Yeah, every state. Not every 3.5 million people. Every 3.5 million people get one Senator on the average, because there are 100 of them for 350 million. But the 3.2 million people of Puerto Rico don't get one senator; whereas the 3.2 million people of Vermont, Wyoming, Alaska and the two Dakotas get ten of them! And that would be the heart of Puerto Rico's real problem.
It's pushing 15 years now since Dr. Peter Tertzakian, maybe the continent's most distinguished "energy economist", wrote the book "A Thousand Barrels a Second", when the world consumption topped 84.6 million bbl/day. His company, Arc Energy, isn't in oil per se, they consult on the economics of developing various alternatives, whether undersea exploration will pay off, etc.
He accepted that the entire industry had to go, eventually, and provided many contrasts to the all-coal era and how Winston Churchill started the beginning of the end for coal as a transportation fuel (trains, ships) by demanding the British Navy switch to oil in prep for WW1. That required every port to have oil facilities, which then stimulated civilian oil cargo ships, the development of oil-based engines that wound up in trains.
For changing over all cars to an alternative (in 2004, it wasn't clear whether batteries or hydrogen or biofuels or what was the next thing) he noted that the "North American vehicle fleet" takes a minimum of 20 years to turn over. That's the period where both infrastructures have to be around for two kinds of cars. So that's a pretty large societal cost and the flip won't start until everybody can see that there's enough eventual profit to get over the cost 'hump' of the switchover.
I didn't start a mental 20-year clock with the first Tesla or Leaf, however, as they seem still experimental, we don't even have a standard charger settled on yet. (The next Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war is coming. Presumably, at some point, we'll see a YouTube where "Hitler is told that GM just standardized on Tesla chargers").
2020, however, is an irresistible year for starting a 20-year countdown to the Last Gas Station closing up. Or at least the last ones in small towns.
Look, I've been using nothing but Linux at home for almost 20 years now, still volunteer a bit for the Calgary Unix Users Group, always talked it up at work.
But I *retired* two years back, so I can't advocate any more. It wasn't so much that Windows is "preferred" at work, but that nobody is aware of another option. All my Linux advocacy might as well have been advocating that business be conducted in Esperanto. It wasn't worthy of a laugh, or an eye-roll; it was forgotten two minutes after I'd spoken. (I was the I.T. Coordinator for the Waterworks, by the way; I managed million-dollar software projects. It wasn't that I had no respect, just that I was talking crazy talk.)
Mac's embrace of the entertainment/home market has relegated them to "just the graphic design guys" ghetto in business. Even the quite practicable notion that web applications would make OS irrelevant, still didn't. Why have a second OS? They barely support Windows. If you have *any* problem with it, they re-install from the "golden disk image", so most people don't complain.
Linux poses NO danger, whatsoever, to Microsoft on the desktop at work. I would say the same for "home" as well, since all my Linux advocacy for decades hasn't convinced a single non-techie friend to try it. Why would they? Windows is essentially free, they got it at purchase time. And it runs everything. And Blue Screens Of Death have become very rare.
Linux won the server market, mostly, and provided the basis for Android phones and tablets; it did its job. It's not an all-Windows world. But it is a nearly all-Windows-desktop world except for home and designer Mac users.
Electricity is the key to de-carbonization over the next few decades. The easy part is carbon-free electricity generation. As noted, renewable prices are in free-fall. I've been a big nuke-booster for decades, but even that option may not be needed, so low are wind and solar prices getting to be. (We need a major new grid to make that work, of course: only across a large continent is the wind always blowing somewhere... Also, we need some power storage; people had been thinking mountain lakes, pumps and turbines, but the Australian mega-battery has me wondering...)
Then there's transportation, and battery improvements would indicate we might be able to replace most cars and light trucks with electric; trains can be electric.
And there's home heating. Heat pumps have gotten so good we could ditch our entire piping infrastructure that moves, basically, an explosive around the city into every home. That's been a nutty idea since it started, and now there's more reason than ever to move off of it.
We can eliminate 90% of natural gas, 90% of gasoline, half of diesel, half of avgas, with technologies that now exist, given only determination and, well, a huge pile of money. We'd have to build a lot of infrastructure, from that trillion-dollar grid, a few trillion in renewable power plants, to a zillion changing stations to an all-electric train system. But it's engineering and accounting, not new science.
Even the staggering costs are not that daunting, really. Yes, you're talking a whole year's GDP for the US ($13 T) but that would be spread over about 25 years, and most of it would be private investments into utilities and trains and private vehicle purchases. [No, I don't know *how* you get 100 million households to all convert to heat pumps at $10K each when they hated giving up light bulbs; I'm just saying the engineering and money are do-able. ]
And it would all depend on using a LOT more electricity instead of combustible gases and fluids.
The book should probably come with a warning that it may be too intense for adults.
I read it as a kid, and devoured all the ideas, though, oddly, I did't become militaristic or in any way right-wing. Vietnam was going on, and you could see where real wars end up.
The review by James Davis Nicol highlights the stuff that I thought was cooool as a kid, and gagged at as a grownup:
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/r......Rico is a very young war criminal in scenes where the "demonstration of firepower and frightfulness" (heh: now, "shock and awe") includes toasting a church congregation of the "Skinnies" with his flamethrower, and looking for the town's water treatment plant with his micro-nuke. (After a 25-year career with the local waterworks, I know that's germ warfare...)
And it sinks in that the basic philosophy is that humanity must grow, must colonize forever, to live, constantly expanding through the galaxy, and that any species also wanting the same "real estate" must be fought. The word "liebensraum" does come into the mind.
Heinlein had a few philosophies to expound, of course, and the whole rest of the book is built around having some reason to have a busy military with occasional heavy losses and routine light losses. Oh, and a need to assault planets from space with anything smaller than nukes.
He wanted to look right inside the mind of a military volunteer who understands that this will likely enough cost his life or at least limbs, and accepts it as the noble thing to do, to sacrifice the, ah, One for the Many. It is made clear what the movie did even better, that Rico, while well-indoctrinated with the understanding of this nobility, that only those who have done this are worthy of voting rights, really joins to impress a girl. (In the promo book for the movie, writers said they asked actual Soldiers and vets if that was corny. They were told with grins that it is still common.)
The key to the training section (classic military book structure: first bit is training camp, then on to the story of actual battles; see Full Metal Jacket, Dirty Dozen, etc) is that when Rico internalizes and accepts the noble reason rather than the girl reason, "The noblest fate a man can endure is to place his mortal body between his beloved home and war's desolation" (I just typed that from memory...jeez.), then the torturous training camp is suddenly almost easy.
Heinlein's defense in "Expanded Universe" noted the book is "militaristic" specifically to the Army/Marines, rival services to his beloved Navy, where at least you usually die with a full belly and not frozen in a trench; that it's a love letter to the heroic sufferings of "the doughboy, the duckfoot....the thin red line of heroes". This is hardly more militaristic than the displays at most American parades and football games, and obviously, Veteran's Day. That's fine.
It's setting up that story in a world where human expansion makes war with aliens inevitable, that's the problem. And the war-crime stuff. He could have set up his war-needing-environment with a need for pure defense of home, and outlined some rules of war descended from Geneva Conventions rather than the chapter "Caesar Chastens Gaul" of his memoir.
That he was pushing out the endless-expansion thing instead is all the more problematic in that the Bugs were a pure Communism by nature, oddly enough, and the real geopolitical concern of the time was that the First World (us) was in a game of Risk with the Second World (communist countries) fighting over the rest of the global real estate. Tends to make anybody even faintly left look askance. I was mercifully unaware of all this, enjoying it at 11. (1970) And on re-reads though teen years. I missed Vietnam by both nationality (Canadian) and a few years of time; Boomer Americans were probably clearer on it.
Salon.com seems to have lost the 1997 review that nailed the movie's total fa
by Rutger Bregman. It has other proposals, but Bregman, a little uncomfortably, has been turned to as Mr. UBI Spokesman for a lot of journalists.
The most surprising part of his story on UBI is not that it was tried in various Canadian and American municipalities and found to work amazingly well, but that those trials convinced none other than Richard Nixon to seriously propose it. (Died a slow, agonizing death in the Senate over years of dithering.)
It has a lot in common with legalization of cannabis: while the science has been solid for decades, a certain mentality just. can't. stand it. Offensive on a gut level.
The old joke about "can't stand that somebody, somewhere, is having fun" about cannabis-haters works, changed to "somebody, somewhere, is getting something for nothing". Ah, well, there used to be a LOT of people with the mentality that interest on loans was "usury", a sin, and "getting something for nothing". It took literally centuries for it to become a commonplace that lenders were contributing to society.
We may be in the last few decades before it's acknowledged that people whose contributions to society are hard to measure with our current economic system are nonetheless contributing - or at least, so many of them (humans being incorrigibly productive in great majority) that picking out the rest for punishment has too high a "transaction cost", as they say about the idea of tollbooths on every block to pay for roads. Everybody who drives on million-dollar-a-mile pavements gets something for nothing.
I got the big James Bond collection two Christmases back, and it came with material about making it, proudly showing the huge scanner that went over every frame at 4K. The images were knocked down to "mere" blu-ray. So they can do a 4K version of the box set some time if people will buy. If 8K was going to be a thing, they'll have to haul out the negatives or prints again and run them through THAT scanner. Maybe they didn't because it would not have been worth it, only showing the grains in the film more clearly??
I think Bond films were "mere" 35mm, not 70mm (or 65mm or whatever) that a relatively small number of movies were shot in. I think Branagh's Hamlet was the last one where they bothered with that film stock.
So I suppose they can start shooting in 8K from now on, if cheap enough, but will 8K make a difference to digital versions of older movies?
My all-time fave movie, Apocalypse Now, was one of the 70mm movies. THAT movie, I might buy in 8K if I could tell the diff from 4K, which I suspect I couldn't. If the market is that small, will the tech fly?
Sir, I believe I explained my methodology. I did a google and grabbed the top link. That's not a way of finding accurate information, but a way of finding out *popular* references. Many people consider that the most-read list of grievances against Mr. Obama for being "divisive", presumably the people who find Mr. Obama divisive. I've actually never heard of the periodical in question, all I know is that it is popular with a certain set of people, the ones I am attempting to ask for *specifics* on his "divisiveness". One need not approve of an information source to note that it is popular with people that one is trying to reach.
...then you're one weird American. Nobody else does. But as long as we're standing on the sidelines, hands in pockets, could we ask politely for some particulars: concrete policy, enforcement, or regulatory examples, of how Obama was all specially kind to American black people?
The "identity politics" of *saying* something nice are typically used to avoid doing much, and are often seen as a bullshit gesture. Here in Canada we appointed an Inuk (Leona Aglukkaq) as a federal minister, but she eventually failed reelection, because the Conservative government she represented forced her to take unpopular positions in her far-north riding (Nunavut). Her government was happy to have her as a face popular with northern people, but didn't change any policies because of her presence in the cabinet.
Under Obama, I'm at a loss to think of a regulation that was changed, or enforced less or more, that advantaged black people. They didn't appear to get arrested any less, killed any less, their communities didn't seem to get any more money. He didn't hand out a disproportionate number of government jobs to blacks. They didn't receive any special treatment that got them out of more mortgage foreclosures than white people (Neil Barofsky was pretty plain that Obama's Tim Geither only cared about the banks, didn't help *any* foreclosure victims.)
Welfare and food stamp rules didn't change - more people *needed* them because of the giant bank collapse and 10 million tossed out of work, but most of those people were still white. This question cuts both ways: why would black people vote for him so monolithically? What the hell did he DO for them, except psychologically?
People appear, from afar, to act as if Obama offering a few, purely verbal, opinions, was some great act, when none of them actually *DID* anything. Saying that Trayvon Martin looked like him didn't change any policing rules or persecute any cops. The Henry Gates cop still has a job and is now friendly with Gates. More briefly, "nothing happened".
Curious just now for how to end this question, I tried just googling "obama divisive identity" and grabbed the top link, a full article on same by a guy who'd appeared on Hannity in 2012. It has a long bullet-point list of his Obama-is-divisive grievances: http://www.wnd.com/2012/08/oba......and I could see only two that were about concrete actions that changed government spending, my personal touchstone for words-vs-works. The other 20+ were all just things that Obama *said*. (The two were "passing ObamaCare", which he'd run upon, and something about the auto bailout, which I could have sworn was popular at the time, certainly with mostly-white auto workers.)
Honestly, if you can't find policy changes, laws, regulations that caused harm, can't you let it go about what speeches or off-the-cuff remarks he makes? They don't hurt anything.
I also raise the issue because this goes, I dunno, not just double, maybe "octuple" for Trump. He mostly *says* things that offend his opponents, but if you had two different sections of the paper, the front page for things Trump *did* and the back page for "crap the President said today", the front page would need almost no space.
...it's normal for the plains of America, at least, to be covered with 65 million buffalo. While that state wouldn't produce nearly as much meat as is consumed today, you wouldn't have to substitute entirely.
American conservatives of 1975 would have confidently predicted that Vietnam would be a flaming hellhole of totalitarian thought police and dire poverty, because the Communists succeeded in pushing out the hated "American Imperialists", hung the capitalist collaborators, renamed Saigon "Ho Chi Minh City", and a corrupt socialist regime.
And Vietnam, of course, is corrupt and socialist and really has thought police. But it's also pretty capitalist, the way China quickly became, and a lot of stuff is made there, and America trades with them, and industrialization HAS, still, brought about greatly rising fortunes. Socialism and some corruption have been a smaller drag than industrialization has been a lift.
By contrast, also-Communist Cuba, which did not kill 58,000 Americans, did NOT have trading status restored, ever, and remained mired in dire poverty. Frankly, it's decent back-of-the-envelope proof that "socialism" (or what passes for it in Vietnam and China) does not inherently lead to poverty, it's lack of trade that does, extreme corruption also, of course. (Russia has extreme corruption compared to the East...)
I wonder how many American millionaire investors you could find that are not from Cuban families and also are in favour of continued suppression of the Cuban economy. Trading with them would be no more immoral than with Vietnam, surely, and it would produce another Vietnam 90 miles offshore: Vietnam has had one of the highest growth rates in the world since 2000. What an investment opportunity!
Meanwhile, the most proudly capitalist of nations, their American enemies, are not on the list of nations that feel the economic fortunes of most are improving. You'll have to forgive the Ho Chi Minh Fan Club from doing the dance and giving the finger, today.
The real comparison is to my Dad, of course, 38 years older than I. I'm somewhat better off than he, but not much. Not really enough, considering I got two college degrees and he worked his way up to "engineer" from "surveyman" (when "engineer" was a job description, not always licensed) from only high school. He could afford to retire at the same age, actually had a bigger house. But my place is better located, and I'll be able to manage a little more travel. Much of that, however, comes from our inheritances from parents - he got almost nothing from his, same for my wife's parents.
A younger friend of mine who is about 60 years younger than my Dad, recently mentioned that when she wished aloud to just quit, her son joked she couldn't afford not to work unless she has a magic wand that makes money. Her nine-year-old was dead right. My parents never *needed* two incomes the way my friend does. Dad supported three kids, bought a 1600 sf. split level for us, took us on vacations to Disneyland and Mexico, had us all in an athletic club for the pool and skating rinks - on the salary of a highway construction engineer, never got past mid-level.
Oh, and all three of kid kids went to college, needing only summer jobs to pay the tuition; the only family expense was free rent and food.
As a report from Piketty's institute just confirmed ( https://boingboing.net/2017/12... ) "inequality in the Americas has been soaring since 1980", shortly after Dad retired. The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution ("Mulroney" here in Canada) won, and my young friend who can't quit her job, lost.
Tim Weiner's book about the FBI said that Nixon lost Hoover's support when Nixon started to ask for taps not just on "radicals" but on their friends and families that had no such activity.
In short, Hoover was a strong partisan about anybody protesting racism or economic persecution being an enemy of the state... but at the very least he understood their were good people he should not try to "protect" by listening on their phone calls.
Today's NSA really does "protect" you by surveilling YOU. They recognize no "good people" and lied to everybody about it.
Unless the "rest of the world" was thriving and currencies tightly coupled to the price of oil were *all* doing poorly. The coupling of the Canadian dollar to the price of oil across 2014 and 2015 is a graph to review here.
To the news story about how that number is from a think-tank essay hotly disputed by the bankers assn and the Dept of Finance, both.
If loaning banks money (and making a few billion profit on it) , at a time when all the big American banks they would normally rely upon for liquidity are locked up, is a bailout, then every government is bailing all the time.
Well, it's the 86th month in a row of job-growth, and the whole "world economy is surging" to pick from a WaPo headline today.
Crediting an 11-month administration with 75 previous months of growth, and prosperity 10,000 miles away in economies not that interlocked with America's, would be a stretch.
The other 75 months are no great credit to Obama, either, as he was much-constrained from economic actions by Congress holding that "Power of the Purse". Recovery could have come faster, as up here in Canada, say. Whereas places with even *more* of the "austerity" than what the US Congress inflicted through sequestration and cuts to States, had the triple-dip recession...Britain for example.
But when you totally tank your economy through bank malfeasance (again, Canada never deregulated our banks, so none failed or needed bailouts), you can't help but have growth after while, no matter how badly you mismanage. Kids keep getting bigger; young people need homes, salaries have fallen painfully and labour is cheap. Money is even cheaper, since there's less to invest in.
"Growth" isn't always good. Sometimes is means "things fell really far and are really bad for a lot of people". Things are not remotely yet back to where they would have been if there'd been no bank collapse. A whole generation has had its early employment years sabotaged.
Did Brittanica or The World Book employ more than 1300 people as core staff? They certainly hired more if "you write the article on Slovenia" counts as "hiring" but "writing one article" describes the other 99% of the 132,000 people, so you have to talk core staff.
There were 2300 *sales* staff at peak, but the editorial staff in the home office, number in the dozens. A figure I googled for extensively, but only found... in the Wikipedia.
...by an open process run by a government than a closed process run by a private corporation the size of a government with no responsibility to the public whatsoever.
Because of the open process, this is going to timidly filter out a little of the worst of the worst, and that's about it.
You write as if this were entirely about your hyperventilated political polarization about *every issue* that has to be seen through an American lens.
The issue is global, just FYI. Your nutball belief that BLM is tearing apart a country of 350 million people, (half of whom vote and 60% of whom don't watch enough news to recall what BLM is about) will have no effect on whether a lot of really good banking jobs will disappear in the City of London or on the Tokyo Exchange. It will have less effect on whether automated manufacturing will throw 100 million Chinese back into rural poverty or not, after a generation of having had the taste of an industrial job.
These issues are very large and will shake nations and cause rumours of war, whether 12% of America remains quiet and submissive about police violence against people of their skin shade, or wave some signs in the streets about it...that being a comparatively small issue.
The real world is bigger than the one you see in American news media that have tailored their coverage to your local interests about American ethnic conflicts.
I just finished 30 years working for a municipality (Calgary) with about 12,000 desktops.
We were mixed DOS/Mac at first and when the IT department finally admitted that they were not toys, and that their beloved mainframe was dying at last, they took over PC IT from the departments, and immediately insisted on getting rid of Macs because of "one environment".
It was always about "support costs" and "total cost of ownership", a number they never actually had to calculate. They also never had to prove it was cheaper to do everything their way - but as a gross measure, our costs never went down. Not even on a per-PC basis.
We always had Unix, from when you had to have a workstation to run drafting software. Because IT clung to the mainframe to the bitter end, it was the engineering department Unix server room that took over running servers (this was happening around 1996, with the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China imminent, when the joke was "will it actually be Hong Kong that takes over China" was big - in our shop, it really was a bunch of drafting-support staff that took over the server room!) We also ran all the E-mail servers on Solaris because 'e-mail' was "an Internet thing" and all corporate E-mail until then had been IBM PROFS. Finally a few Windows servers were allowed to provide Outlook, but only after Windows 2000 Server got decent. Everything else is still Unix.
Unix support staff were NOT hard to find for a large server room. Windows server staff that could support a LARGE installation were rarer! MS courses turn out lots of guys that can run a dentist's office but very few that can run a city.
After all support went to IT...there was no actual support, except re-installs. They re-install the software, they re-install your whole machine, but they. will. NOT. come to your machine and help you with your difficult spreadsheet. None of the alleged "support" staff understand any of our software except for basic MS-Office apps they themselves have to use (and, as mentioned, the won't come help with that, either). But for any special office software of the type that the article speaks of, departments have to drum up their own local "power users" for support, who by the way are discouraged from it by IT and certainly given no passwords or special access.
And for that matter, what does the client even matter to IT? They hate clients. All business software that can possibly be moved to web apps for easier admin, has been. It would run on Android just as well.
So I just don't see what the big deal is. Here's an experiment: Offer, gasp TWO alternatives with internal costs that match the actual support costs of each choice, then let your customers choose which desktop they want.
A more recent story? Not being tasked as your research assistant, no, I've only got the story I came in with. Google is your friend.
And, by the way, did you have some reason for anybody to imagine that the editorial direction or fact-checking standards of Fox news have changed since 2003? I don't recall any major changes of senior staff in that time until Ailes was forced out in disgrace - he set ALL the standards around there, nobody crossed him. WHY would he have changed any standards in his late 60s while the old ones were making money hand-over-fist?
Getting a few simple facts right or wrong absolutely addresses the issue. If a school cannot successfully teach that, say, the British Queen is Head of State but not Head of Government and thus has only ceremonial power*, then it's pointless to discuss whether it has accurate stories about Theresa May having low-polling with professional women in the Midland Counties.
Perhaps you did not read the study, but those simple facts that heavy Fox viewers got wrong were 1) whether the rest of the world was generally in support of the American invasion of Iraq, 2) Were there links between AQ and Saddam (Bush explicitly denied it on TV) and 3) Had WMDs been found in 2003 [Infamously not]. 80% of Fox viewers had more than one misperception out of the three. And really, "The rest of the world supports the invasion", "WMDs have been found" and "Saddam is working with AQ" are the very genesis of what we are currently calling "Fake News".
(*Example chosen because Sarah Palin did not know that.)
Man, if you`re a nation of 350 million people who invented the Internet and have a larger security budget than the rest of the world put together, it must totally burn you to be hacked by a half-starved, half-drunk nation of 150 million.
But not as much as being told about it by a nation of 8 million.
Guys, we don`t agree with all your foreign adventurism and neo-colonialism, but if you`re going to run around the planet just making enemies hand-over-mailed-fist, you really need to up your cybersecurity game. You have WAY too many of your human IT resources trying to figure out how to out-snapchat SnapChat.
And hire Snowden back. That guy could run a computer.
Slashdot Mirror
> A President ...is the actual joke though.
Yeah, every state. Not every 3.5 million people. Every 3.5 million people get one Senator on the average, because there are 100 of them for 350 million.
But the 3.2 million people of Puerto Rico don't get one senator; whereas the 3.2 million people of Vermont, Wyoming, Alaska and the two Dakotas get ten of them!
And that would be the heart of Puerto Rico's real problem.
Pretty sure it was already here.
Also, that a private service refusing to do business with certain customers is not it.
It's pushing 15 years now since Dr. Peter Tertzakian, maybe the continent's most distinguished "energy economist", wrote the book "A Thousand Barrels a Second", when the world consumption topped 84.6 million bbl/day. His company, Arc Energy, isn't in oil per se, they consult on the economics of developing various alternatives, whether undersea exploration will pay off, etc.
He accepted that the entire industry had to go, eventually, and provided many contrasts to the all-coal era and how Winston Churchill started the beginning of the end for coal as a transportation fuel (trains, ships) by demanding the British Navy switch to oil in prep for WW1. That required every port to have oil facilities, which then stimulated civilian oil cargo ships, the development of oil-based engines that wound up in trains.
For changing over all cars to an alternative (in 2004, it wasn't clear whether batteries or hydrogen or biofuels or what was the next thing) he noted that the "North American vehicle fleet" takes a minimum of 20 years to turn over. That's the period where both infrastructures have to be around for two kinds of cars. So that's a pretty large societal cost and the flip won't start until everybody can see that there's enough eventual profit to get over the cost 'hump' of the switchover.
I didn't start a mental 20-year clock with the first Tesla or Leaf, however, as they seem still experimental, we don't even have a standard charger settled on yet. (The next Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD war is coming. Presumably, at some point, we'll see a YouTube where "Hitler is told that GM just standardized on Tesla chargers").
2020, however, is an irresistible year for starting a 20-year countdown to the Last Gas Station closing up. Or at least the last ones in small towns.
Look, I've been using nothing but Linux at home for almost 20 years now, still volunteer a bit for the Calgary Unix Users Group, always talked it up at work.
But I *retired* two years back, so I can't advocate any more. It wasn't so much that Windows is "preferred" at work, but that nobody is aware of another option. All my Linux advocacy might as well have been advocating that business be conducted in Esperanto. It wasn't worthy of a laugh, or an eye-roll; it was forgotten two minutes after I'd spoken. (I was the I.T. Coordinator for the Waterworks, by the way; I managed million-dollar software projects. It wasn't that I had no respect, just that I was talking crazy talk.)
Mac's embrace of the entertainment/home market has relegated them to "just the graphic design guys" ghetto in business. Even the quite practicable notion that web applications would make OS irrelevant, still didn't. Why have a second OS? They barely support Windows. If you have *any* problem with it, they re-install from the "golden disk image", so most people don't complain.
Linux poses NO danger, whatsoever, to Microsoft on the desktop at work. I would say the same for "home" as well, since all my Linux advocacy for decades hasn't convinced a single non-techie friend to try it. Why would they? Windows is essentially free, they got it at purchase time. And it runs everything. And Blue Screens Of Death have become very rare.
Linux won the server market, mostly, and provided the basis for Android phones and tablets; it did its job. It's not an all-Windows world. But it is a nearly all-Windows-desktop world except for home and designer Mac users.
Microsoft can afford to be magnanimous.
Electricity is the key to de-carbonization over the next few decades. The easy part is carbon-free electricity generation. As noted, renewable prices are in free-fall. I've been a big nuke-booster for decades, but even that option may not be needed, so low are wind and solar prices getting to be. (We need a major new grid to make that work, of course: only across a large continent is the wind always blowing somewhere... Also, we need some power storage; people had been thinking mountain lakes, pumps and turbines, but the Australian mega-battery has me wondering...)
Then there's transportation, and battery improvements would indicate we might be able to replace most cars and light trucks with electric; trains can be electric.
And there's home heating. Heat pumps have gotten so good we could ditch our entire piping infrastructure that moves, basically, an explosive around the city into every home. That's been a nutty idea since it started, and now there's more reason than ever to move off of it.
We can eliminate 90% of natural gas, 90% of gasoline, half of diesel, half of avgas, with technologies that now exist, given only determination and, well, a huge pile of money. We'd have to build a lot of infrastructure, from that trillion-dollar grid, a few trillion in renewable power plants, to a zillion changing stations to an all-electric train system. But it's engineering and accounting, not new science.
Even the staggering costs are not that daunting, really. Yes, you're talking a whole year's GDP for the US ($13 T) but that would be spread over about 25 years, and most of it would be private investments into utilities and trains and private vehicle purchases. [No, I don't know *how* you get 100 million households to all convert to heat pumps at $10K each when they hated giving up light bulbs; I'm just saying the engineering and money are do-able. ]
And it would all depend on using a LOT more electricity instead of combustible gases and fluids.
The book should probably come with a warning that it may be too intense for adults.
I read it as a kid, and devoured all the ideas, though, oddly, I did't become militaristic or in any way right-wing. Vietnam was going on, and you could see where real wars end up.
The review by James Davis Nicol highlights the stuff that I thought was cooool as a kid, and gagged at as a grownup:
https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/r... ...Rico is a very young war criminal in scenes where the "demonstration of firepower and frightfulness" (heh: now, "shock and awe") includes toasting a church congregation of the "Skinnies" with his flamethrower, and looking for the town's water treatment plant with his micro-nuke. (After a 25-year career with the local waterworks, I know that's germ warfare...)
And it sinks in that the basic philosophy is that humanity must grow, must colonize forever, to live, constantly expanding through the galaxy, and that any species also wanting the same "real estate" must be fought. The word "liebensraum" does come into the mind.
Heinlein had a few philosophies to expound, of course, and the whole rest of the book is built around having some reason to have a busy military with occasional heavy losses and routine light losses. Oh, and a need to assault planets from space with anything smaller than nukes.
He wanted to look right inside the mind of a military volunteer who understands that this will likely enough cost his life or at least limbs, and accepts it as the noble thing to do, to sacrifice the, ah, One for the Many. It is made clear what the movie did even better, that Rico, while well-indoctrinated with the understanding of this nobility, that only those who have done this are worthy of voting rights, really joins to impress a girl. (In the promo book for the movie, writers said they asked actual Soldiers and vets if that was corny. They were told with grins that it is still common.)
The key to the training section (classic military book structure: first bit is training camp, then on to the story of actual battles; see Full Metal Jacket, Dirty Dozen, etc) is that when Rico internalizes and accepts the noble reason rather than the girl reason, "The noblest fate a man can endure is to place his mortal body between his beloved home and war's desolation" (I just typed that from memory...jeez.), then the torturous training camp is suddenly almost easy.
Heinlein's defense in "Expanded Universe" noted the book is "militaristic" specifically to the Army/Marines, rival services to his beloved Navy, where at least you usually die with a full belly and not frozen in a trench; that it's a love letter to the heroic sufferings of "the doughboy, the duckfoot....the thin red line of heroes". This is hardly more militaristic than the displays at most American parades and football games, and obviously, Veteran's Day. That's fine.
It's setting up that story in a world where human expansion makes war with aliens inevitable, that's the problem. And the war-crime stuff. He could have set up his war-needing-environment with a need for pure defense of home, and outlined some rules of war descended from Geneva Conventions rather than the chapter "Caesar Chastens Gaul" of his memoir.
That he was pushing out the endless-expansion thing instead is all the more problematic in that the Bugs were a pure Communism by nature, oddly enough, and the real geopolitical concern of the time was that the First World (us) was in a game of Risk with the Second World (communist countries) fighting over the rest of the global real estate. Tends to make anybody even faintly left look askance. I was mercifully unaware of all this, enjoying it at 11. (1970) And on re-reads though teen years. I missed Vietnam by both nationality (Canadian) and a few years of time; Boomer Americans were probably clearer on it.
Salon.com seems to have lost the 1997 review that nailed the movie's total fa
by Rutger Bregman. It has other proposals, but Bregman, a little uncomfortably, has been turned to as Mr. UBI Spokesman for a lot of journalists.
The most surprising part of his story on UBI is not that it was tried in various Canadian and American municipalities and found to work amazingly well, but that those trials convinced none other than Richard Nixon to seriously propose it. (Died a slow, agonizing death in the Senate over years of dithering.)
It has a lot in common with legalization of cannabis: while the science has been solid for decades, a certain mentality just. can't. stand it. Offensive on a gut level.
The old joke about "can't stand that somebody, somewhere, is having fun" about cannabis-haters works, changed to "somebody, somewhere, is getting something for nothing". Ah, well, there used to be a LOT of people with the mentality that interest on loans was "usury", a sin, and "getting something for nothing". It took literally centuries for it to become a commonplace that lenders were contributing to society.
We may be in the last few decades before it's acknowledged that people whose contributions to society are hard to measure with our current economic system are nonetheless contributing - or at least, so many of them (humans being incorrigibly productive in great majority) that picking out the rest for punishment has too high a "transaction cost", as they say about the idea of tollbooths on every block to pay for roads. Everybody who drives on million-dollar-a-mile pavements gets something for nothing.
I got the big James Bond collection two Christmases back, and it came with material about making it, proudly showing the huge scanner that went over every frame at 4K. The images were knocked down to "mere" blu-ray. So they can do a 4K version of the box set some time if people will buy. If 8K was going to be a thing, they'll have to haul out the negatives or prints again and run them through THAT scanner. Maybe they didn't because it would not have been worth it, only showing the grains in the film more clearly??
I think Bond films were "mere" 35mm, not 70mm (or 65mm or whatever) that a relatively small number of movies were shot in. I think Branagh's Hamlet was the last one where they bothered with that film stock.
So I suppose they can start shooting in 8K from now on, if cheap enough, but will 8K make a difference to digital versions of older movies?
My all-time fave movie, Apocalypse Now, was one of the 70mm movies. THAT movie, I might buy in 8K if I could tell the diff from 4K, which I suspect I couldn't. If the market is that small, will the tech fly?
Sir, I believe I explained my methodology. I did a google and grabbed the top link. That's not a way of finding accurate information, but a way of finding out *popular* references. Many people consider that the most-read list of grievances against Mr. Obama for being "divisive", presumably the people who find Mr. Obama divisive. I've actually never heard of the periodical in question, all I know is that it is popular with a certain set of people, the ones I am attempting to ask for *specifics* on his "divisiveness".
One need not approve of an information source to note that it is popular with people that one is trying to reach.
...then you're one weird American. Nobody else does. But as long as we're standing on the sidelines, hands in pockets, could we ask politely for some particulars: concrete policy, enforcement, or regulatory examples, of how Obama was all specially kind to American black people?
The "identity politics" of *saying* something nice are typically used to avoid doing much, and are often seen as a bullshit gesture. Here in Canada we appointed an Inuk (Leona Aglukkaq) as a federal minister, but she eventually failed reelection, because the Conservative government she represented forced her to take unpopular positions in her far-north riding (Nunavut). Her government was happy to have her as a face popular with northern people, but didn't change any policies because of her presence in the cabinet.
Under Obama, I'm at a loss to think of a regulation that was changed, or enforced less or more, that advantaged black people. They didn't appear to get arrested any less, killed any less, their communities didn't seem to get any more money. He didn't hand out a disproportionate number of government jobs to blacks. They didn't receive any special treatment that got them out of more mortgage foreclosures than white people (Neil Barofsky was pretty plain that Obama's Tim Geither only cared about the banks, didn't help *any* foreclosure victims.)
Welfare and food stamp rules didn't change - more people *needed* them because of the giant bank collapse and 10 million tossed out of work, but most of those people were still white. This question cuts both ways: why would black people vote for him so monolithically? What the hell did he DO for them, except psychologically?
People appear, from afar, to act as if Obama offering a few, purely verbal, opinions, was some great act, when none of them actually *DID* anything. Saying that Trayvon Martin looked like him didn't change any policing rules or persecute any cops. The Henry Gates cop still has a job and is now friendly with Gates. More briefly, "nothing happened".
Curious just now for how to end this question, I tried just googling "obama divisive identity" and grabbed the top link, a full article on same by a guy who'd appeared on Hannity in 2012. It has a long bullet-point list of his Obama-is-divisive grievances: ...and I could see only two that were about concrete actions that changed government spending, my personal touchstone for words-vs-works. The other 20+ were all just things that Obama *said*.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/08/oba...
(The two were "passing ObamaCare", which he'd run upon, and something about the auto bailout, which I could have sworn was popular at the time, certainly with mostly-white auto workers.)
Honestly, if you can't find policy changes, laws, regulations that caused harm, can't you let it go about what speeches or off-the-cuff remarks he makes? They don't hurt anything.
I also raise the issue because this goes, I dunno, not just double, maybe "octuple" for Trump. He mostly *says* things that offend his opponents, but if you had two different sections of the paper, the front page for things Trump *did* and the back page for "crap the President said today", the front page would need almost no space.
...it's normal for the plains of America, at least, to be covered with 65 million buffalo. While that state wouldn't produce nearly as much meat as is consumed today, you wouldn't have to substitute entirely.
Vietnam is one of the happy countries? Funny.
American conservatives of 1975 would have confidently predicted that Vietnam would be a flaming hellhole of totalitarian thought police and dire poverty, because the Communists succeeded in pushing out the hated "American Imperialists", hung the capitalist collaborators, renamed Saigon "Ho Chi Minh City", and a corrupt socialist regime.
And Vietnam, of course, is corrupt and socialist and really has thought police. But it's also pretty capitalist, the way China quickly became, and a lot of stuff is made there, and America trades with them, and industrialization HAS, still, brought about greatly rising fortunes. Socialism and some corruption have been a smaller drag than industrialization has been a lift.
By contrast, also-Communist Cuba, which did not kill 58,000 Americans, did NOT have trading status restored, ever, and remained mired in dire poverty. Frankly, it's decent back-of-the-envelope proof that "socialism" (or what passes for it in Vietnam and China) does not inherently lead to poverty, it's lack of trade that does, extreme corruption also, of course. (Russia has extreme corruption compared to the East...)
I wonder how many American millionaire investors you could find that are not from Cuban families and also are in favour of continued suppression of the Cuban economy. Trading with them would be no more immoral than with Vietnam, surely, and it would produce another Vietnam 90 miles offshore: Vietnam has had one of the highest growth rates in the world since 2000. What an investment opportunity!
Meanwhile, the most proudly capitalist of nations, their American enemies, are not on the list of nations that feel the economic fortunes of most are improving. You'll have to forgive the Ho Chi Minh Fan Club from doing the dance and giving the finger, today.
I'm definitely richer at 59 than 9. Solved.
The real comparison is to my Dad, of course, 38 years older than I. I'm somewhat better off than he, but not much. Not really enough, considering I got two college degrees and he worked his way up to "engineer" from "surveyman" (when "engineer" was a job description, not always licensed) from only high school. He could afford to retire at the same age, actually had a bigger house. But my place is better located, and I'll be able to manage a little more travel. Much of that, however, comes from our inheritances from parents - he got almost nothing from his, same for my wife's parents.
A younger friend of mine who is about 60 years younger than my Dad, recently mentioned that when she wished aloud to just quit, her son joked she couldn't afford not to work unless she has a magic wand that makes money. Her nine-year-old was dead right. My parents never *needed* two incomes the way my friend does. Dad supported three kids, bought a 1600 sf. split level for us, took us on vacations to Disneyland and Mexico, had us all in an athletic club for the pool and skating rinks - on the salary of a highway construction engineer, never got past mid-level.
Oh, and all three of kid kids went to college, needing only summer jobs to pay the tuition; the only family expense was free rent and food.
As a report from Piketty's institute just confirmed ( https://boingboing.net/2017/12... ) "inequality in the Americas has been soaring since 1980", shortly after Dad retired. The Reagan/Thatcher Revolution ("Mulroney" here in Canada) won, and my young friend who can't quit her job, lost.
Tim Weiner's book about the FBI said that Nixon lost Hoover's support when Nixon started to ask for taps not just on "radicals" but on their friends and families that had no such activity.
In short, Hoover was a strong partisan about anybody protesting racism or economic persecution being an enemy of the state ... but at the very least he understood their were good people he should not try to "protect" by listening on their phone calls.
Today's NSA really does "protect" you by surveilling YOU.
They recognize no "good people" and lied to everybody about it.
Hoover would have arrested them.
Unless the "rest of the world" was thriving and currencies tightly coupled to the price of oil were *all* doing poorly. The coupling of the Canadian dollar to the price of oil across 2014 and 2015 is a graph to review here.
Thanks for that link!
To the news story about how that number is from a think-tank essay hotly disputed by the bankers assn and the Dept of Finance, both.
If loaning banks money (and making a few billion profit on it) , at a time when all the big American banks they would normally rely upon for liquidity are locked up, is a bailout, then every government is bailing all the time.
Well, it's the 86th month in a row of job-growth, and the whole "world economy is surging" to pick from a WaPo headline today.
Crediting an 11-month administration with 75 previous months of growth, and prosperity 10,000 miles away in economies not that interlocked with America's, would be a stretch.
The other 75 months are no great credit to Obama, either, as he was much-constrained from economic actions by Congress holding that "Power of the Purse". Recovery could have come faster, as up here in Canada, say. Whereas places with even *more* of the "austerity" than what the US Congress inflicted through sequestration and cuts to States, had the triple-dip recession...Britain for example.
But when you totally tank your economy through bank malfeasance (again, Canada never deregulated our banks, so none failed or needed bailouts), you can't help but have growth after while, no matter how badly you mismanage. Kids keep getting bigger; young people need homes, salaries have fallen painfully and labour is cheap. Money is even cheaper, since there's less to invest in.
"Growth" isn't always good. Sometimes is means "things fell really far and are really bad for a lot of people". Things are not remotely yet back to where they would have been if there'd been no bank collapse. A whole generation has had its early employment years sabotaged.
...that I never watched.
Did Brittanica or The World Book employ more than 1300 people as core staff? They certainly hired more if "you write the article on Slovenia" counts as "hiring" but "writing one article" describes the other 99% of the 132,000 people, so you have to talk core staff.
There were 2300 *sales* staff at peak, but the editorial staff in the home office, number in the dozens. A figure I googled for extensively, but only found ... in the Wikipedia.
...by an open process run by a government than a closed process run by a private corporation the size of a government with no responsibility to the public whatsoever.
Because of the open process, this is going to timidly filter out a little of the worst of the worst, and that's about it.
You write as if this were entirely about your hyperventilated political polarization about *every issue* that has to be seen through an American lens.
The issue is global, just FYI. Your nutball belief that BLM is tearing apart a country of 350 million people, (half of whom vote and 60% of whom don't watch enough news to recall what BLM is about) will have no effect on whether a lot of really good banking jobs will disappear in the City of London or on the Tokyo Exchange. It will have less effect on whether automated manufacturing will throw 100 million Chinese back into rural poverty or not, after a generation of having had the taste of an industrial job.
These issues are very large and will shake nations and cause rumours of war, whether 12% of America remains quiet and submissive about police violence against people of their skin shade, or wave some signs in the streets about it...that being a comparatively small issue.
The real world is bigger than the one you see in American news media that have tailored their coverage to your local interests about American ethnic conflicts.
I just finished 30 years working for a municipality (Calgary) with about 12,000 desktops.
We were mixed DOS/Mac at first and when the IT department finally admitted that they were not toys, and that their beloved mainframe was dying at last, they took over PC IT from the departments, and immediately insisted on getting rid of Macs because of "one environment".
It was always about "support costs" and "total cost of ownership", a number they never actually had to calculate. They also never had to prove it was cheaper to do everything their way - but as a gross measure, our costs never went down. Not even on a per-PC basis.
We always had Unix, from when you had to have a workstation to run drafting software. Because IT clung to the mainframe to the bitter end, it was the engineering department Unix server room that took over running servers (this was happening around 1996, with the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China imminent, when the joke was "will it actually be Hong Kong that takes over China" was big - in our shop, it really was a bunch of drafting-support staff that took over the server room!) We also ran all the E-mail servers on Solaris because 'e-mail' was "an Internet thing" and all corporate E-mail until then had been IBM PROFS. Finally a few Windows servers were allowed to provide Outlook, but only after Windows 2000 Server got decent. Everything else is still Unix.
Unix support staff were NOT hard to find for a large server room. Windows server staff that could support a LARGE installation were rarer! MS courses turn out lots of guys that can run a dentist's office but very few that can run a city.
After all support went to IT...there was no actual support, except re-installs. They re-install the software, they re-install your whole machine, but they. will. NOT. come to your machine and help you with your difficult spreadsheet. None of the alleged "support" staff understand any of our software except for basic MS-Office apps they themselves have to use (and, as mentioned, the won't come help with that, either). But for any special office software of the type that the article speaks of, departments have to drum up their own local "power users" for support, who by the way are discouraged from it by IT and certainly given no passwords or special access.
And for that matter, what does the client even matter to IT? They hate clients. All business software that can possibly be moved to web apps for easier admin, has been. It would run on Android just as well.
So I just don't see what the big deal is. Here's an experiment: Offer, gasp TWO alternatives with internal costs that match the actual support costs of each choice, then let your customers choose which desktop they want.
A more recent story? Not being tasked as your research assistant, no, I've only got the story I came in with. Google is your friend.
And, by the way, did you have some reason for anybody to imagine that the editorial direction or fact-checking standards of Fox news have changed since 2003? I don't recall any major changes of senior staff in that time until Ailes was forced out in disgrace - he set ALL the standards around there, nobody crossed him. WHY would he have changed any standards in his late 60s while the old ones were making money hand-over-fist?
Getting a few simple facts right or wrong absolutely addresses the issue. If a school cannot successfully teach that, say, the British Queen is Head of State but not Head of Government and thus has only ceremonial power*, then it's pointless to discuss whether it has accurate stories about Theresa May having low-polling with professional women in the Midland Counties.
Perhaps you did not read the study, but those simple facts that heavy Fox viewers got wrong were 1) whether the rest of the world was generally in support of the American invasion of Iraq, 2) Were there links between AQ and Saddam (Bush explicitly denied it on TV) and 3) Had WMDs been found in 2003 [Infamously not]. 80% of Fox viewers had more than one misperception out of the three. And really, "The rest of the world supports the invasion", "WMDs have been found" and "Saddam is working with AQ" are the very genesis of what we are currently calling "Fake News".
(*Example chosen because Sarah Palin did not know that.)
Man, if you`re a nation of 350 million people who invented the Internet and have a larger security budget than the rest of the world put together, it must totally burn you to be hacked by a half-starved, half-drunk nation of 150 million.
But not as much as being told about it by a nation of 8 million.
Guys, we don`t agree with all your foreign adventurism and neo-colonialism, but if you`re going to run around the planet just making enemies hand-over-mailed-fist, you really need to up your cybersecurity game. You have WAY too many of your human IT resources trying to figure out how to out-snapchat SnapChat.
And hire Snowden back. That guy could run a computer.