It's one thing to cut salaries when you're hemorrhaging. It's another to cut salaries when everyone else is hemorrhaging, and you have a stable, monopoly-protected revenue base, just because your workers have no alternative.
Hate to say it, but that's exactly why. The cost of labor is dropping, because there's a massive pool of it willing to work for less right now. Market forces and all - more supply, less demand, price drops.
Sure, it was awesome for us all during the.com boom because it was the other way around (demand outstripping supply, causing outrageous salaries, etc.), but the point is stop your bitching when it goes the other way. That's just the way an open market works.
FedEx did it too, about two months ago. CEO took a 20% cut, various levels of management took 7.5-10%, and everybody else (well, everybody salaried, aka me) took 5%. The bigger hurt was the suspension of the 401k match.
Still, honestly given the economy, I'd rather see this than layoffs. Not that there aren't people I'd like to see gone, but that needs to come as part of the normal, "You're a moron/sloth, go pursue other career opportunities" methods. Layoffs always seem to get 75% of those people, and another 25% that were invaluable but pissed off the wrong person.
The more layoffs we get, the further down the bottom of this thing is going to be. So, given that a company's options are lay some people off or just make everybody take a little pain for the collective good, I'll take the collective pain right now. I think it's better for the economy as a whole.
I hate to break it to you, but nearly everything is toxic at some level. The ugly truth is that we're not going to get to a green utopia without some exotic materials that'll probably kill you if you look at them funny. Coal and oil are very safe, non-toxic materials - as is any reasonable concentration of CO2 - but the reality is that they're not green overall. The "green-ness" of a material is in its overall impact, not in its intrinsic properties. We can engineer around the fact that handling them is toxic - it's just a process and plant design question.
We aren't going to build a completely renewable energy infrastucture out of rainbows and ponies. It's going to take some very strange stuff, much of it not good for you. We just have to manage it well.
Definitely not kW/h, a really very meaningless unit. (It'd be joules / (1000*(second^2)) - what exactly are you going to measure with that?) kWh would make a lot more sense, but not in this context, as the OP was confused and not realizing this is about panels, not power.
Mod parent up - the mining industry typically just isn't wandering around prospecting for new ore veins unless they a) don't have enough reserves to meet projected demand or b) the price is high enough to justify opening new mines. When the price gets high enough or the reserves get low enough, they go looking and they usually find something. Most of these alarmist "we're out of element X" projections are based on proved reserve numbers, which are just what the mining companies know about *right now* and can extract.
It won't last forever, but there's a lot of ground out there to be dug up yet. I can't promise it'll be as economical to extract as current reserves and prices may fluctuate accordingly, but there *IS MORE OUT THERE*.
Or it's at least counter-intuitively capitalist...
The conventional, straight-forward capitalist thinking is to tightly control access to the resource (software) to create scarcity, and thus control the price. He does this for his own profit, as well as to cover his costs (capitalist programmers, overhead, etc).
The open source capitalist realizes that economic theory dictates that prices of software will trend towards zero, as there are very few barriers to entering the market. Any reasonably trained goon can write software (not necessarily good software, but something that gets the job done). The open source thinkers are searching elsewhere for markets with higher barriers to entry, such as support, customization, integration, etc. - things where the cost of entry is a fair amount of background knowledge and experience.
Clearly if I made artificial life, I'd put it on an ASIC. Otherwise you'd just have too many discrete components and general purpose things to get it in a tiny package.
Then again I'm an EE, and I equate everything biological to the word "slimy" in my mind. Mechanical life for the win...
Not only that, but every chair I have has a metal plate on the bottom, between the gas cylinder and the sittin' part. There's no way one of those cylinders could blow that big of a hole in that plate.
Or, better yet, torch them off at some depth so that they're no longer a navigation hazard and recycle the platform itself and upper superstructure. Seems silly to sink all that material. If you want to make artificial reefs, make them out of something cheap and plentiful, like formed concrete shapes.
Personally if they'd just learn the ancient and mystical art of autofocus calibration, that would help... My last two DSLR bodies (20D, 40D) have needed to go back for re-adjustment (which made a world of difference).
If they cause equal road damage/use, they should pay equal taxes. Even me, and I would get seriously boned by this plan because I love to drive. I'm tired of fucking subsidizing everyone who makes less than me.
Yearly fee based on weight and mileage, in addition to abolishing gas taxes, and I might be in. Mileage is a requirement to make this work, as while I drive a old Civic on a daily basis, I have a 3/4-ton Chevy that I rarely move (except when I need to haul stuff). I don't want to be billed like it's my daily vehicle.
I also don't want anybody monitoring where I'm driving, so no GPS crap. A simple radio odomoter reader will be just fine - possibly with the requirement that as part of renewing my plates every year, I have to drive the car through some sort of scan arch in the DMV's parking lot to get a read.
It's called a damn nuisance. If gas taxes aren't covering it, just raise the gas taxes. That's what they're there for, and work quite nicely. I don't want to have to pay 9 zillion different tolling authorities every month from places I barely remember and likely won't ever visit again - just build it into my fuel costs.
That'd be the number one reason that 90% of my Colorado to Iowa trips go via I-80 and NE. It's not that it financially breaks me, it's just the irritation of having tolls on a rural western freeway that has few, if any, high speed alternates. That and Nebraska has cheaper gas, cheaper hotels, lower grades (read: virtually none), and 80 is every bit as good if not better than 35. Oh, and a higher speed limit.
At least 35's tolls are reasonable. 2.35 for something like 40 miles. As for 470... The 27 miles between the southern I-25 junction and the airport has a toll of $7.25 each way. F@#$ing ridiculous. I never take it unless I'm absolutely sure that I'll miss my flight if I don't.
I've never had rodents chew through steel wool. We used to use it all over the place on the farm to seal holes, and it was about the only thing they wouldn't eat.
Already have read one in its entirety while I was eating lunch, and will probably go digging around for more of interest this evening.
While I agree with the supposition that the general populous is too stupid and/or lazy to bother educating themselves, and the release will not do them any good anyway, I'd argue on the side of, "Why not make the information available anyway?" It's a pretty good way for someone to bring themselves up to speed on some of the nuances of issues without doing a lot of research. Not like the government doesn't have plenty of bandwidth and a few servers...
Look folks, McCain is a *politician*. There are some of them out there who genuinely have a philosophy and an agenda against which all of their decisions are measured, but they're rare. Within some bounds, they flex from side to side based on which way they think will get them elected. McCain went right, thinking that he'd attract more of the R nutjob base than if he'd move to the center.
Obama did the right thing, and came center from the left. That was enough to satisfy conservatives like myself who cannot stand GWB or what the party has become.
That said, I too liked the pre-2008 McCain. My kind of conservative - a guy generally interested in a small, pragmatic government unbeholden to religious zealots and other nutjobs. To bad he didn't tell the nuts to take a hike and continue being himself.
Okay, so the *productive* societies of the world are responsible for most of the carbon output.
Duh, we're the ones doing stuff. A million billion African or South American tribesmen don't produce much, so they don't produce many emissions, either. It's one of those claims on which I happily accept blame.
Oh, and there's that little fact that many highly industrialized nations are now experiencing drastic slowdowns in population growth. Turns out when we get successful, we have something else to do besides have a fuckton of kids. Except if you live in Utah, then for religious reasons that rule does not apply.
I agree completely - though if we'd just get over our hang-ups on fuel reprocessing, we'd have a virtually limitless supply of fission power. Seriously, it's completely idiotic to dump fuel rods that have only burned 5% or so of their fuel. It makes power more expensive than it needs to be and gives us a crapton more waste to deal with.
Actually, no, I'm being perfectly serious. Unacceptable to whom? Obviously to you, but not so much to me. Really I don't care that there are giant holes in Arizona or Utah where decades of copper extraction have gone on. Actually I find the whole thing rather interesting from an industrial history perspective. Oh, and I like having electricity, so copper is kind of a prerequisite. Got to get it from somewhere... Did I mention that I live about ten miles from one of the US's larger open pit gold mines?
As for tailings... There's ore tailings and fines, which do tend to create toxic runoff problems and do need long term care and management. Then there's just overburden dirt and rock, such as from coal mining (particularly the strip mines of the Western US - not so much talking about mountaintop removal, which even I'm opposed to). Yes, it's still there, and yes, it erodes. Got news for you - stuff all around you is eroding. We've moved it around and increased the rate, but again, in many cases I'd argue this does only localized real damage and in those where it does have larger effects, it can be mitigated.
This destroys the landscape and has a lot of waste (i.e. dirt)
Yes, we must not get dirt on the nature - we wouldn't want our beautiful outdoors getting dirty.
While most mines aren't exactly candidates for national parks, they're relatively small and contained, and may cover a few tens of thousands of acres. In comparison to the huge amount of space out there, they're trivial. Plus, in western countries, mining companies are almost always required to do reclamation work when they leave to restore the landscape to something usable.
I find a big hole in the ground no more visually disagreeable than an equivalent surface area of solar arrays, or buried under the waters impounded behind a dam. Both just aren't natural, but such is the cost of the industrial society most of us want.
Slashdot Mirror
Or it's the ones who are forced to take the risk because more stable employment isn't interested in them as candidates...
It's one thing to cut salaries when you're hemorrhaging. It's another to cut salaries when everyone else is hemorrhaging, and you have a stable, monopoly-protected revenue base, just because your workers have no alternative.
Hate to say it, but that's exactly why. The cost of labor is dropping, because there's a massive pool of it willing to work for less right now. Market forces and all - more supply, less demand, price drops.
Sure, it was awesome for us all during the .com boom because it was the other way around (demand outstripping supply, causing outrageous salaries, etc.), but the point is stop your bitching when it goes the other way. That's just the way an open market works.
FedEx did it too, about two months ago. CEO took a 20% cut, various levels of management took 7.5-10%, and everybody else (well, everybody salaried, aka me) took 5%. The bigger hurt was the suspension of the 401k match.
Still, honestly given the economy, I'd rather see this than layoffs. Not that there aren't people I'd like to see gone, but that needs to come as part of the normal, "You're a moron/sloth, go pursue other career opportunities" methods. Layoffs always seem to get 75% of those people, and another 25% that were invaluable but pissed off the wrong person.
The more layoffs we get, the further down the bottom of this thing is going to be. So, given that a company's options are lay some people off or just make everybody take a little pain for the collective good, I'll take the collective pain right now. I think it's better for the economy as a whole.
I hate to break it to you, but nearly everything is toxic at some level. The ugly truth is that we're not going to get to a green utopia without some exotic materials that'll probably kill you if you look at them funny. Coal and oil are very safe, non-toxic materials - as is any reasonable concentration of CO2 - but the reality is that they're not green overall. The "green-ness" of a material is in its overall impact, not in its intrinsic properties. We can engineer around the fact that handling them is toxic - it's just a process and plant design question.
We aren't going to build a completely renewable energy infrastucture out of rainbows and ponies. It's going to take some very strange stuff, much of it not good for you. We just have to manage it well.
Definitely not kW/h, a really very meaningless unit. (It'd be joules / (1000*(second^2)) - what exactly are you going to measure with that?) kWh would make a lot more sense, but not in this context, as the OP was confused and not realizing this is about panels, not power.
Mod parent up - the mining industry typically just isn't wandering around prospecting for new ore veins unless they a) don't have enough reserves to meet projected demand or b) the price is high enough to justify opening new mines. When the price gets high enough or the reserves get low enough, they go looking and they usually find something. Most of these alarmist "we're out of element X" projections are based on proved reserve numbers, which are just what the mining companies know about *right now* and can extract.
It won't last forever, but there's a lot of ground out there to be dug up yet. I can't promise it'll be as economical to extract as current reserves and prices may fluctuate accordingly, but there *IS MORE OUT THERE*.
*pointing and stuttering in fear*
GU...GU...GU...GURL!
Or it's at least counter-intuitively capitalist...
The conventional, straight-forward capitalist thinking is to tightly control access to the resource (software) to create scarcity, and thus control the price. He does this for his own profit, as well as to cover his costs (capitalist programmers, overhead, etc).
The open source capitalist realizes that economic theory dictates that prices of software will trend towards zero, as there are very few barriers to entering the market. Any reasonably trained goon can write software (not necessarily good software, but something that gets the job done). The open source thinkers are searching elsewhere for markets with higher barriers to entry, such as support, customization, integration, etc. - things where the cost of entry is a fair amount of background knowledge and experience.
Clearly if I made artificial life, I'd put it on an ASIC. Otherwise you'd just have too many discrete components and general purpose things to get it in a tiny package.
Then again I'm an EE, and I equate everything biological to the word "slimy" in my mind. Mechanical life for the win...
Not only that, but every chair I have has a metal plate on the bottom, between the gas cylinder and the sittin' part. There's no way one of those cylinders could blow that big of a hole in that plate.
Or, better yet, torch them off at some depth so that they're no longer a navigation hazard and recycle the platform itself and upper superstructure. Seems silly to sink all that material. If you want to make artificial reefs, make them out of something cheap and plentiful, like formed concrete shapes.
Personally if they'd just learn the ancient and mystical art of autofocus calibration, that would help... My last two DSLR bodies (20D, 40D) have needed to go back for re-adjustment (which made a world of difference).
Clearly understands that government has never dropped a tax or fee - they just keep adding new ones.
If they cause equal road damage/use, they should pay equal taxes. Even me, and I would get seriously boned by this plan because I love to drive. I'm tired of fucking subsidizing everyone who makes less than me.
Yearly fee based on weight and mileage, in addition to abolishing gas taxes, and I might be in. Mileage is a requirement to make this work, as while I drive a old Civic on a daily basis, I have a 3/4-ton Chevy that I rarely move (except when I need to haul stuff). I don't want to be billed like it's my daily vehicle.
I also don't want anybody monitoring where I'm driving, so no GPS crap. A simple radio odomoter reader will be just fine - possibly with the requirement that as part of renewing my plates every year, I have to drive the car through some sort of scan arch in the DMV's parking lot to get a read.
It's called a damn nuisance. If gas taxes aren't covering it, just raise the gas taxes. That's what they're there for, and work quite nicely. I don't want to have to pay 9 zillion different tolling authorities every month from places I barely remember and likely won't ever visit again - just build it into my fuel costs.
...and I-35 in Kansas
That'd be the number one reason that 90% of my Colorado to Iowa trips go via I-80 and NE. It's not that it financially breaks me, it's just the irritation of having tolls on a rural western freeway that has few, if any, high speed alternates. That and Nebraska has cheaper gas, cheaper hotels, lower grades (read: virtually none), and 80 is every bit as good if not better than 35. Oh, and a higher speed limit.
At least 35's tolls are reasonable. 2.35 for something like 40 miles. As for 470... The 27 miles between the southern I-25 junction and the airport has a toll of $7.25 each way. F@#$ing ridiculous. I never take it unless I'm absolutely sure that I'll miss my flight if I don't.
I've never had rodents chew through steel wool. We used to use it all over the place on the farm to seal holes, and it was about the only thing they wouldn't eat.
Already have read one in its entirety while I was eating lunch, and will probably go digging around for more of interest this evening.
While I agree with the supposition that the general populous is too stupid and/or lazy to bother educating themselves, and the release will not do them any good anyway, I'd argue on the side of, "Why not make the information available anyway?" It's a pretty good way for someone to bring themselves up to speed on some of the nuances of issues without doing a lot of research. Not like the government doesn't have plenty of bandwidth and a few servers...
Look folks, McCain is a *politician*. There are some of them out there who genuinely have a philosophy and an agenda against which all of their decisions are measured, but they're rare. Within some bounds, they flex from side to side based on which way they think will get them elected. McCain went right, thinking that he'd attract more of the R nutjob base than if he'd move to the center.
Obama did the right thing, and came center from the left. That was enough to satisfy conservatives like myself who cannot stand GWB or what the party has become.
That said, I too liked the pre-2008 McCain. My kind of conservative - a guy generally interested in a small, pragmatic government unbeholden to religious zealots and other nutjobs. To bad he didn't tell the nuts to take a hike and continue being himself.
Okay, so the *productive* societies of the world are responsible for most of the carbon output.
Duh, we're the ones doing stuff. A million billion African or South American tribesmen don't produce much, so they don't produce many emissions, either. It's one of those claims on which I happily accept blame.
Oh, and there's that little fact that many highly industrialized nations are now experiencing drastic slowdowns in population growth. Turns out when we get successful, we have something else to do besides have a fuckton of kids. Except if you live in Utah, then for religious reasons that rule does not apply.
I'm interested in your new housing development that lists "hookers and beer" as amenities included with a home purchase. Please tell me more. :)
I agree completely - though if we'd just get over our hang-ups on fuel reprocessing, we'd have a virtually limitless supply of fission power. Seriously, it's completely idiotic to dump fuel rods that have only burned 5% or so of their fuel. It makes power more expensive than it needs to be and gives us a crapton more waste to deal with.
Actually, no, I'm being perfectly serious. Unacceptable to whom? Obviously to you, but not so much to me. Really I don't care that there are giant holes in Arizona or Utah where decades of copper extraction have gone on. Actually I find the whole thing rather interesting from an industrial history perspective. Oh, and I like having electricity, so copper is kind of a prerequisite. Got to get it from somewhere... Did I mention that I live about ten miles from one of the US's larger open pit gold mines?
As for tailings... There's ore tailings and fines, which do tend to create toxic runoff problems and do need long term care and management. Then there's just overburden dirt and rock, such as from coal mining (particularly the strip mines of the Western US - not so much talking about mountaintop removal, which even I'm opposed to). Yes, it's still there, and yes, it erodes. Got news for you - stuff all around you is eroding. We've moved it around and increased the rate, but again, in many cases I'd argue this does only localized real damage and in those where it does have larger effects, it can be mitigated.
This destroys the landscape and has a lot of waste (i.e. dirt)
Yes, we must not get dirt on the nature - we wouldn't want our beautiful outdoors getting dirty.
While most mines aren't exactly candidates for national parks, they're relatively small and contained, and may cover a few tens of thousands of acres. In comparison to the huge amount of space out there, they're trivial. Plus, in western countries, mining companies are almost always required to do reclamation work when they leave to restore the landscape to something usable.
I find a big hole in the ground no more visually disagreeable than an equivalent surface area of solar arrays, or buried under the waters impounded behind a dam. Both just aren't natural, but such is the cost of the industrial society most of us want.