I've heard the guy talk on the radio and concluded that he's probably insane. Maybe the aliens think he is a highly-evolved being and come to hear his sermons.
The main reason the B-52s are so expensive to operate is that the Air Force has steadfastly refused to refurbish them with modern engines because the upgrade would cut into funding for fighter planes.
Those 8 engines you see on the B-52 are old, very thirsty turbojets. Fuel costs for this plane are a mutha.
The reason is because the Slashdot crowd is (nearly) as succeptible to the herd instinct as the rest of humanity. We're all monkeys, underneath the sophisticated rationales we ascribe our own behavior during those rare moments of introspection.
Not that we aren't capable of enlightened modes of behavior, but the rule has historically been the exact, bestial, opposite.
Meta-moderation helps fix some of this, but I think as a community we should rely more on logic than name-calling to solve our differences.
Dare we call it "civility?" It would be nice.
When a discussion degenerates into petty flaming, it negates the potential for the various, arbitrarily aligned factions to learn anything. It's an ancient irony--the point of discourse is, among other things, to negate the herd instinct, not perpetuate it.
Yeah. And soccer is just 22 guys running after a ball. What a stupid game.
Yeah, but at least with soccer you get those really excitable South American TV announcers who yell "GOOOAAAAL!" when somebody scores. It's half the fun of watching Telemundo.
That's why I set up my computer to say that whenever I print a page on my crappy inkjet printer. I flick on the 20W computer speakers with the subwoofer pointing at my neighbors ceiling, turn up the volume, hit 'print' and then,
"GOOOAAAAL!"
It keeps the whole printing experience fresh and exciting, in my view. Oh wait, here comes another page...
That's funny. I thought that North Dakota is the most boring place in the universe. For the record, I favor cutting all funding to North Dakota before cutting funding to Voyager 1.
Re:Too bad he's running the site off on 28.8 Kbps
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 2
You might feel differently if you were the one living next to them.
Frankly, I feel bad for both parties; one is clearly insane, the other is driven to despair by his neighbor's insanity.
Your research is commendable, but with respect to your EPA figures, I think they're full of shit; not your quoting of them, specifically, but the EPA's political agenda, their field research, and their statistical analysis as well. Why? Because, as has been demonstrated with arsenic, dioxin, and other toxics, I think they have set an unrealistic threshold, courtesy of industry lobbyists, of toxicity in human tissue for MBTE that cannot possibly have been adequately researched, because it hasn't been in the environment long enough for us to know what it does to people, and how long it takes for those health effects to manifest.
To start, MBTE imparts a quite noticable taste to water at a level of concentration much lower than what they say is dangerous to humans. I'm not a chemist or a doctor, but this would seem imprudent; if it is registering with your sense of taste, what is it doing to your tissue? How well can you metabolize it? Does the human body store it long-term in fatty tissue where its well-demonstrated carcinogenic properties can manifest? As with other toxics, the clinical research has been inadequate.
As you know, we humans have a penchant for using stuff in huge quantities before considering the downside of its use. See what I'm saying? I don't think the corrupt EPA provides accurate data or even has an incentive to do so. It is an industry mouthpiece that provides token resistance to the worst offenders while harrasing the petty ones so as to put up a good public face. Like any bureaucracy, there are good public servants working for the EPA, but their good efforts are fatally undermined by the industry cronies who determine its overall direction.
And as for your comment about using industrial hemp for land reclamation, this is the first time I've hear about it, but it sounds like a good idea. Too bad the same corrupt entities that shape the EPA's policies are the same ones that oppose industrial hemp. Getting IH to these shores again will take a miracle. Well, cheers anyway.
I'm not taking simultaneous opposing views at all. The only people who consistently benefit from tariffs are corrupt executives and corrupt politicians, regardless of their nationality.
Forgive me if my arguments weren't well-structured. To clarify, I argued that tariffs harmed Chrysler by shielding them from real market competition, thereby making them uncompetitive when "foreign" manufacturers like Honda and Toyota chose to subvert the tariffs by moving their production closer to their intended market, that is, to the U.S. So U.S. tariffs are bad for American workers and the long-term health of their company, in this instance.
Then, I said that the remaining (other) industries in the U.S. are at a disadvantage in the export market due to foriegn protectionism. To be sure, this is an unjust situation that should have been strenuously negotiated years ago among all parties, and to a state of affairs everybody could tolerate. Japan has been obtuse with the U.S. over imports, but India and China have been unrepentently protectionist. For their part, U.S. manufacturers saw dollar signs in the early 90's and shifted production to Mexico, then, when Mexican labor costs rose too high, to the Pacific Rim countries. The U.S. companies that weren't elite, high-end manufacturers like computers, defense, and aerospace, and chose not to relocate, have largely been bought out or driven to bankruptcy.
So, what I was trying to make clear was that tariffs, both foreign and domestic, have been bad for the United States. Without hesitation and without meaningful public debate, U.S. politicians have in recent years entered into lopsided trading agreements that place U.S. industries in many categories at an insurmountable disadvantage. Simultaneously, our foreign partners have agreed to placate our insatiable consumption of their goods by extending us such infinite levels of credit that default and hyperinflation can be the only outcome. Given the grotesquely distorted balance of trade between the U.S. and it's exporter/creditors, I wonder if our economy is not intentionally being demolished by the global trading cartels, with the connivance of "American" politicians, in order to reestablish the U.S. along authoritarian lines (thing China) as a low-wage manufacturing center. Or a fiefdom, if you will.
But to tie up this thread, which began as a discussion of the DHS "buy American" scheme, and it is a dastardly scheme in the cynical New Deal tradition, because it dangles a promise of increased job security for a lucky few in the manufacturing sector, be they lowly workers or well-connected elitists, in an effort to bolster the public image of a state security bureaucracy, that is, an agency intended to protect the people who own the factories from the people who work in the factories. It's like the Cheka launching a "Buy Soviet" campaign.
Yes, that's true that we have the technology, but dammit, how much will it cost to implement it on a large scale? The dollar cost to do what must be done is obscene. The alternative, in the post-safe-groundwater future (and present, in many locales,) is purifying the polluted groundwater as it is extracted from the ground for immediate use.
Regardless of which method we choose, it will be very expensive, and impossible to dispense with. In the most affected regions, it will be a legacy that lasts generations, much like the regions of Vietnam blighted by defoliants during the war.
English comedy is only considered bland by those who don't understand it.
Exactly. Just like English food.
Okay, I'm being facetious. Actually, English comedy is pretty easy for an intelligent foreigner (i.e. American) to "get." Otherwise, there would not be scads of Monty Python DVDs all over the globe. However, I must confess that I don't understand that "Absolutely Fabulous" program that features the two aging lushes and their, uh, adventures. It seems rather grim to make a comedy series about people in a perpetual state of decline and cynical hopelessness. What does the series' success say for the culture that produced it? Not that an America's popular media has anything to be proud of lately, except "Seinfeld," which ironically borrows several truckfulls of inspiration from "Canterbury Tales."
Oh, I'll agree with that. Fiats are right up there with old Citroens and Trabants when it comes to "frumpy chic." And I think Yugos are downright cool, not that any of them are still on the road.
Yes, but in a slimmed-down, fitness-conscious version named Sri Swami Cookiemanda, who after a lengthy period of reflection and purification, came to renounce his sedentary lifestyle and wanton consumption of satvic foods.
My hunch with respect to the blighted land is that in the 21st century, environmental reclaimation technology will be the big, big growth industry, as we become aware of what we are doing to ourselves by shitting in our own nest. We are awash in poisons. The groundwater's fucked--it's full of MBTE, which we cleverly thought would lessen air pollution. Well, it did that, but the damnable stuff leaks out of containment the way tritium does, gets into aquifers, and makes the water undrinkable in the minutest quantities. Now, how the hell does one clean out an aquifer? Right now, the only thing we can do is wait for the molecules to break down, and with a great many toxics, that takes a long time.
As for soil reclaimation, the situation is better. There has been a lot of research into high-temperature composting, which breaks down toxic leftovers in the soil. Alas, if that soil contains heavy metals, as is often the case, then those must be removed by other means. All of this is quite labor-intensive, and therefore expensive, but some brownfield sites have been turned into parks and gardens this way. I, for one, would love to see a rejuvenated Rust Belt. I'd also like to see the people responsible for these messes be forced to clean them up, rather than socializing the problems that capitalists created, which is what we're doing now.
Flamebait? Who's the clown who modded the parent as such? Unfortunately, he is correct. Many large American companies have lost their competitiveness because their government connections allow them to function as de facto state industries. Witness the Chrysler bailout, for example. Good grief. A once-successful company is permitted to get sloppy in design and manufacturing because it is protected from foreign competition. Then, despite its protected status, it still manages to squander that advantage and slide into insolvency, jeopardizing the livelihoods of thousands of ordinary people. So in steps the Congress with wads of cash to buy the votes of the grateful workers, and Chrysler lurches inefficiently along to this day, churning out their mediocre vehicles, a la Fiat. The other two U.S. auto makers aren't doing well, either. Meanwhile, Toyota, who, because of the tariffs, manufactures most of their U.S. market content domestically, continues to gobble up the Big Three's marketshare by selling a better product.
Other sectors, like textiles and consumer electronics, are not shielded by tariffs and consequently, those companies have either shut down or been moved overseas, ironically enough to places like China and India, who place outrageous tariffs on numerous categories of imports in order to bolster their own industries.
This is a situation that directly pits U.S. economic strength against the cheap, tariff-protected workers in the Asian economies, a losing proposition for the U.S, which is why we see political band-aids like DHS's unworkable subsidy program. The "Buy American" program will reassure the more naive voters that the new state police buraucracy will not only protect their physical safety, but their economic safety as well, when in fact it will do neither, not only because they are as incompetent as any other government agency, but because the American industries to provide the equipment they need no longer exist. If it proceeds, it will resurrect in a certain, zombie-like fashion, a passel of inefficient, politically-connected companies (I'm thinking Bechtel and Halliburton here) who will draw their pay more or less directly from the pockets of taxpayers. You could call it socialistic, but a better term would be "crony capitalist," which is socialism for wealthy parasites. It is very much like the New Deal programs, but unlike the America those programs helped/fleeced, I don't think the modern America will recover. We've become a vulgar mob administered by feudal masters, but I digress.
Now, let the real flaming begin. I think I hear the ultranationalists coming...
The real reason that so much industry has moved overseas to places like China and India, is that there are very loose environmental and worker safety rules. Manufacturing electronics involves toxic chemicals that are very expensive to dispose of in Germany, US and Japan... but in China you can just dump these chemicals out the back.
Yes, that's right, and those people are poisoning themselves, particularly in China. The pollution in the industrial cities is so bad that if it goes unchecked, it will, paradoxically, threaten their economic survival. Ruined land and water is no good to anybody.
Tangentially: have you ever driven on I-80 through the Rust Belt? I'm talking about former manufacturing hubs like Buffalo, Gary, and parts of Cleveland. They look abandoned. And the factories? Rusting and abandoned. It's sad, not only because of the unemployment and social upheaval, but because great swaths of that abandoned land cannot be reclaimed for agriculture. The soil and groundwater is too polluted. So the hulks of the factories remain, the rusting monuments to America's fading greatness.
Now, what's really eerie are all of the abandoned strip malls: just boarded-up buildings and weedy expanses of grey asphalt. Nearby, you find housing built in the 40's and 50's, some abandoned by the people who once made their livings in the factories, some filled with poor immigrants, others by retirees who try to keep up appearances and put out their flags on Independence Day. I'm not being lurid here, either. There are a thousand towns like this and they are depressing places. What will become of them?
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is very safe to say that in 15 years, CRTs will be consigned to the dustbin (or hopefully, the recycling bin.)
I've heard the guy talk on the radio and concluded that he's probably insane. Maybe the aliens think he is a highly-evolved being and come to hear his sermons.
Those 8 engines you see on the B-52 are old, very thirsty turbojets. Fuel costs for this plane are a mutha.
I predict that 50 percent of the people who read it will mod you up, and the rest will be overwhelmed by the urge to take a shower.
Nah, that stuff is vomit under the bridge by now.
In other words, you non-USians aren't missing anything.
The reason is because the Slashdot crowd is (nearly) as succeptible to the herd instinct as the rest of humanity. We're all monkeys, underneath the sophisticated rationales we ascribe our own behavior during those rare moments of introspection. Not that we aren't capable of enlightened modes of behavior, but the rule has historically been the exact, bestial, opposite.
Dare we call it "civility?" It would be nice.
When a discussion degenerates into petty flaming, it negates the potential for the various, arbitrarily aligned factions to learn anything. It's an ancient irony--the point of discourse is, among other things, to negate the herd instinct, not perpetuate it.
Yeah, but at least with soccer you get those really excitable South American TV announcers who yell "GOOOAAAAL!" when somebody scores. It's half the fun of watching Telemundo.
That's why I set up my computer to say that whenever I print a page on my crappy inkjet printer. I flick on the 20W computer speakers with the subwoofer pointing at my neighbors ceiling, turn up the volume, hit 'print' and then,
"GOOOAAAAL!"
It keeps the whole printing experience fresh and exciting, in my view. Oh wait, here comes another page...
"GOOOAAAAL!"
Awesome.
Yeah, but at least the trains ran on time. Or else.
Mandark, is it really you?
That's funny. I thought that North Dakota is the most boring place in the universe. For the record, I favor cutting all funding to North Dakota before cutting funding to Voyager 1.
Frankly, I feel bad for both parties; one is clearly insane, the other is driven to despair by his neighbor's insanity.
It's called "vestigal Puritanism." It infects us to this very day.
To start, MBTE imparts a quite noticable taste to water at a level of concentration much lower than what they say is dangerous to humans. I'm not a chemist or a doctor, but this would seem imprudent; if it is registering with your sense of taste, what is it doing to your tissue? How well can you metabolize it? Does the human body store it long-term in fatty tissue where its well-demonstrated carcinogenic properties can manifest? As with other toxics, the clinical research has been inadequate.
As you know, we humans have a penchant for using stuff in huge quantities before considering the downside of its use. See what I'm saying? I don't think the corrupt EPA provides accurate data or even has an incentive to do so. It is an industry mouthpiece that provides token resistance to the worst offenders while harrasing the petty ones so as to put up a good public face. Like any bureaucracy, there are good public servants working for the EPA, but their good efforts are fatally undermined by the industry cronies who determine its overall direction.
And as for your comment about using industrial hemp for land reclamation, this is the first time I've hear about it, but it sounds like a good idea. Too bad the same corrupt entities that shape the EPA's policies are the same ones that oppose industrial hemp. Getting IH to these shores again will take a miracle. Well, cheers anyway.
Forgive me if my arguments weren't well-structured. To clarify, I argued that tariffs harmed Chrysler by shielding them from real market competition, thereby making them uncompetitive when "foreign" manufacturers like Honda and Toyota chose to subvert the tariffs by moving their production closer to their intended market, that is, to the U.S. So U.S. tariffs are bad for American workers and the long-term health of their company, in this instance.
Then, I said that the remaining (other) industries in the U.S. are at a disadvantage in the export market due to foriegn protectionism. To be sure, this is an unjust situation that should have been strenuously negotiated years ago among all parties, and to a state of affairs everybody could tolerate. Japan has been obtuse with the U.S. over imports, but India and China have been unrepentently protectionist. For their part, U.S. manufacturers saw dollar signs in the early 90's and shifted production to Mexico, then, when Mexican labor costs rose too high, to the Pacific Rim countries. The U.S. companies that weren't elite, high-end manufacturers like computers, defense, and aerospace, and chose not to relocate, have largely been bought out or driven to bankruptcy.
So, what I was trying to make clear was that tariffs, both foreign and domestic, have been bad for the United States. Without hesitation and without meaningful public debate, U.S. politicians have in recent years entered into lopsided trading agreements that place U.S. industries in many categories at an insurmountable disadvantage. Simultaneously, our foreign partners have agreed to placate our insatiable consumption of their goods by extending us such infinite levels of credit that default and hyperinflation can be the only outcome. Given the grotesquely distorted balance of trade between the U.S. and it's exporter/creditors, I wonder if our economy is not intentionally being demolished by the global trading cartels, with the connivance of "American" politicians, in order to reestablish the U.S. along authoritarian lines (thing China) as a low-wage manufacturing center. Or a fiefdom, if you will.
But to tie up this thread, which began as a discussion of the DHS "buy American" scheme, and it is a dastardly scheme in the cynical New Deal tradition, because it dangles a promise of increased job security for a lucky few in the manufacturing sector, be they lowly workers or well-connected elitists, in an effort to bolster the public image of a state security bureaucracy, that is, an agency intended to protect the people who own the factories from the people who work in the factories. It's like the Cheka launching a "Buy Soviet" campaign.
Regardless of which method we choose, it will be very expensive, and impossible to dispense with. In the most affected regions, it will be a legacy that lasts generations, much like the regions of Vietnam blighted by defoliants during the war.
Exactly. Just like English food.
Okay, I'm being facetious. Actually, English comedy is pretty easy for an intelligent foreigner (i.e. American) to "get." Otherwise, there would not be scads of Monty Python DVDs all over the globe. However, I must confess that I don't understand that "Absolutely Fabulous" program that features the two aging lushes and their, uh, adventures. It seems rather grim to make a comedy series about people in a perpetual state of decline and cynical hopelessness. What does the series' success say for the culture that produced it? Not that an America's popular media has anything to be proud of lately, except "Seinfeld," which ironically borrows several truckfulls of inspiration from "Canterbury Tales."
Oh, I'll agree with that. Fiats are right up there with old Citroens and Trabants when it comes to "frumpy chic." And I think Yugos are downright cool, not that any of them are still on the road.
You and Elvis, that is. Yes, the King had a penchant for whipping out a revolver and shooting the television when he didn't like what was being shown.
Yes, but in a slimmed-down, fitness-conscious version named Sri Swami Cookiemanda, who after a lengthy period of reflection and purification, came to renounce his sedentary lifestyle and wanton consumption of satvic foods.
The mixture is nontoxic. Here, check out this badass website for Periodic Table information. (Damn, I love Google.)
As for soil reclaimation, the situation is better. There has been a lot of research into high-temperature composting, which breaks down toxic leftovers in the soil. Alas, if that soil contains heavy metals, as is often the case, then those must be removed by other means. All of this is quite labor-intensive, and therefore expensive, but some brownfield sites have been turned into parks and gardens this way. I, for one, would love to see a rejuvenated Rust Belt. I'd also like to see the people responsible for these messes be forced to clean them up, rather than socializing the problems that capitalists created, which is what we're doing now.
Other sectors, like textiles and consumer electronics, are not shielded by tariffs and consequently, those companies have either shut down or been moved overseas, ironically enough to places like China and India, who place outrageous tariffs on numerous categories of imports in order to bolster their own industries.
This is a situation that directly pits U.S. economic strength against the cheap, tariff-protected workers in the Asian economies, a losing proposition for the U.S, which is why we see political band-aids like DHS's unworkable subsidy program. The "Buy American" program will reassure the more naive voters that the new state police buraucracy will not only protect their physical safety, but their economic safety as well, when in fact it will do neither, not only because they are as incompetent as any other government agency, but because the American industries to provide the equipment they need no longer exist. If it proceeds, it will resurrect in a certain, zombie-like fashion, a passel of inefficient, politically-connected companies (I'm thinking Bechtel and Halliburton here) who will draw their pay more or less directly from the pockets of taxpayers. You could call it socialistic, but a better term would be "crony capitalist," which is socialism for wealthy parasites. It is very much like the New Deal programs, but unlike the America those programs helped/fleeced, I don't think the modern America will recover. We've become a vulgar mob administered by feudal masters, but I digress.
Now, let the real flaming begin. I think I hear the ultranationalists coming...
Yes, that's right, and those people are poisoning themselves, particularly in China. The pollution in the industrial cities is so bad that if it goes unchecked, it will, paradoxically, threaten their economic survival. Ruined land and water is no good to anybody.
Tangentially: have you ever driven on I-80 through the Rust Belt? I'm talking about former manufacturing hubs like Buffalo, Gary, and parts of Cleveland. They look abandoned. And the factories? Rusting and abandoned. It's sad, not only because of the unemployment and social upheaval, but because great swaths of that abandoned land cannot be reclaimed for agriculture. The soil and groundwater is too polluted. So the hulks of the factories remain, the rusting monuments to America's fading greatness.
Now, what's really eerie are all of the abandoned strip malls: just boarded-up buildings and weedy expanses of grey asphalt. Nearby, you find housing built in the 40's and 50's, some abandoned by the people who once made their livings in the factories, some filled with poor immigrants, others by retirees who try to keep up appearances and put out their flags on Independence Day. I'm not being lurid here, either. There are a thousand towns like this and they are depressing places. What will become of them?