If they put the plant in Michigan, hire a bunch of middle aged former factory workers, organize them into 3 shifts of eight hours, they should be able to run the plant 120 hours a week.
You know what would most likely happen? They'll build a new plant, it'll be highly automated with the very newest tech rather than employ any line workers, they'll hire three shifts of managers with green cards from India to watch the computer report the status of the assembly lines (and record everything they do on cameras.) The plant will run 168 hours a week. They'll incorporate parts from China, which are now 140% the cost of what they were previously because President Trump wants that tariff really bad, and they'll charge you double and then multiply that by 1.4.
Welcome to the new world, where we don't buy stuff from China anymore, and we still have no work, and we can't afford anything.
President Trump's gonna make America Grate Again. Ouch! Here, hold my footgun.
The $649 phone would wind up being around $880. No shipping costs would really be saved because I am assuming the components for the iPhone would still be sourced from China because that's where the supply chain is nowadays, maybe they factored it into the doubling.
I wonder if they factored in Trump's intended 40% tariff on those part cost estimates?
Or the fact that China says, "you erect trade barriers, we will too."
That didn't just "happen" to them. They got regulated in exchange for access to a market in which they would exercise a near- or complete-monopoly.
If you want to make an argument that Twitter has a near-monoply on... um, tweeting, or that Facebook has a near-monopoly on communicating among people in general, and you are able to reasonably contend that these things are important to society then you might want to make an argument for regulation and see if you can make it fly.
Both companies use their terms of service to say "you over here can participate, but you over there can't" one way or another, and in a fairly arbitrary manner. They also restrict what you can do if they do let you use their service. And they are both pretty much the only real serious game in town for their respective functions in society. So you might have an argument. But that's the way you have to present it if you want it to even have a chance of flying. Seems to me your chances are overall better with Facebook, as they really do have a stranglehold on general interaction and friendly-to-the-general-public networking, which does indeed affect society in general in a very broad and powerful sense. Tweeting... I don't know. Maybe. I can't see it, personally. If you take my 140 characters away from me, I will just laugh at you. I think I would take being cut off from the vast majority of the people I have met over my lifetime and my extended family much more seriously. If I used Facebook and cared, which I don't, either one.:)
You understand what a market force is, don't you? It's demand. Works like this:
1- People want lots of stuff. 2- Stuff is made from resources. 3- There are lots of unclaimed resources out there. 4- Ergo, Resources... Stuff == Gonna go get that.
I suggest you write that down. It'll help you understand a lot about the world. An area you clearly suffer from a deficit in, at present.
Here's how it doesn't work:
Someone knows where a seam of gold is. They also know it's unclaimed. They ignore it, because "that'd be hard to dig out of the ground."
Cuz (a), well, then you don't get the gold, and (b) someone else gets the gold.
Everything out there... everything is unclaimed. Resources - and so, riches - awesome amounts of riches. Someone's going to go get that. Not some guy sitting around muttering "we're never gonna be in space", but that won't affect the people who are actually, you know, paying attention.
I suggest you write all that down, too. Same reason.
I'd call for James P. Hogan on the one hand, for good SF with a strong human element, and Keith Laumer's "Bolo" series for machine intelligence / war stories, and also Keith Laumer's "Galactic Odyssey" for the best... well, galactic odyssey story.
For fantasy, I think I'd like to see Naiomi Novak's Temeraire books, and/or anything by Robin Hobb.
For simple awesomeness, I'd like to see John Birmingham's "Weapons of Choice" series done.
The problem, as has been observed, is that generally speaking Hollywood makes an utter hash out of the books it makes into movies. Soylent Green being the poster child for Hollywood wrecking a great story. And that is something I would not like to see happen to any of these.
You're wasting your time. To the GP, the only technological development that will ever matter to achieving space has already happened; the only engineering that will ever matter to achieving space has already been done. It's wholly loony, but it's not uncommon.
Eventually, we'll be all over the solar system. The available space, energy, manufacturing conditions and natural resources all better (and in some cases, dwarf) those we can achieve on earth. Market forces will make this happen. Assuming we don't get hit by a comet or an asteroid, or the ecology doesn't collapse, or we don't nuke each other into glowing dust, of course.
The tech to get into space is known. The tech to live in space is known too, although it is true that the engineering has yet to be done.
The "space nutters" are actually the ones that claim we'll be indefinitely planet-bound. It's a pretty clueless assertion.
Chemical rockets can bootstrap this, though the cost is high; something like a space elevator would change the entire picture, but we're still working on the material science for that, and again, no engineering has been done (because no materials as yet.)
Anyway, fear not the nay-sayers. They know not of what they speak.:)
This, today, from US Gov. I saw something previously, an offhand remark by Peskov, but I've been unable to find it again. So this is all I can offer. Sorry.
Alright, but then the innovation of multithreading (and each innovation that increases complexity) has relegated more programmers to the status of amateur.
Entirely a good thing.
The way I look at it is that programming is a discipline with a wide range from very limited skill to professional level competence. As with any field that is both innovative and active, staying at or near the upper tiers is going to be an increasingly difficult challenge. That's natural. So yes, if you can't grasp some of the most powerful tools available to your craft, you're going down-rank, fast. As it should be.
If someone doesn't want to be caught in such a slide, it behooves them to learn how to handle whatever challenges the face before they go writing production code all willy-nilly. There was a time when threading was new to me. I asked questions, wrote a crapload of test code, listened to the caveats I was told about, and wrapped my head around it. That's the path I suggest anyone take, and particularly so when even the most cursory research about the tool turns up well-known gotchas. Honestly, if you just take a few minutes to google it, you immediately run into mutex techniques and rationales, cache behavior across cores and multiple CPUs, etc. If you can't be bothered to train yourself to use your tools well, is there any truth at all in calling yourself a professional?
Clinton is of the same party, and has made a number of statements that align her closely with President Obama.
President Obama (re)imposed the (un)PATRIOT(ic) act on the US; if that doesn't give you a guiding sense of where the party is, and very likely where Mrs. Clinton is in terms of invasive surveillance, imposition on personal liberty, and constitutional malfeasance, I don't know what would.
Not to say President-elect Trump is likely to be any better, but inasmuch as his campaign was riddled with trivially disproved falsehoods, and in just the few days since the election, we've seen (at least) these radical pivots from him and/or his team...
o Not getting rid of pre-existing conditions or the ACA as a whole; o Not dumping the banksters (met with them already to kill Dodd–Frank consumer protections) o Not cleaning house (already hiring the most in- of the in-movers and shakers and lobbyists, for his team) o Not actually building a wall, that was just figurative; o No special prosecutor for Clinton ("what a great campaign she ran!"); o Making nice with President Obama after explicitly claiming he was the worst president ever; o The whole "no-ties with Russia" thing, oops, lots of ties, plus wikileaks admitted by the Russians now; o Going from "ultra-vet all Muslims at the border" to "we will not allow people in from terrorist regions"
...I don't see any way to associate his previously asserted goals with his actual intent. So I can't say he'd be any worse, either. The man is a policy cypher. A misogynist, xenophobic, sexist, rude, compulsive, racist, and frankly, none-too-bright policy-cypher with a grade school vocabulary and the rhetorical (lack of) skills of (at best) a 7th grader. Who knows what the heck he will do if the EC lets this farce come to fruition?
Normally you're happy with a good but not perfect solution and that can be found in reasonable time, so you can avoid tackling an actual NP completeness challenge.
You don't tackle NP-completeness challenges. NP-completeness challenges tackle YOU!
Yes, this. the threading comment struck me more as indicative of an amateur in the area than any real flag of a problem area.
if you understand threading, you can work just fine within it, do appropriate things, don't do inappropriate things. You also have to understand the problem you're trying to solve, but again, that comes down to your skills - not any inherent "Dragon-ness" of threading.
I thread the heck out of my software. Works great. Cross-platform, too. Relatively easy stuff - image processing - and really hard stuff, real time signal processing where all manner of stuff is happening concurrently that depends in one way or another on the other stuff that's happening concurrently. I'm not talking about some thread off doing network management, either.
For me, it's strictly a matter of not going in there casually and carelessly. The appropriate planning and thinking - IOW, design first, then write software - pays off every time.
Of course, if you treat threading casually (as with many other things), it immediately becomes a footgun. Well, that's why Darwin gave us multiple feet, sonny.:)
But the whole point is we're supposed to be good at this. You have to pay your dues to get there. Programming Javascript on a web site isn't going to build the required skillsets.
Yes, that's a possibility; it depends entirely on how congress structures any barriers and/or tariffs, assuming they even do. It's one thing to talk about it -- it's entirely another to do it. Lobbyists control what congress does. The process is that of an oligarchy. So in the crafting of any legislative policy, it's all about who has the deepest pockets. American corporations, or the Chinese and Japanese nation states.
We also have to keep in mind that China and Japan opening to our products coming in means they do damage to their own local production. That damage has to be less than the benefit gained -- it may not, in fact, be "half of something", it may be a straight-up loss. And China, at least, is enjoying the fruits of a large population combined with a roaring economic engine because they don't let in other products easily, or in some cases, at all.
It's not a given that any of this will work out well. It's popcorn time.
Even Democracy could be made to work with some careful genetic manipulation to improve the breed so intelligence is uniformly high, credulous outlooks are replaced with a lean towards critical thinking and skepticism, and on top of this was actually layered a decent education.
We know democracy is very dangerous now and historically speaking because the public has not been, and is not now, well informed nor able to make quality decisions. Fix that, and the terrain changes dramatically. Still might not work, but it'd have to be for a whole spate of new reasons. What those might be isn't obvious to me at the moment.
Likewise, an actual intelligent, benevolent, scientifically leaning dictator / king / etc. wouldn't be a bad thing at all. The tricks, of course, are finding one in the first place, and then the question of who follows that act arises in a most unsavory fashion.
Naive interpretation of Plato suffers from the same warts and smelly parts as naive interpretation of C.S. Lewis; the assertions and implications that the scope of possibilities are constrained as described cannot be taken seriously by any clear-headed reader with a grasp on matters beyond the scope of the works.
When a nation-state crosses our borders against our wishes, with or without violence, or interferes with / damages our navy on the high seas, or interferes with / damages our aircraft in the air.
What if that country has an ally that is capable of wiping you off the face of the earth? See it's not so simple...
Yes, it's perfectly simple. That situation already exists: Russia. It doesn't matter, and I covered it completely: They won't attack, regardless of their ability to destroy us, because they would not survive the process. That's what a nuclear deterrent (stealthy, nuclear-armed missile submarines, minutes-from launch nuclear armed aircraft, nuclear-armed cruise missing carrying warships) does -- it makes MAD a reality, and that in turn holds back other nation-states.
Except when you engage in trade which results in prosperity for your people
Trade is a two-edged sword when you engage in it across lower production cost boundaries as we do. You get less expensive products, but you lose jobs. You try and raise a tariff or block a product outright, some jobs may come back, but the cost is up and the market will slow. And that's not even taking into account the jobs that won't come back because automation is now preferred over people if it's at all practical, and in many venues, it's very practical and only getting more so.
Because that logic was already tried in 1939 and failed. You need a better plan than that.
That's like saying that our attack on Iraq was like our attack on Hiroshima. It's nonsensical. The tools and the means and the objectives are completely different today. This isn't a "there's only one way to do this" issue; it is a very complex one with many subtleties. You need a comprehensive counter-argument, because I am not claiming this is simple on any front.
That is what the vote for Trump is, a pile of tinder and a box of matches.
I agree. However, Trump voters have not reasonably accounted for the fire-resistance provided by congress. They aren't going to go along with Trump's attempt to burn it all down. It's already begun: Congress has reacted to Trump's "I'll impose term limits" idea with "oh, no you won't" and that's absolutely the end of that.
We can expect a lot more along those lines. For instance, if he tries to make any restrictive impact on free trade, he'll be raising the costs of products here. That in turn will slow the markets for the products, and the majority of jobs won't come back anyway, because first, lesser demand, and second, manufacture now uses automation everywhere it can. It doesn't take a genius to see this coming, and there are plenty of smart people on the staffs of congresscritters. Arbitrarily defund the ACA withotu providing a functionally equivalant replacement first? Sure. Leave the insurance companies in the financial lurch, and watch the fines for not having insurance continue to accrue anyway. Etc. Can't see it happening.
The match is mostly all wet; all I mostly expect is a load of butthurt from the low-information group that decided Trump was the answer to Washington's various warts and smelly parts.
You know what the president's primary domestic strength is? It's not in saying "we're going to do things there her new way", it's in saying "no, I veto this, you can't do this unless you can cobble up a super-majority." Bottom line, his ideas have to get through congress. If they are seen as damaging (and believe it or not, congress does look at that), they simply won't fly.
The things to seriously worry about here, if anything, are the changes that the republicans want to make that they can get Trump to agree with, not the other way around; and social changes that may cascade from the supreme court swinging right. A great deal of social progress cou
No. Self-interest is not idiocy. It's selfish, sure enough, particularly in this context, but it's not idiocy.
When you win from your decisions, from the standpoint of your own life and those who you care about (and I am definitely implying that legislators don't actually care about the people the represent except as to how far they can pull the wool over their eyes), self-interest is quite smart. And there's another issue, when you really face reality: Old congressional person isn't going to see any serious negative consequences. Will die long before anything actually can affect them. The things you are worried about, they aren't worried about, because they literally won't affect them at all.
It's not idiocy. It's corruption based on pure selfishness in the form of influence flowing from oil interests into the legislative process. Money, favor, power... you name it, it's in play here. Re-election coffers swell, cousin Cletus gets a great deal on land / home / boat, etc., that post-political book deal, speaking tour, think-tank position... sexual favors, access to art, collectables, stock tips, club memberships "somehow" become readily available...
How will you magically build these durable things without producing CO2?
What you're missing is that if the thing lasts longer, fewer of them will be produced, and that reduces the CO2 of manufacture, transport and so on.
What the GP is missing is that in a very large number of product categories, low endurance products are a significant part of keeping costs low and sales high, profits likewise. The consequence of that is it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to get manufacturers to actually make more durable products.
For instance, if we want our refrigerators to last longer, that can certainly be done, in the engineering sense. Those cheap little compressors and thin-walled heat exchangers will have to go, the seals around the doors will become much more expensive, the lighting and defrosting mechanisms will have to be changed, the hardware in the icemaker will no longer be able to use plastic gears, and so on. This will cost a lot more, and when it's done, far fewer refrigerators will be sold. Good for the environment; not good for the manufacturer. Guess what that means... Right: we get cheap refrigerators with short lifetimes. Welcome to profiteering 101.
Well, if that happens, just remember: the cost of products like steel and phones and laptops and desktops and RPIs and toys and chips and televisions and audio systems and cars and so on are going to spike immediately. As in, the moment associated trade barriers, in whatever form, go up.
I'm not insisting that's a bad thing in the long run (I have mixed opinions on the matter, and they're far too involved to go into here), but you'd best be ready to reap what gets sown, because if nothing else, you're going to feel it. (BTW, my advice for keeping the personal impact lowish is to buy the stuff you want in the "made overseas" category now, before the impact of trade barriers makes them much more consequential to purchase.)
Trade between entities with unbalanced cost of production costs jobs on one side and gains them on the other, while providing less expensive products to the side that loses the jobs. That's pretty much right where the US is right now: cheap products and lost jobs.
Stifle that trade, or eliminate the disparity between cost of production with tariffs, and costs of products will go up, consumption of same will slow, and some jobs may return, depending on just how needful the market is for the product in question.
Right now, a TV can be had for $100, no problem. Balance the cost of production in China with the cost of production here using tariffs, or block such imports entirely, and a TV will become much more expensive. Probably a large number of people will buy them anyway, but I guarantee it will be a more carefully vetted and far less casual purchase when the entry cost rises to $200, $300 or even higher.
Same thing for everything else. You want jobs to come back here, okay, but don't run around thinking it's all going to be flowers and candy. It's going to hurt.
Also, there will be the amusement of watching China continue to sell televisions and the like inexpensively to everyone else: basically, it's going to be harder for consumers to swallow that they have to pay $2x or more for what people in the EU pay $1x for. The butthurt will be profound -- because if there's one thing I am absolutely sure of, it's that the average Trump voter doesn't see this coming at all. But come it will.
Odd how this never seems to factor in unless we are dealing with climate science.
That's because climate science, in the sense of the "A CO2-induced catastrophe is imminent" message, predicts a future result that has no historical analog (we've never, ever seen this happen), and does so in such a way as to bring a message that massive financial and behavioral change is outright required.
You have to expect people to hold a prediction like that to a much higher standard of proof than either a claim that has no significant immediate consequences for individuals regardless of its factual nature, or not; or claims that have such impacts, but for which we actually have historical precedent, such as "Tsunamis here will destroy your beachfront house."
It's perfectly natural for people to resist those who insist they change their behavior when you cannot demonstrate the validity of the impetus -- there has been a lot of variability between the predictions and the actual circumstances, depending on which claims one looks at.
Expecting the "common person" to grasp the scientific arguments... that's so overly optimistic as to be fairly characterized as outright ridiculous.
Assuming the suggested consequences are coming and are pendent upon nearly or exactly the CO2 levels and rate of increase that we have now, there's a huge amount of physical inertia to the whole process, and between that and the social inertia inherent in a mostly non-scientifically literate populace, you'd best be thinking ahead, because there isn't any way to really put on the brakes at this point.
And as someone else noted above, if it's not going to proceed as predicted, then anything you do that has no other benefit to you... is a waste of your time and resources.
I honestly don't know why either side really expects the other side to grasp the arguments of the other. The one strongly resists anything that might interfere with their lives or cost them time and resources, the other relies on extremely technical arguments that are both hard to grasp in toto, more than a little vague in many ways, and suffer from no historical precedent to point to.
TLDR: Quit arguing about it. How often have you seen these arguments actually change anyone's mind? I don't think I've ever seen that happen.
You want to have an actual effect, convince a legislator. Bring an envelope full of money.
The point was that climate change over 100,000 years is less challenging to the biosphere than a similar amount of climate change occurring in 100 years.
That's not assurance that said 100-year change is going to actually happen as the various attempts at models depict -- those are predictions, and none of them take into account any ameliorative technolg(y/ies), because of course no one has any good way to measure what the impact of such things might be.
One thing I am pretty sure of is that we'll be transitioning to EVs fairly rapidly now (in terms of a 100 year time period) and that will push the rate of human-generated CO2 downwards by some significant amount [waves hands.]
Personally, that's what I'm looking for from whatever leadership we end up with next year: get us off the oil teat as fast as possible. For many reasons. It may be Trump and crew or it may not be, but whoever it is, that's the responsible thing to do.
I mean, seriously. Do just the most basic research on these Trumpisms, they don't hold up worth a darn. You've been hoodwinked. Because you're too damn lazy to check things out -- or too mired in your consensual hallucination. There's plenty of crap wrong with the world, you don't need to go making things up to have legit complaints. Unless you're just trying to serve your own agenda. You wouldn't be doing that, would you? Would you???
Slashdot Mirror
You know what would most likely happen? They'll build a new plant, it'll be highly automated with the very newest tech rather than employ any line workers, they'll hire three shifts of managers with green cards from India to watch the computer report the status of the assembly lines (and record everything they do on cameras.) The plant will run 168 hours a week. They'll incorporate parts from China, which are now 140% the cost of what they were previously because President Trump wants that tariff really bad, and they'll charge you double and then multiply that by 1.4.
Welcome to the new world, where we don't buy stuff from China anymore, and we still have no work, and we can't afford anything.
President Trump's gonna make America Grate Again. Ouch! Here, hold my footgun.
I wonder if they factored in Trump's intended 40% tariff on those part cost estimates?
Or the fact that China says, "you erect trade barriers, we will too."
Just wondering over here.
That didn't just "happen" to them. They got regulated in exchange for access to a market in which they would exercise a near- or complete-monopoly.
If you want to make an argument that Twitter has a near-monoply on... um, tweeting, or that Facebook has a near-monopoly on communicating among people in general, and you are able to reasonably contend that these things are important to society then you might want to make an argument for regulation and see if you can make it fly.
Both companies use their terms of service to say "you over here can participate, but you over there can't" one way or another, and in a fairly arbitrary manner. They also restrict what you can do if they do let you use their service. And they are both pretty much the only real serious game in town for their respective functions in society. So you might have an argument. But that's the way you have to present it if you want it to even have a chance of flying. Seems to me your chances are overall better with Facebook, as they really do have a stranglehold on general interaction and friendly-to-the-general-public networking, which does indeed affect society in general in a very broad and powerful sense. Tweeting... I don't know. Maybe. I can't see it, personally. If you take my 140 characters away from me, I will just laugh at you. I think I would take being cut off from the vast majority of the people I have met over my lifetime and my extended family much more seriously. If I used Facebook and cared, which I don't, either one. :)
You understand what a market force is, don't you? It's demand. Works like this:
1- People want lots of stuff. ... Stuff == Gonna go get that.
2- Stuff is made from resources.
3- There are lots of unclaimed resources out there.
4- Ergo, Resources
I suggest you write that down. It'll help you understand a lot about the world. An area you clearly suffer from a deficit in, at present.
Here's how it doesn't work:
Someone knows where a seam of gold is. They also know it's unclaimed. They ignore it, because "that'd be hard to dig out of the ground."
Cuz (a), well, then you don't get the gold, and (b) someone else gets the gold.
Everything out there... everything is unclaimed. Resources - and so, riches - awesome amounts of riches. Someone's going to go get that. Not some guy sitting around muttering "we're never gonna be in space", but that won't affect the people who are actually, you know, paying attention.
I suggest you write all that down, too. Same reason.
Cheers. :)
I'd call for James P. Hogan on the one hand, for good SF with a strong human element, and Keith Laumer's "Bolo" series for machine intelligence / war stories, and also Keith Laumer's "Galactic Odyssey" for the best... well, galactic odyssey story.
For fantasy, I think I'd like to see Naiomi Novak's Temeraire books, and/or anything by Robin Hobb.
For simple awesomeness, I'd like to see John Birmingham's "Weapons of Choice" series done.
The problem, as has been observed, is that generally speaking Hollywood makes an utter hash out of the books it makes into movies. Soylent Green being the poster child for Hollywood wrecking a great story. And that is something I would not like to see happen to any of these.
We'll soon make America Grrr. Ate again today; food still arguably mediocre.
You're wasting your time. To the GP, the only technological development that will ever matter to achieving space has already happened; the only engineering that will ever matter to achieving space has already been done. It's wholly loony, but it's not uncommon.
Eventually, we'll be all over the solar system. The available space, energy, manufacturing conditions and natural resources all better (and in some cases, dwarf) those we can achieve on earth. Market forces will make this happen. Assuming we don't get hit by a comet or an asteroid, or the ecology doesn't collapse, or we don't nuke each other into glowing dust, of course.
The tech to get into space is known. The tech to live in space is known too, although it is true that the engineering has yet to be done.
The "space nutters" are actually the ones that claim we'll be indefinitely planet-bound. It's a pretty clueless assertion.
Chemical rockets can bootstrap this, though the cost is high; something like a space elevator would change the entire picture, but we're still working on the material science for that, and again, no engineering has been done (because no materials as yet.)
Anyway, fear not the nay-sayers. They know not of what they speak. :)
...the storage is set for the lifetime of the notebook... and the lifetime of the notebook is set by the longevity of the storage.
Way to go, Apple.
Buy now, while still DRUNK!
This, today, from US Gov. I saw something previously, an offhand remark by Peskov, but I've been unable to find it again. So this is all I can offer. Sorry.
Signing it this time around is Obama's fault. Period.
He didn't create it; but he perpetrated it.
Entirely a good thing.
The way I look at it is that programming is a discipline with a wide range from very limited skill to professional level competence. As with any field that is both innovative and active, staying at or near the upper tiers is going to be an increasingly difficult challenge. That's natural. So yes, if you can't grasp some of the most powerful tools available to your craft, you're going down-rank, fast. As it should be.
If someone doesn't want to be caught in such a slide, it behooves them to learn how to handle whatever challenges the face before they go writing production code all willy-nilly. There was a time when threading was new to me. I asked questions, wrote a crapload of test code, listened to the caveats I was told about, and wrapped my head around it. That's the path I suggest anyone take, and particularly so when even the most cursory research about the tool turns up well-known gotchas. Honestly, if you just take a few minutes to google it, you immediately run into mutex techniques and rationales, cache behavior across cores and multiple CPUs, etc. If you can't be bothered to train yourself to use your tools well, is there any truth at all in calling yourself a professional?
Clinton is of the same party, and has made a number of statements that align her closely with President Obama.
President Obama (re)imposed the (un)PATRIOT(ic) act on the US; if that doesn't give you a guiding sense of where the party is, and very likely where Mrs. Clinton is in terms of invasive surveillance, imposition on personal liberty, and constitutional malfeasance, I don't know what would.
Not to say President-elect Trump is likely to be any better, but inasmuch as his campaign was riddled with trivially disproved falsehoods, and in just the few days since the election, we've seen (at least) these radical pivots from him and/or his team...
o Not getting rid of pre-existing conditions or the ACA as a whole;
o Not dumping the banksters (met with them already to kill Dodd–Frank consumer protections)
o Not cleaning house (already hiring the most in- of the in-movers and shakers and lobbyists, for his team)
o Not actually building a wall, that was just figurative;
o No special prosecutor for Clinton ("what a great campaign she ran!");
o Making nice with President Obama after explicitly claiming he was the worst president ever;
o The whole "no-ties with Russia" thing, oops, lots of ties, plus wikileaks admitted by the Russians now;
o Going from "ultra-vet all Muslims at the border" to "we will not allow people in from terrorist regions"
What a weird set of circumstances.
You don't tackle NP-completeness challenges. NP-completeness challenges tackle YOU!
...compounded with "I know it'll work, I'll just build and ship, THAT doesn't need to be tested!"
Yes, this. the threading comment struck me more as indicative of an amateur in the area than any real flag of a problem area.
if you understand threading, you can work just fine within it, do appropriate things, don't do inappropriate things. You also have to understand the problem you're trying to solve, but again, that comes down to your skills - not any inherent "Dragon-ness" of threading.
I thread the heck out of my software. Works great. Cross-platform, too. Relatively easy stuff - image processing - and really hard stuff, real time signal processing where all manner of stuff is happening concurrently that depends in one way or another on the other stuff that's happening concurrently. I'm not talking about some thread off doing network management, either.
For me, it's strictly a matter of not going in there casually and carelessly. The appropriate planning and thinking - IOW, design first, then write software - pays off every time.
Of course, if you treat threading casually (as with many other things), it immediately becomes a footgun. Well, that's why Darwin gave us multiple feet, sonny. :)
But the whole point is we're supposed to be good at this. You have to pay your dues to get there. Programming Javascript on a web site isn't going to build the required skillsets.
Yes, that's a possibility; it depends entirely on how congress structures any barriers and/or tariffs, assuming they even do. It's one thing to talk about it -- it's entirely another to do it. Lobbyists control what congress does. The process is that of an oligarchy. So in the crafting of any legislative policy, it's all about who has the deepest pockets. American corporations, or the Chinese and Japanese nation states.
We also have to keep in mind that China and Japan opening to our products coming in means they do damage to their own local production. That damage has to be less than the benefit gained -- it may not, in fact, be "half of something", it may be a straight-up loss. And China, at least, is enjoying the fruits of a large population combined with a roaring economic engine because they don't let in other products easily, or in some cases, at all.
It's not a given that any of this will work out well. It's popcorn time.
It's not the only alternative.
Even Democracy could be made to work with some careful genetic manipulation to improve the breed so intelligence is uniformly high, credulous outlooks are replaced with a lean towards critical thinking and skepticism, and on top of this was actually layered a decent education.
We know democracy is very dangerous now and historically speaking because the public has not been, and is not now, well informed nor able to make quality decisions. Fix that, and the terrain changes dramatically. Still might not work, but it'd have to be for a whole spate of new reasons. What those might be isn't obvious to me at the moment.
Likewise, an actual intelligent, benevolent, scientifically leaning dictator / king / etc. wouldn't be a bad thing at all. The tricks, of course, are finding one in the first place, and then the question of who follows that act arises in a most unsavory fashion.
Naive interpretation of Plato suffers from the same warts and smelly parts as naive interpretation of C.S. Lewis; the assertions and implications that the scope of possibilities are constrained as described cannot be taken seriously by any clear-headed reader with a grasp on matters beyond the scope of the works.
When a nation-state crosses our borders against our wishes, with or without violence, or interferes with / damages our navy on the high seas, or interferes with / damages our aircraft in the air.
Yes, it's perfectly simple. That situation already exists: Russia. It doesn't matter, and I covered it completely: They won't attack, regardless of their ability to destroy us, because they would not survive the process. That's what a nuclear deterrent (stealthy, nuclear-armed missile submarines, minutes-from launch nuclear armed aircraft, nuclear-armed cruise missing carrying warships) does -- it makes MAD a reality, and that in turn holds back other nation-states.
Trade is a two-edged sword when you engage in it across lower production cost boundaries as we do. You get less expensive products, but you lose jobs. You try and raise a tariff or block a product outright, some jobs may come back, but the cost is up and the market will slow. And that's not even taking into account the jobs that won't come back because automation is now preferred over people if it's at all practical, and in many venues, it's very practical and only getting more so.
That's like saying that our attack on Iraq was like our attack on Hiroshima. It's nonsensical. The tools and the means and the objectives are completely different today. This isn't a "there's only one way to do this" issue; it is a very complex one with many subtleties. You need a comprehensive counter-argument, because I am not claiming this is simple on any front.
I agree. However, Trump voters have not reasonably accounted for the fire-resistance provided by congress. They aren't going to go along with Trump's attempt to burn it all down. It's already begun: Congress has reacted to Trump's "I'll impose term limits" idea with "oh, no you won't" and that's absolutely the end of that.
We can expect a lot more along those lines. For instance, if he tries to make any restrictive impact on free trade, he'll be raising the costs of products here. That in turn will slow the markets for the products, and the majority of jobs won't come back anyway, because first, lesser demand, and second, manufacture now uses automation everywhere it can. It doesn't take a genius to see this coming, and there are plenty of smart people on the staffs of congresscritters. Arbitrarily defund the ACA withotu providing a functionally equivalant replacement first? Sure. Leave the insurance companies in the financial lurch, and watch the fines for not having insurance continue to accrue anyway. Etc. Can't see it happening.
The match is mostly all wet; all I mostly expect is a load of butthurt from the low-information group that decided Trump was the answer to Washington's various warts and smelly parts.
You know what the president's primary domestic strength is? It's not in saying "we're going to do things there her new way", it's in saying "no, I veto this, you can't do this unless you can cobble up a super-majority." Bottom line, his ideas have to get through congress. If they are seen as damaging (and believe it or not, congress does look at that), they simply won't fly.
The things to seriously worry about here, if anything, are the changes that the republicans want to make that they can get Trump to agree with, not the other way around; and social changes that may cascade from the supreme court swinging right. A great deal of social progress cou
No. Self-interest is not idiocy. It's selfish, sure enough, particularly in this context, but it's not idiocy.
When you win from your decisions, from the standpoint of your own life and those who you care about (and I am definitely implying that legislators don't actually care about the people the represent except as to how far they can pull the wool over their eyes), self-interest is quite smart. And there's another issue, when you really face reality: Old congressional person isn't going to see any serious negative consequences. Will die long before anything actually can affect them. The things you are worried about, they aren't worried about, because they literally won't affect them at all.
So quite smart. Just horribly selfish.
It's not idiocy. It's corruption based on pure selfishness in the form of influence flowing from oil interests into the legislative process. Money, favor, power... you name it, it's in play here. Re-election coffers swell, cousin Cletus gets a great deal on land / home / boat, etc., that post-political book deal, speaking tour, think-tank position... sexual favors, access to art, collectables, stock tips, club memberships "somehow" become readily available...
Yep, it's great to be in congress.
What you're missing is that if the thing lasts longer, fewer of them will be produced, and that reduces the CO2 of manufacture, transport and so on.
What the GP is missing is that in a very large number of product categories, low endurance products are a significant part of keeping costs low and sales high, profits likewise. The consequence of that is it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to get manufacturers to actually make more durable products.
For instance, if we want our refrigerators to last longer, that can certainly be done, in the engineering sense. Those cheap little compressors and thin-walled heat exchangers will have to go, the seals around the doors will become much more expensive, the lighting and defrosting mechanisms will have to be changed, the hardware in the icemaker will no longer be able to use plastic gears, and so on. This will cost a lot more, and when it's done, far fewer refrigerators will be sold. Good for the environment; not good for the manufacturer. Guess what that means... Right: we get cheap refrigerators with short lifetimes. Welcome to profiteering 101.
Well, if that happens, just remember: the cost of products like steel and phones and laptops and desktops and RPIs and toys and chips and televisions and audio systems and cars and so on are going to spike immediately. As in, the moment associated trade barriers, in whatever form, go up.
I'm not insisting that's a bad thing in the long run (I have mixed opinions on the matter, and they're far too involved to go into here), but you'd best be ready to reap what gets sown, because if nothing else, you're going to feel it. (BTW, my advice for keeping the personal impact lowish is to buy the stuff you want in the "made overseas" category now, before the impact of trade barriers makes them much more consequential to purchase.)
Trade between entities with unbalanced cost of production costs jobs on one side and gains them on the other, while providing less expensive products to the side that loses the jobs. That's pretty much right where the US is right now: cheap products and lost jobs.
Stifle that trade, or eliminate the disparity between cost of production with tariffs, and costs of products will go up, consumption of same will slow, and some jobs may return, depending on just how needful the market is for the product in question.
Right now, a TV can be had for $100, no problem. Balance the cost of production in China with the cost of production here using tariffs, or block such imports entirely, and a TV will become much more expensive. Probably a large number of people will buy them anyway, but I guarantee it will be a more carefully vetted and far less casual purchase when the entry cost rises to $200, $300 or even higher.
Same thing for everything else. You want jobs to come back here, okay, but don't run around thinking it's all going to be flowers and candy. It's going to hurt.
Also, there will be the amusement of watching China continue to sell televisions and the like inexpensively to everyone else: basically, it's going to be harder for consumers to swallow that they have to pay $2x or more for what people in the EU pay $1x for. The butthurt will be profound -- because if there's one thing I am absolutely sure of, it's that the average Trump voter doesn't see this coming at all. But come it will.
That's because climate science, in the sense of the "A CO2-induced catastrophe is imminent" message, predicts a future result that has no historical analog (we've never, ever seen this happen), and does so in such a way as to bring a message that massive financial and behavioral change is outright required.
You have to expect people to hold a prediction like that to a much higher standard of proof than either a claim that has no significant immediate consequences for individuals regardless of its factual nature, or not; or claims that have such impacts, but for which we actually have historical precedent, such as "Tsunamis here will destroy your beachfront house."
It's perfectly natural for people to resist those who insist they change their behavior when you cannot demonstrate the validity of the impetus -- there has been a lot of variability between the predictions and the actual circumstances, depending on which claims one looks at.
Expecting the "common person" to grasp the scientific arguments... that's so overly optimistic as to be fairly characterized as outright ridiculous.
Assuming the suggested consequences are coming and are pendent upon nearly or exactly the CO2 levels and rate of increase that we have now, there's a huge amount of physical inertia to the whole process, and between that and the social inertia inherent in a mostly non-scientifically literate populace, you'd best be thinking ahead, because there isn't any way to really put on the brakes at this point.
And as someone else noted above, if it's not going to proceed as predicted, then anything you do that has no other benefit to you... is a waste of your time and resources.
I honestly don't know why either side really expects the other side to grasp the arguments of the other. The one strongly resists anything that might interfere with their lives or cost them time and resources, the other relies on extremely technical arguments that are both hard to grasp in toto, more than a little vague in many ways, and suffer from no historical precedent to point to.
TLDR: Quit arguing about it. How often have you seen these arguments actually change anyone's mind? I don't think I've ever seen that happen.
You want to have an actual effect, convince a legislator. Bring an envelope full of money.
The point was that climate change over 100,000 years is less challenging to the biosphere than a similar amount of climate change occurring in 100 years.
That's not assurance that said 100-year change is going to actually happen as the various attempts at models depict -- those are predictions, and none of them take into account any ameliorative technolg(y/ies), because of course no one has any good way to measure what the impact of such things might be.
One thing I am pretty sure of is that we'll be transitioning to EVs fairly rapidly now (in terms of a 100 year time period) and that will push the rate of human-generated CO2 downwards by some significant amount [waves hands.]
Personally, that's what I'm looking for from whatever leadership we end up with next year: get us off the oil teat as fast as possible. For many reasons. It may be Trump and crew or it may not be, but whoever it is, that's the responsible thing to do.
How deep would you like to dig your hole?
I mean, seriously. Do just the most basic research on these Trumpisms, they don't hold up worth a darn. You've been hoodwinked. Because you're too damn lazy to check things out -- or too mired in your consensual hallucination. There's plenty of crap wrong with the world, you don't need to go making things up to have legit complaints. Unless you're just trying to serve your own agenda. You wouldn't be doing that, would you? Would you???