The new coal mines are for the manufacture of steel. Please tell me how to make steel without coal.
According to my Fundamentals of Metallurgy (ISBN 978-1-85573-927-7), metal oxides are most often reduced by carbon monoxide CO, or sometimes hydrogen. The reactions needed to refine iron oxide (iron ore) into iron involve both melting the ore and adding CO. Iron occurs predominantly in nature as hematite, Fe2O3. The reduction reactions include:
3Fe2O3 + CO --> 2Fe3O4 + CO2
Fe3O4 + CO --> 3FeO + CO2
Fe2O3 + 3CO --> 2Fe + 3CO2
Fe2O3 + 3H2 --> 2Fe + 3H2O
FeO + CH4 --> Fe + 2H2 + CO
3Fe2O3 + 5H2 + 2CH4 --> 2Fe3C + 9H2O
FeO + CO --> Fe + CO2
The above includes reactions using CO, H2, and CH4 (natural gas). Not all reactions are used in each process. Coal gasification and natural gas reforming are convenient and economical ways to generate the CO and/or H2 to process iron ore, but neither of these fossil fuels is strictly required for the redox reactions used to manufacture steel.
Content costs something to produce once and the media companies milk it for ages to come. Thanks to copyright being extended essentially forever it's a great investment.
That used to be the way to do business, I'm not sure it will hold up over time the way things are going. We are already in the middle of a gluttony of excellent TV. There are many excellent shows that I will never have time to watch. Streaming services that self-produce content mean that "reruns" are now available indefinitely, but viewership probably drops off sharply over time. The value of that content declines quite rapidly, so content producers will have to maintain this level of production indefinitely unless the market situation changes.
This is a known fact, has been known, has been studied, and is not only common knowledge but also common sense. Another waste of time and money from the No Shit Sherlock Institute of Bloody Obvious Conclusions.
The CDC published a rather good metastudy of cardiovascular and other health issues possibly caused by long working hours back in 2004. Direct PDF link
There is a lot more to maintaining healthy gut bacteria than just drinking them down. There have been precious few studies that show "probiotic" foods or drinks actually do anything, and almost none that show effects that are more than extremely temporary.
If you want to have healthy gut bacteria, you've got to eat a variety of healthy food that have been minimally processed or not processed at all. And stay off the antibiotics. Fermented foods and foods that are advertised as having "live bacteria" just won't get the job done.
There has been a lot of scientific activity lately that shows that the bacteria in the gut play a large role in every aspect of both mental and physical health. There is correlation that fat people and thin people have different ratios of different types of bacteria. Cause or effect, who knows, but the correlation is there.
My personal pet theory (based on basically nothing) is that it is reasonable to assume that bacteria which are successful in breaking down food outside the body may also affect how food is broken down inside the body. In our refrigerated, sanitize everything western society, we may be damping down such kinds of good bacteria. In my wife's culture, it is acceptable to leave stews, soups, and sauces on the countertop for much longer than most people in the USA. Leaving a stew, covered, at room temperature for 24-48 hours is common in her culture. The food is reheated before eating, but even so, this practice is almost unthinkable to most Americans. This difference in practice could result in differences in bacteria, either directly by allowing bacteria to grow on the food, or indirectly by breaking down the food outside the body and giving certain internal bacteria an advantage over other types.
Even if we are eating the exact same foods, the exact details of how it is prepared may matter.
I expect that Volvo did most of the training with animals they find on the road in Sweden. The White Tailed Deer lives in North America.
But Moose live in Sweden. Moose are much larger than deer, but share the same basic body type (large body on relatively long and thin legs).
Special caution needs to be taken with moose, since their eyes don't glow in the dark, and they have tendencies to bite. In fact, a moose once bit my sister.
Regarding the copyright issue, had you actually read the C&D notice, you would see that Zillow is claiming copyright infringement, and further falsely claiming that fair use doesn't apply, when it very clearly and obviously does.
Second, the terms of use on their website are immaterial. The publication of content on a website inherently makes that content available to the world. In the absence of a user performing some action that forces the user to agree to the terms and conditions (e.g. signing up for an account), I can't see any plausible way that merely viewing the website would cause that person to be legally bound by those terms in any way, because all rights that would be granted under those supposed terms of use are de facto rights that the user already has. And as best I can tell, Zillow does not require users to sign up for an account to see pictures of houses. So unless the blogger explicitly agreed to the terms of use, the blogger is not bound by them.
Further, even if you somehow could twist the law to somehow interpret those terms of service as binding upon people who did not explicitly agree to them and may not have even read them, in the absence of the copyright claim, Zillow cannot show any actual harm from the use of these specific photos in criticizing the homes in question. In the absence of such actual harm specific to the use of these photographs (harm that would not have occurred if the blogger had gone out and taken his/her own photos of the same houses instead of theirs), Zillow has no standing to sue for a violation of the terms of service in the first place.
In short, Zillow's lawyers might as well have sent this C&D on toilet paper, because it is so full of you-know-what that it stinks from top to bottom.
Oh, but it gets better. There is reason to doubt whether the material in question is even protected by copyright. Ostensibly, a photograph is copyrightable by virtue of the artistic nature of its composition, etc. However, arguably, photographs of a house on a real estate website are typically just whatever shots some real estate agent took, probably more with an eye for showing specific things in the photo, rather than with any attention paid to the composition, angle, lighting, etc. of the photograph itself. Chances are, anybody could walk by and take a very nearly identical photograph with a modicum of effort, which puts it in basically the same category as photographs of artwork, which are generally held to not be protected by copyright.
Further, there's reason to question whether anything on Zillow's website other than their own graphics is actually protected by copyright. It is, after all, just a collection of facts. Nobody would be even asking that question if Zillow's lawyers hadn't stepped in it, but now, thanks to their ineptitude, folks are going to start asking questions, and if they come to the same conclusions that I have, it's open season on all the data contained therein for anyone to use for any reason. In effect, this threat of a lawsuit is likely to backfire in any number of ways, many of which have very serious ramifications for Zillow's ability to remain in business.
Either way, unless I missed something major in my analysis (e.g. the blogger working for a Zillow competitor and using the blog to convince people that Zillow only sells crappy houses), this would appear to be prima facie a SLAPP suit intended to harm a blogger whose criticism of high-end homes has no doubt in their minds reduced the value of those homes, and thus their profits on those sales. This is exactly the sort of criticism that the fair use section of Title 17 was intended to protect. Zillow should be ashamed of themselves, and their lawyers doubly so.
Is Zillow even the origin of the photos on the Zillow website? Here in Houston, they are the same photos you find on HAR.com. HAR.com has listings 3-7 days before Zi
The Untold History of the United States is a great documentary, although there is very little in it that is "untold". My interest tapered off considerably during the last 3-4 episodes (may reflect my age) but a worldwide perspective on WWII and the cold war was very interesting.
The Vice Guide to North Korea is very dated now, but it intrigued me enough that I visited the country in 2014. So many things have changed since 2008 that many of the details are no longer accurate, but may be worthwhile to watch after watching a more recent DPRK documentary.
[Plug] I made a short video of my DPRK trip in 2014. There are far better ones on Youtube (Aram Pan has done several), but this one is mine.
Reality TV and bullshit program quality is the problem. People can find better quality shows online for the same price or cheaper. The learning channel is now the shit reality TV channel. Same with all of them. Provide a decent product and people will buy it...
The proliferation of Reality TV is driven by ratings.
When looking for a decent product start demanding society favor an intelligent audience instead of catering to the Honey Boo Boo generation of Kartrashians demanding shit content today.
Potentially untrue depending on the show. Some reality TV shows are basically long-form advertising. "Undercover Boss" is one example, the companies have to pay to be on the show. As long as companies feel they are getting good return on their marketing dollars, such shows will continue to exist. Ratings are still important but only half of the equation. A tv show does not need to survive purely on commercial break advertising if the show itself is sponsored!
Additionally, sometimes people watch TV to get inspiration or education, not entertainment. HGTV is a good example of this. Low-budget programming, tons of sponsored content and product tie-ins, and yet people will tolerate it if they are planning a home improvement project and need some ideas.
Many of our machinists and welding technicians rarely or never come into the shop. They travel to the job site, do their work, and spend the rest of their time at home.
If you are going to say someone works from home that means they actually do work they get paid for while in their own residence. What you are describing are essentially contractors that travel to a job site to do their work. Just because they don't work in the same place every day doesn't mean they work from home.
It's not usual for executives and management to be able to do some of their work outside the office. This does not describe anywhere close to half the work force in the vast majority of companies.
We have contractors too, but we have many W-2 employees who fall into this category. In slow years, we have them do paperwork at home when they are not "on a job". In busy years, we don't ask much during off times, but they are still on payroll and getting full benefits.
I agree it is an unusual arrangement but it works well for our business.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the trend towards remote working "is inexorable" in America's labor force, with 43% of workers now doing at least some of their work from home...
In select industries among white collar workers perhaps but as a general proposition? I don't buy it. It's trivial to name entire industries where it isn't even possible to do much in the way of useful work from home even if you wanted to. Restaurant work, many types of nursing, manufacturing assembly work, maintenance, machining, retail sales, most farming, mining, foundry workers, drivers, etc. The list goes on and on and almost certainly accounts for well over half the work force.
Depends on what you mean by "work from home". I work for a company that does maintenance, machining, and manufacturing on large rotating machinery. Many of our machinists and welding technicians rarely or never come into the shop. They travel to the job site, do their work, and spend the rest of their time at home. All the VPs work from home or the road, and I personally don't have a real need to be in the office every day. We do have manufacturing, supply, and maintenance depots where people have to go into work every day, but we have about 70 employees and about 40% work in a state in which we don't have a facility.
It may be somewhat peculiar to our work (very large machines) but the end users of these machines seem to be going more in a direction of being light on staff and bringing in contractors to do all the maintenance. The maintenance still needs to be done, so the net result is more people traveling between states to work on specific jobs, and staying at home when they aren't working. That counts as "working from home" in my book, since the employee can live wherever they choose to.
Intel has released a new study that predicts a $7 trillion annual revenue stream from the emerging passenger economy.
Remember, that money has to come from somewhere. There are a lot of people that drive for a living that will suddenly be out of a job. 7 trillion for some company to provide transportation-as-a-service, but you'll have millions of people out of work as a result.
I'm not saying self driving cars are good or bad, I'm just saying we as a society better prepare for this. That's a lot of able bodied yet suddenly unemployed people for the economy to absorb.
"Driver" is a very common job for new immigrants. You don't have to know much english or education to drive a vehicle. Our company ships something by dedicated freight (18-wheeler, step deck) about once a week, and it is somewhat rare for the driver to not be a 1st generation immigrant. Immigrant drivers for passenger services are common enough that it is a well-known stereotype. Adjustments to immigration policy might soften the self-driving transition significantly.
Not meaning to offend any 'official' engineers here - I understand the work that goes into an engineering degree, and I understand the legal and ethical need to protect the title from pretenders. What I really don't get is that people automatically place more trust in the opinions of an engineer, (or a doctor, etc), than people who don't hold the title, yet have similar or greater accomplishments in the field.
I've spent my life working in the electronics field. I once worked for a degreed electrical engineer whose idea of heatsinking a component on a PCB was blobbing some heatsink compound on it. (No, I'm not kidding). This same engineer casually implemented some resistor-diode logic between 74HC logic inputs and the outside world, without so much as a couple of protection diodes from the inputs to the supply rails. In this case the 'outside world' happened to be various points in the noisy, spikey electrical system of a large military vehicle. The design was being field-tested just prior to production. 'Nuff said. A bit later in my career, I worked for a guy who, (thankfully), actually merited his engineer's title. But he told me about an engineer who once worked for him, who couldn't understand why trying to start his car with a 12-volt lantern battery wasn't working.
There are smart, knowledgeable, competent people, and there are incompetent fools. In my experience, a degree, (or lack thereof), is no kind of an indication of which category a given person falls into.
We're talking here about a state-issued engineering license for the title of Professional Engineer, not simply a degree. In the US, this involves taking a grueling 8-hour test with a pass rate of ~70% for first-time takers and ~40% for repeat takers. Most states require a degree to take the test, plus experience, or non-degreed applicants can take the test with longer experience. It is generally open-book, but the problems are numerous and complex enough that there is no time to learn how to do them during the test, and very little time to spend looking for data tables or charts.
Anyone with a PE in the USA probably has a good idea of what they are doing, in the field they passed the test in. Other fields, they might be clueless in, and part of the test includes questions about what to do in these situations.
Apples have made great progress since the Red Delicious era. They may be able to make a tomato that tastes good and is commercially convenient.
Some of the cherry tomato varieties nowadays are terrific.
I log everything I eat... because I'm a data geek. Then one day I noticed I was getting something like only 20% of the potassium I needed. Potassium has a huge number of roles in the body, so being low on it is not good.
So I decided that I'd try to get 100% of the 4700 mg a day you supposedly need, and it's hard. Even supplements typically only contain something like 3% of your RDA. Bananas contain only about 9% of your RDA; even so they're one of the highest potassium common foods. You'd have to eat 11 a day to get the 4700 mg, but that beats taking 33 potassium gluconate pills.
In fact, getting enough potassium is sufficiently tough (and impractical to get through supplementation), you could almost use potassium intake as an overall proxy for dietary quality. I eat a lot of bananas -- typically three or four a day, but I have to eat a huge variety of high potassium foods to hit my target; you can't do it on a single food unless you want to eat ten cups of beans or thirteen cups of yogurt a day. Avocados, when you can get one ripe, are packed with potassium -- almost a thousand gram of it apiece.
Where are you getting 4700 mg as a RDA? The Mayo clinic says "Because lack of potassium is rare, there is no RDA or RNI for this mineral. However, it is thought that 1600 to 2000 mg (40 to 50 milliequivalents [mEq]) per day for adults is adequate."
The episode order has been increased to 15. That's 15 too many, in my opinion. The development of Discovery has been marked by pure incompetence, despite having some really good people involved. I had high hopes with Bryan Fuller and Nicholas Meyer, who did really good work previously with Star Trek. I thought Rod Roddenberry might have a good feel how to run the show because he had praised Star Trek Continues, which is really well done. Fuller is gone and the show keeps sounding less interesting as more news comes out. It wasn't that long ago that Michael Dorn passed on being cast for Discovery as one of Worf's ancestors because they gave him an insulting lowball offer, about 65% of what he was paid on TNG and DS9. Between seven seasons on TNG and four on DS9, I don't think anyone else has come close to appearing in as many episodes as Dorn has. It's embarrassing.
I have no confidence in the people developing Discovery that it's going to be worthwhile. There's nothing in the trailer that impresses me. There's a lot of action but I'm not convinced there's an interesting story to go along with it. CBS hasn't given much information on the actual premise for Discovery, and I don't see a whole lot in this trailer to provide any more information about it. It doesn't matter how diverse your cast is or how much you include special effects and combat if you don't have good writing and an interesting story to tell. With all of the delays and personnel changes, there has been more than enough time to devise a compelling premise. If there was truly an interesting premise to this show, I would expect CBS to provide more information on what that is to attract viewers. The trailer doesn't do that at all. This just seems like more incompetence to me.
I wish this show interested me. But I have yet to see anything that makes me think it's worth watching. If I'm going to watch anything on All Access, it'll be Big Brother and The Good Fight, both of which seem far more worthwhile than Discovery. It's a shame because I really like TOS and DS9, and TNG was pretty good.
The TV market has changed a lot since the last Star Trek series ended. Unless Amazon, Netflix, HBO, AMC or some other network that prioritizes quality picks up the franchise, the budget can be expected to not be sufficient. Star Trek has historically had a reasonably large cast of generally good actors, significant use of CGI, liberal use of guest actors, alien makeup and costumes, mostly decent writing, and a variety of custom-built sets of a generally professional nature. All of which cost money. They could cut any of these elements to save costs. My solution would be a smaller core cast of very good actors. This is a bit outside of the standard Star Trek formula, however.
but $120k isn't nearly enough. Training is expensive, and these people come pre-trained on the cheap thanks to the crazy low cost of living in their countries (supported by a massive underclass, no safety net and no environmental or employee protections).
These are suppose to be the best and brightest the world has to offer. Either that or employees that are so desperately needed that training isn't an option. Start at $300k/yr and adjust for double inflation (so they can't cheat there too). That's about what a PH D in a profitable field makes, right?
I think $120k, with control for future inflation, is about right. I have worked for several international companies. They all invariably needed to bring in compliance officers, liaisons to the home office, and similar positions. You really need someone with experience and clout back at the home country. A local person, even one fluent in the language, is not an effective advocate. There would only be a couple of these types of roles in the $100-150k range, all the other employees would be locals (but paid similarly). $300k is too high and would put a damper on investment and hinder international business.
Government benefits from importing cheap labor. Rich landowners (now corporations) benefit from cheap labor. History is replete with rich people trying to get richer by importing slaves and/or indentured servants.
It never works out well for society in the long run, but in the long run you're dead anyways, so might as well make some more money and bribe some more gov't officials while you're here, right?
Doesn't matter which political party is in power, doesn't matter whether a politician is a leftist or a rightist, they ALWAYS import more cheap labor... because they want to benefit the rich (and by extension, themselves). Trump ran a campaign saying he will put a stop to this, and now that he's in power he's already he's backpedaling. He's just turning into Clinton Lite. I'll bet you large sums that if Bernie was elected, right about now he will be finding excuses to import more cheap labor too.
The US is a country of immigrants. When new immigrants come in, the pre-existing immigrants generally find themselves on a higher rung of the economic ladder. Everyone here before is in a slightly better position. This is often not a quick process, and can take several generations. These immigrants, while cheaper than existing workers, are generally considered to be a net benefit at some point. Some immigration is good. Nobody today would seriously argue that Irish immigrants to the US in the 1860s-1920s are a long-term drag on the economy. Determining how much immigration is manageable / desirable, and controlling the influx of immigrants to that level is a difficult problem.
Placing an addition rung at the bottom of the ladder, which is how I view the H1B program, is not the same thing and has different effects.
The elites live well, mostly in the capital city of Pyongyang, but the rest of the country is in terrible shape, because the resources and money that might otherwise be used to help alleviate those terrible conditions instead goes to weapons, missiles, nukes, etc. This is why the only lights in North Korea at night are pretty much the ones in Pyongyang, as seen here: http://news.nationalgeographic...
Is light pollution desirable? You could say the same thing about Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia or any number of other poor asian countries. The big cities are lit up, and the countryside is mostly dark. All of these countries have significant inequality. Several of these countries are actively committing or allowing various forms of genocide. Singling out North Korea as "the bad one" seems a bit strange to me.
Their Q&A and local manufacturing quality is low. But it'll get the job done. They expect failures. When they shelled Yeonpyeong, only half of the shells even hit the island, a quarter of those that hit it didn't explode, and most of their shots were aimed based on obsolete maps, or just aimed poorly. But they simply put out enough firepower to overcome that. And that's undoubtedly going to be the same strategy that they pursue with missiles - "so what if a lot of them explode on the pad, in the air, go way off course.... we'll just make enough that some of them will get through."
You know, in a way, the DPRK is sort playing a high-stakes game of Kerbal Space Program.
Rocket science isn't easy, and they are certainly handicapped by being embargoed both in information and physical goods. The assumption that their manufacturing quality is low may not be correct. I was surprised to find on my trip to the DPRK in 2014 that several of the factories that we visited, including a foundry, were ISO 9001 certified. Anybody will tell you that ISO 9001 certification is no guarantee of quality, but the tools of high quality manufacturing (CAD, computer design and simulation, CNC, management systems) are widely available and there is no reason to believe that the DPRK wouldn't use them. Casting and forging Inconel isn't particularly difficult, any material engineer with the right books can work it out. You can even get Inconel powder and make parts with additive machining [3d printing] without much fuss.
The war on poverty has killed too many poor people.
Huh?
GP is right - being poor is strongly correlated with poor health outcomes. Diabetes, etc. lead to death very prematurely, especially without management. Availability of healthcare isn't the primary factor; people who are in poverty tend to seek care less often and are less compliant on average, regardless of healthcare availability.
The "Great Society" programs in the US have locked people into cycles of poverty. Look at the data for Eastern Kentucky, for instance: before the "Great Society" the net outflow of population was much higher. In prospective studies/experiments children who left with their families (subsidized to do so) at an early age did far better than their peers who stayed, and their life outcomes were much improved. But that's not how these programs work.
Before the "Great Society" if an area was overpopulated for its industries, the lack of work would cause people to leave. With these so-called "War on Poverty" programs, they are incentivized to stay put and collect welfare checks instead of seeking opportunity. There are multi-generational families in Appalachia who have never known a typical work environment.
Since the Green Revolution nobody is going to starve in a first-world country (obesity is our problem now). But the current Welfare State system definitively locks people into poverty and that turns out to be deadly.
You're missing a huge factor- quality education. Somehow we have managed to tie the quality of primary education completely to where one lives. The good schools are in areas with a good tax base, and the poorer areas get schools that reflect the reduced tax base. Just a quick look around Beattyville, KY (poorest white town in the USA) shows a lot of schools with GreatSchool ratings under 5/10. Multiple schools rated 2/10. The rating system may have some flaws but that is an indication that these schools have problems. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to determine if a school is bad because of the management, the funding, the teachers, or the parents. Nevertheless, without a decent education, those kids have little hope of doing better than their parents.
Tumblr is one of the few websites that brings my tablet (2GB ram) to its knees. Infinite scrolling of an image-heavy website certainly doesn't help things.
The only reason why it's falling is because they count renewables as "fuel". So of course per unit of "fuel" consumed (and remember, solar radiation count as "fuel"), they emit less CO2. It doesn't mean the process of CO2 emitting thermal power plants actually improved.
If you look at the source, it seems fairly straightforward that they are simply multiplying the amount of fuel used by the amount of CO2 emitted per BTU of that fuel. That analysis if flawed in several ways, but saying that renewables are affecting this in a large way is not correct. Solar + Wind only produced 22,490 Million Kilowatt-hours in January 2017, or 6.5% of the total electricity produced in January 2017. Hydro and Geothermal production rate hasn't increased significantly in decades, so I will exclude them for now.
The big driver of this reduced carbon intensity is the shift from coal to natural gas for electricity production. In 2016, coal produced 1,240,089 Million Kilowatt-hours of electricity, down from a high of around 2,000,000 Million Kilowatt-hours in 2005-2007. The last time coal electricity production was this low was in 1985, and it will probably be even lower in 2018.
Meanwhile, natural gas electricity production was 1,380,293 Million Kilowatt-hours in 2016, the highest ever, and significantly increased from the 291,946 Million Kilowatt-hours produced in 1985. It will probably be even higher in 2018. Natural gas produces less CO2 than coal, so this is the major factor here.
It is worth noting that nuclear power production in January 2017 was 73,121 Million Kilowatt-hours, or 21.2% of total production. Demand has been basically flat at 4 Billion Giga-watt-hours per year since 2004. Natural gas and renewables are slurping up the slack in coal, but natural gas is a much more dominant factor.
You're missing the point of a carbon tax. The tax is meant to speed the end of fossil fuel use. And really it's natural gas that killed coal, so you're going after the wrong target.
The current market forces point to a direction of renewables, natural gas, and whatever nuclear remains operational (with no new nuclear plants). That's not a bad plan for the US for right now. However, natural gas in the US is currently 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of any other natural gas in the world. It is exceptionally, and historically cheap. Various people estimate that this low-pricing situation will last between 15 and 100 years. My personal opinion is that it is difficult to make estimates on that kind of timeframe.
Regardless, if natural gas in the US ever approaches the cost of natural gas elsewhere in the world, US consumers would be in for a very rude awakening on their utility bills. My personal opinion is that we should not eliminate these plants entirely. It isn't wrong to let market forces dictate our choices, but we should hedge against unfavorable market changes in the future.
Disclaimer- I'm "in the industry", my customers are roughly 60% gas and 40% coal.
How is that ratio modified by the electrical costs of running an 8 core FX chip? They consume like twice the power that zen does for like half the performance.
The Ryzen 1700 is a 65W chip, the FX-8300 is a 95W chip. Assuming you are running the machine at 100% load 24/7, and these ratings are accurate, the FX-8300 will cost you $1.75 extra per month at $0.08/kW-hr. If you want to consider the added AC load, you can round up to $2.50 per month. Given the price difference between the chips (currently ~$310+ vs ~$120), it would take more than 6 years to get to the electricity cost breakeven point.
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The new coal mines are for the manufacture of steel. Please tell me how to make steel without coal.
According to my Fundamentals of Metallurgy (ISBN 978-1-85573-927-7), metal oxides are most often reduced by carbon monoxide CO, or sometimes hydrogen. The reactions needed to refine iron oxide (iron ore) into iron involve both melting the ore and adding CO. Iron occurs predominantly in nature as hematite, Fe2O3. The reduction reactions include:
3Fe2O3 + CO --> 2Fe3O4 + CO2
Fe3O4 + CO --> 3FeO + CO2
Fe2O3 + 3CO --> 2Fe + 3CO2
Fe2O3 + 3H2 --> 2Fe + 3H2O
FeO + CH4 --> Fe + 2H2 + CO
3Fe2O3 + 5H2 + 2CH4 --> 2Fe3C + 9H2O
FeO + CO --> Fe + CO2
The above includes reactions using CO, H2, and CH4 (natural gas). Not all reactions are used in each process. Coal gasification and natural gas reforming are convenient and economical ways to generate the CO and/or H2 to process iron ore, but neither of these fossil fuels is strictly required for the redox reactions used to manufacture steel.
Content costs something to produce once and the media companies milk it for ages to come. Thanks to copyright being extended essentially forever it's a great investment.
That used to be the way to do business, I'm not sure it will hold up over time the way things are going. We are already in the middle of a gluttony of excellent TV. There are many excellent shows that I will never have time to watch. Streaming services that self-produce content mean that "reruns" are now available indefinitely, but viewership probably drops off sharply over time. The value of that content declines quite rapidly, so content producers will have to maintain this level of production indefinitely unless the market situation changes.
This is a known fact, has been known, has been studied, and is not only common knowledge but also common sense. Another waste of time and money from the No Shit Sherlock Institute of Bloody Obvious Conclusions.
The CDC published a rather good metastudy of cardiovascular and other health issues possibly caused by long working hours back in 2004. Direct PDF link
There is a lot more to maintaining healthy gut bacteria than just drinking them down. There have been precious few studies that show "probiotic" foods or drinks actually do anything, and almost none that show effects that are more than extremely temporary.
If you want to have healthy gut bacteria, you've got to eat a variety of healthy food that have been minimally processed or not processed at all. And stay off the antibiotics. Fermented foods and foods that are advertised as having "live bacteria" just won't get the job done.
There has been a lot of scientific activity lately that shows that the bacteria in the gut play a large role in every aspect of both mental and physical health. There is correlation that fat people and thin people have different ratios of different types of bacteria. Cause or effect, who knows, but the correlation is there.
My personal pet theory (based on basically nothing) is that it is reasonable to assume that bacteria which are successful in breaking down food outside the body may also affect how food is broken down inside the body. In our refrigerated, sanitize everything western society, we may be damping down such kinds of good bacteria. In my wife's culture, it is acceptable to leave stews, soups, and sauces on the countertop for much longer than most people in the USA. Leaving a stew, covered, at room temperature for 24-48 hours is common in her culture. The food is reheated before eating, but even so, this practice is almost unthinkable to most Americans. This difference in practice could result in differences in bacteria, either directly by allowing bacteria to grow on the food, or indirectly by breaking down the food outside the body and giving certain internal bacteria an advantage over other types.
Even if we are eating the exact same foods, the exact details of how it is prepared may matter.
I expect that Volvo did most of the training with animals they find on the road in Sweden. The White Tailed Deer lives in North America.
But Moose live in Sweden. Moose are much larger than deer, but share the same basic body type (large body on relatively long and thin legs). Special caution needs to be taken with moose, since their eyes don't glow in the dark, and they have tendencies to bite. In fact, a moose once bit my sister.
You're wrong on both counts.
Regarding the copyright issue, had you actually read the C&D notice, you would see that Zillow is claiming copyright infringement, and further falsely claiming that fair use doesn't apply, when it very clearly and obviously does.
Second, the terms of use on their website are immaterial. The publication of content on a website inherently makes that content available to the world. In the absence of a user performing some action that forces the user to agree to the terms and conditions (e.g. signing up for an account), I can't see any plausible way that merely viewing the website would cause that person to be legally bound by those terms in any way, because all rights that would be granted under those supposed terms of use are de facto rights that the user already has. And as best I can tell, Zillow does not require users to sign up for an account to see pictures of houses. So unless the blogger explicitly agreed to the terms of use, the blogger is not bound by them.
Further, even if you somehow could twist the law to somehow interpret those terms of service as binding upon people who did not explicitly agree to them and may not have even read them, in the absence of the copyright claim, Zillow cannot show any actual harm from the use of these specific photos in criticizing the homes in question. In the absence of such actual harm specific to the use of these photographs (harm that would not have occurred if the blogger had gone out and taken his/her own photos of the same houses instead of theirs), Zillow has no standing to sue for a violation of the terms of service in the first place.
In short, Zillow's lawyers might as well have sent this C&D on toilet paper, because it is so full of you-know-what that it stinks from top to bottom.
Oh, but it gets better. There is reason to doubt whether the material in question is even protected by copyright. Ostensibly, a photograph is copyrightable by virtue of the artistic nature of its composition, etc. However, arguably, photographs of a house on a real estate website are typically just whatever shots some real estate agent took, probably more with an eye for showing specific things in the photo, rather than with any attention paid to the composition, angle, lighting, etc. of the photograph itself. Chances are, anybody could walk by and take a very nearly identical photograph with a modicum of effort, which puts it in basically the same category as photographs of artwork, which are generally held to not be protected by copyright.
Further, there's reason to question whether anything on Zillow's website other than their own graphics is actually protected by copyright. It is, after all, just a collection of facts. Nobody would be even asking that question if Zillow's lawyers hadn't stepped in it, but now, thanks to their ineptitude, folks are going to start asking questions, and if they come to the same conclusions that I have, it's open season on all the data contained therein for anyone to use for any reason. In effect, this threat of a lawsuit is likely to backfire in any number of ways, many of which have very serious ramifications for Zillow's ability to remain in business.
Either way, unless I missed something major in my analysis (e.g. the blogger working for a Zillow competitor and using the blog to convince people that Zillow only sells crappy houses), this would appear to be prima facie a SLAPP suit intended to harm a blogger whose criticism of high-end homes has no doubt in their minds reduced the value of those homes, and thus their profits on those sales. This is exactly the sort of criticism that the fair use section of Title 17 was intended to protect. Zillow should be ashamed of themselves, and their lawyers doubly so.
Is Zillow even the origin of the photos on the Zillow website? Here in Houston, they are the same photos you find on HAR.com. HAR.com has listings 3-7 days before Zi
The Untold History of the United States is a great documentary, although there is very little in it that is "untold". My interest tapered off considerably during the last 3-4 episodes (may reflect my age) but a worldwide perspective on WWII and the cold war was very interesting.
The Vice Guide to North Korea is very dated now, but it intrigued me enough that I visited the country in 2014. So many things have changed since 2008 that many of the details are no longer accurate, but may be worthwhile to watch after watching a more recent DPRK documentary.
[Plug] I made a short video of my DPRK trip in 2014. There are far better ones on Youtube (Aram Pan has done several), but this one is mine.
Reality TV and bullshit program quality is the problem. People can find better quality shows online for the same price or cheaper. The learning channel is now the shit reality TV channel. Same with all of them. Provide a decent product and people will buy it...
The proliferation of Reality TV is driven by ratings.
When looking for a decent product start demanding society favor an intelligent audience instead of catering to the Honey Boo Boo generation of Kartrashians demanding shit content today.
Potentially untrue depending on the show. Some reality TV shows are basically long-form advertising. "Undercover Boss" is one example, the companies have to pay to be on the show. As long as companies feel they are getting good return on their marketing dollars, such shows will continue to exist. Ratings are still important but only half of the equation. A tv show does not need to survive purely on commercial break advertising if the show itself is sponsored!
Additionally, sometimes people watch TV to get inspiration or education, not entertainment. HGTV is a good example of this. Low-budget programming, tons of sponsored content and product tie-ins, and yet people will tolerate it if they are planning a home improvement project and need some ideas.
Many of our machinists and welding technicians rarely or never come into the shop. They travel to the job site, do their work, and spend the rest of their time at home.
If you are going to say someone works from home that means they actually do work they get paid for while in their own residence. What you are describing are essentially contractors that travel to a job site to do their work. Just because they don't work in the same place every day doesn't mean they work from home.
It's not usual for executives and management to be able to do some of their work outside the office. This does not describe anywhere close to half the work force in the vast majority of companies.
We have contractors too, but we have many W-2 employees who fall into this category. In slow years, we have them do paperwork at home when they are not "on a job". In busy years, we don't ask much during off times, but they are still on payroll and getting full benefits.
I agree it is an unusual arrangement but it works well for our business.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the trend towards remote working "is inexorable" in America's labor force, with 43% of workers now doing at least some of their work from home...
In select industries among white collar workers perhaps but as a general proposition? I don't buy it. It's trivial to name entire industries where it isn't even possible to do much in the way of useful work from home even if you wanted to. Restaurant work, many types of nursing, manufacturing assembly work, maintenance, machining, retail sales, most farming, mining, foundry workers, drivers, etc. The list goes on and on and almost certainly accounts for well over half the work force.
Depends on what you mean by "work from home". I work for a company that does maintenance, machining, and manufacturing on large rotating machinery. Many of our machinists and welding technicians rarely or never come into the shop. They travel to the job site, do their work, and spend the rest of their time at home. All the VPs work from home or the road, and I personally don't have a real need to be in the office every day. We do have manufacturing, supply, and maintenance depots where people have to go into work every day, but we have about 70 employees and about 40% work in a state in which we don't have a facility.
It may be somewhat peculiar to our work (very large machines) but the end users of these machines seem to be going more in a direction of being light on staff and bringing in contractors to do all the maintenance. The maintenance still needs to be done, so the net result is more people traveling between states to work on specific jobs, and staying at home when they aren't working. That counts as "working from home" in my book, since the employee can live wherever they choose to.
Intel has released a new study that predicts a $7 trillion annual revenue stream from the emerging passenger economy.
Remember, that money has to come from somewhere. There are a lot of people that drive for a living that will suddenly be out of a job. 7 trillion for some company to provide transportation-as-a-service, but you'll have millions of people out of work as a result.
I'm not saying self driving cars are good or bad, I'm just saying we as a society better prepare for this. That's a lot of able bodied yet suddenly unemployed people for the economy to absorb.
"Driver" is a very common job for new immigrants. You don't have to know much english or education to drive a vehicle. Our company ships something by dedicated freight (18-wheeler, step deck) about once a week, and it is somewhat rare for the driver to not be a 1st generation immigrant. Immigrant drivers for passenger services are common enough that it is a well-known stereotype. Adjustments to immigration policy might soften the self-driving transition significantly.
Not meaning to offend any 'official' engineers here - I understand the work that goes into an engineering degree, and I understand the legal and ethical need to protect the title from pretenders. What I really don't get is that people automatically place more trust in the opinions of an engineer, (or a doctor, etc), than people who don't hold the title, yet have similar or greater accomplishments in the field.
I've spent my life working in the electronics field. I once worked for a degreed electrical engineer whose idea of heatsinking a component on a PCB was blobbing some heatsink compound on it. (No, I'm not kidding). This same engineer casually implemented some resistor-diode logic between 74HC logic inputs and the outside world, without so much as a couple of protection diodes from the inputs to the supply rails. In this case the 'outside world' happened to be various points in the noisy, spikey electrical system of a large military vehicle. The design was being field-tested just prior to production. 'Nuff said. A bit later in my career, I worked for a guy who, (thankfully), actually merited his engineer's title. But he told me about an engineer who once worked for him, who couldn't understand why trying to start his car with a 12-volt lantern battery wasn't working.
There are smart, knowledgeable, competent people, and there are incompetent fools. In my experience, a degree, (or lack thereof), is no kind of an indication of which category a given person falls into.
We're talking here about a state-issued engineering license for the title of Professional Engineer, not simply a degree. In the US, this involves taking a grueling 8-hour test with a pass rate of ~70% for first-time takers and ~40% for repeat takers. Most states require a degree to take the test, plus experience, or non-degreed applicants can take the test with longer experience. It is generally open-book, but the problems are numerous and complex enough that there is no time to learn how to do them during the test, and very little time to spend looking for data tables or charts.
Anyone with a PE in the USA probably has a good idea of what they are doing, in the field they passed the test in. Other fields, they might be clueless in, and part of the test includes questions about what to do in these situations.
Apples have made great progress since the Red Delicious era. They may be able to make a tomato that tastes good and is commercially convenient. Some of the cherry tomato varieties nowadays are terrific.
I log everything I eat... because I'm a data geek. Then one day I noticed I was getting something like only 20% of the potassium I needed. Potassium has a huge number of roles in the body, so being low on it is not good.
So I decided that I'd try to get 100% of the 4700 mg a day you supposedly need, and it's hard. Even supplements typically only contain something like 3% of your RDA. Bananas contain only about 9% of your RDA; even so they're one of the highest potassium common foods. You'd have to eat 11 a day to get the 4700 mg, but that beats taking 33 potassium gluconate pills.
In fact, getting enough potassium is sufficiently tough (and impractical to get through supplementation), you could almost use potassium intake as an overall proxy for dietary quality. I eat a lot of bananas -- typically three or four a day, but I have to eat a huge variety of high potassium foods to hit my target; you can't do it on a single food unless you want to eat ten cups of beans or thirteen cups of yogurt a day. Avocados, when you can get one ripe, are packed with potassium -- almost a thousand gram of it apiece.
Where are you getting 4700 mg as a RDA? The Mayo clinic says "Because lack of potassium is rare, there is no RDA or RNI for this mineral. However, it is thought that 1600 to 2000 mg (40 to 50 milliequivalents [mEq]) per day for adults is adequate."
The episode order has been increased to 15. That's 15 too many, in my opinion. The development of Discovery has been marked by pure incompetence, despite having some really good people involved. I had high hopes with Bryan Fuller and Nicholas Meyer, who did really good work previously with Star Trek. I thought Rod Roddenberry might have a good feel how to run the show because he had praised Star Trek Continues, which is really well done. Fuller is gone and the show keeps sounding less interesting as more news comes out. It wasn't that long ago that Michael Dorn passed on being cast for Discovery as one of Worf's ancestors because they gave him an insulting lowball offer, about 65% of what he was paid on TNG and DS9. Between seven seasons on TNG and four on DS9, I don't think anyone else has come close to appearing in as many episodes as Dorn has. It's embarrassing.
I have no confidence in the people developing Discovery that it's going to be worthwhile. There's nothing in the trailer that impresses me. There's a lot of action but I'm not convinced there's an interesting story to go along with it. CBS hasn't given much information on the actual premise for Discovery, and I don't see a whole lot in this trailer to provide any more information about it. It doesn't matter how diverse your cast is or how much you include special effects and combat if you don't have good writing and an interesting story to tell. With all of the delays and personnel changes, there has been more than enough time to devise a compelling premise. If there was truly an interesting premise to this show, I would expect CBS to provide more information on what that is to attract viewers. The trailer doesn't do that at all. This just seems like more incompetence to me.
I wish this show interested me. But I have yet to see anything that makes me think it's worth watching. If I'm going to watch anything on All Access, it'll be Big Brother and The Good Fight, both of which seem far more worthwhile than Discovery. It's a shame because I really like TOS and DS9, and TNG was pretty good.
The TV market has changed a lot since the last Star Trek series ended. Unless Amazon, Netflix, HBO, AMC or some other network that prioritizes quality picks up the franchise, the budget can be expected to not be sufficient. Star Trek has historically had a reasonably large cast of generally good actors, significant use of CGI, liberal use of guest actors, alien makeup and costumes, mostly decent writing, and a variety of custom-built sets of a generally professional nature. All of which cost money. They could cut any of these elements to save costs. My solution would be a smaller core cast of very good actors. This is a bit outside of the standard Star Trek formula, however.
but $120k isn't nearly enough. Training is expensive, and these people come pre-trained on the cheap thanks to the crazy low cost of living in their countries (supported by a massive underclass, no safety net and no environmental or employee protections). These are suppose to be the best and brightest the world has to offer. Either that or employees that are so desperately needed that training isn't an option. Start at $300k/yr and adjust for double inflation (so they can't cheat there too). That's about what a PH D in a profitable field makes, right?
I think $120k, with control for future inflation, is about right. I have worked for several international companies. They all invariably needed to bring in compliance officers, liaisons to the home office, and similar positions. You really need someone with experience and clout back at the home country. A local person, even one fluent in the language, is not an effective advocate. There would only be a couple of these types of roles in the $100-150k range, all the other employees would be locals (but paid similarly). $300k is too high and would put a damper on investment and hinder international business.
Government benefits from importing cheap labor. Rich landowners (now corporations) benefit from cheap labor. History is replete with rich people trying to get richer by importing slaves and/or indentured servants.
It never works out well for society in the long run, but in the long run you're dead anyways, so might as well make some more money and bribe some more gov't officials while you're here, right?
Doesn't matter which political party is in power, doesn't matter whether a politician is a leftist or a rightist, they ALWAYS import more cheap labor... because they want to benefit the rich (and by extension, themselves). Trump ran a campaign saying he will put a stop to this, and now that he's in power he's already he's backpedaling. He's just turning into Clinton Lite. I'll bet you large sums that if Bernie was elected, right about now he will be finding excuses to import more cheap labor too.
The US is a country of immigrants. When new immigrants come in, the pre-existing immigrants generally find themselves on a higher rung of the economic ladder. Everyone here before is in a slightly better position. This is often not a quick process, and can take several generations. These immigrants, while cheaper than existing workers, are generally considered to be a net benefit at some point. Some immigration is good. Nobody today would seriously argue that Irish immigrants to the US in the 1860s-1920s are a long-term drag on the economy. Determining how much immigration is manageable / desirable, and controlling the influx of immigrants to that level is a difficult problem.
Placing an addition rung at the bottom of the ladder, which is how I view the H1B program, is not the same thing and has different effects.
The elites live well, mostly in the capital city of Pyongyang, but the rest of the country is in terrible shape, because the resources and money that might otherwise be used to help alleviate those terrible conditions instead goes to weapons, missiles, nukes, etc. This is why the only lights in North Korea at night are pretty much the ones in Pyongyang, as seen here: http://news.nationalgeographic...
Is light pollution desirable? You could say the same thing about Philippines, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia or any number of other poor asian countries. The big cities are lit up, and the countryside is mostly dark. All of these countries have significant inequality. Several of these countries are actively committing or allowing various forms of genocide. Singling out North Korea as "the bad one" seems a bit strange to me.
Their Q&A and local manufacturing quality is low. But it'll get the job done. They expect failures. When they shelled Yeonpyeong, only half of the shells even hit the island, a quarter of those that hit it didn't explode, and most of their shots were aimed based on obsolete maps, or just aimed poorly. But they simply put out enough firepower to overcome that. And that's undoubtedly going to be the same strategy that they pursue with missiles - "so what if a lot of them explode on the pad, in the air, go way off course.... we'll just make enough that some of them will get through."
You know, in a way, the DPRK is sort playing a high-stakes game of Kerbal Space Program.
Rocket science isn't easy, and they are certainly handicapped by being embargoed both in information and physical goods. The assumption that their manufacturing quality is low may not be correct. I was surprised to find on my trip to the DPRK in 2014 that several of the factories that we visited, including a foundry, were ISO 9001 certified. Anybody will tell you that ISO 9001 certification is no guarantee of quality, but the tools of high quality manufacturing (CAD, computer design and simulation, CNC, management systems) are widely available and there is no reason to believe that the DPRK wouldn't use them. Casting and forging Inconel isn't particularly difficult, any material engineer with the right books can work it out. You can even get Inconel powder and make parts with additive machining [3d printing] without much fuss.
The calculator is free to use, and the company makes money by charging organizations to use it, according to Bloomberg.
Sounds like it is not free to me.
The war on poverty has killed too many poor people.
Huh?
GP is right - being poor is strongly correlated with poor health outcomes. Diabetes, etc. lead to death very prematurely, especially without management. Availability of healthcare isn't the primary factor; people who are in poverty tend to seek care less often and are less compliant on average, regardless of healthcare availability.
The "Great Society" programs in the US have locked people into cycles of poverty. Look at the data for Eastern Kentucky, for instance: before the "Great Society" the net outflow of population was much higher. In prospective studies/experiments children who left with their families (subsidized to do so) at an early age did far better than their peers who stayed, and their life outcomes were much improved. But that's not how these programs work.
Before the "Great Society" if an area was overpopulated for its industries, the lack of work would cause people to leave. With these so-called "War on Poverty" programs, they are incentivized to stay put and collect welfare checks instead of seeking opportunity. There are multi-generational families in Appalachia who have never known a typical work environment.
Since the Green Revolution nobody is going to starve in a first-world country (obesity is our problem now). But the current Welfare State system definitively locks people into poverty and that turns out to be deadly.
You're missing a huge factor- quality education. Somehow we have managed to tie the quality of primary education completely to where one lives. The good schools are in areas with a good tax base, and the poorer areas get schools that reflect the reduced tax base. Just a quick look around Beattyville, KY (poorest white town in the USA) shows a lot of schools with GreatSchool ratings under 5/10. Multiple schools rated 2/10. The rating system may have some flaws but that is an indication that these schools have problems. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to determine if a school is bad because of the management, the funding, the teachers, or the parents. Nevertheless, without a decent education, those kids have little hope of doing better than their parents.
Try the login page for Tumblr.
It loads more than 20Mb of scripts and images.
Tumblr is one of the few websites that brings my tablet (2GB ram) to its knees. Infinite scrolling of an image-heavy website certainly doesn't help things.
The only reason why it's falling is because they count renewables as "fuel". So of course per unit of "fuel" consumed (and remember, solar radiation count as "fuel"), they emit less CO2. It doesn't mean the process of CO2 emitting thermal power plants actually improved.
If you look at the source, it seems fairly straightforward that they are simply multiplying the amount of fuel used by the amount of CO2 emitted per BTU of that fuel. That analysis if flawed in several ways, but saying that renewables are affecting this in a large way is not correct. Solar + Wind only produced 22,490 Million Kilowatt-hours in January 2017, or 6.5% of the total electricity produced in January 2017. Hydro and Geothermal production rate hasn't increased significantly in decades, so I will exclude them for now.
The big driver of this reduced carbon intensity is the shift from coal to natural gas for electricity production. In 2016, coal produced 1,240,089 Million Kilowatt-hours of electricity, down from a high of around 2,000,000 Million Kilowatt-hours in 2005-2007. The last time coal electricity production was this low was in 1985, and it will probably be even lower in 2018.
Meanwhile, natural gas electricity production was 1,380,293 Million Kilowatt-hours in 2016, the highest ever, and significantly increased from the 291,946 Million Kilowatt-hours produced in 1985. It will probably be even higher in 2018. Natural gas produces less CO2 than coal, so this is the major factor here.
It is worth noting that nuclear power production in January 2017 was 73,121 Million Kilowatt-hours, or 21.2% of total production. Demand has been basically flat at 4 Billion Giga-watt-hours per year since 2004. Natural gas and renewables are slurping up the slack in coal, but natural gas is a much more dominant factor.
You're missing the point of a carbon tax. The tax is meant to speed the end of fossil fuel use. And really it's natural gas that killed coal, so you're going after the wrong target.
The current market forces point to a direction of renewables, natural gas, and whatever nuclear remains operational (with no new nuclear plants). That's not a bad plan for the US for right now. However, natural gas in the US is currently 1/3 to 1/4 the cost of any other natural gas in the world. It is exceptionally, and historically cheap. Various people estimate that this low-pricing situation will last between 15 and 100 years. My personal opinion is that it is difficult to make estimates on that kind of timeframe.
Regardless, if natural gas in the US ever approaches the cost of natural gas elsewhere in the world, US consumers would be in for a very rude awakening on their utility bills. My personal opinion is that we should not eliminate these plants entirely. It isn't wrong to let market forces dictate our choices, but we should hedge against unfavorable market changes in the future.
Disclaimer- I'm "in the industry", my customers are roughly 60% gas and 40% coal.
How is that ratio modified by the electrical costs of running an 8 core FX chip? They consume like twice the power that zen does for like half the performance.
The Ryzen 1700 is a 65W chip, the FX-8300 is a 95W chip. Assuming you are running the machine at 100% load 24/7, and these ratings are accurate, the FX-8300 will cost you $1.75 extra per month at $0.08/kW-hr. If you want to consider the added AC load, you can round up to $2.50 per month. Given the price difference between the chips (currently ~$310+ vs ~$120), it would take more than 6 years to get to the electricity cost breakeven point.