Even if petroleum gets back into the $100 range, it won't be the end of hydrocarbon fuel. "Artificial petroleum" made by thermal depolymerization of turkey guts (or whatever) gets economically viable around that price (well, a bit more, with subsidies and tax breaks removed).
The stuff that used to be made at the plant in Carthage, MO, near the turkey processing plant, was comparable to high-grade crude. You couldn't power a diesel engine with it, quite, but it didn't need much refining.
Recycling plastic bottles and sawdust and newspapers and household garbage at the local TDP plant looks better and better, the higher petroleum prices go.
Anyone who doesn't hunt or gather is technologically unemployed. Inventions like agriculture, animal husbandry, sanitary sewers, paved roads, carpentry, cloth created new jobs that didn't exist for our paleolithic ancestors.
Over the millennia, the specific technologies that have thrown people out of work, generation after generation, have changed. But the process has not.
The big change in the last couple of centuries is that people live long enough to see their occupations go away, or change so dramatically they're far from the same thing, because they pace of change has picked up. Old age took care of those made redundant by the horse-collar. Dockworkers, not so much.
My dentist isn't doing the same things now as when he started, decades ago. (I for one am glad of it.)
And nobody unloads cargo ships by hand into boxcars, or boxcars into trucks. (And I'm glad of that, too.)
So, they're making steel the way Lays makes potato chips. This is a bad thing? I guess it is, if you're a professional slag wrangler or potato peeler, and you can't or won't learn how to do anything else that is more in demand.
My yahoo.com address has been around a while. It's the one I used for many newsletters and web-based services over the years. A large portion of my e-mail comes to me via that address, forwarded automatically to my ISP address.
So when e-mail forwarding failed, without warning, it had consequences. It took over a day for me to notice it and to take corrective action: turn it on when it was already on, and then verify I wanted it on.
A chunk of that time was spent finding current information about how to check the status of forwarding (it was on) and how to turn it on (which I did, anyway). Once I opened the e-mail to verify activation, it worked as though nothing had happened.
Except that a bunch of e-mails which didn't get forwarded before still didn't forward.
Understandable, and desirable, when turning on automatic forwarding that had not been on. You likely wouldn't want all the e-mail in your inbox, no matter how old, to get forwarded to that address -- just the new e-mail that arrived after automatic forwarding was turned on.
Still, a pain in the ass. No response from service@yahoo.com. But it's been zero business days since I notified them (Friday evening), so maybe it's too early to be disappointed with them.
Budget is visible. Conspicuous, even. Schedule, perhaps even more so. Quality -- especially in the parts that aren't visible, like maintainability and security -- often gets little attention.
Well, one aspect of security gets attention: when the access is too restrictive, and the software is unusable. Someone should be able to do something, but can't. The other aspect -- someone shouldn't be able to do something, but can -- isn't obvious. It may not get addressed by the time of the first demo. It may not get addressed by the time of initial delivery. It may not get addressed before the team is moved to a new project.
And who will know and care, and be in a position to do something about it?
Man, a functioning government sure would be nice right about now...
Oh, it's functioning, and has been over the entire interval covered by those EPA tests. It just hasn't been doing what you expected it to do. It gathered money from people not willing to part with it voluntarily, and spent it doing things the politicians directed it to do (more or less).
Getting mad or disappointed or sad because a human creation isn't doing what you expect it to do, when it's clearly not very good at that sort of thing, is just silly.
You don't get upset when a bicycle doesn't fly. You don't get excited when a library doesn't build cars, or when a tractor manufacturer doesn't do veterinary dental procedures.
Of course, if I'd RTFA, I might also comment on the particulars of the gripe, especially if it's nonsensical. (Maybe later.)
"Open plan" work areas, where there isn't even a short cubicle wall between you and the conversations and standup meetings of your co-workers. Headphones, white-noise generators, and noise-cancelling can only do so much. And they have their own problems.
The motion of people in your peripheral vision -- or right in front of your goddam face -- is distracting, too.
This is a fad that has not gone away, despite the obvious problems.
Did they intimidate voters at polling places? Systematically prevent some categories of people from registering to vote? Did they stuff ballot boxes? Did they fraudulently fill out large numbers of absentee ballots for people suffering from severe cases of dementia or death?
I've not been following this all that closely, so maybe I missed it.
The proximate cause was the new hire who screwed up on his first day.
But the root cause was a lack of control over their shop. This company was a disaster waiting to happen. The newbie was guilty of walking too fast past a house of cards.
As others pointed out, it should not have been possible for him to do that.
What are developers -- novices or old hands -- doing with that kind of access to production data? A company big enough to have someone called a CTO ought to have separation of authority, so those sorts of things can't happen.
He was a rookie who made a mistake with serious consequences. The alleged professionals already on staff made it possible for one mistake to perhaps destroy the company.
I'm guessing it's not a publicly traded company subject to Sarbanes-Oxley.
Those who claim that the second decade of the 20th century was a source of terrible laws and court rulings now have another datapoint in support of their contention. Several bad FDR administration actions were exercises of presidential power granted during that period.
Here's another possible explanation for "why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women": When someone's job is to find possible instances of something, they're apt to find it. Its actual existence is irrelevant to that quest. Appearance is enough.
Could be Google (or rather, some specific person in Google, or group of people) is doing exactly what what the government says. Which would be detrimental to the company, of course, because: (1) they could get caught and there could be negative impacts to its reputation as a firm and as an employer, (2) even if not caught it diminishes the company's ability to hire the best available people for positions.
Once the data is in the hands of the government, they are free to cherry-pick and misinterpret (perhaps innocently, perhaps not -- bureaucrats are people, too) and otherwise make their case.
A smaller company likely would simply knuckle under, regardless of the merits of the claim. Instances of the federal government have to pay serious consequences for being wrong are pretty rare. I suspect instances of that happening to the bureaucrats are even rarer.
There's reason to believe it's new amateur beekeepers who don't follow best practices, either out of correctable ignorance or deliberate avoidance of the "unnatural". Their hives are susceptible to mites and other problems, which can then spread to the hives of more responsible beekeepers, professional or amateur.
The last credible info I'd seen on bee colony numbers shows them to be recovering nicely.
And of course, the people in the business of providing replacement bees are working like mad to find and breed bees that are resistant. And they're not the only ones working the problem from than angle, of course. (And so are the bees, come to think of it.)
The summary was oddly silent on the position of the Democrats on this legislation. Maybe if I RTFA I'll find out what their position is, or why they don't have one.
The "Hidden Figures" movie was OK, despite numerous times it failed to match the book and well-documented historical reality. (Amazingly, the John Glenn story was true. And just about everything else about words or actions -- good or bad -- of white men, from the cop to the Kevin Costner and Jim Parsons characters, wasn't.)
The book _Hidden Figures_ was considerably better, as it covers a larger span of time, and tells more of how those women got to be how and where they were.
As absurd as it may sound coming from a baby-boomer white man, I felt considerably pride in them and their accomplishments. And some embarrassment in being, in comparison, an underachiever.
Given the increasingly obvious conclusion that government doesn't scale well, perhaps the US should be broken up into a number of independent governments of a more effective size. Fifty seems like a pretty good number, and we already have fifty states
It's an idea. It sounds a little far out, but worth considering.
I suppose there might still be an ongoing need for some limited amount of coordination between the states. Defense against invasion from other countries, for instance. How might that coordination be described, and of what would that uniting coordination be constituted?
How about documenting what constitutes that coordination in a single document? A document that is subject to change when the situation clearly warrants it, but is otherwise stable over time?
But what would you call it?
How about the Constitution of the United States of America?
It's an idea. It sounds a little far out, but worth considering.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article, the U.S. government told the court that national security was at risk.
The big two: "for the children" and "national security".
There are others, but these two shut down thinking faster than anything.
All that snooping using just one search warrant? That's efficiency.
I for one welcome our snoopy police state overlords.
The statutory duopoly Congress and POTUS have way too many connections to big business to allow such a thing to happen.
FTFY.
Even if petroleum gets back into the $100 range, it won't be the end of hydrocarbon fuel. "Artificial petroleum" made by thermal depolymerization of turkey guts (or whatever) gets economically viable around that price (well, a bit more, with subsidies and tax breaks removed).
The stuff that used to be made at the plant in Carthage, MO, near the turkey processing plant, was comparable to high-grade crude. You couldn't power a diesel engine with it, quite, but it didn't need much refining.
Recycling plastic bottles and sawdust and newspapers and household garbage at the local TDP plant looks better and better, the higher petroleum prices go.
If they ever do up much again.
Anyone who doesn't hunt or gather is technologically unemployed. Inventions like agriculture, animal husbandry, sanitary sewers, paved roads, carpentry, cloth created new jobs that didn't exist for our paleolithic ancestors.
Over the millennia, the specific technologies that have thrown people out of work, generation after generation, have changed. But the process has not.
The big change in the last couple of centuries is that people live long enough to see their occupations go away, or change so dramatically they're far from the same thing, because they pace of change has picked up. Old age took care of those made redundant by the horse-collar. Dockworkers, not so much.
My dentist isn't doing the same things now as when he started, decades ago. (I for one am glad of it.)
And nobody unloads cargo ships by hand into boxcars, or boxcars into trucks. (And I'm glad of that, too.)
So, they're making steel the way Lays makes potato chips. This is a bad thing? I guess it is, if you're a professional slag wrangler or potato peeler, and you can't or won't learn how to do anything else that is more in demand.
My yahoo.com address has been around a while. It's the one I used for many newsletters and web-based services over the years. A large portion of my e-mail comes to me via that address, forwarded automatically to my ISP address.
So when e-mail forwarding failed, without warning, it had consequences. It took over a day for me to notice it and to take corrective action: turn it on when it was already on, and then verify I wanted it on.
A chunk of that time was spent finding current information about how to check the status of forwarding (it was on) and how to turn it on (which I did, anyway). Once I opened the e-mail to verify activation, it worked as though nothing had happened.
Except that a bunch of e-mails which didn't get forwarded before still didn't forward.
Understandable, and desirable, when turning on automatic forwarding that had not been on. You likely wouldn't want all the e-mail in your inbox, no matter how old, to get forwarded to that address -- just the new e-mail that arrived after automatic forwarding was turned on.
Still, a pain in the ass. No response from service@yahoo.com. But it's been zero business days since I notified them (Friday evening), so maybe it's too early to be disappointed with them.
Tomorrow evening is not.
"Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick any two."
Budget is visible. Conspicuous, even. Schedule, perhaps even more so. Quality -- especially in the parts that aren't visible, like maintainability and security -- often gets little attention.
Well, one aspect of security gets attention: when the access is too restrictive, and the software is unusable. Someone should be able to do something, but can't. The other aspect -- someone shouldn't be able to do something, but can -- isn't obvious. It may not get addressed by the time of the first demo. It may not get addressed by the time of initial delivery. It may not get addressed before the team is moved to a new project.
And who will know and care, and be in a position to do something about it?
Man, a functioning government sure would be nice right about now...
Oh, it's functioning, and has been over the entire interval covered by those EPA tests. It just hasn't been doing what you expected it to do. It gathered money from people not willing to part with it voluntarily, and spent it doing things the politicians directed it to do (more or less).
Getting mad or disappointed or sad because a human creation isn't doing what you expect it to do, when it's clearly not very good at that sort of thing, is just silly.
You don't get upset when a bicycle doesn't fly. You don't get excited when a library doesn't build cars, or when a tractor manufacturer doesn't do veterinary dental procedures.
Of course, if I'd RTFA, I might also comment on the particulars of the gripe, especially if it's nonsensical. (Maybe later.)
"Open plan" work areas, where there isn't even a short cubicle wall between you and the conversations and standup meetings of your co-workers. Headphones, white-noise generators, and noise-cancelling can only do so much. And they have their own problems.
The motion of people in your peripheral vision -- or right in front of your goddam face -- is distracting, too.
This is a fad that has not gone away, despite the obvious problems.
What form did this "interference" take, anyway?
Did they intimidate voters at polling places? Systematically prevent some categories of people from registering to vote? Did they stuff ballot boxes? Did they fraudulently fill out large numbers of absentee ballots for people suffering from severe cases of dementia or death?
I've not been following this all that closely, so maybe I missed it.
What form did this "interference" take?
The proximate cause was the new hire who screwed up on his first day.
But the root cause was a lack of control over their shop. This company was a disaster waiting to happen. The newbie was guilty of walking too fast past a house of cards.
As others pointed out, it should not have been possible for him to do that.
What are developers -- novices or old hands -- doing with that kind of access to production data? A company big enough to have someone called a CTO ought to have separation of authority, so those sorts of things can't happen.
He was a rookie who made a mistake with serious consequences. The alleged professionals already on staff made it possible for one mistake to perhaps destroy the company.
I'm guessing it's not a publicly traded company subject to Sarbanes-Oxley.
Those who claim that the second decade of the 20th century was a source of terrible laws and court rulings now have another datapoint in support of their contention. Several bad FDR administration actions were exercises of presidential power granted during that period.
And now this.
Only in the context of fundraising, where people don't mind losing their money, because it's a donation to the cause.
Mindread much?
Even the ones who are less than 5 feet tall?
If you're too incompetent too many times, I ignore you.
If you're too biased too many times, I ignore you.
If you're too lightweight in your choice of stories, I ignore you.
If you're too Orwellian in your choice of words or structure of sentences, I ignore you.
Whoever is left after all that,I pay attention to.
Pretty slim pickings, of late.
But this time it's different.
Funny, that's what they said last time.
But this time it really is different.
Funny, that's what they said last time.
But this time it really is different.
Funny, that's what they said last time.
(Repeat until someone is too tired to continue.)
I brake for hurricanes.
I brake for tornadoes.
Or maybe they should be:
I break for hurricanes.
I break for tornadoes.
Let's bring out the rulers, and get to measuring. (Pun intended.)
Here's another possible explanation for "why the technology corporation appears to be systematically discriminating against women": When someone's job is to find possible instances of something, they're apt to find it. Its actual existence is irrelevant to that quest. Appearance is enough.
Could be Google (or rather, some specific person in Google, or group of people) is doing exactly what what the government says. Which would be detrimental to the company, of course, because: (1) they could get caught and there could be negative impacts to its reputation as a firm and as an employer, (2) even if not caught it diminishes the company's ability to hire the best available people for positions.
Once the data is in the hands of the government, they are free to cherry-pick and misinterpret (perhaps innocently, perhaps not -- bureaucrats are people, too) and otherwise make their case.
A smaller company likely would simply knuckle under, regardless of the merits of the claim. Instances of the federal government have to pay serious consequences for being wrong are pretty rare. I suspect instances of that happening to the bureaucrats are even rarer.
There's reason to believe it's new amateur beekeepers who don't follow best practices, either out of correctable ignorance or deliberate avoidance of the "unnatural". Their hives are susceptible to mites and other problems, which can then spread to the hives of more responsible beekeepers, professional or amateur.
The last credible info I'd seen on bee colony numbers shows them to be recovering nicely.
And of course, the people in the business of providing replacement bees are working like mad to find and breed bees that are resistant. And they're not the only ones working the problem from than angle, of course. (And so are the bees, come to think of it.)
The summary was oddly silent on the position of the Democrats on this legislation. Maybe if I RTFA I'll find out what their position is, or why they don't have one.
But that would be wrong.
The "Hidden Figures" movie was OK, despite numerous times it failed to match the book and well-documented historical reality. (Amazingly, the John Glenn story was true. And just about everything else about words or actions -- good or bad -- of white men, from the cop to the Kevin Costner and Jim Parsons characters, wasn't.)
The book _Hidden Figures_ was considerably better, as it covers a larger span of time, and tells more of how those women got to be how and where they were.
As absurd as it may sound coming from a baby-boomer white man, I felt considerably pride in them and their accomplishments. And some embarrassment in being, in comparison, an underachiever.
Feminist Studies Barbie says: "Math is hard".
Given the increasingly obvious conclusion that government doesn't scale well, perhaps the US should be broken up into a number of independent governments of a more effective size. Fifty seems like a pretty good number, and we already have fifty states
It's an idea. It sounds a little far out, but worth considering.
I suppose there might still be an ongoing need for some limited amount of coordination between the states. Defense against invasion from other countries, for instance. How might that coordination be described, and of what would that uniting coordination be constituted?
How about documenting what constitutes that coordination in a single document? A document that is subject to change when the situation clearly warrants it, but is otherwise stable over time?
But what would you call it?
How about the Constitution of the United States of America?
It's an idea. It sounds a little far out, but worth considering.