How is the "Drake Equation" filling in so far?
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Is the Earth Special?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
What's exciting about the recent exoplanet work is that we're actually filling in the first few parameters of the Drake Equation. We're getting a grip on how common planets are, and now how common it is for them to be (a) not gas giants and (b) in the right zone around the star. I think those two alone (combined with "how many stars are like ours", which we have known a long time), knock off a good four orders of magnitude - from hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy to tens of millions that are 1) not short-lived stars ; 2) have non-gas-giants that are 3) in the "habitable zone".
We already know enough from extremophiles on earth that anything with liquid water, practically, is "habitable zone".
What we can get from just closer examination of our own solar system whether life NOT "as we know it" happens - did it arise in liquid methane, or floating about in Jupiter's atmosphere and all that. And if it does, how complex does it get?
These "special conditions" may not be necessary for *life*, but they may be necessary for it to bother (sorry, "have reproductive advantage") going past single cells, which biologists still consider a pretty Great Leap Forward.
It may well be; until we're not extrapolating from one data point, speculation is just entertainment. If it turns out complex life happens only every trillion stars and there's only one other in the "local group", ten million light-years from here, well...rats. Just ourselves to talk to.
Console yourself with this: it means our celebrities are even MORE important than we ever imagined. "Miss Universe", for instance, really IS Miss Universe!!
I'm watching a project from a place I don't work via friends that are there right now. A web store of sorts - the kind of thing that's a solved problem and they probably could have bought an off-the-shelf product. But no, it had to be bespoke and the local contractor subcontracted to, umm, a nameless Asian country (that is triangular, and a subcontinent - but nameless).
To programmers that appear to have never USED a web store, much less written one. People who had to have the term "your basket" explained to them. As for brilliant programming, they have some kind of development environment (or lack of discipline in its use) that allows bug-regression: solved bugs suddenly re-appear when new code versions are introduced later to solve others. We're talking a year late on what should have been less than a year worth of project.
I agree that working for less than half price gets you a lot of forgiveness for running even 100% over budget, but the cost on the local staff doing the requirements and testing has been high. Even in this economy, people have been quitting to get away.
William Langewiche, Atlantic Monthly, "The Lessons of ValuJet 592". It was basically done in because it was transporting safety equipment itself, which was vulnerable to a hard-to-predict failure. The more complex we make air travel, with its multiple checks and layers of protection, the more opportunities for failure. Adding another check to avoid 592, as they did, creates yet another opportunity.
It is, as they say, a Hard Problem. Yet, still: the US recently celebrated 10 whole years without a major airliner loss, despite a phenomenal amount of air travel. Things are getting better. Hard != Insoluable.
You are, through ignorance or mendacity, confusing "all energy consumed" with "electrical power generation" in a discussion about nuclear power, which is exclusively used for electrical power generation.
When electric power is compared to all energy consumption - every car and truck and train and boat, every bit of home heating, then, yes, this "Energy Mix Fact Sheet" gives that kind of number.
However, nuclear power is the source of 75-80% of French electrical power, depending on year and so forth.
Nuclear power is of particular interest in lowering greenhouse-gas emissions because the principal other sources of GHGs - natural gas space heating and transportation fuels (gasoline, diesel) can be significantly reduced by electric vehicles and heat-pump "furnaces" using electric...but these only reduce GHGs if the electric power comes from non-coal plants.
I'm disappointed to see no high-modded comments noting that TFA showed nuclear power support in France, where there is more interacting with the population than anywhere, has RISEN, and dramatically, from 66% to 83%, during the study period. It has also risen in Russia, which is interesting given the cries of "Chernobyl" that rise up when the topic is discussed.
Oh, and I'll stack up that "non-stellar" safety record against 24,000 coal-realated early deaths in the USA. Per year.
Look up the energy content of uranium and thorium, and the world reserves, and the Japanese experiment with extraction from seawater, and do the math, assuming that with an exttra cent per kwH you can pay for reprocessing or the seawater trick.Your "eventually" becomes many millenia. Many.
A favourite dump on nuclear power is the free subsidy it gets from government research; but divide original R&D by millenia and it isn't so much . We'll be driven there eventually because everything else does run out: sites where you can put wind turbines or solar farms that are also near consumers, massive storage of hydro to balance out intermittent sources no good for base load, good geothermal spots. And once we finally go there, we'll stay for millenia (unless we get fusion, somewhere over the rainbow, but that's nuclear too) and the R&D will look cheap.
Yoicks, have a look at the posts about a metre uphill from here. "revenue" "income". Net income was about 1.249B. So - about half an order of magnitude, or so.
Not that fines should be pro-rated to income, as others have argued; they should be large enough to hurt. 15,000 euros would not hurt 200M/year Greenpeace worth mentioning. $1.5M euros would trim 1% off their budget for that year...
Ah. HIdden in the PDFs, google usually pulls those out. 208M euros spent in 2010, so the news reports were about right.
Clearly 1.5M Euros would be painful but hardly crippling for them; barely more than 2 days operating costs. About the right fine, really, should they pull a stunt like EDF did. So I really think the original poster about the 15 euros was dead wrong.
I just spent 20 frustrating minutes at the Greenpeace web site and couldn't find their budget.
Finally I just googled "Greenpeace budget" and was surprised to not find it declared anywhere by them. I'm not saying they keep it secret, but man, it sure isn't easy to find.
I did find some site called "activistcash.com",which sounded pro-activist, but had this odd phrase:
"its Amsterdamits Amsterdam-based activist moguls pull the strings on what is estimated to be a $360 million global empire."
The "radio free europe" web site quoted: Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, now has offices in more than 40 countries and claims some 2.8 million supporters. Its 1,200-strong staff ranges from "direct action" activists to scientific researchers.
Last year, its budget reached $310 million. Greenpeace does not accept money from companies, governments, or political parties in order to maintain independence.
I think your "15 euros" argument imagines them in a community centre at a card table. Maybe in 1971. That's 40 years ago.
The ad campaign where they picked on the tar sands as "The worlds dirtiest oil" (70kg carbon to extract a barrel vs 50kg conventional...but both are burned to produce 200-300kg depending on what your refine it into) was just a lot of expensive ad time, not to mention all the billboards. They're really quite wealthy.
Switching to Win7 took some learning curve and sped up nothing. Switching from KDE to Gnome took some learning curve and sped up nothing.
But switching from WinNT to KDE took some learning curve and I really liked multiple desktops, cut/paste with the mouse alone. Switching from Win3 to Win95 gave me the right-click menu and that was one of the best ideas ever.
Learning the tablet touch OS was frustrating for two days and now I like it and tend to laugh as I mistakenly touch other screens.
Mostly, I miss Jef Raskin; his attitude does live on in some of Apple's work - Jef *studied* what worked and didn't; tested people's time to get something done with various UI strategies and could defend his designs as maximizing efficiency.
With Gnome 3 and Unity, I've seen no evidence that they used the scientific method and tested hypotheses with experiments about speed of work, complexity that could be handled, options given the user to solve various needs. They seemed to be "designed" the way architects design the "look" of buildings -as some kind of art project with no regard for the actual usefulness.
You're half-way there. France already sells Italy a substantial fraction of Italy's power. Add in Germany and now Belgium, and one starts to see a nice national business for the French, exporting the results of decades of investment and mass-production of nuclear power plants and operators, and the whole fuel chain. It will keep getting cheaper by the unit, the more they do. France is undoubtedly the mainstay of the OECD analysis that nuclear is actually the most competitive investment, with the proviso you hold the initial construction costs down. But the move to green power, combined with these nations shutting down nuclear, gives France an opening to quickly bring down the costs of building "Generation III+" plants by building several one after another.
At this rate, the whole French border will be dotted with new plants, powering Germany, Belgium, Italy, maybe Spain next.
There's an argument to be made for creating an organization with high moral standards that does not let those with low standards in. I've heard of the "League of Democracies" and so forth for decades.
The United Nations, however, is NOT such an organization. Membership does not recognize that you are moral or democratic, or anything else. It recognizes that certain entities must be dealt with as the government of a certain area/people because the only other way to deal with that area/people is to have a war with said "government" that would be able to muster a fair number of those people to come out and fight you. (Iraq simultaneously was this horrible dictatorship AND had "the worlds fourth-largest army") And the U.N. was chartered to avoid war itself.
It's not so much a "club" you pass a test to join, it's a meeting ground where you go to meet with people you have to meet with, however many showers you want to take afterwards. The only sense it's a "club" is they exclude organizations (insurgents in the hills, typically) that may call themselves the "government in exile", but have no real power to control an area/people. We don't like the antidemocratic government of China that bumps off far more human beings every year than Palestinian fighters could dream of doing to Israel, but we gotta.
So don't take this as an affront; it's merely an acknowledgment that Palestinians elected them, that they have vastly more control over Palestinian behaviour and opinion and organization than Israel does, and that the opinions and needs of a couple of million people are - to put it mildly - not, in their own opinion, represented well at the UN by the Israeli delegation.
It's not really about the medical issues, it's about freedom and choice. Society has had to learn to live with the costs of tobacco and alcohol - which are higher - because people get really tetchy if you make those against the law; they start breaking that law right and left and giving money to murderous gangsters. (Yes it happened with tobacco, too - when Canada jacked up the taxes until it was worth breaking the law to smuggle smokes in from the states. In no time, there was gunplay between those doing the smuggling over stealing each other's loads, and the usual turf rights. We had to ratchet down the taxes again.)
It's not about "wanting to get high" - people who don't touch the stuff support legalization. Some, from a more abstract reverence for individual freedom. Others, because of the high costs: It's about 20 million arrests. It's about $16 billion per year. (That's at all three gov't levels). It's enough to pay for 25,000 of those "lavish" teacher retirement funds. Every year.
The waste of $16B may sound small these days as the USA tosses hundreds of billions at banks and more at defense expenditures. But it works out to $150/household/year in the US - and since only half pay taxes, it costs $300 per tax-paying household. To put people in jail that, if they grew and sold tobacco, would be called "upstanding taxpaying citizens". Still think that's "nonsense"?
I had the same eye-roll that everybody else has had about "addictive" and to some extent "cognitive impairment". (Not giving up on stuff that causes life-affecting "cognitive impairment" is pretty much a definition of 'addictive'; since the 'addictive' property is known to be very weak, those who don't probably don't have a lot of responsibility in their life; and, indeed, most of my contemporaries gave it up upon getting jobs, mortgages, kids.)
But the lung disease link sat me up in my chair - I've been waiting for years to see an equivalent to the 1964 surgeon general's report about smoking and cancer.
But it wasn't a link to a cancer study, it was about "bullous lung disease" which is rare enough, I'd never heard of it. (It is rare, and mostly hits smokers, surprise) It's based on a Jan 2008 paper in Respirology that noted the ten (10) cases they'd been presented with that were chronic cannabis smokers in a year, averaged 41 years old, when the mean for all cases is 65 - so they concluded it can cause this disease up to 20 years earlier than tobacco.
The ten cases weren't overwhelming, though, especially not when presented as the proof of something by the White House. And, oddly enough, the first thing I found when googling for it was actually this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360494/ in Britain, with the headline "Bullous disease of the lung and cannabis smoking: insufficient evidence for a causative link". Mind you, they were tracking a mere 117 cases, still very small, though 12x bigger at least.
Interestingly, they offered the hypothesis that it related not so much to the chemicals in cannabis vs. tobacco, nor even to the respiratory harm from smoking ANYTHING, but to the WAY that cannabis is often inhaled:
"There is a quite separate way in which cannabis smokers are reported to present with abnormal air in the chest (pneumothorax and/or pneumomediastinum). Instances in case reports are attributed to extreme breath holding, Valsalva, and Müller's manouevres.8-11 This is a form of barotrauma which is a well-recognized cause of pneumothorax in intensive care units. If there is a cause-and-effect relationship between cannabis smoking and acute rupture of previously normal lung air spaces due to extreme pressure change, it falls under the diagnostic heading not of spontaneous but of traumatic pneumothorax. The focus in our investigation was on bullous lung disease in cannabis smokers."...in short, don't inhale until your lungs are full to the max and then hold that. It can cause a physical trauma. (Also, don't stick your finger in your eye.)
That does not mean that smoking anything, even dried leaves off of trees, is a good idea for your lungs, of course!
But, frankly, this is very weak tea indeed, as evidence that cannabis is "not a benign drug", to be used at such a level. All of their links pointed to effects that happen to users that were heavy, or chronic, or both. Man, I'd like to hear of ANY over-the-counter drug that is so benign that you can use it heavily or chronically, without adverse side-effects. ASA and Ibuprofen certainly wouldn't qualify.
Are you kidding? This is *perfect*. Complain three times in meetings with as many witnesses as possible that "this exposes us to risk of downtime and high support costs", and be sure to end with "...this is your call, but its against my professional advice". Have that minuted.
Then, if the "train jumps the track", it won' be you who catches hell. You'll get your RH soon enough.
And it's *perfect*, because, like a military man asking for $800B next year instead of $700B, you come across as money-hungry, but honestly so, in service of doing your job well. No special approbation will attach. So, you don't lose significantly in the event that all goes swimmingly for many years on end, and you look prescient and wise if anything goes bad.
If you think structural engineering is not done on deadlines and budgets, you're kidding yourself.
But your main point is mostly correct - real software engineering is HARD. One of my courses was about applying mathematical proof methods to programs and proving them correct. It was HARD. Exponentially so for more-complex programs.
However, it *is* done, mostly in EE with control systems. Medical equipment, phone exchanges , aircraft control - anything where people die if there's a failure and the maker gets sued for it - is done to engineering standards. That is, it costs 10x as much per line of code. Boeing's software guys I have no problem calling "Engineers"; but of course, most of them already were before they added programming totheir skills.
All software could be done to such standards, but we don't want to pay for that , so we endure some bugs instead. Less in some places than others, though - banks have very few software errors.
I've had a terrific career, culminating in a six-figure salary, six weeks vacation, very flexible start times (they wearily put up with my 10AM arrivals as long as I stay to 6), and my choice of projects, and my boss's, boss's, boss's boss recently writing me to congratulating me on 25 years of service and 40 years since I started programming (at 13, with punch-cards) with kind words like "one of our best assets" and "one of a kind".
My secret? I started with a "real" engineering degree and a few years experience at it, then went back or the CompSci degree. I was going to take CompSci at 18 after 5 years of "fun" programming and some paid work doing stats with FORTRAN for civil eng grad students; but backed out with a funny feeling that I should start off in closer touch with the "real world". Best call I ever made.
Being grounded as first an engineer, accountant, doctor, lawyer, nurse, salesperson, surveyor, MBA, technician, any profession that involves a lot of data - in these web days that includes "graphic artist" and "PR", is the difference between GP and medical specialist.
The value you add is that you can skip over half the money spent on software - the requirements analysis, the whole phase of explaining the problem to programmers. Plus, you can go back and forth from yor base profession to w"mostly programming" as the needs of the business come and go. Where there are big software projects, you're the obvious guy to be project leader, you know when the hired programmers are BS-ing or just off-track.
And you're the guy everybody relies upon when the IT systems are balky.What really freaked me is the calls for help I getfrom "kids"- Junior engineers in their early 20's who grew up with Windows PC's and the Web- but they've never studiedprogramming at all. They really aren't sure how to replace me!
So: don't just not call yourself a programmer - don't be one. Enhance another profession with programming.
No. Real Engineers are held responsible for their mistakes, like doctors. They go to jail if the building falls and kills somebody. This has never happened with a software "engineer". That's the difference.
You know who really like Austrian Economics? The same very rich folk who run major banks and insurance companies. That is, they like Austrian austerity when it means they pay lower taxes on $100M of yearly income.
And these are the geniuses that ran their gigantic banks and insurance companies right into utter bankruptcy, with much higher debts than assets, an utter market failure of stunning incompetence. The Austrian solution for that would have been to let them be shattered into a thousand assets to be bought up into small banks, default on nearly every private investor and pension fund, bankrupting millions, ensuring tens of millions had no retirement, and throwing the economy into a very deep depression for at least a decade.
Very, very non-Austrian economics prevented all that by bailing them out at public expense, saved by the hated government.
As your other reply notes, the Austrians avoid actual numbers, so they have trouble with specificity that would make a prediction useful. As my own post in this topic above noted, Mises predicted the Great Depression - but couldn't say, as late as 1929, what year it would happen in...just like the recent bubble was predicted to pop...but not exactly when.
Honestly, after a miserable failure like that, can't you people just be decent and shut up for a while? It's arguably worse than people who shouted "nuclear bomb" before the Iraq war still being allowed platforms for public comment. The Iraq war was just the one wad of lies about one country; the failed economics beliefs have gone on now for over 30 years, since the first "cut taxes and the economy will expand so much that revenue will actually rise!" failed and ran up the first few trillion of debt.
So I googled around for a few moments about "Austrian Economics" and "predictive", and found a quote from the main guy, Mises, himself:
From 1926 to 1929 the attention of the world was chiefly focused upon the question of American prosperity. As in all previous booms brought about by expansion of credit, it was then believed that the prosperity would last forever, and the warnings of the economists were disregarded. The turn of the tide in 1929 and the subsequent severe economic crisis were not a surprise for [Austrian] economists; they had foreseen them, even if they had not been able to predict the exact date of their occurrence.6 (Money & Credit, 1934)....in short, he claims to have predicted an eventual crash. But could not say, as late as 1929, that 1930 would be the year it happened.
That's not a USEFUL predictive capability. In fact, it kind of supports the article.
...except that has nothing to do with the article. Most of the posts below are also about how "economics" is hard or bad at predicting humans or something. The article was about how *any* complex, multi-variate model is impossible to calibrate correctly with limited historical data. The guy was modelling oil reservoirs, and I really don't think petrochemical engineers impose personality traits upon them.
It's perfectly consistent with a whole lifetime of stances on this and similar issues. Just not news.
Paul stands for something, and that's what he's chosen to do. He stands for it, and other people who wish to stand up and be counted for it go stand with him. Good for them all; system working as designed.
And the system says that the number of the counting, every time, is barely 10% of the nation, and then everybody can go sit down again for a few years. But the standing for these "shocking" ideas is what he's been doing for a long time. Hooray. But it's still not news.
Everybody is posting about being a specialist in programming, a full-time programmer.
I'm an engineer who also programs, and there are biologist-programmers and chemist-programmers, and accountant-programmers and salesman-programmers.
Tell them it is generically about the "systematization" and automation of any human work that can be handled without conscious thought. That if they can program and do any kind of white-collar or technical job, they will never have to do drudge work for long, because they'll be able to automate it themselves. Co-workers will come to them for help when bogged down with repetitive work.
I've become convinced that if more people treated the ability to do a few macros, the comprehension of a database and basic filtering and queries, all as required "computer literacy", about half the business software in corporations would not be needed.
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What's exciting about the recent exoplanet work is that we're actually filling in the first few parameters of the Drake Equation. We're getting a grip on how common planets are, and now how common it is for them to be (a) not gas giants and (b) in the right zone around the star. I think those two alone (combined with "how many stars are like ours", which we have known a long time), knock off a good four orders of magnitude - from hundreds of billions of stars in this galaxy to tens of millions that are 1) not short-lived stars ; 2) have non-gas-giants that are 3) in the "habitable zone".
We already know enough from extremophiles on earth that anything with liquid water, practically, is "habitable zone".
What we can get from just closer examination of our own solar system whether life NOT "as we know it" happens - did it arise in liquid methane, or floating about in Jupiter's atmosphere and all that. And if it does, how complex does it get?
These "special conditions" may not be necessary for *life*, but they may be necessary for it to bother (sorry, "have reproductive advantage") going past single cells, which biologists still consider a pretty Great Leap Forward.
It may well be; until we're not extrapolating from one data point, speculation is just entertainment. If it turns out complex life happens only every trillion stars and there's only one other in the "local group", ten million light-years from here, well...rats. Just ourselves to talk to.
Console yourself with this: it means our celebrities are even MORE important than we ever imagined. "Miss Universe", for instance, really IS Miss Universe!!
People forget that Europe is a basically triangular subcontinent of Asia.
I'm watching a project from a place I don't work via friends that are there right now. A web store of sorts - the kind of thing that's a solved problem and they probably could have bought an off-the-shelf product. But no, it had to be bespoke and the local contractor subcontracted to, umm, a nameless Asian country (that is triangular, and a subcontinent - but nameless).
To programmers that appear to have never USED a web store, much less written one. People who had to have the term "your basket" explained to them. As for brilliant programming, they have some kind of development environment (or lack of discipline in its use) that allows bug-regression: solved bugs suddenly re-appear when new code versions are introduced later to solve others. We're talking a year late on what should have been less than a year worth of project.
I agree that working for less than half price gets you a lot of forgiveness for running even 100% over budget, but the cost on the local staff doing the requirements and testing has been high. Even in this economy, people have been quitting to get away.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-lessons-of-valujet-592/6534/
William Langewiche, Atlantic Monthly, "The Lessons of ValuJet 592". It was basically done in because it was transporting safety equipment itself, which was vulnerable to a hard-to-predict failure. The more complex we make air travel, with its multiple checks and layers of protection, the more opportunities for failure. Adding another check to avoid 592, as they did, creates yet another opportunity.
It is, as they say, a Hard Problem. Yet, still: the US recently celebrated 10 whole years without a major airliner loss, despite a phenomenal amount of air travel. Things are getting better. Hard != Insoluable.
Bullshit.
You are, through ignorance or mendacity, confusing "all energy consumed" with "electrical power generation" in a discussion about nuclear power, which is exclusively used for electrical power generation.
When electric power is compared to all energy consumption - every car and truck and train and boat, every bit of home heating, then, yes, this "Energy Mix Fact Sheet" gives that kind of number.
http://ec.europa.euenergyenergy_policydocfactsheetsmixmix_fr_en.pdf/
However, nuclear power is the source of 75-80% of French electrical power, depending on year and so forth.
Nuclear power is of particular interest in lowering greenhouse-gas emissions because the principal other sources of GHGs - natural gas space heating and transportation fuels (gasoline, diesel) can be significantly reduced by electric vehicles and heat-pump "furnaces" using electric...but these only reduce GHGs if the electric power comes from non-coal plants.
I'm disappointed to see no high-modded comments noting that TFA showed nuclear power support in France, where there is more interacting with the population than anywhere, has RISEN, and dramatically, from 66% to 83%, during the study period. It has also risen in Russia, which is interesting given the cries of "Chernobyl" that rise up when the topic is discussed.
Oh, and I'll stack up that "non-stellar" safety record against 24,000 coal-realated early deaths in the USA. Per year.
Look up the energy content of uranium and thorium, and the world reserves, and the Japanese experiment with extraction from seawater, and do the math, assuming that with an exttra cent per kwH you can pay for reprocessing or the seawater trick.Your "eventually" becomes many millenia. Many.
A favourite dump on nuclear power is the free subsidy it gets from government research; but divide original R&D by millenia and it isn't so much . We'll be driven there eventually because everything else does run out: sites where you can put wind turbines or solar farms that are also near consumers, massive storage of hydro to balance out intermittent sources no good for base load, good geothermal spots. And once we finally go there, we'll stay for millenia (unless we get fusion, somewhere over the rainbow, but that's nuclear too) and the R&D will look cheap.
Actually, the justice department is required to prosecute all crimes that come to their attention, whether the crime is "popular", or not.
Otherwise, almost anybody could shoot Donald Trump.
Yoicks, have a look at the posts about a metre uphill from here. "revenue" "income". Net income was about 1.249B. So - about half an order of magnitude, or so.
Not that fines should be pro-rated to income, as others have argued; they should be large enough to hurt. 15,000 euros would not hurt 200M/year Greenpeace worth mentioning. $1.5M euros would trim 1% off their budget for that year...
Ah. HIdden in the PDFs, google usually pulls those out. 208M euros spent in 2010, so the news reports were about right.
Clearly 1.5M Euros would be painful but hardly crippling for them; barely more than 2 days operating costs. About the right fine, really, should they pull a stunt like EDF did. So I really think the original poster about the 15 euros was dead wrong.
I just spent 20 frustrating minutes at the Greenpeace web site and couldn't find their budget.
Finally I just googled "Greenpeace budget" and was surprised to not find it declared anywhere by them. I'm not saying they keep it secret, but man, it sure isn't easy to find.
I did find some site called "activistcash.com" ,which sounded pro-activist, but had this odd phrase:
"its Amsterdamits Amsterdam-based activist moguls pull the strings on what is estimated to be a $360 million global empire."
The "radio free europe" web site quoted: Greenpeace International, based in Amsterdam, now has offices in more than 40 countries and claims some 2.8 million supporters. Its 1,200-strong staff ranges from "direct action" activists to scientific researchers.
Last year, its budget reached $310 million. Greenpeace does not accept money from companies, governments, or political parties in order to maintain independence.
I think your "15 euros" argument imagines them in a community centre at a card table. Maybe in 1971. That's 40 years ago.
The ad campaign where they picked on the tar sands as "The worlds dirtiest oil" (70kg carbon to extract a barrel vs 50kg conventional...but both are burned to produce 200-300kg depending on what your refine it into) was just a lot of expensive ad time, not to mention all the billboards. They're really quite wealthy.
Switching to Win7 took some learning curve and sped up nothing. Switching from KDE to Gnome took some learning curve and sped up nothing.
But switching from WinNT to KDE took some learning curve and I really liked multiple desktops, cut/paste with the mouse alone. Switching from Win3 to Win95 gave me the right-click menu and that was one of the best ideas ever.
Learning the tablet touch OS was frustrating for two days and now I like it and tend to laugh as I mistakenly touch other screens.
Mostly, I miss Jef Raskin; his attitude does live on in some of Apple's work - Jef *studied* what worked and didn't; tested people's time to get something done with various UI strategies and could defend his designs as maximizing efficiency.
With Gnome 3 and Unity, I've seen no evidence that they used the scientific method and tested hypotheses with experiments about speed of work, complexity that could be handled, options given the user to solve various needs. They seemed to be "designed" the way architects design the "look" of buildings -as some kind of art project with no regard for the actual usefulness.
You're half-way there. France already sells Italy a substantial fraction of Italy's power. Add in Germany and now Belgium, and one starts to see a nice national business for the French, exporting the results of decades of investment and mass-production of nuclear power plants and operators, and the whole fuel chain. It will keep getting cheaper by the unit, the more they do. France is undoubtedly the mainstay of the OECD analysis that nuclear is actually the most competitive investment, with the proviso you hold the initial construction costs down. But the move to green power, combined with these nations shutting down nuclear, gives France an opening to quickly bring down the costs of building "Generation III+" plants by building several one after another.
At this rate, the whole French border will be dotted with new plants, powering Germany, Belgium, Italy, maybe Spain next.
Reuters on the OECD report http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH4t1XC8kr8
There's an argument to be made for creating an organization with high moral standards that does not let those with low standards in. I've heard of the "League of Democracies" and so forth for decades.
The United Nations, however, is NOT such an organization. Membership does not recognize that you are moral or democratic, or anything else. It recognizes that certain entities must be dealt with as the government of a certain area/people because the only other way to deal with that area/people is to have a war with said "government" that would be able to muster a fair number of those people to come out and fight you. (Iraq simultaneously was this horrible dictatorship AND had "the worlds fourth-largest army") And the U.N. was chartered to avoid war itself.
It's not so much a "club" you pass a test to join, it's a meeting ground where you go to meet with people you have to meet with, however many showers you want to take afterwards. The only sense it's a "club" is they exclude organizations (insurgents in the hills, typically) that may call themselves the "government in exile", but have no real power to control an area/people. We don't like the antidemocratic government of China that bumps off far more human beings every year than Palestinian fighters could dream of doing to Israel, but we gotta.
So don't take this as an affront; it's merely an acknowledgment that Palestinians elected them, that they have vastly more control over Palestinian behaviour and opinion and organization than Israel does, and that the opinions and needs of a couple of million people are - to put it mildly - not, in their own opinion, represented well at the UN by the Israeli delegation.
It's not really about the medical issues, it's about freedom and choice. Society has had to learn to live with the costs of tobacco and alcohol - which are higher - because people get really tetchy if you make those against the law; they start breaking that law right and left and giving money to murderous gangsters. (Yes it happened with tobacco, too - when Canada jacked up the taxes until it was worth breaking the law to smuggle smokes in from the states. In no time, there was gunplay between those doing the smuggling over stealing each other's loads, and the usual turf rights. We had to ratchet down the taxes again.)
It's not about "wanting to get high" - people who don't touch the stuff support legalization. Some, from a more abstract reverence for individual freedom. Others, because of the high costs: It's about 20 million arrests. It's about $16 billion per year. (That's at all three gov't levels). It's enough to pay for 25,000 of those "lavish" teacher retirement funds. Every year.
The waste of $16B may sound small these days as the USA tosses hundreds of billions at banks and more at defense expenditures. But it works out to $150/household/year in the US - and since only half pay taxes, it costs $300 per tax-paying household. To put people in jail that, if they grew and sold tobacco, would be called "upstanding taxpaying citizens". Still think that's "nonsense"?
I had the same eye-roll that everybody else has had about "addictive" and to some extent "cognitive impairment". (Not giving up on stuff that causes life-affecting "cognitive impairment" is pretty much a definition of 'addictive'; since the 'addictive' property is known to be very weak, those who don't probably don't have a lot of responsibility in their life; and, indeed, most of my contemporaries gave it up upon getting jobs, mortgages, kids.)
But the lung disease link sat me up in my chair - I've been waiting for years to see an equivalent to the 1964 surgeon general's report about smoking and cancer.
But it wasn't a link to a cancer study, it was about "bullous lung disease" which is rare enough, I'd never heard of it. (It is rare, and mostly hits smokers, surprise) It's based on a Jan 2008 paper in Respirology that noted the ten (10) cases they'd been presented with that were chronic cannabis smokers in a year, averaged 41 years old, when the mean for all cases is 65 - so they concluded it can cause this disease up to 20 years earlier than tobacco.
The ten cases weren't overwhelming, though, especially not when presented as the proof of something by the White House. And, oddly enough, the first thing I found when googling for it was actually this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1360494/ in Britain, with the headline "Bullous disease of the lung and cannabis smoking: insufficient evidence for a causative link". Mind you, they were tracking a mere 117 cases, still very small, though 12x bigger at least.
Interestingly, they offered the hypothesis that it related not so much to the chemicals in cannabis vs. tobacco, nor even to the respiratory harm from smoking ANYTHING, but to the WAY that cannabis is often inhaled:
"There is a quite separate way in which cannabis smokers are reported to present with abnormal air in the chest (pneumothorax and/or pneumomediastinum). Instances in case reports are attributed to extreme breath holding, Valsalva, and Müller's manouevres.8-11 This is a form of barotrauma which is a well-recognized cause of pneumothorax in intensive care units. If there is a cause-and-effect relationship between cannabis smoking and acute rupture of previously normal lung air spaces due to extreme pressure change, it falls under the diagnostic heading not of spontaneous but of traumatic pneumothorax. The focus in our investigation was on bullous lung disease in cannabis smokers." ...in short, don't inhale until your lungs are full to the max and then hold that. It can cause a physical trauma. (Also, don't stick your finger in your eye.)
That does not mean that smoking anything, even dried leaves off of trees, is a good idea for your lungs, of course!
But, frankly, this is very weak tea indeed, as evidence that cannabis is "not a benign drug", to be used at such a level. All of their links pointed to effects that happen to users that were heavy, or chronic, or both. Man, I'd like to hear of ANY over-the-counter drug that is so benign that you can use it heavily or chronically, without adverse side-effects. ASA and Ibuprofen certainly wouldn't qualify.
Are you kidding? This is *perfect*. Complain three times in meetings with as many witnesses as possible that "this exposes us to risk of downtime and high support costs", and be sure to end with "...this is your call, but its against my professional advice". Have that minuted.
Then, if the "train jumps the track", it won' be you who catches hell. You'll get your RH soon enough.
And it's *perfect*, because, like a military man asking for $800B next year instead of $700B, you come across as money-hungry, but honestly so, in service of doing your job well. No special approbation will attach. So, you don't lose significantly in the event that all goes swimmingly for many years on end, and you look prescient and wise if anything goes bad.
...only they will be healthy. I, for one, welcome our new piscine masters.
If you think structural engineering is not done on deadlines and budgets, you're kidding yourself.
But your main point is mostly correct - real software engineering is HARD. One of my courses was about applying mathematical proof methods to programs and proving them correct. It was HARD. Exponentially so for more-complex programs.
However, it *is* done, mostly in EE with control systems. Medical equipment, phone exchanges , aircraft control - anything where people die if there's a failure and the maker gets sued for it - is done to engineering standards. That is, it costs 10x as much per line of code. Boeing's software guys I have no problem calling "Engineers"; but of course, most of them already were before they added programming totheir skills.
All software could be done to such standards, but we don't want to pay for that , so we endure some bugs instead. Less in some places than others, though - banks have very few software errors.
I've had a terrific career, culminating in a six-figure salary, six weeks vacation, very flexible start times (they wearily put up with my 10AM arrivals as long as I stay to 6), and my choice of projects, and my boss's, boss's, boss's boss recently writing me to congratulating me on 25 years of service and 40 years since I started programming (at 13, with punch-cards) with kind words like "one of our best assets" and "one of a kind".
My secret? I started with a "real" engineering degree and a few years experience at it, then went back or the CompSci degree. I was going to take CompSci at 18 after 5 years of "fun" programming and some paid work doing stats with FORTRAN for civil eng grad students; but backed out with a funny feeling that I should start off in closer touch with the "real world". Best call I ever made.
Being grounded as first an engineer, accountant, doctor, lawyer, nurse, salesperson, surveyor, MBA, technician, any profession that involves a lot of data - in these web days that includes "graphic artist" and "PR", is the difference between GP and medical specialist.
The value you add is that you can skip over half the money spent on software - the requirements analysis, the whole phase of explaining the problem to programmers. Plus, you can go back and forth from yor base profession to w"mostly programming" as the needs of the business come and go. Where there are big software projects, you're the obvious guy to be project leader, you know when the hired programmers are BS-ing or just off-track.
And you're the guy everybody relies upon when the IT systems are balky.What really freaked me is the calls for help I getfrom "kids"- Junior engineers in their early 20's who grew up with Windows PC's and the Web- but they've never studiedprogramming at all. They really aren't sure how to replace me!
So: don't just not call yourself a programmer - don't be one. Enhance another profession with programming.
No. Real Engineers are held responsible for their mistakes, like doctors. They go to jail if the building falls and kills somebody.
This has never happened with a software "engineer". That's the difference.
You know who really like Austrian Economics? The same very rich folk who run major banks and insurance companies. That is, they like Austrian austerity when it means they pay lower taxes on $100M of yearly income.
And these are the geniuses that ran their gigantic banks and insurance companies right into utter bankruptcy, with much higher debts than assets, an utter market failure of stunning incompetence. The Austrian solution for that would have been to let them be shattered into a thousand assets to be bought up into small banks, default on nearly every private investor and pension fund, bankrupting millions, ensuring tens of millions had no retirement, and throwing the economy into a very deep depression for at least a decade.
Very, very non-Austrian economics prevented all that by bailing them out at public expense, saved by the hated government.
As your other reply notes, the Austrians avoid actual numbers, so they have trouble with specificity that would make a prediction useful. As my own post in this topic above noted, Mises predicted the Great Depression - but couldn't say, as late as 1929, what year it would happen in...just like the recent bubble was predicted to pop...but not exactly when.
Honestly, after a miserable failure like that, can't you people just be decent and shut up for a while? It's arguably worse than people who shouted "nuclear bomb" before the Iraq war still being allowed platforms for public comment. The Iraq war was just the one wad of lies about one country; the failed economics beliefs have gone on now for over 30 years, since the first "cut taxes and the economy will expand so much that revenue will actually rise!" failed and ran up the first few trillion of debt.
So I googled around for a few moments about "Austrian Economics" and "predictive", and found a quote from the main guy, Mises, himself:
From 1926 to 1929 the attention of the world was chiefly focused upon the question of American prosperity. As in all previous booms brought about by expansion of credit, it was then believed that the prosperity would last forever, and the warnings of the economists were disregarded. The turn of the tide in 1929 and the subsequent severe economic crisis were not a surprise for [Austrian] economists; they had foreseen them, even if they had not been able to predict the exact date of their occurrence.6 ...in short, he claims to have predicted an eventual crash. But could not say, as late as 1929, that 1930 would be the year it happened.
(Money & Credit, 1934).
That's not a USEFUL predictive capability. In fact, it kind of supports the article.
...except that has nothing to do with the article. Most of the posts below are also about how "economics" is hard or bad at predicting humans or something. The article was about how *any* complex, multi-variate model is impossible to calibrate correctly with limited historical data. The guy was modelling oil reservoirs, and I really don't think petrochemical engineers impose personality traits upon them.
It's perfectly consistent with a whole lifetime of stances on this and similar issues. Just not news.
Paul stands for something, and that's what he's chosen to do. He stands for it, and other people who wish to stand up and be counted for it go stand with him. Good for them all; system working as designed.
And the system says that the number of the counting, every time, is barely 10% of the nation, and then everybody can go sit down again for a few years. But the standing for these "shocking" ideas is what he's been doing for a long time. Hooray. But it's still not news.
Everybody is posting about being a specialist in programming, a full-time programmer.
I'm an engineer who also programs, and there are biologist-programmers and chemist-programmers, and accountant-programmers and salesman-programmers.
Tell them it is generically about the "systematization" and automation of any human work that can be handled without conscious thought. That if they can program and do any kind of white-collar or technical job, they will never have to do drudge work for long, because they'll be able to automate it themselves. Co-workers will come to them for help when bogged down with repetitive work.
I've become convinced that if more people treated the ability to do a few macros, the comprehension of a database and basic filtering and queries, all as required "computer literacy", about half the business software in corporations would not be needed.