Contact lenses may subtly not fit your eye, and so every year you need a new prescription specifically so the doctor can look at your eyes and decide if the lenses you're wearing need to be switched out for a different brand, same prescription. It's usually okay; you might have that one brand that isn't quite okay, and your doctor will notice a couple short years before it damages your eyes permanently.
Sure, that's the main point: people say we'd have never gotten these things, but the truth is maybe we got them sooner. The other side of that is maybe we overpaid for the luxury.
Actually, fiat money represents labor time at an exchange rate. That is to say: you can't just print up some cash and make up some stuff and say "hey look, wealth!" You have to make things. Then you sell things. The economy essentially ends up representing those things in the money spent, and heads toward something resembling stable.
Money is essentially credit for working, and functionally is a portion of production.
why do you feel that "sending a bunch of crap into space" is done for no reason?
Because people would like us to repeatedly go to the moon or try to make it to mars for no other reason than because it would be cool.
Apart from the many ancillary benefits of space research (spinoff technologies, entertainment prospects etc), the science we learn in space and on other worlds is often clearly applicable to our own world, or at least could well be in the future.
If done under conditions where it is reasonable and where we have an idea of what we'd like to learn--or at least some of what we'd like to learn, and hope new and interesting things pop up as well--then, well, yes. If we're just firing rockets into space because we're space cowboys, then no.
Then there's the prospect of vast resources in the asteroid belt, the longer-term objective of habitat redundancy for the species, general ongoing growth and expansion etc etc - all clearly beneficial to society, at least at longer time scales.
Which we can't actually achieve yet, and won't get closer to achieving by actually sending missions to Mars. We get better at those kinds of things by sending probes (long-distance travel) and satellites (just getting out of the well is really, really hard)—things which provide real, useful, definable scientific and technological benefit.
At the point where it costs like $200k to put a satellite in geosync and we can reliably send robust probes with long lifespans (instead of the save-every-gram minimalist crap we barely hobble over to the next giant rock), we'll have tech that can actually put a colony on Mars for relatively-cheap. It'll cost tens or hundreds of millions, but we can heavy lift some materials up there, ferry them across, and put them on the planet. Then we have to figure out how to actually build a self-sustaining colony, but that's an easier problem. We don't get there (optimally) by just launching rockets because hell, we're not ready, it's not going to work, and we're going to learn nothing, but it screw it let's go!
You're looking at a $5,000 jackpot in asteroids and thinking, hey, I can just keep chugging along until I get it, and burning $700,000 and your wife along the way doesn't seem to be an unreasonable expense to get there. Spend the money on things that will produce an incremental return now, then go after the jackpot when it's going to cost $500 to hit it; you'll come out a millionaire in the end, and get there just as fast.
The area under solar panels can support shade-tolerant grasses (and full-sun-intolerant grasses). The area around can support low-growing cover like micro-clovers, clovers, and some short-growing grasses. This is relatively-common and nurtures the land, preventing erosion and soil death.
I can free up a lot of that money. My Universal Dividend is an enormous tax cut, stimulus, and aid package all in one. It's fundamentally new economic policy, and causes a reduction in welfare costs by making the poor less-poor. It grows with GDP-per-capita, so it lifts the bottom out of poverty more over time, thus reducing the need for welfare and the associated percentage of our GDP spent toward that. It even takes some of Social Security's burden, guaranteeing solvency and slowly cutting back the payroll tax without reducing the total benefits in retirement or raising the retirement age.
We sent a moon mission because it was expensive and our economy was stronger than the USSR's economy. They called our bluff while holding a pair of jacks--which can't quite beat a pair of aces.
This argument always bothered me. It's a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, which is latin and thus means I am very smart and you should listen to me; also that a thing happened after another thing, therefor the first thing caused the second.
Fasteners evolved before space. The zipper was invented in 1901. Buttons are vastly-different from snaps. Velcro is similar to the hooks on various types of plants which attach to animal fur to carry seeds far away, but somehow is an invention only possible by NASA.
Foam rubber existed in 1929; we have similar latex beds today; but foam polyurethane somehow is an invention only conceivable because of NASA.
Plasma TVs gave us flat screens, and LCDs are based on the 1888 work of Friedreich Reinitzer and the 1927 work of Vsevolod Frederik's light valve; yet LCDs apparently were inconceivable without NASA.
The first photoelectric cell was built in 1888, but nobody would conceive of building terrestrial PVs to combat the climate change fears which began emerging in the 1970s and the long-standing concerns of air pollution if it weren't for putting the damned things in space.
Is this really the kind of argument we should use to justify NASA? That things are just impossible unless the Government space and war machines get out and push? Is that what you want to commit to as the entire reason NASA should exist? Because if so, somebody is going to reason that it shouldn't exist based on your argument being ridiculous.
We have research facilities in zero gravity which provide invaluable scientific data (okay, it's valued at billions or trillions of dollars) unobtainable via any other modern method.
1) You don't imagine any reason other than profit for going into space.
Well, yes.
Today, we work 40 hours per week. We get paid, and what do we do with the money? We buy things. We go into debt to buy, and then inflation makes our dollar-wages higher while not making our dollar-debt higher: it shrinks our debt back down. Corporations profit, banks profit, and we sort of fold some of the buying power back into worker hands.
When we improve technology, we make more for the hours we work. We still swap dollars at the exchange rate--I take home $20/hr, you cost payroll $10/hr, I work one hour to induce you to work two--and we get more for that time we put in getting those dollars.
Now imagine humans do a bunch of work and then burn the things they made.
We still work 40 hours, but a quarter of what we make gets tossed in the trash and incinerated for no purpose. Essentially, we work 40 hours and get paid for 30 hours. We're poorer.
That's what sending a bunch of crap into space for no reason does. That's what going to war does. That's what anything not really profitable does. Oh, sure, we can take a loss on paper doing drug research, and that might even be a loss for the world if the drug is useful for like 10 people a year but costs $3 billion to come up with; but we can also expend $100 million to, say, import a low-cost generic, research it, and FDA approve it, with no capacity to make a business profit. In both case, we as a society bear the cost; yet in the latter case, we get access to a low-cost drug like Bromantane, and can now treat depression (and maybe ADHD?) more-effectively with a $10/month prescription.
Profit isn't just a matter of a business surviving; it's a matter of society as a whole getting out more than it put in. Neither of these outcomes guarantees the other is also happening, and the latter one is the important one in long terms (thus why we have welfare).
It makes economic sense. We have a lot of reserve agricultural land we don't want destroyed, and which isn't necessary for environmental management. Pay a subsidy to retain it; make half that subsidy conditional on only covering the full costs of installing new, non-permanent solar generation capacity on that agricultural land. Simple, efficient, and cuts into the cost of electricity. Retains our farmland. Uses some of the sunniest areas to collect solar energy.
Lots of daemons don't capture stdout. On some systems, you can see logs spew to the console, making tty1 unusable.
Upstart was another SystemV-like, but better. I generally think of Upstart and whatever Gentoo uses as "SystemV" because they attempt to be that with new capabilities.
Just imagine if they all integrated Supervisord instead.
The most-important part of Net Neutrality is that you have bought X, you have X access to everything.
I like the colocation opportunities: to relieve costs for Comcast (which get distributed in the general package), Netflix had placed Netflix data centers in Comcast's network to accelerate Netflix and reduce their (expensive) peered traffic. Comcast didn't require it of them, but it did improve Netflix's service performance, and arguably lowered Comcast's costs. That definitely needs to be fair play.
Net Neutrality legislation needs to account for those unintended consequences. The primary mission of Net Neutrality is to ensure that a user purchasing a certain Internet service gets the service's baseline access to absolutely everything, full stop. No throttling, no de-prioritizing. At the same time, it needs to not ban things like voluntary co-location, or consumer opt-in services like T-Mobile's free streaming video proxy--things that reduce costs and improve services for consumers in comparison to baseline.
I find that logs still get pumped out to/var/log on Ubuntu, yet journalctl captures information that never went to those logs, so it has been an absolute boon in troubleshooting things I'd never understood before. There was a time when I'd occasionally try to run the application myself, or modify the init script; frequently I found this nigh-on-impossible with the ultra-complex, 700-line bash scripts Redhat and Debian like to shove into init.d.
Docker has also been a godsend.
The one time shit pissed me off was when I had/var/spool/mail in fstab, as it's a symlink to/var/mail, and systemd decided one day it didn't like that and forever refused to boot. Took me 3 hours to figure out that wasn't allowed, fix fstab (from the systemd recovery shell it happily offered!), and reboot. That was during an Ubuntu major upgrade.
It's never given me trouble, and has cut out the amount of time spent looking under the hood and trying to muck about with machines nobody honestly understands.
I think about how gnome3 seems to be slowly gaining more acceptance
Gnome 3 has always had a superior workflow, aside from its alt-tab behavior (which can take you to a different desktop, then back to a different window from the same application, then tab you between those two--no rapid swapping between the last 2 windows you touched). With the Activities view, it became possible to just press Meta and swap up/down through desktops, or press Meta and type an application name or keyword ("DVD burner" etc.), and press enter to take the first result. You can tap the corner and move windows to any desktop, or create new desktops between desktops, and so forth.
The desktop environment's job is to get out of your way and let you use applications. When you have to go searching around for windows, or use a lot of manipulation to reorganize your windows across desktops, or go hunting through menus, it's broken. I eventually did look at the menus in Gnome 3--kind of annoying to traverse--only by curiosity; I've never actually used them to find or launch an application. It hadn't occurred to me until someone complained about it.
People dislike change. Learning a new system takes some effort. I happen to identify new interfaces as new systems and not reach for old muscle memory,
so switching to a different DE doesn't bother me unless that DE is objectively-worse. That gains me exemption from that particular growing pain.
Sure, just like the tiny group of Slackware users who always argued that it was better because of its "more pure UNIX approach", talking about how package managers are essentially garbage (Slackware's package manager essentially unpacks a tarball and says good luck; removal wasn't a feature last time I saw this argument surface).
Recuperation systems (storing the compression heat and reinjecting it upon decompression) are a nice idea but not practical - some quick calculations of the energy involved will point to the volumes of well-insulated thermal storage required being "difficult" at best at multi MW scales.
I said the same thing about electric cars.
There's a thousand-mWh adiabatic CAES plant in Germany, with around 300MW output capacity, but it's lagging: the plant was supposed to come online in 2016. It hasn't been canceled, and they still claim they're going to bring it up with about 70% efficiency (practical peak efficiency should be around 90%, with theoretical at 100%, but this plant won't do that).
Slashdot Mirror
Contact lenses may subtly not fit your eye, and so every year you need a new prescription specifically so the doctor can look at your eyes and decide if the lenses you're wearing need to be switched out for a different brand, same prescription. It's usually okay; you might have that one brand that isn't quite okay, and your doctor will notice a couple short years before it damages your eyes permanently.
Sure, that's the main point: people say we'd have never gotten these things, but the truth is maybe we got them sooner. The other side of that is maybe we overpaid for the luxury.
Actually, fiat money represents labor time at an exchange rate. That is to say: you can't just print up some cash and make up some stuff and say "hey look, wealth!" You have to make things. Then you sell things. The economy essentially ends up representing those things in the money spent, and heads toward something resembling stable.
Money is essentially credit for working, and functionally is a portion of production.
You wanted to talk about medicare and welfare. I gave you a solution.
why do you feel that "sending a bunch of crap into space" is done for no reason?
Because people would like us to repeatedly go to the moon or try to make it to mars for no other reason than because it would be cool.
Apart from the many ancillary benefits of space research (spinoff technologies, entertainment prospects etc), the science we learn in space and on other worlds is often clearly applicable to our own world, or at least could well be in the future.
If done under conditions where it is reasonable and where we have an idea of what we'd like to learn--or at least some of what we'd like to learn, and hope new and interesting things pop up as well--then, well, yes. If we're just firing rockets into space because we're space cowboys, then no.
Then there's the prospect of vast resources in the asteroid belt, the longer-term objective of habitat redundancy for the species, general ongoing growth and expansion etc etc - all clearly beneficial to society, at least at longer time scales.
Which we can't actually achieve yet, and won't get closer to achieving by actually sending missions to Mars. We get better at those kinds of things by sending probes (long-distance travel) and satellites (just getting out of the well is really, really hard)—things which provide real, useful, definable scientific and technological benefit.
At the point where it costs like $200k to put a satellite in geosync and we can reliably send robust probes with long lifespans (instead of the save-every-gram minimalist crap we barely hobble over to the next giant rock), we'll have tech that can actually put a colony on Mars for relatively-cheap. It'll cost tens or hundreds of millions, but we can heavy lift some materials up there, ferry them across, and put them on the planet. Then we have to figure out how to actually build a self-sustaining colony, but that's an easier problem. We don't get there (optimally) by just launching rockets because hell, we're not ready, it's not going to work, and we're going to learn nothing, but it screw it let's go!
You're looking at a $5,000 jackpot in asteroids and thinking, hey, I can just keep chugging along until I get it, and burning $700,000 and your wife along the way doesn't seem to be an unreasonable expense to get there. Spend the money on things that will produce an incremental return now, then go after the jackpot when it's going to cost $500 to hit it; you'll come out a millionaire in the end, and get there just as fast.
The area under solar panels can support shade-tolerant grasses (and full-sun-intolerant grasses). The area around can support low-growing cover like micro-clovers, clovers, and some short-growing grasses. This is relatively-common and nurtures the land, preventing erosion and soil death.
I can free up a lot of that money. My Universal Dividend is an enormous tax cut, stimulus, and aid package all in one. It's fundamentally new economic policy, and causes a reduction in welfare costs by making the poor less-poor. It grows with GDP-per-capita, so it lifts the bottom out of poverty more over time, thus reducing the need for welfare and the associated percentage of our GDP spent toward that. It even takes some of Social Security's burden, guaranteeing solvency and slowly cutting back the payroll tax without reducing the total benefits in retirement or raising the retirement age.
Welcome to a world of new solutions.
We sent a moon mission because it was expensive and our economy was stronger than the USSR's economy. They called our bluff while holding a pair of jacks--which can't quite beat a pair of aces.
This argument always bothered me. It's a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument, which is latin and thus means I am very smart and you should listen to me; also that a thing happened after another thing, therefor the first thing caused the second.
Fasteners evolved before space. The zipper was invented in 1901. Buttons are vastly-different from snaps. Velcro is similar to the hooks on various types of plants which attach to animal fur to carry seeds far away, but somehow is an invention only possible by NASA.
Foam rubber existed in 1929; we have similar latex beds today; but foam polyurethane somehow is an invention only conceivable because of NASA.
Plasma TVs gave us flat screens, and LCDs are based on the 1888 work of Friedreich Reinitzer and the 1927 work of Vsevolod Frederik's light valve; yet LCDs apparently were inconceivable without NASA.
The first photoelectric cell was built in 1888, but nobody would conceive of building terrestrial PVs to combat the climate change fears which began emerging in the 1970s and the long-standing concerns of air pollution if it weren't for putting the damned things in space.
Is this really the kind of argument we should use to justify NASA? That things are just impossible unless the Government space and war machines get out and push? Is that what you want to commit to as the entire reason NASA should exist? Because if so, somebody is going to reason that it shouldn't exist based on your argument being ridiculous.
We have research facilities in zero gravity which provide invaluable scientific data (okay, it's valued at billions or trillions of dollars) unobtainable via any other modern method.
1) You don't imagine any reason other than profit for going into space.
Well, yes.
Today, we work 40 hours per week. We get paid, and what do we do with the money? We buy things. We go into debt to buy, and then inflation makes our dollar-wages higher while not making our dollar-debt higher: it shrinks our debt back down. Corporations profit, banks profit, and we sort of fold some of the buying power back into worker hands.
When we improve technology, we make more for the hours we work. We still swap dollars at the exchange rate--I take home $20/hr, you cost payroll $10/hr, I work one hour to induce you to work two--and we get more for that time we put in getting those dollars.
Now imagine humans do a bunch of work and then burn the things they made.
We still work 40 hours, but a quarter of what we make gets tossed in the trash and incinerated for no purpose. Essentially, we work 40 hours and get paid for 30 hours. We're poorer.
That's what sending a bunch of crap into space for no reason does. That's what going to war does. That's what anything not really profitable does. Oh, sure, we can take a loss on paper doing drug research, and that might even be a loss for the world if the drug is useful for like 10 people a year but costs $3 billion to come up with; but we can also expend $100 million to, say, import a low-cost generic, research it, and FDA approve it, with no capacity to make a business profit. In both case, we as a society bear the cost; yet in the latter case, we get access to a low-cost drug like Bromantane, and can now treat depression (and maybe ADHD?) more-effectively with a $10/month prescription.
Profit isn't just a matter of a business surviving; it's a matter of society as a whole getting out more than it put in. Neither of these outcomes guarantees the other is also happening, and the latter one is the important one in long terms (thus why we have welfare).
Yeah. The standard CAES plants vent the heat; adiabatic attempt to store the heat.
It makes economic sense. We have a lot of reserve agricultural land we don't want destroyed, and which isn't necessary for environmental management. Pay a subsidy to retain it; make half that subsidy conditional on only covering the full costs of installing new, non-permanent solar generation capacity on that agricultural land. Simple, efficient, and cuts into the cost of electricity. Retains our farmland. Uses some of the sunniest areas to collect solar energy.
The last Jedi is in captivity. The galaxy is at peace.
It's like the 8th magical open phone, after the Firefox phone, the Ubuntu phone, and some others nobody ever heard of.
Today we hear a lot about bitcoin and blockchain, too, with IBM trying to talk people into shoving blockchain where it doesn't belong.
Lots of daemons don't capture stdout. On some systems, you can see logs spew to the console, making tty1 unusable.
Upstart was another SystemV-like, but better. I generally think of Upstart and whatever Gentoo uses as "SystemV" because they attempt to be that with new capabilities.
Just imagine if they all integrated Supervisord instead.
Well fundraising is hard. Care to help?
The most-important part of Net Neutrality is that you have bought X, you have X access to everything.
I like the colocation opportunities: to relieve costs for Comcast (which get distributed in the general package), Netflix had placed Netflix data centers in Comcast's network to accelerate Netflix and reduce their (expensive) peered traffic. Comcast didn't require it of them, but it did improve Netflix's service performance, and arguably lowered Comcast's costs. That definitely needs to be fair play.
Net Neutrality legislation needs to account for those unintended consequences. The primary mission of Net Neutrality is to ensure that a user purchasing a certain Internet service gets the service's baseline access to absolutely everything, full stop. No throttling, no de-prioritizing. At the same time, it needs to not ban things like voluntary co-location, or consumer opt-in services like T-Mobile's free streaming video proxy--things that reduce costs and improve services for consumers in comparison to baseline.
I find that logs still get pumped out to /var/log on Ubuntu, yet journalctl captures information that never went to those logs, so it has been an absolute boon in troubleshooting things I'd never understood before. There was a time when I'd occasionally try to run the application myself, or modify the init script; frequently I found this nigh-on-impossible with the ultra-complex, 700-line bash scripts Redhat and Debian like to shove into init.d.
Docker has also been a godsend.
The one time shit pissed me off was when I had /var/spool/mail in fstab, as it's a symlink to /var/mail, and systemd decided one day it didn't like that and forever refused to boot. Took me 3 hours to figure out that wasn't allowed, fix fstab (from the systemd recovery shell it happily offered!), and reboot. That was during an Ubuntu major upgrade.
It's never given me trouble, and has cut out the amount of time spent looking under the hood and trying to muck about with machines nobody honestly understands.
No it was because of this one secret insurance companies hate!
You won't believe what happened next!
Did you upgrade Ubuntu and find out that /var/spool/mail is a symlink to /var/mail and you can't mount to a symlink in fstab?
I think about how gnome3 seems to be slowly gaining more acceptance
Gnome 3 has always had a superior workflow, aside from its alt-tab behavior (which can take you to a different desktop, then back to a different window from the same application, then tab you between those two--no rapid swapping between the last 2 windows you touched). With the Activities view, it became possible to just press Meta and swap up/down through desktops, or press Meta and type an application name or keyword ("DVD burner" etc.), and press enter to take the first result. You can tap the corner and move windows to any desktop, or create new desktops between desktops, and so forth.
The desktop environment's job is to get out of your way and let you use applications. When you have to go searching around for windows, or use a lot of manipulation to reorganize your windows across desktops, or go hunting through menus, it's broken. I eventually did look at the menus in Gnome 3--kind of annoying to traverse--only by curiosity; I've never actually used them to find or launch an application. It hadn't occurred to me until someone complained about it.
People dislike change. Learning a new system takes some effort. I happen to identify new interfaces as new systems and not reach for old muscle memory, so switching to a different DE doesn't bother me unless that DE is objectively-worse. That gains me exemption from that particular growing pain.
Generally, the improvement is in if it lowers labor required downstream. That's the absolute measure of "better".
Sure, just like the tiny group of Slackware users who always argued that it was better because of its "more pure UNIX approach", talking about how package managers are essentially garbage (Slackware's package manager essentially unpacks a tarball and says good luck; removal wasn't a feature last time I saw this argument surface).
Recuperation systems (storing the compression heat and reinjecting it upon decompression) are a nice idea but not practical - some quick calculations of the energy involved will point to the volumes of well-insulated thermal storage required being "difficult" at best at multi MW scales.
I said the same thing about electric cars.
There's a thousand-mWh adiabatic CAES plant in Germany, with around 300MW output capacity, but it's lagging: the plant was supposed to come online in 2016. It hasn't been canceled, and they still claim they're going to bring it up with about 70% efficiency (practical peak efficiency should be around 90%, with theoretical at 100%, but this plant won't do that).