And not operational until 2050. For that price, there's an awful lot of other science that could be done. It might be more useful to invest in, for example, carbon sequestration tech in the short term instead. Those tiny tiny particles will still be there after we've solved climate change.;-)
That's funny . . . looks like they're expanding 19 existing sites, and French nuclear power output rose by 3.7% last year. Sorry dude, despite the little snit thrown by anti-nuke pols in the French gov't, France is the leader in European nuclear power, and they're going to stay that way for a very long time.
The entire premise of the article you linked to is that the costs of renewables "could" drop by certain levels. These hopeful projections -- backed by no real data, I might add -- also reference dates 40-50 years in the future, which is just silly theater. No one has any specifics about future efficiency gains even close to that far out. In that amount of time we will certainly have entirely new ways of working with nuclear energy too, but this apparently wasn't taken into consideration. But the most damning statement is that the plants won't be economically viable due to excess capacity. That is, they are saying we'll literally have too much power for them to pay for themselves, which is literally laughable. There is no time in recorded history that human energy consumption has ever dropped -- ever -- and the new technologies we are developing consume electricity at an ever increasing rate.
You have somewhat of a point about waste, which is not nil -- but it would be vastly improved over today's situation, and I trust people like the French to come up with real-world solutions, as they have for many decades now.
But let's keep investing into archaic unsafe technology and pollute the environment when they fail
People like you spreading this complete strawman bullshit and generations of Greenpeace psychos before that are the reason that we have no modern, safe nuclear options. Updated designs using passive reactor safety, such as Generation IV, *can't* have an uncontrolled meltdown -- in the event of a problem, gravity automatically shuts down the reaction. Ask the French -- they generate 40% of their own power via nukes plus they generate electricity for a good chunk of the rest of Europe using nuclear. Please educate yourself instead of using 70 year old stereotypes about nuclear power -- because thanks to the misinformation you are spreading, we are stuck with ancient, unsafe reactor designs.
Streaming brings better quality and less time loss.
So does piracy. Every incremental price increase makes piracy look like a better deal. Netflix better be careful about finding that sweet spot and staying within it.
Because by your own admission, they're non-citizens. Non-citizens should have *zero* voting rights, period, and certainly not those who willfully break the law in the first place. If you want to vote in the US, then you have to become a citizen. To do that, you have to wait in line and do it legally. My ancestors all did it. I know a number of people who have done it recently. It's terribly, horribly unfair to those people who live in the same municipalities who waited and paid many thousands of dollars to go thru the process the right way to become legal US citizens to give those same, hard-earned rights to people that purposely broke the fucking law. Just because these Maryland towns and San Francisco have found loopholes to allow illegals to vote does not make it just or fair. Additionally, most of the time all municipalities receive significant revenues from their state and the Federal government (fund from legal US taxpayers). You are giving illegals a say in how the tax dollars of legal US citizens in other jurisdictions are spent, which is wrong.
I'm not sure why liberals think that enforcing immigration to the US using the methods currently legally available, and strictly controlling who we let in -- you know, like Canada does it, for example -- is such a burdensome requirement.
Make it a felony to employ an illegal immigrant (and as a small business owner, I'd totally support this 100%). Require everyone including asylum seekers to declare at a legit port of entry and stay there on their side of the border in a secure facility waiting for their hearing. Anyone else gets kicked out and permanently banned. These simple legal changes would be way more effective than any physical barrier.
The units of the NPS, the Smithsonian, and other cultural institutions simply will not continue to tolerate shutdown after shutdown. Many of them already have private foundations which assist their operations, and because they're so under-funded by the gov't to begin with (e.g., Smithsonian is the only Federal agency actually allowed to fund-raise because of their pathetic level of funding) and with the gov't continually using them as a political football, it's not a stretch for them all to go fully public-private and just opt out of the whole broken system. For example, Gettysburg National Military Park has done this for years now, and while their NPS staff have indeed been furloughed, the Visitors Center and battlefield are both open during this current shutdown, paid for by the Gettysburg Foundation. Some foundations at other NPS units are actually paying ranger salaries so they can keep working.
Oh yeah, and it's time for Smithsonian to start charging an entry fee. Discount / waive it for the poor if you wish, but well-off and middle-class visitors can and should pay *something*. Even our friends in Europe charge admission fees to their museums.
There's a very strong argument to be made that if you really require GPG, you shouldn't be using one of the major webmail platforms in the first place, given the companies who own and provide them.
And infinitely better than Google's horrible, completely unusable GMail "UI". For people who want an open source, Outlook-style drag-and-drop front-end for GMail, Thunderbird has been the way to go for a long time, but it has been plagued by the slow downs and other problems lately that are mentioned in TFS. Glad to hear they've acknowledged this and are at least considering fixing the issues.
This isn't due to bricks and mortar being obsolete (though the net has played a role), but rather due to the loss of purchasing power among the American middle class.
What in the absolute fuck are you babbling about? This past holiday retail US shopping season was the best in the last six years. American consumers (you know, that middle class you claim that has no purchasing power) spent $850 *BILLION* dollars between November 1 and December 24, up 5.1 percent from last year. By all definitions, (online) retail totally crushed it.
Please feel free to refute with links to real reports or numbers backing your claims of a broke-ass US middle class with no purchasing power. Seriously, if you're gonna post total unsupportable bullshit, at least try to disguise it a little better.
The real problem is that in America you no longer make money by running successful companies. You make money by firing up a startup and waiting for a buyout or by buying up an existing, longstanding company and gutting it like a fish.
This is complete horseshit. You are cherry-picking one high-profile example of someone being a Trump-like dick in the aftermath of an enormous merger in the most turbulent sector in the entire world and painting the entire US economy with the same brush, which is just nonsense. There are 30.2 million small businesses in the US of tremendous diversity which employ 58.9 million people, or 47.5% of ALL workers in the US, and the median income for self-employed people working for an incorporated business was $50,347 in 2016 (certainly not "vulture capitalist"-class income). Looking at the report, these owners are NOT all "startups waiting for a buyout" and they're definitely NOT all people buying an "existing, longstanding company and gutting it like a fish" (source: US Small Business Profile, 2018). They're just the owners of plain old businesses (the kind you say don't exist anymore) in health care, food service, retail, manufacturing, tech, construction, waste management, you name it. Do you have ANY numbers to back up your ridiculous claims?
The US still innovates far better than any other country in the world, and this in turn provides ample opportunity for smart and hard-working people to build real, successful companies which provide truly valuable goods and services, with growth and long-term profitability in mind. These in turn create jobs and economic opportunity for the people they employ, as clearly documented in this report.
Is it easy? Absolutely not. But it never has been, and it's not supposed to be.
Yes -- libraries are rightfully risk-adverse about certain tech-facing facets of their core activities -- specifically, those which pertain to copyright. The nightmare scenario for all libraries and archives is that they make something from their holdings freely available on the Internet when it's in fact not copyright-clear, and then years later someone shows up claiming millions of dollars in damages. Out of necessity, they *must* be conservative when it comes to anything dealing with copyright status.
As Ageh mentions, keeping libraries' donors happy is key, and NYPL and most similar institutions are incredibly under-funded by the gov't and literally live and die by their wealthy patrons. So the technology footprint needs to be aligned with the wants of the donor to a certain extent. Because these people are often older, sometimes they don't have a firm grasp of why the library would want to spend their money on "tech," so the money goes elsewhere. The big donors pretty much get what they want, and sometimes that's more than having a branch named after themselves.
Now, can libraries do cool stuff when it comes to tech? Absolutely, and they do, including NYPL (check out NYPL Labs) and of course, the Library of Congress and their long-term digital strategy. But all of these activities are subject to the two rules above.
These people have already been beaten, or they wouldn't have wound up as thieves. Let's find a way to help them before they fall to this level instead of beating them down afterwards.
Bull fucking shit. A lot of people are just bad regardless of what happened to them (or didn't), their socio-economic status, etc. Some people would rather steal than earn something. Quit pretending that everyone who does this was somehow a victim first -- that's naive nonsense at best. This isn't anywhere remotely like the "stealing bread to feed my starving family" cliche -- it's opportunistic twats cowardly stealing from others who are out working. Anyone who does this absolutely deserves a solid ass kicking, at a minimum.
Quit discounting it or ignoring it. Modern, safer reactor designs are absolutely an integral part of combating climate change and divesting ourselves of fossil fuels.
Comcast will sue and ironically claim anti-competitive / anti-free market behavior on the part of the town. They will seek to add hundreds of thousands in legal fees before this is settled, win or lose. That is what they do.
With the exception of a few fringe states (specifically Massachusetts), they're generally unenforceable when it comes to preventing an employee from seeking gainful employment.
Poor genetic health is a factor, with urban communities typically having better genes
Ummm, what? You're actually claiming that rural folks are genetically inferior in some way? Got a link to back that up, or are you just stereotyping them all as inbreds?
Because let's be honest, a wireless light switch does not cost more than 3 bucks to produce. It just doesn't.
Sure, if you don't count the R & D and engineers' salaries. And setup costs with the off-shore manufacturer. And any licensing fees for protocols like Z-Wave / Zigbee. And cost of getting it UL-certified. And the cost of shipping it from China (or wherever it's being made) to the US. And the % the retailer will charge you to sell it on Amazon, eBay, or in a brink and morter like Lowe's or Home Depot. And any post-sale support / handling returns and exchanges when a customer can't figure out how to get it to work with their network or is just unlucky enough to receive a bad one. And oh yeah, some type of profit margin after all of this.
Yeah, 3 bucks sounds right. You should totally do it!
Slashdotters interested in a DIY combination security / automation platform might want to check out the ELK M1 Gold. It's not cheap but highly configurable and has been around for a very long time (like, over 15 years I think?). It has outlasted many of its competitors because it's highly modular -- if / when a new protocol like ZWave becomes available, ELK can just make a module for it that plugs right into the bus. They also make a wide range of sensors for just about anything you'd want to do, and best of all, you can write rules that make the system take actions when certain events happen. You can even get affordable third party monitoring for it from Watchlight and a few others. Note that it's NOT a surveillance platform, so no camera support or integration.
You are not identified as poor -- you are identified as a risky borrower because you have no history of borrowing money and paying it back. That's all your credit score means. The next time you buy something like a TV or refrigerator, try using the "12 months same as cash" / 0% financing option if it's available, pay the item off over a year (at no additional cost to yourself) and then check your credit score -- you'll be pleasantly surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
And not operational until 2050. For that price, there's an awful lot of other science that could be done. It might be more useful to invest in, for example, carbon sequestration tech in the short term instead. Those tiny tiny particles will still be there after we've solved climate change. ;-)
That's funny . . . looks like they're expanding 19 existing sites, and French nuclear power output rose by 3.7% last year. Sorry dude, despite the little snit thrown by anti-nuke pols in the French gov't, France is the leader in European nuclear power, and they're going to stay that way for a very long time.
The entire premise of the article you linked to is that the costs of renewables "could" drop by certain levels. These hopeful projections -- backed by no real data, I might add -- also reference dates 40-50 years in the future, which is just silly theater. No one has any specifics about future efficiency gains even close to that far out. In that amount of time we will certainly have entirely new ways of working with nuclear energy too, but this apparently wasn't taken into consideration. But the most damning statement is that the plants won't be economically viable due to excess capacity. That is, they are saying we'll literally have too much power for them to pay for themselves, which is literally laughable. There is no time in recorded history that human energy consumption has ever dropped -- ever -- and the new technologies we are developing consume electricity at an ever increasing rate.
You have somewhat of a point about waste, which is not nil -- but it would be vastly improved over today's situation, and I trust people like the French to come up with real-world solutions, as they have for many decades now.
But let's keep investing into archaic unsafe technology and pollute the environment when they fail
People like you spreading this complete strawman bullshit and generations of Greenpeace psychos before that are the reason that we have no modern, safe nuclear options. Updated designs using passive reactor safety, such as Generation IV, *can't* have an uncontrolled meltdown -- in the event of a problem, gravity automatically shuts down the reaction. Ask the French -- they generate 40% of their own power via nukes plus they generate electricity for a good chunk of the rest of Europe using nuclear. Please educate yourself instead of using 70 year old stereotypes about nuclear power -- because thanks to the misinformation you are spreading, we are stuck with ancient, unsafe reactor designs.
Streaming brings better quality and less time loss.
So does piracy. Every incremental price increase makes piracy look like a better deal. Netflix better be careful about finding that sweet spot and staying within it.
Because by your own admission, they're non-citizens. Non-citizens should have *zero* voting rights, period, and certainly not those who willfully break the law in the first place. If you want to vote in the US, then you have to become a citizen. To do that, you have to wait in line and do it legally. My ancestors all did it. I know a number of people who have done it recently. It's terribly, horribly unfair to those people who live in the same municipalities who waited and paid many thousands of dollars to go thru the process the right way to become legal US citizens to give those same, hard-earned rights to people that purposely broke the fucking law. Just because these Maryland towns and San Francisco have found loopholes to allow illegals to vote does not make it just or fair. Additionally, most of the time all municipalities receive significant revenues from their state and the Federal government (fund from legal US taxpayers). You are giving illegals a say in how the tax dollars of legal US citizens in other jurisdictions are spent, which is wrong.
I'm not sure why liberals think that enforcing immigration to the US using the methods currently legally available, and strictly controlling who we let in -- you know, like Canada does it, for example -- is such a burdensome requirement.
Make it a felony to employ an illegal immigrant (and as a small business owner, I'd totally support this 100%). Require everyone including asylum seekers to declare at a legit port of entry and stay there on their side of the border in a secure facility waiting for their hearing. Anyone else gets kicked out and permanently banned. These simple legal changes would be way more effective than any physical barrier.
Non-citizens cannot vote.
Wrong wrong wrong. They can and do vote where liberal governments allow it, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Except it's not California's land. The National Parks belong to all Americans.
The units of the NPS, the Smithsonian, and other cultural institutions simply will not continue to tolerate shutdown after shutdown. Many of them already have private foundations which assist their operations, and because they're so under-funded by the gov't to begin with (e.g., Smithsonian is the only Federal agency actually allowed to fund-raise because of their pathetic level of funding) and with the gov't continually using them as a political football, it's not a stretch for them all to go fully public-private and just opt out of the whole broken system. For example, Gettysburg National Military Park has done this for years now, and while their NPS staff have indeed been furloughed, the Visitors Center and battlefield are both open during this current shutdown, paid for by the Gettysburg Foundation. Some foundations at other NPS units are actually paying ranger salaries so they can keep working.
Oh yeah, and it's time for Smithsonian to start charging an entry fee. Discount / waive it for the poor if you wish, but well-off and middle-class visitors can and should pay *something*. Even our friends in Europe charge admission fees to their museums.
There's a very strong argument to be made that if you really require GPG, you shouldn't be using one of the major webmail platforms in the first place, given the companies who own and provide them.
And infinitely better than Google's horrible, completely unusable GMail "UI". For people who want an open source, Outlook-style drag-and-drop front-end for GMail, Thunderbird has been the way to go for a long time, but it has been plagued by the slow downs and other problems lately that are mentioned in TFS. Glad to hear they've acknowledged this and are at least considering fixing the issues.
This isn't due to bricks and mortar being obsolete (though the net has played a role), but rather due to the loss of purchasing power among the American middle class.
What in the absolute fuck are you babbling about? This past holiday retail US shopping season was the best in the last six years. American consumers (you know, that middle class you claim that has no purchasing power) spent $850 *BILLION* dollars between November 1 and December 24, up 5.1 percent from last year. By all definitions, (online) retail totally crushed it.
Please feel free to refute with links to real reports or numbers backing your claims of a broke-ass US middle class with no purchasing power. Seriously, if you're gonna post total unsupportable bullshit, at least try to disguise it a little better.
The real problem is that in America you no longer make money by running successful companies. You make money by firing up a startup and waiting for a buyout or by buying up an existing, longstanding company and gutting it like a fish.
This is complete horseshit. You are cherry-picking one high-profile example of someone being a Trump-like dick in the aftermath of an enormous merger in the most turbulent sector in the entire world and painting the entire US economy with the same brush, which is just nonsense. There are 30.2 million small businesses in the US of tremendous diversity which employ 58.9 million people, or 47.5% of ALL workers in the US, and the median income for self-employed people working for an incorporated business was $50,347 in 2016 (certainly not "vulture capitalist"-class income). Looking at the report, these owners are NOT all "startups waiting for a buyout" and they're definitely NOT all people buying an "existing, longstanding company and gutting it like a fish" (source: US Small Business Profile, 2018). They're just the owners of plain old businesses (the kind you say don't exist anymore) in health care, food service, retail, manufacturing, tech, construction, waste management, you name it. Do you have ANY numbers to back up your ridiculous claims?
The US still innovates far better than any other country in the world, and this in turn provides ample opportunity for smart and hard-working people to build real, successful companies which provide truly valuable goods and services, with growth and long-term profitability in mind. These in turn create jobs and economic opportunity for the people they employ, as clearly documented in this report.
Is it easy? Absolutely not. But it never has been, and it's not supposed to be.
Yes -- libraries are rightfully risk-adverse about certain tech-facing facets of their core activities -- specifically, those which pertain to copyright. The nightmare scenario for all libraries and archives is that they make something from their holdings freely available on the Internet when it's in fact not copyright-clear, and then years later someone shows up claiming millions of dollars in damages. Out of necessity, they *must* be conservative when it comes to anything dealing with copyright status.
As Ageh mentions, keeping libraries' donors happy is key, and NYPL and most similar institutions are incredibly under-funded by the gov't and literally live and die by their wealthy patrons. So the technology footprint needs to be aligned with the wants of the donor to a certain extent. Because these people are often older, sometimes they don't have a firm grasp of why the library would want to spend their money on "tech," so the money goes elsewhere. The big donors pretty much get what they want, and sometimes that's more than having a branch named after themselves.
Now, can libraries do cool stuff when it comes to tech? Absolutely, and they do, including NYPL (check out NYPL Labs) and of course, the Library of Congress and their long-term digital strategy. But all of these activities are subject to the two rules above.
These people have already been beaten, or they wouldn't have wound up as thieves. Let's find a way to help them before they fall to this level instead of beating them down afterwards.
Bull fucking shit. A lot of people are just bad regardless of what happened to them (or didn't), their socio-economic status, etc. Some people would rather steal than earn something. Quit pretending that everyone who does this was somehow a victim first -- that's naive nonsense at best. This isn't anywhere remotely like the "stealing bread to feed my starving family" cliche -- it's opportunistic twats cowardly stealing from others who are out working. Anyone who does this absolutely deserves a solid ass kicking, at a minimum.
Quit discounting it or ignoring it. Modern, safer reactor designs are absolutely an integral part of combating climate change and divesting ourselves of fossil fuels.
Comcast will sue and ironically claim anti-competitive / anti-free market behavior on the part of the town. They will seek to add hundreds of thousands in legal fees before this is settled, win or lose. That is what they do.
So how many Social Credit points did the Motherland award you for making this post?
With the exception of a few fringe states (specifically Massachusetts), they're generally unenforceable when it comes to preventing an employee from seeking gainful employment.
If you think this is just because of Trump, you may want to look back at the number of incidents which actually occurred when Obama lived there, including an armed intruder jumping the fence and actually ENTERING THE BUILDING and a mentally ill woman getting shot to death with a baby in her car after panicking, ramming the east entrance, and fleeing. Seriously, knock it off with the partisan shit. I know about 45% of the readers on this site blame Trump, Republicans, and straight white men for the entirety of the world's evils, but nutters being attracted to the White House are a completely non-partisan phenomenon.
Poor genetic health is a factor, with urban communities typically having better genes
Ummm, what? You're actually claiming that rural folks are genetically inferior in some way? Got a link to back that up, or are you just stereotyping them all as inbreds?
Preying on old people. They should all die in a fire.
Because let's be honest, a wireless light switch does not cost more than 3 bucks to produce. It just doesn't.
Sure, if you don't count the R & D and engineers' salaries. And setup costs with the off-shore manufacturer. And any licensing fees for protocols like Z-Wave / Zigbee. And cost of getting it UL-certified. And the cost of shipping it from China (or wherever it's being made) to the US. And the % the retailer will charge you to sell it on Amazon, eBay, or in a brink and morter like Lowe's or Home Depot. And any post-sale support / handling returns and exchanges when a customer can't figure out how to get it to work with their network or is just unlucky enough to receive a bad one. And oh yeah, some type of profit margin after all of this.
Yeah, 3 bucks sounds right. You should totally do it!
Slashdotters interested in a DIY combination security / automation platform might want to check out the ELK M1 Gold. It's not cheap but highly configurable and has been around for a very long time (like, over 15 years I think?). It has outlasted many of its competitors because it's highly modular -- if / when a new protocol like ZWave becomes available, ELK can just make a module for it that plugs right into the bus. They also make a wide range of sensors for just about anything you'd want to do, and best of all, you can write rules that make the system take actions when certain events happen. You can even get affordable third party monitoring for it from Watchlight and a few others. Note that it's NOT a surveillance platform, so no camera support or integration.
You are not identified as poor -- you are identified as a risky borrower because you have no history of borrowing money and paying it back. That's all your credit score means. The next time you buy something like a TV or refrigerator, try using the "12 months same as cash" / 0% financing option if it's available, pay the item off over a year (at no additional cost to yourself) and then check your credit score -- you'll be pleasantly surprised.