of these situations, one wants the change to not appear at the point in time that the revision is made but to be indistinguishably dated to the time of the initial record. So, there is an inherent conflict here between the use of the block-chain to create a non-centralized log with non-repudiation versus the fact that a certificate of birth is very much an act of a central authority which can and may legitimately later change its mind. It would, at the very least, require a complete change to the way we legally approach the issue of birth certificates.
However the problem was there was a Legal Act of Congress saying this is when the website will need to be up and running.
Sure, but there was no law against delivering incremental features early in order to gain experience and have a fallback in case of partial failure. As the article points out, they had (and are having) an incremental roll-out anyway, it's just a lousy incremental roll-out.
Maybe their should be a button to fork and exec a sub-topic that develops in an interesting direction. I'm not actually saying that this branch is particularly interesting, but, given the beta-period, I was interested in the possibility of interesting-ness.
Typical misconception. Chernobyl was the result of rogue operations. There were many government mandates broken leading to the accident.
In addition to the AC's response, "government mandates" were "broken" because they were mutually contradictory and the Soviets had engendered a system where, because failure was not tolerated and everything was centrally planned, lying was the only way to survive. Because Company A was mandated to complete and ship 10 widgets in a month (whether or not this was physically possible), they had to file paperwork that they were completed on time and shipped to Company B. Company B could not necessarily challenge this--- even though they received only six--- because someday they would need Company A to lie for them. This kind of problem was endemic throughout Soviet Block countries; a unit which had 100 tanks might only have 40 functioning, having to cannibalize one to keep another running. The system collapsed under its own weight.
The thing is, the culture of lies is no different than what naturally develops inside any large bureaucracy, government or private. Bureaucracy is pretty much defined by a system of mutually contradictory rules which must be navigated through exchange of favors (that is, "lies"). There is therefore a point where a level of regulation is helpful in any endeavor, and a point where any gain is rapidly overtaken by the fact that the central planners operate in an absolute fantasy world defined by the lies being told to sustain its daily function. I have seen this in the operation of the Soviet system, in our own military planning, elsewhere in our government, and in big businesses ruled by compliance with ISO-9000, TAFIM, SEI-CMM and other standards. Achieving balance is key, and it is almost never accomplished by simply handing something to the government to control.
Now, that being said, it may be that in certain endeavors, balance is impossible to achieve from where we now stand: deep-water oil extraction and nuclear power perhaps among them. It may not be possible for these industries to be regulated to the point where they do not pose a danger of regional or global disaster. Where this is the case, we need to make a decision as a society as to whether to allow them and take substantial risk or disallow them and suffer the consequences of stifled innovation (or perhaps limiting development to small-scale, isolated experiments which it may be possible to regulate adequately and the potential consequences of which are greatly reduced). But thinking that we just need to tweak the rules a bit or change the letterhead of the organization controlling them is foolish. Government will simply contract the work back out the the same private companies which are screwing things up now and probably with even more cost to taxpayers.
True. The muti-state "public safety network" here is 6m; Storm-chasers and fire watch is 2m. That's what ARES is for. It's simple, reliable technology and there are good volunteers to run it. Our local Sheriff recently remarked that the feds are trying to shove narrow band digital radios down the counties' throats. The proffered radios are expensive, overwhelmingly benefit one corp, and perform poorly in this terrain (the digital radios tend to be all or nothing; in much of rural MO, you can get a poor but comprehensible analog signal further, at least with current equipment). Switching will either hurt strained county budgets or the strained federal deficit (if subsidized) and will mean other services don't happen.
The whole population can't scrap the entire housing infrastructure and rebuild their entire lives out of totally new-design housing. Tighter insulation means less air circulation. That means an unhealthy habitat.
It means tighter control over the airflow of that habitat. There is nothing preventing someone from opening a window selectively. That's most of how we cool during the summer: close the house up during the day to keep it from heating up and open it up at night to cool it down. Wallah! Airflow and energy savings.
You're burning wood and calling it a green energy source? Really????
Yup. You know it even looks green? (While on the tree anyway.) We get wood from our own wood lot which replenishes itself every year pulling the CO2 we emit right back out of the air. We burn dead-fall and cullings from managing the wood lot. Our stove is most efficient with small bits of wood, so we burn mostly sticks and twigs. Given that, we very seldom have to use the chainsaw and expend fossil fuel. We have probably between 1/3 and 1/2 of our season's wood put up right now and have not used the chainsaw once. The only time we even fired it up this year is when we went to help with Joplin's disaster relief.
You know what would happen if we did not burn it? It would sit on the ground and rot or build up until there was a wildfire and the same gases would get released anyway. We use the heat of the wood stove to cook in the cold months and reuse the ash first to leech for potash for soap making (and leavening) and then as soil amendment in the garden. We're in the middle of building a wood-fired mass oven in the backyard to do a lot of baking efficiently, with renewable energy, and outside the house in the warm months so the heat does not contribute to cooling costs. So, yes, wood is a "a green energy source". Perhaps not for everyone or the way everyone does it, but it just goes to show that people have options for doing things effectively if they don't get caught up in irrational dogma about what's "green" or "not green". Green energy is in the process and the life-cycle, not the choice of technology.
That is the first problem. Ours is 2-3 kwh for the whole farm. The folks down the road from us whom we are helping set up an alternative energy system is about 9 for the whole (larger) farm. You did a sensible thing and moved into a better insulated home to reduce your needs rather than trying to replace your needs with PV. Most people are not sensible. Reducing first opens up a lot of options to provide that power with a much more modest system, in our case, an 850 watt wind turbine and a few hundred watts in panels (and some wood and some passive techs by time we are done, propane for a last-ditch backup for some systems) at an overall favorable cost per watt and a bit more reliability than our grid out here. We have a ways to go before our system is finished, but the wiring sucked in this place and would have had to go anyway.
Of course, there is also the problem that most people are stuck on the idea that solar==PV. Our whole business is effectively solar since we grow plants which sheep go around and eat. Wind is solar energy but is, for well-sited small installations, considerably cheaper. Passive solar is low-tech, cheap, and effective. Wood is carbon-neutral solar power, and cheaper than PV (if you have it readily available and do it right). There are a lot of options for being a better care-taker of the land than running your big entertainment system off of an acre of solar panels.
I consider Evergreen to be a great loss. As my wife just reminded me, they came up with innovative ways to cut silicon wafers with less energy and waste. They also developed a strategy for producing solar panels using renewables in their own process. They seemed to be energetic, innovative, and relatively responsible. But your point is taken: instead of subsidizing failing businesses, we need to change the politico-economic climate which is causing them to fail, most of which is self-inflicted.
NONE of the costs of which are factored into the price of coal? That's A-OK?...One way is to subsidize green tech.
In theory, internalizing the costs is a good idea. In practice, it is very hard to do correctly and government is no better at it than the multinationals. Just because a venture has "solar" in the prospectus does not mean that the idea is feasible, will ever be economical, or even is particularly "green". Subsidizing one alternative technology does not just run the risk of wasting taxpayer money (which is the bread and butter of Congress anyway), but of foreclosing better alternatives, such as squiggly light bulbs with mercury versus domestic LEDs or improvements on incandescents or... something we haven't thought of yet. Similarly, taxing coal might drive people to use more solar, or it might drive them to use something even worse which doesn't happen to be taxed. IPP laws in the US seem to have driven the market for natural gas turbines rather than the renewable energies the law was intended to promote.
So, any effort at internalizing external costs has to be approached very carefully, and for the most part, they are not. Instead we make bad decisions for political gain and thereby encourage more bad decisions for economic gain.
What the heck is this sheep-tossing thing anyway? We raise sheep, and if there is an alternative market for our product...
For that matter, we raise Shetlands, which are fairly small sheep: easier to throw and potentially concealable (need a big coat). Also, they have fine wool, so they might not chafe as much when concealed...
You won't find any professor in the biology, physics, chemistry - or even religion - departments who would claim that the earth was actually created in six days.
If you assume for the sake of argument that Genesis was written by a divine being, then it should be obvious that He is describing a process beyond our understanding then and slightly less beyond our understanding now. Further, He would be describing what *He thinks* is important about the process rather than what we can plainly see from the inside. Many people have tried mutating the literal account to make it work, including the whole 1 day as a 1,000 years thing, but it does not work. It is quite possible, however, for it to both be literal and easily reconciled with science: it's just a production sketch.
If I write a program, the time it took me to write the program has no relation to its run time. If I shoot a film, the time it took me to film has no relation to the run time of the film. I can also write parts of the software or shoot sequences of the film in whatever order is convenient, regardless of how it actually plays out. I can do the dialogue on the first day, the action sequence on the second day, then go back and film the opening sequence. When I do the opening sequence, which covers the billions of years before the beginning of the story of interest, it fills about twenty seconds of reel time. Similarly, when stars spring into existence in the creation account, so does light already millions of years in transit and all of the laws which guide their motion. That's more or less how I tend to look at it.
We tend to create the divine in our own image, forgetting that we are linear and He likely is not. YHWH presumably created what we experience as time itself and lines of history, perhaps even multiple lines of history, all at once and that is not easy for us to envision. So, given the assumption that the account is divine, then it becomes a matter of why the divine gave us that account and what He thought we should take away from it. Certainly not the age of the universe or the behavior of galaxies--- as that is something we can see for ourselves. Rather that He spoke the world into existence, the categories of things he felt were important to the [our] story, and that we were given a specific task in that story: tend My garden, be steward over and name the beasts, the origin and importance of the sabbath (both the weekly cycle for people and the seven-year cycle for fallowing land). We're absentee landlords and beholden to our boss when we do it badly. He gave us some instructions for how to go about the task. At some point (from our linear point of view) He is going to check on our performance and we know that the owner's son is willing to intervene on our behalf to reduce the punishment due for much of our idiocy. That's really what scripture is about. The rest is gravy.
I therefore don't tend to bother too much about the exact age of the earth or other details. It's interesting to speculate about, the science can be fascinating, but it is not directly relevant to my task--- one way or the other--- so it just isn't that critically important. We can never prove history one way or another since, for non-divine beings, history is not an experimental science.
If you don't buy the assumption--- that Bereshet/Genesis is of divine origin--- then I can't help you on that much. That's a very different argument.
Surely those "unknown informants" still have copies of the documents.
Many times it is dangerous for an informant to keep copies of leaked documents because if they are caught with them, or caught with them somewhere they were not supposed to be, they would be compromised. Manning, for instance, carried a CD-RW into secure facilities with music and wrote files to them during the work day. He was then able to access a non-sequestered network on his off-time and send the documents. Good spy-craft would require getting rid of such data and removing all traces of it as quickly as possible. If someone had discovered him in possession of these files outside the SIF (or on improperly-labelled/controlled media inside the facility) that would have been enough for him to get in serious trouble even if the transfer were accidental.
OK, so they loaned out a truly epic amount of money.
Not just an "epic" amount but a destabilizing amount. Privileged insiders having access to gobs of money--- even as a loan--- can allow one to destroy competitors, manipulate markets, and control commodities. It's not really about the money; it's about power and corruption.
All tax-payers are bad. As long as we have unjust laws, cops will be charged with enforcing those laws, and tax-payers will be charged with financing those cops. Anyone who finances the enforcement of an unjust law is a bad person. Do you see anything wrong with my reasoning?
No, I don't.
This is why the Founders insisted on a limited government of explicitly delegated powers with deliberate inefficiencies ("checks and balances") and state/local control of the armed forces. They were, not, however, perfect. They could not, for instance, conceive of Americans ever being stupid enough to give the Feds control of a standing army (read, e.g. Madison in "The Federalist Papers") and disband the militias. [Sane] people don't believe in limited government because government is not useful--- it certainly can be--- but rather because it is a foregone conclusion that any government shall become corrupt given enough time and at least a limited one does less damage when it goes bad.
Slashdot Mirror
...rural Americans deserve services that are comparable to those in urban areas..."
Why? I am a 'rural American' and even I don't agree with that. I expect that there are costs to living in the middle of nowhere and connectivity is going to be one of them. Besides, as many people have pointed out, we have flushed gobs of public money down that hole before and got nothing. I still don't have the ISDN service out here the industry was subsidized to provide years ago. In fact, the phone service theoretically available out here doesn't even reliably support dial-up. We depend on a radio link to the next town, but that is my problem, not that of 'urban Americans'.
[Actually, the fixed radio link works surprisingly well. Much better than the land-line didn't. Except when there is lightning. Anywhere.]
I agree with the AC that no amount of gun-control seems to be enough, and the fact that, for instance, Australia's gun laws are frequently held up as an example even though they would violate a whole raft of Constitutional rights if implemented in the US is certainly worrisome. But the problem is deeper and much more troublesome than that. Existing laws are not employed against known threats by objective criteria-- the Parkland gunman had over thirty encounters with law enforcement, several of which were chargeable as felony assault, and a request for involuntary confinement which was ignored. There was an agreement between the county and the school district to avoid criminal charges for students (in order to affect statistics and get more grant money) and this may have played into the matter. And yet, the Sheriff (the one who screwed up in the first place) immediately blames the NRA, blames gun-owners, asks for even more authority, pointing the finger at everybody except himself. They cannot apply objective criteria correctly, and yet they ask to be allowed to apply subjective criteria and have even more discretion. The country would be stupid to permit that.
At the same time, protections for law-abiding gun owners are not enforced. As just one example, carry permits and registries are often sold to the populace with promises of protection for the confidential data. Here in Missouri we had a scandal in 2013 where the Department of Revenue was collecting information the law explicitly did not permit them to collect and then it was discovered that the entire registry had been illegally distributed (this scandal occurred shortly after a similar database in the NE, including addresses of gun of registered gun-owners, was published by a newspaper). The law makes these things felonies, but there was no investigation and no criminal charges. The impeachment proceedings against the governor were derailed by a committee chairman without informing the committee (I was at the hearings, myself, and spoke to members of the committee). As part of the backlash, the people pushed to take the registry away from the DOR and finally to allow concealed-carry without a permit.
So, you have two major practical problems: 1) LE has implemented the power they have in both an ineffective and frequently corrupt fashion, and 2) the 'teeth' supposedly in the law to protect rights in existing laws are not enforced. The result is that gun-owners--- even those like myself who believe guns should be kept out of the wrong hands--- have no trust in the system. It has been concretely demonstrated that the system cannot be trusted and we would be stupid to support further restrictions. If more of the gun-control advocacy had showed interest in having the law enforced, perhaps we would feel differently.
There was a backup. The phone belonged to the terrorist's public employer who were cooperating to provide access. The FBI requested that San Bernardino reset the phone password which then caused the phone to stop syncing data which had not yet been backed up (correct and expected behavior).
So, it was the FBI's error that caused the phone data to be potentially important in the first place. Of course, the FBI did not actually know (and could not know) whether there was additional data on the phone or not, so the importance of the phone itself was highly speculative.
If he's pretty smart, then you might be able to hand him a copy of Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory....
Indeed, I started that way, myself. Between his thought experiments and illustrations, Einstein did a very good job of bringing the extreme conditions he was talking about down to things you could imagine. I also read a number of Asimov's non-fiction books between 4th and 7th grade (my parents had a very good library downstairs). Today, I have a tabletop illustrated edition of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Universe In a Nutshell which I have worked through parts of with our daughter (now 13). The combination of a text which takes a layman's approach without dumbing it down and good illustrations is key.
Good movies also help. My wife and I have had really good conversations with our daughter at a diner with a pen and a pile of napkins after a movie. Hidden Figures was one she has gotten hooked on. She is now reading the book and interested enough to sit down and voluntarily work through Algebra problems in a Schaum's Outline with me while it is otherwise very difficult to get her to sit still for anything. Others which got her thinking were Arrival, The Martian and ... blast... the one involving ecological disaster, a colonizing mission, a black hole, and a time loop... one of the characters was 'Murph'. Anyway, kids need to be able to think about things in context, even a fictional one, and sometimes the faults in the fiction can even become teaching examples themselves. Honestly, most adults learn best that way, too, we just don't always admit it.
We were surprised to find that there are a few good 'space camps' around and in different parts of the country. We sent our daughter to a program in the Midwest over the summer after she got hooked on the Martian; just an introductory program, but some of the exhibits and simulators they had for kids to learn on were amazing. If kids can see where some of the knowledge plugs in in a real physical, visceral way, they have someplace to file even knowledge that they don't quite understand yet. It can become a puzzle that they keep coming back to as they get more pieces.
I mean I'm sure that would lead to a bit of an arms race as someone develops a bittorrent client that stops transmitting...
At least some bittorrent clients already have configurable bandwidth throttles. Other clients (e.g. rsync, wget) often do as well. You can also throttle your clients at your own router, before your traffic leaves your internal/home network,
At that point why not cut out the middle man? States could (shudder) actually mostly fund their own projects within their own borders. The federal purse could remain what it was supposed to be: a fund for regional and national emergencies, federal courts and administration, common defense, etc. This would, of course, force federal budgets down and state budgets up. State taxpayers would, as a result, actually have proportionally more control over their own money. Collecting national revenue to subsidize effectively local non-emergency needs never really made sense anyway, and the state budget should be the first stop even in crisis (which it sometimes is now).
Here is a free red state example for you: a nearby (mostly blue) city mismanaged its budget for years, including not adequately funding its own police/fire pension fund. They preferred ice-skating and dog-walking parks (which bought immediate votes) to fiscal security. So, when the state courts forced them to make good on the shortfall, they drew down their police/fire personnel sharply, leading to an inability to deal with routine emergencies (no, 'routine emergencies' is not an oxymoron). So, they applied for and got federal COPS emergency funding to hire more police (at least twice to my recollection). How is it fair for this city to charge people in California (or myself, elsewhere in the state) for their own mismanagement?
The bigger problem: what incentive is there to ever correct the budget problems there or anywhere else? For that matter, why have one dollar of local money go up to the federal government, pay the federal bureaucracy, and then come back down as much less than a dollar to pay purely local personnel?
On top of that, subsidies always come with strings. Blue states often want to legislate a level or type of service other states cannot afford (even without local mismanagement). We cannot adequately prioritize our limited resources because of federal mandates (more than half our budget tends to be non-discretionary). So, we need to follow federal requirements whether we want to or not--- even if that means other things which are arguably bigger local problems go untreated.
So, personally, in a red state, I don't have a problem with getting rid of whole swaths of inappropriate subsidies(*), even if I am a net beneficiary, because I am smart enough to realize that we all lose the way it is now.
(*) And yes, that includes most Ag subsidies, although there is arguably a place for some strategic Ag/food reserve as a valid component of national defense.
It also could allow politicians to ban a subject by deeming it terrorist content. "You think you have a right to look at information on birth control? Well, that could be used by terrorists so we've classified all birth control information as 'terrorist content.' You are now under arrest for viewing terrorist content."
Yes, precisely, and the wonderful thing about that is that since no one else can read the content in question, no one can challenge the fact that the information claimed to be about terrorism is really about birth control, or, for that matter, intelligently provide oversight on the laws or the application of the laws (let alone open academic debate on controversial subjects). Censorship obliterates the last vestige of any democratic oversight over the government.
... The fact is that the only reason we keep cows around is that we eat them/use their milk. If we stopped doing that, which again, we don't have to do, cow emissions go away.
Um. Sure. To be replaced by fossil-fuel-driven irrigation, pesticide, and erosion-heavy agriculture alone? And are you going to shoot all of the other methane-producing grazing animals on the planet too, or just cows? How much methane will decomposing deer release in the first few years?
Feed lots are a problem and they produce a lot of methane. Grazing animals, per se, are not the problem. Nor do most grazers produce that much methane on an appropriate forage-heavy diet.
Here's a "novel" concept... When cattle eat food they are biologically suited to eat (grass, not corn) they produce a lot less methane.
Yes, thank you. Some of us in flyover country understand that. We raise sheep ourselves, and our hardy primitive breed (Shetlands) neither need nor get much grain at all. The problem is not the design of cattle but the design of the feed lots cattle are raised in which also require large amounts of fossil fuels to supply. Grazing animals, grazed properly, are a fairly efficient autonomous device to gather solar power off the land.
In practice that is going to be problematic, because some of this information is personnal - I would guess sex changes, in some jurisdiction : the person doesn't necessarily want that the history of past sex identities to be publicly known.
Yes, and there are many other situations where there is a long legal tradition of retroactive and potentially sealed changes to a birth record:
Anyway, in any of these situations, one wants the change to not appear at the point in time that the revision is made but to be indistinguishably dated to the time of the initial record. So, there is an inherent conflict here between the use of the block-chain to create a non-centralized log with non-repudiation versus the fact that a certificate of birth is very much an act of a central authority which can and may legitimately later change its mind. It would, at the very least, require a complete change to the way we legally approach the issue of birth certificates.
Sure, but there was no law against delivering incremental features early in order to gain experience and have a fallback in case of partial failure. As the article points out, they had (and are having) an incremental roll-out anyway, it's just a lousy incremental roll-out.
Maybe their should be a button to fork and exec a sub-topic that develops in an interesting direction. I'm not actually saying that this branch is particularly interesting, but, given the beta-period, I was interested in the possibility of interesting-ness.
Typical misconception. Chernobyl was the result of rogue operations. There were many government mandates broken leading to the accident.
In addition to the AC's response, "government mandates" were "broken" because they were mutually contradictory and the Soviets had engendered a system where, because failure was not tolerated and everything was centrally planned, lying was the only way to survive. Because Company A was mandated to complete and ship 10 widgets in a month (whether or not this was physically possible), they had to file paperwork that they were completed on time and shipped to Company B. Company B could not necessarily challenge this--- even though they received only six--- because someday they would need Company A to lie for them. This kind of problem was endemic throughout Soviet Block countries; a unit which had 100 tanks might only have 40 functioning, having to cannibalize one to keep another running. The system collapsed under its own weight.
The thing is, the culture of lies is no different than what naturally develops inside any large bureaucracy, government or private. Bureaucracy is pretty much defined by a system of mutually contradictory rules which must be navigated through exchange of favors (that is, "lies"). There is therefore a point where a level of regulation is helpful in any endeavor, and a point where any gain is rapidly overtaken by the fact that the central planners operate in an absolute fantasy world defined by the lies being told to sustain its daily function. I have seen this in the operation of the Soviet system, in our own military planning, elsewhere in our government, and in big businesses ruled by compliance with ISO-9000, TAFIM, SEI-CMM and other standards. Achieving balance is key, and it is almost never accomplished by simply handing something to the government to control.
Now, that being said, it may be that in certain endeavors, balance is impossible to achieve from where we now stand: deep-water oil extraction and nuclear power perhaps among them. It may not be possible for these industries to be regulated to the point where they do not pose a danger of regional or global disaster. Where this is the case, we need to make a decision as a society as to whether to allow them and take substantial risk or disallow them and suffer the consequences of stifled innovation (or perhaps limiting development to small-scale, isolated experiments which it may be possible to regulate adequately and the potential consequences of which are greatly reduced). But thinking that we just need to tweak the rules a bit or change the letterhead of the organization controlling them is foolish. Government will simply contract the work back out the the same private companies which are screwing things up now and probably with even more cost to taxpayers.
Or simply eliminating the profit motive by having the government run the plant directly.
Like Chernobyl?
Public safety is a transparent excuse.
True. The muti-state "public safety network" here is 6m; Storm-chasers and fire watch is 2m. That's what ARES is for. It's simple, reliable technology and there are good volunteers to run it. Our local Sheriff recently remarked that the feds are trying to shove narrow band digital radios down the counties' throats. The proffered radios are expensive, overwhelmingly benefit one corp, and perform poorly in this terrain (the digital radios tend to be all or nothing; in much of rural MO, you can get a poor but comprehensible analog signal further, at least with current equipment). Switching will either hurt strained county budgets or the strained federal deficit (if subsidized) and will mean other services don't happen.
The whole population can't scrap the entire housing infrastructure and rebuild their entire lives out of totally new-design housing. Tighter insulation means less air circulation. That means an unhealthy habitat.
It means tighter control over the airflow of that habitat. There is nothing preventing someone from opening a window selectively. That's most of how we cool during the summer: close the house up during the day to keep it from heating up and open it up at night to cool it down. Wallah! Airflow and energy savings.
You're burning wood and calling it a green energy source? Really????
Yup. You know it even looks green? (While on the tree anyway.) We get wood from our own wood lot which replenishes itself every year pulling the CO2 we emit right back out of the air. We burn dead-fall and cullings from managing the wood lot. Our stove is most efficient with small bits of wood, so we burn mostly sticks and twigs. Given that, we very seldom have to use the chainsaw and expend fossil fuel. We have probably between 1/3 and 1/2 of our season's wood put up right now and have not used the chainsaw once. The only time we even fired it up this year is when we went to help with Joplin's disaster relief.
You know what would happen if we did not burn it? It would sit on the ground and rot or build up until there was a wildfire and the same gases would get released anyway. We use the heat of the wood stove to cook in the cold months and reuse the ash first to leech for potash for soap making (and leavening) and then as soil amendment in the garden. We're in the middle of building a wood-fired mass oven in the backyard to do a lot of baking efficiently, with renewable energy, and outside the house in the warm months so the heat does not contribute to cooling costs. So, yes, wood is a "a green energy source". Perhaps not for everyone or the way everyone does it, but it just goes to show that people have options for doing things effectively if they don't get caught up in irrational dogma about what's "green" or "not green". Green energy is in the process and the life-cycle, not the choice of technology.
A typical home uses about 30 KWH/Day.
That is the first problem. Ours is 2-3 kwh for the whole farm. The folks down the road from us whom we are helping set up an alternative energy system is about 9 for the whole (larger) farm. You did a sensible thing and moved into a better insulated home to reduce your needs rather than trying to replace your needs with PV. Most people are not sensible. Reducing first opens up a lot of options to provide that power with a much more modest system, in our case, an 850 watt wind turbine and a few hundred watts in panels (and some wood and some passive techs by time we are done, propane for a last-ditch backup for some systems) at an overall favorable cost per watt and a bit more reliability than our grid out here. We have a ways to go before our system is finished, but the wiring sucked in this place and would have had to go anyway.
Of course, there is also the problem that most people are stuck on the idea that solar==PV. Our whole business is effectively solar since we grow plants which sheep go around and eat. Wind is solar energy but is, for well-sited small installations, considerably cheaper. Passive solar is low-tech, cheap, and effective. Wood is carbon-neutral solar power, and cheaper than PV (if you have it readily available and do it right). There are a lot of options for being a better care-taker of the land than running your big entertainment system off of an acre of solar panels.
I consider Evergreen to be a great loss. As my wife just reminded me, they came up with innovative ways to cut silicon wafers with less energy and waste. They also developed a strategy for producing solar panels using renewables in their own process. They seemed to be energetic, innovative, and relatively responsible. But your point is taken: instead of subsidizing failing businesses, we need to change the politico-economic climate which is causing them to fail, most of which is self-inflicted.
NONE of the costs of which are factored into the price of coal? That's A-OK?...One way is to subsidize green tech.
In theory, internalizing the costs is a good idea. In practice, it is very hard to do correctly and government is no better at it than the multinationals. Just because a venture has "solar" in the prospectus does not mean that the idea is feasible, will ever be economical, or even is particularly "green". Subsidizing one alternative technology does not just run the risk of wasting taxpayer money (which is the bread and butter of Congress anyway), but of foreclosing better alternatives, such as squiggly light bulbs with mercury versus domestic LEDs or improvements on incandescents or ... something we haven't thought of yet. Similarly, taxing coal might drive people to use more solar, or it might drive them to use something even worse which doesn't happen to be taxed. IPP laws in the US seem to have driven the market for natural gas turbines rather than the renewable energies the law was intended to promote.
So, any effort at internalizing external costs has to be approached very carefully, and for the most part, they are not. Instead we make bad decisions for political gain and thereby encourage more bad decisions for economic gain.
What the heck is this sheep-tossing thing anyway? We raise sheep, and if there is an alternative market for our product...
For that matter, we raise Shetlands, which are fairly small sheep: easier to throw and potentially concealable (need a big coat). Also, they have fine wool, so they might not chafe as much when concealed...
...they'll have to be measured in pumpkins.
You won't find any professor in the biology, physics, chemistry - or even religion - departments who would claim that the earth was actually created in six days.
If you assume for the sake of argument that Genesis was written by a divine being, then it should be obvious that He is describing a process beyond our understanding then and slightly less beyond our understanding now. Further, He would be describing what *He thinks* is important about the process rather than what we can plainly see from the inside. Many people have tried mutating the literal account to make it work, including the whole 1 day as a 1,000 years thing, but it does not work. It is quite possible, however, for it to both be literal and easily reconciled with science: it's just a production sketch.
If I write a program, the time it took me to write the program has no relation to its run time. If I shoot a film, the time it took me to film has no relation to the run time of the film. I can also write parts of the software or shoot sequences of the film in whatever order is convenient, regardless of how it actually plays out. I can do the dialogue on the first day, the action sequence on the second day, then go back and film the opening sequence. When I do the opening sequence, which covers the billions of years before the beginning of the story of interest, it fills about twenty seconds of reel time. Similarly, when stars spring into existence in the creation account, so does light already millions of years in transit and all of the laws which guide their motion. That's more or less how I tend to look at it.
We tend to create the divine in our own image, forgetting that we are linear and He likely is not. YHWH presumably created what we experience as time itself and lines of history, perhaps even multiple lines of history, all at once and that is not easy for us to envision. So, given the assumption that the account is divine, then it becomes a matter of why the divine gave us that account and what He thought we should take away from it. Certainly not the age of the universe or the behavior of galaxies--- as that is something we can see for ourselves. Rather that He spoke the world into existence, the categories of things he felt were important to the [our] story, and that we were given a specific task in that story: tend My garden, be steward over and name the beasts, the origin and importance of the sabbath (both the weekly cycle for people and the seven-year cycle for fallowing land). We're absentee landlords and beholden to our boss when we do it badly. He gave us some instructions for how to go about the task. At some point (from our linear point of view) He is going to check on our performance and we know that the owner's son is willing to intervene on our behalf to reduce the punishment due for much of our idiocy. That's really what scripture is about. The rest is gravy.
I therefore don't tend to bother too much about the exact age of the earth or other details. It's interesting to speculate about, the science can be fascinating, but it is not directly relevant to my task--- one way or the other--- so it just isn't that critically important. We can never prove history one way or another since, for non-divine beings, history is not an experimental science.
If you don't buy the assumption--- that Bereshet/Genesis is of divine origin--- then I can't help you on that much. That's a very different argument.
Surely those "unknown informants" still have copies of the documents.
Many times it is dangerous for an informant to keep copies of leaked documents because if they are caught with them, or caught with them somewhere they were not supposed to be, they would be compromised. Manning, for instance, carried a CD-RW into secure facilities with music and wrote files to them during the work day. He was then able to access a non-sequestered network on his off-time and send the documents. Good spy-craft would require getting rid of such data and removing all traces of it as quickly as possible. If someone had discovered him in possession of these files outside the SIF (or on improperly-labelled/controlled media inside the facility) that would have been enough for him to get in serious trouble even if the transfer were accidental.
OK, so they loaned out a truly epic amount of money.
Not just an "epic" amount but a destabilizing amount. Privileged insiders having access to gobs of money--- even as a loan--- can allow one to destroy competitors, manipulate markets, and control commodities. It's not really about the money; it's about power and corruption.
All tax-payers are bad. As long as we have unjust laws, cops will be charged with enforcing those laws, and tax-payers will be charged with financing those cops. Anyone who finances the enforcement of an unjust law is a bad person. Do you see anything wrong with my reasoning?
No, I don't.
This is why the Founders insisted on a limited government of explicitly delegated powers with deliberate inefficiencies ("checks and balances") and state/local control of the armed forces. They were, not, however, perfect. They could not, for instance, conceive of Americans ever being stupid enough to give the Feds control of a standing army (read, e.g. Madison in "The Federalist Papers") and disband the militias. [Sane] people don't believe in limited government because government is not useful--- it certainly can be--- but rather because it is a foregone conclusion that any government shall become corrupt given enough time and at least a limited one does less damage when it goes bad.