When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of Mexico.
We needed a universally unique personal identifier. Only the feds could actually create one, and the SSN is the only one they ever got political consensus to create. The real problem is treating it as both identification and authentication.
Three ID's for Credit Reporting Agencies under the sky, Seven ID's for Three Letter Agencies in their halls of stone, Nine ID's for each system you log on to.
One ID for the DHS on it's dark throne, In the Land called DC, where the shadows lie.
One ID to rule them, One ID to find them One ID to normalize the database and in the darkness bind them. In the land called DC where the shadows lie.
Seriously...I sometimes think the average IQ is dropping on a daily basis (and, yes, I get the irony)...Both with what I read, and my own experiences working in IT, I become more and more convinced that society will eventually collapse under the weight of bad advice from consultants (and, no, I don't own a fallout shelter)...and I spend more and more time thinking about ways that I can profit off of the stupidity of leadership.
Read it and grab your tin foil and duct tape. You're gonna need lots.
I work with a number of Filipinos on a daily basis - some of them are quite fluent, others less so.
The times I have worked with Philippines-based call centers (Adobe, I'm looking at YOU you slimy parthogenic mutant spawn of a perverted invertebrate) between the poor connection, the very limited knowledge that the person had and the accent, I had a very, very unpleasant experience. The employees were, however, unfailingly polite.
It's not so much the language barrier, although at times that is a problem - it's the whole concept of a complex, poorly thought out, poorly executed process that makes my blood pressure go up every time I even think about calling.
My point is that even if you 'vaccinate against every single thing you can' it's only perhaps a dozen organisms. The human body is exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of organisms on a regular basis. To suggest that the specific immune responses occurring after a vaccination have much of an impact with the enormous numbers of responses an intact immune system gets exposed to on a regular basis and that those limited specific exposures are somehow deleterious strikes me as extremely implausible.
So, if you have some research that actually speaks to that, I would be obliged.
But your last statement
I understand that slashdot is flat-out rabid in their favor of vaccines, but just because vaccines don't cause autism or any other direct health concern doesn't mean it's healthy from an evolutionary standpoint to vaccinate every single child against every single infinitesimal threat.
really makes it seem that you don't know what you're talking about. A dozen vaccines is not "every single infinitesimal threat" by a long shot.
Human cloning is banned. Expect the new batch of cloned TSA agents in approximately fifteen years.
Well, the obvious solution to this is to hybridize a TSA agent with the super nosed Labrador Retriever clone. You get the perfect employee - works for treats and an occasional pat on the head, can sniff out anything from marijuana to C4, lives about 10 years so no long term Social Security / Medicare costs and is one hell of a lot cuter than the vast majority of current TSA agents.
Because 1) Those probes (even all SIX of them) have barely scratched the surface 2) as hard as it is Mars is an order of magnitude easier to get to than Europa and 3) there are plenty of folks who would just LOVE to plan and execute complex missions to the outer planets and moons but are stymied by a certain lack of funding.
Got any extra cash you care to devote to the cause?
Do you realize intersection between the 'hygiene hypothesis' (exposure to many different infectious vectors helps prime the immune system in useful ways) and immunizations (attempting to decrease the incidence of a few, serious infections) is very, very, very small?
I don't see the relevance to a corporation's content policy? Do you suggest that the congress can't use its influence to encourage voluntary compliance with the movie rating system either?
Yes, I definitely think that a standing Senator should not be advocating abrogating the Constitution and associated documents. Private citizen Lieberman can do whatever he pleases in this regard, but he should not put "Senator" in front of his name nor should it be on US Senate letterhead. The movie rating system, will kinda dumb, does not infringe on any constitutional boundaries. If it did, then the same considerations would apply.
May I interest you in an important Historical Document that, I might add, you were supposed to have read and understood when you were sworn into the Senate?
Be careful about posting a single citation that is contrary to the thinking of pretty much everybody else (except the abiogenesis folks). Your article's nice handwaving is trying to create the argument that 'estimated reserves' all over the world are much higher than everybody else believes.
But nobody in the business believes the reserves are high because those numbers are basically fairy tales. They are for political, not scientific consumption. It is incredibly difficult to figure out what an economically viable geologic reserve of anything is. It's not like you just do a seismic survey and punch in a number.
However, I would be willing to agree with you that reality is that we are somewhere in the middle of 'fucking doomed' and happy shiny thoughts forever. Personally, I think it's going to be along the lines of a whole lot of people are going to be less well off then they are today over the coming decades and some of that less well off-ness may happen pretty fast which will be be rather unpleasant.
Yes, the definition of 'peak oil' can be complicated. Absolute production is one metric, and of course, we will never know when that happens. The production curve has been pretty flat for a while (warning: complex, lots of graphs, don't just grab a number an run).
But just looking at production only shows part of the problem. If various economies are price sensitive to energy (which they appear to be) and economic growth is considered a 'good thing', then if demand increases significantly past production (which is our current situation), then you have a problem, Houston.
Oil is always going to be available. Whether or not it will be available at prices that allow for stable economies around the globe is the question. If oil hits, for example, $500 / gallon and thus gasoline prices are $15 / gallon "business as usual" (aka the economy) has big issues. Big issues.
1) China's and India's economies have been expanding at an insane pace in the last 10 years. More people in those countries drive cars now than every before. The demand has continually been increasing.
And the oil exporters in the Middle East, understanding they have a limited supply of oil in the ground are NOT increasing output much, if at all. The US / Canada in a mad attempt to keep up has been utilizing every drilling rig available for the past 5 years and we are just barely keeping pace with output reductions from the older fields.
So, if Chindia keeps munching on the fossil fuels and we keep doing the same AND production INCREASES don't keep up, you have, wait for it, Peak Oil.
2) Developed nations (most notably the U.S. and Canada) have politically decided that oil is "dirty" and entire industries have been prevented from expanded production of oil in these 2 nations (which have vast tracks of land, full of oil), this is to say nothing of the rest of the world, which seemed quite content to just let the monopoly OPEC exist and just deal with them.
Well, aside from the implication that the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are running things (you might want to tell them), we are, as I mentioned, punching holes through our 'vast tracts of land' and not keeping up with the big increases. Hint - go look up the geology of future North American 'conventional' oil reserves. The USGS keeps dropping that number every year. And a lot of geologists think that the official USGS figures are still overstated.
You have an funny definition of 'monopoly' - Oil is probably the most decentralized power supply on the planet. OPEC / Brazil / China / US / USSR / whateverstan / Non OPEC Middle East - it's everywhere. We've just sucked out the easy stuff.
Now it gets as Johnny Depp would say, complicated.
I don't think your second reference says what you think it says. It just points out that the total magnitude of the CO2 sink in the oceans is poorly understood. Chemistry 101 points out that once you reach saturation in your solution's ability to buffer, pH changes occur rapidly. Rapid pH changes mess with critters which messes with ecological stability which generally messes with our dinner.
That's what people are worried about.
And don't worry, we ARE carrying on as usual, as long as we can. Doing things otherwise requires coordination, foresight and planning, not to mention some people winning and others 'losing'. Things will change, the unanswerable question is how fast. We can traverse to a more sustainable energy use scenario given enough stable resources and time. Jack around with things enough and we might not have either.
I'm not an extremist, but I always look at this sudden change of minds with skepticism.
The only 'sudden change of mind' is your little marble rattling around in your skull. This is just another attempt to refine the models. Even a cursory reading of the the majority of the literature gives you the understanding that there are bunch of variables that we understand and can quantify only minimally. This is just another attempt to improve the model.
Actually 1.7 to 2.6 due to a doubling of CO2 is fantastic. It means with the current trajectory we're only going to get the "expected" unavoidable warming (2 degrees C) even if we do nothing till 2050 or later.
Basically, we let Peak Oil kill off the internal-combustion engine automobile and ride out solar/battery improvements for stationary energy. It changes a lot.
Depends. We're just talking about air temp, not ocean CO2 exchanges. That could flip climate real fast, real dramatically.
We're still in the 'we don't exactly know what's going to happen' stage of our understanding but the light at the end of the tunnel may well be another train.
And, more to the point, we're tossing the term 'oil' around loosely. For the purposes of the global warming - CO2 argument here, it's any fossil fuel that, when burned, releases 'extra' CO2 into the atmosphere. That means oil, coal, natural gas, overly adipose Americans.
Yep, there is a lot of oil left. Now, how do you get it out of the ground - that's the rub. Even in a totally depleted, water soaked oil field, there is a metric shitload of oil under the surface. Just no way to economically bring it to the surface.
Same with Ultradeep oil in the Gulf of Mexico (and elsewhere). You stick a $2 billion dollar rig on surface, spend a long time drilling (and oopsie occasionally - dry holes and the unavoidable blowout) and you get a couple more million barrels for a few years (Deepwater plays tend to be smaller fields that go flat pretty fast because of the pressures and the geology). Keep doing that and you've driven the price of oil up to like $100 / barrel. Add increasing growth of Homo Industrialis and now oil is $150 / barrel. Fine, that gives the folks with the billion dollar oil rigs more economic room to drill in Godknowswhereistan (or Cleveland) but that brings home heating oil up to $5 / gallon. Fine, you say, just insulate. Oopsie, my income stream has been flat to going backwards over the past several years because the economy (which is only happy at constant to accelerating growth) isn't growing.
Get's complicated. There will always be oil (which is good - petrochemicals are wonderfully useful) but cheap energy may be a thing of the past.
And cheap energy is what has driven the Industrial Revolution so far.
Now, back to the original subject - we might have a few more years of breathing room. Maybe.
Like I keep repeating - there's only 40 years of oil left.
While I find your argument of proof by repetitive assertion convincing, I think that 20 years ago there was only 30 years oil left. In another 40 years it may have reach 80 years left. Maybe there's more people repeating the opposite to you and it's actually driving the oil supplies upwards?
We have certainly reached "Peak Oil" - we are not increasing oil production in the face of increasing oil demand. We are going after harder to extract oil (oil sands, deep water oil), we ARE improving fractional production from existing wells through horizontal drilling and fracking and other methods but this serves more to make a long tail type of decline.
"Running out" of oil (or petrochemicals in general) is a more complex issue than can be stuffed in a sound bite. We will never run completely out of oil - there are thousands of 'stripper wells' pulling out a couple of barrels of crude oil per day and will do so for hundreds of years. But you can't run a major industrial economy on stripper wells. It will depend on a number of inter related issues - economic growth, conservation, solar / wind / hydro / nuc power, wars, etc.
But we;re already beyond 'cheap oil' - if that's any consolation to the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of Mexico.
There, I fixed it for you.
We needed a universally unique personal identifier. Only the feds could actually create one, and the SSN is the only one they ever got political consensus to create.
The real problem is treating it as both identification and authentication.
Three ID's for Credit Reporting Agencies under the sky,
Seven ID's for Three Letter Agencies in their halls of stone,
Nine ID's for each system you log on to.
One ID for the DHS on it's dark throne,
In the Land called DC, where the shadows lie.
One ID to rule them, One ID to find them
One ID to normalize the database and in the darkness bind them.
In the land called DC where the shadows lie.
(Apologies to just about everyone)
Galaxy Note....with 5.2 inch screen and stylus. Now that is a phone.
A stylus? A stylus? Were you in some sort of cryogenic storage? Check your calendar, dude - it's the 21st century already.
He's hardly dead and already they start meddling with the _absolute truths_ according to the Messiah.
Happens to every religion.
Seriously...I sometimes think the average IQ is dropping on a daily basis (and, yes, I get the irony)...Both with what I read, and my own experiences working in IT, I become more and more convinced that society will eventually collapse under the weight of bad advice from consultants (and, no, I don't own a fallout shelter)...and I spend more and more time thinking about ways that I can profit off of the stupidity of leadership.
Read it and grab your tin foil and duct tape. You're gonna need lots.
Which 2011 are you in? Mine distinctly doesn't have teleportation over IP lines. (I just checked.)
I work with a number of Filipinos on a daily basis - some of them are quite fluent, others less so.
The times I have worked with Philippines-based call centers (Adobe, I'm looking at YOU you slimy parthogenic mutant spawn of a perverted invertebrate) between the poor connection, the very limited knowledge that the person had and the accent, I had a very, very unpleasant experience. The employees were, however, unfailingly polite.
It's not so much the language barrier, although at times that is a problem - it's the whole concept of a complex, poorly thought out, poorly executed process that makes my blood pressure go up every time I even think about calling.
Which may be exactly how they planned it.
My point is that even if you 'vaccinate against every single thing you can' it's only perhaps a dozen organisms. The human body is exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of organisms on a regular basis. To suggest that the specific immune responses occurring after a vaccination have much of an impact with the enormous numbers of responses an intact immune system gets exposed to on a regular basis and that those limited specific exposures are somehow deleterious strikes me as extremely implausible.
So, if you have some research that actually speaks to that, I would be obliged.
But your last statement
I understand that slashdot is flat-out rabid in their favor of vaccines, but just because vaccines don't cause autism or any other direct health concern doesn't mean it's healthy from an evolutionary standpoint to vaccinate every single child against every single infinitesimal threat.
really makes it seem that you don't know what you're talking about. A dozen vaccines is not "every single infinitesimal threat" by a long shot.
Human cloning is banned. Expect the new batch of cloned TSA agents in approximately fifteen years.
Well, the obvious solution to this is to hybridize a TSA agent with the super nosed Labrador Retriever clone. You get the perfect employee - works for treats and an occasional pat on the head, can sniff out anything from marijuana to C4, lives about 10 years so no long term Social Security / Medicare costs and is one hell of a lot cuter than the vast majority of current TSA agents.
What's not to like?
Because 1) Those probes (even all SIX of them) have barely scratched the surface 2) as hard as it is Mars is an order of magnitude easier to get to than Europa and 3) there are plenty of folks who would just LOVE to plan and execute complex missions to the outer planets and moons but are stymied by a certain lack of funding.
Got any extra cash you care to devote to the cause?
Do you realize intersection between the 'hygiene hypothesis' (exposure to many different infectious vectors helps prime the immune system in useful ways) and immunizations (attempting to decrease the incidence of a few, serious infections) is very, very, very small?
Basically it's a non sequitor.
I need people to know my child's retardation is inherited and not forced by a doctor's vaccines!!!!!
Not a problem, amigo.
I don't see the relevance to a corporation's content policy? Do you suggest that the congress can't use its influence to encourage voluntary compliance with the movie rating system either?
Yes, I definitely think that a standing Senator should not be advocating abrogating the Constitution and associated documents. Private citizen Lieberman can do whatever he pleases in this regard, but he should not put "Senator" in front of his name nor should it be on US Senate letterhead. The movie rating system, will kinda dumb, does not infringe on any constitutional boundaries. If it did, then the same considerations would apply.
Dear Honorable Senator Lieberman:
May I interest you in an important Historical Document that, I might add, you were supposed to have read and understood when you were sworn into the Senate?
Reading comprehension is important for everyone.
Be careful about posting a single citation that is contrary to the thinking of pretty much everybody else (except the abiogenesis folks). Your article's nice handwaving is trying to create the argument that 'estimated reserves' all over the world are much higher than everybody else believes.
But nobody in the business believes the reserves are high because those numbers are basically fairy tales. They are for political, not scientific consumption. It is incredibly difficult to figure out what an economically viable geologic reserve of anything is. It's not like you just do a seismic survey and punch in a number.
However, I would be willing to agree with you that reality is that we are somewhere in the middle of 'fucking doomed' and happy shiny thoughts forever. Personally, I think it's going to be along the lines of a whole lot of people are going to be less well off then they are today over the coming decades and some of that less well off-ness may happen pretty fast which will be be rather unpleasant.
After all, Murphy was an optimist, right?
Yes, the definition of 'peak oil' can be complicated. Absolute production is one metric, and of course, we will never know when that happens. The production curve has been pretty flat for a while (warning: complex, lots of graphs, don't just grab a number an run).
But just looking at production only shows part of the problem. If various economies are price sensitive to energy (which they appear to be) and economic growth is considered a 'good thing', then if demand increases significantly past production (which is our current situation), then you have a problem, Houston.
Oil is always going to be available. Whether or not it will be available at prices that allow for stable economies around the globe is the question. If oil hits, for example, $500 / gallon and thus gasoline prices are $15 / gallon "business as usual" (aka the economy) has big issues. Big issues.
1) China's and India's economies have been expanding at an insane pace in the last 10 years. More people in those countries drive cars now than every before. The demand has continually been increasing.
And the oil exporters in the Middle East, understanding they have a limited supply of oil in the ground are NOT increasing output much, if at all. The US / Canada in a mad attempt to keep up has been utilizing every drilling rig available for the past 5 years and we are just barely keeping pace with output reductions from the older fields.
So, if Chindia keeps munching on the fossil fuels and we keep doing the same AND production INCREASES don't keep up, you have, wait for it, Peak Oil.
2) Developed nations (most notably the U.S. and Canada) have politically decided that oil is "dirty" and entire industries have been prevented from expanded production of oil in these 2 nations (which have vast tracks of land, full of oil), this is to say nothing of the rest of the world, which seemed quite content to just let the monopoly OPEC exist and just deal with them.
Well, aside from the implication that the Sierra Club and Greenpeace are running things (you might want to tell them), we are, as I mentioned, punching holes through our 'vast tracts of land' and not keeping up with the big increases. Hint - go look up the geology of future North American 'conventional' oil reserves. The USGS keeps dropping that number every year. And a lot of geologists think that the official USGS figures are still overstated.
You have an funny definition of 'monopoly' - Oil is probably the most decentralized power supply on the planet. OPEC / Brazil / China / US / USSR / whateverstan / Non OPEC Middle East - it's everywhere. We've just sucked out the easy stuff.
Now it gets as Johnny Depp would say, complicated.
I have looked around and cannot find the answer as to whether Curiosity has a microphone on board.
If not then why not?
Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine, - who wouldn't want to hear the winds of Mars?
In space, no one can hear you scream.
I don't think your second reference says what you think it says. It just points out that the total magnitude of the CO2 sink in the oceans is poorly understood. Chemistry 101 points out that once you reach saturation in your solution's ability to buffer, pH changes occur rapidly. Rapid pH changes mess with critters which messes with ecological stability which generally messes with our dinner.
That's what people are worried about.
And don't worry, we ARE carrying on as usual, as long as we can. Doing things otherwise requires coordination, foresight and planning, not to mention some people winning and others 'losing'. Things will change, the unanswerable question is how fast. We can traverse to a more sustainable energy use scenario given enough stable resources and time. Jack around with things enough and we might not have either.
I'm not an extremist, but I always look at this sudden change of minds with skepticism.
The only 'sudden change of mind' is your little marble rattling around in your skull. This is just another attempt to refine the models. Even a cursory reading of the the majority of the literature gives you the understanding that there are bunch of variables that we understand and can quantify only minimally. This is just another attempt to improve the model.
Actually 1.7 to 2.6 due to a doubling of CO2 is fantastic. It means with the current trajectory we're only going to get the "expected" unavoidable warming (2 degrees C) even if we do nothing till 2050 or later.
Basically, we let Peak Oil kill off the internal-combustion engine automobile and ride out solar/battery improvements for stationary energy. It changes a lot.
Depends. We're just talking about air temp, not ocean CO2 exchanges. That could flip climate real fast, real dramatically.
We're still in the 'we don't exactly know what's going to happen' stage of our understanding but the light at the end of the tunnel may well be another train.
And, more to the point, we're tossing the term 'oil' around loosely. For the purposes of the global warming - CO2 argument here, it's any fossil fuel that, when burned, releases 'extra' CO2 into the atmosphere. That means oil, coal, natural gas, overly adipose Americans.
Yep, there is a lot of oil left. Now, how do you get it out of the ground - that's the rub. Even in a totally depleted, water soaked oil field, there is a metric shitload of oil under the surface. Just no way to economically bring it to the surface.
Same with Ultradeep oil in the Gulf of Mexico (and elsewhere). You stick a $2 billion dollar rig on surface, spend a long time drilling (and oopsie occasionally - dry holes and the unavoidable blowout) and you get a couple more million barrels for a few years (Deepwater plays tend to be smaller fields that go flat pretty fast because of the pressures and the geology). Keep doing that and you've driven the price of oil up to like $100 / barrel. Add increasing growth of Homo Industrialis and now oil is $150 / barrel. Fine, that gives the folks with the billion dollar oil rigs more economic room to drill in Godknowswhereistan (or Cleveland) but that brings home heating oil up to $5 / gallon. Fine, you say, just insulate. Oopsie, my income stream has been flat to going backwards over the past several years because the economy (which is only happy at constant to accelerating growth) isn't growing.
Get's complicated. There will always be oil (which is good - petrochemicals are wonderfully useful) but cheap energy may be a thing of the past.
And cheap energy is what has driven the Industrial Revolution so far.
Now, back to the original subject - we might have a few more years of breathing room. Maybe.
Just send them over to The Oil Drum - a nice peak oil site with equations, graphs, charts and a reasonable amount of common sense.
Like I keep repeating - there's only 40 years of oil left.
While I find your argument of proof by repetitive assertion convincing, I think that 20 years ago there was only 30 years oil left. In another 40 years it may have reach 80 years left. Maybe there's more people repeating the opposite to you and it's actually driving the oil supplies upwards?
We have certainly reached "Peak Oil" - we are not increasing oil production in the face of increasing oil demand. We are going after harder to extract oil (oil sands, deep water oil), we ARE improving fractional production from existing wells through horizontal drilling and fracking and other methods but this serves more to make a long tail type of decline.
"Running out" of oil (or petrochemicals in general) is a more complex issue than can be stuffed in a sound bite. We will never run completely out of oil - there are thousands of 'stripper wells' pulling out a couple of barrels of crude oil per day and will do so for hundreds of years. But you can't run a major industrial economy on stripper wells. It will depend on a number of inter related issues - economic growth, conservation, solar / wind / hydro / nuc power, wars, etc.
But we;re already beyond 'cheap oil' - if that's any consolation to the planet.