Value is in the mind of the beholder, and most people value the things they own more than other people do, which is a big part of why they still own them.
If this is a shakedown for cash, I presume the cash will be making some people happy - whether or not you agree that their use of the cash is noble, just, or even sensible is just one perspective on the situation. Another perspective is that those politicians worked long and hard to get to their position of legal power, and if they represent their constituents' interests well, they will keep the power - if not, maybe this is the cashing out day for them - and hopefully the constituents will choose more wisely next time (not bloody likely, ya know da surf's up, brah.)
Developing the mountaintop has impacts all the way back down into Hilo - increased traffic / noise / dust on the road - people who work up there living down in town, etc. Traditional economic productivity isn't the only measure of land's value, and development of a place like that has huge impacts beyond the building site.
As someone else pointed out, what I put out there is basically racist - which, I'm afraid, is my perception of life on the big Island. Haole is offensive, except that most people it applies to are so smug that they don't even care.
Small pox was probably the single biggest problem that the west brought to the islands. Accelerated cultural revolution was another, I doubt many alive today would care to live in a 1600s Hawaiian civilization, but part of why that civilization was so successful there for so long was the general "easy living" of the location - if you can handle poi as a staple, and if there's no options, it's not so bad. Bizarre taboos seem to me to be a symptom of too much free time on their hands, so they made up things to be concerned about (like nipple exposure taboos in the west, perhaps?)
Anyway, I do hope it works out and they get another telescope - but, the elder's agenda may well be to bring things back to the stone age civilization, as much as they can.
It's a racist problem, in a racist state. Try "walking while white at night" in Pahoa and see how well you do, especially if you cop an attitude with the people you meet.
I see this as a case of some natives actually getting power in the "establishment's" political system, and using it. It's incredibly racist and corrupt by modern mainland standards - but roll back 50 years and look at how things went down in the US South and tell me this is any worse?
So, my perspective is that anyone interested in progress should suck it up and let the (corrupt, racist, currently existing) political system play out - which will involve something that can be seen as a bribe from many perspectives, but that's the price of doing business in that particular neighborhood. Something very similar goes on in the Florida Keys, where the "development permit lottery" is a completely corrupt joke, the only way anybody gets permission to build anything there is by horse trades - mostly putting "exchange" land into preservation for accelerated permitting for development.
People call them crooks and ignorant bumpkins all the time, what they really are (were) is too technologically disadvantaged to fight back against cannon, and smallpox. Put 100,000 randomly selected mainland Americans on an island and give them similar challenges as the Hawaiians have faced, I think the Haole would look even more ignorant, corrupt, self serving, and generally pathetic.
1960, one year after statehood - pretty heady times in Hawaii. Maybe more traditional values have taken root in the last 50 years?
Another telescope will mean more traffic on the road, and generally more degradation of the natural values of the site and its surroundings. I'm not saying it should or shouldn't be built, just that there are two sides to this and it's not win-win all around.
So, the telescope gets built in China (or is that Tibet?) Will that mean the end of US based astronomy? All significant papers published in Mandarin? Probably not for a century or more, and if there's going to be a lunar based telescope during that time, that would probably be more the deciding factor than the latest mountaintop model.
Dig deep enough into the Hawaiian "religious" stories and you will find some surprisingly scientific basis - much more than "he created the heaven and earth in seven days" - Hawaiians have the god of Fire (Pele?) who makes the land, then a god of life (green / forest growth, I'm too much Haole to remember her name anymore and I refuse to Wiki-research a message oard post) who reshapes the land after Pele makes it, etc. etc.
The elders have been telling people not to develop in certain places because those places are "too much in conflict with Pele" or something to that effect, basically: "your house will be consumed by lava there, fool." But, westerners have ignored them and built dozens of homes which were consumed within a decade or two.
This thing about the mountaintop is more about having a sacred place of quiet reflection (which, if the elders would get their head in the game, is basically what the telescopes are doing, but I'm sure they mostly see the roads, tourists, etc.) Really it comes down to respect, respect these people for whatever their reasoning is - whether it is science masquerading as religion, religion masquerading as science, or just a bunch of ornery old coots who have been pushed around one too many times - we have a system, let it play out according to the rules.
1700 is less than a few thousand... and more detail than I cared to get into, but, sure, Wikipedia is probably as close to the truth as any tribal memory.
Even worse, consider the situation of the Hawaiian natives, pushed off of almost every island except a corner of the big one with the active volcano, pushed around regarding the original telescope placement, etc. etc. Granted, they only got there a few hundred years before Cook, but still, life took a serious turn for the worse for them ever since he landed. Now, the Haole want to just stick another telescope up on the mountain top - continuing to disregard the natives as they do for almost every issue - except, the natives actually have gotten some legal say in this matter - not surprising that they're getting up in the face of the astronomers, or anyone else who is doing something they don't particularly like.
Hopefully, the telescope is important enough to the scientific community for them to wrangle a good deal for the natives and still get the telescope they want built. Anything you do with land in Hawaii gets expensive quick, but you might be able to extend preservation zones around the peak on Maui, in exchange for continued development at the top of Mauna Kea? I don't really know what's in the elder's heads on this one, but surely something of greater value to them can be found to exchange - the question is: do we really want the telescope bad enough to pay the price?
I considered cobbling together a system like this in 2011, coupled with a speed gun and driver photographing camera - mounted in my mailbox. Speed limit on our street is 20mph, but we get cars coming around our (blind) curve at 50+ at all hours - perhaps only 8 or 10 times a month, often enough to be a concern, not often enough to easily catch.
I happened to hear one coming once while I was out walking, and managed to get a visual ID of the occupants, that one was a divorced dad bringing his daughter home with an attitude. Others I glimpsed and recognized the vehicles as residents in the neighborhood. Having the data won't get me citizens' arrests, or shame the parties into "growing up" and not driving like a teenager (at 50+ they're unlikely to change), but it would sway the neighborhood governance committee about the necessity for additional speed bumps.
Better solution: we moved out of the neighborhood with the board of governors and glass smooth winding roads through the forest - now we live at the end of a bumpy road, no more speeders, and no more board of governors to screw with, win-win.
Plate readers have existed since plates were mandated - they just used to be very expensive to feed, this is a technological advancement that has reduced the cost of plate reading by several orders of magnitude. A logical outcome of the advancement of available computer power per $.
MRI guided fiber conducted laser thermal ablation is also an option these days (just started gaining wider use in the last 2 years).
It's a technique that can target small areas with great precision, not too good for massive or diffuse tumor growths, but it excels at "string of pearls" problems.
...deuterium fusion still isn't anywhere near breakeven after 60 years of effort.
Define effort... in those 60 years, have we put as much "effort" into fusion development as we have in politically stabilizing the middle east in the last 12?
Most components I buy off Amazon.com are direct shipped from the far East these days - usually arrive in less than a week, cheap, same quality as domestic, what's not to like?
Agreed, I've often thought that a 7" tablet with bluetooth phone capabilities is what I really want to carry, but they haven't edged the market quite that large yet.
Even with a decent audio interface, the carrier quality is still all over the map - some have HD voice, but most don't. Skype over 4G is a good way to get high quality with a lot of people, but good luck getting my 70 year old mother to use that instead of the dialer keypad to call us.
HD Voice: how do I ensure that I get HD Voice as a codec without controlling both handsets and having them on a supporting carrier? It's a shame that we've dropped below POTS quality as the baseline.
Battery life: can you receive calls or texts when in ultra-low power saving mode? What's your boot up time to make a call? My moto feature phone from 2006 would go 24hrs x 7 days in "standby" without charging which included being able to receive text and photos and take incoming calls, talk time was measured in hours, but I didn't talk on it more than 30 minutes a day, and could get by with charging it only on weekends.
Rugged, yeah, they're out there - all 3 of them. Again, back in 2006 we got a waterproof feature phone with "top of the line" camera and other goodies - free with 2 year contract (at least that has improved) - with interfaces being touch and wireless charging, it seems like a waterproof option should be easier on the new models, but instead it is becoming less common.
I wouldn't mind carrying a "flip phone" today if it had the features and specs of my 2006 moto 815e, but they don't sell those anymore, if you can get your hands on one, good luck finding a carrier that will support it - that market segment has devolved into a very few offerings with lower feature sets and quality than used to be available - and the new stuff is all "tablets that fit in an oversized pocket, oh, and you can make a phone call on it, too." Back in 2005, my company gave me a crackberry - the digital features were cool, calendar integration was actually useful, but call quality was really poor compared to a "real phone," and I guess that set the bar for today - if you can do the cool stuff, you don't need to worry about call quality.
And, again, this is down to implementation... most digital implementations out there do have a very sharp cutoff on the signal quality... good until gone. The simplest analog implementations will have a gradual loss of quality - though there are techniques to "sharpen" that up, most haven't been developed to a level that resembles the digital cutoff, and few have been deployed.
Now EVERYONE pays a monthly cell phone subscription and the network has switched from having to build new towers all the time to mostly expanding capacity on the existing towers. Coverage and capacity is rising to meet demand, and possibly to blame for the reduction in phone capability.
In the 1980s, your car phones needed big roof mounted antennas to have meaningful coverage, in part because the towers were so few and far between.
Now, if you are 10 miles from the nearest tower, you're just screwed unless you stop the car - get out and stand on the roof while carefully holding the phone so as not to obstruct the antenna, but coverage is so much better that you're rarely even 2 miles from a tower, especially in urban areas.
Neither Analog nor Digital is inherently "better" - it's all about the implementations, basically how much bandwidth you give to each channel. Digital technologies are a little more bandwidth efficient than Analog due to compression tricks that are more highly developed in the digital realm - so, overall, given a bandwidth budget, digital can deliver better quality than analog, but that in no way guarantees that a digital implementation will deliver better perceived quality sound quality than an arbitrary analog reference.
It's too bad that the market is mostly flocking to compete on screen size, camera quality, processor speed, etc. and not offering choices like: good voice quality, 7 day battery life, rugged / waterproof.
It's even worse due to the disappearance of landlines - used to be you could always make a decent quality call on a twisted copper pair landline, but the VOIP interface has crept all the way out to the handset in most cases now, the VOIP quality is nowhere near as good as it used to be, and my hearing is getting worse in the meantime.
Slashdot Mirror
Value is in the mind of the beholder, and most people value the things they own more than other people do, which is a big part of why they still own them.
If this is a shakedown for cash, I presume the cash will be making some people happy - whether or not you agree that their use of the cash is noble, just, or even sensible is just one perspective on the situation. Another perspective is that those politicians worked long and hard to get to their position of legal power, and if they represent their constituents' interests well, they will keep the power - if not, maybe this is the cashing out day for them - and hopefully the constituents will choose more wisely next time (not bloody likely, ya know da surf's up, brah.)
Hey, half of that island is due to break off and plummet to the bottom of the Pacific any time now.... why worry about a little quake?
I'd rather have it on the moon, preferably "dark side."
Developing the mountaintop has impacts all the way back down into Hilo - increased traffic / noise / dust on the road - people who work up there living down in town, etc. Traditional economic productivity isn't the only measure of land's value, and development of a place like that has huge impacts beyond the building site.
As someone else pointed out, what I put out there is basically racist - which, I'm afraid, is my perception of life on the big Island. Haole is offensive, except that most people it applies to are so smug that they don't even care.
Small pox was probably the single biggest problem that the west brought to the islands. Accelerated cultural revolution was another, I doubt many alive today would care to live in a 1600s Hawaiian civilization, but part of why that civilization was so successful there for so long was the general "easy living" of the location - if you can handle poi as a staple, and if there's no options, it's not so bad. Bizarre taboos seem to me to be a symptom of too much free time on their hands, so they made up things to be concerned about (like nipple exposure taboos in the west, perhaps?)
Anyway, I do hope it works out and they get another telescope - but, the elder's agenda may well be to bring things back to the stone age civilization, as much as they can.
It's a racist problem, in a racist state. Try "walking while white at night" in Pahoa and see how well you do, especially if you cop an attitude with the people you meet.
I see this as a case of some natives actually getting power in the "establishment's" political system, and using it. It's incredibly racist and corrupt by modern mainland standards - but roll back 50 years and look at how things went down in the US South and tell me this is any worse?
So, my perspective is that anyone interested in progress should suck it up and let the (corrupt, racist, currently existing) political system play out - which will involve something that can be seen as a bribe from many perspectives, but that's the price of doing business in that particular neighborhood. Something very similar goes on in the Florida Keys, where the "development permit lottery" is a completely corrupt joke, the only way anybody gets permission to build anything there is by horse trades - mostly putting "exchange" land into preservation for accelerated permitting for development.
People call them crooks and ignorant bumpkins all the time, what they really are (were) is too technologically disadvantaged to fight back against cannon, and smallpox. Put 100,000 randomly selected mainland Americans on an island and give them similar challenges as the Hawaiians have faced, I think the Haole would look even more ignorant, corrupt, self serving, and generally pathetic.
1960, one year after statehood - pretty heady times in Hawaii. Maybe more traditional values have taken root in the last 50 years?
Another telescope will mean more traffic on the road, and generally more degradation of the natural values of the site and its surroundings. I'm not saying it should or shouldn't be built, just that there are two sides to this and it's not win-win all around.
So, the telescope gets built in China (or is that Tibet?) Will that mean the end of US based astronomy? All significant papers published in Mandarin? Probably not for a century or more, and if there's going to be a lunar based telescope during that time, that would probably be more the deciding factor than the latest mountaintop model.
Dig deep enough into the Hawaiian "religious" stories and you will find some surprisingly scientific basis - much more than "he created the heaven and earth in seven days" - Hawaiians have the god of Fire (Pele?) who makes the land, then a god of life (green / forest growth, I'm too much Haole to remember her name anymore and I refuse to Wiki-research a message oard post) who reshapes the land after Pele makes it, etc. etc.
The elders have been telling people not to develop in certain places because those places are "too much in conflict with Pele" or something to that effect, basically: "your house will be consumed by lava there, fool." But, westerners have ignored them and built dozens of homes which were consumed within a decade or two.
This thing about the mountaintop is more about having a sacred place of quiet reflection (which, if the elders would get their head in the game, is basically what the telescopes are doing, but I'm sure they mostly see the roads, tourists, etc.) Really it comes down to respect, respect these people for whatever their reasoning is - whether it is science masquerading as religion, religion masquerading as science, or just a bunch of ornery old coots who have been pushed around one too many times - we have a system, let it play out according to the rules.
1700 is less than a few thousand... and more detail than I cared to get into, but, sure, Wikipedia is probably as close to the truth as any tribal memory.
Even worse, consider the situation of the Hawaiian natives, pushed off of almost every island except a corner of the big one with the active volcano, pushed around regarding the original telescope placement, etc. etc. Granted, they only got there a few hundred years before Cook, but still, life took a serious turn for the worse for them ever since he landed. Now, the Haole want to just stick another telescope up on the mountain top - continuing to disregard the natives as they do for almost every issue - except, the natives actually have gotten some legal say in this matter - not surprising that they're getting up in the face of the astronomers, or anyone else who is doing something they don't particularly like.
Hopefully, the telescope is important enough to the scientific community for them to wrangle a good deal for the natives and still get the telescope they want built. Anything you do with land in Hawaii gets expensive quick, but you might be able to extend preservation zones around the peak on Maui, in exchange for continued development at the top of Mauna Kea? I don't really know what's in the elder's heads on this one, but surely something of greater value to them can be found to exchange - the question is: do we really want the telescope bad enough to pay the price?
I considered cobbling together a system like this in 2011, coupled with a speed gun and driver photographing camera - mounted in my mailbox. Speed limit on our street is 20mph, but we get cars coming around our (blind) curve at 50+ at all hours - perhaps only 8 or 10 times a month, often enough to be a concern, not often enough to easily catch.
I happened to hear one coming once while I was out walking, and managed to get a visual ID of the occupants, that one was a divorced dad bringing his daughter home with an attitude. Others I glimpsed and recognized the vehicles as residents in the neighborhood. Having the data won't get me citizens' arrests, or shame the parties into "growing up" and not driving like a teenager (at 50+ they're unlikely to change), but it would sway the neighborhood governance committee about the necessity for additional speed bumps.
Better solution: we moved out of the neighborhood with the board of governors and glass smooth winding roads through the forest - now we live at the end of a bumpy road, no more speeders, and no more board of governors to screw with, win-win.
Plate readers have existed since plates were mandated - they just used to be very expensive to feed, this is a technological advancement that has reduced the cost of plate reading by several orders of magnitude. A logical outcome of the advancement of available computer power per $.
MRI guided fiber conducted laser thermal ablation is also an option these days (just started gaining wider use in the last 2 years).
It's a technique that can target small areas with great precision, not too good for massive or diffuse tumor growths, but it excels at "string of pearls" problems.
In Mexico:
https://map.what3words.com/glo...
Wouldn't it just suck to be located at: balls.rust.painfully?
3 words plus one number?
...deuterium fusion still isn't anywhere near breakeven after 60 years of effort.
Define effort... in those 60 years, have we put as much "effort" into fusion development as we have in politically stabilizing the middle east in the last 12?
Most components I buy off Amazon.com are direct shipped from the far East these days - usually arrive in less than a week, cheap, same quality as domestic, what's not to like?
Agreed, I've often thought that a 7" tablet with bluetooth phone capabilities is what I really want to carry, but they haven't edged the market quite that large yet.
Even with a decent audio interface, the carrier quality is still all over the map - some have HD voice, but most don't. Skype over 4G is a good way to get high quality with a lot of people, but good luck getting my 70 year old mother to use that instead of the dialer keypad to call us.
HD Voice: how do I ensure that I get HD Voice as a codec without controlling both handsets and having them on a supporting carrier? It's a shame that we've dropped below POTS quality as the baseline.
Battery life: can you receive calls or texts when in ultra-low power saving mode? What's your boot up time to make a call? My moto feature phone from 2006 would go 24hrs x 7 days in "standby" without charging which included being able to receive text and photos and take incoming calls, talk time was measured in hours, but I didn't talk on it more than 30 minutes a day, and could get by with charging it only on weekends.
Rugged, yeah, they're out there - all 3 of them. Again, back in 2006 we got a waterproof feature phone with "top of the line" camera and other goodies - free with 2 year contract (at least that has improved) - with interfaces being touch and wireless charging, it seems like a waterproof option should be easier on the new models, but instead it is becoming less common.
I wouldn't mind carrying a "flip phone" today if it had the features and specs of my 2006 moto 815e, but they don't sell those anymore, if you can get your hands on one, good luck finding a carrier that will support it - that market segment has devolved into a very few offerings with lower feature sets and quality than used to be available - and the new stuff is all "tablets that fit in an oversized pocket, oh, and you can make a phone call on it, too." Back in 2005, my company gave me a crackberry - the digital features were cool, calendar integration was actually useful, but call quality was really poor compared to a "real phone," and I guess that set the bar for today - if you can do the cool stuff, you don't need to worry about call quality.
And, again, this is down to implementation... most digital implementations out there do have a very sharp cutoff on the signal quality... good until gone. The simplest analog implementations will have a gradual loss of quality - though there are techniques to "sharpen" that up, most haven't been developed to a level that resembles the digital cutoff, and few have been deployed.
Now EVERYONE pays a monthly cell phone subscription and the network has switched from having to build new towers all the time to mostly expanding capacity on the existing towers. Coverage and capacity is rising to meet demand, and possibly to blame for the reduction in phone capability.
In the 1980s, your car phones needed big roof mounted antennas to have meaningful coverage, in part because the towers were so few and far between.
Now, if you are 10 miles from the nearest tower, you're just screwed unless you stop the car - get out and stand on the roof while carefully holding the phone so as not to obstruct the antenna, but coverage is so much better that you're rarely even 2 miles from a tower, especially in urban areas.
Neither Analog nor Digital is inherently "better" - it's all about the implementations, basically how much bandwidth you give to each channel. Digital technologies are a little more bandwidth efficient than Analog due to compression tricks that are more highly developed in the digital realm - so, overall, given a bandwidth budget, digital can deliver better quality than analog, but that in no way guarantees that a digital implementation will deliver better perceived quality sound quality than an arbitrary analog reference.
It's too bad that the market is mostly flocking to compete on screen size, camera quality, processor speed, etc. and not offering choices like: good voice quality, 7 day battery life, rugged / waterproof.
It's even worse due to the disappearance of landlines - used to be you could always make a decent quality call on a twisted copper pair landline, but the VOIP interface has crept all the way out to the handset in most cases now, the VOIP quality is nowhere near as good as it used to be, and my hearing is getting worse in the meantime.
Did I forget to say: "Get off my lawn!"?