Actually, compressed air energy storage is pretty cheap. People keep trying to build adiabatic CAES plants without building a tank by using an underground cavern lately, and then find out the cavern is sandstone and won't work; you gotta pay up for the storage tank if you want this to work. Still, batteries cost about 200x more.
These are city-scale storage plants at above 70% efficiency (they can easily approach 90%, but the engineers don't think they'll get much higher in the immediate term; theoretical efficiency of an adiabatic system is 100%).
The problem with using wind is that we have to account for the intermittent nature of wind
Besides storage, you have the average production over time, which is stable.
Right now I've been calling up some people who know more about this than I. I've spoken to ND's DoC head and learned about some of their programs. They've been pushing a program called Justice Reinvestment whereby they change how their corrections system operates and reinvest the savings into making it operate even better, in a basic sense. Their legislature has a committee for this.
They actually have a system where private behavioral health service providers get paid a monthly fee for their cases, and get awards if they perform well. That means your profits are kind of crappy unless you maximize successful: addiction needs to be treated long-term, behavioral problems need to be treated, and folks need to go out and thrive in the community after going through the corrections or pre-corrections processes.
I asked about for-profit prisons and was given the indication that it doesn't really matter. If your system isn't designed to normalize people into the community, it fails. For-profit prisons need to follow the rules of the contract, and the contract can state that their job is to rehabilitate people, that they are to make these programs available, and that business is to be carried out in a certain manner. You can even do an awards contract that minimizes profits if the people in the prison aren't thriving, if solitary confinement isn't diminished to near-nothing (there are, at any given time, about THREE people in solitary in North Dakota; they don't stay there long), if people don't get put on discretionary parole early enough, and if they reoffend too frequently. You can make their income stream dependent on results.
The real problem is nobody cares. State-run prisons are drab, authoritarian pits of shame and self-loathing, a place we lock people away so we don't have to see them. They destroy prisoners just as much as the for-profit prisons because nobody has been pushed to do better.
Private, for-profit prison advocates claim these institutions are innovative and have well-developed rehabilitation programs. The truth is private, for-profit prison advocates have made figuring out how to rehabilitate inmates somebody else's problem. Until our legislators make it their responsibility, we won't see improvement--regardless of who runs the prisons.
Actually, correctional systems in states such as North Dakota have started implementing policies to normalize the prison environment and improve correctional outcomes, among other things. They have a discretionary parole program there, too, to get people out of prison and instead control them via the mechanism of parole; and the governor can commute sentences at the request of the parole advisory board if they think it's a waste of resources to keep tabs on a guy with a 20-year sentence who got out on parole after 3 years and has been determined not a likely reoffender or otherwise threat to the community 6 months later.
Between expanded in-prison programs, more inmate autonomy, a better relationship between inmates and prison staff, expanded behavioral health services, and incoming and outgoing services to keep people out of prison or to stabilize them when they get out, the amount of trouble inmates cause in prison and the rate at which inmates reoffend has dropped considerably.
As a result of all of this, North Dakota went from having over a hundred inmates in solitary confinement to having maybe three; and they don't stay in solitary confinement for very long at all. Their caseworkers spend a lot of time with them, and they get cognitive therapy to help them improve so they can go back to general population quickly. It really is phenomenal.
It is my intent to drive similar change across the whole of the United States.
My strategy for identity theft includes legislation requiring the CFPB to follow NIST guidelines on current security technology and implement regulations requiring consumer-ready, current technical countermeasures to prevent identity theft. Regulations are faster to change than legislation (hence the weak language), and the industry doesn't just undo all that overnight (so it has some staying power even with a rogue President).
The current tech for this is FIDO U2F with RSA and ECC. A device holding 1,000 identities costs $18. You walk in a bank, show your hard ID (e.g. passport, driver's ID), and the bank lets you plug in and associate the physical device with yourself with Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. After that, opening any new credit account requires having that physical device; and if you lose it, you can call the bank to cancel the association but leave the requirement of verification enabled.
Banks need a strong physical presence verification process to open credit accounts. You can open a credit account without being at a bank by knowing what car someone drove 10 years ago; that's no good.
We can do more things to reduce attack surface in the case where the banks are bad actors by way of not doing appropriate verification, such as requiring the bank to be your bank--a branch you physically visited within the past few months, or designated from another branch. Largely, however, we need to remove all the attacks possible from many positions (many points of failure, non-redundant) and consolidate them to a physical bank branch, which we can better-control with stronger regulations on verifying identity (single point of failure, stronger).
Going after Equifax is important: they concealed this breach, took advantage of their knowledge, and otherwise acted with bad faith. In the broad scope, however, it's only important for procedural reasons: fines and threats of action when breaches happen won't stop identity theft; you have to bring pressure for not having the correct countermeasures in place before breaches happen.
You don't need separate servers. You just need to have programmed your game in an object-oriented model by which you swap out the components to make the configuration you want, and instantiate separate components for each apparent "server" configuration.
Shorter copyright terms. Trademarks are perpetual: you have to renew them, and protect them; if you fail to renew, eventually it becomes a dead trademark. Copyright shouldn't be hundreds of years, though.
Using DMCA for a trademark case or other not-really-copyright case will get you fined pretty badly. It's an explicit provision of the DMCA and has gotten a few companies nuked out of existence.
Luck, probably. More people meme'd to Home Depot and Lowes than Heckinger. Big contractors actually source their materials from these big home improvement stores: while we think of them as consumer stores, they're actually the supply chain for pretty much all residential and commercial construction work. Lots of stores, lots of employees.
In any case, I'm not concerned with CEOs pulling $20 or $100 off every employee every year and becoming millionaires. I'm concerned with employees working themselves to death and still barely being able to afford rent and food, while going without access to healthcare they can afford--because it's not "affordable" if it's only affordable for someone else.
But maybe it makes more sense for the CEO to make half a million and the top hundred people make 25000 (a significant increase for them), and the rest make 20000 as usual.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Why do they get that $5,000?
Philosophical reasoning aside, what the hell is going on with the other 299,900 employees who still get shit? You're not helping; you're just creating a $5,000 bonus for a tiny force of elites. Look into Home Depot's bonus structure to see how that works (pretty much the median employee gets $250 and almost nobody gets over $400, but the announcement is "$1,000 bonuses for everyone!")
those are two extremes. There are other possibilities
Sure. AIG with its highly-compensated executives gets $148/year from each of 56,400 employees to the entire key executive suite in cash compensation. If you include other non-equity compensation (i.e. all the perks), it's $528/year per employee. Sinclair's CEO gets $119, while the entire executive suite there gets nearly $1,000 per employee in cash compensation--for 8,400 employees. Sinclair's executive suite doesn't get so much in the way of other expenditures as compensation.
Generally, the ones with fewer employees take more per employee. The service businesses are typically big: you have a lot of low-paid retail workers, and only a little executive comp per each. The ones that are good examples of high executive pay representing high dollar values generally have a workforce of middle-income employees who are a bit less impressed by an extra few hundred a year, and mostly complain that the guy at the next business over is doing the same thing for $15k more pay and better benefits--which is valid, but we're not having trouble finding food.
That's pretty much my point: the executive pay is usually not as egregious as it looks; and redistributing it is not a viable strategy for reducing poverty. A few people will be better off, maybe; that's not enough.
when there is dishonesty or breaking the rules in pure market forces, it is prudent to make sure wealth isn't being too unevenly distributed.
I'm a social democrat. I believe in a strong system of capitalism and a free market, with regulations to ensure these systems operate in a socially-equitable and economically-optimal manner, and social programs to redistribute wealth to create equity. Such social programs have historically included unemployment insurance, retirement and disability pension, housing assistance, nutritional assistance (SNAP, WIC), and so forth.
All the talk about income distribution and equality, and nothing about equity. There's a difference, you know: equality means similarity, and so increasing equality means to reduce the difference between people; while equity means similarity in terms of means, and increasing equity means reducing the difference between people's opportunities. Public school provides equality; public school programs to provide alternative teaching for learning-impaired students so as to increase their success provide equity.
I have something you can pass on to your Democrat Party buddies
None yet.
I will find it very hard to vote for a Democrat so long as the party platform does not include support for nuclear power.
The Sierra Club doesn't support it. After Fukushima Daiichi, everyone is rolling back the nuclear agenda. Pebble bed reactors are extremely inefficient; and there's a lot of propaganda (not sure if accurate) about the Westinghouse design being built such that if all those extra failsafes do somehow all fail, it just belches shitloads of nuclear dust into the air.
I like nuclear. I don't like nuclear disasters. I'm okay with nuclear if we can show that it's safe; everybody else is distinctly not okay with nuclear. We do have hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunami, so I can see where someone would question our safety against known-unknown external factors like unexpectedly-large waves and once-in-ten-thousand-years earthquakes.
My answer would probably be to convert the environmental disaster into an economic disaster: build the damned thing so that it breaks and drains into a robust underground holding area (e.g. a graphite sponge or sand bed), where it will cool; cap it with concrete if that ever happens and accept that the disaster, while contained, means your nuclear plant is dead and gone forever. That does require building a sort of underground box that won't shatter in an extreme earthquake--back to uncertainty.
So while I'm behind nuclear if it's safe, I can see why nobody is ready to say it's safe. Pebble bed will work, but costs something like $3,500 per kW--solar is $35/kW for panels, and nowadays about $140/kW installed at utility scale. A large build-out of solar-over-parking-lot would be nearly utility scale.
after 40 years of subsidies and preferential legislation neither have shown the ability to replace coal
The technology is evolving fast. The subsides aren't. For the $7.8 billion of annual subsidies Obama was handing out, we could have directly built 55MW of installed capacity per year. One kW of installed solar produces 3.5kWh/day in some poor-insolation regions (cold places in Germany), so think of a range of 1.2-1.9 MWh per kW installed.
Maryland generates 37,000,000MWh net per year.
That's 20-30 GW of installed capacity, or at least 363 years of subsidies, to replace MD's power output with solar. Of course, 40% of our power is nuclear, a LOT is hydro, and we have a lot of solar now. At the same time, the demand created by electric cars will raise the requirements.
So you're right: economically, solar is viable, but not viable for rapid replacement today (those numbers above will skew: the tech gets cheaper and we get wealthier over time; it's still going to be a while). Off-shore wind is also viable, and requires additional funding on top of solar, so we're picking around in the same pot here and should probably go with one or the other based on the biggest immediate ROI. Nuclear can provide the capacity, but also carries a hell of a severe acute risk in its failure mode unless you use an economically-non-viable plant design (pebble bed). RTGs are low-efficiency and expensive.
It's kind of an annoying problem. I've got one other alternate power source, but it needs a piece of technology that's only in infancy right now, and sort of skirts the laws of thermodynamics by operating in reality instead of in an ideal system (it doesn't work on paper for valid engineering reasons which cannot be reproduced in the real world). Not sure if it works in practice--not just if it's net-positive, but if it's got sufficient energy density. We'll leave that one to the sci-fi writers for now, along with transparent aluminum.
You really need to stop being a voice of reason around here.
Somebody has to. You should see my political campaign. I got in an argument with some guy who keeps telling me capitalism is past its end and it's time we moved on; he was very angry when I pointed out that the CEO of Home Depot taking lower pay and fewer bonuses wouldn't "pay for higher wages and benefits" because Home Depot has 300,000 employees and the entire executive suite nets $28/year per employee in cash compensation between them. His argument was I'm wrong because "their wealth is built on the backs of mistreated employees" (notice this ignores the numerical analyses).
Even when you ditch the socialists, that's the voice of today's progressive left movement: make the rich pay, make the businesses pay, make everybody with power pay, make Wall Street pay. I can agree with regulation about banks and such; and I'm interested in something today's progressives aren't talking about: strategies to bring the poor out of poverty and provide more economic fairness to the middle-class.
It makes people angry. It's like the progressive left don't really care about the poor, only about the rich. Somebody's got to say it.
Fair enough. I'm more looking at more wood-building construction, disposal by dropping debris down old oil wells, and fast-growing trees in controlled tree farms. We have a lot of land in Virginia and Florida where the biomass energy market has driven destruction of native forests and replacement with pine plantations; we need to re-log those, destroy the remaining pine species, and restore them to original habitat. The pine is useful for building material; and we can authorize a limited amount of land for fast-growing pine or poplar species (poplar is a fast-growing hardwood) for further building material.
There are processes to turn plant waste and oils into polyurethane and polyisocyanurate, as well as polycarbonate. With the right processes, polycarbonate becomes relatively ignition-proof (I've seen side-by-side polycarbonate buildings where one ignited into a giant fireball and the other only burned so long as a propane torch was focused on it). I've used low-VOC (4-hour curing, then no offgassing after 24 hours), flame-retardant polyurethane foams built from plant-derived compounds activated by chemical reaction with dextrose; such foams create an R7-per-inch barrier while providing tremendous structural support and impeding flame spread. Engineered wooden paneling with polyurethane-bound fibers can also provide a modified, flame-resistant matrix. Flammability is the primary challenge with such construction.
With improvements to processes and reduction in costs, demolition and reconstruction becomes more-viable. Flammability controls make the waste unsuitable for burning; dropping it down an oil well provides permanent sequestering. A strong enough market for home customization would fuel such consumption; otherwise we rely on the habit of businesses remodeling their office space repeatedly, which is significant today. The fact is that remodeling is waste, and economically we tend to avoid it--rightly so.
Therein lies the real problem: efforts to convert air to fuel require at least as much energy in as burning oil and coal produces--and our energy market is huge. Offsetting with solar would require a lot of solar, at high expense, just so we can pour liquid hydrocarbons down the well. Literally anything else we do requires either a primary benefit or an enormous economic sacrifice.
860 million metric tonnes per year of oil consumed by the United States. One tonne of oil is 11630kWh. Plenty of processes can produce liquid hydrocarbons with nearly 100% faradic efficiency; energy efficiency is another matter, hitting nearly 20%. You're going to store about 27.4 billion kWh per day, consuming five times that, to put oil away as fast as it's used now. That's 137TWh consumed every day; the US currently consumes 25,000TWh per year, so you're talking about producing half our power over again with solar in order to create a National Liquid Hydrocarbon Reserve dumping oil down the well at the same yearly rate we burn it now.
1MW of installed PV can average.00158TWh per year. That means we need 15.8TW of installed capacity to cover current energy usage, plus 8TW more to reverse the rate of oil usage of the US (sequester instead of release CO2). That's $2.8 trillion just for 35 cent/W panels, plus all the rest of the installed capacity. The good news is that's 1.75% of our GDP for 10 years, and panels should become cheaper over time; the bad news is that doesn't include installation and management. That's also all of the paved space in the US: solar over just parking lots can generate a lot, but not 10TW.
You also need to factor in the additional power draw for electric vehicles, adding to the 16TW of base capacity. We can do a lot, but that's starting to ask a little more than I can deliver right now. On the other hand, we have $39 billion of Federal solar subsidies that aren't working too well today; restructuring that might get us on our way. It will take 50 years at that pace to run out of space for solar; and with the way
Bookstores and newsstands don't collect information on their customers
They keep records of sales, not faces. They have a record of every sale, with a time stamp. I've actually called a supermarket and gotten the clock time someone was in the store by giving them a day, last 4 digits of a credit card, and an exact purchase amount.
This means that, to keep track of the books and magazines a suspect has available. they pretty much need to be tailed whenever out.
It's called cell phone signal triangulation, and it can be done pretty much by subpoenaing the tower operators, or by stationing several $800 boxes in an area (in which case you can read information to identify every handset device passively, and track anyone in the area at any future date by running a query).
Let the computer do the boring job of sitting around watching 24/7.
Otherwise, there's a very large number of possibilities, most of which are not likely cataloged electronically.
OCR is pretty accurate, and book ciphers aren't feedback ciphers.
With machine learning, you can theoretically use a known set of good DNA reads to determine what needs adjustment. That, of course, requires a human to train the machine learning algorithm to better-interpret the data and learn properly. It also requires a lot of manual setup reading and rereading known DNA, as well as making adjustments to the hardware to decrease its error rate as you discover particular error conditions for which you can correct directly.
Even with all the manual work involved, it's going to give you greater accuracy with less labor. It's not nearly as simple as measuring repeatedly and running a quick statistical analysis, as you observe: we've improved the technology of "counting" over the last decades.
I tend to be adversarial and will try to break things. A supportive approach when problem-solving tends to just create more problems. Therefor, I would like to hear more about the dynamics of pharmaceutical services in this area of WV, and pursue the hypothesis that this investigation is founded on bullshit.
Should that line of argument prove indefensible, then we are left with stronger evidence of drug supplier, pharmacist, and prescriber reckless neglect, if not collusion. I'm certain we can deliberately build a case for collusion if we simply ignore the facts and don't ask important questions about alternative theories; there are already enough people interested in that conclusion, so they should be able to provide an anchor against mishandling the opposing investigation.
The government has nation-state resources, but also nation-state concerns, which eans lots of surveillance target, which means that its resources are spread thin.
Sure, and they're going to have to dedicate resources to a particular individual case if they want to actually learn anything about that case.
The appropriate government agencies knew that the Florida nightclub shooter was likely to do what he did sometime. Not knowing when, they couldn't assign enough resources to keep track of the shooter on a moment-to-moment basis.
Actually, they think he was using encryption to hide communications, e.g. via WhatsApp or another double-ratchet-based messenger. They know he had a cell phone, and they most likely were able to follow his movements with the appropriate warrants which would have allowed them to read his (encrypted) communications. Had he been using a book cipher, they could have identified periodicals and books from his entire movement path, including any bookstore, library, or news stand he passed. That's actually not a lot of data; and for the stores, they could pull purchase history during the time he was near (or purchased) to prioritize e.g. a potential newspaper or magazine buy.
A lot of that can be done automatically, and any physical surveillance can be recommended by machine or by agents who want to see what he's doing in a library every Wednesday--or just have someone in the area and alert them when the suspect is on the move.
Not that they do anything so fancy. They could, and with minimal resource expenditure.
Of course, none of that is going to break the encryption on his phone. I quite like it that way, even if it causes some trouble for our law enforcement agencies now and then.
Okay, so you're assuming that a single agent is unimportant enough that the adversarial state won't be following him around or noticing his actions, but he needs a book cipher to hide from an adversarial state. You also suggest that such a state won't have enough plainclothes agents to keep surveillance, although how they're supposed to know to apply the book cipher based on someone approaching a book when they don't have a surveillance target is not answered.
Look, for any of this premise to make sense, the government knows who you are, and knows you're using a cipher. They know this because they're trying to read your information (they have it), but your information is encrypted, They are now specifically targeting you with nation-state resources, which means they know what library you visit, where you are now, and where you're headed, and can mobilize agents specifically to be at that library and no other library because you are physically present there.
If they don't know who you are and can't track your movement, then you can go ahead and trade your secrets in plain-text, because nobody's watching.
I'll agree that developing a form of UBI to counter the effects of late stage capitalism
Actually, it's less of a basic income and more of a fair share of productivity. It's not designed to provide enough for anything; it's designed to provide fairness. The welfare system takes up the slack. Because productivity increases continuously, the load on welfare comes down over time.
should be a priority over restoring domestic production of consumer goods, since automation and lights-out factories are poised to take over eventually anyway
It's more than that. Any rise in prices without a corresponding rise in consumer spending (and consumer spendable income) brings a loss of jobs. Bringing factory jobs back from China will actually cause a net-loss of American jobs if Chinese production (notably, wages and payrolls) is cheaper by a small fraction.
Even if production in America is more-expensive, you can have a net-gain in jobs since the associated spending now represents domestic income. You still end up with everyone poorer because they have to spend more for the same goods. A minimum wage worker suddenly works 3 hours instead of 1.5 to buy pants, for example; while a middle-class worker is spending 1.5 hours instead of 0.75 (the proportion is the same to all workers).
Open, free trade is great for both sides. The transition is a problem: people lose their jobs in trade and technical progress. Jobs come back later as our industries shift around. Those in the path of progress are cast aside; this is not right. We need to keep them stable, to carry them to the next opportunity.
That may, at times, mean slowing the transition. Trade deals may need to drain the potential over years--prevent jobs from flooding out all at once when there is a clear market drive to move millions of jobs ASAP--so we can handle the fall-out and ensure people aren't abandoned in the process. The end goal should always be to zero that potential so there isn't the threat of the next administration signing an open trade deal and making a 20-million-job industry vanish overnight.
That's why I told PCCC I don't oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership: it may have some rough edges to work out, but going in the direction of fair trade (which eventually just becomes open trade, since fair trade drives up the economic situation of the exporting countries and causes the natural price to meet or exceed the fair-trade price) is a good thing. If the terms are outright bad, we need to modify the terms; that's different from support (of the current proposal) or opposition (of the proposal entire).
Governments have the capacity to have multiple plain-clothes agents happen to be passing in and out of libraries at the same time, you know. Just normal traffic. We've narrowed it down to a shelf. Hell, we have digital copies of everything at that library branch.
Overall, I still prefer traditional paper voting. Your ideas, while interesting, don't strike me as the right way to do things, partly because it's too technical for most people.
The part people actually see is they click a few boxes, plug a thing in, and push a button. There's no technical knowledge required. Everything else is a behavioral countermeasure.
I've had no trouble explaining how these things work to the uneducated, even at a technical level.
Interesting that the voting is observed by major parties. That helps. I'm sure I could attack that system, but it'd take me a while to figure out how, and I'd have to watch it in action a few times. It would also take greater collusion.
he should have advised the rich young man to invest his money wisely and maximize ROI, so as to generate sustainable employment for as many people as possible
That also increases the number of people in need of employment due to weird economic behaviors. Zeroing out the number in poverty is a little more complex than that, although it also creates the maximum ROI; it requires taxes and welfare systems.
Not really. The cost to employ a worker under this model is actually lower--payrolls are lower--while the worker takes home more income and has guaranteed access to healthcare.
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Actually, compressed air energy storage is pretty cheap. People keep trying to build adiabatic CAES plants without building a tank by using an underground cavern lately, and then find out the cavern is sandstone and won't work; you gotta pay up for the storage tank if you want this to work. Still, batteries cost about 200x more.
These are city-scale storage plants at above 70% efficiency (they can easily approach 90%, but the engineers don't think they'll get much higher in the immediate term; theoretical efficiency of an adiabatic system is 100%).
The problem with using wind is that we have to account for the intermittent nature of wind
Besides storage, you have the average production over time, which is stable.
Right now I've been calling up some people who know more about this than I. I've spoken to ND's DoC head and learned about some of their programs. They've been pushing a program called Justice Reinvestment whereby they change how their corrections system operates and reinvest the savings into making it operate even better, in a basic sense. Their legislature has a committee for this.
They actually have a system where private behavioral health service providers get paid a monthly fee for their cases, and get awards if they perform well. That means your profits are kind of crappy unless you maximize successful: addiction needs to be treated long-term, behavioral problems need to be treated, and folks need to go out and thrive in the community after going through the corrections or pre-corrections processes.
I asked about for-profit prisons and was given the indication that it doesn't really matter. If your system isn't designed to normalize people into the community, it fails. For-profit prisons need to follow the rules of the contract, and the contract can state that their job is to rehabilitate people, that they are to make these programs available, and that business is to be carried out in a certain manner. You can even do an awards contract that minimizes profits if the people in the prison aren't thriving, if solitary confinement isn't diminished to near-nothing (there are, at any given time, about THREE people in solitary in North Dakota; they don't stay there long), if people don't get put on discretionary parole early enough, and if they reoffend too frequently. You can make their income stream dependent on results.
The real problem is nobody cares. State-run prisons are drab, authoritarian pits of shame and self-loathing, a place we lock people away so we don't have to see them. They destroy prisoners just as much as the for-profit prisons because nobody has been pushed to do better.
Private, for-profit prison advocates claim these institutions are innovative and have well-developed rehabilitation programs. The truth is private, for-profit prison advocates have made figuring out how to rehabilitate inmates somebody else's problem. Until our legislators make it their responsibility, we won't see improvement--regardless of who runs the prisons.
Actually, correctional systems in states such as North Dakota have started implementing policies to normalize the prison environment and improve correctional outcomes, among other things. They have a discretionary parole program there, too, to get people out of prison and instead control them via the mechanism of parole; and the governor can commute sentences at the request of the parole advisory board if they think it's a waste of resources to keep tabs on a guy with a 20-year sentence who got out on parole after 3 years and has been determined not a likely reoffender or otherwise threat to the community 6 months later.
Between expanded in-prison programs, more inmate autonomy, a better relationship between inmates and prison staff, expanded behavioral health services, and incoming and outgoing services to keep people out of prison or to stabilize them when they get out, the amount of trouble inmates cause in prison and the rate at which inmates reoffend has dropped considerably.
As a result of all of this, North Dakota went from having over a hundred inmates in solitary confinement to having maybe three; and they don't stay in solitary confinement for very long at all. Their caseworkers spend a lot of time with them, and they get cognitive therapy to help them improve so they can go back to general population quickly. It really is phenomenal.
It is my intent to drive similar change across the whole of the United States.
My strategy for identity theft includes legislation requiring the CFPB to follow NIST guidelines on current security technology and implement regulations requiring consumer-ready, current technical countermeasures to prevent identity theft. Regulations are faster to change than legislation (hence the weak language), and the industry doesn't just undo all that overnight (so it has some staying power even with a rogue President).
The current tech for this is FIDO U2F with RSA and ECC. A device holding 1,000 identities costs $18. You walk in a bank, show your hard ID (e.g. passport, driver's ID), and the bank lets you plug in and associate the physical device with yourself with Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. After that, opening any new credit account requires having that physical device; and if you lose it, you can call the bank to cancel the association but leave the requirement of verification enabled.
Banks need a strong physical presence verification process to open credit accounts. You can open a credit account without being at a bank by knowing what car someone drove 10 years ago; that's no good.
We can do more things to reduce attack surface in the case where the banks are bad actors by way of not doing appropriate verification, such as requiring the bank to be your bank--a branch you physically visited within the past few months, or designated from another branch. Largely, however, we need to remove all the attacks possible from many positions (many points of failure, non-redundant) and consolidate them to a physical bank branch, which we can better-control with stronger regulations on verifying identity (single point of failure, stronger).
Going after Equifax is important: they concealed this breach, took advantage of their knowledge, and otherwise acted with bad faith. In the broad scope, however, it's only important for procedural reasons: fines and threats of action when breaches happen won't stop identity theft; you have to bring pressure for not having the correct countermeasures in place before breaches happen.
You don't need separate servers. You just need to have programmed your game in an object-oriented model by which you swap out the components to make the configuration you want, and instantiate separate components for each apparent "server" configuration.
Granted that takes planning or refactoring.
Shorter copyright terms. Trademarks are perpetual: you have to renew them, and protect them; if you fail to renew, eventually it becomes a dead trademark. Copyright shouldn't be hundreds of years, though.
Using DMCA for a trademark case or other not-really-copyright case will get you fined pretty badly. It's an explicit provision of the DMCA and has gotten a few companies nuked out of existence.
Luck, probably. More people meme'd to Home Depot and Lowes than Heckinger. Big contractors actually source their materials from these big home improvement stores: while we think of them as consumer stores, they're actually the supply chain for pretty much all residential and commercial construction work. Lots of stores, lots of employees.
In any case, I'm not concerned with CEOs pulling $20 or $100 off every employee every year and becoming millionaires. I'm concerned with employees working themselves to death and still barely being able to afford rent and food, while going without access to healthcare they can afford--because it's not "affordable" if it's only affordable for someone else.
But maybe it makes more sense for the CEO to make half a million and the top hundred people make 25000 (a significant increase for them), and the rest make 20000 as usual.
Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. Why do they get that $5,000?
Philosophical reasoning aside, what the hell is going on with the other 299,900 employees who still get shit? You're not helping; you're just creating a $5,000 bonus for a tiny force of elites. Look into Home Depot's bonus structure to see how that works (pretty much the median employee gets $250 and almost nobody gets over $400, but the announcement is "$1,000 bonuses for everyone!")
those are two extremes. There are other possibilities
Sure. AIG with its highly-compensated executives gets $148/year from each of 56,400 employees to the entire key executive suite in cash compensation. If you include other non-equity compensation (i.e. all the perks), it's $528/year per employee. Sinclair's CEO gets $119, while the entire executive suite there gets nearly $1,000 per employee in cash compensation--for 8,400 employees. Sinclair's executive suite doesn't get so much in the way of other expenditures as compensation.
Generally, the ones with fewer employees take more per employee. The service businesses are typically big: you have a lot of low-paid retail workers, and only a little executive comp per each. The ones that are good examples of high executive pay representing high dollar values generally have a workforce of middle-income employees who are a bit less impressed by an extra few hundred a year, and mostly complain that the guy at the next business over is doing the same thing for $15k more pay and better benefits--which is valid, but we're not having trouble finding food.
That's pretty much my point: the executive pay is usually not as egregious as it looks; and redistributing it is not a viable strategy for reducing poverty. A few people will be better off, maybe; that's not enough.
when there is dishonesty or breaking the rules in pure market forces, it is prudent to make sure wealth isn't being too unevenly distributed.
I'm a social democrat. I believe in a strong system of capitalism and a free market, with regulations to ensure these systems operate in a socially-equitable and economically-optimal manner, and social programs to redistribute wealth to create equity. Such social programs have historically included unemployment insurance, retirement and disability pension, housing assistance, nutritional assistance (SNAP, WIC), and so forth.
All the talk about income distribution and equality, and nothing about equity. There's a difference, you know: equality means similarity, and so increasing equality means to reduce the difference between people; while equity means similarity in terms of means, and increasing equity means reducing the difference between people's opportunities. Public school provides equality; public school programs to provide alternative teaching for learning-impaired students so as to increase their success provide equity.
I have an approach for this.
I have something you can pass on to your Democrat Party buddies
None yet.
I will find it very hard to vote for a Democrat so long as the party platform does not include support for nuclear power.
The Sierra Club doesn't support it. After Fukushima Daiichi, everyone is rolling back the nuclear agenda. Pebble bed reactors are extremely inefficient; and there's a lot of propaganda (not sure if accurate) about the Westinghouse design being built such that if all those extra failsafes do somehow all fail, it just belches shitloads of nuclear dust into the air.
I like nuclear. I don't like nuclear disasters. I'm okay with nuclear if we can show that it's safe; everybody else is distinctly not okay with nuclear. We do have hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunami, so I can see where someone would question our safety against known-unknown external factors like unexpectedly-large waves and once-in-ten-thousand-years earthquakes.
My answer would probably be to convert the environmental disaster into an economic disaster: build the damned thing so that it breaks and drains into a robust underground holding area (e.g. a graphite sponge or sand bed), where it will cool; cap it with concrete if that ever happens and accept that the disaster, while contained, means your nuclear plant is dead and gone forever. That does require building a sort of underground box that won't shatter in an extreme earthquake--back to uncertainty.
So while I'm behind nuclear if it's safe, I can see why nobody is ready to say it's safe. Pebble bed will work, but costs something like $3,500 per kW--solar is $35/kW for panels, and nowadays about $140/kW installed at utility scale. A large build-out of solar-over-parking-lot would be nearly utility scale.
after 40 years of subsidies and preferential legislation neither have shown the ability to replace coal
The technology is evolving fast. The subsides aren't. For the $7.8 billion of annual subsidies Obama was handing out, we could have directly built 55MW of installed capacity per year. One kW of installed solar produces 3.5kWh/day in some poor-insolation regions (cold places in Germany), so think of a range of 1.2-1.9 MWh per kW installed.
Maryland generates 37,000,000MWh net per year.
That's 20-30 GW of installed capacity, or at least 363 years of subsidies, to replace MD's power output with solar. Of course, 40% of our power is nuclear, a LOT is hydro, and we have a lot of solar now. At the same time, the demand created by electric cars will raise the requirements.
So you're right: economically, solar is viable, but not viable for rapid replacement today (those numbers above will skew: the tech gets cheaper and we get wealthier over time; it's still going to be a while). Off-shore wind is also viable, and requires additional funding on top of solar, so we're picking around in the same pot here and should probably go with one or the other based on the biggest immediate ROI. Nuclear can provide the capacity, but also carries a hell of a severe acute risk in its failure mode unless you use an economically-non-viable plant design (pebble bed). RTGs are low-efficiency and expensive.
It's kind of an annoying problem. I've got one other alternate power source, but it needs a piece of technology that's only in infancy right now, and sort of skirts the laws of thermodynamics by operating in reality instead of in an ideal system (it doesn't work on paper for valid engineering reasons which cannot be reproduced in the real world). Not sure if it works in practice--not just if it's net-positive, but if it's got sufficient energy density. We'll leave that one to the sci-fi writers for now, along with transparent aluminum.
You really need to stop being a voice of reason around here.
Somebody has to. You should see my political campaign. I got in an argument with some guy who keeps telling me capitalism is past its end and it's time we moved on; he was very angry when I pointed out that the CEO of Home Depot taking lower pay and fewer bonuses wouldn't "pay for higher wages and benefits" because Home Depot has 300,000 employees and the entire executive suite nets $28/year per employee in cash compensation between them. His argument was I'm wrong because "their wealth is built on the backs of mistreated employees" (notice this ignores the numerical analyses).
Even when you ditch the socialists, that's the voice of today's progressive left movement: make the rich pay, make the businesses pay, make everybody with power pay, make Wall Street pay. I can agree with regulation about banks and such; and I'm interested in something today's progressives aren't talking about: strategies to bring the poor out of poverty and provide more economic fairness to the middle-class.
It makes people angry. It's like the progressive left don't really care about the poor, only about the rich. Somebody's got to say it.
Fair enough. I'm more looking at more wood-building construction, disposal by dropping debris down old oil wells, and fast-growing trees in controlled tree farms. We have a lot of land in Virginia and Florida where the biomass energy market has driven destruction of native forests and replacement with pine plantations; we need to re-log those, destroy the remaining pine species, and restore them to original habitat. The pine is useful for building material; and we can authorize a limited amount of land for fast-growing pine or poplar species (poplar is a fast-growing hardwood) for further building material.
There are processes to turn plant waste and oils into polyurethane and polyisocyanurate, as well as polycarbonate. With the right processes, polycarbonate becomes relatively ignition-proof (I've seen side-by-side polycarbonate buildings where one ignited into a giant fireball and the other only burned so long as a propane torch was focused on it). I've used low-VOC (4-hour curing, then no offgassing after 24 hours), flame-retardant polyurethane foams built from plant-derived compounds activated by chemical reaction with dextrose; such foams create an R7-per-inch barrier while providing tremendous structural support and impeding flame spread. Engineered wooden paneling with polyurethane-bound fibers can also provide a modified, flame-resistant matrix. Flammability is the primary challenge with such construction.
With improvements to processes and reduction in costs, demolition and reconstruction becomes more-viable. Flammability controls make the waste unsuitable for burning; dropping it down an oil well provides permanent sequestering. A strong enough market for home customization would fuel such consumption; otherwise we rely on the habit of businesses remodeling their office space repeatedly, which is significant today. The fact is that remodeling is waste, and economically we tend to avoid it--rightly so.
Therein lies the real problem: efforts to convert air to fuel require at least as much energy in as burning oil and coal produces--and our energy market is huge. Offsetting with solar would require a lot of solar, at high expense, just so we can pour liquid hydrocarbons down the well. Literally anything else we do requires either a primary benefit or an enormous economic sacrifice.
860 million metric tonnes per year of oil consumed by the United States. One tonne of oil is 11630kWh. Plenty of processes can produce liquid hydrocarbons with nearly 100% faradic efficiency; energy efficiency is another matter, hitting nearly 20%. You're going to store about 27.4 billion kWh per day, consuming five times that, to put oil away as fast as it's used now. That's 137TWh consumed every day; the US currently consumes 25,000TWh per year, so you're talking about producing half our power over again with solar in order to create a National Liquid Hydrocarbon Reserve dumping oil down the well at the same yearly rate we burn it now.
1MW of installed PV can average .00158TWh per year. That means we need 15.8TW of installed capacity to cover current energy usage, plus 8TW more to reverse the rate of oil usage of the US (sequester instead of release CO2). That's $2.8 trillion just for 35 cent/W panels, plus all the rest of the installed capacity. The good news is that's 1.75% of our GDP for 10 years, and panels should become cheaper over time; the bad news is that doesn't include installation and management. That's also all of the paved space in the US: solar over just parking lots can generate a lot, but not 10TW.
You also need to factor in the additional power draw for electric vehicles, adding to the 16TW of base capacity. We can do a lot, but that's starting to ask a little more than I can deliver right now. On the other hand, we have $39 billion of Federal solar subsidies that aren't working too well today; restructuring that might get us on our way. It will take 50 years at that pace to run out of space for solar; and with the way
Wouldn't that destroy delicate desert habitat and extinct a variety of species?
Yeah, I still haven't figured the campiagning thing out. It's annoying, and awkward, yet this is apparently what people do.
Bookstores and newsstands don't collect information on their customers
They keep records of sales, not faces. They have a record of every sale, with a time stamp. I've actually called a supermarket and gotten the clock time someone was in the store by giving them a day, last 4 digits of a credit card, and an exact purchase amount.
This means that, to keep track of the books and magazines a suspect has available. they pretty much need to be tailed whenever out.
It's called cell phone signal triangulation, and it can be done pretty much by subpoenaing the tower operators, or by stationing several $800 boxes in an area (in which case you can read information to identify every handset device passively, and track anyone in the area at any future date by running a query).
Let the computer do the boring job of sitting around watching 24/7.
Otherwise, there's a very large number of possibilities, most of which are not likely cataloged electronically.
OCR is pretty accurate, and book ciphers aren't feedback ciphers.
Should I add this to the ACA?
With machine learning, you can theoretically use a known set of good DNA reads to determine what needs adjustment. That, of course, requires a human to train the machine learning algorithm to better-interpret the data and learn properly. It also requires a lot of manual setup reading and rereading known DNA, as well as making adjustments to the hardware to decrease its error rate as you discover particular error conditions for which you can correct directly.
Even with all the manual work involved, it's going to give you greater accuracy with less labor. It's not nearly as simple as measuring repeatedly and running a quick statistical analysis, as you observe: we've improved the technology of "counting" over the last decades.
I tend to be adversarial and will try to break things. A supportive approach when problem-solving tends to just create more problems. Therefor, I would like to hear more about the dynamics of pharmaceutical services in this area of WV, and pursue the hypothesis that this investigation is founded on bullshit.
Should that line of argument prove indefensible, then we are left with stronger evidence of drug supplier, pharmacist, and prescriber reckless neglect, if not collusion. I'm certain we can deliberately build a case for collusion if we simply ignore the facts and don't ask important questions about alternative theories; there are already enough people interested in that conclusion, so they should be able to provide an anchor against mishandling the opposing investigation.
The government has nation-state resources, but also nation-state concerns, which eans lots of surveillance target, which means that its resources are spread thin.
Sure, and they're going to have to dedicate resources to a particular individual case if they want to actually learn anything about that case.
The appropriate government agencies knew that the Florida nightclub shooter was likely to do what he did sometime. Not knowing when, they couldn't assign enough resources to keep track of the shooter on a moment-to-moment basis.
Actually, they think he was using encryption to hide communications, e.g. via WhatsApp or another double-ratchet-based messenger. They know he had a cell phone, and they most likely were able to follow his movements with the appropriate warrants which would have allowed them to read his (encrypted) communications. Had he been using a book cipher, they could have identified periodicals and books from his entire movement path, including any bookstore, library, or news stand he passed. That's actually not a lot of data; and for the stores, they could pull purchase history during the time he was near (or purchased) to prioritize e.g. a potential newspaper or magazine buy.
A lot of that can be done automatically, and any physical surveillance can be recommended by machine or by agents who want to see what he's doing in a library every Wednesday--or just have someone in the area and alert them when the suspect is on the move.
Not that they do anything so fancy. They could, and with minimal resource expenditure.
Of course, none of that is going to break the encryption on his phone. I quite like it that way, even if it causes some trouble for our law enforcement agencies now and then.
Okay, so you're assuming that a single agent is unimportant enough that the adversarial state won't be following him around or noticing his actions, but he needs a book cipher to hide from an adversarial state. You also suggest that such a state won't have enough plainclothes agents to keep surveillance, although how they're supposed to know to apply the book cipher based on someone approaching a book when they don't have a surveillance target is not answered.
Look, for any of this premise to make sense, the government knows who you are, and knows you're using a cipher. They know this because they're trying to read your information (they have it), but your information is encrypted, They are now specifically targeting you with nation-state resources, which means they know what library you visit, where you are now, and where you're headed, and can mobilize agents specifically to be at that library and no other library because you are physically present there.
If they don't know who you are and can't track your movement, then you can go ahead and trade your secrets in plain-text, because nobody's watching.
I'll agree that developing a form of UBI to counter the effects of late stage capitalism
Actually, it's less of a basic income and more of a fair share of productivity. It's not designed to provide enough for anything; it's designed to provide fairness. The welfare system takes up the slack. Because productivity increases continuously, the load on welfare comes down over time.
should be a priority over restoring domestic production of consumer goods, since automation and lights-out factories are poised to take over eventually anyway
It's more than that. Any rise in prices without a corresponding rise in consumer spending (and consumer spendable income) brings a loss of jobs. Bringing factory jobs back from China will actually cause a net-loss of American jobs if Chinese production (notably, wages and payrolls) is cheaper by a small fraction.
Even if production in America is more-expensive, you can have a net-gain in jobs since the associated spending now represents domestic income. You still end up with everyone poorer because they have to spend more for the same goods. A minimum wage worker suddenly works 3 hours instead of 1.5 to buy pants, for example; while a middle-class worker is spending 1.5 hours instead of 0.75 (the proportion is the same to all workers).
Open, free trade is great for both sides. The transition is a problem: people lose their jobs in trade and technical progress. Jobs come back later as our industries shift around. Those in the path of progress are cast aside; this is not right. We need to keep them stable, to carry them to the next opportunity.
That may, at times, mean slowing the transition. Trade deals may need to drain the potential over years--prevent jobs from flooding out all at once when there is a clear market drive to move millions of jobs ASAP--so we can handle the fall-out and ensure people aren't abandoned in the process. The end goal should always be to zero that potential so there isn't the threat of the next administration signing an open trade deal and making a 20-million-job industry vanish overnight.
That's why I told PCCC I don't oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership: it may have some rough edges to work out, but going in the direction of fair trade (which eventually just becomes open trade, since fair trade drives up the economic situation of the exporting countries and causes the natural price to meet or exceed the fair-trade price) is a good thing. If the terms are outright bad, we need to modify the terms; that's different from support (of the current proposal) or opposition (of the proposal entire).
Governments have the capacity to have multiple plain-clothes agents happen to be passing in and out of libraries at the same time, you know. Just normal traffic. We've narrowed it down to a shelf. Hell, we have digital copies of everything at that library branch.
Overall, I still prefer traditional paper voting. Your ideas, while interesting, don't strike me as the right way to do things, partly because it's too technical for most people.
The part people actually see is they click a few boxes, plug a thing in, and push a button. There's no technical knowledge required. Everything else is a behavioral countermeasure.
I've had no trouble explaining how these things work to the uneducated, even at a technical level.
Interesting that the voting is observed by major parties. That helps. I'm sure I could attack that system, but it'd take me a while to figure out how, and I'd have to watch it in action a few times. It would also take greater collusion.
he should have advised the rich young man to invest his money wisely and maximize ROI, so as to generate sustainable employment for as many people as possible
That also increases the number of people in need of employment due to weird economic behaviors. Zeroing out the number in poverty is a little more complex than that, although it also creates the maximum ROI; it requires taxes and welfare systems.
Not really. The cost to employ a worker under this model is actually lower--payrolls are lower--while the worker takes home more income and has guaranteed access to healthcare.