I don't think you appreciate the difference between natural forest and a clear-cut, replanted tree farm. It's like grass vs. astroturf. The replanted area is lacking all of the birds, plants, mammals, even bugs and microbes that are in the ecology of natural forest.
As the owner of a replanted tree farm that is now 19 years old, I think you should know that your eloquent conjecture is completely false.
It takes 100 years for a forest to recover from being clear cut.
While you've got your hand in there, can you also pull some winning lottery tickets or perhaps a Grand Unified Field Theory out of your ass?
Trees might be what people think of as a forest, but they are only one element.
Yes, and the other elements waste no time in returning -- the whole "unfilled niches" or "available energy" thing. Sometimes the newcomers are different species than were there originally -- perhaps this offends your romanticized sense of 'natural'.
That said, it does seem kind of silly to talk about solar cells "saving trees".
Indeed it does, especially since more trees will get planted in response to increased demand for paper and wood products. Recycling reduces demand and hence ruins the economic incentive for preserving or creating a forest on one's property. I myself am directly affected by pulpwood prices, and every paper recycling program is a thorn in my side, encouraging me to ditch the trees and put the land to more profitable use.
This was bound to happen and will happen again. The interesting question is how come they didn't maneuver one of them out of the way. I don't know if 22675 is an active payload that still has power but Iridium33 certainly had the capability of moving. This one was avoidable.
"I believe" is exactly the root of the issue. You are free to state your opinions up until the point where it might be actionable under hate speech laws, and need have no fear of reprisal. Saying, "I think this guy is a total piece of shit and I hope he dies" is fine, because you can stand up in court and say, "I'm anonymous coward, and I support this message."
Saying, on the other hand, "This person is guilty of x crime" when that person has been proven innocent in a court of law...That's a falsehood, and actionable.
That's incorrect. The statement "I believe John Smith molests farm animals." is actionable.
Look at it this way: every statement of fact implicitly begins with the words "I believe". Whether or not you type them out is irrelevant.
...and I immediately heard that British waitress saying "Well, there's spam-it-spam-story, that's not got much spam in it." Wow I need to go outside more often.
Have you read About Face from Alan Cooper? He explains in that the concept of a file is horrible from a user perspective. Files are added as a concept because it is a hack and makes it easier for the programmer. A user in fact does not want to have say, "oh I have to save this?"
We saw a similar paradigm-shift when we went from landlines to cellphones. The process of dialing a number went from instant-persistent (touch-tones that the exchange listened to as you typed) to a compose-save process (enter number then hit 'send'). Humans are obviously capable of understanding both paradigms and they both have benefits and costs.
I for example love being able to mess with a file in a memory buffer, save it when I see fit, make further adjustments, discard them and reload, and so forth. Sure, I usually always commit to disk, in fact my left hand hits Alt+Z to save almost automatically... except when I don't. Same with landlines and cellphones -- I don't always hit 'send' after typing in a number, and there is very little mental CPU load expended in remembering whether or not I have or should.
I already have a sixth external sense... it's the sense of acceleration in my inner ear, colloquially known as the sense of balance. That one's just as important as the other senses.
Perfectly said.
I hold this topic in my mind as a shining, breathtaking example of how everyone, every book and teacher in the world, is cobviously wrong. And I'm carrying two three-axis accellerometers to prove it.
Enough examples like this will turn anyone into a cynical little subversive like me.
Or, an alternate way to look at it is that he's trying to remind the wealthy that just sitting still and letting poor rot instead of trying to help raise them up isn't a good thing. Encouraging empathy by upsetting their comfortable little world and letting them know a little bit of what the plebians feel of fear. Sometimes you've got be knocked on your ass once to appreciate the view. Dunno why this is a "Liberal" thing in your mind (and thus bad?), but there you go.
Ah yes, that would be the Green-Liberal plan that we executed in the 1960s-1970s...
Develop DDT.
Use DDT to wipe out the North American malaria-carrying mosquito population.
Drain the swamps to prevent mosquitos from returning.
Enjoy life in a malaria-free country.
Ban DDT.
Crusade against anyone else seeking to drain their own swamps.
Offer extremely expensive anti-malarial drugs for sale.
Completely fail to understand why poor third-world countries have a malaria problem.
??
Profit!
Our society has a bad habit of declaring a thing to be evil after we don't need it any more.
I would prefer they have no interrogation facilities where extra-legal techniques can be used outside any oversight. And there's zero evidence that such a facility would help prevent anything. All they do is increase the risk when innocent people are eventually sent home with a horror story to tell.
If you think that horror stories about American military/intel methods increase the risk we will be attacked, then you do not yet understand human nature.
In any case, there will never be any public evidence about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of such things. We just have to decide whether or not we can trust the CIA to do what is best in the long term for us. Apparently you don't... but if the CIA is even half competent, there will not be any public basis for you or I to justify our opinions.
The Superconducting Super-Collider to be built in Texas fifteen years ago used magnetic monopoles in its design. In my physics class in 1991 we received a lecture visit from an SSC representative who casually hand-waved the matter of inventing such a thing.
In hindsight I see that perhaps the SSC project really was as overpromised as Congress, in cancelling it, suspected.
The good thing about solar/wind/wave etc. is that we can use it to lessen the need for more nuclear/coal energy, but even easier is to use less energy.
Define 'easier' please?
Because right now, the market's actions indicate that it is ea$ier to build more powerplants than it is to use less energy.
For commercial energy production, we do not NEED nuclear energy. There are safer alternatives. It is a needless risk.
What a bunch of mealy-mouthed dreck!
I challenge you to define 'need', 'safer', and 'needless' in a way that excludes nuclear energy production in the face of its competitors for base load generation. Your statement must account for all the safety and environmental issues (including wars) associated with fossil-fuel extraction.
And your definitions must hold for those regions that are not blessed with geothermal, tidal, and wind resources. Nor can you handwave away solar power's problems with efficiency, transmission, overcast sky, and battery problems.
Generations ago we were masters of waste not want not. If you burned candles for light, you collected your drippings, remelted them into new candles.
That was the consequence of materials costing more than manhours. Now thanks to industrialization and automation, manhours are vastly more expensive than material, simply because one manhour produces 1000x more material than it did before. (In the grand scheme of things, the cost of either is a function of its exchange rate with the other.)
Our allegedly wasteful modern society is wasteful of the visible component (material) because it is so careful to conserve the invisible component (manhours). Unfortunately most people are concrete-bound and so do not understand what's going on.
Imagine if the 13 Colonies outlawed this because you could also remelt them into canon wicks... absolute stupidity.
* So far so good on this count, but of course I won't be happy until [Obama really closes Gitmo down for good].
Will you declare victory when he orders it closed down and quietly relocated somewhere else? Because that's what's in the works right now.
Or would you prefer that the CIA have no interrogation facilities at all? In which case, will you be among those who scream at the government for the next "fail to prevent"?
Wasn't this law just borrowed from japan, which has been dealing with this kind of stuff for a while? I could have sworn that I read about some similar law a few years ago due to the gropey-nature of japanese city dwellers.
Yes it was.
As an aside, camera-phones have almost completely ruined the Mardi Gras experience. When everyone has a phone taking pictures to be immediately posted onto the internet where they will remain forever, the curtains quickly fell on the lovely era of chicks flashing random strangers in the street.
Western culture is apparently in that ugly teenage phase of the Information Revolution, in which we have the ability to generate ubiquitous data but have not yet matured enough to appreciate the occasional massive value of data impermanence.
Yeah, and the linux kernel mailing list would be bankrupt in 15 minutes. Nice try.
Nice try being snarky without thinking the matter through.
How hard would it be to add to this new stamp system a flag "Do not deliver if there is a charge"?
Or a button in your email client for "Refund the charge to the sender", which if you fail to click it five times in a row, the mailing list stops delivering to you until you do?
Or a set of public blacklists like we have now, except instead of blackholing all email from those domains, applying the one-cent charge to them (and only to them)?
If you've done the (very hard) work of setting up a stamp system, adding exceptions, exclusions, and refunds is easy.
The whole thing is disgusting to me though. We're not living in any semblance of a free country when your neighbors can tell you what things you can and can't have on your property simply because they don't look pretty.
If you equate 'free' with "allowed to create negative externalities", then yes, we are not living in any semblance of a free country. But your lost externality is a necessary part of preventing all those other externalities that you would hate, such as loud music.
That said, I agree that 'prettiness' is a difficult externality to quantify, and enforcement of non-quantifiable things is perilous.
Manufacturing moved elsewhere 20yrs ago. IIRC Reagan and Thatcher spent most of the 80's crushing unions and telling everyone it would be a GoodThing(TM). Not that I think the removal of tarrifs and perpetual subsidies is a bad thing, quite the opposite, but you need more than that to "level the playing field".
...assuming you believe that the citizens of a modern, enlightened society belong on an assembly line, performing repetitive work. They don't.
That sort of work is a temporary "rite of passage" that societies pay in order to enter the more proper world of mind work. Once they complete the rite, let the mindless work be passed down to the next modernizing country, as China is beginning to do now too.
You also need to take into account the reglatory regime under which the manafacturing was performed. To do otherwise is simply exporting the labour/environmental problems to nations that don't/can't give a fuck about either.
Yes, those countries cannot yet afford to care about those problems. Those issues are 'problems' only for people whose basic needs have been completely met. To poor folks, environmental problems might be a perfectly acceptable price to pay in order to have steady work, a reliable food supply, and rapid modernization. We went through this phase too, beginning about a century ago. Now you would deny it to other cultures because you disagree with their risk/reward tradeoffs.
You remind me of a rich idiot who would like to force the lower class to drink only Starbucks coffee because the cheap stuff is made from nasty Rubosto beans grown from Africa.
Before you know what's happening everything is made elsewhere, it's dirt cheap
Nothing wrong with that... though once again, the primary beneficiary of this is the lower classes and we've already seen that you don't understand why that matters.
and has a high probability of serious defects and toxic contaminants
Bulls***.
Do you know how much stuff we import from wherever, and what percentage of it has 'serious defects' and contamination? Or are you just stringing words together in whatever way will make your point?
(reminicent of pre-seventies "jap-crap").
That's an excellent point. The Japanese went through this phase too, in the seventies, in order to become the economic jewel they are today. Now it's China's turn. Next it will be India and Thailand. And so on. I suspect your real motivation behind your rant is that you fear the lesser countries will someday reach our level.
IMHO the corect term for the labour side of this is "cheap labour capitalisim", I don't know if there is an equivalent for the environmental side.
As noted, it's a transition phase that cultures willingly pay. They are willing because they want to be modernized, and cheap/dirty manufacturing is the accellerated modernization program that the West offers the world.
Hi, yes, I'd like to buy points 1 and 3, but can I still get package pricing if I don't want point 2?
To wit:
there are government price controls to ensure the public isn't getting reamed on products they're subsidizing. and every 2-3 years the government and industry representatives get together to renegotiate the prices. (this is similar to how health care is run in Japan as a hybrid between privatized and socialized medicine.)
If anyone other than a free market sets the price, then you will get oversupply or undersupply. Oversupply means that consumers are getting reamed qua high prices (above demand), and undersupply means that consumers are getting reamed qua scarcity.
The real problem is people visiting Web sites through email links, and replying to unsolicited email (from companies they recognize or not). Banks don't conduct business through yahoo email addresses. The real issue is educating consumers, or having consumers educate themselves. One does not drive a car without knowing the rules of the road (despite what people may think of cliched analogies), and email clients shouldn't be Web 2.0 browsers.
In real life this "don't talk to strangers" / "don't buy from some guy in a back alley" issue is solved with our eyes and our sense of context. There is no context or visual aid when browsing to a website or reading an email... hence, people will click anything. They are still subconsciously relying on their vision ("a normal-looking email message") and context ("here safe in my home") to judge the safety of interacting.
So let's stop trying to fix people, rowing upstream as such, and instead go with the flow. Write a web browser and an email client that change their appearance based on trust chains or certificates or whatever we use to authenticate known-good entities. When reading an email from a stranger, or an email from bankofamerica.com that lacks the proper signature, the email window turns black and gets covered in spikes. Same with the web browser.
Or bring back clippy, and have him appear as a shady-looking guy in an overcoat, standing next to the email, and he opens his coat to sell you something if your mouse hovers over a link. Or whatever. Point is, work *with* humans' natural authentication mechanisms, rather than whine about how users are clueless.
The real cluelessness is us programmers who ignored our knowledge of existing human authentication systems when we wrote email clients and web browsers. Gee, "let's make all web pages appear equally clean and safe, and then expect users to not click the mean ones!"
I'd like to recommend the book "Collapse," by Jared Diamond (the author of "Guns, Germs, and Steel," another book I'd recommend). He spends several pages explaining the damage that salinization has done to farmland in places like Australia. It's kind of an eye opener about how wasteful irrigation policies have ended up basically permanently ruining large ares of Australia's farmlands by drawing salt up into the soil.
That's what happened to Sumer.
Sumer began as a confederation of city-states in the best part of the fertile crescent in SE Iraq (nee Mesopatamia), and became the world's first wealthy culture, in a time when wealth = calories. Their farming success was due to the development of irritation, in which river water was permitted to flood the farmlands every year. Farms were replanted as soon as the river water evaporated, which left behind a verdant layer of nutrients. Including salt. Within a dozen generations the land was too salty for wheat, so they switched to barley, but barley doesn't produce near the calories/acre or calories/farmer that wheat does, so Sumer declined.
The farmers, and therefore the wealth, and therefore the tradesmen and markets, and therefore the tax base, and therefore the whole culture, moved northward in search of better (i.e. unsalted) farmland... hence, Babylonia. Later the [As]Syrians and then the Persians conquered it -- polytheistic cultures can't stand against the unity that monotheistic cultures can muster.
Because more of the U.S. deaths were homicides (as opposed to suicides or accidental deaths), the U.S. rate of gun homicide was nearly eight times Canada's, the agency says. Homicides accounted for 38 per cent of deaths involving guns in the United States and 18 per cent in Canada."
Subtract blacks from the US numbers, and then compare again.
I'm sorry, did you really mean to say "density"? Atmospheric drag affects surface area of an object, not the number of atoms per unit of volume.
Meanwhile, the kinetic energy of the object (which is what atmospheric drag is carrying away) is based on the number of atoms in the object. Therefore, the rate at which atmospheric drag bleeds energy off an object is a function of density and shape.
To wit: compare the rate at which a marshmallow and a marble, both the same size and shape, differing only by density, would be affected by drag.
Slashdot Mirror
As the owner of a replanted tree farm that is now 19 years old, I think you should know that your eloquent conjecture is completely false.
While you've got your hand in there, can you also pull some winning lottery tickets or perhaps a Grand Unified Field Theory out of your ass?
Yes, and the other elements waste no time in returning -- the whole "unfilled niches" or "available energy" thing. Sometimes the newcomers are different species than were there originally -- perhaps this offends your romanticized sense of 'natural'.
Indeed it does, especially since more trees will get planted in response to increased demand for paper and wood products. Recycling reduces demand and hence ruins the economic incentive for preserving or creating a forest on one's property. I myself am directly affected by pulpwood prices, and every paper recycling program is a thorn in my side, encouraging me to ditch the trees and put the land to more profitable use.
Fixed that for you.
That's incorrect. The statement "I believe John Smith molests farm animals." is actionable.
Look at it this way: every statement of fact implicitly begins with the words "I believe". Whether or not you type them out is irrelevant.
I saw that this article is tagged:
...and I immediately heard that British waitress saying "Well, there's spam-it-spam-story, that's not got much spam in it." Wow I need to go outside more often.
We saw a similar paradigm-shift when we went from landlines to cellphones. The process of dialing a number went from instant-persistent (touch-tones that the exchange listened to as you typed) to a compose-save process (enter number then hit 'send'). Humans are obviously capable of understanding both paradigms and they both have benefits and costs.
I for example love being able to mess with a file in a memory buffer, save it when I see fit, make further adjustments, discard them and reload, and so forth. Sure, I usually always commit to disk, in fact my left hand hits Alt+Z to save almost automatically... except when I don't. Same with landlines and cellphones -- I don't always hit 'send' after typing in a number, and there is very little mental CPU load expended in remembering whether or not I have or should.
Perfectly said.
I hold this topic in my mind as a shining, breathtaking example of how everyone, every book and teacher in the world, is cobviously wrong. And I'm carrying two three-axis accellerometers to prove it.
Enough examples like this will turn anyone into a cynical little subversive like me.
Ah yes, that would be the Green-Liberal plan that we executed in the 1960s-1970s...
Our society has a bad habit of declaring a thing to be evil after we don't need it any more.
If you think that horror stories about American military/intel methods increase the risk we will be attacked, then you do not yet understand human nature.
In any case, there will never be any public evidence about the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of such things. We just have to decide whether or not we can trust the CIA to do what is best in the long term for us. Apparently you don't... but if the CIA is even half competent, there will not be any public basis for you or I to justify our opinions.
The Superconducting Super-Collider to be built in Texas fifteen years ago used magnetic monopoles in its design. In my physics class in 1991 we received a lecture visit from an SSC representative who casually hand-waved the matter of inventing such a thing.
In hindsight I see that perhaps the SSC project really was as overpromised as Congress, in cancelling it, suspected.
Define 'easier' please?
Because right now, the market's actions indicate that it is ea$ier to build more powerplants than it is to use less energy.
What a bunch of mealy-mouthed dreck!
I challenge you to define 'need', 'safer', and 'needless' in a way that excludes nuclear energy production in the face of its competitors for base load generation. Your statement must account for all the safety and environmental issues (including wars) associated with fossil-fuel extraction.
And your definitions must hold for those regions that are not blessed with geothermal, tidal, and wind resources. Nor can you handwave away solar power's problems with efficiency, transmission, overcast sky, and battery problems.
That was the consequence of materials costing more than manhours. Now thanks to industrialization and automation, manhours are vastly more expensive than material, simply because one manhour produces 1000x more material than it did before. (In the grand scheme of things, the cost of either is a function of its exchange rate with the other.)
Our allegedly wasteful modern society is wasteful of the visible component (material) because it is so careful to conserve the invisible component (manhours). Unfortunately most people are concrete-bound and so do not understand what's going on.
Indeed.
Will you declare victory when he orders it closed down and quietly relocated somewhere else? Because that's what's in the works right now.
Or would you prefer that the CIA have no interrogation facilities at all? In which case, will you be among those who scream at the government for the next "fail to prevent"?
Yes it was.
As an aside, camera-phones have almost completely ruined the Mardi Gras experience. When everyone has a phone taking pictures to be immediately posted onto the internet where they will remain forever, the curtains quickly fell on the lovely era of chicks flashing random strangers in the street.
Western culture is apparently in that ugly teenage phase of the Information Revolution, in which we have the ability to generate ubiquitous data but have not yet matured enough to appreciate the occasional massive value of data impermanence.
*clap clap clap*
Well said.
...and the nasty hobbitseseses.
Nice try being snarky without thinking the matter through.
How hard would it be to add to this new stamp system a flag "Do not deliver if there is a charge"?
Or a button in your email client for "Refund the charge to the sender", which if you fail to click it five times in a row, the mailing list stops delivering to you until you do?
Or a set of public blacklists like we have now, except instead of blackholing all email from those domains, applying the one-cent charge to them (and only to them)?
If you've done the (very hard) work of setting up a stamp system, adding exceptions, exclusions, and refunds is easy.
If you equate 'free' with "allowed to create negative externalities", then yes, we are not living in any semblance of a free country. But your lost externality is a necessary part of preventing all those other externalities that you would hate, such as loud music.
That said, I agree that 'prettiness' is a difficult externality to quantify, and enforcement of non-quantifiable things is perilous.
...assuming you believe that the citizens of a modern, enlightened society belong on an assembly line, performing repetitive work. They don't.
That sort of work is a temporary "rite of passage" that societies pay in order to enter the more proper world of mind work. Once they complete the rite, let the mindless work be passed down to the next modernizing country, as China is beginning to do now too.
Yes, those countries cannot yet afford to care about those problems. Those issues are 'problems' only for people whose basic needs have been completely met. To poor folks, environmental problems might be a perfectly acceptable price to pay in order to have steady work, a reliable food supply, and rapid modernization. We went through this phase too, beginning about a century ago. Now you would deny it to other cultures because you disagree with their risk/reward tradeoffs.
You remind me of a rich idiot who would like to force the lower class to drink only Starbucks coffee because the cheap stuff is made from nasty Rubosto beans grown from Africa.
Nothing wrong with that... though once again, the primary beneficiary of this is the lower classes and we've already seen that you don't understand why that matters.
Bulls***.
Do you know how much stuff we import from wherever, and what percentage of it has 'serious defects' and contamination? Or are you just stringing words together in whatever way will make your point?
That's an excellent point. The Japanese went through this phase too, in the seventies, in order to become the economic jewel they are today. Now it's China's turn. Next it will be India and Thailand. And so on. I suspect your real motivation behind your rant is that you fear the lesser countries will someday reach our level.
As noted, it's a transition phase that cultures willingly pay. They are willing because they want to be modernized, and cheap/dirty manufacturing is the accellerated modernization program that the West offers the world.
Hi, yes, I'd like to buy points 1 and 3, but can I still get package pricing if I don't want point 2?
To wit:
If anyone other than a free market sets the price, then you will get oversupply or undersupply. Oversupply means that consumers are getting reamed qua high prices (above demand), and undersupply means that consumers are getting reamed qua scarcity.
So how about neither?
In real life this "don't talk to strangers" / "don't buy from some guy in a back alley" issue is solved with our eyes and our sense of context. There is no context or visual aid when browsing to a website or reading an email... hence, people will click anything. They are still subconsciously relying on their vision ("a normal-looking email message") and context ("here safe in my home") to judge the safety of interacting.
So let's stop trying to fix people, rowing upstream as such, and instead go with the flow. Write a web browser and an email client that change their appearance based on trust chains or certificates or whatever we use to authenticate known-good entities. When reading an email from a stranger, or an email from bankofamerica.com that lacks the proper signature, the email window turns black and gets covered in spikes. Same with the web browser.
Or bring back clippy, and have him appear as a shady-looking guy in an overcoat, standing next to the email, and he opens his coat to sell you something if your mouse hovers over a link. Or whatever. Point is, work *with* humans' natural authentication mechanisms, rather than whine about how users are clueless.
The real cluelessness is us programmers who ignored our knowledge of existing human authentication systems when we wrote email clients and web browsers. Gee, "let's make all web pages appear equally clean and safe, and then expect users to not click the mean ones!"
That's what happened to Sumer.
Sumer began as a confederation of city-states in the best part of the fertile crescent in SE Iraq (nee Mesopatamia), and became the world's first wealthy culture, in a time when wealth = calories. Their farming success was due to the development of irritation, in which river water was permitted to flood the farmlands every year. Farms were replanted as soon as the river water evaporated, which left behind a verdant layer of nutrients. Including salt. Within a dozen generations the land was too salty for wheat, so they switched to barley, but barley doesn't produce near the calories/acre or calories/farmer that wheat does, so Sumer declined.
The farmers, and therefore the wealth, and therefore the tradesmen and markets, and therefore the tax base, and therefore the whole culture, moved northward in search of better (i.e. unsalted) farmland... hence, Babylonia. Later the [As]Syrians and then the Persians conquered it -- polytheistic cultures can't stand against the unity that monotheistic cultures can muster.
The venn diagram of "some idiot out to make a quick buck" and "people can just get desperate" has a great deal of overlap.
As well, 'desperate' is a slippery word. There are few places in the world that have copper wire but insufficient food, water, and shelter.
Subtract blacks from the US numbers, and then compare again.
Meanwhile, the kinetic energy of the object (which is what atmospheric drag is carrying away) is based on the number of atoms in the object. Therefore, the rate at which atmospheric drag bleeds energy off an object is a function of density and shape.
To wit: compare the rate at which a marshmallow and a marble, both the same size and shape, differing only by density, would be affected by drag.