Bingo. Most of these commenters are clearly not reading TFA. It describes the woman having to take a 3-hour ride and pay a fee *to charge her cell phone*. This economic decision of hers wasn't made lightly, she shopped and worked it out the way you'd have to justify buying a car. With this trickle of power, she has lighting at night, and she can charge the cell phone, and she can charge others in the village to charge *their* cell-phones, though that payback is just for early adopters; everybody in her village will have them soon.
The picture gets better going forward five years. By then, most poor Africans will have cell phones. LED lighting is expected to double in lumens/watt efficiency in that time, and more so in economic efficiency as prices may drop by 40%. (The market for LED over here is going to explode soon, because Compact-Fluorescent is always going to look bluish and cold, but LED's are coming out now with CRI [colour indexes] as nice as incandescent. The economies of scale will start to kick in then.) And, of course, solar panels are improving too.
At some point, development in these places will reach a point where they have so many electrical needs that they will pay for a few local wires to a small generator. Once the locals pay to wire up the village, a market has just appeared for an entrepreneur who can get a line out to them from a real power station. At least we can hope that works, since 50 years of attempts to teleport these villages from nothing to mid-20th century in one Big Development have done almost nothing but fail.
...of you, to not know about the central problem of development we've been discovering since the 1960's. By the 90's, it was accepted wisdom and changes slowly began to be made, despite all the money to be made from selling them hydroelectric dams.
You see, attempting to catapult unready societies into the late industrial revolution from a 1700's-era starting point kept failing and failing and failing. Books like "The Road to Hell" by aid professional Michael Maren and "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins brought out how so much of that "aid" was to benefit the givers, not the receivers. Perkins was particularly damning about hydroelectric dams and power stations being built all over the world with "aid" money all those loans that went into default. It was a straightforward recipe:
(1) Bogus economic study of how the country would blossom and prosper if only they had power, a market would explode as soon as it was available, and the national or World Bank loan would be paid back in years. (Perkins' job - he goes over it in detail for Ecuador and Indonesia). (2) Local "400 families" get extravagant cuts of the action, of course, and they approve the deal, being also the government. (3) Dam is built, Western engineering firms do well, 400 families do well, local people are bumped off the reservoir land, sometimes at gunpoint, etc. (4) No market actually arises, country wasn't ready after all, loan goes into default. (5) People of country end up with higher taxes and lower services for about 40 years to pay back World Bank and IMF.
High capital investments come with high risk. You can substitute "coal-fired" for "hydroelectric" if you like, it actually makes it worse since you now have to develop TWO major plants - a coal mine and a power station - with a populace that has trouble keeping a local chlorine-drip 1-man water treatment plant running reliably.
We built up to a massively centralized economy with small numbers of very large stations and plants and factories and so forth for power and materiel production, only after more than a century of slowly scaling up from very small distributed ones. We thought we could take them straight to Big Industry, and we were wrong. And it was not an "honest mistake"; the decision to try that at all was highly affected by the profits to be made just attempting it, because others had to pay the price for the error.
Indeed. There being no actual super-powered villains, I've never heard of the police being unable to handle any crime, at least since SWAT teams were invented. The only help the police need is with COVERAGE - there aren't enough of them to be within screaming distance of every point in town all night.
The only superhero kit really needed is already here: with cell phones, citizen patrols are quite possible, and just depend on community participation..
Neal Stephenson did a WIRED article over a decade ago about how maybe the web and cheap webcams would solve this problem: we have a little window in our work PCs showing a street in Honshu or Karachi all day and we phone the Karachi 911 if we see a crime at their 2AM - and they do the same for us. And it only works if millions sign up.
My mother was 80 and absolutely terminal with acute myeloblastic leukemia. Her immune system was failing and every time she got a cold it wa 3 days of delirium, failing organs, massive antibiotics. Her mind was also going due to a series of small strokes. The doctors asked us (not told us) to have a conversation with the ethics-types about choices. We did go with the choice to not continue heroic measures when the next crisis hit.
What sticks in my mind, though, are that the doctors guiding the conversation and outlining the choices were very much on the side of continuing the fight. They pointed out that families are often emotional about the suffering of the patient, and the patient exhausted and ready to just give up; they pointed out that while her odds of living much longer were low, they were not zero. (And, indeed, she made it 18 months, which was remarkable given her condition.)
When she was moved to a "care home" that was NOT a hospice, I almost had to have an argument with the doctor there about her "no heroics" decision - not a real fight, but he asked me about six times in different ways if we were really sure about this, if we'd had a conversation with the ethicists, if Mom had been able to understand the decision at the time (she was by then beyond such a conversation).
And all this was in Calgary, Canada.
I completely believe your story, I'm just saying you need to take a large enough group of such stories to do statistics with to arrive at the chance you'd be guided poorly by Canadian doctors about end-of-life issues. One anecdote shouldn't set people's opinions about a national policy. I'm not aware of ANY Canadian friends with a story like yours, and many with stories like mine.
Based on that sample - itself too small, I admit - but also on all the policy discussions and their tone, that make the Canadian news, I believe that my story is more representative than yours.
But thanks for sharing (not meant sarcastically) - I suspect those are some Canadian doctors in for some hard monthly review sessions with their peers about this outcome.
Which party is ascendant does not appear to affect the larger sweep of history by all that much. Loads of Democrats voted for the War. Banking deregulation did start under Reagan and Bush I, but continued merrily under Clinton. Obama was supposed to be this big transformation, but all the civil rights slide and the wars continued untouched; banking and health reforms were way more timid than expected.
As for the Stalinist Obama Takeover....they're arguing about whether income over $363,000 should be taxed at 35% or 39.6%...spare me.
But Prop 19, that's the first crack in a very, very big wall that has stood there for over 75 years, making a crime out of a handful of leaves. Several tens of millions of people know that the underlying assumptions of that law are utterly false, Literally millions of people who work jobs, raise families, pay mortgages fear arrest because of it, and have all their adult lives.
It's a big deal. And enough has happened in recent years (complete decrim in Portugal, popularity for medical use) to make this, well, umm, change we can believe in. For those of us who thought it was surely going to happen in the 80's, before a sudden rightward swing brought stupid arguments (and lying ads based on brainwaves of coma patients) right back to fhe fore when we thought them defeated at last, it's starting to look Really Possible at long, long last.
Every US election cycle, I get more proud of Canada. My latest warm fuzzy? There was a nice article in Maclean's (our Newsweek) a few months ago about Beverly Mclachlin, our Chief Justice for the last 10 years, and the various notable decisions of the Mclachlin court. It's only because of that article I know her name, and I can't name any of the other eight.
Whereas, just from news spillover, I can probably name most of the SCOTUS, because every confirmation and a dozen decisions every year are so politically charged. Polarized pitched battles seem to infuse every branch of the US governments, at every level. Quite frankly, it sounds exhausting.
Gartner's been saying this stuff for 20 years. In practice, the news that software has ongoing costs was used to exterminate any solution except Microsoft from large organizations.
In order to do that, non-IT departments had to be forbidden to install or choose any software at all, or they would have shown an annoying tendency to pick software that worked better for their needs. So IT had to remove all admin privileges and get Purchasing to not permit any purchase orders for software not OK'd by IT.
The larger the organization, the better the argument works. The proportional costs actually drop through advantages of scale; but the absolute cost starts to sound appalling when multiplied by 10,000, particularly when a single, generic, (Garter-quoted) number like $1000/application/year/PC (developed by dividing the whole support budget by the number of apps) is used for all apps, including handy little graphics utilities like XnView.
In theory, a department could prove by business case that some second (third...) solution to the same basic software category within the organization was justified by some benefit. In practice, this was made almost impossible to prove and was limited to graphics jobs being allowed Macs.
It was used to prevent Firefox, for instance; though free, the same "administration costs" were applied to the decision. Pleas that customers could upgrade and manage it themselves by clicking the "upgrade" button were scoffed at; one or two anecdotes of users that got themselves into a mess were multiplied by 1000 PCs to claim that vast costs would be incurred.
In short, this argument was used to take the "Personal" out of corporate PCs. Someone I know discovered there were only a few things he COULD change on his desktop; couldn't even delete the icons for Approved Corporate Software he didn't use. But he could, and did, change one icon to read "Their Computer".
I've noticed a difference between some political systems I know best - British, Canadian, American. British and Canadian Members of Parliament, cabinet Ministers, and so on, generally will resign at the drop of an accusation that stands a chance of lasting more than a few news cycles - anything even debatable. If they don't, the PM tends to ask for a resignation. It's nothing to do with guilt; it's about Party Vs. Member.
The political agenda is in the hands of the Party, and even the PM is expected to put it ahead of his own career. You resign, not because you're guilty, but because it's bad for the Party (capital P!) to have the news be about the accusation story. It should be about whatever bill or program they're flogging this week. So the guy resigns, the accusers do a dance of victory - and are staring at another person in the position the next morning, one with the same agenda and probably the same qualifications. It makes it a very minor victory.
(The resigner, by the way, is generally rewarded with the best jobs the party can hand out...and if the problem does turn out to be minor, they show right back up in public office soon after, trumpeting their heroic sacrifice for the team at rallies. Long-run, being a smear victim is probably a career plus...)
American politicians, on the other hand, seem to regard resignation as confession, and fight to the bitter end, past where EVERYBODY knows they're guilty. (OK, Nixon resigned...after his friend Barry Goldwater told him that impeachment was certain and that he had maybe SIX votes in the Senate.)
So she may be just saying "The material's good enough to keep the news filled with police and court statements for weeks or months, so Do The Right Thing."... and there'll just be another Wikileaks rep on the job in the morning.
I know that Japan is practically the only south-east Asian nation that *doesn't* have the selective abortion issue. If they all have it, there won't be any place in SE Asia with an excess of women dropping from the trees.
Granted, the "Asia Needs Women" (so much for Mars) scenario does involve a dramatic attitude change on the part of the husbands.
A dramatic attitude change in Japan might work wonders, as their ratio is still about even, but it won't help in China which now has a 1.19 male/female at birth and 24 million men face single lives. They'll need a dramatic attitude change. AND more women.
I'm just guessing, here, no research done (hey, a/. tradition) but I suspect that if your culture continues to have a deeply-embedded prejudice for treating women like crap, and wives in particular as servants for yourself and her mother-in-law, it could be tough finding a wife.
This problem exists to varying degrees in Asia, and is already being hugely exacerbated by a plummeting female/male ratio in some countries due to selective abortion and even (quiet) infanticide.
A whole generation of men the size of the whole US population won't be able to find women in the coming generation.
And if you aren't sympathetic, maybe you will be later. Because that's also the generation that's going to enjoy a whole new level of industrialized prosperity - enough to basically come bidding for women from other countries.
Women from America's growing underclass, as rich and poor grow further apart might find a nice condo in Bangalore and a (pathetically) grateful south Asian hubby more attractive than a trailer park...
The required reading on this topic is programmer/author Ellen Ullman. Her book, "Close to the Machine" and her articles in Salon, like "The Dumbing-Down of Programming", often speak to her position as an aging programmer.
Most of the programming team consisted of programmers who had great facility with Windows, Microsoft Visual C++ and the Foundation Classes. In no time at all, it seemed, they had generated many screenfuls of windows and toolbars and dialogs, all with connections to networks and data sources, thousands and thousands of lines of code. But when the inevitable difficulties of debugging came, they seemed at sea. In the face of the usual weird and unexplainable outcomes, they stood a bit agog. It was left to the UNIX-trained programmers to fix things. The UNIX team members were accustomed to having to know. Their view of programming as language-as-text gave them the patience to look slowly through the code. In the end, the overall "productivity" of the system, the fact that it came into being at all, was the handiwork not of tools that sought to make programming seem easy, but the work of engineers who had no fear of "hard."
In other articles I couldn't find on the web, I do remember Ullman writing about being the young programmer who rolled her eyes at the objections of mainframe-era programmers to client/server...and then finding herself on the other side of the same story, making noises like "...but doesn't that create a lot of network traffic and latency?" at web-app programmers...as they rolled their eyes whenever they thought the client/server-era fogey wasn't looking.
At 52, I count as tar-pit fodder myself now, worse because my primary work is engineering and I could afford to drop off the keep-up train in the 90's, never learned Java. (Though I find the office can still be dazzled by humble scripts and mini-apps done in Perl and VBA/Excel; people don't care HOW you automate boring work, you just have to do it). I was discussing this issue with a 40-something friend who is a full-time programmer and did keep up; his reply was that it's more important to know that a sort cannot beat O(n log(n)) than to know the current language to write it in.
I believe that most ageism in IT is from its culture. A previous poster was, simply, dead wrong to imply that other fields like medicine and engineering do not change as rapidly as IT. They do. We now use materials, construction equipment, and techniques that did not exist a decade ago. However, as a very young business, IT was *always* stacked with young people and young bosses. It's only recently that there could be such a thing as a 60-year-old programmer. It used to be assumed no woman had the "temperament" to practice law. As people gradually discover that older programmers are (usually) still useful, I think the attitude will fade away.
As Kurt Vonnegut once put it, the real two parties in the USA are "Winners" and "Losers".
Ralph Nader would be your classic Loser. Stands always for a set of principles, never wins a thing. Ron Paul also very principled, despite having won at one level, despite having a crowd of fanatics that love his every utterance ("Nader's Raiders" could probably exchange some notes with them) has no better chance at a presidential run than Nader, and so is another Loser.
The "rightward shift" of recent decades has basically been both parties wanting to be Winners, because corporate lobbying, corporate personnel going through revolving-doors into government and vice-versa, and regulatory capture of government agencies like the FCC and the MMS, and other forms of influence, have clarified for them all that anti-corporate laws and regulations will make you a Loser.
Why nobody ever seems to do a kamikaze political career, a one-term deal where he does all the damage to the system he can and goes back to his law practice, mystifies me. Unless that's what Alan Grayson's plan is. (No plan is actually visible at present.)
So both parties now claim to champion the Regular Little Guy while emphatically not doing so. The only difference I can spot is that Republicans openly claim that What's Good For Business IS Good For Everybody, and Democrats claim to be restraining business while putting only the most superficial and ineffective limits and controls on them, for show.
Please, I'm not taking sides on that. It's possible that letting telecoms do anything they want with the airwaves and internet is a good thing, letting Wall Street make any deals is wants is a good thing, letting oil companies drill and frac anywhere they want (not "frack", that would be obscene) is a good thing. I'm just saying that one party says that and does it, the other ALSO does it while saying something different.
It's getting ever-harder to stand for Party rather than principles, and much of Mr. Paul's appeal is he actually does so, breaking with is party, diametrically, and often. I happen to think his principles are frequently batshit crazy, but hey, I'm Canadian and can safely be dismissed from Serious Discussion.
"We're probably going to do that THIS century" ?
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Look For AI, Not Aliens
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· Score: 2, Insightful
We were probably going to do that [invent AI] LAST century. "If we're any example"... don't use us as an "example" until we've actually done it.
In 1983 I was a year away from getting a CompSci degree and attended the party for my "analysis of algorithms" GTA that was getting her MSc in AI. She said frankly at the party that the turning point was a system that actually *understood* language as well as a human 3-year-old, the point where we start understanding and creating arbitrary longer-than-4-word sentences. And that she was aware of no system on Earth that could.
I'm still not, and that's a good 40 years after it was first expected. HAL in 2001 was based on hard science and reasonable expectations of 1969. 10 years of hard work after that, computers have the whole Internet to troll for text, sound,images to learn from.
I'm not saying there's zero progress or that it can't be done. But it's become and extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, not something to wave your hand and say "it'll happen, so just use us doing it as an example". Heck, we aren't doing that for fusion any more, and at least we have a THEORY for that, it's "merely" very hard engineering.
When The Economist magazine became the first general-interest magazine to cover the space junk problem about 15 years ago, it pointed out that the problem was there was no international agreement or agency forcing private owners of satellites to budget enough fuel to de-orbit the satellite at the end of its life. Every gram costs a small fortune, so they used every gram of fuel to keep the satellite "stationary" (i.e. in desired orbit).
The space junk problem (except for paint chips and astronaut toolbags) nearly ceases to exist if everybody would just de-orbit their property. I find it hard to believe that the mass of a football-field-sized balloon is less than the fuel to just drop the orbit into a brief but colourful brush with the atmosphere.
The taxes on oil primarily are taxes on gasoline and diesel for consumer use - as farmers know, industrial use is not so much. The taxes on coal are a joke. I googled the words "taxes coal" and came up with this news story from Tennessee, 2008:
"The state coal tax is currently set at 20 cents per ton and has not been increased since 1984.
As introduced, the bill would have set the tax at 4.5 percent of gross value, which Jackson said is the same rate charged in neighboring Kentucky. Members of the Senate Tax Subcommittee suggested the levy was too high at an earlier meeting and presented an amendment Tuesday that calls for a two-step increase to 3 percent."...while that $557B comes to about 14% of worldwide spending on oil & coal, based (roughly) on the Wikipedia articles.
I'm sure that on the whole, more is taken from than given to the fossil-fuel industries, but the subsidies, as another poster mentioned mostly in Asia, mean that world-wide, the "pressure" on the whole industry is much lighter than most would assume.
It's not that renewables are economically viable in any situation where the fossil-fuel industries don't have to pay for their externalities; it's a way of highlighting that far from bringing in those externalities in the form of a tax or fund or cap or any other restriction, we are taxing their use at all, very lightly.
The moment all the subsidies stop and something like $50/T (C) is imposed on digging or pumping carbon out of the ground (and $50/T is paid to those who put it in), the game is pretty much up for fossil, save where gas/kerosene/diesel are the only way to go for high-energy density (aviation, remote cabins).
Subsidies are not just there because of lobbying and power, though - subsidizing cheap energy is a great economic stimulus in general, which is why you find it in new, growing, developing economies especially. Which is the heart of the warming issue: if "saving the world" involves telling a couple of billion Asians to spend an extra generation in poverty, is it worth it?
I'm a raving pro-nuke, but even the biggest solar detractor should be willing to admit this. In the few places in the States with the highest "insolation" (national champion: Death Valley, about 8 kWh/m2/day) you could build some very effective solar plants that would be perfect for handling the sunshine-related air-conditioning power spikes that plague that same region. And it wouldn't be that hard to push the power as far as California and through the western half of the US "Sun Belt" that has skyrocketed in population.
I see nuclear as the best choice for "base load" power, but not all power is base load, and for the air-conditioning related spikes, solar is actually a pretty natural, even obvious, option. It's not even 10% of the national consumption, but would eliminate the guilt people are feeling now when they gratefully turn on that blessedly cool air.
Actually, France sells power to Italy at $0.05/kWh for 48.9 B kWh (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf101.html) I managed to find the price one customer knows it can get, 35 Euro/MWH (about that 5 cents/kwh) here: http://in.reuters.com/article/idINLDE65T1P920100630
On the contrary, nuclear power in France is not subsidized (why subsidize Italy by billions of Euros per year?) it is rather made MORE expensive by union featherbedding and other giveaways to local towns to buy their acceptance of th plant. And it works. Most French towns are overjoyed to have a plant built nearby.
Dude, did you READ your own link? It clearly says that EDF is on the EU carpet because they were charging artificially HIGH prices for electricity to downstream providers, in an anti-competitive effort to RAISE the competitor prices.
When I looked into EDF prices, the one I came across was the recent agreement to sell Italy power in bulk for $50/MWh - 5 per kWh.
Are you seriously suggesting that after 30 years of nukes, the French government is using French taxpayer euros to subsidize Italian power companies, all to hide how expensive the power actually still is? That's just hard to believe.
If you say stupid nonsense that is apparently devised to excuse incompetence and get you out of improving a bad situation, you get fired.
And I know just the public official to demonstrate this life lesson with. I'm sure that his sacrifice will be deeply appreciated by all the children instructed.
Of course, he might not see it that way, now that it's HIS life being screwed by the "life lesson". He was OK when it was just thousands of students.
I second the statement, "I'm not claustrophobic, but this is insane". It's the sheer un-rescue-ability of it all, if you simply get wedged, that gets to me.
A young man died cave diving in the Rockies not far from Calgary a few years back. The awful bit was that he got delayed coming back, wasn't sure how far it was, went to the limit of his air, turned the little knob that gives you the last five minutes, and used that time scratching out a goodbye to his family on the air tank.
Right around one more corner from where he would have seen the flashlights of his friends waiting for him.
Lessons I took from it:
1) Cave diving is insane.
2) If you're ever certain you're at that last moment of your life, nevertheless spend it trying to survive. Your family actually knew you loved them already.
The original novel came out at the height of the baby boom hitting adulthood; across the developing world, the population explosion was making it look like the whole world was kids. (Erlich's "The Population Bomb" was just out, too.) So they had this world where you were shot at 20, there were only teenagers. How the high-tech machinery kept running was never explained.
The movie raised the 20 to 30 to accommodate a not-nearly-teen Michael York. Who kept the lights on was still never explained; everybody seemed to lounge about in day-glo party clothes.
Of course, it was terrible science fiction; many analysts were pointing to dropping birth rates in the developed world and debunking Erlich even at the time. The youth explosion of the decade was a blip. Now the world faces an increasingly aging population and it's the loss of 50-somethings from the workforce that is creating concerns.
Apparently, they are good at keeping the lights on.
Well, your throat hasn't been slit and your rural home taken by foreign invaders, because of the Army, or marauding gangs out of "Road Warrior", because the justice system puts criminals in jail if they start to form them. Nothing in your house has electrocuted you and the house hasn't blown up or fallen down because the government imposes standards on vendors of everything from copper wire and gas appliances to lumber.
And most public debt is taken out to pay for large, slow-payback infrastructure like the $5M/mile roads out to your house that we city people don't use. Perhaps you got this way because you insisted on living outside the family home in a tent while your father sat inside, "wasting" 40% of his income on the non-productive activity of paying off the home mortgage, which is the exact financial equivalent of most national debts.
People hate taxes; they tend to assume government doesn't spend the money on something for them, but rather flushes it down the toilet in some way. (And this can be hard to dispute some days).
So make it a sinking fund. Take a ton of carbon out of the ground and into the biosphere, pay $50 into the fund. If you take a ton of carbon out of the air and put it in the ground (biochar a hectare of trees, say) and you can take $50 out of the fund.
Coal-generated power goes up by a crippling 5 cents per kWh; nuclear and renewables become competitive. The price of gas, alas, barely changes, but it's starting to look like electric cars can kick their ass anyway, given one more advance in batteries.
Theoretically, the fund stabilizes in size when as much carbon is going out of the air as into it, either because most forms of carbon emissions have been replaced with cleaner (and now cheaper) fuels, or because "biochar" and ocean-iron-seeding and all that stuff actually works at $50/ton like they claim.
If not, you re-analyse and tweak the $/ton figure. Please note: by definition, this does as much good to the overall economy as harm. Some things that have been causing externalities get more expensive, some things that repair externalities get cheaper.
The greatest thing about my new "Linux Mint" distribution with "CompizConfig" was the "negative" trick under "Accessibility". It negates all the colour bits in a window or desktop, turning the usual "black ink on white paper" look of most web pages (at least news pages) to white-on-black.
Hitting that button at night makes you go "aaahhh" as your eyes stop aching when you hadn't noticed how strained they were.
It was all keewwwwl for them to make the Mac be the first computer to have word processing and so forth look like black ink on paper when every computer monitor before them had been white text on dark. But direct light into your face is NOT reflections from paper and it was always a stupid idea for legibility and ergonomics both.
I'm not sure about the sleep thing (I don't recall any trouble before I got the "negative" function a few months ago) but trust me, get that capability if you use either a CRT or LCD with modern apps and web pages in a dim room. Your optic nerves will practically sob with relief.
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Bingo. Most of these commenters are clearly not reading TFA. It describes the woman having to take a 3-hour ride and pay a fee *to charge her cell phone*. This economic decision of hers wasn't made lightly, she shopped and worked it out the way you'd have to justify buying a car. With this trickle of power, she has lighting at night, and she can charge the cell phone, and she can charge others in the village to charge *their* cell-phones, though that payback is just for early adopters; everybody in her village will have them soon.
The picture gets better going forward five years. By then, most poor Africans will have cell phones. LED lighting is expected to double in lumens/watt efficiency in that time, and more so in economic efficiency as prices may drop by 40%. (The market for LED over here is going to explode soon, because Compact-Fluorescent is always going to look bluish and cold, but LED's are coming out now with CRI [colour indexes] as nice as incandescent. The economies of scale will start to kick in then.) And, of course, solar panels are improving too.
At some point, development in these places will reach a point where they have so many electrical needs that they will pay for a few local wires to a small generator. Once the locals pay to wire up the village, a market has just appeared for an entrepreneur who can get a line out to them from a real power station. At least we can hope that works, since 50 years of attempts to teleport these villages from nothing to mid-20th century in one Big Development have done almost nothing but fail.
...of you, to not know about the central problem of development we've been discovering since the 1960's. By the 90's, it was accepted wisdom and changes slowly began to be made, despite all the money to be made from selling them hydroelectric dams.
You see, attempting to catapult unready societies into the late industrial revolution from a 1700's-era starting point kept failing and failing and failing. Books like "The Road to Hell" by aid professional Michael Maren and "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins brought out how so much of that "aid" was to benefit the givers, not the receivers. Perkins was particularly damning about hydroelectric dams and power stations being built all over the world with "aid" money all those loans that went into default. It was a straightforward recipe:
(1) Bogus economic study of how the country would blossom and prosper if only they had power, a market would explode as soon as it was available, and the national or World Bank loan would be paid back in years. (Perkins' job - he goes over it in detail for Ecuador and Indonesia).
(2) Local "400 families" get extravagant cuts of the action, of course, and they approve the deal, being also the government.
(3) Dam is built, Western engineering firms do well, 400 families do well, local people are bumped off the reservoir land, sometimes at gunpoint, etc.
(4) No market actually arises, country wasn't ready after all, loan goes into default.
(5) People of country end up with higher taxes and lower services for about 40 years to pay back World Bank and IMF.
High capital investments come with high risk. You can substitute "coal-fired" for "hydroelectric" if you like, it actually makes it worse since you now have to develop TWO major plants - a coal mine and a power station - with a populace that has trouble keeping a local chlorine-drip 1-man water treatment plant running reliably.
We built up to a massively centralized economy with small numbers of very large stations and plants and factories and so forth for power and materiel production, only after more than a century of slowly scaling up from very small distributed ones. We thought we could take them straight to Big Industry, and we were wrong. And it was not an "honest mistake"; the decision to try that at all was highly affected by the profits to be made just attempting it, because others had to pay the price for the error.
Indeed. There being no actual super-powered villains, I've never heard of the police being unable to handle any crime, at least since SWAT teams were invented. The only help the police need is with COVERAGE - there aren't enough of them to be within screaming distance of every point in town all night.
The only superhero kit really needed is already here: with cell phones, citizen patrols are quite possible, and just depend on community participation..
Neal Stephenson did a WIRED article over a decade ago about how maybe the web and cheap webcams would solve this problem: we have a little window in our work PCs showing a street in Honshu or Karachi all day and we phone the Karachi 911 if we see a crime at their 2AM - and they do the same for us. And it only works if millions sign up.
My mother was 80 and absolutely terminal with acute myeloblastic leukemia. Her immune system was failing and every time she got a cold it wa 3 days of delirium, failing organs, massive antibiotics. Her mind was also going due to a series of small strokes. The doctors asked us (not told us) to have a conversation with the ethics-types about choices. We did go with the choice to not continue heroic measures when the next crisis hit.
What sticks in my mind, though, are that the doctors guiding the conversation and outlining the choices were very much on the side of continuing the fight. They pointed out that families are often emotional about the suffering of the patient, and the patient exhausted and ready to just give up; they pointed out that while her odds of living much longer were low, they were not zero. (And, indeed, she made it 18 months, which was remarkable given her condition.)
When she was moved to a "care home" that was NOT a hospice, I almost had to have an argument with the doctor there about her "no heroics" decision - not a real fight, but he asked me about six times in different ways if we were really sure about this, if we'd had a conversation with the ethicists, if Mom had been able to understand the decision at the time (she was by then beyond such a conversation).
And all this was in Calgary, Canada.
I completely believe your story, I'm just saying you need to take a large enough group of such stories to do statistics with to arrive at the chance you'd be guided poorly by Canadian doctors about end-of-life issues. One anecdote shouldn't set people's opinions about a national policy. I'm not aware of ANY Canadian friends with a story like yours, and many with stories like mine.
Based on that sample - itself too small, I admit - but also on all the policy discussions and their tone, that make the Canadian news, I believe that my story is more representative than yours.
But thanks for sharing (not meant sarcastically) - I suspect those are some Canadian doctors in for some hard monthly review sessions with their peers about this outcome.
Which party is ascendant does not appear to affect the larger sweep of history by all that much. Loads of Democrats voted for the War. Banking deregulation did start under Reagan and Bush I, but continued merrily under Clinton. Obama was supposed to be this big transformation, but all the civil rights slide and the wars continued untouched; banking and health reforms were way more timid than expected.
As for the Stalinist Obama Takeover....they're arguing about whether income over $363,000 should be taxed at 35% or 39.6% ...spare me.
But Prop 19, that's the first crack in a very, very big wall that has stood there for over 75 years, making a crime out of a handful of leaves. Several tens of millions of people know that the underlying assumptions of that law are utterly false, Literally millions of people who work jobs, raise families, pay mortgages fear arrest because of it, and have all their adult lives.
It's a big deal. And enough has happened in recent years (complete decrim in Portugal, popularity for medical use) to make this, well, umm, change we can believe in. For those of us who thought it was surely going to happen in the 80's, before a sudden rightward swing brought stupid arguments (and lying ads based on brainwaves of coma patients) right back to fhe fore when we thought them defeated at last, it's starting to look Really Possible at long, long last.
Every US election cycle, I get more proud of Canada. My latest warm fuzzy? There was a nice article in Maclean's (our Newsweek) a few months ago about Beverly Mclachlin, our Chief Justice for the last 10 years, and the various notable decisions of the Mclachlin court. It's only because of that article I know her name, and I can't name any of the other eight.
Whereas, just from news spillover, I can probably name most of the SCOTUS, because every confirmation and a dozen decisions every year are so politically charged. Polarized pitched battles seem to infuse every branch of the US governments, at every level. Quite frankly, it sounds exhausting.
Gartner's been saying this stuff for 20 years. In practice, the news that software has ongoing costs was used to exterminate any solution except Microsoft from large organizations.
In order to do that, non-IT departments had to be forbidden to install or choose any software at all, or they would have shown an annoying tendency to pick software that worked better for their needs. So IT had to remove all admin privileges and get Purchasing to not permit any purchase orders for software not OK'd by IT.
The larger the organization, the better the argument works. The proportional costs actually drop through advantages of scale; but the absolute cost starts to sound appalling when multiplied by 10,000, particularly when a single, generic, (Garter-quoted) number like $1000/application/year/PC (developed by dividing the whole support budget by the number of apps) is used for all apps, including handy little graphics utilities like XnView.
In theory, a department could prove by business case that some second (third...) solution to the same basic software category within the organization was justified by some benefit. In practice, this was made almost impossible to prove and was limited to graphics jobs being allowed Macs.
It was used to prevent Firefox, for instance; though free, the same "administration costs" were applied to the decision. Pleas that customers could upgrade and manage it themselves by clicking the "upgrade" button were scoffed at; one or two anecdotes of users that got themselves into a mess were multiplied by 1000 PCs to claim that vast costs would be incurred.
In short, this argument was used to take the "Personal" out of corporate PCs. Someone I know discovered there were only a few things he COULD change on his desktop; couldn't even delete the icons for Approved Corporate Software he didn't use. But he could, and did, change one icon to read "Their Computer".
I've noticed a difference between some political systems I know best - British, Canadian, American. British and Canadian Members of Parliament, cabinet Ministers, and so on, generally will resign at the drop of an accusation that stands a chance of lasting more than a few news cycles - anything even debatable. If they don't, the PM tends to ask for a resignation. It's nothing to do with guilt; it's about Party Vs. Member.
The political agenda is in the hands of the Party, and even the PM is expected to put it ahead of his own career. You resign, not because you're guilty, but because it's bad for the Party (capital P!) to have the news be about the accusation story. It should be about whatever bill or program they're flogging this week. So the guy resigns, the accusers do a dance of victory - and are staring at another person in the position the next morning, one with the same agenda and probably the same qualifications. It makes it a very minor victory.
(The resigner, by the way, is generally rewarded with the best jobs the party can hand out...and if the problem does turn out to be minor, they show right back up in public office soon after, trumpeting their heroic sacrifice for the team at rallies. Long-run, being a smear victim is probably a career plus...)
American politicians, on the other hand, seem to regard resignation as confession, and fight to the bitter end, past where EVERYBODY knows they're guilty. (OK, Nixon resigned...after his friend Barry Goldwater told him that impeachment was certain and that he had maybe SIX votes in the Senate.)
So she may be just saying "The material's good enough to keep the news filled with police and court statements for weeks or months, so Do The Right Thing." ... and there'll just be another Wikileaks rep on the job in the morning.
...at least according to Larry Niven, in "The Soft Weapon" (1967) which was remade into a Star Trek cartoon script "The Slaver Weapon".
"There was smoke across the sky, a trail of red smoke wound in a tight spiral coil..." - one of the first "Interstellar Tourist Attractions".
It's been depicted in fan art:
http://www.scifi-az.com/dixon/ddbetalyrae.htm ...and by the great Chesley Bonestell, who was doing astronomical paintings back before space travel, though this was in 1978:
http://www.noreascon.org/retroart/images/Bonestell,%20Double%20Star.jpg
I know that Japan is practically the only south-east Asian nation that *doesn't* have the selective abortion issue. If they all have it, there won't be any place in SE Asia with an excess of women dropping from the trees.
Granted, the "Asia Needs Women" (so much for Mars) scenario does involve a dramatic attitude change on the part of the husbands.
A dramatic attitude change in Japan might work wonders, as their ratio is still about even, but it won't help in China which now has a 1.19 male/female at birth and 24 million men face single lives. They'll need a dramatic attitude change. AND more women.
I'm just guessing, here, no research done (hey, a /. tradition) but I suspect that if your culture continues to have a deeply-embedded prejudice for treating women like crap, and wives in particular as servants for yourself and her mother-in-law, it could be tough finding a wife.
This problem exists to varying degrees in Asia, and is already being hugely exacerbated by a plummeting female/male ratio in some countries due to selective abortion and even (quiet) infanticide.
A whole generation of men the size of the whole US population won't be able to find women in the coming generation.
And if you aren't sympathetic, maybe you will be later. Because that's also the generation that's going to enjoy a whole new level of industrialized prosperity - enough to basically come bidding for women from other countries.
Women from America's growing underclass, as rich and poor grow further apart might find a nice condo in Bangalore and a (pathetically) grateful south Asian hubby more attractive than a trailer park...
Here at Salon, from 12 years ago. (Hmmm, the young programmers in the article are now old...) http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/1998/05/13/feature/index.html
In other articles I couldn't find on the web, I do remember Ullman writing about being the young programmer who rolled her eyes at the objections of mainframe-era programmers to client/server...and then finding herself on the other side of the same story, making noises like "...but doesn't that create a lot of network traffic and latency?" at web-app programmers...as they rolled their eyes whenever they thought the client/server-era fogey wasn't looking.
At 52, I count as tar-pit fodder myself now, worse because my primary work is engineering and I could afford to drop off the keep-up train in the 90's, never learned Java. (Though I find the office can still be dazzled by humble scripts and mini-apps done in Perl and VBA/Excel; people don't care HOW you automate boring work, you just have to do it). I was discussing this issue with a 40-something friend who is a full-time programmer and did keep up; his reply was that it's more important to know that a sort cannot beat O(n log(n)) than to know the current language to write it in.
I believe that most ageism in IT is from its culture. A previous poster was, simply, dead wrong to imply that other fields like medicine and engineering do not change as rapidly as IT. They do. We now use materials, construction equipment, and techniques that did not exist a decade ago. However, as a very young business, IT was *always* stacked with young people and young bosses. It's only recently that there could be such a thing as a 60-year-old programmer. It used to be assumed no woman had the "temperament" to practice law. As people gradually discover that older programmers are (usually) still useful, I think the attitude will fade away.
As Kurt Vonnegut once put it, the real two parties in the USA are "Winners" and "Losers".
Ralph Nader would be your classic Loser. Stands always for a set of principles, never wins a thing. Ron Paul also very principled, despite having won at one level, despite having a crowd of fanatics that love his every utterance ("Nader's Raiders" could probably exchange some notes with them) has no better chance at a presidential run than Nader, and so is another Loser.
The "rightward shift" of recent decades has basically been both parties wanting to be Winners, because corporate lobbying, corporate personnel going through revolving-doors into government and vice-versa, and regulatory capture of government agencies like the FCC and the MMS, and other forms of influence, have clarified for them all that anti-corporate laws and regulations will make you a Loser.
Why nobody ever seems to do a kamikaze political career, a one-term deal where he does all the damage to the system he can and goes back to his law practice, mystifies me. Unless that's what Alan Grayson's plan is. (No plan is actually visible at present.)
So both parties now claim to champion the Regular Little Guy while emphatically not doing so. The only difference I can spot is that Republicans openly claim that What's Good For Business IS Good For Everybody, and Democrats claim to be restraining business while putting only the most superficial and ineffective limits and controls on them, for show.
Please, I'm not taking sides on that. It's possible that letting telecoms do anything they want with the airwaves and internet is a good thing, letting Wall Street make any deals is wants is a good thing, letting oil companies drill and frac anywhere they want (not "frack", that would be obscene) is a good thing. I'm just saying that one party says that and does it, the other ALSO does it while saying something different.
It's getting ever-harder to stand for Party rather than principles, and much of Mr. Paul's appeal is he actually does so, breaking with is party, diametrically, and often. I happen to think his principles are frequently batshit crazy, but hey, I'm Canadian and can safely be dismissed from Serious Discussion.
We were probably going to do that [invent AI] LAST century. "If we're any example" ... don't use us as an "example" until we've actually done it.
In 1983 I was a year away from getting a CompSci degree and attended the party for my "analysis of algorithms" GTA that was getting her MSc in AI. She said frankly at the party that the turning point was a system that actually *understood* language as well as a human 3-year-old, the point where we start understanding and creating arbitrary longer-than-4-word sentences. And that she was aware of no system on Earth that could.
I'm still not, and that's a good 40 years after it was first expected. HAL in 2001 was based on hard science and reasonable expectations of 1969. 10 years of hard work after that, computers have the whole Internet to troll for text, sound,images to learn from.
I'm not saying there's zero progress or that it can't be done. But it's become and extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary proof, not something to wave your hand and say "it'll happen, so just use us doing it as an example". Heck, we aren't doing that for fusion any more, and at least we have a THEORY for that, it's "merely" very hard engineering.
When The Economist magazine became the first general-interest magazine to cover the space junk problem about 15 years ago, it pointed out that the problem was there was no international agreement or agency forcing private owners of satellites to budget enough fuel to de-orbit the satellite at the end of its life. Every gram costs a small fortune, so they used every gram of fuel to keep the satellite "stationary" (i.e. in desired orbit).
The space junk problem (except for paint chips and astronaut toolbags) nearly ceases to exist if everybody would just de-orbit their property. I find it hard to believe that the mass of a football-field-sized balloon is less than the fuel to just drop the orbit into a brief but colourful brush with the atmosphere.
The taxes on oil primarily are taxes on gasoline and diesel for consumer use - as farmers know, industrial use is not so much. The taxes on coal are a joke. I googled the words "taxes coal" and came up with this news story from Tennessee, 2008:
"The state coal tax is currently set at 20 cents per ton and has not been increased since 1984.
As introduced, the bill would have set the tax at 4.5 percent of gross value, which Jackson said is the same rate charged in neighboring Kentucky. Members of the Senate Tax Subcommittee suggested the levy was too high at an earlier meeting and presented an amendment Tuesday that calls for a two-step increase to 3 percent." ...while that $557B comes to about 14% of worldwide spending on oil & coal, based (roughly) on the Wikipedia articles.
I'm sure that on the whole, more is taken from than given to the fossil-fuel industries, but the subsidies, as another poster mentioned mostly in Asia, mean that world-wide, the "pressure" on the whole industry is much lighter than most would assume.
It's not that renewables are economically viable in any situation where the fossil-fuel industries don't have to pay for their externalities; it's a way of highlighting that far from bringing in those externalities in the form of a tax or fund or cap or any other restriction, we are taxing their use at all, very lightly.
The moment all the subsidies stop and something like $50/T (C) is imposed on digging or pumping carbon out of the ground (and $50/T is paid to those who put it in), the game is pretty much up for fossil, save where gas/kerosene/diesel are the only way to go for high-energy density (aviation, remote cabins).
Subsidies are not just there because of lobbying and power, though - subsidizing cheap energy is a great economic stimulus in general, which is why you find it in new, growing, developing economies especially. Which is the heart of the warming issue: if "saving the world" involves telling a couple of billion Asians to spend an extra generation in poverty, is it worth it?
I'm a raving pro-nuke, but even the biggest solar detractor should be willing to admit this. In the few places in the States with the highest "insolation" (national champion: Death Valley, about 8 kWh/m2/day) you could build some very effective solar plants that would be perfect for handling the sunshine-related air-conditioning power spikes that plague that same region. And it wouldn't be that hard to push the power as far as California and through the western half of the US "Sun Belt" that has skyrocketed in population.
I see nuclear as the best choice for "base load" power, but not all power is base load, and for the air-conditioning related spikes, solar is actually a pretty natural, even obvious, option. It's not even 10% of the national consumption, but would eliminate the guilt people are feeling now when they gratefully turn on that blessedly cool air.
You heard it years ago? Awesome citation.
Actually, France sells power to Italy at $0.05/kWh for 48.9 B kWh (http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf101.html)
I managed to find the price one customer knows it can get, 35 Euro/MWH (about that 5 cents/kwh) here:
http://in.reuters.com/article/idINLDE65T1P920100630
On the contrary, nuclear power in France is not subsidized (why subsidize Italy by billions of Euros per year?) it is rather made MORE expensive by union featherbedding and other giveaways to local towns to buy their acceptance of th plant. And it works. Most French towns are overjoyed to have a plant built nearby.
Dude, did you READ your own link? It clearly says that EDF is on the EU carpet because they were charging artificially HIGH prices for electricity to downstream providers, in an anti-competitive effort to RAISE the competitor prices.
When I looked into EDF prices, the one I came across was the recent agreement to sell Italy power in bulk for $50/MWh - 5 per kWh.
Are you seriously suggesting that after 30 years of nukes, the French government is using French taxpayer euros to subsidize Italian power companies, all to hide how expensive the power actually still is? That's just hard to believe.
If you say stupid nonsense that is apparently devised to excuse incompetence and get you out of improving a bad situation, you get fired.
And I know just the public official to demonstrate this life lesson with. I'm sure that his sacrifice will be deeply appreciated by all the children instructed.
Of course, he might not see it that way, now that it's HIS life being screwed by the "life lesson". He was OK when it was just thousands of students.
I second the statement, "I'm not claustrophobic, but this is insane". It's the sheer un-rescue-ability of it all, if you simply get wedged, that gets to me.
A young man died cave diving in the Rockies not far from Calgary a few years back. The awful bit was that he got delayed coming back, wasn't sure how far it was, went to the limit of his air, turned the little knob that gives you the last five minutes, and used that time scratching out a goodbye to his family on the air tank.
Right around one more corner from where he would have seen the flashlights of his friends waiting for him.
Lessons I took from it:
1) Cave diving is insane.
2) If you're ever certain you're at that last moment of your life, nevertheless spend it trying to survive. Your family actually knew you loved them already.
The original novel came out at the height of the baby boom hitting adulthood; across the developing world, the population explosion was making it look like the whole world was kids. (Erlich's "The Population Bomb" was just out, too.) So they had this world where you were shot at 20, there were only teenagers. How the high-tech machinery kept running was never explained.
The movie raised the 20 to 30 to accommodate a not-nearly-teen Michael York. Who kept the lights on was still never explained; everybody seemed to lounge about in day-glo party clothes.
Of course, it was terrible science fiction; many analysts were pointing to dropping birth rates in the developed world and debunking Erlich even at the time. The youth explosion of the decade was a blip. Now the world faces an increasingly aging population and it's the loss of 50-somethings from the workforce that is creating concerns.
Apparently, they are good at keeping the lights on.
Well, your throat hasn't been slit and your rural home taken by foreign invaders, because of the Army, or marauding gangs out of "Road Warrior", because the justice system puts criminals in jail if they start to form them. Nothing in your house has electrocuted you and the house hasn't blown up or fallen down because the government imposes standards on vendors of everything from copper wire and gas appliances to lumber.
And most public debt is taken out to pay for large, slow-payback infrastructure like the $5M/mile roads out to your house that we city people don't use. Perhaps you got this way because you insisted on living outside the family home in a tent while your father sat inside, "wasting" 40% of his income on the non-productive activity of paying off the home mortgage, which is the exact financial equivalent of most national debts.
People hate taxes; they tend to assume government doesn't spend the money on something for them, but rather flushes it down the toilet in some way. (And this can be hard to dispute some days).
So make it a sinking fund. Take a ton of carbon out of the ground and into the biosphere, pay $50 into the fund. If you take a ton of carbon out of the air and put it in the ground (biochar a hectare of trees, say) and you can take $50 out of the fund.
Coal-generated power goes up by a crippling 5 cents per kWh; nuclear and renewables become competitive. The price of gas, alas, barely changes, but it's starting to look like electric cars can kick their ass anyway, given one more advance in batteries.
Theoretically, the fund stabilizes in size when as much carbon is going out of the air as into it, either because most forms of carbon emissions have been replaced with cleaner (and now cheaper) fuels, or because "biochar" and ocean-iron-seeding and all that stuff actually works at $50/ton like they claim.
If not, you re-analyse and tweak the $/ton figure. Please note: by definition, this does as much good to the overall economy as harm. Some things that have been causing externalities get more expensive, some things that repair externalities get cheaper.
The greatest thing about my new "Linux Mint" distribution with "CompizConfig" was the "negative" trick under "Accessibility". It negates all the colour bits in a window or desktop, turning the usual "black ink on white paper" look of most web pages (at least news pages) to white-on-black.
Hitting that button at night makes you go "aaahhh" as your eyes stop aching when you hadn't noticed how strained they were.
It was all keewwwwl for them to make the Mac be the first computer to have word processing and so forth look like black ink on paper when every computer monitor before them had been white text on dark. But direct light into your face is NOT reflections from paper and it was always a stupid idea for legibility and ergonomics both.
I'm not sure about the sleep thing (I don't recall any trouble before I got the "negative" function a few months ago) but trust me, get that capability if you use either a CRT or LCD with modern apps and web pages in a dim room. Your optic nerves will practically sob with relief.