Surely you've forgotten the cleric epics in sky fire and Fear.
We raided Fear 39 hours straight over memorial day weekend in 2003 (4?). Every 14 hours. We could predict the order the mobs would spawn in. It was a brutal, brutal break.
I left work twice and woke up sometime in the early AM once for cleric epics in Skyfire. Then there were the little casual things like the 20+ hours spent getting jboots and similar insane quests with drop rates over 12 hours. No quest step in EQ should have taken over 2 hours. Sure- make it a 96 hour quest, but make it 48 2 hour chunks. Not five 12-20 hour chunks.
I regularly played over 60 hours a week while working a full time job. I kept playing when my hands went numb and my forearms were killing me from tendonitis. I finally went uber at the end, saw everything in the game, and then quit as my right thumb blew out with bursitis.
I learned things from the experience that benefited my career.
I was in a "casual guild." We raided 3 days a week, 6 hours a day then probably played another 18 hours a week. It drove the true uber players crazy for the lack of serious play. The play schedule drove truly casual players insane too. They just couldn't keep up but they wanted the uber rewards.
I also learned that if I get in an activity like this again- go uber from the start. It's actually less effort, less betrayal, less "we'll always be buds", etc. It's often much easier there on the leading edge of the game. Heck, we had the dev's go back after 24 months and make a specific encounter in Uqua impossible to beat for about 3 months. It just about killed the guild. Several people gave up.
I had drivers ed once for a ticket (gravity assist*) and one person in the room had been ticketed for 1mph over the limit. When they need the money, or there is a new speed limit they want folks to be aware of, it's legal. There is no legal "buffer" over the limit.
* Two of the three? tickets (anyway, every ticket for the last 25 or so years) I have gotten since I was a teenager were at the base of steep hills. The police just set up, wait for gravity to speed you up and voila. The third ticket was sometime in my mid 20's doing 50mph on the 40mph feeder. They drove on the freeway, matched my speed, then got off at the exit and ticketed me.
There was something like this on Slate a while back.
The guy stopped to hold a rather heavy door open for some young business lady. She not only refused his help but started to chew him up one side and down the other for insulting her by holding the door open. Rather than continue to stand there being abused, he let go and started to walk on to the elevators and the door knocked her down as she was so focused on her rant she was not paying attention to the door.
I don't think he went back to help her up. Didn't want to insult her.
In fact, the cases where the doctor is most likely to forget to write "please" include a higher rate of cases where time is critical.
In the fine article, the doctor considered this important enough to stay and work personal over time instead of simply rewriting the note with please and resubmitting it.
This is some kind of dick waving contest between the doctors and the techs.
That's correct. I remember now it was volcanic ash that they used -- I guess the article said it was "like fly ash" or something so that's the primary key my brain stored it under.
Still amazing how far and fast we have come in the last 30 years from 1980 to 2010. It is getting very science fictiony at times.
I think we solve the viral problem in under 50 years.
I think using that same technology to create a doomsday virus is much more likely than a naturally occurring plague.
Pretty soon, we'll be able to develop cures for diseases before they kill a few thousands of people (maybe hundreds of thousands in a really extreme event). That's not enough to keep our population in check.
This relates to the problem tho of, "it gets easier and easier for one crazy idiot to kill a whole lot of people."
It wasn't until the 80's or 90's that romans use of fly ash became common knowledge. Back in the 70's, roman concrete was still in the "ancient mysteries" column.
Writing laws to include the human officer's judgement to either ticket, and arrest or give a warning would be extremely complex.
Most traffic laws have edge cases (like minimum speed 40mph on the high way... which doesn't apply if there is traffic).
I'm okay with automated enforcement, but they need to distinguish between the freeway of cars going 5mph over the speed limit in dry well lit conditions vs the car going 85 cutting back and forth between them.
As privacy has decreased, an increasing number of people have been outed for private behavior. It's very oppressive to need to be spanked or suck boners and have to stand in front of all your relatives, co-workers, customers, etc. and lay that out. Humans need to do a lot of things they are a little ashamed of. But privacy lets them express themselves.
I'm most proud of my odd friends who can be openly odd but a lot of folks don't have that freedom.
At least have the balls to post with an id since you are proud to steer us into disaster by doing nothing.
And you didn't read the post anyway. Nothing is going to be done. It's going to get extremely ugly.
And I'll probably be about 10 years dead at that point.
But hence the (bitterly).
I can see we are doomed, I can see there are solutions which are really quite mild at this point, and I can see assholes like you are going to run us right over the cliff.
The problem is things have been nice long enough that most people have no clue just how bad things can get. It's all science fantasy to them. But the fact is multiple civilizations have gone extinct from this behavior. Multiple non-human species have gone extinct.
Now- if you have a BETTER solution- please post that instead of this "uh huh, huh, huh, well you go furst!" bullshit. It wasn't clever 15 years ago. It's increasingly stupid today as these problems loom ever clearer on the horizon.
Until you address the basic problem, everything you do will just make things more oppressive and more fragile until being human is nearly unbearable.
I dug into this a bit and it is going to be challenging to get straight information.
The optimistic sources say the oil is $2 a gallon and can be refined for $1 a gallon into fuel and plastics. The pessimistic sources (but of them is wikipedia which for all the heat it gets is usually reasonably truthy) say the fuel is about $800/barrel ($20ish a gallon.)
However, a lot of this is the processing cost and it seems to me that would drop over time.
Hemp fuel and plastic appears to be less expensive currently with the technology going back as far as Henry Ford. It appears to be about $5 a gallon for fuel.
---
Both hemp and algae as solutions run into the underlying problem. If you grow enough of it, both of them ultimately consume resources. If we are doing things for 9 billion people, it is going to be hard on the planet period.
It seems to me that algae is the better long term solution-- but eventually, the human population is going to lock up all the phosphorus and other trace minerals. The larger the population, the sooner that happens.
Obviously, we are not going to be able to retire as young as the baby boomers (of whom I'm technically part of by a year or two).
The flip side is, there won't be enough jobs so we are looking at providing some kind of minimal assistance or else massive civil unrest (which will lead to warehousing people in prisons if they are not killed so why not give them public housing and food).
It is a very hard and ugly problem. It resolves after I die. No way I make it another 25 years, much less 50.
Old people can take care of themselves quite well unless they get sick and unless they were unlucky or unwise financially. My grandmother lived alone until she was 86.
By reducing the birth rate (no tax incentives, stop sending free food to people who are reproducing beyond their area's carrying capacity, provide birth control, provide investments to those areas which are behaving sanely), we avoid much more hideous actions and decisions later.
I figured out why years ago. It's the same reason people bought houses they couldn't afford.
Live for today, for tomorrow we may die.
---
It took me a while but I finally realized a major role of managers (like military leaders) is to be hardass. Either all 100 can lose their jobs (or die), or 2 people can be ordered to work on a holiday, or laid off, (or die.)
It is very hard to fire someone, or order them to work on a holiday, or to stay on the job when their wife is sick, etc. Yet someone must give that order. Otherwise everyone suffers.
The longer we delay, the worse the order given will have to be. At some point, they may very well release bio-engineered weapons on the population (heaven's to betsy- reminiscent of star trek now that I think of it) because they avoided making easier (but still hard) choices 50 years previously.
We are KILLING the oceans. Fishing populations are collapsing. We are using up all of the easy to reach resources. Most of the people being born will never make any difference to the world.
Slashdot Mirror
That is both very funny, well related, and yet more disgusting that I really want to process.
I personally really like this new "yyyeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh" meme I'm seeing the last few months on slashdot.
I think I even got to use it once.
Of course, I suppose the first rule of memes on slashdot, should be that you don't break the third wall and talk about memes on slashdot.
The city could have a hole lot of problems.
8-9 hour raids.
Surely you've forgotten the cleric epics in sky fire and Fear.
We raided Fear 39 hours straight over memorial day weekend in 2003 (4?). Every 14 hours. We could predict the order the mobs would spawn in. It was a brutal, brutal break.
I left work twice and woke up sometime in the early AM once for cleric epics in Skyfire. Then there were the little casual things like the 20+ hours spent getting jboots and similar insane quests with drop rates over 12 hours. No quest step in EQ should have taken over 2 hours. Sure- make it a 96 hour quest, but make it 48 2 hour chunks. Not five 12-20 hour chunks.
I regularly played over 60 hours a week while working a full time job. I kept playing when my hands went numb and my forearms were killing me from tendonitis.
I finally went uber at the end, saw everything in the game, and then quit as my right thumb blew out with bursitis.
I learned things from the experience that benefited my career.
I was in a "casual guild." We raided 3 days a week, 6 hours a day then probably played another 18 hours a week. It drove the true uber players crazy for the lack of serious play. The play schedule drove truly casual players insane too. They just couldn't keep up but they wanted the uber rewards.
I also learned that if I get in an activity like this again- go uber from the start. It's actually less effort, less betrayal, less "we'll always be buds", etc.
It's often much easier there on the leading edge of the game. Heck, we had the dev's go back after 24 months and make a specific encounter in Uqua impossible to beat for about 3 months. It just about killed the guild. Several people gave up.
Me? I'm in aerospace. A small propulsion company.
I had drivers ed once for a ticket (gravity assist*) and one person in the room had been ticketed for 1mph over the limit. When they need the money, or there is a new speed limit they want folks to be aware of, it's legal. There is no legal "buffer" over the limit.
* Two of the three? tickets (anyway, every ticket for the last 25 or so years) I have gotten since I was a teenager were at the base of steep hills. The police just set up, wait for gravity to speed you up and voila. The third ticket was sometime in my mid 20's doing 50mph on the 40mph feeder. They drove on the freeway, matched my speed, then got off at the exit and ticketed me.
Police only know about most crimes if the populace helps them.
So trust is important as long as we lack 100% surveillance.
Not enough.
I think because it had a poor sound track
Others say it was because of the huge swinging blue penis.
I think implicit in this conversation is that the technicians, for some reason, can't be sacked right now.
They are probably understaffed, overworked, and if the hospital fires them it will take weeks to replacet them.
There was something like this on Slate a while back.
The guy stopped to hold a rather heavy door open for some young business lady. She not only refused his help but started to chew him up one side and down the other for insulting her by holding the door open. Rather than continue to stand there being abused, he let go and started to walk on to the elevators and the door knocked her down as she was so focused on her rant she was not paying attention to the door.
I don't think he went back to help her up. Didn't want to insult her.
I disagree.
In fact, the cases where the doctor is most likely to forget to write "please" include a higher rate of cases where time is critical.
In the fine article, the doctor considered this important enough to stay and work personal over time instead of simply rewriting the note with please and resubmitting it.
This is some kind of dick waving contest between the doctors and the techs.
Wells was reporting on a real event. They just got to him and brainwashed him into saying it was a fictional event.
That's correct. I remember now it was volcanic ash that they used -- I guess the article said it was "like fly ash" or something so that's the primary key my brain stored it under.
Still amazing how far and fast we have come in the last 30 years from 1980 to 2010. It is getting very science fictiony at times.
I think we solve the viral problem in under 50 years.
I think using that same technology to create a doomsday virus is much more likely than a naturally occurring plague.
Pretty soon, we'll be able to develop cures for diseases before they kill a few thousands of people (maybe hundreds of thousands in a really extreme event). That's not enough to keep our population in check.
This relates to the problem tho of, "it gets easier and easier for one crazy idiot to kill a whole lot of people."
It wasn't until the 80's or 90's that romans use of fly ash became common knowledge. Back in the 70's, roman concrete was still in the "ancient mysteries" column.
The enforcement.
Writing laws to include the human officer's judgement to either ticket, and arrest or give a warning would be extremely complex.
Most traffic laws have edge cases (like minimum speed 40mph on the high way... which doesn't apply if there is traffic).
I'm okay with automated enforcement, but they need to distinguish between the freeway of cars going 5mph over the speed limit in dry well lit conditions vs the car going 85 cutting back and forth between them.
As privacy has decreased, an increasing number of people have been outed for private behavior. It's very oppressive to need to be spanked or suck boners and have to stand in front of all your relatives, co-workers, customers, etc. and lay that out. Humans need to do a lot of things they are a little ashamed of. But privacy lets them express themselves.
I'm most proud of my odd friends who can be openly odd but a lot of folks don't have that freedom.
At least have the balls to post with an id since you are proud to steer us into disaster by doing nothing.
And you didn't read the post anyway. Nothing is going to be done. It's going to get extremely ugly.
And I'll probably be about 10 years dead at that point.
But hence the (bitterly).
I can see we are doomed, I can see there are solutions which are really quite mild at this point, and I can see assholes like you are going to run us right over the cliff.
The problem is things have been nice long enough that most people have no clue just how bad things can get. It's all science fantasy to them. But the fact is multiple civilizations have gone extinct from this behavior. Multiple non-human species have gone extinct.
Now- if you have a BETTER solution- please post that instead of this "uh huh, huh, huh, well you go furst!" bullshit. It wasn't clever 15 years ago. It's increasingly stupid today as these problems loom ever clearer on the horizon.
Until you address the basic problem, everything you do will just make things more oppressive and more fragile until being human is nearly unbearable.
Thanks,
I dug into this a bit and it is going to be challenging to get straight information.
The optimistic sources say the oil is $2 a gallon and can be refined for $1 a gallon into fuel and plastics.
The pessimistic sources (but of them is wikipedia which for all the heat it gets is usually reasonably truthy) say the fuel is about $800/barrel ($20ish a gallon.)
However, a lot of this is the processing cost and it seems to me that would drop over time.
Hemp fuel and plastic appears to be less expensive currently with the technology going back as far as Henry Ford.
It appears to be about $5 a gallon for fuel.
---
Both hemp and algae as solutions run into the underlying problem. If you grow enough of it, both of them ultimately consume resources. If we are doing things for 9 billion people, it is going to be hard on the planet period.
It seems to me that algae is the better long term solution-- but eventually, the human population is going to lock up all the phosphorus and other trace minerals. The larger the population, the sooner that happens.
Thanks. Reading it now.
Now that is an interesting proposition.
Got any good links to start at?
I'd like to know more.
Obviously, we are not going to be able to retire as young as the baby boomers (of whom I'm technically part of by a year or two).
The flip side is, there won't be enough jobs so we are looking at providing some kind of minimal assistance or else massive civil unrest (which will lead to warehousing people in prisons if they are not killed so why not give them public housing and food).
It is a very hard and ugly problem. It resolves after I die. No way I make it another 25 years, much less 50.
Old people can take care of themselves quite well unless they get sick and unless they were unlucky or unwise financially. My grandmother lived alone until she was 86.
By reducing the birth rate (no tax incentives, stop sending free food to people who are reproducing beyond their area's carrying capacity, provide birth control, provide investments to those areas which are behaving sanely), we avoid much more hideous actions and decisions later.
I figured out why years ago. It's the same reason people bought houses they couldn't afford.
Live for today, for tomorrow we may die.
---
It took me a while but I finally realized a major role of managers (like military leaders) is to be hardass.
Either all 100 can lose their jobs (or die), or 2 people can be ordered to work on a holiday, or laid off, (or die.)
It is very hard to fire someone, or order them to work on a holiday, or to stay on the job when their wife is sick, etc. Yet someone must give that order.
Otherwise everyone suffers.
The longer we delay, the worse the order given will have to be. At some point, they may very well release bio-engineered weapons on the population (heaven's to betsy- reminiscent of star trek now that I think of it) because they avoided making easier (but still hard) choices 50 years previously.
We are KILLING the oceans. Fishing populations are collapsing. We are using up all of the easy to reach resources. Most of the people being born will never make any difference to the world.
At LEAST as a start, stop incenting more babies.
The "young taking care of the elderly" is a one generation problem.
If you are at 7 billion and you half the replacement rate, you are at 3.5 billion in 40 years and 1.75 billion in 60 years. Hence the 50 year mark.
As for retirement, we are going to have forced, massive retirement sooner than later.
Robots are very close to being ready to take manual labor jobs in 1st (and maybe even 2nd) world countries.
You are not going to have shelf stockers in the 1st world in 20 years.
I and my ex had one child. We are reducing the population by 50% in one generation.
If everyone did that for two generations, we would drop to 2 billion and then people could average 2 children per family for the rest of time.
There is no reason to give families $5,000 per year per child when overpopulation is a root cause of many problems.
WTH?
HEMP produces massive amounts of oil, on poor soil, fiber for paper, etc. etc.
If it were not for the failing drug war and the Hearst pulp industries demonization back in the 20's, we would be using hemp today.
There is no way this was flamebait. It's a legitimate solution to this problem.