With current debt to GDP ratios the US is in the greenzone. Doubling debt to to GDP ratio would be bad though. It would put the US somewhere between Ireland and Portugal.
This will affect Treasury Bill ratings, and the amount of interest the US pays on its debt.
The worst case is a sovereign debt crisis where credit ratings fall, interest payments on debt increase, those interest payments add to the debt, so the debt rises and the cycle repeats until the country defaults.
Policies that add $32 trillion to the US's public debt risk heading down this path.
SJW-ism is Church Of No Salvation. A doctrinal revision has converted white guilt into a form of original sin. Ancestral guilt which no amount of penitence can expiate.
And has been pointed out, why follow a religion which offers no redemption?
In the latter half of the 20th century, our civic religion was egalitarianism. If you got accused of the sin of racism, you could atone. And as long as he hired a few token women, paid off the Rainbow/PUSH coalition, engaged in ritual recitation of of "I Have a Dream," or voted Democrat, a heterosexual white male could atone for the original sin of his birth.
The problem is that in the last ten years, the Cathedral has undergone a doctrinal reformation. The old creed, "Race is only skin deep," has been replaced with a new one, "To be white is to be racist." The means of salvation have been taken away, and it is now taught that there is literally no way for a straight, white male to find salvation, to get right with the god of the age, to be restored to respectability.
Why follow a religion that offers no redemption? Why listen to its priests or care about its rites? The cult of equality is losing its grip on white males, because more and more of us are realizing it offers nothing to us whatsoever. Its condemnations mean nothing now. A church with no salvation is a church with no adherents.
Now going from $19 Trillion and 100% of GDP to $51 Trillion and presumably over 200% of GDP doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
And that's from one policy. Most people think the forecast is hopelessly optimistic and if you're willing to add $32 trillion to the debt over one policy to buy votes, what's to stop you adding another one?
It's disastrous. And up until the last election most Democrats knew it. Hillary still does
In an interview published Wednesday, Ezra Klein of Vox asked Clinton, who defeated Sanders to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, what she thought of the independent Vermont senator's Medicare-for-all plan, which he is set to release later Wednesday.
"Well, I don't know what the particulars are," Clinton said. "As you might remember, during the campaign he introduced a single-payer bill every year he was in Congress - and when somebody finally read it, he couldn't explain it and couldn't really tell people how much it was going to cost."
Clinton also highlighted what she saw as potential flaws in selling such a plan: special interests and public sentiment.
"When I was working on healthcare back in in '93 and '94, I said if we could've waved the magic wand and started all over, maybe we would start with something resembling single-payer plus other payers, like other countries that have universal coverage and are much better at controlling costs than we do, primarily in Europe," Clinton said. "But we were facing the reality of not just strong, powerful forces but people's own fears as well as their appreciation for what they already had."
As an example, Clinton cited the difficulties with the attempt at single-payer in Sanders' home state of Vermont, saying it was "difficult to out the pieces together."
Thorium-cycle fuels produce hard gamma emissions, which damage electronics, limiting their use in bombs. U-232 cannot be chemically separated from U-233 from used nuclear fuel; however, chemical separation of thorium from uranium removes the decay product Th-228 and the radiation from the rest of the decay chain, which gradually build up as Th-228 reaccumulates. The contamination could also be avoided by using a molten-salt breeder reactor and separating the Pa-233 before it decays into U-233.
Kirk Sorenson, who is a big LFTR proponent, agrees
Once it turns into Pa-233, the absorption cross-section is still over 5 times greater than the Th-232. That is one of the basic reasons why it's so important to isolate the Pa-233 from the blanket-in order to prevent another neutron absorption. This is a key step that you just can't do in a solid-core reactor that's trying to "burn" thorium (and achieve a conversion ratio of > 1.0).
Finally, the Pa-233 decays to U-233 in 27 days. The U-233 has a huge cross-section, mostly for fission (531 barns) but with a lot of absorption (45 barns). Thus, uranium-233 left in the blanket will really want to gobble up blanket neutrons and cause fission. That leads to even more trouble, because that will deposit fission products in the blanket, complicating reprocessing and making the blanket "hot" with radiation from fission products.
All of these factors argue for getting protactinium of out the blanket and letting it decay to U-233 outside of the neutron flux. The U-233 can then be removed by fluorination to UF6 and adding it back to the core salt by reduction to UF4. Continuous refueling of the core means that excess reactivity in the core can be held to almost nothing, an extremely important consideration for safe operation that is very difficult to achieve in a solid-core reactor.
I.e. LFTRs are the sollution to the Thallium problem you'd get in a solid fuelled Thorium cycle reactor. However I don't really know enough about this to be able to comment further.
Still I'd support funding into research into LFTRs and molten salt waste burners and then see what the result is. Maybe they're something which could be used industrially and maybe they're not.
Same with fusion and things like travelling wave reactors really - at this point it seems like it's promising enough to do research now and hope to deploy it in a few decades. It might not work out, but it seems to be promising enough to be worth funding research in. Maybe it will pay off, maybe it won't. Fund enough advanced reactors simultaneously and you're bound to get lucky with one or more of them. A lot of the funding is coming from the private sector anyway - it doesn't need to be all public.
You live in an echo chamber where everything you read tells you your views are virtuous and clever and the other side is evil and stupid. The reason Google got into such trouble is that they hire people from inside the same echo chamber and fire people when they point this out like Damore did.
You American left wingers have ironically become indistinguishable from the way you used to portray the religious right - self righteous authoritarians who think anyone who disagrees with them is stupid and/or evil. The American left even has doctrines equivalent to original sin (male privilege and white guilt) and hell (environmental collapse). As with original sin white guilt can only be expiated by continual penitence. As with the Christian fundamentalist version of hell environmental collapse can only be avoided by not doing fun stuff. And like the Christian fundamentalists the onus always seems to be on stopping other people doing fun stuff - people like Al Gore live in vast, energy efficient mansions while telling everyone else to use less energy to save the planet from global warming, analogous to the way Ted Haggard used meth and slept with rent boys in private while publicly telling everyone else to abstain from sin in order to save their souls from hellfire. Like the religious right in the 80's the modern American left wants to take away people's freedom, ostensibly for their own good. But like the religious right you always get the feeling that pursuit of political power is a significant part of the real reason. And the people wanting to set standards have no intention of living up to those standards themselves.
It's actually kind of amusing to watch from the outside. You don't know how much like the standard Hollywood portrayal of a hypocritical, power hungry fundamentalists your side sounds like. You can see characters like this in any Stephen King novel. What the left in the US don't realise is to at least half the US people like Al Gore look a lot like that to them.
The left in the US didn't used to be this way. Bill Clinton may have been an awful person when it came to sexual harassment and corruption, but he moved the party to the centre, a trick Tony Blair copied in the UK. It's only recently that the left has become captivated by identity politics and millennial fears of environmental catastrophe that can only be averted by vast amounts of central planning. Bernie for example wants Medicare for all. Something even NPR - a sympathetic media outlet - said would cost $32 Trillion over 10 years
Payment is unclear. A generous plan that covers all Americans is going to require more revenue. There's no exact plan for how to pay for Sanders' bill, but he did on Wednesday afternoon release a list of potential payment options. Among the proposals: a 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers, a 4 percent individual income tax and an array of taxes on wealthier Americans, as well as corporations. In addition, Sanders' plan says the end of big health insurance-related tax expenditures, like employers' ability to deduct insurance premiums, would save trillions of dollars.
But even with all of those potential revenue-boosters, Sanders may still fall far short of the total amount of money needed to pay for his ambitious program. Altogether, his estimates of how much money his funding mechanisms would generate totals up to around $16 trillion over 10 years. In a 2016 report on his presidential campaign's "Medicare for All" plan, the Urban Institute estimated that the plan would cost $32 trillion over 10 years.
To put $32 Trillion in perspective the cumulative debt almost doubled under Obama - increasing from $10.63 Trillion to $19.4 trillion. Once again Politifact is a source sympathetic to the left.
Yup. And actually the recent kerfuffle with Keurig shows the same thing.
Media Matters called up Keurig and convinced them to pull advertising from Hannity because he was, according to Media Matters 'pro child molestor'. None of which was true of course.
So Keurig pulled their ads. Of course at that point the right started a 'boycott Keurig' campaign, with videos of people smashing their Keurig machines. Though as Ben Shapiro pointed out - smashing a machine you already own doesn't make any sense. All you need to do is stop buying K cups from Keurig.
Now in the long run this means that companies will either be Democrat companies or Republican ones. Up to now that hasn't happened. E.g.
Experian assigned number values to restaurants, with 100 representing neutral territory. That means that a restaurant that scores 120 on the liberal index boasts 20 percent more liberals at its tables than average. The numbers aren't all that surprising. California Pizza Kitchen brings in the most liberals, with a score of 146 on the lefty index. O'Charley's-a chain located throughout the South and Midwest-and Cracker Barrel have the most conservative clientele, scoring 121 and 118, respectively, on the righty index.
I live outside the US and CPK used to have a branch near me and I used to quite like their salads, despite being politically conservative. If I was in the US I'd have gone there too. However suppose CPK took a political stand I didn't approve of. Then I'd eat somewhere else.
Companies don't realise that as soon as they take a political position they will please about half the people and alienate about half. However the people they please are not going to shop their more and the people they alienate can easily shop somewhere else. I.e. companies taking an open political stance is a net loss.
People who don't realise this are spending too much time inside an echo chamber were everyone things their politics are virtuous and the other side's politics are evil.
Quality of life in Germany remains high. Base energy cost is comparable to the rest of western Europe, including France, it's just the tax that makes it more expensive to consumers.
Germans and French people pay more way more than Americans for energy
German energy-related COâ emissions rose almost 1 percent in 2016, despite a fall in coal use and the ongoing expansion of renewable energy sources, according to first estimates by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen.
Last week, in an interview with Fox News, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt claimed: "We are leading the nation - excuse me - the world with respect to our CO2 footprint in reductions."
The Washington Post fact-checked this claim and rated it "Three Pinocchios," which means they rate the claim mostly false. They further wrote that Pruitt's usage of data appeared to be a "deliberate effort to mislead the public."
I agree that this is a nuanced issue, but the data mostly support Pruitt's claim.
According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.
By comparison, the second largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline. At the same time, China's carbon dioxide emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India's grew by 1 billion metric tons.
It's interesting they mention the UK. The UK's CO2 emissions fell during the 'dash to gas'. Newly privatised electricity companies switched from coal to cheaper gas powered stations. And those gas powered stations emitted less CO2 per MW generated
I.e. if you want cheap power and falling CO2 emissions privatise and deregulate. If you want expensive power and flat or rising CO2 emissions, go the German route.
As for thorium it was a great idea in the 50's if we didn't want to have MAD but we chose Uranium and the thorium fuel cycle does not provide anyway (that I have seen) to deal with the existing waste problem we have with Uranium and plutonium
A plan to burn Britain's radioactive nuclear waste as fuel in a next-generation reactor moved a step closer to reality on Monday when GE-Hitachi submitted a thousand-page feasibility report to the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
The UK has a large stockpile - around 100 tonnes - of plutonium waste. This is considered a security risk and the government is considering options for its disposal. The current "preferred option" is to convert the plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel (Mox) for use in conventional nuclear reactors.
But a previous Mox plant in the UK was deemed a failure, and GE-Hitachi claims that its Prism fast reactor - a completely different design fuelled by plutonium and cooled by liquid sodium - offers a more attractive solution.
One of the potential benefits of fast reactors is that they could extract large quantities of energy from nuclear waste. In February, David MacKay, the chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) told the Guardian there was enough energy in the UK's waste stockpile to power the country for more than 500 years.
The NDA initially dismissed fast reactors as being decades from commercial viability. But after the Prism proposal was submitted by GE-Hitachi, the NDA agreed to review the evidence. Monday's report - a summary of which has been seen by the Guardian - is designed to persuade the NDA that the Prism is technically credible and commercially attractive.
And there are proposals for molten salt waste burners too
Not thorium based, but it is based on molten salt, the same as a LFTR.
Nuclear power was the resurgent darling of the energy industry just a few years ago as concerns over global warming mounted. Then there was the disastrous meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in central Japan, which will continue to affect residents for years to come. In the wake of this event, nuclear plants in Japan and Germany were completely shut off and plans to expand nuclear power around the world were shelved.
A few companies have continued pushing safer forms of nuclear power in a smaller form, and now one of them is getting the finding to make its plans a reality. Transatomic Power has just picked up $2 million from Founders Fund to develop a custom molten salt reactor that can eat nuclear waste.
It's definitely worth funding pilot projects for this sort of thing. Potentially you could get rid of waste and produces non negligible amounts of energy doing it.
It's the stuff your friends or advertisers posted which Facebook wants you to see. It has the following purposes
1) To show you ads 2) To show you political content the people who run FB approve of 3) To show you stuff your friends have shared. 4) To give people a virtual slap for posting political content the people who run FB don't approve of. I.e. to enforce the Overton Window. 5) To collect lots of metadata from people which can be commercialised in a variety of scummy ways
tl;dr - don't post to FB and don't look at the feed because it's absolute cancer.
Though I have to admit I do have a FB account and Facebook messenger on my phone because a lot of people I know use it for messaging.
Problem is what about security? Opera 12.x hasn't been updated in ages. I mean you can make an argument that no one cares about it because has such a low share of the market but I'm wary of relying on that.
I guess you could say it had a 1MB or 20 bit address space or 1MB. In real mode a far pointer has a 16 bit segment and a 16 bit offset. However real mode segment addressing rules say you shift the segment 4 bits left and add the offset.
Of course MSDOS on an IBM compatible machine before the 386 was limited to 640K because IBM decided to reserve the top 384K for IO devices.
Then the 386 was introduced and there were various ways for DOS applications to get access to expanded memory (paged in below 1MB), extended memory (above 1MB). And it had UMBs - memory above 1MB was paged into unused spaces in the 384K IBM reserved for IO. The UMBs and expanded memory were all made possible by the 386's on chip MMU.
So how big was the address space? I'd say 20 bit with the 8086, growing to 24 bit with the 286 and 32 bit with the 386.
The odd thing is that DOS didn't really die because it run out of address space. It died because Win32 have programs a nice flat 32 bit address space and also a standardised way to talk to hardware. In the DOS days you had to drive hardware directly. With Windows you could use an DirectX or OpenGL to talk to a driver which knew how to do hardware acceleration. Also Windows let you run all the code in flat 32 bit mode, whereas in Dos you'd need to Dos extender to do magic behind the scenes to switch back to real mode or something like it when you called Dos. Still games like Doom run like that with an Dos extender initially before they moved to Win32. Then again Doom probably didn't make many API calls once it had loaded level data and was rendering frames.
That was my problem with Opera. Back in the 12.x days it had a better UI than Firefox and Chrome. Once they switched to the Chromium rendering engine they ended up with an even more feature free UI than Chrome plus a bunch of extensions.
The first version of Opera with the Chrome rendering engine didn't even have bookmarks. 12.x had loads of cool features. Even Chrome with a bunch of extensions isn't as good to be honest. But hey, it's a webbrowser and it does the job, albeit using more memory and with a less advanced UI than Opera 12 had five years ago.
I've tried the mobile versions of Firefox but never really liked it. Same with the mobile version of Opera and Dolphin Browser. I noticed Samsung's browser just got updated to a version with Ad Block and gave it a try.
Yeah, it's an example of a low trust society. Which is why, despite having vast natural resources Nigeria has a GDP(PPP) per capita of $5900 table, i.e. it does pretty badly.
The opposite case in Japan. Almost no natural resource but it's a very high trust society. And it does pretty well with a GDP(PPP) per capita of $41,300.
GDP(PPP) per capita isn't everything of course. I mean I'd prefer Japan over Nigeria even if you reverse their prosperity levels. Funny thing is Japan got levelled completely in WWII and grew very quickly back to first world prosperity. So actually a Japan rebuilding from devastation but keeping its high trust society status would be an awesome place to be. Same with the more high trust bits of the USA. The low trust bits of the USA are almost as bad as Nigeria though.
Smart phones have levelled out. For most people, including me a Galaxy S5 is just as good as an S8 because I don't really do anything performance intensive on it. Better in fact because of the removable battery. And the trend for future phones from both Apple and Android seems to be to up the price, not have a removable battery and even remove things like headphone jacks.
Yeah, a Snapdragon 835 in an S8 might get better benchmarks but it's not worth losing a removable battery over. Like I say only use the phone for a bunch of IM apps, Google Maps, a Chinese dictionary and the odd Google search.
Android phones get slower and run hotter with time but a factory reset every so often seems to cure that. In fact factory reset plus a fresh battery gives you a new phone. Which is a lot cheaper than spending $700+ on an S8.
I.e. once you get away from the attempts at built in obsolescence a three year old phone is fine. And will probably last longer than a new one.
I used to use Opera up to 12.x. Then they moved over to Chromium and it lost all the features. I moved to Chrome and to be honest Chrome is fine on OS-X and Windows. On Android I use Samsung Internet because it has ad blocking which mobile Chrome lacks.
For desktop OSs I like Chrome and a bunch of extensions including uBlock Origin, Floating For Youtube and so on. It's got a lot more bloated than it was when I switched over, possibly due to all the extensions you need. But it's OK on a machine with an SSD and lots of Ram.
I can't really see why you'd buy an iMac and run something other than OS-X on it. Apple hardware is nicely designed but it is overpriced, And it works well running OS-X but it's likely to be subpar running anything else. E.g. lots of people have pointed out that Macs have poor battery life running Windows in Boot Camp. That's because Apple do some clever stuff like run the keyboard and trackpad in SPI mode, not USB. But that only works in OS-X. In other OSs they might just run them in USB mode.
If you want to run WIndows go to your favourite laptop/desktop OEM(s) and buy a machine/parts. It'll be cheaper than a Mac. If you want to run Linux go to your favourite OEM(s) and make sure all the parts have decent Linux support.
Now on my Mac I still occasionally need to run Visual Studio for Windows to build stuff. And for that there's Parallels Desktop. Parallels Desktop's Coherence mode where you can have Visual Studio running in a window on the same desktop as native Mac applications is a thing of beauty.
And it looks like they support it for Ubuntu virtual machines too -
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally Moody's have worked out the fiscal headway various countries have here
https://www.economy.com/dismal...
The Economist wrote about it here
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
With current debt to GDP ratios the US is in the greenzone. Doubling debt to to GDP ratio would be bad though. It would put the US somewhere between Ireland and Portugal.
This will affect Treasury Bill ratings, and the amount of interest the US pays on its debt.
The worst case is a sovereign debt crisis where credit ratings fall, interest payments on debt increase, those interest payments add to the debt, so the debt rises and the cycle repeats until the country defaults.
Policies that add $32 trillion to the US's public debt risk heading down this path.
The government doesn't consume the entire GDP+
The Federal Government currently owes more than the annual GDP
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se...
SJW-ism is Church Of No Salvation. A doctrinal revision has converted white guilt into a form of original sin. Ancestral guilt which no amount of penitence can expiate.
And has been pointed out, why follow a religion which offers no redemption?
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
In the latter half of the 20th century, our civic religion was egalitarianism. If you got accused of the sin of racism, you could atone. And as long as he hired a few token women, paid off the Rainbow/PUSH coalition, engaged in ritual recitation of of "I Have a Dream," or voted Democrat, a heterosexual white male could atone for the original sin of his birth.
The problem is that in the last ten years, the Cathedral has undergone a doctrinal reformation. The old creed, "Race is only skin deep," has been replaced with a new one, "To be white is to be racist." The means of salvation have been taken away, and it is now taught that there is literally no way for a straight, white male to find salvation, to get right with the god of the age, to be restored to respectability.
Why follow a religion that offers no redemption? Why listen to its priests or care about its rites? The cult of equality is losing its grip on white males, because more and more of us are realizing it offers nothing to us whatsoever. Its condemnations mean nothing now. A church with no salvation is a church with no adherents.
US debt to GDP is already at over 100%
https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
It's forecast to stay there
https://tradingeconomics.com/u...
Now going from $19 Trillion and 100% of GDP to $51 Trillion and presumably over 200% of GDP doesn't seem like a good idea to me.
And that's from one policy. Most people think the forecast is hopelessly optimistic and if you're willing to add $32 trillion to the debt over one policy to buy votes, what's to stop you adding another one?
It's disastrous. And up until the last election most Democrats knew it. Hillary still does
http://www.businessinsider.com...
In an interview published Wednesday, Ezra Klein of Vox asked Clinton, who defeated Sanders to become the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, what she thought of the independent Vermont senator's Medicare-for-all plan, which he is set to release later Wednesday.
"Well, I don't know what the particulars are," Clinton said. "As you might remember, during the campaign he introduced a single-payer bill every year he was in Congress - and when somebody finally read it, he couldn't explain it and couldn't really tell people how much it was going to cost."
Clinton also highlighted what she saw as potential flaws in selling such a plan: special interests and public sentiment.
"When I was working on healthcare back in in '93 and '94, I said if we could've waved the magic wand and started all over, maybe we would start with something resembling single-payer plus other payers, like other countries that have universal coverage and are much better at controlling costs than we do, primarily in Europe," Clinton said. "But we were facing the reality of not just strong, powerful forces but people's own fears as well as their appreciation for what they already had."
As an example, Clinton cited the difficulties with the attempt at single-payer in Sanders' home state of Vermont, saying it was "difficult to out the pieces together."
In Vermont Single Payer For All failed
https://www.politico.com/story...
I bet the Democrats end up supporting it though and wheeling out Jimmy Kimmel to cry that anyone who opposes it wants kids like his to die.
A molten salt waste burner doesn't produce Thallium
And as Wikpedia puts it
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Thorium-cycle fuels produce hard gamma emissions, which damage electronics, limiting their use in bombs. U-232 cannot be chemically separated from U-233 from used nuclear fuel; however, chemical separation of thorium from uranium removes the decay product Th-228 and the radiation from the rest of the decay chain, which gradually build up as Th-228 reaccumulates. The contamination could also be avoided by using a molten-salt breeder reactor and separating the Pa-233 before it decays into U-233.
Kirk Sorenson, who is a big LFTR proponent, agrees
http://energyfromthorium.com/2...
Once it turns into Pa-233, the absorption cross-section is still over 5 times greater than the Th-232. That is one of the basic reasons why it's so important to isolate the Pa-233 from the blanket-in order to prevent another neutron absorption. This is a key step that you just can't do in a solid-core reactor that's trying to "burn" thorium (and achieve a conversion ratio of > 1.0).
Finally, the Pa-233 decays to U-233 in 27 days. The U-233 has a huge cross-section, mostly for fission (531 barns) but with a lot of absorption (45 barns). Thus, uranium-233 left in the blanket will really want to gobble up blanket neutrons and cause fission. That leads to even more trouble, because that will deposit fission products in the blanket, complicating reprocessing and making the blanket "hot" with radiation from fission products.
All of these factors argue for getting protactinium of out the blanket and letting it decay to U-233 outside of the neutron flux. The U-233 can then be removed by fluorination to UF6 and adding it back to the core salt by reduction to UF4. Continuous refueling of the core means that excess reactivity in the core can be held to almost nothing, an extremely important consideration for safe operation that is very difficult to achieve in a solid-core reactor.
I.e. LFTRs are the sollution to the Thallium problem you'd get in a solid fuelled Thorium cycle reactor. However I don't really know enough about this to be able to comment further.
Still I'd support funding into research into LFTRs and molten salt waste burners and then see what the result is. Maybe they're something which could be used industrially and maybe they're not.
Same with fusion and things like travelling wave reactors really - at this point it seems like it's promising enough to do research now and hope to deploy it in a few decades. It might not work out, but it seems to be promising enough to be worth funding research in. Maybe it will pay off, maybe it won't. Fund enough advanced reactors simultaneously and you're bound to get lucky with one or more of them. A lot of the funding is coming from the private sector anyway - it doesn't need to be all public.
No, but one of them is a molten salt reactor. And molten salt is the basis for LFTR.
You live in an echo chamber where everything you read tells you your views are virtuous and clever and the other side is evil and stupid. The reason Google got into such trouble is that they hire people from inside the same echo chamber and fire people when they point this out like Damore did.
You American left wingers have ironically become indistinguishable from the way you used to portray the religious right - self righteous authoritarians who think anyone who disagrees with them is stupid and/or evil. The American left even has doctrines equivalent to original sin (male privilege and white guilt) and hell (environmental collapse). As with original sin white guilt can only be expiated by continual penitence. As with the Christian fundamentalist version of hell environmental collapse can only be avoided by not doing fun stuff. And like the Christian fundamentalists the onus always seems to be on stopping other people doing fun stuff - people like Al Gore live in vast, energy efficient mansions while telling everyone else to use less energy to save the planet from global warming, analogous to the way Ted Haggard used meth and slept with rent boys in private while publicly telling everyone else to abstain from sin in order to save their souls from hellfire. Like the religious right in the 80's the modern American left wants to take away people's freedom, ostensibly for their own good. But like the religious right you always get the feeling that pursuit of political power is a significant part of the real reason. And the people wanting to set standards have no intention of living up to those standards themselves.
It's actually kind of amusing to watch from the outside. You don't know how much like the standard Hollywood portrayal of a hypocritical, power hungry fundamentalists your side sounds like. You can see characters like this in any Stephen King novel. What the left in the US don't realise is to at least half the US people like Al Gore look a lot like that to them.
The left in the US didn't used to be this way. Bill Clinton may have been an awful person when it came to sexual harassment and corruption, but he moved the party to the centre, a trick Tony Blair copied in the UK. It's only recently that the left has become captivated by identity politics and millennial fears of environmental catastrophe that can only be averted by vast amounts of central planning. Bernie for example wants Medicare for all. Something even NPR - a sympathetic media outlet - said would cost $32 Trillion over 10 years
https://www.npr.org/2017/09/14...
Payment is unclear. A generous plan that covers all Americans is going to require more revenue. There's no exact plan for how to pay for Sanders' bill, but he did on Wednesday afternoon release a list of potential payment options. Among the proposals: a 7.5 percent payroll tax on employers, a 4 percent individual income tax and an array of taxes on wealthier Americans, as well as corporations. In addition, Sanders' plan says the end of big health insurance-related tax expenditures, like employers' ability to deduct insurance premiums, would save trillions of dollars.
But even with all of those potential revenue-boosters, Sanders may still fall far short of the total amount of money needed to pay for his ambitious program. Altogether, his estimates of how much money his funding mechanisms would generate totals up to around $16 trillion over 10 years. In a 2016 report on his presidential campaign's "Medicare for All" plan, the Urban Institute estimated that the plan would cost $32 trillion over 10 years.
To put $32 Trillion in perspective the cumulative debt almost doubled under Obama - increasing from $10.63 Trillion to $19.4 trillion. Once again Politifact is a source sympathetic to the left.
Yup. And actually the recent kerfuffle with Keurig shows the same thing.
Media Matters called up Keurig and convinced them to pull advertising from Hannity because he was, according to Media Matters 'pro child molestor'. None of which was true of course.
http://www.dailywire.com/news/...
So Keurig pulled their ads. Of course at that point the right started a 'boycott Keurig' campaign, with videos of people smashing their Keurig machines. Though as Ben Shapiro pointed out - smashing a machine you already own doesn't make any sense. All you need to do is stop buying K cups from Keurig.
Now in the long run this means that companies will either be Democrat companies or Republican ones. Up to now that hasn't happened. E.g.
http://www.foodandwine.com/fwx...
Experian assigned number values to restaurants, with 100 representing neutral territory. That means that a restaurant that scores 120 on the liberal index boasts 20 percent more liberals at its tables than average. The numbers aren't all that surprising. California Pizza Kitchen brings in the most liberals, with a score of 146 on the lefty index. O'Charley's-a chain located throughout the South and Midwest-and Cracker Barrel have the most conservative clientele, scoring 121 and 118, respectively, on the righty index.
I live outside the US and CPK used to have a branch near me and I used to quite like their salads, despite being politically conservative. If I was in the US I'd have gone there too. However suppose CPK took a political stand I didn't approve of. Then I'd eat somewhere else.
Companies don't realise that as soon as they take a political position they will please about half the people and alienate about half. However the people they please are not going to shop their more and the people they alienate can easily shop somewhere else. I.e. companies taking an open political stance is a net loss.
People who don't realise this are spending too much time inside an echo chamber were everyone things their politics are virtuous and the other side's politics are evil.
The Annual General Meeting won't be that bad, dude.
Quality of life in Germany remains high. Base energy cost is comparable to the rest of western Europe, including France, it's just the tax that makes it more expensive to consumers.
Germans and French people pay more way more than Americans for energy
http://dailycaller.com/2016/05...
And German CO2 emissions are still rising, not falling
https://www.cleanenergywire.or...
German energy-related COâ emissions rose almost 1 percent in 2016, despite a fall in coal use and the ongoing expansion of renewable energy sources, according to first estimates by energy market research group AG Energiebilanzen.
Meanwhile US CO2 emissions are falling
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...
Last week, in an interview with Fox News, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt claimed: "We are leading the nation - excuse me - the world with respect to our CO2 footprint in reductions."
The Washington Post fact-checked this claim and rated it "Three Pinocchios," which means they rate the claim mostly false. They further wrote that Pruitt's usage of data appeared to be a "deliberate effort to mislead the public."
I agree that this is a nuanced issue, but the data mostly support Pruitt's claim.
According to the 2017 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, since 2005 annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have declined by 758 million metric tons. That is by far the largest decline of any country in the world over that timespan and is nearly as large as the 770 million metric ton decline for the entire European Union.
By comparison, the second largest decline during that period was registered by the United Kingdom, which reported a 170 million metric ton decline. At the same time, China's carbon dioxide emissions grew by 3 billion metric tons, and India's grew by 1 billion metric tons.
It's interesting they mention the UK. The UK's CO2 emissions fell during the 'dash to gas'. Newly privatised electricity companies switched from coal to cheaper gas powered stations. And those gas powered stations emitted less CO2 per MW generated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I.e. if you want cheap power and falling CO2 emissions privatise and deregulate. If you want expensive power and flat or rising CO2 emissions, go the German route.
As for thorium it was a great idea in the 50's if we didn't want to have MAD but we chose Uranium and the thorium fuel cycle does not provide anyway (that I have seen) to deal with the existing waste problem we have with Uranium and plutonium
There are proposals for waste burning reactors
https://www.theguardian.com/en...
A plan to burn Britain's radioactive nuclear waste as fuel in a next-generation reactor moved a step closer to reality on Monday when GE-Hitachi submitted a thousand-page feasibility report to the UK's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
The UK has a large stockpile - around 100 tonnes - of plutonium waste. This is considered a security risk and the government is considering options for its disposal. The current "preferred option" is to convert the plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel (Mox) for use in conventional nuclear reactors.
But a previous Mox plant in the UK was deemed a failure, and GE-Hitachi claims that its Prism fast reactor - a completely different design fuelled by plutonium and cooled by liquid sodium - offers a more attractive solution.
One of the potential benefits of fast reactors is that they could extract large quantities of energy from nuclear waste. In February, David MacKay, the chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) told the Guardian there was enough energy in the UK's waste stockpile to power the country for more than 500 years.
The NDA initially dismissed fast reactors as being decades from commercial viability. But after the Prism proposal was submitted by GE-Hitachi, the NDA agreed to review the evidence. Monday's report - a summary of which has been seen by the Guardian - is designed to persuade the NDA that the Prism is technically credible and commercially attractive.
And there are proposals for molten salt waste burners too
https://www.extremetech.com/ex...
Not thorium based, but it is based on molten salt, the same as a LFTR.
Nuclear power was the resurgent darling of the energy industry just a few years ago as concerns over global warming mounted. Then there was the disastrous meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in central Japan, which will continue to affect residents for years to come. In the wake of this event, nuclear plants in Japan and Germany were completely shut off and plans to expand nuclear power around the world were shelved.
A few companies have continued pushing safer forms of nuclear power in a smaller form, and now one of them is getting the finding to make its plans a reality. Transatomic Power has just picked up $2 million from Founders Fund to develop a custom molten salt reactor that can eat nuclear waste.
It's definitely worth funding pilot projects for this sort of thing. Potentially you could get rid of waste and produces non negligible amounts of energy doing it.
It's the stuff your friends or advertisers posted which Facebook wants you to see. It has the following purposes
1) To show you ads
2) To show you political content the people who run FB approve of
3) To show you stuff your friends have shared.
4) To give people a virtual slap for posting political content the people who run FB don't approve of. I.e. to enforce the Overton Window.
5) To collect lots of metadata from people which can be commercialised in a variety of scummy ways
tl;dr - don't post to FB and don't look at the feed because it's absolute cancer.
Though I have to admit I do have a FB account and Facebook messenger on my phone because a lot of people I know use it for messaging.
Problem is what about security? Opera 12.x hasn't been updated in ages. I mean you can make an argument that no one cares about it because has such a low share of the market but I'm wary of relying on that.
I guess you could say it had a 1MB or 20 bit address space or 1MB. In real mode a far pointer has a 16 bit segment and a 16 bit offset. However real mode segment addressing rules say you shift the segment 4 bits left and add the offset.
Of course MSDOS on an IBM compatible machine before the 386 was limited to 640K because IBM decided to reserve the top 384K for IO devices.
Then the 386 was introduced and there were various ways for DOS applications to get access to expanded memory (paged in below 1MB), extended memory (above 1MB). And it had UMBs - memory above 1MB was paged into unused spaces in the 384K IBM reserved for IO. The UMBs and expanded memory were all made possible by the 386's on chip MMU.
So how big was the address space? I'd say 20 bit with the 8086, growing to 24 bit with the 286 and 32 bit with the 386.
The odd thing is that DOS didn't really die because it run out of address space. It died because Win32 have programs a nice flat 32 bit address space and also a standardised way to talk to hardware. In the DOS days you had to drive hardware directly. With Windows you could use an DirectX or OpenGL to talk to a driver which knew how to do hardware acceleration. Also Windows let you run all the code in flat 32 bit mode, whereas in Dos you'd need to Dos extender to do magic behind the scenes to switch back to real mode or something like it when you called Dos. Still games like Doom run like that with an Dos extender initially before they moved to Win32. Then again Doom probably didn't make many API calls once it had loaded level data and was rendering frames.
That was my problem with Opera. Back in the 12.x days it had a better UI than Firefox and Chrome. Once they switched to the Chromium rendering engine they ended up with an even more feature free UI than Chrome plus a bunch of extensions.
The first version of Opera with the Chrome rendering engine didn't even have bookmarks. 12.x had loads of cool features. Even Chrome with a bunch of extensions isn't as good to be honest. But hey, it's a webbrowser and it does the job, albeit using more memory and with a less advanced UI than Opera 12 had five years ago.
I've tried the mobile versions of Firefox but never really liked it. Same with the mobile version of Opera and Dolphin Browser. I noticed Samsung's browser just got updated to a version with Ad Block and gave it a try.
I.e. IMO right now on Android
Samsung>Chrome>(Firefox,Opera)
Well I meant "rather than Opera" rather than "rather than Chromium".
Yeah, it's an example of a low trust society. Which is why, despite having vast natural resources Nigeria has a GDP(PPP) per capita of $5900 table, i.e. it does pretty badly.
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...
The opposite case in Japan. Almost no natural resource but it's a very high trust society. And it does pretty well with a GDP(PPP) per capita of $41,300.
GDP(PPP) per capita isn't everything of course. I mean I'd prefer Japan over Nigeria even if you reverse their prosperity levels. Funny thing is Japan got levelled completely in WWII and grew very quickly back to first world prosperity. So actually a Japan rebuilding from devastation but keeping its high trust society status would be an awesome place to be. Same with the more high trust bits of the USA. The low trust bits of the USA are almost as bad as Nigeria though.
Smart phones have levelled out. For most people, including me a Galaxy S5 is just as good as an S8 because I don't really do anything performance intensive on it. Better in fact because of the removable battery. And the trend for future phones from both Apple and Android seems to be to up the price, not have a removable battery and even remove things like headphone jacks.
Yeah, a Snapdragon 835 in an S8 might get better benchmarks but it's not worth losing a removable battery over. Like I say only use the phone for a bunch of IM apps, Google Maps, a Chinese dictionary and the odd Google search.
Android phones get slower and run hotter with time but a factory reset every so often seems to cure that. In fact factory reset plus a fresh battery gives you a new phone. Which is a lot cheaper than spending $700+ on an S8.
I.e. once you get away from the attempts at built in obsolescence a three year old phone is fine. And will probably last longer than a new one.
I used to use Opera up to 12.x. Then they moved over to Chromium and it lost all the features. I moved to Chrome and to be honest Chrome is fine on OS-X and Windows. On Android I use Samsung Internet because it has ad blocking which mobile Chrome lacks.
For desktop OSs I like Chrome and a bunch of extensions including uBlock Origin, Floating For Youtube and so on. It's got a lot more bloated than it was when I switched over, possibly due to all the extensions you need. But it's OK on a machine with an SSD and lots of Ram.
Rowhammer attacks in Javascript were able to cross VMs.
https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-71...
And obviously if you have byte code the possibilities for obfuscation are really good. E.g. MOVfuscator the 'single instruction compiler'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Opera committed seppuku when they changed their rendering engine to Chromium and lost all the features that made Opera worth using.
https://www.reddit.com/r/opera...
If you're going to use a Chromium based browser, why not just use Chrome?
I can't really see why you'd buy an iMac and run something other than OS-X on it. Apple hardware is nicely designed but it is overpriced, And it works well running OS-X but it's likely to be subpar running anything else. E.g. lots of people have pointed out that Macs have poor battery life running Windows in Boot Camp. That's because Apple do some clever stuff like run the keyboard and trackpad in SPI mode, not USB. But that only works in OS-X. In other OSs they might just run them in USB mode.
https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
If you want to run WIndows go to your favourite laptop/desktop OEM(s) and buy a machine/parts. It'll be cheaper than a Mac. If you want to run Linux go to your favourite OEM(s) and make sure all the parts have decent Linux support.
Now on my Mac I still occasionally need to run Visual Studio for Windows to build stuff. And for that there's Parallels Desktop. Parallels Desktop's Coherence mode where you can have Visual Studio running in a window on the same desktop as native Mac applications is a thing of beauty.
And it looks like they support it for Ubuntu virtual machines too -
http://kb.parallels.com/en/112...
vi cheatshhet
[ESC] - Escape
: - This colon thing. Colon thing is another name for vi
q - Quit and
! - Never
[RETURN] - Return
I dunno why Slashdot doesn't like them. They're part of unicode and Slashdot is UTF-8.
E.g suppose I paste an left double quote from here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
slashdot displays this
âoe
However if I paste it into here
http://www.ltg.ed.ac.uk/~richa...
I see
LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK 0x201C
It seems like Slashdot doesn't like any UTF-8 sequence that decodes outside of ASCII and turns it into gibberish. Very odd.
Though if I do this
“
I get
“
It seems like it doesn't like anything but 7 bit ASCII in comments.